Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

Jackie thought she was joking, and managed to fake a polite laugh. “I can be there in thirty minutes if it’s the middle of the night,” she said. “Forty-five if it’s rush hour. You want me there now?”

“Not yet,” Jenny said. “Got to go—it’s just coming up to dinner time.”

Dinner was roast lamb and mint sauce with new potatoes, green beans and broccoli, followed by lemon sorbet, but the nurse had obviously dealt with cases like hers before, because she was also permitted to order a packet of Garibaldi biscuits, a five-hundred-gram bar of Cadbury’s fruit and nut and three bananas, all presumably paid for by the army. She only had mineral water to drink, because the bathroom was down the hall and she didn’t want to subject herself to the indignity of calling for bottles at regular intervals.

She refused the sleeping pills she was offered, but began to regret it when she realized that she couldn’t find a comfortable position in which to lie for more than three minutes at a time, let alone go to sleep. She tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter, because she still had to come to terms with her new situation, and its prospects.

She was still thinking about it three hours later, when the door of her room quietly swung open.

There was a nightlight beside the bed, so it wasn’t dark, but the glow was too dim to show her anything but the blurred silhouette of the man who came in. For a moment, Jenny couldn’t suppress the fear that this was someone come to steal her baby, even though her baby hadn’t been born yet and there was no reason in the world why the army would want to steal him, given that it would work out so much cheaper and so much less trouble to let her bring him up. The absurd panic died when she took note of the fact that the man was exceptionally tall, and realized who it must be.

“Hi,” said Lieutenant Graham Lunsford, uncomfortably. It was obvious that he hadn’t volunteered for this mission.

“You utter bastard,” she said. “You knew you were shooting killer sperm, and you just went right ahead. Considering that you must have been trying to get soldier girls pregnant week in and week out, I’m surprised you even wanted to.”

“You told me you were on the pill,” he pointed out, as he came to stand beside the bed.

Standing so close wasn’t as heroic as it seemed; he knew perfectly well that she had about as much mobility as a beached whale. “And sex isn’t as much fun when you’re doing it under orders. You have no idea how much I needed one just for me .”

“So I lied,” she said. “It was Jackie’s idea. No, it wasn’t—it was mine. Jenny Loomis, walking cliché. Alarm on the biological clock about to go off, no reason to saddle oneself with a bloody husband, no reason why a bloody accountant can’t work from home, etcetera. Turned out not to be just for you after all, didn’t it? It’s the medal rather than the court martial, I suppose?”

“What the treatment was supposed to do,” he told her—and perhaps his naivety was genuine—“was to make sure that any kids I fathered would be better equipped to live in the future we’re heading for. Isn’t that what you want too?”

“Sure I do,” she said. “You and your mate must have had a fine time listening to Jackie ramble on about the tactics of biological warfare. Abstract expressionism—a load of Jackson Pollocks. If you’re here because they’ve ordered you to be a good father, I’d rather you didn’t bother. I’d rather stick to plan A, warts and all.”

She watched his face carefully, but couldn’t judge the exact extent of his relief. The fact that he changed the subject was a bit of a giveaway, though.

“How much did Gilfillan tell you?” he asked, warily.

“Just enough,” she replied, confidently. “He told me about imprinting. I’d never heard of that, but it’s a neat idea. The womb as an eternal battleground, where every mother and her child are locked into a struggle for resources. Makes all that old kin selection stuff seem quaintly sentimental, doesn’t it? At the end of the day, it’s all warfare—even motherhood. We all get caught by friendly fire if our defenses get leaky. There’s a certain irony in the fact that a perfect carrier is so hard to carry to term… but I can see the upside now. You’re absolutely right about my kid being better equipped than most to live in the future we’re designing. And I can see the next step in the argument, too—the side effects side effect. I can see the real weapons potential.”

Lieutenant Lunsford hesitated a lot longer than Dr. Gilfillan had, and when he did speak, all he said was: “Ah.”

“Jackie was right, wasn’t she?” Jenny said. “Okay, maybe it’s not that easy to design, manufacture or spread viruses that will sterilize women or feminize men—but that’s not the name of the game, is it? Expressionism is the way to go. You don’t have to invent bioweapons when they’re already built in, when all you have to do is upset the balance of power. You don’t have to sterilize women if you have a means of doing to them what you’ve done to me… or the opposite. It really doesn’t matter, weaponwise, whether it’s the mother or the fetus that gets the upper hand in the eternal struggle—just so long as natural selection’s carefully negotiated balance is upset. Either the kids become too difficult to carry, or they’re starved of resources before birth. A lose-lose situation—unless, of course, you’re the enemy. Which we will be. After all, we’re the ones with the fancy hospitals and the hi-tech medicine. As usual, it’ll be the rich that get the pleasure, and the poor that pay the price.”

“You’re a tax accountant,” the lieutenant said, brutally. “Would you want it any other way?”

“Speaking as an early casualty in this particular war,” Jenny said, “no. But I still think you’re an utter bastard, whether I lied about the pill or not. You can’t excuse the casualties of friendly fire by saying that you thought they were wearing flak jackets.”

“You’re right,” he said, although his heart wasn’t in it. “But if you need me, I’m around. All you have to do is ask. Your son is my only child, so far, and the way things are going, he might have to wait quite a while for a little brother or sister—so I’m not sorry about what happened, all things considered.”

Jenny opened her to mouth to say “I am,” but she couldn’t shape the words. She was exhausted, she was being kicked black and blue from inside, she was paranoid, and she was probably even a little delirious, but she couldn’t quite manage to be sorry. She was a victim of friendly fire, and she was carrying the spawn of Satan, and she was a complete idiot, and she was extremely hungry, but she couldn’t quite manage to be sorry. After all, her perfect, healthy, glorious baby boy might still grow up to be an actor, or a lawyer, or a brain surgeon, even if he did have to do his national service as a secret weapon… and if progress moved on, he had twenty years to become redundant in that capacity.

“You can go now,” she said to him, eventually. “I think I might be able to go to sleep now.

For breakfast Jenny had a big bowl of cornflakes sprinkled with sultanas, followed by three croissants with butter and strawberry jam, a bowl of mixed fruits, including slices of melon, pineapple, oranges and kiwifruit, washed down with half a liter of apple and mango juice and a single cup of black coffee without sugar. Then she had a couple of rounds of toast with butter and lime marmalade. She’d never felt so virtuous in all her life, but she would have killed for half a dozen rashers of crispy bacon.

When she’d finished, she called Jackie. Jackie was already at work, but this time she had her mobile switched on. “I’m ready,” she said. “Just say the word, and I’ll be there before the contractions have got into gear.”