by Jack Dann
The monitors were to be fed information from flea-sized flying robots, each with a special purpose, and it would take several hours for them to wing into the city. We posted a one-man guard, one-hour shifts; the other two inside the ship until the monitors started clicking. But they never started.
Being senior, I took the first watch. A spooky hour, the jungle making dark little noises all around, but nothing happened. Then Fred stood the next hour, while I put on the deep-sleep helmet. Figured I’d need the sleep—once data started coming in, I’d have to be alert for about forty hours. We could all sleep for a week once we got off Anomaly and hit lightspeed.
Getting yanked out of deep-sleep is like an ice-water douche to the brain. The black nothing dissolved and there was Fred a foot away from my face, yelling my name over and over. As soon as he saw my eyes open, he ran for the open lock, priming his laser on the way (definitely against regulations, could hole the hull that way; I started to say something but couldn’t form the words). Anyhow, what were we doing in free fall? And how could Fred run across the deck like that while we were in free fall?
Then my mind started coming back into focus and I could analyze the sinking, spinning sensation—not free fall vertigo at all but what we used to call snail-fever. The enemy was very near. Crackling combat sounds drifted in from outdoors.
I sat up on the cot and tried to sort everything out and get going. After long seconds my arms and legs got the idea, I struggled up and staggered to the weapons cabinet. Both the lasers were gone, and the only heavy weapon left was a grenade launcher. I lifted it from the rack and made my way to the lock.
Had I been thinking straight, I would’ve just sealed the lock and blasted—the presence in my mind was so strong that I should have known there were too many of the enemy, too close, for us to stand and fight. But no one can think while their brain is being curdled that way. I fought the urge to just let go and fall down that hole in my mind, and slid along the wall to the airlock. By the time I got there my teeth were chattering uncontrollably and my face was wet with tears.
Looking out, I saw a smoldering gray lump that must have been Paul, and Fred screaming like a madman, fanning the laser on full over a 180-degree arc. There couldn’t have been anything alive in front of him; the jungle was a lurid curtain of fire, but a bolt lanced in from behind and Fred dissolved in a pink spray of blood and flesh.
I saw them then, moving fast for snails, shambling in over thick brush toward the ship. Through the swirling fog in my brain I realized that all they could see was the light pouring through the open lock, and me silhouetted in front. I tried to raise the launcher but couldn’t—there were too many, less than a hundred meters away, and the inky whirlpool in my mind just got bigger and bigger and I could feel myself slipping into it.
The first bolt missed me; hit the ship and it shuddered, ringing like a huge cathedral bell. The second one didn’t miss, taking off my left hand just above the wrist, roasting what remained of my left arm. In a spastic lurch I jerked up the launcher and yanked the trigger, holding it down while dozens of microton grenades popped out and danced their blinding way up to and across the enemy’s ragged line. Dazzled blind, I stepped back and stumbled over the med-robot, which had smelled blood and was eager to do its duty. On top of the machine was a switch that some clown had labeled emergency exit; I slapped it, and as the lock clanged shut the atomic engines muttered—growled—screamed into life and a ten-gravity hand slid me across the blood-slick deck and slammed me back against the real-wall padding. I felt ribs crack and something in my neck snapped. As the world squeezed away, I knew I was a dead man but it was better to die in a bed of pain than to just fall and fall . . .
###
I woke up to the less-than-tender ministrations of the med-robot, who had bound the stump of my left arm and was wrapping my chest in plastiseal. My body from forehead to shins ached from radiation burns, earned by facing the grenades’ bursts, and the nonexistent hand seemed to writhe in painful, impossible contortions. But numbing anesthetic kept the pain at a bearable distance, and there was an empty space in my mind where the snail-fever had been, and the gentle hum told me we were at lightspeed; things could have been one flaming hell of a lot worse. Fred and Paul were gone but that just moved them from the small roster of live friends to the long list of dead ones.
A warning light on the control panel was blinking stroboscopically. We were getting near the hole—excuse me, “relativistic discontinuity”—and the computer had to know where I wanted to go. You go in one hole at lightspeed and you’ll come out of some other hole; which hole you pop out of depends on your angle of approach. Since they say that only about one percent of the holes are charted, if you go in at any old angle you’re liable to wine up in Podunk, on the other side of the galaxy, with no ticket back.
I just let the light blink, though. If it doesn’t get any response from the crew, the ship programs itself automatically to go to Heaven, the hospital world, which was fine with me. They cure what ails you and then set you loose with a compatible soldier of the opposite sex, for an extended vacation on that beautiful world. Someone once told me there were over a hundred worlds named Hell, but there’s only one Heaven. Clean and pretty from the tropical seas to the Northern pine forests. Like Earth used to be, before we strangled it.
A bell had been ringing all the time I’d been conscious, but I didn’t notice it until it stopped. That meant that the information capsule had been jettisoned, for what little it was worth. Planetary information, very few espionage-type data; just a tape of the battle. Be rough for the next recon patrol.
I fell asleep knowing I’d wake up on the other side of the hole, bound for Heaven.
###
I pick up my drink—an old-fashioned old-fashioned—with my new left hand and the glass should feel right, slick but slightly tacky with the cold-water sweat, fine ridges molded into the plastic. But there’s something missing, hard to describe, a memory stored in your fingertips that a new growth has to learn all over again. It’s a strange feeling, but in a way seems to fit with this crazy Earth, where I sit in my alcoholic time capsule and, if I squint with my mind, can almost believe I’m back in the twenty-first.
I pay for the nostalgia—wood and natural food, human bartender and waitress who are also linguists, it all comes dear—but I can afford it, if anyone can. Compound interest, of course. Over four centuries have passed on Earth since I first went off to the war, and my salary’s been deposited at the Chase Manhattan Credit Union ever since. They’re glad to do it; when I die, they keep the interest and the principal reverts to the government. Heirs? I had one illegitimate son (conceived on my first furlough) and when I last saw his gravestone, the words on it had washed away to barely legible dimples.
But I’m still a young man (at lightspeed you age imperceptibly while the universe winds down outside) and the time you spend going from hole to hole is almost incalculably small. I’ve spent most of the past half-millennium at lightspeed, the rest of the time usually convalescing from battle. My records show that I’ve logged a trifle under one year in actual combat. Not bad for 438 years’ pay. Since I first lifted off I’ve aged twelve years by my biological calendar. Complicated, isn’t it—next month I’ll be thirty, 456 years after my date of birth.
But one week before my birthday I’ve got to decide whether to try my luck for the fourth trip out or just collect my money and retire. No choice, really. I’ve got to go back.
It’s something they didn’t emphasize when I joined up, back in 2088—maybe it wasn’t so obvious back then, the war only decades old—but they can’t hide it nowadays. Too many old vets wandering around, like animated museum pieces.
I could cash in my chips and live in luxury for another hundred years. But it would get mighty lonely. Can’t talk to anybody on Earth but other bets and people who’ve gone to the trouble to learn Basic.
Everyone in space speaks Basic. You can’t lift off until you’ve become fluent. Otherwis
e, how could you take orders from a fellow who should have been food for worms centuries before your grandfather was born? Especially since language melted down into one Language.
I’m tone-deaf. Can’t speak or understand Language, where one word has ten or fifteen different meanings, depending on pitch. To me it sounds like puppy dogs yapping. Same words over and over; no sense.
Of course, when I first lived on Earth there were all sorts of languages, not just one Language. I spoke Spanish (still do when I can find some other old codger who remembers) and learned English—that was before they called it Basic—in military training. Learned it damn well, too. If I weren’t tone-deaf, I’d crack Language and maybe I’d settle down.
Maybe not. The people are so strange, and it’s not just the Language. Mind plugs and homosex and voluntary suicide. Walking around with nothing on but paint and powder. We had Fullerdomes when I was a kid, but you didn’t have to live under one. Now if you take a walk out in the country for a breath of fresh air, you’ll drop over dead before you can exhale.
My mind keeps dragging me back to Heaven. I’d retire in a minute if I could spend my remaining century there. Can’t, of course; only soldiers allowed in space. And the only way a soldier gets to Heaven is the hard way.
I’ve been there three times; once more and I’ll set a record. That’s motivation of a sort, I suppose. Also, in the unlikely event that I should live another five years, I’ll get a commission, and a desk job if I live through my term as a field officer. Doesn’t happen too often—but there aren’t too many desk jobs that people can handle better than cyborgs.
That’s another alternative. If my body gets too garbaged for regeneration, and they can save enough of my brain, I could spend the rest of eternity hooked up to a computer, as a cyborg. The only one I’ve ever talked to seemed to be happy.
I once had an African partner named N’gai. He taught me how to play O’wari, a game older than Monopoly or even chess. We sat in this very bar (or the identical one that was in its place two hundred years ago) and he tried to impress on my non-Zen-oriented mind just how significant this game was to men in our position.
You start out with forty-eight smooth little pebbles, four in each one of the twelve depressions that make up the game board. Then you take turns, scooping the pebbles out of one hole and distributing them one at a time in holes to the left. If you dropped your last pebble in a hole where your opponent had only one or two, why, you got to take those pebbles off the board. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?
But N’gai sat there in a cloud of bhang-smoke and mumbled about the game and how it was just like the big game we were playing, and every time he took a pebble off the board, he called it by name. And some of the names I didn’t know, but a lot of them were on my long list.
And he talked about how we were like the pieces in this simple game; how some went off the board after the first couple of moves, and some hopped from place to place all through the game and came out unscathed, and some just sat in one place all the time until they got zapped from out of nowhere . . .
After a while I started hitting the bhang myself, and we abandoned the metaphor in a spirit of mutual intoxication.
And I’ve been thinking about that night for six years, or two hundred, and I think that N’gai—his soul find Buddha—was wrong. The game isn’t all that complex.
Because in O’wari, either person can win.
The snails populate ten planets for every one we destroy.
Solitaire, anyone?
ON THE ORION LINE
Stephen Baxter
Here’s a harrowing look at the proposition that a soldier’s duty is to survive, especially when trapped behind enemy lines, especially when those “enemy lines” are in the depths of interstellar space, thousands of light-years from Earth, and you have no ship, no shelter, and only a quickly dwindling supply of air. In those circumstances, you do anything you have to do to survive—if you’re strong enough to actually do it, that is!
British writer Stephen Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. Like many of his colleagues who are also engaged in revitalizing the “hard-science” story here in the nineties, Baxter often works on the Cutting Edge of science, but he usually succeeds in balancing conceptualization with storytelling, and rarely loses sight of the human side of the equation. His first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H.G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships. His other books include the novels, Voyage, Titan, and Moonseed, and the collections Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence and Traces. He’s won the Philip K. Dick Award twice. His most recent books are the novels Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, and Manifold: Time.
###
The Brief Life Burns Brightly broke out of the fleet. We were chasing down a Ghost cruiser, and we were closing.
The lifedome of the Brightly was transparent, so it was as if Captain Teid in her big chair, and her officers and their equipment clusters—and a few low-grade tars like me—were just floating in space. The light was subtle, coming from a nearby cluster of hot young stars, and from the rivers of sparking lights that made up the fleet formation we had just left, and beyond that from the sparking of novae. This was the Orion Line—six thousand light-years from Earth and a thousand lights long, a front that spread right along the inner edge of the Orion Spiral Arm—and the stellar explosions marked battles which must have concluded years ago.
And, not a handful of klicks away, the Ghost cruiser slid across space, running for home. The cruiser was a rough egg-shape of silvered rope. Hundreds of Ghosts clung to the rope. You could see them slithering this way and that, not affected at all by the emptiness around them.
The Ghosts’ destination was a small, old yellow star. Pael, our tame Academician, had identified it as a fortress star from some kind of strangeness in its light. But up close you don’t need to be an Academician to spot a fortress. From the Brightly, I could see with my unaided eyes that the star had a pale blue cage around it—an open lattice with struts half a million kilometres long—thrown there by the Ghosts, for their own purposes.
I had a lot of time to watch all this. I was just a tar. I was fifteen years old.
My duties at that moment were non-specific. I was supposed to stand to, and render assistance in any way that was required—most likely with basic medical attention should we go into combat. Right now, the only one of us tars actually working was Halle, who was chasing down a pool of vomit sicked up by Pael, the Academician, the only non-Navy personnel on the bridge.
The action on the Brightly wasn’t like you see in Virtual shows. The atmosphere was calm, quiet, competent. All you could hear was the murmur of voices from the crew and the equipment, and the hiss of recycling air. No drama: it was like an operating theatre.
There was a soft warning chime.
The Captain raised an arm and called over Academician Pael, First Officer Till, and Jeru, the Commissary assigned to the ship. They huddled close, conferring—apparently arguing. I saw the way flickering nova light reflected from Jeru’s shaven head.
I felt my heart beat harder.
Everybody knew what the chime meant: that we were approaching the fortress cordon. Either we would break off, or we would chase the Ghost cruiser inside its invisible fortress. And everybody knew that no Navy ship that had ever penetrated a fortress cordon, ten light-minutes from the central star, had come back out again.
One way or the other, it would all be resolved soon.
Captain Teid cut short the debate. She leaned forward and addressed the crew. Her voice, cast through the ship, was friendly, like a cadre leader whispering in your ear. “You can all see we can’t catch that swarm of Ghosts this s
ide of the cordon. And you all know the hazard of crossing a cordon. But if we’re ever going to break this blockade of theirs we have to find a way to bust open those forts. So we’re going in anyhow. Stand by your stations.”
There was a half-hearted cheer.
I caught Halle’s eye. She grinned at me. She pointed at the Captain, closed her fist and made a pumping movement. I admired her sentiment but she wasn’t being too accurate, anatomically speaking, so I raised my middle finger and jiggled it back and forth.
It took a slap on the back of the head from Jeru, the Commissary, to put a stop to that. “Little morons,” she growled.
“Sorry, sir—”
I got another slap for the apology. Jeru was a tall, stocky woman, dressed in the bland, monastic robes said to date from the time of the founding of the Commission for Historical Truth a thousand years ago. But rumour was she’d seen plenty of combat action of her own before joining the Commission, and such was her physical strength and speed of reflex, I could well believe it.
As we neared the cordon, the Academician, Pael, started a gloomy countdown. The slow geometry of Ghost cruiser and tinsel-wrapped fortress star swiveled across the crowded sky.
Everybody went quiet.
The darkest time is always just before the action starts. Even if you can see or hear what is going on, all you do is think. What was going to happen to us when we crossed that intangible border? Would a fleet of Ghost ships materialize all around us? Would some mysterious weapon simply blast us out of the sky?
I caught the eye of First Officer Till. He was a veteran of twenty years; his scalp had been burned away in some ancient close-run combat long before I was born, and he wore a crown of scar tissue with pride.
“Let’s do it, tar,” he growled.
