fight.”
“Even our cloned troopers?” I asked.
“Yes, of course. They’re humans. They want to live, cloned or not. Got to train them to stand up to battle, not to run when all hell’s breaking loose on them.”
“And train them to kill,” I said.
“Oh, yes, killing’s an important part of it. No one’s figured out how to win a battle without killing, despite all the scientists and computers.”
“Brigadier, what’s going to happen to my troop?”
“Happen?” He blinked his bleary eyes. “They’ll be reassigned, what else?”
“Don’t they get any time for R and R? Furloughs?”
Uxley sat up straighter in his chair. “You’re talking about troopers, Orion. They were made to fight. That’s what they’re for. They’re not real people, like you and me. We’ve got families and friends and a life back home. They don’t. They’re nothing but soldiers. What would they do with a furlough? They’ve got no place to go, no families, no home except the army.”
“But you said you’ve drifted apart from your family, your home,” I pointed out.
“So what? I’ve still got ’em. They’re still there if I decide to go back to them. You’ve got a family and home, don’t you?”
I wondered what to say, finally decided on, “No, I don’t. I’m—an orphan.”
“Too bad. But the troopers, they’re just clones. We made ’em to fight, not to mix with society.”
“There’s nothing in their lives except battle and training for battle.”
“We let ’em have sex, don’t we?” he countered with a broad wink.
“Because some psychotechs decided they’d fight better if their aggressive/protective instincts were reinforced by sexual relationships. Is that all they mean to you? A bunch of instincts to be trained and used like weapons?”
Uxley began to look uncomfortable, his face flushing slightly. “Listen to an old veteran, Orion. Being a soldier consists of long months of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. We’ve eliminated the boredom for them. They ought to be grateful.”
“And left them nothing but the terror. Is that fair to them?”
“Fair?” His face reddened even more. I didn’t know whether he was going to burst out laughing or roar with anger. “Fair? We’re fighting a war, man! We need the biggest number of troops we can generate. And the cheapest. We can’t go around worrying about their feelings. It’d make them soft, lower their fighting morale.”
I tried to make him see the troopers as human beings, fully as human as he himself was, or as he thought I was. But it was useless. Night after night we talked about it, and he always came down to the same statement. “They were made to fight. Otherwise they would never have been made at all. They ought to be grateful that they’re alive and able to serve the Commonwealth.”
Yes, I thought. Just as I should be grateful that I have been given life after life, all for the privilege of serving Aten and the other Creators.
“What will their next assignment be?” I asked one night.
Uxley shrugged. “Headquarters hasn’t decided yet. Or at least, I haven’t been informed.”
“Aren’t they being retrained while they’re in cryosleep?”
“Not yet,” he told me. “Not as far as I know.”
I began to wonder. And to think. As I lay awake in my bunk after bidding the colonel good night, I began to consider what the Golden One had told me and what I had seen with my own eyes of this era, this time of interstellar war, this battle among the Creators themselves.
The Golden One had told me that Anya had rejected me, rejected human form, that she was leading the fight against him. I was programmed to believe him, but deep within me there was a shadow of doubt. Anya and I had loved one another through the eons, in every era to which I had been sent. Why would she change now?
The Golden One said that if I found Anya she would kill me as quickly and casually as a man swats an insect. And he would not revive me; perhaps he would be unable to do so, more likely he would be unwilling.
Very well, then, I thought. If I seek out Anya, wherever she is among the stars, and find that what Aten has told me is the truth, then I will be killed and that will be the end of it. The end of all suffering. The end of all my hopes and pains. The end of love.
But if he has been lying to me, if Anya still loves me and wants me with her, then it is lunacy for me to remain locked into this servitude. I should go out and find her.
Love or death. The ultimate stakes of life.
I began to plan.
The Golden One had his own plans for me, I discovered.
Once we reached sector base six I supervised the offloading of my troop’s cryosleep capsules. I wanted to begin retraining them for the mission I had in mind, and began to look into how I might tap into the computers that programmed the sleep training systems for the base.
But as I started cautiously playing with the computer terminal in my cramped quarters, Aten appeared to me once more. One instant I was sitting at the desk in my quarters, hunched over the keyboard and display screen.
The next I was on that grassy hillside above the Creators’ mausoleum of a city. The sun shone warmly, the wildflowers nodded in the breeze from the nearby sea. Waves washed up on the beach. I knew there were dolphins out there who regarded me as their friend.
A golden sphere appeared in the air before me, blazing radiance, forcing me to throw my arms up over my face and sink to my knees.
“That’s better, Orion,” I heard Aten’s arrogant voice say. “A properly worshipful position.”
When I dared to look up, the Golden One had assumed human form, standing before me in his immaculate military uniform.
“You did well on Bititu,” he said, almost grudgingly.
“It was a slaughter.”
“Yes, but necessary.”
“Why?”
“You mean you haven’t puzzled that out for yourself, Orion? You who claim to be almost as good as your Creators? You who scheme to find the goddess you’re so infatuated with? Why would the Commonwealth want Bititu?”
Not for itself, certainly, I reasoned swiftly. Then it must be valuable for its location. But there was nothing else in the Jilbert system except the fading red dwarf star itself, a single gas giant planet orbiting close to it, and the scattered debris of other asteroids, dead chunks of rock and metal…
I looked into Aten’s gold-flecked eyes. “There was once another planet in the system. You destroyed it.”
“Two others, Orion,” he answered. “We destroyed them both.”
“How many were killed?”
He shrugged carelessly. “The Hegemony had planted colonies on those worlds. They were turning them into powerful military bases.”
“But what did that threaten?” I asked. “There’s no Commonwealth world for a hundred light-years or more.”
“So?” he taunted. “Think, Orion. Think.”
The only other planet in the Jilbert system was the gas giant, a huge blue world covered in clouds. Beneath those clouds the planet’s gases would be condensed by its massive gravity field into liquids. A planetwide ocean. Of water, perhaps.
It hit me. “The Old Ones.”
Aten actually clapped his hands. “Very good, Orion. The Jilbert gas giant is a world on which the Old Ones have lived since time immemorial. Perhaps it is their original home world.”
“The Hegemony established their bases in the system in an attempt to establish contact with the Old Ones.”
