by Adam Roberts
And Sidlan wanted to be part of that army. He wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be a mainstay of Humanity’s defence against the menace of the Virus Race.
~ * ~
Two
On the twelfth day of the fourth month of the year of Galactic Empire 1349, the fortieth year of the reign of the Committee of Seven, Sidlan Air beta, the son of Sidlan Air alpha, sat in a small room in the tall blue spire of the Paizon building. He was masturbating. He came to this building once every three weeks, and did this. In return the Paizon group paid him forty divizos, enough to buy a meal for two at one of the city’s better restaurants, or some air-shoes and finger prostheses for the popular sport of Wall Battery (Sid was good at that particular sport). A small but useful sum of money, in other words, and - in Sid’s opinion — money for nothing. What sixteen-year-old boy wouldn’t happily masturbate for free? When a Paizon representative approached him one afternoon, after a Football match, and suggested the arrangement, Sid could hardly believe his luck.
He sat in a special couch, and stimulated himself to emission. The gluey string of material landed on the couch between his legs, and was instantly absorbed into the body of the thing, as was usual. He sat back, and let out a small sigh. Then he rearranged himself, hopped off the couch, and made his way to the down-tube. Moments later he was walking out of the main door to the Paizon building, into bright double-sunshine. Everything about his life was good.
‘Sid,’ somebody called.
Sid turned. Sunlight spattered off the deliberately uneven tiling of the esplanade, and shone through the gushing fountain at its centre, making it difficult to see exactly who had hailed him. Somebody was standing beside the fountain. Sid wandered towards him.
‘Do I know you?’
‘Sure you do, Sid,’ said the man. ‘Rep’s party? The game? Remember afterwards?’
‘I remember drinking my brains out, afterwards,’ said Sid, grinning, and then he glanced guiltily up at the tall blue building he had just left, stretching brightly above the plaza. It was part of his contract with Paizon that he not indulge in damaging intoxicants, such as Splash, seven days before his sessions for fear (he assumed) of degrading the sperm. In the early days Sid had been rigorous about this; but now he was much less careful. He’d become blasé about the arrangement. Every three weeks, a quick wank, another forty divizos. Who cared about the other stuff?
‘Well, I was there, boy-man,’ said the stranger. ‘I was at that party. I remember you.’ He followed Sid’s guilty glance up at the Paizon building. ‘I’m not fond of hanging out under their eye either,’ he said. ‘Can we, like, go somewhere else? Can we get a drink, Sid, and sit and talk?’
‘Sure,’ said Sid. He liked to make new friends.
~ * ~
Three
The stranger introduced himself as Syr Dubsig the 1st alpha. Syr, he explained, was an antique discriminant, a sort of hereditary title his family had purchased from one of the arcane sub-departments of Imperial administration a hundred years before. ‘Hey Sid,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you call me Dub?’
‘Call me Sid,’ said Sidal. ‘But, you already did.’
They walked for twenty minutes, until the blue peak of the Paizon building was in the distance, and then sat at a silver-and-diamond table outside a little bar, overlooking another plaza centred on a smaller but more beautiful fountain. Dub ordered Zest, and Sid a tall glass of Dancer. For a while they chatted. It turned out that Dub was almost exactly the same age as Sid. He lived in the same city, but a different suburb and went to a different school. It was a city of millions, so it wasn’t surprising that they hadn’t met before that party. ‘But I’ll tell you something that is surprising,’ he said.
‘And that is?’
‘I know what you were doing in the Paizon building.’
‘What was I doing in the Paizon building?’
‘You were masturbating,’ said Dub, and sniggered into his Zest.
Sid looked up at the sky.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Dub, suddenly serious, ‘how I know.’
Sid looked at him.
‘Because I’ve been doing it too. Forty divizos, right? Once every three weeks or so, right?’
‘Right.’
‘You ever wonder why they pay us to do it?’
Sid shrugged. ‘I never thought of it much,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. Something, or other. Medical, maybe?’
Dub shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you why,’ he said, ‘and it’ll change your life.’
Sid laughed at this. His life was fluid enough for the concept of change to mean little to him.
‘I found out by accident, really,’ Dub said. ‘Did a lot of browsing about, browsing around, on Screen connections and so on, and came across this group, and went to one of their meetings, and they told me about it. Then I checked up, various ways, and found they were right mostly. You know what they do with our, you know, our stuff?’
Sid shrugged again.
‘They whip it straight up the cable, then they take it out to the arcologies, in orbit. You know the ones? Round Helio, and round Ber, and round Manifree, and round thirty other stars nearby. Why do you think they do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sid.
‘Let me put it this way. When you masturbate, when you come, you know how many sperm come out? Three hundred million. That’s a lot of sperm. Don’t you think that’s a lot of sperm? If you have sex, then one sperm finds the egg and the rest die. If you masturbate, they all do, they all die.’
Sid shrugged once more. His was a generation not in awe of giant numbers. One hundred and forty thousand inhabited worlds banded together in one enormous Galactic Empire. A hundred million stars altogether in Imperial Space. You grew up with this; you didn’t think about it except as a distant background to your own life. Sid’s brain was pleasantly drugged by the Dancer, which he had now drunk, and the immensity of it all was even pleasant to contemplate; a sort of hazy, milky backdrop to everything. Three hundred million sperms, like miniature black comets; the night sky with its great splash of light, the galactic arm running straight up through the night sky, like bright semen spilled on a black sheet.
He said, slightly slurred: ‘What I don’t see—’
Dub cut across him. ‘I’ll tell you what they do with your sperm and with my sperm,’ he said. ‘They put them together. You and me, we make babies. Can you believe it?’ He laughed at the absurdity of it, but he didn’t laugh long. ‘They screen out about a hundred million, with obvious deformities. Then with all the stuff that remains they combine one spermatozoon of mine with one of yours. When a baby is made normally, one sperm, with half the chromosomes to make a baby, joins with an egg, which also has half the chromosomes, eleven each. As far as sex-determination is concerned, the egg has an X chromosome and the sperm an X or a Y, and if they combine XX that’s a girl, and if they combine XY that’s a boy. But since each sperm has half the chromosomes needed for a human, putting two sperm together works just as well as sperm-and-egg. So that’s what they do. XX, XY chromosome, they don’t mind about that. Male or female are equally useful to them.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Sid, vaguely troubled. ‘Why don’t they just use a sperm and an egg?’
‘Because women produce one egg a month, and men produce three hundred million sperm in moments. Pay attention. They seed the two of them together, your spermatozoon and mine, and grow them in a medium. When the cells are replicating, they remove it to an artificial nutrient wall, and grow it into a person. They grow it past nine months, actually, because as it’s an artificial environment, they don’t have to worry about the baby being too big to fit down the birth canal. When it’s a year, I think, they bring it out and wean it and grow it some more. They accelerate growth in various ways, that’s not important, because the acceleration is all keyed in with the training, they train them as they grow. That way the training is in the bone, is second nature to them. They
feed them and train them and grow them strong, and then they’re ready.’
‘Ready?’
‘Ready to fight.’
‘Fight who?’
‘Fight the Virus Race, of course. Who else? This group I was telling you about? They found the footage. The soldiers look like me, Sid - it is more freaky than I can tell you. The male and female soldiers look like me. And, I guess, like you. Some of them look like variants of me, with different noses or chins or whatever, but so many of them look exactly and precisely like me. Half my genes, half yours, we’re like mummy and daddy, or more like daddy and daddy.’
‘How can they look exactly like us?’
‘Oh, not exactly like us. They resemble us the way kids resemble their parents, some a lot, others less so. But there are hundreds of millions, so plenty look just like us. Man, I watched forbidden footage of some of the battles, and I’ve watched hundreds of thousands of male and female mes and yous slaughtered in battle. It’s incredible.’
Sid didn’t feel drunk any more. The sunlight had a harder edge. ‘I don’t get what you’re saying,’ he said.
‘The Imperial government doesn’t exactly keep it secret,’ said Dub, ‘but they don’t exactly make it out to be common knowledge either. I guess most of the hundred and forty thousand worlds just, well, assume that soldiers are recruited on some other world, in some other part of the empire. But that’s not true. This group, they call themselves the Cell, you got to come along to their meeting tonight. They’ll show you the evidence. Enlighten you.’
‘Evidence?’ said Sid. ‘Which is evidence of what?’
‘Wake up, Sid,’ yelled Dub. Then he calmed himself, looked around. ‘Paizon use our sperm to grow soldiers. Every three weeks they take our sperm. They skim out a hundred million or so of the weaker or deformed or malgrown spermatozoa, and that leaves two hundred million. That’s how many soldiers they can make. It’s a production line. They grow them for a year in-vitro and two years accelerated growth out of the box. They are able, at the other end of the process, to send one hundred and fifty million soldiers to the war every three weeks.’
‘My god,’ said Sid.
‘One hundred and fifty million you and mes,’ said Dub. ‘One hundred and fifty million of our children.’
‘Why so many?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? It’s a war of attrition. I guess we’ve tried, I mean I guess humanity has tried, you know, other ways of beating the Xflora back, but I guess it has eventually come to this. It’s come to a war of sheer numbers, of battles in which tens and hundreds of millions of our guys sacrifice themselves to hold back the unimaginable swarms of, of them.’
Sid didn’t say anything to this. It seemed, fuzzily and distantly, possible. It could be. Outlandish, but maybe, maybe. Only later in the day did the enormity of it start to sink in. Only in the days that followed did he find his teenage numbness to the world-at-large turning into something approaching outrage. He attended a meeting of the group Dub had mentioned, the Cell, and then a week later he attended another. By the end of the week, he had dropped out of school.
~ * ~
Four
Sid’s life changed. Before, he had drifted through the usual range of teenage pastimes and hobbies. After the revelation he became more and more single-minded. He had been providing the material for an army of billions, out of his own body. The Cell had made it their business to investigate the prosecution of the war. The Council of Seven is handling the war badly, they said. They keep the trillions of Imperial citizens in the dark about their strategy. They didn’t even tell you what your sperm was being used for.
Sid gave up sports, gave up his usual circles of friends and parties and entertainments. He read widely on Imperial history, and discovered that the Galactic Empire had been ruled for a thousand years on the principle of local distraction and general inertia. People on the individual planets were concerned with what was right in front of their face, and barely noticed anything else. And the mass of the Imperial population was such that it was literally, statistically impossible for political agitators, revolutionaries or rebels to create any sort of momentum. Your cause might attract a million followers: it was still a negligible proportion of the Imperial population. It could attract ten million followers, and the situation was the same. The Cell knew this to their cost; they had been trying to raise consciousness on the subject of the war for decades, and had got nowhere. It wasn’t that news about the war was censored, exactly; it was more that they could not interest a sizeable enough group of people to amount to anything more than one of the billions of splinter groups, fan-bases, cults, religions, political parties, pressure organisations, terrorist cadres, discussion clubs or agit-prop teams that already crowded the system. The war? Some people cared about it, but more people cared about one of the many other things about which it was possible to care: about one of the thousand forms of art, or the two thousand popular sports, or the three thousand political allegiances, or the four thousand games and hobbies.
But Sid cared. He cared so much it became an obsession. He watched the forbidden files and screen images that the Cell had somehow obtained, and saw low-qual footage of great sweeping armies of men and women, armed and armoured, rushing in a terrifying surging crowd over the horizon, under a plum sky, through an orchard-like formation of vanilla rocks, charging down upon the chitinous defence formations of the Xflora. He watched young men and young women with faces similar to his, and similar to Dub’s, rushing towards death with a battle song in their throats. He watched it over and over again. The fact that these were all his children, quite literally all his children in their millions and millions - the fact sank deep into his consciousness. His own children, dying in such numbers. He dreamed about them, and woke sopping with sweat and screaming. He argued with his parents and his brother and sister, because they didn’t believe it. They refused to view the footage at first, and then, when he had yelled and bullied them into viewing it, they thought it was a computer special-effect. His arguments with his parents grew more intense. He left home, and slept on the floor of a Cell member. He and Dub both had a special status in the Cell. They were revered, almost. Certainly neither of them lacked for girlfriends. The struggle became the most important thing in their lives. Soon enough, it became their whole lives.
Sid stopped masturbating. He became almost phobic about it. As soon as he was convinced of the Paizon Corporation’s role in the Imperial Government’s scheme he stopped his three-weekly visits. He informed the Corporation of his decision, and the reason for it, hoping that they would challenge his breach of contract in court, where the truth might be aired. But they did not seem worried. The Cell discovered that two new teenagers had been offered the post. There seemed no special aspect to these two boys, except that they were fairly athletic and fairly intelligent and, like most teenage boys, extremely willing to masturbate and be paid for it. Sid and Dub tried picketing the tall blue tower of the Corporation in an attempt to warn these boys off, but ArmyPolice descended in soft cars that grabbed them in their underbellies, and swept them into the sky and deposited them in funnel-gaol, with the 100ft sheer walls and the open roofs. Three days in gaol with no food and only rainwater to drink, and the boys were released with a warning not to trespass on Paizon Corporation ground again.
But they had decided not to bother the new boys. If they were turned, persuaded to stop donating their sperm, then two new boys would be found easily; and if they were turned, then two more. The Empire had an enormous supply of young boys who could fill the role. That was not the way to go.
The way to go, they decided after discussion with the Cell, was to visit one of the arcologies in which the foetuses were speed-grown and trained as soldiers. Sid and Dub would go; the fathers would visit their hive-grown family. Maybe they could make such a splash that publicity would spread the story round the Empire. Maybe they could draw on some family loyalty, and turn an army of millions to the Cell’s cause. Bett
er to try something than do nothing.