The Forever War

by Joe Haldeman

Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it.

Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists’ ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since ‘Aldebaraniam’ is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy ‘Tauran.’

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there … the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

We were to take at least one enemy alive. We were under no circumstances to allow ourselves to be taken alive, however. And the decision wasn’t up to us; one special pulse from the battle computer, and that speck of plutonium in your power plant would fiss with all of .01% efficiency, and you’d be nothing but a rapidly expanding, very hot plasma.

But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters …

A teddy bear walked in front of me, looking dazed. I started to raise my laser-finger, but somebody beat me to it and the creature’s head exploded in a cloud of gray splinters and blood. Lucky groaned, half-whining. ‘Dirty … filthy fucken bastards.’ Lasers flared and crisscrossed, and all of the teddy bears fell dead.

Because it was murder, unadorned butchery — once we had the anti-spacecraft weapon doped out, we hadn’t been in any danger. The Taurans hadn’t seemed to have any conception of person-to-person fighting. We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species.

I couldn’t get over the ‘20 Mar 2007’ at the bottom of the T/O. I’d been in the army ten years, though it felt like less than two. Time dilation, of course; even with the collapsar jumps, traveling from star to star eats up the calendar.

Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products.

The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust.

We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.

She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.

Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

A good sign that an army has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only 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?’

You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.

iraq

Stapled to the front page was a small square of paper. All the other pages were pristine white, but this one was tan with age and crumbling around the edges. The handwriting was familiar, too familiar even after so long. The date was over 250 years old.

I’m going to a planet they call Middle Finger, the fifth planet out from Mizar. It’s two collapsar jumps, ten months subjective. Middle Finger is a kind of Coventry for heterosexuals. They call it a ‘eugenic control baseline.’ No matter. It took all of my money, and all the money of five other old-timers, but we bought a cruiser from UNEF. And we’re using it as a time machine. So I’m on a relativistic shuttle, waiting for you. All it does is go out five light years and come back to Middle Finger, very fast. Every ten years I age about a month. So if you’re on schedule and still alive, I’ll only be twenty-eight when you get here. Hurry! I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.