Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 9

pointed his thumb. "Gone to beg the General again to let him send out scouts."
    I looked toward the General's rock. Tice was talking animatedly; the General looked stone-faced.
    I sighed and turned away. "Everything's ready where you are?"
    "Everything's fine," replied Fairview; then, seeing my men nudge each other knowingly, he sighed too. "Come see," he suggested.
    I don't know how it is in other nations' armies. I've heard that the Mippites, all egalitarians at heart, would hardly blink if a private chewed out his colonel, or if a lesser-ranked colonel failed to address a higher-ranked colonel as "sir."
    Matters work differently in the armies of the Dozen Landsteads. True, we no longer have tens of thousands of different words for soldiers' ranks, each word invented especially for one man. I was no longer "Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Roman Rook, Ranked Just Below Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Fairview." We'd given up such complex titles, because they confused foreigners.
    But within the Dozen Landsteads, such ranks still exist. When I first joined the Ninth Landstead's military forces after university, I was tattooed with a number that represented my rank in the Ninth Landstead's military: the thirteenth minute of the six hour of the first day of the seventh month of the sun-cycle of the year in which I joined. Fairview's tattoo showed that he was two minutes higher-ranked than I was. We had flipped a coin to decide which of us stood before the other in the recruitment queue.
    When the decision was made for a war alliance with the other landsteads, there had been a tedious process of cross-checking rank records with the other landsteads to determine that nobody held the exact same rank. Nobody did; the recruiting offices of the various landstead military forces deliberately stagger their schedules to prevent anyone from joining the military at the exact same moment that anyone else does. As a result, I was still ranked directly below Fairview; no other officer in the Allied Armies was ranked between us.
    Not that any of this had ever made any difference to Fairview and me. We made our decisions the way we always had: jointly. Sometimes, in the darkness of night, I had wondered what would happen if one of us was promoted in the field. But in the daytime, I had a bigger problem to worry about: Doyle.
    Thanks to Doyle's insinuations, everyone in our brigade joked that Fairview and I made our decisions jointly because we were love-mates. Thankfully, the General, unlike other officers we'd suffered under, had not objected to our companionable manner of working. These days, our problems arose from the reactions of our men. Disconcerted by our unconventional manner of sharing responsibilities, but unwilling, through their loyalty, to rebel in any overt form, Fairview's men and mine turned their bewilderment into satire. Everywhere Fairview and I went these days, there were winks and sniggers and stares. The only thing worse would have been if we had presented the men with actual proof that Fairview and I did more than share a tent in a chaste manner.
    I wondered sometimes – on those same dark nights – whether affairs might have gone differently between Fairview and me if we hadn't made the mistake of adopting Doyle as our pet troublemaker. Certainly our friendship had satisfied us to the full in the past. Any man who thinks that friendship is not true love has never possessed a true friend.
    But men spin in the cycle of transformation and rebirth. Nothing stays still; all changes. The scientists in the First Landstead are proving this to be true, with their talk of evolution.
    If Doyle had not been there, turning the love between Fairview and me into a source of filthy jokes, what evolutions might have occurred in our lives? Where would we be now, if we had been spared Doyle's presence?
    As I walked across the summit with Fairview, I turned my attention back to the trenches. Though the trenches were exceedingly shallow, Spearman had laid them out properly, with one long main trench and two shorter trenches jutting back diagonally from the main trench, like the wings of a barn swallow in flight.
    We'd had some discussions about those trenches. Tice was considerably senior to Fairview and me in army years, and so, by right of rank, Tice ought to have received the honor of holding the main trench. That was what the General had planned.
    But Tice had demurred when the time came to position our men, saying that the greater