Gary is here also, and they renew their friendship. There is a week of callisthenics, as they get in shape once more. The atmosphere, Harker notices, is less relaxed than it was the first time, as though people are impatient to get the resurrectees out and fighting again.
Antarctica, needless to say, has different physical conditions than most of them are used to. They bundle up in heavy boots and thin, electrically warmed coats and gloves. They wear goggles to protect their eyes. Their weapons now fire laser beams instead of projectiles; the lack of recoil takes some getting used to. So does the climate. Cold instead of hot, snow instead of rain, bare plains and snow fields instead of jungles and farms. The terrain under dispute seems no different to Harker than any of the rest that is free for the taking, but his superiors tell him that this is what they must have and so this is what he fights for.
After three months of fighting, Harker is wounded. A laser beam grazes his arm, burning flesh down to the bone. He is taken to a hospital, where they heal the wound quite efficiently – but while they do so, the war comes to an end. The decision arises again whether to reenlist or leave the service. Many resurrectees opt out before becoming too estranged from the world. But the slang of the contemporary soldiers is already becoming unrecognisable, and the few pictures Harker has received of the rest of the ‘modern’ world seem strange and out of phase. After talking it over with Gary, they both decide on one more try aboard the resurrection express.
There is a new slant to it this time, though. A very experimental program, top-secret, is being worked out whereby, instead of putting a man in hibernation, they can record his mind as an individual and reconstruct him later when needed. This will make the system much more manoeuvrable, since they won’t have the problem of transporting frozen bodies to and from battlegrounds. This method is a bit riskier, since it hasn’t been fully tested yet, but it offers more advantages in the long run.
Gary and Harker sign up and are duly recorded.
Harker was thrown clear by the explosion, but the other soldier had not been so lucky. The left side of her torso had been blown away and guts were spilling onto the steaming ground. Harker shook his head to clear it from the shock, and rolled quickly behind a barely standing section of wall.
It was not nearly so dark now. Energy weapons were being fired, lighting up the countryside with their multicoloured glows. The drizzle continued steadily, and the mists still steamed up from the ground. Like ghosts, Harker thought. But he didn’t have much time for thinking. He had a job to do.
There could be no strategy in this type of combat – it was strictly man-to-man, a series of individual battles where the only winners were those who remained alive. Move cautiously, ever alert, looking for someone with the other colour armtag. When you see him, shoot immediately, before he can shoot you. If he’s too far out of range, hurl a grenade. Reduce the number of the enemy to increase your own odds. Stay alive. That was the law here on this nameless world beneath a green sun.
Harker emerged from one doorway after killing seven of the enemy, onto a main ‘street’ – or what had been one – of this city. It was now clogged with heaps of rubble from the fallen buildings; stone, cement, steel, plastiglas jumbled every which way. Among the wreckage were strewn the bodies of thousands of the original inhabitants. They were not human, but it was impossible for Harker to reconstruct what they had looked like. Many of the bodies were in pieces, with an unusually short leg lying here, an oddly shaped arm over there, a limbless, headless torso further on. Some bodies were pinned beneath pieces of debris; others had been hideously mutilated by the latest advances in war technology.
Harker’s stomach felt no unease at what his eyes were viewing. He had seen scenes like this before, many times, in countless places throughout the universe. It took him barely a second to absorb the silent tragedy before him, then he started moving on.
A bolt of energy his hit right calf. He whirled and fired instinctively at his attacker, even as he felt himself falling.
This new type of resurrection is a sudden, frightening thing, a lightning bolt summoning his soul from the depths of limbo.
Harker awakens to sterility, to a place of abnormal quiet. The air smells funny, antiseptic, even more so than most of the hospitals he’s been in. His body feels funny too, as though he were floating in some strangely buoyant liquid; yet he can feel a firm couch underneath his back. His heart bangs away inside his chest, much too fast, much too hard.
He is in a room with other men, other resurrectees, all of whom feel equally strange and perplexed. Their number has almost tripled now from the original three hundred, and they have been crowded closely together to fit into one large hall. Harker lifts his head, and after much looking, manages to spot Gary a dozen rows away. The presence of his friend allays some of the alienness he feels here.
“Welcome to the Moon, men,” blares a voice from a loudspeaker. There is a reverberation of gasps throughout the room at this revelation of their location. The Moon! Only astronauts and scientists got to go there. Are there wars on the Moon now? What year is this and who – and how – are they expected to fight?
The loudspeaker goes on to give further information. For one thing, they are no longer a part of the U.S. Army. The United States has been incorporated into the North American Union, which has inherited their tapes. The enemy is the South Americans, the Sammies, led largely by the Peruvian complex. The two powers are fighting for possession of the Mare Nectaris, which symbolises the points of disagreement between them. Since the outlawing of war on Earth itself, aggressions have to be released here, on the Moon.
“The Moon!” Gary exclaims when they can finally talk together. “Can you believe it? I never thought I’d make it up here. Don’t it knock you on your ass just thinking about it?”
Callisthenics are not necessary, since their bodies have been recreated in as good a shape as they were in when they were first recorded. But they do have to spend almost two weeks undergoing training to be able to deal with the lighter gravity of the Moon. There are also spacesuits they have to become accustomed to, and whole new instincts have to be drilled into the men to take care that nothing will rip their suits, the portable wombs they carry against Nature’s hostility.
Projectile weapons are back, Harker notices, in use as antipersonnel armament. On the Moon, in spacesuits, a small sliver of shrapnel is just as deadly as a laser beam. Rifles that fire the lunar equivalent of buckshot are relied on heavily by the infantry in the field. Orbiting satellites cover their advances with wide-angle energy beams that Harker doesn’t even begin to understand.
It is an entirely different style of fighting, he finds. Totally silent. There are radios in their spacesuits, but they are forbidden to use them because the enemy could triangulate their position. The soldiers make no noise, and on the airless surface of the Moon, the weapons make no noise. It is a battle in pantomime, with silent death ready to creep up at any time.
Gary is killed the third week out. It is during a battle at the open end of the crater Fracastorius, which proves to be the turning point of the war. Gary and Harker are part of a line advancing cautiously across the pockmarked plain, when suddenly Gary falls to the ground. Other men along the line fall too. Harker goes to the ground, feigning death so that the Sammie snipers will not waste any more ammunition on him. But Gary is not feigning it. Harker, otherwise motionless, can turn his head within the helmet and see the tiny tear in the right side of his friend’s spacesuit. The wound would have been minuscule, but the explosive decompression has been fatal. Gary’s eyes are bugged out, as though in horror at death, and blood is bubbling at his nostrils and mouth.
Harker cries for his friend. For the last time, he cries.
He lies there for three hours, motionless, until his air supply is almost exhausted. Then he is picked up by a Sammie sweep patrol and taken prisoner. He sits out the short remainder of the war in a Sammie camp where he is treated decently enough, suffering only a few indignities.
When the war ends, he is exchanged back to the N.A.U., where, still numbed from Gary’s death, he allows himself to be retaped and rerecorded for future use.
Harker fell and hit his head against a block of stone rubble. The helmet withstood the blow – unlike the primitive ones he had worn at first, which would have cracked open – but it started a ringing in his ears which momentarily drowned out the pain impulses coming from his leg. He lay there stunned, waiting for death, in the form of the enemy soldier, to claim him. But nothing happened. After a while his head cleared, which only meant that he could feel the searing agony in his leg more deeply. It was hardly an improvement.
If the soldier had not delivered the killing blow, it could mean that Harker’s reflex shot had killed or wounded him. He had to find out quickly; his life might depend on it. He twisted around painfully, his leg pulsing with agony. There, about thirty metres down the street, a spacesuited body lay flat on the ground. It wasn’t moving, but was it dead? He had to know.
Harker crawled over the field of death, over the remains of shattered bodies. The front of his spacesuit became caked with mud and some not-quite-dried blood that had an inhuman, oily consistency. The drizzle was becoming harder, turning to rain, but still steaming up from the radioactively heated ground. Clouds of vapour fogged his way, hiding the object of his search. Still Harker crawled, keeping to the direction he knew to be the true one.
His leg was on fire, and every centimetre of the crawl was hell, a surrealist’s nightmare of the world gone mad. Once he thought he heard a scream, and he looked around, but there was no one nearby. It must have been a hallucination. He’d had them before on the battlefield, under pain.
He reached his goal after an eternity of crawling. He could detect faint twitches; the enemy was still alive then, though barely. Harker turned him over on his back to deliver the death blow, then looked into the man’s face.
It was Gary.
All the resurrections now seem to run together in his memory. The next one, he thinks, is Venus, the place of hot, stinking swamps, of nearly killing atmospheric pressure and protective bubble-pockets of life. These are the first aliens he has ever killed, the tiny creatures no more than twenty-five centimetres high who can swarm all over a man and kill him with a million tiny stabs. At first it is easier to kill nonhumans, less wearing on the scruples. But eventually it doesn’t matter. Killing is killing, no matter whom it is done to. It becomes a clinical, mechanical process, to be done as efficiently as possible, not to be thought over.
Then back on the Moon again – or is it Mars? – fighting other humans. The spacesuits are improved this time, tougher, but the fighting is just as silent, just as deadly.
Then a war back on Earth again. (Apparently that outlawing of war on the mother planet has not worked out as well as expected.) Some of the fighting is even done under the oceans, in and around large domes that house cities with populations of millions. There are trained dolphins and porpoises fighting in this one. It doesn’t matter. Harker kills them no matter what they look like.
This war is the last time Harker ever sets foot upon his native planet.
Then comes the big jump to an interstellar war. He is resurrected on a planet under a triple sun – Alpha Centauri, someone says – and the enemy is two-foot long chitinous caterpillars with sharp pincers. They fight valiantly despite a much more primitive technology. By this time Harker is no longer sure whom he is working for. His side is the one that resurrects him and gives him an enemy to fight. They give him shelter, food, clothing, weapons and, occasionally, relaxation. They no longer bother to tell him why he is fighting. It no longer seems to matter to him.
Wake up and fight until there is no more killing to do; then retreat into purgatory until the next war, the next battle. The killing machine named Harker has trod the surfaces of a hundred planets, leaving nothing but destruction and death in his wake.
Gary stared up into Harker’s eyes. He was in pain, near death, but was there some recognition there? Harker could not speak to him, their communicators were on different frequencies, but there was something in Gary’s eyes … a plea. A plea for help. A plea for a quick and merciful death.
Harker obliged.
His mind was numb, his leg was burning. He did not think of the paradox of Gary still being alive though he had seen him die on the Moon years (centuries? millennia?) ago. He knew only that his leg hurt and that he was in an exposed position. He crawled on his side, with his left elbow pulling him forward, for ten metres to a piece of wall. He lifted himself over it and tumbled to the ground. If not completely safe, he was at least off the street, out of the open space.
He reached for the first-aid kit on his belt, to tend his leg. There was none there. That idea took a full minute to sink into his mind: THEY HADN’T GIVEN HIM A FIRST-AID KIT. He felt a moment of anger, but it subsided quickly. Why should they give him a kit? What was he to them? A pattern called out of the past, an anachronism – useful for fighting and, if necessary, dying. Nothing more. He was a ghost living far beyond his appointed hour, clinging to life in the midst of death. A carrion eater, feeding on death and destruction to survive, for he had no purpose except to kill. And when the killing was done, he was stored away until his time came round again.
He sat in the rubble with his back against the crumbling wall, and for the first time since Gary’s death on the Moon, he cried.
Asia.
Africa.
Antarctica.
Luna.
Venus.
Pacifica.
Alpha Centauri 4.
The planet with the forests.
The world with oceans of ammonia.
Planets whose names he’s never even bothered to learn.
The ghosts of billions of war dead assault his conscience. And Harker cries with them, for them, about them, over them, to them.
There was a movement. A man in a red armtag. A strangely familiar figure. He hadn’t seen Harker yet. Without thinking, Harker’s hand raised the gun to fire.
His motion attracted the other’s attention. The soldier, with reflexes as fast as his own, whirled to face him. It was himself.
“They copied some of our tapes,” he had been told. Exactly. Then they could make themselves a Harker, just as this side could. He wanted to laugh, but the pain in his leg prevented it. It would have been his first laugh in uncounted incarnations. This was the ultimate irony – fighting himself.
The two Harkers’ eyes joined and locked. For one joyless instant, each read the other’s soul. Then each fired at the other.
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* * * *
THE RAMPARTS
by Hilary Bailey
Here is a deceptively quiet story of a future Earth where mankinds ills of aggression and violence have been done away with, and a calm, near-pastoral Utopia prevails. But it is a mysterious, ominous Utopia of civilized townships surrounded by wild and dark forests— and the forests are once again encroaching.
Hilary Bailey’s full name is Hilary Bailey Moorcock: her husband is the well-known writer and editor Michael Moorcock. She’s the author of “The Fall of Frenchie Steiner” and “Dogman of Islington,” among a number of other first-rank sf stories, and after you’ve read this understated but trenchant story, you’ll want to watch for her byline in the future.
* * * *
This afternoon, at last, I can put down my instruments, push aside my drawing board and watch the sunlight undulating over the long sweep of shadowed lawn in front of my house, see the waves of light playing over the grass right down to the first scattering of trees where the forest begins. From the glass-walled room at the top of the house the great curve of the lawn is like an ocean. And I can look up at the dark sky through the glass ceiling, gazing at the clouds which gather, part and move. When I turn my head I see the white city lying behind me—the straight, tree-lined avenues, the large houses with their pillared porticoes, the gardens brilliant with flowers and bushes. To right and left the lawns
sweep down into the forest, darkening and lightening under the erratic sun. This house is a promontory of the city, an isthmus between it and the forest.
Below, the house is silent. Regan and Arthur are resting because Regan is playing tonight in our concert hall and Arthur is being allowed to stay up and hear her.
Tomorrow I shall be driving her along the Mendip Road to Juram, where she is to play for the citizens there. Our new car is ready, all but the batteries. If we decide to go. It would be pleasant to glide along the smooth paths through the forest—if, that is, we decide to go.
I must get ready soon for the council meeting where my plans are to be discussed. What a fuss over such a small, obvious project! But I think everything is settled at last and approval will be automatic.
I can remember going into the forest as a boy, on a dare, edging slowly through the trees and tangled brushwood, wondering if I had gone far enough to win the dare, with the darkness increasing as the trees grew thicker, bare legs scratched by fern and bramble, hearing the scutterings and flapping of wings in the gloom, tense with listening, forcing one foot in front of the other—oh, the tales that circulated about the Headless Man and the Hunchbacked Monsterwoman of the Forest—but, good heavens, enough of this. It’s quite time to get ready for the meeting. I must begin to lay the things out—but how dark it was in there. There were the terrifying little scratchings and scrapings in the undergrowth, no light, my feet cracking fallen branches at one moment and up to the ankles in mud the next. Day was like night in the forest. And at night—no, nothing could increase that blackness. No one could endure it. It is too dark.
Universe 5 - [Anthology] Page 18
