A Separate War and Other Stories

by Joe Haldeman

  “So I moved in with my girlfriend. It happens.”

  “Not so conveniently.”

  I tried to look confused. “That’s why you’re on my case. I’m one of the dozens, hundreds, of people who moved out of D.C. that day or the next?”

  “You’re the only one with underwater demolition training. On that alone, we could haul you down to Cuba and throw away the key.”

  “Come on—”

  “And you were already on a watch list for your attitude. The things you’ve said to customers.”

  “The apartment was too expensive, so I got back my deposit and moved out. My girlfriend—”

  “A week before the first of the month.”

  “Sure. It was—”

  “In a blizzard.”

  “Yeah, it was snowing. No problem. Or the cabbie’s problem, not mine. We wanted to have Christmas together.”

  “For Christmas, you just sort of boated through twelve miles of blizzard. By compass, for the fun of it.”

  “Oh, bullshit. I just kept the Beltway to my left for ten-some miles and turned right at the half-submerged Chevron sign. Then about a hundred yards to a flagpole, bear left, and so forth. I’ve done it a hundred times. You try it with a compass. I want to watch.”

  He nodded without changing expression. “One of the things we lost when the dam blew was a really delicate sniffing machine. It can tell whether you’ve been anywhere near high explosives recently. The closest one’s in our New York office.”

  “Let’s go. I haven’t touched anything like that since the Navy. Four or five years ago.” I’d been in the same house with some, but I hadn’t touched it.

  He stood up very smoothly, one flex, not touching the arm of the couch. I wouldn’t want to get into anything physical with him. “Get your coat.”

  I got it from the musty closet and shook it out, shedding molecules of mold and plastic explosive. How sensitive was that machine, really?

  He knocked twice, and the cop took us to an open elevator. The buttons under 4 were covered with duct tape. The cop used a cylindrical fire department key to start it. “Roof?”

  “Right.”

  “Where’s my stuff?” I said. “I don’t want to leave it here.”

  “We’re not going anywhere.” He buttoned up his coat and I zipped mine up. We got out of the elevator into a glassed-in waiting area and went out onto the roof. There was no helicopter on the pad. Not too cold, high twenties with no wind, and the air smelled really good, almost like the ocean.

  I followed him over to the edge. There was water all the way to where the horizon was lost in bright afternoon haze, the tops of a few buildings rising like artificial islands in a science-fiction world. Behind us, the Beltway, with almost no traffic.

  “It’s quiet,” I said. Faint rustle of ice slurry below us. I peered over the rusty guardrail and saw it rolling along the building wall.

  “They said ‘Power to the People.’ This isn’t power to anybody. It’s like the country’s been beheaded.”

  I didn’t say that if you’re ugly enough, extreme cosmetic surgery could help. I might be in enough trouble already.

  “Whoever did this didn’t think it through. It’s not just the government, the bureaucracy. It’s the country’s history. Our connection to the past; our identity as America.”

  That was something Hugh was always on about. The way they wrap themselves in the flag and pretend to be the inheritors of a grand democratic tradition. While they’re really alchemists, turning the public trust into gold.

  “Hugh Oliver,” he said, startling me.

  “What about Hugh?”

  “He disappeared the same time you did.”

  “What, like I disappeared? I left a forwarding address.”

  “Your parents’ address.”

  “They knew where I was.”

  “So did we. But we’ve lost Mr. Oliver. Perhaps you know where to find him?”

  “Huh-uh. We’re not that close.”

  “Funny.” He took a pair of small binoculars out of his coat pocket and switched them on. The stabilizers hummed as he scanned along the horizon. Still looking at nothing, he said, “A surveillance camera saw you go into a coffeehouse in Georgetown with him last Wednesday. The Lean Bean.”

  Oh shit. “Yeah, I remember that. So?”

  “The camera didn’t show either of you coming out. You’re not still there, so you must have left through the service entrance.”

  “He was parked in the alley out back.”

  “Not in his own car. It had a tracer.”

  “So I’m not my brother’s car’s keeper. It must have been somebody else’s. What did he—”

  “Or a rental?”

  That much, I could give up. “Not a rental. It was clapped-out and full of junk.”

  “You didn’t recognize it?”

  I shook my head. Actually, I’d assumed it was Hugh’s. “Why did you have a tracer on his car?”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Business. How bad it is.” Hugh’s a diver; not much winter work. Idle hands do the devil’s work, I guess. “We just had a cup of coffee, and he drove me home.”

  “And what did you do when you got home?”

  “What? I don’t know. Made dinner.”

  He put the binoculars down on the railing and pulled out a little sound recorder. “This is what you did.”

  It was a recording of me phoning my landlord, saying I’d found a cheaper place and would be moving out before Christmas.

  “That was at six twenty-five,” he said. “When you got home from the coffeehouse, you must have gone straight to the phone.”

  I had, of course. “No. But I guess it was the same day. That Wednesday.”

  He picked up the binoculars again and scanned the middle distance. “It’s okay, Johnson.”

  The big man slammed me against the guardrail, hard, then tipped me over and grabbed my ankles. I was gasping, coughing, trying not to vomit, dangling fifty feet over the icy water.

  “Johnson is strong, but he can’t hold on to you forever. I think it’s time for you to talk.”

  “You can’t…you can’t do this!”

  “I guess you have about a minute,” he said, looking at his watch. “Can you hold on a minute?” I could see Johnson nod, his upside-down smile.

  “Let me put it to you this way. If you can tell us where Hugh Oliver went, you live. If you can’t, you have this little accident. It doesn’t matter whether it’s because you don’t know, or because you refuse to tell. You’ll just fall.”

  My throat had snapped shut, paralyzed. “I—”

  “You’ll either drown or freeze. Neither one is particularly painful. That bothers me a little. But I can’t tell you how little guilt I will feel.”

  Not the truth! “Mexico. Drove to Mexico.”

  “No, we have cameras at every crossing, with face recognition.”

  “He knew that!”

  “Can you let go of one ankle?” He nodded and did, and I dropped a sickening foot. “Mexico returns terrorists to us. He must have known that, too.”

  “He was going to Europe from there. Speaks French.” Quebec.

  He shrugged and made a motion with his head. The big man grabbed the other ankle and hauled me back. My chin snapped against the railing, and my shoulder and forehead hit hard on the gravel.

  “Yeah, Europe. You’re lying, but I think you do know where he is. I can send you to a place where they get answers.” He rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “Maybe I’ll go along with you. It’s warm down there.”

  Cuba. Point of no return.

  My stomach fell. Even if I knew nothing about Hugh, I knew too much about them.

  They couldn’t let me live now. They’ll pull out their answers and bury me in Guantanamo.

  Johnson picked me up roughly. I kicked him in the shin, tore loose, ran three steps, and tried to vault over the edge. My hurt shoulder collapsed, and I cartwheeled clumsily into spac
e.

  Civil disobedience. What would the water feel like?

  Scalding. Then nothing.

  (2005)

  Memento Mori

  She sat on the examination table, trying to hold the open back of the hospital robe closed. Everything was cold chrome and eggshell white and smelled of air-conditioning and rubbing alcohol. And of her, slightly.

  The man stepped in and quietly closed the door behind him. He had a stethoscope and a name tag but was wearing all black.

  He spoke her name and took her cold hand. His hand was warm and dry.

  He listened for a heart and then for breathing. He put the stethoscope away in a drawer and left it open.

  “You have to trust me completely,” he said.

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Not really,” he said. He wasn’t actually lying. The pain would not belong to her.

  “But people have died from it.”

  “People have died during it. Not many,” he said. “What would death be to you?”

  “I don’t know. John Donne said something about it.”

  “‘Death, thou shalt die.’” He almost smiled. “Take off the robe.”

  She took it off and tried to fold it, then just dropped it.

  He didn’t react to her strange nakedness. “Lie down here.” She did. “Hold still.”

  With his finger he traced a line from her navel to her breastbone. Her skin was gray and tight, room temperature and parchment smooth. He kept his finger pressed there, marking a place midway between her small breasts.

  He painted something cold there.

  “You will just barely feel this,” he said. She looked away. He pressed a round fitting firmly into the bone, with a small snap.

  He blotted for blood. There wasn’t any. “That wasn’t bad,” he said. “Was it?”

  She nodded, eyes tightly closed.

  “How did you die?” he asked.

  “I don’t really know. I woke up like this.”

  He tapped the fitting a few times and wiggled it. “This must be your first time,” he said.

  “Yes; I’m only 110.”

  He bound her wrists and ankles to the table with metal clamps.

  “Is that really necessary? I’m weak as a kitten.”

  “You never know,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a violent reaction, hysterical strength.”

  He put on a chain necklace with a heavy silver cross, with rubies at the stigmata points. She heard the metallic rattle and opened her eyes. “I’m not a Christian. Will it work?”

  “You don’t have to be a believer,” he said. “And this is not an exorcism, except in some metaphorical way. Metaphorical, not metaphysical.”

  “Okay.”

  “Close your eyes again,” he said. He reached into the open drawer and withdrew a black metal rod that tapered to a point. He gently inserted the point of the long black tool into the fitting in her chest. Then he moistened his fingertips with his tongue and touched her ears and then her eyes, whispering in Latin, “Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei…”

  “So why the Latin? If it’s not an exorcism.”

  “It’s a message to both our bodies,” he said. “An incantation that initializes us as patient and healer.”

  “That sounds as bad as exorcism.”

  “It’s science,” he said. “The nanozooans that keep you immortal have gone into an emergency mode. Some imbalance has to be addressed. They can stay alive themselves, in aggregate, but they can’t keep you alive, beyond oxygenating your brain.

  “Together, they have the intelligence of a small child. But it’s not easy to get them to do anything out of their routine. Like organic cells, most of them have a single function in terms of keeping your body going. But instead of dying when things go wrong, they go into shutdown mode and await instruction.

  “We chose the old Latin rite as an instruction code because no one will run into it accidentally. If it were some common phrase, you might overhear it accidentally, and your body would start deconstructing itself. That would be frightening.”

  “I don’t think I understand. I’m not a technical person. What is that black thing?”

  “It’s like medicine in the old days,” he said. “Helping your body help itself. Try to let the Latin put you to sleep.”

  “Okay.” She closed her eyes again.

  “…in nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi eradicare, et effugare ab hoc plasmate Dei. Ipse tibi imperat, qui te de supernis caelorum in inferiora terrae demergi praecepit. Ipse tibi imperat, qui mari, ventis, et tempestatibus imperavit…”

  Her eyes snapped open, bright red, and she bucked against the restraints, howling. Lunging, she was almost able to bite him, with teeth suddenly long and sharp as fangs. He leaned into the short sword and pushed her back to the table. The door behind him banged open, and two big attendants in green started in and hesitated.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Get the cleaning ’bot.”

  Her mouth overflowed with black foam, and she shook her head violently, spraying the room. Yellow and gray worms came crawling out of her mouth and nose. Noxious gases rose out of her body and billowed into orange flame. Something like electricity crackled along her arms. Finally, she fell limp.

  He had studied her carefully through the whole seizure. Now he rotated the black tool patiently between his palms, like a man trying to start a fire, but more slowly. Green vapors rose out of her chest for a minute, and then stopped, and there was a little bright blood there. He put down the tool and found a cap in the open drawer, and closed off the fitting with it.

  He undid the restraints. “Okay, guys,” he said. “She’s ready for cleanup.” The two big men came in and carried her away, while the cleaning robot scuttled around after wriggling worms and various excreta.

  She came slowly back to consciousness seated in a lukewarm shower. There was a kindly looking matron in a candy-stripe uniform watching her. “Are you coming around?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” The dead gray skin sloughed off, and the skin underneath glowed bright healthy pink. “That didn’t hurt at all.”

  The man in black appeared in the door. “Good thing. There’d be hell to pay.”

  (2004)

  Faces

  I think the universe would have been a much finer place if space travel had stayed expensive. Then it would never have involved me. So now I get to spend two years of my life doing “social observation” on a planet where, stepping out without a space suit, you wouldn’t live long enough to take a second breath.

  Social observation by a draftee with a gun. You couldn’t call it war, since these woogies were still killing each other with sticks when we arrived—and besides, nobody really wants to hurt them. We just want to find out whether they have anything worth taking.

  I do the reals and read books about the old days, my great-grandparents’ time, when they spent more to put two men on the Moon than we spend to keep ten battalions on ten worlds. I try to feel what they felt, but I can’t get there. It’s not very glorious: step into the machine, step out on a woogie planet, try not to get into too much trouble, come back one month a year to spend your pay.

  We call this one La-la Land, or just Lalande, because its star’s real name was Lalande followed by some number. A sun with another sun pretty far away. Not much night, or none at all, for about half the year, which bothers some people. I grew up in Alaska, sun all night in the summer, and also lived there while getting my highly useful degree in art history. For some reason that seems to have qualified me to become a heavy equipment operator. With a gun, one must add, and a big gun, on the heavy equipment, which I would call a tank if I didn’t know it was a GPV(E), General Purpose Vehicle (Exploration). Which spends half its time in the motor pool with mysterious ailments.

  My partner in this dubious enterprise is Whoopie Marchand, whose name may affect her demeanor, with another appropriate degree: library science. We both wish the other was a mechanic. Whoopie comes from Jamaic
a, and likes to keep the machine about ten degrees hotter than I would choose, and in our tiny space cooks food so spicy it makes my eyes water. So except for the fact that I prefer the company of men and can hardly understand a word she says, we were just made for one another.

  The Lalandians are a little more like humans, or at least other Earth creatures, than most woogies. (I have an older cousin who served on Outback, where the natives are like big spiders with metal shells.) They have the right number of eyes and ears and nostrils and a tiny mouth-thing, but six arm/legs. Their body chemistry is so different from ours that they breathe chlorine along with their oxygen. The water that comes out of their wells would kill you in a second.

  Their heads are long and squashed-looking, with batwing ears and chins like axe blades. Bright red slanted eyes with nictitating membranes, set in deep sockets. Not easy to love.

  They look sort of like nightmare centaurs, but their front, with the chest and “arms” and head, isn’t always pointed forward. When they want to, those arms become the hind legs, and their butts rise up into the air, and they can use their former hind legs as arms. It’s a defense thing, since from a distance the butt looks like the head, with dark spots for eyes and ears and mouth, but it’s just a fat-and-water storage organ. If something bites it off, they can regenerate it.

  It’s an evolutionary anachronism now; their ancestors killed off all the large predators when they became tool-users. The old guys were pretty fierce, too, evidently. Sabretooth centaurs with big claws. They’re more or less settled down now, though.

  Whoopie and I are part of X Group, engineers, and normally stay in the compound that overlooks the town Nula. It’s the biggest town on the continent, with maybe ten thousand natives. Hard to get a count, though; they’re nomadic, and most of them are just in town temporarily, buying and selling and anxious to get back on the road. They ride six-legged things that aren’t mammals but look like big soft camels, going from one oasis to another on this dry dustball of a world.