Oberheim (Voices): A Chronicle of War by Christopher Leadem (to read list txt) 📗

very fiber of his being, he disbelieved in all semblance of hope.

"Going through the motions. . .never believing that you really have a chance for life or happiness."

He massaged his brow, the fingertips out of habit stroking the rough straggle of his eyebrows. That had been the one area where the plastic surgeons had been unable to restore living hair and skin—-the forehead and cranial cap. The new stuff looked real enough, but felt, especially the hair, coarse and unnatural.

Flashing back, he saw in memory the thick gut of blue flame rush toward him as the ship tore apart—-closing his eyes in sudden, brittle shock, striking the flames from his forehead with wild slaps of his hands….. Not that such memories retained much terror for his waking mind. It was in sleep, in the subconscious worlds beyond his control, that such images were deadly.

He remembered also the first grim reawakening, the grotesque nightmare of ruinous skin and flesh before the surgeons had begun their work. The days of fever, the endless crises. He had not, like Prince Andrei near death, felt a comforting presence calling his soul from this life….. Though now at these memories he felt it shrink back, yet again, from human existence. And seek escape in his work.

"And the desire to strike back, too soon, that the younger commanders are always advocating. Urging attacks that can only end in ruin….. But the impulse. Haven't I felt it? Lying there in that bed."

"The helpless, trapped feeling. . .the rage that rises inside you, tearing through your fatigue. And you're just so tired. . .so worn out physically. . . that some desperate instinct takes over, telling you to attack. Half crazy from the constant pounding. So that you want. . .not even want. . .that you're forced into this thing. Like your will is being pushed out through the top of your skull. Something. And saying no to that urge. . .almost sexual . . .seems so unfair, and beyond the strength of any man.

"But it's wrong, an irretrievable mistake, and you know it. A fatal error that you're just not allowed in that situation.

"Internal warfare. . .and its relation to….." At last the weariness of true sleep was coming over him. But one more thought remained unspoken.

"And the hardest thing, unlike before. It's not just my own life that's at stake, but those of all my men….. My men. How did I ever get into all of this? This power and responsibility. I never wanted it. Just my own piece of mind….. Aahh."

Tomorrow was another day. Maybe in the morning things would look brighter. Morning. How meaningless the pilgrimage from Earth had made that word. There would be no dawn, no rising of the sun, only a different angle facing it.

'YET DAWN IS EVER THE HOPE OF MEN.' TOLKIEN, THE TRENCHES, WORLD WAR I. BULLETS POPPING IN THE MUD….. He rolled over onto the side on which he slept, the microphone still in his hand. "Trench fever. The veterans hospitals. Feeling he would never get well….." FEVER. . .NEVER GET WELL. COLD FEVER. NEVER GET WELL….. NEVER. . .FEELING. With that he fell asleep. And the next day, he rose again to face the onslaught.

Part, the Last

                When the Zionists took Israel,
                        Land of their deepest fathers
                With just cause, and more than that
                It raised the hopes of many, that empty, horrible
                                        Holocaust
                Would not be utterly meaningless.

                Writers, artists, and musicians
                        Jew and Gentile, belief and disbelieving
                        Flocked to this new human banner
                In tribute to this triumph of the soul—-
                        'Exodus' it was called—-
                Imparting unto the new inhabitants, the more so
                        Because the darkness still remained

                Blank checks of righteousness.
                Even Wouk, who walked with honesty and selflessness
                        through two-thousand pages
                Rightly. Hoping perhaps, to help the prophesy fulfill
                Even he, at the end, made this mistake.

                For it is not enough to be right
                The heart must also remain true.

                        "Goyim kill Goyim,
                                and they come to hang the Jews."*

*Menachim Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, when questioned whether his troops had allowed Lebanese Christian militia to massacre more than a hundred men, women and children in a Palestinian refugee camp.

The Palestinians still had no homeland, after two-hundred and forty years. The ill-conceived and ill-fated PLO had long since self-destructed. Its thoughtless acts of terrorism could hardly have done less to loosen Israel's grip on the West Bank of the Jordan river, or to win favor and sympathy abroad. And the Israelis themselves (or so their actions would seem to indicate) had never for a single instant intended to return either Jerusalem to the Moslems, or even to make it an international city, such as the Vatican, or Palestine to those who had inhabited it for centuries.

The Arab nations (excepting Egypt and Jordan), which had continually used the Palestinian question as an excuse for violence and religious hatred, yet had not loved their orphaned brothers enough to take them permanently into their own lands—-either Earth nations, or the settled colonies of Space. Ironically, bitterly, the Palestinians had become the 'wandering Jews' of the post-modern era, living here and there in scattered clumps, always vowing vengeance, always being promised future acts of restoration: of home, family, and self-respect.

Finally, in the year 2167, the United Commonwealth had felt a pang of conscience (or fashion, or something), and decided to do these poor unfortunates a long overdue, and much deserved kind turn. So a small, tillable planet was given to them, along with transports, to bring together in this new life all those who wished to go. The Egyptians had then contributed materials for building, the Japanese had added factories and technicians, and the British and Australians, teachers and universities to bring the less educated up to date. The Free French had provided defense systems, and the French Elite a modest fleet (later to be supplemented by the more sophisticated weapons of Soviet Space, never far in the background at the birth of a nation they hoped to seduce). All in all, the contributing powers had looked upon the venture as a success, and the Salvation Army humor of the Commonwealth was much restored.

But now, forty years later, the numbers of the Palestinians had grown great enough, and their force of arms respectable enough, to raise the hopes of the embittered and illusioned one last time. Bolstered yet again by the warlike teachings of the prophet Mohammad, which state that to die in a Holy War is to ensure the soul's salvation, the stubborn and simple among them had seized power from the more educated and enlightened moderates, and prepared, in secret, a last attempt at true retribution.

To accomplish their aims, the radicals (supported by most within the country, strongly challenged by none), would have to violate all the sanctions of the civilized world, including the Green Earth Pact, and the unspoken, though severely understood, international policy of non-violence upon the Earth itself. But what of that? GOD was with them.

For they did not intend merely to hurt the Israelis symbolically, or to steal from them some distant and less guarded settlement, but to return in triumph to their true home, and the land of their most ancient fathers. Given to them by Allah himself…..

Palestine!

The Green Earth Pact, as it was called, had been enacted (and unanimously approved) by the United Nations, to insure the peace and neutrality of the beloved home planet of all humanity, which had so narrowly escaped war's destruction and environmental catastrophe during the Nuclear Age. Among other clauses designed to protect the fragile environment, so long and senselessly abused, it specified that no more than one-hundred military vessels of any given nation, and these of limited size and destructive capability, were to enter the parochial Solar System at any one time, and that no more than half that number could engage an Earth orbit or rest upon the Moon. And except in sudden crisis of defense, absolutely none were allowed to pierce the upper atmosphere.

And so one hundred Palestinian vessels were sent, mostly fighters, manned not by the best trained pilots and soldiers, but by the most fervent believers, and those with the deepest grudge. Under the pretext of diplomatic and training purposes they came, believing against all Satan's whisperings that if once, by their own actions they could retake that sacred land, some miracle of God would allow them to keep it.

Half remained at the legal distance, the other half locking in around the Earth. After visiting with the Soviets, the Syrians, and the Saudis, betraying their true purpose to none, the fifty vessels broke suddenly from orbit and rushed down upon the tiny speck of land known as modern Israel —-before that Palestine, before that Judea, and so on back into the dawn of history, when it had been little more than a forbidding desert, endlessly fought over by tribes and Empires until it was hard to say (and still harder to care) who had been there first, or why.

In one sense at least, the modern Israelis had not changed from the turbulent and close-knit times of the 1950's and 60's. When it came to defense, they took nothing for granted. At the instant the first Palestinian fighters began to dive, they had released their own fifty, more sophisticated craft, and in conjunction with the best ground batteries on the planet Earth, cut short the brave but foolish attack. No prisoners were taken.

For the next several days, in Western publications circulated throughout the settled galaxy, the headlines, columns and editorial pages all expressed the same outrage, decrying the viciousness and small-mindedness of the Palestinian attack; and the Israelis were freed once more to expound upon the necessities of their hard-nosed, aggressive, and completely intransigent foreign policies. They also took it upon themselves to retaliate, destroying the remaining forces and outer defenses of the exiled Arab planet, 'inadvertently' killing thousands of civilians in the process.

The moral? Pointless insanity on all sides, that had gone on for three centuries. BECAUSE IT HAD GONE UNCHALLENGED.

* * *

"The next time you start to get angry, count to ten."

ELEVEN

"Did it never strike you as just a trifle odd that the Cantons destroyed the Laurian ore planet, instead of just taking the colonies by force? They had the machinery."

"I don't know. I suppose I always thought that tactic psychological.
The whole affair with the gravity beam was quite impressive."

"Yes, and that was the lure of it. But think. Who stood to gain by such an expensive side show? Who paid the bill, and why?"

"The German States? I don't understand. I thought they sided with the Cantons out of principle." Dubcek looked at him like all the fools that had ever been born.

"Horse-shit. They did it because they had the equipment to move in and salvage ninety percent of the planet's high-grade ore—-the Cantons didn't—-and because they could use the station again for other purposes. The move was purely economic: they got their original investment back three times over, and flexed their muscles a little in the process. And (so you know you weren't completely wrong) there is this. So long as people believe the West Germans are still Nazis at heart, it gives them a tremendous psychological weapon: the aura of ruthlessness."

The young man stood bewildered, turned his head from side to side as if trying to see something through a fog. He paused, frozen it seemed, and then spoke.

"But the Canton fleets. Who supplied them? Not the German States.
That would make them direct accomplices, and—-"

"Now you are beginning to think like a socialist. The ships were, in fact, of GS build, but they didn't just give them away. First they were sold to the Belgian-Swiss—-along with the arsenal that's headed here—-then passed on. The Alliance needed someone to test the waters, and the Cantons