The Merchant's War (16 page)

I knew I shouldn’t have signed those Reserve papers in college, but who knew they’d take it seriously? When you’re ten years old you join the Junior Copywriters. When you’re fifteen it’s the Little Merchandising League. In college it’s the Reserves. Everybody does it. It’s two course credits a semester, and you don’t have to take English lit. All the smart students spotted it for a snap course.

But for somebody who’d got the bad breaks, somebody like me, it wasn’t all that smart.

If I’d kept my wits about me I’d have seen a way to escape—maybe find Mitzi and grovel for a job—maybe find a friendly medic to help me fail the physical. Maybe suicide. What I actually did was closest to Option 3.1 went on a Moke binge, lacing the stuff with Vodd-Quor, and woke up on a troop transport. I had no memory at all of reporting for duty, and not much of what turned out to be the forty-eight hours before that. Total blackout.

And total hangover. I didn’t have time to appreciate the sordid miseries of traveling military style because I was too absorbed in the internal miseries of my own head. I was just beginning to be able to open the eyes without instant death when they dumped me, and five hundred others, at Camp Rubicam, North Dakota, for two weeks of the officers’ refresher course. It consisted mostly of being told that we were doing society’s most honorable work, plus close-order drill. Then it was pack your keyboard, sling your disk bag on your shoulder, all aboard for a field exercise.

Field exercise. I’d hate to get involved in the real thing.

The first troop transport had been plain hell. This one was nearly identical, except that it lasted many hours longer and I had to face it cold sober. No food. No toilets. No place to go outside the cocoon you were supposed to “rest” in. Nothing to drink but water—and the “water” was as close to purest ocean brine as you could get without actually breaking the law. The worst was we didn’t know how long it was going to last. Some people thought it was all the way to Hyperion, to teach the gas miners a lesson. I might have thought so myself except that the transport had only wings and jets. No rockets. No space travel, therefore; so it had to be somewhere on Earth.

But where? The rumors that floated through the fetid air from bunk to bunk were Australia —no; Chile—no, positively; the watch officer had been heard to tell the flight engineer definitely Iceland.

We wound up in the Gobi Desert.

We piled out of the transport with our kits and our bursting bladders and lined up to be counted. The first thing we noticed was it was hot. The second thing was it was dry. I don’t mean your average summer hot-spell dry, I mean
dry.
The wind blew fine white dust everywhere. It got between your fingers. If you kept your mouth closed it even got in between your teeth, and when you moved your jaw it crunched. They took an hour for the head count and then loaded us up into ten-trailer troop transports and dragged us along those dusty white roads to our billets.

The place is technically known as the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, but everybody called it the Reservation. It was where one of the last remaining batches of unconsolidated aboriginals lived, Uygurs and Hui and Kazak, the ones that never made the transition to the market society when the rest of China joined in. There’s civilization all around them. There’s RussCorp to the North, Indiastries South and all the China-Han complex at their gates. But the Eager Weegers just sit there and do their own thing. As we dragged along, coughing and choking, we’d see the men squatting in a circle in the middle of the side roads, never looking up at us. The squalor was shocking. Their mud houses were crumbling around them, with a stack of mud bricks in the backyard drying to be ready for building the next house when that one fell down. In the front there was a rusty old satellite dish that couldn’t get a decent picture any more … and always there would be the kids, hundreds of them, laughing and waving to us —what did they have to be happy about? Not their housing, surely. Certainly not after we came along and requisitioned the best of it— what I guess had been a row of tourist motels (imagine anybody going there voluntarily?), with real air conditioners in the windows and a real fountain in the courtyard. Of course, the fountain was turned off. So, it turned out, were the air conditioners. So was all the power there was, so we ate (if you could call it eating —soy steaks and nondairy milkshakes!) by the light of
candles.
They promised the officers among us better quarters in the morning, after the commanders sorted us out, but for now, if we wouldn’t mind—

Whether we minded or not made no difference, because there was nowhere for us to go but into the motel rooms. They might not have been so bad if the quartermaster had got mattresses onto the beds before we had to sleep on them. So we all spread out as much of our clothing as we could and tried to sleep, in the heat, in the dust, with everyone coughing around us and strange sounds coming from outside. The worst was a kind of mechanical honking noise—“Aaaah,” and sometimes “Aaaah-ee!” I fell asleep wondering what sort of primitive machinery they kept going all night. Wondering what I was doing there. Wondering if I’d ever get back to the Tower, much less to the fifty-fifth floor. Wondering, most of all, what a guy’s chances were of scoring a couple of Mokes around here in the morning, since the twelve-packs I’d put in my kitbag were just about running out.

“You Tarb?” grated a harsh voice in my ear. “Out of the sack! Chow’s in five minutes and the colonel wants to see you in ten.”

I propped one eye open. “The what?”

The face leaning down to mine didn’t retreat. “Up!” it roared, and as my eyes focused I perceived that it belonged to a dark, scowling man with major’s stripes and a row of ribbons on his camouflage suit.

“Right you are,” I mumbled, and managed to remember to add, “sir.” The face didn’t look pleased, but it went away. I edged myself to the side of the bed, trying to avoid the sharpest and rustiest of the springs—half my body was covered with punctures from where I had tossed and turned in the night—and attacked the problem of getting into my tee and culottes. That problem proved soluble, though I think I carried it out in my sleep. The problem of where “chow” was was no problem at all, because I only had to follow the slow migration of red-eyed, unshaved, blinking troops to what was marked Dining Hall A. At least there was Coffiest. Better than that, there were Mokes, though these were not government issue and I wasted precious moments wheedling change from the one or two slightly familiar faces doggedly attacking their Om’Lets and Bredd. Naturally the vending machine ate my first three coins without spitting out a Moke in return, but on the fourth try I got one—warm, to be sure—and faced the blinding outdoor sun a little more bravely.

Finding the colonel’s office was a lot harder. None of the new replacements like myself seemed to have a clue. The wiser regulars were, it appeared, still happily asleep in their bunks, waiting out the press of new boys in the mess hall so that they could enjoy their breakfast in a more leisurely way later on. The couple of natives wandering around, bearing brooms or pails of gray, scummy water— though showing no signs of using either— were glad to give me directions; but as we had no language in common I had no notion of what they were directing me to. I found myself on the edge of the compound, passing through a gate, when a repellent odor filled my nostrils and, at the same moment, that raucous Aaaah-
ee!
blasted in my ear.

The mystery of the machine noises in the night was cleared up. To my infinite disgust I discovered that the machines were no machines. These people had
animals.
Living animals! Not in a zoo or properly stuffed in some museum, but standing on the streets, pulling carts, even
defecating
right where people might walk. I had blundered into what was a kind of parking lot for the creatures. I tell you, for a minute there it was touch and go whether I would retain the hard-won Moke I had just swallowed.

By the time I finally found the colonel’s office I was, of course, at least twenty minutes late, but I had learned some sobering facts about this new world I had been thrust into.

The particular animals with the loud bray were called donkeys. A smaller, horned kind of donkey they called goat, but they also had chickens and horses and yaks. And each one smelled fouler, and had habits more disgusting, than the next. When at last I stumbled into the mud-brick structure marked 3d Bn Hq & Hq Cy I knew I was well on the way to earning my first reprimand, but I didn’t care. It was air-conditioned, and the air conditioning actually worked, and when the first sergeant told me, scowling, that I would have to wait and the colonel would eat me out, I could have kissed him, for the air was cool, the sickening sounds from outside were muffled—and there was a Moke dispenser by the door.

The sergeant was a true prophet. The colonel’s first words were, “You were late, Tarb! A bad beginning! I tell you true, you admen make me sick!”

In normal times that kind of talk would have had me up and fighting, but these were not normal times. I could read the colonel like a book: grizzled old campaigner, chest full of ribbons for the Sudan and Papua New Guinea and the Patagonian campaign. No doubt up from the ranks, with all the former consumer’s hatred of the upper classes. I swallowed the words that rose to my lips, held the tightest brace at attention I could manage and said only, “Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at me with the same sort of unbelieving dislike that, I am sure, I gave to the donkeys. She shook her head. “So what am I going to do with you, Tarb? You got any skills that don’t show on your personnel record-cooking, plumbing, running an officers’ club?” I said indignantly, “Ma’am! I’m a copy-smith, star class!”

“You were,” she corrected. “Here you’re just another casual officer that I’ve got to find a job for.”

“But surely—my skills—my ability to create a promotional campaign—”

“Tarb,” she said wearily, “all that stuffs done back in the Pentagon. We don’t make strategy here in the field. We’re just the dogfaces that carry it out.” She flicked gloomily through the data stores—hesitated—went on —turned back and cursored one line in the Table of Organization.

“Chaplain,” she said with satisfaction.

I goggled at her. “Chaplain? But I never—I mean, I don’t know anything about—”

“You don’t know anything about anything, Lieutenant Tarb,” she said, “but chaplaining’s easy work. You can get the hang of it in no time. You’ll have an assistant who knows the ropes—and, as far as I can see, it’s a place where you can’t do much harm. Dismissed! And try to keep your nose clean till this campaign’s over so you’ll be somebody else’s problem.”

So I began my career as chaplain to the Third Battalion Headquarters and Headquarters Company—heavy limbic projectors and sky-screens—not the best duty in the world, but a long way better than going door-to-door with the infantry. The colonel had promised me an experienced chaplain’s assistant, and I got one. Staff-Sergeant Gert Martels wore the ribbons of campaigns as far back as Kampuchea on her rather prominent chest.

She greeted me as I entered my domain for the first time with a sloppy salute but a fully accomplished smile. “Morning, Lieutenant,” she sang out. “Welcome to the Third!”

I saw at once that S/Sgt Martels was going to be the best thing about my chaplaincy— well, the second best thing, anyway. The office itself was drab. It had been a laundry room in the motel, and you could still see the stains of bleach and soap powder outlining where the washing machines had been. Capped-off pipes were still present along the wall. But it was air-conditioned! It was located in that handsome motel with the fountains and shady arbors, only now the fountains were working —and we casuals had been moved out to “regular” housing, so that the space could become headquarters offices. I guess the air conditioning was the third best thing; the very best was a Moke vending machine, and the way it purred told me that the Mokes would be coming out ice-cold. “How did you know?” I demanded, and the handsome, scarred face lit up with another of those excellent smiles.

“It is,” she said, “a chaplain’s assistant’s
business
to know such things. Now, if the lieutenant would care to sit at his desk I’ll be glad to answer the lieutenant’s questions …”

It was better than that. I didn’t even have to ask any questions, because S/Sgt Martels knew what the lieutenant needed to know better than the lieutenant did. This was the way to the officers’ club. These were the blank passes I had the authority to sign. That on the wall was the intercom, used only by a friend in the colonel’s office to warn us when the colonel was coming this way. And, in case the lieutenant didn’t much care for the food in the mess hall, the lieutenant always had the privilege of declaring that he had been too busy with emergency duties during regular meal hours to get there, and so avail himself of between-meals “snacks” in the private dining room of the field-officers’ mess. The lieutenant, she added innocently, had also the privilege of taking his assistant at such times if he cared to.

And why, I wondered starrily, had I been so reluctant to give up the Mad. Ave. rat race to come to this earthly paradise?