At any rate, Division, Regiment, and Mulvaney wanted this to be a relaxed and intimate discussion.
The trainees sensed that this would not be another training lecture. For one thing, their sergeant hadn't ordered them to give him thirty or thirty-five pushups before seating them.
Hawkins didn't begin with the usual "at ease" to shut them up. He simply asked, "What did you think of the training cube this afternoon?" When no one volunteered a comment, he pointed. "How about you, Abner?"
It took Abner McReynolds a moment to react. No cadreman had ever addressed him by his given name before. It distracted him enough, he even forgot to address Hawkins as "sergeant."
"Those warbots were something to watch," he said. "I can see why the army wants us to volunteer."
Hawkins nodded. McReynolds didn't sound like someone deeply perturbed by the request. "I'm signing up myself," Hawkins told them. "As soon as we get back in." He looked around, then pointed at Esau Wesley. "Esau, what did you think about the training cube?"
"Sergeant, the thing that struck me most was all the bodies, all the dead and wounded. I knew all along a person could get killed fighting in a war, but seeing it like that made it a lot more real to me. Those pulses don't pick and choose. If you're in the way, you're a deader. Wounded at least. It doesn't matter if you're the toughest man in the company."
"Good observation. Isaiah, what have you got to say?"
"Sergeant, it's well to be in good standing with the Lord before you go into battle. Of course, it's well to be in good standing with Him anyway, on general principles and for your own soul. As Jesus said in the Book of Mark: We don't know the time when death will come." He shrugged. "Although a battlefield seems a lot more dangerous than being home in bed."
"True. Unless you're home in bed when the Wyzhnyny arrive." Hawkins paused. "What about death, Isaiah? What can you tell us about that?"
"In Contemplations on the Testaments, Elder Hofer wrote that `death is the door to Heaven and Hell, and each of us chooses in life which one it will be.' So I'm prepared to die defending humankind."
"How about you, Hosea?"
"Well, Sergeant, say you're out deadening timber. And your hound's laid up hurt, so you're out there alone. You hear something and turn, and there's a big old tiger ten foot away, and you'd just set aside your ringing ax. My bet is, you'd be too scared to spit, even if you were spotless as the Lamb of God. The soul might go to Heaven, but the body? It'd stay behind for tiger feed, and don't no way like the prospect."
"Ah! Now there's a good way of putting it. Thank you, Hosea." Hawkins scanned and pointed. "Jael, you look as if you have something to say."
"Yessir, Sergeant. I'm a lot more scared of great pain than of dying. I suspect that lying out there in terrible pain, with maybe my innards ripped open and the flies buzzing, I'd be crying out to God to take me fast as he can."
"Good point," Hawkins said, thinking he'd as soon it hadn't come up. "But if it comes down to it, in combat you'll all have something in your aid kit that will greatly deaden the pain."
Jael continued before Hawkins could call on someone else. "And something else, Sergeant. There are things I want to do before I die. Have children, bring them up, watch them grow. Maybe even be a grandmother."
Hawkins nodded. "A good wish to have; a good ambition. But to enjoy it, it helps to have a safe place to live. There are lots of people who chose to stay on New Jerusalem-many with children-and they're a lot more likely to see their children murdered than grow up. While those who left with children… a labor camp's a hard place to raise a family. But when the war is over, and if we win it, things will work out for them.
"The fact is, the invaders have changed everything for us. I have a wife and two children back in North America. In a city called Madison, by a large beautiful lake. There's a good chance I'll never see them again, but I'll be doing what I can to keep them safe."
"Sergeant Hawkins?" It was Isaiah Vernon again.
"Yes, Isaiah?"
"Where do Sikhs believe they go when they die?"
Don't get into that, Arjan, Hawkins warned himself. It'll dilute the subject we're here for, and maybe generate contention. He would, he decided, give them a generality, something uncomplicated but basically valid. "Isaiah," he said, "think of it as returning to the loving arms of God."
When 2nd Platoon got back to the company area, there wasn't any real discussion about their evening. A few comments, but no actual discussion. In fact, the hut was more quiet than usual.
Jael Wesley was the first to take her toiletries bag and head for the latrine to brush her teeth. When she was almost there, she met Isaiah Vernon on his way to the hut. On impulse she stopped him.
"Isaiah," she said, "can we talk? Privately somewhere?"
His eyes widened. "What about?" he asked cautiously.
"I don't want to stand out here and talk about it. Where can we go that's private?"
For a long moment he stood silently. What would Esau think? Jael was so pretty and so nice, more than once he'd caught himself drifting into a fantasy about her. A guilty fantasy. It was well, he'd told himself, that they trained so hard and had so little time to think. "The dayroom," he said at last. "That might be all right."
She knew where it was, though she'd never been inside it. She led off, Isaiah following. No one else was there, and they sat down opposite each other at a reading table.
"It's about agreeing to be turned into a warbot," she said. "If someone's badly wounded and going to die."
He stared at her, then realizing he needed to respond, he nodded.
"I'm thinking about signing," she said.
His mouth opened slightly, but nothing came out for several seconds. "That's something you need to talk to Esau about, not me."
"I will. Before I make any decision anyway. The reason I want to talk to you is, you were studying to be a speaker. So you must have read and reread all the books, and thought about them a lot. And the first thing I need to know is… "
She groped, clarifying her thoughts. "Like I told Sergeant Hawkins, I'm afraid of great pain. And I don't trust myself to be signing for the right reason: to help out in the war. I might just want to be rescued from great pain, or not spend the rest of my life all crippled up. You see. But God might want me to experience those things. To suffer in those ways."
Isaiah's expression changed, showing not worry now, but focus, and his answer, when it came, was expressed as a speaker might have phrased it. "Jael," he answered, "you've read that sometimes God tests people, as in the case of Job, and Abraham. But there's no sign that he'd have punished them if they'd failed."
"But what about suicide?"
"Suicide?"
"If I caused my crippled body to die, on purpose and ahead of its time, would that be suicide? And if my brain got cut out and bottled, then when God gathers the blessed to rise, and if I qualified, would I be resurrected as a warbot, or a person?"
Isaiah frowned not in disapproval but in thought, then shook his head. "First of all, all I can tell you is how it seems to me. The Testaments don't speak of that, nor does Elder Hofer's Contemplations. But it seems to me a warbot is a person. Because it has a soul. And as for resurrection- If a person gets eaten by a tiger, his flesh becomes tiger flesh, but he won't be resurrected as a tiger." Jael shook her head at that, rejecting. Isaiah continued. "And martyrs that were burned at the stake won't be resurrected as smoke and ashes. Nor cripples as cripples. God wouldn't resurrect them all humped over or twisted, or short an arm or leg."