Future on Fire

by Orson Scott Card

  Derek bio-fed the faintest microcosmic ripples into his vestibular caverns and felt in command, secure, then suddenly patriotic, even jingoistic. He was going to be a warrior, and that was a thing of honor. The human body was a marvel of osteal keels, spars, ribs, gussets, fillets, and bulkheads. There were fulcrum-pivots of great power in the coccygeal nest, the lifting lever of the spinal cord, the tibial-femoral extensor, and the flexor pattern of the elbow and wrist joints. To utilize the osteal and muscular kinesthesias of the body in combat was the ultimate paradigm of personal power: to overcome an opponent in unarmed combat, to dominate, to control, to conquer, to triumph. Combat was an ancient practice, perhaps homologous to mock fighting in animals, though animals rarely if ever fought to the death. It remained for man to use his cognition to upset the evolutionary adaptiveness of mock fighting by inventing ritual killings and codes of conduct—in dueling, for example—that carried an insult, minor or egregious, into capstans of encounters that routinely resulted in death or serous injury.

  Warfare, too, perhaps singularly, was justified—even glorified—through its sanctioned institutional status, as when hysterical patriotic fervor gripped nations. And though war was condemned on all sides, it was also practiced with sporadic ferocity on all sides. Justification through condemnation, Derek thought. It was oddly invented reasoning somehow; but, once caught up in the mob hysteria, any recourse to sober reasoning drew rage response from the mob. The power of networked outrage in human groups was remarkably like feeding frenzies in sharks, the waterfall rush of lemmings over an arctic precipice, the thunder of a cattle stampede, or indeed, the networked sputter of reticular outrages in epileptic seizure. Once launched, there was no turning back.

  Derek slept for an hour or so, a light, pleasing nap, when the jarring stop of the skimmer awakened him. They had arrived at the camp. He stepped from the skimmer, saw the Brevard heights close up, now partially misted over, and before both his feet were yet solidly on the quay, a tomato-faced instructor was nose to nose with him, shouting, flicking plosive microbubbles of spittle on his face. Derek surged in autonomic anger. His was an eighteen-inch world; no person came closer than this, and if so, was repulsed. The private life-space of any citizen included a foot and a half of buffer zone encasing the body. The instructor recognized Derek’s response; it was his job to evoke it. Now he shouted in Derek’s ear, and in instant reflex, Derek elbowed the man in the ribs. It was a hard, efficient, satisfying blow, and Derek felt the spare rib cave in with a soft, sluicing pop. The instructor let out an odd, airy groan and backed off. Derek dropped into a gunfighter stance, ready for anything, momentarily fueled by hypothalamic fire, and then he had a cognitive flash, wondering if his striking the man had already washed him out of the training program.

  “Stand at attention,” the instructor said, his voice at neutral command level. “I am bionic. I could kill you easily. Do you read me? Do you read me, Plebe?” The instructor grasped Derek’s elbow and squeezed it. Derek gasped and almost fainted at the pain. He stood at attention and steeled himself for a retaliatory blow, but it did not come. He riveted his eyes on the low white barracks across the quad and felt tears of pain well up. Then the instructor strode off, down the gathering line of young men, his bulging triceps clearly visible beneath his beige-colored bodysuit. Three other instructors were moving about, pushing the plebes, shouting at them, insulting them in nose-to-nose postures. Derek closed his eyes and began to sway. At the far end of the line, a portly plebe was shouting back at an instructor in a curiously loud, yet timorous, grating voice.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Sing it out, you baby plebe!”

  “Yo! Affirm! Yessir!” The vocal feeling tones of the instructors came through like jabs to the body and face: dartlike, quick, immobilizing, inexorable. The intensity of the stimulus disarrayed normal response repertories, so that Derek and his peer-plebes were obliterated by the action. Even the strongest of these young men, the boldest, most secure, most dominant, offered no overt resistance. Physical strength was no recourse, no invariant kinesthetic force. Many of the young plebes were, at least temporarily, cataleptically weak and flaccid. Far down the rank, a thin boy’s knees buckled, and he sank slowly to the ground, as if keeling to pray.

  “Don’t touch him!” the tomato-faced instructor bellowed. “Let him be!” He strode over to where the boy lay on his side, beginning to draw into a soft fetal curl. Without a word, he lifted the boy into a fireman’s carry position, as easily as if the boy were a kitten or a blanket, or a light sack of flour. The instructor’s body showed absolutely no sense of the burden, no visible allowance for the weight of the boy’s 160 or so pounds as he made his effortless saunter across the quad. As if adjusting an epaulet, or simply shrugging, the instructor loosed the boy into a shallow stone fountain, and the boy fairly exploded into life with the shock of the cold water, which Derek later discovered to be kept at forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. It was July, and hot, but the waters of the fountain were kept chillingly cold. Two relatively unimpressive-looking bionic figures came out of the barracks and took the drenched but invigorated plebe inside.

  “Who else needs a cold bath?” the tomato-faced warrior-instructor yelled, his authoritarian tone ringing down the lines of men like a single audible hand slapping every face. “Who wants to faint? Any thumbsuckers here? Any tantrum-pitchers?” He said these last words with such consummate articulatory clarity, such plosive consonance, that the inanity of the connotation fled in the face of the thrusting timbre of its deliverance. The words were flinty particles to duck away from, warning drums, snarls from a stone ledge above one’s head, heavy rustling in saw grass, screams of pop-off valves, trumpetings at sacrificial rites. The voice is bionic, Derek concluded, like an air horn on a car, or a siren, or a ship’s whistle. No human voice could produce such controlled explosions, such surges of power.

  Now the voice modulated to quieter levels, but still very much command quality: “You men are barely dry behind the ears. Fresh young cubs straight from the maternal breast….” Here Derek wondered at the word-choice; much cruder levels of reference came to his mind. “…little foxes just out of the den, babies protected by parents. Up until now, perhaps until this very day, you have been nurtured. People have been assigned to protect you. Society has been charged with your advocacy. It is the function of the warrior to fight, and by the gods, you will be fighters, or you will return home to nurse at the breast. To be a fighter is to know freedom from fear, to forge your body into a combat machine that has but one destiny, and that is the vanquishment of an enemy. You will develop new spirits here, new cores of confidence, new orientations. Some of you will become permanent members of the warrior caste, and be greatly rewarded for your actions. The expectation level is high, and will cull out the weaker among you, separate the men from the boys, weed out the few that we need for permanent service—Hey, where’s the brash kid that tried to cave in my ribs?”

  Derek’s stomach churned, and he felt a tinny ringing germinate in his ears. He had been temporarily lulled by the intelligent turn of the instructor’s talk. Now Derek fancied his vestibular cochlear shells as cringing fetuses with watery piping systems.

  “Hey, Samson! Hercules! Hey, boy hero, get your ass out here so the rest of these boys can have a look-see at you!”

  Derek stepped forward, hesitatingly, and the instructor brusquely motioned him forward. He’s going to stomp the shit out of me, Derek thought, but he was strangely unafraid. I could cower and slink, he thought, but I’m beyond that. I’ll take him any way I can. He’s not going to kill me. Then Derek felt the ordinary contempt reaction to bionic people, and saw the instructor as a mere device to outwit, if not eventually conquer. There was something about bio-humans that reduced their generic credibility. One wanted always to test their bionic mettle, to bushwhack them, to prod their limits; because, at least in the full bionics and robots, no inappropriat
e retaliatory response would be forthcoming, since biones and robots were eminently fair, by law and precedent and construction. Once, Derek had seen a tiny boy tease a sanitation robot unmercifully, with no response from the bot. Finally, when the boy tried to trip the boy, it gave the boy an eye-rattling electroshock that dramatically validated the robot’s dominance.

  Derek decided to close with the instructor. “Come on, puppy,” the instructor snarled, “come get your ass whipped.” It was a desperation move on Derek’s part. Bravery is a form of stupidity, he thought as he approached the man on the balls of his feet, still feeling no fear. He’s stuffed full of Akai transistors, Derek thought, and aimed a haymaker at the man’s mandibular joint, just forward of the ear and low on the jawline, hoping for a quick break of this vulnerable fulcrum. For a moment he forgot that this was no ordinary man, and sold short on the assurance that biones were a minority group (and thus scapegoatable). In the flash of a microsecond, the looming facial target was gone, and the inertia of Derek’s swing spun him off balance. The instructor had ducked the punch with incredible agility and reflexive speed. Derek thought of tiger cubs teasing cobras, the reflexes of the cats all but guaranteeing their safety.

  “Now see this!” the instructor trumpeted to the row of young men. “This is how tough I am.” And he clamped a single bionic hand around Derek’s elbow. Again Derek gasped, and wilted in the machinelike power of the grip. He cried out—a strangling, air-bellows, laryngeal moan—and hung, like a limp puppet, in the grip. It was as if every tendon in his body were soft as taffy strands. The pain panicked him, and his very lifesense flared in his elbow joint, as if giant pliers were crushing the frail osteal wing. His vestibular cues flared alarm, overload, critical mass, redline, in extremis, and he fainted.

  He came awake, just seconds later, in an infusive shock of icy immersion, and knew, with immediate, blue-steel clarity, that he was in the waters of the stone fountain. His equilibratory centers gave him to know he was supine, and he rolled dextral, drew up his knees, and just barely fought off the urge to open his mouth, the icy waters inundating the base of the occipital lobe, keying in this often fatal reflex. His feet touched the bottom of the shallow pool, and he felt a new and temporarily commanding power over his lifespace. He sprang from the bottom of the shallow fountain and broke the surface like a breaching whale. He heard the cheers of the men, and then the two drone-level biones lifted him out and took him inside the barracks. He was something of a hero in the eyes of the other plebes.

  The new plebes, the vestigial warriors, were lined up and marched to an ancient-looking tin-shed building called HYGIENIC UNIT. Waves of heat shimmered in the air above the roof, and Derek thought the place to resemble the camp buildings of Buchenwald or Auschwitz. Inside the men were told to strip naked and to put their clothing and possessions in heavy canvas bags. One plebe asked what to do with the $491 in barter-script he had brought with him, and was told to dump it with everything else, that he would get a receipt for it, and that he wouldn’t need any script where he was going, that he was a nipplehead to carry that amount around with him, and finally, that the government was going to do all his worrying for him. Derek had traveled light: jockey shorts, cotton jeans, tennis shirt, socks, soft shoes, a handkerchief, a thin wallet, and a few coins. The filled canvas bags were fluxed shut, and as each man hefted his onto a corner, a bionic drone affixed an ID plate and gave the men a small receipt plate. The naked men were then lined up against the corrugated metal walls, twenty on one side of the room, and twenty on the other. Forty naked young men in one room, Derek realized, and the scene was without precedent in his experience. He could not help but appraise the bodies of the men, to compare the somatotypes with his own. There were a few plump ones, their bodies remarkably feminine, and Derek had a memory-trace of cabin boys and sodomy in the British navy in ancient times. Given an imprisoned sample of men, with no access to women, and the intromissive drives still sought culmination, and it was a matter of targeting in on female surrogates and alternative apertures. There were thin, asthenic boys, with every muscle visible beneath thin skin; a few hairy mesomorphs; at least one heavily muscled bodybuilder stereotype—in all, a seemingly endless variation of body sizes, shapes, and proportions. And every penis hung flaccid and somesthetically numb. Into this thin metal cage of fish-belly white vulnerability strode the tomato-faced drill instructors, the “D.I.”

  “All right, you shitbirds,” he bellowed, “this row, LEFT FACE! And over here—yeah, Plebe, face to the left—you baby plebes, RIGHT FACE!” Some of the men knew nothing at all of close-order drill, but others performed the movements snappily. A door opened in the face of the corrugated tin wall, and Derek could see into a small room, the floor of which was covered with hair. It was, he realized, a makeshift barbershop, an absurd tonsorial palace, a hirsuite grooming station, an emasculation parlor, an evolutionary precursor of medical surgery. In places the hair was a foot deep on the floor. There were convoluted clumps of ebony wire, brown thatch, auburn swatches, kinky ebony plumage, coppery red wires, greasy duckback residuals, coiled swirls of blond locks—in all, a weird instant rug of freshly cut hair, from the heads of innumerable young men.

  The haircut did not take very long: Derek sat in the smooth wooden chair, careful not to mash his soft scrotal walnuts, and the barber man made a few quick swaths across his head, with a heavy shaver that sounded loud enough to cut wire. Derek rubbed his hand across his head and felt the bony vulnerability of total baldness. Where there had been luxuriant hair, perhaps fifty thousand individual long hairs, there was now tight skin, keenly etched cranial fissures, osteal bumps he didn’t know he had, piebald marks, excoriated pustules, stubble, epidermal oil, sebaceous dew, and most of all, the primal white skin. Derek had never felt more neutered in his life. He was a eunuch, a Samson shorn of his locks, a virility symbol suddenly rendered impotent, a grassy carpet clean cut from the earth, revealing the barest worn, hard, sterile dirt.

  Quickly the forty men became cranially homogenized, their identities gone, individualities neutralized, charismatic covariances canceled. There seemed to be no pecking order now. A massively built, lantern-jawed boy was opposite Derek as the group lined up once more, and the boy looked innocuous, harmless, pathetic.

  Derek’s vestibular nests seemed like terminal message stations, relaying to him in the keenest wavelengths those routine graviton-matrix cues he took so much for granted. His richly sensitized footpads felt the individual cubes of grit on the curiously warm cement floor (deck, you shitbirds, it’s a deck!), and he could feel the infinitesimal ebbings of cochlear fluid in his semicircular canals as his locus of balance shifted slowly from heel to ball, then up along the outboard calves, to the thighs; the staunchly underpinned pelvic girdle, the snakelike tubings of cradled viscera, the cautiously throbbing heart, the rib-box with its bladders of precious air, the pylon of the cervical post, and the bony crown of the skull with its cheesy gray furrows of brain mass.

  “Move it!” the instructor bellowed, and Derek’s column of men moved into a shower room, where the similarity to a Buchenwald gas-chamber was institutionally unmistakable. Would stinging sprays of water erupt from those grayish-green shower heads, Derek thought, or mists of poison gas? He discovered rapidly enough, and even felt triumphant, as he adjusted the water spray to warm. A few of the men turned the metal knobs to hot, and the room began to fill with steam. The soap was hard, brownish-colored, strong, and yielded a bare minimum of lather. The instructor left the men in the room, and there were careful chitterings of babble-talk, an occasional whoop, and an increasing din of moderate yips and whistles and plosive sputterings. The scene was Dantesque: wet white bodies, hairy chests, bare chests, circumsized phalluses, uncircumcized phalluses, bulging pectorals, bird-chests, tight bellies with well-defined muscles, flaccid paunches, varicose veins, drowned pubic sporrans, sagging varicoceles, scars, moles, prurient pustules, freckles, piebald filigrees—a bizarre, non-contextual amalgam of basic bipedal humanoid
bodies, all humbled and homogenized by nakedness, wetness, waterproofed cleanliness, and shaved craniums. After ten minutes the D.I. bellowed for the men to get out. A muffin-faced ectomorph named Hovorka was trying to soap his phallus into tumescence, but with little success. As the men emerged from the shower room, they were issued a stack of four thick green towels, green dungaree pants, loose jackets, and soft-billed caps. The clothing was stiff and substantial, and Derek felt like a grubworm encased in a denim exoskeleton. With damp towels around their necks, thick socks and heavy brogan shoes on their feet, and hefting the canvas bags now stuffed with underwear, bedding, and toilet articles, the men were marched to the barracks. I don’t feel like a warrior at all, Derek thought, looking at the drab, slumping, shuffling column of men in front of him. I feel like a convict, a conscript, a drone, a laborer, a mental patient in some ancient, snake-pit hospital, with confining pens and drain rooms.

  The barracks room was like a cement vault some one hundred feet long and forty feet wide, with wooden floors (deck, you shitbird!), a great many windows, and lined with ancient iron double-decker bunks. Derek had been accustomed to sleeping on graviton chaises, in gelatinous coffins, or on filmy forcefield beds, and he wondered at the primitiveness of the olive drab bunks and their thin mattresses.