Mercenary (4 page)

Then Joe got sick. His harvesting suffered, and he missed his quota. Now I carried him, paying for his meals and bunk. I was glad to expiate my social debt this way, owed for the manner in which he had rescued me from the concourse at Leda and given me support and a kind of family. I was a good picker now, well able to stay ahead, and on good terms with most of the other workers. I was, for one thing, thoroughly literate; when others had paperwork to decipher, I helped, sometimes saving them grief. Had either Joe or I asked for help, it would have been provided, but I preferred to help him myself.

I brought Joe his supper, which the foreman had served out especially for him, a generous portion. But he consumed only a mouthful and relapsed into his lethargy. There was no doctor; I could only sit by him and hope he got better.

I waited, finishing some of his meal for him, rather than let it go to waste. But my own appetite was gone, and so most of the stew was lost, anyway.

Others came by to express concern, but no one knew what to do. There were no contagious diseases in the Juclip; the bad days of personal contamination had been eliminated when man went out into the Solar System, with its natural quarantine. Only on septic Earth itself did the ancient maladies still flourish, and in occasional pockets in the major System cities. But there were degenerative maladies, such as the other Worry's declining liver. This one of Joe's was not familiar to any of us. We carried him back to his bunk in the ship where he lay unconscious.

In the night I got sick myself, vomiting out the stew I had taken. I felt awful, hurting and weak all over. I told myself it was nerves, or a sympathetic reaction, and forced myself to relax, and I got through the night, improving.

But I dreamed. I dreamed of a faceless man whom I realized was QYV, my private nemesis. He held out to me a goblet, urging me to drink, but I didn't want to because I knew he only wanted me dead. I spilled the goblet, and from it stew heaved out like my own vomit.

Stew?

I wrenched myself awake. “Poison!” I screamed.

Rivers appeared beside my bunk. “What?”

“Poisoned stew!” I said. “I ate some of Joe's stew, and it made me sick. It was served special for him—”

“For several days,” Rivers said grimly. “Damn! I warned him not to stir up the animals!” He put his hand to Joe's forehead and froze.

“Is he better?” I asked.

“He's dead,” Rivers said.

Numbly, I put my hand on Joe's face. It was cold. In a moment I was sure. He really was dead.

The other workers gathered around, their faces blank with uncertainty and horror. Joe Hill had been their tacit leader, and now, just like that, he was gone. My face was as blank as theirs, anesthetized by the first stun of grief. In the past year I had grown unaccustomed to death; now I had lost my friend and could not quite encompass the horrendous significance.

“Poison,” Rivers repeated. “I thought he was wrong, but I guess he wasn't. Not if they had to take him out like this.”

“But who—?” I asked, my lips fumbling numbly over the words, my tongue feeling thick, my face a chilled mask.

“The farmers,” he said, “who must've paid off the foreman. They murdered my brother.” He was silent a moment, staring at the dead man. There was no tear in Rivers's eye, no tremor to his chin; he simply stared. Feared of dyin'...

Then he reached down and took Joe's long knife. He held the wicked blade before him like a holy relic, and he sang:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night

Alive as you and I...

The rest of us joined in, singing Joe's song, mourning him. Rivers held the knife before him, pointing up, and marched to the ladder-tube. He climbed, one-handed. We followed.

Says Joe, "What they forgot to kill

Went on to organize..."

As I climbed, my lethargy of horror converted to cold rage. I knew there was going to be mayhem.

Vengeance...

The bubble-guards were stirring themselves, hearing our song. They were armed with billy clubs, and evidently supposed a gesture of force would cow us. We tore into them, crazed, knocking them out.

Then we wrecked the tally pavilion. We set fire to the dry potato plants, and smoke smudged through the bubble.

The plantation owner's mansion was on the equator, between fields. We marched on it, singing. We outnumbered the defensive farm-guards five to one. In a moment the house was ablaze.

The police arrived. They must have accelerated at ten gees to reach the bubble so soon—or they had been warned ahead. They burst upon the scene with gas bombs, and in moments it was over. I inhaled and fell on the ground, unconscious.

There followed an interminable sequence of confinement in prison cells interspersed with official hearings. They kept me drugged most of the time, so I have no clear memory for detail. But I do remember being brought before a magistrate. The essence of what he said was this: There was no proof that I had either instigated the riot or done any of the damage, but I had certainly been involved. I was henceforth barred from the privilege of performing migrant labor.

Privilege? “But my ID replacement never came through!” I protested. “I can't get other work!”

"We are aware of that. Therefore, your options are limited. You are a resident alien of uncertain status.

You must choose between deportation to your planet of origin or induction into the Jupiter Navy as a recruit."

“But I'm underage,” I said, though I wanted no part of deportation to Callisto, where at best I would face indefinite prison. If the Halfcal bureaucracy was as inefficient as that of Jupiter, they probably would not be able to identify me, and that could save my life; but still there was no future for me there. Yet I had tried to join the Navy before and learned that seventeen was their minimum enlistment age. I lacked six months.

“We have two affidavits attesting to your age as seventeen,” he said tiredly, as if accustomed to the prevarications of migrant scum. “You are eligible for induction.”

“Two?” I was amazed by this detail. “Who?”

He checked the papers on his desk impatiently. “Rivers, half-brother of the deceased, who testifies that the deceased informed him you were of age, and that the deceased was in a position to know.”

Rivers! Now I remembered that he had said he owed me one. It seemed this was his way of paying. Joe might have told him I had tried to enlist in the Navy; Joe would not have lied about my age. All the migrants knew I faced trouble on Callisto, for I had told my story in full detail several times.

“He also testified that you had no part in the incitement to riot, though the deceased was a friend of yours. That you had been ill. A blood test confirmed mild contamination in your system, evidently from defective food. Rivers will be put on trial for riot, but we seem to have no reason to doubt his statements concerning you.” He leafed through more pages. “The other statement is by your uncle Worry, confirming your age.”

Worry! So he had been true to the brotherhood of the song!

“Nothing I can say would convince you that I am underage for induction?” I asked.

“We have the affidavits,” he repeated firmly.

I sighed. Please don't throw me in that briar patch! I had tried to tell the truth, and they wouldn't listen. “Then you had better draft me.”

And that was the manner of my enlistment as a common soldier in the Jupiter Navy, at age sixteen and a half. My career as an alien mercenary had begun.

It would be tedious to describe in detail the whole of basic training, surely already familiar to the twenty-seventh-century citizen. The initial stage was a jumble of hurry-up-and-waits, of stripping and being reclothed completely, of taking batteries of tests for intelligence and aptitudes and skills, after a night with four hours sleep in a recalcitrant hammock. Hammocks are handy in space, because they adapt automatically to changes of thrust, but sleeping in them is an art that is not mastered instantly. I managed to make up the loss by sleeping through parts of several tests, by punching computer terminal buttons randomly in rapid order so as to finish early. I was a survivor. I was assigned to a barracks ship similar in certain respects to the migrant-labor ships I had been in before. That housing made it easy to ferry our company to any part of the base or nearby space for the various training exercises; in fact, sometimes we were moved while we slept. We never knew what new hazard we would emerge to, and perhaps that was best.

I was part of the 666th Training Battalion, nicknamed “Hell's Rejects,” for reasons relating to occidental mythology or numerology and the supposed savagery of the exercises. It had three companies, A, B, and C—I was in A for Awful—each of which had three platoons, each of which had three sections. The Jupiter Navy was trilaterally organized. One platoon in Awful was female. There were thirty trainees and five supervisory personnel in each platoonship, and additional cadre in each company, so Awful had a total manpower of one hundred fifty. But I was in regular contact only with the people of my own platoon; the other two platoons were of largely peripheral awareness, and the other companies might as well not have existed. My whole attention, like that of my fellow recruits, was occupied just getting through training.

We marched, we did grueling calisthenics, we attended dull lectures, we ate, we slept, we polished boots and brass. And of course we did KP—Kitchen Police, a euphemism for scrubbing floors and pots in the mess hall, sometimes with the same brushes. Theoretically the past five or six centuries were enough time for the military machines of our species to find ways to automate the kitchen facilities, but it had never happened. Similarly, permashine leather and brass were on the civilian market but were not available to us. We theorized that these were simply ways to keep us busy and miserable—and in subsequent years I have never found a better explanation. Likewise, inspections, a colossal expenditure of nervous energy without reward, and the necessity of maintaining entire display units of equipment that were used only for inspections. Some feculent personality once knotted my display towel over my hammock-cord while I slept, in the signal for early waking for special duty; not only was it not my turn for duty, it ruined my display. Some joke! I would have put his head out into the vacuum of space, had I known who it was.

We got haircuts every week, or else. For the first occasion, my full platoon was marched in step to the barbershop to be shorn, like it or not. We had been issued partial pay toward our first month's pay of eighty-six dollars—twenty per week—so we had the necessary cash. The Navy always made sure we had the cash for its requirements, and woe betide the recruit who spent it otherwise. Two dollars for a scalping; no hair on my head was left longer than half an inch. Later we would be allowed to grow some hair back; here in Basic the bald look was in.

The Navy was equally efficient about sex. Prescribed normal heterosexual relations were mandatory, and the Navy was the agency that defined “normal.” There was, it was aptly said, the right way, the wrong way, and the Navy way. “You will indulge once a week,” the platoon sergeant brayed, only he happened to employ a more explicit Saxon vernacular term in lieu of “indulge.” Whereupon, for the first occasion, we were marched to the brothel ship for the maiden performance. The sanitary facilities were termed the Head; this department was, of course, the Tail. Each of us had to pay the two-dollar fee at the entrance, just as we had for the haircuts. Or, as the sergeant put it, else.

Talking was not permitted in the ranks, but I heard muttered exclamations of amazement, delight, and shock. Awful Company was largely Hispanic, made up of refugees like myself, ranging up to twenty-five years of age; many did not yet speak English, so had not comprehended the nature of this assignment until they saw the red Tail light by the door. I do not think Hispanics are any more sensitive about sex than are those of other origins, but we were ill prepared for the suddenness and dispatch of this particular requirement. We should have known; the haircutting had been as forceful and insensitive, and the physical examinations had nearly provoked riot when the medics started checking prostates. I do not know how the average recruit of Saxon stock feels about this, but to us the prostate check seemed very much like buggery. We also had suffered painful inoculations against obscure diseases to which we never expected to be exposed. Why hadn't they used the painless mists instead of the huge blunt needles? To humiliate and cow us, of course; that was common knowledge. So we should have been prepared for something akin to rape as the Navy introduction to sex; the Navy prided itself on making any natural occupation a horror. Yet, in our naïveté, we were dismayed.

One man broke ranks and fled. The Saxon sergeant turned and aimed his stunner almost casually, but caught the man in the back, a perfect shot, and the fugitive fell facedown to the floor. No one went to pick him up; he was left there unconscious as an object lesson for us all. We knew he wasn't seriously hurt—the stunner only stuns—but still, this had a sobering effect. No one else broke ranks. Numbly we waited as the lines moved forward.

In one sense it was an eternity before my turn came; in another it was an instant. The act of sex was not foreign to my experience, but I had no interest in this manner of indulging it. A uniformed matron, a female sergeant, met me just inside the door and guided me to Room Number Eighteen. Eighteen—my older sister, Faith, had been eighteen when she was brutally raped. “You have fifteen minutes, soldier,”

she said, and more or less shoved me through the entrance. Fifteen—my age when I watched my sister raped. I heard the door click behind me, and knew I was locked in. Both physically and symbolically.

A young woman in a pink negligee sat on a bunk. She was attractive enough in face and form for a Saxon, but her bored expression and my knowledge of her profession put me further off. I really had no sexual desire for her. Some people assume that any young man will eagerly indulge in any sex that offers; this is fantasy. For most of us, there has to be some emotional commitment, some indication that the woman is not merely willing but interested, that some sort of continuing relationship is possible. Our drives are strong but with many counterindications, so that the net effect is often doubt rather than passion.

“Well, get your clothes off, soldier,” she snapped. The way she pronounced “soldier” reminded me that a soldier was the lowest form of life in the Jupiter Navy, and a recruit somewhat beneath that.

“I—do not feel inclined,” I said, aware that I was blushing about as well as my swarthy skin permitted.

“Would you like me to undress you?” she inquired, as if this too were dull routine. Surely it was, for her.

“Uh—please, no, thank you. I—”

“Listen, kid, you only have fifteen minutes, and it takes five to undress and redress. I've got a schedule to keep. If you don't strip, I'll do it for you. I don't indulge with clothed men.” Again, the term used was not

“indulge.”

“It—I think that would do no good,” I said. “I—”

“You asked for it,” she said impatiently. She bounced off the bed and strode to me. Without formality she unbuttoned my fatigue shirt and tugged it free of one arm and then the other. Then she went for the trousers.

I am, as it is put in English, ornery in some ways. I did not resist her; I let her undress me completely, moving when and in the manner she directed me, to complete the operation. In moments I stood naked before her, un-aroused. This is, if you choose to call it that, another kind of talent I possess.

She looked at me and made a wry face. Then she shrugged out of her negligee and stood as naked as I was. She bounced a little on her feet so that her breasts lifted and fell impressively. She had the requisite physical attributes. But to me this was like a laboratory exhibit, and I did not react.

“May I touch you?” she asked. In the Navy no person is permitted to touch another without that person's permission; it is supposedly a safeguard against abuse. An inspecting sergeant asks the recruit's permission before he takes hold of the belt buckle to see whether the back side of it has been properly shined. Of course the sensible recruit does not refuse such permission, ever—but the forms are scrupulously honored, and I believe it is right that they are. Only an ignorant person would believe that the military service is a profession of physical violence; it is, in fact, a profession of social violence, at least in the training stage. The recruit's soul, not his body, is abused, generally. So this woman requested my permission before she touched me, but I was not wearing a belt or buckle for inspection at the moment.

“Yes,” I said somewhat harshly, for my throat was tight.

She knelt before me and took hold of my member. She kneaded it delicately. She knew what she was doing; obviously she had had much experience. But there was no response, for my mental control, buttressed by my genuine aversion to the proceedings, remained in effect. I was impotent—and therein lay my true potency.

She got up, her lip curling with disgust. “Okay, soldier, I give up,” she said. She walked to the wall and touched a button. “I'm buzzing the supe; she knows how to handle your kind.”

“My kind?” I asked.

“The slobs who can't get it up.”

This creature was not becoming more endearing with familiarity. “As I explained, I am not inclined at the moment.”

She stared at my member. “Exactly.” The door opened behind me. I half-turned, abruptly embarrassed about my nakedness, but there was no refuge.

The one who entered was a woman in her twenties, garbed in a kind of off-the-shoulder, half-off-the-breast robe. She was beautiful, with flowing orange hair and a voluptuous body. She took in the situation in an instant. “Leave him to me, June. Take five.”

“Yes, sir,” the girl said, and quickly donned her negligee and departed.

Sir? This was an officer! That dismayed me further.

The woman sat on the bed. “Sit beside me, Private,” she said, patting the bed. “Do not be alarmed.”

I sat beside her, still conscious of my nakedness. Somehow it was worse to be naked before an officer than before an enlisted girl.

“You are young, I see,” she said. “Probably admitted underage on a waiver, or by error. Fifteen?”

“Sixteen, sir,” I said. Growth rates vary, and I am not a large person; still, this too was embarrassing.

“They wouldn't—”

“It is all right; I inquired merely as a point of information, not as criticism. I presume you do not want to be discharged on that ground?”

“No, sir!” I said quickly. “I want to be in the Navy.”

“Excellent,” she murmured, and I saw how skillfully she was managing me. She had gotten me to agree with her on a matter of substance, and she had couched what could have been a threat in a positive manner. I had good reason to cooperate now. She understood motivation. “Have you copulated before?”

She had a higher-class vocabulary than did the girl, June! “Yes, sir.” I said.

“With a woman?”

I felt the flush starting again. “Yes, sir.”

“You object to doing it with a stranger?”

“I—not exactly, sir. I realize the Navy has its requirements. But—”

“Please speak freely, Private. I'm here to help you.”

“Sir, it is better if there is love, or at least respect.”

She smiled, and she was very likeable when she did that. She was the sort of poised woman who could make a man feel at ease, even in a situation like this. “Of course. But that will come in its proper time. For recruits there is only sex.”

“I would prefer to wait for the proper time, sir.”

“You are not homosexual?”

“No, sir!”

“Or routinely impotent?”

“No, sir.”

“You are, then, normally disposed? It is merely the crudity of this introduction that has put you off?”

“Yes, pretty much, sir.” I was beginning to feel guilty for my obstructionism.

“Do you understand why we do it this way?”

“No, not really, sir. It seems to me that—”

"Several excellent reasons, private. Jupiter does not permit homosexuals of either sex to serve in the armed forces, for historical and practical reasons that I personally may question but must honor. Other cultures have shown that homosexuals can make fine officers and personnel, if things are done openly so that blackmailing is impossible. But I do not make policy, any more than you do. We are all to that extent victims of the system, and must do what is required of us. This introduction to the services of the Tail represents a specific test for homosexuality; a man who is truly impotent with women cannot pass this point without discovery. The certainty is less with a woman, but whatever her underlying preference, she will function heterosexually, so the Navy is satisfied.

"It is also the opinion of the Jupiter Navy that the best soldier is a satisfied one. We do not care to have stifled sexual urges generating mischief in the ranks, so we see that sex is not stifled. Sexual expression is normal and healthy, and the Navy wants normal and healthy personnel. But this cannot be verified by a computerized test, and psychiatric charting is cumbersome and, in my opinion, unreliable; a person like yourself could readily distort the results. It is necessary to see sexual expression in practice.

“It is also true that some recruits are young, shy, inexperienced, or have some foolish notion of saving it for marriage or for a loved one. In reality, it is better to bring experience and competence to love or marriage, so that the relationship can be most positive where it counts most, without fumbling or accident or misunderstanding. So it is necessary to take care of this training at the outset. You are not in civilian life now, soldier; you are in the Navy, and your body is ours. Once you perform by the book in this house, you will comprehend the power the Navy has over you. Your sexual expression is no more private than your haircut or your pay. You will conform—or be compelled.”