There Will Be War Volume II

by Jerry Pournelle

  “Sound decent?” Crandall puffed, lowering his arms. He stood bent over slightly, recovering from his high-pressure sales pitch.

  “Of course it does,” said Terri. She smiled and cocked her head to watch his face. It was red.

  “Sure,” said Wendell. He was watching Terri.

  “Right,” said Richard. “I guess we have a partner automatically, eh? No choice?”

  “She’s a fine choice,” Wendell thought to him. He knew her as an opponent, and that was the best test of her ability. She had won at Zama, after all. She had an unusual quickness, too, and in that first moment at the bell, when the Gamers found out which battle was to take place and which sides were assigned where and at what odds, decisiveness was crucial. Sixty seconds for orientation were allowed before the screen activated automatically. The computer chose battles and sides at random, and could choose grand matchups or hopeless routs. Also, Wendell was envious of the short time she took to recover her strength after the game. He felt he needed a younger teammate like her.

  Besides, he could talk to her.

  Besides, Richard was nearly screaming with anticipation inside Wendell’s brain.

  At Crandall’s assurance that the Guild had already approved the new game, Terri and Wendell agreed to try it the next morning, exchanging quick glances as they nodded. Elsewhere, the contractors with whom Crandall had a dispute were contacting other Masters. They, too, would be excited over the new development.

  Wendell wanted to get away so that he could consult Richard without interruption, and excused himself from the reception early. His goodbye was awkward as always, but Terri congratulated him once more and said that she was looking forward to the new game.

  Wendell left without speaking to most of the people. His shyness was generally interpreted as arrogance, and was notorious as such. However, lack of social grace was another indulged idiosyncracy of Master Gamers. He could get away with it, and he knew it.

  “Fancy game, huh?” Richard crowed. “Wonder what dispute they’ll use the first one for—it’ll have to be a big one. None of this, ‘where do we put the fire hydrant, your yard or mine?’” He laughed. “We’ll show the world—those slimy losers.”

  “Yeah,” said Wendell. He wondered who the opposing Masters would be—not that it would matter much. Still, with the World Headquarters here in the center of the country, it could literally be anyone in the Guild. The fact that he and Terri were both Americans was an off-chance occurrence; there were only six in the twenty highest-rated positions.

  Wendell took a deep breath and glanced around. He had stepped out of the Crown Center Plaza, and, on a whim, decided to walk up Main for a while. He took off his suit coat and loosened his tie. The summer evening was humid, warm and damp, and the streets shone with the film of rainwater and oil.

  “You heard what she said about me,” Richard insisted. “ ‘The ringing of hot steel, the beat of the hooves, the grip of old leather.’ That’s what I provide, y’know.”

  “I know.” Wendell tried not to think, or else to think about trivia. At the moment, he didn’t want Richard picking up his thoughts. Just how much Richard could read his mind, he wasn’t sure, but a Master Gamer was cautious by nature. In any case, he couldn’t read Richard’s mind at all. He took a long breath, and caught the smell of rain lingering in the breeze.

  “I can give it, too,” Richard went on. “You know, I really think I have nearly as many important facts as those computers—not all, of course, that’s impossible. But—well, you know how it was.”

  “I know,” said Wendell. He turned up a long institutional driveway, blotting out the visions of their childhood friendship that Richard had brought up. How it was.

  “Technically, I suppose, we’re illegal,” Richard mused, “there being two of us. Not that anybody’d believe it. Still, considering that—” He stopped. The silence was dark and frigid and sudden.

  Wendell sighed. “That’s right,” he thought to Richard.

  No answer. There never was, on these visits. But Richard would have to come; that was one fact they had established. Their periods of consciousness and sleep coincided exactly, right down to the brainwave type and REM cycles. He had escaped one body, to be trapped in another, and, sometimes—lately, more than ever— Wendell took him back.

  Wendell knew the way, and the hospital personnel recognized him and waved him on. The special ward, which was nearly a vault, lay in one of the underground floors, deep beneath the city. An orderly who knew Wendell escorted him to a cold, cavernous room in dim light. Coffin-sized tanks with a bluish tinge were lined up in long, lonely rows. Storage drawers or upright cases would have saved space, but they were too reminiscent of morgues and mummies. The orderly withdrew and Wendell, still feeling the icy silence in the back of his mind, stood over one of the tanks and looked through the transparent casing that covered its occupant.

  The face, always lean, was nearly a skull. He wore only the steel headband and its attendant wires that monitored what little brain activity remained. The whitish cheeks showed faint gray spots where the synthetic blood picked its way through the sleeping capillaries. His wavy hair was the red-gold of the Celt, not the white gold of the Norse. Even now, the repose looked fitful— the face not quite relaxed, the limbs not quite comfortable. In other days and other places, the long legs would have worn a Highland kilt, and the bony, slender arms would have known a Lochaber axe, not the cold cushion of a suspension tank.

  Richard had been the very best, even at age twenty.

  The coma had begun nine years ago, and after four years, suspended animation had been suggested until further medical advances developed a way to induce recovery. It had been caused by those experimental helmets, in the only time they were ever used, and by Richard’s own insane enthusiasm for the games. Without that waking obsession, he never would have invented the helmets, or induced Wendell to join him.

  Burned out, Wendell thought—Richard had gone nova, after reaching the top in so few years. That was part of it, too.

  The lilting spirit of a Burns melody forced its way through the frozen arteries. The wonder of Loch Ness lay flat under the realism of a phony death. Only the soul of Bannockburn leaped and roared, through the avenue of another person.

  The helmets had been complex bio-feedback contraptions, keyed into the game machine, worn by both Gamers. Supposedly, they would monitor the stress on each Gamer in relation to each quick development on the screen. They were Richard’s creation, an even greater monument to his involvement in the games than his youthful grip on the number-one rating. Richard was only a Master Gamer, though, and his dynamism in the field had fooled him. He had botched the electronics badly, and when the helmets jammed and buzzed and quivered with too much energy, the Gaming Master’s Guild lost its number-one Master to a coma—apparently.

  Richard wore a different kind of helmet now.

  When Wendell had awakened in the hospital, he had had company inside his own head. The emotional drive and the machine had become fused, and so had they. Richard had become the ghost of obsessed wargamers, the patron deity of electronic monomania, a scowling, blue-eyed, discorporate Guan Gung.

  At first, the sharing of one body had been nearly unbearable for both of them—it wasn’t exactly deliberate on Richard’s part any more than on Wendell’s, at least consciously. They grew accustomed to it surprisingly fast, once clear and detailed personal questions had established to each other that they were not crazy, after all. Gradually, if painfully, they adjusted to the situation. Their closeness as childhood companions helped immeasurably, as did their common aversion to social mixing and people in general.

  Now the strain was growing.

  Wendell gazed quietly. He was a Master Gamer now, an accomplished performer with a greater knowledge of his field than many military historians. Great civil decisions rode on his tides, and the Prairie Sector of the country followed. He was too young to remember the entry of the games into stalemated judicial disputes,
though he had read about it later. The game sets had had only a few battles to choose from back then, though all had been classics. The technology was primitive.

  And Wendell and Richard were two ostracized, introverted kids in an upstairs bedroom, setting up toy plastic knights. A carefully tumbled landscape of books, boxes, and blankets on the floor formed rugged peaks, treacherous valleys, and unscalable castle walls. Set aside, stacks of various histories provided countless scenarios and suggestions for their vivid visions.

  “Okay,” Richard announced, from his own side of the floor. He had his back to Wendell and was maneuvering nine thirteenth-century men in armor down the cascading folds of a blue blanket. “Mace-face is leading his puny band down into the valley now, sneaking up on the camp down there.” Carefully, he lifted a large armored individual with an upraised mace, and knocked over a sentry with it.

  “The Norman cavalry is having trouble,” said Wendell, from his side of the room. He wheeled about seven toy knights, actually from the Wars of the Roses, and sent them into retreat. They didn’t resemble Norman cavalry at all, but they did have horses and lances. “The Saxon shieldwall has held, and re-forms while the Normans regroup for another attack.” He knew that Richard was listening with only the barest of attention, just as he was, but that didn’t matter. This way, they could enact whatever battles and time periods and strategies they wanted. This included manipulating defeats into victories, and deciding on their own who would live or die. Both of them always won and the victories were always shared.

  Richard sat back suddenly and considered. “All of these kinds of people were descended from Roman tradition—mixed up with the Franks and other barbarians, of course. I wonder what would have happened if some descendants of Carthage had lasted into medieval times.”

  “Yeah,” said Wendell, without interest. He was trying to form a new shieldwall on the fold of a bedspread with nine Saxons and two temporarily-converted Vikings, who looked similar enough, but they all kept falling down.

  “No good, I guess,” Richard continued. “Even if Carthage had survived the Romans, the Vandals went through later anyway. So did the Arabs, too, in the 700s.” His voice grew pedantic. “Jebel Al-Tarik invaded Europe from Africa in 711—the easiest date to remember in all history.”

  “Hm.” Wendell tried to fix the name in his memory, to go with the date, but he didn’t know how to spell it. He had never been as good with dates as Richard, but he had a better grasp of concurrent events and their inter-relation. Then Richard gave him an opening.

  “I guess those Carthagians were doomed from the start,” he said, and turned back to his half-completed battle.

  “Carthaginians,” Wendell corrected him.

  Richard clenched his jaw and took on a firm look. “The city is Carthage—so, Carthagians, stupid. It’s the easiest way to change it.”

  “I read ‘Carthaginians’ someplace,” said Wendell. For them, the printed word was the last word.

  “I presume,” Richard said loftily, “that’s C-A-R-T-H-A-G-I-N-I-A-N.”

  “Yep,” said Wendell, thinking that Richard must be the only ten-year-old in the country who said “presume” out loud in sentences.

  They looked at each other, and the undercurrent of childhood rivalry rose up in a mutual giggling ferocity that set them leaping at each other. Growling and yelling and laughing, they grappled and rolled in a narrow space of the floor that was still clear. Both were slender and limber, making them quick at close quarters. Richard had the reach, being considerably taller—and he looked thinner on account of it—but Wendell was more aggressive. As they rapidly approached their usual stalemate, someone’s foot flicked into a battlefield and knocked over a few miniature stalwarts. Instantly, they both froze.

  “Whose was it?” Richard panted, holding an awkward pose.

  “Yours, I think.” They untangled themselves gingerly and returned with extreme care to their battles. Fallen fighters were resurrected, to be killed according to plan instead of by accident. Although their backs were turned to each other, they repaired the damage with a shared reverence, and in silence.

  The insomnia that night was no worse than usual. In nine years as a Master, Wendell had never slept the night after any of his twenty-six games. Unlike some Masters he knew, he slept easily and soundly on the nights preceding games, and on every other night. But after the games, he lay on his back in his huge blackened bedroom, staring from his circular bed into the gloom. Coupled with silence, the darkness seemed to be a giant void.

  “I’m exhausted,” Richard whined. “Go to sleep. I can’t stand this.”

  “Me, too,” thought Wendell with effort. His arms and legs felt like inorganic weights, attached to his torso by straps. In the total darkness, and his complete weariness, his mind felt detached from his body and yet trapped in it—floating in his skull like a—like a body in a suspension tank. Or a specimen in formaldehyde.

  “Go to sleep,” Richard said again. “I’m… tired.”

  “Shut up,” Wendell answered, without force. “What are you? You might… not even be there. Just another voice in my head.”

  “What! Of course I’m here. We figured that out a long—”

  “Yeah, I know… but what if I am just crazy, huh? What if you’re not there?” Wendell spoke in a spiritless monotone that largely disarmed the words. Vaguely, he wished he could be firmer. Or maybe a farmer.

  Richard made a sound of annoyed muttering. Wendell blinked, or tried to. In the darkness, without moving anything but his eyelids, he wasn’t sure if his eyes were open or closed. If he couldn’t tell, then it could hardly matter. But he wondered. He always wondered.

  “Stupid game… no people involved,” Wendell thought. “All machinery. No… heart to it. Circuits and moving lights. Dead. I should give it up… I hate it. It’s empty, like, uh, my head.” His tone lacked bitterness, even that required energy.

  “If that’s a joke, I resent it.”

  “Games. I’ve got games coming out of my ears. I haven’t got any friends. I’m scared of them. All of them. Aiieee.” He sighed inwardly. This was nothing new; the same thoughts went through his mind every sleepless, post-game night, after every urgent, killer-filled war game. He hated war, even his toy war. But he hated socializing more. The careful cultivation of a smooth, laconic speaking style camouflaged that fear, but it ruled his life.

  For a moment, images of Terri rose up, laughing and talking with him earlier in the evening. Her hair bounced and swung as she moved. She looked at him when she smiled.

  “Go to sleep,” mumbled Richard.

  Terri’s face dissolved into blackness.

  Wendell tried to blink again and see if he could tell. He stared at the darkness and gave up again. On the average, he supposed, he tried this ten or twelve times every sleepless night. If he ever reached a conclusion, he’d have to find something else to do. He tried it a third time. So tired.

  “Aw, c’mon. Can’t you take a pill or something?” Richard always made the same complaints and asked the same questions on these nights. Why not? There was nothing else to do.

  Fear—that was the true source of Richard’s coma. Fear of life. Fear of human contact. Fear of doing something stupid. Fear had sent him diving into the world of the phosphorous shine.

  Wendell understood it all, because he shared it. He lived his life inside the electronic game box, killing and rekilling people centuries dead, to flex his embryonic courage against other Masters—people who might be just as weird and anti-social as he, if not exactly in the same way. He wasn’t sure, but he suspected that the Masters’ Guild was another of the many refuges for loners, cowards, and repressed crazies. If one could handle the occupation, it paid better than bookkeeping, running projectors, wandering carnival crowds, and the rest. An occasional normal like Terri or Kirk Emerald preserved the staid image.

  Someday he would quit. He certainly wouldn’t want anyone ever replaying his life, and improving upon it. How would Napoleon fee
l, seeing Wendell win Leipzig and Waterloo over and over again? It was a funny business.

  The coma was a combination of electronic mishap and willful escape. Wendell had no idea how Richard’s presence in his mind had really come about, but he was certain that some volition was involved in Richard’s remaining there, even if it was all subconscious. Out of boredom, Wendell tried to imagine that he, motionless in the consuming black silence of his room, was also in a sort of trance. For a fleeting second, the escape had its attraction: no fears, no contests, and no irrevocability, like suicide. Then his physical exhaustion intruded upon his senses again, dissolving the respite. Not a trance, just old insomnia.

  Until Crandall had mentioned the new tandem game that night, Wendell had hoped, guardedly, that their symbiotic relationship would reach an end soon. If Richard was as bored with it as he was, then the subconscious desire to maintain it would fade away. Now, the new game would bring another exciting dimension into their lives. And Wendell would never be able to request being left alone outright—not with his lifelong fear of others making that same request to him.

  If Richard could listen to these thoughts, he gave no sign.

  Shrugging away his serious concerns, Wendell took a deep breath. Without intending to, he began to visualize surroundings, somewhere out in the darkness. Then, amused, he began listing them in order from beyond his left ear, clockwise: alarm radio with voice-activated clock, set to light up when he gave the Clan Munro battle cry in Gaelic; the controls to an elaborate sound system which was similarly started or stopped by listing the first three Plantagenet kings or the last three Capetians, respectively; a video desk and television receiver whose channels were selected by the names of certain standard military procedures in Sun Tze’s Art of War, a desk with a combined telephone and dictaphone set rendered usable from across the room by reciting any two of the major military contributions of the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan; a small movie projector which, unfortunately, had to be operated manually; last, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, totally filled, which covered an entire wall. They were his instant references, the ones most needed or the ones most rarely in libraries.