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 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 commander 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.
I went down to Six early, thinking to eat dinner there, but they had nothing but snacks. So I munched on a fungus thing that vaguely resembled escargots and took the rest of my calories in the form of alcohol.
“Major Mandella?” I’d been busily engaged in my seventh beer and hadn’t seen the Colonel approach. I started to rise but he motioned for me to stay seated and dropped heavily into the chair opposite me.
“I’m in your debt,” he said. “You saved me from at least half of a boring evening.” He offered his hand. “Jack Kynock, at your service.”
“Colonel—”
“Don’t Colonel me and I won’t Major you. We old fossils have to … keep our perspective. William.”
“All right with me.”
He ordered a kind of drink I’d never heard of. “Where to start? Last time you were on Earth was 2007, according to the records.”
“That’s right.”
“Didn’t like it much, did you?”
“No.” Zombies, happy robots.
“Well, it got better. Then it got worse, thank you.” A private brought his drink, a bubbling concoction that was green at the bottom of the glass and lightened to chartreuse at the top. He sipped. “Then they got better again, then worse, then … I don’t know. Cycles.”
“What’s it like now?”
“Well … I’m not really sure. Stacks of reports and such, but it’s hard to filter out the propaganda. I haven’t been back in almost two hundred years; it was pretty bad then. Depending on what you like.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, let me see. There was lots of excitement. Ever hear of the Pacifist movement?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hmn, the name’s deceptive. Actually, it was a war, a guerrilla war.”
“I thought I could give you name, rank and serial number of every war from Troy on up.” He smiled. “They must have missed one.”
“For good reason. It was run by veterans — survivors of Yod-38 and Aleph-40, I hear; they got discharged together and decided they could take on all of UNEF, Earthside. They got lots of support from the population.”
“But didn’t win.”
“We’re still here.” He swirled his drink and the colors shifted. “Actually, all I know is hearsay. Last time I got to Earth, the war was over, except for some sporadic sabotage. And it wasn’t exactly a safe topic of conversation.”
“It surprises me a little,” I said, “well, more than a little. That Earth’s population would do anything at all … against the government’s wishes.”
He made a noncommittal sound.
“Least of all, revolution. When we were there, you couldn’t get anybody to say a damned thing against the UNEF — or any of the local governments, for that matter. They were conditioned from ear to ear to accept things as they were.
“Ah. That’s a cyclic thing, too.” He settled back in his chair. “It’s not a matter of technique. If they wanted to, Earth’s government could have total control over … every nontrivial thought and action of each citizen, from cradle to grave.
“They don’t do it because it would be fatal. Because there’s a war on. Take your own case: did you get any motivational conditioning while you were in the can?”
I thought for a moment. “If I did, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”
“That’s true. Partially true. But take my word for it, they left that part of your brain alone. Any change in your attitude toward UNEF or the war, or war in general, comes only from new knowledge. Nobody’s fiddled with your basic motivations. And you should know why.”
Names, dates, figures rattled down through the maze of new knowledge. “Tet-17, Sed-21, Aleph-14. The Lazlo … ‘The Lazlo Emergency commission Report.’ June, 2106.”
“Right. And by extension, your own experience on Aleph-1. Robots don’t make good soldiers.”
“They would,” I said. “Up to the twenty-first century. Behavioral conditioning would have been the answer to a general’s dream. Make up an army with all the best features of the SS, the Praetorian Guard, the Golden Horde. Mosby’s Raiders, the Green Berets.”
He laughed over his glass. “Then put that army up against a squad of men in modern fighting suits. It’d be over in a couple of minutes.”
“So long as each man in the squad kept his head about, him. And just fought like hell to stay alive.” The generation of soldiers that had precipitated the Lazlo Reports had been conditioned from birth to conform to somebody’s vision of the ideal fighting man. They worked beautifully as a team, totally bloodthirsty, placing no great importance on personal survival — and the Taurans cut them to ribbons. The Taurans also fought with no regard for self. But they were better at it, and there were always more of them.
Kynock took a drink and watched the colors. “I’ve seen your psych profile,” he said. “Both before you got here and after your session in the can. It’s essentially the same, before and after.”
“That’s reassuring.” I signaled for another beer.
“Maybe it shouldn’t be.”
“What, it says I won’t make a good officer? I told them that from the beginning. I’m no leader.”
“Right in a way, wrong in a way. Want to know what that profile says?”