Still, we were getting them one by one, and managed to destroy four of the seven buildings. Then, when there were only two aliens left, a nearby grenade blast flung one of them to within a few meters of a door. He dove in and several grenadiers fired salvos after him, but they all fell short, or detonated harmlessly on the side. Bombs were falling all around, making an awful racket, but the sound was suddenly drowned out by a great sigh, like a giant’s intake of breath, and where the building had been was a thick cylindrical cloud of smoke, solid-looking, dwindling away into the stratosphere, straight as if laid down by a ruler. The other Tauran had been right at the base of the cylinder; I could see pieces of him flying. A second later, a shock wave hit us and I rolled helplessly, pinwheeling, to smash into the pile of Tauran bodies and roll beyond.
I picked myself up and panicked for a second when I saw there was blood all over my suit—when I realized it was only alien blood, I relaxed but felt unclean.
“Catch the bastard! Catch him!” In the confusion, the Tauran—now the only one left alive—had got free and was running for the grass. One platoon was chasing after him, losing ground, but then all of B team ran over and cut him off. I jogged over to join in the fun.
There were four people on top of him, and fifty people watching.
“Spread out, damn it! There might be a thousand more of them waiting to get us in one place.” We dispersed, grumbling. By unspoken agreement we were all sure that there were no more live Taurans on the face of the planet.
Cortez was walking toward the prisoner while I backed away. Suddenly the four men collapsed in a pile on top of the creature…even from my distance I could see the foam spouting from his mouth-hole. His bubble had popped. Suicide.
“Damn!” Cortez was right there. “Get off that bastard.” The four men got off and Cortez used his laser to slice the monster into a dozen quivering chunks. Heartwarming sight.
“That’s all right, though, we’ll find another one—everybody! Back in the arrowhead formation. Combat assault, on the Flower.”
Well, we assaulted the Flower, which had evidently run out of ammunition—it was still belching, but no bubbles—and it was empty. We just scurried up ramps and through corridors, fingers at the ready, like kids playing soldier. There was nobody home.
The same lack of response at the antenna installation, the “Salami,” and twenty other major buildings, as well as the forty-four perimeter huts still intact. So we had “captured” dozens of buildings, mostly of incomprehensible purpose, but failed in our main mission; capturing a Tauran for the xenologists to experiment with. Oh, well, they could have all the bits and pieces of the creatures they’d ever want. That was something.
After we’d combed every last square centimeter of the base, a scout-ship came in with the real exploration crew, Star Fleet scientists. Cortez said, “All right, snap out of it,” and the hypnotic compulsion fell away.
At first it was pretty grim. A lot of the people, like Lucky and Marygay, almost went crazy with the memories of bloody murder multiplied a hundred times. Cortez ordered everybody to take a sedtab, two for the ones most upset. I took two without being specifically ordered to do so.
Because it was murder, unadorned butchery—once we had the anti-spacecraft weapon doped out, we weren’t in any danger. The Taurans didn’t seem to have any conception of person-to-person fighting. We just herded them up and slaughtered them, in the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate? Maybe it was the second encounter, counting the teddy-bears. But they got the same treatment.
I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the Twentieth Century, they established to everybody’s satisfaction that “I was just following orders” was an inadequate excuse for inhuman conduct…but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?
Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren’t all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellowmen, without any hypnotic conditioning.
So I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army, and horrified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so…well, there was always brainwipe.
The ship that the lone Tauran survivor had escaped in had got away clean, the bulk of the planet shielding it from Earth’s Hope while it dropped into Aleph’s collapsar field. Escaped to home, I guessed whoever that was, to report what twenty men with hand-weapons could do to a hundred fleeing on foot, unarmed.
I suspected that the next time humans met Taurans in ground combat, we would be more evenly matched. And I was right.
SAUL’S DEATH: TWO SESTINAS, by Joe Haldeman
First published in There Will Be War, 1982
I
I used to be a monk, but gave it over
Before books and prayer and studies cooled my blood.
And joined with Richard as a mercenary soldier.
(No Richard that you’ve heard of, just
A man who’d bought a title for his name).
And it was in his service I met Saul.
The first day of my service I liked Saul;
His easy humor quickly won me over.
He admitted Saul was not his name;
He’d taken up another name for blood.
(So had I—my fighting name was just
(A word we use at home for private soldier.)
I felt at home as mercenary soldier.
I liked the company of men like Saul.
(Though most of Richard’s men were just
(Fighting for the bounty when it’s over.)
I loved the clash of weapons, splashing blood—
I lived the meager promise of my name.
Saul promised that he’d tell me his real name
When he was through with playing as a soldier.
(I said the same; we took an oath in blood.)
But I would never know him but as Saul;
He’d die before the long campaign was over,
Dying for a cause that was not just.
Only fools require a cause that’s just,
Fools and children out to make a name.
Now I’ve had sixty years to think it over
(Sixty years of being no one’s soldier).
Sixty years since broadsword opened Saul
And splashed my body with his steaming blood.
But damn! we lived for bodies and for blood.
The reek of dead men rotting, it was just
A sweet perfume for those like me and Saul.
(My peaceful language doesn’t have a name
(For lewd delight in going off to soldier.)
It hurts my heart sometimes to know it’s over.
My heart was hard as stone when it was over;
When finally I’d had my fill of blood.
(And knew I was too old to be a soldier.)
Nothing left for me to do but just
Go back home and make myself a name
In ways of peace, forgetting war and Saul.
In ways of blood he made himself a name
(Though he was just a mercenary soldier)—
I loved Saul before it all was over.
II
A mercenary soldier has no future;
Some say his way of life is hardly human.
And yet, he has his own small bloody world
(Part aches and sores and wrappings soaking blood,
(Partly fear and glory grown familiar)
Confined within a shiny fence of swords.
But how I learned to love to fence with swords!
Another world, my homely past and future—
Once steel and eye and wrist became familiar
With each other, then that steel was almost human
(With an altogether human
taste for blood).
I felt that sword and I could take the world.
I felt that Saul and I could take the world:
Take the whole world hostage with our swords.
The bond we felt was stronger than mere blood
(Though I can see with hindsight in the future
(The bond we felt was something only human:
(A need for love when death becomes familiar.)
We were wizards, and death was our familiar;
Our swords held all the magic in the world.
(Richard thought it almost wasn’t human,
(The speed with which we parried others’ swords,
(Forever end another’s petty future.)
Never scratched, though always steeped in blood.
Ambushed in a tavern, fighting ankle-deep in blood,
Fighting back-to-back in ways familiar.
Saul slipped: lost his footing and his future.
Broad blade hammered down and sent him from this world.
In angry grief I killed that one, then all the other swords;
Then locked the door and murdered every human.
No choice, but to murder every human.
No one in that tavern was a stranger to blood.
(To those who live with pikes and slashing swords,
(The inner parts of men become familiar.)
Saul’s vitals looked like nothing in this world:
I had to kill them all to save my future.
Saul’s vitals were not human, but familiar:
He never told me he was from another world:
I never told him I was from his future.
Author’s Note
The sestina is an ingenious, intricate form of verse that originated in France around the twelfth century, percolated into Italy, and from there was appropriated by the English. At first glance, it looks like a rather arbitrary logjam, sort of a hybrid of poetry with linear algebra, but it does have a special charm.
The form calls for six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three-line envoi. The lines don’t rhyme, but they give a sort of illusion of rhyming, by forced repetition. The last words of the first six lines provide the last words of every subsequent line, by a strict system of inside-out rotation. (If the last words of the first stanza are 1-2-3-4-5-6, then the last words of the second are
6-1-5-2-4-3; the third, 3-1-4-1-2-5, and so forth. Clara? The envoi ought to have all six words crammed into its three lines, but the writer is allowed a certain amount of latitude with that, and I’ve taken it.)
The result, in English at least, is a sort of a chant, which is one of two reasons the form is appropriate for an entertainment like “Saul’s Death.”
* * * *
“Hero” Copyright © 1972 by Joe W. Haldeman.
“Saul’s Death: Two Setinas” Copyright © 1982 by Joe W. Haldeman.
MILITARY SCIENCE FICTION, by James D. Macdonald
Since the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy…writers have created military science fiction. Military science fiction is that branch of the art that focuses on war, on soldiers, and on military values: Honor, loyalty, and faith in one’s comrades in arms.
Whether we count Caesar’s Gallic Commentaries as military science fiction or military fantasy, whatever we may think about the Middle English Metrical romances (e.g. Octavian; see also various Breton lais by Marie de France concerning the adventures of assorted knights; also Malory’s stories of King Arthur, the poem of El Cid, and the Song of Roland, where the protagonists, all of them military characters, fight assorted menaces both human and supernatural), we can skip lightly over several thousand years of literature to alight in the mid-nineteenth century, when science fiction, as a distinct genre, was being forged. The military venue is an obvious one for literature in general: Stories require conflict, and wars are conflict crystalized. When science fiction came on the scene, it fell upon the military venue with cries of joy.
It’s always tricky to call something the “first” in its category. Scholars don’t agree on what was the first novel, let alone what was the first science fiction novel. Therefore, let me say that an early military science fiction novel, if not the first, belonged to the sub-subgenre, “technothriller.” (It was, indeed a sub genre, for it dealt with a sub.) Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Seas, by Jules Verne (1870), at the time it was written was what you could call very-near-future science fiction. It incorporated the latest understanding of oceanography, submersible vessels, and the newly invented self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. And it was military, for the submarine, the Nautilus, under the command of the mysterious Captain Nemo (whose name is a shout-out to that example of proto-military-SF, Homer’s Odyssey) was able to attack the very latest British warships. And if Verne took the technology in question a little further than it actually existed at the time, that extrapolation only places the novel more firmly in the realm of science fiction.
The next year saw the next leap in military science fiction. The Invasion Novel had existed as a genre in Europe since the beginning of the century, with titles like The Invasion of England (1803) and The Armed Briton (1806). Invasion Novels used current advances in military science (e.g. balloons; breech-loading artillery) to show how the defenses of assorted countries were inadequate to guard against aggression on the part of their historic enemies.
In spring of 1871, Blackwood’s Magazine published a novel serialized in three parts, launching the next phase of military science fiction, the Future War. The novel was The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer, by George Chesney. Chesney was an army man, a major of engineers, who had himself been wounded in the Indian Mutiny.
The Battle of Dorking purports to be a reminiscence set some fifty years in the future, telling the story of the defeat of an unprepared England by a nameless (but German-speaking) invader. The novel’s best-seller status launched a fleet of imitators.
One of the later future war books is out-and-out science fiction: The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells. The War of the Worlds closely follows The Battle of Dorking in its scenes and incidents. But the foe this time is not an unnamed European power using actual, if advanced, weapons. The enemy here are mollusklike Martians with mechanical tripod fighting machines armed with heat rays, against which the British Empire is helpless. One character in The War of the Worlds, an artilleryman, brings this novel into the sub-genre of military science fiction. The artilleryman proposes a guerilla war while humans attempt to duplicate the Martians’ weapons.
The War of the Worlds proved immensely popular and long-lived. It was reprinted several times. When it was remade as a radio drama by Orson Welles in 1938, the story caused widespread panic in the United States. Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951), another invasion novel, closely followed The War of the Worlds (right the way down to the invaders being ultimately overcome by ordinary human disease), just as The War of the Worlds had closely followed The Battle of Dorking.
Over in Japan, Oshikawa Shunrô wrote Kaitei Gunkan (1900), in which a Japanese Naval officer builds the eponymous Submarine Battleship with which he fights pirates and, in the sequels, a future-historical war against the Russians. The submarine of the novels, and its tactics, reflect the earlier works by Verne.
Although the purpose of science fiction (in so far as it has a purpose at all) is not predicting the future, Verne and Oshikawa correctly predicted the vulnerability of surface ships to submarines, while Wells predicted the laser ray, poison gas, armored fighting vehicles (“The Land Ironclads,” 1903), and the atomic bomb (“The World Set Free,” 1914).
Then (in 1914 and the decades after) came World War One, the invention of science fiction as a separate genre, the rise of the pulp magazines, the Great Depression, and World War II.
The Galactic Patrol appeared in the novel Triplanetary by E. E. Smith (serialized in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in 1934). The story revolves around the planets Earth, Mars, and Venus, which have just fought
a successful war against the inhabitants of Jupiter. Other plot elements involve a millennia-long war between extra-human intelligences that are carrying out selective breeding on Earth to foster their own ends. The Patrol is a combination military/police force/peacekeeping organization. The novel Galactic Patrol (a sequel to Triplanetary) was serialized in six parts in Astounding magazine in 1937. The Galactic Patrolmen, as they fight an intergalactic crime syndicate called the Boskone, personify military virtues. They continued to have adventures in further novels involving the Lensmen, written by Smith both before and after World War II.
When World War II ended, the great age of Military Science Fiction began.
In 1948, former Naval officer Robert Heinlein published Space Cadet, a school adventure set in a military academy for a service that covered the same three planets as the Galactic Patrol. These planets were the swampy Venus, the arid Mars (home of a former advanced civilization), and Earth. Intelligent life on Mars was, or had been, mainstream scientific thought, with Percival Lowell championing the canals on Mars. And Venus was the same size as Earth and was known to have permanent cloud cover, which suggested a habitat not unlike Earth’s own Age of Dinosaurs. The plot possibilities were endless.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 327