Peace and War - Omnibus (22 page)

'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 bloodthirsty, 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 colours. '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 footsoldier.'

'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 offplanet, 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.'

2

They looked normal enough, filing into the lecture hall where we held our first muster, the next day. Rather young and a little stiff.

Most of them had only been out of the creche for seven or eight years. The creche was a controlled, isolated environment to which only a few specialists – pediatricians and teachers, mostly – had access. When a person leaves the creche at age twelve or thirteen, he chooses a first name (his last name having been taken from the donor-parent with the higher genetic rating) and is legally a probationary adult, with schooling about equivalent to what I had after my first year of college. Most of them go on to more specialized education, but some are assigned a job and go right to work.

They're observed very closely and anyone who shows any signs of sociopathy, such as heterosexual leanings, is sent away to a correctional facility. He's either cured or kept there for the rest of his life.

Everyone is drafted into UNEF at the age of twenty. Most people work at a desk for five years and are discharged. A few lucky souls, about one in eight thousand, are invited to volunteer for combat training. Refusing is 'sociopathic,' even though it means signing up for an extra five years. And your chance of surviving the ten years is so small as to be negligible; nobody ever had. Your best chance is to have the war end before your ten (subjective) years of service are up. Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles.

Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it's easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. It comes to about two one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You're a civilian.

There being some sixty thousand combat soldiers in UNEF, you could expect about 1.2 of them to survive for ten years. I didn't seriously plan on being the lucky one, even though I was halfway there.

How many of these young soldiers filing into the auditorium knew they were doomed? I tried to match faces up with the dossiers I'd been scanning all morning, but it was hard. They'd all been selected through the same battery of stringent parameters, and they looked remarkably alike: tall but not too tall, muscular but not heavy, intelligent but not in a brooding way … and Earth was much more racially homogenous than it had been in my century. Most of them looked vaguely Polynesian. Only two of them, Kayibanda and Lin, seemed pure representatives of racial types. I wondered whether the others gave them a hard time.

Most of the women were achingly handsome, but I was in no position to be critical. I'd been celibate for over a year, ever since saying goodbye to Marygay, back on Heaven.

I wondered if one of them might have a trace of atavism, or might humor her commander's eccentricity.
It is absolutely forbidden for an officer to form sexual liaison with his subordinates
. Such a warm way of putting it.
Violation of this regulation is punishable by attachment of all funds and reduction to the rank of private or, if the relationship interferes with a unit's combat efficiency, summary execution
. If all of UNEF's regulations could be broken so casually and consistently as that one was, it would be a very easygoing army.

But not one of the boys appealed to me. How they'd look after another year, I wasn't sure.

'Tench-
hut
!' That was Lieutenant Hilleboe. It was a credit to my new reflexes that I didn't jump to my feet. Everybody in the auditorium snapped to.

'My name is. Lieutenant Hilleboe and I am your Second Field Officer.' That used to be 'Field First Sergeant.' A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

Hilleboe came on like a real hard-ass professional soldier. Probably shouted orders at the mirror every morning, while she was shaving. But I'd seen her profile and knew that she'd only been in action once, and only for a couple of minutes at that. Lost an arm and a leg and was commissioned, same as me, as a result of the tests they give at the regeneration clinic.

Hell, maybe she had been a very pleasant person before going through that trauma; it was bad enough just having one limb regrown.

She was giving them the usual first-sergeant peptalk, stern-but-fair: don't waste my time with little things, use the chain of command, most problems can be solved at the fifth echelon.

It made me wish I'd had more time to talk with her earlier. Strike Force Command had really rushed us into this first muster – we were scheduled to board ship the next day – and I'd only had a few words with my officers.

Not enough, because it was becoming clear that Hilleboe and I had rather disparate philosophies about how to run a company. It was true that
running
it was her job; I only commanded. But she was setting up a potential 'good guy-bad guy' situation, using the chain of command to so isolate herself from the men and women under her. I had planned not to be quite so aloof, setting aside an hour every other day when any soldier could come to me directly with grievances or suggestions, without permission from his superiors.