The Eternity Brigade Part 9

Hawker remembered one incident where Thaddeus Connors, the hostile black whose life he'd saved in China, went completely crazy. The soldiers were fighting an alien invasion on a human-occupied colony world, and a group of soldiers were enjoying some leave time in a local bar. Connors, as usual, kept to himself, disdaining to speak to anyone. Several of the bar's customers were civilian colonists of this era, and they got into an involved philosophical discussion on the question of race. Most modern humans were all of a fairly dusky skin, the products of long racial interbreeding, and the civilians could scarcely understand why some people in earlier times had allowed themselves to be all black or all white.

Something in this conversation touched off a spark in Connors. Hesuddenly went berserk, throwing furniture around the room and lunging at people indiscriminately. He lifted one bar patron bodily and threw her so hard against the wall that her head was smashed in; the rest of the people danced quickly out of his reach and Connors, unable to inflict more damage, left the bar. He was shot and killed a short while later by the robot police.

In relating the incident to Green some time afterward, Hawker wondered what would have caused Connors to explode that way. "Simple,"

Green answered. "Those people were attacking the one piece of pride Connors had."

"I don't understand."

"Connors has always kept apart-and he always thought it was our prejudice rather than his own. Being black was a convenient excuse for him. He'd say to himself, 'People hate me because I'm black,' and so he turned it around and made it a point of pride: 'People are jealous of me because I'm black.' I should know; we Jews have done that for thousands of years, always being different and priding ourselves on it.

"Those people in the bar undercut his entire rationale. They said skin color didn't matter, and it mattered very much to Connors. He's built his whole life around the idea of being Superblack, and he couldn't stand to see himself mocked that way."

Green shook his head. "That's a very dangerous man, Hawk. I try to avoid him whenever possible."

Another duple of Connors was resurrected, of course, one who had no recollection of the incident in the bar. But new man or not, there seemed nothing anyone could do to improve his disposition.

There were a few pleasant memories in all that time. Hawker fondly recalled his first s.e.xual experience with an alien.

He'd been lost and separated from his unit for two days. He'd been wounded slightly in the shoulder-not serious, but combined with hunger and exposure, the injury had weakened him. He came to a farm building and tried to find shelter inside it. Something moved, he glanced up quickly, and there was one of the alien natives staring down at him from a loft.These beings, the Bimaree, were bipedal and averaged the same height as a human, but those were about the only similarities. Their bodies were completely covered with downy fur, in a wide variety of colors that ranged mostly in the yellows and browns. They had no heads; instead, all their sensory apparatus and their brain cases were in a bony area near the center of their torsos. Their notion of clothing seemed to be lengths of wide, colorful cloth draped tastefully about their limbs, leaving the torso bare. It was rumored they had three, possibly more, s.e.xes. Hawker never knew for certain; soldiers were rarely given such detailed biological data.

As long as he knew how to kill them, that was sufficient.

He had no way of knowing what s.e.x this particular Bimaree was, but he always thought of it as female because of its personality-and perhaps, in some little way, that made it acceptable.

The training probe the army had given him on his awakening hadn't included knowledge of the local language-it wasn't anything that the soldiers were expected to know. Consequently, Hawker found himself in an awkward position: he didn't know whether this particular Bimaree was an ally or one of the rebels he was fighting-and his flamer was out of charge.

The only other weapon he had was a knife, and his arm was wounded a little too badly to throw it accurately. If this was an enemy, he'd have to wait until it came into range.

But the Bimaree didn't look hostile. She stared back at him with those large green eyes in the center of her torso, and didn't move for several minutes. Then, slowly, she climbed down out of the loft and approached him, careful to make no sudden moves that would alarm him.

An enemy, Hawker decided, would have shot him instantly if it could, and in no case would it approach this timidly. He had probably just stumbled across some hapless civilian farmer tending her ch.o.r.es. He had no quarrel with her. Perhaps she would give him some food and help him find his way back to camp.

He pointed to his shoulder, and even the Bimaree could tell the flamer wound was not a normal part of his body. She said something and backed slowly out of the barn, to return minutes later with a container of salve.

Hawker had no idea whether an alien medication would help or hurt him, but, like the other resurrectees, he had developed a philosophical att.i.tude about such things. He might as well try the salve in the hopes it would cure him; if it killed him instead, the worst thing that would happen ishe'd be dupled again without remembering this war. Life and death had ceased being matters of high concern.

He peeled off his shirt and motioned the Bimaree closer. She came to him slowly, took a handful of the salve and began rubbing it into the wound. The cream stung at first; Hawker gasped in pain, and the Bimaree pulled back, startled. Hawker beckoned her again, though, and she reluctantly continued the process. After a few minutes the stinging abated, and all he could feel was the coolness of the salve and the warmth of her furry hand caressing his skin.

Hawker had never had s.e.x with an alien before. Some of the other resurrectees had, but he'd always considered them perverted. Now, though, tired as he was he couldn't help recalling some of the obscene barracks chatter about the Bimaree. "They f.u.c.k like bunnies," confided one man, who claimed to know. "They got some kind of s.e.xual cycle where they get aroused real easy, and then it don't matter whether you're a man, a Bimaree, or a tree branch, they gotta have you in them. Go for the little slit in the back, where you think the a.s.shole's gonna be-it's really the c.u.n.t. Nice and tight, too. They're fantastic." Hawker had been repelled by the idea then-but now, with the Bimaree's hand sensuously caressing his wounded shoulder, he felt himself becoming strongly aroused.

He reached up tentatively to caress the Bimaree. Her down skin was velvet to his questing fingertips, a smooth, sensual warmth that seemed to welcome his touch. The Bimaree did not shy away, but responded to his stroking by rubbing harder against his body-not just his wounded shoulder, but across his chest and neck as well.

It's true, Hawker marveled. They do arouse quickly.

He was suddenly more excited than he could bear. He reached awkwardly down to unfasten his slacks and yanked them below his knees, then pulled the alien down on top of him. She came compliantly and he was soon inside her, his only concern being not to grab her eyes accidentally. The feel of her soft fur against his skin added a dimension to the experience that no human female could have matched.

Afterward he felt greatly embarra.s.sed, though she seemed to think nothing of the incident. He dressed again and she brought him into her house-where she apparently lived alone-for dinner. They made love again twice that night, and each time was unique unto itself.The next morning, a company of soldiers came by the farm, and Hawker joined up with them. He said goodbye to the Bimaree, but he was never sure she understood him. And of course he never saw her again.

He had s.e.x with many other alien females after losing that particular virginity, but he always treasured the memory of that one idyllic encounter. And while other soldiers joked and made obscene comments about the other races, Hawker kept his private relations very much to himself-perhaps out of respect for the "honor" of that one Bimaree who gave so much pleasure to a stranger.

s.e.x was not always that easily indulged in, however. During one incarnation the resurrectees found themselves segregated by gender once again. This was surprising after so many centuries of s.e.xual equality, but they learned that the culture they were fighting for was a particularly puritanistic one. s.e.x between a man and a woman before marriage was a capital crime-and even during marriage, it was only permitted during specified religious celebrations.

There was nothing sinful, however, about h.o.m.os.e.xual relations at any time. The army offered a wide selection of men for Hawker and his comrades to utilize (and Hawker a.s.sumed there were women available for the female resurrectees). Somehow, though-despite his experiences with women of other races-the line of h.o.m.os.e.xuality was one that Hawker could not bring himself to cross. He and most of his fellows decided to abstain throughout the course of this particular war.

Perhaps because of that, or because its defenders lacked the essential enthusiasm, this religious culture lost its war. The society was smashed, its principles crushed, its people scattered to planets all across the Galaxy.

The resurrectees never had to face anything quite that strict again.

Through good times and bad, Hawker fought on. He lived hundreds of lives, died hundreds of deaths. He dwelt among the stars and trod on soils that had never before felt the foot of man. He walked side by side with creatures out of a surrealist's imagination, and called them "friend." He killed with the efficiency of his namesake the hawk, and laughed but seldom. He was orphan to the Universe, slave to Chaos and Destruction.

He was the ultimate soldier, obeying his orders, marching into unimaginable battles, fighting for causes he could not comprehend.

His soul-if, indeed, he'd ever possessed one-had been lost long ago inthe mists of antiquity, when Mankind was still confined to one tiny ball of rock. He pursued his destiny emotionlessly, as though in a dream. He was drained. Nothing in the Universe could matter to him ever again-or at least, that was what he thought when he bothered to think of such things.

Until he came to a world called Cellina.

PART TWO.

CELLINA.

The awakening occurred as it always did, with barely the slightest pause between his last thought and the present, even though, he found later, there had been fifteen years in between. The resurrection machinery was by now quite sophisticated, able to reconstruct the entire army of recorded soldiers at one time in one place, rather than on the piecemeal basis it had been at first.

Hawker was standing in a large blue auditorium with more than a thousand other resurrectees. From the information the training probe had placed in his brain, he knew he was on the planet Cellina, third world out from a G-type star. The inhabitants were all of human extraction, although by this time there had been so much genetic engineering done on the race that "humans" could be as bizarre as any alien. Hawker had generously been given a knowledge of the native language, since it was a.s.sumed the army would be doing liaison work with the locals. The dispute was with an alien race who claimed a prior right to colonize the planet, having visited it a thousand years before the humans came and left some esoteric mark to note their presence.

This was all standard stuff, not even worth thinking about.

Straightforward, no problem. The only question, deep in the back of his mind, was whether he'd survive the experience and carry the memory forward with him into the future.

Then a woman screamed off to his right, and Hawker-along with the rest of the group-turned quickly to see what was the matter.

At first glance there was an alien in their midst. There was no reason why aliens couldn't be dupied too, and Hawker was certain that there wereother computers doing just that; but normally, for the sake of h.o.m.ogeneity if nothing else, each group of resurrectees was of the same race. Still, the mere sight of an alien should not have caused one of their number, battle-hardened as she must be, to scream.

Then Hawker looked more closely at the being, and felt a chill run up his spine. It wasn't an alien, it was a human being-but a human being so twisted and deformed that it was barely recognizable as such. Its face was a putty mask left out in the sun and then attacked by a hyperactive child; the right half of the face was a runny, flesh-colored blank, with both eyes on the left side of the nose and an eyebrow arching crazily upward. The neck was twisted halfway around, so the man was constantly looking over his left shoulder. His spine was bent into an S-curve, and the limbs on his left side were perceptibly longer than those on his right. The fingers on the man's right hand were barely warts growing out of a clublike fist.

Hawker turned away quickly again in disgust. No wonder the woman had screamed. Something had obviously gone wrong with the dupling process, creating a monster instead of the person who was supposed to be there. But Hawker guessed that the real reason behind the woman's scream-and behind his own revulsion-was not the actual sight of the person there; after all, each of them had seen creatures far uglier than that. The really horrifying thought was that this mistake in dupling could just as easily have happened to any of them.

He wondered what it would be like to go into the dupling machine as he'd done hundreds of times before, totally confident of the procedure-and then suddenly, between one thought and the next, become a hideous, twisted freak. To become deformed during the course of a lifetime was one thing; everyone in this room had probably lost a limb or been burned beyond recognition, only to be fixed up again, with some degree of success, by army medical technicians. But the suddenness of this transformation hit like a hard blow to the stomach; Hawker had to fight the waves of nausea that threatened to overwhelm him.

Officers in crisp green uniforms pushed their way through the mob of resurrectees to the side of the twisted creature, and Hawker took a second look at the mistake. It was then that he got the second shock in as many minutes. In trying to visualize what that person might have looked like before the accident, he rearranged the facial features-and felt a chill shoot up his spine when he realized who it was.That pitiful, deformed monstrosity was David Green.

The officers hustled Green out of the room before anyone had a chance to do more than note what had happened. No mention was officially made of the incident, and the army behaved as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. But the question burned in Hawker's mind, and he resolved not to leave this incarnation without finding some answer to his friend's horrible transformation.

The war was mostly being fought in s.p.a.ce, as the aliens launched wave after wave of attack ships against Cellina's defenses. Hawker served on the crew of one fighter ship, occasionally seeing action by boarding enemy vessels. Everything was totally routine; he'd seen such action a dozen times before. After two months, he received a pa.s.s to go on leave back to the planet's surface-where, he hoped, some answers would await him.

As it turned out, Symington was on a pa.s.s at the same time. Hawker found him in a bar, drinking with three other resurrectees-two men named Singh and Costanza, and a woman named Belilo. Hawker knew them all vaguely. He joined Symington's party- something he would normally have avoided unless specifically asked-and forced himself to join in the usual b.i.t.c.h session about the duty each had pulled and how rotten the conditions were. After a decent interval of meaningless chatter, Hawker brought the conversation around to the subject of the "accident"

at their resurrection.

"Yeah, that was weird," Costanza said with a shiver.

"Do you have any idea who it was, Lucky?" Hawker asked.

Symington scratched his head. "I'm not sure..."

"It was Dave," Hawker said flatly. "He looked pretty horrible, but I recognized him despite the changes."

"Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Symington said.

"You mean Green?" asked Singh. "He seemed like a nice guy. I think I served with him once."

"We all did," said Belilo. There was a moment's silence as she took a sip of her drink, and then she added, "It's a d.a.m.n shame. He sure as h.e.l.ldidn't deserve all this."

"AH what?" Hawker asked. "Have you heard anything about him?"

"Well, I spent a part of my time on the base, and I managed to get plugged into the pipeline. A few rumors were leaking around. Nothing much. They just say that something went wrong with the tape, or whatever it is they record our patterns on. It's a total loss, and the guy-Green-can't ever be remade properly.

From what I hear, they've got him under observation for tests somewhere on the base. They're studying him like some sort of freak."

"Thanks." Hawker stood up from the table.

"Where are you going?" Symington asked.

"I'm going to see if I can get some answers from the people in charge."

"They don't want to talk much about it," Belilo said.

"They will when I get through with them." Hawker turned angrily to leave.

Singh grabbed his arm. "You think you're going to go in there like that and scare them? They won't take any s.h.i.t from you."

"You got any better ideas?" Hawker tried to pull his arm away, but Singh's grip was too strong.

"As a matter of fact, I do. We all go in together. Green was our friend too, right?" Singh looked around the table as though daring the others to deny the fact. But there was no thought of disagreement. The resurrectees had been under the thumb of the army so long that the thought of shaking up the bureaucracy was stimulating.

"They'll think twice about crossing us if there's five of us," Costanza said.

"We'd better be ready for trouble, though," Belilo warned. "If we give them too much ha.s.sle they can just shoot us down and duple us again-and the new versions won't know anything's wrong.""I can break into the arms locker, no problem," Symington said.

"Hey, wait," Costanza objected. "Facing them down is one thing; armed revolt is another."

Belilo stared into his face. "Oh yeah? What can they do to us they haven't already done? Come on, Chico, make up your mind-are you in or not?"

Costanza looked at the four determined faces around him. "In," he said with little hesitation. "I just wanted to make sure we all knew what we're doing."

"We know," Hawker said grimly.

By implied consent, Singh took charge of the group. They first "liberated" a floatcar and drove it back to the base, where, as Symington had promised, they had no trouble raiding the weapons storeroom. In addition to two beampistols apiece, which they tucked, hidden, into their trousers, they took a small supply of grenades and rifles. "If we're going to look for trouble," Singh explained, "we'd better be prepared to find it."

The grenades were small enough to store in their pockets; the rifles would be left in the floatcar until they met bigger trouble.

Thus armed, they began making their inquiries. They were polite at first, but their tempers grew shorter as they were bounced from office to office, being told at each step along the way that someone else had the information they wanted. Finally, though, they reached a point where the clerks began looking more guilty, and the denials were much too emphatic.

It was Hawker who tired of the runaround first. The clerk behind the desk was a woman with feathered eyebrows and a smooth, downy head of hair. Grabbing her by the front of her tunic, Hawker informed her that he wanted to speak to the officer in charge immediately. The woman looked at him, and then at the determined faces of his four friends. The fighters were usually so apathetic that she didn't know how to deal with them in this aroused state. She decided to pa.s.s the problem along to her superior.

She coded the door to open and told them they could go in-but Singh insisted that she be brought along, too, so she couldn't give any alarm.

Beyond the door was a s.p.a.cious office. A flattened computer screenfloated in midair like a desktop with no legs, and behind it sat a man who was obviously used to being in charge. He was fat and totally bald, clad in a one-piece gray uniform, and his skin was a mottled green and blue. His breast plate identified him only as "Philaskut."

Rank as Hawker had originally known it had long ago vanished in the army, replaced by a sideways tiered system of authority so complicated he had never fully understood it. Under normal circ.u.mstances this caused little problem; everyone not a resurrectee was in principle his superior, and he just obeyed everyone's orders. Soldiers were just p.a.w.ns in the great cosmic game, and inferior to everyone else. Hawker and his friends had no way of knowing how important this Philaskut was in the chain of command-but at the moment, they didn't care.

"What do you people want?" Philaskut asked. He was neither angry nor indignant at this invasion of his office; if anything, Hawker would have judged him bemused.

Hawker became the group's unofficial spokesman. "We want to know what happened to the man who was accidentally malformed when we were dupled two months ago."

Philaskut steepled his fingers in front of him. "The army would prefer not to dwell on that subject. In view of the process's overwhelming success for centuries, one failure is hardly worth-"

Symington leaned forward, resting his clenched first on the computer screen. His large bulk was satisfactorily intimidating. "He was a friend of ours."

"I see. That is a pity. However, as I said, there's nothing I can-"

"A very special friend," Singh moved around to the other side of the desk, his looming providing a counterpoint to Symington's. He enunciated each word clearly.

"We want to know everything about the problem," Belilo added, taking a menacing stance beside Hawker in front of the desktop.

Philaskut was no longer quite so bemused. "I a.s.sure you, there's nothing you could do about the matter, anyway.""Why don't you just give us the details so we can see that for ourselves?" Hawker allowed his tone to be more reasonable, providing a rational alternative to the blatant menace of the others.

Philaskut leaped at the bait. "It was a total accident, well beyond anyone's ability to either predict or control. Do you know how an object's patterns are stored?"

"No," Singh said slowly, "but I'm sure you'll tell us."

Philaskut licked his lips and considered, reminding himself that he was dealing with people who were, compared to himself, scientifically primitive. "Do you know what molecules are?"

"Basically," Hawker answered.

"Well, the molecules of certain crystals are arranged in an orderly configuration called a lattice. Normally these lattices are rigidly constructed, but under the proper circ.u.mstances we can bend them, making some sides infinitesimally longer or shorter, as we choose. There's a complex code for what each slight amount of deviation means, and so wide a possible variation that we can make each molecule hold several bits of information. A crystal large enough to describe an entire human being is only slightly bigger than a grain of salt. The fact that we've kept perfect track of everyone for so long indicates how accurate and efficient our system is."

"But not this time," Hawker persisted.

Philaskut took a deep breath. "No, not this time. Something went wrong in the subject's crystal..."

"Green," Hawker said.