Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  Someone said they heard these things were the inhabitants of this sector, beings who’d once had a star-spanning empire of their own, but by then it didn’t matter. Sentient or not, they tasted damned good, though our Spin fellow-supplied systemic symbionts insisted we could get no nutrition from them at all.

  Something about levorotation.

  I remember floating with my friends in a misty blue-green sky, eating long, thin, silvery people, smacking my lips over their flavor, joking with my friends, and remembering how my father and I used to fish together, when I was a boy.

  It wasn’t like that at all.

  More like this, with gear just like this, he and I standing hip-deep in swift, oily brown water, holding our fancy fly-casters . . . I remember how serious my father’s eyes would get, as we fished away one long morning after another, one of my mother’s silvergirl servants standing on the shore, watching us, shanghaied from household chores to carry our gear and cook whatever lunch we caught.

  At some point, while I lay on my stone, remembering these things, the sky grew black overhead and the stars came out, stars shining between broad, featureless panels of black, light streaming in from the galaxy beyond.

  They were the same stars after all, refusing to change for me.

  Finally, I went to bed, crawling into the empty blackness of the tent.

  ###

  In the morning, I stood on my hilltop beneath a cold cobalt dawn, blue sky striated with a barely visible herringbone pattern, streamers of dusty light from a dark, golden stemshine.

  That way, the light seemed to say.

  It’s over there.

  I stretched, feeling wonderful in some insensate way. Splendid animal health, a sense of meaningless being.

  Down below, the stream was a sinuous rille of molten metal, reflecting a perfect mixture of sky light, chuckle of moving water blending promiscuously with the soft, whispering wind.

  They write poems about this stuff.

  When I turned away from the river, there in the distance, hanging in blue space, rising out of the mist, was the faraway mountain, streamer of snow blowing from its peak, stilled by distance, like a motionless white flag.

  After a while, I knelt and opened my pack, rummaging around until I found the ballonet gun in its compact case. I opened it up on the hillside by the tent and began going through an assembly routine I could do not only with my eyes shut, not only in my sleep, but perhaps even if I were dead.

  Barrel. Condenser. Stock. Arming mechanism. Power source.

  I twisted it together, one part following another in magically perfect succession, made the last connection, everything together just so, and felt it grow ever so slightly warm to the touch.

  Hefted it.

  Looked through the sight.

  Armed my weapon and switched off the safeties, listening to the condenser whine.

  The ready light blinked green.

  Yes. Yes, I remember.

  I remember how we used to worry about how warm it got, giving us away in combat, compromising our stealth.

  But this wasn’t a sniper gun. No. More like a portable artillery piece.

  I thumbed the détente button and felt it grow still in my hands, engaged the safeties and slung it over my shoulder, hanging by an indestructible gray strap, not quite a mass of insensible plastic, still warm to the touch. Still alive as I stood looking at my faraway mountain with its beckoning white flag.

  Time to go.

  ###

  It was cold on the mountain.

  I could sense the cold, though I can never be cold. Ice and snow? Nothing. Not when you’ve had vacuum on your skin, when you’ve stood in the void between the stars, on some forgotten chunk of ice, stood on the brink of absolute zero, waiting for the fire.

  But I could know the cold.

  This cold now.

  Could remember what cold had been.

  It took me the better part of a day and a night to walk to the mountain, human exhaustion and hunger discarded as luxuries, feeling like a strong mechanical man, walking and walking, over the plains, up the foothills to steeper slopes, then climbing, ballonet gun slung across my back.

  After a while, the slopes turned to bare, gray, vertical rock, my fingers digging in like pitons. Crack. Stone giving way to flesh.

  Once, I slipped, sliding on my back across a scree-slick slope, shooting over a knife’s edge, out into space, twisting in the air, reaching out, catching myself in a spalled-open crevice, hand wedging in with just the tiniest flicker of pain, body flailing above the void, slapping hard against the cliff-face with a sound like a wet rag, hanging on, dangling, feet down over some howling abyss, listening to the wind, wondering what it would be like.

  Maybe a thousand meters to the snowfield below, this one handhold the last one I could possibly have reached.

  I could see myself tumbling, end over end, all the long way down, eyes closed so I wouldn’t see the ground reach out for me.

  Would that have been enough?

  No way to know.

  Just a fantasy, compounded by remembered fears.

  In a more real world, this one perhaps, I would’ve picked myself up from a man-shaped hole in the snow, grimacing at my carelessness, checked to make sure the gun was all right, would’ve begun the long climb all over again.

  After a while, I lifted myself back over the ledge, unwedged my hand, shook out its little cramp, and went on, climbing a bit more carefully. Only a bit. No hurry. No hurry at all.

  You’ll get there soon enough, Mr. Ashe.

  ###

  High up, up above the clouds, the mountain leveled out, and I walked along a knife-edged ridge of tight-packed snow toward the final peak. The sky was a remote, brilliant blue here, silver-blue, like cold steel, the world spread out below like the inside of a pipe, stemshine stretching out this way and that to infinity above, painful white light hiding the world beyond.

  I stopped, looking at nothing, my breath like a plume of frost, each breath ending in a cloud of tiny snowflakes.

  Wasteful, that.

  I set a timer on the heat exchangers in my nose and throat, starting and stopping bloodflow as I inhaled and exhaled. There. Better. I could do without the oxygen, of course, but wanted it nonetheless.

  World like a painting.

  Like some cheap, mass-produced art.

  How many worlds like this did we make before that old human universe came to an end? Millions, perhaps?

  How many of them now remain?

  Only a few.

  Junk art resting on the rubbish heap, waiting for the bulldozer to come.

  That old world seemed so limitless. Limitless, and I could hardly wait to grow up, to get out into it, get away from my circumscribed childhood, out into the infinite black deep between the stars.

  Do I remember when it ended?

  Maybe so.

  I remember a day long ago, a day floating isolated in my past, so separated from the rest I have no way of knowing who or what I was back then. My sister and I had one of the household silvergirls up in a seldom-visited part of the attic that day, so I suppose we’d gotten old enough to be a little on the naughty side, making it practice kissing with us.

  I remember my sister giggling as I carefully pushed my tongue between its cold lips, trying to look like a character in a drama, silent silvergirl snatched from household chores, trying its best to give me what I wanted.

  Maybe we had a datanode up there with us, calling in music from the household net, making the silvergirl dance with us. I remember there was a party coming up, that we’d wanted to look oh-so-sophisticated for our friends.

  Nodes are real smart, are supposed to figure out what’s important, tell you what you need to know, not just what you want. This one suddenly dropped the music, projected imagery into the attic’s air, my sister going, “Huh . . .” Surprise in her voice

  The silvergirl pulled away from me, hand on my chest, turning to look just as I did.

  There was
a mountain, just like this one, under a stark violet sky with two pale blue suns, a snowy ridge just like this one, alien starship strewn in pieces down a long, white slope.

  Human ships hovering overhead.

  Then a tight close-up, showing us those alien crewmen standing in the snow, watching us come in for a landing.

  I looked at the silvergirl first. Nothing in its empty silver eyes, but . . . the silvergirl was looking at me. Waiting. As if it knew something I didn’t. We sent it down the service chute, back on duty, then went on down ourselves, knowing Dad would be digging for data.

  Looking back, I feel that I knew what was coming, impossible foreknowledge implanted in memory because I lived through everything that came afterward.

  So I remember fear as well as breathless excitement.

  And when we found out about the great war, I remember how proud we were at being invited to take part.

  ###

  Not far from the top of the peak, up above the source of the snowy plume, I found a little hollow where I could rest, scanning the sky, sheltered from the wind, looking round at the world’s brilliant vistas. From here, the snow was no more than mist, a transparent mist stretching away into the sky, hiding nothing.

  I stood still, looking upward, my frequency sensitivities roving however they would. The sky grew bright, then dark, shadows emerging from beyond the blue. Faraway places, faraway things.

  Beyond the stemshine, I knew, lay only more world, world beyond the sky just exactly like this, going round and round without end or beginning. Not really a world at all. Merely an artifact, like a silvergirl, or a gun.

  Hanging strung between crags nearby was something like an orb spider’s web, frost glistening on its strands, something like a spider hanging there, stemlight glinting from shiny metal limbs, picking out colored metal eyes.

  Every now and again, it would whisper to itself, or perhaps to me, whispering in something that sounded like an unknown language, a soft, suggestive voice, utterly without meaning.

  The stuff of myth, I know.

  Raven. Pallas. Nevermore.

  Bullshit.

  Ominous whispering, ghostly creatures watching you from the dark, knowing something you don’t, creatures who would warn you if only you had the wit to understand.

  But you don’t, because you’re not a creature in a myth, nor an artifact in a story.

  Just a human being, frail and small, for all the changes wrought upon you by artificers beyond imagining.

  Sometime . . . sometime, long ago, I stopped being a man and started being . . . what? I don’t know.

  An instrument.

  Superhuman.

  Unafraid.

  Almost indestructible.

  We knew we could die, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  We were supermen, together, and nothing more.

  Overhead, kilometers away, I could see a score of birdlike things circling. Not what I’m waiting for, of course.

  I remembered standing on a mountain not so very different from this one, not quite so high, but craggy, gray, cold. It was a natural world, not much like a human world, with cold nitrogen air, frigid nitrogen contaminated by gaseous ammonia, with icy liquid ethane that would sometimes condense and fall like rain.

  The sun, not our sun, nor any sun we’d ever known, shone like a tiny, brilliant silver dot in a dull blue-purple sky. There were clouds, very high up, like tissue stratus, colored paler blue-white.

  Spinfellows dropped us here one day, armed to the teeth, as they say, and told us to kill whomever was lurking about; the people of this world were enemies, they said, in league with the terrible Starfish foe.

  I remember they ran like buffalo across the plain below, the people of this world, armed only with spears and bows.

  I remember going down among them afterward, walking among their hulked and steaming carcasses, dead bodies covered with stiff, icy chrome-steel fur, like thin, silvery metal strands.

  Walking among them, I remembered decorating the Yuletide tree with my family, a very little boy then, doing the tree with my laughing mother, my smiling father holding my sister up to watch as we draped it all over with thin, silvery metal strands.

  Our guns had melted holes in the plain, leaving craters behind, coagulating craters full of chemical ice water.

  I remember standing, quiet for a while, looking at a dead soldier, a soldier lying half-submerged in molten ground, slowly freezing into its grave. Its eyes were open and seemed to look at me, but utterly expressionless, without sight, life, meaning.

  Another piece of myth, the eyes of the dead regarding the living, full of accusation.

  All I had to do now was wait.

  ###

  Finally they came, as the stemlight began to fade and the sky turned magenta.

  Maybe a dozen of them, balloonsailers in a long line, far away, no more than black dots, strung out across the darkening sky. Impossibly remote overhead, the stemshine was no more than a smear of brilliant rust, fading into the ruddy afterglow.

  I made my eyes behave, suppressing telescopic vision, making them remain no more than specks, like disciplined gnats in the long autumnal twilight.

  That was how they looked before, though it wasn’t on a world like this.

  It must be horrible for them, discarded as worthless junk, cast away in an abandoned pipe, an inside-out world, a miniature world, adrift between the stars.

  I remember that other world.

  Immense.

  Cold.

  Like blue Neptune, with vast islands of fluffy aerogel ice floating in an empty blue sky, remote triple suns clustering together, tiny on the horizon, achingly brilliant for all their distance, streaking the sky with sunset, red, gold, green smeared together, yet still distinct.

  We didn’t know when the Spinfellows would come for us, or if they would, although the battle was long over.

  We’d killed their surrogates, hoped the Spinfellows would pick us up, take us away to fight another day—and knew what would happen if the Starfish caught us here.

  They’ll come.

  Sure they will.

  Spinfellows need us to win their war.

  Win the war at last.

  Balance of power broken.

  Starfish on the run.

  I remember that it was Santos who suddenly pointed off into that reddening sky. There.

  It was somebody else muttered, Damn. Balloonsailers.

  Probably left behind, just like us, waiting for the Starfish to come, hoping the Spinfellows didn’t get here first, knowing what would happen to them if they did.

  Maybe there were seventy of us left out of the thousand who’d been combat-dropped a few days before. You could look around and see bad luck written across haggard faces.

  Tired.

  Even supermen get tired.

  Half of us unarmed.

  Most of the rest with nothing more than torches, a few grenades. We’d been rooting Beetles from the tunnels in the aerogel clouds, burning them, blasting tunnel mouths shut . . . watching those dots in the sky, I wondered if we could reopen a tunnel in the little time left.

  No.

  I’d looked down at the ballonet gun in my hands, knowing I was one of the few artillerymen left, knowing the others, with their useless torches and pitiful grenades, would be looking at me now.

  I remember I tried to grin.

  God knows what it must have looked like.

  I remember I thumbed the arming button, listening to the condenser’s whine, just like now.

  I remember the balloonsailers came at us out of the sunset, just like now, as those nameless triple suns fell through the clouds, spreading a momentarily brilliant fan, a cascade of colors against the sky, Biofrost beckoning us homeward bound.

  I wonder why they came?

  Why not simply go away, hide in the shadows, pray for their Starfish to come?

  Just doing their jobs, that’s all.

  Just like us.

  They came, maybe f
orty or fifty of them in all, stooping on us out of a blackening sky, while frosty white stars popped out up above.

  I remember I fired once, just as they came in range, hit one, watching him flare, bumbling out of formation, falling away into the infinite darkness below our little white island.

  Maybe I would’ve liked watching him fall, fire sputtering sullen red, falling away to nothing, then gone.

  No time.

  The condenser whined, the ready light blinked, I fired again, someone else fired, other balloonsailers blazed and fell, one of them dropping onto the soft ice nearby, blazing up as oxygen got to it, making a sudden plume of blue smoke as it burned into the fragile ground.

  People began firing their torches as they made the first pass, yellow-white fire splashing harmlessly.

  There were screams.

  When the balloonsailers arced away, there weren’t so many of us anymore. I got another one as it receded, balloonsailer exploding in a burst of beautiful silver light, sky suddenly freckled with lovely vermilion sparks. The shadow of a man fell from the explosion, arms and legs flailing as he dropped into black nowhere.

  He’d fall for a long time before atmospheric pressure and growing heat killed him.

  Supermen are tough.

  Not too tough for these other soldiers, though.

  I wonder where the Starfish found them?

  Maybe they just made them.

  I remember wedging myself into a little crack in the ice, I remember that I kept on shooting, while friends of mine screamed and died.

  At some point, I watched the last balloonsailer catch fire, twist against the starry, starry night, arc off on its back, turn nose-down, and crash, exploding brilliant red, not far away.

  When I pulled myself from the crevice, there were three other men standing, that’s all; men with guns just like mine.

  Spinfellows came for us the next morning and took us away into yellow sunrise, not commenting on what they’d found.

  I sat now, watching the red sky turn deep indigo, watching the balloonsailers come. Out of the fading backdrop, three broad panels of stars began to form, still pale, still far away, nighttime hardly begun.