“I’m signing up for the army.” Ephesus said. “You can’t stop me!” He took a few steps backwards then noticed the black jumpsuit his brother was wearing. “You enlisted!” He cried. Envy bit at his heart like a poison. “That’s so not fair.” Then he looked up at Moses and frowned. “Does Dad know?”
Moses’ scowl deepened. “No. Did you ask him if you could go?”
“Of course not.” Ephesus said. “He would have said no. Why didn’t you tell him?”
“I was afraid.”
“Oh.” Ephesus liked Moses but there was no denying there was something off about his big brother. He could say anything sometimes, to anyone. It made him seem stupid. Big and dumb, without any secrets. “Well I was afraid too, alright? So now I’m joining.”
Ephesus moved to step past Moses and head back towards the recruiter but Moses grabbed his arm to stop him. “You’re too young.”
“Everyone says that!” Ephesus shouted. He shook his brother’s hand off.
“You should go home.” Moses said. “How will Mom and Dad feel when you die?”
“I’m not going to die.” Ephesus grumbled. He felt a little shiver in his spine. Somehow he hadn’t really given the possibility any thought. Now it made ice water run down his back until he shook himself. “You can’t make me quit.” He marched down the road without a plan or a hope. He hadn’t begged yet. Maybe that was all he had to do. Somehow he didn’t think it would work, but he couldn’t go back. Even Moses hadn’t stayed. That meant something. Moses would put up with anything without complaining. If even he wouldn’t stay at the Homestead, there was no way Ephesus was going to return.
A moment later Moses stepped up beside him and marched with him. Silent and black as death in his army jumpsuit.
“What do you want?” Ephesus snapped after a few steps.
“I will help you.” Moses said.
When the words registered Ephesus felt his heart speed up.
“But” Moses added. “If I help you, you have to do what I say. Agreed?”
“Whatever you want.” Ephesus said with a grin. Moses was in, maybe his help would make it all possible again.
Chapter 5: Moses // Confession
“I’m not going to let you stay here.”
Cardino’s words, years ago, when Moses tried to run away from home by going to Cardino. At the time Cardino had lived here, only a few houses away from the Church in an old hogan on the verge of being abandoned. Moses had said many of the same things that Ephesus had said. In the end Cardino let him stay. But not long.
“If you want to stay, then you’ll have to learn to serve at Mass.” Cardino told him. “This is Church property. You don’t get to stay here for free.” And Moses had, if only so he wouldn’t have to go home. Cardino called their parents cube and told them he was staying for “religious education” and they accepted it. Cardino became Moses’ escape, for a little while.
“I already told him no.” The recruiter told Moses when the two of them returned to the sheriff’s office. Ephesus didn’t meet Moses’ gaze.
“He’s my brother.” Moses told the recruiter.
“And he’s young. This isn’t a game we’re sending ya boys out on. This is a war. People die.”
Moses nodded. “We all die.” He said. “If this is how he wants to die, doesn’t he have that choice?”
“No.” The recruiter said. “He’s still a boy.”
“Then send him with me.” Moses said. “And I can take responsibility for keeping him alive.”
The recruiter regarded Moses in silence for a long moment.
“I’ll be sixteen in two months!” Ephesus said.
The recruiter looked at Ephesus then back to Moses. “Is that true?” He asked.
Moses nodded, though he couldn’t be sure. He had trouble keeping track of what day or month it was if it wasn’t linked to a season or the seasonal feast days they went to Church for. The last winds of the winter hurricanes were beginning to die though, and the sibsig were putting out new shoots to replace those shredded in the storm. By the time they were as long as his outstretched arms it would be about the time they usually celebrated Ephesus’ birthday, so maybe it was.
The recruiter tapped one of his front teeth with a fingernail in thought. “Alright.” He said after a moment. “The best I can do is put the both of ya in the same Battalion. Easy enough, but the rest, that will be up to you. Ya want to take responsibility for your brother’s life, then ye’ve got it. I wash my hands of it.” He madea washing gesture with his hands and pulled out his data pad before Ephesus’ grin could split his head in two.
The recruiter ran through his usual spiel. Don’t desert, don’t steal the gear or supplies, don’t rape and pillage, and if you make it through you’re paid in corporate credits or land rights, if you agree then look into the light and blink three times. If you can read, you can look through the contract yourself.
Neither of them could read, and Ephesus did the same as Moses had when the time came, and blinked three times into the light. A small signature appeared at the base of the display the recruiter held out for him and the recruiter pulled a small chip off the back. He slung it on a chain then handed it to the boy. “This is yer ID. You keep it with ya at all times. The moment ya take it off ye’re considered a deserter. Understand?” Ephesus nodded and the recruiter told him to grab a uniform off of the table and get himself dressed.
“Bell strikes eight tomorrow morning, you show up at the front of the Church.” The recruiter told him when he was dressed. The same words he’d said a dozen times today. “Yer late and we leave you behind. The rest of the time is yers. Use it any way yoa please.” He handed a grinning Ephesus a packet. “This is all ya get till yer deployed. Don’t squander it.”
Ephesus whooped as they left. “Look at this!” Ephesus said. He turned round and round looking down at the dark black uniform. “This is corporate clothing!” He fingered the cloth, far finer than anything else he’d worn. Finer even than the server’s robes Moses had worn when he served mass with Cardino. “We’re in real, military, corporate clothing! We’re soldiers. We’re really soldiers!” Clothing of the kind of quality they’d been given would have ordinarily cost the smokoska family a small fortune in trade goods. A few kegs of mitchel beer, a hundred jars of oil or mounds on mounds of good tight sibsig tarps. There was not an inch of plant fiber or animal ligament anywhere.
“Do you want to see yourself?” Moses asked.
“Yes!”
He nodded for the boy to follow him. There was a mirror in the general store.
Moses didn’t smile at the other boy’s enthusiasm. The recruiter’s final hand washing had left him with a heavy feeling of responsibility he didn’t like. He didn’t like having Ephesus along. He hadn’t planned on having responsibilities as he started the new life that would be, to his mind, his last life. For him, the journey out of the wilderness had been like a pilgrimage rather than the escape which Ephesus treated it as. Each stone and tree along the trail had been familiar to him from a young age. Each one was part of a life he did not expect to see again, each prayer on the circle of beads he carried was a reminder of the times he’d followed along with his father’s prayers as they made the long walk for the sacraments themselves. When he stopped for the night amidst the stones he had not slept, thinking of all he was leaving behind. His first stop on reaching town had been at the Church where Cardino had instructed him in the faith, to pray for forgiveness and for everyone he’d left behind, except, it seemed, for Ephesus.
“You cannot run away from something.” Cardino had told Moses that first evening when A much younger Moses demanded an explanation for his brother’s refusal to harbor him. “If you’re going to run, you should only run towards something.”
“Where are you running?” Moses demanded. They sat cross legged in the hogan Cardino had been cleaning up for the church. It was a much nicer hogan than the one they’d grown up in, even old and out of repair as it was. It was
carpeted with old sibsig tarps in a layer so thick that you almost couldn’t smell the hard packed dirt beneath. The thick woody stems of the trees had been plaited into slats which encircled the entire space, holding additional tarps against the piled up dirt which made up the structures walls, all of it old and in need of replacing, but dry beneath an old metal roof that pinged and panged like miniature church bells when it rained, or howled like a monster when the hurricane winds swept through the town. Their beds were tied bundles of dry fronds that rattled when they shifted in their sleep just like home. Only the oven was missing to complete the picture. It had been removed ages ago by whoever had donated the hogan to the Church and he and Cardino had to make do with a very small portable stove top that had to be left in the sun when it wasn’t being used.
“To God. To the Church. To the priesthood.” Cardino replied. “If I am accepted, to another place, if God prepares one for me.” When Moses said nothing to that Cardino asked him “Would you like to run there too?” Moses hadn’t answered that either, but Cardino had taken him in anyways and given him a chance, and that had turned out for the best.
Moses knew that he was not Cardino. Cardino wasn’t smart, Cardino was brilliant. Cardino couldn’t just read, he liked to read, and he could talk and talk. He was a font of words and all of it was wiser than the best wisdom Moses had ever been able to articulate. It had taken Moses weeks to decide what to do about his father’s question while Cardino knew without anyone asking that life had a purpose and what his purpose would be in it. “The creator made the word from love.” He’d said. “This life is a gift, and I intend to spend it serving him.” All that kind of thing left in Moses was questions. How do you serve love? Eventually it seemed like it meant going home. Doing the hard thing, and learning to keep doing the hard thing until he had to make a choice about what to do with the rest of life.
Either way, Cardino had taken Moses under his care and taught him what it meant to try and live with a purpose. Now Moses had taken Ephesus into his care. It changed, subtly, what Moses was doing there, but he couldn’t tell if it changed what he should do. He planned to die. Should he be preparing his brother for the same end? Everyone died, after all. What difference did it make where or how, if you were prepared? But how to do that?
He didn’t have an answer, but as they passed by the Church on their way to the store and its mirror he glanced at the statue of Christ mounted in a niche above the door and prayed that he would be shown the way. His spring with Cardino had made him who he was today. Taking Ephesus with him into the army could do the same for his little brother.
Getting Ephesus into the army proved easier than finding somewhere to sleep.
“They should have issued us something.” One of the men complained around a fire that night. There were four of them, all wearing the distinctive black army jumpsuits, squatting or sitting around a small smoky fire one of them had started to keep what little night chill there might have been at bay. The flames swirled in the spring winds, the last of winter’s roaring gales. The fire served a more important role as a gathering place than as a source of heat. Several of the men who hadn’t been able to acquire roofed accomodations for their last night in Carmichael sat with them beneath the stars.
“Corporation isn’t going to babysit you.” One of the others said. “They want you to fight. If you’re uncomfortable in the process it’s none of their concern.”
The big man who’d spoken first poked at the fire with a long branch and sent sparks shooting up into the night, a red imitation of the enemy’s war ships when they’d swarmed across the night sky a few days ago. “Still. Think they ought to’ve been more prepared. Got a brother working for the corporation. Got himself an education so he could design machines for them. He says they’ve been getting ready for this war almost three years! Think they’d have thought to make some tents.”
In the silence that followed Moses listened to the night sounds of the forest. The whisper of leaves, the very occasional rustle of a scut bug or a long walker pushing through the loam. Not far away he could hear the swaying of the oat field in the wind, an alien sigh that did not belong on this planet, mingling with the breathing of the human’s fire.
The group around the fire was a good group, as Moses had discovered. As good as might be asked for in a group of strangers. They were mostly older than him, with a single exception, A pale boy with a wisp of a mustache who might have been Ephesus’ age, and all of them assigned to the second Battalion with Moses and Ephesus.
“What brought you to the Battalion boy?” The man who complained about the tents asked when they’d sat down at the fire. Ephesus was amazed to find sweet fish in the packet the recruiter had handed them and they’d put theirs on spits to roast next to the burning peat as they sat and talked, listening to the grease dripping into the coals and inhaling the aroma of hot food and burning dirt. “Man oughta know who’s on his side.”
The man’s name was Maxwell O’neill. He was a big man, not a giant, but broad, at the shoulders and the chest, with a voice that boomed like a drum and a beard that probably hadn’t seen a knife since he was born. Moses couldn’t readily answer the question and he rotated his spit while he tried to find the words to explain his decision.
“Well why did you join?” Ephesus asked.
Maxwell grinned. “I always felt a good fight in me.” He flexed muscles that bulged like huge chords beneath his jumpsuit and gave Ephesus a crooked toothed grin that showed off a chip in one of the front teeth. “Had my fair share. Thought maybe I’d find someone out there who could give me a decent one in return. Not feel too bad about killing the weak ones anymore.”
“I wanted to escape my parents.” The boy with the Mustache said.
“What’s-a-matta with your parents?” Maxwell asked.”They beat you when you won’t cut firewood?”
The boy shook his head. “They fight all the time. Mom drinks too much beer. Dad tries to take it away but she sleeps with the outpost keeper and he gives her more so Dad beats her.”
Maxwell’s face grew dark. “I’d have left too.” He said. “Might have taught my father a lesson first.”
Ephesus pulled the greasy slab of fish off of his spit and stuffed it into his mouth, grinning as he did. “I just want to see a battle.” He said. “Like the one in space, but up close this time. I want to see automata, and space, and the Mighty River.”
“Do you know what we’ll be doing for the corporation?” Moses asked Maxwell. “No one said anything about fighting to me.”
“Well it’s an army isn’t it?” Maxwell spluttered. “Course there will be fighting. Why would they ask us to join otherwise?”
“They used automata in space.” Moses pointed out. “I’d think they’d do the same here.”
“Maybe we’re supposed to fix the robots.” The pale boy said.
“No.” A tall thin man opposite Moses said pulling his own sweet fish from the fire as Ephesus put another piece of his on the spit and replaced it. “None of us have ever seen a machine more complicated than a stove or a cube. Not that they know that, they didn’t even bother asking. All they’re looking for is muscle.” He waved his spit like a finger for emphasis. “Dumb muscle and guts. I say We’ll be fighting.”
“Aye. That or shoveling shit.” Maxwell said. “I hear there’s people make a living at that in the big city. I hope we haven’t been hired to do nothing like that. Might walk out if that’s the case.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?” Moses asked.
Maxwell grinned. “Have you ever seen a man with a broken spine?”
“It’s worse than death.” The thin man murmured.
“I want to see something new.” Ephesus said. “I’ve seen the same thing my entire life. Now I’m wearing a uniform and I’m going to see an actual battle.” Ephesus grinned like things couldn’t be better and watched his fish sizzle.
Moses lifted his spit from the fire and held it in front of him where it could cool. He pulled the fil
let from the stick after a moment and stuffed it, still steaming into his mouth. He closed his eyes and savored the rich unfamiliar flavor of the fat and grease on his tongue. He could taste a hint of the earthy flavor the burning peat had infused in the meat. When he opened his eyes he found the thin man staring at him across the embers waiting for an answer and he tried to marshal his thoughts.
“I saw the captains on the cube, Samuel, Yammaro, Atomsqe, Gerald.” He said. “They seemed worth imitating.”
“They died.” Maxwell said.
Moses stripped a bit more meat off of his spit and shrugged. “A man’s got to die for something.” They were the same words he’d said to the recruiter, words he’d hoped to embellish for Ephesus, to drive home that this wasn’t just an adventure, this wasn’t just running away.
“You believe all that crap on the cube then?” The thin man asked.
“I don’t know what they say on the cube.” Moses said.
“Defense of the hearth, moral obligation, all that?”
“Don’t you think we should defend our world?” Moses asked.
“I don’t see why they would bother with us.” The thin man replied. “They’re here for the corporation. I just joined for the pay. Saw an opportunity to get something out of the stingy bastards. Haven’t done anything for me or any of my sisters.”
“The man at the outpost said they burned Churches on their homeworld.” Moses said. “He’s got library access. I’ve asked him to look things up for me before.”
“What if they did?” The thin man said. “There’s no reason they’d do it here, and even if they did, it’s just a set of buildings, some people that don’t do anything for anybody. There’s no way we can know.” In the light of the fire the thin man’s features seemed sharp and angular, his eyes sparkling in the shadow of his cheeks.
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