by Joe Haldeman
“Put it away. I got ten.” The silly dagger was no match for a puttyknife, but I didn’t want to perform a dissection out here on the sidewalk.
“Oh, you got ten. Maybe you got fifty.” He took a step toward me.
I pulled out the puttyknife and turned it on. It hummed and glowed. “You just lost ten. How much more you want to lose?”
He stared at the vibrating blade. The shimmering mist on the top third was as hot as the surface of the sun. “You in the army. You a mechanic.”
“I’m either a mechanic or I killed one and took his knife. Either way, you want to fuck with me?”
“Mechanics ain’t so tough. I was in the army.”
“You know all about it, then.” He took a half-step to the right, I think a feint. I didn’t move. “You don’t want to wait for your Rapture? You want to die right now?”
He looked at me for a long second. There was nothing in his eyes. “Oh, fuck you anyhow.” He put the knife back in his boot, turned, and walked away without looking back.
I turned off the puttyknife and blew on it. When it was cool enough, I put it back and went into the liquor store.
The clerk had a chrome Remington airspray. “Fuckin’ Endie. I would’ve got him.”
“Thanks,” I said. He would’ve gotten me too, with an airspray. “You got six Dixies?”
“Sure.” He opened the case behind him. “Ration card?”
“Army,” I said. I didn’t bother with the ID.
“Figured.” He rummaged. “You know they got a law I got to let the fuckin’ Endies in the store? They never buy anything.”
“Why should they?” I said. “World’s going up in smoke tomorrow, maybe the next day.”
“Right. Meanwhile they steal y’ blind. All I got’s cans.”
“Whatever.” I was starting to shake a little. Between the Ender and this trigger-happy clerk I’d probably come closer to dying than I ever would in Portobello.
He put the six-pack in front of me. “You don’t want to sell that knife?”
“No, I need it all the time. Open fan mail with it.”
That was the wrong thing to say. “Got to say I don’t recognize you. I follow the Fourth and Sixteenth, mainly.”
“I’m Ninth. Not nearly as exciting.”
“Interdiction,” he said, nodding. The Fourth and Sixteenth are hunter/killer platoons, so they have a considerable following. Warboys, we call their fans.
He was a little excited, even though I was just Interdiction. And Psychops. “You didn’t catch the Fourth last Wednesday, did you?”
“Hey, I don’t even follow my own outfit. I was in the cage then, anyhow.”
He stopped for a moment with my card in his hand, struck dumb by the concept that a person could live nine days in a row inside a soldierboy and then not jump straight to the cube and follow the war.
Some do, of course. I met Scoville when he was out of the cage once, here in Houston for a warboy “assembly.” There’s one every week somewhere in Texas—they haul in enough booze and bum and squeak to keep them cross-eyed for a long weekend, and pay a couple of mechanics to come in and tell them what it’s really really like. To be locked inside a cage and watch yourself murder people by remote control. They replay tapes of great battles and argue over fine points of strategy.
The only one I’ve ever gone to had a “warrior day,” where all of the attendees—all except us outsiders—dressed up as warriors from the past. That was kind of scary. I assumed the tommy guns and flintlocks didn’t function; even criminals were reluctant to risk that. But the swords and spears and bows looked real enough, and they were in the hands of people who had amply demonstrated, to me at least, that they shouldn’t be trusted with a sharp stick.
“You were going to kill that guy?” the clerk said conversationally.
“No reason to. They always back off.” As if I knew.
“But suppose he didn’t.”
“It wouldn’t be a problem,” I heard myself saying. “Take his knife hand off at the wrist. Call 9–1–1. Maybe they’d glue it back on upside down.” Actually, they’d probably take their time responding. Give him a chance to beat the Rapture by bleeding to death.
He nodded. “We had two guys last month outside the store, they did the handkerchief thing, some girl.” That was where two men bite down on opposite corners of a handkerchief, and have at each other with knives or razors. The one who lets go of the handkerchief loses. “One guy was dead before they got here. The other lost an ear; they didn’t bother to look for it.” He gestured. “I kept it in the freezer for awhile.”
“You’re the one who called the cops?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Soon as it was over.” Good citizen.
I strapped the beer onto the rear carrier and pedaled back toward the gate.
Things are getting worse. I hate to sound like my old man. But things really were better when I was a boy. There weren’t Enders on every corner. People didn’t duel. People didn’t stand around and watch other people duel. And then police picked up the ears afterward.
* * *
not all enders had ponytails and obvious attitudes. There were two in Julian’s physics department, a secretary and Mac Roman himself.
People wondered how such a mediocre scientist had come out of nowhere and brown-nosed his way into a position of academic power. What they didn’t appreciate was the intellectual effort it took to successfully pretend to believe in the ordered, agnostic view of the universe that physics mandated. It was all part of God’s plan, though. Like the carefully falsified documents that had put him in the position of being minimally qualified for the chairmanship. Two other Enders were on the Board of Regents, able to push his case.
Macro (like one of those Regents) was a member of a militant and supersecret sect within a sect: the Hammer of God. Like all Enders, they believed God was about to bring about the destruction of humankind.
Unlike most of them, the Hammer of God felt called upon to help.
* * *
on the way back to campus I took a wrong turn and, circling back, passed a downscale jack joint I’d never seen. They had feelies of group sex, downhill skiing, a car crash. Done there; been that. Not to mention all the combat ones.
Actually, I’d never done the car crash. I wonder if the actor died. Sometimes Enders did that, even though jacking’s supposed to be a sin. Sometimes people do it to be famous for a few minutes. I’ve never jacked into one of those, but Ralph has his favorites, so when I’m jacked with Ralph I get it secondhand. Guess I’ll never understand fame.
There was a new sergeant at the gate to the university, so we went through the delaying song and dance again.
I pedaled aimlessly through the campus for an hour. It was pretty deserted, Sunday afternoon of a long weekend. I went into the physics building to see whether any students had slipped papers under my door, and one had—an early problem set, wonder of wonders. And a note saying he’d have to miss class because his sister had a coming-out party in Monaco. Poor kid.
Amelia’s office was one floor above mine, but I didn’t bother her. I really ought to work out the answers to the problem set, get ahead of the game. No, I ought to go back to Amelia’s and waste the rest of the day.
I did go back to Amelia’s, but in a spirit of scientific inquiry. She had a new appliance they called the “anti-microwave;” you put something in it and set the temperature you want, and it cools it down. Of course the appliance has nothing to do with microwaves.
It worked well on a can of beer. When I opened the door, wisps of vapor came out. The beer was forty degrees, but the ambient temperature inside the machine must have been a lot lower. Just to see what would happen, I put a slice of cheese in it and set it to the lowest temperature, minus forty. When it came out I dropped it on the floor, and it shattered. I think I found all the pieces.
Amelia had a little alcove behind the fireplace that she called “the library.” There was just room for an antique fut
on and a small table. The three walls that defined the space were glassed-in shelves, full of hundreds of old books. I’d been in there with her, but not to read.
I set the beer down and looked at the titles. Mostly novels and poetry. Unlike a lot of jacks and jills, I still read for pleasure, but I like to read things that are supposed to be true.
My first couple of years of college, I majored in history with a minor in physics, but then switched around. I used to think it was the degrees in physics that got me drafted. But most mechanics have the usual compulsoryed degrees—gym, current events, communication skills. You don’t have to be that smart to lie in the cage and twitch.
Anyhow, I like to read history, and Amelia’s library was lean in that subject. A few popular illustrated texts. Mostly twenty-first century, which I planned to read about when it was over.
I remembered she wanted me to read the Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, so I took it down and settled in. Two hours and two beers.
The differences between their fighting and ours were as profound as the difference between a bad accident and a bad dream.
Their armies were equally matched in weaponry; they both had a diffuse, confused command structure that essentially resulted in one huge mob being thrown against another, to flail away with primitive guns and knives and clubs until one mob ran away.
The confused protagonist, Henry, was too deeply involved to see this simple truth, but he reported it accurately.
I wonder what poor Henry would think about our kind of war. I wonder whether his era even knew the most accurate metaphor: exterminator. And I wondered what simple truth my involvement kept me from seeing.
* * *
julian didn’t know that the author of The Red Badge of Courage had had the advantage of not having been a part of the war he wrote about. It’s harder to see a pattern when you’re part of it.
That war had been relatively straightforward in terms of economic and ideological issues; Julian’s was not. The enemy Ngumi comprised a loose alliance of dozens of “rebel” forces, fifty-four this year. In all enemy countries there was a legitimate government that cooperated with the Alliance, but it was no secret that few of those governments were supported by a majority of their constituents.
It was partly an economic war, the “haves” with their automation-driven economies versus the “have-nots,” who were not born into automatic prosperity. It was partly a race war, the blacks and browns and some yellows versus the whites and some other yellows. Julian was uncomfortable on some level about that, but he didn’t feel much of a bond with Africa. Too long ago, too far away, and they were too crazy.
And of course it was an ideological war for some—the defenders of democracy versus the rebel strong-arm charismatic leaders. Or the capitalist land-grabbers versus the protectors of the people, take your pick.
But it was not a war that was going to have a conclusive endgame, like Appomattox or Hiroshima. Either the slow erosion of the Alliance would make it collapse into chaos, or the Ngumi would be swatted down hard enough in all locations that they would become a collection of local crime problems rather than a somewhat unified military one.
The roots of it went back to the twentieth century and even beyond; many of the Ngumi traced their political parentage back to when white men first brought sailing ships and gunpowder to their lands. The Alliance dismissed that as so much jingoistic rhetoric, but there was logic to it.
The situation was complicated by the fact that in some countries the rebels were strongly linked to organized crime, as had happened in the Drug Wars that simmered early in the century. In some, there was nothing left but crime, organized or disorganized, but universal, from border to border. In some of those places, Alliance forces were the only vestige of law—often underappreciated, when there was no legal commerce and the population’s choice was between a well-stocked black market and essentials-only charity from the Alliance.
Julian’s Costa Rica was anomalous. The country had managed to stay out of the war early on, maintaining the neutrality that had kept it out of the twentieth century’s cataclysms. But its geographic location between Panama, the only Alliance stronghold in Central America, and Nicaragua, the hemisphere’s most powerful Ngumi nation, finally dragged it into the war. At first, most of the patriotic rebels spoke with a suspicious Nicaraguan accent. But then there was a charismatic leader and an assassination—both engineered by Ngumi, the Alliance claimed—and before long the forests and fields were filled with young men, and some women, ready to risk their lives to protect their land against the cynical capitalists and their puppets. Against the huge bulletproof giants who stalked the jungle quiet as cats; who could level a town in minutes.
Julian considered himself a political realist. He didn’t swallow the facile propaganda of his own side, but the other side was just plain doomed; their leaders should be making deals with the Alliance rather than annoying it. When they nuked Atlanta they hammered the last nail into their coffin.
If indeed Ngumi had done it. No rebel group claimed responsibility, and Nairobi said it was close to being able to prove that the bomb had come from the Alliance nuclear archives: they had sacrificed five million American lives to pave the way for total war, total annihilation.
But Julian wondered about the nature of the proof, that they could be “close” to it and not be able to say anything specific. He didn’t rule out the possibility that there were people on his own side insane enough to blow up one of their own cities. But he did wonder how such a thing could be kept secret for long. A lot of people would have to be involved.
Of course that could be dealt with. People who would murder five million strangers could sacrifice a few dozen friends, a few hundred coconspirators.
And so it went around and around, as it had in everybody’s thoughts in the months since Atlanta, Sao Paulo, and Mandelaville. Would some actual proof emerge? Would another city be snuffed out tomorrow; and then another one, in retaliation?
It was a good time for those who owned rural real estate. People who could move were finding country life appealing.
* * *
the first few days I’m back are usually nice and intense. The homecoming mood energizes our love life, and all the time I’m not with her I’m deeply immersed in the Jupiter Project, catching up. But a lot depends on the day of the week I come back, because Friday is always a singularity. Friday is the night of the Saturday Night Special.
That’s the name of a restaurant up in the Hidalgo part of town, more expensive than I would normally patronize, and more pretentious: the theme of the place is the romanticized California Gang Era—grease, graffiti, and grime, safely distant from the table linen. As far as I’m concerned, those people were no different from today’s whackers and slicers—if anything, worse, since they didn’t have to worry about the federal death penalty for using guns. The waiters come around in leather jackets and meticulously grease-stained T-shirts, black jeans, and high boots. They say the wine list is the best in Houston.
I’m the youngest of the Saturday Night Special crowd by at least ten years; the only one who’s not a full-time intellectual. I’m “Blaze’s boy”; I don’t know which of them knew or suspected I literally was her boy. I came as her friend and coworker, and everybody seemed to accept that.
My primary value to the group was the novelty of being a mechanic. That was doubly interesting to them, because a senior member of the group, Marty Larrin, was one of the designers of the cyberlink that made jacking, and thus soldierboys, possible.
Marty had been responsible for designing the system’s security. Once a jack was installed, it was failsafed at a molecular level, literally impossible to modify, even for the original manufacturers; even for researchers like Marty. The nanocircuitry inside would scramble itself within a fraction of a second if any part of the complex device was tampered with. Then it would take another round of invasive surgery, with a one-in-ten chance of death or uselessness, to take the scrambled jack
out and install a new one.
Marty was about sixty, the front half of his head shaved bald in a generation-old style, the rest of his white hair long except for the shaved circle around his jack. He was conventionally handsome, still; regular leading-man features, and it was obvious from the way he treated Amelia that they had a past. I once asked her how long ago that had been, the only such question I’ve ever asked her. She thought for a moment and said, “I guess you were out of grade school.”
The population of the Saturday Night Special crowd varies from week to week. Marty is almost always there, along with his traditional antagonist, Franklin Asher, a mathematician with a chair in the philosophy department. Their jocular sniping goes back to when they were graduate students together; Amelia’s known him nearly as long as Marty.
Belda Magyar is usually there, an odd duck but obviously one of the inner circle. She sits and listens with a stern, disapproving look, nursing a single glass of wine. Once or twice a night she makes a hilarious remark, without changing expression. She’s the oldest, over ninety, a professor emeritus in the art department. She claims to remember having met Richard Nixon, when she was very small. He was big and scary, and gave her a book of matches, no doubt a White House souvenir, which her mother took away.
I liked Reza Pak, a shy chemist in his early forties, the only one besides Amelia with whom I socialized outside the club. We met occasionally to shoot pool or play tennis. He never mentioned Amelia and I never mentioned the boyfriend who always drove up to fetch him, exactly on time.
Reza, who also lived on campus, usually gave me and Amelia a ride to the club, but this Friday he was already uptown, so we called a cab. (Like most people, Amelia doesn’t own a car and I’ve never even driven, except in Basic Training, and then only jacked with someone who knew how.) We could bike to Hidalgo in daylight, but coming back after dark would be suicide.
It started raining at sundown anyhow, and by the time we got to the club it was a full-fledged thunderstorm, with tornado watch. The club had an awning, but the rain was almost horizontal; we got drenched between the cab and the door.