Peeg snuffles out a hollow between the burned roots of a tree stump, digs a small scrape where we lie together.
“Hungry,” says Peeg.
“We are all hungry,” I say. “There is nothing here for us. We will have to be hungry a little longer.”
I lie in the scrape. The moon stands over me. A little lower than the moon, strange lights cross the sky, moving fast, fast, from horizon to horizon in a breath. I cannot sleep. I dare not sleep. If I sleep, I will see Ceefer broken apart and all her words and knowledge and strange unbelief that, in truth, was a kind of belief, spilled out and lost.
In the night, Peeg wakes.
“Coon-ass.”
“Yes.”
“Give me.”
“Give you what?”
“Give me knowledge.”
“I do not know how. I do not know what this knowledge is.”
“Peeg know. Mamavator give Peeg words. Mamavator say: ‘Say Coon-ass: Load File B13 echelon 7’.”
And it is as if those words, which Peeg could not possibly know unless he had, indeed, been given them by mamavator, gather all my beingness and roll it up like clay in a hand, push it away away to the very back of my head so that I may watch but am helpless to act as I feel my hands reach round to the back of my neck and pull out an emplant. And I see those hands that look like my hands reach out and slide the emplant into an empty socket beneath Peeg’s ear. And the ears that hear like my ears hear Peeg sigh, and gasp, and say, in a voice I have never heard Peeg speak in before:
“Reset normal sentience simulation parameters.”
I shake my head, try to shake my Coon-ass back into every corner of my being. I am frightened: clever, proud, wise Coon-ass, mastered and ridden like a . . . like an animal. I lie and watch the lights crossing the sky, feeling small, small, smaller than the smallest thing I can imagine. Nothing.
The black, beating star beat-beats all night, so huge and close it has spilled out of the place in my head where the pictures are to fill everything with its beating.
All together now, all together now, all together now.
In No Man’s Land.
The Farm.
In the morning my eyes and hands are raw sore with the white ash that covers the burned lands. We are all very hungry but we know among ourselves it is better not to speak about such things. Peeg offers to let me ride on his back. I am glad to accept. With Porcospino trotting beside us, we enter the inner defences. The borderline is clearly marked. A metal arm jutting from the ash bars our path. Clenched in its steel grip is a rodentlike being, furious even in death. The steel fingers crush the rodent’s neck, the rodent’s teeth are sunk into the arm’s brightly coloured wiring. Both are long, long dead.
It is both warning and welcome.
Much occupied with our own thoughts, whatever kind of thoughts the angels have given us to think, we pass into a landscape of terrible, terrible destruction. As far as we can see, the ash is littered with bodies of beings organic and inorganic, locked together in embraces that seem to this Coon-ass almost tender. Paws clawing for the light; mouths open to snap bright teeth one last time at the sun. Torn and twisted metal; gnaw-bones, jawbones. Hanks of hair and wind-dried hide. Dead birds, pulled out of the sky, skywise wings splayed out, feathers rustling in the wind, beaks and eyeless eyesockets silted up with drifting ash. Standing guard over them, half-clogged to the waist in ash and mud, the machines: shattered, crushed, twisted apart by ancient explosions, smashed metal limbs swinging, creaking, red sensor eyes dull dead dark.
A cat hanging from a wire noose.
A bird shot through with a metal spike.
Three bloated dogs floating in a crater full of rainwater.
Porcospino lets out a cry. It is the first sound to break the silence of the ashlands. He has seen the body of a brother porcupine, lying close by in a hollow in the ash, surrounded by the skin-draped skeletons of dogs.
“Leave it, leave it,” I say. “You can do nothing here. It is dead, it has been dead for time beyond counting.”
But Porcospino will not listen; it is as if this rattle of dead, dry quills and spines is a comrade to him, a comfort in the dreadfulness all around him. A lost littermate he never had. He nuzzles the dead thing, pushes it with his nose, as if he might push life back into it, push it into movement and joy. He pulls at its pelt with his teeth; clumps of emplants come away in his teeth.
“Leave it leave it leave it!” I say. “There is too much danger here!”
The ash hears me. The ash stirs. The ash moves. The ash opens. Like a flower blooming, the machine unfolds from beneath the earth. Its head quests; back, forth, back, forth. Red machine eyes open, staring.
“Run run run!” I say, but the weaving head on the long flexing neck has fascinated Porcospino, like the snake I once saw in my mamavator dreams, which could dazzle you with its dancing, weaving, flexing. The huge red sensor eyes fasten on Porcospino. He gazes up into the huge red eyes.
The machine spews out a sheet of fire. Porcospino goes up in a shriek of burning. He tries to beat at the flames with his tiny useless hands, rolls on to his back to roll them out. The fire roars up and eats him.
The head on its long neck wavers, collapses into the ash. Its red sensor eyes go black. Its work is done. I curl my fingers into the circuitry on Peeg’s neck, urge him onward.
“To the Destination,” I say. “The Destination.”
A thin trail of smoke goes up behind us; the wind changes direction and bends it low over us as we pick our way across the battlefield. As Peeg carries me along, he tells me about what the chip has told him about the Destination he is to destroy. It is a strategic manufacturing installation, he says. His words are large and strange, not Peeg words. It builds machines and grows beings, this strategic manufacturing installation.
“Like mamavator?” I ask.
“Like mamavator,” says Peeg, “but this one does not fly in heaven. This one is buried deep under the ground. Deep deep, way down deep. It is very old. Very very old. The angels have been trying to destroy it for long long years. Attack after attack after attack they have sent, from heaven first, and then by machine, and then by beings. Attack after attack after attack. After so many attacks, it must be tired now, old. It cannot have much energy left. That is how we will be able to reach the Destination.”
“How will we know when we reach the Destination?” I ask.
“We will know,” says Peeg. “That is what the chip tells me.”
“And then you will destroy it?”
“And then Peeg will destroy it.”
“How?”
Peeg does not know. But Peeg trusts that the angels, in their great wisdom, having told him much already, will tell him that also when he needs to know.
Angels, in their great wisdom. Peeg would have cried, once. Peeg would have cried for Porcospino. Peeg would have cried for each one of those many many beings, more than many many hands can count, that died so that Peeg and Coon-ass can reach their Destination. What did the angels take away to make room for their great wisdom?
We will know, the angel voices in the chip said. Why must they be so very very true in everything they say? We will know, I will know, I have known, since I stumbled, blinking from the warm wet womb into the forest morning. The Destination is the great black star in the picture in my head taken out and pressed into the earth; real, actual. Huge. The black star is bigger than I can cover with both hands spread out in front of my eyes. Many many hours walk across. Heat shimmers and dances over the star: I cannot see its further edge. Now that the shock is passing, I see that it is not the same as that other star, my inner star. It is not as sharp-edged, as definite; it has many many rays, the shiny black of it is streaked and stained with colours, its surface is crazed and cracked, like something that has fallen from heaven to earth.
Fallen, or cast down? We stand at the edge of the great black star, a raccoon riding on the back of a tapir.
“You must get down now,” says P
eeg. “I am to go on my own.”
“Where?” I touch the blackness with my hand, it is smooth, slippery, warm to the touch.
Peeg points with his trunk out across the black. “I hear voices,” he says in that voice, with those words, which are not his own. “Voices, coming from big bright lights. Wonderful wonderful lights.”
“Peeg, you cannot go, I must go too, you need me.”
“On my own,” Peeg says, looking far into the heat haze. “I will destroy it on my own. Then I will come back to you.”
“You will come back to me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you promise?”
“I do not understand what that means.”
“It means that when you say that you will come back, you will come back, that nothing will stop you coming back.”
“Yes.”
“Then I will do as you say.”
“It is the will of the angels,” says Peeg, and walks out on his little, neat feet, out across the black glass star, until the heathaze swallows him and I can see him no more. I sit. I wait. The sun moves across the sky, I watch it reflected in the blackness before me. In the reflection I can see where the wars of the angels have left their marks even there. The face of the sun is scarred with dark pockmarks. Craters. Black starbursts. The heathaze runs over the black, melted land like water. In the shiver and the shimmer I am no longer certain what is true, what is false. For in the silver shining I see a distant dark figure standing. Then the heathaze flows and runs and I see clearly: it is Peeg out there in the black lands.
“Peeg!” I shout, “Peeg!” But he cannot hear me. He is looking into the sky, questing up with his trunk, like one who has been given a vision of angels.
“Peeg!” I call again, and start to run to him, across the black glass star. “You have come back!” I run and run and run; the soles of my feet and hands blister on the burning black glass, but however hard I run, however much I call, I never seem to come any closer. Peeg remains a tiny, wavering dark figure in the huge silver shimmer of the heathaze.
“Peeg!” I call one final time. And Peeg looks round.
And the sky turns white with a light so bright that it burns through my closed eyelids as if they were not there, burns through my hands that I clamp over my eyes, a burning burning light as if the sun has burst and died. Belly, hands, face are seared by the light, the fur shrivels and crisps away in an instant.
And after the light, is darkness. And after the darkness is a thunder like the sound of heaven falling, so loud that it becomes more than sound, it becomes a voice, a cry of angels.
And after the thunder is a rushing mighty wind; a screaming, scorching wind that does not seem like a thing of air, but a thing of earth, a solid, material thing that strikes like a fist, strikes the breath from me, sends me hurling, tumbling backward in the tearing whirl of ash and dust and roaring air, away away away from Peeg’s Destination, into the ashlands.
And after the rushing mighty wind is darkness again, beautiful darkness, and in the beautiful darkness; silence.
. . . and dance by the light of the moon.
“Thirtysomething”: Production company sound-byte.
Am forgetting. Am losing. Words. Rememberings. Knowings. Feel with fingers, for darkness still in eyes; feel the chips, feel the emplants; they feel not right, they feel melted, burned. The blast must have damaged my circuitry. Words come, words go, sentences, memories. Words from deep deep in the chips. Words that I once knew. Words that I have forgotten. Words I was meant to forget. Words I now remember, stirred up like silt in a river by the explosion. Words like implanted nanotok warhead. Words like containment field generator. Words like mass/energy conversion. I take the words in these clever hands of mine and understand. Everything. I understand what has been done to me, to Porcospino and Ceefer and Bir-dee, and every other creature trapped and impaled and dismembered and burned to nothing out there in the ashlands. Most of all I understand what has been done to Peeg.
Enough intelligence to carry out the mission, but not to understand. Never to understand, merely to obey.
Blind, burning, I crossed the ashlands. Nothing harmed me, nothing knew of my existence. Dead. All dead now. In my blindness I pushed down down down into my memories, down into the deep deep river of remembering, down beyond our birth from the womb of mamavator into this hardworld, down past the dreamforest in which we ran and played and swam while we were yet seeds in the metal womb. And there I found words. Words like programmed neural simulation, and pre-natal environmental conditioning, like shadows in a heathaze.
I came to the forest. The trees were tumbled and fallen, brought down by the blast. I felt my way over the trees, picked out fat grubs and beetles with my fingers, crunched them down with my small teeth. Anima. The spirit of livingness. When I felt coolness and shade on my pelt, and smelled dampness, and growing, I knew I had passed under the canopy of the living forest.
Grubbing. Sniffing. Feeling. When will seeing be again? When will hearing be again? When this hissing, ringing no more?
There. Do I hear? Look up in darkness, turning turning, under cool cool trees, again, do I hear, a whisper, a whistle, a call? Two notes. Two tones. Hi-lo. Hi-lo. Hi-lo. Hush, you whistling, chirping, rustling things, in my head or in the world. Coon-ass must listen. Hi-lo. Hi-lo. Hi-lo. Two words.
Blind, I hold up my hand into the warmth of a beam of sunlight. And, light as light, she comes to rest on my fingers, singing her two-word name. Bir-dee. Bir-dee. Bir-dee.
Colours gone. Sweet flashing darting movement, up through leaves, branches, into heaven: gone.
“Bir-dee.” Name remains. “Bir-dee.” She sings her two-note song. I feel her bobbing, impatient, on my finger. Chip. Chip. Pull chip. See pictures. See pictures.
No, Bir-dee, no. Gently gently, I bring her in front of my face, gently gently move close until my lips touch the back of her head. No fear. Trust. I press my lips to her blue blue feathers, then, one by one, pull the chips and emplants from their sockets and drop them, one by one, to the ground. When they are all gone, I lift Bir-dee high, high as my arm will reach, into the warmth of the sun.
“Go, Bir-dee, go. Be animal again. Be full of joy. Fly!” I cast her up into the light. Wings beat, I imagine bright darting colours rising up, rising up, above the forest, into light. I look up into the light: do I see shapes, movings, loomings, like motion of angels? I touch long, trailing coils of circuits and chips, trace them back to the metal sockets in my skull.
Then one by one, I pull them out and let them fall.
THE PRIVATE WAR OF PRIVATE JACOB
by Joe Haldeman
Here’s a disturbing little story about the call of duty that shows us that maybe you don’t have as much choice about answering it as you think you do . . .
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel, The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the ’70s. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard-science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of The Hemingway Hoax. His story “None So Blind” won the Hugo Award in 1995. His other books include two mainstream novels, War Year and 1969; the SF novels, Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II), Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, and Th
e Hemingway Hoax; the “techno-thriller” Tools of the Trade, the collections, Infinite Dreams, Dealing in Futures, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, and None So Blind; and, as editor, the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent book is the long-awaited follow-up to The Forever War, called Forever Peace, which has just won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife Gay make their home.
* * *
With each step your boot heel cracks through the sun-dried crust and your foot hesitates, drops through an inch of red talcum powder, and then you draw it back up with another crackle. Fifty men marching in a line through this desert and they sound like a big bowl of breakfast cereal.
Jacob held the laser projector in his left hand and rubbed his right in the dirt. Then he switched hands and rubbed his left in the dirt. The plastic handles got very slippery after you’d sweated on them all day long, and you didn’t want the damn thing to squirt out of your grip when you were rolling and stumbling and crawling your way to the enemy, and you couldn’t use the strap, no place off the parade ground; goddamn slide-rule jockey figured out where to put it, too high, take the damn thing off if you could. Take the goddamn helmet off too, if you could. No matter you were safer with it on. They said. And they were pretty strict, especially about the helmets.
“Look happy, Jacob.” Sergeant Melford was always all smile and bounce before a battle. During a battle, too. He smiled at the tanglewire and beamed at his men while they picked their way through it—if you go too fast you get tripped and if you go too slow you get burned—and he had a sad smile when one of his men got zeroed and a shriek a happy shriek when they first saw the enemy and glee when an enemy got zeroed and nothing but smiles smiles smiles through the whole sorry mess. “If he didn’t smile, just once,” young-old Addison told Jacob, a long time ago, “just once he cried or frowned, there would be fifty people waiting for the first chance to zero that son of a bitch.” And Jacob asked why and he said, “You just take a good look inside yourself the next time you follow that crazy son of a bitch into hell and you come back and tell me how you felt about him.”
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