“Yeah, that’s obvious, it’d tear her—say…you mean, low pressure—”
“That’s right. We wouldn’t need thousands of atmospheres to protect her against five gees’ straight-line acceleration; that’s only for all the swerving and dodging—I’m going to call Maintenance. Get down to your squad bay; that’s the one we’ll use. Dalton’ll meet you there.”
~~~
Five minutes before injection into the collapsar field, and I started the flooding sequence. Marygay and I were the only ones in shells; my presence wasn’t really vital since the flooding and emptying could be done by Control. But it was safer to have redundancy in the system and besides, I wanted to be there.
It wasn’t nearly as bad as the normal routine; none of the crushing-bloating sensation. You were just suddenly filled with the plasticsmelling stuff (you never perceived the first moments, when it rushed in to replace the air in your lungs), and then there was a slight acceleration, and then you were breathing air again, waiting for the shell to pop; then unplugging and unzipping and climbing out—
Marygay’s shell was empty. I walked over to it and saw blood.
“She hemorrhaged.” Doc Wilson’s voice echoed sepulchrally. I turned, eyes stinging, and saw him leaning in the door to the locker alcove. He was unaccountably, horribly, smiling.
“Which was expected. Doctor Harmony’s taking care of it. She’ll be just fine.”
Twenty-one
Marygay was walking in another week, “Confraternizing” in two, and pronounced completely healed in six.
Ten long months in space and it was army, army, army all the way. Calisthenics, meaningless work details, compulsory lectures—there was even talk that they were going to reinstate the sleeping roster we’d had in basic, but they never did, probably out of fear of mutiny. A random partner every night wouldn’t have set too well with those of us who’d established more-or-less permanent pairs.
All this crap, this insistence on military discipline, bothered me mainly because I was afraid it meant they weren’t going to let us out. Marygay said I was being paranoid; they only did it because there was no other way to maintain order for ten months.
Most of the talk, besides the usual bitching about the army, was speculation about how much Earth would have changed and what we would do when we got out. We’d be fairly rich: twenty-six years’ salary all at once. Compound interest, too; the $500 we’d been paid for our first month in the army had grown to over $1500.
We arrived at Stargate in late 2023, Greenwich date.
The base had grown astonishingly in the nearly seventeen years we had been on the Yod-4 campaign. It was one building the size of Tycho City, housing nearly ten thousand. There were seventy-eight cruisers, the size of Anniversary or larger, involved in raids on Tauran-held portal planets. Another ten guarded Stargate itself, and two were in orbit waiting for their infantry and crew to be outprocessed. One other ship, the Earth’s Hope II, had returned from fighting and had been waiting at Stargate for another cruiser to return.
They had lost two-thirds of their crew, and it was just not economical to send a cruiser back to Earth with only thirty-nine people aboard. Thirty-nine confirmed civilians.
We went planetside in two scoutships.
Twenty-two
General Botsford (who had only been a full major the first time we met him, when Stargate was two huts and twenty-four graves) received us in an elegantly appointed seminar room. He was pacing back and forth at the end of the room, in front of a huge holographic operations chart.
“You know,” he said, too loud, and then, more conversationally, “you know that we could disperse you into other strike forces and send you right out again. The Elite Conscription Act has been changed now, five years’ subjective in service instead of two.
“And I don’t see why some of you don’t want to stay in! Another couple of years and compound interest would make you independently wealthy for life. Sure, you took heavy losses—but that was inevitable, you were the first. Things are going to be easier now. The fighting suits have been improved, we know more about the Taurans’ tactics, our weapons are more effective…there’s no need to be afraid.”
He sat down at the head of the table and looked at nobody in particular.
“My own memories of combat are over a half-century old. To me it was exhilarating, strengthening. I must be a different kind of person than all of you.”
Or have a very selective memory, I thought.
“But that’s neither here nor there. I have one alternative to offer you, one that doesn’t involve direct combat.
“We’re very short of qualified instructors. The Force will offer any one of you a lieutenancy if you will accept a training position. It can be on Earth; on the Moon at double pay; on Charon at triple pay; or here at Stargate for quadruple pay. Furthermore, you don’t have to make up your mind now. You’re all getting a free trip back to Earth—I envy you, I haven’t been back in fifteen years, will probably never go back—and you can get the feel of being a civilian again. If you don’t like it, just walk into any UNEF installation and you’ll walk out an officer. Your choice of assignment.
“Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgment. Earth is not the same place you left.”
He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, smiling. “Most of you have something on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war. Your income puts you in a ninety-two-percent income-tax bracket: thirty-two thousand might last you about three years if you’re careful.
“Eventually you’re going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There are not that many jobs available. The population of Earth is nearly nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed.
“Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now going to be twenty-one years older than you. Many of your relatives will have passed away. I think you’ll find it a very lonely world.
“But to tell you something about this world, I’m going to turn you over to Captain Siri, who just arrived from Earth. Captain?”
“Thank you, General.” It looked as if there was something wrong with his skin, his face; and then I realized he was wearing powder and lipstick. His nails were smooth white almonds.
“I don’t know where to begin.” He sucked in his upper lip and looked at us, frowning. “Things have changed so very much since I was a boy.
“I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph…to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?” Nobody. “That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is.
“Most governments encourage homosexuality—the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual countries—they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.”
That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.
“As the General said, the population of the world is nine billion. It’s more than doubled since you were drafted. And nearly two-thirds of those people get out of school only to go on relief.
“Speaking of school, how many years of public schooling did the government give you?”
He was looking at me, so I answered. “Fourteen.”
He nodded. “It’s eighteen now. More, if you don’t pass your examinations. And you’re required by law to pass your exams before you’re eligible for any job or Class One relief. And brother-boy, anything besides Class One is hard to live on. Yes?” Hofstadter had his hand up.
“Sir, is it eighteen years public school in every country? Where do they find enough schools?”
“Oh, most people take the last five or six years at home or in a community center, via holoscre
en. The UN has forty or fifty information channels, giving instruction twenty-four hours a day.
“But most of you won’t have to concern yourselves with that. If you’re in the Force, you’re already too smart by half.”
He brushed hair from his eyes in a thoroughly feminine gesture, pouting a little. “Let me do some history to you. I guess the first really important thing that happened after you left was the Ration War.
“That was 2007. A lot of things happened at once. Locust plague in North America, rice blight from Burma to the South China Sea, red tides all along the west coast of South America: suddenly there just wasn’t enough food to go around. The UN stepped in and took over food distribution. Every man, woman, and child got a ration booklet, allowing thim to consume so many calories per month. If tha went over ther monthly allotment, tha just went hungry until the first of the next month.”
Some of the new people we’d picked up after Aleph used “tha, ther, thim” instead of “he, his, him,” for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal.
“Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over. They kept the rationing, but it’s never been really severe again.
“Incidentally, the General translated the money coming to you into dollars just for your own convenience. The world has only one currency now, calories. Your thirty-two thousand dollars comes to about three thousand million calories. Or three million k’s, kilocalories.
“Ever since the Ration War, the UN has encouraged subsistence farming wherever it’s practical. Food you grow yourself, of course, isn’t rationed…It got people out of the cities, onto UN farming reservations, which helped alleviate some urban problems. But subsistence farming seems to encourage large families, so the population of the world has more than doubled since the Ration War.
“Also, we no longer have the abundance of electrical power I remember from boyhood…probably a good deal less than you remember. There are only a few places in the world where you can have power all day and night. They keep saying it’s a temporary situation, but it’s been going on for over a decade.”
He went on like that for a long time. Well, hell, it wasn’t really surprising, much of it. We’d probably spent more time in the past two years talking about what home was going to be like than about anything else. Unfortunately, most of the bad things we’d prognosticated seemed to have come true, and not many of the good things.
The worst thing for me, I guess, was that they’d taken over most of the good parkland and subdivided it into little farms. If you wanted to find some wilderness, you had to go someplace where they couldn’t possibly make a plant grow.
He said that the relations between people who chose homolife and the ones he called “breeders” were quite smooth, but I wondered. I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I’d never had to cope with such an abundance of them.
He also said, in answer to an impolite question, that his powder and paint had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. It was just stylish. I decided I’d be an anachronism and just wear my face.
I don’t guess it should have surprised me that language had changed considerably in twenty years. My parents were always saying things were “cool,” joints were “grass,” and so on.
We had to wait several weeks before we could get a ride back to Earth. We’d be going back on the Anniversary, but first she had to be taken apart and put back together again.
Meanwhile, we were put in cozy little two-man billets and released from all military responsibilities. Most of us spent our days down at the library, trying to catch up on twenty-two years of current events. Evenings, we’d get together at the Flowing Bowl, an NCO club. The privates, of course, weren’t supposed to be there, but we found that nobody argues with a person who has two of the fluorescent battle ribbons.
I was surprised that they served heroin fixes at the bar. The waiter said that you get a compensating shot to keep you from getting addicted to it. I got really stoned and tried one. Never again.
Sub-major Stott stayed at Stargate, where they were assembling a new Strike Force Alpha. The rest of us boarded the Anniversary and had a fairly pleasant six-month journey. Cortez didn’t insist on everything being capital-M military, so it was a lot better than the trip from Yod-4.
Twenty-three
I hadn’t given it too much thought, but of course we were celebrities on Earth: the first vets home from the war. The Secretary General greeted us at Kennedy and we had a weeklong whirl of banquets, receptions, interviews, and all that. It was enjoyable enough, and profitable—I made a million k’s from Time-Life/Fax—but we really saw little of Earth until after the novelty wore off and we were more or less allowed to go our own way.
I picked up the Washington monorail at Grand Central Station and headed home. My mother had met me at Kennedy, suddenly and sadly old, and told me my father was dead. Flyer accident. I was going to stay with her until I could get a job.
She was living in Columbia, a satellite of Washington. She had moved back into the city after the Ration War—having moved out in 1980—and then failing services and rising crime had forced her out again.
She was waiting for me at the monorail station. Beside her stood a blond giant in a heavy black vinyl uniform, with a big gunpowder pistol on his hip and spiked brass knuckles on his right hand.
“William, this is Carl, my bodyguard and very dear friend.” Carl slipped off the knuckles long enough to shake hands with surprising gentleness. “Pleasameecha Misser Mandella.”
We got into a groundcar that had “Jefferson” written on it in bright orange letters. I thought that was an odd thing to name a car, but then found out that it was the name of the high-rise Mother and Carl lived in. The groundcar was one of several that belonged to the community, and she paid 100k per kilometer for the use of it.
I had to admit that Columbia was rather pretty: formal gardens and lots of trees and grass. Even the high-rises, roughly conical jumbles of granite with trees growing out at odd places, looked more like mountains than buildings. We drove into the base of one of these mountains, down a well-lit corridor to where a number of other cars were parked. Carl carried my solitary bag to the elevator and set it down.
“Miz Mandella, if is awright witcha, I gots to go pick up Miz Freeman in like five. She over West Branch.”
“Sure, Carl, William can take care of me. He’s a soldier, you know.” That’s right, I remember learning eight silent ways to kill a man. Maybe if things got really tight, I could get a job like Carl’s.
“Righty-oh, yeah, you tol’ me. Whassit like, man?”
“Mostly boring,” I said automatically. “When you aren’t bored, you’re scared.”
He nodded wisely. “Thass what I heard. Miz Mandella, I be ’vailable anytime after six. Righty-oh?”
“That’s fine, Carl.”
The elevator came and a tall skinny boy stepped out, an unlit joint dangling from his lips. Carl ran his fingers over the spikes on his knuckles, and the boy walked rapidly away.
“Gots ta watch out fer them riders. T’care a yerself, Miz Mandella.”
We got on the elevator and Mother punched 47. “What’s a rider?”
“Oh, they’re just young toughs who ride up and down the elevators looking for defenseless people without bodyguards. They aren’t too much of a problem here.”
The forty-seventh floor was a huge mall filled with shops and offices. We went to a food store.
“Have you gotten your ration book y
et, William?” I told her I hadn’t, but the Force had given me travel tickets worth a hundred thousand “calories” and I’d used up only half of them.
It was a little confusing, but they’d explained it to us.
When the world went on a single currency, they’d tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration books, so they’d made the new currency k’s, kilocalories, because that’s the unit for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalories of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread. So they instituted a sliding “ration factor,” so complicated that nobody could understand it. After a few weeks they were using the books again, but calling food kilocalories “calories” in an attempt to make things less confusing. Seemed to me they’d save a lot of trouble all around if they’d just call money dollars again, or rubles or sisterces or whatever…anything but kilocalories.
Food prices were astonishing, except for grains and legumes. I insisted on splurging on some good red meat: 1500 calories worth of ground beef, costing 1730k. The same amount of fakesteak, made from soy beans, would have cost 80k.
I also got a head of lettuce for 140k and a little bottle of olive oil for 175k. Mother said she had some vinegar. Started to buy some mushrooms but she said she had a neighbor who grew them and could trade something from her balcony garden.
At her apartment on the ninety-second floor, she apologized for the smallness of the place. It didn’t seem so little to me, but then she’d never lived on a spaceship.
Even this high up, there were bars on the windows. The door had four separate locks, one of which didn’t work because somebody had used a crowbar on it.