Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

"Please. Just tell him it's from his sister – "

"The general doesn't have a sister."

"His sister Gavrila," he pressed on. "She's in trouble."

Her head jerked up suddenly and she spoke beyond the screen. "Yes, sir. Immediately." She pushed a button and her face was replaced by the green DARPA sigil. A shimmering encryptation bar appeared over it, and then it dissolved to the general's face. He looked kind, grandfatherly.

"Do you have security on your end?"

"No, sir. It's a public phone. But there's no one around."

He nodded. "You spoke with Gavrila?"

"Indirectly, sir." He looked around. "She was captured and had a jack installed. I jacked briefly with her captors. She's dead, sir."

He didn't change expression. "Did she complete her assignment?"

"If that was to get rid of the scientist, no, sir. She was killed in the attempt."

While they were talking, the general made two unobtrusive hand gestures, recognition signals for Enders and for Hammer of God. Of course Thurman didn't respond to either one. "Sir, there's a huge conspiracy – "

"I know, son. Let's continue this conversation face-to-face. I'll send my car down for you. You'll be paged when it arrives."

"Yes, sir," he said to a blank screen.

Thurman drank coffee for most of an hour, looking at the paper without actually reading it. Then he was paged and told that the general's limousine was waiting for him in the arrivals area.

He went there and was surprised to see that the limo had a human driver, a small young female tech sergeant in dress greens. She opened the back door for him. The windows were opaque mirrors.

The seats were deep and soft but covered with uncomfortable plastic. The driver didn't say a word to him, but did turn on some music, soft-drift jazz. She didn't drive, either, other than pushing a button. She read from an old-fashioned paper Bible and ignored the numbing monotony of the huge gray Grossman modules that housed a tenth of a million people each. Thurman was kind of fascinated by them. Who would live that way voluntarily? Of course most of them were probably government draftees, just marking time until their term of service was up.

They traveled alongside a river, in a greenbelt, for several miles, and then went spiraling up an entrance ramp to a broad highway that led to the Pentagon, which was actually two pentagons-the smaller historical building nested inside the one where most of the work was actually done. He could only see the whole structure for a few seconds, and then the car banked down a long arc of concrete toward its home.

The limousine came to a stop outside a loading bay, identified only by the flaking yellow letters blkrde21. The driver put her Bible down and got out and opened Thurman's door. "Please follow me, sir."

They went through an automatic door straight into an elevator, whose walls were an infinite regression of mirrors. The driver put her hand on a touchplate and said, "General Blaisdell."

The elevator crawled for about a minute, while Thurman studied a million Thurmans going off in four directions, and tried not to stare at the various attractive angles of his escort. A Bible-thumper, not his type. Nice butt, though.

The doors opened to a silent and spare reception room. The sergeant went behind the desk and turned on a console. "Tell the general that Lieutenant Thurman is here." There was a whisper and she nodded. "Come with me, sir."

The next room was more like a major general's office. Wood paneling, actual paintings on the walls, a pic window that displayed Mount Kilimanjaro. One wall of awards and citations and holos of the general with four presidents.

The old gentleman rose gracefully from behind his acre of uncluttered desk. He was obviously athletic and had a twinkle in his eye.

"Lieutenant, please sit over here." He indicated one of a pair of leather-upholstered easy chairs. He looked at the sergeant. "And bring in Mr. Carew."

Thurman sat uneasily, "Sir, I'm not sure how many people ought to – "

"Oh, Mr. Carew's a civilian, but we can trust him. He's an information specialist. He'll jack with you and save us all kinds of time."

Thurman had a premonitory migraine glow. "Sir, is that absolutely necessary? Jacking – "

"Oh yes, yes. The man's a jack witness in the federal court system. He's a marvel, a real marvel."

The marvel came in without speaking. He looked like a wax replica of himself. Formal tunic and string tie.

"Him," he said, and the general nodded. He sat down in the other chair and pulled two jack cables from a box on the table between him and Thurman.

Thurman opened his mouth to explain, but then just plugged in. Carew followed suit.

Thurman stiffened and his eyes rolled back. Carew stared at him with interest and started breathing hard, sweat dotting his forehead.

After a few minutes he unplugged, and Thurman sagged into relieved unconsciousness. "That was hard on him," Carew said, "but I have a great deal of interesting information."

"Have it all?" the general said.

"All we need and more."

Thurman started to cough and slowly levered himself into a normal sitting position. He clamped his forehead with one hand and massaged a temple with the other. "Sir... could I ask for a Pain-go?"

"Certainly ... sergeant?" She went out and returned with a glass of water and a pill.

He gulped it down gratefully. "Now ... sir. What do we do next?"

"The next thing you do, son, is get some rest. The sergeant will take you to a hotel."

"Sir, I don't have a ration book, or any money. It's all back in Portobello; I was under detention."

"Don't worry. We'll take care of everything."

"Thank you, sir." The headache was retreating, but he had to close his eyes at the mirrored elevator car, or face the prospect of watching himself puke a thousand times at once.

The limousine hadn't moved. He slid gratefully onto the soft slick plastic.

The driver closed his door and got in the front. "This hotel," he asked her, "are we going all the way downtown?"

"No," she said, and started the engine. "Arlington." She turned and raised a silenced .22 automatic and shot him once in the left eye. He clawed for the door handle and she leaned over and shot him again, point-blank in the temple. She made a face at the mess and pushed the button that directed the car to the cemetery.

MARTY DROPPED HIS BOMBSHELL by bringing a friend to breakfast. We were eating out of the machines, as usual for the morning meal, when Marty walked in with someone whom I didn't at first recognize. He smiled, though, and I remembered the diamond set into his front tooth.

"Private Benyo?" He was one of the mechanic guards replaced by my old platoon.

"In the flesh, sarge." He shook hands with Amelia and introduced himself, then sat down and poured a cup of coffee.

"So what's the story?" I asked. "It didn't take?"

"Nope." He grinned again. "What it didn't take was two weeks.'"

"What?"

"It doesn't "take two weeks," Marty said. "Benyo is humanized, and so are all the others."

"I don't get it."

"Your stabilizer, Candi, was in the loop. That's what did it! It only takes about two days, if you're jacked with somebody who's already humanized."

"But... then why did it take the whole two weeks with Jefferson?"

Marty laughed. "It didn't! He was one of them after a couple of days, but people didn't recognize it, since he was the first-and he was ninety percent there from the beginning. Everybody, Jefferson included, was concentrating on Ingram, not him."

"But then you take a guy like me," Benyo said, "who hates the idea from the very start-and wasn't exactly a sweetheart to begin with-hell, everybody could tell when I converted."

"And you are converted?" Amelia said. He got a serious look and nodded in jerks. "You don't feel resentful about... losing the man you used to be?"

"It's hard to explain. What I am now is the man I used to be. But more me than I used to be, get it?" He made a helpless gesture with both hands. "What I mean is I never in a million years could've found out who I really was, even though it was there all the time. I needed the others to show me."

She smiled and shook her head. "It sounds like a religious conversion."

"It is, sort of," I said. "It literally was, with Ellie." I shouldn't have said that; she started to cloud up. I put my hand on hers.

For a moment everyone was silent. "So," Amelia said. "What does this do to the timetable?"

"If we'd known before the thing started, it would've sped it up considerably-and of course it will do that in the long run, when we're out to change the world.

"Right now the limiting factor is the surgery schedule. We plan to finish the last set of implants on the thirty-first. So by the third of August, we should have a building-full of converts, general to private."

"What about the POWs?" I asked. "McLaughlin didn't convert them in two days, did he?"

"Again, if we'd only known. He was never jacked with them for more than a few hours at a time. It would be good to know whether it does work with thousands of people at once."

"How do you know it's one or the other?" Amelia said. "Two weeks if they're all just 'normal' people; two days if one of the elect is with them all the time. You don't know anything about intermediate states."

"That's right." He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. "And no time to experiment. There's some fascinating science to be done, but as we said up at St. Bart's, we're not doing science quite yet." His phone pinged. "Just a second."

He touched his earring and listened, staring. "Okay ... I'll get back to you. Yes." He shook his head.

"Trouble?" I asked.

"Could be nothing; could be disaster. We've lost our cook."

That took me a moment. "Thurman's gone AWOL?"

"Yep. He cruised right past the guard last night, right after you ... after Gavrila died."

"No idea where he went?"

"He could be anywhere in the world. Could be downtown living it up. You jacked with him, Benyo?"

"Huh-uh. But Monez did, and I'm with Monez all the time. So I got a little. Not much, you know, his headaches."

"Do you have any secondhand impression of him?"

"Just a guy." He rubbed his chin. "I guess he was a little more army than most. I mean he kind of liked the idea.".

"He didn't much like our idea, then."

"I don't know. I'd guess not."

Marty looked at his watch. "I'm due in surgery in twenty minutes. Be doing jacks until one. Julian, you want to track him down?"

"Do what I can."

"Benyo, you jack with Monez and whoever else was with Thurman. We have to know how much he knows."

"Sure." He stood up. "I think he's down by the game room."

We watched him go. "At least he couldn't have known who the general was."

"Not Roser," Marty said. "But he might have gotten the name of Gavrila's boss, Blaisdell, through one of the people in Guadalajara. That's what I want to find out." He checked his watch again. "Call Benyo about it in an hour or so. And check all the flights to Washington."

"Do what I can, Marty. Once he's out of Porto, hell, there must be ten thousand ways to get to Washington."

"Yeah, right. Maybe we should just wait and see whether we hear from Blaisdell."

We were about to.

BLAISDELL SPENT A FEW minutes talking to Carew – the actual "download" of information from the jack session would take several hours' patient interrogation under hypnosis, by machine, but he did learn that there were a couple of days unaccounted for, between the time Gavrila was jacked in Guadalajara and her death more than a thousand miles away. What did she learn that sent her to Portobello?