Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

That message was Sunday night. The next was from Hayes, Monday, saying he'd checked my schedule and wouldn't do anything until I got home. I took time for a quick shave and called him at home.

It was only ten, but he answered no-face. When he heard it was me, he turned on the screen, rubbing his face. I'd obviously gotten him out of bed.

"Julian. Sorry ... I've been on an odd schedule because we're testing for the big jump. The engineers had me up till three last night.

"Okay, look, about Blaze. It's no secret that you two are keeping company. I understand why she wants to be discreet, and appreciate it, but that's not a factor between you and me." His smile had real pain in it. "Okay?"

"Sure. I figured..."

"So what about Guadalajara?"

"I, I'm still a little in shock. I'll go downtown and get the first train; two hours, four, depending on connections ... no, I'll call the base first and see if I can get a flight."

"Once you get down there?"

"I'll have to talk to people. I have a jack but don't know much about the installation-I mean, I was drafted; nobody gave me a choice. See whether I can talk to her."

"Son, they said she can't talk. She's paralyzed."

"I know, I know. But that's just motor function. If we can jack, we can talk. Find out what she wants."

"Okay." He shook his head. "Okay. But tell her what I want. I want her back in the shop today. Yesterday. Macro is going to have her head on a platter." He was trying to sound angry. "Damn fool stunt, just like Blaze. You call me from Mexico."

"Will do." He nodded and cut off.

I called the base and there weren't any direct flights scheduled. I could go back to Portobello and hitch up to Mexico City in the morning. Gracias, pero no gracias. I punched up the train schedule and called a cab.

It was only three hours to Guadalajara, but a bad three hours. I got to the hospital about one-thirty but of course couldn't get past the front desk. Not until seven; even then, I wouldn't be able to see Amelia until Dr. Spencer came in, maybe eight, maybe nine.

I got a mediocuarto-half-room – – at a motel across the street, just a futon and a lamp. Couldn't sleep, so I found an all-night place and got a bottle of tequila almendrada and a news magazine. I sipped about half the bottle, laboriously picking my way through the magazine article by article. My everyday Spanish is all right but it's hard for me to follow a complicated written argument, since I never studied the language in school. There was a long article about the pros and cons of a euthanasia lottery for the elderly, which was scary enough even when you only got half the words.

In the war news there was a paragraph about our kidnapping venture, which was described as a peacekeeping police action ambushed by rebels. I don't guess they sell too many copies in Costa Rica. Or they probably just print a different version.

It was an amusing magazine, with ads that would have been illegal pornography in some of the United States. Six-image manifolds that move with stroboscopic jerkiness if you shake the page. Like most male readers, I suppose, I came up with an interesting way to shake the page, which finally helped me get to sleep.

I went over to the waiting room at seven and read less interesting magazines for an hour and a half, when Dr. Spencer finally showed up. He was tall and blond and spoke English with a Mexican accent thick as guaca-mole.

"Into my office, first, come." He took me by the arm and steered me down the hall. His office was a plain windowless room with a desk and two chairs; one of the chairs was occupied.

"Marty!"

He nodded. "Hayes called me, after he talked to you. Blaze had said something about me."

"An honor to have you here, Dr. Larrin." Spencer sat down behind the desk.

I sat on the other hard chair. "So what are our options?"

"Directed nanosurgery," Spencer said. "There are no other options."

"But there is," Marty said, "technically."

"Not legally."

"We could get around that."

"Would somebody tell me what you're talking about?"

"Mexican law is less liberal than American," Marty said, "in matters of self-determination."

"In your country," Spencer said, "she would have the option of remaining a vegetable."

"Well put, Dr. Spencer. Another way of putting it is that she would have the option of not risking her life and sanity."

"I'm missing something," I said.

"You shouldn't be. She's jacked, Julian! She can live a very full life without moving a muscle."

"Which is obscene."

"It's an option. The nanosurgery is risky."

"Not so. Not so risky. Mas o menos the same as the jack. We have ninety-two percent recovery."

"You mean ninety-two percent survival," Marty said. "What percent total recovery?"

He shrugged, twice. "These numbers. They don't mean anything. She's healthy and relatively young. The operation will not kill her."

"She's a brilliant physicist. If she comes out with brain damage, that's the same as no recovery."

"Which is explained to her before the installation of the jack." He held up a document five or six pages long. "Before she signs the release."

"Why don't you jack her and ask her?" I said.

"It is not simple," Spencer said. "The first moment she is jacked, is new, new neural pathways are formed. The network grows ..." He gestured with one hand. "It grows more than fast."

"It grows at an exponential rate," Marty said. "The longer she's jacked, the more experiences she has, the harder it is to undo."

"And so this is why we do not ask her."

"In America you'd have to," Marty said. "Right of full disclosure."

"America is a very strange country. You don't mind my saying?"

"If I jacked with her," I said, "I could be in and out muy pronto. Dr. Larrin's had a jack longer, but it's not an everyday tool, the way it is with a mechanic." Spencer frowned at that. "A soldier."

"Yes ... I suppose that's true." He leaned back and paused. "Still, it is against the law."

Marty gave him a look. "This law is never broken."

"I think you would say 'bent.' The law is bent, for foreigners." Marty made an unambiguous gesture with thumb and two fingers. "Well... not a bribe, as such. Some bureaucracy, and a tax. Do either of you have a ..." He opened a desk drawer and said, "Poder."

The drawer answered, "Power of attorney."

"Do you have one of those with her?"

We looked at each other and shook our heads. "This was a surprise to both of us."

"She was not well advised. This is something she should have done. Is either of you her fiance?"

"You could say that," I said.

"Bueno, okay." He picked a card out of a drawer and passed it over. "Go to this office after nine o'clock and this woman will issue you a temporary designation de responsabilidad." He repeated it into the drawer. "State of Jalisco Temporary Assignment of Legal Responsibility," it translated.

"Wait," I said. "This allows a person's fiance to authorize a life-threatening surgical procedure?"

He shrugged. "Brother, sister, too. Uncle, aunt, nephew. Only when the person cannot decide for himself, herself. People wind up in Profesora Harding's situation every day. Several people every day, counting Mexico City and Acapulco."

It made sense; elective surgery must be one of the biggest sources of foreign income for Guadalajara, maybe for all of Mexico. I turned the card over; the English side said, "Accommodations to the Mexican Legal System."

"How much is this going to cost?"

"Maybe ten thousand pesos." Five hundred dollars.

"I can pay for it," Marty said.

"No, let me do it. I'm the fiance." I also make three times his salary.

"Whoever," Spencer said. "You come back with the piece of paper and me, I set up the jack. But have your mind ready. Find the answer and then unplug. That will be safer and easier all around."

But what would I do if she asked me to stay?

It took almost as long to find the lawyer as it had to get to Guadalajara from Texas. They had moved.

Their new digs were not impressive, a table and a moth-eaten couch, but they did have all the paperwork. I wound up with a limited power of attorney that gave me authority for medical decisions. It was a little scary, how easy the process was.

When I came back, I was directed to Surgery B, a small white room. Dr. Spencer had Amelia prepped for both jacking and surgery, lying on a gurney with a drip in each arm. A thin cable led from the back of her head to a gray box on a table. Another jack was coiled on top of it. Marty was dozing in a chair by the door. He woke up when I came in.

"Where's the doctor?" I said.

"Aqui." He was right behind me. "You have the paper?" I handed it to him; he glanced at it, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

He touched Amelia on the shoulder, and then put the back of his hand on her cheek, then her forehead, an oddly maternal gesture.

"For you, you know ... this is not going to be easy."

"Easy? I spend a third of my life – "

"Jacked, si. But not with someone who's never done it before. Not with someone you love." He pointed. "Bring that chair here and sit."

While I was doing that, he rummaged through a couple of drawers. "Roll up your sleeve."

I did that and he buzzed off a little patch of hair with a razor, then unwrapped a 'derm and slapped it on.

"What's that, a trank?"

"Not exactly. It does trank, tranquilize, in a way. It softens the blow, the shock of first contact."

"But I've done first contact a dozen times."

"Yes, but only while your army had control over your ... what? System of circulation. You were drugged then, and now you will be drugged as well."

It hit me like a soft slap. He heard my sudden intake of breath.

"iListo?"

"Go ahead." He uncoiled the cable and slipped the jack into my socket with a metallic click. Nothing happened. Then he turned on a switch.

Amelia suddenly turned to look at me and I had the familiar double-vision sensation, seeing myself while I looked at her. Of course it wasn't familiar to her, and I was seized with secondhand confusion and panic. It gets easy dear hold on! I tried to show her how to separate the two pictures, a mental twist really no harder than defocusing your eyes. After a moment she got it, calmed, and tried to make words.

You don't have to verbalize, I felt at her. Just think what you want to say.

She asked me to touch my face and run my hand slowly down my chest to my lap, my genitals.

"Ninety seconds," the doctor said. "Tenga prisa."

I basked in the wonder of discovery. It wasn't like the difference between blindness and sight, exactly, but it was as if all your life you'd been wearing thick tinted glasses, one lens opaque, and suddenly they were gone. A world full of brilliance, depth and color.

I'm afraid you get used to it, I felt. It becomes just another way of seeing. Of being, she answered.

In one burst of gestalt I told her what her options were, and of the danger of staying jacked too long. After a silence, she answered in individual words. I transferred her questions to Dr. Spencer, speaking with robotic slowness.

"If I have the jack removed, and the brain damage is such that I can't work, can I have the jack reinstalled?"

"If somebody pays for it, yes. Though your perceptions would be diminished."

"I'll pay for it."

"Which one are you?"

"Julian."

The pause seemed very long. She spoke through me: "I'll do it, then. But on one condition. First we make love this way. Have sex. Jacked."