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We had two weeks of rest and rehabilitation-in orbit, unfortunately, not on Heaven-after the ALSC experience. While we were sweating it out in the officers' gym, I met the other line officers, who were as shaken and weak as I was, after three weeks' immersion in oxygenated fluorocarbon, mayhem, and book learning.
We were also one mass of wrinkles from head to toe, the first day, when our exercises consisted of raising our arms above our heads and trying to stand up and sit down without help. The wrinkles started to fade in the sauna, as we conversed in tired monosyllables. We looked like big muscular pink babies; they must have shaved or depilated us during the three weeks.
Three of us were male, which was interesting. I've seen lots of naked men, but never a hairless one. I guess we all looked kind of exposed and diagrammatic. Okayawa had an erection, and Morales kidded him about it, but to my relief it didn't go any further than that. It was a socially difficult situation anyhow.
The commander, Angela Garcia, was physically about ten years older than me, though of course by the calendar she was centuries younger. She was gruff and seemed to be holding a lot in. I knew her slightly, at least by sight; she'd been a platoon leader, not mine, in the Tet-2 disaster. Both her legs had the new-equipment look that my arm did. We'd come to Heaven together, but since her regrowth took three times as long as mine, we hadn't met there. William and I were gone before she was able to come into the common ward.
William had been in many of my ALSC dreams, a shadowy figure in some of the crowds. My father sometimes, too.
I liked Sharn Taylor, the medical officer, right off. She had a cheerful fatalism about the whole thing, and had lived life to the hilt while on Heaven, hiring a succession of beautiful women to help her spend her fortune. She'd run out of money a week early, and had to come back to Threshold and live on army rations and the low-power trips you could get for free. She herself was not beautiful; a terrible wound had ripped off her left arm and breast and the left side of her face. It had all been put back, but the new parts didn't match the old parts too well.
She had a doctor's objectivity about it, though, and professional admiration for the miracles they could accomplish-by the current calendar, she was more than 150 years out of medical school.
Her ALSC session had been totally different from ours, of course; an update of healing skills rather than killing ones. "Most of it is getting along with machines, though, rather than treating people," she told me while we nibbled at the foodlike substance that was supposed to help us recover. "I can treat wounds in the field, basically to keep someone alive until we can get to a machine. But most modern weapons don't leave enough to salvage." She had a silly smile.
"We don't know how modern the enemy is going to be," I said. "Though I guess they don't have to be all thatmodern to vaporize us." We both giggled, and then stopped simultaneously.
"I wonder what they've got us on," she said. "It's not happyjuice; I can feel my fingertips and have all my peripheral vision."
"Temporary mood elevator?"
"I hope it's temporary. I'll talk to someone."
Sharn found out that it was just a euphoriant in the food; without it, ALSC withdrawal could bring on deep depression. I'd almost rather be depressed, I thought. We were,after all, facing almost certain doom. All but one of us had survived at least one battle in a war where the average survival rate was only 34 percent per battle. If you believed in luck, you might believe we'd used all of ours up.
We had the satellite to ourselves for eight days-ten officers waited on by a staff of thirty perso
Risa Danyi and Sharn and I made up a logical trio, the three officers out of the chain of command. Risa was the tech officer, a bit older than Sharn and me, with a Ph.D. in systems engineering. She seemed younger, though, born and raised on Heaven. Not actually born, I reminded myself. And never traumatized by combat.
Risa's ALSC had been the same as mine, but she had found it more fascinating than terrifying. She was apologetic about that. She had grown up tripping, and was accustomed to the immediacy and drama of it-and she didn't have any real-life experiences to relate to the dream combat.
Both Risa and Sharn were bawdy by nature and curious about my heterosex, and while we were silly with the euphoriants I didn't hold back anything. When I was first in the army, we'd had to obey a rotating "sleeping roster," so I slept with every male private in the company more than once, and although sleeping together didn't mean you had to have sex, it was considered unsporting to refuse. And of course men are men; most of them would have to go through the motions, literally, even if they didn't feel like it.
Even on board ship, when they got rid of the sleeping roster, there was still a lot of switching around. I was mainly with William, but neither of us was exclusive (which would have been considered odd, in our generation). Nobody was fertile, so there was no chance of accidental pregnancy.
That notion really threw Sharn and Risa. Pregnancy is something that happens to animals. Sharn had seen pictures of the process, medical history, and described it to us in horrifying detail. I had to remind them that I was born that way-I did thatto my mother, and she somehow forgave me.
Risa primly pointed out that it was actually my father who did it to my mother, which for some reason we all thought was hilarious.
One morning when we were alone together, just looking down at the planet in the lounge, she brought up the obvious.
"You haven't said anything about it, so I guess you've never loved a woman." She cleared her throat, nervous. "I mean had sex. I know you loved your mother."
"No." I didn't know whether to elaborate. "It wasn't that common; I mean I knewgirls and women who were together. That way."
"Well." She patted my elbow. "You know."
"Uh, yes. I mean yes, I understand. Thanks, but I . . ."
"I just meant, you know, we're the same rank. It's even legal." She laughed nervously; if all the regulations were broken that enthusiastically, we'd be an unruly mob, not an army.
I wasn't quite sure what to say. Until she actually asked, I hadn't thought about the possibility except as an abstraction. "I'm still grieving for William." She nodded and gave me another pat and left quietly.
But of course that wasn't all of it. I could visualize her and Sharn, for instance, having sex; I'd seen it on stage and cube often enough. But I couldn't put myself in their place. Not the way I could visualize myself being with one of the men, especially Sid, Isidro Zhulpa. He was quiet, introspective, darkly beautiful. But too well balanced to contemplate a sexual perversion involving me.
I was still jangled about fantasy, imagination; real and artificial memories. I knew for certain that I had never killed anyone with a club or a knife, but my body seemed to have a memory of it, more real than the mental picture. I could still feel the ghost of a penis and balls, and breastlessness, since all of the ALSC combat templates were male. Surely that was more alien than lying down with another woman. When I was waiting for William to get out of his final range-and-motion stage, reading for two days, I'd had an impulse to try tripping, plugging into a lesbian-sex simulation, the only kind that was available for women.