I stiffened. One thing Sergeant Ord had drilled into my little trainee’s brain was that soldiers followed orders and that, ultimately, those orders came from civilians elected by a civilian majority. Take away that discipline and America was a banana republic. “No, sir.”
The President lit his grin again. “Good! Stability. Reassurance. Team play. That’s what we’re going to need.”
“Of course, sir.”
He jerked a thumb toward the parade staging area. “That business before the parade, putting the casualties front and center in the limousine? The event was carefully arranged to project a positive message. Ruth Tway reports direct to me. She’s the best in her business. Why she volunteered to take you on I don’t know. But pay attention to her! We needed a young, hologenic leader in those shots. Someone to demonstrate that the world was safe to shift to a peacetime economy. To encourage the world to follow our lead on defense spending. What we got was a horrifying bunch of people showing off stumps. We won’t be seeing more of that counterproductive behavior from you, will we?”
I shrugged. “I’m just glad to be home, sir.”
“You dodge questions like a politician. That’s encouraging.”
To the President, maybe.
Thirteen
After the President left, Tway handed me my new orders as I climbed into a limousine. Yes, handed. The Army, being somewhere back from the cutting edge of innovation, still delivered personnel orders on paper, like it was 1995. I climbed the steps into the hospital, turning the envelope in my hands, in no hurry to open it. It was a demotion, certainly. Why else would Tway have held the news unless it was bad?
I had been assigned a hospital room at Walter Reed, rooming with Howard Hibble while we both underwent two days of welcome-home medical tests. I opened the door and found Howard sitting on his bunk, hunched over a football-sized mechanical cockroach.
The roach swiveled its head my way and bounced up and down on the blanket on six metal legs.
“Jeeb!” I said.
Howard looked up at me and smiled. “Ordnance just got him cleaned.”
Like every other Tactical Observation Transport, this particular J-Series unit, unit E, Jeeb for short, was factory-wired with plastic explosive under his radar-absorbent skin. If captured, he would not only have blown his top-secret carcass into bb-shot, he would have taken some bad guys with him.
Therefore, all the way home from Ganymede, Jeeb had ridden in an ammunition bay, like the animated hand grenade he was. And I thought I had been lonely.
I sat next to him on the bunk and stroked his coat, radar-absorbent bristles like short-pile felt, while he trained round eyes, as large and flat as Oreos, on me.
It is, of course, absurd to pet a robot. But Jeeb was more than a robot. He was my robot. Maybe. “Howard, did you seal the deal?”
Howard tossed his head in the direction of the desk. “The title documents are on the table. Even as scrap, he cost you three months’ pay. You realize most people would think that’s an absurdly high price to pay for a worn-out bundle of nanochips.”
I picked up the old-fashioned papers. Certificate of Original Commissioning. Finding of Battle Damage, Equipment Obsolescence and Surplusage. Jeeb was battle-damaged and obsolete, all right. The explosion that had won the Battle of Ganymede had fried his circuits. Five years is forever in nanoputer technology. Jeeb was decrepit. Next was a Certification of Value of Salvageable Components. Then a Bill of Retransfer from United Nations Joint Command. Finally, a Bill of Sale and Salvage Title from the United States Department of the Army to Wander, Jason.
I swallowed. That was Jeeb’s life story, as far as the Army was concerned. Nowhere did the papers say that Jeeb’s wrangler, the GI who had been brain-linked to Jeeb by surgical implants, had been my bunkmate until the day he died. Nowhere did the papers say that Ari Klein had asked me, as his guts leaked into the dust of Ganymede, to adopt the robot who was closer to Ari than an old K-9 Corps dog to his handler.
Howard handed me a flat palm-holo receiver. “It’s not like implants. You and Jeeb will never be linked like Ari and Jeeb were. This cube’s not like implants. But when you switch it on, you’ll see what Jeeb sees, visible spectrum, infrared or ultraviolet, hear what Jeeb hears, audio or electromagnetic, in your earpiece. He’ll translate foreign languages, teach them to you while you sleep. He’ll fly at near the speed of sound or run as fast as a cheetah, anywhere you tell him to. And he’ll never gripe or be too tired to do anything you ask of him.”
“And what does he want from me, Howard?”
Jeeb flexed his three right-side legs and rolled onto his back. I scratched his ventral armor. Jeeb had a way of cocking his head that mimicked what Ari used to do when he heard a joke he liked.
Howard shrugged. “His creator, Lockheed, says he doesn’t want anything. There are no nerve endings in that belly you’re scratching. He’s just a machine.”
“You believe that, Howard?”
Another shrug. “Even chondrichtyian fishes recognize individual humans and display affection behaviors. He’s a lot smarter than a sting ray. There’s plenty of room in his thinking apparatus to imprint human behaviors and to remember. Oh, you also granted us rights to recover his survey data from his Ganymede overflights.”
It measured the Slug War’s irrelevance to the post-war world that data gathered about another world had been sold off as part of a war souvenir.
Jeeb, Howard, and I spent an hour that afternoon outdoors, playing fetch with a tennis ball. We might have played longer, but brain-link, even the watered-down excuse for it that we shared, let Jeeb sense where I was going to throw the ball. So the old pretend to throw and hide it behind my back didn’t amuse either of us.
Besides, being outdoors, even in Washington, halfway down the USA toward Florida, depressed me. Earth would need a decade to recover from the near nuclear winter the Slugs had brought down on her. Every day dawned gray and dry. Grass wasn’t green and trees quivered leafless in perpetual chill. Temperate crops had relocated to the equator. That made for some strange holos of overalled Nebraskans saddling up their combines on the Brazilian plains.
Jeeb had just dropped the tennis ball at my feet and telescoped his wings for the hundredth time when I realized that I hadn’t read my orders. But now, I had run out of other things to do.
I sighed, tugged them from my pocket, and slit the envelope with a fingernail. Howard moved downwind and lit a cigarette.
I had read half a page before I realized what I was reading. I blinked, then stiffened.
Howard picked up the tennis ball, looked away from me, and chucked it for Jeeb to chase. Howard voluntarily doing anything athletic was as improbable as a tap-dancing trout.
I rolled the paper and waved it at him. “You knew about this! But you didn’t tell me!”
He shrugged. “That wouldn’t have changed it.”
I crumpled the page and threw it at him. “You did know!”
Jeeb hovered, optic sensors swiveling between the tennis ball and the paper knuckle ball I bounced off Howard’s chest.
Howard watched my orders hit the dirt, then turned his palms up. “Don’t be such a pooby!”
I had been trying to teach Howard to swear for years. Drill sergeants spun in their graves, from Fort Benning to Fort Carson. I ground my teeth. “A pooby?”
He flapped a hand at me. “Don’t worry. You’ll love it!”
Fourteen
At six hundred hours the next morning, during my post-ten-K-run shave, our infirmary-room door flew open as a fist rapped the doorjamb.
“Good morning!” Tway, the White House publicity woman, stalked in like a drill sergeant into a barracks. She centered herself in the room and crossed her arms. “We’re late.”
I turned from the sink without shaving off my eyebrow, waved off the running water and stood barefoot and bare-chested in fatigue trousers. “Late for what?”
Jeeb perched on the sink edge, clucking like an electric chicken. Howard
said it was just diagnostics. A TOT, according to Lockheed, did not, could not, imprint its wrangler’s personality. But Ari had always fussed whenever I left whiskers in the sink. Not that Ari had always been critical. One night when we were both tired and scared and lonely, he had told me that greatness was my destiny.
Tway stared at Jeeb. TOTs were so rare and so expensive that people did that. But TOTs didn’t look so different from the swarms of dumber utility ’bots that vacuumed everybody’s carpets and pulled everybody’s weeds. And I’d have expected somebody with Tway’s chutzpah had seen it all.
Howard sat up in bed and coughed a phlegmy barrage. It subsided and he swung his feet to the floor and into slippers with duct-tape-wrapped toes. Yawning, he flapped plaid-pajamaed arms above the nightstand until he found his glasses. “You the flack?”
“I’m Ruth Tway. I report directly to the President of the United States. You can call me Ms. Tway, Major Hibble.”
Howard grunted, then creaked to his feet and shuffled to the latrine.
Fwop-fwop-fwop.
Howard’s rubber slipper soles flapped with each step. He had only duct-taped the toes. He closed the door behind him, sparing Tway and me further sound effects.
Tway poked me above my trouser pocket with her Chipboard’s corner, then frowned. “Love handles gotta go. Holocam adds ten pounds already. Heroes aren’t fat.”
I straightened. Maybe I sucked in my gut a little. What did she expect? I’d been cooped up in a spaceship or a cave most of the last five years. “Heroes aren’t heroes because of how they look.”
She squinted at my chin while she tugged something from a pocket. “Manual shaving’s impractical on tour. You’ve gotta be as shiny-cheeked at dinner as at breakfast. And”—she wiped a finger across my chin and it came away red-streaked—“no nicks.” She slapped a pressurized plasti into my palm. “Dipil cream. Lasts longer. All the holo stars use it.”
I shook my head. “I look fine!”
Her lip curled. “Sure.”
“My orders say I’m assigned to the joint media liaison command. Does that mean I report to you?”
She bent and rummaged on my wall locker’s floor and dug out my boots. “We’ll put lifts in these. No time to make you slim. But we can make you tall.”
“I thought we were going to explain post-war defense spending to the taxpayers.”
“Yeah. But you gotta look good doing it.”
The latrine door opened and Howard returned, hair combed, hands thrust into robe pockets. He held out his hand to Ruth Tway, like an old flatscreen hero. “Hibble. Howard Hibble.”
Except James Bond never fwop-fwop’ed when he walked.
Tway moved us out of the infirmary that afternoon, to a still-open hotel in Georgetown so fancy that a maid turned down your bed each night. Breakfast the next day was in the dining room, with tablecloths and linen napkins, each thick enough to stop shrapnel.
“You’ll do a half-dozen live spots each morning, moving east to west with the time change. Local news and morning shows,” Tway said.
I spread preserves, oozing hunks of fresh strawberry, on a muffin, still bakery-warm in my fingers. “How can we be—”
Tway snatched my muffin and replaced it with a brown rectangle that felt like plywood. “Protein bar. You’ll lose six pounds the first week and you won’t spill jelly on your uniform.”
I bit the bar, then spit it into my napkin. “It tastes like dung.”
“I told you you’d lose weight.” She broke a piece off my muffin and popped it in her mouth. “The morning appearances are all holo. You’ll be in a studio, say in New York. The interviewer sits in a chair in Detroit and it looks like you’re sitting in the chair alongside her. And to the homers, you’re both sitting on their living-room rug.”
I stared at my vanishing breakfast. “Why are you doing this with us?”
“Because fresh-grown food is too valuable to waste.”
“I mean this PR circus. We’re cutting defense spending but I’m staying in this palace?”
“America wants to give back.”
“Then give back my muffin.”
Tway frowned, then glanced at her ’puter. “Eat your protein bar. We’ve got thirty minutes to prep before your first interview.”
Twenty-eight minutes later I slouched in a blue Plastine chair, in a hotel conference room converted to a holo studio. That meant an echoing, bare room, with daybrites on spider stands glaring into my eyes, a refrigerator-sized holo generator to the left of the lamp bank and a tripod-mount holocam. Black cables pythoned between them. The holo operator and the show’s director stood in the cable snakepit.
Tway stood behind me, pounding my shoulder blades as she puckered my uniform jacket’s back with duct tape. “Your lapels gap.”
“If I turn around the tape will show.”
“Don’t! We’ll have a tailor here before lunch. In five . . . four . . .” She brushed a protein-bar crumb off my tie and backed out of camera range.
Pop.
I’d never seen holo produced before. When the image flickers up, the generator makes a pop like uncorked champagne. That’s why newbies like me look wide-eyed when the viewer first sees them.
The interviewer sat in a maroon leather armchair, just like the one that now seemed to surround me. The arms on my real chair were the same height, so my elbows didn’t disappear. Not only that, if I moved an elbow, the generator inserted a tiny, cloth-across-leather squeak in the delayed soundtrack.
The anchor was already speaking to the holocam, her head turned away from me. “—news for the Sox, Eddie. Next, we have someone truly special for Boston to meet. General Jason Wander, the hero of the Battle of Ganymede.”
I leaned forward, nodding, like Tway had coached me, prepared and focused.
She turned to me, blond with jewel-blue eyes. Her pale pink lapels didn’t gap. Imagining duct tape under there evaporated my focus.
“It’s an honor, General.”
“Uh. Yeah . . .”
Next to the holocam, Tway pointed at a cue card, held by the show’s headsetted director.
I read off the card, “Tawny.”
Two minutes later, Tawny had expressed to me the sorrow, pride, and gratitude of the entire Greater Boston viewing area. Then she vanished while emotional file footage of returning troops entertained the home audience.
Tway bent beside me and spoke in a strawberry-preserve-scented whisper. “Next segment coming up. The threat is over. If there were Slugs left, my command would handle them just like it handled the last bunch.”
The lovely Tawny reappeared, wiping away a tear, or stray mascara. “General, is this episode behind us?”
Tway’s words spewed from me like a Pavlovian poodle.
Tawny nodded thoughtfully. “Then the Lewis budget makes sense?”
“Excuse me?”
“Drastic defense cuts make sense?”
Alongside the holocam’s red light, Tway nodded like an antique bobblehead doll.
I swallowed a snort. “If the Slugs are gone.”
Tawny’s smile fluttered, then dropped, like a table-bred turkey chucked from a plane. Behind her tinted, lased lenses welled dark terror. “They’re not?”
“They are. I mean, as far as we know.”
Tway leaned toward the director and whispered. Tawny fingered her earpiece. We went to commercial and she vanished.
Tway pounced. “What the hell was that?” She glanced at the holo producer and twirled a wrap-up motion with one hand while she guided me out to the hall with the other.
Glancing up and down the empty corridor, she said, “Jason—General Wander—you’re on holo to soothe people, not scare the pee out of them!”
“I just said ‘if.’”
“Except for Major Hibble, you’re the biggest expert alive on Slugs. The last five years were the most horrific in human history and you just told people they might come back. You have to watch what you say. The public believes you when you belch.”<
br />
“They should believe the truth! Even Howard thinks the Slugs may still be out there. Let him be your spokes-person.”
“You know Hibble. The public doesn’t want a hero with duct tape on his bedroom slippers. We may use him for hard news. But nobody under eighty watches hard news. It went out with paper newspapers.”
It was an old expression, and since the war, an inaccurate one. Paper newspapers had come back after the war cut commercial holo transmissibility.
She crossed her arms and sighed. “You needed more prep. I should have seen it coming. I thought the President told you in person that the world needed reconstruction, not panic.”
“President Lewis told me America needed reassurance. I’m not so sure I’m reassured, myself. What are we reconstructing?”
She sighed. “Okay. Rule number one. If you don’t want to see it on the Washington Post frontscreen, don’t say it.” Tway tugged her lip. “You know, you’re not stupid.”
“Thank you very much.”
“The underlying problem is you haven’t seen the world you came back to. We’ll educate you.”
“Will I like being educated?”
“You like the protein bars, don’t you?”
Fifteen
Tway scrubbed the rest of the morning talk shows. Forty-five minutes later, an Air Force executive jet rolled up to Tway and me on the tarmac at Reagan, shut down one engine while we boarded, then swung back out and shot south toward Florida.
I stared down at dead ochre hills, my forehead on the jet window’s cold, ancient plastic. Caterpillar-yellow specks of reconstruction equipment scurried like ants as we overflew the crater that had been Richmond. A real general knew how to deal with the media. A real general understood the interface between his civilian superiors and the electorate. I hadn’t even lived long enough to vote for President.
Tway, facing me in an oversized leather recliner, leaned forward and pressed the steward call button on her seat arm. Posh. The business of government was booming. In American-style democracy, government feeds on misery. People who don’t need help don’t need government, or so they think. People in trouble do, or so they think.
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