Soldiers

Epilog

Soldiers has been the story of a war, and with the Treaty of Eridani Prime, the war and the story were over-officially, and pretty much in fact. But whether human or Wyzhnyny, those who'd survived had futures, reset by the war itself, and by the treaty.

The war had never been named, officially or otherwise. It was just "the war." There was no other. There hadn't been since that earlier turning point, that long-ago fraternal conflict known as the Troubles. In his speech announcing the peace agreement, President Chang asked that it not be referred to as the Wyzhnyny War. The surviving Wyzhnyny would become part of the Commonwealth, and their integration would not be eased by naming the war after them. Describe it as it was, he said, but call it simply "the Invasion."

A millennium earlier he'd never have gotten away with a suggestion like that. But now, near the end of the third millennium, his request was very largely complied with. Gradually over the centuries, humankind had become increasingly civilized, with a civility beyond political correctness. A consensus civility. Without it, civilization and quite possibly humankind would not have survived in the Sol System long enough to meet the Wyzhnyny. There was still significant and occasionally noisy social discord, but all in all, people were remarkably and comfortably civil.

Even on the hundreds of colony worlds settled by reclusive ethnic groups, and religious, political, and philosophical sects, civility tended to be the rule-at least as long as they were left alone, to live as they pleased.

Among the people of the forty-four human worlds conquered and depopulated by the Wyzhnyny, cultural disruption had been extreme. But the people lacked the passion, the zeal of their expatriate forebears. Many of the evacuees harbored bitterness or grief, but few felt gnawed upon for revenge.

And most did go home, arriving to find it unrecognizable. With Core World help they rebuilt farms, villages, and towns, but it would never be the same. The genie didn't fit in the bottle anymore. Their cultural realities had been irreparably changed by the war and their brief exiles.

On Terra, a number of antiwar activists had already been tried for terrorism. A remarkable phenomenon: antiwar terrorists! And among the Terran public, zeal had become even more distasteful than before.

The Justice Ministry had aimed at penalties befitting the crimes. Thus Gunther Genovesi and Kuei-Fei Wu, who'd conceived and planned the Night of Blood and Fire, were sentenced to visit every Wyzhnyny-conquered world, and listen to the tales of nonevacuees who'd survived in hiding. Both were reprieved before completing the tour. President Chavez (Chang Lung-Chi had retired) felt that five years had been enough. The two spent the rest of their lives in tolerably comfortable exile, under house arrest on a colony world outside the invasion corridor.

Paddy Davies, Jaromir Horvath, and several other Peace Front kingpins had been sentenced to accompany the Terran 6th Infantry Division to New Miocene. It proved to be a Wyzhnyny holdout world. Thus they experienced battle, loading wounded and dead onto grav sleds. Davies himself was mortally wounded, trying to help a wounded Wyzhnyny. Always an idealist, he'd signed the agreement, and awoke as a medic bot. Back on Terra, Horvath became a sort of hermit, more misanthropic than ever.

Fritjof Ignatiev's role, on the other hand, had been little more than inspirational orator. And after the Night of Blood and Fire, he'd voluntarily come forward to work with the government in its terrorist roundup. Thus his sentence had been only thirty days on a work gang. But in his youth he'd been an emergency medical technician, and prevailed on the judge to send him to New Miocene with the others, as a battlefield medic. There he was wounded, and cited for bravery.

After his return, Ignatiev dictated his memoir of the Peace Front and his service on New Miocene. He'd always had an excellent memory, and his recounting fitted the known facts. It would become a useful source for historians of the war.

The New Jerusalem Liberation Corps saw no further combat. Commodore Kereenyaga's flagship had parked three hundred miles above New Jerusalem, and broadcast the peace treaty through Gosthodar Jilchuk's command channel. It was received in every Wyzhnyny unit headquarters on the planet. The cube had been recorded by a savant bot-Melody Boo'tsa, whom Admiral Apraxin had left with the commodore when she'd departed for Dinebikeyah. Thus Qonits's cultivated Wyzhnynyc was well reproduced and easily understood.

But still detectably foreign, so Jilchuk rejected it. Two days later, a Dragon parked above the limestone ridge in whose extensive caverns Jilchuk's headquarters was hidden. Along with what remained of his elite force, and other important units of his army, notably his two remaining tank companies. The earlier surveillance buoys had located the entrances and exits, and the Dragon thoroughly smashed them. It also pounded the ridge in general, and parts of the caverns collapsed. Elsewhere the Dragons hit the caverns sheltering most of the rest of the army. Little remained on the surface but patrols.

In the caverns, casualties had been moderate, and their geogravitic power converters continued to provide light, heat, and interior air circulation. But the air intake and waste air expulsion systems had been destroyed. Jilchuk reconsidered his refusal, and sent engineers to work their way through a collapse hole, to radio his acceptance to both the humans and his command.

This presented the Burger engineers with a new highly urgent project: to hastily set up secure, reasonably liveable POW stockades-tent camps. One for the Wyzhnyny officers, another for the elite companies, and several others for everyone else. Meanwhile, many kilotons of key Wyzhnyny military material were collected, and lightered into near-space. There they were magnetically bundled, and the bundles sent on trajectories that would plunge them into New Jerusalem's sun.

Four other Wyzhnyny-occupied worlds had been invaded by liberation forces. Major fleet detachments were dispatched to visit the rest. The size of the forces tended to convince the local gosthodars. Those who were adamant had their colonies visited by Dragons and wolf packs. In several cases where a gosthodar still refused, coups or mutinies resulted in a more agreeable leader. On six planets that still held out, colonies of Apis mellifera scutella were widely introduced during the current or next growing season, and the colonies recontacted a few months later.

Only two had eventually to be liberated "the hard way," several years later. After being liberated from the African bees by the introduction of enhanced strains of American and European foulbrood. Then regiments were landed-with Wyzhnyny interpretors-to root out the remaining Wyzhnyny. Most of whom surrendered more or less readily.

Qonits zu-Kitku was appointed advisor to the president and prime minister. Later, in a sort of reverse appointment, the prime minister named him Wyzhnyny ambassador to the Commonwealth.

In time, Qonits would also oversee the establishment of the Wyzhnyny and human youth exchange programs, a School of Wyzhnyny Studies at Kunming University, and a Department of Humanity at the Institute of Knowledge, on Wyzhuursok, the world on which the Wyzhnyny survivors were settled.

Twenty-three Terran years after the treaty was signed, Qonits died in his apartment on the Kunming University campus, of cardiac arrest.

David MacDonald worked with Qonits throughout the ambassador's career. After Qonits' death, he served for two years as advisor to the Wyzhnyny's new ambassador. He then retired to the new Commonwealth-sponsored colony on Maritimus, referring to himself as "the ambassador to the dolphin republic." The dolphins were amused.

At the end of hostilities on New Jerusalem, Jael Wesley and Isaiah Vernon returned to Terra. By that time they'd become close friends, and married in Kunming-a union necessarily platonic. Meanwhile, rapid progress was being made on pseudo-organic civilian servos for ex-warbots. These were made as humanlike as feasible, and the couple was transferred to customized android servos. A meaningful sexual relationship resulted between these two who'd already developed a very considerate and affectionate relationship.

A few years after leaving military service, they joined the Gopal Singh Order of Compassion, and were trained to help the mentally afflicted. This period of relatively normal life, however, was rather short. Among ex-warbots, the peripheral nerves controlling the limbs began to deteriorate ten to twenty years after first installation. Use of the limbs was then lost within weeks or months. The only treatment was to rebottle the CNS for installation into a sensorially-equipped life-support system like those designed for savant bots. In any case, senile dementia set in, mainly at age sixty to seventy Terran. Persons inhabiting such life-support systems generally arranged for life support to be discontinued at some predefined point in their deterioration.

Jael and Isaiah died within seven weeks of each other.

Esau Wesley and Bjorg Aribau returned to Terra with the 1st New Jerusalem Division, and were married at Bjorg's family home in Tarragona, in the Catalunya Prefecture. Both converted to Sikhism (the Gopal Singh Dispensation), and remained in the military. They volunteered to serve in a New Jerusalem battalion assigned as the low-profile embassy garrison on Wyzhuursok (Wyzh: root of Wyzhnyny; uur: the seventh [swarm]; sok: world).

After ten years they returned again to Terra, where they wrote a joint account of the war on New Jerusalem, from a soldier's and nurse's point of view. Its substantial success encouraged another book of their years on Wyzhuursok. The experience there had been enriched by a powerful hypno-tutorial of the Wyzhnyny language and culture. And by considerable involvement in Wyzhnyny life, aided by friendship with several Wyzhnyny of varied gender and status. The book's best-seller performance surprised them.

The marriage produced two sons and a daughter. One son was named Arjan, the other Isaiah. The daughter was named Jael. The family visited the senior Jael and Isaiah several times after returning from Wyzhuursok.

Retiring from the military, Esau and Bjorg lived on Eridani Prime, to enjoy the 0.87 gee gravity. There they bought and resided on a small frontier "hobby farm," which Esau worked himself. They died in their nineties of natural causes.

The pirate ship Minerva, with Drago Dravec and his crew, showed up haggard and hungry in the Hart's Desire System. This was two days before, and most of a hyperspace year away from, the battle of Shakti. Dravec helped set up the planet's own "Project Noah," and a few weeks later married Ambassador Annalis Khai. After the peace, he managed a marginally legal import-export office for Harlan Cheregian, but seldom traveled offworld.

He is credited with having introduced war-gaming to Hart's Desire.

After the war, Male Infant Doe 731 had his name legally changed to Charley Gordon and, with Ophelia Kennah, left government service on liberal pensions, fortified by a very generous annuity to Charley, voted by parliament. Meanwhile, Alvaro Soong retired from the Admiralty and married Ophelia Kennah. Charley "gave away" the bride. For several years the three shared a comfortable condominium, in an affluent retirement community in the mountains of the Chiapas Prefecture, in the Central American Autonomy.

During those years (with travel breaks to attend live concerts all over Terra), Charley's major activity was research on a unified field theory that included psionics. His mathematics was largely incomprehensible, however, except to a very few. More successful was the music he composed in odd moments. Strange, mostly beautiful music-some for instruments, some for voices, some for both. It was found therapeutic for many persons with physical as well as mental problems. (For still others it was psychologically addictive.)

Charley's research period led into what came to be known as "Charley Gordon's meditation phase," ending with three years spent mostly in silence, beneath a lovely canopy in a chan (zen) monastery garden near Kunming. There he was tended by monks, and visited by pilgrims not only from all over Terra, but from other worlds, including exchange youths from Wyzhuursok.

Afterward Charley remained at the monastery, but treated himself to a well-accessoried artificial intelligence, and spent a year secluded with his new "toy." After programming it to suit his needs, he composed a musical work which he titled Opus Number One: Logos for the Emotionally Centered. It was premiered by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, to a video/holo audience estimated at 2.7 billion, and a live audience of 11,736. In a post-performance interview, Charley described it as an improved form of his unified field theory.

Following a brief period of CNS deterioration, Charley Gordon died at age 67, one of the best-known and most loved persons in the Commonwealth.

Ophelia Kennah, then 84 years old, dictated her best-selling Memories of Charley, and died shortly afterward.