War (part 2)

I remember hearing someone say that life is nothing but a series of moments, one after the other. Yes, I should have said, you're right. At least, in retrospect. When people describe a near-death experience and say their whole life flashed in front of their eyes, I think you should take that literally. It is not a smooth film playing, but stuttering images flashing in the dark. Each one a moment, and each one leaving an after-image in the blackness. Some leave a stronger image, others dissolve almost instantly. Memory, I think, works the same. Life is a strobing light, flashing pictures onto film. Some stick and others fade.
Most of the years following the man with the grey moustache have faded. That's alright though; most of it was school anyway, and those years are worth forgetting. It's not until after we finished school that another image burned bright enough to still be visible.
By that time we were both young adults. Jake had grown into the broad-shouldered blue-eyed poster boy his parents had certainly not been disappointed to see. Girls had developed the habit of flocking around him. He seemed to be the sort of guy who just breezed through life, nothing ever in his way, no troubles and no hurt. Yes, of course I was jealous sometimes, but not often and not much. He was, after all, my best friend. So that was good.
It was summer and we had made our plans. Jake was content to stay in our town, and enrolled in a local school for Arts. That was not for me, however. I wanted linguistics. Languages were what interested me, especially their underlying mechanics, their subtleties and their secrets. I loved to fiddle their verbs and build complex structures of communication, but most of all I loved to discover their inner workings. So I was going to move to Cardoza, the planet's capital, to enroll in the best university Polnaki had to offer. But that was all yet to come.
Before that, it was summer.1

There may have been a girl. I think there was a girl. She may have been called Jade. She may have been looking up at me as her head rested on my chest, her blue eyes sometimes hidden by her brown hair vibrating in the wind as we lay by the lake. But the girl does not matter. Jake was also there, probably also with a girl, but that girl was not important either.
The lake was big, we knew that much. We had heard about a Navy port on the other side, but we had never been more than mildly interested, until that summer.
As I lay there, possibly looking at Jade's cute face or squinting against the sun, yes, probably squinting, - I remember the sun being very bright that day – the wind suddenly picked up speed. Dark, tumorous clouds came rushing at us from across the lake , obscuring the sapphire blue sky as we felt a deep rumbling in the ground. Jake and I sat up and looked at each other. I remember that very well, the wild-eyed excitement on his features, and probably on mine too. We felt the air pressure change, somehow, and felt a strange popping in our ears. The smell of ozone intruded upon my senses.
As we clambered to our feet (I don't know what the girls were doing at this point, and frankly, it doesn't matter), the wind turned into a gale and the grass around us flattened against the ground as the sky darkened. We leaned forward against the wind and looked across the gigantic lake. At first we saw nothing there, except the familiar but very distant tree-line.
“You think it's coming from the port?” I shouted at Jake.
“Yeah,” he yelled back, “maybe something taking off!”
“You shittin' me? It must be huge!”
As if it could hear our conversation, a titanic dark shape appeared above the horizon. Our jaws came loose.
“Holy shit,” we chorused. It was the only sensible thing to say. We gaped at the colossal thing that broke away from the land. I did not know exactly what it was then, but I memorized its contours and features exactly as I saw them. When I looked the data up later, it turned out to be a Hellion-class battle-cruiser, one of only six in the entire Navy, and I learned it was nearly six miles in length. That day by the lake though, miles meant nothing. It was simply huge, like a part of the planet had come alive and simply decided to leave. We gaped some more. Then, to our surprise and maybe - momentarily - our horror, the thing turned our way.
We glanced at each other, then back at the spaceship. The long boxy form had turned into a black square as it faced us, dotted with blue and red lights, dark thin needles sticking from it; probably antennae or weapons. I learned later that the storm and the smell of ozone had something to do with the ship's ion engines, which up until that moment had been running almost idle, only lifting the ship from the ground. But then, they fired. The colossus moved with astonishing and frightening speed, rushing our way, driving the clouds and the storm before it. The rain hit us, flying almost horizontally into our faces. We raised our arms but kept watching. The ship arched up as it passed over us, the top half of it already disappearing through the clouds. It blotted out the sun and we stood in the darkness and the rain, watching blue shards of lightning striking the ship across its hull as it plowed through the atmosphere. A thunderous explosion hit us as the thing smashed through the sound barrier, and we were almost knocked to the ground by the shock wave. Then, just as fast as it had appeared, the ship vanished, leaving a churning vortex behind in the clouds above.
We looked at each other.
“That,” Jake said.
“was awesome,” I said.
He nodded.
“I'm gonna be on one of those some day,” he stated matter-of-factly.
And he was right.2

* * *3

4

At the end of that summer I moved to Cordoza. The university had a program running for students who needed housing, and they managed to get me a small apartment near the center of the city.
Polnaki did not have a very large population and the cities were generally small, so it was not surprising that only a handful of cities had real universities. Of those, Cordoza was the biggest and the best.
I stepped from the grav-train. The station was huge, with great panes of glass suspended high above me and transparant walls letting in the sunlight from the sprawling city outside. I stood for a moment, unmoving, feeling as though I had just arrived in the center of the universe, basking in the light and the crowd of activity. As I looked up I noticed that I was moving. My feet carried me along with the tide of the crowd towards the station exits. I let it happen, dazed and in awe. I emerged into the streets. I had seen pictures and holofilms set in cities, but I had never actually been to one myself. Compared to other great cities, most notably those on Earth, the capitol of Polnaki was not all that impressive. But I was not from Earth, and Cordoza was very impressive to me. I was right in the center and all around me white towers rose into the sky, blue and yellow playfully streaking the spotless buildings, and green fields snaking their way around the feet of the mighty glass giants. Light humming filled the air as electrocars whizzed by on raised driveways. Somehow, despite the tall buildings the city felt very open to me, alleviating my fear that a busy metropolis might make me claustrophobic. It was impressive indeed. 5


I spent my days studying, finding it everything I had hoped for. Still, I went home as often as I could, which meant almost every weekend. I adjusted quickly and life turned out to not be all that different. We still went to the lake when the weather was good, and we still played wargames and watched holofilms when it rained. An era had closed and a new one had opened but everything still felt the same. It often happens that way. You say to yourself, from now on, everything is going to be different. For better or for worse, I can't say, but my world is about to change. And it does in some ways, but your life is still your life. You still feel the same worries and the same aches. You see the same sky and when you close your eyes you see the same images behind your eyelids. Your heart beats the same and when you lie awake at night your chest rises and falls the same as you sigh in the dark. Somehow, no matter how much you change, life will often shuck and jive until it lands back on its feet and suddenly everything is the same, even when it is different. And so it was that the major change of moving away and starting my studies really didn't seem like a change at all. It was as I had been there all my life. 6

* * *7

It had almost been a full year since I had moved to Cordoza and had started my studies when I went home to find something truly different. Not right away, of course. Life had hidden it from me at first, like a little surprise it was holding behind its back. Then, while I was looking the other way, it held out its hands and yelled “surprise” as I felt the world shift under my feet. 8

We were in the kitchen, Jake and I, like we so often were. Somehow it had become our favorite spot for hanging out. I'd come home at the start of the weekend and Jake would show up not much later, as if he had sensed my return. I would let him in and we would head for the kitchen right away. Then, as was customary between the two of us, we would spent hours there, having drinks and eating cake and discussing everything we knew about or dreamt about.
This day I was just pouring myself a glass of some chilled beverage as Jake leaned against the foodcooler.
“Do you guys have any cake?” It was his trademark.
“Yeah. You know where it is,” I said and he nodded. He crossed the kitchen and opened a drawer beneath the stove.
“Ah,” he said and put a rectangular cake on the counter. I handed him a knife before he could ask for it. He simply took it and started slicing the cake. We were well-rehearsed in this procedure.
He handed me the first slice and then picked up another. While I took my first bite he let his bomb drop.
“I'm joining the army.”9

I kept chewing while I thought of something to say. I knew Jake had not liked the arts school as much as he had hoped, and he had told me he was thinking of finding something else. In some way, it should not have surprised me that he was going to join the military. It had always been our dream, but yet again, it was the sort of dream people hardly ever follow. Maybe shouldn't follow. We had talked about what it would be like to be a soldier many times, but I had not really expected him to actually go ahead and enlist. I had considered it about as likely as myself joining the army.
I swallowed.
“Cool,” I said.
“I know, right?” his eyes sparkled in excitement.
“Which branch?”
“Interstellar Infantry.”
“A grunt? Why not go for NCO school or officer academy?” I knew he was capable of getting a sergeant or lieutenant rank if he wanted to.
“The best officers are those who started out as grunts,” Jake said. I could see the wisdom in that.
“True,” I said, “so when do you start?”
“Basic starts next month.”
“How long will that take?”
“About five months.”
We kept talking about where he would go, how long he would stay, what his parents thought about it, and all those related things. He would be getting the weekends off so I made a mental note to keep the kitchen stocked with cake.
The first pebbles had come rolling down the slope of inescapable events, but for now they had little impact. The avalanche was yet to come. 10

The following weeks and months were almost normal. We just talked about different stuff in the weekends. Every week, we would ask Jake if he had fired live ammo yet. In the beginning, this question would annoy him, and he kept telling us it was three weeks before they were even allowed to handle a weapon. We had all seen the holofilms, and even some of the classics like the ancient Full Metal Jacket, but we had no idea of what boot camp was like in reality.
After about a month Jake told us about his rifle for the first time. In the next weeks he told us about firing blanks, and then, finally, real rounds. We were all jealous, and my studies in Cordoza suddenly seemed a lot less interesting.
Jake said boot was not as bad as one might have expected. “Just do whatever the sarge says. Don't think, don't ask. Just do. And finish every sentence with Sergeant. That's all there is.”
I looked at him. “You mean you should become a robot?”
Jake returned my look, a slight smile on his face. “Yes. But only outwardly. Bury your personality, put it on hold. But don't lose it.”
“Isn't that hard?”
“For some people, I think it is. Some really do become robots. Not me. I just act like one.”
I laughed. I knew Jake's personality was too strong to be buried and lost anyway. He could suppress it for a while, maybe. But Jake was Jake and there was no taking that away from him.