Future War

by Gardner Dozois

  A section of the ground slid back. A metal frame pushed slowly up through the ash, shoving bricks and weeds out of the way. The action ceased as the ship nosed into view.

  “There it is,” Hendricks said.

  The ship was small. It rested quietly, suspended in its mesh frame like a blunt needle. A rain of ash sifted down into the dark cavity from which the ship had been raised. Hendricks made his way over to it. He mounted the mesh and unscrewed the hatch, pulling it back. Inside the ship the control banks and the pressure seat were visible.

  Tasso came and stood beside him, gazing into the ship. “I’m not accustomed to rocket piloting,” she said after a while.

  Hendricks glanced at her. “I’ll do the piloting.”

  “Will you? There’s only one seat. Major. I can see it’s built to carry only a single person.”

  Hendricks’s breathing changed. He studied the interior of the ship intently. Tasso was right. There was only one seat. The ship was built to carry only one person. “I see,” he said slowly. “And the one person is you.”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “You can’t go. You might not live through the trip. You’re injured. You probably wouldn’t get there.”

  “An interesting point. But you see, I know where the Moon Base is. And you don’t. You might fly around for months and not find it. It’s well hidden. Without knowing what to look for—”

  “I’ll have to take my chances. Maybe I won’t find it. Not by myself. But I think you’ll give me all the information I need. Your life depends on it.”

  “How?”

  “If I find the Moon Base in time, perhaps I can get them to send a ship back to pick you up. If I find the Base in time. If not, then you haven’t a chance. I imagine there are supplies on the ship. They will last me long enough—”

  Hendricks moved quickly. But his injured arm betrayed him. Tasso ducked, sliding lithely aside. Her hand came up, lightning fast. Hendricks saw the gun butt coming. He tried to ward off the blow, but she was too fast. The metal butt struck against the side of his head, just above his ear. Numbing pain rushed through him. Pain and rolling clouds of blackness. He sank down, sliding to the ground.

  Dimly, he was aware that Tasso was standing over him, kicking him with her toe.

  “Major! Wake up.”

  He opened his eyes, groaning.

  “Listen to me.” She bent down, the gun pointed at his face. “I have to hurry. There isn’t much time left. The ship is ready to go, but you must give me the information I need before I leave.”

  Hendricks shook his head, trying to clear it.

  “Hurry up! Where is the Moon Base? How do I find it? What do I look for?”

  Hendricks said nothing.

  “Answer me!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Major, the ship is loaded with provisions. I can coast for weeks. I’ll find the Base eventually. And in a half-hour you’ll be dead. Your only chance of survival—” She broke off.

  Along the slope, by some crumbling ruins, something moved. Something in the ash. Tasso turned quickly, aiming. She fired. A puff of flame leaped. Something scuttled away, rolling across the ash. She fired again. The claw burst apart, wheels flying.

  “See?” Tasso said. “A scout. It won’t be long.”

  “You’ll bring them back here to get me?”

  “Yes. As soon as possible.”

  Hendricks looked up at her. He studied her intently. “You’re telling the truth?” A strange expression had come over his face, an avid hunger. “You will come back for me? You’ll get me to the Moon Base?”

  “I’ll get you to the Moon Base. But tell me where it is! There’s only a little time left.”

  “All right.” Hendricks picked up a piece of rock, pulling himself to a sitting position. “Watch.”

  Hendricks began to scratch in the ash. Tasso stood by him, watching the motion of the rock. Hendricks was sketching a crude lunar map.

  “This is the Appenine range. Here is the Crater of Archimedes. The Moon Base is beyond the end of the Appenine, about two hundred miles. I don’t know exactly where. No one on Terra knows. But when you’re over the Appenine, signal with one red flare and a green flare, followed by two red flares in quick succession. The Base monitor will record your signal. The Base is under the surface, of course. They’ll guide you down with magnetic grapples.”

  “And the controls? Can I operate them?”

  “The controls are virtually automatic. All you have to do is give the right signal at the right time.”

  “I will.”

  “The seat absorbs most of the takeoff shock. Air and temperature are automatically controlled. The ship will leave Terra and pass out into free space. It’ll line itself up with the Moon, falling into an orbit around it, about a hundred miles above the surface. The orbit will carry you over the Base. When you’re in the region of the Appenine, release the signal rockets.”

  Tasso slid into the ship and lowered herself into the pressure seat. The arm locks folded automatically around her. She fingered the controls. “Too bad you’re not going, Major. All this put here for you, and you can’t make the trip.”

  “Leave me the pistol.”

  Tasso pulled the pistol from her belt. She held it in her hand, weighing it thoughtfully. “Don’t go too far from this location. It’ll be hard to find you, as it is.”

  “No. I’ll stay here by the well.”

  Tasso gripped the takeoff switch, running her fingers over the smooth metal. “A beautiful ship, Major. Well built. I admire your workmanship. You people have always done good work. You build fine things. Your work, your creations, are your greatest achievements.”

  “Give me the pistol,” Hendricks said impatiently, holding out his hand. He struggled to his feet.

  “Good-bye, Major.” Tasso tossed the pistol past Hendricks. The pistol clattered against the ground, bouncing and rolling away. Hendricks hurried after it. He bent down, snatching it up.

  The hatch of the ship clanged shut. The bolts fell into place. Hendricks made his way back. The inner door was being sealed. He raised the pistol unsteadily.

  There was a shattering roar. The ship burst up from its metal cage, fusing the mesh behind it. Hendricks cringed, pulling back. The ship shot up into the rolling clouds of ash, disappearing into the sky.

  Hendricks stood watching a long time, until even the streamer had dissipated. Nothing stirred. The morning air was chill and silent. He began to walk aimlessly back the way they had come. Better to keep moving around. It would be a long time before help came—if it came at all.

  He searched his pockets until he found a package of cigarettes. He lit one grimly. They had all wanted cigarettes from him. But cigarettes were scarce.

  A lizard slithered by him, through the ash. He halted, rigid. The lizard disappeared. Above, the sun rose higher in the sky. Some flies landed on a flat rock to one side of him. Hendricks kicked at them with his foot.

  It was getting hot. Sweat trickled down his face, into his collar. His mouth was dry.

  Presently he stopped walking and sat down on some debris. He unfastened his medicine kit and swallowed a few narcotic capsules. He looked around him. Where was he?

  Something lay ahead. Stretched out on the ground. Silent and unmoving.

  Hendricks drew his gun quickly. It looked like a man. Then he remembered. It was the remains of Klaus. The Second Variety. Where Tasso had blasted him. He could see wheels and relays and metal parts, strewn around on the ash. Glittering and sparkling in the sunlight.

  Hendricks got to his feet and walked over. He nudged the inert form with his foot, turning it over a little. He could see the metal hull, the aluminum ribs and stmts. More wiring fell out. Like viscera. Heaps of wiring, switches and relays. Endless motors and rods.

  He bent down. The brain cage had been smashed by the fall. The artificial brain was visible. He gazed at it. A maze of circuits. Miniature tubes. Wires as fine as hair.
He touched the brain cage. It swung aside. The type plate was visible. Hendricks studied the plate.

  And blanched.

  IV-V.

  For a long time he stared at the plate. Fourth Variety. Not the Second. They had been wrong. There were more types. Not just three. Many more, perhaps. At least four. And Klaus wasn’t the Second Variety.

  But if Klaus wasn’t the Second Variety—

  Suddenly he tensed. Something was coming, walking through the ash behind the hill. What was it? He strained to see. Figures. Figures coming slowly along, making their way through the ash.

  Coming toward him.

  Hendricks crouched quickly, raising his gun. Sweat dripped down into his eyes. He fought down rising panic, as the figures neared.

  The first was a David. The David saw him and increased its pace. The others hurried behind it. A second David. A third. Three Davids, all alike, coming toward him silently, without expression, their thin legs rising and falling. Clutching their teddy bears.

  He aimed and fired. The first two Davids dissolved into particles. The third came on. And the figure behind it. Climbing silently toward him across the gray ash. A Wounded Soldier, towering over the David. And—

  And behind the Wounded Soldier came two Tassos, walking side by side. Heavy belt, Russian army pants, shirt, long hair. The familiar figure, as he had seen her only a little while before. Sitting in the pressure seat of the ship. Two slim, silent figures, both identical.

  They were very near. The David bent down suddenly, dropping its teddy bear. The bear raced across the ground. Automatically, Hendricks’s fingers tightened around the trigger. The bear was gone, dissolved into mist. The two Tasso types moved on, expressionless, walking side by side, through the gray ash.

  When they were almost to him, Hendricks raised the pistol waist high and fired.

  The two Tassos dissolved. But already a new group was starting up the rise, five or six Tassos, all identical, a line of them coming rapidly toward him.

  And he had given her the ship and the signal code. Because of him she was on her way to the moon, to the Moon Base. He had made it possible.

  He had been right about the bomb, after all. It had been designed with knowledge of the other types, the David Type and the Wounded Soldier Type. And the Klaus Type. Not designed by human beings. It had been designed by one of the underground factories, apart from all human contact.

  The line of Tassos came up to him. Hendricks braced himself, watching them calmly. The familiar face, the belt, the heavy shirt, the bomb carefully in place.

  The bomb—

  As the Tassos reached for him, a last ironic thought drifted through Hendricks’s mind. He felt a little better, thinking about it. The bomb. Made by the Second Variety to destroy the other varieties. Made for that end alone.

  They were already beginning to design weapons to use against each other.

  SALVADOR

  by Lucius Shepard

  Lucius Shepard may have been the most popular and influential new writer of the ’80s, rivaled only by William Gibson, Connie Willis, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Although his novels have been generally well received, he has had greater impact with his short fiction, an unusual situation these days. Shepard made his first sale to Terry Carr’s Universe in 1983, and the rest of the decade would see a steady stream of bizarre and powerfully compelling stories that would persist through the ’90s as well, stories such as the landmark novella “R&R,” which won him a Nebula Award in 1987; “The Jaguar Hunter”; “Black Coral”; “A Spanish Lesson”; “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule”; “Shades”; “Aymara”; “A Traveler’s Tale”; “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket”; “On the Border”; “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter”; and “Barnacle Bill the Spacer,” which won him a Hugo Award in 1993. Shepard also won the John W. Campbell Award in 1985 as the year’s Best New Writer. In 1988, he picked up a World Fantasy Award for his monumental short-story collection, The Jaguar Hunter, following it in 1992 with a second World Fantasy Award for his second collection, The Ends of the Earth.

  Shepard has made something of a specialty in writing vividly and knowingly about future war in stories such as “Shades” and “Delta Sly Honey,” as well as melding stories such as “Fire Zone Emerald” and the above-mentioned “R&R” into his well-known novel Life During Wartime—one of the field’s most chilling speculations about a possible future “Vietnam.” Perhaps his best handling of the theme, though, is in the harrowing story that follows, in which he shows us that we do learn from the experience of war—the only question is: learn what?

  Shepard’s other books include the novels Green Eyes, Kalimantan, and The Golden. His most recent book is a new collection. Barnacle Bill the Spacer, and he’s currently at work on a mainstream novel, Family Values. Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, he now lives in Seattle, Washington.

  * * *

  Three weeks before they wasted Tecolutla, Dantzler had his baptism of fire. The platoon was crossing a meadow at the foot of an emerald-green volcano, and being a dreamy sort, he was idling along, swatting tall grasses with his rifle barrel and thinking how it might have been a first-grader with crayons who had devised this elementary landscape of a perfect cone rising into a cloudless sky, when cap-pistol noises sounded on the slope. Someone screamed for the medic and Dantzler dove into the grass, fumbling for his ampules. He slipped one from the dispenser and popped it under his nose, inhaling frantically; then, to be on the safe side, he popped another—“A double helpin’ of martial arts,” as DT would say—and lay with his head down until the drugs had worked their magic. There was dirt in his mouth, and he was very afraid.

  Gradually his arms and legs lost their heaviness, and his heart rate slowed. His vision sharpened to the point that he could see not only the pinpricks of fir blooming on the slope, but also the figures behind them, half-obscured by brush. A bubble of grim anger welled up in his brain, hardened to a fierce resolve, and he started moving toward the volcano. By the time he reached the base of the cone, he was all rage and reflexes. He spent the next forty minutes spinning acrobatically through the thickets, spraying shadows with bursts of his M-18; yet part of his mind remained distant from the action, marveling at his efficiency, at the comic-strip enthusiasm he felt for the task of killing. He shouted at the men he shot, and he shot them many more times than was necessary, like a child playing soldier.

  “Playin’ my ass!” DT would say. “You just actin’ natural.” DT was a firm believer in the ampules; though the official line was that they contained tailored RNA compounds and pseudoendorphins modified to an inhalant form, he held the opinion that they opened a man up to his inner nature. He was big, black, with heavily muscled arms and crudely stamped features, and he had come to the Special Forces direct from prison, where he had done a stretch for attempted murder. The palms of his hands were covered by jail tattoos—a pentagram and a horned monster. The words DIE HIGH were painted on his helmet. This was his second tour in Salvador, and Moody—who was Dantzler’s buddy—said the drugs had addled DT’s brains, that he was crazy and gone to hell.

  “He collects trophies,” Moody had said. “And not just ears like they done in ’Nam.”

  When Dantzler had finally gotten a glimpse of the trophies, he had been appalled. They were kept in a tin box in DT’s pack and were nearly unrecognizable; they looked like withered brown orchids. But despite his revulsion, despite the fact that he was afraid of DT, he admired the man’s capacity for survival and had taken to heart his advice to rely on the drugs.

  On the way back down the slope they discovered a live casualty, an Indian kid about Dantzler’s age, nineteen or twenty, black hair, adobe skin, and heavy-lidded brown eyes. Dantzler, whose father was an anthropologist and had done fieldwork in Salvador, figured him for a Santa Ana tribesman; before leaving the States, Dantzler had pored over his father’s notes, hoping this would give him an edge, and had learned to identify the various regional types. The kid had a minor leg wound and was wearing fa
tigue pants and a faded Coke Adds Life T-shirt. This T-shirt irritated DT no end.

  “What the hell you know ’bout Coke?” he asked the kid as they headed for the chopper that was to carry them deeper into Morazán Province. “You think it’s funny or somethin’?” He whacked the kid in the back with his rifle butt, and when they reached the chopper, he slung him inside and had him sit by the door. He sat beside him, tapped out a joint from a pack of Kools, and asked, “Where’s Infante?”

  “Dead,” said the medic.

  “Shit!” DT licked the joint so it would burn evenly. “Goddamn beaner ain’t no use ’cept somebody else know Spanish.”

  “I know a little,” Dantzler volunteered.

  Staring at Dantzler, DT’s eyes went empty and unfocused. “Naw,” he said. “You don’t know no Spanish.”

  Dantzler ducked his head to avoid DT’s stare and said nothing; he thought he understood what DT meant, but he ducked away from the understanding as well. The chopper bore them aloft, and DT lit the joint. He let the smoke out his nostrils and passed the joint to the kid, who accepted gratefully.

  “Qué sabor!” he said, exhaling a billow; he smiled and nodded, wanting to be friends.

  Dantzler turned his gaze to the open door. They were flying low between the hills, and looking at the deep bays of shadow in their folds acted to drain away the residue of the drugs, leaving him weary and frazzled. Sunlight poured in, dazzling the oil-smeared floor.

  “Hey, Dantzler!” DT had to shout over the noise of the rotors. “Ask him whass his name!”

  The kid’s eyelids were drooping from the joint, but on hearing Spanish he perked up; he shook his head, though, refusing to answer. Dantzler smiled and told him not to be afraid.

  “Ricardo Quu,” said the kid.

  “Kool!” said DT with false heartiness. “Thass my brand!” He offered his pack to the kid.

  “Gracias, no.” The kid waved the joint and grinned.

  “Dude’s named for a goddamn cigarette,” said DT disparagingly, as if this were the height of insanity.

  Dantzler asked the kid if there were more soldiers nearby, and once again received no reply; but, apparently sensing in Dantzler a kindred soul, the kid leaned forward and spoke rapidly, saying that his village was Santander Jiménez, that his father was—he hesitated—a man of power. He asked where they were taking him. Dantzler returned a stormy glare. He found it easy to reject the kid, and he realized later this was because he had already given up on him.