Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

I fell asleep and instantly awoke to a blaze of pain. My sensors brought in nothing but blinding light, a roar of white noise, searing heat-and complete isolation! All of my platoon was disconnected or destroyed.

I knew it wasn't real; knew I was safe in a cage in Portobello. But it still hurt like a third-degree burn over every square centimeter of naked flesh, eyeballs fried in their sockets, one dying inhalation of molten lead, enema of same: complete feedback overload.

It seemed to last for a long time-long enough for me to think this was actually it; the enemy had cracked Portobello or nuked it, and it was actually me dying, not my machine. Actually, we were switched off after 3.03 seconds. It would have been quicker, but the mechanic in Delta platoon who was our horizontal liaison-our link to the company commander if I died-was disoriented by the sudden intensity of it, even secondhand.

Later satellite analysis showed two aircraft catapulted from five kilometers away. They were stealthed and, with no propellant, left no heat signature. One pilot ejected just before the plane hit the schoolhouse. The other plane was either automatically guided or its pilot came in with it-kamikaze or ejection failure.

Both planes were full of incendiaries. About one hundredth of a second after Candi sensed something was wrong, all our soldierboys were trying to cope with a flood of molten metal.

They know we have to sleep, and know how we do it. So they contrive things like this setup: a camouflaged catapult, zeroed on a building we would sooner or later use, its two-pilot crew waiting for months or years.

They couldn't have just boobytrapped the building, because we would have sensed that amount of incendiary or other explosive.

In Portobello, three of us went into cardiac arrest; Ralph died. They used air-cushion stretchers to move us to the hospital wing, but it still hurt to move; just to breathe.

Physical treatment wouldn't touch where that pain was, the phantom pain that was the nervous system's memory of violent death. Imaginary pain had to be fought through the imagination.

They jacked me into a Caribbean island fantasy, swimming warm waters with lovely black women. Lots of virtual fruit-and-rum drinks, and then virtual sex, virtual sleep.

When I woke up still in pain, they tried the opposite scenario-a ski resort, thin dry cool air. Fast slopes, fast women, the same sequence of virtual voluptuousness. Then canoeing in a calm mountain lake. Then a hospital bed in Portobello.

The doctor was a short guy, darker than me. "Are you awake, sergeant?"

I felt the back of my head. "Evidently." I sat up and clutched at the mattress until the dizziness subsided. "How are Candi and Karen?"

"They'll be all right. Do you recall..."

"Ralph died. Yes." I dimly remembered when they had stopped working on him, and brought the other two out of the cardiac unit. "What day is it?"

"Wednesday." The shift had started Monday. "How do you feel? You're free to go as soon as you feel up to it."

"Medical leave?" He nodded. "The skin pain is gone. I still feel strange. But I've never spent two days jacked into fantasies before." I put my feet on the cold tile floor and stood up. I walked shakily across the room to a closet and found a dress uniform there, and a bag with my civvies.

"Guess I'll hang around awhile, check on my platoon. Then go home or wherever."

"All right. I'm Dr. Tull, in RICU Recovery, if you have any problems." He shook hands and left. Do you salute doctors?

I decided to wear the uniform and dressed slowly and sat there for awhile, sipping ice water. I'd lost soldier-boys twice before, but both times it was just a twist of disorientation and then switch-off. I'd heard about these total feedback situations, and knew of one instance when a whole platoon had died before they could be turned off. Supposedly, that couldn't happen anymore.

How would it affect our performance? Scoville's platoon went through it last year. We all had to spend a cycle training with the replacement soldierboys, but they seemed unaffected, other than being impatient with not fighting. Theirs was only a fraction of a second, though, not three seconds of burning alive.

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?"