Frederik Pohl - Jem

The creature was no longer a specimen to Ana. She was a friend. Into the cognitive half of Ana’s brain the songs of the balloonists had poured. In the first day she had learned to understand a few simple phrases, in a week to communicate abstract thoughts; now she was almost fluent. Ana had never thought of herself as having any kind of a singing voice, but the balloonist was not critical. They sang to each other for hours on end, and more and more Shirley’s songs were sad and despairing, and sometimes even disconnected. She was, she told Ana, the last survivor of the dozen or more of her species who had been wrenched from Kungson and hurled to this inhospitable place. She did not expect to live much longer. She sang to Ana of the sweetness of warm pollen in a damp cloud, of the hot, stinging sadness of egg-spraying, of the communal joy of the flock in chorus. She told Ana that she would never sing in the flock again. She was thrice right. She would not have dared sing with her voice so pitifully harsh and weak because the gas pump gave her only faltering tones. She had no chance of being returned to Kungson. And she knew death was near.

Two days later she was dead. Ana arrived at the zoo to find her cage empty and Julia Arden supervising the sterilization of its parts.

“Don’t take on,” she advised gruffly. “You’ve learned all you need to know.”

“It is not for the learning that I weep. It is because I have lost someone dear.”

“Christ. Get out of here, Dimitrova. How did they let a jerk like you into this project in the first place? Crying over a dead fartbag and sending love letters to the Peeps — you’re really out of it!”

Ana marched back to the barracks, threw herself down on her cot, and allowed herself to weep as she had not done in months — for Shirley, for Ahmed, for the world, and for herself. “Out of it” described her feelings exactly. How had everything become so hideous and complex?

That afternoon in the exercise field was an ordeal. The physical strain was no longer a real problem, but for some days now the “exercises” had taken a new turn. All of them, her own original detachment as well as the new arrivals, had been working less to strengthen their muscles and reflexes than to learn to handle unfamiliar equipment — unfamiliar to Ana, at least. She observed that all of the new people, and some of the old, had obviously had experience with it already. Such equipment! Heavy hoses like water cannon, backpack tanks and nozzles like flamethrowers, lasers, even grenade launchers. For what grotesque purpose was all this intended? Tight-lipped, Ana did as she was told. Repeatedly she found herself in difficulties and had to be bailed out by one of the others. The colonel saved her from incinerating herself with a flamethrower, and Sergeant Sweggert had to rescue her when the recoil of her water cannon knocked her off her feet.

“Please do not concern yourself,” she gasped furiously, pulling herself erect and reaching once more for the hose. “I am quite all right.”

“Hell you are,” he said amiably. “Lean into it more, honey, you hear? It doesn’t take muscle, just a little brains.”

“I do not agree.”

He shook his head. “Why do you get so uptight, Annie?”

“I do not like being trained in the use of weapons!”

“What weapons?” He grinned at her. “Don’t you know this stuff is only to use against vermin? Colonel Menninger spelled it all out for us. We don’t want to kill any sentients; that’s against the law, and besides, we’ll all get our asses in a crack. But all the intelligent ones got little cousins, crabrats and airsharks and things that dig around in the dirt and come out and chew your ass off. Those are what we’re going to use this stuff for.”

“In any event,” said Ana, “I do not require assistance from you, sergeant — even if I believed you, or your Colonel Menninger, which I do not.”

Sweggert looked past her and pursed his lips. “Hello, there, colonel,” he said. “We was just talking about you.”

“So I noticed,” said Margie Menninger’s voice. Ana turned slowly, and there she was. Looking, Ana observed without regret, quite poorly. The shots were having their way with her; her face was broken out in cerise blotches, her eyes were red and running, and her hair showed dark roots. “Get on with it, sergeant,” she said. “Dimitrova, see me in my room after chow.”

She turned away and raised her voice. “All right, all of you,” she cried. “Get your asses down! Let’s see how you crawl!”

Rebelliously Ana dropped to the ground and practiced the way of worming herself across an open field that she had learned the day before. These were infantry tactics! What nonsense for a scientific expedition! She conserved her anger carefully, and it lasted her the rest of the afternoon, through dinner, and right up to the moment she knocked on Menninger’s door in that other barracks halfway across the base.

“Come in.” Lt. Col. Menninger was sitting at a desk in a white, fluffy dressing gown, rimless granny glasses on her nose, a half-eaten dinner tray pushed to one side. She looked up from some papers and said, “Take a seat, Ana. Do you smoke? Would you like a drink?”

The angry fires inside Ana banked themselves. But they were still ready to blaze out. “No, thank you,” she said, in general, to all.

Margie stood up and poured herself a scant shot of whiskey. She would have preferred marijuana, but she did not care to share a joint with this Bulgarian. She sipped a centimeter off the top of the drink and said, “Personal question. What have you got against Sweggert?”

“I have nothing against Sergeant Sweggert. I simply do not care to make love with him.”

“What are you, Dimitrova, some maximum women’s libber? You don’t have to ball him on the parade ground. Just let him give you a hand when he wants to.”

“Colonel Menninger,” Ana said precisely, “are you ordering me to encourage his sexual overtures so that I can complete the obstacle course more readily?”

“I am not ordering you to do diddly-shit, Dimitrova. What is it with you? Sweggert comes on to everything with a hole in it. It’s his nature. He comes on to me, too. I could put the son of a bitch in Leavenworth for the places his hands have been on the drill field. But I won’t, because he’s a good sol — Because he’s essentially a good person. He’ll help you if you let him. You can always tell him to fuck off later on.”

“This I consider immoral, Colonel Menninger.”

Margie finished her drink and poured half of another. “You’re not too happy here, are you, Ana?”

“That is correct, Mis Menninger. I did not ask for this assignment.”

“I did.”

“Yes, no doubt, perhaps you did, but I—”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I asked for it for myself, but I also asked for it for you. I picked you out by name, Ana, and it took hell’s own conniving to make the Bulgarians turn you loose. They think you’re pretty great at translating.” She tossed down the rest of the drink and took off her glasses. “Look, Ana, I need you. This project is important to me. It should be important to you, too, if you have a spark of patriotism in your body.”

“Patriotism?”

“Loyalty, then,” said Margie impatiently. “Loyalty to our bloc. I know we come from different countries, but we stand for the same thing.”

Ana found herself more puzzled than angered by this strange American. She tried to sort her feelings out and express them exactly. “Bulgaria is my home,” she began. “I love my home. The Food Bloc — that is a much more abstract thing, Mis Menninger. I understand that in a world of two hundred nations there must be alliances and that one owes one’s allies some sort of allegiance, or at least courtesy. But I cannot say I feel loyalty. Not to the Food Bloc.”