Forever Peace Read online

  It was never resolved. Carolyn died in a sudden brain blowout when we weren’t doing anything particularly stressful, just waiting for a pickup after an uneventful mission.

  I had to be hospitalized for a week; in a way, it was even worse than just losing someone you loved. It was like that plus losing a limb, losing part of your brain.

  Amelia held my hand that week, and we were holding each other soon enough.

  I don’t usually fall asleep right after making love, but this time I did, after the weekend of dissipation and the sleepless hours on the plane—you’d think a person who spent a third of his life as part of a machine would be comfortable traveling inside another one, but no. I have to stay awake to keep the damned thing in the air.

  The smell of onions woke me up. Brunch, lunch, whatever. Amelia has a thing about potatoes; her Irish blood, I suppose. She was frying up a pan with onions and garlic. Not my favorite wake-up call, but for her it was lunch. She told me she’d gotten up at three to log on and work out a decay sequence that turned out to be nothing. So her reward for working on Sunday was a shower, a somewhat awake lover, and fried potatoes.

  I located my shirt but couldn’t find my pants, and settled on one of her nightgowns, not too pretty. We were the same size.

  I found my blue toothbrush in her bathroom and used her weird clove-flavored toothpaste. Decided against a shower because my stomach was growling. It wasn’t grits and gravy, but it wasn’t poison.

  “Good morning, bright eyes.” No wonder I couldn’t find my pants. She was wearing them.

  “Have you gone completely strange?” I said.

  “Just an experiment.” She stepped over and held me by both shoulders. “You look stunning. Absolutely gorgeous.”

  “What experiment? See what I would wear?”

  “See whether.” She stepped out of my jeans and handed them over, and walked back to her potatoes wearing only a T-shirt. “I mean, really. Your generation is so prudish.”

  “Oh, are we?” I slipped off the gown and came up behind her. “Come on. I’ll show you prudish.”

  “That doesn’t count.” She half-turned and kissed me. “The experiment was about clothes, not sex. Sit down before one of us gets burned.”

  I sat down at the dinette and looked at her back. She stirred the food slowly. “I’m not sure why I did that, really. Impulse. Couldn’t sleep but didn’t want to wake you up, going through the closet. I stepped on your jeans getting out of bed and I just put them on.”

  “Don’t explain. I want it to be a big perverse mystery.”

  “If you want coffee you know where it is.” She had a pot of tea brewed. I almost asked for a cup. But to keep the morning from being too full of mystery, I stuck with coffee.

  “So Macro’s getting a divorce?” Dr. “Mac” Roman was dean of research and titular head of our project, though he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day work.

  “Deep dark secret. He hasn’t told anybody. My friend Nel passed it on.” Nel Nye was a schoolmate who worked for the city.

  “And they were such a lovely couple together.” She laughed one “ha,” stabbing at the potatoes with the spatula. “Was it another woman, man, robot?”

  “They don’t put that on the form. They’re splitting this week, though, and I have to meet with him tomorrow before we go to Budget. He’ll be even more distracted than usual.” She divided the potatoes between two plates and brought them over. “So you were out blowing up trucks?”

  “Actually, I was lying in a cage, twitching.” She dismissed that with a wave. “There wasn’t much to it. No drivers or passengers. Two saps.”

  “Sapients?”

  “‘Sapient defense units,’ yeah, but that puts a pretty low threshold on sapience. They’re just guns on tracks with AI routines that give them a certain degree of autonomy. Pretty effective against ground troops and conventional artillery and air support. Don’t know what they were doing in our AO.”

  “Is that a blood type?” she said over her teacup.

  “Sorry. ‘Area of operations.’ I mean, one flyboy could have taken them out in a single treetop pass.”

  “So why didn’t they use a flyboy? Rather than risk damaging your expensive armored carcass.”

  “Oh, they said they wanted the cargo analyzed, which was bullshit. The only stuff besides food and ammo were some solar cells and replacement boards for field mainframes. So we know they use Mitsubishi. But if they buy anything from a Rimcorp firm, we automatically get copies of the invoices. So I’m sure that was no big surprise.”

  “So why’d they send you?”

  “Nobody said officially, but I got a thread on my vertical jack that they were feeling out Sam, Samantha.”

  “She’s the one who, her friend?”

  “Got beaten up and raped, yeah. She didn’t do too well.”

  “Who would?”

  “I don’t know. Sam’s pretty tough. But she wasn’t even half there.”

  “That would go rough on her? If she got a psychiatric discharge.”

  “They don’t like to give them, unless there’s actual brain damage. They’d either ‘find’ that or put her through an Article 12.” I got up to find some catsup for my potatoes. “That might not be as bad as rumor has it. Nobody in our company has gone through it.”

  “I thought there was a congressional investigation of that. Somebody with important parents died.”

  “Yeah, there was talk. I don’t know that it got any further than talk. Article 12 has to be a wall you can’t climb. Otherwise half the mechanics in the army would try for a psych discharge.”

  “They don’t want to make it that easy.”

  “So I used to think. Now I think part of it is keeping a balanced force. If you made an Article 12 easy, you’d lose everyone bothered by killing. The soldierboys would wind up a berserker corps.”

  “That’s a pretty picture.”

  “You should see what it looks like from inside. I told you about Scoville.”

  “A few times.”

  “Imagine him times twenty thousand.” People like Scoville are completely disassociated from killing, especially with the soldierboys. You find them in regular armies, too, though—people for whom enemy soldiers aren’t human, just counters in a game. They’re ideal for some missions and disastrous for others.

  I had to admit the potatoes were pretty good. I’d been living on bar food for a couple of days, cheese and fried meats, with corn chips for a vegetable.

  “Oh . . . you didn’t get on the cube this time.” She had her cube monitor the war channels and keep any sequences where my unit appeared. “So I was pretty sure you were having a safe, boring time.”

  “So shall we find something exciting to do?”

  “You go find something.” She picked up the plates and carried them to the sink. “I have to go back to the lab for half a day.”

  “Something I could help you with?”

  “Wouldn’t speed it up. It’s just some data formatting for a Jupiter Project update.” She sorted the plates into the dishwasher. “Why don’t you catch up on your sleep and we’ll do something tonight.”

  That sounded good to me. I switched the phone over, in case somebody wanted to bother me on Sunday morning, and returned to her rumpled bed.

  * * *

  the jupiter project was the largest particle accelerator ever built, by several orders of magnitude.

  Particle accelerators cost money—the faster the particle, the more it costs—and the history of particle physics is at least partly a history of how important really fast particles have been to various sponsoring governments.

  Of course, the whole idea of money had changed with the nanoforges. And that changed the pursuit of “Big Science.”

  The Jupiter Project was the result of several years’ arguing and wheedling, which resulted in the Alliance sponsoring a flight to Jupiter. The Jupiter probe dropped a programmed nanoforge into its dense atmosphere, and deposited another one on the surface of
Io. The two machines worked in concert, the Jupiter one sucking up deuterium for warm fusion and beaming the power to the one on Io, which manufactured elements for a particle accelerator that would ring the planet in Io’s orbit and concentrate power from Jupiter’s gargantuan magnetic field.

  Prior to the Jupiter Project, the biggest “supercollider” had been the Johnson Ring that circled several hundred miles beneath Texas wasteland. This one would be ten thousand times as long and a hundred thousand times as powerful.

  The nanoforge actually built other nanoforges, but ones that could only be used for the purpose of making the elements of the orbiting particle accelerator. So the thing did grow at an exponential rate, the busy machines chewing up the blasted surface of Io and spitting it out into space, forming a ring of uniform elements.

  What used to cost money now cost time. The researchers on Earth waited while ten, a hundred, a thousand elements were chucked into orbit. After six years there were five thousand of them, enough to start firing up the huge machine.

  Time was involved in another way, a theoretical measure. It had to do with the beginning of the universe—the beginning of time. One instant after the Diaspora (once called the Big Bang), the universe was a small cloud of highly energetic particles swarming outward at close to the speed of light. An instant later, they were a different swarm, and so on out to a whole second, ten seconds, and so on. The more energy you pumped into a particle accelerator, the closer you could come to duplicating the conditions that obtained soon after the Diaspora, the beginning of time.

  For more than a century there had been a back-and-forth dialogue between the particle physicists and the cosmologists. The cosmologists would scribble their equations, trying to figure out which particles were flitting around at what time in the universe’s development, and their results would suggest an experiment. So the physicists would fire up their accelerators and either verify the cosmologists’ equations or send them back to the blackboard.

  The reverse process also happens. One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.

  Thus it went, back and forth, up to the time of the Jupiter Project. The Johnson Ring had been able to take us back to conditions that were obtained when the universe was one tenth of a second old. By that time, it was about four times the size the Earth is now, having expanded from a dimensionless point at a great rate of speed.

  The Jupiter Project, if it worked, would take us back to a time when the universe was smaller than a pea, and filled with exotic particles that no longer exist. But it would be the biggest machine ever built, by several orders of magnitude, and it was being built by automatic robots with no direct supervision. When the Jupiter group sent an order out to Io, it would get there fifteen to twenty-four minutes later, and of course the response would be delayed by an equal length of time. A lot can happen in forty-eight minutes; twice, the Project had to be halted and reprogrammed—but you couldn’t really “halt” it, not all at once, because the submachines that were making the parts that would go into orbit just kept on going for forty-eight minutes plus however long it took to figure out how to reprogram them.

  Over the Jupiter Program director’s desk, there was a picture from a movie over a century old: Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, staring dumbfounded at the endless line of brainless brooms marching through the door.

  * * *

  i slept a couple of hours and woke up suddenly, in a panic sweat. I couldn’t remember what I’d been dreaming about, but it left me with a fading sense of vertigo, falling. It had happened a few times before, the first day or two off duty.

  Some people wound up never getting any deep sleep unless they were jacked. Sleeping that way gave you total blackness, total lack of sensation or thought. Practicing up for death. But relaxing.

  I lay there staring into the watery light for another half hour and decided to stop trying. Went into the kitchen and buzzed up some coffee. Really ought to work, but I wouldn’t have any papers until Tuesday, and Research could wait until tomorrow morning’s meeting.

  Catch up on the world. I’d resolutely stayed away from it in Cambridge. I turned on Amelia’s desk and decrypted a thread to my news module.

  It humors me and puts the light stuff first. I read through twenty pages of comics and the three columns I knew to be safely immune from politics. One of them did a broad satire about Central America anyhow.

  Central and South America took up most of the world news section, unsurprisingly. The African front was quiet, still stunned a year after our nuking of Mandelaville. Perhaps regrouping and calculating which of our cities would be next.

  Our little sortie wasn’t even mentioned. Two platoons of soldierboys took the towns of Piedra Sola and Igatimi, in Uruguay and Paraguay; supposedly rebel strongholds. We did it with their governments’ foreknowledge and permission, of course—and there were no civilian casualties, equally of course. Once they’re dead they’re rebels. “La muerte es el gran convertidor,” they say—“Death is the great converter.” That must be literally true as well as a sarcasm about our body counts. We’ve killed a quarter-million in the Americas and God knows how many in Africa. If I lived in either place I’d be a “rebel.”

  There was a business-as-usual running report about the Geneva talks. The enemy is so fragmented they will never come together on terms, and I’m sure at least some of the rebel leaders are plants, puppets ordered to keep the thing good and confused.

  They did actually come to agreement over nuclear weapons: neither side would use them except in retaliation, starting now, though Ngumi still won’t take responsibility for Atlanta. What we really need is an agreement on agreements: “If we promise something, we won’t break the promise for at least thirty days.” Neither side would agree to that.

  I turned off the machine and checked Amelia’s refrigerator. No beer. Well, that was my responsibility. Some fresh air wouldn’t hurt, anyhow, so I locked up and pedaled toward the campus gate.

  The shoe sergeant in charge of security looked at my ID and made me wait while he phoned for verification. The two privates with him leaned on their weapons and smirked. Some shoes have a thing about mechanics, since we don’t “actually” fight. Forget that we have to stay in longer and have a higher death rate. Forget that we keep them from having to do the really dangerous jobs.

  Of course, that’s exactly it for some of them: we also stand in the way of their being heroes. “It takes all kinds of people to make a world,” my mother always says. Fewer kinds to make an army.

  He finally admitted I was who I was. “You carrying?” he asked as he filled out the pass.

  “No,” I said. “Not in the daytime.”

  “Your funeral.” He folded the pass precisely in two and handed it over. Actually, I was armed, with a puttyknife and a little Beretta belt-buckle laser. It might be his own funeral someday, if he couldn’t tell whether or not a man was armed. I saluted the privates with one erect finger between the eyes, traditional draftee greeting, and went out into the zoo.

  There were about a dozen whores lounging around the gate, one of them a jill, her head shaved. She was old enough to be an ex-mechanic. You always wondered.

  Of course, she noticed me. “Hey, Jack!” She stepped onto the path and I stopped the bike. “I got something you can ride.”

  “Maybe later,” I said. “You’re lookin’ good.” Actually, she wasn’t. Her face and posture showed a lot of stress; the telltale pink in her eyes tagged her as a cherrybomb user.

  “Half price for you, honey.” I shook my head. She grabbed on to my handlebars. “Quarter price. Been so long since I done it jacked.”

  “I couldn’t do it jacked.” Something made me honest, or partly so. “Not with a stranger.”

  “So how long w
ould I be a stranger?” She couldn’t hide the note of pleading.

  “Sorry.” I pushed off onto the grass. If I didn’t get away fast, she’d be offering to pay me.

  The other hookers had watched the exchange with various attitudes: curiosity, pity, contempt. As if they weren’t all addicts of one kind or another, themselves. Nobody had to fuck for a living in the Universal Welfare State. Nobody had to do anything but stay out of trouble. It works so well.

  They had legalized prostitution in Florida for a few years, when I was growing up. But it went the way of the big casinos before I was old enough to be interested.

  Hooking’s a crime in Texas, but I think you have to be a real nuisance before they lock you up. The two cops who watched the jill proposition me didn’t put the cuffs on her. Maybe later, if they had the money.

  Jills usually get plenty of work. They know what it feels like to be male.

  I pedaled past the college-town stores, with their academic prices, into town. South Houston was not exactly savory, but I was armed. Besides, I figured that bad guys kept late hours, and would still be in bed. One wasn’t.

  I leaned the bike up against the rack outside of the liquor store and was fiddling with the cranky lock, which was supposed to take my card.

  “Hey boy,” a deep bass voice said behind me. “You got ten dollars for me? Maybe twenny?”

  I turned around slowly. He was a head taller than me, maybe forty, lean, muscle suit. Shiny boots up to his knees and the tightly braided ponytail of an Ender: God would use that to haul him up to heaven. Soon, he hoped.

  “I thought you guys didn’t need money.”

  “I need some. I need it now.”

  “So what’s your habit?” I put my right hand on my hip. Not natural or comfortable, but close to the puttyknife. “Maybe I got some.”

  “You don’t got what I need. Got to buy what I need.” He drew a long knife with a slender wavy blade from his boot.