Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

I'd seen it on the cube. They weren't hanged so much as slowly strangled. This in a country that hadn't used capital punishment in generations, before the war.

Maybe after the war we'll be civilized again. That's the way it has always happened in the past.

JULIAN USUALLY WENT STRAIGHT home to Houston, but not when his ten days were up on a Friday. That was the day of the week when he had to be the most social, and he needed at least a day of preparation for that. Every day you spent jacked, you felt closer to the other nine mechanics. There was a terrible sense of separation when you unjacked, and hanging around with the others didn't help. What you needed was a day or so of isolation, in the woods or in a crowd.

Julian was not the outdoor type, and he usually just buried himself in the university library for a day. But not if it was Friday.

He could fly anywhere for free, so on impulse he went up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he'd done his undergraduate work. It was a bad choice, dirty slush everywhere and thin sleet falling in a constant sting, but he grimly persisted in his quest to visit every bar he could remember. They were full of inexplicably young and callow people.

Harvard was still Harvard; the dome still leaked. People made a point of not staring at a black man in uniform.

He walked a mile through the sleet to his favorite pub, the ancient Plough and Stars, but it was padlocked, with a card saying Bahama! taped inside the window. So he squished back to the Square on frozen feet, promising simultaneously to get drunk and not lose his temper.

There was a bar named after John Harvard, where they brewed nine kinds of beer on the premises. He had a pint of each one, methodically checking them off on the blotter, and flowed into a cab that decanted him at the airport. After six hours of off-and-on slumber, he flew his hangover back to Houston Sunday morning, following the sunrise across the country.

Back at his apartment he made a pot of coffee and attacked the accumulated mail and memos. Most of it was throwaway junk. Interesting letter from his father, vacationing in Montana with his new wife, not Julian's favorite person. His mother had called twice about a money problem, but then called again to say never mind. Both brothers called about the hanging; they followed Julian's "career" closely enough to realize that the woman who'd been attacked was in his platoon.

His actual career had generated the usual soft sifting pink snowfall of irrelevant interdepartmental memos, which he did have to at least scan. He studied the minutes of the monthly faculty meeting, just in case something real had been discussed. He always missed it, since he was on duty from the tenth to the nineteenth of every month. The only way that might have hurt his career would be jealousy from other faculty members.

And then there was a hand-delivered envelope, a small square under the memos, addressed "J." He saw a corner of it and pulled it out, pink slips fluttering, and ripped open the flap, over which a red flame had been rubber-stamped: it was from Blaze, who Julian was allowed to call by her real name, Amelia. She was his coworker, ex-adviser, confidante, and sexual companion. He didn't say "lover" in his mind, yet, because that was awkward, Amelia being fifteen years older than him. Younger than his father's new wife.

The note had some chat about the Jupiter Project, the particle-physics experiment they were engaged in, including a bit of scandalous gossip about their boss, which did not alone explain the sealed envelope. "Whatever time you get back," she wrote, "come straight over. Wake me up or pull me out of the lab. I need my little boy in the worst way. You want to come over and find out what the worst way is?"

Actually, what he'd had in mind was sleeping for a few hours. But he could do that afterward. He stacked the mail into three piles and dropped one pile into the recycler. He started to call her but then put the phone down unpunched. He dressed for the morning cool and went downstairs for his bicycle.

The campus was deserted and beautiful, redbuds and azaleas in bloom under the hard blue Texas sky. He pedaled slowly, relaxing back into real life, or comfortable illusion. The more time he spent jacked, the harder it was to accept this peaceful, monocular view of life as the real one. Rather than the beast with twenty arms; the god with ten hearts.

At least he wasn't menstruating anymore.

He let himself into her place with his thumbprint. Amelia was actually up at nine this Sunday morning, in the shower. He decided against surprising her there. Showers were dangerous places-he had slipped in one once, experimenting with a fellow clumsy teenager, and had wound up with a cut chin and bruises and a decidedly un-erotic attitude toward the location (and the girl, for that matter).

So he just sat up in her bed, quietly reading the newspaper, and waited for the water to stop. She sang bits of tunes, happy, and switched the shower from fine spray to coarse pulse and back. Julian could visualize her there and almost changed his mind. But he stayed on the bed, fully clothed, pretending to read.

She came out toweling and started slightly when she saw Julian; then recovered: "Help! There's a strange man in my bed!"

"I thought you liked strange men."

"Only one." She laughed and eased alongside him, hot and damp.

ALL OF US MECHANICS talk about sex. Being jacked automatically accomplishes two things that normal people pursue through sex, and sometimes love: emotional union with another and the penetration, so to speak, of the physical mysteries of the opposite sex. These things are automatic and instantaneous, jacked, as soon as they turn on the power. When you unjack, it's a mystery you all have in common, and you talk about that as much as anything.

Amelia's the only civilian I've talked about it with at any length. She's intensely curious about it, and would take the chance if it were possible. But she would lose her position, and maybe a lot more.

Eight or nine percent of the people who go through the installation either die on the operating table or, worse, come out of it with their brains not working at all. Even those of us who come out successfully jacked face an increase in the frequency of cerebrovascular incidents, including fatal stroke. For mechanics in soldier-boys, the increase is tenfold.

So Amelia could get jacked-she has the money and could just slip down to Mexico City or Guadalajara and have it done at one of the clinics there-but she would automatically lose her position: tenure, retirement, everything. Most job contracts had a "jack" clause; all academic ones did. People like me were exempt because we didn't do it voluntarily, and it was against the law to discriminate against people in National Service. Amelia's too old to be drafted.

When we make love I sometimes have felt her stroking the cold metal disk at the base of my skull, as if she were trying to get in. I don't think she's aware of doing it.

Amelia and I had been close for many years; even when she was my Ph.D. adviser, we had a social life together. But it didn't become physical until after Carolyn died.

Carolyn and I were first jacked at the same time; joined the platoon on the same day. It was an instant emotional connection, even though we had almost nothing in common. We were both black Southerners (Amelia's pale Boston Irish) and in graduate school. But she was no intellectual; her MFA was going to be in Creative Viewing. I never watched the cube and she wouldn't know a differential equation if it had reared up and bit her on the butt. So we had no rapport at that level, but that wasn't important.

We'd been physically attracted to each other during training, the shoe stuff you go through before they put you in a soldierboy, and had managed to sneak a few minutes of privacy, three times, for hasty sex, desperately passionate. Even for normal people, that would have been an intense beginning. But then when we were jacked it was something way beyond anything either of us had ever experienced. It was as if life were a big simple puzzle, and we suddenly had a piece dropped in that nobody else could see.

But we couldn't put it together when we weren't jacked. We had a lot of sex, a lot of talks, went to relators and counsellors – but it was like we were one thing in the cage and quite another, or two others, outside.

I talked to Amelia about it at the time, not only because we were friends, but because we were on the same project and she could see my work was starting to suffer. I couldn't get Carolyn off my mind, in a very literal way.

It was never resolved. Carolyn died in a sudden brain blowout when we weren't doing anything particularly stressful, just waiting for a pickup after an uneventful mission.

I had to be hospitalized for a week; in a way, it was even worse than just losing someone you loved. It was like that plus losing a limb, losing part of your brain.

Amelia held my hand that week, and we were holding each other soon enough.

I don't usually fall asleep right after making love, but this time I did, after the weekend of dissipation and the sleepless hours on the plane-you'd think a person who spent a third of his life as part of a machine would be comfortable traveling inside another one, but no. I have to stay awake to keep the damned thing in the air.

The smell of onions woke me up. Brunch, lunch, whatever. Amelia has a thing about potatoes; her Irish blood, I suppose. She was frying up a pan with onions and garlic. Not my favorite wake-up call, but for her it was lunch. She told me she'd gotten up at three to log on and work out a decay sequence that turned out to be nothing. So her reward for working on Sunday was a shower, a somewhat awake lover, and fried potatoes.

I located my shirt but couldn't find my pants, and settled on one of her nightgowns, not too pretty. We were the same size.

I found my blue toothbrush in her bathroom and used her weird clove-flavored toothpaste. Decided against a shower because my stomach was growling. It wasn't grits and gravy, but it wasn't poison.

"Good morning, bright eyes." No wonder I couldn't find my pants. She was wearing them.

"Have you gone completely strange?" I said.

"Just an experiment." She stepped over and held me by both shoulders. "You look stunning. Absolutely gorgeous."

"What experiment? See what I would wear?"

"See whether." She stepped out of my jeans and handed them over, and walked back to her potatoes wearing only a T-shirt. "I mean, really. Your generation is so prudish."

"Oh, are we?" I slipped off the gown and came up behind her. "Come on. I'll show you prudish."

"That doesn't count." She half-turned and kissed me. "The experiment was about clothes, not sex. Sit down before one of us gets burned."

I sat down at the dinette and looked at her back. She stirred the food slowly. "I'm not sure why I did that, really. Impulse. Couldn't sleep but didn't want to wake you up, going through the closet. I stepped on your jeans getting out of bed and I just put them on."

"Don't explain. I want it to be a big perverse mystery."

"If you want coffee you know where it is." She had a pot of tea brewed. I almost asked for a cup. But to keep the morning from being too full of mystery, I stuck with coffee.

"So Macro's getting a divorce?" Dr. "Mac" Roman was dean of research and titular head of our project, though he wasn't involved in the day-to-day work.

"Deep dark secret. He hasn't told anybody. My friend Nel passed it on." Nel Nye was a schoolmate who worked for the city.