Quincy gestured us in and we sat on the couch, a meter from him. Marysia silently went through a tunnel to what must have been a kitchen, for she soon came back with a tray of munchies and some cold beers. After a few moments, the women went off and left Quincy and me alone.
“I knew that Zuzanna would be gone, but with the two of you working alternate shifts, it will be a while before I can see the two of you together, or her at all, for that matter. She has the same shift as Radek, my alternate. It’s been months since I’ve talked to someone who wasn’t a tank, a simulation, or my girlfriend, and I’ve been craving for some human company. You’re lucky, being able to have your wife with you.”
“There wasn’t any luck involved with it. When we volunteered, it was with the express understanding that we would stay together. They went along with it, even though the draft had already been approved.”
“The draft?” I said, “This is the first I’ve heard of any draft.”
“You must have joined a few weeks before we did, then. There was quite a flap about it, especially the way it was done.”
“What way was that?”
“Well, back in history, when all the wars were fought, they always drafted the healthy young men. Young people who had the most to contribute to the world, and who were actually the most valuable to society. But the council decided to do it backwards, for us. They said that there was no need to risk the young when there were so many of us oldsters around. Fighting in one of these tanks doesn’t take any strength or much endurance, after all. You don’t have to be healthy to start out with, either. These tanks are better doctors than anything we had on New Kashubia, I can tell you. And you don’t have to be male. A woman can do just as well as a man. All you need is judgment and discretion, and that’s where a mature person shines. So they started by taking the oldest and feeblest of us, and God! How the people complained!”
“I would have complained too!” I said, “The very thought of sending my grandmother off to fight somebody else’s war is horrible!”
“True. But once your grandmother had spent a few days in a tank, she wouldn’t be complaining at all. In fact, I guarantee that she will love it. Or rather that she does love it, since if she’s over sixty-five, she has almost certainly been drafted.”
“And how can you know such a thing?”
“Because I am a great-grandfather myself. Zuzanna and I have eleven great-grandchildren! I tell you that getting into these tanks was the best thing that has happened to us in thirty years. My wife was dying, for lack of decent chemotherapy, and I was in pretty poor shape myself. Look at me now! I’m a young man again, and Zuzanna is her old sexy self.”
“In simulation, yes. But in reality?” I said.
“Screw reality! I feel great! What’s more, my real body is getting much better. Zuzanna’s cancer has been arrested, and it’s likely that we both have many years of good, enjoyable life ahead of us.”
“If you don’t get killed in this war.”
“True. But if that does have to happen, well, better me than one of my grandkids. After all, I’ve had my life, and it’s been a good one. They haven’t had theirs, yet.”
“What if your bodies don’t get better?”
“In time, of course, that’s going to happen, medicine or no medicine. It’ll even happen to you, eventually. But when it does, there is still one more option open to us. Most of these tanks you’ve seen are Mark XIXs. Did you know that there is also a Mark XX model? They have the same capabilities, but they are thirty percent smaller, so they’re that much harder for the enemy to hit. They could shrink them down because they don’t have to contain a complete human body, just the brain and the spinal column. When your body finally goes to hell, you don’t have to go there along with it! You can become a cyborg and live another thousand years!”
Now that was a strange thought, and one I didn’t like. I said as much to Quincy.
“I take it that you are a very young man, Mickolai. In your twenties, right? Well, let me tell you that when you are eighty-five, as I am, your thoughts will be different. At my age, a body is no longer a source of joy. It’s a source of almost continuous pain, or it would be except for my tank. The thought of doing without a body doesn’t bother me in the least, and Zuzanna likes the idea. We were ready to volunteer for the cyborg treatment when the current emergency occurred, and as soon as it’s over, we’ll likely do it. In combat, it’s safer, among other things. They tell me that the process is absolutely painless. If fact, they can even do it to you without your ever knowing it was done, Dream World being what it is.”
“Well, my uncle once told me that it takes all kinds of people to make a world, and I guess he’s right again. I only wish I’d had the option of working a deal with Kasia, my girlfriend, the way you have with Zuzanna.”
“I take it that you didn’t exactly volunteer,” Quincy said.
“No.”
“Well, don’t talk about it until you’re ready to. I’ll still be here to listen. Hell, I’ve been around since they sent out the first interstellar ships.”
“You remember the invention of the Hassan-Smith Transporter?”
“Well, I’m not that old. After all, the Hassan-Smith Interstellar Transporter was invented way back in 1972 in Beirut, Lebanon, as part of a program ostensibly designed to transport terrorists quickly and quietly into and out of sensitive areas. The leadership of the organization had no faith in Abdul Hassan’s absurd claims, but they supported him because some of his followers were good at time bombs and booby traps, and anyway, he worked cheap.”
“That’s not quite the way they told it when I was in school.”
“Schoolteachers lie a lot. I know. I married one. I’m telling you the way it really happened. On its first tryout, Hassan’s fairly simple device worked entirely too well, transporting a Fatimid volunteer two meters into the wall of the cellar where the work was being done. This accident did not dismay the terrorist leadership, for they were quite accustomed to losing half of their followers to premature bombs and so on. After all, explosives are tricky stuff for guys mostly used to herding goats and beating women.”
I could tell that he was getting wound up on a favorite topic, the way an old man will, so I just popped another beer, leaned back, and let him rattle on. Hearing a male voice was good after months of exclusively female companionship.
“Unfortunately, it set Hassan’s project back fifty years, and Hassan himself for the theological seven thousand, since the inventor, his assistants, all of their notes, and the surrounding nine city blocks were demolished in the blast. Some days you just can’t win,” he said, shaking his head and taking another drink himself before continuing.
“Three separate right wing Israeli groups claimed credit for the kill, but no one was left alive to dispute their claims, so people soon forgot about it.
“Rumors of Hassan’s accomplishments were discounted by the academic community. After all, his only advanced degree was a mere master’s granted by a college in North Dakota, for God’s sake, and his papers weren’t published by the best journals. Obviously a second rater.
“Nothing was done about it for fifty years, until 2021, when a fellow named Christian Artemis Smith became interested in Hassan’s work after finding a paper by him in the basement of the Hoople Weekly Times. To be sure, Smith was but a lowly history major, but Hassan’s basic ideas and circuits were so simple that they could be followed by even the totally uneducated products of American institutions. Working with an E-2 from the local air base who had built his own stereo, success soon followed.
“Fortunately, their device was aimed upward at the first trial, and it was set by mistake for three kilometers instead of the intended three meters. Their test object, a hundred pounds of old newspapers, fluttered down in very poor and shredded condition over two square miles of winter wheat.
“Shortly thereafter, the pair of inventors brought in a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman to help them promote the idea, and they prospered largely because Smith’s aunt insisted that the patent be put in his name before she’d lend them another dime.
“Their first public demonstration in 2022 resulted in an atrocious bill from the electric company, which was canceled since nobody believed they could possibly have used that much power.