The Forever War Read online

  Marygay had been bumped to captain, and I to major, on the basis of our military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company commander and she was a company’s executive officer.

  But they weren’t the same company.

  She was going to muster with a new company being formed right here on Heaven. I was going back to Stargate for “indoctrination and education” before taking command.

  For a long time we couldn’t say anything. “I’m going to protest,” I said finally, weakly. “They can’t make me a commander. Into a commander.”

  She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.

  We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death.

  We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had all been allotted. I pointed out that most of them probably hadn’t even been born yet. Nevertheless, allotted, they said. It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries.

  Not in terms of people.

  We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn’t just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other’s only link to real life, the Earth of the 1980s and ’90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it was like a casket rattling down into a grave.

  I commandeered computer time and found out the orbital elements of her ship and its departure time; found out I could watch her leave from “our” desert.

  I landed on the pinnacle where we had starved together and, a few hours before dawn, watched a new star appear over the western horizon, flare to brilliance and fade as it moved away, becoming just another star, then a dim star, and then nothing. I walked to the edge and looked down the sheer rock face to the dim frozen rippling of dunes half a kilometer below. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge, thinking nothing, until the sun’s oblique rays illuminated the dunes in a soft, tempting chiaroscuro of low relief. Twice I shifted my weight as if to jump. When I didn’t, it was not for fear of pain or loss. The pain would be only a bright spark and the loss would be only the army’s. And it would be their ultimate victory over me—having ruled my life for so long, to force an end to it.

  That much, I owed to the enemy.

  MAJOR MANDELLA

  2458-3143 A.D.

  Twenty-eight

  What was that old experiment they told us about in high school biology? Take a flatworm and teach it how to swim through a maze. Then mash it up and feed it to a stupid flatworm, and lo! the stupid flatworm would be able to swim the maze, too.

  I had a bad taste of major general in my mouth.

  Actually, I supposed they had refined the techniques since my high school days. With time dilation, that was about 450 years for research and development.

  At Stargate, my orders said, I was to undergo “indoctrination and education” prior to taking command of my very own Strike Force. Which was what they still called a company.

  For my education on Stargate, they didn’t mince up major generals and serve them to me with hollandaise. They didn’t feed me anything except glucose for three weeks. Glucose and electricity.

  They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That’s an “accelerated life situation computer.” It kept me busy.

  I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.

  I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that’s what all those electrodes were for. Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was long and black. I relearned épeé from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.

  Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn’t in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.

  Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don’t. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I’ll never forget the poetry of “the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party commander will detail one platoon sergeant…” and so on. That’s from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader’s Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.

  If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.

  One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.

  I hadn’t met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers’ Club after dinner.

  I went down to Six early, thinking to eat dinner there, but they had nothing but snacks. So I munched on a fungus thing that vaguely resembled escargots and took the rest of my calories in the form of alcohol.

  “Major Mandella?” I’d been busily engaged in my seventh beer and hadn’t seen the Colonel approach. I started to rise but he motioned for me to stay seated and dropped heavily into the chair opposite me.

  “I’m in your debt,” he said. “You saved me from at least half of a boring evening.” He offered his hand. “Jack Kynock, at your service.”

  “Colonel—”

  “Don’t Colonel me and I won’t Major you. We old fossils have to…keep our perspective. William.”

  “All right with me.”

  He ordered a kind of drink I’d never heard of. “Where to start? Last time you were on Earth was 2007, according to the records.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Didn’t like it much, did you?”

  “No.” Zombies, happy robots.

  “Well, it got better. Then it got worse, thank you.” A private brought his drink, a bubbling concoction that was green at the bottom of the glass and lightened to chartreuse at the top. He sipped. “Then they got better again, then worse, then…I don’t know. Cycles.”

  “What’s it like now?”

  “Well…I’m not really sure. Stacks of reports and such, but it’s har
d to filter out the propaganda. I haven’t been back in almost two hundred years; it was pretty bad then. Depending on what you like.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, let me see. There was lots of excitement. Ever hear of the Pacifist movement?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Hmn, the name’s deceptive. Actually, it was a war, a guerrilla war.”

  “I thought I could give you name, rank and serial number of every war from Troy on up.” He smiled. “They must have missed one.”

  “For good reason. It was run by veterans—survivors of Yod-38 and Aleph-40, I hear; they got discharged together and decided they could take on all of UNEF, Earthside. They got lots of support from the population.”

  “But didn’t win.”

  “We’re still here.” He swirled his drink and the colors shifted. “Actually, all I know is hearsay. Last time I got to Earth, the war was over, except for some sporadic sabotage. And it wasn’t exactly a safe topic of conversation.”

  “It surprises me a little,” I said. “Well, more than a little. That Earth’s population would do anything at all…against the government’s wishes.”

  He made a noncommittal sound.

  “Least of all, revolution. When we were there, you couldn’t get anybody to say a damned thing against the UNEF—or any of the local governments, for that matter. They were conditioned from ear to ear to accept things as they were.”

  “Ah. That’s a cyclic thing, too.” He settled back in his chair. “It’s not a matter of technique. If they wanted to, Earth’s government could have total control over…every nontrivial thought and action of each citizen, from cradle to grave.

  “They don’t do it because it would be fatal. Because there’s a war on. Take your own case: did you get any motivational conditioning while you were in the can?”

  I thought for a moment. “If I did, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

  “That’s true. Partially true. But take my word for it, they left that part of your brain alone. Any change in your attitude toward UNEF or the war, or war in general, comes only from new knowledge. Nobody’s fiddled with your basic motivations. And you should know why.”

  Names, dates, figures rattled down through the maze of new knowledge. “Tet-17, Sed-21, Aleph-14. The Lazlo…’The Lazlo Emergency Commission Report.’ June, 2106.”

  “Right. And by extension, your own experience on Aleph-1. Robots don’t make good soldiers.”

  “They would,” I said. “Up to the twenty-first century. Behavioral conditioning would have been the answer to a general’s dream. Make up an army with all the best features of the SS, the Praetorian Guard, the Golden Horde. Mosby’s Raiders, the Green Berets.”

  He laughed over his glass. “Then put that army up against a squad of men in modern fighting suits. It’d be over in a couple of minutes.”

  “So long as each man in the squad kept his head about him. And just fought like hell to stay alive.” The generation of soldiers that had precipitated the Lazlo Reports had been conditioned from birth to conform to somebody’s vision of the ideal fighting man. They worked beautifully as a team, totally blood-thirsty, placing no great importance on personal survival—and the Taurans cut them to ribbons. The Taurans also fought with no regard for self. But they were better at it, and there were always more of them.

  Kynock took a drink and watched the colors. “I’ve seen your psych profile,” he said. “Both before you got here and after your session in the can. It’s essentially the same, before and after.”

  “That’s reassuring.” I signaled for another beer.

  “Maybe it shouldn’t be.”

  “What, it says I won’t make a good officer? I told them that from the beginning. I’m no leader.”

  “Right in a way, wrong in a way. Want to know what that profile says?”

  I shrugged. “Classified, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But you’re a major now. You can pull the profile of anybody in your command.”

  “I don’t suppose it has any big surprises.” But I was a little curious. What animal isn’t fascinated by a mirror?

  “No. It says you’re a pacifist. A failed one at that, which gives you a mild neurosis. Which you handle by transferring the burden of guilt to the army.”

  The fresh beer was so cold it hurt my teeth. “No surprises yet.”

  “And as far as being a leader, you do have a certain potential. But it would be along the lines of a teacher or a minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you’re right, you’ll make one hell of a bad officer unless you shape up.”

  I had to laugh. “UNEF must have known all of this when they ordered me to officer training.”

  “There are other parameters,” he said. “For instance, you’re adaptable, reasonably intelligent, analytical. And you’re one of the eleven people who’s lived through the whole war.”

  “Surviving is a virtue in a private.” Couldn’t resist it. “But an officer should provide gallant example. Go down with the ship. Stride the parapet as if unafraid.”

  He harrumphed at that. “Not when you’re a thousand light-years from your replacement.”

  “It doesn’t add up, though. Why would they haul me all the way from Heaven to take a chance on my ‘shaping up,’ when probably a third of the people here on Stargate are better officer material? God, the military mind!”

  “I suspect the bureaucratic mind, at least, had something to do with it. You have an embarrassing amount of seniority to be a foot soldier.”

  “That’s all time dilation. I’ve only been in three campaigns.”

  “Immaterial. Besides, that’s two and a half more than the average soldier survives. The propaganda boys will probably make you into some kind of a folk hero.”

  “Folk hero.” I sipped at the beer. “Where is John Wayne now that we really need him?”

  “John Wayne?” He shook his head. “I never went in the can, you know. I’m no expert at military history.”

  “Forget it.”

  Kynock finished his drink and asked the private to get him—I swear to God—a “rum Antares.”

  “Well, I’m supposed to be your Temporal Orientation Officer. What do you want to know about the present? What passes for the present.”

  Still on my mind: “You’ve never been in the can?”

  “No, combat officers only. The computer facilities and energy you go through in three weeks would keep the Earth running for several days. Too expensive for us desk-warmers.”

  “Your decorations say you’re combat.”

  “Honorary. I was.” The rum Antares was a tall slender glass with a little ice floating at the top, filled with pale amber liquid. At the bottom was a bright red globule about the size of a thumbnail; crimson filaments waved up from it.

  “What’s that red stuff?”

  “Cinnamon. Oh, some ester with cinnamon in it. Quite good…want a taste?”

  “No, I’ll stick to beer, thanks.”

  “Down at level one, the library machine has a temporal orientation file, that my staff updates every day. You can go to it for specific questions. Mainly I want to…prepare you for meeting your Strike Force.”

  “What, they’re all cyborgs? Clones?”

  He laughed. “No, it’s illegal to clone humans. The main problem is with, uh, you’re heterosexual.”

  “Oh, that’s no problem. I’m tolerant.”

  “Yes, your profile shows that you…think you’re tolerant, but that’s not the problem, exactly.”

  “Oh.” I knew what he was going to say. Not the details, but the substance.

  “Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF. I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.”

  “If they think they’re going to cure me—”

  “Relax, you’re too
old.” He took a delicate sip. “It won’t be as hard to get along with them as you might—”

  “Wait. You mean nobody…everybody in my company is homosexual? But me?”

  “William, everybody on Earth is homosexual. Except for a thousand or so; veterans and incurables.”

  “Ah.” What could I say? “Seems like a drastic way to solve the population problem.”

  “Perhaps. It does work, though; Earth’s population is stable at just under a billion. When one person dies or goes off-planet, another is quickened.”

  “Not ‘born.’”

  “Born, yes, but not the old-fashioned way. Your old term for it was ‘test-tube babies,’ but of course they don’t use a test tube.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “Part of every creche is an artificial womb that takes care of a person the first eight or ten months after quickening. What you would call birth takes place over a period of days; it isn’t the sudden, drastic event that it used to be.”

  O brave new world, I thought. “No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals.”

  “Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards. You and I might find them a little odd.”

  “That’s an understatement.” I drank off the rest of my beer. “Yourself, you, uh…are you homosexual?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. I relaxed. “Actually, though, I’m not hetero anymore, either.” He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. “Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can’t regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I’m a cyborg.”

  Far out, as my mother used to say. “Oh, Private,” I called to the waiter, “bring me one of those Antares things.” Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

  “Make it a double, please.”

  Twenty-nine