Especially since I was not at all sure which side I wanted to fight for.
How had I come to be here? To put it succinctly, I had been shanghaied. This worked in my favor; I was able to put on a show of total ignorance of where I was going, and why, without rousing any suspicion. Even the fact that no one knew me had so far not posed a problem.
Escaping Farren’s palace had proven far easier than I could have hoped; his security, to give it perhaps a better name than it deserved, was unused to actually needing to do more than stand and look mildly menacing. As with so much of their culture, the Nuum had placed too much confidence in their machines to have any experience in the real-life tracking of men.
How ironic, then, that such was my own goal, to track Farren down wherever he might run and wrest from him that which I desired with my heart, and which he desired with only the basest animal emotions: Hana Wen. Whence he would fly, I knew not, but the answer would likely be found in the midst of his fellows.
With that end in mind, I marched boldly into the aliens' headquarters, planning to elicit advice from the Library. Hardly had I stopped before the elevator than two Nuum pulled up even with me, seized me by the arms, and whisked me away.
At first I thought I had been arrested, but in the space of the few words they vouchsafed me, they made it clear that they thought I was merely one of their own, whose blind obedience and cooperation were expected. I immediately discarded any impulse to break free, although I am certain I could have done so with ease. Although their bulk was nearly the equal of my own, their muscles seemed less developed, as if generations of allowing mechanicals to do their heavy work had softened them.
They ushered me back to the hangar whence I had first entered the building days before, loosening their grip when it became obvious I was not going to resist. Docked there was what I could only presume was a large airship. It was a silvery white oval, not unlike a large zeppelin, but without any gondola that I could see. I was marched up a gangplank to an officer holding an electronic clipboard who presided at a hatchway at the top. After a few words with my escort the officer waved me inside.
"Hey, wait a minute!"
I stopped and turned slowly, still in the hatchway. "Yes, sir?"
He spent a very long moment staring me up and down.
"What's your name?"
As much as I had been expecting this, it was still hard to form the words.
"Uh, Keryl Clee, sir."
Again he studied me closely, his eyes narrowing.
"Good to have you aboard. We're going to need men like you." He made an entry on his clipboard, and waved me inside, where more officers stood to direct me to my bunk assignment.
I tried not to stare, but the few open doors I passed were full of banks of machinery whose blinking lights and buttons that were very nearly frightening to a boy barely out of the dusty Southwest. Electricity was still very new where I grew up, and Bantos Han's house had featured few machines of any kind, or at least any that I could recognize as such. Knowing that this was a war vessel and that some of those lights and panels probably represented weapons beyond my comprehension did nothing to soothe my nerves.
One—and not the least—of the evils of trench warfare had been the hours of waiting until your orders came up from the rear echelons, knowing that when the waiting ended the dying and the killing began. As I sat on my bunk in the belly of a war machine the likes of which I could not have imagined a few weeks ago, I felt that same anxiety—except that this time I didn't have any chums to help pass the time away in song, or family reminiscences, or just plain companionable silence. I was alone, and only one person could make that any better.
Finally overcoming my own self-pity, I got off my meager bunk and wandered off to find food. The mess room hit me like a sharp, cold wave at the beach. All of my previous experience with the Nuum had shown me an efficient, aloof people in a cold, streamlined environment. I had dismissed Harros' attempts at camaraderie as an aberration, only what was expected of civilized men trying to make the most of uncivilized conditions. One minute in the mess hall plainly revealed that this time the uncivilized lout had been me.
Only three-quarters full, the room could not have held more noise. Arching over all was the music—at least I think it was music. To me it was loud, chaotic, and discordant, but from the number of tables rocking back and forth under the timely pounding of Nuum fists, to them it was prime entertainment. I resisted the urge to put my hands over my ears with some effort and found an empty seat as far from the others as I could. I was still being unsociable, but at least I was being unsociable in a crowd. And I was still an alien among aliens—I wasn't even sure I knew how to order a meal.
Suddenly I realized that I was famished. When had I last eaten? I couldn't remember for the life of me—unless it was in the Library, and I didn't know just how far the food provided by the Librarian might satisfy me. Without a thought I swept my hand over the table, and a menu glowed to life beneath the surface. The Librarian had plainly taken wide latitude with the knowledge he had implanted: The operation of the food service machines seemed to flow straight from my fingers with no direction from my brain. My facility was that of any Nuum born and bred, nor did my familiarity stop there. I had never seen a single one of the menu items before, yet I made my selections with alacrity and confidence. While I waited, I took in the room again.
No eyes at all were directed toward me; no one had heard me walk in over the noise. The music stopped abruptly—I breathed a sigh of relief—only to crash back as twice as loudly and incomprehensibly as before. This time I couldn't help putting my hands over my ears.
"Loud enough for you?"
I jerked my head up. I had heard the question as clearly as if the music hadn't been driving straight through me. For an instant, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, I thought it must have stopped—then I remembered the magic of telepathy and its independence of my ears.
Harros stood across from me, a tray of food in his hand and an inquiring look on his face. I nodded and he sat down.
"Sorry if I startled you," he said in my mind. It was an odd feeling, this communication through telepathy alone, but it seemed to block out normal hearing, and soothed the headache I was getting from the music. "I didn't realize you had come in here because it would help you concentrate."
He had a smile on his face, and he conveyed it with his thoughts, so I grinned back. With the music softened, it seemed easier to smile. Harros' timeless offer of friendship had helped me delude myself into believing for the moment that we were merely two more soldiers fighting a war we pretended to understand.
"It's all right," I said. "I really came in here for the company. I just wasn't prepared for the music."
"First time, eh?"
"Hm?"
"First time on a fighting ship?"
"Yes." At least on a flying one. "How did you know?"
"Easy. You hate the music." He grinned. "This is all they play. After a while you get used to it. What did you do before?"
I hazarded a guess. "I was in the library section."
"You?" His eyebrows shot up. "You sure don't look like a librarian. How'd you land a job like that?"
"Just lucky, I guess."
He leaned back in his chair and laughed, the sound lost in the music. It didn't come through his thoughts at all. I just kept grinning like an idiot. I had no idea why he thought it was so funny.
And then the music halted again, abruptly as before, but this time it didn't start back up. Harros' laugh came out full force, odd like a sound that is cut off in reverse. He brought himself under control with an effort and swiveled in his chair.
I expected an officer to address us, but in the air over our heads in the center of the room an image began to take form. It was a map of a hilly plot of land that I didn't recognize. The accompanying voice emanated from no particular direction.
"You are viewing a map of the black sector. The Thorans have taken advantage of the loc
al topography to mount an unusually strong terrorist offensive." In the next sentence I thought the voice deviated noticeably from its even pedantic tone. "The blacks have been unable to contain the problem."
The image glided to a ground-level view of a rolling jungle criss-crossed with what had looked from the air like roads.
"The local eco-system is highly fragile and highly valuable, which prevents our using our heaviest firepower, a fact that the rebels have used to their own advantage. Witness."
The next scene was reminiscent of a motion picture battle scene, save that the pictures were in color, and far more vivid than anything I had ever seen in the cinema back home. Our point of view started at ground level, then rose straight up like a man coming to his feet. It was only when our vantage point moved forward that I realized it was a man, evidently carrying a camera—although where he held it I could not fathom, since at intervals either of his hands might be seen.
Something bothered me about his hands, and distracted me from the action. I tried to concentrate, but at the moment the camera was simply moving through tall grasses toward a line of overwhelming trees. We could see helmeted men to either side carrying what appeared be staffs of some sort, and hear the swishing of many legs cutting through the rushes, but no one spoke, and there was little to keep my attention. What was it…?
Of course! The voice had spoken of "the blacks" being unable to handle their own problems with the rebels. I had assumed that the Nuum to whose aid we were speeding were dark-skinned…but the hands in the picture were white. I breathed a sigh of inward relief that I could dispose of my irrelevant concerns—obviously the man carrying the camera must be an officer, a white man commanding a Negro company. It was comforting in a way to see that some of Nature's orders remained the same no matter how else Man might change.
Like so many other cherished illusions of my existence, this would soon be shattered by a truth far more astonishing than any I could imagine.
I jerked my head back to the screen as a flash of light scored across it. The camera began to zig-zag back and forth. Occasionally a small explosion would burst off to the side or in front of us, return fire as I supposed, but there were few of those, and as we approached the trees the firing from our side halted altogether.
But it was not until at last the camera burst through the grasses onto a seared strip of land, and a line of men rose up to meet us in hand-to-hand combat as if Jason himself had sown them from dragon's teeth, that I realized how cruelly correct my observations of humanity had been. Those were not roads I had seen earlier. And this was not war with buttons and levers and death rays from the sky.
This was trench warfare. And I was headed straight for it.
15. I See Battle
The mess room briefing was only a short overview of the problem; after a few minutes of watching the kind of warfare any intelligent species would have banned millennia past, we were ordered back to our bunks for what turned out to be some kind of sleep learning, similar in process to what the Librarian had done for me.
Harros seemed more disposed to conversation on the way back to our room; apparently he had forgiven me my earlier rudeness.
"That looked like fun, didn't it?" He winked as though he didn't believe I would understand his stab at humor.
"At least it wasn't raining," I answered, which earned me an odd look.
"Are you sure you haven't done this before? I thought you were in the Library section."
I couldn't help it; he seemed so gullible.
"Do I look like someone who's spent his entire life in the library?" Actually, up until a year ago, I had.
"You mean you have been in combat?"
"Years ago." Inwardly I cringed at my own understatement. "But it was all on the ground," I added, sensing his confusion. "No flying."
He seemed satisfied to take me at my word. "Then you know what this kind of stuff is like—all this running back and forth and jumping into holes in the ground."
I nodded unhappily. "Like I said, it's worse when it rains."
"I heard somebody say it rains down there every day. I guess it would, from all those trees we saw." He stopped as we came abreast of our compartment. "We must be pretty far south, then."
Pretty far, I agreed to myself. An unexpected stroke of Providence, that. But was it far enough?
I was awakened by the cessation of a motion I hadn't been aware of before it stopped. I awoke clear-headed, a notable phenomenon for me under any circumstances, with the feeling I had just emerged from a dream—and the entire tactical situation of South Equator in my head. Across from me, Harros was rousing himself with somewhat less celerity than I; I used the few moments this gave me to myself to acquaint my conscious mind with what my sleeping brain already understood.
South Equator was what the Nuum, in the exercise of their limitless imagination, had christened the southern equatorial continent. I suppose that it most closely resembled northern Africa of my day, but only in geographic placement. The flora and fauna were more akin to that I had read of in certain explorers' accounts of Central America in my own time. When I read them, I had frankly dismissed many of their tales outright; I found their tales of jungle fever and delirium more than an adequate explanation for imagined man-eating mosquitoes, plants, and just about anything else that crawled, slithered, or oozed.
After dreaming of South Equator, I viewed jungle fevers as almost friendly.
The political situation was clear enough: Less of a rebellion than a strike, the Thorans had abandoned their plantation duties for the trenches. Apparently believing soldiers were merely pawns to go and to fight where and when ordered without access to the higher reasons behind the fighting itself (another practice I was sad to see had survived the centuries), the Nuum had not bothered to describe why the workers had revolted. They told us that the harvest of a number of plant species was being interrupted, plants that served important purposes we were either assumed to know or weren't entitled to be told.
Still, the pictures they did show us were instructive.
Along with many other animals I had seen in the hills during my first few days here, the beasts of the jungle had climbed up the evolutionary ladder in almost one million years. Most obviously fearsome were the lions. In addition to increasing in size fifty percent, their forelimbs had developed longer and more useful claws until now they were almost arms, and the King of Beasts walked nearly upright, like an ape. In my day they had climbed trees like ladders—now they climbed walls.
Our lessons touched upon my friendly fevers, but only to the extent that we would be vaccinated against them before we were allowed out. More ominous were the myriad bites and stings that awaited us, "all of which can be made harmless with immediate treatment." I thought about the immediacy of medical aid in the trenches and resolved not to be stung or bitten.
Amazing, in hindsight, that anyone besides me ever stepped off the airship. That I did so could be traced to but one fact: On the other side of South Equator and perhaps a thousand miles further south from this spot stood the city of Dure.
But step off every man did, and purposefully, for we had a job to do. The local "blacks" had failed to keep order, and now it was our job. I still had not seen one of the "blacks." We stood at parade rest outside the ship, in the sun, while our officers stood about deep in conference about matters far beyond the ken of their troops. As an officer myself once upon a time, I had participated in those conferences, and I knew they first and foremost consisted of tossing about ideas as to how to get ourselves out of the hot sun.
As far as I was concerned, the officers could twiddle their thumbs all afternoon. I hadn't asked to be part of this army, I didn't believe in this army, and as soon as humanly possible I intended to separate myself from this army. And although I hardly needed my sleep-briefing to tell me that nighttime was a bad time in the bush, it beat being shot in the back trying to escape during the daylight. So I suffered in the heat. The longer we stood here the less likely it
was that I would ever find myself in hand-to-hand combat with my own kind.
Nor was I planning any pitched battles with the men around me. True, they had enslaved my planet, but I was here only by accident, and I had my own fight. As soon as I could, I would strike out by myself across country and find my way to Dure and Hana. That was my well-laid plan…
…which I had plenty of time to reflect upon while I crouched in a trench awaiting the order to charge. Our officers hadn't wasted away the afternoon in idle chatter; they had formed us into smaller units and marched us straight onto the field of battle. We were armed with staffs, just as I had seen in the moving pictures. I examined mine as carefully as I could without arousing suspicion, but as far as I could tell it was no more or less than what it appeared to be: a long, heavy stick. I looked about; only the officers carried sidearms.
I shook my head in disbelief. The Nuum were so afraid of damaging the local jungle plants that they sent their own men into combat with…sticks. I knew what crossing no man's land was like. If the Thorans had gotten their hands on a single sidearm, they would wipe us out.
The order came to advance.
And it started to rain.
In my months in France, I had learned of the concept of déjà vu, or living through the same event twice. It had come over me again and again in those ancient trenches, and it hit me now. The rain, the men, the uncertainty of enemy fire were all the same elements I had faced the day I left France for this place. Only now I wasn't in charge.
We clambered over the slippery lip of the trench and began walking. Other than my mood, which was blacker than the Kaiser's mustache, it wasn't all that bad. The rain was warm, and the ground seemed to absorb as much as it could drink, so that the mud was only mud and not soul-sucking pools of sludge into which a man might disappear without so much as a cry. It made sticking sounds when I lifted my boots but at least I could lift them.
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