Far Horizons

by Robert Silverberg

  William had been in many of my ALSC dreams, a shadowy figure in some of the crowds. My father sometimes, too.

  I liked Sharn Taylor, the medical officer, right off. She had a cheerful fatalism about the whole thing, and had lived life to the hilt while on Heaven, hiring a succession of beautiful women to help her spend her fortune. She’d run out of money a week early, and had to come back to Threshold and live on army rations and the low-power trips you could get for free. She herself was not beautiful; a terrible wound had ripped off her left arm and breast and the left side of her face. It had all been put back, but the new parts didn’t match the old parts too well.

  She had a doctor’s objectivity about it, though, and professional admiration for the miracles they could accomplish—by the current calendar, she was more than 150 years out of medical school.

  Her ALSC session had been totally different from ours, of course; an update of healing skills rather than killing ones. “Most of it is getting along with machines, though, rather than treating people,” she told me while we nibbled at the foodlike substance that was supposed to help us recover. “I can treat wounds in the field, basically to keep someone alive until we can get to a machine. But most modern weapons don’t leave enough to salvage.” She had a silly smile.

  “We don’t know how modern the enemy is going to be,” I said. “Though I guess they don’t have to be all that modern to vaporize us.” We both giggled, and then stopped simultaneously.

  “I wonder what they’ve got us on,” she said. “It’s not happyjuice; I can feel my fingertips and have all my peripheral vision.”

  “Temporary mood elevator?”

  “I hope it’s temporary. I’ll talk to someone.”

  Sharn found out that it was just a euphoriant in the food; without it, ALSC withdrawal could bring on deep depression. I’d almost rather be depressed, I thought. We were, after all, facing almost certain doom. All but one of us had survived at least one battle in a war where the average survival rate was only 34 percent per battle. If you believed in luck, you might believe we’d used all of ours up.

  We had the satellite to ourselves for eight days—ten officers waited on by a staff of thirty personnel—while we got our strength back. Of course friendships formed. It was pretty obvious that it went beyond friendship with Chance Nguyen and Aurelio Morales; they stuck like glue from the first day.

  Risa Danyi and Sharn and I made up a logical trio, the three officers out of the chain of command. Risa was the tech officer, a bit older than Sharn and me, with a Ph.D. in systems engineering. She seemed younger, though, born and raised on Heaven. Not actually born, I reminded myself. And never traumatized by combat.

  Risa’s ALSC had been the same as mine, but she had found it more fascinating than terrifying. She was apologetic about that. She had grown up tripping, and was accustomed to the immediacy and drama of it—and she didn’t have any real-life experiences to relate to the dream combat.

  Both Risa and Sharn were bawdy by nature and curious about my heterosex, and while we were silly with the euphoriants I didn’t hold back anything. When I was first in the army, we’d had to obey a rotating “sleeping roster,” so I slept with every male private in the company more than once, and although sleeping together didn’t mean you had to have sex, it was considered unsporting to refuse. And of course men are men; most of them would have to go through the motions, literally, even if they didn’t feel like it.

  Even on board ship, when they got rid of the sleeping roster, there was still a lot of switching around. I was mainly with William, but neither of us was exclusive (which would have been considered odd, in our generation). Nobody was fertile, so there was no chance of accidental pregnancy.

  That notion really threw Sharn and Risa. Pregnancy is something that happens to animals. Sharn had seen pictures of the process, medical history, and described it to us in horrifying detail. I had to remind them that I was born that way—I did that to my mother, and she somehow forgave me.

  Risa primly pointed out that it was actually my father who did it to my mother, which for some reason we all thought was hilarious.

  One morning when we were alone together, just looking down at the planet in the lounge, she brought up the obvious.

  “You haven’t said anything about it, so I guess you’ve never loved a woman.” She cleared her throat, nervous. “I mean had sex. I know you loved your mother.”

  “No.” I didn’t know whether to elaborate. “It wasn’t that common; I mean I knew girls and women who were together. That way.”

  “Well.” She patted my elbow. “You know.”

  “Uh, yes. I mean yes, I understand. Thanks, but I…”

  “I just meant, you know, we’re the same rank. It’s even legal.” She laughed nervously; if all the regulations were broken that enthusiastically, we’d be an unruly mob, not an army.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Until she actually asked, I hadn’t thought about the possibility except as an abstraction. “I’m still grieving for William.” She nodded and gave me another pat and left quietly.

  But of course that wasn’t all of it. I could visualize her and Sharn, for instance, having sex; I’d seen it on stage and cube often enough. But I couldn’t put myself in their place. Not the way I could visualize myself being with one of the men, especially Sid, Isidro Zhulpa. He was quiet, introspective, darkly beautiful. But too well balanced to contemplate a sexual perversion involving me.

  I was still jangled about fantasy, imagination; real and artificial memories. I knew for certain that I had never killed anyone with a club or a knife, but my body seemed to have a memory of it, more real than the mental picture. I could still feel the ghost of a penis and balls, and breastlessness, since all of the ALSC combat templates were male. Surely that was more alien than lying down with another woman. When I was waiting for William to get out of his final range-and-motion stage, reading for two days, I’d had an impulse to try tripping, plugging into a lesbian-sex simulation, the only kind that was available for women.

  For a couple of reasons, I didn’t do it. Now that it’s too late—the only trips on Athene are ALSC ones—I wish I had. Because it’s not as simple as “I accept this because it’s the way they were brought up,” with the implied condescension that my pedestal of normality entitles me.

  Normality. I’m going to be locked up in a can with 130 other people for whom my most personal, private life is something as exotic as cannibalism. So rare they don’t even have an epithet for it. I was sure they’d come up with one.

  5

  Table of Organization

  Strike Force Beta

  Aleph-10 Campaign

  Supporting: 1LT Otto (NAV), 2LTs Wennyl and Van Dykken (MED), Durack (PSY), Bleibkey (MAINT), Lackey (ORD), Obspowich (COMM), Madison (COMP): lSgts Masten-broek (MED), Anderson (MED), Szoki (MED), Fraser (MED), Henne (PSY), Neelson (MAINT), Ender (ORD); SSgts Krause (MED), Steinseller (MED), Hogshead (MED), Otto (MED), Yong (MAINT), Jingyi (CK), Meyer (COMP); Sgts Gould (MED), Bonder (MAINT), Kraus (ORD), Waite (REC); Cpls Friedrich (MED), Haislett (MED), Poll (SEX), Norelius (SEX), Gyenge (ORD); Pvts Curtiss (MAINT), Senff (CK), Harup (ORD).

  APPROVED STFCOM STARGATE 12 Mar 2458 FOR THE COMMANDER:

  Olga Torischeva BGEN

  STFCOM

  The lounge was a so-called “plastic room”; it could reform itself into various modes, according to function. One of the Athene staff had handed over the control box to me—my first executive function as executive officer.

  When the troop carriers lined up outside for docking, I pushed the button marked “auditorium,” and the comfortable wood grain faded to a neutral ivory color as the furniture sank into the floor, and then rose up again, extruding three rows of seats on ascending tiers. The control box asked me how many seats to put on the stage in front. I said six and then corrected myself, to seven. The Commodore would be here, for ceremony’s sake.

  As I watched the Strike Force file into the auditorium, I trie
d to separate the combat veterans from the Angels. There weren’t too many of the latter; only fourteen out of the 130 were born on Heaven. For a good and unsettling reason.

  Major Garcia waited until all the seats were filled, and then she waited a couple of minutes longer, studying the faces, maybe doing the same kind of sorting. Then she stood up and introduced the Commodore and the other officers, down to my echelon, and got down to business.

  “I’m certain that you have heard rumors. One of them is true.” She took a single note card from her tunic pocket and set it on the lectern. “One hundred sixteen of us have been in combat before. All wounded and brought here to Heaven. For repairs and then rest.

  “You may know that this concentration of veterans is unusual. The army values experience and spreads it around. A group this size would normally have about twenty combat veterans. Of course this implies that we face a difficult assignment.

  “We are attacking the oldest known enemy base.” She paused. “The Taurans established a presence on the portal planet of the collapsar Aleph-10 more than two hundred years ago. We’ve attacked them twice, to no effect.”

  She didn’t say how many survivors there had been from those two attacks. I knew there had been none.

  “If, as we hope, the Taurans have been out of contact with their home planet for the past two centuries, we have a huge technological advantage. The details of this advantage will not be discussed until we are under way.” An absurd but standard security procedure. A spying Tauran could no more disguise itself and come aboard than a moose could. No one here could be in the pay of the Taurans. The two species had never exchanged anything but projectiles.

  “We are three collapsar jumps away from Aleph-10, so we will have eleven months to train with the new weapon systems…with which we will defeat them.” She allowed herself a bleak smile. “By the time we reach them, we may be coming from four hundred years in their future. That’s the length of time that elapsed between the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the first nuclear war.”

  Of course relativity does not favor one species over the other. The Taurans on Aleph-10 might have had visitors from their own future, bearing gifts.

  The troops were quiet and respectful, absorbing the fraction of information that Major Garcia portioned out. I suppose most of them knew that things were not so rosy, even the inexperienced Angels. She gave them a few more encouraging generalities and dismissed them to their temporary billets. We officers were to meet with her in two hours, for lunch.

  I spent the intervening time visiting the platoon billets, talking with the sergeants who would actually be running the show, day by day. I’d seen their records but hadn’t met any of them except Cat Verdeur, who had been in physical therapy with me. We both had right-arm replacements, and as part of our routine we were required to arm wrestle every day, apologetic about the pain we were causing each other. She was glad to see me, and said she would have let me win occasionally if she’d known I was going to outrank her.

  The officers’ lounge was also a plastic room, which I hadn’t known. It had been a utilitarian meeting place before, with machines that dispensed simple food and drink. Now it was dark wood and intricate tile; linen napkins and crystal. Of course the wood felt like plastic and the linen, like paper, but you couldn’t have everything.

  Nine of us showed up on the hour, and the major came in two minutes later. She greeted everyone and pushed a button, and the cooks Jengyi and Senff appeared with real food and two carafes of wine. Aromatic stir-fried vegetables and zoni, which resembled large shrimp.

  “Let’s enjoy this while we can,” she said. “We’ll be back on recycled Class A’s soon enough.” Athene had room enough for the luxury of hydroponics and, apparently, fish tanks.

  She asked us to introduce ourselves, going around the table’s circle. I knew a little bit about everyone, since my XO file had basic information on the whole Strike Force, and extensive dossiers of the officers and noncoms. But there were surprises. I knew that the major had survived five battles, but didn’t know she’d been to Heaven four times, which was a record. I knew her second-in-command, Chance Nguyen, came from Mars, but didn’t know he was from the first generation born there, and was the first person drafted from his planet—there had been a huge argument over it, with separatists saying the Forever War was Earth’s war. But at that time, Earth could still threaten to pull the plug on Mars. The red planet was self-sufficient now, Chance said, but he’d been away for a century, and didn’t know what the situation was.

  Lillian Mathes just came from Earth, with less than twenty years’ collapsar lag, and she said they weren’t drafting from Mars at that time; it was all tied up in court. So Chance might be the only Martian officer in service.

  He had a strange way of carrying himself and moving, wary and careful, swimming through this unnaturally high gravity. He told me he’d trained for a Martian year, wearing heavier and heavier weights, before going to Stargate and his first assignment.

  All of them were scholarly and athletic, but only Sid, Isidro Zhulpa, had actually been both a scholar and an athlete. He’d played professional baseball for a season, but quit to pursue his doctorate in sociology. He’d gotten his appointment as a junior professor the day before his draft notice. His skin was so black as to be almost blue; with his chiseled features and huge muscularity, he looked like some harsh African god. But he was quiet and modest, my favorite.

  I mainly talked with him and Sharn through the meal, chatting about everything but our immediate future. When everything was done, the cooks came in with two carts and cleared the table, leaving tea and coffee. Garcia waited until all of us had been served and the privates were gone.

  “Of course we don’t have the faintest idea of what’s waiting for us at Aleph-10,” the major said. “One thing we have been able to find out, which I don’t think any of you have been told, is that we know how the second Strike Force bought it.”

  That was something new. “It was like a minefield. A matrix of nova bombs in a belt around the portal planet’s equator. We’re assuming it’s still there.”

  “They couldn’t detect it and avoid it?” Risa asked.

  “It was an active system. The bombs actually chased them down. They detonated four, coming closer and closer, until the fifth got them. The drone that was recording the action barely got away; one of the bombs managed to chase it through the first collapsar jump.

  “We can counter the system. We’re being preceded by an intelligent drone squad that should be able to detonate all of the ring of nova bombs simultaneously. It should make things pretty warm on the ground, as well as protecting our approach.”

  “We don’t know what got the first Strike Force?” Sid asked.

  Garcia shook her head. “The drone didn’t return. All we can say for sure is that it wasn’t the same thing.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Aleph-10’s easily visible from Earth; it’s about eighty light-years away. They would have detected a nova bomb 120 years ago, if there’d been one. The assumption has to be that they attacked in a conventional way, as ordered, and were destroyed. Or had some accident on the way.”

  Of course they hadn’t beamed any communication back to Earth or Stargate. We still didn’t. The war was being fought on portal planets, near collapsars, which were usually desolate, disposable rocks. It would only take one nova bomb to vaporize the Stargate station; perhaps three to wipe out life on Earth.

  So we didn’t want to give them a road map back.

  6

  A lot of the training over the next eleven months had to do with primitive weapons, which explained why so much of my ALSC time had been spent practicing with bows and arrows, spears, knives, and so forth. We had a new thing called a “stasis field,” which made a bubble inside which you had to use simple tools: no energy weapons worked.

  In fact, physics itself didn’t work too well inside a stasis field; chemistry, not at all. Nothing could move faster than 16.
3 meters per second inside—including elementary particles and light. (You could see inside, but it wasn’t light; it was some tachyon thing.) If you were exposed to the field unprotected, you’d die instantly of brain death—no electricity—and anyhow freeze solid in a few seconds. So we had suits made of stuff like tough crinkly aluminum foil, full of uncomfortable plumbing and gadgets so that everything recycled. You could live inside the stasis field, inside the suit, indefinitely. Until you went mad.

  But one rip, even a pinprick, in the fabric of the suit, and you were instantly dead.

  For that reason, we didn’t practice with the primitive weapons inside the field. And if you had a training accident that caused the smallest scratch, on yourself or anyone else, you got to meditate on it for a day in solitary confinement. Even officers; my carelessness with arrow points cost me a long anxious day in darkness.

  Only one platoon could fit in the gym at a time, so at first I trained with whoever was using it when I got a few hours off from my other duties. After a while I arranged my schedule so that it was always the fourth platoon. I liked both Aurelio Morales, the squad leader, and his staff sergeant, Karl Hencken. But mainly I liked Cat Verdeur.

  I don’t remember a particular time when the chumminess suddenly turned into sex; there was nothing like a proposition and a mad fling. We were physically close from the beginning, because of our shared experience at Threshold. Then we were natural partners for hand-to-hand combat practice, being about the same physical age and condition. That was a rough kind of intimacy, and the fact that officers and noncoms had a shower separate from the other men and women gave us another kind. Aurelio and Karl took one side, and Cat and I took the other. We sort of soaped each other’s backs, and eventually fronts.