by Joe Haldeman
Reza and Belda were already there, at our usual table in the grease section. We talked them into moving to the Club Room, where a phony-but-warm fireplace crackled.
Another semi-regular, Ray Booker, came in while we were relocating, also drenched. Ray was an engineer who worked with Marty Larrin on soldierboy technology, and a serious ’grass musician who played banjo all over the state, summers.
“Julian, you should of seen the Tenth today.” Ray had a little warboy streak in him. “Delayed replay of an amphibious assault on Punta Patuca. We came, we saw, we kicked butt.” He handed his wet overcoat and hat to the wheelie that had followed him in. “Almost no casualties.”
“What’s ‘almost’?” Amelia said.
“Well, they ran into a shatterfield.” He sat down heavily. “Three units lost both legs. But we got them evac’ed before the scavengers could get to them. One psych, a girl on her second or third mission.”
“Wait,” I said. “They used a shatterfield inside a city?”
“They sure as hell did. Brought down a whole block of slums, urban renewal. Of course they said we did it.”
“How many dead?”
“Must be hundreds.” Ray shook his head. “That’s what got the girl, maybe. She was in the middle of it, immoblilized with both her legs off. Fought the rescue crew; wanted them to evac the civilians. They had to turn her off to get her out of there.”
He asked the table for a scotch and soda and the rest of us put our orders in. No greasy waiters in this section. “Maybe she’ll be okay. One of those things you have to learn to live with.”
“We didn’t do it,” Reza said.
“Why would we? No military advantage, bad press. Shatterfield’s a terror weapon, in a city.”
“I’m surprised anyone survived,” I said.
“Nobody on the ground; they were all instant chorizo. But those were four- and five-story buildings. People in the upper stories just had to survive the collapse.
“The Tenth set up a knockout perimeter with UN markers and called it a no-fire zone, collateral casualty, once we had all our soldierboys out. Dropped in a Red Cross med crawler and moved on.
“The shatterfield was their only real ’tech touch. The rest of it was old-fashioned, cut-off-and-concentrate tactics, which doesn’t work on a group as well integrated as the Tenth. Good platoon coordination. Julian, you would have appreciated it. From the air it was like choreography.”
“Maybe I’ll check it out.” I wouldn’t; never did, unless I knew somebody in the fight.
“Any time,” Ray said. “I’ve got two crystals of it, one jacked through Emily Vail, the company coordinator. The other’s the commercial feed.” They didn’t show battles while they were happening, of course, since the enemy could jack in. The commercial feed was edited both for maximum drama and minimum disclosure. Normal people couldn’t get individual mechanics’ unedited feeds; lots of warboys would cheerfully kill for one. Ray had top-secret clearance and an unfiltered jack. If a civilian or a spy got ahold of Emily Vail’s crystal, they would see and feel a lot that wasn’t on the commercial version, but selected perceptions and thoughts would be filtered out unless you had a jack like Ray’s.
A live waiter in a clean tuxedo brought our drinks. I was splitting a jug of house red with Reza.
Ray raised a glass. “To peace,” he said, actually without irony. “Welcome back, Julian.” Amelia touched my knee with hers under the table.
The wine was pretty good, just astringent enough to make you consider a slightly more expensive one. “Easy week this time,” I said, and Ray nodded. He always checked on me.
A couple of others showed up, and we broke down into the usual interlocking small conversational groups. Amelia moved over to sit with Belda and another man from fine arts, to talk about books. We usually did separate when it seemed natural.
I stayed with Reza and Ray; when Marty came in he gave Amelia a peck and joined the three of us. There was no love lost between him and Belda.
Marty was really soaked, his long white hair in lanky strings. “Had to park down the block,” he said, dropping his sodden coat on the wheelie.
“Thought you were working late,” Ray said.
“This isn’t late?” He ordered coffee and a sandwich. “I’m going back later, and so are you. Have a couple more scotches.”
“What is it?” He pushed his scotch away a symbolic inch.
“Let’s not talk shop. We have all night. But it’s that girl you said you saw on the Vail crystal.”
“The one who cracked?” I asked.
“Mm-hm. Why don’t you crack, Julian? Get a discharge. We enjoy your company.”
“Your platoon, too,” Ray joked. “Nice bunch.”
“How could she fit into your cross-linking studies?” I asked. “She must hardly have been linking at all.”
“New deal we started while you were gone,” Ray said. “We got a contract to study empathy failures. People who crack out of sympathy for the enemy.”
“You may get Julian,” Reza said. “He just loves them pedros.”
“It doesn’t correlate much with politics,” Marty said. “And it’s usually people in their first year or two. More often female than male. He’s not a good candidate.” The coffee came and he picked up the cup and blew on it. “So how about this weather? Clear and cool, they said.”
“Love them Knicks,” I said.
Reza nodded. “The square root of minus one.” There was going to be no more talk of empathy failures that night.
* * *
julian didn’t know how selective the draft really was, finding people for specific mechanics’ slots. There were a few hunter/killer platoons, but they tended to be hard to control, on a couple of levels. As platoons, they followed orders poorly, and they didn’t integrate well “horizontally,” with other platoons in the company. The individual mechanics in a hunter/killer platoon tended not to link strongly with one another.
None of this was surprising. They were made up of the same kind of people earlier armies chose for “wet work.” You expected them to be independent and somewhat wild.
As Julian had observed, most platoons had at least one person who seemed like a really unlikely choice. In his outfit it was Candi, horrified by the war and unwilling to harm the enemy. They were called stabilizers.
Julian suspected she acted as a kind of conscience for the platoon, but it would be more accurate to call her a governor, like the governor on an engine. Platoons that didn’t have one member like Candi had a tendency to run out of control, go “berserker.” It happened sometimes with the hunter/killer ones, whose stabilizers couldn’t be too pacifistic, and it was tactically a disaster. War is, according to von Clausewitz, the controlled use of force to bring about political ends. Uncontrolled force is as likely to harm as to help.
(There was a mythos, a commonsense observation, that the berserker episodes had a good effect in the long run, because they made the Ngumi more afraid of the soldierboys. Actually, the opposite was true, according to the people who studied the enemy’s psychology. The soldierboys were most fearsome when they acted like actual machines, controlled from a distance. When they got angry or went crazy—acting like men in robot suits—they seemed beatable.)
More than half of the stablilizers did crack before their term was up. In most cases it was not a sudden process, but was preceded by a period of inattention and indecision. Marty and Ray would be reviewing the performance of stabilizers prior to their failure, to see whether there was some invariable indicator that would warn commanders that it was time for a replacement or modification.
The unbreakable jack fail-safe supposedly was to keep people from harming themselves or others, though everybody knew it was just to maintain the government monopoly. Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn’t true. It wasn’t quite true that you couldn’t modify a jack in place, either, but the changes were limited to memory—usually when a soldier saw something the army wanted him or
her to forget. Only two of the Saturday Night Special group knew about that.
Sometimes they erased a soldier’s memory of an event for security reasons; less often, for humane ones.
Almost all of Marty’s work now was with the military, which made him uncomfortable. When he had started in the field, thirty years before, jacks were crude, expensive, and rare, used for medical and scientific research.
Most people still worked for a living then. A decade later, at least in the “first world,” most jobs having to do with production and distribution of goods were obsolete or quaint. Nanotechnology had given us the nanoforge: ask it for a house, and then put it near a supply of sand and water. Come back tomorrow with your moving van. Ask it for a car, a book, a nail file. Before long, of course, you didn’t have to ask it; it knew what people wanted, and how many people there were.
Of course, it could also make other nanoforges. But not for just anybody. Only for the government. You couldn’t just roll up your sleeves and build yourself one, either, since the government also owned the secret of warm fusion, and without the abundant free power that came from that process, the nanoforge couldn’t exist.
Its development had cost thousands of lives and put a huge crater in North Dakota, but by the time Julian was in school, the government was in a position where it could give everybody any material thing. Of course, it wouldn’t give you everything you wanted; alcohol and other drugs were strictly controlled, as were dangerous things like guns and cars. But if you were a good citizen, you could live a life of comfort and security without lifting a finger to work, unless you wanted to. Except for the three years you were drafted.
Most people spent those three years working in uniform a few hours a day in Resource Management, which was dedicated to making sure the nanoforges had access to all the elements they needed. About five percent of the draftees put on blue uniforms and became caregivers, people whose tests said they would be good working with the sick and elderly. Another five percent put on green uniforms and became soldiers. A small fraction of those tested out fast and smart, and became mechanics.
People in National Service were allowed to re-enlist, and a large number did. Some of them didn’t want to face a lifetime of total freedom, perhaps uselessness. Some liked the perquisites that went along with the uniform: money for hobbies or habits, a kind of prestige, the comfort of having other people tell you what to do, the ration card that gave you unlimited alcohol, off duty.
Some people even liked being allowed to carry a gun.
The soldiers who weren’t involved in soldierboys, waterboys, or flyboys—the people mechanics called “shoes”—got all of those perquisites, but always faced a certain probability of being ordered to go out and sit on a piece of disputed real estate. They usually didn’t have to fight, since the soldierboys were better at it and couldn’t be killed, but there was no doubt that the shoes fulfilled a valuable military function: they were hostages. Maybe even lures, staked goats for the Ngumi long-range weapons. It didn’t make them love the mechanics, as often as they owed their lives to them. If a soldierboy got blown to bits, the mechanic just put on a fresh one. Or so they thought. They didn’t know how it felt.
* * *
i liked sleeping in the soldierboy. Some people thought it was creepy, so complete a knockout it was like death. Half the platoon stands guard while the other half is shut down for two hours. You fall asleep like a light being turned out and wake up just as suddenly, disoriented but as rested as you would have been after eight hours of normal sleep. If you get the full two hours, that is.
We had taken refuge in a burned-out schoolhouse in an abandoned village. I was on the second sleep shift, so I first spent two hours sitting at a broken window, smelling jungle and old ashes, patient in the unchanging darkness. From my point of view, of course, it was neither dark nor unchanging. Starlight flooded the scene like monochromatic daylight, and once each ten seconds I switched to infrared for a moment. The infrared helped me track a large black cat that stalked up on us, gliding through the twisted remains of the playground equipment. It was an ocelot or something, aware of motion in the schoolhouse and looking for a meal. When it got within ten meters it froze for a long period, scenting nothing, or maybe machine lubricant, and then was away in a sudden flash.
Nothing else happened. After two hours, the first shift woke up. We gave them a couple of minutes to get their bearings and then passed on the “sit-rep,” situation report: negative.
I fell asleep and instantly awoke to a blaze of pain. My sensors brought in nothing but blinding light, a roar of white noise, searing heat—and complete isolation! All of my platoon was disconnected or destroyed.
I knew it wasn’t real; knew I was safe in a cage in Portobello. But it still hurt like a third-degree burn over every square centimeter of naked flesh, eyeballs fried in their sockets, one dying inhalation of molten lead, enema of same: complete feedback overload.
It seemed to last for a long time—long enough for me to think this was actually it; the enemy had cracked Portobello or nuked it, and it was actually me dying, not my machine. Actually, we were switched off after 3.03 seconds. It would have been quicker, but the mechanic in Delta platoon who was our horizontal liaison—our link to the company commander if I died—was disoriented by the sudden intensity of it, even secondhand.
Later satellite analysis showed two aircraft catapulted from five kilometers away. They were stealthed and, with no propellant, left no heat signature. One pilot ejected just before the plane hit the schoolhouse. The other plane was either automatically guided or its pilot came in with it—kamikaze or ejection failure.
Both planes were full of incendiaries. About one hundredth of a second after Candi sensed something was wrong, all our soldierboys were trying to cope with a flood of molten metal.
They know we have to sleep, and know how we do it. So they contrive things like this setup: a camouflaged catapult, zeroed on a building we would sooner or later use, its two-pilot crew waiting for months or years.
They couldn’t have just boobytrapped the building, because we would have sensed that amount of incendiary or other explosive.
In Portobello, three of us went into cardiac arrest; Ralph died. They used air-cushion stretchers to move us to the hospital wing, but it still hurt to move; just to breathe.
Physical treatment wouldn’t touch where that pain was, the phantom pain that was the nervous system’s memory of violent death. Imaginary pain had to be fought through the imagination.
They jacked me into a Caribbean island fantasy, swimming warm waters with lovely black women. Lots of virtual fruit-and-rum drinks, and then virtual sex, virtual sleep.
When I woke up still in pain, they tried the opposite scenario—a ski resort, thin dry cool air. Fast slopes, fast women, the same sequence of virtual voluptuousness. Then canoeing in a calm mountain lake. Then a hospital bed in Portobello.
The doctor was a short guy, darker than me. “Are you awake, sergeant?”
I felt the back of my head. “Evidently.” I sat up and clutched at the mattress until the dizziness subsided. “How are Candi and Karen?”
“They’ll be all right. Do you recall . . .”
“Ralph died. Yes.” I dimly remembered when they had stopped working on him, and brought the other two out of the cardiac unit. “What day is it?”
“Wednesday.” The shift had started Monday. “How do you feel? You’re free to go as soon as you feel up to it.”
“Medical leave?” He nodded. “The skin pain is gone. I still feel strange. But I’ve never spent two days jacked into fantasies before.” I put my feet on the cold tile floor and stood up. I walked shakily across the room to a closet and found a dress uniform there, and a bag with my civvies.
“Guess I’ll hang around awhile, check on my platoon. Then go home or wherever.”
“All right. I’m Dr. Tull, in RICU Recovery, if you have any problems.” He shook hands and left. Do you salute doctors?
&n
bsp; I decided to wear the uniform and dressed slowly and sat there for awhile, sipping ice water. I’d lost soldierboys twice before, but both times it was just a twist of disorientation and then switch-off. I’d heard about these total feedback situations, and knew of one instance when a whole platoon had died before they could be turned off. Supposedly, that couldn’t happen anymore.
How would it affect our performance? Scoville’s platoon went through it last year. We all had to spend a cycle training with the replacement soldierboys, but they seemed unaffected, other than being impatient with not fighting. Theirs was only a fraction of a second, though, not three seconds of burning alive.
I went down to see Candi and Karen. They’d been out of jack therapy for half a day, and were pale and weak but otherwise all right. They showed me the pair of red marks between their breasts where they’d been jolted back to life.
Everyone but them and Mel had checked out and gone home. While I waited for Mel I went down to Ops and replayed the attack.
I didn’t replay the three seconds, of course; only the minute leading up to them. All the people on guard heard a faint “pop” that was the enemy pilot ejecting. Then Candi, out of the corner of her eye, saw one plane for a hundredth of a second, as it cleared the trees that bordered the parking lot and dove in. She started to swing, to target it with her laser, and then the record ended.
When Mel came out, we had a couple of beers and a plate of tamales at the airport. He went off to California, and I went back to the hospital for a few hours. I bribed a tech to jack me with Candi and Karen for five minutes—not strictly against regulations; in a way, we were still on duty—which was long enough for us to reassure each other that we would be all right, and to share grief about Ralph. It was especially hard on Candi. I took on some of the fear and pain they had about their hearts. Nobody likes to face the possibility of a replacement, having a machine at the center of your life. They were likely candidates now.
When we unjacked, Candi held my hand very hard, actually just the forefinger, staring at me. “You hide your secrets better than anyone else,” she whispered.