Forever Peace Part 11

I suggested the underwater tour of the Great Barrier Reef.

I'm not a good swimmer, Amelia said. Would that make a difference?

Me neither; don't worry. It's like being a fish. I'd done this one. You don't even think about swimming.

It was a dollar a minute, cash, or two minutes for three dollars, plastic. Ten minutes up front. I paid cash; keep the plastic for emergencies.

A stern-looking fat lady, black with a springy forest of white hair, led us to the booth. It was a small cubicle just over a meter high, with a padded blue mat on the floor, two jack cables hanging from the low ceiling.

Time start' when the first one plug in. You all want to take your clothes off first, I s'pose. Place been sterilized. You-all have a good time, now.

She turned abruptly and bustled away. She thinks you're a jill, I said.

I could use a second income. We entered the place on our hands and knees and when I shut the door the air conditioner started to whir. Then a white-noise generator added a steady hiss.

Does the light make a difference?

It goes off automatically. We helped each other undress and she lay down the right way, on her stomach facing the door.

She was rigid and trembling slightly. Relax, I said, kneading her shoulders.

I'm afraid nothing will happen.

If nothing happens, we'll try it again. I remembered what Marty had said-she really should start off with something like jumping off a cliff. Well, I could tell her that later.

Here. I slid over a diamond-shaped pillow that supports your face on the chin, cheekbones, and forehead. This'll help your neck relax. I stroked her back for a minute, and when she seemed looser, I moved the jack interface into place over the metal socket in her head. There was a faint click and the light went out.

Of course after thousands of hours, I didn't need the pillow; I could jack standing up or hanging upside down. I groped for the cable and stretched out so we were touching, arm and hip. Then I jacked in.

The water was warm as blood and it tasted good, salt and seaweed, on my lips, as I breathed it in. I was in less than two meters of water, bright coral formations all around, tiny fish with brilliant colors ignoring me until I came close enough to be a danger. A small green moray eel, face like a cartoon villain, stared at me from a hole in the coral.

Volition is strange when you're jacked like this. I decided to go off to the left, although there was nothing obvious there, just a plain of white sand. Actually, the person who had recorded the trip had a good reason to check it out, but the customer wasn't in contact with him or her at that level; nothing but the sensorium, amplified.

Sunlight refracting through the ripples on the surface made a pleasant s.h.i.+mmering pattern on the sand, but that wasn't why we had come here. I hovered over two eye-stalks that poked out of the sand, twitching, agitated. Suddenly the sand exploded underneath me, and to the left and right, and a tiger-striped manta ray flew out from where it had been hiding, under a few centimeters of sand. It was huge, easily three meters wide. I shot forward and grabbed a wing, before it had time to gather speed.

One powerful flap of the wings and we surged forward; another, and we were going faster than any merely human swimmer, the water churning smoothly down my body...

And hers. Amelia was there, definitely but faintly, like a shadow inside me. The turbulence from the fast water made my genitals flutter, but part of me didn't have that; for that part of me the water flowed smoothly tickling between her legs.

Intellectually, I knew that they'd had to merge two strings to create this, and wondered how hard it had been to find a large manta for both the man and the woman or how they'd gotten around it. But mainly I focused on that particular dual sensation and tried to make contact with Amelia through it.

I couldn't, quite. No words, no specificity; just a vague isn't this thrilling gestalt that I felt reflected with a different twist, Amelia's personality. There was also a faint different excitement that must have been her realization that we were in contact.

The sand surface fell away in an underwater cliff and the manta dived, the water suddenly cool and the pressure increasing. We lost our grip and went tumbling alone in the dark water.

As we slid slowly upward I felt little b.u.t.terfly flutterings that I knew were Amelia's hands on me, back in the cubical, and as I became erect it was wetness that wasn't the imaginary ocean around me, and then the ghostly clasp of her legs and a faint pulsing up and down.

It wasn't like Carolyn, where I was her and she was me. It was more like a compelling s.e.xual dream that possessed you while you were half awake.

The water above was like beaten silver, and three sharks scudded there as we floated up. There was a little s.h.i.+ver of fear, though I knew they were harmless, since the string wasn't rated D or I; death or injury. I tried to project to Amelia not to be scared, but I didn't feel any fear from her. She was preoccupied. Her physical presence grew stronger in me, and she wasn't exactly swimming.

Her o.r.g.a.s.m was faint but long, radiating and pulsating in that strange-but-familiar way that I hadn't felt in the three years since I lost Carolyn. The ghosts of her arms and legs rocked me left and right as we rose up toward the sharks.

It was one large nurse shark and two dogfish, no danger. But as we pa.s.sed them I felt myself go soft and slip out of her. It wasn't going to work, not this time, not for both of us.

Her hands on me were like feathers, coaxing, pleasant but not enough. There was a sudden faint loss of something, dimensionality, that meant she had come un-jacked, and then she was using her mouth, cool and then warm, but it still wouldn't work. Most of me was still in the reef.

I felt for the cable and unjacked myself. The lights went on and I immediately started to respond to Amelia's ministrations. I slipped my arms around her slipperiness and rested my head on her hip and didn't think about Carolyn, and worked a couple of fingers between her legs from behind, and in a minute we both came at once.

We were allowed about five seconds' rest, and then the lady was pounding on the cubicle door, saying we had to get out or pay rent; she had to clean it up for the next customers.

The meter stops running when we both unjack, I guess, Amelia said. She nuzzled me. I could pay a dollar a minute for this, though. You want to tell her that?

Nah. I reached for our clothes. Let's go home and do it for free.

Your place or mine?

Home, I said. Your place.

JULIA AND AMELIA SPENT the next day moving and cleaning house. Since it was Sunday, they couldn't get any paperwork done, but they didn't expect any problems. There was a waiting list for singles who qualified for Julian's efficiency, and Amelia's place was rated for two, or even two adults and a child.

(A child was something that was never going to happen. Twenty-four years before, after a miscarriage, Amelia had opted for voluntary sterilization, which gave her a monthly cash-and-coupon bonus until age fifty. And Julian's view of the world was so sufficiently dark that he wasn't eager to bring a new person into it.) When they had everything boxed, and Julian's apartment clean enough to satisfy the landlord, they called Reza for his car. He scolded Julian for not calling him earlier so he could have helped, and Julian said, honestly, that it hadn't occurred to him.

Amelia listened to the conversation with interest, and a week later would point out that there had been a good reason for them to do it alone, a kind of sacramental labor-or something even more elemental, nest-building. But what she said when Julian hung up was, It'll take him ten minutes to get here, and hurried him to the couch, one last quick time in this place.

It only took two trips to move all the boxes. On the second trip Reza and Julian were alone, and when Reza offered to help unpack, Julian said well, you know, maybe Blaze wants to go to bed.

In fact, she did. They collapsed exhausted and slept until dawn.

ONCE OR TWICE a year, they don't bring the soldier-boys in between s.h.i.+fts; they just immobilize us one by one and have the mechanic's second move straight from barber chair to cage, a hot transfer. It usually meant something interesting was going on, since we don't normally work the same AO as Scoville's hunter-killer platoon.

But Scoville had been grouchy because nothing had happened. They'd gone to three different ambush sites in nine days with nothing but bugs and birds showing up. It was obviously a make-work a.s.signment, marking time.

He crawled out of the cage and it sealed shut for its ninety-second cleaning cycle. Have fun, Scoville said. Bring something to read.

Oh, I think they'll come up with some little ch.o.r.e for us to do. He nodded morosely and hobbled away. They wouldn't do a hot transfer if there was a choice. So it was something important that the hunter-killers weren't supposed to know about.

The cage popped and I wiggled into it, quickly setting the muscle sensors and plugging in the orthotics and blood shunt. Then I closed the sh.e.l.l and jacked.

It was always disorienting for a moment, but a lot more so with a hot transfer, since being platoon leader, I went first, and was suddenly jacked with a bunch of relative strangers. I did know Scoville's platoon vaguely, since I spent one day a month lightly jacked with him. But I didn't know all the intimate details of their lives, and really didn't care to know. I was plopped in the middle of this convoluted soap opera, an interloper who suddenly knew all the family secrets.

Two by two, they were replaced by my own men and women. I tried to concentrate on the problem at hand, which was to keep guard on the pairs of soldierboys as they spent their couple of minutes of immobile vulnerability, which was easy. I also tried to open a vertical link to the company commander and find out what was really going on. What were we going to do that was so secret Scoville was kept in the dark?

There was no answer until all of my people were in place. Then it came in a gestalt trickle while I automatically scanned the morning jungle for signs of trouble: there was a spy in Scoville's platoon. Not a willing spy, but somebody whose jack was tapped, real time.

It might even have been Scoville himself, so he couldn't be told. Brigade had set up an elaborate manipulation, where each member of the platoon was misinformed as to the location of their ambush. When an enemy force showed up in the middle of nowhere, they'd know which one was the leak.

I had a lot more questions than the company commander had answers. How could they control all the feedback states? If nine of the people thought they were at point A and one thought they were at point B, wouldn't there be conspicuous confusion? How could the enemy tap a jack in the first place? What was going to happen to the mechanic who was affected?

That last one, she could answer. They would examine him and take out his jack, and he would serve out the rest of his term as a tech or a shoe, depending. Depending on whether he could count to twenty without taking off his shoes and socks, I supposed. Army neurosurgeons made a lot less than Dr. Spencer.

I cut off the thread to the commander, which didn't mean she couldn't eavesdrop on me if she wanted to. There were some large implications here, and you didn't need a degree in cybercomm to see them. All of Scoville's platoon had spent the last nine days in an elaborate and tightly maintained virtual-reality fiction. Everything each one saw and felt was monitored by Command, and fed back instantly in an altered state. That state included nine other tailor-made fictions for the rest of the platoon. A total of a hundred discrete fictions, constantly created and maintained nonstop.

The jungle around me was no more or less real than the coral reef I'd visited with Amelia. What if it bore no relation to where my soldierboy actually was?

Every mechanic has entertained the fantasy that there is no war at all; that the whole thing is a cybernetic construction that the governments maintain for reasons of their own. You can turn on the cube when you get home, and watch yourself in action, replaying the news-but that could be faked even more easily than the input-feedback state that connects soldierboy to mechanic. Had anybody actually been to Costa Rica, any mechanic? No one in the military could legally visit Ngumi territory.

Of course, that was nothing but a fantasy. The piles of shattered bodies in the control room had been real. They couldn't have faked the nuclear flattening of three cities.

It was just a place to retreat from your own responsibility for the carnage. I suddenly felt pretty good, and realized my blood chemistry was being adjusted. I tried to hold on to the thought: how could you, how could you justify ... well, they actually did ask for it. It was sad that so many Ngumi had to die for their leaders' lunacy. But that's not the thought; that's not the thought...

Julian, the company commander thought down, move your platoon northwest three kilometers for a pickup. As you approach the PZ, you want to home in on a twenty-four megahertz beeper.

I rogered. Where we headed?

"Town. We're going to join up with Fox and Charlie for a daytime thing. Details on the way.

We had ninety minutes to get to the pickup zone, and the jungle wasn't thick, so we just spread out in echelon, maintaining about twenty meters between each soldier-boy, and picked our way northwest.

My uneasiness faded in the mundane business of keeping everybody in line and moving. I realized that my train of thought had been interrupted, but wasn't sure whether it was anything important. No way to write a note to myself, I realized for about the hundredth time. And things sort of fade when you get out of the cage.

Karen saw something and I froze everybody. After a moment she said false alarm; just a howler monkey and its baby. Out of the branches? I asked, and got a nod back. I projected uneasiness to everybody, as if that were necessary, and had us split into two groups and move in file, two hundred meters apart. Very quietly.

Animal behavior is an interesting term. When an animal misbehaves, it's for a reason. Howler monkeys are more vulnerable on the ground.

Park sighted a sniper. Got a pedro at ten o'clock, range a hundred ten meters, in a tree blind about ten meters up. Permission to fire.

Not granted. Everyone stop and look around. Claude and Sara got the same one, but there weren't any others obvious.

I put all three images together. She's asleep. I got the gender from Park's olfactory receptors. The IR pattern gave me almost nothing, but her breathing was regular and sonorous.

Let's drop back about a hundred meters and circle around her. I got a confirm from the company commander and an angry ? from Park.

I expected others-people don't just wander out into the woods and climb a tree; she was protecting something.

Possible she knew we were coming? Karen asked.

I paused ... Why else would she be here? If so, she's pretty calm about it, to be able to sleep. No, it's a coincidence. She's guarding something. We don't have time to look for it, though.

We have your coordinates, the commander said. Flyboy coming in, in about two minutes. You want to be elsewhere.

I gave the platoon the order to move out fast. We didn't make too much noise, but enough: the sniper woke up and fired a burst at Lou, who was bringing up the rear on the left flank.

It was a pretty sophisticated anti-soldierboy weapon, explosive rounds with depleted-uranium punchers, probably. Two or three rounds. .h.i.t Lou about waist-level and blew out his leg control. As he fell over backward, another one blew off his right arm.

He hit the ground with a jarring crash, and for a moment everything was still, the high leaves over him rustling in the morning breeze. Another round exploded into the ground next to his head, showering his eyes with dirt. He shook his head to clear them.

Lou, we can't do a pickup. Get out of there except for eyes and ears.

Thanks, Julian. Lou jacked out, and the warning-signal pains from his back and arm stopped. He was just a camera pointed at the sky.

We were most of a kilometer away when the flyboy screamed overhead. I linked to her through Command and got a strange double view: from above the forest canopy, a spreading blossom of napalm shot through with glittering streaking sparkles, hundreds of thousands of flechettes. On the ground, a sudden sheet of fire overhead that dripped down through the branches, loud splintering crackle as the flechettes tore through the forest. Sonic boom and then silence.

Then a man screaming and another one talking to him in low tones, and one shot that ended the screaming. A man ran by, close but out of sight, and threw a grenade at the soldierboy. It bounced off the chest and exploded harmlessly.

The napalm dripped and flames from the underbrush licked up toward it. Monkeys screamed at the fire. Lou's eyes flickered twice and went out. As we moved away from the inferno, two more flyboys came in low and dropped fire r.e.t.a.r.dant. It was an ecological preserve, after all, and the napalm had done all we wanted it to.

As we approached the PZ, Command said they'd calculated a body count of four-our sniper and both of the men plus one for whoever else might have been there-and gave three of them to the flyboy and split one among us. Park didn't like that at all, since there wouldn't have been a sortie if he hadn't spotted the sniper, and she would've been an easy kill if I hadn't ordered otherwise. I advised him to hold that in; he was on the verge of a public tantrum that would leak up to command and force an Article 15-pro forma company-level punishment for petty insubordination.

As I shot that warning to him, I had to think how much easier it must be to be a shoe. You can hate your sergeant and smile at him at the same time.

The PZ was obvious without the radio beacon, the denuded dome of a hill that had been cleaned up recently with a controlled burn-and-blast.

As we picked our way up the muddy ashes of the hillside, two flyboys came in and hovered protectively. Not a normal fast s.n.a.t.c.h.

The cargo helicopter came in and landed, or at least hovered a foot off the ground while the rear door slammed down to form an unsteady ramp. We scrambled aboard to join twenty other soldierboys.

My opposite number in Fox platoon was Barboo Seaves; we'd worked together before. I had a double-weak link to her, through Command and through Rose, who had replaced Ralph as horizontal liaison. By way of greeting, Barboo projected a multisensory image of came asada, a meal we'd shared at the airport a few months ago.

Anybody tell you anything? I asked.

I am but a mushroom. That military joke was old when my father heard it: They keep me in the dark and feed me bulls.h.i.+t.

The chopper was rising and tilting as soon as the last soldierboy dove in off the ramp. We all sort of crashed around, getting acquainted.

I didn't really know Charlie platoon's leader, David Grant. Half of his platoon had been replaced in the past year-two stroked out and the others Temporarily rea.s.signed for psychological adjustment. David had only been in command for two cycles. I h.e.l.lo'ed him, but at first he was busy with his platoon, trying to calm down a couple of neos who were afraid we were going into a kill situation.

With luck, we wouldn't be. When the door slammed shut I got an outline of the general order, which was basically a parade, or show of force, in an urban area that was due for a reminder that we See All, Know All. It was the el Norte section of Liberia, which, oddly enough, had both guerrilla activity and a high concentration of Anglos. They were a mixture of older Americans who had retired to Costa Rica and the children and grandchildren of earlier retirees. The pedros thought that the presence of a lot of gringos would protect them. We were supposed to demonstrate otherwise.

But if the enemy stayed out of sight, there wouldn't be any problems. Our orders were to use force only reactively.

So we were to be both bait and hook. It didn't look like a good situation. The rebels in Guanacaste province had been faring badly and needed their own demonstration. I supposed Command had taken that into account.

We picked up some riot control accessories-extra gas grenades and a couple of tanglefoot projectors. They spray out a skein of sticky string that makes it impossible to walk; after ten minutes, it suddenly evaporates. We were also issued extra concussion grenades, though I'm not sure they're a good idea with civilians. Blow out somebody's eardrums and expect him to be grateful you didn't do worse? None of the riot control weapons are pleasant, but that's the only one that does permanent damage. Unless you're staggering around blinded by tear gas and get run over by a truck. Or breathe VA and choke on vomit.

We came in over the city at treetop level, lower than many of the buildings, helicopter and two flyboys in tight slow formation, loud as three banshees. I suppose that was good psychology, show we're not afraid and at the same time rattle their windows. But again I wondered whether we weren't set out as tempting bait. If somebody fired at us, I had no doubt the sky could be full of flyboys in a few seconds. The enemy must have figured that out, too.

Once on the ground and out of the chopper, the twenty-nine soldierboys could easily destroy the city themselves, without air support. Part of our show was going to be a public service demonstration: a block of tenements to be razed. We could save the city a lot of construction, or deconstruction, expense. Just walk in and pull things down.

We set down gently on the town square, flyboys hovering, and disembarked into a parade formation, ten by three, minus one. Only a scattering of people were there to watch us, which surprised no one. A few curious children and defiant teenagers and old people who live in the park. Only a few police; most of the force, it turned out, was waiting down by our demonstration area.

The buildings surrounding the square were late colonial architecture, graceful in the shadow of the gla.s.s-and-metal geometries that hovered over them. The blind reflective windows of those modern buildings could conceal a city full of watchers, maybe snipers. As we marched off in robotic lockstep I was more than ever aware of the fact that I was a safe puppeteer a couple of hundred miles away-if rifles did appear in each window and started firing, no actual people would be killed. Until we retaliated.

We broke step into a carefully random rolling gait as we crossed an old bridge, so as not to be embarra.s.sed by shaking it apart and falling into the noisome trickle below, and then went back to the slam-slam-slam that was supposed to be so intimidating. I did see a dog run away. If any humans were being terrorized along our route, they were doing it indoors.

Past the postmodern anonymity of downtown, we went through a few blocks of a residential neighborhood, presumably upper-cla.s.s dwellings, all hidden behind tall whitewashed walls. Watchdogs howled at our echoing steps, and in several places we were tracked by surveillance cameras.

Then we got into the barrios. I always felt a kind of referred sympathy for the people who lived in these circ.u.mstances, here and in Texas, so similar to the American black ghettos that I had avoided by accident of birth. I also knew that there were sometimes compensations, family and neighborhood bonds that I never experienced. But I could never be sentimental enough to consider that a reasonable trade-off for my longer life expectancy; higher life expectations.