THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman

I looked behind me and she was still standing in the aisle. To make things even more odd, the man was virtually a twin to both of them. The man riffled through one of the notebooks and cleared his throat. “These books are for your convenience,” he said, also with perfect accent, “and you don’t have to read them if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, because.. . you’re free men and women. The war is over.” Disbelieving silence. “As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 A.D. “You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.” He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. “I am sorry for what you’ve been through and wish Icould say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not. “Even the wealth you have accumulated, back salary and compound interest, is worthless, as I no longer use money or credit. Nor is there such a thing as an economy, in which to use these . .. things.” “As you must have guessed by now,” the man took over, “I am, we are, clones of a single individual. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, my name was Kahn. Now it is Man. “I had a direct ancestor in your company, a Corporal Larry Kahn. It saddens me that he didn’t come back.” “I am over ten billion individuals but only one consciousness,” she said. “After you read, I will try to clarify this. I know that it will be difficult to understand. “No other humans are quickened, since I am the perfect pattern. Individuals who die are replaced. “There are some planets, however, on which humans are born in the normal, mammalian way. If my society is too alien for you, you may go to one of these planets. If you THE FOREVER WAR 249 wish to take part in procreation, I will not discourage it. Many veterans ask me to change their polarity to heterosexual so that they can more easily fit into these other societies. This I can do very easily.” Don’t worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket. “You will be my guest here at Stargate for ten days, after which you will be taken wherever you want to go,” he said. “Please read this book in the meantime. Feel free to ask any questions, or request any service.” They both stood and walked off the stage. Charlie was sitting next to me. “Incredible,” he said. “They let.. . they encourage. . . men and women to do thw again? Together?” The female aisle-Man was sitting behind us, and she answered before I could frame a reasonably sympathetic, hypocritical reply. “It isn’t a judgment on your society,” she said, probably not seeing that he took it a little more personally than that. ‘1 only feel that it’s necessary as a eugenic safety device. I have no evidence that there is anything wrong with cloning only one ideal individual, but if it turns out to have been a mistake, there will be a large genetic pool with which to start again.” She patted him on the shoulder. “Of course, you don’t have to go to these breeder planets. You can stay on one of my planets. I make no distinction between heterosexual play and homosexual.” She went up on the stage to give a long spiel about where we were going to stay and eat and so forth while we were on Stargate, “Never been seduced by a computer before,” Charlie muttered.

The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate. Once they could talk, the first question was “Why did you start this thing?” and the answer was “Me?” The Taurans hadn’t known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were 250 Joe Haldeman in positions of power. They virtually ran the United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group, that was taking advantage of the newly-discovered collapsar jump to explore interstellar space. Many of the early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The ex-military men were suspicious. They armed the colonizing vessels, and the first time they met a Tauran ship, they blasted it. They dusted off their medals and the rest was going to be history. You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored. The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it. The Taurans relearned war, after a fashion. They never got really good at it, and would eventually have lost. The Taurans, the book explained, couldn’t communicate with humans because they had no concept of the individual; they had been natural clones for millions of years. Eventually, Earth’s cruisers were manned by Man, Kahn-clones, and they were for the first time able to get through to each other. The book stated this as a bald fact. lasked a Man to explain what it meant, what was special about clone-to-clone communication, and he said that I a priori couldn’t understand it. There were no words for it. and my brain wouldn’t be able to accommodate the concepts even if there were words. All right. It sounded a little fishy, but I was willing to accept it. I’d accept that up was down if it meant the war was over.

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