Luca said, ‘I imagined birthing centres.’ Like the one into which he had been born, on Earth.
‘Yes. The children of soldiers are incubated in such places. But you’ve seen yourself that there is a - drift - in such populations, under the relentless selection pressure of combat. It’s a good idea to freshen up the gene pool with infusions of wild stock.’
‘Wild? Commissary, what is a “press gang”?’
‘You’ll see.’
The skimmer arrived at a village by the coast.
Luca stepped out of the hovering vehicle. The volcanic rock felt lumpy through the thin soles of his boots. A harbour, a rough crescent shape, had been blasted into the rock, and small boats bobbed languidly on oily water. Even through the filters in his mask Luca could smell the intense salt of the sea air, and the electric tang of ozone. But the volcanic rock was predominantly black, as were the pebbles and sand, and the water looked eerily dark.
He looked back along the coast. Dwellings built of volcanic rock were scattered along a road that led back to a denser knot of buildings. Here and there green flashed amidst the black - grass, trees, Earth life struggling to prosper in this alien soil. It was clear these people fed themselves through agriculture: crops grown on the transformed land, fish harvested from the seeded seas. The Second Expansion had occurred before the Qax had brought effective replicator technology to Earth, an unintended legacy which still fed the mass of the human population today. And so these people farmed, a behavioural relic.
From the doorway of the nearest house a child peered out at him, a girl aged about ten, finger thrust into one nostril, wide-eyed and curious. She wore no mask; the locals were implanted with respiratory equipment at birth.
He said, wondering, ‘This is not a Coalition world.’
‘No, it is not,’ said Dolo. ‘Ideally all human beings, across the Galaxy, would think exactly the same thought at every moment; that is what we must ultimately strive for. But out here on the fringe of the Expansion, where resources are limited, things are - looser. The three million inhabitants here have been left to their own devices - such as their own peculiar form of government, which lapsed into a kind of monarchy. The war against the Xeelee is a priority over cleansing the minds of a few fisher-folk on a dirt ball like this.’
‘As long as they pay their taxes.’
Dolo grinned at him. ‘An unexpectedly cynical remark from my idealistic young Novice! But yes, exactly so.’
They walked with the troopers towards the house. The little girl disappeared indoors. Luca could smell cooking, a baking smell like bread, and a sharper tang that might have been some kind of bleach. Simple domestic smells. Flowers adorned the top of the doorway, a colourful stripe, and two small bells dangled from the door itself, too small to be useful as a signal to the occupants, a cultural symbol Luca couldn’t decode. The troopers in their bright green uniforms looked strikingly out of place, the shapes and colours all wrong, as if they had been cut out of some other reality and inserted into this sunlit scene.
There is a whole world here, Luca thought, a society which has followed its own path for twenty thousand years, with all the subtlety and individuality that that implies. I know nothing about it, had never even heard of it before coming here into the Core. And the Galaxy, which I as a Commissary will presume to govern, must be full of such places, such worlds, shards of humanity scattered over the stars.
A woman came to the door - the little girl’s mother? - strong-faced, about forty, with hands grimy from work in a field, or garden. She looked resigned, Luca thought on first impression. Her gaze ran indifferently over the Commissaries, and she turned to the lead trooper.
She spoke a language he didn’t recognise. The artificial voice of the trooper’s translating desk was small and tinny.
Luca said, ‘They must have brought their language with them. This woman speaks a relic of a pre-Extirpation tongue.’ He felt excited, intellectually. ‘Perhaps that aboriginal tongue could be reconstructed. Populations are scattered on this island world, isolated. Their languages must have diverged. By comparing the dialects of different groups—’
‘Of course that would be possible,’ said Dolo, sounded vaguely irritated. ‘But why would you want to do such a thing?’
Now the woman pressed her hand against the trooper’s data desk, a simple signature, and she called a name. The little girl came back to the door. She was a thin child with an open, pretty face; she looked bewildered, not scared, Luca thought. The mother reached down and gave the girl a small valise. She placed her hand on the girl’s back, as if to push her to the troopers.
Luca understood what was happening a moment before the girl herself. ‘We are here to take her away, aren’t we?’
Dolo held up a finger, silencing him.
The girl looked at the tall armour-clad figures. Her face twisted with fear. She threw down the valise and turned to bury her face in her mother’s belly, yelling and jabbering. The mother was weeping herself, but she tried to pull the child away from her legs.
‘She’s just a child,’ Luca said. ‘She doesn’t want to leave her mother.’
Dolo shrugged. ‘Child or not, she should know her duty.’
At first the troopers seemed tolerant. They stood in the sun, watching impassively as the mother gently cajoled the child. But after a couple of minutes the lead trooper stepped forward and put his gloved hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl squirmed away. The trooper seemed to have misjudged the mother’s mood, for she jabbered angrily at him, pulled the child inside the house and slammed the door. The troopers glanced at each other, shrugged wearily, and fingered the weapons at their belts.
Dolo tugged Luca’s sleeve. ‘We don’t need to see the resolution of this little unpleasantness. Come. Let me show you what will happen to that child.’
The lead trooper agreed that Dolo could take the skimmer if a replacement was sent out. So Luca climbed back into the skimmer alongside Dolo, leaving the harbour village behind them. It did not take long before they were back within the enclosing wall of the Navy compound, with the complex disorderly local world of sea and rock and light shut out. Luca felt a huge relief, as if he had come home.
Dolo directed the skimmer to a cluster of buildings huddled within the wall. These blocky huts had been set around a rectangle of cleared ground, and fenced off from the rest of the Navy base. Once inside this compound within a compound, Dolo and Luca got out of the skimmer and walked across obsessively swept dirt.
Everywhere Luca could see children. They were of varying ages from ten or so through to perhaps sixteen. One group marched in formation, another was lined up in rows, a third was undergoing some kind of physical training over a crude obstacle course, a fourth was standing in a rough square, watching something at the centre. Luca imagined this place must be big enough to hold a thousand children, perhaps more.
‘What is this place?’
‘Call it a school,’ Dolo said. ‘Keep your eyes open; listen and learn. And remember—’
‘I know. I am the Commission. I mustn’t show what I feel.’
‘Better yet that you should feel nothing inappropriate in the first place. But not showing it is a start. First impressions?’
‘Regularity,’ Luca said. ‘Straight lines everywhere. Everything planned, everything ordered. Nothing spontaneous.’
‘And the children?’
Luca said nothing. There was silence save for barked commands; none of the children seemed to be saying anything.
Dolo said, ‘You must understand that children brought in from the wild are more difficult to manage than those raised in birthing centres from soldier stock, for whom the war is a way of life; they know nothing else. These wild ones must be taught there is nothing else. So they will spend six or more years of their lives in places like this. Of course past the age of thirteen - or younger in some cases - they are used in combat.’
‘Thirteen?’
‘At that age their usefulness is limite
d. Those who survive are brought back for further training, and to shape the others. It helps them become accustomed to death, you see, if they are returned from the killing fields to a place like this, which keeps filling up with more people, people, people, so that mortality becomes trivial, a commonplace of statistics . . . Here now; this is where that pretty little girl from the coast will be brought, when the troopers extract her from her clinging mother.’
It was a nondescript building, before which children had been drawn up in rows. Male and female, no older than ten or eleven, they were dressed in simple orange coveralls, and were all barefoot. A woman stood before them. She had a short club in her hand. The children’s posture was erect, their heads held still, but Luca could see how their eyes flickered towards the club.
One child was called forward. She was a slim girl, perhaps a little younger than the rest. The woman spoke to her almost gently, but Luca could hear she was describing, clinically, some small crime to do with not completing laundry promptly. The girl was wide-eyed and trembling, and Luca, astonished, saw urine trickle down her leg.
Then, without warning, the woman drew her club and slammed it against the side of the child’s head. The child fell in the dust and lay still. Luca would have stepped forward, but Dolo had anticipated his reaction and grabbed his arm. Immediately the woman switched her attention to the others. She stepped over the prone form and walked up and down their rows, staring into their faces; she seemed to be smelling their fear.
Luca had to look away. He glanced up. The Galaxy’s centre glowed beyond a milky blue sky.
Dolo murmured, ‘Oh, don’t worry. They know how to do such things properly here. The child is not badly hurt. Of course the other children don’t know that. The girl’s crime was trivial, her punishment meaningless - save as an example to the others. They are being exposed to violence; they have to get used to it, not to fear it. They must be trained not to question the authority over them. And—ah, yes.’
The woman had pulled a boy out of the ranks of silent children. Luca thought she could see tears glistening in his round eyes. Again the woman’s club flashed; again the child fell to the ground.
Luca asked, aghast, ‘And what was his crime?’
‘He showed feelings for the other, the girl. That too must be programmed out. What use would such emotions be under a sky full of Xeelee nightfighters?’ Dolo studied him. ‘Luca, I know it is hard. But it is the way of the Doctrines. One day such training may save that boy’s life.’
They walked on, as the children were made to pick up their fallen comrades.
They came to a more ragged group of children. Some of these were older, Luca saw, perhaps twelve or thirteen. It disturbed him to think that there might actually be combat veterans among this group of barefoot kids. At the centre of the group, two younger children - ten-year-olds - were fighting. The others watched silently, but their eyes were alive.
Dolo murmured, ‘Here is a further stage. Now the children have to learn to use violence against others. The older ones have been put in charge of the younger. Beaten regularly themselves, now they enjoy meting out the same treatment to others. You see, they are forcing these two to fight, perhaps just for entertainment.’
At last one of the fighters battered her opponent to the ground. The fallen child was dragged away. The victor was a stocky girl; blood trickled from her mouth and knuckles. One of the older children walked into the crude ring, grinning, to face the stocky girl.
Dolo nodded with a connoisseur’s approving glance. ‘That fighter is strong,’ he said. ‘But now she will learn afresh that there are many stronger than she is.’
‘These barefoot cadets must long to escape.’
‘But their prison is not just a question of walls. In some places the regime is - harsher. When they are taken from their homes, the children are sometimes made to commit atrocities there.’
‘Atrocities?’
Dolo waved a hand. ‘It doesn’t matter what. There are always criminals of one class or another who require corrective treatment. But after committing such an act the child is instantly transformed, in her own heart, and in the hearts of her family. The family may not even want the child back. So she knows that even if she escapes this place, she can never go back home.’ He smiled. ‘Ideally, of course, it would be a family member who is struck down; that would be the purest blow of all.’
‘How efficient.’
‘Even in the face of violence a child’s social and moral concepts are surprisingly resilient; it takes a year or more before such things as family bonds are finally broken. After that the child crosses an inner threshold. Her sense of loyalty - why, her sense of self - becomes entwined not with her family but with the regime. And, of course, the first experience of combat itself is the final threshold. After that, with all she has seen and done, she cannot go home. She has been reborn. She doesn’t even want to be anywhere else.’
They walked on to the edge of the compound. Beyond the rows of buildings there was a break in the fence. On the rocky plain beyond, a group of children, with adult overseers, were lying on their bellies in crude pits dug into the ground. They were working with weapons, loading, dismantling, cleaning them, and firing them at distant targets. The weapons seemed heavy, dirty and noisy; every firing gave off a crack that made Luca jump.
Dolo asked, ‘Now. Do you see what is happening here?’
‘More indoctrination. The children must be trained to handle weapons, to deploy destructive forces - and to kill?’
‘There are native animals - flying, bird-like creatures - which they hunt. These days the animals are raised for that purpose, of course; it has ironically saved them from extinction. Yes, they must learn to kill.’
‘And people?’
‘The Xeelee are not like us - but they are sentient. Therefore it helps to be exposed to the moral conflict of killing a sentient creature, before it is necessary to do it to save one’s life. So, yes, people too, when appropriate.’
‘Commissary, must we commit such barbarism to wage our war?’
Dolo looked surprised. ‘But there is no barbarism here. Novice, what did you expect? This regime, this crude empire of mud and clubs and blood, is actually a sophisticated processing system. It turns human beings, children, into machines.’
‘Then why use human beings at all? Why not fight the war with machines?’ It shocked him to find himself even mouthing such ideas.
Dolo seemed patient. ‘This is a question everybody must ask at least once, Luca. We fight as we do because of the nature of our foe, and ourselves. The Xeelee are not like humans, not even like species such as the Silver Ghosts, our starfaring rivals in the early days of the Expansion. Read your history, Novice. With the Xeelee there has never been a possibility of negotiation, diplomacy, compromise. None. In fact there has been no contact at all - other than the brutal collision of conflict. The Xeelee ignore us until we do something that disturbs them - and then they stomp on us hard, striking with devastating force until we are subdued. To them we are vermin. Well, the vermin are fighting back.’
‘And we are doing so,’ Luca said, ‘by consuming our children.’
‘Yes, our children - our human flesh and blood. Because that is all we have.’ Dolo held up his hands and flexed his fingers in Galaxy light. ‘We weren’t designed for waging a Galactic war - as the Xeelee seem to have been. We carry our past in our bodies, a past of cowering in trees, of huddling on plains, without weapons, without even fire to protect us, as the predators closed. But we fought our way out of that pit, just as we’re fighting our way out of this one - not by denying our nature but by exploiting it, by breeding, breeding, breeding, filling up every empty space with great swarms of us. We are nothing but flesh and blood - but in overwhelming numbers even soft flesh can win the day. Our humanity is our only, our final weapon, and that is how we will win.’ As he talked his broad face was alive with a kind of pleasure.
Around Luca the squads of children went through thei
r routine of training, punishment, reward and abuse, their young minds shaped like bits of heated metal. He conjured up the face of Teel, her soft humanity above the stiff collar of the military uniform.
Dolo was watching him again. ‘You’re thinking of the lovely Captain. This is where she came from.’ He waved a hand. ‘An inductee into this dismal boot camp, here on New Earth, she was a tough fighter. Saw her first action at twelve, survived, went back for more. Why do you think I brought you here?’
Luca, bewildered, looked down at the dirt.
Dolo, at random, beckoned a small boy standing in a row of others. With a glance at his overseer the boy came running and stood at attention before them. His eyes were bright, lively. Dolo bent down and smiled. ‘Do you know who we are?’
‘No, sir,’ snapped the boy.
‘Then who are you?’
‘Who I am does not matter. Sir,’ he appended hastily.
‘Good. Then what are you?’
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