“Your decorations say you’re combat.”
“Honorary. I was.” The rum Antares was a tall slender glass with a little ice floating at the top, filled with pale amber liquid. At the bottom was a bright red globule about the size of a thumbnail; crimson filaments waved up from it.
“What’s that red stuff?”
“Cinnamon. Oh, some ester with cinnamon in it. Quite good. . . want a taste?”
“No, I’ll stick to beer, thanks.”
“Down at level one, the library machine has a temporal orientation file, that my staff updates every day. You can go to it for specific questions. Mainly I want to… prepare you for meeting your Strike Force.”
“What, they’re all cyborgs? Clones?”
He laughed. “No, it’s illegal to clone humans. The main problem is with, uh, you’re heterosexual.”
“Oh, that’s no problem. I’m tolerant.”
“Yes, your profile shows that you… think you’re tolerant, but that’s not the problem, exactly.”
“Oh,” I knew what he was going to say. Not the details, but the substance.
“Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF.
“I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.”
“If they think they’re going to cure me-”
“Relax, you’re too old.” He took a delicate sip. “It won’t be as hard to get along with them as you might-”
“Wait. You mean nobody… everybody in my company is homosexual? But me?”
“William, everybody on Earth is homosexual. Except for a thousand or so; veterans and incurables.”
“AK” What could I say? “Seems like a drastic way to solve the population problem.”
“Perhaps. It does work, though; Earth’s population is stable at just under a billion. When one person dies or goes offplanet, another is quickened.”
“Not ‘born.'”
“Born, yes, but not the old-fashioned way. Your old term for it was ‘test-tube babies,’ but of course they don’t use a test-tube.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Part of every creche is an artificial womb that takes care of a person the first eight or ten months after quickening. What you would call birth takes place over a period of days; it isn’t the sudden, drastic event that it used to be.”
O brave new world, I thought. “No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals.”
“Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards. You and I might find them a little odd.”
“That’s an understatement.” I drank off the rest of my beer. “Yourself, you, uh.. . are you homosexual?”
“Oh, no,” he said. I relaxed. “Actually, though, I’m not hetero anymore, either.” He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. “Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can’t regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I’m a cyborg.”
Far out, as my mother used to say. “Oh, Private,” I called to the waiter, “bring me one of those Antares things.” Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.
“Make it a double, please.”
2
They looked normal enough, filing into the lecture hail where we held our first muster, the next day. Rather young and a little stiff.
Most of them had only been out of the creche for seven or eight years. The creche was a controlled, isolated environment to which only a few specialists-pediatricians and teachers, mostly-had access. When a person leaves the creche at age twelve or thirteen, he chooses a first name (his last name having been taken from the donor-parent with the higher genetic rating) and is legally a probationary adult, with schooling about equivalent to what I had after my first year of college. Most of them go on to more specialized education, but some are assigned a job and go right to work.
They’re observed very closely and anyone who shows any signs of sociopathy, such as heterosexual leanings, is sent away to a correctional facility. He’s either cured or kept there for the rest of his life.
Everyone is drafted into UNEF at the age of twenty. Most people work at a desk for five years and are discharged. A few lucky souls, about one in eight thousand, are invited to volunteer for combat training. Refusing is “sociopathic,” even though it means signing up for an extra five years. And your chance of surviving the ten years is so small as to be negligible; nobody ever had. Your best chance is to have the war end before your ten (subjective) years of service are up. Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles.