Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  Wait.

  Wait for it.

  Wait ’til they’re close enough.

  I thumbed the condenser, feeling the gun arm itself in my hands. There, that’s got their attention. They turned hard against the sky, arcing toward me, forming up for a combat run.

  The spider muttered something and, when I looked, it was scurrying from its web.

  They came, slowing, become like graceful ice dancers, circling the mountain peak, spiraling in close, round and round, watching me, waiting.

  Will I have to shoot one to get it started?

  Or can I just stand and wait. Wait for them to . . .

  I sighted in, looking through the scope, watching the ready light blink.

  Now?

  I imagined the detonation. Imagined the first balloonsailer falling, on fire, down to the earth below.

  After a while, I lowered the gun, thumbed the détente button, and felt it grow still in my hands.

  I laid it aside and stood, looking up at the balloonsailers, watching them circle about.

  After a while, the circle broke and they began to stream away, receding into the night.

  The last one called out to me, some high, incomprehensible wail, sounding so utterly lost.

  When it was gone, when I was alone again, I wondered.

  Maybe they miss their comrades.

  Maybe, as they circled, round and round, they were only waiting for the same thing as I was.

  Why is this so Goddamned hard?

  ###

  Somehow the night was dark, cold wind whipping around me, making a low moan that seemed to come from all directions, from nowhere close by.

  The spider got back in his web, chanting softly to himself, vaguely distracting, like theme music put in a drama by some incompetent producer who thought it might have something to do with atmosphere, with the ambiance of his tale.

  I sat, clutching the gun between my thighs, hugging its warmth to my chest. In the dark and cold, I must be blazing infrared, making the crag a lighthouse beacon to sensitive eyes below. How many ersatz animals, how many abandoned machines, seeing my light, would grow nervous, wondering what it might mean? Or, worse yet, knowing.

  All of them, perhaps.

  I couldn’t do it.

  And neither could they.

  Too complex a plan?

  Well, the gun’s in your hands, warm and suggestive, beckoning, waiting, as deadly as any balloonsailer who ever lived.

  Not so hard to do what has to be done.

  So just . . . but I continued to sit, emptied of imagery, unable to conjure the necessary scene.

  Harder than I ever imagined it’d be, that’s all.

  Suddenly, I saw what it would look like to the creatures below, lost machines all, when I tripped the arming button, listened to the condenser whine, watched the ready light blink, a tiny spark of welcoming green, positioned the emission point and pulled the trigger.

  It’d look, for just a moment, like someone had punched a hole through the walls of creation, out into whatever lies beyond.

  Then it’d be done.

  Over with.

  As fast and unmomentous as anything in this universe could ever be.

  I realized the spider had fallen silent.

  When I looked up, there were two shadows, humanoid shapes on the ridgeline, flat black against the lesser darkness beyond.

  I let my eyes get up to their tricks, making the night go steely gray and fill up with countless details.

  Two silvergirls, sleek and slim, starlight glinting here and there, standing still, were looking down on me. One of them was obviously maimed, its left arm gone, socket exposed, a tatter of hanging shreds, like muscle and bone made of twisted, blackened metal. The other . . . face torn away, eyes and all, ragged hole covered over by a clumsily shaped, riveted-on patch. It had a radarset strapped to its head, grid nodding slowly, back and forth, up and down, cable running in under one side of the patch.

  Nothing, just the two of them standing there, the blind one holding on to the cripple’s lone hand.

  After a while, the blind one said, “Well. And I thought they were no more.” Soft silvergirl voice without emotion, just like my mother’s silvergirls, all those long years ago, cold, remote, doing as they were told.

  I could still taste their lips on mine; hear my sister’s laughter.

  They turned away, slipped below the ridgeline, down into the night, and were gone.

  After a while, I stood, tucking the ballonet gun under my arm, and went to stand on the ridgeline where they’d been, while the spider chattered senselessly away. You could see their footsteps in the snow, a trail of pale blotches leading away down the slope, no creature so cold that it leaves no trace.

  I started walking slowly after them, not thinking of what I might want, or why.

  ###

  In time, the darkness and cold were banished by orange morning light, stemshine flaring to life, coloring the sky, flooding fields of ruins and runaway garden forest, picking out patches of shadowy haze, bits of fog gathered in the hollows, burning them away.

  Something like a free-flying kite, complete with child-made, knotted-rag white tail, floated overhead, dark shadow against a sky turning from orange to yellow, on its way to cornflower blue.

  I’d walked down off the mountain, following the glow of my damaged silvergirls’ trail. The splotches of light grew more widely spaced. Running now, putting distance between us. Eventually, they began to stumble and fall, pick themselves up and go on.

  I kept on walking, slow, steady, one foot after another after another, untiring, unable to fall or falter. Machines can’t do this. Machines wear out. Machines grow old. Life renews itself, going on whether you want it to or not.

  In full daylight, the trail of footsteps faded away, hidden. I let my eyes do what they needed to, finding the disturbances for me, showing me the way the silvergirls had gone.

  I walked through a cool yellow-green forest of towering zinnias, immense flat flowers of orange and red nodding in the breeze a dozen meters overhead, came out in a clearing and saw where the silvergirls had lived.

  Gone now.

  They’d left things behind, artifacts, tools . . .

  I kneeled in the entrance to a hut, looking at a strewn-out rubble of clothing. Abandoned human clothing, patched and repaired, lovingly maintained.

  Pretty things.

  Feminine things.

  Silvergirls went naked in the household where I was a boy, on the world where I grew up, on all the worlds where humans lived, and live no more.

  Silvergirls were things.

  Things we made to serve us.

  Things without souls.

  Things without need for pretty things of their own.

  I remember playing by myself, all alone in a sandbox, somewhere on the palace grounds. I had my little cars and trucks, aircraft and spaceships arrayed in the sand, arrayed on roads I’d graded with my little bulldozer toys.

  I remember the silvergirl silent by my side, silvergirl detailed to watch me, silvergirl helping me pack sand in a plastic bucket, helping me upend it, lift it away, leaving a fat truncated cone behind, standing free, smooth and brown. A building maybe, or a mountain around which my roads could wind.

  I remember looking up, seeing it look back at me with empty silvergirl eyes. I remember how it reached out to touch my hair, smooth it down ever so gently, hair lifted by a warm wind I hadn’t noticed before.

  Standing in the empty silvergirl village, village of remains, spoils from a worldwide refuse heap, I imagined them here, broken silvergirls, tossed away with all the rest of the junk, dressing up in their salvaged finery.

  My mother’s silvergirls . . .

  I remembered suddenly being on a starship, orbiting in the sky, looking down at my homeworld.

  Someone standing beside me had said, “It’s like those pictures of Luna you sometimes see in old books.”

  Yes, like any terrestrial moon, or world, in the era of
planetary formation, at the time of maximum bombardment, glowing pink under a haze of pale silica vapor, craters shining brilliant yellow-white amid red seas of flowing magma.

  I turned away from the village and walked on, following them still.

  ###

  I found her where the silvergirls left her staked out for me, naked, supine, spread-eagled, blindfolded, wrists bound to stakes driven into the damp, mossy ground, in a cool, dim green tunnel of a trail, cut through a forest of dry, long-dead trees under a canopy of pale, weeping vines.

  I stood looking down at her, not a woman, not a child, not a human thing at all, with her short, feathery silver hair; long, slim, motionless limbs; bare, dry vulva sprung open by the position in which she’d been bound.

  I remember once overhearing two women discuss that special moment when a man sees them naked for the first time.

  The first one swore she could see the light of love dawning in his eyes.

  The other nodded, smiling, looking ever so wise.

  I remember wondering how it was they didn’t know the truth.

  Wondering why none of them seem to know, why they think men are something else entirely.

  Maybe they don’t want to know.

  Maybe I wouldn’t want to know, myself, about that terrible spasm of desire, nothing at all like love.

  A moment like nothing so much as an inexplicable urge to strangle a kitten in your bare hands, kitten struggling as it dies, tongue protruding, eyes popping from its head, until there’s nothing left in your hands but a sodden lump of empty, matted fur.

  The allomorph’s nostrils flared slightly, sampling for pheromones. The skin on her chest seemed to thicken imperceptibly, tiny pink nipples growing, perhaps, just a bit, vulval flesh darkening ever so slightly.

  I stood still, waiting, watching a tool do its work.

  She lifted her head, blindfold facing me, knowing where I was, tipping her face back and forth, as if trying to see.

  My combat shield tickled, warning me I’d been probed by a short-range nerve-induction scanner.

  I hadn’t seen one of these in a long time, already had my protective implants before I met the first one. No way of knowing what it must be like to be worked over by a psychiatric allomorph, as naked as a human being possibly can be.

  She licked her lips, a careful human gesture, part of an artfully programmed charade, and, voice hoarse, betraying some faux emotion that passed me by, whispered, “Are you really human? That . . . shield. I can’t tell.”

  As I knelt on the forest floor, untying her bonds, her nostrils flared again, driving change, fuzz of silver hair blooming across her escutcheon, breasts beginning to form.

  When the last rope was released, she sat quietly on the mossy ground and waited for me to take the blindfold away, exposing fathomless eyes of glass.

  ###

  As we walked through dim green forest, over bright, stemlit plains dotted with tumbledown mechanical ruins, walking away from the silvergirls’ trail, all the long way back to my no-longer abandoned camp, she said, “Call me Deseret.”

  “Desirée?”

  She spelled it out for me.

  Ah. Got it. “Ashe,” I said.

  At first, she tried to walk in front of me, naked and pretty, letting me watch her change from thing to girl to woman stage by stage. Tried to stop me from walking, getting in my path, slowing down, walking backward, facing me, smiling just so, getting upwind and flooding the air between us with desperate chemical signals.

  I felt myself tighten up inside, just before the filters in my lungs kicked in, cutting it off, exhaling her own coded provocation back at her.

  She stood still in my path, looking up at me, a face so serious, head tipped back, hands clasped behind her waist, heels apart, toes pointing slightly away from the centerline of her body, shine of desire visible on her inner thighs.

  I’d stood still, looking down at her for just a moment, then stepped to one side, stepped around her, and walked on.

  She stayed behind me for a while after that, walking softly, footfalls almost inaudible, keeping up, nonetheless. When she came abreast of me, walking head down, as if pensive, she was a girl again, woman-parts mostly reabsorbed.

  Somewhere, sometime, in some long-ago factory, they made her to be a tool, useful to a human world in which she had no nonfunctional role.

  I wonder if her designers, men and women long vanished, ever imagined she’d walk down this trail, lost and useless, full of unimaginable longings.

  She’s the only child of those dead souls, left behind in the noösphere to mark their passing. A pencil vanishes utterly, used up, thrown away, but its dust persists in drawings made, words written down.

  Overhead, a vee of shiny birdlike things flew, crossing our path not far ahead, low enough I could hear the soft buss of their shiny metal wings, one red, one green, one blue, stemlight glinting as they passed from left to right. Deseret’s head tipped as she watched them, tracking quickly, some unknown hunger filling her pretty face, not reaching into the depths of her clear, featureless eyes.

  Eyes like tiny, optically perfect windows into an unlit room.

  She glanced at me and I wondered how her face could be pretty. So many human cultures, races new and old, formed across time and space. No one thing for the word pretty to mean.

  If I’d been looking, I would’ve seen the pretty face form, using my own face as a template, an appropriate pretty girl for a standard pretty superman. Now that I was watching, she became distinctly more female again.

  I said, “Why’d they put you out like that?” Not that I couldn’t guess.

  She smiled, making my heart falter, no filter ever made that can stop a pretty girl’s smile. Not without erasing the man within from the mannequin without. “Get you off their trail. Give them a little more time to get away.”

  Maybe the silvergirls imagined me on top of her, not even undoing those bonds, blindfold in place, allomorph spread out for me just so. He’s human, male, this is all he really needs, they might whisper among themselves, remembering a time when they lived among humans, male and female alike.

  “Did you live with them?” Imagining panicky silvergirls betraying a friend? Humans made them. Maybe we made them with all our flaws.

  She shook her head, looking up at the sky, empty blue now, not a cloud in sight. The stemshine was brightening, burning white, burning the sky dark azure, making it seem impossibly far away. When she turned and looked at me, we stopped walking. Not a girl anymore.

  She said, “I try to stay away from them. Let them get on with their business. Hope they’ll let me get on with mine.”

  Their business. What business is there for abandoned tools? I walked on, waiting, stemlight coloring my skin emerald.

  After a while, Deseret said, “It’s their world now, Green Man. They’re afraid you’ve come to take it away.”

  “And you?”

  “No world for me.”

  ###

  The tent was just where I left it, sturdy and stiff atop its little hill, clasped in a crook of a slow-running river. Overhead, the stemshine was darkening, turning red against the dark blue sky, some tawny light beginning to form, emerging everywhere across the sky at once. No horizon here.

  I knelt and opened the pack, marveling that I’d remembered to put the cookstove away before setting out on my final errand, taking my gun on its long, pointless walk to the mountain, the gun now lying flat on the ground beside me, unfired.

  Something in the gun might have longings too . . .

  Deseret stood a little distance away, back toward me, looking out across the landscape, hair ruffling in the wind. It seemed a little longer now then it’d been before, and from this angle, she was more woman than girl. Subtle effects, tried and true, tried and tried again.

  Overhead, vermilion began spilling through the sky.

  I pulled the cookstove out of the pack and sat cross-legged on the ground, looking at its shiny metallic resistance elements, a
technology older, by just the tiniest bit, than starships. Older than what made me as well.

  I released the first and simplest of my locks, feeling hunger bloom in my gut.

  Softly, Deseret said, “In the olden days, I used to come here with a friend.”

  I pulled a ration card from the pack and set it on the stove, not bothering to read the label, trying not to remember what those olden days were like, trying not to picture what Deseret might have been like, picturing who her friend might have been.

  A man like me? A client for whatever health-maintenance compact had owned her, had thrown her away, or merely forgotten her?

  Or just some other tool?

  Friend is such a complicated word.

  I got out another pack and put it beside the first, ordering the stove to do its job. Deseret turned, probably picking up my command with her scanners. That’s her job, left over from the olden days.

  I saw she’d turned woman again, but subdued, barely defined.

  Just enough.

  She said, “Is one of those for me?”

  I nodded.

  She said, “I’m glad you remembered we can eat.”

  Something hooted from a patch of dark forest over where the valley floor began to slope upward toward the plain. Beyond the forest, towering out of the mist of distance, the end-cap cliffs were colored blood-red, etched with shadows by the fading stemlight.

  Somewhere far overhead, unseeable by mortal eyes, an indistinct blotch of gray to me, lay the backside of the docking portal. When I arrived, I hadn’t given any thought to how I might get out again.

  I turned away and found Deseret standing before me, fully fleshed out once more, face shadowed and reddened by the fading light, body swollen, prepared, ready.

  Nothing in her empty eyes, of course.

  Beyond her, the ration cards were expanding on the stove-top, opening like flowers, rich steam rising, bringing us the flavor of the meal. One pack held a steak, baked potato, sour cream, butter, onions. The other one was a sausage pizza.