Люциус Шепард: Eternity and Other Stories

The things he’s learned from Baxter and others about the bomb and the field of flowers, what happened and why, drift through his thoughts. Probably none of it’s true. They float these rumors in lieu of actual explanation, let the men and media sort and combine them into a consensus lie. But there are no media this far north in Iraq, he tells himself. So maybe it’s all true, maybe all the scraps of loose talk are pieces of a truth that he isn’t smart enough to fit together. He wonders what the villagers said when asked why they thought the field of flowers was the entrance to Paradise. He wonders why the answers they gave their interrogators have been classified. Like maybe the villagers knew something command doesn’t want the rest of them to hear. It’s better not to consider these things, better to shoot some battle juice and get drooly and red-eyed. Nonetheless, he considers them. The things he does know, the things he’s heard. Fitting them together—that’s Today’s New Army Challenge. He switches off his tunes, switches on the intrasuit channel and hears Baxter say, “…I’m live in hollowed-out pearls. Each man gets two gardens of gold and two gardens of silver.”

“I ain’t hearin’ nothin’ ’bout what the women s’posed to get,” says Janet Perdue. “Though I guess I can figger it out.” She laughs, and the other woman in the patrol, Gay Roban, GRob, joins in.

The carrier stops, and the lights go red. Wilson knows they’re at the edge of the field. Time to juice up, buckle down, jack your rifle into your computer, make everything secure. Baxter drones on, now talking about the varieties of demons and angels and how people are brought out of hell burned all over, except on their faces, and are laid down on the banks of a river to recuperate. How on the day of judgment, hell will be hauled up from beneath the earth by seventy thousand ropes. Wilson punches up a drug mix on the computer, treating himself to a dry martini of God’n Country, with just a whisper of IQ. The syringe bites his forearm. Within seconds he’s gripped by a pathologically smooth feeling of competency and confidence, underscored by a stream of outrage and devotion to duty. The claustrophobic enclosure of the carrier seems like a seed pod that will soon burst open and expel them, deploying them so as to sow Democracy in its new ground. Though muted by suits and helmets, the ferocity of his comrades-in-arms radiates out around him. Their expressions, partially shielded by red reflection, are uniformly grim. Except for DeNovo, who’s turned on his privacy screen. Instead of eyes and nose and mouth, his faceplate displays a video capture from a home movie, some kids—one of them probably DeNovo himself—playing in somebody’s back yard, splashing in a plastic pool. Wilson’s privacy screen is programmed to show shots of the Rockies, but he’s been thinking about making a change.

The voice of Colonel Reese sounds over the intrasuit channel. Wilson has never met the colonel, never even laid eyes on him. He suspects that Reese does not exist, that he is a computer program, but he hearkens to the words, he lets their design control him. He pictures Reese to be a towering martial figure and not a doughy chaplain type. Standing at crisp parade rest, engaging them sternly, yet with loving familiarity.

“The idea for which you are fighting is too large to hold in the mind,” says the colonel. “If it was visible, it would be too large to see. Like the breadth of the sky or the shape of the universe. Here in this place of terror and iniquity, you are the sole expression of that idea. You represent its burning edges, you carry its flame, you are the bearers of its purifying light. You are the most dangerous men and women in the world. You kill so others may not need to kill, and there is no one better at it. If you die, you will in some form continue, because what lives in you and through you will not die. Even your death will serve to light the way.”

The colonel talks about home, God, the country in whose national interest this beautifully tailored, corporate-sponsored message of warrior religion has been created, invoked to inspire in them a zealousness comparable to that of the Enemy. He mentions each soldier by name and refers to elements of their private lives, to specific moments and people and places. The words seem like a prayer to Wilson, and he closes his eyes.

0637 hours

There are three patrols, teams of eight each, with two more such patrol groups scheduled to follow. Seventy-two soldiers in all. Now and then Wilson checks his helmet screen, which shows a digital animation of their progress, little brown figures knee-deep in yellow flowers. He can control the screen to give him whatever angle he wants, even close-ups of the helmets that reveal the expression any soldier is wearing at a particular moment, stamped-on features that are individualized, but rendered like cartoon superheroes. Sometimes he commands the screen to give him a low angle looking upward at one soldier or another, a cool point of view that makes them appear to be giants moving beneath a blank grayish blue sky. He’s looking at Baxter that way when a toylike helicopter appears in the digital sky above Baxter’s image. Flashing red words materialize on the screen, ordering them to proceed more rapidly, the patrols at their rear are ready to deploy.

The mouth of the cave excavated by the bomb is four hundred sixty-seven feet wide, but its depth reads infinite on Wilson’s instruments. Even more distressing, the cave appears to occupy the entire base of the mountain—an unimaginable tonnage is essentially hovering, supported to a height ranging from forty-one to seventy-seven feet only by thin rock walls. Thinking his helmet must be whack, Wilson checks with the others. Everyone’s readings are the same. The red words keep on flashing, telling them to advance. Baxter, who leads the patrol, asks for a confirmation from command and receives a go. The thought that he’s about to be crushed does not unnerve Wilson. Death will be quick, his drugs are good, and Colonel Reese’s words were a knife that spread his fear so thin, it has melted away into him like hot butter into a biscuit. He moves forward, swinging his rifle in an easy arc to cover his area. As he passes beneath a toothy hang of rock at the entrance to the cave, he switches to a private channel and signals Baxter.

“Yo, dog!” Wilson says. “Got any more good advice on the afterlife?”

Baxter doesn’t respond for a couple of beats, then says, “Yeah. Get ready.”

“Fucking command knew this all along, man. They knew this was whack.”

“You think?” says Baxter, affecting a retard voice. “Do some IQ, man. Your dumbass is showin’.”

“This here’s no time to be peaking,” Wilson says. “This here’s look-straight-ahead time. Keep-your-mind-on-the-map time.”

“IQ’s good any ol’ time. You been usin’ too drifty a mix, man. You got to burn that shit home. Straight no chaser.”

They walk without speaking for a few seconds.

“All right. I’m shuttin’ it down,” Baxter says.

“Hey, Baxter!”

“Yeah?”

Wilson wants to say something to fortify their bond, to acknowledge it, because in the midst of his lion glow, his sense of supernatural direction, there’s an unfortified part of him that needs a human affirmation, but he can’t bring the words out. Finally he says, “We cool, man?”

“Nothin’ but, man. You know that. Nothin’ but.”

“Okay… cool.”

They trudge onward, crushing the yellow blossoms underfoot, and then Baxter says, “One thing that book tells about Paradise? Said you enter Paradise in the most beautiful and perfect of forms… in the form of Adam.”

“Adam-and-Eve Adam?”