The Eternity Brigade (27 page)

He paused for a moment’s thought. “If they let me.” The reality of his situation hit him with a sudden frightening impact. With Green gone forever, he was now alone in enemy territory. The army knew he was here, they’d be coming for him. He had deserted, broken more regs than he could count. What reason did they have to keep him alive? Wouldn’t it be far easier for them just to shoot him, then dub another Jerry Hawker—one who knew nothing whatsoever of these events? Green had asked to be remembered—but to do that, Hawker had to live past the next few minutes, live until the next time they recorded him.

They must be coming. They’d held off for so long, but it couldn’t last forever. And they
would
kill him, unless he could strike a bargain. But what could he offer them? They held all the top cards.

A grim smile came to his face. He was a dealer in one commodity—destruction. He would deal in that.

He pulled a pair of grenades from his belt, set their controls for “contact” and stood up, holding the grenades high off the floor. “Hello,” he yelled to empty air. “I bet you can hear me. I know you’re coming for me, but you’d better wait for a few minutes and listen to what I have to say.”

Silence.

“I’ve got a couple grenades here, set to go off if they hit anything. If you shoot me, they’ll drop to the floor and explode. I bet they could take out at least twenty of these pillars. How many people’s files is that? A couple hundred, maybe? That’s several hundred people whose files will be ruined. Think about that before anyone shoots at me.”

More silence for nearly a minute. Then a voice materialized out of the air above his head. “What do you want?”

It was a deceptively simple question. Hawker opened his mouth and then realized he didn’t have an answer. What
did
he want? What in all the universe could be worthwhile to a man like him? The phrase, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” climbed out of his childhood memory, but what good were they? He’d had enough life to satisfy ten men. Liberty was illusory; how could he be free when the army could always make another copy of him, a Jerry Hawker still shackled to his slavery? The final freedom Green had found wasn’t a path open to him. And as for pursuit of happiness—well, that was what Amassa and her friends were doing, and it was as hollow as everything else.

Moreover, while he’d made them stop and listen, he was in no position to force them to do anything. He could ask some price—but if they didn’t like it, if they thought it too outrageous, they could come in here and wipe him out despite the consequences. Whatever he asked for, it had to be realistic—it had to be within boundaries they might accept.

The one thing he wanted most was to fulfill Green’s final request: to remember him. And to do that, he had to live. Even if it made him sound cowardly now, even if it was a betrayal of everything he’d fought for, something deep in the back of his mind told him it was vitally important to live and remember what had happened here today.

He drew a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “I want to make a deal with you that I don’t think is too unreasonable.” He stopped and waited for a reply.

“Go on,” said the voice.

“I’ve accomplished what I wanted. I never wanted to desert or commit mutiny. I’m not a troublemaker, I’ve got a good service record.”

“Until now.”

“All I wanted to do was help my friend. He was being tortured for something that wasn’t his fault. That’s over now. I’m prepared to go back and continue being a good soldier for you.”

“You have no choice in that. We can always dub you again.”

Sweat broke out on Hawker’s upper lip. He could feel his position slipping. What could he offer them they couldn’t get from a dub?

Green had said it, many times:
Memory is the key.
“It won’t be
me
, though,” Hawker answered. “My experiences here are valuable. Every one of them makes me a better fighter. As awkward as this has been, it might come in handy sometime in the future. You can never tell.”

“If you wish to surrender, we will take it under advisement.”

“That’s not all,” Hawker said, pressing forward a little to gain the ground he’d lost in the bargaining process. “I’ll rejoin you voluntarily and go back to being a model soldier—but there’s something I want in return.”

The voice did not answer.

“I want out,” Hawker continued, after a suitable pause. “I want to be free of all the fighting. I want to live like an ordinary person, away from the army, and not have to worry about being resurrected in futures I have no say in.”

“That contradicts what you just offered,” the voice said.

Hawker shook his head. “No, it’s very simple. Just dub me the way I am right now. One of me goes off and lives any way he can; the other goes back to the army.”

“We can’t make deals like that, or every soldier would want the same treatment.”

“I won’t tell anyone about it. It’ll be our secret. It’s a small enough price for you to pay—you make dubs all the time, anyway. And if you cooperate with me instead of fighting me, you get a bonus—Green’s body. You can probably still learn a lot from it even though he’s dead. He’s past caring now. If these grenades go off, you won’t get even that much.”

The voice was silent for several minutes, which Hawker considered a positive sign, They must at least be thinking about his deal—which is more than he would ever have expected a few hours ago. When no answer was immediately forthcoming, he prodded them further. “Well, I’m waiting. I’m getting awfully tired after all I did today. I don’t think I can hold these grenades up much longer.”

“Stay as you are,” the voice answered. “A mobile scanner is on its way to you, and will be there within two minutes.”

A mobile scanner! Hawker smiled in triumph. He’d won! It was a small enough victory, after all he’d been through, but he’d faced down the army and gotten concessions from them. He would be dubbed, giving him two chances to keep Green’s memory alive. It meant a return to slavery for one of him—but that would have been true in any case.

He looked down at Green’s still-bleeding corpse. “We know one thing at least, Dave,” he said. “They’re not invincible.”

Hawker was dubbed right there in the aisle beside Green’s body. There were some very tricky arrangements that had to be developed to make sure the army kept its word. The “original” Hawker stayed in Rez Central holding his grenade while the dub was allowed to go free. Neither self said farewell to the other; the second copy just walked off without looking back. Only after several hours, when the dub radioed in that he was safely away from the vicinity, did Hawker finally surrender to army authorities.

He half expected them to kill him anyway, as retaliation for all the trouble he’d caused them—but, to his surprise, they didn’t. The conquest of death had made retribution like that a meaningless exercise, and the army was too pragmatic. Green had been right on that score; his memories, even rebellious ones, were too valuable a commodity to be squandered on anything as petty as revenge.

At the same time, the army wanted to make an example of him to prevent future desertions. He was given a showy trial and made to serve a ten-month sentence at hard labor in the stockade—a development that actually worked out in his favor. Had he merely been returned to duty, he might have died in action and his memories lost anyway; as it was, the war was over by the time he’d finished his sentence. He was simply recorded once more and passed down to the wars of some future generation.

***

Ibañez, Singh, Belilo, and Symington were all around at his next resurrection—and of course, none of them had the faintest idea of what had occurred on Cellina. Hawker did his best to avoid them—particularly Belilo. He still felt guilty about deserting her—and the thought lurked in the back of his mind that one version of her could still be suffering the daily pain and humiliation Nya and her acolytes loved to inflict.

Belilo was puzzled by Hawker’s reticence—but the resurrectees had long since learned not to pry into anything related to former lives, and she accepted his behavior without comment.

Symington was baffled that Green no longer seemed to be with them. He mentioned it once, but Hawker pretended not to know anything about it. After a few moments’ thought, Symington said, “Do you think he’s been... reassigned?”

Hawker shrugged. “Maybe.” Let Symington believe Green had joined Norquist’s Rangers, an explanation that was no explanation. And for all Hawker knew, it might even be true.

Hawker learned that twenty-five years had passed since the war on Cellina, and he was naturally curious about how his dub, anchored in time, had fared during that period. The current war, though, was half the galaxy away from Cellina, and information was impossible to come by. As far as the army was concerned, the other Hawker simply did not exist. No amount of long-distance investigation gained him any results.

When the war was over, Hawker was copied again, his curiosity unabated.

***

On his fourth resurrection after Cellina, the fighting was on a planet near enough for Hawker to hope for information about his dub’s fate. It was nearly a century and a half since the events on Cellina, but with modern technology that meant very little. Anything was possible these days—or so it seemed to a man born in the far-off past. Anything, that is, but hope.

The army refused to cooperate, insisting even in private that no such dub had ever been created. Hawker exhausted every legitimate avenue to find out more about the “free” copy, and banged into blank walls at every turn. Finally, with no other recourse left, he went AWOL to find “himself.”

Alone and undercover, he traveled as a common spacehand to Cellina, only to find that his dub had left the planet less than a year after being created. Thinking to perhaps right old wrongs, he tried to find Nya and Belilo—but there was no trace of either, and he gave up that quest.

Doggedly, Hawker pursued his older self. The trail blew hot and cold and hot again, leading him to three different planets over the next seven months. At last, on an insignificant world called Roskol, he found what he was looking for—sort of.

Roskol was a world founded by religious fanatics who rejected much of modern technology. Its inhabitants lived a simple life, reached an average age of one hundred or so, and then died natural deaths. Roskol was considered a backwater, a quiet world  where nothing ever happened.

Hawker’s dub was instantly attracted to Roskol because it was technologically and socially close to the world of his childhood. He’d had his fill of artificially extended life; one more death would be enough for him. Within five years of Green’s death, the Hawker-dub settled on Roskol, never to leave it again.

He dwelled there for sixty-eight years, married, and had two sons. One of the sons left the planet for greener pastures, never to return. The other son lived his whole life on Roskol, producing one son of his own. That son, in turn, had a son before his own premature death in an accident—so at present there was only one direct descendant of the original Hawker-dub alive on the planet.

Hawker tracked the man down and found him working as a master potter, teaching his craft to a handful of young apprentices. His great-grandson looked in his late twenties, but without much family resemblance.

Their brief meeting was extremely awkward. Hawker came into his descendant’s shop and watched him work for a few minutes. The man stared at him, as though wondering where he’d seen that face before. When his great-grandson finally asked him what he wanted, Hawker stammered around and finally walked away. He never bothered to identify himself. What would have been the point?

Disillusioned with the whole of life, Hawker returned to the army. He had now gotten a second mark against his record as a troublemaker, and the army seriously debated whether to copy this current version or return to his previous pattern already on file. The convincing factor was Hawker’s contention that the previous him, not knowing the fate of his descendants, would probably go AWOL all over again to find them—whereas he now knew there was nothing to find in that direction. That, and the fact that Hawker did have an outstanding combat record, convinced the board of inquiry to dub him again as is.

***

And so it went—war after war, planet after planet, century after century. Hawker held on to the memory of Green, but very little else. He became a brutally efficient machine, living without hope of redemption from this eternal slavery. He obeyed orders and did his job, never caring what the fight was about or why he was called on to kill beings he’d never met. Reality for him became a gray blur of fighting, punctuated by the occasional battlefield lulls.

Until he came, at last, to a civil war on a nameless world, to a hopeless siege, to a Spardian woman who spoke to him only in broken Vandik, and to bright blue fireballs that rained death and destruction from the skies....

After the hit from the blue fireball, Hawker lay still in the stairwell as the building collapsed around him. He covered his head with his hands and closed his eyes to keep out the dust. The ground shook as great chunks of masonry tumbled down, some missing him by scant millimeters. He was buried instead beneath a pile of fine dust and rubble. His only thought was to keep a breathing passage open, and his chief fear was suffocation. A bullet through the brain or an energy beam through the heart were quick ways to go, but a painful death was not his choice.

After a few minutes, the dust stopped settling. He waited a little longer to be sure, then slowly began digging out of the debris, up toward the light and air. He broke through and breathed deeply, taking in great lungfuls of fresh oxygen.

When at last he regained his breath, he looked around at the damage. Almost the entire block had been leveled; not a building remained intact, with just an occasional wall standing here and there. The smoky atmosphere was filled with even more choking fumes than before. There was no sign of his partner, the Spardian woman; the place across the street where he’d last seen her was now buried beneath a small mountain of rubble. He had to assume he was on his own—and the red armband on his uniform might be a definite disadvantage if this area was soon overrun by the side in blue, as seemed likely.

Behind him, his rifle had been shattered by a large piece of falling building, leaving him armed with four grenades, two throwing knives and his wide-dispersion pistol. Not much with which to fight off an invading army.

Why bother?
he asked himself.
Nobody expects miracles from you any more. Just go through the motions and hope for better luck next time.

But when the shooting started around him, his instincts took over. He could no more ignore his training than a fish could fly.

No one was aiming precisely at him; the shooting instead seemed to be part of a general barrage intended to keep any survivors in this area under cover. Hawker inched forward, taking advantage of whatever cover he could find, to reach a safer vantage point from which to assess his situation.

He came to a wall that was still standing, with a chink that may have been part of a window to act as a peephole. The wall was at the top of a slight rise, and offered him the best view from a bad neighborhood. From this spot he could see the advancing lines of invading troops, all with their blue armbands neatly in place. They were not far away.

There was a slight noise behind him, and Hawker turned quickly. A human figure rose over a pile of rubble, silhouetted against the sky. The blue armband was quite apparent, though the facial features were hidden by the glare from one of the fireballs passing through the sky behind the man.

The enemy soldier had him dead to rights, yet he didn’t fire. Maybe he was under orders to take prisoners, but Hawker felt no such compunction. He raised his pistol and fired, hitting the man squarely in the chest. The enemy soldier fell, and as he did so his face became visible for the first time. It was Symington, not quite so lucky this time.

Hawker pounded his fist against the wall. Is this what it all came down to, killing his only real friend in the last few hundred years? What kind of insanity was this? He felt no guilt for murdering his friend; how could he, when Symington would simply be resurrected again next time with no memory of what had occurred here? But Hawker nonetheless felt so frustrated by the lunacy around him he wanted to scream.

He stood up and walked away from the wall, in full view of anyone who might want to take a shot at him. What did it matter? He’d only be resurrected again, anyway, to fight some other senseless war on some other world in some farther future.

Perhaps because he was so uncaring, no one fired at him as he walked across the street, moving without direction or purpose. His feet trod across the uneven surface of the broken paving, and twice he stumbled but did not lose his balance completely. He was heading on an approximate diagonal toward enemy lines, but that didn’t matter to him. Nothing mattered very much, it seemed.

He made it almost to the shell of a building when he saw a movement to his right. Reflex, more than any conscious desire for survival, made him spin that way, gun drawn. He would have shot instantly, but something made him halt in midaction. He stood frozen, staring at the man across from him.

It was Jerry Hawker, wearing a blue armband.

It was a strange sensation, seeing himself like this. He hadn’t faced one of his dubs since Cellina. A mirror image was one thing, but this was an independent entity, capable of movement on his own. Left and right seemed curiously interchanged, and Hawker felt disoriented. Somewhere offstage was the ghoulish laughter of Fate.

The two men stood, suspended in time, no more than five meters apart. Eternity existed in that instant as volumes of unspoken thoughts flashed through each man’s mind. Then the Hawker in blue gave a wan smile and spread his arms apart in a gesture of resignation and friendship. He could not kill himself.

The Hawker in red, because of his experiences here, was more cynical. Looking across at the other him, centuries of rage and frustration exploded in his brain. This was the man who’d been stupid enough to let the army make a toy of him. This was the man who accepted what happened to him and never thought of fighting back. This was the man who’d brought him all the miseries of an eternal damnation in a living hell.

Self-hatred tightened his finger on the firing button. His pistol fired at his double’s face, and he kept up the fire long after the other Hawker fell dead to the ground.

***

At length the rage passed. Hawker stopped firing and bent down to examine his own corpse. There was nothing left of the face or head, but at least it had been a quick, painless death—there was no point to making himself suffer. He looked over the still body and, after a moment’s consideration, ripped the blue armband off the other Hawker’s sleeve. Stuffing it into his pocket, he continued along the way he’d started, into the burned-out building.

In this place of comparative shelter, he sat on the floor with his back to one wall and started laughing. He couldn’t help himself. This whole war had gone beyond the bounds of insanity; it was now a farce, and he was one of the comedians. This final confrontation had been too crazy for anyone to take seriously, and Hawker’s body was shaking hysterically as he collapsed on the floor, tears streaming from his eyes.

After a while the laughter eased, and he sat up again. He thought of David Green, and wondered what his friend would have said about this lunacy. He probably would have been resigned to it, saying something to the effect that
their merry-go-round might be passing through the funhouse every once in a while, and they were seeing themselves through those crazy distorting mirrors.
But, he would have added, there was no way off the merry-go-round, so they had to accept it and try to deal with it as best they could.

Maybe it should have been Dave with the nickname Lucky,
he thought.
He at least managed to break the circuit.

Hawker suddenly tensed. There
was
a way out. Green had found it. Hawker thought back to his friend’s last words as he lay bloody and dying in Hawker’s arms. He didn’t say, “Remember me.” He just said, “Remember.’’

“He didn’t care about himself,” Hawker whispered to the empty room. “He was telling me to remember how it was done, how to get off the merry-go-round. He was telling me there was a way, and I had to remember it to help myself.”

His eyes were filling with tears, and he closed them tightly to stanch the flow. “Thank you, Dave,” he said. “You were helping me, and I didn’t even know it. I thought
I
was helping
you
. Thank you. Thank you.”

He took a deep breath and wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. This was a time for clear thinking, something he’d never been too good at. This could be the most important day of his life, and he’d need all his wits about him to do it right.

He pulled himself slowly to his feet, left the shelter of the building and started back toward the underground bunker where he and the others had been resurrected. He moved through the torn-up streets with great caution, now. If he got killed at this juncture, he’d merely be dubbed again with memories of this lifetime gone, and he might never have this insight again. For the first time in longer than he cared to think about, he had a reason to live.

The territory looked considerably different than when he’d first passed through it. The enemy’s blue fireballs had done vast damage in their continual barrage, reducing the city to rubble. He saw very few people wandering about; many of the defenders had probably died in the bombardment, and some of the rest may have fled in despair. Hawker took great care that no one saw him. Even though he was in red territory and still wearing his red armband, he didn’t want to be shot mistakenly by his own side—not at this stage of the game.

There was a sentry standing at to the bunker, looking very worried. Hawker approached him slowly, his arms spread wide apart and his red armband in plain view. The guard was nervous, and might fire at anything.

“I’ve got to make a report,” Hawker said. “The enemy has breached the north side. I must get in to headquarters.”

The guard didn’t understand a word. Hawker ran through all the languages he knew, and still there was no reply. The sentry stood there, not firing at him because he had the proper armband, but at the same time not trusting him enough to let him back down inside the bunker.

Hawker resorted to pantomime. After a few minutes of frantic gesturing, the sentry nodded and stepped aside for Hawker to enter. Hawker did not dare express the relief he felt, and instead walked briskly inside the door and took the elevator down to the command levels.

He wandered for half an hour through the bunker, looking for the particular office he wanted. The air of panic that had been so tangible when he was first here had multiplied several times since then. Everyone knew the cause was lost, and many of the staff were going through the same feelings of apathy he himself had experienced a little while ago. He wandered through normally secured areas unchallenged, able to observe things as he pleased. On the few occasions when anyone stopped him, he had the legitimate excuse that he couldn’t communicate with them, and they eventually gave up trying. Hawker didn’t look like a spy or saboteur, and even if he was—did it really matter at this point?

He came at last to the place he was looking for, the duplicator in which the soldiers’ patterns were filed. The actual stored material was very small, but the machinery to house it filled an entire room. Hawker knew he’d never be able to sort through everything to find just his own pattern and destroy it; he’d have to destroy the entire works. That meant the patterns of all the resurrectees, all the soldiers he’d fought beside down through the ages.
So be it.

Hawker took one of the grenades from his jumpsuit, tossed it at the computer and left the room, never looking back. The explosion rocked the bunker and increased the feeling of panic within the headquarters. People began running around without purpose, certain the enemy had arrived. The confusion only helped his cause; no one paid any attention as he took the elevator to the surface along with twenty other frightened fighters and left the bunker in the general stampede. He was back in the open now, free to move around once more.

As soon as he could conveniently do so, he broke away from the bunker’s panicked mob and set off on his own. Staying with the others would be suicide; in their hysterical rush, they’d simply be gunned down at leisure by the enemy artillery. He had to be by himself, where he could move with caution and stealth.

He found a deserted spot hidden from view, ripped off his red armband and replaced it with the blue one he’d taken from his dead double. The other Hawker had been wearing a uniform similar enough to his that he could pass as the man he’d killed. The only problem might be language; if the attackers had been better prepared, as seemed obvious, they may have had time to implant a common language in all their soldiers—and if it was one he didn’t speak, he’d be spotted as an infiltrator despite his blue armband.

He stopped by a corpse on the ground and ripped off a piece of its uniform, then wrapped it tightly around his head as a bandage. Now if anyone spoke to him in a language he didn’t understand, he could pretend he’d gotten a head injury that affected his hearing and left him in shock. He’d seen that glazed expression on comrades’ faces thousands of times throughout his career; now he hoped he could emulate it successfully.

He skulked through the ruins until he was well behind the blue lines. The soldiers here weren’t nearly as trigger-happy. The slight mop-up action was all being handled by the front-line troops; the job of these soldiers was to occupy and hold against possible counterattack—which everyone on both sides knew was impossible. The mood of these fighters was lighthearted, even boisterous. They were triumphant, there was nothing to fear.

Hawker walked through their ranks to the rear, attracting hardly any attention. Once they noted the color of his armband and saw the stunned expression on his face, they weren’t interested in him any more. They didn’t want anything to spoil the feeling of triumph, least of all the knowledge that they, too, had suffered some casualties. The soldiers ignored him.