We were enjoying a light lunch in the transparent “first floor” of Skye, watching the ocean glide by underneath us, when a messenger bustled in and gave us two envelopes: our orders. Marygay had been bumped to captain, and 1 to major, on the basis of our military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company commander and she was a company’s executive officer. But they weren’t the same company. She was going to muster with a new company being formed right here on Heaven. I was going back to Stargate for “indoctrination and education” before taking command. For a long time we couldn’t say anything. “I’m going to protest,” I said finally, weakly. “They can’t make me a commander. Into a commander.” She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead. We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death. We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had [LIE FUKEVEIt WAIt 169 all been allotted. I pointed out That most of them probably hadn’t even been born yet. Nevertheless, allotted, they said. It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries. Not in terms of people. We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn’t just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other’s only link to real life, the Earth of the 1980s and 90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it was like a casket rattling down into a grave. I commandeered computer time and found out the orbital elements of her ship and its departure time; found out I could watch her leave from “our” desert. I landed on the pinnacle where we had starved together and, a few hours before dawn, watched a new star appear over the western horizon, flare to brilliance and fade as it moved away, becoming just another star, then a dim star, and then nothing. I walked to the edge and looked down the sheer rock face to the dim frozen rippling of dunes half a kilometer below. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge, thinking nothing, until the sun’s oblique rays illuminated the dunes in a soft, tempting chiaroscuro of low relief. Twice I shifted my weight as if to jump. When I didn’t, it was not for fear of pain or loss. The pain would be only a bright spark and the loss would be only the army’s. And it would be their ultimate victory over me- having ruled my life for so long, to force an end to it. That much, I owed to the enemy. MAJOR MANDELLA 2458-3143 A.D. 1
What was that old experiment they told us about in high school biology? Take a flatworm and teach it how to swim through a maze. Then mash it up and feed it to a stupid flatworm, and lo! the stupid flatworm would be able to swim the maze, too. I had a bad taste of major general in my mouth. Actually, I supposed they had refined the techniques since my high school days. With time dilation, that was about 450 years for research and development. At Stargate, my orders said, I was to undergo “indoctrination and education” prior to taking command of my very own Strike Force. Which was what they still called a company. For my education on Stargate, they didn’t mince up major generals and serve them to me with hollandaise. They didn’t feed me anything except glucose for three weeks. Glucose and electricity. They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That’s an “accelerated life situation computer.” It kept me busy. I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff. I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that’s what all those electrodes were for. Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was 173 14 ~•1 j ‘iv iiaiuviiwu long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time. Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn’t in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank. Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don’t. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I’ll never forget the poetry of “the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party c~ommander will detail one platoon sergeant. . .” and so on. That’s from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader’s Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages. If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training. One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself. I hadn’t met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers’ Club after dinner. I11L r’JnLVLn Wt-t[t .i ~ TABLE OF ORGANIZATION