The Gods of War

by Christopher Stasheff

  "What do you think?" said the voice from off to one side. He turned to see the young man in the paint-stained coveralls come from around the back of the Mirage. Dark hair, dark eyes: nothing unusual in this part of the world. But the grin caught him by surprise, after the cool reception in the commander's office.

  He looked at the plane again. "The sand over there," he said, "is pretty much the same color as over here. Should be a good match."

  The young man laughed as he came over. "Should be," he said. "You're the new guy? Duvid ben-Akiah." He held out his hand.

  "Micha ben-David."

  They grinned at one another conspiratorially as they shook hands. In the armed forces, Duvid and David were not just names: they were a pejorative—a "desk-duvid," someone holding down a backlines position out of cowardice or ineptness, was about one of the worst things you could be called. It was no help that it was a common name: you worked twice as hard to avoid being thought of as a duvid by anyone.

  "How many of these do you have?" Micha el said. It was a temptation to say we, but that would be premature.

  "Fourteen here. Sixteen over at Zenifim, another twenty up by Karkom. You've flown them?" Here there was just a moment's suspicious look; Duvid was wondering whether this was some displaced Mystre-jockey or other lowlife.

  Micha'el just nodded. "These," he said. "And I was testing the Five."

  Duvid sucked in breath, and his eyes gleamed in anticipation. "How is it? How many do we get?"

  He smiled. "It hums. The force has ordered fifty. But the French haven't delivered them yet."

  Duvid frowned. "What's keeping them?"

  Free will, Micha'el was tempted to say. But he shook his head. "Could be money. I don't know."

  Duvid shrugged. "Never mind that—come meet the others. They're still having lunch. Right now we don't have anything to do but paint the birds and do maintenance on them, and take a briefing every couple days." He led the way off across the hangar.

  Four days, said the voice, and they'll have more to do.

  So I gather, Micha'el said, or I wouldn't be here. When do I get my briefing?

  Soon enough. Not everything's in place yet. There was a thoughtful silence. But it's a new manifestation named Tek this time, if you were wondering. Operating in isolation and anxious to test itself. I'll brief you when all the decisions have been fated.

  Micha'el smiled at that. I can wait, he said silently.

  There were thirteen other pilots, which pleased him; it meant there was no one he would have to displace, either by temporary physical mishap or some method more permanent. They were a crazed crowd, much of a piece with other young flyers he had worked with in various wars; intelligent, quickwitted, rude-mouthed, endlessly energetic, aggressive, and somewhat politically hotheaded. Running mostly on hormones, he thought, as his own body fell into chemical-ridden camaraderie with others of its own kind, and began smoking what they smoked—some of the foulest cigarettes he had ever tried not to inhale—and drinking what they drank, mostly Coke. If they had had any alcohol, they would have refused to drink it—they knew how tense the situation was becoming in their part of the world, and they knew their job was to be ready. They were ready. Meanwhile they grilled Micha'el about his politics and his flying, and when they were initially satisfied that he might fit in, they jumped him, the second night in, hog-tied him, and painted him in sand camouflage to match his plane, the fourteenth one, Nesheh. After that, they considered him one of them.

  "I would have thought you'd wanted to wait to see how I fly," he said, trying not to breathe while he poured paint thinner over his head to get the last of the beige out of it.

  Duvid shrugged at that, leaning on the shower-room wall with his arms folded. "Nu, we'll find out in a day or so. But you couldn't be too bad, if you were testing Fives. Maybe you were, maybe they sent us a hamburger—well, too bad, you're our hamburger now. If you turn out to be too much of one, you'll probably have an accident before we have to go into combat. Probably break a leg or something if you don't struggle too hard. We wouldn't want to hurt the aircraft."

  And that was that. He helped them with their painting—dreadful work, in the heat—and began speaking as they spoke, a dreadful amalgam of Sabra slang and fighter-pilot talk, much contaminated by the passage through their training of various American and RAF advisors. He smoked their awful cigarettes, and drank Coke until he thought he could become airborne merely from belching, and bided his time.

  He flew with them the same day they took their first briefing together: June 4th, the day before it would happen. The commander was as angry as he had been when Micha'el had first seen him, but for different reasons this time: he was terrified for his young pilots, the chicks who had been under his wing for all this while. The uproar Egypt had made in the UN the day before had been dreadful, and though no word had come from Jerusalem, the commander had his suspicions. The pilots did too, and were buzzing with excitement. It pleased the commander, and horrified him at the same time, and the turmoil of his soul got under Micha'el's skin and made him itch all through the briefing.

  "There is no change in the situation," the commander said. "If trouble starts suddenly, it is an air war we'll be concerned with—for the first good while, the tanks will not be our problem. Syria and Lebanon are not as much of a problem as them." He jerked his head westward, and all the young heads nodded thoughtfully: that way was Egypt. "They have five aircraft to every one of ours, various MiGs in various configurations. The more modern versions, the nine-teens and twenty-ones, are more versatile craft than ours—at least, when they're flown by better pilots."

  Micha'el's buddies snickered at the unlikeliness of this. "Your advantage, your only advantage, gentlemen, is that all their pilots are Soviet-trained and ninety-nine percent of Soviet pilots don't have the initiative God gave a clam, because their bosses have noticed that any one of them who does, flies his MiG straight off to where the money is. Their pilots are trained to do exactly what they're told, and they wouldn't push their own eject button if ground control didn't tell them it was all right. So hotheaded idiots with a little initiative, like you, can make a mess of them, if you only watch your six, and watch out for that one percent of their pilots who have the brains to use their aircraft correctly. They may never fly again after that engagement, when their GCIs have blown the whistle on them, but you'll be dead and you won't care."

  There was a bit of silence at this. The reminder of the six o'clock position as seen from a Mirage was always a little sobering: the narrow cockpit and its high-backed ejector seat were so positioned that there was no rearward view worthy of the name, despite the fact that in this age of heat-seeking missiles, the lethal cone that lay straight behind was any warplane's most vulnerable spot.

  "It's never safe to second-guess orders ahead of time," the commander said, "but it's a safe guess what ours will look like when war breaks out." Not if, Micha'el thought. "With an advantage of numbers like theirs, and the further advantage of their radar system—also a little present from the Soviets, and a lot more sensitive than anybody else's, including ours as far as I can tell—there is only one possible plan. Don't let their aircraft up. Get there at top speed, get there before you can possibly be there, and kill them on the ground. Crater their runways first and then smoke anything that has managed to scramble to meet you. Runways first. I'll say it as many times as I have to, until you snore it in your sleep. Runways first. After that, you can take them at your leisure, and they'll never get up to go bother our tanks and our people. It won't matter then whether their pilots are half bird, or whether they belong inside a bun. Runways first. Here—" He pointed at the map, indicating one spot, and another, and a third. "No telling which one we'll be sent to. It doesn't matter. Know them all, know the way there in your sleep, get there and crater it. And then have all the fun you like, but whatever you do, bring your planes home. We've only got seventy of them."

  And yourselves, Michael heard his heart cry. But he would no
t say it to any of them: he was a soldier too.

  The pilots nodded, but not out of any great concern. They had heard it all before. They waited until the commander dismissed them, and then they went out and got ready for the day's exercise.

  Duvid was already in his cockpit, going through pre-flights, by the time Micha'el was climbing into Nesher, next on the flightline. "Gotta be quicker than that," Duvid shouted at him over the scream of the warming engines. His voice was harsh, almost angry.

  Micha'el was surprised to see that the eternal good humor had slipped. He scrambled a bit getting up into the cockpit, shook his shoulders—there was always an itch there when he was in confined quarters, his deep self's memory of his usual shape, fretting against the present physical one. He subdued the itch and pulled the canopy down, locked it. Duvid's mechanic signaled him forward, and Duvid bounced instantly forward and rolled, the Mirage doing that little nose-nod it always did when you popped the brakes. Micha'el went straight after him. Protocol allowed double launch from the runway: he caught up with Duvid, and they went straight up together, third and fourth of four.

  There he laid to rest the pilots' concerns about whether he belonged in a bun or not. Better now than tomorrow morning, he thought. There was little to it. Half his gift, half his reason for being, was the ability to sense others' reactions and react to them first; mortal or immortal, it had never mattered. Now he locked his deeper self into theirs, knew every turn and bank and matched it, anticipated their evasive moves while they were still nothing but fire running down a pilot's nerves. The commander came at him, under his six, to see if he had been listening; Micha'el arched up and over and back in the new Immelman, did the 180-degree flip as half a hesitation roll, and throttled up: with gravity helping, the skin leaning back from his face, he was on the commander's tail barely a second later. They were working at altitude, where the Mirage's engine was happiest and the flight characteristics of the big delta wings enabled it to turn much more quickly than down in thick air. All of them would have a harder time of it, down low, where they would be trying to evade the radar; but for now, Micha'el smiled and let them know that he had the art handled, and didn't need any coaching, or concern.

  They were an hour in the air. He came down as sweat-soaked as any of them—the cold of thirty-thousand wasn't enough to temper the heat of that relentless sun glaring into the cockpit—and as his wheels came down, the thirst hit him all at once. He taxied down to in front of Three, where the crew chiefs were waiting: waited till his wheels were chocked, then popped the cockpit and almost fell out, onto Jesh, who was holding out an empty Coke bottle full of cold water.

  He drank and drank. As he finished, Duvid poked him in the side, so he choked, and said, "Don't believe in G, do you?" He sounded impressed.

  Micha'el raised his eyebrows and traded his bottle for another full one. "Didn't want you to think I was slow."

  "Yeah," Duvid said. "Okay." He took a bottle for himself, and walked away.

  That horrible sense of resonance hit him again. It felt no better than it had the first time, however long ago—there had been no time, just then, so trying to date it was meaningless. Back then it had been the certain knowledge that the bright power with which he had been intimate, his peer, created with him, would shortly burn dark, and rebel. He would triumph—he had known that too—but the knowledge was not even slightly satisfying. It's not fair, he thought now, the human version of the thought. He was my brother—And he sighed and withdrew from the memory, and said, Not him.

  Yes, the voice said. It almost sounded weary. It's in your briefing. Later, when it's dark.

  He handed the bottle back to the crew chief, and followed the other pilots into the relative cool of the hangar.

  The sun went down in its usual peach-colored splendor. There was a lot of dust in the sky that evening, so that those who were interested in such things could look at it with binoculars, or even the naked eye, and count the sunspots. Lounging there in the hangar door with some of the others, he remembered the arguments about it that other time, when he had been with a group of Crusaders: some of them had become very upset, insisting that the sunspots were some kind of evil sorcery, because the Church said the Sun was perfect and couldn't have marks on it. All a long time ago, but he remembered those sunsets, the same color as this one, and the smells of spices on the air, the tents flapping in the evening wind, the spears stuck in the ground, the idle sharpening of swords. Nothing had changed: the warriors still didn't want to be far from their weapons. The pilots lounged around, drank Coke, smoked the awful cigarettes, and their eyes lingered on the Mirages, all fueled, the engines quiet, but otherwise ready.

  They were quiet. They feel it coming, Micha'el thought. That had not changed either. He had been perhaps the first creature made specifically to be a soldier: all of them since partook in some small way of his nature, and part of it involved that sense of what was about to happen, and when. Other parts of his nature . . . were no one's problem but his own.

  He's on the radars, the voice said.

  Predictable, if nothing else, said Micha'el. Tek always would prefer the shiny new toys to the really important part of the battle, the warriors themselves.

  Unfortunately he's selected the toy that could make the difference, the voice said. With warning, all these lads' valor will come to nothing. That warning must be prevented.

  After that— Micha'el said.

  The images became real inside him. The flights of Mirages, Mystres, Ouragans, even Magisters, streaking across into Egypt, just as the first limb of the sun reached up over the horizon; the Egyptian MiGs scrambling to meet them. The glitter of combat in the early morning, swift movement, smoke trailing down. Very little loss on the side to which he had been assigned. But what loss there was, inevitable. Duvid, for one.

  I told you there might be a price, the voice said.

  Micha'el nodded. I keep paying this one, though, he said. How many battles, now? I know I have to defend them. I promised I would defend the helpless, be the Champion. Yours, and theirs. But they keep dying. Aren't we supposed to be doing something about that? Aren't we trying to have them not have to die any more?

  A long while before that happens, the voice said, dispassionate. And something else is required for that. Their agreements to stop.

  Micha'el sighed, nodded. A while yet, he said.

  "Pretty quiet tonight," Duvid said.

  Micha'el looked at him in mild surprise, took the Coke he held out. "This stuff," he said, "is rotting my teeth by the day. I want to go on leave and have a nice clean beer."

  "Me too," Duvid said, "but no hope of that for a while." He took back the bottle, took a swig himself.

  "You scared?" he said.

  Michael smiled, not easily. "Not since the first time," he said softly. "Then—I wasn't sure. It could have gone either way, I thought. Afterwards . . . it had always been OK, since the very beginning." He laughed, not a happy sound. "You?"

  Duvid swigged from the bottle, handed it back. Very quietly, but with no change in his face, he said, "I'm going to die."

  Micha'el just looked at him. "I tried telling Jesh," Duvid said. "He just looked at me as if I was nuts. The thing is, it's okay. It really is." He looked at Michael's face. "You believe me," he said, rather surprised.

  "Hard not to," Michael said. "How do you know?"

  "Just a feeling. No," Duvid said. "A knowing. It was a suspicion, earlier. I'm sure now, though."

  "You approve?" Micha'el said. It was the harshness of his own voice, now, that surprised him.

  Duvid grinned. "Do I get a vote?"

  "I'm not sure," Michael said. This was true enough: his level of creation didn't always understand the rules as they applied to human beings. "But I think maybe it helps if you can accept it."

  There was silence for a while. "I don't know if I can do that," Duvid said. "But I can go out shooting."

  The Coke bottle was empty. Duvid looked at it for a moment, then walked awa
y.

  "I think," Micha'el said softly, "it may come to the same thing."

  He didn't sleep that night. He didn't always have to, even when in a human body; and tonight, he would have found it particularly difficult. He was being tempted. About an hour before dawn, he was still standing there, looking east now. The morning star was hanging there like a particularly bright landing light.

  Is it possible, he thought, leaning against that hangar door—alone, now; the rest of them had long since gone to bed—is it possible to go against one's nature?

  No answer.

  Typical. Free will, he thought ironically. Even we have it. That was what started the whole problem, wasn't it? But that was a long time ago. Here and now he was faced with the problem: could he disobey? Certainly he could. Would it be wise?

  That was not the point. Wouldn't it be right?

  And what would make it so? The chance of saving one innocent life? This was a war, or was going to be. Many of the innocent would die in it. That was one of the tragedies and injustices of war: that was one of the reasons why, at one end of time or another, he looked desperately to see himself out of a job. Why should this one innocent be spared, just because he had taken a liking to him? Doubtless there was reason in his dying; it would hardly be happening, otherwise. It had to be allowed to occur. Meanwhile, he, like all the soldiers ever since, could do nothing but take his orders, whether he understood them or not, and execute them. And the same again, tomorrow, and tomorrow. . . .

  I could say no, he thought. Others had. But not for reasons like this: it had been pride, all that while ago, not pity, that had caused his brother to say no, and had caused him to take up his spear for the first time. He thought for a little while of that combat, of all the levels on which it had taken place. The mortal body ached and twinged at the images, memories which it was incapable of harboring, or handling. This was part of the danger for him of being in-body—he was incomplete, and vulnerable to the dangers of mortality: fear, uncertainty, delusion.