The Forever War (The Forever War, #1) - Joe Haldeman Page 0,102
shoulder. “Of course, you don’t have to go to these breeder planets. You can stay on one of my planets. I make no distinction between heterosexual play and homosexual.”
She went up on the stage to give a long spiel about where we were going to stay and eat and so forth while we were on Stargate. “Never been seduced by a computer before,” Charlie muttered.
~~~
The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate.
Once they could talk, the first question was “Why did you start this thing?” and the answer was “Me?”
The Taurans hadn’t known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were in positions of power. They virtually ran the United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group, that was taking advantage of the newly-discovered collapsar jump to explore interstellar space.
Many of the early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The exmilitary men were suspicious. They armed the colonizing vessels, and the first time they met a Tauran ship, they blasted it.
They dusted off their medals and the rest was going to be history.
You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.
The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.
The Taurans relearned war, after a fashion. They never got really good at it, and would eventually have lost.
The Taurans, the book explained, couldn’t communicate with humans because they had no concept of the individual; they had been natural clones for millions of years. Eventually, Earth’s cruisers were manned by Man, Kahn-clones, and they were for the first time able to get through to each other.
The book stated this as a bald fact. I asked a Man to explain what it meant, what was special about clone-to-clone communication, and he said that I a priori couldn’t understand it. There were no words for it, and my brain wouldn’t be able to accommodate the concepts even if there were words.
All right. It sounded a little fishy, but I was willing to accept it. I’d accept that up was down if it meant the war was over.
~~~
Man was a pretty considerate entity. Just for us twenty-two, he went to the trouble of rejuvenating a little restaurant-tavern and staffing it at all hours (I never saw a Man eat or drink—guess they’d discovered a way around it). I was sitting in there one evening, drinking beer and reading their book, when Charlie came in and sat down next to me.
Without preamble, he said, “I’m going to give it a try.”
“Give what a try?”
“Women. Hetero.” He shuddered. “No offense…it’s not really very appealing.” He patted my hand, looking distracted. “But the alternative…have you tried it?”
“Well…no, I haven’t.” Female Man was a visual treat, but only in the same sense as a painting or a piece of sculpture. I just couldn’t see them as human beings.
“Don’t.” He didn’t elaborate. “Besides, they say—he says, she says, it says—that they can change me back just as easily. If I don’t like it.”
“You’ll like it, Charlie.”
“Sure; that’s what they say.” He ordered a stiff drink. “Just seems unnatural. Anyway, since, uh, I’m going to make the switch, do you mind if…why don’t we plan on going to the same planet?”
“Sure, Charlie, that’d be great.” I meant it. “You know where you’re going?”
“Hell, I don’t care. Just away from here.”
“I wonder if Heaven’s still as nice—”
“No.” Charlie jerked a thumb at the bartender. “He lives there.”
“I don’t know. I guess there’s a list.”
A man came into the tavern, pushing a cart piled high with folders. “Major Mandella? Captain Moore?”
“That’s us,” Charlie said.
“These are your military records. I hope you find them of interest. They were transferred to paper when your strike force was the only one outstanding, because it would have been impractical to keep the normal data retrieval networks running to preserve so few data.”
They always anticipated your questions, even when you didn’t have any.
My folder was easily five times as thick as Charlie’s. Probably thicker than any other, since I seemed to be the only trooper who’d made it through the whole