“I’ll be out of the chain of command, anyhow, as executive officer.”
“Unless everybody over you dies. It’s happened.”
“Then the army will find out what a mistake it made. A little too late.”
“You might surprise yourself, after the ALSC training.” He checked his watch. “Which is coming up in a couple of hours.”
“Would you like to get together for lunch before that?”
“Um, no. I don’t think you want to eat. They sort of clean you out beforehand. From both ends.”
“Sounds…dramatic.”
“Oh, it is, all of it. Some people enjoy it.”
“You don’t think I will.”
He paused. “Let’s talk about it afterwards.”
3
The purging wasn’t bad, since by that time I was limp and goofy with drugs. They shaved me clean as a baby, even my arms and cheeks, and were in the process of covering me with feedback sensors when I dozed off.
I woke up naked and running. A bunch of other naked people were running after me and my friends, throwing rocks at us. A heavy rock stung me under the shoulder blade, knocking my breath away and making me stumble. A chunky Neanderthal tackled me and whacked me on the head twice with something.
I knew this was a simulation, a dream, and here I was passing out in a dream. When I woke up a moment later, he had forced my legs apart and was about to rape me. I clawed at his eyes and rolled away. He came after me, intention still apparent, and my hand fell on his club. I swung it with both hands and cracked his head, spraying blood and brains. He ejaculated in shuddering spurts as he died, feet drumming the ground. God, it was supposed to be realistic, but couldn’t they spare me a few details?
Then I was standing in a phalanx with a shield and a long spear. There were men in front of our line, crouching, with shorter spears. All of the weapons were braced at the same angle, presenting a wall of points to the horses that were charging toward us. This is not the hard part. You just stand firm, and live or not. I studied the light armor of the Persian enemy as they approached. There were three who might be in my area if we unhorsed them, or if their horses stopped.
The horse on my left crashed through. The one on the right reared up and tried to turn. The one charging straight at us took both spears in the breast, breaking the shaft of mine as it skidded, sprawling, spraying blood and screaming with an unearthly high whine, pinning the man in front of me. The unhorsed Persian crashed into my shield and knocked me down as I was drawing my short sword; the hilt of it dug in under my ribs and I almost slashed myself getting it free of the scabbard while I scrambled back to my feet.
The horseman had lost his little round shield, but his sword was coming around in a flat arc. I just caught it on the edge of my shield and as I had been taught chopped down toward his unprotected forearm and wrist—he twisted away, but I nicked him under the elbow, lucky shot that hit a tendon or something. He dropped his sword and as he reached for it with his other hand, I slashed at his face and opened a terrible wound across eye, cheek, and mouth. As he screamed a flap of skin fell away, exposing bloody bone and teeth, and I shifted my weight for a backhand, aiming for the unprotected throat, and then something slammed into my back and the bloody point of a spear broke the skin above my right nipple; I fell to my knees dying and realized I didn’t have breasts; I was a man, a young boy.
It was dark and cold and the trench smelled of shit and rotting flesh. “Two minutes, boys,” a sergeant said in a stage whisper. I heard a canteen gurgle twice and took it when it was passed to me, warm gin. I managed not to cough and passed it on down. I checked in the darkness and still didn’t have breasts and touched between my legs and that was strange. I started to shake and heard the man next to me peeing, and I suddenly had to go, too. I fumbled with the buttons left-handed, holding on to my rifle, and barely managed to get the thing out in time, peeing hotly onto my hand. “Fix bayonets,” the sergeant whispered while I was still going and instinct took over and I felt the locking port under the muzzle of my Enfield and held it with my left hand while my right went back and slid the bayonet from its sheath and clicked it into place.
“I shall see you in Hell, Sergeant Simmons,” the man next to me said conversationally.
“Soon enough, Rez. Thirty seconds.” There was a German machine-gun position about eighty yards ahead and to the right. They also had at least one very good sniper and, presumably, an artillery observer. We were hoping for some artillery support at 1:17, which would signal the beginning of our charge. If the artillery didn’t come, which was likely, we were to charge anyhow, riflemen in two short squads in front of grenadiers. A suicide mission, perhaps, but certain death if your courage flags.
I wiped my hand on the greasy, filthy fatigues and thumbed the safety off the rifle. There was already a round chambered. I put my left foot on the improvised step and got a handhold with my left. My knees were water, and my anus didn’t want to stay closed. I felt tears, and my throat went dry and metallic. This is not real. “Now,” the sergeant said quietly, and I heaved myself up over the lip of the trench and fired one-handed in the general direction of the enemy, and started to run toward them, working the bolt, vaguely proud of not soiling myself. I flopped on the ground and took an aimed shot at the noise of the machine gun, no muzzle flash, and then held fire while squad two rushed by us. A grenadier skidded next to me, and said, “Go!” It became “Oh!” when a bullet smacked into him, but I was up and running, another round chambered, four left. A bullet shattered my foot, and I took one painful step and fell.
I pulled myself forward, trying to keep the muzzle out of the mud, and rolled into a shallow crater half-filled with water and parts of a swollen decaying body. I could hear another machine gun starting, but I couldn’t breathe. I pushed up with both arms to gasp some air above the crater’s miasma, and a bullet crashed into my teeth.
It wasn’t chronological. I went from there to the mist of Breed’s Hill, on the British side of what the Americans would call the Battle of Bunker Hill. The deck of a ship, warding off pirates while sails burned; then another ship, deafened by cannon fire while I tried to keep a cool lead on the kamikaze Zero soaring into us.
I flew cloth-winged biplanes and supersonic fighters, used lasers and a bow and arrow and leveled a city with the push of a button. I killed with bullets and bolos and binary-coded decimals. Every second, I was aware that it was a training exercise; I felt terror and sorrow and pain, but only for minutes or hours. And I slept at least as many hours as I was awake, but there was no rest—somehow while sleeping, my brain was filled with procedures, history, regulations.
When they unplugged me after three weeks I was literally catatonic. That was normal, though, and they had drugs that pulled you back into the world. They worked for more than 90 percent of the new officers. The others were allowed to drift away.
4
We had two weeks of rest and rehabilitation—in orbit, unfortunately, not on Heaven—after the ALSC experience. While we were sweating it out in the officers’ gym, I met the other line officers, who were as shaken and weak as I was, after three weeks’ immersion in oxygenated fluorocarbon, mayhem, and book learning.
We were also one mass of wrinkles from head to toe, the first day, when our exercises consisted of raising our arms above our heads and trying to stand up and sit down without help. The wrinkles started to fade in the sauna, as we conversed in tired monosyllables. We looked like big muscular pink babies; they must have shaved or depilated us during the three weeks.
Three of us were male, which was interesting. I’ve seen lots of naked men, but never a hairless one. I guess we all looked kind of exposed and diagrammatic. Okayawa had an erection, and Morales kidded him about it, but to my relief it didn’t go any further than that. It was a socially difficult situation anyhow.
The commander, Angela Garcia, was physically about ten years older than me, though of course by the calendar she was centuries younger. She was gruff a
nd seemed to be holding a lot in. I knew her slightly, at least by sight; she’d been a platoon leader, not mine, in the Tet-2 disaster. Both her legs had the new-equipment look that my arm did. We’d come to Heaven together, but since her regrowth took three times as long as mine, we hadn’t met there. William and I were gone before she was able to come into the common ward.
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 support 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
The lounge was a so-called plastic room; it could re-form 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 tried 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 echel
on, 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 weigh.” 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 supposed 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.