Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  Colonel Pao frowned. “Are you telling me you don’t believe Captain Min should accept General Lundstrom’s offer, Dr. Barian?”

  “I think it’s time someone pointed out that Captain Min hasn’t been permitted to talk to Deni’s parents. We’re going to be talking to Deni’s father under the worst possible conditions. If our efforts fail—the primary reason will be the fact that we’ve been forced into this position because your general and her staff have spent the last two weeks doing everything they could to evade their responsibilities.”

  Colonel Pao belonged to a subgroup that the sociologists who studied the military community sometimes referred to as the “military aristocracy.” Members of his family had been serving in United Nations military units since the years in which the first international brigades had been formed on Earth. From his earliest days in the army, when he had been a young intern, people had been impressed by the way he always conducted himself with the controlled graciousness of the classic Confucian gentleman.

  Two weeks ago, just before the torch ships had left Hammarskjold, Captain Min had spent a few hours with a young surgical captain who had been responsible for loading the hospital equipment. The captain had let his mind wander at a critical moment and the entire loading process had been snarled into a tangle that could have delayed departure by ten hours if Colonel Pao hadn’t suddenly started offering courteously phrased “suggestions.” The captain was one of the most self-absorbed young men Captain Min had ever known, but even he had been forced to admit that he would have disemboweled a subordinate who had created the kind of mess he had manufactured.

  “I realize General Lundstrom may have behaved somewhat cautiously,” Colonel Pao said. “I must tell you, however, that I might have tried to postpone a decision on this matter myself, if I were in her position. General Lundstrom is responsible for the lives of four hundred beings. If Sergeant Kolin does go into combat—and we’ve been given every reason to think combat is unavoidable—the lives of all the people around him could depend on his reactions. General Lundstrom wouldn’t have been doing her duty if she hadn’t worried about something that could have a significant effect on his emotional state.”

  “Your bureaucratic maneuvering may have destroyed the future of a defenseless child. If—”

  Captain Min’s hand leaped to the keyboard. She jabbed at the appropriate buttons and cut the link between Colonel Pao and Dr. Barian.

  “Dr. Barian and I will get to work on our statement for Sergeant Kolin right away, sir. Please thank General Lundstrom for me.”

  “Please give Dr. Barian my regards, Dorothy.”

  A neutral background color replaced Colonel Pao’s face in the lower left quarter of the screen. In the upper left quarter, Dr. Barian was looking at her defiantly.

  “We needed to get that on the record,” Dr. Barian said. “I made a recording of my side of the conversation, with a record of who else was on the line.”

  “Colonel Pao is one of the most respected men I’ve ever known,” Captain Min said. “He always treats everybody around him with respect—and they normally respond by treating him the way he treats them.”

  “He’s a military bureaucrat just like everybody else you’re dealing with, young woman. You should have put a statement like that in your files the day he and the rest of your military colleagues started giving you the runaround.”

  ###

  The director of the childcare center looked relieved when he realized he wouldn’t have to break the news to Deni himself. Two of his full-time charges had parents on Rinaswandi. Eleven of the kids who had parents on the torch ships were old enough to realize Mr. and Mrs. Chen had just demonstrated their parents really were charging into danger.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t call you right away,” the director said. “I’m afraid we’ve really been in a turmoil here.”

  Dorothy nodded. “How long can you keep Deni quarantined?”

  “He should be all right until just before breakfast—until 0730. We’ve made it a point not to make any mention of the news when they first wake up, just in case something like this happened, but there’s no way we can keep it quiet once the day kids come in.”

  “He’s going to know there’s something odd going on as soon as he sees me showing up that early. I’m not exactly one of his favorite people.”

  “We’ll make a private room available. I’ll tell the night counselor you need to take Deni into her room as soon as you get there.”

  Dr. Barian’s precise high-speed Techno Mandarin broke into the conversation. “Dr. Min needs to take her patient directly to her office. This situation has important therapeutic ramifications. She needs to see him in a place where she can spend as much time with him as she needs.”

  “Have somebody tell Deni I’ve got some extra questions I need to ask him,” Dorothy said. “Don’t tell him any more than that—make it sound like one of those things grownups do and kids have to put up with. Tell him I’m sorry—tell him I’ve promised you I’m having strawberry muffins with real butter brought into the office just to make up for it. He claims that’s the best thing he and his father eat for breakfast when they’re alone together.”

  ###

  Given the communications lag, there was only one way to handle the situation. An autonomous discussion program had to be transmitted to the torch ship. The program would be outfitted with a general strategy and equipped with critical information and prerecorded discussions of the treatment. Then they would sit back and watch as their screens told them how Sergeant Kolin had reacted eleven minutes ago.

  Dr. Barian had reviewed almost every session Dorothy had spent with Sergeant Kolin. He quibbled with her over some of the numerical estimates she plugged into the program, but no one could argue with her overall evaluation of the sergeant’s personality structure.

  Deni’s father had grown up in an “extended family network” that had been created by a complicated series of divorces and regrouping. He had spent his formative years in a complex web of relationships in which no one and everyone was responsible for the children. His emotional development had been shaped by a situation in which he and nine other children were involved in a ceaseless competition for the love and praise of thirty adults who were heavily involved in their own competitions and interactions. He had never experienced the love of someone who considered him the absolute dead center of the universe. He had covered up his own lack of self-esteem by convincing himself he had enough self-esteem for twenty people. Then he had buried his insecurities a couple of meters deeper by telling himself other people were just as bouncy and assertive as he thought he was. His son, he had told Dorothy on several occasions, was about as stuck on himself as a boy could be. Deni would have been a lot easier to handle, Sergeant Kolin believed, if his mother hadn’t succumbed to the delusion she had given birth to a genius.

  Sergeant Wei and Sergeant Kolin belonged to the class that created some of the worst problems military family therapists had to live with. They were both people who responded to the enticements of the recruiting commercials precisely because their own childhoods had been developmental disasters. Deni’s mother had pushed and punished because she herself had grown up in a family that had lived on the edge of chaos. His father had hammered at him because it was the only way Sergeant Kolin could deny the existence of the hungry boy inside himself.

  If someone had put Deni’s parents inside an esem treatment chamber at some point in their childhoods, their son might not be facing a psychological catastrophe. Essentially, the esem was supposed to endow Deni with a powerful, totally unsmashable feeling that he was a worthwhile person. In families where everything was working the way it was supposed to, the child developed that feeling from parents who communicated—day after day, year after year—a normal amount of love and a general sense that the child was valued. Deni would get it in two hours, with the help of half a dozen drugs and an interactive, multisensory program. The drugs would throw him into a semiconscious state, imme
rse him in an ocean of calm, and dissolve his defenses against persuasion. The program would monitor all the standard physiological reactions while it bombarded him with feelings, ideas, and experiences that “rectified the deficits in his domestic environment.” The intervention was usually applied three times, over the period of a month, but even one application could be helpful.

  In the midst of winter, a twentieth-century philosopher named Albert Camus had once said, I found that there was in me an invincible summer. For the rest of his life, no matter how he was treated, Deni would be held erect by the summer the esem would plant in the center of his personality.

  So how should they convince an exceptionally un-esem’d adult male that he should let them transform his son into the kind of person he thought he was? Dorothy had originally assumed Deni’s mother would be the one who accepted the need for the esem. Once Sergeant Wei had acquired some insight into the realities of her family life, Dorothy had believed, there was a good chance she would buy the esem for the same reasons she bought expensive learning programs and other products that could help her son “achieve his full potential.” And once Deni’s mother had made up her mind, the relevant analyses all indicated Sergeant Kolin would eventually let her have her way.

  Their best hope, in Dorothy’s view, was an appeal to some of the most powerful emotions nurtured by the military culture. Normally Sergeant Kolin would have rooted himself behind an armored wall as soon as anyone claimed his son needed special treatment. Now they could get around his defenses by claiming Deni was a combat casualty. The program should play on the idea that Deni had been wounded, Dorothy argued. It should portray the esem as a kind of emotional antibiotic.

  Dr. Barian wanted to work with the emotional dynamics that coupled guilt with idealization. The Kolin-Wei marriage, in Dr. Barian’s opinion, had been one of the worst mixtures of dependency and hostility he had ever examined. It had been so bad he felt confident they could assume Sergeant Kolin had already started idealizing his wife’s memory. Their best approach, therefore, would be an appeal that treated the esem as if it were primarily supposed to help Deni deal with the loss of his mother. Dorothy was correct when she objected that the idealization process usually didn’t acquire any real force for several days—but Dr. Barian wouldn’t be surprised, in this case, if it had kicked into action the moment Sergeant Kolin had been advised his wife might be dead.

  “We’re talking about one of the fundamental correlations in the literature, Dorothy. The worse the relationship, the stronger the tendency to idealize.”

  Dorothy started to argue with him, then glanced at the clock and compromised. The program would open with the combat casualty approach and follow it with a couple of tentative comments on the special problems of boys who had lost their mothers. If Sergeant Kolin made a response that indicated he was already locked into the idealization process, the program would shift tracks and start developing the idea that the boy needed special help because he had lost the support of a special person.

  The really divisive issue was the description of the therapy. Dr. Barian wanted her to prepare a description that talked about the procedure as if they were merely going to bathe Deni in love. They might include a hint that they were trying to replace the love Deni had lost when his mother had died. But there would be no reference whatsoever to the effect on the patient’s self-image.

  That was a little like describing an antibiotic without mentioning it killed germs, of course. Dr. Barian apparently had his own ideas about the meaning of the term “informed consent.” In his case, the important word was obviously “consent.”

  Deni would have been surprised to hear it, but he and his parents were only the second family Captain Min had ever worked with. Her original doctorate had been a Ph.D. in educational psychology, not family therapy. The Secretariat had paid for it and she had assumed she would pay off the debt by spending six years in uniform working with military training systems. Instead, the military personnel experts had looked at the data on their screens and discovered the Fourth International Brigade had a pressing need for family therapists. A crash program had been set up and she had spent her first eighteen months as an officer working on a second doctorate—under the guidance of a civilian mentor who apparently believed there was an inverse relationship between intelligence and the number of years someone had spent in the military. In her case, in addition, Dr. Barian had seemed to feel her childhood had subtracted an additional twenty points from her IQ.

  It was the first time she had encountered someone with Dr. Barian’s attitude. She had spent two years in a lunar “socialization academy” when she had been a teenager, but 80 percent of the children in her cohort had been the offspring of military people and international bureaucrats. At first she had thought Dr. Barian was trying to probe her responses to the kind of stresses she might receive from her patients. Then she had decided she would just have to ignore his comments on her “contaminated upbringing.”

  Dr. Barian had hammered at her resolution as if he thought his career depended on it. Much of her training involved long sessions with simulations of patient-therapist relationships. Most of the simulated people who appeared on her screens were trapped in simulated messes that were so foolish—and unbelievable—that she frequently found herself wondering how the human race had made it to the twenty-second century. In the critiques that followed the simulations, Dr. Barian loved to remind her that her reactions to her imaginary patients had probably been distorted by the “inadequacies” in her own “formative environment.”

  “My upbringing was about as good as it could be, Dr. Barian,” she had told him once. “I may have more sympathy for the way military people look at things than you do, but it isn’t because anybody indoctrinated me. My father may not have been the most loving man who ever lived, but he was so responsible he must have scanned half the research that’s been done on military families in the last fifty years. He must have interviewed half a dozen foster care candidates every time he had to leave me alone, just to make sure they really would give me a consistent environment, just like all the literature said they should.”

  Naturally, Dr. Barian had then started questioning her feelings about her father.

  Nineteen years ago, when Dorothy had been six, she had sat on a rug that had looked exactly like the shaggy rug Deni and his schoolmates sat on when they received their daily briefing. In her case, the orbital diagram on the screen had only contained two symbols—a circle that represented a single torch ship and an oval that represented a Lumina Industries mining asteroid.

  The 150 men and women who had taken over the asteroid had belonged to a group that had somehow convinced themselves the city of Rome, on Earth, was the center of all evil and the sole reason mankind could not achieve political perfection. They had killed fifty people in a surprise attack that had put them in control of the torch that was supposed to shove the asteroid and its load of minerals into orbit about the Earth. Then they had set up their defensive weaponry and placed the asteroid on a course that would bring it down somewhere on the southern Italian peninsula. Her father, Pilot Sergeant Min, had made eight ferry trips to the surface of the asteroid, carrying assault troops and heavy weapons.

  Her father had been her only parent for most of her childhood, but there had been no danger she would ever succumb to guilt feelings if he had happened to die in combat. After her mother had left them, her father had shouldered full responsibility for her upbringing—and carried out his parental duties in the same way he had fulfilled every other obligation life had loaded on him.

  It hadn’t been a natural thing, either. Her father was currently living in retirement in Eratosthenes Crater, on the Moon, and she knew he was perfectly content with a relationship that was limited to biweekly phone calls. He was, at heart, the kind of man who was happiest when he was hanging around with other adults like himself. As far as she could tell, he now spent most of his waking hours with a group of cronies whose idea of Heaven was an NCO c
lub that never closed.

  The last time she had talked to him, she had been looking for advice on the best way to speed up consideration of her request to speak to Deni’s parents. It had been a serious matter, but they had both enjoyed the way he had folded his arms over his chest and pondered the subject with all the exaggerated, slightly elephantine dignity of a senior NCO who had been asked to give a junior officer his best advice.

  “Are you asking me, Captain, if I’m still connected with the sergeant’s network?”

  “I did have something like that in mind, Sergeant.”

  “As it turns out, I do have a friend who has a certain position on General Lundstrom’s staff. I’d rather not mention her name, but I suspect she might be willing to give me some useful advice on the best way to slip your next report past the general’s aides. She might even give it a little judicious help if I gave her some good reasons to do it.”

  “That would be most helpful, Sergeant.”

  “Then I shall attend to it with the utmost dispatch, Captain.”