I was, and so was she.
Afterward, I idly asked, “What happens when a soldier gets pregnant?”
She was silent for a moment, then replied softly, “That never happens, Orion. We’re all sterilized. For a soldier, sex is just a way of letting off steam. We’ll never have children.”
And for the soldiers’ masters, I knew, sex was a way of maintaining their army’s aggressive/protective instincts. I remembered the bitter words of an old man who had been a storyteller, blinded by Agamemnon after the siege of Troy: “Lower than slaves, that’s what we are, Orion. Vermin under their feet. Dogs. That’s how they treat us.”
I shook my head. Dogs are allowed to breed, at least.
I slept that night, curled up with Frede. And dreamed.
I could not tell if it was truly a dream or one of the Golden One’s communications. Often Aten or one of the other Creators would summon me out of space-time to some other place in the continuum to speak to me, to give me orders, or to berate my performance.
In this dream—if a dream it was—none of the Creators appeared. I was alone, walking on the hard-packed sand of a wide white beach, breaking surf hissing and booming as the waves ran up to lap my booted feet, a hot sun burning in a sky of molten bronze.
At the edge of the sand was a line of tangled bushes, some of them bearing flowers of red and blue. And beyond them, the stumps of buildings, looking like candles that had burned down almost to their ends, melted and blackened. Ancient buildings. Somehow I knew that they had been abandoned for untold ages. Abandoned, just as I was.
A voice called to me. I did not hear the voice, I felt it in my mind. It did not call me by name, it did not even use words. But I sensed a presence that was reaching out to me, touching me mentally, examining me. I felt an intelligence, a curiosity—and then a loathing, fear and anger and disgust all mixed together. A rejection. The presence in my mind disappeared, winked out as suddenly and completely as a dolphin diving beneath the waves.
I stood alone on that distant beach and felt a yearning, a desperate desire for understanding, a sadness about who I was and what I was, a hollowness at the core of my existence.
“Anya!” I cried out. “Anya, where are you?”
No answer. The surf rolled in. The wind blew in my face. The sun beat down on me. For all I could tell, I was alone on that dream beach, alone on that planet, alone in the universe.
I wept.
Frede shook me awake. “Orion, what is it? Wake up!”
I sat bolt upright. We were in camp, under the trees, the first streaks of dawn breaking through low gray clouds overhead. The other troopers were still sleeping, sprawled alone or coupled, except for the sentries I could see down by the river-bank.
Frede wrapped her arms around my bare shoulders. “You were moaning in your sleep.”
“I had a dream.”
“And calling to someone. Anna.”
“Anya,” I corrected.
She pulled her shirt on. “Is she the one you’re promised to?”
I almost smiled. “She’s the woman I love.”
Frede nodded matter-of-factly. “If we get out of this alive—you’ll be going back to her?”
“I don’t know. I want to, but I don’t know if I can.”
“The army won’t pop you back into a cryo freezer until the next time they need you?”
I had to shake my head and admit, “I just don’t know.”
“That’s what we’ve got to look forward to,” Frede said. “Cryosleep or battle. With some training in between. It’s a great life, Orion, being a soldier. You’ve got to be born to it.”
So that was the meaning of the tag line. You’ve got to be born to it. A bitter joke, but it was just as applicable to me as to any of these cloned involuntary soldiers. You’ve got to be born to it. Or created for it. As all of us were.
“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet. “Time to start moving.”
She got up, but locked her gaze on me and asked, “Why?”
I stared back at her. “What do you mean?”
“Why do we have to start moving?”
“You know as well as I—”
“To attack the Skorpis base? Why should we? What difference would it make? Except to get the rest of us killed.”
I knew that the troops had been conditioned to obey, to fight, to follow orders. That conditioning had weakened terribly during this mission, but it could be reinforced by a set of key words that every officer above the rank of lieutenant had memorized. I supposed, now that I thought about it, that higher ranks had other sets of memorized trigger phrases to use on the ranks below them. Aten had put those key words into my memory, and they sprang to my conscious mind now, just as if he were standing at my elbow, prompting me.
I could not speak those words. Not then. Not to Frede. Condemned to a life she never had asked for, never had any choice in, she was beginning to show the first signs of independent humanity: she was afraid that she— and all of us—were not only going to die, but throw away our lives needlessly.
She misunderstood my openmouthed silence. “All right, you can break me down to private and put somebody else in my place. But I still don’t see what good we’re going to do, throwing fifty-two of us at an entrenched Skorpis base.”
“What alternatives do you see?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath, as if afraid to say what was in her thoughts. But she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, gathering her courage, and then said, “We can stay here. Live here. Forget the war, forget whatever the hell it’s all about and just live the rest of our lives right here.”
“Forget our orders?”
“They abandoned us, Orion! We didn’t leave them, they left us!”
“Do you think the enemy will leave us alone?”
“We’re no threat to them if we stay here. And they know we can maul them pretty good if they attack us. So why would they bother us as long as we can’t hurt them?”
I thought about it for a moment. She was probably right. But if we remained here I would never find Anya. And as much as I hated the Golden One and all the other Creators, except Anya, I had to admit that there must be some purpose to his sending me here, to this place and time. Some reason.
“Frede,” I said slowly, calmly, “my orders are to knock out the Skorpis base on this planet. Setting up the transceiver was merely the first step toward that objective, you know that.”
Her face hardened. “And you’re going to try to obey those orders, with fifty-two effectives?”
“That’s what we’re here for.”
“Then you’re going to get all of us killed.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” I repeated.
She glowered at me for a moment; then, strangely, she broke into a rueful grin. “You’re sounding more like a real officer every day.”
She marched off and started giving orders just as if nothing had been said between us. I was glad that I had not been forced to use the conditioning phrase. But I thought that Frede’s moment of questioning was not the last discipline problem I would face. Indeed, it was probably only the first.
It got cooler as the ground rose toward the mountain chain. The nights grew chill, with a steady wind sweeping down from the mountains. It rained for several days in a row, until we were coughing miserably, sodden and muddy. But we doggedly slogged ahead, following the natural pass made through the mountains by the river
