Straying From the Path

The night before the ceasefire, I kept watch over my platoon. I had to, because I was the only one standing, apart from the one medic still healthy enough to tend the ill. Soldiers lay on bedrolls on the ground, wet from recent rains. Row after row of bedrolls. Stripped to t-shirts and briefs, men complained of the heat and tossed, dehydrated, sweating with fever, coughing, grimacing, unable to swallow with searing throats. I made sure the fires we used to boil pots of water kept burning; we’d run out of butane and propane stove fuel. We always, always boiled our water.

I imagined them all dying. We were supposed to meet the battalion in two days. I’d have to go myself, carrying the stack of dogtags of my dead friends. If we were attacked now, we wouldn’t survive. One or the other, the plague or the Chinese, would destroy us. But the plague had leveled them just as badly. No one would be fighting when the armies met at Beijing.

Light, smoke from the fires that burned in the Beijing suburbs obscured the night sky with a hellish red glow. For a year I had waited to die, looked on every sweaty, noisy night as my last. I was prepared, I thought. I expected it. But still I kept watch. Something kept the plague from striking me, some obscene luck kept me from any injury greater than a cut from shrapnel.

That obscene luck meant that even if only one of us could join the battalion, one of us would, carrying the dogtags, ready to report.

But we didn’t join the battalion in two days. Orders came t

o hold our position, and we held for a week while supplies arrived, new medications that, if they did not induce miracle cures, at least stabilized many of the ill. Not all of us died. Those of us who were well enough to march met with the decimated battalion and arrived in Beijing for the armistice two weeks later.

Once, I’d been ready to be the last.

I kept my dogtags in a cardboard box with my medals, my old insignia, odds and ends and souvenirs that had seemed like a good idea at the time, and a sheaf of official papers: shipping orders, discharge papers, that sort of thing. A box of relics that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but me. I hadn’t looked at that stuff in years. I avoided the urge. Let the kids find it when I’m gone. And so they didn’t wonder, maybe I would write those memoirs. A few pages of explanation, of memory. Just for them.

Fifteen years after the armistice, resentment from the last war festered into new conflicts. Diseases continued to make populations unstable, and the supply of soldiers was unreliable. Governments started using machines to fight their wars. When they found they could claim territory and win arguments with machines, they didn’t need people anymore.

Machines didn’t care whether or not they were buried with military honors.

I asked Ken to email me every day. Nothing elaborate, just a note, a line: I’m alive. One last time, I keep watch, downloading my email every day, looking for that one note: I’m alive. When the day arrives that I don’t get that message, I will know.

I wait for my last funeral.

Silence Before Starlight

Metaphors tell of the cold light of the stars, but her body felt warm when she wrapped her arms around me, smiling at her reflection in the faceplate of my helmet. I had been looking at the stars—at nothing, at vacuum—and then I saw her, shining face, silver eyes, long pale hair floating weightless.

Her slender fingers raised the shield over the faceplate, so at last we looked into each other’s eyes. She pressed herself close to me; I could see she was naked. She couldn’t have been, she couldn’t have lived—she should have been dead. But she smiled.

Even through the suit I could feel her reaching for me, and I held her, clenching my bulky gloved hands against her while she worked the catch of the faceplate. I couldn’t wait for her to open the helmet so I could taste her lips. Making love to starlight.

The plate went up, her lips met mine. She kissed me, smoothed my face, my hair. My eyes closed, and I forgot what she looked like.

So I looked again, inhaled, and drowned.

I gasped at vacuum, reached for my helmet—gone, long gone. She smiled like an angel. I tried to scream as my lungs imploded, and she laughed at me, a sound of crystal bells, a sound starlight might make . . .

“Barrie!”

I breathed. I breathed one desperate inhalation after another. I tried to touch my face, and the faceplate—shield down, seals intact—blocked me. My hands shook, my gasping continued, and I saw the hull of the ship, the gray arc of Europa, and the stars. Nothing else.

“Barrie! What’s wrong? Your vitals spiked, your heart rate’s tripled—”

“Alvy?” My voice cracked, I couldn’t help it. The sound of my own breathing overwhelmed me.

“What’s happening out there, Barrie?”

The tether still held me to the probe. I’d have spun off into the void otherwise. Drifting, gently tugged now and then by the lifeline, I patted my helmet, my neck, every joint of my suit, convincing myself that I was well and whole.

I couldn’t explain to Alvy what had happened. Making love to starlight.

“Might—might be a suit malfunction. I think I should come in.”

Alvy’s voice on my helmet inset turned tired but no less anxious. “Just what we need right now. I’ll meet you this side of the airlock.”

Alvy had to talk me to the airlock hatch, telling me to breathe slowly, one breath in, one breath out, until I matched her steady coaxing. In, out. My hands stopped shaking by the time air cycled into the airlock, and I could finally take off the suit—safely.

I started trembling again when Alvy helped me lift off the helmet.