The Forever War

by Joe Haldeman

I wondered what it would be like to be a fish and have a definite roof over your world.

I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I’d never had to cope with such an abundance of them.

She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her.

‘In case you’re interested, you aren’t the first combat veterans to come back.’ The recruiting officer was a muscular lieutenant of indeterminate sex. I flipped a coin mentally and it came up tails. ‘Last I heard, there had been nine others,’ she said in her husky tenor.

When her shuttle took off it was like a casket rattling down into a grave.

‘That was when the Eugenics Council was first getting people used to the idea of universal homosex.’ ‘Eugenics Council?’ ‘Part of UNEF. Only has authority on Earth.’ She took a deep sniff at the empty capsule. ‘The idea was to keep people from making babies the biological way. Because, A, people showed a regrettable lack of sense in choosing their genetic partner. And B, the Council saw that racial differences had an unnecessarily divisive effect on humanity; with total control over births, they could make everybody the same race in a few generations.’

There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi-memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn’t make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun.