Wheels. One day Charlie asked me from what country my name originated; it sounded weird to him. I told him it originated from the lack of a dictionary and that if it were spelled right, it would look even weirder.
I got to kill a good half-hour explaining all the peripheral details to that. Basically, though, my parents were “hippies” (a kind of subculture in the late-twentieth-century America, that rejected materialism and embraced a broad spectrum of odd ideas) who lived with a group of other hippies in a small agricultural community. When my mother got pregnant, they wouldn’t be so conventional as to get married: this entailed the woman taking the man’s name, and implied that she was his property. But they got all intoxicated and sentimental and decided they would both change their names to be the same. They rode into the nearest town, arguing all the way as to what name would be the best symbol for the love-bond between them — I narrowly missed having a much shorter name — and they settled on Mandala.
A mandala is a wheel-like design the hippies had borrowed from a foreign religion, that symbolized the cosmos, the cosmic mind, God, or whatever needed a symbol. Neither my mother nor my father knew how to spell the word, and the magistrate in town wrote it down the way it sounded to him.
They named me William in honor of a wealthy uncle, who unfortunately died penniless.
The six weeks passed rather pleasantly: talking, reading, resting. The other ship landed next to ours and did have nine free berths. We shuffled crews so that each ship had someone who could get it out of trouble if the preprogrammed jump sequence malfunctioned. I assigned myself to the other ship, in hopes it would have some new books. It didn’t.
We zipped up in the tanks and took off simultaneously.
We wound up spending a lot of time in the tanks, just to keep from looking at the same faces all day long in the crowded ship. The added periods of acceleration got us back to Stargate in ten months, subjective. Of course, it was 340 years (minus seven months) to the hypothetical objective observer.
There were hundreds of cruisers in orbit around Stargate. Bad news: with that kind of backlog we probably wouldn’t get any furlough at all.
I supposed I was more likely to get a court-martial than a furlough, anyhow. Losing 88 percent of my company, many of them because they didn’t have enough confidence in me to obey the direct earthquake order. And we were back where we’d started on Sade-138; no Taurans there, but no base either.
We got landing instructions and went straight down, no shuttle. There was another surprise waiting at the spaceport. Dozens of cruisers were standing around on the ground (they’d never done that before for fear that Stargate would be hit) — and two captured Tauran cruisers as well. We’d never managed to get one intact.
Seven centuries could have brought us a decisive advantage, of course. Maybe we were winning.
We went through an airlock under a “returnees” sign. After the air cycled and we’d popped our suits, a beautiful young woman came in with a cartload of tunics and told us, in perfectly-accented English, to get dressed and go to the lecture hall at the end of the corridor to our left.
The tunic felt odd, light yet warm. It was the first thing I’d worn besides a fighting suit or bare skin in almost a year.
The lecture hall was about a hundred times too big for the twenty-two of us. The same woman was there and asked us to move down to the front. That was unsettling; I could have sworn she had gone down the corridor the other way — I knew she had; I’d been captivated by the sight of her clothed behind.
Hell, maybe they had matter transmitters. Or teleportation. Wanted to save herself a few steps.
We sat for a minute and a man, clothed in the same kind of unadorned tunic the woman and we were wearing, walked across the stage with a stack of thick notebooks under each arm.
The woman followed him on, also carrying notebooks.
I looked behind me and she was still standing in the aisle: To make things even more odd, the man was virtually a twin to both of them.
The man riffled through one of the notebooks and cleared his throat. “These books are for your convenience,” he said, also with perfect accent, “and you don’t have to read them if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, because … you’re free men and women. The war is over.”
Disbelieving silence.
“As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 A.D.
“You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.”
He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. “I am sorry for what you’ve been through and wish I could say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not.
“Even the wealth you have accumulated, back salary and compound interest, is worthless, as I no longer use money or credit. Nor is there such a thing as an economy, in which to use these … things.”
“As you must have guessed by now,” the man took over, “I am, we are, clones of a single individual. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, my name was Kahn. Now it is Man.
“I had a direct ancestor in your company, a Corporal Larry Kahn. It saddens me that he didn’t come back.”
“I am over ten billion individuals but only one consciousness,” she said. “After you read, I will try to clarify this. I know that it will be difficult to understand.
“No other humans are quickened, since I am the perfect pattern. Individuals who die are replaced.
“There are some planets, however, on which humans are born in the normal, mammalian way. If my society is too alien for you, you may go to one of these planets. If you wish to take part in procreation, I will not discourage it. Many veterans ask me to change their polarity to heterosexual so that they can more easily fit into these other societies. This I can do very easily.”
Don’t worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket.
“You will be my guest here at Stargate for ten days, after which you will be taken wherever you want to go,” he said. “Please read this book in the meantime. Feel free to ask any questions, or request any service.” They both stood and walked off the stage.
Charlie was sitting next to me. “Incredible,” he said. “They let … they encourage … men and women to do that again? Together?”
The female aisle — Man was sitting behind us, and she answered before I could frame a reasonably sympathetic, hypocritical reply. “It isn’t a judgment on your society,” she said, probably not seeing that he took it a little more personally than that. “I only feel that it’s necessary as a eugenic safety device. I have no evidence that there is anything wrong with cloning only one ideal individual, but if it turns out to have been a mistake, there will be a large genetic pool with which to start again.”
She patted him on the shoulder. “Of course, you don’t have to go to these breeder planets. You can stay on one of my planets. I make no distinction between heterosexual play and homosexual.”
She went up on the stage to give a long spiel about where we were going to stay and eat and so forth while we were on Stargate, “Never been seduced by a computer before,” Charlie muttered.
The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate.
Once they could talk, the first question was “Why did you start this thing?” and the answer was “Me?”
The Taurans hadn’t known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were in positions of power. They virtually ran the United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group, that was taking advantage of the newly-discovered collapsar jump to explore interstellar space.