Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  Military parents like Deni’s father and mother had a well-documented tendency to think of the family as a military unit, with the parents as the officers, and the children, inevitably, as members of the lower ranks. Her father had called her “Lieutenant” from the time she was two years old. For most of her childhood, she had been herself as a younger person who was being guided and supported by an experienced, gently ironic senior who respected her potential.

  ###

  It was 02:04 by the time they got the program ready for transmission. At 02:15 the transmission began to arrive at the ship. At 02:20 Sergeant Kolin sat down in front of a screen and started watching Dorothy’s presentation. At 02:31 his face appeared on Dorothy’s communication screen and she got her first look at his response to her efforts.

  The program opened with a recording in which Dorothy discussed the effects of combat deaths on children. The presentation was calm, statistical, and scrupulously accurate. On the auxiliary screen on her right, she could watch her neat, fully uniformed image and correlate the statements it was making with the reactions flickering across Sergeant Kolin’s face.

  “Do you have any questions about anything I’ve said so far?” the recording asked.

  Sergeant Kolin shook his head. He had always kept his guard up during their counseling sessions and he was falling into the same pattern now. Most of her information about his personality came from his responses to interactive video dramas. The dramas that had worked had usually been designed so they practically forced the subject to make a response.

  Dorothy’s hands tightened on her desktop. She hated watching herself make presentations. Every flaw in her delivery jumped out at her. She saw her head dip just a fraction of a centimeter—a brief, tiny lapse in concentration—and she winced at the way she had telegraphed the fact that she was about to say something significant.

  “In this case,” the Dorothy on the screen said, “there’s the added factor that the parent who’s become a casualty is the child’s mother. The relationship between a young boy and his mother frequently includes emotional overtones that can’t be replaced by any other kind of relationship.”

  Her image paused for a carefully timed instant—a break that was supposed to give Sergeant Kolin the chance to start a response. He leaned forward with the beginning of a frown on his face and a subtitle lit up on the auxiliary screen. Light positive response detected. Continuing probe.

  The program’s visual interpretation capabilities were limited to relatively large-scale body movements, but Dorothy had been able to list three actions that should be given extra weight—and the first item on the list had been that tendency to lean forward. Sometimes, if you waited just a moment longer, Sergeant Kolin would lean a little further and say something that could lead to three minutes of real discussion.

  This time he just settled back again. If he had started idealizing his wife’s memory, he apparently didn’t feel like expressing the feelings the idealization had aroused.

  “I’m afraid there’s a good possibility he’s just angry,” Dorothy said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen that kind of tight-lipped expression.”

  “Angry at us?” Dr. Barian said.

  “He really hates the whole idea of people examining his feelings. He looks like he’s in one of those moods where he’d like to pick up his chair and throw it at the screen.”

  The program had apparently reached a similar conclusion. Her image had already slipped into a sentence that treated the mother-son relationship as if it was merely a side issue. The sound system let out a blip, to remind Sergeant Kolin he was looking at a recording, and the program switched to her description of the therapy.

  Dorothy had drastically revised her standard description. She had included a shot of the treatment chamber, but the shot only showed part of the cover and it only lasted a couple of seconds.

  She had done everything she could to make it clear they weren’t “rewiring” Deni. “To a large extent,” the video Dorothy said, “we’re just giving Deni in advance the effects of all the love he’s going to be missing during the next few years.” She had touched on the danger of guilt feelings, but she had skipped over the relationship between guilt and the anger evoked by demanding parents.

  The program reached a checkpoint. “Do you have any comments you would like to make, Sergeant Kolin? Please feel free to speak as freely as you want to. This program can answer almost any question you can ask.”

  Sergeant Kolin leaped out of his chair. His head disappeared from the screen for a moment. The camera readjusted its field of vision and focused on a face that was contorted with rage.

  Deni’s father had been trained in the same NCO schools every sergeant in the Fourth International Brigade had attended. Sergeants never bellowed. Their voices dropped to tight, controlled murmurs that made the anger on their faces look a hundred times more intense.

  “My son doesn’t need people poking into his brain,” Sergeant Kolin said. “My son will get all the attention he needs from the person who’s supposed to give it to him.”

  Dorothy’s image stared at him while the program raced through alternative responses. The screen dissolved into an abstract pattern that was supposed to be emotionally neutral. An avuncular synthetic voice took over the conversation.

  “We’re sorry if we’ve angered you, Sergeant Kolin,” the voice said. “We’re trying to explain this procedure under difficult circumstances. Captain Min has prepared answers to most of the questions people raise when they’re asked to approve this type of emotional intervention.”

  Dorothy bit her lip. Her right hand hovered over her notebook with the stylus poised to start writing—as if some part of her nervous system still didn’t believe her orders had to cross eleven light-minutes before they evoked a response from the program.

  She had prepared a statement the program could jump to if Sergeant Kolin expressed his basic hostility to the very idea of psychological “tempering.” The program should have switched to the statement, but it had responded to his display of anger instead.

  “This isn’t working,” Dr. Barian murmured.

  Sergeant Kolin dropped into his armchair. He rested his hands on his knees and stared at the screen.

  “Tell Captain Min to continue,” Sergeant Kolin said.

  Dorothy’s hand started inscribing instructions on her notebook. “He knows he’s been recorded,” she said. “He knows he has to give us a minimum amount of cooperation. He may be ready to explode but he’s still thinking about his career, too.”

  “So he’ll sit there. And listen. And say no.”

  Her image had returned to the screen. The program had switched to her review of the psychological dangers faced by children who had lost a parent—a review she had included in the program so it could be used in situations in which they needed to mark time. The program was still reacting to his anger. There was no indication it was going to deal with his feelings about psychological intervention.

  She drew a transmit symbol at the bottom of her last instruction and her orders began creeping across the Solar System. Eleven minutes ago the program had made a misjudgment. Eleven minutes from now—twenty-two minutes after the original mistake—it would receive a message ordering it to deal with Sergeant Kolin’s hostility to psychological tampering.

  “You’ve done about as well as anyone could have, Dorothy,” Dr. Barian said. “I couldn’t have done it any better myself. It isn’t your fault they made you wait so long you had to work through a program.”

  “It should have understood,” Dorothy said. “It should have switched to the psychological tampering track as soon as he made that remark about people poking holes in his son’s brain. It shouldn’t have let that slip past it.”

  “The anger response was too strong. It picked up the anger and it didn’t hear the content. You aren’t the first person who’s seen a program make a mistake she would have avoided.”

  Sergeant Kolin had sat like that for a big part
of half the sessions she’d had with him. His eyes were fixed on the screen. His face looked attentive and interested. And she knew, from experience, that he wasn’t hearing one word in three.

  “It isn’t your fault, Dorothy. You might have had a chance if they’d let you talk to him when the time lag was only a couple of minutes. They fiddled around with your request and now you’ve got a hopeless situation.”

  She wrote another set of commands on her notebook and bent over the dense, black-on-yellow format she had chosen the last time she had felt like fooling around with her displays. Somewhere in the mass of information she had collected on Sergeant Kolin there had to be a magic fact that would drill a hole through his resistance.

  “Your patient is in exactly the same position as a child who’s dying of a disease,” Dr. Barian said. “Would you wait for his father’s permission—or some general’s permission—if he needed a new lung or a new spinal cord? Your first responsibility is to that child—not some set of rules thought up by people who are still living in the Dark Ages.”

  The last useless paragraphs in Sergeant Kolin’s file scrolled across her notebook. She raised her head and discovered Dr. Barian was regarding her with an expression that actually looked understanding.

  “There’s another consideration you might want to factor into your decision-making process,” Dr. Barian said. “It may be your friend Colonel Pao is right—maybe General Lundstrom’s staff did do the right thing when they decided her mental state is so delicate they might be endangering four hundred combat troops if they bothered her with a difficult matter like this. It’s also true that the military personnel on those ships are all volunteers. They agreed to take the risk they’re taking. Deni didn’t volunteer for anything.”

  ###

  She had dispatched her new set of instructions at 02:58. At 03:09 it arrived at the torch ship. At 03:20 she saw the program switch to the path it should have taken in the first place. At 03:40, she ordered it to switch to the termination routing and started waiting for the images that would tell her if Sergeant Kolin had refused permission. Dr. Barian started talking the moment she took her eyes off her notebook.

  ###

  She picked up Deni at the door of the childcare center, in a cart she had requested from Special Services when it had finally occurred to her they would probably provide her with anything she asked for “under the circumstances.” She had even been given a route that had been specially—and unobtrusively—cleared of any traffic that might cause her problems. A few of the pedestrians stared when they saw a cart with a child sitting in the passenger seat, but they all looked away as soon as their brains caught up with their reflexes.

  Hammarskjold Station was a military base, so its public spaces looked something like the public spaces of a civilian space city and something like the decks of a torch ship. The corridors had been landscaped with trees, fountains, and little gardens, just like the corridors in lunar cities, but it had all been done in the hyper-manicured style that characterized most military attempts at decorating. The doors that lined the walls came in four sizes and three colors. The gardens were spaced every hundred meters and they all contained one tree, a carpet of flowers that was as trim as a major’s mustache, and two, three, or four shrubs selected from a list of twenty.

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to see you until after lunch,” Deni said.

  “I had to make some changes in my schedule,” Dorothy said, with deliberate vagueness.

  “Am I going to have to see you during breakfast from now on?”

  “It’s just this once.”

  The big, utilitarian elevator near the childcare center opened as soon as the cart approached it. It went directly to the fourth level without stopping, and she turned left as she cleared the door and started working her way around the curve of the giant wheel that had been her home since the day she had been born.

  ###

  The strawberry muffins had big chunks of real strawberries embedded in them. The butter had been synthesized in a Food Services vat, but to everyone who lived off-Earth, it was the “real thing”—an expensive, luxurious alternative of the cheaper look-alikes. The milk in the big pitcher was flavored with real strawberries, too—and laced with a carefully measured dose of the tranquilizer that had given her the best results when she had slipped it to him in the past.

  “Did I get the muffins the same temperature your father gets them?” Dorothy said.

  Deni stopped chewing for a moment and nodded politely. He never talked with his mouth full. His mother had dealt with that issue before he was three.

  “Are we talking about my feelings some more?”

  “Maybe later. Right now—why don’t we just relax and have breakfast? I’m kind of fond of real butter myself.”

  “How many can I have?”

  “Well, I bought six. And I’ll probably only be able to eat two myself. I’d say you can count on eating at least three.”

  She glanced at the notebook sitting beside her coffee cup. The chair Deni was sitting in looked like a normal dining chair, but it was packed with the same array of noninvasive sensors that had been crammed into the therapeutic chair he normally used. His heartbeat, blood pressure, muscle tension, and movement-count all agreed with the conclusion a reasonably sensitive human being would have drawn from the enthusiasm with which he was biting into his muffin.

  ###

  Deni had finished the last bite of his second muffin and given her a quick glance before he reached for the third. The numbers on the notebook were all advancing by the appropriate amount as the tranquilizer took hold.

  She stood up and strolled toward her desk with her coffee cup in her hand. “Take your time, Deni. Don’t worry about it if you decide you can’t finish it.”

  She called up a status report on her desk screen and stared the same numbers she had gone over only two hours ago. The drugs she needed for the esem were all sitting in the appropriate places on her shelves. The devices that were supposed to deliver the drugs were all functional. The components that would deliver the appropriate images, sounds, and sensations all presented her with green lights when she asked for an equipment check.

  She had thought about putting Deni under and checking the current slate of his feelings but she had known it was a stupid idea as soon as it had popped into her head. She knew what his real feelings were. Every test she had run on him in the last three months had confirmed he was still in the grip of the emotions she had observed when she had begun working with him.

  She had begun her sessions with Deni with a two-hour diagnostic unit in which he had been drugged semiconscious. Deni didn’t remember any of it, but she had stored every second of the session in her confidential databanks. Any time she wanted to, she could watch Deni’s hands curl—as if he was strangling someone—as he relived an evening in which his parents might have killed each other if they hadn’t both been experts in the art of falling. She knew exactly what he really thought about the time his father had taken his flute away from him for two weeks. She had observed his childish rage at the cage of work and study his mother had erected around his life.

  She scrawled another code number on her notebook and the results of the work she had done last night appeared on her desk screen. She had been ready to crawl into bed as soon as she had made Deni’s travel arrangements but Dr. Barian had insisted they should prepare a complete quantified prognosis. They had spent over fifty minutes haggling over a twenty-two-item checklist. Dr. Barian had insisted nineteen of her estimates were wildly out of line and tried to replace every one of them with the most pessimistic numbers he could produce.

  In the end, it hadn’t really mattered which set of numbers you used. The most optimistic prognosis the program could come up with merely offered some hope that someday the boy might voluntarily seek out a therapist. Someday, just possibly, he might ask for the treatment that would pull him out of the emotional swamp mat was going to start sucking at his psyche the moment he learned his
mother had died.

  And that’s your best prognosis, Captain. Based on numbers most experienced therapists would consider hopelessly optimistic.

  “How are you coming, Deni?”

  “I think I’m starting to feel a little burpy, ma’am.”

  She waved the numbers off the screen and turned around. His glass still held about three fingers of milk.

  “I’ve got a pill I’d like you to take. Can your tummy hold enough milk to help you get a pill down?”

  ###

  On the main communications screen, Mr. and Mrs. Chen were holding a press conference. The “reporters” were all “volunteers” from their own Zen-Random congregation, but that was a minor matter. The questions would have been a little different if the Chens had been facing real media types, but the answers would have been the same.

  A bona fide journalist, for example, might have asked them how they would answer all the military analysts who thought they had made a tactical mistake when they destroyed Rinaswandi. The phony reporter on the screen had merely asked his leaders if they could tell the people how the attack had improved their military position.

  “I think the answer to that is obvious,” Mrs. Chen said. “The forces that were guarding Rinaswandi Base can now join the force defending our city. The Secretariat mercenaries will be faced with a force of overwhelming size, with every weapon and vehicle controlled by a volunteer who is prepared to make any sacrifice to preserve the state of moral liberation we have created in our city . . .”

  Every two or three minutes—for reasons Dorothy couldn’t quite grasp—the Chens let the camera pick up a bald, slump-shouldered man who seemed to shrink against the wall as soon as he realized a lens was pointed his way. If there was one person in this situation who wasn’t going to come out of it alive, Dorothy knew, it was Major Jen Raden—the officer who had betrayed the equipment stashed on Rinaswandi.