The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (85 page)

Officers and enlisted, we relaxed at meditation sessions with bowed heads, everybody breathing like tortoises. There were also formal religious services – I didn’t attend, but in the corridors I’d see people fingering rosaries, though whether Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist, I didn’t know. In the evening, before lights-out, I’d check the barracks a last time and find the guys sitting in darkness and watching feelies – the laser projectors humming, the virtual actors making love and war in four dimensions and looking a lot realer than the rest of us. “Darling, I shall always remember you, even on the far side of the stars!” Music, the end. Tough guys wiping away tears. The artless seduced by the illusion of art.

Since we were out of murder mysteries, I resumed command of my platoon, just to have something to fill the days. I joined them in the mornings for P.T., glad of a chance to use my muscles and keep fat at bay. In the shadowy and frigid storage spaces we practiced small-unit tactics, at which they were already fairly proficient. I never got chummy with them, that’s not my style, but I was intrigued to see that Morales was able to become a pal to his people without losing control. Swapping foul jokes, drinking with them at the enlisted Happy Hour – you’d think he’d have forfeited their respect. But he didn’t.

When I asked him about it, he told me, “My guys who speak Spanish call me Tío, Uncle. Your guys call you Dios, God. They know they can trust you, and yet you’re out of reach. They think that’s what God is like.”

“You do talk a lot of crap, Morales.”

“We’re like the two American generals in the war with Mexico. The soldiers called one Old Fuss and Feathers because he always played by the book. They called the other Old Rough and Ready because he dressed like a peasant and paid no attention to the book. Both won their battles. The point is, either way can work if it’s natural for you.”

I’d never heard about a war between America and Mexico. “Who won?” I asked.

“Oh, the Americans did. Later on we got back at them, but it took us a couple of hundred years.”

“Mexico conquered America?”

“In a way. Yes. In a way.”

From Schlacht I inherited Cos. He needed somebody to attach himself to, and soon began bringing me tidbits of information.

“Sergeant Chu – did you know he comes from a criminal family? They’re all pirates, except for him.”

“Pirates?”

“In the Malacca Strait. They’ve been pirates there for centuries. They use a skimboat that goes hundreds of clicks an hour just above the waves. The Security Forces tried to stamp them out, but they’ve got good political connections in the world capital at New Angkor, so Security had to let them go and even return their boat.”

“What do Chu’s relatives think about him joining the Forces?”

“He’s the black sheep of the family. He can never go home.”

“Who told you all this?”

“Nobody told me. I just know.”

One day Cos warned me about an impending fight in my platoon over one of the most popular douches. Just to test him, I showed up in the barracks compartment at midnight, routed out O’Rourke, and held a shakedown. In the laundry bags of two guys we found enough brass knuckles and knives to start a minor war.

Of course both claimed they were only keeping the contraband for self-protection, but I figured it was time they learned that Old Fuss and Feathers went by the book. So I invited O’Rourke to consider the fact that these idiots could have cost him all his hard-earned stripes, and suggested he take them to one of the empty compartments for a fatherly chat. When he’d finished, their comrades carried them to the dispensary, where Doc Gannett patched them up. Then I issued them plastic teaspoons and set them to work cleaning out grease traps and stopped-up latrines.

I ran into Gannett a few days later, and he told me the culprits insisted that their injuries resulted from tripping and falling down. “They,” he said with what I assumed was irony, “are the clumsiest guys I’ve ever come across.”

By tipping me off, Cos had probably saved a life or two, and he’d certainly saved me a ton of trouble and embarrassment. So I got in the habit of meeting him for a few beers in the evening, and letting him fill my ears with whatever tidbits he’d picked out of the air that day.

It was addictive, listening in on other peoples’ thoughts, and only the fear of turning into Schlacht II made me stop him from digging into the minds of Marie and Morales. In fact I flatly forbade him to repeat anything he learned from either one, to me or anybody else. I wouldn’t spy on the inner life of a lover or a friend, but aside from that I listened greedily to everything the little snitch had to offer. After we left the Bubble, I was glad I did.

Because we did eventually return to our own universe.

The Bubble had no such thing as time, yet clocks were still running on shipboard, and in due course our eternity of boredom came to an end. Reentry to our own universe was chronometric, and an error of a microsecond could put us almost anyplace, including the center of a star. I for one was seriously anxious, and even Marie showed strain.

“I’ve done this twenty-eight times,” she said one night, seeking comfort in the thicket of chest hair I sprouted back in those days. Somewhat muffled, her voice continued, “But I’ll never get used to it. It’s all up to the computers, and there’s no way for mere humans like us to control our fate.”

“What does the celestial navigator do during reentry?”

“Usually gets drunk. It’s all he can do.”

Actually, when it happened, I found it less distressing than the last time. Similar phenomena occurred, but I was expecting them. The process went fast, and within seconds it was clear that we weren’t in the core, convective zone, or corona of anything hot. After a while Marie’s quiet tones informed the whole ship that we were just about where we were supposed to be. Indeed, reentry had been a smashing success – system H2223 was already visible, its sun appearing to be about the size of Jupiter as seen from Terra, only colored like Mars.

It was wonderful how people brightened at the news. In the upbeat mood of the moment, I took the Dumb Duo off their shit details and instructed O’Rourke that punishment was now over. Everybody was happy, including me. During a session of afternoon love, Marie tied me up and gave me a present so long, slow, and marvelous that I remember it today – remember it as well as you can remember something transcendent.

I was still wearing a silly grin that evening when Cos joined me in the officers’ canteen for our usual session. His face was my first indication that the happy times were over.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Something wrong with the others, then?”

“No. I’ve never felt such good vibes on the
Zhukov.
Everybody’s happy.” For some reason, that seemed to depress him more than anything else.

“Come on, little buddy. Spit it out.”

“I saw that star we’re headed for on a monitor.”

“So?”

“I’ve been getting some . . . I guess I’d say . . . some tremors. From Paradiso. From humans. They’re eerie, coming out of the void like that. Thousands of people must all be feeling basically the same thing, that’s why it reaches so far. That and the fact that telepathy doesn’t seem to be subject to the inverse-square law. Anyway, something terrible’s happening in that system, or maybe is just about to happen, I’m not sure which.”

I looked at his big face and his little hands holding the beer stein and his dark, mournful cuttlefish eyes, and I had a sudden impulse to grab him and push him out through the airlock. Logic or no logic, we all want to kill the messenger of bad news. Especially when he lays it on us just when we’re feeling great.

Instead, after taking a deep breath, I thanked him. He was doing his job, after all. Later on I told Marie about Cos’s singular talent, about the evidence I’d seen that his gift was real, and about his warning. She didn’t take it any better than I had.

“Exactly what do you expect me to do about this dwarfs silly notion?”

You ever notice how, when somebody has a physical disability, everyone carefully avoids mentioning it until they get mad with him, and then it’s the first thing they bring up?

I said somewhat stiffly, “You’re in command here, and I don’t expect you to do anything. I’m advising you to take this seriously and use full precautions to make sure we carry out our mission. Okay?”

She thought that over, and said, “Pardonnez-moi.” A little later she added, “Of course, it may be the aliens. Le zoo. It’s only reasonable to treat this as a military operation. Before we risk the ship, Lieutenant Morales will lead an armed reconnaissance to check things out.”

I just looked at her. Very unwillingly, she said, “Okay, I can’t let you off the hook just because I sleep with you. You’re the senior, so you’ll lead it. Are you satisfied?”

“No,” I said, “but I hope to be.”

After we’d relaxed a while and had a few shots of five-star brandy, I gave her a little present I’d been planning all day. When we were done, and having a shower in the command suite’s opulent bathroom, I leaned through clouds of steam and whispered in her rosy ear, “Now, don’t say I never did anything for you.”

She smiled. “Oh, I’d never say that.”

Suddenly everybody was in a fever of anticipation. Because we didn’t know what was going on down there,
Zhukov
maintained radio silence until such time as we found out. Janesco spent long days in the Arctic Circle with a crew of combat bots that had been in storage up to this point, but now needed activation and testing and being hooked up to the fire-control computer and so on. He’d been in the Alien War, and had scores to settle. He was an efficient guy, and personally I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the bullseye of any of his missiles, especially the big one in its housing outside on the hull.

For us too the training tempo picked up. A lot of the work was intrinsically boring, but when your life is soon going to depend on your gadgets, you develop a passionate interest in things like nuts and bolts and pins and gauges. There was no end to checking and rechecking our weapons. I remember watching in something like awe as one of our dumber peons, blindfolded, field-stripped and re assembled in about thirty seconds a launcher that by any objective estimate was a lot smarter than he was.

The mainframe computer had to run diagnostic checks on all systems, and that was fine. But when it came to the
Zhukov’s
two SDVs or suborbital descent vehicles (shuttles, if you don’t speak in military acronyms), Morales and I manually made damn sure the airfoils would deploy when needed. I also decided to give each platoon its own symbol. Instead of the Roman or Greek alphabets, which were kind of overused already, I chose the Hebrew and called our platoons Aleph (‘) and Beth (b) and had the symbols stenciled on all the equipment and the shuttles. We planned to use both craft, in case an enemy destroyed one on the way down.

Once we arrived on Paradiso, we needed to be able to exit the little ships fast, fast, fast, in case something mean was waiting for us – and enter them again just as fast, in case we had to get away quick. “Get in, buckle up – buckle off, get out! Move, goddamn it!” O’Rourke explained to our platoon, and emphasized his remarks by whacking laggards with his belt.

Insofar as there’s any secret to training people for battle, endless repetition is it. Soldiers don’t need a lot of brains – they need to be rote-trained and obedient to orders and not have too many nerve endings. Above all, they need to trust their leaders and their comrades and be trustworthy in return. That’s what esprit de corps means, and as we readied for action it was fascinating to watch it develop among our people, including the two who’d recently been ready to knife each other over the favors of a douche.

Morales and I had as many butterflies as anybody else, plus those extra ones a young officer gets before his first action. It’s one thing to face combat and take orders. It’s something else to face combat and give them, knowing you may give the wrong ones and take down a bunch of people besides yourself More than ever, we depended on our sergeants, and they understood and called us sir while quietly telling us what to do next.

Evenings I sat in the canteen and listened to Cos, and the closer we got to our objective the more depressing he became. The local sun had attained about the size of Luna, a dull red Luna newly risen through haze. Across the disc moved a tiny dark object – Paradiso. I’d sit there watching on a monitor the transit of what looked like a cinder, at the same time listening to Cos tell me how those we’d come to save were expecting ruin and desolation.

“They’re running,” he added, “but they’re running from something they know they can’t escape.”

“You can sense all this from way out here?”

“As I told you, ESP isn’t subject to the inverse-square law. That’s one of the most baffling things about it. You know those ancient drawings by Dürer, where a mountain five miles away is in perfect perspective – tiny, about the size of a thumbnail – and yet just as clear and sharp as the big figures in the foreground? That’s the kind of message I’m getting. It’s small, it’s distant, but it’s perfectly clear. There’s no loss of definition, no fuzzing out. I’m not making this up.”

Goddamn him, I thought, he probably isn’t, either. Cos was an expert on his own singular gift, and I couldn’t argue with him, much as I wanted to.