Forever Peace (3 page)

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.

"And they were such a lovely couple together." She laughed one "ha," stabbing at the potatoes with the spatula. "Was it another woman, man, robot?"

"They don't put that on the form. They're splitting this week, though, and I have to meet with him tomorrow before we go to Budget. He'll be even more distracted than usual." She divided the potatoes between two plates and brought them over. "So you were out blowing up trucks?"

"Actually, I was lying in a cage, twitching." She dismissed that with a wave. "There wasn't much to it. No drivers or passengers. Two saps."

"Sapients?"

"'Sapient defense units,' yeah, but that puts a pretty low threshold on sapience. They're just guns on tracks with AI routines that give them a certain degree of autonomy. Pretty effective against ground troops and conventional artillery and air support. Don't know what they were doing in our AO."

"Is that a blood type?" she said over her teacup.

"Sorry. 'Area of operations.' I mean, one flyboy could have taken them out in a single treetop pass."

"So why didn't they use a flyboy? Rather than risk damaging your expensive armored carcass."

"Oh, they said they wanted the cargo analyzed, which was bullshit. The only stuff besides food and ammo were some solar cells and replacement boards for field mainframes. So we know they use Mitsubishi. But if they buy anything from a Rimcorp firm, we automatically get copies of the invoices. So I'm sure that was no big surprise."

"So why'd they send you?"

"Nobody said officially, but I got a thread on my vertical jack that they were feeling out Sam, Samantha." "She's the one who, her friend?" "Got beaten up and raped, yeah. She didn't do too well."

"Who would?"

"I don't know. Sam's pretty tough. But she wasn't even half there."

"That would go rough on her? If she got a psychiatric discharge."

"They don't like to give them, unless there's actual brain damage. They'd either 'find' that or put her through an Article 12." I got up to find some catsup for my potatoes. "That might not be as bad as rumor has it. Nobody in our company has gone through it."

"I thought there was a congressional investigation of that. Somebody with important parents died."

"Yeah, there was talk. I don't know that it got any further than talk. Article 12 has to be a wall you can't climb. Otherwise half the mechanics in the army would try for a psych discharge."

"They don't want to make it that easy." "So I used to think. Now I think part of it is keeping a balanced force. If you made an Article 12 easy, you'd lose everyone bothered by killing. The soldierboys would wind up a berserker corps."

"That's a pretty picture."

"You should see what it looks like from inside. I told you about Scoville."

"A few times."

"Imagine him times twenty thousand." People like Scoville are completely disassociated from killing, especially with the soldierboys. You find them in regular armies, too, though—people for whom enemy soldiers aren't human, just counters in a game. They're ideal for some missions and disastrous for others.

I had to admit the potatoes were pretty good. I'd been living on bar food for a couple of days, cheese and fried meats, with corn chips for a vegetable.

"Oh... you didn't get on the cube this time." She had her cube monitor the war channels and keep any sequences where my unit appeared. "So I was pretty sure you were having a safe, boring time."

"So shall we find something exciting to do?"

"You go find something." She picked up the plates and carried them to the sink. "I have to go back to the lab for half a day."

"Something I could help you with?"

"Wouldn't speed it up. It's just some data formatting for a Jupiter Project update." She sorted the plates into the dishwasher. "Why don't you catch up on your sleep and we'll do something tonight."

That sounded good to me. I switched the phone over, in case somebody wanted to bother me on Sunday morning, and returned to her rumpled bed.

THE JUPITER PROJECT WAS the largest particle accelerator ever built, by several orders of magnitude.

Particle accelerators cost money—the faster the particle, the more it costs—and the history of particle physics is at least partly a history of how important really fast particles have been to various sponsoring governments.

Of course, the whole idea of money had changed with the nanoforges. And that changed the pursuit of "Big Science."

The Jupiter Project was the result of several years' arguing and wheedling, which resulted in the Alliance sponsoring a flight to Jupiter. The Jupiter probe dropped a programmed nanoforge into its dense atmosphere, and deposited another one on the surface of Io. The two machines worked in concert, the Jupiter one sucking up deuterium for warm fusion and beaming the power to the one on Io, which manufactured elements for a particle accelerator that would ring the planet in Io's orbit and concentrate power from Jupiter's gargantuan magnetic field.

Prior to the Jupiter Project, the biggest "supercollider" had been the Johnson Ring that circled several hundred miles beneath Texas wasteland. This one would be ten thousand times as long and a hundred thousand times as powerful.

The nanoforge actually built other nanoforges, but ones that could only be used for the purpose of making the elements of the orbiting particle accelerator. So the thing did grow at an exponential rate, the busy machines chewing up the blasted surface of Io and spitting it out into space, forming a ring of uniform elements.

What used to cost money now cost time. The researchers on Earth waited while ten, a hundred, a thousand elements were chucked into orbit. After six years there were five thousand of them, enough to start firing up the huge machine.

Time was involved in another way, a theoretical measure. It had to do with the beginning of the universe— the beginning of time. One instant after the Diaspora (once called the Big Bang) the universe was a small cloud of highly energetic particles swarming outward at close to the speed of light. An instant later, they were a different swarm, and so on out to a whole second, ten seconds, and so on. The more energy you pumped into a particle accelerator, the closer you could come to duplicating the conditions that obtained soon after the Diaspora, the beginning of time.

For more than a century there had been a back-and-forth dialogue between the particle physicists and the cosmologists. The cosmologists would scribble their equations, trying to figure out which particles were flitting around at what time in the universe's development, and their results would suggest an experiment. So the physicists would fire up their accelerators and either verify the cosmologists' equations or send them back to the blackboard.