War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  “Two weeks left, minus twelve hours.”

  We were sitting in the coffee shop. This was our usual day for chess, though we hadn’t managed a full game in weeks. Don always brought his laptop, leaping around the Web while we suffered through a halting, chaotic conversation.

  Three times in three minutes, Don glanced at his watch.

  “Expecting somebody?” I finally asked.

  “I am,” he admitted.

  I waited for the full answer. When none came, I asked outright, “So, whom are we expecting?”

  Don smiled, anguish swirled with anticipation. “Somebody important,” he mentioned. “Somebody who can help us.”

  Then he gave the coffee shop door a long hard stare.

  I made one wrong guess. “Is it a parent?”

  There were thousands like Don, and the Internet allowed them to meet and commune, sharing gossip and useful tips. Our particular town was too small to have its own support group, but every Sunday, Don and Amanda drove to Kansas City in order to sit in a stuffy room and drink coffee with people a little farther along in their misery.

  Maybe one of those Kansas City friends was dropping by, I reasoned.

  But Don said, “No,” and then his tired eyes blinked.

  Glancing over my shoulder, I understood.

  Our visitor was in his middle sixties, and he didn’t look too awful. I would have expected a limp or maybe stumps in place of hands. But no, the gentleman could have been any newly retired citizen, respectable and even a little bland. He stood at the door, taking in the room as if weighing all the hazards. And then I noticed his tailored clothes and the polished leather shoes, a little old-fashioned but obviously expensive.

  Some veterans returned to Earth with gems in their loot. But to my knowledge, not one ever sold his treasures, since each item carried some embedded significance far beyond commercial gain.

  To myself, I whispered, “Where do you get your money, stranger?”

  “I’m sorry,” Don told me, sounding decidedly unsorry. “I should have warned you. Just this morning, I learned this fellow was passing through, and I was lucky enough to get his number and arrange this. This meeting.”

  Don hurriedly gathered up his belongings. The laptop. The labeled folders. A notebook full of intense scribbles. And finally, half a cup of black Sumatran. Then he threw a careless look over his shoulder, telling me, “Stay, if you want. Or I can call you afterward, tell you how it went.”

  “Okay, Don. Good luck.”

  Because I was his friend, I stayed. To keep busy, I brought out my own laptop and searched through the Wikipedia list of confirmed veterans. Meanwhile the two strangers shook hands and sat in back, across from each other in a little booth. I heard a few words from our honored guest, and reading the accent, I moved to the Russian portion of the database, bringing up a series of portraits.

  Thirty-five years ago, a talented young art student slipped out of his parents’ Moscow apartment and vanished.

  I could almost understand it: A Russian might prefer fighting aliens among the stars over trying to survive the next three decades inside a tottering communist empire.

  The two old boys chatted amiably for several minutes.

  Then the Russian mentioned something about his time and his considerable trouble, and Don pulled an envelope from his pocket and passed it over. The Russian opened the gift with a penknife waiting at the ready, using fingers and eyes to count the bills and their denominations until he was satisfied enough to continue.

  Cheryl had warned me.

  “Our friends are spending their life savings,” she said just the other night. “Any person or little group that might help find LD gets a check, and sometimes several checks.”

  “Don’s no fool,” I had claimed. “He wouldn’t just throw his money away.”

  “But a lot of scam artists are working this angle,” she added. “Anybody with a missing son is going to be susceptible.”

  Those words came back to me now.

  Who actually compiled these lists of Kuiper veterans? Russia wasn’t a bastion of honest government and equal opportunity. I could envision somebody bribing the right people and then setting off for the West, retelling stories that were public legends by now, and helping no one but their parasitic selves.

  The Russian seemed vigorous and fit.

  I couldn’t get past that.

  After half an hour of intense conversation and coffee, Don had to slip off to the bathroom. He barely gave me a nod as he passed by. I stood and walked over, not asking permission when I sat beside the Russian, introducing myself without offering my hand and then asking pointblank, “So what are you and my good friend talking about?”

  I can’t say why, but that’s when my initial suspicions collapsed.

  Maybe it was the man’s face, which up close revealed delicate and unusual burn scars. Or maybe it was the straight white line running from the back of his hand up his forearm and under his sleeve. Or it was the smell rising from his body—something I’d read about but never experienced—that faintly medical stink born from a diet of alien chow and peculiar water.

  But mostly, what convinced me were the man’s haunted blue eyes.

  “The training,” said a deep, ragged voice. “Donald wants to know about the training. About what his son is enduring now.”

  “Can you help him?”

  “I am trying to.”

  “Help me now,” I pleaded. Then after a deep breath, I added, “But I’m not going to pay you anything.”

  The blue eyes entertained their own suspicions.

  “Why now?” I asked. “If this war’s been going on forever, why just in these last forty years have the Kuipers started coming here?”

  He said nothing.

  “Does their war need fresh blood? Are they short of bodies to fight their ugly fight, maybe?”

  “No,” he said once, mildly.

  And then louder, with authority, he said, “Hardly.”

  “But why now?”

  “Because forty years ago, my benefactors came to the conclusion that it was possible for humans to observe their world. We had not yet discovered it, no. But just the possibility was critical to the ceremony. Because all who can see what is transpiring must be made welcome—”

  “Ceremony?” I interrupted. “What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what you would expect the word to mean,” he claimed. Then he leaned closer to me, his breath stinking of alien chemicals that still swam in his blood. “What you call a war is not. More than anything, the ceremony is a religious event. It is a pageant of great beauty and much elegance, and by comparison, all human beliefs are cluttered little affairs without a thousandth the importance that one day up there brings to the open soul.”

  As the Russian spoke to me, Don returned.

  “I miss that world,” said the one-time recruit. “I miss the beauty of it. The power of it. The intensity and importance of each vivid, thrilling moment.” He broke into some kind of Creole jabber—a mixture of Earthly languages and Kuiper that must have been better suited to describe his lost, much beloved life. Then he concluded by telling me, “Belonging to one nest while serving my good elders, standing limb to limb with my brethren . . . I miss that every waking moment, every dreaming moment . . . constantly, I find myself wishing I could return again to that good, great place. . . . ”

  “Is that what it is?” I asked. “A great place?”

  “I do envy that boy of his,” the Russian said to me.

  Maybe I smiled, just a little. Just to hear that more than survival was possible, that poor LD could actually find happiness.

  But Don roared, “Get out of here!”

  I thought he was speaking to the Russian, and I was right.

  And I was wrong.

  “Both of you,” my best friend snapped. “I don’t want to hear this anymore. ‘The beauty. The power.’ I want you to leave me alone! Goddamn it, go!”

  I felt awful for what I had done,
or what I had neglected to do. For the next couple nights, I lay awake replaying the conversation and the yelling that followed. In my charitable moments I would blame exhaustion and despair for Don’s graceless temper. Because what did I do wrong? Nothing, I told myself, and certainly nothing intentional.

  After that, I called Don half a dozen times, making various apologies to his voice mail.

  Eventually Cheryl heard from Amanda. Their thirty-second phone conversation translated into a five-minute lecture from my wife.

  “Here’s what you have to understand, John. These next days are critical. There won’t be another chance to save LD. They have leads about where he might be, which is something. Very unusual, and maybe they will manage to find him—”

  “And accomplish what?” I interrupted.

  She looked at me with outrage and pity.

  “Has any recruit ever been found like this?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Cheryl said. “Two or three times, perhaps.”

  “And talked out of leaving?”

  She had to admit, “No.”

  But then with her next breath, she said, “This is about LD’s parents This is about them doing their very best. They can’t let this moment escape without putting up a fight. And what Amanda says . . . the way that you’ve been acting around Don . . . it’s as if you don’t want to believe just how awful this mess is. . . . ”

  What did I believe?

  “Doubt is a luxury they can’t afford now,” Cheryl explained. “And you’re going to have to give Don space, if you’re not going to help.”

  “But I want to help,” I pleaded.

  “Then stop calling him, honey. He’s got enough guilt in his head without hearing your voice every day too.”

  One week remained.

  Two days.

  And then on the eighty-sixth day after LD’s disappearance, an unexpected voice came searching for me, along with a very pleasant face and a sober, well-considered attitude.

  “Hey, John.”

  “Morgan?” I sputtered.

  “Can I come in? Just for a minute, please. It’s about my brother.”

  We welcomed her. Of course we welcomed the young woman, offering our guest a cold drink and the best chair and our undivided attention. Morgan was being truthful when she said she had just a few minutes to spend with us. A list of people needed to be seen, and soon. A phone call or the Internet would have worked just as well, but with some of these names—us in particular—she felt that it was best to come personally.

  “A favor, John? Cheryl?”

  Her shy smile made me flinch. “Anything,” I said for both of us.

  “We have three areas to watch tonight,” she reported. “Three pastures, scattered but close to town. There’s evidence—different kinds of evidence—that LD’s buried in one of them. Although it’s probably none of them, and this is a long shot at best.”

  Cheryl asked, “Which pasture do we watch?”

  “Here.” On a photocopy of a map, she had circled eighty acres in the southeast corner of the county. “Really, the only reason to think LD’s there is a farmer thinks he saw odd lights moving in the grass. And he’s halfway sure it was the same night my brother vanished.”

  A very long shot.

  But I said, “We’ll be there, Morgan.”

  “There’s going to be others out there with you. Cousins of mine, and some friends, and a lot of volunteers from all over. But most of us, including me . . . we’ll be at the north site.”

  “Is that place more promising?” my wife asked.

  Morgan nodded. “We have a reliable witness who saw LD, or somebody like him, walking across an empty corn field in the middle of the night.” She rolled her shoulders with a skeptical gesture. Then as she stood again, she said, “Thank you. For everything, I mean.”

  “We want to help,” Cheryl promised.

  Morgan looked straight at me.

  Then despite the crush of time, she hesitated. Standing at our front door, Morgan spent three minutes making small talk. With a grin, she told us about the evening we’d come to their house to grill out, and while her brother put on a show for everyone, clowning around and throwing the football a mile into the air, I had taken the time to come over and sit with the ignored sister.

  I had no recollection of the moment.

  But Morgan did, and years later it was a cherished incident worth retelling. Then she looked at neither one of us, shaking her head. “Want to know the truth?” she asked with a conspiratorial tone. “Half of me believes Little Donnie is faking this. Just for fun. Just to see everybody jump and weep.”

  The big sister who had never shown a trace of jealousy said those hard, unsentimental words.

  “He would love tonight,” she told us. “All this effort on his behalf . . . he would find it to be absolutely lovely. . . . ”

  The evening began with showers and then a hard cold rain mixed with biting sleet. Cheryl and I packed for any weather. We arrived early, pulling off the country road and waiting in the gathering darkness. Several dozen searchers were expected, half of whom never showed. In the end, it was a gathering of distant relations and friends from Don’s work who stood on the mud, coming up with a battle plan. Because nobody else volunteered, Cheryl and I took the far end of the pasture. LD’s parents had been over this ground a dozen times. But we were told to look for signs of fresh digging that they might have missed, and to be most alert sometime before dawn. If the most common scenario played out, the new recruit would emerge from his hiding place then, still wearing his warrior suit.

  With my wife beside me, I walked across the wet cold and shaggy brome. At the fence line, she went to the right and I went left, her flashlight soon vanishing in a rain that refused to quit.

  In the end, I had no idea where I was.

  Three in the morning, full of coffee and desperate for sleep, I walked the same ground that Don had searched in broad daylight. The mission was impossible, if the mission was to discover LD. But in my mind, what I was doing was saving a friendship that I hadn’t cherished enough.

  By four, I was too tired to even pretend to search.

  By five in the morning, clear skies arrived along with the sudden glow of a thousand stars.

  Change one turn that night, or pause in a different spot, and I would have heard nothing.

  And even what I heard was insignificant enough to ignore.

  What I was reminded of was the sound of an old-fashioned thermostat. That’s all. The soft click that meant the furnace was about to kick on, except that I heard the click repeating itself every few seconds.

  I turned toward the sound.

  My flashlight was off, my eyes adjusted to the starlight. Even though it probably wouldn’t do any good, I tried for stealth—a quiet stride and a steadiness of motion.

  At some point, the clicking stopped.

  I halted.

  Then a slab of late-season grass, blond and shaggy, lifted up on my right. It was maybe ten feet from me. There was no disturbed area there before, I’m sure. Afterward I couldn’t find any trace of the hole where our newest recruit was undergoing his indoctrinations. But there he was, rising up from that random patch of ground. I saw the head. The broad shoulders. Arms and long legs. All those good human parts encased inside a suit that seemed neither large nor particularly massive, or for that matter, all that tough either.

  From behind, he looked like LD dressed up for a Halloween party, pretending to be a cut-rate astronaut.

  I said, “Donnie.”

  My voice was little more than a whisper.

  The shape turned with a smooth suddenness, as if it knew that I was there and wasn’t surprised, but maybe it wasn’t sure of my motives. LD pivoted, and then a face that I couldn’t quite make out stared at me through a shield of glass or diamond or who-knew-what.

  “How’s that big bike ride coming?” I asked.

  LD stepped closer.

  It did occur to me, just then, that maybe there was a good
reason why no one had ever seen a recruit leaving for space. Witnesses weren’t allowed. But even if the kid was twice my strength, he did nothing to me. He just stepped close enough so that I could make out his features and he could see mine, and with a satisfied sound, he said, “If it has to be someone, John, I’m glad it is you.”

  Maybe the feeling was mutual.

  But I didn’t say that. Instead, I decided to lay things out as clearly and brutally as I could. “Your folks are sick with worry. They’ve spent their savings and every emotional resource, and after tonight, they will be ruined. They’ll be old and beaten down, and for the rest of their lives, they won’t enjoy one good happy day.”

  “No,” said LD.

  “What does that mean?”

  “They will recover just fine,” he claimed. “People are strong, John. Amazingly strong. We can endure far more than you realize.”

  The wee hours of the most unlikely morning, and I was getting a pep talk from a college dropout.

  “Donnie,” I said. “You are a spoiled little brat.”

  That chiseled, utterly handsome face just smiled at my inconsequential opinion.

  “So much promise,” I said, “and what are you doing with it? Going off to fight some idiotic alien war?”

  Inside his battle helmet, the boy shook his head. “Where I will be is on a large world that is more beautiful and more complex than you could ever envision.”

  Could I hit him with something? A rock or a log? Or maybe a devastating chunk of bloody guilt?

  But I had the impression that his flimsy suit wasn’t weak at all.

  “I am needed up there,” LD said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “More than I am needed down here, yes.” He said it simply, calmly. And I suppose that’s when I realized that not only did he mean what he was saying, but that in deep ways, he was probably right.

  I didn’t have anything left to offer.

  “John?” the boy asked. “Would you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Turn around for a moment.”

  If there was a noise when he left, I didn’t hear it. And maybe there was motion, a sense of mass displaced into an endless sky. But at that moment, all I could feel was the beating of my heart and that slight but genuine anguish that comes when you wish it was you bound for places unseen.