Forever Peace (7 page)

I went down to see Candi and Karen. They'd been out of jack therapy for half a day, and were pale and weak but otherwise all right. They showed me the pair of red marks between their breasts where they'd been jolted back to life.

Everyone but them and Mel had checked out and gone home. While I waited for Mel I went down to Ops and replayed the attack.

I didn't replay the three seconds, of course; only the minute leading up to them. All the people on guard heard a faint "pop" that was the enemy pilot ejecting. Then Candi, out of the corner of her eye, saw one plane for a hundredth of a second, as it cleared the trees that bordered the parking lot and dove in. She started to swing, to target it with her laser, and then the record ended.

When Mel came out, we had a couple of beers and a plate of tamales at the airport. He went off to California, and I went back to the hospital for a few hours. I bribed a tech to jack me with Candi and Karen for five minutes—not strictly against regulations; in a way, we were still on duty—which was long enough for us to reassure each other that we would be all right, and to share grief about Ralph. It was especially hard on Candi. I took on some of the fear and pain they had about their hearts. Nobody likes to face the possibility of a replacement, having a machine at the center of your life. They were likely candidates now.

When we unjacked, Candi held my hand very hard, actually just the forefinger, staring at me. "You hide your secrets better than anyone else," she whispered.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"I know you don't."

"Talk about what?" Karen said.

Candi shook her head. "Thanks," I said, and she released my finger.

I backed out of the small room. "Be...," Candi said, and didn't complete the sentence. Maybe that was the sentence.

She had seen how profoundly I hadn't wanted to wake up.

I called Amelia from the airport and said I'd be home in a few hours, and would explain later. It would be after midnight, but she said to come straight over to her place. That was a relief. Our relationship didn't have any restrictions, but I always hoped she slept alone, waiting, the ten days I was away.

Of course she knew something was seriously wrong. When I got off the plane, she was there, and had a cab waiting outside.

The machine's programming was stuck in a rush-hour pattern, so it took us twenty minutes to get home, via surface roads I never see except on bicycle. I was able to tell Amelia the basic story while we drove through the maze that avoided nonexistent traffic. When we got to the campus the guard looked at my uniform and waved us through, wonder of wonders.

I let her talk me into some reheated stir-fry. I wasn't really hungry, but knew she liked to feed me.

"It's hard for me to visualize," she said, rummaging for bowls and chopsticks while the stuff warmed. "Of course it is. I'm just talking." She stood behind me and massaged my neck. "Tell me you're going to be all right."

"I am all right."

"Oh, bullshit." She dug in. "You're stiff as a board. You're not halfway back from ... wherever that was."

She had nuked some sake. I poured a second cup. "Maybe. I... they let me go back and jack with Candi and Karen in the cardiac recovery unit. Candi's in a pretty bad way."

"Afraid of getting her heart pulled?"

"That's more Karen's problem. Candi's going round and round about Ralph. She can't handle losing him."

She reached over me and poured herself a cup. "Isn't she a grief counselor? Out of uniform."

"Yeah, well, why does somebody take that up? She lost her father when she was twelve, an accident while she was in the car. That's never buried very deep. He's there in the background with every man she, she's close to."

"Loves? Like you?"

"Not love. It's automatic. We've been through this."

She crossed the kitchen to stir the pot, her back to me. "Maybe we should go through it again. Maybe every six months or so."

I almost blew up at her, but held back. We were both tired and rattled. "It's not at all like Carolyn. You just have to trust me. Candi's more like a sister—"

"Oh sure."

"Not like my sister, okay." I hadn't heard from her in more than a year. "I'm close to her, intimate, and I guess you could call it a kind of love. But it's not like you and me."

She nodded and measured the stuff into bowls. "I'm sorry. You go through hell there and get more hell here."

"Hell and stir-fry." I took the bowl. "Time of the month?"

She put her own bowl down a little hard. "That's another goddamned thing. Sharing their periods. That's more than 'intimate.' It's just plain strange."

"Well, count your blessings. You've got a couple of years' peace." The women in a platoon synchronize periods pretty quickly, and the men are of course affected. It's a problem with the thirty-day rotation cycle: the first half of last year I came home every month crabby with PMS, proof that the brain is mightier than the gland.

"What was he like, Ralph? You never said much about him."

"It was only his third cycle," I said. "Still a neo. Never saw any real combat."

"Just enough to kill him."

"Yeah. He was a nervous guy, maybe oversensitive. Two months ago, when we were parallel-jacked, Scoville's platoon was worse than usual, and he was bouncing around for days. We all had to hang on to him, keep him putting one foot in front of the other. Candi was best at that, of course."

She played with her food. "So you didn't know all that intimate stuff about him."

"Intimate, yeah, but not as deep as the others. He wet the bed until puberty, had terrible childhood guilt over killing a turtle. Spent all his money on jacksex with the jills that hang around Portobello. Never had real sex until he was married, and didn't stay married long. Before he got jacked he used to masturbate compulsively to tapes of oral sex. Is that intimate?"

"What was his favorite food?"

"Crab cakes. The way his mother made them."

"Favorite book?"

"He didn't read much, not at all for pleasure. He liked Treasure Island in school. Wrote a report about Jim in eleventh grade and then recycled it in college."

"He was likeable?"

"Nice enough guy. We never did anything social—I mean nobody did, with him. He'd get out of the cage and run to the bars, with a hard-on for the jills."

"Candi didn't, none of the women wanted to ... help him out that way?"

"God, no. Why would you?"

"That's what I don't understand. Why wouldn't you? I mean, all the women knew he went off with these jills."

"That's what he wanted to do. I don't think he was unhappy on that score." I pushed the bowl away and poured some sake. "Besides, it's an invasion of privacy on a cosmic scale: when Carolyn and I were together, every time we went back to the platoon we had eight people who knew everything we had done, from both sides, as soon as we jacked. They knew how Carolyn felt about what I did, and vice versa, and all the feedback states that that kind of knowledge generates. You don't start that sort of thing casually."

She persisted. "I still don't see why not. You're all used to everybody knowing everything. You know each other's insides, for Christ's sake! A little friendly sex wouldn't be that earthshaking."

I knew my anger was unreasonable, that it didn't really come from her questions. "Well, how would you like to have the whole Friday night gang in the bedroom with us? Feeling everything you felt?"

She smiled. "I wouldn't mind. Is that a difference between men and women or between you and me?"

"I think it's a difference between you and merely sane people." My smile might not have been totally convincing. "It's actually not the physical sensations. The details vary, but men pretty much feel like men and women feel like women. Sharing that isn't a big deal after the initial novelty. It's how the rest of you feels that's personal. And embarrassing."

She took our bowls to the sink. "You wouldn't be able to tell that from the ads." Her voice dropped. "‘feel how it feels to her.'"

"Well, you know. People who pay to have a jack installed often do it out of sexual curiosity. Or something deeper; they feel trapped in the wrong kind of body but don't want to do the swap-op." I shuddered. "Understandably."

"People do it all the time," she said, teasing, knowing how I felt. "It's less dangerous than jacking, and reversible."

"Oh, reversible. You get somebody else's dick."

"Men and their dicks. It's mostly your own tissue."

"Used to be inseparable." Karen had been male until she turned eighteen, and was able to file with National Health for a swap. She took a few tests and they agreed she'd be better off outside-in.

The first one's free. If she wanted to go back to being a male, she'd have to pay. Two of the jills that Ralph liked were ex-males trying to earn enough to buy their dicks back. What a wonderful world.

PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF NATIONAL Service did have legitimate ways to earn money, though not many of them were paid as much as prostitutes. Academics made small stipends, larger ones for people who did "hands-on" teaching, only a token for people who just did research. Marty was the head of his department and was a world-renowned authority on brain-machine and brain-brain interfacing—but he made less money than a teaching assistant like Julian. He made less money than the greaseball kids who served drinks at the Saturday Night Special. And like most people in his position, Marty took a perverse pride in being broke all the time—he was too busy to make money. And he rarely needed the things you could buy with it, anyhow.

You could buy objects with money, like handcrafts and original art, or services; masseur, butler, prostitute. But most people spent money on rationed things—things the government allowed you to have, but didn't allow you enough of.

Everyone had three entertainment credits a day, for instance. One credit would get you a movie, a roller-coaster ride, one hour of hands-on driving on a sports car track, or entry into a place like the Saturday Night Special.

Once inside, you could sit all night for free, unless you wanted something to eat or drink. Restaurant meals ranged from one to thirty credits, mostly depending on how much labor went into them, but the menu also had dollar amounts, in case you had used up all your entertainment and had money.

Plain money wouldn't buy alcohol, though, unless you were in uniform. You were rationed one ounce of alcohol per day, and it made no difference to the government whether you parceled it out to yourself as two small glasses of wine each night or as a once-a-month binge with two bottles of vodka.

It made abstainers and people in uniform sought-after companions in some wobbly circles—and, perhaps predictably, did nothing to reduce the number of alcoholics. People who had to have it would either find it or make it.

Illegal services were available for money, and in fact were the most active part of the dollar economy. Penny-ante activities like home-brewing or freelance prostitution were either ignored or taken care of with small regular bribes. But there were big operators who moved a lot of cash for hard drugs and services like murder.

Some medical services, like jack installation, cosmetic surgery, and sex-change operations, were theoretically available through National Health, but not many people qualified. Before the war, Nicaragua and Costa Rica had been the places to go to buy "black medicine." Now it was Mexico, though a lot of the doctors had Nicaraguan or Costa Rican accents.

BLACK MEDICINE CAME UP at the next Friday night gathering. Ray was on a little vacation in Mexico. It was no secret he'd gone there to have a few dozen pounds of fat removed.

"I suppose the medical advantages outweigh the risk," Marty said.

"You had to approve the leave?" Julian asked.

"Pro forma," Marty said. "Pity he couldn't put it against sick leave. I don't think he's ever used a day of it."

"Well, it's vanity," Belda said in a quavering voice. "Male vanity. I liked him fine, fat."

"He didn't want to get in bed with you, darling," Marty said.

"His loss." The old woman patted her hair.

The waiter was a surly handsome young man who looked as if he'd stepped out of a movie poster. "Last call."

"It's only eleven," Marty said.

"So maybe you get one more."

"Same all around?" Julian said. Everyone said yes except Belda, who checked her watch and bustled out.

It was getting toward the end of the month, so they put all the drinks on Julian's tab, to conserve ration points, and paid him under the table. He offered to let them do it all the time, but it was technically against the law, so most of the people usually demurred. Except Reza, who had never spent a dime in the club except in payoffs to Julian.

"I wonder how fat you have to be to go to National Health," Reza said.

"You have to need a forklift to get around," Julian said. "Your mass has to alter the orbits of nearby planets."

"He did apply," Marty said. "He didn't have high enough blood pressure or cholesterol."

"You're worried about him," Amelia said.

"Of course I am, Blaze. Personal feelings aside, if something happened to him I'd be stopped dead on three different projects. The new one especially, the empathy failures. He's pretty much taken that over."

"How's that coming along?" Julian asked. Marty raised a palm and shook his head. "Sorry. Didn't mean to—"

"Oh, well, you might as well know one thing—we've been studying one of your people. You'll know all about it next time you jack with her."

Reza got up to go to the bathroom, so it was just the three of them: Julian, Amelia, and Marty.

"I'm very happy for you both," Marty said, in a distant tone, as if he were talking about the weather.

Amelia just stared. "You ... you have access to my string," Julian said.

"Not directly, and not for the purpose of invading your privacy. We've been studying one of your people. So naturally I know a lot about you, secondhand, and so does Ray. Of course we will keep your secret for as long as you wish it to remain a secret."