Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  Her father was only one-eighth Gurkhali, but no one had ever had to remind him—or any other member of the Fourth International Brigade—that he belonged to an institution which could trace its origins to the Fourth Gurkha Rifles, the ancient, battle-scarred infantry regiment the Indian government had donated to the United Nations in the years when the Secretariat had acquired its first permanent forces. I will keep faith, the Gurkha motto had run—and they had proved it in battle after battle, First in the service of the British Empire, then in the service of the Republic of India, and finally under the flag that was supposed to represent humanity’s best response to its own capacity for violence.

  A light glowed on Dorothy’s communications board. A line of type appeared at the bottom of the screen. Call from Pilot Sergeant Min. Nonpriority.

  On the couch, Deni was still sleeping peacefully. The monitor she had clipped to his wrist was still transmitting readings that indicated he would sleep for the full two hours the deep-sleep pill was supposed to deliver. There were two messages from Dr. Barian in her communications system, but she hadn’t looked at either of them.

  She tapped the appropriate button on her keyboard. Her father stared at her out of the screen with a blurred, puffy-eyed look that immediately triggered off a memory of beery odors—a memory that was so strong it was hard to believe the communications system could only transmit sounds and images. She wasn’t the only member of her family who had been up most of the night.

  “Good morning, daughter. I hope I’m not disturbing anything.”

  “I was just sitting here watching the news. I’ve got something I’m supposed to do, but I’m giving myself a little break.”

  “I’ve been thinking about the family you’ve been concerned about. It seems to me you indicated one of the parents was stationed on Rinaswandi . . .”

  She nodded. “It was the mother. The son’s sleeping on the couch in my office.”

  Her father leaned back and folded his arms across his chest—but this time neither of them smiled. She had realized, at some point in her teens, that it was a body posture that frequently indicated he was trying to keep his reactions under control. He arranged his arms like that, she had decided, so he wouldn’t run his hands across his face or do something else that might affect the image a good sergeant tried to maintain.

  “I was afraid something like that might have happened. Have they told him yet?”

  “I told them I’d do it.”

  “That’s not the easiest job you can volunteer for.”

  “I still haven’t told him. I’m letting him sleep while I think about . . . the best way to approach it.”

  “I only did that twice all the time I was on active duty. If you don’t mind me giving you some advice—I never talked to anybody who thought they’d found a good way to do it. Whatever you do, you’re not going to be happy with it.”

  “There’s some special problems in this case—some reactions he’ll probably have because of the family problems I was trying to deal with.”

  Sergeant Min frowned. “You were trying to get permission for some special procedure . . . for something that would help him with the possibility his parents might become casualties . . .”

  “We tried to get permission from his father last night and we couldn’t do it. Dr. Barian thinks we failed because they stalled us for so long we had to communicate across a big communications lag. I’m inclined to think we might have failed anyway.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means basically that we end up with a human being who’s permanently crippled psychologically. I could show you the numbers and explain them but that’s what they all add up to. He’ll be just as much of a casualty as anybody who’d been physically wounded.”

  “And nobody ever asked him if he wanted to enlist . . .”

  “That’s essentially what Dr. Barian said.”

  “I’m sorry, Dorothy. It sounds to me like you’ve done everything anyone could have.”

  “I’m not blaming myself, Papa. I’m just sorry it’s happening.”

  “There isn’t anything else you can do? There isn’t some possibility he’ll get some kind of therapy later? When he’s old enough to make his own decision?”

  “It’s possible, but the odds are against it. We’re talking about something that will eventually affect almost every aspect of his personality. When a child has certain kinds of problems with his parents, the death of one of his parents can create unconscious feelings . . . guilt feelings . . . that are so powerful they influence everything he does. People tend to protect the personalities they’ve acquired. Somebody who’s rebellious, unruly, and angry usually isn’t going to feel he needs a treatment that will give him a different outlook—even when he isn’t satisfied with the kind of life his emotions have led him into.”

  “Major Raden has a lot to answer for.”

  “Dr. Barian seems to feel it’s mostly General Lundstrom’s fault.”

  “Or some of those babus on her staff.”

  She shrugged. “They were trying to protect her—to shield her from distractions.”

  “She’s a general. She’s supposed to look after her troops. If she can’t put up with a little pestering from a medical captain without going into convulsions, she shouldn’t be wearing the pips.”

  When Dorothy had been fourteen, one of her best friends had been plagued with a father who had “confined her to quarters” almost every other weekend—usually for some trivial matter like a dusty piece of furniture or a piece of clothing that didn’t look “inspection presentable.” Her first boyfriend had been a wary thirteen-year-old whose father seemed to watch everything his children did for signs of “weakness.”

  There were people in Dorothy’s opinion, for whom military life was a kind of moral exoskeleton. Their upbringing had left them with no useful values or goals. The ideals imposed on them by their military indoctrination were the only guidelines they had.

  She never experienced the kind of problems Deni had lived with, but she had no trouble relating her records of his case to the things she had observed during her own childhood. Press one set of buttons and the database presented you with a recording of a counseling session in which Sergeant Kolin justified a punishment by arguing that people would behave “like animals” if no one imposed any “discipline” on them. Press another set, and you got to watch Sergeant Wei, in a message she had transmitted from Rinaswandi, telling Deni she hoped he was practicing his flute and spending enough time with his learning programs—and never once suggesting she loved him or hoped he was having a little fun.

  Press a third combination, and the database gave you a look at the hour she had spent with Deni on the day he had received his tenth message from his mother. They had sat on the couch, side by side, and she had spent most of the session stubbornly trying to evoke some kind of comment on his reactions to his mother’s exhortations.

  “How did you feel about the length of the message?” the Insistent, Patient Therapist had prodded. “Was it too short? Would you like it better if she sent you a longer message every two or three days?”

  Deni shrugged. “It was all right.”

  The therapist stifled the natural response of a normal adult and produced an attempt at a conciliatory smile. “Try again, Deni. Is there anything else you wish your mother had talked about? Besides school? And music practice? We’re not here to play, soldier.”

  She had been dealing with the great problem that confronted every therapist who tried to get military children to talk about their emotions—the trait that had been observed by almost every researcher who had ever explored the child-rearing customs of this odd little subculture. The one thing that seemed to be true about all military children was their tendency to pick up, almost at birth, the two great commandments of military life: don’t complain, don’t talk about your feelings. Her solution had been to tell him it was a task—a duty the officer in command of the situation expected him to fulfill to the bes
t of his ability.

  It had helped some, but only some. The resistance she was dealing with couldn’t be eliminated by direct orders and nagging persistence. Talk therapy was only a second-best stopgap—a procedure that she kept up mostly so she could convince herself she was doing something while she waited for the day his mother finally agreed he needed the only help that could do him any good.

  He won’t have the slightest idea you did it, Dr. Barian had said. His father won’t know you did it. No one. Somebody may wonder, fifteen years from now, why a kid with his prognosis has turned out so well, but they’ll probably assume he just happened to beat the odds. He’ll just have the kind of life he should have—the kind of life you’ve got.

  Deni looked up at her from the couch. His right hand made a little twitching movement.

  “You fell asleep,” Dorothy said. “I thought I’d let you rest.”

  He frowned. He was old enough to know she gave him medicines that affected his feelings, but she wasn’t sure he realized she would do it without telling him first.

  His eyes shifted toward the time strip on her desk. “Can I go home now? Are we finished?”

  He pulled up his legs and sat up. “They start play time in ten minutes, Captain Min. It isn’t my fault I fell asleep.”

  “Deni—”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I’d like you to go sit in the chair you usually sit in. I’d like you to do it now, if you don’t mind. There’s something I have to talk about with you—something that happened last night.”

  ###

  The ceremony for the people who had died at Rinaswandi took place in the biggest theater in Hammarskjold, two days after the attack. Deni sat in the front row, with the other children whose parents had been killed. Dorothy could watch him, from her place in the ranks of the medical personnel, and note how he was still maintaining the same poise he had adopted in the cart when she had driven him back to the childcare center.

  It was the same ceremony she had attended with her father, nineteen years ago, in memory of the people who had died in the assault on the Lumina mining asteroid. The names of the dead would be read one by one. (Twenty this time, thirty-three then.) A lone trumpeter would play “The Last Post.” The minute of silence—timed precisely to the second—would end with the bagpipes roaring into one of the big, whirling, totally affirmative marches the Gurkha regiments had inherited, three hundred years in the past, from the British officers who had introduced them to European military music.

  That was how you always did it at a military ceremony. First, you remembered the dead. Then—the moment over, the tribute paid—you returned to the clamor and bustle of life. She lived in a world in which people sometimes died, her father had said when he had explained it to her. You never forgot they had died, but you didn’t let it keep you from living.

  Her father hadn’t asked her if she wanted to go to the Lumina ceremony. And she had known, without being told, that it wasn’t something they could discuss. There were some things that had to be left unsaid, even with the kind of father she had. She had never told him, for example, about the nights, the whole year after he had returned from the Lumina “incident,” when she had stared at the ceiling of her bedroom and tried to ignore the pictures that kept floating into her head.

  ###

  She had given Colonel Pao a recommendation for a week of deep-sleep therapy, to be implemented sometime in the next month, and he had indicated he would probably approve it. Colonel Pao didn’t think there would be any problems, either, with her recommendation for a long-term follow-up, from now until Deni’s legal maturity, that would include any legal procedures that might reduce the damage. If there was one thing everyone in the chain of command understood, it was the plight of a child who had lost a parent in combat.

  “. . . It’s the same basic idea you always come back to,” she had told Colonel Pao. “The point they always emphasize in all those courses on military ethics they make you take in baby officer’s school. My father even explained it to me when I was a child—when I asked him how he could be sure he was doing the right thing when he helped kill people. If you’re a soldier . . . then for you morality is defined by the law. A soldier is someone who engages in legally authorized acts of violence. If you take away the law, then there’s no difference between us and a bunch of thugs. If we can’t obey the law, too . . . at least the important laws . . .”

  Dr. Barian hadn’t been particularly impressed with her attempts to explain herself, of course. He had stared at her as if she had just suggested they should deal with the Akara situation by poisoning half the people in the asteroid belt.

  “The only difference between an army and a bunch of thugs,” Dr. Barian had told her, “is that armies work for governments and thugs don’t. You turned your back on a helpless child because you felt you had to stick to the letter of some rule a pack of politicians set up so they could appease a mob of voters who can’t tell the difference between an esem and a flogging.”

  ###

  Behind his desk, to the left, Colonel Pao had set up a serenity corner with a composition composed of green plants and dark, unevenly glazed pottery. He had arranged two chairs so they faced it from slightly different angles, and he had insisted they should sit in the chairs and drink tea while they talked. On the sound system a wooden flute had been tracing a long meditative line.

  “I take it,” Colonel Pao had said, “that you feel you might have proceeded with the esem if you had been a civilian.”

  Dorothy shrugged. “My father always used to claim that a good sergeant took care of the people under him. I have a feeling that if you took it to a vote half the people on this base might have felt I should have thrown the rules out the airlock and given a casualty whatever he needed.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  She shrugged again. “When I think about it that way—I feel like Dr. Barian’s absolutely right and I’ve acted like a priggish junior officer who thinks rules are more important than human beings.”

  The left side of the serenity corner was dominated by a thin, long-necked jar that would have thrown the entire composition out of balance if it had been one centimeter taller. She focused her eyes on the line of the neck and tried to concentrate on the way it intersected a thin, leafless branch. Then she lost control and snapped her head toward the trim, carefully positioned figure in the other chair.

  “He was sitting right in front of me, sir! I had to look him in the face when I told him his mother was dead. I could be watching what this has done to him for the next ten years if I decide to stay in. If I had my way we’d have a law that let us set up some kind of committee—without giving the parents an absolute veto—whenever we got into this kind of emergency. If all the people like Dr. Barian had their way, there wouldn’t be any rules at all and we could spend our lives arbitrarily altering people’s personalities just because we felt it was good for them. My father, the people on Rinaswandi—they spent their lives trying to build a wall around chaos. There has to be a law regulating personality modification! Even when it’s as benign as this one. Just like there have to be laws that tell you when it’s all right to engage in violence.”

  Colonel Pao folded his arms over his chest. He tipped his head to one side—as if he were concentrating on the long arc the flute was describing—and Dorothy settled back in her chair and waited while he collected his thoughts.

  He had shifted his thought processes to the formal, somewhat bureaucratic phrases he tended to adopt when he communicated in Techno Mandarin. “It is my personal opinion,” he said, “that any responsible observer would have to agree that you did everything anyone could reasonably expect you to do. You took everything into account—including a point many civilians have trouble understanding. You did everything you could to get a favorable response from Sergeant Kolin. You made a real decision, furthermore, when you arrived at the moment when a decision couldn’t be postponed. You didn’t just stand there and let the s
ituation drift into a decision by default.”

  Colonel Pao raised his bowl of tea to his lips. He stared at the center of the serenity composition over the top of the bowl and Dorothy waited again.

  “I could tell you that I think you made the right choice and try to ease your feelings by providing you with whatever authority I may possess. I could even tell you that you did the wrong thing and try to give you the comforting illusion someone knows what’s right and wrong in these situations. The truth is I can’t tell you any more than I’ve already said. If I understood the principles of ethical philosophy as well as I would like to, I think I would conclude that you applied the Confucian principle of reciprocity, even if I couldn’t guarantee you made the most ethical choice. You treated Deni the way you probably would want to be treated yourself. If you or I were in Deni’s position . . . if someone had to make a decision that might affect us the way this one affects him . . . then I think we would want it to be someone who’s been as thoughtful and conscientious as you’ve been.”

  He rested his bowl on the tray beside his chair and switched back to Ghurkali—the language of her infancy. “Does that help you, Captain? Does it give you any comfort?”

  “I think so, sir. Yes, sir.”

  “The other thing I think I should say is related to something you and I have in common, so perhaps I’m biased. Still, there have been moments—during the less illustrious interludes in my career—when it’s been the only thought that’s kept me functioning.”

  He reached across the space between the chairs and rested his hand on her shoulder. It would have been a perfectly unremarkable gesture if anyone else had done it; in his case it was the first time he had touched her since she had been six years old and the duty officer at the post clinic, young Surgical Captain Pao, had held her hand while the first aid equipment had repaired a greenstick fracture in her left arm. Colonel Pao frequently touched his patients who needed encouragement or reassurance, but he tended to be physically reserved with everyone else.