Deserts of Fire Read online

It didn’t take the Corps long to realize he was a liability, but since he possessed consciousness, though it be man-made, the law disallowed his being simply turned off. Instead, he was retired and set up in a nice apartment at the center of a small town where he drew his sizeable pension and history of combat bonus.

  An inauspicious ending to a historic career, but in the beginning, at the general’s creation, when the Harvang had invaded in the south and were only miles outside of Central City, he was a promising savior. His artificial intelligence was considered a miracle of Science, his construction, the greatest engineering feat of the human race. And the standard by which all of this was judged was the fact that his face could make seven different expressions. Everyone agreed it was proof of the robot builder’s exemplary art. Before the general, the most that had ever been attempted was three.

  The first six of these expressions were slight variations on the theme of “determination.” Righteousness, Willfulness, Obstinacy, Eagerness, Grimness 1 and 2 were the terms his makers had given them. The facial formation of the six had a lot to do with the area around the mouth, subtly different clenchings of the jaw, a straightness in the lips. The eyes were widened for all six, the nostrils flared. For Grimness 2, steam shot from his ears.

  When he wasn’t at war, he switched between Righteousness and Obstinacy. He’d lost Eagerness to a Harvang blade. It was at the Battle of Boolang Crater that the general was cut across the cheek, all the way through to his internal mechanism. After two days of leaking oil through the side of his face, the outer wound healed, but the wiring that caused the fourth expression had been irreparably severed.

  There is speculation, based primarily on hearsay, that there was also an eighth expression, one that had not been built into him but that had manifested of its own accord through the self-advancement of the AI. Scientists claimed it highly unlikely, but Ms. Jeranda Blesh claimed she’d seen it. During a three-month leave, his only respite in the entire war, she’d lived with him in a chalet in the Grintun Mountains. A few years before she died of a Harvang venereal disease, she appeared on a late-night television talk show. She was pale and bloated, giddy with alcohol, but she divulged the secrets of her sex life with the general.

  She mentioned the smooth chrome member with fins, the spicy oil, the relentless precision of his pistons. “Sometimes, right when things were about to explode,” she said, “he’d make a face I’d never seen any other times. It wasn’t a smile, but more like calm, a moment of peace. It wouldn’t last long, though, cause then he’d lose control of everything, shoot a rocket blast out his backside and fly off me into the wall.” The host of the show straightened his tie and said, “That’s what I call ‘drilling out a victory.’”

  It was the seventh expression that was the general’s secret, though. That certain configuration of his face reserved for combat. It was the reason he was not tricked out with guns or rockets. The general was an excellent killing machine, but how many could he kill alone? Only when he had armies ready to move at his will could he defeat the Harvang. The seventh expression was a look that enchanted his young troops and made them savage extensions of his determination. Out manned, out gunned, out maneuvered, out flanked, it didn’t matter. One glance from him, and they’d charge, beam rifles blazing, to their inevitable deaths. They’d line up in ranks before a battle and he’d review the troops, focusing that imposing stare on each soldier. It was rare that a young recruit would be unaffected by the seventh expression’s powerful suggestion, understand that the mission at hand was sheer madness, and protest. The general had no time for deserters. With lightning quickness, he’d draw his beam pistol and burn a sudden hole in the complainant’s forehead.

  In an old government document, “A Report to the Committee on Oblique Renderings Z-333–678AR,” released since the Harvang war, there was testimony from the general’s creators to the fact that the seventh expression was a blend of the look of a hungry child, the gaze of an angry bull, and the stern countenance of God. The report records that the creators were questioned as to how they came up with the countenance of God, and their famous response was “We used a mirror.”

  There was a single instance when the general employed the seventh expression after the war. It was only a few years ago, the day after it was announced that we would negotiate a treaty with the Harvang and attempt to live in peace and prosperity. He left his apartment and hobbled across the street to the coffee shop on the corner. Once there, he ordered a twenty-four-ounce Magjypt black, and sat in the corner, pretending to read the newspaper. Eventually, a girl of sixteen approached him and asked if he was the robot general.

  He saluted and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We’re reading about you in school,” she said.

  “Sit down, I’ll tell you anything you need to know.”

  She pulled out a chair and sat at his table. Pushing her long brown hair behind her ears, she said, “What about all the killing?”

  “Everybody wants to know about the killing,” he said. “They should ask themselves.”

  “On the Steppes of Patience, how many Harvang did you, yourself, kill?”

  “My internal calculator couldn’t keep up with the slaughter. I’ll just say, ‘Many.’”

  “What was your favorite weapon?” she asked.

  “I’m going to show it to you, right now,” he said, and his face began changing. He reached into his inside jacket pocket and brought forth a small caliber ray gun wrapped in a white handkerchief. He laid the weapon on the table, the cloth draped over it. “Pick it up,” he said.

  He stared at her and she stared back, and after it was all over, she’d told friends that his blue pupils had begun to spin like pinwheels and his lips rippled. She lifted the gun.

  “Put your finger on the trigger,” he said.

  She did.

  “I want you to aim it right between my eyes and pull the trigger.”

  She took aim with both hands, stretching her arms out across the table.

  “Now!” he yelled, and it startled her.

  She set the gun down, pushed back her chair, and walked away.

  It took the general two weeks before he could find someone he could convince to shoot him, and this was only after he offered payment. The seventh expression meant nothing to the man who’d promised to do the job. What he was after, he said, were the three shrunken Harvang heads the general had kept as souvenirs of certain battles. They’d sell for a fortune on the black market. After the deal was struck, the general asked the man, “Did you see that face I had on a little while ago?”

  “I think I know what you mean,” said the man.

  “How would you describe it?” asked the general.

  The man laughed. “I don’t know. That face? You looked like you might have just crapped your pants. Look, your famous expressions, the pride of an era, no one cares about that stuff anymore. Bring me the heads.”

  The next night, the general hid the illegal shrunken heads beneath an old overcoat and arrived at the appointed hour at an abandoned pier on the south side of town. The wind was high and the water lapped at the edges of the planks. The man soon appeared. The general removed the string of heads from beneath his coat and threw them at the man’s feet.

  “I’ve brought a ray gun for you to use,” said the general, and reached for the weapon in his jacket pocket.

  “I brought my own,” said the man and drew out a magnum-class beam pistol. He took careful aim, and the general noticed that the long barrel of the gun was centered on his own throat and not his forehead.

  In the instant before the man pulled the trigger, the general’s strategy centers realized that the plot was to sever his head and harvest his intelligence node—“The Knot.” He lunged, drill bits whirring. The man fired the weapon and the blast beam disintegrated three quarters of the general’s neck. The internal command had already been given, though, so with head flopping to the side, the robot general charged forward—one drill bit skewered the heart and
the other plunged in at the left ear. The man screamed and dropped the gun, and then the general drilled until he himself dropped. When he hit the dock what was left of his neck snapped and his head came free of his body. It rolled across the planks, perched at the edge for a moment, and then a gust of wind pushed it into the sea.

  The general’s body was salvaged and dismantled, its mechanical wizardry deconstructed. From the electric information stored in the ganglia of the robotic wiring system it was discovered that the general’s initial directive was—To Serve the People. As for his head, it should be operational for another thousand years, its pupils spinning, its lips rippling without a moment of peace in the cold darkness beneath the waves. There, “The Knot,” no doubt out of a programmed impulse for self-preservation, is confabulating intricate dreams of victory.

  shock, awe, and combat

  The present wars seem to be straight out of science-fiction stories from the sixties. Today’s armed forces deploy robots from underground bunkers on far away continents. Today’s air forces overwhelm their targets by launching over eight hundred missiles at a time. In 2003 the Shock and Awe campaign attempted to win the war all at once—to demoralize the Iraqi forces with a show of overwhelming force. Whether the tactic worked—whether all the technological firepower made any difference—is a subject of debate. But it sure looked great on television.

  This might explain why, in the last decade, military science fiction has mostly been futuristic, and it hints at why most military science fiction skirts politics. Today’s military SF writer aims to be apolitical and to produce fantasies as divorced as possible from world we know. It’s not that these fictions are glorifying or justifying the real life military adventures and atrocities that continue on, almost unnoticed, but more that they set up alternative realities far removed from our current one.

  Preparing this anthology there was a special effort made to reach out to conservative writers and to find fiction that romanticized or celebrated the wars in the Middle East in precisely the way that Vonnegut, if he were alive, would rail against. There was, in fact, an attempt to find combat stories that served as justifications or even as celebrations for the wars we’ve seen, but no such stories could be found. Even self-proclaimed conservative writers, the so-called Sad Puppies, apparently hadn’t written any kind of apologia for the last decade’s wars. Perhaps this is because one of them, the war in Afghanistan, appeared to need no defending and the other one was indefensible.

  But a more likely explanation might be found by looking to the way modern warfare is fought. As we already noted, today’s combat is already science fiction. It is already presented to us as a television show with awesome special effects and digital graphics.

  What this means for writers, what these real world technological advances do to us, is make the job of producing optimistic science fiction more difficult. In order to shock and awe a reader, to provide a sense of wonder, the wars are pushed further away, further out into space, or else they’re pushed backward into an increasingly nobler and more idealized past.

  Or maybe the truth is simpler still. To celebrate these wars in the Middle East one has to keep them at quite a distance. Maybe only the pessimists can dare to tell these tales directly.

  Whatever the reason, you’ll find that the stories of combat and bombardment to follow are told either from the perspective of those on the receiving end of the cruise missiles or from the perspective of soldiers with a close proximity to the shock.

  Ray Vukcevich is one of science fiction and fantasy’s little-known masters. His first short story collection Meet Me in the Moon Room gained a lot of attention and praise precisely because it was a work that went beyond the realm of reader’s expectations. Publishers Weekly once described his stories as “helium-filled” while Booklist described him as an outlandish virtuoso.

  “Over Here” was originally written for Benjamin Buchholz’s project called “The Dust Girl” and it now includes an afterword from Buchholz, wherein he explains how his experiences serving in Iraq precipitated his project and the creation of “Over Here.”

  “over here”

  RAY VUKCEVICH

  For MAJ Benjamin Buchholz, US Army

  Megumi

  i suspect my daughter Amelia and that man she married named my granddaughter after a character from Japanese animation. I never did press the point, and now we’ll never know for sure. She is my Megumi who is even now hiding in the yard. Right over there. Under the big Douglas fir tree. She is holding so very still like a cautious rabbit. She is afraid I will call her inside to play the clavichord.

  Megumi is all eyes squatting on her heels and looking over her knees. She knows that I’m looking right at her so she is not moving her eyes at all. I wonder how long she’ll be able to hold off blinking. I wonder if losing her parents and coming to live with her grandfather is making her weird. Are you weird, Megumi? I make a funny face at her through the big window. She doesn’t respond.

  Maybe I should get a professional opinion about her weirdness?

  I can see her sneakers, which are black with pink cartoons and yellow laces. High tops. She doesn’t play basketball. But she might some day. Blue jeans with the cuffs turned way up. I should get some advice on what modern six-year-old orphan girls like to wear when they are not playing the clavichord.

  Can you even buy dresses these days?

  I could lure her inside with the promise of a story about Layla, the desert princess. Someday I am going to have to tell Megumi the bad news about Layla.

  Not today.

  Layla

  I wonder what Layla was wearing when the truck ran her down yesterday. It isn’t the kind of question I can ask our friend who wants us to call him “Abu Yusef.” That probably isn’t his real name. It might be dangerous for him if it got out he was using his computer to post messages on the international clavichord list. We are, generally speaking, a contentious bunch on the clavichord list, but we understand and are sympathetic when our friend and colleague in Iraq tells us he is reluctant to reveal his real name or identify his real town in the south where there are many Persian influences.

  And speaking of Persian influences, Abu Yusef believes the clavichord is a direct descendant (by way of the cymbalum) of the Persian santur, a hammered dulcimer. Hey, it’s a theory and might even be true. Not everyone agrees. There has been some online heat on this subject. With any group you’re going to have some people who take things too seriously. No one will admit to hurt feelings. Often it’s a good thing we are not all in the same room or there would be fistfights over matters like tuning, for example. Never mind origin theories.

  Abu Yusef does not say the dead girl is his granddaughter. He is keeping a stiff upper lip. For weeks he talked about finding his perfect student. Too bad she’s a girl, he said. We don’t know if he was joking about that. Yesterday she was killed in a pointless accident.

  Layla and her friends were outside watching a US convoy go by. So many trucks all going north. It was like they would keep coming until they filled the country up with trucks and tanks and guns and foreign soldiers, and there would be room for nothing else. Where would they all stay when they got to where they were going?

  One of the drivers tossed Layla a bottle of water and a smile. The bottle bounced off her hands and rolled into the road. When she ran out to get it, a truck coming in the other direction ran over her.

  So, some of the trucks and soldiers must have been going south.

  By the time Abu Yusef came onto the scene, someone had covered Layla with a blanket. Everyone was talking at once. The whole town and all the foreign soldiers who were not in their trucks had gathered around the small body. He didn’t say so, but I imagine the people made way for Abu Yusef since he is the mayor. I get the idea that he is proud to be the mayor, but also that he sometimes feels like a front man since it is the deputy town council president, a Shi’a religious functionary of some kind, who has all the power. I detect no resentment about this on
Abu Yusef’s part. That is simply the way of things.

  Like Megumi, Layla had been six years old. The two girls were destined to be animated superheroes and fight evil together. There is nothing like a couple of six-year-old girls to bring peoples and cultures together. Who could have foreseen that one of them would be a ghost? Well, that’s the kind of plot twist Megumi’s mother must have anticipated when she came up with Megumi’s name in the first place. I wonder if my daughter had imagined the name of the show the two girls would be starring in. If so, she didn’t pass that name down to us. I will have to name the show myself. Here are some of my ideas.

  “The Strings of Doom!”

  Where the strings are clavichord strings, of course.

  “Megumi, Layla, and the Legend of the Twangs.”

  The Twangs could be these guys you think are the bad guys, but then they turn out to be only misunderstood. The Twangs are proud and stern and have many baffling customs, but they are basically good guys. Megumi and Layla come to understand the Twangs after many adventures, hurt feelings, kissing and making up, giant robots, evil eyebeams, talking woodland creatures, and martial art clavichord playing.

  “Princess Layla and the Twangster.”

  This time Megumi turns out to be the twangster which is (but only superficially) like a gangster. She wears a fedora, and she’s adorable. Princess Layla comes to the rescue in the end, and the twangster finally comes out of her shell and is able to make a pretty sound.

  “The Twangsters.”

  This time both Megumi and Layla can be twangsters—a couple of six-year-old girls who save the world on a weekly basis with transcendental early music. The joke being they can’t actually make such music yet, and that’s why they’re called twangsters. It really isn’t easy to make pleasant sounds with a clavichord.

  In any case, there will be some kind of rat spider sidekick who is also very cute—maybe it makes wisecracks, and the girls pretend to be angry or exasperated. Maybe it turns into a clavichord when drenched in water.