“It’s been four months…”
“Yes, four”, Paul nodded intently.
“…that you say you’ve been hearing this… voice”, said the Doctor, taking several long, pensive steps from Paul’s bedside over to the window.
“Have you experienced any loss of sleep or appetite?”
“Some.”
“Any visual hallucinations or impairment?”
“No sir”, Paul replied attentively.
“Any pain?”
“No”.
A tick and three crosses on his clipboard. With his back to Paul, the Doctor watched the latest batch of recruits performing drills on a field outside, while the untethered part of his brain probably imagined a firefight on some unknown distant battlefield. At least not here on Hope.
“I hadn’t thought anything of it in truth, until now. In light of everything we’ve seen, the company and I: the horrors of the Antelifon, the massacre of Gossen Hill, the Shine. I’m the last of many. This voice, whoever it is, if I listen, it guides me. They’re the reason I’m still here, Doctor.” Paul took another breath as if meaning to go on but then, held by a momentary wave of guilt, let all the air in his lungs out. He should have been getting back to his squad.
“In a way, I do understand”, the Doctor replied forgivingly. “And the Colony is extraordinarily grateful for what you’ve done. You’ve been out there a long time.”
Sitting upright in his bed, Paul tried to imagine a version of himself that hadn’t experienced everything he had, all the purpose and pain; a person who’d had more respect for his father’s cautionary advice back home; a person who’d sought a clean, comfortable life working the fields, without other people’s politics and wars. No matter how hard he tried, that person didn’t resemble him as he was now or anything he’d ever wanted. The call to fight had pulled him across the galaxy like a backwash pulls a person out to sea. It had been helpless to struggle.
Paul couldn’t recall an exact moment he’d started hearing the voice. More like a series of moments when he realised its utterances weren’t being said by people or machines. It grew from whispers, into vaguely discernible sounds. Human sounds, pervading dreams. Then fully-formed words.
On base, while waiting for orders and time moved perceptibly slower, Paul would wake suddenly from deep sleep to the snores of his bunkmates or the occasional radio broadcast from Hope, playing some old-timey music from the end of the last century. He’d walk the corridors at night so he could shake off some excess energy then wake the next morning, his head on his pillow, wondering if any of it had really happened.
“Stick to your drills. Keep the squad ready. The rest will follow”, was the advice of his commanding officer.
But no word came for days or weeks; it didn’t matter. Then Paul and his squad were thrust into combat. Fighting who? The jungle was his greatest enemy, left untouched for millenia and now showered with bullets, lasers piercing the sky, splintering wood. Something unnatural. But always giving way to silence.
The guerrillas had retreated further in they would say, where our tanks couldn’t go. Back to base. Back to sleep.
After one such skirmish, a preacher swept the still smouldering battlefield, taking a knee beside each of the slain to say a short prayer. Stopping to catch his breath and drink the last of his canteen, Paul could hear the man muttering behind him. Not individual words, only the “s” sounds, like whispers.
“You are loved, Paul”, the man asserted from his kneeled position only a few feet away.
“Thank you”, Paul replied hesitantly. They’d never spoken before, so Paul was surprised the preacher even knew his name. He thought he’d made his position clear to others: he had no respect for the devoted. How could anyone in their right mind believe there was a physical being watching over their every move, every decision? Among all the galaxy’s troubles, this conflict. There were just two sides. Paul was certain of it.
He stood and turned to face the preacher but there was nobody there. The battlefield, the dead, all still intact. Dropships ready to collect those that had survived. But no preacher.
A few steps away lay the body of a comrade, someone Paul hadn’t known well but trained with at an earlier time. Sadly, he couldn’t remember the man’s name. With the corpse’s head turned away Paul unashamedly reached into its pocket, finding a New Testament there. Entire civilisations had been scorched, but somehow, unrelenting, religion found a way. And so would he, Paul thought, tossing the book to the ground.
Why was his voice any of the Army’s concern? Why he’d felt the need to tell one of his squadmates, Paul still wondered. It had been an unnecessary overshare. A person devoid of sleep will do questionable things.
In some ways he felt lucky to have been chosen. “No”, he almost muttered to himself, he was never chosen. How could he know the voice wasn’t him? A partition in his brain. In tones and accents he’d heard before but not the voice of anyone he personally knew, it would tell him how to navigate the battlefield to avoid being shot, who to shoot, and sometimes who to speak to and which frequency to call on. But Paul knew this wasn’t just another part of his brain telling him things he already knew; it was another person entirely; his own Guardian Angel, looking out for him. He appreciated the irony.
The Doctor placed a probe in Paul’s left ear and music started to play, initially only faintly and then becoming louder. This lasted a few minutes. “Functionally, your hearing works exactly as it’s supposed to. Our scans haven’t revealed anything out of the ordinary”, said the Doctor reassuringly. “You’ll be able to return to the field, Paul, but only after you rest. I’m recommending you stay off-world, at least for a month or two”.
Paul felt disappointed to not be returning to his squad soon, but relieved to know there wasn’t anything fundamentally wrong with him. What had been the point of all of this? The urgency with which the Army had removed him from his post had surprised him, initially labelling him “insane” but then privately retracting what it had said. There hadn’t been any apparent danger. He hadn’t represented a threat to others, or to order. Or had he? While his comrades fell, Paul continued to survive impregnable odds, not by any of his own strengths or merits but by, as he had described to the Doctor, a voice. He could challenge Death. Where had the voice come from if not from Paul himself?