Endgame

1) "A Fred alien, and everybody else except a human, can never die. Even when you shoot his body to Swiss cheese, so his blue guts and red blood dribble out the holes onto the deck, his consciousness remains intact. Blow his head apart, and it floats as a ghost, drifting like invisible smoke—still thinking, hearing and seeing, feeling and desperately dreaming. You can talk to them; they actually hear you. The Freds and other races pile their dead in fantastic cenotaph theaters where they are entertained day and night by elaborate operas and dances of great beauty, all to keep the 'dead' vibrant and interested until such time as they're needed for revivification—assuming there's enough left of the body and enough interest on the part of an animate Fred to pay for it. I'd shot the captain nine days ago as he lay on the floor, reaching up to implement and lock in the preprogrammed course for Fredworld. Despite the best efforts of me and Arlene and our contractor-advisors Sears and Roebuck—a Klave binary pair who each looked like a cross between Magilla Gorilla and Alley Oop—we couldn't figure out how to change course or even shut off the engines."

2) "Jesus, I felt homesick. Just a few months ago—my time—I was wasting my life at Camp Pendleton, loafing and pulling the occasional watch, thinking of not reupping and dropping back into the world instead. I had a fiancee, now deceased; I had parents and high-school friends; I had the expectation that the world would look pretty much the same twenty years later. Then we got sent to Kefiristan, but even that was all right; it was crap, but it was the crap I'd always known was possible in my chosen profession. But when they yanked us out of the Pearl Triangle and boosted Fox Company up to Phobos... well, they yanked me out of my comfortable reality and threw me into primordial chaos. So now I was jogging the length and circumference of an alien spaceship, hurling toward an unknown star at nearly lightspeed, with a plural alien as ally and a mutable thing for a guide; the only constancy was Arlene Sanders, now my last and only friend."

3) "'Christ, S and R—do something!' Having issued my first military command in a week, I did what any good military man does when confronted with an invisible enemy: I ran in circles, screaming and shouting. Sears and Roebuck looked frustrated, being constitutionally unable to follow the order 'do something.' Then Arlene, whirling rapidly in every direction with her magazine-fed shotgun, thought of the obvious: 'Fly! Isn't this stupid Fred ship steered by consensus?' 'Yes! I don't know what that means!'"

4) "Then the overcaptain's face softened. 'Actually studied first mission in school; strange to meet legends in flesh.' 'You read about it?' I asked. 'There's a book?' 'Two books. Many books, but two originals: Knee-Deep in the Dead and Hell on Earth. Woman named Lovelace Jill wrote them, said was on mission with you.'"

5) "I came to the room with the sabotaged radio and the incinerated map. No matter—the floor plan of the facility was burned into my brain, either by the sheer horror of the memory or else by the Resuscitators when they resurrected me here. Didn't need the map, in any event, and the radios were useless inside the RAM of an alien computer. I felt like I'd been drafted into a computer game, jerked by electronic strings like a meat puppet."

6) "The brain is a gifted storyteller. 'We are all greater artists than we realize,' or whatever the hell that guy said, whoever the hell he was."

7) "'You're a product of genetic engineering, created by a race of creatures we call the Freds, who have heads like an artichoke, if you know what that is—covered with colored leaves—and grow taller and smaller as part of their mating cycle. You've seen them, right? Is my description right on, or what?' 'Sssssspeak!' demanded the spiney, but it closed its mouth, swallowing the rest of its spittle. I took that as a good sign. 'You know they're members of a grand galaxy-wide conspiracy of philosophical-literary criticism that is reasonably well-translated into English as the Deconstructionists. They're fighting the other school, called the Hyper-realists. You were sent here to prepare us for invasion and conquest by the Freds, and they told you that we would roll over and beg for mercy if you came looking like our ancient demons, right?'"

8) "Above us was sky, horribly enough; we had come down more than two kilometers through the solid rock of Phobos... and here, at the bottom, directly overhead we saw the stars! It made no geographic sense, but, of course, it didn't have to—it was nothing but computer software, after all."

9) "I shrugged. I know when I'm beat. 'So long, boys, can't say it's always been a treat, but it's been real.' Even Arlene turned her attention away from her true love's final resting place to smile in farewell. 'Don't take any wooden Fredpills,' she said, thoroughly confusing the Klave. 'Has been it a slice,' said the pair of Magilla Gorillas. Without another word, they turned left and strode off, marching in unison, subvocalizing all the way to each other. They disappeared around a tall ancient-looking column that supported a statue of what looked like Brigham Young, and we never saw Sears and Roebuck again."

10) "The End...?"