The Eternity Brigade (17 page)

“No choice,” she said. “The judge ordered me in here.”

“What’d you do?” He had sudden visions of her on trial for murder. Not that it mattered now, of course.

“Counterfeiting.”

“I thought nobody used money any more.”

“Not money. People. The technical charge was ‘unauthorized dubbing.’ The government likes to keep their monopoly. Three of my co-husbands and I were dubbing people without permission. My husbands were just executed, but I was the ringleader, so I got sent into the army.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “Wish they’d just killed me, too. It’d be better than all this shit.”

Food, sleep, sex and talk. Belilo did most of the talking. She told Hawker what it was like to grow up and live in a totally artificial world. He listened, not completely understanding and not completely caring.

After nearly a month of this they were discovered by a salvage crew looking for wreckage. The war, they learned, had been over for two weeks. In due course they were returned to the army to be copied once more into the database.

***

Then back to Earth, but in a role he hadn’t expected. He was part of an expeditionary force from the Planetary League, sent to punish the mother world for its recalcitrance in submitting to the “natural domination” of Geos.

Hawker and his cohorts did their job well, and Earth learned its lesson. Never again was it in a position to challenge its former colonies for control of its own destiny.

***

Then there came a gap of more than a hundred and fifty years, the largest single hiatus Hawker could ever recall. Since it was unlikely there’d been no wars during all that period, Hawker could only assume he’d died numerous times in the interim. None of his friends, of course, would say anything about it, and he never asked.

Norquist’s Rangers continued to expand. The dubs called it “getting reassigned.” It became a humorless joke, and then a bitter fact of life. Some envied the Rangers.

Technology had improved markedly during the past few centuries. The resurrection process had been made ever more streamlined, with the nutrient tanks growing smaller and more efficient, until now they were no longer needed. At present it was possible to re-create a person out of “thin air” simply by playing his pattern in a special way that Hawker couldn’t even begin to understand.

The language barrier, which had been a constantly growing problem, was also solved by the invention of the training caps. All the information the subject needed to know was implanted directly into his brain. After that, he became as fluent in the current language as any native, and was well versed in the theory and practice of all the latest weaponry. Green was vastly disappointed at these developments; he’d been hoping he and the other resurrectees would become gradually obsolete. Now there seemed no chance of that.

At the same time, the army dashed another hope of his—that the soldiers would eventually become too old to fight any more. While no time elapsed for them when they were patterns in the computer, they did age during the periods when they were let out to fight. Physically, Hawker, Green and Symington were all men in their thirties by this time; if they aged too much further, even the army would give up on them.

But progress once again decided against them. They were now given rejuvenation treatments and learned that no one—at least, no one on the advanced, civilized planets—aged anymore. Everyone was eternally youthful and, except for accidents and acts of war, no one ever died.

On the surface, it sounded ideal: an age of prosperity when material goods, like the soldiers, could be dubbed at will to relieve need, and when people could look forward to many centuries, at least, of useful, active lives.

But this golden age was on the surface only. There were still soldiers, still wars, still a need to fight and kill. The reasons behind the combat had become too subtle for Hawker to comprehend, but they still existed—and as long as they did, he and his friends were doomed to Green’s “merry-go-round.”

This was the first war Hawker fought in a different solar system. The planet was a world circling the star Alpha Centauri B, and the enemy was a group of rebel colonists who were trying to declare their independence from the Solar League that had given them birth. Days were long, and very strange. Sometimes there would be two suns in the sky at once, casting odd double shadows on the landscape and playing hell with Hawker’s perceptions. Sometimes night never came at all, as Alpha Centauri A would come over the horizon just as B was setting. And even when both stars were down, the night was seldom dark—Proxima Centauri, the nearby companion, often glowed in the sky like a bright red distress flare. Battle strategies had to be considerably revamped to take these ephemerides into account.

Not that it mattered to Hawker. The landscapes might change, the weapons might improve, but war itself remained dismally the same.

***

The next war was also fought on a world circling a different star, one that didn’t even have a real name in human language, just a catalog designation. What made this war particularly memorable was that it was the first time Hawker fought against alien beings. The “Sticks” were no more native to this planet than Hawker was; this world had developed no intelligent life of its own, and was being coveted by both races.

The Sticks were tall, thin creatures who looked much more fragile than they really were. They came from a world with a slightly lower gravitational force than Earth, and were probably better suited to this world than the humans. Hawker found the gravity a little too light—though stronger than on Mars—and the air a little too thin for his taste; he was constantly having to gulp for breath, while the Sticks seemed unaffected.

In the end, an agreement was reached. The Sticks settled on two of the three major continents and the humans on the remaining one. Hawker wondered why no one had thought of that earlier.

***

There was an incarnation, somewhere in this time period, when the army tried an experiment. Someone in Planning decided there was no reason why only one duplicate of a given soldier should be made at a time; why not dub squads composed entirely of a single man? The advantages were obvious. Such a squad would be more coordinated than any other in history. Every member would have the same reflexes, the same thought patterns, the same level of skills. There could be no dissension, no arguments, no conflicts of personality—in short, it would be the perfect fighting unit.

The experiment was duly carried out, with Hawker and several of the other dubs chosen to be multiply copied for special squadrons. At first, the experiment seemed to pay off—the “clone squads” fought with exceptional precision as long as they received no casualties. But then the experiment fell apart. There was something very demoralizing about seeing
yourself
lying dead or bleeding on the ground beside you. Once a few members of the clone squads were killed, the other members generally went crazy and became useless.
These dubs were destroyed without allowing their memories to be recorded, and were later restored from previous backups.

Hawker, naturally, remembered nothing of this, and the experiment was never repeated.

***

Then there was a war back on Earth itself, between two vast domed cities under the Pacific Ocean, and the soldiers had to fight in pressure suits and odd protective vehicles just as they did in space. Dolphins and porpoises were used extensively on both sides of the conflict. During his few periods of leave, Hawker had a chance to examine civilian life, and found it incomprehensible. People didn’t seem to have jobs, yet they kept busy at something. Material objects meant very little, yet—though they seemed immortal—time was very valuable as something not to be wasted. The citizens behaved unpredictably, for motivations Hawker could not understand. These glimpses of life on Earth only made Hawker depressed, because they emphasized how alienated he was from everything he thought he’d known. He was glad when the war was over, because he knew he’d probably end up on some other planet where he
expected
things to be strange.

As it turned out, Hawker never set foot on his native world again.

***

Technology improved faster than he could keep up with it. Personal force fields were devised to protect the soldiers from most weapons—and then, just as rapidly, weapons were developed that made the force fields obsolete. Even the training caps became outmoded; any necessary information could now be imparted directly into the subject’s mind with a mental probe during the resurrection process itself, in a fraction of a second.

Mankind continued to expand into the galaxy and, as might be expected, the army was at the forefront of the expansion. Hawker fought battles on many worlds, under suns of every hue, against beings of every imaginable description. Sometimes the atmosphere itself was so dense he couldn’t see through it, and had to rely on instruments to show him the way. Sometimes the gravity was so high that merely standing up was a major achievement. Sometimes the combat took place in space itself, and Hawker actually found himself
liking
that environment. The dark, silent void ideally matched what his own life was becoming.

***

Another piece of etiquette that developed through the ages was the mercy-kill. Medical science had made great advances since the days of Hawker’s birth, and even lost limbs could be replaced on a wounded resurrectee before his pattern was rerecorded. But out in the field, where medical assistance was often lacking altogether, it was sometimes better to finish off a colleague rather than let him suffer a lingering death.

There was one jungle planet where Hawker encountered Green after the latter’s patrol had been caught by an ambush. Most of the soldiers were dead, but Hawker found Green still alive in a pit, impaled on a crudely carved wooden spike. Green was conscious, but in so much pain he couldn’t even speak. He looked at Hawker with pleading in his eyes, just like that woman major in the prison camp. Hawker took his gun and calmly shot his friend through head, confident Green would be dubbed again.

In their next lifetime, Hawker never even bothered to mention the incident to Green. There was little point. Green would have done the same for him, he knew. Perhaps, sometime in the past, he even had.

***

Hawker remembered one incident where Thaddeus Connors 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. He suddenly 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.

Another dub of Connors was resurrected, of course, 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 sexual experience with an alien.

He’d been lost and separated from his unit for two days, 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, sexes. Hawker never knew for certain; soldiers were rarely given such detailed biological data. As long as he knew how to kill or disable them, that was sufficient.

He had no way of knowing what sex 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 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 too badly wounded to throw it accurately. If this was an enemy, he’d have to wait until it came into range.