by Joe Haldeman
The thousands of POWs in the Canal Zone were a much larger entity, which only had two problems to work on: How do we get out of here? and What then?
Getting out was so easy as to be almost trivial. Most of the labor in the camp was done by POWs; together, they knew more about how it actually ran than did the soldiers and computers that ran it. Taking over the computers was simple, a matter of properly timing a simulated medical emergency in order to get the right woman (whom they knew to be kindhearted) to leave her desk for a crucial minute.
This was at two in the morning. By two-thirty, all the soldiers had been awakened at gunpoint and marched to a maximum-security compound. They gave up without a shot being fired, which was not surprising, given that they faced thousands of apparently angry armed enemy prisoners. They couldn’t know that the enemy were not really angry, and constitutionally unable to pull the trigger.
None of the POWs knew how to operate a soldierboy, but they could turn them off from Command and Control, and leave them immobile while they pried the mechanics out of their cages, and took them down to join the shoes in prison. They left them plenty of prison food and water, and then went on to the next step.
They could have simply escaped and dispersed. But then the war would go on, the war that had turned their peaceful, prosperous country into a strangled battlefield.
They had to go to the enemy. They had to offer themselves.
There were regular freight shipments between Portobello and CZ via monorail. They left their weapons behind, along with a few people who could speak perfect American English (to maintain for a few hours the illusion of a functioning POW camp), and crowded into a few freight cars manifested as fresh fruit and vegetables.
As the cars pulled in to the commissary station, they all undressed, so as to present themselves as totally unarmed and vulnerable—and also to confuse the Americans, who were strange about nudity.
Several of their number had been sent to the camp from Portobello, so when the doors opened and they stepped in unison into the shocked floodlights, they knew exactly where to go.
Building 31.
* * *
i watched the soldierboy at the guard box teeter for a second and then swivel, taking in the magnitude of the phenomenon.
“What the hell is going on?” Claude’s voice boomed out. “¿Qué pasa?”
A wrinkled old man shuffled forward, holding a portable jack transfer box. A shoe rushed up behind him, raising an M-31 butt-first.
“Stop!” Claude said, but it was too late. The buttplate smacked into the old man’s skull with a cracking sound, and he skidded forward to lie at the soldierboy’s feet, unconscious or dead.
It was a scene the whole world would see the next day, and nothing Marty could have orchestrated would have had such an effect.
The POWs turned to look at the shoe with expressions of quiet pity, forgiveness. The huge soldierboy knelt down and carefully scooped up the frail body, cradling him, and looked down at the shoe. “He was just an old man, for Christ’s sake,” he said quietly.
And then a girl of about twelve picked the box up off the ground and pulled out one cable and offered it wordlessly to the soldierboy. It went down on one knee and accepted it, awkwardly plugging it in while not letting go of the old man. The girl plugged the other jack into her own skull.
The sun comes up fast in Portobello, and for the couple of minutes that tableau lasted, thousands of still people and one machine in thoughtful communion, the street began to glow, gold and rose.
Two shoes in hospital whites came up with a stretcher.
Claude unjacked and gently lowered the body into their care. “—This is Juan José de Cordoba,” he said in Spanish. “—Remember his name. The first casualty of the last war.”
He took the little girl’s hand and they walked toward the entrance.
* * *
they did call it The Last War, perhaps too optimistically, and there were tens of thousands more casualties. But Marty had predicted the course of it and the outcome pretty accurately.
The POWs, who collectively called themselves Los Liberados, “the Freed,” actually absorbed Marty and his group, and led the way to peace.
They started out with an impressive display of intellectual force. They deduced from first principles the nature of the signal that would turn off the Jupiter Project, and used a small radio telescope in Costa Rica to bleep the signal out there—saving the world, as an opening move in an enterprise that resembled a game as much as a war. A game whose goal was to discover its own rules.
A lot that happened over the next two years was difficult for we merely normal people to understand. In a way, the conflict ultimately would be almost Darwinian, one ecological niche contested by two different species. Actually, we were subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens pacificans, because we could interbreed. And there never was any doubt that pacificans was going to win in the long run.
When they began to isolate us “normals,” who would be the subnormals in less than a generation, Marty asked me to be the chief liaison for the ones in the Americas, who would be populating Cuba, Puerto Rico, and British Columbia. I said no, but eventually gave in to wheedling. There were only twenty-three normals in the world who had once had the experience of jacking with the humanized. So we would be a valuable resource to the other normals who were filling up Tasmania, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, and so on. I supposed eventually we would be called “islanders.” And the humanized would take over our former name.
Two years of chaos stubbornly resisting the new order. It all sort of crystallized that first day, though, after Claude had taken the little girl in to jack completely two-way with her brothers and sisters in Building 31.
It was about noon. Amelia and I were dog-tired, but unwilling, almost unable, to sleep. I certainly was never going to sleep in that room again, though an orderly had come by and discreetly told me that it had been “tidied up.” With buckets and scrub brushes and a body bag or two.
A woman had come by with baskets of bread and hard-boiled eggs. We spread a sheet of newspaper on the steps and assembled lunch, slicing the eggs onto the bread.
A middle-aged woman came up smiling. I didn’t recognize her at first. “Sergeant Class? Julian?”
“Buenos días,” I said.
“I owe you everything,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion.
Then it clicked, her voice and face. “Mayor Madero.”
She nodded. “A few months ago, you saved me from killing myself, aboard that helicopter. I went to la Zona and was conectada, and now I live; more than live. Because of your compassion and swiftness.
“All the time I was changing, these past two weeks, I was hoping you would still be alive so that we could, as you say, jack together.” She smiled. “Your funny language.
“And then I come here and find out that you live but have been blinded. But I have been with those who knew you and loved you when you could see into each other’s hearts.”
She took my hand and looked at Amelia and offered her other hand. “Amelia . . . we also have touched for one instant.”
So the three of us held hands in a triangle, a silent circle. Three people who almost threw away their lives, for love, for anger, for grief.
“You . . . you,” she said. “No hay palabras. There are no words for this.” She let go of our hands and walked toward the beach, wiping her eyes in the brightness.
We sat and watched Madero for some time, our bread and eggs drying in the sun, her hand clenched tight in mine.
Alone, together. The way it always used to be.
Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!