Cyberpunk (21 page)

board; one Monday the Spartans and Athenians formed an alliance,

Sparta supplying the muscle and the Athens supplying tons of grain, and

they looked damn near unstoppable—until the Thracians (another

footnote like us Thebans) sent a small unit in the back door and burned

their granaries. It was just exact like the time that bozo opened an

Iranian front in Peshawar and cut my fuel lines. The Spartans wheeled

and marched on the nearest enemy granary, but two moves into the

assault they ground to a stop and the proctors called time.

“This is the lesson of Alexander’s march across the Gedrosian

Desert!” the T.I. of the day said, backlinking us to the last lecture. “The

belligerant force left the bulk of their supplies at their initial base, and

did not adequately defend them.

“This is a recipe for disaster! A supply line has a definite tensile

strength; stretched too far it’s
very
easy to snap.” The T.I. turned to

Lawrence Borec. “General Larius: How could the Spartans have

obviated this situation?”

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I flagged they never asked Scott questions anymore. I guess they

were getting tired of hearing him say, “Huh? Well, I dunno dude,

y’know?”

I
sure was. I don’t know how I
ever
thought he was even half as

derzky as Rayno.

#

By mid-July, everything we did was focused on the game. They

replaced the rulebook with a three-ring binder, and we started getting a

set of insert pages every day. Domestic politics entered the game the

week the Athenians took the field with Deke Luger barred from the

room: Seems they were getting tired of his bonafide Bonaparte swagger

back in the bunkhouse (
They
were tired of it? They should have asked

us
!) and his citizens took a vote of ostracism, sent him into exile for a

week.

The Thracians had their fifteen minutes of glory the next

Wednesday, when the Spartans whacked everybody but Thrace, then

were recalled from the field four moves away from total victory. The

Thracians were declared the winners by forfeit, and the Spartan general

was furious. “What d’y’all mean,
he
lot
re
volt?” You could always tell

when the southern-fried jarheads were mad; they forgot to hide their

accents.

“Sparta is an object lesson in the clumsiness of the police state,” the

T.I. explained, patient. We had a different T.I. that day; a tall, blond guy

named Schmidt, who always talked quiet and calm. “Most of the actual

work was done by helot slaves. Only true citizens could join the army.

What this means to you is, the more effectives you put in the field, the

fewer true citizens you have back home to keep the helots suppressed.”

The Spartan general swore softly.

“There is another way,” Schmidt said, a wicked twinkle in his eye.

“The Spartans originated right-wing death squads. You can kill all

suspected helot revolutionaries.”

The Spartan general’s face brightened.

“Of course,” Schmidt added, “pursuing that policy makes it a virtual

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certainty that the helots
will
revolt. And it cuts down on the number of

slaves you have—,” he shrugged, and smiled, “—so you have to pull

effectives from the field to do actual productive work. Sort of like the

deep South after the First American Civil War.”

The Spartan general refused to rise to the bait. With a grumble, he

turned to his adjutant. “Billy Ray, how many effectives can I really

use?” The adjutant started flipping through the rule book, looking for

that data. He wouldn’t find it; I knew that rule book backwards and there

was nothing like that in it.

Billy Ray found a table and ran his finger down the page. “Ten

percent, tops,” he said. “Five percent’d be better.”

Now wait a minute!
I flipped my rule book open and started

whipping through the pages. Dammit, I knew that data wasn’t in there!

Then it dawned on me. It wasn’t in the
Theban
rule book. Separate

rules for separate armies. Just like geopolitical level Peshawar. Oh boy.

The Spartan general was doing some calculating, his lips moving

silent, his fingers wiggling. “Five percent? Good God, that’s—”

“Five hundred in a good year,” Schmidt said. He turned to the rest of

us. “By the way, starting next Monday losses are cumulative. Each week

is a generation. So you will need to protect your breeding population, or

you will be out of the game, understood?”

Scott was staring at a wasp that was flying up near the ceiling,

tapping its way along the rafters; he snapped his head down to nod

affirmative, then looked at me with
What did he say?
in his eyes.

Speaking of breeding populations, I could think of one real good

candidate for a retroactive vasectomy.

Schmidt was talking to the Spartan general. “This is especially a

problem for you,” he said soft. “Under Spartan law, male citizens cannot

marry until they’re 30. Even then, man and wife live apart. Your

reproduction rate is very low.”

I kicked back in my chair, and blew off some relief. Cruel to their

kids, hooked on a death-before-dishonor attitude even worse than

Bushido, governed by the gerusia—a bunch of stodgy old farts who

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made the Politburo look damn near open-minded— and now
this
! The

more I learned about the real Sparta, the happier I was to be Theban.

#

By the end of July, Sundays had turned into my definite refuge day.

We’d start the day off with a toned-down inspection, go through just a

little drill and a mild harangue, then form up on the quad for generic

church services. All the rain had turned the quad into a simulated rice

paddy, and after awhile the academy chaplain—being allowed to be

almost fully human— realized we were standing ankle-deep in mud and

started keeping church blessed short.

The Butthole Skinheads, though, being chronic jerks, couldn’t resist

the opportunity to screw off. The last Sunday in July they finagled

themselves into the back row, carefully set their hats on the ground, and

snuck off. An hour later, when church was over and they were missed,

they jumped sudden— excuse me, sudden
ly
jumped—out of one of the

nearby outhouses and started telling some stupid story about sinking into

the mud and having to climb back up through the latrine.

Payne gave them about thirty seconds. Then he smiled, paternal, and

suggested that there might be more cadets down there, so they’d better

go back and shovel it out to make sure.

The rest of us went off to breakfast. By this time the Butthole

Skinheads were getting pretty familiar with shovelling out latrines, so

they were done quick. Half an hour later, Stig came into the mess hall,

kicked the bigger lumps off his boots and stood his shovel in a corner,

then got his tray and sat down with the rest of us Thebans.

I think me and Mister Style set a new speed record for finishing

breakfast that morning.

#

Sunday afternoons were the high point of my week: Liberty time.

Four whole hours of doing
nothing
. I could go back to the bunkhouse

and get my civvies on; I could wander anywhere in or around the

academy I wanted. For four hours, I wasn’t a Theban anymore, and I

wasn’t an Involuntary, and I wasn’t anything but Mikey Harris, kid,

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normal, unit of (1). Even Payne stopped shouting at me, provided I

stayed out of his way and didn’t do anything real stupid.

I suppose I could have tried to go runaway. The vidiot who’d gotten

depantsed tried that, in early July. The Spartans had been giving him a

real hard time; dumping buckets of water on him while he was gone

Tommy, that sort of thing. So one Sunday he tried to stow away on the

mail plane.

Idiot. The plane wasn’t scheduled to leave until Monday. He turned

up missing at evening mess, of course, and the Grade Fives were out half

the night looking for him. When they found him, about0/ 30/0/ , they took

him back to
their
camp.

Piggy Jankowicz’d gotten off easy. Hearing the vidiot’s stories

about the Grade Five camp and watching him do punishment for a week

was enough to convince
me
.

But not everybody. One of the Spartans was having a real hard

time—there were all kinds of weird status things going on among the

jarheads that I, being an Involuntary, never got updated on—and the last

weekend in July, he took off on a carefully planned runaway. Squirreled

some food; found a map; even stole a compass, someone said.

This one the Grade Fives didn’t bring back. Instead, a couple days

later the rumor started going around that someone’d seen them bringing

in pieces of bloody uniform and a fresh killed bear. A well-fed looking

bear.

After that, I stopped thinking about running out. Instead, I hard

coded my Sunday afternoons for one task; keeping my Real World

identity current in my mind. The jarheads usually went down to the

firing range and shot themselves deaf, the vidiots went Tommy and

vedged out, the comikaze just stared at his vidslate (the batteries had

crapped out sometime in late June), the Slammers and Butthole

Skinheads—aw, who cares what they did?, and Scott and the rest of the

Thebans went back to the bunkhouse.

Me, I was getting real tired of listening to Angie Pectoris, so I went

to the library and hung out with Mr. Lewellyn. Three weeks to go. Just

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three more weeks to tough it out.

#

Lewellyn’s Apple II turned out to be a semi-fun machine, in a truly

limited kind of a way. I mean, working with it must have given

Lewellyn the same kind of feel some olders get from restoring old

private cars. I admit I got some pride (and more than a little surprise)

from just being able to make the damn thing work. But every time I went

to the library I’d end up asking myself, Is this feeling truly worth having

to spend four hours listening to Lewellyn correct my grammar?

I decided it was. If nothing else, the library was the only place in the

Academy where I could hide out and explore my Starfire. It processed

rings around the Apple! Every Sunday I cooked up something new,

tucked it away in bubble, and burned its params in my living memory.

When I got back to The World and CityNet I was going to be downright

dangerous!

For contrasters, when Lewellyn was watching I twiddled around

with the Apple, and that was kind of like teaching a pet brick to do

tricks. Lewellyn used a file handling program, FID (
FI
le
D
eveloper), a

lot. The only fun thing I came up with was cracking into FID and

tinkering around with it until the name had new meaning:
F
ile
I
ntercept