There was no agonizing decision to be made this time when the war was over. There was nothing left in this world to live for, so Hawker volunteered to be recorded one more time.
***
He could tell when he emerged from the protein bath the next time that he was back on Earth; gravity felt right again. He was prepared, this time, for the abrupt transition from one moment to the next, and didn’t have to be helped from the tub. He nodded silently to the technicians, accepted the clothing they handed him and walked into the next room—where his jaw fell open from shock. Standing there in the center of the room, amid a group of other resurrectees, were Green and Symington, just as naturally as though Hawker had not seen them die with his own eyes. He stood stock still, not believing what he saw, until they finally noticed him and came over to greet him. As Symington reached out one long arm to place around his shoulders, Hawker shrank back from the touch.
“Hey, what’s the matter, buddy?” Symington said in his usual booming voice. “Ain’t you glad to see us? We didn’t know whether you’d actually sign up for another term.”
“What do you think of the new process?” Green asked. “I told you in the email—jeez, it seems like just this afternoon I did that—I told you I had some reservations, but it does seem to work. I sure don’t feel any different. It really is instantaneous—what’s the matter?”
Hawker had gone white. “You—you’re dead. Both of you. You’re both dead!”
“Somebody sure forgot to tell me that,” Symington laughed, but Green was inclined to take Hawker’s upset a little more seriously.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “How can we be dead? The army just resurrected us; we don’t even know who we’re fighting yet.”
“You died last time—on the Moon.”
“The Moon? Last time?” Symington’s impatience was showing. “What the fuck are you talking about? Maybe this new process scrambled your brains.”
Green turned to Symington. ‘“Take it easy, can’t you see something’s wrong?” Then, to Hawker, ‘“Take your time, Hawk, and tell us what you’re trying to say. We won’t interrupt.”
Slowly, painfully, Hawker told them the story of the war on the Moon, and of how each of them had died there. The other two listened silently, the expression on Green’s face growing more worried by the minute.
When Hawker finished, Green shook his head slowly and closed his eyes. “Oh my God,” he said softly, half to himself. “Oh my God, they’ve done it.”
“Done what?” Symington demanded. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“I think so—but I wish I didn’t. They really have stolen our souls, and now there’s no escape, ever. There’s no way out. Damn, why didn’t I think? Why didn’t I see it coming?”
“If you don’t start talking sense, ol’ buddy,” Symington said, “I’m gonna knock your head right down through your asshole.”
“Don’t you see? Now that they’ve got us recorded, they can resurrect us any time they like. If we die in battle, they can still bring us back for the next war—or even later in the same battle—and we’ll never know anything’s wrong. Even if we quit the program or desert, they can just make another one as a backup—and that new one will never know the old one left. They’ve got us by balls, now, and they’ve got us forever. We’re slaves, Lucky. We may be immortal, in a funny sort of way, but we’re still slaves.”
Symington’s face clouded with anger. “They can’t do that to me! I’ll show them!”
“Oh really?” Green gave an ironic laugh. “What are you going to do—mutiny? They don’t even have to bother with a court-martial, because you’re not a real person. They can shoot you on the spot and make themselves another Lucky Symington—one who doesn’t know a thing about what happened to his predecessor, and who might be more docile.”
“What if we told everyone else about this, organized a sit-down strike or something…?”
Green shook his head. “It wouldn’t do any good. Don’t you see, our lives aren’t worth a flea’s fart any more. They can always make us over. Even if everyone decides to string along with us, they could come in here with a machine gun, kill everybody and duplicate the entire herd. They can keep doing that forever until they find a group that goes along with them.”
“There’s got to be something we can do!” Symington said.
“I don’t know….”
Green’s remarks were interrupted by the arrival of a sergeant who’d come to give them their by now familiar briefing. Hawker was so dazed by Green’s observations that he could pay no attention to the lecture. An army of soldiers, turned out like a production line. He’d played with little plastic soldiers as a kid, setting them up in various positions to simulate combats. When one soldier “died,” he moved it around to another place and pretended it was someone different.
And now he and his friends were the plastic soldiers, no more real in the minds of the generals than Hawker’s toys had been to him. They were all interchangeable, just pieces in a vast game that had been going on since the beginning of time.
Hawker never did find out very clearly what this particular war was about—but none of the other soldiers seemed to know, either. They just fought where they were told to fight and didn’t ask too many questions. Most of the fighting seemed to be in the mountains of Mexico, which had apparently split off from Nacom to be independent once more—and that was all Hawker could ever really pin down.
Hawker’s path crossed Green’s several times during the course of the ten-month-long war. The serious young man had done some heavy thinking about their problem and, while he had no solution, he’d at least worked out a philosophy for tackling the situation. “Memory is the key,” he told Hawker once as the two of them enjoyed a leisure moment together in a wartime bar, sipping a beer. “It’s the only thing we have left that we can call our own. Don’t ever let them take it away from you.”
“I don’t understand,” Hawker said.
Green leaned forward to explain. “Look, we’re going to live a very long time, maybe forever, who knows? Somewhere in all that time, an answer has got to appear—and when it does, we have to be ready for it.
“Each time we die they’ll resurrect us again—but the person they’ll resurrect will be missing the memories of the one who got killed. They’ll have to go back to the last time he was recorded to get a new copy. There’ll be times when we can’t avoid that, obviously, but we’ve got to minimize it. We can’t allow ourselves to forget. Don’t ever give them an excuse to kill you prematurely and rob you of the memories you’ve just gained. Be a good soldier, try to stay alive, do whatever you must to preserve your memories. Good God, if they’re going to force us to live forever, then at least let’s live with hope that someday, somehow, we can win free.”
The battles of this war were particularly fierce, as the Nacom generals threw their troops into combat with suicidal abandon. They, too, had realized how cheap were the lives of their soldiers, and casualty statistics became meaningless to them.
Amazingly, all three of the friends survived that war, all kept their memories of the experience intact. None of them was particularly surprised, either, when—at war’s end—they were no longer given any choice in the matter; it was just assumed they’d be recorded to serve in future wars. The “merry-go-round,” as Green called it, would never stop again, and there was no way to get off.
***
The next war was once again fought in outer space, between two artificial worlds in orbit around the Earth. The reasons for the conflict became more abstruse, less comprehensible. The weapons were constantly being improved and updated, but the dreary business of fighting remained ever the same.
Hawker, however, would have no recollection of this war. A laser beam tore through his spacesuit as he and a boarding party were trying to sabotage the enemy colony’s exterior rotation jets. It was his first death, but by no means his last.
***
On the next incarnation, Green
and Symington didn’tt mention to Hawker that he had died last time. A new etiquette was growing among the resurrectees, because some of the troops reacted badly to hearing they’d died before. Some went completely crazy and had to be killed and re-dubbed. Now it was taboo to mention someone’s previous death—and, in fact, it was considered very bad form to even talk about past wars. If it turned out that a person had died in that war he would have no recollection of it, and someone else’s talking about it would bring the point home to him most painfully.
With the past taboo and the future a bleak nightmare, conversations were all anchored solidly in the present: how tired everyone was, the wretched quality of the food, and sexual successes or failures during their infrequent leaves. Society was changing around them, and the troops found it hard to keep up. Even the language itself was changing; people who ostensibly spoke English were difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend. Green remarked to Hawker that the entire system would break down soon, at this rate, because soldiers wouldn’t be able to understand their officers.
Norquist’s Rangers grew in numbers, and people gradually stopped talking about old friends they didn’t see anymore. It seemed to Hawker the list of taboo topics got longer every time they were called into action.
This war was fought on Earth. It seemed that every nation was set against every other, and alliances shifted so rapidly it was impossible to tell who was on your side even with a scorecard. It was chaos in its primal form, but that mattered not at all to Hawker. He did his job like a good soldier and refused to let the external world impinge on his personal reality.
***
The next war was on Mars, and the language spoken was so far from twenty-first century English that the resurrectees had to sit through a basic language course before they could be sent into battle. Green drew some hope from this; if the process of retraining the soldiers became too expensive, perhaps the army—whoever’s army it was by now—would decide the process of dubbing the soldiers should be scrapped in favor of some other system. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was some hope, at least.
Conditions on Mars seemed to be a cross between Antarctica and the Moon, with all the worst features of each. A rip in one’s pressure suit was not automatically lethal here, but it was damned incapacitating. The general staff was belatedly reaching the same conclusion as Green: the memories of its fighters were an asset to be preserved if possible. The more memories a soldier had, the wilier and more cunning a fighter he became. The number of suicide missions leveled off until they became, as they’d been before, merely last-ditch efforts of a desperate strategist.
***
There followed several wars Hawker never knew about, because he died in each of them.
***
The next war he could recall was on the hell known as Venus, where the atmospheric pressure was hundreds of times that on Earth and the temperature was hot enough to melt tin. To go out on the surface, even in the best spacesuits ever conceived, was instant death. The war was fought instead using mobile bases that roamed over the barren landscape like enormous tanks, each holding a crew of between five and twenty people.
Hawker was in one base that sustained a near-direct hit. The feet were knocked out from under it, and it tumbled down a steep ravine into a shallow river of molten metal. The base’s skin was durable—it didn’t rupture during the fall—but the occupants were thrown madly against the equipment.
He woke up lying on what had been the side of the room. His body was a single mass of bruises and cuts. A couple of toes on his left foot may have been broken. His forehead felt wet, and when he raised his hand to it he found it was blood—but it had already been bandaged.
“Hey!” he called out.
A woman appeared in the doorway to another room. She was covered in blood, but didn’t seem that badly injured herself. “Oh good, you’re up,” she said. “I could use the help. Can you stand?”
Hawker tried moving. His body was stiff and sore, but he’d felt worse. Slowly he picked himself up, favoring his left foot. “What happened?”
“We got hit. The only camera that works is pointing up at the sky, so I don’t know how we ended up. Obviously the skin held, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“How many others made it?”
The woman shrugged. “Technically two, but their skulls were cut open so bad I just crushed them with a pistol butt and saved them the trouble. It’s just you and me now for the duration. Name’s Belilo, by the way.”
“Hawker.”
She extended her right hand toward his and pretended to shake it in pantomime of a greeting. “Ready for some work?”
“What kind?”
“We’re in a closed-in space with eleven dead bodies, and they’re already starting to smell. The recycler won’t take a whole body, so we’ve got to cut ‘em up to feed them in. It ain’t easy with just a field knife, believe me. I could use some help.”
“Sure.”
They set about their gruesome task with determination, and soon Hawker’s uniform was as blood-soaked as Belilo’s. Even with the two of them working at it, it took half an hour to dismember each body with blades not meant for the purpose. They had to take longer and longer breaks between corpses, and after six they had to stop to eat. They dubbed some meals and sat down on whatever flat surfaces they could find.
After chewing a while in silence, Belilo said, “So, where you from?”
“Kansas.”
Belilo showed only mild comprehension. “That’s on Earth, right?”
“Yeah. United States. North America.”
She gave a slight nod.
More silence. Finally he replied, “And you?”
“Geos.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Used to be called O’Neill Three.”
“Still don’t know it.”
Belilo cocked her head. “You’re one of the old ones, aren’t you?”
Hawker nodded. “First sleeper program.”
Her eyes widened. “Wow, that’s impressive!”
“It’s something.”
“You don’t look a day over two hundred.” It was an old joke among the dubs. Hawker gave her the obligatory smile.
“It’s a space settlement,” Belilo said after a minute. “An artificial world in space. Built in 2167. I never even set foot on a planet till I was in the army.”
Hawker just grunted and said nothing else. Eventually they finished eating and went back to the grim job of dismembering their comrades. They were utterly exhausted—”bone tired,” Belilo joked morbidly—and each found a place to curl up and sleep for a few hours.
When they woke, they had breakfast, then just stared at one another for a while. “Wanna fuck?” Belilo asked without passion.
Belilo was neither outstandingly attractive nor ugly. Hawker shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
They stripped off their blood-soaked uniforms and tossed them in the recycler. They had sex quietly, rested a while, then did it again. They lay naked and peaceful in each other’s arms. “Anyone know where we are?” Hawker eventually asked.
“Don’t know. The comm’s not working. There’s supposed to be some kind of emergency rescue beacon, but I don’t know if that’s working, either. The dubber works, though, so we’ve got all the air and food we need.”
Eventually they got up and dubbed themselves some clean new uniforms, since it was dangerous walking naked through the sharp metal edges of the twisted machinery. They ate lunch, then had some more sex. Then they got up and tried the transmitter once more, without success.
There was surprisingly little to do inside the base except eat, sleep and have sex. Hawker was never very loquacious, but Belilo tried to draw him out. “Why’d you join the army?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I guess it got me away from my family. How about you?”
“No choice,” she said. “The judge ordered me in here.”
“What’d you do?” He had sudden visions
of her on trial for murder. Not that it mattered now, of course.
“Counterfeiting.”
“I thought nobody used money any more.”
“Not money. People. The technical charge was ‘unauthorized dubbing.’ The government likes to keep their monopoly. Three of my co-husbands and I were dubbing people without permission. My husbands were just executed, but I was the ringleader, so I got sent into the army.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “Wish they’d just killed me, too. It’d be better than all this shit.”
Food, sleep, sex and talk. Belilo did most of the talking. She told Hawker what it was like to grow up and live in a totally artificial world. He listened, not completely understanding and not completely caring.
After nearly a month of this they were discovered by a salvage crew looking for wreckage. The war, they learned, had been over for two weeks. In due course they were returned to the army to be copied once more into the database.
***
Then back to Earth, but in a role he hadn’t expected. He was part of an expeditionary force from the Planetary League, sent to punish the mother world for its recalcitrance in submitting to the “natural domination” of Geos.
Hawker and his cohorts did their job well, and Earth learned its lesson. Never again was it in a position to challenge its former colonies for control of its own destiny.
***
Then there came a gap of more than a hundred and fifty years, the largest single hiatus Hawker could ever recall. Since it was unlikely there’d been no wars during all that period, Hawker could only assume he’d died numerous times in the interim. None of his friends, of course, would say anything about it, and he never asked.
Norquist’s Rangers continued to expand. The dubs called it “getting reassigned.” It became a humorless joke, and then a bitter fact of life. Some envied the Rangers.
Technology had improved markedly during the past few centuries. The resurrection process had been made ever more streamlined, with the nutrient tanks growing smaller and more efficient, until now they were no longer needed. At present it was possible to re-create a person out of “thin air” simply by playing his pattern in a special way that Hawker couldn’t even begin to understand.
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