Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

Mendez was still there, too, and Julian was aware of his immediate connection with Cameron, casually sorting through what the soldier had taken from his new contact. That part was not so alien, except for the speed and completeness of it. And Julian could understand why the totality could become more clear as more people joined: all the information was already there, but parts of it were better focused now that Cameron's point of view had combined with Mendez's.

Now Tyler. She was one of the murderers, too, having remorselessly killed three people in one year for money, to support a drug habit. That was just before cash became obsolete in the States; she had been captured in a routine check when she tried to emigrate to a country that had both paper pesos and designer drugs. Her crimes were older than Julian was, and although she didn't deny legal or moral responsibility for them, they literally had been done by a different person. The DD doper who lured three pushers into bed and killed them there, as a favor for their boss, was just a vivid melodramatic memory, like a movie you saw a few hours ago. For the peaceful part of her day, Tyler was part of the Twenty, as they still called themselves in their minds, even though four had died; other times she worked as an arbitrageur, bartering and buying commodities in dozens of different countries, Alliance and Ngumi. With their own nanoforge, the Twenty could survive without wealth-but then if the machine asked for a cup of praseodymium, it was nice to have a few million rupees close to hand, so Tyler could buy it without having to go through a lot of tiresome paperwork.

The others came in more rapidly, or seemed to, once Julian got over the initial strangeness.

As each of the fifteen presented himself or herself, another part of the vast, but now not endless, structure became clear. When they all had logged in, the ocean was more like an inland sea, huge and complex, but thoroughly mapped and navigable.

And they sailed together for what seemed like hours, in a voyage of mutual exploration. The only one they had ever jacked with outside the Twenty was Marty, who was a sort of godfather figure, remote because he only jacked one-way with them now.

Julian was a vast treasure of quotidian detail. They were hungry for his impressions of New York, Washington, Dallas-every place in the country had been drastically changed by the social and technological revolution, the Universal Welfare State, that the nanoforge had wrought. Not to mention the endless Ngumi War.

The nine who had been soldiers were fascinated with what the soldierboy had become. In the pilot program they had been taken from, the primitive machines were little more than stick men with one laser finger. They could walk around and sit or lie down, and open a door if the latch was simple. They all knew from the news what the current machines were capable of doing, and in fact three of them were warboys, after a fashion. They couldn't go to the conventions, but they followed units and jacked into soldierboy crystals and strings. It was nothing like being jacked two-way with an actual mechanic, though.

Julian was embarrassed by their enthusiasm but could share their amused feedback at his embarrassment. He was familiar enough with that from his platoon.

A lot of it became more and more familiar-feeling as he grew used to the scale of it. It wasn't only that the Twenty had been together so long; they had also been around a long time. At thirty-two, Julian was the oldest in his platoon by several years; all together, they had less than three hundred years of experience. The aggregate age of the Twenty was well over a thousand, a lot of that time spent in mutual contemplation.

They weren't exactly a "group mind," but they were a lot closer to that state than Julian's platoon. They never argued, except for amusement. They were gentle and content. They were humane ... but were they quite human?

This was the question that had been in the back of Julian's mind from the time Marty first described the Twenty: maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.

The others picked up on this worry and said no, we're still human in all the ways that count. Human nature does change, and the fact that we've developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise, there would be no universe. Unless we're the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there's no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we're the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Someone does have to be first.

But maybe the first is always the last.

They caught the hopefulness that Julian was protecting with pessimism. You're much more idealistic than us, Tyler pointed out. Most of us have killed, but none of us was driven to attempt suicide by remorse over the act.

Of course there were a lot of other factors, which Julian didn't have to explain. He was cushioned by wisdom and forgiveness-and suddenly had to get out!

He pulled the plug and was surrounded but alone, fifteen people staring down at the wildflowers. Staring into their collective soul.

He checked his watch and was shocked. Only twelve minutes had actually passed during all those seeming hours.

One by one they unjacked. Mendez kneaded his face and grimaced. "You felt outnumbered."

"That's part of it... out-gunned. All of you are so good at this, it's automatic. I felt, I don't know, out of control."

"We weren't manipulating you."

Julian shook his head. "I know. You were being very careful that way. But I felt like I was being absorbed anyhow. By... by my own willingness. I don't know how long I could stay jacked with you before becoming one of you."

"And that would be such a bad thing?" Ellie Frazer said. She was the youngest, almost Amelia's age, beautiful hair prematurely white.

"Not for me, I think. Not for me personally." Julian studied her quiet beauty and knew, along with everyone else, exactly how desperately she desired him. "But I can't do it yet. The next stage of this project involves going back to Portobello with a set of false memories, infiltrating the command cadre. I can't be as ... obviously different as you are."

"We know that," she said. "But you could still spend a lot more time with us – "

"Ellie," Mendez said gently, "turn off the goddamned pheromones. Julian knows what's best for him."

"I don't, actually. Who would? Nobody's ever done anything like this before."

"You have to be cautious," Ellie said in a way that was reassuring and infuriating: we know exactly what you think, and though you're wrong, we'll go along with it.

Marc Lobell, the chess master and wife murderer who had stayed out of the circle to answer the phone, ran pounding over the little bridges and skidded to a stop in front of them.

"A guy in uniform," he said, panting. "Here to see Sergeant Class."

"Who is it?" Julian said.

"A doctor," he said. "Colonel Zamat Jefferson."

MENDEZ IN ALL THE authority of his own black uniform, came along with me to meet Jefferson. He stood up slowly when we walked into the shabby foyer, setting down a Reader's Digest half his age.

"Father Mendez; Colonel Jefferson," I said. "You went to some trouble to find me."

"No," he said, "it was some trouble to get here, but the computer tracked you down in a few seconds."

"To Fargo."

"I knew you'd take a bicycle. There was only one place to do that at the airport, and you left them an address."

"You pulled rank."

"Not on civilians. I showed them my ID and said I was your doctor. Which is not false."

"I'm okay now. You can go."

He laughed. "Wrong on both counts. Can we sit?"

"We have a place," Mendez said. "Follow me."

"What is 'a place'?" Jefferson said.

"A place where we can sit." They looked at each other for a moment and Jefferson nodded.

Two doors down the corridor, we turned into an unmarked room. It had a mahogany conference table with overstuffed chairs and an autobar. "Something to drink?"

Jefferson and I wanted water and wine; Mendez asked for apple juice. The bar wheelie brought our orders while we were sitting down.

"Is there some way we can help each other?" Mendez said, folding his hands on his small paunch.

"There are some things Sergeant Class might shed some light on." He stared at me for one second. "I suddenly made full colonel and had orders cut for Fort Powell. Nobody in Brigade knew anything about it; the orders came from Washington, some 'Medical Personnel Redistribution Group.'"

"This was a bad thing?" Mendez said.

"No. I was gratified. I've never been happy with the Texas and Portobello posting, and this move took me back to the area where I grew up.

"I'm still in the middle of moving, settling in. But I was going through my appointment calendar yesterday, and your name came up. I was scheduled to jack with you and see how well the antidepressants are working."

"They're working fine. Are you traveling thousands of miles to check up on all your old patients?"

"Of course not. But I punched up your file out of curiosity, almost automatically-and what do you know? There's no record of your having contemplated suicide. And it seems you have new orders cut, too. Authorized by the same major general in Washington who cut my orders. But you're not part of the 'Medical Personnel Redistribution Group'; you're in a training program for assimilation into command structure. A soldier who wanted to commit suicide because he killed someone. That's interesting.

"And so I trace you down to here. A rest home for old soldiers who aren't so old, and some of whom aren't soldiers."

"So you want to lose your colonelcy," Mendez said, "and go back to Texas? To Portobello?"

"Not at all. I'll risk telling you this: I didn't go through channels. I don't want to rock the boat." He pointed at me. "But I have a patient here, and a mystery I'd like to solve."

"The patient's fine," I said. "The mystery is something that you don't want to be involved in."

There was a long, thick silence. "People know where I am."

"We don't mean to threaten you, or frighten you," Mendez said. "But there's no way you have the clearance to be told about this. Julian can't let you jack with him, for that reason."

"I have top-secret clearance."

"I know." Mendez leaned forward and said quietly: "Your ex-wife's name is Eudora and you have two children – Pash, who's in medical school in Ohio, and Roger, who's in a New Orleans dance company. You were born on 5 March 1990 and your blood type is O-Negative. Do you want to know your dog's name?"

"You're not threatening me with this."

"I'm trying to communicate with you."

"But you're not even in the military. Nobody here is, except Sergeant Class."

"That should tell you something. You have top-secret clearance and yet my identity is concealed from you."

The colonel shook his head. He leaned back and drank some wine. "There's been time enough for somebody to find out these things about me. I can't decide whether you're some kind of super-spook or just one of the best bullshit artists I've ever come across."

"If I were bluffing, I'd threaten you now. But you know that, and that's why you said what you just said."

"And so you threaten me by making no threat."

Mendez laughed. "Takes one to know one. I will admit to being a psychiatrist."