Peace and War - Omnibus (20 page)

Finally I woke up in a regular bay. I was strapped down and being fed through a tube, biosensor electrodes attached here and there, but no medics around. The only other person in the little room was Marygay, sleeping on the bunk next to me. Her right arm was amputated just above the elbow.

I didn't wake her up, just looked at her for a long time and tried to sort out my feelings. Tried to filter out the effect of the mood drugs. Looking at her stump, I could feel neither empathy nor revulsion. I tried to force one reaction, and then the other, but nothing real happened. It was as if she had always been that way. Was it drugs, conditioning, love? Have to wait and see.

Her eyes opened suddenly and I knew she had been awake for some time, had been giving me time to think. 'Hello, broken toy,' she said.

'How – how do you feel?' Bright question.

She put a finger to her lips and kissed it, a familiar gesture, reflection. 'Stupid, numb. Glad not to be a soldier anymore.' She smiled. 'Did they tell you? We're going to Heaven.'

'No. I knew it would be either there or Earth.'

'Heaven will be better.' Anything would. 'I wish we were there now.' 'How long?' I asked. 'How long before we get there?'

She rolled over and looked at the ceiling. 'No telling. You haven't talked to anybody?'

'Just woke up.'

'There's a new directive they didn't bother to tell us about before. The
Sangre y Victoria
got orders for four missions. We have to keep on fighting until we've done all four. Or until we've sustained so many casualties that it wouldn't be practical to go on.'

'How many is that?'

'I wonder. We lost a good third already. But we're headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid.' New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artefacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.

One knock on the door and Dr Foster barged in. He fluttered his hands. 'Still in separate
beds?
Marygay, I thought you were more recovered than that.' Foster was all right. A flaming mariposa, but he had an amused tolerance for heterosexuality.

He examined Marygay's stump and then mine. He stuck thermometers in our mouths so we couldn't talk. When he spoke, he was serious and blunt.

'I'm not going to sugarcoat anything for you. You're both on happyjuice up to your ears, and the loss you've sustained isn't going to bother you until I take you off the stuff. For my own convenience I'm keeping you drugged until you get to Heaven. I have twenty-one amputees to take care of. We can't handle twenty-one psychiatric cases.

'Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you'll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you're going to think of how lucky the other one is. You're going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other… You may be at each other's throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.

'Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don't kid yourselves if it doesn't work out.'

He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. 'Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind.' He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, 'We've got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks.'

We went into the tanks – so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells – and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.

Predictably the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren't exactly straining at the leash.

It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.

Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity; Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof, Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.

We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city. Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it's by far the planet's largest city, but you couldn't tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.

Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks. They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.

I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.

We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital's reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren't set up for that.

'Earth-year' was 2189. So I was 215 years old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat – no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I'd find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.

They took the most severely wounded first, so it was several days before I went into surgery. Afterwards, I woke up in my room and found that they had grafted a prosthesis onto my stump, an articulated structure of shiny metal that to my untrained eye looked exactly like the skeleton of a leg and foot. It looked creepy as hell, lying there in a transparent bag of fluid, wires running out of it to a machine at the end of the bed.

An aide came in. 'How you feelin', sir?' I almost told him to forget the 'sir' bullshit, I was out of the army and staying out this time. But it might be nice for the guy to keep feeling that I outranked him.

'I don't know. Hurts a little.'

'Gonna hurt like a sonuvabitch. Wait'll the nerves start to grow.' 'Nerves?'

'Sure.' He was fiddling with the machine, reading dials on the other side. 'How you gonna have a leg without nerves? It'd just sit there.'

'Nerves? Like regular nerves? You mean I can just think "move" and the thing moves?'

"Course you can.' He looked at me quizzically, then went back to his adjustments.

What a wonder. 'Prosthetics has sure come a long way.'

'Pross-what-ics?'

'You know, artificial–'

'
Oh
yeah, like in books. Wooden legs, hooks and stuff.'

How'd he ever get a job? 'Yeah, prosthetics. Like this thing on the end of my stump.'

'Look, sir.' He set down the clipboard he'd been scribbling on. 'You've been away a long time. That's gonna be a leg, just like the other leg except it can't break.'

'They do it with arms, too?'

'Sure, any limb.' He went back to his writing. 'Livers, kidneys, stomachs, all kinds of things. Still working on hearts and lungs, have to use mechanical substitutes.'

'Fantastic.' Marygay would be whole again, too.

He shrugged. 'Guess so. They've been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?'

I told him, and he whistled. 'God
damn
. You musta been in it from the beginning.' His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.

'Yeah. I was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null.' They'd started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.

'Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?'

'I don't know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago – hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I re-enlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense.'

He shrugged. 'Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better.'

'What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?' No wonder I couldn't place his accent.

'Born, raised and drafted.' He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. 'Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF.' He spelled it out, didn't say 'youneff' the way I'd always heard it.

'Look, I've gotta run, Lieutenant. Two other monitors to check, this hour.' He backed out the door. 'You need anything, there's a buzzer on the table there.'

Third-generation angel. His grandparents came from Earth, probably when I was a young punk of a hundred. I wondered how many other worlds they'd colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?

It was going to be good to settle down and live a whole year for every year that went by.

The guy wasn't kidding about the pain. And it wasn't just the new leg, though that hurt like boiling oil. For the new tissues to 'take,' they'd had to subvert my body's resistance to alien cells; cancer broke out in a half-dozen places and had to be treated separately, painfully.

I was feeling pretty used up, but it was still kind of fascinating to watch the leg grow. White threads turned into blood vessels and nerves, first hanging a little slack, then moving into place as the musculature grew up around the metal bone.

I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt – she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.

I'd had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.

They transferred me to orthopedics, for 'range and motion repatterning' – a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.

Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her; she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.

As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor-guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.

The only real excitement we had on Heaven – excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities – was in that carefully guarded water.

They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.

The undisputed master of Heaven's oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the 'shark.' It could eat a stack of Earth sharks for breakfast, though.

The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there's a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.

He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.

They couldn't just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.

I wasn't too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d'oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.

These 'sharks' supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen's stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat, armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.

This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.