Forever Peace

IT WAS NOT QUITE completely dark, thin blue moonlight threading down through the canopy of leaves. And it was never completely quiet.

A thick twig popped, the noise muffled under a heavy mass. A male howler monkey came out of his drowse and looked down. Something moved down there, black on black. He filled his lungs to challenge it.

There was a sound like a piece of newspaper being torn. The monkey's midsection disappeared in a dark spray of blood and shredded organs. The body fell heavily through the branches in two halves.

Would you lay off the goddamn monkeys? Shut up! This place is an ecological preserve. My watch, shut up. Target practice.

Black on black it paused, then slipped through the jungle like a heavy silent reptile. A man could be standing two yards away and not see it. In infrared it wasn't there. Radar would slither off its skin.

It smelled human flesh and stopped. The prey maybe thirty meters upwind, a male, rank with old sweat, garlic on his breath. Smell of gun oil and smokeless powder residue. It tested the direction of the wind and backtracked, circled around. The man would be watching the path. So come in from the woods.

It grabbed the man's neck from behind and pulled his head off like an old blossom. The body shuddered and gurgled and crapped. It eased the body down to the ground and set the head between its legs.

Nice touch. Thanks.

It picked up the man's rifle and bent the barrel into a right angle. It lay the weapon down quietly and stood silent for several minutes.

Then three other shadows came from the woods, and they all converged on a small wooden hut. The walls were beaten-down aluminum cans nailed to planks; the roof was cheap glued plastic.

It pulled the door off and an irrelevant alarm sounded as it switched on a headlight brighter than the sun. Six people on cots, recoiling.

" – Do not resist," it boomed in Spanish. " – You are prisoners of war and will be treated according to the terms of the Geneva Convention."

"Mierda." A man scooped up a shaped charge and threw it at the light. The tearing-paper sound was softer than the sound of the man's body bursting. A split second later, it swatted the bomb like an insect and the explosion blew down the front wall of the building and flattened all the occupants with concussion.

The black figure considered its left hand. Only the thumb and first finger worked, and the wrist made a noise when it rotated.

Good reflexes. Oh, shut up.

The other three shapes turned on sunlights and pulled off the building's roof and knocked down the remaining walls.

The people inside looked dead, bloody and still. The machines began to check them, though, and a young woman suddenly rolled over and raised the laser rifle she'd been concealing. She aimed it at the one with the broken hand and did manage to raise a puff of smoke from its chest before she was shredded.

The one checking the bodies hadn't even looked up. "No good," it said. "All dead. No tunnels. No exotic weapons I can find."

"Well, we got some stuff for Unit Eight." They turned off their lights and sped off simultaneously, in four different directions.

The one with the bad hand moved about a quarter-mile and stopped to inspect the damage with a dim infrared light. It beat the hand against its side a few times. Still, only the two digits worked.

Wonderful. We'll have to bring it in.

So what would you have done?

Who's complaining? I'll spend part of my ten in base camp.

The four of them took four different routes to the top of a treeless hill. They stood in a row for a few seconds, arms upraised, and a cargo helicopter came in at treetop level and snatched them away.

Who got the second kill there? thought the one with the broken hand.

A voice appeared in all four heads. "Berryman initiated the response. But Hogarth commenced firing before the victim was unambiguously dead. So by the rules, they share the kill."

The helicopter with the four soldierboys dangling slipped down the hill and screamed through the night at treetop level, in total darkness, east toward friendly Panama.

I DIDN'T LIKE SCOVILLE having the soldierboy before me. You have to monitor the previous mechanic for twenty-four hours before you take it over, to warm up and become sensitive to how the soldierboy might have changed since your last shift. Like losing the use of three fingers.

When you're in the warm-up seat you're just watching; you're not jacked into the rest of the platoon, which would be hopelessly confusing. We go in strict rotation, so the other nine soldierboys in the platoon also have replacements breathing over their mechanics' shoulders.

You hear about emergencies, where the replacement has to suddenly take over from the mechanic. It's easy to believe, The last day would be the worst even without the added stress of being watched. If you're going to crack or have a heart attack or stroke, it's usually on the tenth day.

Mechanics aren't in any physical danger, deep inside the Operations bunker in Portobello. But our death and disability rate is higher than the regular infantry. It's not bullets that get us, though; it's our own brains and veins.

It would be rough for me or any of my mechanics to replace people in Scoville's platoon, though. They're a hunter-killer group, and we're "harassment and interdiction," H &I; sometimes loaned to Psychops. We don't often kill. We aren't selected for that aptitude.

All ten of our soldierboys came into the garage within a couple of minutes. The mechanics jacked out and the exoskeleton shells eased open. Scoville's people climbed out like little old men and women, even though their bodies had been exercised constantly and adjusted for fatigue poisons. You still couldn't help feeling as if you'd been sitting in the same place for nine days.

I jacked out. My connection with Scoville was a light one, not at all like the near-telepathy that links the ten mechanics in the platoon. Still, it was disorienting to have my own brain to myself.

We were in a large white room with ten of the mechanic shells and ten warm-up seats, like fancy barber chairs. Behind them, the wall was a huge backlit map of Costa Rica, showing with lights of various colors where soldierboy and flyboy units were working. The other walls were covered with monitors and digital readouts with jargon labels. People in white fatigues walked around checking the numbers.

Scoville stretched and yawned and walked over to me.

"Sorry you thought that last bit of violence was unnecessary. I felt the situation called for direct action." God, Scoville and his academic airs. Doctorate in Leisure Arts.

"You usually do. If you'd warned them from outside, they would've had time to assess the situation. Surrender."

"Yes indeed. As they did in Ascension."

"That was one time." We'd lost ten soldierboys and a flyboy to a nuclear booby trap.

"Well, the second time won't be on my watch. Six fewer pedros in the world." He shrugged. "I'll go light a candle."

"Ten minutes to calibration," a loudspeaker said. Hardly enough time for the shell to cool down. I followed Scoville into the locker room. He went to one end to get into his civvies; I went to the other end to join my platoon.

Sara was already mostly undressed. "Julian. You want to do me?"

Yes, like most of our males and one female, I did, as she well knew, but that's not what she meant. She took off her wig and handed me the razor. She had three weeks' worth of fine blond stubble. I gently shaved off the area surrounding the input at the base of her skull.

"That last one was pretty brutal," she said. "Scoville needed the body count, I guess."

"It occurred to him. He's eleven short of making E-8. Good thing they didn't come across an orphanage."

"He'd be bucking for captain," she said.

I finished her and she checked mine, rubbing her thumb around the jack. "Smooth," she said. I keep my head shaved off duty, though it's unfashionable for black men on campus. I don't mind long bushy hair, but I don't like it well enough to run around all day wearing a hot wig.

Louis came over. "Hi, Julian. Give me a buzz, Sara." She reached up-he was six feet four and Sara was small-and he winced when she turned on the razor.

"Let me see that," I said. His skin was slightly inflamed on one side of the implant. "Lou, that's going to be trouble. You should've shaved before the warm-up."

"Maybe. You gotta choose." Once you were in the cage you were there for nine days. Mechanics with fast-growing hair and sensitive skin, like Sara and Lou, usually shaved once, between warm-up and the shift. "It's not the first time," he said. "I'll get some cream from the medics."

Bravo platoon got along pretty well. That was partly a matter of chance, since we were selected out of the pool of appropriate draftees by body size and shape, to fit the platoon's cages and the aptitude profile for H &I. Five of us were survivors of the original draft pick: Candi and Mel as well as Lou, Sara, and me. We've been doing this for four years, working ten days on and twenty off. It seems like a lot longer.

Candi is a grief counselor in real life; the rest of us are academics of some stripe. Lou and I are science, Sara is American politics, and Mel is a cook. "Food science," so called, but a hell of a cook. We get together a few times a year for a banquet at his place in St. Louis.

We went together back to the cage area. "Okay, listen up," the loudspeaker said. "We have damage on Units One and Seven, so we won't calibrate the left hand and right leg at this time."

"So we need the cocksuckers?" Lou asked.

"No, the drains will not be installed. If you can hold it for forty-five minutes."

"I'll certainly try, sir."

"We'll do the partial calibration and then you're free for ninety minutes, maybe two hours, while we set up the new hand and leg modules for Julian and Candi's machines. Then we'll finish the calibration and hook up the orthotics, and you're off to the staging area."

"Be still my heart," Sara murmured.

We lay down in the cages, working arms and legs into stiff sleeves, and the techs jacked us in. For the calibration we were tuned down to about ten percent of a combat jack, so I didn't hear actual words from anybody but Lou – a "hello there" that was like a faint shout from a mile away. I focused my mind and shouted back.

The calibration was almost automatic for those of us who'd been doing it for years, but we did have to stop and back up twice for Ralph, a neo who'd joined us two cycles ago when Richard stroked out. It was just a matter of all ten of us squeezing one muscle group at a time, until the red thermometer matched the blue thermometer on the heads-up. But until you're used to it, you tend to squeeze too hard and overshoot.

After an hour they opened the cage and unjacked us. We could kill ninety minutes in the lounge. It was hardly worth wasting time getting dressed, but we did. It was a gesture. We were about to live in each other's bodies for nine days, and enough was enough.

Familiarity breeds, as they say. Some mechanics become lovers, and sometimes it works. I tried it with Carolyn, who died three years ago, but we could never bridge the gap between being combat-jacked and being civilians. We tried to work it out with a relator, but the relator had never been jacked, so we might as well have been talking Sanskrit.

I don't know that it would be "love" with Sara, but it's academic. She's not really attracted to me, and of course can't hide her feelings, or lack of same. In a physical way we're closer than any civilian pair could be, since in full combat jack we are this one creature with twenty arms and legs, with ten brains, with five vaginas and five penises.

Some people call the feeling godlike, and I think there have been gods who were constructed along similar lines. The one I grew up with was an old white-bearded Caucasian gent without even one vagina.

We'd already studied the order of battle, of course, and our specific orders for the nine days. We were going to continue in Scoville's area, but doing H &I, making things difficult in the cloud forest of Costa Rica. It was not a particularly dangerous assignment, but it was distasteful, like bullying, since the rebels didn't have anything remotely like soldierboys.

Ralph expressed his discomfort. We had sat down at the dining table with tea and coffee.

"This overkill gets to me," he said. "That pair in the tree last time."

"Ugly," Sara said.

"Ah, the bastards killed themselves," Mel said. He sipped the coffee and scowled at it. "We probably wouldn't have noticed them if they hadn't opened up on us."

"It bothers you that they were children?" I asked Ralph.

"Well, yeah. Doesn't it you?" He rubbed the stubble on his chin. "Little girls."

"Little girls with machine guns," Karen said, and Claude nodded emphatically. They'd come in together about a year ago, and were lovers.

"I've been thinking about that, too," I said. "What if we'd known they were little girls?" They'd been about ten years old, hiding in a tree house.

"Before or after they started shooting?" Mel asked.

"Even after," Candi said. "How much damage can they do with a machine gun?"

"They damaged me pretty effectively!" Mel said. He'd lost one eye and the olfactory receptors. "They knew exactly what to aim for."

"It wasn't a big deal," Candi said. "You got field replacements."

"Felt like a big deal to me."

"I know. I was there." You don't exactly feel pain when a sensor goes out. It's something as strong as pain, but there's no word for it.

"I don't think we would've had to kill them if they were out in the open," Claude said. "If we could see they were just kids and lightly armed. But hell, for all we knew they were FOs who could call in a tac nuke."

"In Costa Rica?" Candi said.

"It happens," Karen said. It had happened once in three years. Nobody knew where the rebels had gotten the nuke. It had cost them two towns, the one the soldierboys were in when they were vaporized, and the one we took apart in retaliation.

"Yeah, yeah," Candi said, and I could hear in those two words all she wasn't saying: that a nuke on our position would just destroy ten machines. When Mel flamed the tree house he roasted two little girls, probably too young to know what they were doing.

There was always an undercurrent in Candi's mind, when we were jacked. She was a good mechanic, but you had to wonder why she hadn't been given some other assignment. She was too empathetic, sure to crack before her term was up.

But maybe she was in the platoon to act as our collective conscience. Nobody at our level knew why anybody was chosen to be a mechanic, and we only had a vague idea why we were assigned to the platoon we got. We seemed to cover a wide range of aggressiveness, from Candi to Mel. We didn't have anybody like Scoville, though. Nobody who got that dark pleasure out of killing. Scoville's platoon always saw more action than mine, too; no coincidence. Hunter-killers-they're definitely more congenial with mayhem. So when the Great Computer in the Sky decides who gets what mission, Scoville's platoon gets the kills and ours gets reconnaissance.

Mel and Claude, especially, grumbled about that. A confirmed kill was an automatic point toward promotion, in pay grade if not in rank, whereas you couldn't count on the PPR-Periodic Performance Review-for a dime. Scoville's people got the kills, so they averaged about twenty-five percent higher pay than my people. But what could you spend it on? Save it up and buy our way out of the army?

"So we're gonna do trucks," Mel said. "Cars and trucks."

"That's the word," I said. "Maybe a tank if you hold your mouth right." Satellites had picked up some IR traces that probably meant the rebels were being re-supplied by small stealthed trucks, probably robotic or remote. One of those outbursts of technology that kept the war from being a totally one-sided massacre.

I suppose if the war went on long enough, the enemy might have soldierboys, too. Then we could have the ultimate in something: ten-million-dollar machines reducing each other to junk while their operators sat hundreds of miles away, concentrating in air-conditioned caves.

People had written about that, warfare based on attrition of wealth rather than loss of life. But it's always been easier to make new lives than new wealth. And economic battles have long-established venues, some political and some not, as often among allies as not.

Well, what does a physicist know about it? My science has rules and laws that seem to correspond to reality. Economics describes reality after the fact, but isn't too good at predicting. Nobody predicted the nanoforges.

The loudspeaker told us to saddle up. Nine days of truck-stalking.

ALL TEN PEOPLE IN Julian Class's platoon had the same basic weapon-the soldierboy, or Remote Infantry Combat Unit: a huge suit of armor with a ghost in it. For all the weight of its armor, more than half of the RICU's mass was ammunition. It could fire accurate sniper rounds to the horizon, two ounces of depleted uranium, or at close range it could hose a stream of supersonic flechettes. It had high explosive and incendiary rockets with eyes, a fully automatic grenade launcher, and a high-powered laser. Special units could be fitted with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but those were only used for reprisal in kind.

(Fewer than a dozen nuclear weapons, small ones, had been used in twelve years of war. A large one had destroyed Atlanta, and although the Ngumi denied responsibility, the Alliance responded by giving twenty-four hours notice, and then leveling Mandellaville and Sao Paulo. Ngumi contended that the Alliance had cynically sacrificed one nonstrategic city so it could have an excuse to destroy two important ones. Julian suspected they might be right.)

There were air and naval units, too, inevitably called flyboys and sailorboys, even though most flyboys were piloted by females.

All of Julian's platoon had the same armor and weapons, but some had specialized functions. Julian, being platoon leader, communicated directly and (in theory) constantly with the company coordinator, and through her to the brigade command. In the field, he received constant input in the form of encrypted signals from fly-over satellites as well as the command station in geosynchronous orbit. Every order came from two sources simultaneously, with different encryptation and a different transmission lag, so it would be almost impossible for the enemy to slip in a bogus command.

Ralph had a "horizontal" link similar to Julian's "vertical" one. As platoon liaison, he was in touch with his opposite number in each of the other nine platoons that made up Bravo. They were "lightly jacked" – the communication wasn't as intimate as he had with other members of the platoon, but it was more than just a radio link. He could advise Julian as to the other platoons,' actions and even feelings, morale, in a quick and direct way. It was rare for all the platoons to be engaged in a single action, but when they were, the situation was chaotic and confusing. The platoon liaisons then were as important as the vertical command links.

One soldierboy platoon could do as much damage as a brigade of regular infantry. They did it quicker and more dramatically, like huge invincible robots moving in silent concert.

They didn't use actual armed robots, for several reasons. One was that they could be captured and used against you; if the enemy could capture a soldierboy they would just have an expensive piece of junk. None had ever been captured intact, though; they self-destruct impressively.

Another problem with robots was autonomy: the machine has to be able to function on its own if communications are cut off. The image, as well as the reality, of a heavily armed machine making spot combat decisions was not something any army wanted to deal with. (Soldierboys had limited autonomy, in case their mechanics died or passed out. They stopped firing and went for shelter while a new mechanic was warmed up and jacked.)

The soldierboys were arguably more effective psychological weapons than robots would be. They were like all-powerful knights, heroes. And they represented a technology that was out of the enemy's grasp.

The enemy did use armed robots, like, as it turned out, the two tanks that were guarding the convoy of trucks that Julian's platoon was sent to destroy. Neither of the tanks caused any trouble. In both cases they were destroyed as soon as they revealed their position by firing. Twenty-four robot trucks were destroyed, too, after their cargos had been examined: ammunition and medical supplies.

After the last truck had been reduced to shiny slag, the platoon still had four days left on its shift, so they were flown back to the Portobello base camp, to do picket duty. That could be pretty dangerous, since the base camp was hit by rockets a couple of times a year, but most of the time it was no challenge. Not boring, though-the mechanics were protecting their own lives, for a change.

SOMETIMES IT TOOK ME a couple of days to wind down and be ready to be a civilian again. There were plenty of joints in Portobello willing to help ease the transition. I usually did my unwinding back in Houston, though. It was easy for rebels to slip across the border and pass as Panamanians, and if you got tagged as a mechanic you were a prime target. Of course there were plenty of other Americans and Europeans in Portobello, but it's possible that mechanics stood out: pale and twitchy, collars pulled up to hide the skull jacks, or wigs. We lost one that way last month. Arly went into town for a meal and a movie. Some thugs pulled off her wig, and she was hauled into an alley and beaten to a pulp and raped. She didn't die but she didn't recover, either. They had pounded the back of her head against a wall until the skull fractured and the jack came out. They shoved the jack into her vagina and left her for dead.

So the platoon was one short this month. (The neo Personnel delivered couldn't fit Arly's cage, which was not surprising.) We may be short two next month: Sa-mantha, who is Arly's best friend, and a little bit more, was hardly there this week. Brooding, distracted, slow. If we'd been in actual combat she might have snapped out of it; both of them were pretty good soldiers-better than me, in terms of actually liking the work-but picket duty gave her too much time to meditate, and the truck assignment before that was a silly exercise a flyboy could have done on her way back from something else.

We all tried to give Samantha support while we were jacked, but it was awkward. Of course she and Arly couldn't hide their physical attraction for one another, but they were both conventional enough to be embarrassed about it (they had boyfriends on the outside), and had encouraged kidding as a way of keeping the complex relationship manageable. There was no banter now, of course.

Samantha had spent the past three weeks visiting Arly every day at the convalescent center, where the bones of her face were growing back, but that was a constant frustration, since the nature of her injuries meant they couldn't be jacked, couldn't be close. Never. And it was Samantha's nature to want revenge, but that was impossible now. The five rebels involved had been apprehended immediately, slid through the legal system, and were hanged a week later in the public square.

I'd seen it on the cube. They weren't hanged so much as slowly strangled. This in a country that hadn't used capital punishment in generations, before the war.

Maybe after the war we'll be civilized again. That's the way it has always happened in the past.

JULIAN USUALLY WENT STRAIGHT home to Houston, but not when his ten days were up on a Friday. That was the day of the week when he had to be the most social, and he needed at least a day of preparation for that. Every day you spent jacked, you felt closer to the other nine mechanics. There was a terrible sense of separation when you unjacked, and hanging around with the others didn't help. What you needed was a day or so of isolation, in the woods or in a crowd.

Julian was not the outdoor type, and he usually just buried himself in the university library for a day. But not if it was Friday.

He could fly anywhere for free, so on impulse he went up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he'd done his undergraduate work. It was a bad choice, dirty slush everywhere and thin sleet falling in a constant sting, but he grimly persisted in his quest to visit every bar he could remember. They were full of inexplicably young and callow people.

Harvard was still Harvard; the dome still leaked. People made a point of not staring at a black man in uniform.

He walked a mile through the sleet to his favorite pub, the ancient Plough and Stars, but it was padlocked, with a card saying Bahama! taped inside the window. So he squished back to the Square on frozen feet, promising simultaneously to get drunk and not lose his temper.

There was a bar named after John Harvard, where they brewed nine kinds of beer on the premises. He had a pint of each one, methodically checking them off on the blotter, and flowed into a cab that decanted him at the airport. After six hours of off-and-on slumber, he flew his hangover back to Houston Sunday morning, following the sunrise across the country.

Back at his apartment he made a pot of coffee and attacked the accumulated mail and memos. Most of it was throwaway junk. Interesting letter from his father, vacationing in Montana with his new wife, not Julian's favorite person. His mother had called twice about a money problem, but then called again to say never mind. Both brothers called about the hanging; they followed Julian's "career" closely enough to realize that the woman who'd been attacked was in his platoon.

His actual career had generated the usual soft sifting pink snowfall of irrelevant interdepartmental memos, which he did have to at least scan. He studied the minutes of the monthly faculty meeting, just in case something real had been discussed. He always missed it, since he was on duty from the tenth to the nineteenth of every month. The only way that might have hurt his career would be jealousy from other faculty members.

And then there was a hand-delivered envelope, a small square under the memos, addressed "J." He saw a corner of it and pulled it out, pink slips fluttering, and ripped open the flap, over which a red flame had been rubber-stamped: it was from Blaze, who Julian was allowed to call by her real name, Amelia. She was his coworker, ex-adviser, confidante, and sexual companion. He didn't say "lover" in his mind, yet, because that was awkward, Amelia being fifteen years older than him. Younger than his father's new wife.

The note had some chat about the Jupiter Project, the particle-physics experiment they were engaged in, including a bit of scandalous gossip about their boss, which did not alone explain the sealed envelope. "Whatever time you get back," she wrote, "come straight over. Wake me up or pull me out of the lab. I need my little boy in the worst way. You want to come over and find out what the worst way is?"

Actually, what he'd had in mind was sleeping for a few hours. But he could do that afterward. He stacked the mail into three piles and dropped one pile into the recycler. He started to call her but then put the phone down unpunched. He dressed for the morning cool and went downstairs for his bicycle.

The campus was deserted and beautiful, redbuds and azaleas in bloom under the hard blue Texas sky. He pedaled slowly, relaxing back into real life, or comfortable illusion. The more time he spent jacked, the harder it was to accept this peaceful, monocular view of life as the real one. Rather than the beast with twenty arms; the god with ten hearts.

At least he wasn't menstruating anymore.

He let himself into her place with his thumbprint. Amelia was actually up at nine this Sunday morning, in the shower. He decided against surprising her there. Showers were dangerous places-he had slipped in one once, experimenting with a fellow clumsy teenager, and had wound up with a cut chin and bruises and a decidedly un-erotic attitude toward the location (and the girl, for that matter).

So he just sat up in her bed, quietly reading the newspaper, and waited for the water to stop. She sang bits of tunes, happy, and switched the shower from fine spray to coarse pulse and back. Julian could visualize her there and almost changed his mind. But he stayed on the bed, fully clothed, pretending to read.

She came out toweling and started slightly when she saw Julian; then recovered: "Help! There's a strange man in my bed!"

"I thought you liked strange men."

"Only one." She laughed and eased alongside him, hot and damp.

ALL OF US MECHANICS talk about sex. Being jacked automatically accomplishes two things that normal people pursue through sex, and sometimes love: emotional union with another and the penetration, so to speak, of the physical mysteries of the opposite sex. These things are automatic and instantaneous, jacked, as soon as they turn on the power. When you unjack, it's a mystery you all have in common, and you talk about that as much as anything.

Amelia's the only civilian I've talked about it with at any length. She's intensely curious about it, and would take the chance if it were possible. But she would lose her position, and maybe a lot more.

Eight or nine percent of the people who go through the installation either die on the operating table or, worse, come out of it with their brains not working at all. Even those of us who come out successfully jacked face an increase in the frequency of cerebrovascular incidents, including fatal stroke. For mechanics in soldier-boys, the increase is tenfold.

So Amelia could get jacked-she has the money and could just slip down to Mexico City or Guadalajara and have it done at one of the clinics there-but she would automatically lose her position: tenure, retirement, everything. Most job contracts had a "jack" clause; all academic ones did. People like me were exempt because we didn't do it voluntarily, and it was against the law to discriminate against people in National Service. Amelia's too old to be drafted.

When we make love I sometimes have felt her stroking the cold metal disk at the base of my skull, as if she were trying to get in. I don't think she's aware of doing it.

Amelia and I had been close for many years; even when she was my Ph.D. adviser, we had a social life together. But it didn't become physical until after Carolyn died.

Carolyn and I were first jacked at the same time; joined the platoon on the same day. It was an instant emotional connection, even though we had almost nothing in common. We were both black Southerners (Amelia's pale Boston Irish) and in graduate school. But she was no intellectual; her MFA was going to be in Creative Viewing. I never watched the cube and she wouldn't know a differential equation if it had reared up and bit her on the butt. So we had no rapport at that level, but that wasn't important.

We'd been physically attracted to each other during training, the shoe stuff you go through before they put you in a soldierboy, and had managed to sneak a few minutes of privacy, three times, for hasty sex, desperately passionate. Even for normal people, that would have been an intense beginning. But then when we were jacked it was something way beyond anything either of us had ever experienced. It was as if life were a big simple puzzle, and we suddenly had a piece dropped in that nobody else could see.

But we couldn't put it together when we weren't jacked. We had a lot of sex, a lot of talks, went to relators and counsellors – but it was like we were one thing in the cage and quite another, or two others, outside.

I talked to Amelia about it at the time, not only because we were friends, but because we were on the same project and she could see my work was starting to suffer. I couldn't get Carolyn off my mind, in a very literal way.

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 putty knife 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 would 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 putty-knife. "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.

"Put it away. I got ten." The silly dagger was no match for a puttyknife, but I didn't want to perform a dissection out here on the sidewalk.

"Oh, you got ten. Maybe you got fifty." He took a step toward me.

I pulled out the puttyknife and turned it on. It hummed and glowed. "You just lost ten. How much more you want to lose?"

He stared at the vibrating blade. The shimmering mist on the top third was as hot as the surface of the sun. "You in the army. You a mechanic."

"I'm either a mechanic or I killed one and took his knife. Either way, you want to fuck with me?"

"Mechanics ain't so tough. I was in the army."

"You know all about it, then." He took a half-step to the right, I think a feint. I didn't move. "You don't want to wait for your Rapture? You want to die right now?"

He looked at me for a long second. There was nothing in his eyes. "Oh, fuck you anyhow." He put the knife back in his boot, turned, and walked away without looking back.

I turned off the puttyknife and blew on it When it was cool enough, I put it back and went into the liquor store.

The clerk had a chrome Remington airspray. "Fuckin' Endie. I would've got him."

"Thanks," I said. He would've gotten me too, with an airspray. "You got six Dixies?"

"Sure." He opened the case behind him. "Ration card?"

"Army," I said. I didn't bother with the ID.

"Figured." He rummaged. "You know they got a law I got to let the fuckin' Endies in the store? They never buy anything."

"Why should they?" I said. "World's going up in smoke tomorrow, maybe the next day."

"Right. Meanwhile they steal y' blind. All I got's cans."

"Whatever." I was starting to shake a little. Between the Ender and this trigger-happy clerk I'd probably come closer to dying than I ever would in Portobello.

He put the six-pack in front of me. "You don't want to sell that knife?"

"No, I need it all the time. Open fan mail with it."

That was the wrong thing to say. "Got to say I don't recognize you. I follow the Fourth and Sixteenth, mainly."

"I'm Ninth. Not nearly as exciting."

"Interdiction," he said, nodding. The Fourth and Sixteenth are hunter-killer platoons, so they have a considerable following. Warboys, we call their fans.

He was a little excited, even though I was just Interdiction. And Psychops. "You didn't catch the Fourth last Wednesday, did you?"

"Hey, I don't even follow my own outfit. I was in the cage then, anyhow."

He stopped for a moment with my card in his hand, struck dumb by the concept that a person could live nine days in a row inside a soldierboy and then not jump straight to the cube and follow the war.

Some do, of course. I met Scoville when he was out of the cage once, here in Houston for a warboy "assembly." There's one every week somewhere in Texas – they haul in enough booze and bum and squeak to keep them cross-eyed for a long weekend, and pay a couple of mechanics to come in and tell them what it's really really like. To be locked inside a cage and watch yourself murder people by remote control. They replay tapes of great battles and argue over fine points of strategy.

The only one I've ever gone to had a "warrior day," where all of the attendees-all except us outsiders – dressed up as warriors from the past. That was kind of scary. I assumed the tommy guns and flintlocks didn't function; even criminals were reluctant to risk that. But the swords and spears and bows looked real enough, and they were in the hands of people who had amply demonstrated, to me at least, that they shouldn't be trusted with a sharp stick.

"You were going to kill that guy?" the clerk said conversationally.

"No reason to. They always back off." As if I knew.

"But suppose he didn't."

"It wouldn't be a problem," I heard myself saying. "Take his knife hand off at the wrist. Call 9-1-1. Maybe they'd glue it back on upside down." Actually, they'd probably take their time responding. Give him a chance to beat the Rapture by bleeding to death.

He nodded. "We had two guys last month outside the store, they did the handkerchief thing, some girl." That was where two men bite down on opposite corners of a handkerchief, and have at each other with knives or razors. The one who lets go of the handkerchief loses. "One guy was dead before they got here. The other lost an ear; they didn't bother to look for it." He gestured. "I kept it in the freezer for awhile."

"You're the one who called the cops?"

"Oh yeah," he said. "Soon as it was over." Good citizen.

I strapped the beer onto the rear carrier and pedaled back toward the gate.

Things are getting worse. I hate to sound like my old man. But things really were better when I was a boy. There weren't Enders on every corner. People didn't duel. People didn't stand around and watch other people duel. And then police picked up the ears afterward.

NOT ALL ENDERS HAD ponytails and obvious attitudes. There were two in Julian's physics department, a secretary and Mac Roman himself.

People wondered how such a mediocre scientist had come out of nowhere and brown-nosed his way into a position of academic power. What they didn't appreciate was the intellectual effort it took to successfully pretend to believe in the ordered, agnostic view of the universe that physics mandated. It was all part of God's plan, though. Like the carefully falsified documents that had put him in the position of being minimally qualified for the chairmanship. Two other Enders were on the Board of Regents, able to push his case.

Macro (like one of those Regents) was a member of a militant and supersecret sect within a sect: the Hammer of God. Like all Enders, they believed God was about to bring about the destruction of humankind.

Unlike most of them, the Hammer of God felt called upon to help.

ON THE WAY BACK to campus I took a wrong turn and, circling back, passed a downscale jack joint I'd never seen. They had feelies of group sex, downhill skiing, a car crash. Done there; been that. Not to mention all the combat ones.

Actually, I'd never done the car crash. I wonder if the actor died. Sometimes Enders did that, even though jacking's supposed to be a sin. Sometimes people do it to be famous for a few minutes. I've never jacked into one of those, but Ralph has his favorites, so when I'm jacked with Ralph I get it secondhand. Guess I'll never understand fame.

There was a new sergeant at the gate to the university, so we went through the delaying song and dance again.

I pedaled aimlessly through the campus for an hour. It was pretty deserted, Sunday afternoon of a long week-end. I went into the physics building to see whether any students had slipped papers under my door, and one had-an early problem set, wonder of wonders. And a note saying he'd have to miss class because his sister had a coming-out party in Monaco. Poor kid.

Amelia's office was one floor above mine, but I didn't bother her. I really ought to work out the answers to the problem set, get ahead of the game. No, I ought to go back to Amelia's and waste the rest of the day.

I did go back to Amelia's, but in a spirit of scientific inquiry. She had a new appliance they called the "anti-microwave;" you put something in it and set the temperature you want, and it cools it down. Of course the appliance has nothing to do with microwaves.

It worked well on a can of beer. When I opened the door, wisps of vapor came out. The beer was forty degrees, but the ambient temperature inside the machine must have been a lot lower. Just to see what would happen, I put a slice of cheese in it and set it to the lowest temperature, minus forty. When it came out I dropped it on the floor, and it shattered. I think I found all the pieces.

Amelia had a little alcove behind the fireplace that she called "the library." There was just room for an antique futon and a small table. The three walls that defined the space were glassed-in shelves, full of hundreds of old books. I'd been in there with her, but not to read.

I set the beer down and looked at the titles. Mostly novels and poetry. Unlike a lot of jacks and jills, I still read for pleasure, but I like to read things that are supposed to be true.

My first couple of years of college, I majored in history with a minor in physics, but then switched around. I used to think it was the degrees in physics that got me drafted. But most mechanics have the usual compulsory-ed degrees-gym, current events, communication skills.

You don't have to be that smart to lie in the cage and twitch.

Anyhow, I like to read history, and Amelia's library was lean in that subject. A few popular illustrated texts. Mostly twenty-first century, which I planned to read about when it was over.

I remembered she wanted me to read the Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, so I took it down and settled in. Two hours and two beers.

The differences between their fighting and ours were as profound as the difference between a bad accident and a bad dream.

Their armies were equally matched in weaponry; they both had a diffuse, confused command structure that essentially resulted in one huge mob being thrown against another, to flail away with primitive guns and knives and clubs until one mob ran away.

The confused protagonist, Henry, was too deeply involved to see this simple truth, but he reported it accurately.

I wonder what poor Henry would think about our kind of war. I wonder whether his era even knew the most accurate metaphor: exterminator. And I wondered what simple truth my involvement kept me from seeing.

JULIAN DIDN'T KNOW THAT the author of The Red Badge of Courage had had the advantage of not having been a part of the war he wrote about. It's harder to see a pattern when you're part of it.

That war had been relatively straightforward in terms of economic and ideological issues; Julian's was not. The enemy Ngumi comprised a loose alliance of dozens of "rebel" forces, fifty-four this year. In all enemy countries there was a legitimate government that cooperated with the Alliance, but it was no secret that few of those governments were supported by a majority of their constituents.

It was partly an economic war, the "haves" with their automation-driven economies versus the "have-nots," who were not born into automatic prosperity. It was partly a race war, the blacks and browns and some yellows versus the whites and some other yellows. Julian was uncomfortable on some level about that, but he didn't feel much of a bond with Africa. Too long ago, too far away, and they were too crazy.

And of course it was an ideological war for some – the defenders of democracy versus the rebel strong-arm charismatic leaders. Or the capitalist land-grabbers versus the protectors of the people, take your pick.

But it was not a war that was going to have a conclusive endgame, like Appomattox or Hiroshima. Either the slow erosion of the Alliance would make it collapse into chaos, or the Ngumi would be swatted down hard enough in all locations that they would become a collection of local crime problems rather than a somewhat unified military one.

The roots of it went back to the twentieth century and even beyond; many of the Ngumi traced their political parentage back to when white men first brought sailing ships and gunpowder to their lands. The Alliance dismissed that as so much jingoistic rhetoric, but there was logic to it.

The situation was complicated by the fact that in some countries the rebels were strongly linked to organized crime, as had happened in the Drug Wars that simmered early in the century. In some, there was nothing left but crime, organized or disorganized, but universal, from border to border. In some of those places, Alliance forces were the only vestige of law-often underappreciated, when there was no legal commerce and the population's choice was between a well-stocked black market and essentials-only charity from the Alliance.

Julian's Costa Rica was anomalous. The country had managed to stay out of the war early on, maintaining the neutrality that had kept it out of the twentieth century's cataclysms. But its geographic location between Panama, the only Alliance stronghold in Central America, and Nicaragua, the hemisphere's most powerful Ngumi nation, finally dragged it into the war. At first, most of the patriotic rebels spoke with a suspicious Ni-caraguan accent. But then there was a charismatic leader and an assassination-both engineered by Ngumi, the Alliance claimed-and before long the forests and fields were filled with young men, and some women, ready to risk their lives to protect their land against the cynical capitalists and their puppets. Against the huge bulletproof giants who stalked the jungle quiet as cats; who could level a town in minutes.

Julian considered himself a political realist. He didn't swallow the facile propaganda of his own side, but the other side was just plain doomed; their leaders should be making deals with the Alliance rather than annoying it. When they nuked Atlanta they hammered the last nail into their coffin.

If indeed Ngumi had done it. No rebel group claimed responsibility, and Nairobi said it was close to being able to prove that the bomb had come from the Alliance nuclear archives: they had sacrificed five million American lives to pave the way for total war, total annihilation.

But Julian wondered about the nature of the proof, that they could be "close" to it and not be able to say anything specific. He didn't rule out the possibility that there were people on his own side insane enough to blow up one of their own cities. But he did wonder how such a thing could be kept secret for long. A lot of people would have to be involved.

Of course that could be dealt with. People who would murder five million strangers could sacrifice a few dozen friends, a few hundred coconspirators.

And so it went around and around, as it had in everybody's thoughts in the months since Atlanta, Sao Paulo, and Mandelaville. Would some actual proof emerge? Would another city be snuffed out tomorrow; and then another one, in retaliation?

It was a good time for those who owned rural real estate. People who could move were finding country life appealing.

THE FIRST FEW DAYS I'm back are usually nice and intense. The homecoming mood energizes our love life, and all the time I'm not with her I'm deeply immersed in the Jupiter Project, catching up. But a lot depends on the day of the week I come back, because Friday is always a singularity. Friday is the night of the Saturday Night Special.

That's the name of a restaurant up in the Hidalgo part of town, more expensive than I would normally patronize, and more pretentious: the theme of the place is the romanticized California Gang Era-grease, graffiti, and grime, safely distant from the table linen. As far as I'm concerned, those people were no different from today's whackers and slicers – if anything, worse, since they didn't have to worry about the federal death penalty for using guns. The waiters come around in leather jackets and meticulously grease-stained T-shirts, black jeans, and high boots. They say the wine list is the best in Houston.

I'm the youngest of the Saturday Night Special crowd by at least ten years; the only one who's not a full-time intellectual. I'm "Blaze's boy"; I don't know which of them knew or suspected I literally was her boy. I came as her friend and coworker, and everybody seemed to accept that.

My primary value to the group was the novelty of being a mechanic. That was doubly interesting to them, because a senior member of the group, Marty Larrin, was one of the designers of the cyberlink that made jacking, and thus soldierboys, possible.

Marty had been responsible for designing the system's security. Once a jack was installed, it was failsafed at a molecular level, literally impossible to modify, even for the original manufacturers; even for researchers like Marty. The nanocircuitry inside would scramble itself within a fraction of a second if any part of the complex device was tampered with. Then it would take another round of invasive surgery, with a one-in-ten chance of death or uselessness, to take the scrambled jack out and install a new one.

Marty was about sixty, the front half of his head shaved bald in a generation-old style, the rest of his white hair long except for the shaved circle around his jack. He was conventionally handsome, still; regular leading-man features, and it was obvious from the way he treated Amelia that they had a past. I once asked her how long ago that had been, the only such question I've ever asked her. She thought for a moment and said, "I guess you were out of grade school."

The population of the Saturday Night Special crowd varies from week to week. Marty is almost always there, along with his traditional antagonist, Franklin Asher, a mathematician with a chair in the philosophy department. Their jocular sniping goes back to when they were graduate students together; Amelia's known him nearly as long as Marty.

Belda Magyar is usually there, an odd duck but obviously one of the inner circle. She sits and listens with a stern, disapproving look, nursing a single glass of wine. Once or twice a night she makes a hilarious remark, without changing expression. She's the oldest, over ninety, a professor emeritus in the art department. She claims to remember having met Richard Nixon, when she was very small. He was big and scary, and gave her a book of matches, no doubt a White House souvenir, which her mother took away.

I liked Reza Pak, a shy chemist in his early forties, the only one besides Amelia with whom I socialized outside the club. We met occasionally to shoot pool or play tennis. He never mentioned Amelia and I never mentioned the boyfriend who always drove up to fetch him, exactly on time.

Reza, who also lived on campus, usually gave me and Amelia a ride to the club, but this Friday he was already uptown, so we called a cab. (Like most people, Amelia doesn't own a car and I've never even driven, except in Basic Training, and then only jacked with someone who knew how.) We could bike to Hidalgo in daylight, but coming back after dark would be suicide.

It started raining at sundown anyhow, and by the time we got to the club it was a full-fledged thunderstorm, with tornado watch. The club had an awning, but the rain was almost horizontal; we got drenched between the cab and the door.

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 unaltered 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 nano-forge: 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 reenlist, 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?

I decided to wear the uniform and dressed slowly and sat there for awhile, sipping ice water. I'd lost soldier-boys 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.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"I know you don't."

"Talk about what?" Karen said.

Candi shook her head. "Thanks," I said, and she released my finger.

I backed out of the small room. "Be...," Candi said, and didn't complete the sentence. Maybe that was the sentence.

She had seen how profoundly I hadn't wanted to wake up.

I called Amelia from the airport and said I'd be home in a few hours, and would explain later. It would be after midnight, but she said to come straight over to her place. That was a relief. Our relationship didn't have any restrictions, but I always hoped she slept alone, waiting, the ten days I was away.

Of course she knew something was seriously wrong. When I got off the plane, she was there, and had a cab waiting outside.

The machine's programming was stuck in a rush-hour pattern, so it took us twenty minutes to get home, via surface roads I never see except on bicycle. I was able to tell Amelia the basic story while we drove through the maze that avoided nonexistent traffic. When we got to the campus the guard looked at my uniform and waved us through, wonder of wonders.

I let her talk me into some reheated stir-fry. I wasn't really hungry, but knew she liked to feed me.

"It's hard for me to visualize," she said, rummaging for bowls and chopsticks while the stuff warmed. "Of course it is. I'm just talking." She stood behind me and massaged my neck. "Tell me you're going to be all right."

"I am all right."

"Oh, bullshit." She dug in. "You're stiff as a board. You're not halfway back from ... wherever that was."

She had nuked some sake. I poured a second cup. "Maybe. I... they let me go back and jack with Candi and Karen in the cardiac recovery unit. Candi's in a pretty bad way."

"Afraid of getting her heart pulled?"

"That's more Karen's problem. Candi's going round and round about Ralph. She can't handle losing him."

She reached over me and poured herself a cup. "Isn't she a grief counselor? Out of uniform."

"Yeah, well, why does somebody take that up? She lost her father when she was twelve, an accident while she was in the car. That's never buried very deep. He's there in the background with every man she, she's close to."

"Loves? Like you?"

"Not love. It's automatic. We've been through this."

She crossed the kitchen to stir the pot, her back to me. "Maybe we should go through it again. Maybe every six months or so."

I almost blew up at her, but held back. We were both tired and rattled. "It's not at all like Carolyn. You just have to trust me. Candi's more like a sister – "

"Oh sure."

"Not like my sister, okay." I hadn't heard from her in more than a year. "I'm close to her, intimate, and I guess you could call it a kind of love. But it's not like you and me."

She nodded and measured the stuff into bowls. "I'm sorry. You go through hell there and get more hell here."

"Hell and stir-fry." I took the bowl. "Time of the month?"

She put her own bowl down a little hard. "That's another goddamned thing. Sharing their periods. That's more than 'intimate.' It's just plain strange."

"Well, count your blessings. You've got a couple of years' peace." The women in a platoon synchronize periods pretty quickly, and the men are of course affected. It's a problem with the thirty-day rotation cycle: the first half of last year I came home every month crabby with PMS, proof that the brain is mightier than the gland.

"What was he like, Ralph? You never said much about him."

"It was only his third cycle," I said. "Still a neo. Never saw any real combat."

"Just enough to kill him."

"Yeah. He was a nervous guy, maybe oversensitive. Two months ago, when we were parallel-jacked, Scoville's platoon was worse than usual, and he was bouncing around for days. We all had to hang on to him, keep him putting one foot in front of the other. Candi was best at that, of course."

She played with her food. "So you didn't know all that intimate stuff about him."

"Intimate, yeah, but not as deep as the others. He wet the bed until puberty, had terrible childhood guilt over killing a turtle. Spent all his money on jacksex with the jills that hang around Portobello. Never had real sex until he was married, and didn't stay married long. Before he got jacked he used to masturbate compulsively to tapes of oral sex. Is that intimate?"

"What was his favorite food?"

"Crab cakes. The way his mother made them."

"Favorite book?"

"He didn't read much, not at all for pleasure. He liked Treasure Island in school. Wrote a report about Jim in eleventh grade and then recycled it in college."

"He was likeable?"

"Nice enough guy. We never did anything social-I mean nobody did, with him. He'd get out of the cage and run to the bars, with a hard-on for the jills."

"Candi didn't, none of the women wanted to ... help him out that way?"

"God, no. Why would you?"

"That's what I don't understand. Why wouldn't you? I mean, all the women knew he went off with these jills."

"That's what he wanted to do. I don't think he was unhappy on that score." I pushed the bowl away and poured some sake. "Besides, it's an invasion of privacy on a cosmic scale: when Carolyn and I were together, every time we went back to the platoon we had eight people who knew everything we had done, from both sides, as soon as we jacked. They knew how Carolyn felt about what I did, and vice versa, and all the feedback states that that kind of knowledge generates. You don't start that sort of thing casually."

She persisted. "I still don't see why not. You're all used to everybody knowing everything. You know each other's insides, for Christ's sake! A little friendly sex wouldn't be that earthshaking."

I knew my anger was unreasonable, that it didn't really come from her questions. "Well, how would you like to have the whole Friday night gang in the bedroom with us? Feeling everything you felt?"

She smiled. "I wouldn't mind. Is that a difference between men and women or between you and me?"

"I think it's a difference between you and merely sane people." My smile might not have been totally convincing. "It's actually not the physical sensations. The details vary, but men pretty much feel like men and women feel like women. Sharing that isn't a big deal after the initial novelty. It's how the rest of you feels that's personal. And embarrassing."

She took our bowls to the sink. "You wouldn't be able to tell that from the ads." Her voice dropped. "‘feel how it feels to her.'"

"Well, you know. People who pay to have a jack installed often do it out of sexual curiosity. Or something deeper; they feel trapped in the wrong kind of body but don't want to do the swap-op." I shuddered. "Understandably."

"People do it all the time," she said, teasing, knowing how I felt. "It's less dangerous than jacking, and reversible."

"Oh, reversible. You get somebody else's dick."

"Men and their dicks. It's mostly your own tissue."

"Used to be inseparable." Karen had been male until she turned eighteen, and was able to file with National Health for a swap. She took a few tests and they agreed she'd be better off outside-in.

The first one's free. If she wanted to go back to being a male, she'd have to pay. Two of the jills that Ralph liked were ex-males trying to earn enough to buy their dicks back. What a wonderful world.

PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF NATIONAL Service did have legitimate ways to earn money, though not many of them were paid as much as prostitutes. Academics made small stipends, larger ones for people who did "hands-on" teaching, only a token for people who just did research. Marty was the head of his department and was a world-renowned authority on brain-machine and brain-brain interfacing-but he made less money than a teaching assistant like Julian. He made less money than the greaseball kids who served drinks at the Saturday Night Special. And like most people in his position, Marty took a perverse pride in being broke all the time-he was too busy to make money. And he rarely needed the things you could buy with it, anyhow.

You could buy objects with money, like handcrafts and original art, or services; masseur, butler, prostitute. But most people spent money on rationed things-things the government allowed you to have, but didn't allow you enough of.

Everyone had three entertainment credits a day, for instance. One credit would get you a movie, a roller-coaster ride, one hour of hands-on driving on a sports car track, or entry into a place like the Saturday Night Special.

Once inside, you could sit all night for free, unless you wanted something to eat or drink. Restaurant meals ranged from one to thirty credits, mostly depending on how much labor went into them, but the menu also had dollar amounts, in case you had used up all your entertainment and had money.

Plain money wouldn't buy alcohol, though, unless you were in uniform. You were rationed one ounce of alcohol per day, and it made no difference to the government whether you parceled it out to yourself as two small glasses of wine each night or as a once-a-month binge with two bottles of vodka.

It made abstainers and people in uniform sought-after companions in some wobbly circles-and, perhaps predictably, did nothing to reduce the number of alcoholics. People who had to have it would either find it or make it.

Illegal services were available for money, and in fact were the most active part of the dollar economy. Penny-ante activities like home-brewing or freelance prostitution were either ignored or taken care of with small regular bribes. But there were big operators who moved a lot of cash for hard drugs and services like murder.

Some medical services, like jack installation, cosmetic surgery, and sex-change operations, were theoretically available through National Health, but not many people qualified. Before the war, Nicaragua and Costa Rica had been the places to go to buy "black medicine." Now it was Mexico, though a lot of the doctors had Nicaraguan or Costa Rican accents.

BLACK MEDICINE CAME UP at the next Friday night gathering. Ray was on a little vacation in Mexico. It was no secret he'd gone there to have a few dozen pounds of fat removed.

"I suppose the medical advantages outweigh the risk," Marty said.

"You had to approve the leave?" Julian asked.

"Pro forma," Marty said. "Pity he couldn't put it against sick leave. I don't think he's ever used a day of it."

"Well, it's vanity," Belda said in a quavering voice. "Male vanity. I liked him fine, fat."

"He didn't want to get in bed with you, darling," Marty said.

"His loss." The old woman patted her hair.

The waiter was a surly handsome young man who looked as if he'd stepped out of a movie poster. "Last call."

"It's only eleven," Marty said.

"So maybe you get one more."

"Same all around?" Julian said. Everyone said yes except Belda, who checked her watch and bustled out.

It was getting toward the end of the month, so they put all the drinks on Julian's tab, to conserve ration points, and paid him under the table. He offered to let them do it all the time, but it was technically against the law, so most of the people usually demurred. Except Reza, who had never spent a dime in the club except in payoffs to Julian.

"I wonder how fat you have to be to go to National Health," Reza said.

"You have to need a forklift to get around," Julian said. "Your mass has to alter the orbits of nearby planets."

"He did apply," Marty said. "He didn't have high enough blood pressure or cholesterol."

"You're worried about him," Amelia said.

"Of course I am, Blaze. Personal feelings aside, if something happened to him I'd be stopped dead on three different projects. The new one especially, the empathy failures. He's pretty much taken that over."

"How's that coming along?" Julian asked. Marty raised a palm and shook his head. "Sorry. Didn't mean to – "

"Oh, well, you might as well know one thing-we've been studying one of your people. You'll know all about it next time you jack with her."

Reza got up to go to the bathroom, so it was just the three of them: Julian, Amelia, and Marty.

"I'm very happy for you both," Marty said, in a distant tone, as if he were talking about the weather.

Amelia just stared. "You ... you have access to my string," Julian said.

"Not directly, and not for the purpose of invading your privacy. We've been studying one of your people. So naturally I know a lot about you, secondhand, and so does Ray. Of course we will keep your secret for as long as you wish it to remain a secret."

"Nice of you to tell us," Amelia said.

"I don't mean to embarrass you. But of course Julian would know the next time he jacks with her. I was glad to finally get you alone."

"Who was it?"

"Private Defollette."

"Candi. Well, that makes sense."

"She's the one who was so hurt about the death last month?" Amelia said.

Julian nodded. "You expect her to crack?"

"We don't expect anything. We're simply interviewing one person per platoon."

"Chosen at random," Julian said.

Marty laughed and raised an eyebrow. "We were talking about liposuction?"

I DIDN'T EXPECT A lot of action the next week, since we'd have to break in a new set of soldierboys and start with a new mechanic as well. Almost two new ones, since Rose, Arly's replacement, had no experience other than last month's disaster.

The new mechanic was not a neo. For some reason they broke up India platoon to use as replacements. So we all sort of knew the new man, Park, because of the diffuse platoon-level link through Ralph, and Richard before him.

I didn't much like Park. India had been a hunter-killer platoon. He'd killed more people than all the rest of us put together, and unabashedly enjoyed it. He collected crystals of his kills and replayed them off duty.

We trained in the new soldierboys three hours on, one off, destroying the fake town "Pedropolis," built for that purpose on the Portobello base.

When I had time, I linked up to Carolyn, the company coordinator, and asked what was going on-why did I wind up with a man like Park? He'd never really fit in.

Carolyn's reply was sour and hot with confusion and anger. The order to "decompose" India platoon had come from somewhere above the brigade level, and it was causing organizational problems everywhere. The India mechanics were a bunch of mavericks. They hadn't gotten along all that well even with each other.

She assumed it was a deliberate experiment. As far as she knew, nothing like it had been done before; the only time she'd heard of a platoon being broken up, it was because four of them had died at once, and the other six couldn't work together anymore, with the shared grief. India, on the other hand, was one of the most successful platoons they had, in terms of kills. It didn't really make sense to split them up.

I was the lucky one, to have Park, she said. He had been the horizontal liaison, and so had been directly linked to mechanics outside his platoon for the past three years. His cohorts, except for the platoon leader, had only had each other, and they were a fun bunch. They made Scoville look like a pedro lover.

Park liked to kill nonhuman things, too. During the training exercise he occasionally popped a songbird out of the air with his laser, not an easy task. Samantha and Rose both objected when he zapped a stray dog. He sardonically defended his action by pointing out that it didn't belong in the AO, and could have been rigged up as a spy or boobytrap. But we all were linked, and had felt how he felt when he targeted the enemy mutt: it was simple obscene glee. He'd cranked up to maximum magnification to watch the dog explode.

The last three days combined perimeter guard with training, and I had visions of Park using kids as target practice. Children often watch the soldierboys from a safe distance, and no doubt some of them report to Dad, who reports to Costa Rica. But most of them are just kids fascinated by machines, fascinated by war. I probably went through a stage like that. My memories before eleven or twelve are vague almost to nonexistence, a byproduct of the jack installation that affects about a third of us. Who needs a childhood when the present is so much fun?

We had more than enough excitement for anybody the last night. Three rockets came in simultaneously, two of them from the sea and one, a decoy, coming in at treetop level, launched from the balcony of a high-rise on the edge of town.

The two that came in from the sea were in our sector. There were automatic defenses against this kind of attack, but we backed them up.

As soon as we heard the explosion-Alpha knocking out the rocket on the other side of the camp-we stifled the natural impulse to look and turned to watch in the opposite direction, facing directly out from the camp. The two rockets immediately appeared, stealthed but bright in IR. A flak wall sprayed up in front of them, and we targeted them with our heavy bullets about the time they hit that. Two crimson fireballs. They were still glowing impressively in the night sky when a pair of flyboys screamed out to sea in search of the launching platform.

Our reaction time had been fast enough, but we didn't set any records. Park, of course, got in the first shot, .02 of a second ahead of Claude, which made him smug. We all had people in the warm-up seats, it being the last day of our cycle and the first of theirs; I got a confused query from Park's second, through my second: Is there something wrong with this guy?

Just a real good soldier, I said, and knew my meaning was clear. My second, Wu, didn't have any more killer instinct than I did.

I left five soldierboys on perimeter and took the other five down to the beach to police up debris from the missiles. No surprises. They were Taiwanese RPB-4s. A note of protest would be sent, and the reply would lament the obvious theft.

But the rockets were just a diversion.

The actual attack was timed pretty well. It was less than one hour before the shift ended.

As far as we could reconstruct it, the plan was a combination of patience and sudden desperate force. The two rebels who did it had been working for the food service in Portobello for years. They rolled into the lounge adjacent to the locker room to set up the buffet most of us tore into after our shift. But they had scatterguns, two streetsweepers, taped under the food carts. There was a third person, never caught, who cut the fiber line that gave Command its physical picture of the lounge and locker room.

That gave them about thirty seconds of "somebody tripped over the cable," while the two pulled out their weapons and walked through the unlocked doors that connect the lounge to the locker room and the locker room to Operations. They stepped into Ops and started shooting.

The tapes show that they lived for 2.02 seconds after the door opened, during which time they got off seventy-eight 20-gauge buckshot blasts. They didn't hurt any of us in the cages, since that would take armor-piercing shells and more, but they killed all ten of the warm-up mechanics and two of the techs, who were behind supposedly bulletproof glass. The shoe guard, who dozes over us in his armored suit, woke up at the noise and toasted them. It was actually a close thing, as it turned out, because he took four direct hits. They didn't harm him, but if they'd hit the laser, he would have had to lumber down and attack them hand to hand. That might have given them time to crack the shells. They each had five shaped charges taped under their shirts.

All the weapons were Alliance issue; the fully automatic shotguns fired depleted uranium ammunition.

The propaganda machine would play up the suicide aspect of it-lunatic pedros who place no value on human life. As if they had just run amok and wiped out twelve young men and women. The reality was frightening, not only because of their success in infiltrating and attacking, but also in the bold and desperate dedication that it bespoke.

We hadn't just hired those two people off the street. Everyone who worked on the compound had to pass an exhaustive background check, and psychological testing that proved they were safe. How many other time bombs were walking around Portobello?

Candi and I were lucky, in a grim way, because both our seconds died instantly. Wu didn't even have time to turn around. He heard the door click open and then a shotgun blast took off the top of his head. Candi's second, Maria, died the same way. Some of them were pretty bad. Rose's second had time to stand up and turn half around, and was shot in the chest and abdomen. She lived long enough to drown in blood. Claude's was shot in the crotch as a reward for facing the enemy; he lived for a long couple of seconds jackknifed in pain before a second blast tore out his lower spine and kidneys.

It was a light jack, but still profoundly disturbing, especially for those of us whose seconds died in pain. We were all tranked automatically before they popped our cages and rolled us to Trauma. I got a glimpse of the carnage all around, the big white machines that were trying to hammer life back into the ones whose brains were intact. The next day we found out that none of those had been successful. Their bodies were too completely shredded.

So there was no next shift. Our soldierboys stood in frozen postures in their guard positions while shoe infantry, suddenly pressed into guard detail, swarmed around them. The natural assumption was that the attack on our seconds would be followed immediately by a ground attack on the base itself, before another platoon of soldierboys could be brought in. Maybe it would have happened if one or two of the rockets had found their mark. But all was quiet, this time, and Fox platoon, from the Zone, was in place in less than an hour.

They let us out of Trauma after a couple of hours, and at first said we weren't to tell anyone what happened. But of course the Ngumi weren't going to keep it quiet.

AUTOMATIC CAMERAS HAD RECORDED the carnage, and a copy of the scene fell into Ngumi hands. It was powerful propaganda, in a world that couldn't be shocked by death or violence. To the camera, Julian's ten comrades were not young men and women, naked under an unrelenting spray of lead. They were symbols of weakness, triumphant evidence of the Alliance's vulnerability in the face of Ngumi dedication. The Alliance called it a freakish kamikaze attack by two murderous fanatics. It was a situation that could never be duplicated. They didn't publicize the fact that all of the native staff in Portobello were fired the next week, replaced by American draftees.

This was hard on the economy of Portobello proper, as the base was its largest single source of income. Panama was a "most favored nation," but not a full Alliance Member, which in practical terms meant it had limited use of American nanoforges, but there weren't any of the machines within its boundaries.

There were about two dozen small countries in a similar unstable situation. Two nanoforges in Houston were reserved for Panama. The Panama Import-Export Board decided what they were to be used for. Houston supplied them with a "wish book," a list of how long it took to make something, and what raw materials had to be supplied by the Canal Zone. Houston could supply air and water and dirt. If something required an ounce of platinum or a speck of dysprosium, Panama would have to dig it up somewhere or somehow.

The machine had limits. You could give it a bucket of coal and it could return a perfect copy of the Hope Diamond, which would make a dandy paperweight. Of course, if you wanted a fancy gold crown, you'd have to supply the gold. If you wanted an atomic bomb, you'd have to give it a couple of kilograms of plutonium. But fission bombs were not in the wish book; nor were soldierboys or any other products of advanced military technology. Planes and tanks were okay, and among the most popular items.

This is the way things worked: the day after the Portobello base was emptied of native workers, the Panama Import-Export Board presented the Alliance with a detailed analysis of the impact of the loss of income. (It was obvious that someone had foreseen the eventuality.) After a couple of days' haggling, the Alliance agreed to increase their nanoforge allotment from forty-eight hours per day to fifty-four, along with a onetime settlement of a half-billion dollars' credit in rare materials. So if the prime minister wanted a Rolls-Royce with a solid gold chassis, he could have it. But it wouldn't be bulletproof.

The Alliance did not officially care how client nations came up with their requests for the machines' largesse. In Panama there was at least a pretense of democracy, the Import-Export Board being advised by elected representatives, compradores, one from each province and territory. So there were occasional well-publicized imports that benefited only the poor.

Like the United States, technically, they had a semi-socialist electrocash economy. The government supposedly took care of basic needs, and citizens worked for money for luxuries, which were paid for either by electronic credit transfer or cash.

But in the United States, luxuries were just that: entertainments or refinements. In the Canal Zone they were things like medicine and meat, more often bought with cash than with plastic.

There was a lot of resentment, of their own government and Tio Rico to the north, which gave rise to an ironic pattern common to most client states: incidents like the Portobello massacre ensured that Panama would not have its own nanoforges for a long time, but the unrest that led to the massacre was directly traceable to its lack of the magic box.

WE GOT NO PEACE the first week after the massacre. The huge publicity machine that fueled the warboy mania, and was usually concerned with more interesting platoons, turned its energies on us; the general media wouldn't leave us alone, either. In a culture that lived on news, it was the story of the year: bases like Portobello were attacked all the time, but this was the first time the mechanics' inner sanctum had been violated. That the mechanics who were killed had not been in charge of the machines was a detail repeatedly stressed by the government and downplayed by the press.

They even interviewed some of my UT students to see how I was "taking it," and of course they were quick to defend me by saying it was business as usual in the classroom. Which of course demonstrated how unfeeling I was, or how strong and resilient, or how traumatized, depending on the reporter.

Actually, it may have demonstrated all of the above, or maybe just that a particle-physics practicum is not a place where you discuss personal feelings.

When they tried to bring a camera into my classroom, I called a shoe and had them evicted. It was the first time in my academic career that being a sergeant meant more than being an instructor, however junior.

Likewise, I was able to commandeer two shoes to keep the reporters at a distance when I went out. But for almost a week they did have at least one camera watching me, which kept me away from Amelia. Of course, she could just walk into my apartment building as if she were visiting someone else, but the possibility that someone would make a connection-or happen to see her walking into my own apartment-was too great to risk. There were still some people in Texas who would be unhappy about a white woman who had a black man, fifteen years younger, for a lover. There might even be some people in the university who would be unhappy about it.

The newsies seemed to have lost interest by Friday, but Amelia and I went to the club separately, and I brought along my shoes to stand guard outside.

We overlapped trips to the bathroom, and managed a quick embrace unobserved. Otherwise, most of my apparent attention went to Marty and Franklin.

Marty confirmed what I had suspected. "The autopsy showed that your second's jack was disconnected by the same blast that killed him. So there's no reason for it to have felt any different to you than just being unplugged."

"At first, I didn't even realize he was gone," I said, not for the first time. "The input from the rest of my platoon was so strong and chaotic. The ones whose seconds were hurt but still alive."

"But it wouldn't be as bad for them as being fully jacked to someone who died," Franklin said. "Most of you have gone through that."

"I don't know. When somebody dies in the cage, it's a heart attack or stroke. Not being ripped open by buckshot. A light jack may only feed back, say, ten percent of that sensation, but it's a lot of pain. When Carolyn died..." I had to clear my throat. "With Carolyn it was just a sudden headache, and she was gone. Just like coming unjacked."

"I'm sorry," Franklin said, and filled both our glasses. The wine was a duped Lafite Rothschild '28, the wine of the century, so far.

"Thanks. It's years now." I sipped the wine, good but presumably beyond my powers of discrimination. "The bad part, a bad part, was that it didn't occur to me that she'd died. Nor to anybody else in the platoon. We were just standing on a hill, waiting for a snatch. Thought it was a comm failure."

"They knew at the company level," Marty said.

"Of course they did. And of course they wouldn't tell us, risk our screwing up the snatch. But when we popped, her cage was empty. I found a medic and she said they'd done a brain scan and there wasn't enough to save; they'd taken her down to autopsy already. Marty, I've told you this more than once before. Sorry."

Marty shook his head in commiseration. "No closure. No leave-taking."

"They should've popped you all, once you were in place," Franklin said. "They can snatch cold 'boys as easily as warm ones. Then you would've at least known, before they took her away."

"I don't know." My memory of the whole thing is cloudy. They knew we were lovers, of course, and had me tranked before I was popped. A lot of the counseling was just drug therapy with conversation, and after a while I wasn't taking the drugs anymore and I had Amelia there in place of Carolyn. In some ways.

I felt a sudden pang of frustration and longing, partly for Amelia after this stupid week of isolation, partly for the unattainable past. There would never be another Carolyn, and not just because she was dead. That part of me was dead, too.

The talk moved on to safer areas, a movie everybody but Franklin had hated. I pretended to follow it. Meanwhile, my mind went round and round the suicide track.

It never seems to surface while I'm jacked. Maybe the army knows all about it, and has a way of suppressing it; I know I'm suppressing it myself. Even Candi only had a hint.

But I can't keep this up for five more years, all the killing and dying. And the war's not going to end.

When I feel this way I don't feel sad. It's not loss, but escape-it's not whether, but when and how.

I guess after I lose Amelia is the "when." The only "how" that appeals to me is to do it while jacked. Maybe take a couple of generals with me. I can save the actual planning for the moment. But I do know where the generals live in Portobello, Building 31, and with all my years jacked it's nothing to slide a comm thread to the soldierboys who guard the building. There are ways I can divert them for a fraction of a second. Try not to kill any shoes on my way in.

"Yoo-hoo. Julian? Anybody home?" It was Reza, from the other table.

"Sorry. Thinking."

"Well, come over here and think. We have a physics question that Blaze can't answer."

I picked up my drink and moved over. "Not particle, then."

"No, it's simpler than that. Why does water emptying out of a tub go one direction in the Northern Hemisphere and the other in the Southern?"

I looked at Amelia and she nodded seriously. She knew the answer, and Reza probably did, too. They were rescuing me from the war talk.

"That's easy. Water molecules are magnetized. They always point north or south."

"Nonsense," Belda said. "Even I would know it if water were magnetized."

"The truth is that it's an old wives' tale. You'll excuse the expression."

"I'm an old widow," Belda said.

"Water goes one way or the other depending on the size and shape of the tub, and peculiarities of the surface near the outlet. People go through life believing the hemisphere thing without noticing that some of the basins in their own house go the wrong way."

"I must go home and check," Belda said. She drained her glass and unfolded slowly out of the chair. "You children be good." She went to say good-bye to the others.

Reza smiled at her back. "She thought you looked lonely there."

"Sad," Amelia said. "I did, too. Such a horrible experience, and here we are bringing it up all over."

"It's not something they covered in training. I mean, in a way they do. You get jacked to strings recorded while people died, first in a light jack and then deeper."

"Some jackfreaks do it for fun," Reza said.

"Yeah, well, they can have my job."

"I've seen that billboard." Amelia hugged herself.

"Strings of people dying in racing accidents. Executions."

"The under-the-counter ones are worse." Ralph had tried a couple, so I'd felt them secondhand. "Our backups who died, their strings are probably on the market by now."

"The government can't – "

"Oh, the government loves it," Reza broke in. "They probably have some recruitment division that makes sure the stores are full of snuff strings."

"I don't know," I said. "Army's not wild about people who are already jacked."

"Ralph was," Amelia said.

"He had other virtues. They'd rather have you associate the specialness of being jacked with being in the army."

"Sounds really special," Reza said. "Somebody dies and you feel his pain? I'd rather – "

"You don't understand, Rez. You get larger in a way, when somebody dies. You share it and" – the memory of Carolyn suddenly hit me hard – "well, it makes your own death less earthshaking. Someday you'll buy it. Big deal."

"You live on? I mean, they live on, in you?"

"Some do, some don't. You've met people you'd never want to carry around in your head. Those guys die the day they die."

"But you'll have Carolyn forever," Amelia said.

I paused a little too long. "Of course. And after I die, the people who've been jacked to me will remember her too, and pass her down."

"I wish you wouldn't talk like that," Amelia said. Rez, who had known for years that we were together, nodded. "It's like a boil you keep picking at, like you were getting ready to die all the time."

I almost lost it. I literally counted to ten. Rez opened his mouth but I interrupted. "Would you rather I just watched people die, felt them die, and came home asking 'What's for dinner?'" I dropped to a whisper. "How would you feel about me if that didn't hurt me?"

"I'm sorry."

"Don't. I'm sorry you lost a baby. But that's not what you are. We go through these things, and then we more or less absorb them, and we become whatever we are becoming."

"Julian," Reza said in a warning tone, "perhaps you ought to save this for later?"

"That's a good idea," Amelia said, rising. "I have to go on home anyhow." She signaled the wheelie and it went for her coat and bag.

"Share a cab?" I asked.

"It's not necessary," she said in a neutral tone. "End of the month." She could use leftover entertainment points for a cab ride.

Other people didn't have points left over, so I bought a lot of wine and beer and whiskey, and drank more than my share. Reza did, too; his car wouldn't let him drive. He came along with me and my two bodyguard shoes.

I had them drop me at the campus gate, and walked the two kilometers to Amelia's through a cool mist of rain. No sign of any newsies.

All the lights were out; it was almost two. I let myself in through the back and belatedly thought I should have buzzed. What if she wasn't alone?

I turned on the kitchen light and harvested cheese and grape juice from the refrigerator. She heard me moving around and shuffled in, rubbing her eyes. "No reporters?" I asked.

"They're all under the bed."

She stood behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. "Give them something to write about?" I turned around in the chair and buried my face between her breasts. Her skin had a warm, sleepy smell.

"I'm sorry about earlier."

"You've been through too much. Come on." I let her lead me into the bedroom and she undressed me like a child. I was still a little drunk, but she had ways of getting around that, mostly patience, but other things, too.

I slept like a creature stunned and woke to an empty house. She'd left a note on the microwave that she had a sequence scheduled at 8:45 and would see me at the lunch group meeting. It was after ten.

A Saturday meeting; science never sleeps. I found some clean clothes in "my" drawer and took a quick shower.

THE DAY BEFORE I went back to Portobello, I had an appointment with the Luxury Allocation Board in Dallas, the people who handle special requests for the nano-forge. I took the Triangle monorail, and so got a glimpse of Fort Worth streaming by. I'd never gotten off there.

It was a half hour to Dallas, but then another hour crawling through traffic out to the LAB, which took up a huge piece of land outside the city limits. They had sixteen nanoforges, and hundreds of tanks and vats and bins that held the raw materials and the various nanos that put them together in millions of ways. I didn't have time to walk around, but had taken a guided tour of the place with Reza and his friend, the year before. That's when I got the idea to get something special for Amelia. We didn't do birthdays or religious holidays, but next week was the second anniversary of the first time we were intimate. (I don't keep a diary, but could trace the date down through lab reports; we both missed the next day's sequence.)

The evaluator assigned to my request was a sour-faced man, about fifty. He read the form with a fixed glum expression. "You don't want this piece of jewelry for yourself. This is for some woman, some lover?"

"Yes, of course."

"I'll have to have her name, then."

I hesitated. "She's not exactly my – "

"I don't care about your relationship. I just have to know who will eventually own this object. If I should approve it."

I wasn't enthusiastic about having our relationship officially documented. Of course anyone who tapped me with a deep jack would know about it, so it was only as secret as anything in my life was secret.

"It's for Amelia Blaze Harding," I said. "A co-worker."

He wrote that down. "She also lives at the university?"

"That's right."

"Same address?"

"No. I'm not sure what her address is."

"We'll find it." He smiled like a man who had sucked on a lemon and tried to smile. "I see no reason to disapprove your request." A printer in his desk hissed and a piece of paper flipped up in front of me.

"That will be fifty-three utility credits," he said. "If you sign here, the finished piece should be available at Unit Six within half an hour."

I signed. More than a month's worth of credits for a handful of sand transformed was one way to think of it. Or fifty-three worthless government counters for a thing of beauty that would have been literally beyond price a generation ago.

I went out into the corridor and followed a purple line that led to Units 1 through 8. That split, and I followed a red line to Units 5 through 8. Door after door concealing people who sat at desks slowly doing work that machines could have done better and faster. But machines had no use for extra utility and entertainment credits.

I went through a revolving door into a pleasant rotunda built around a rock garden. A thin silvery stream fell and washed through it, splashing among exotic tropical plants that grew out of a gravel of rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and dozens of glittering stones with no common names.

I checked at the Unit 6 counter and it said I still had a half-hour wait. There was a cafe, though, with tables ringed around half the rock garden. I produced my military ID and got a cold beer. At the table where I sat, somebody had left a folded-up copy of the Mexican magazine Sexo!, so I spent the half hour improving my language skills.

A card on the table explained that the gems were specimens rejected for esthetic or structural flaws. They were nevertheless well out of reach.

The desk announced my name and I went over and picked up a small white package. I unwrapped it carefully.

It was exactly what I had ordered, but seemed more dramatic than its picture. A gold chain necklace supporting a dark green nightstone inside a halo of small rubies. Nightstones had only been around for a few months. This one looked like a small egg of onyx that somehow had a green light imbedded. As you turned it, the green changed shape, square to diamond to cross.

It would look good on her delicate skin, the red and green echoing her hair and eyes. I hoped it wouldn't be too exotic for her to wear.

On the train ride back, I showed it to a woman who sat next to me. She said it was pretty, but in her opinion was too dark for a black woman's skin. I told her I'd have to think about that.

I left it on Amelia's dresser, along with a note reminding her it was two years, and went on to Portobello.

JULIAN WAS BORN IN a university town, and grew up surrounded by white people who weren't overtly racist. There were race riots in places like Detroit and Miami, but people treated them as urban problems, far removed from their comfortable reality. That was close to the truth.

But the Ngumi War was changing white America's feelings about race-or, cynics maintained, allowing them to express their true feelings. Only about half the enemy were black, but most of the leaders who appeared on the news were from that half. And they were shown crying out for white blood.

The irony wasn't lost on Julian, that he was an active part of a process that was turning American whites against blacks. But that kind of white person was alien to his personal world, his daily life; the woman on the train literally came from a foreign land. The people in his university life were mostly white but color-blind, and the people he jacked with might have started out otherwise, but didn't stay racist: you couldn't think black people were inferior if you lived inside black skin, ten days every month.

OUR FIRST ASSIGNMENT HAD a lot of potential to turn ugly. We had to "remand for questioning" – kidnap – a woman who was suspected of being a rebel leader. She was also the mayor of San Ignacio, a small town high in the cloud forest.

The town was so small that any two of us could have destroyed it in minutes. We circled it in a silent flyboy, studying the infrared signature and comparing that to maps and low-orbit pictures. The town was lightly defended, apparently; ambushes set on the main road where it entered and left the town. Of course there could be automated defenses that didn't betray themselves with body heat. But it wasn't that rich a town.

"Let's try to do this quietly," I said. "Drop into the coffee plantation about here." I pointed mentally to a spot almost two kilometers downhill from the town. "Candi and I'll work up through the plantation to the rear of Senora Madero's house. See whether we can make the snatch without raising any fuss."

"Julian, you ought to take at least two more," Claude said. "The place is gonna be wired and 'trapped."

I gave him a nonverbal rebuttal: You know I considered that. "Just you be ready to charge up if something happens. We start making noise, I want all ten of you to run up the hill in a tight formation and circle Candi and me. We'll keep Madero protected. Lay down smoke and we head straight down the valley here and then up this little rise for a cargo snatch." I felt the flyboy relay that information laterally and, in a second, confirm that we could have a warm-body snatch in place.

"Now," I said, and all twelve of us were falling fast through the cold night air. We spaced ourselves fifty meters apart and after a minute the black chutes whispered out and we drifted invisibly down into the acres of low coffee trees-bushes, actually; a person of even normal height would have a hard time hiding out there. It was a calculated risk. If we'd landed closer to town, in the actual forest, we would have made a lot of noise.

It was easy to aim between the neat rows. I sank up to my knees in the soft wet soil. The chutes detached and folded and rolled themselves into tight cylinders that quietly fused into solid bricks. They'd probably wind up as part of a wall or fence.

Everybody moved silently to the tree line and took cover, while Candi and I worked uphill, weaving quietly between trees, avoiding brush.

"Dog," she said, and we froze. From where I was, slightly behind her, I couldn't see it, but through her sensors smelled the fur and breath and then saw the IR blob. It woke up and I heard the beginning of a growl that ended with the "thap" of a tranquilizer dart. It was a human dose; I hoped it wouldn't kill the dog.

Just past the dog was the neatly trimmed lawn behind Madero's house. There was a light on in the kitchen – worse luck. The house had been dark when we jumped.

Candi and I could just hear two voices through the closed window. The conversation was too fast and too heavily accented for either of us to follow, but the tone was clear-Senora Madero and some man were anxious, whispering urgently.

Expecting company, Candi thought.

Now, I thought. In four steps, Candi was at the window and I was at the back door. She smashed the window with one hand and fired two darts with the other. I pulled the door off its hinges and stepped into a storm of gunfire.

Two people with assault rifles. I tranked them both and stepped toward the kitchen. An alarm whooped three times before I could track down the relay clicking and rip it out of the wall.

Two people, three people running down the stairs. Smoke and VA, I thought to myself and Candi, and dropped two grenades in the hall. Using vomiting agent was a little tricky, since our snatch was unconscious; we couldn't let her inhale it and possibly choke on her own puke. But we had to work fast anyhow.

Two people were slumped over the kitchen table. There was a circuit-breaker box on the wall; I smashed it and everything went dark, though for Candi and me it was bright red figures in a dark red kitchen.

I picked up Madero and her companion and started back for the hall. But along with the sounds of gagging and retching I heard the greased-metal "snick-chk" of a weapon being armed, and the snap of a safety switch. I flashed an image to Candi and she stuck one arm through the window and swept half the wall down. The roof sagged with a creak and then a splintering crash, but by then I was in the backyard with my two guests. I dropped the man and cradled Madero like a baby.

"Wait for the others," I vocalized unnecessarily. We could hear townsfolk running down the gravel road toward the house, but our people were moving faster.

Ten black giants exploded out of the forest behind us. Smoke there there there, I thought. Lights on. White smoke welled up in a semicircle around us and became an opaque blinding wall with our sunlights. I turned my back on it, shielding Madero from the random chatter of gunfire and laser stab and sweep. Everyone VA and split! Eleven canisters of vomiting agent popped; I was already in the woods and running. Bullets hummed and rustled harmlessly overhead. As I ran I checked her pulse and respiration, normal under the circumstances, and checked the dart site on the back of her neck. The dart had fallen out and she'd already stopped bleeding.

Leave the note?

Candi thought, Yes: on the table somewhere under the roof now. We had a supposedly legal warrant for Senora Madero's detainment. That and a hundred pesos would get you a cup of coffee, if there was any left after export.

Out of the forest, I could run faster. It was exhilarating, bounding over the rows of low coffee bushes, even though in some corner of my mind I always knew I was lying inert a hundred miles away, inside an armored plastic shell. I could hear the others running just behind me and, as I moved up the hill toward the pickup, the faint hiss and snap of the approaching chopper and fly-boys.

When it's just us soldierboys they snatch us at speed; we hold up our arms and grab the bail as it sails by. For a warm-body snatch, though, they have to actually land the helicopter, which is why she had two flyboys as escorts.

I got to the top of the hill and broadcasted a bleep, which the helicopter returned. The rest of the platoon came loping up in twos and threes. It occurred to me that I should have called for two choppers; do a regular snatch on the other eleven. It was dangerous for all of us to stand out in the open for any length of time, with the helicopter noise attracting attention.

As if in answer to my concern, a mortar round hit fifty meters to my left, orange flash and muted thump. I linked with the flyboy in the chopper and sensed a short argument she had with Command. Someone wanted us to drop the body and do a regular snatch. As the flyboy came over the horizon, another mortar round hit, maybe ten meters behind me, and we got the modified order: line up for a regular snatch and she would come in as slowly as practical.

We got together in file with our left arms up, and I had one second to wonder whether I should hold Madero tightly or loosely. I opted for tight, and most of the others agreed, which might have been wrong.

The bail snatched us with an impulse shock of fifteen or twenty gees. Nothing to a soldierboy but, we found out later, it cracked four of the woman's ribs. She woke up with a shriek as two mortar rounds hit close enough to hole the chopper and damage Claude and Karen. Madero wasn't hit by the shrapnel, but she found herself dozens of meters off the ground and rising fast, and she struggled hard, beating at me and screaming, writhing around. All I could do was hold her more tightly, but my arm had her pinned just below the breasts, and I was afraid to press her too hard.

Suddenly she went slack, fainting or dead. I couldn't check her pulse or respiration, hands full, but there was not much I could have done in any case, other than not drop her.

After a few minutes we landed on a bald hill, and I confirmed that she was still breathing. I carried her inside the helicopter and strapped her into a stretcher that was clamped to the wall. Command asked whether there were any handcuffs, which I thought was kind of amusing; but then she elaborated: this woman was a true believer. If she woke up and found herself in an enemy helicopter, she would jump out or otherwise do away with herself.

The rebels told each other horror stories about what we did to prisoners to make them talk. It was all nonsense. Why bother to torture someone when all you have to do is put her under, drill a hole in her skull, and jack her? That way she can't lie.

Of course, international law is not clear on the practice. The Ngumi call it a violation of basic human rights; we call it humane questioning. The fact that one of ten winds up dead or brain-dead makes the morality of it pretty clear to me. But then we only do it to prisoners who refuse to cooperate.

I found a roll of duct tape and bound her wrists together and then taped loops around her chest and knees, fixing her to the stretcher.

She woke up while I was doing her knees. "You are monsters," she said in clear English.

"We come by it naturally, Senora. Born of man and woman."

"A monster and a philosopher."

The helicopter roared into life and we sprang off the hill. I had a fraction of a second's warning, and so was able to brace myself. It was unexpected but logical: what difference did it make whether I was inside the vehicle or hanging on outside?

After a minute we settled into a quieter, steady progress. "Can I get you some water?"

"Please. And a painkiller."

There was a toilet aft, with a drinking water tap and tiny paper cups. I brought her two and held them to her lips.

"No painkillers until we land, I'm afraid." I could knock her out with another trank, but that would complicate her medical situation. "Where do you hurt?"

"Chest. Chest and neck. Could you take this damned tape off? I'm not going anywhere."

I cleared it with Command and a foot-long razor-keen bayonet snicked into my hand. She shrank away, as much as her bonds would allow. "Just a knife." I cut the tape around her chest and knees and helped her to a sitting position. I queried the flyboy and she confirmed that the woman was apparently unarmed, so I freed her hands and feet.

"May I use that toilet?"

"Sure." When she stood up she doubled over in pain, clutching her side.

"Here." I couldn't stand upright in the seven-foot-high cargo area, either, so we shuffled aft, a bent-over giant helping a bent-over dwarf. I helped her with her belt and trousers.

"Please," she said. "Be a gentleman."

I turned my back on her but of course could still see her. "I can't be a gentleman," I said. "I'm five women and five men, working together."

"So that's true? You make women fight?"

"You don't fight, Senora?"

"I protect my land and my people." If I hadn't been looking at her I would have misinterpreted the strong emotion in her voice. I saw her hand flick into a breast pocket and caught her wrist just before her hand made it to her mouth.

I forced her fingers open and took a small white pill. It had an odor of bitter almonds, low-tech.

"That wouldn't do any good," I said. "We'd just revive you and you'd be sick."

"You kill people and, when it pleases you, you bring them back from the dead. But you are not monsters."

I put the pill in a pocket on my leg and watched her carefully. "If we were monsters we would bring them back to life, extract our information, and kill them again."

"You don't do that."

"We have more than eight thousand of your people in prison, awaiting repatriation after the war. It would be easier to kill them, wouldn't it?"

"Concentration camps." She stood and pulled up her trousers, and sat back down.

"A loaded term. There are camps where the Costa Rican prisoners of war are concentrated. With UN and Red Cross observers, making sure they're not mistreated. As you'll see with your own eyes." I don't often defend Alliance policies. But it was interesting to watch a fanatic at work.

"I should live that long."

"If you want to, you will. I don't know how many more pills you have." I linked through the flyboy to Command and brought a speech analyzer on line.

"That was the only one," she said, as I'd expected, and the analyzer said she was telling the truth. I relaxed slightly. "So I'll be one of your prisoners of war."

"Presumably. Unless this has all been a case of mistaken identity."

"I've never fired a weapon. I've never killed anybody."

"Neither has my commander. She has degrees in military theory and cybernetic communication, but she's never been a soldier."

"But she has actually killed people. Lots of us."

"And you helped plan the assault on Portobello. By that logic, you killed friends of mine."

"No I didn't," she said. Quick, intense, lying.

"You killed them while I was intimately connected to their minds. Some of them died very horribly."

"No. No."

"Don't bother to lie to me. I can bring people back from the dead, remember? I could have destroyed your village with one thought. And I can tell when you're lying."

She was silent for a moment, considering that. She must have known about voice analyzers. "I am the mayor of San Ignacio. There will be repercussions."

"Not legal ones. We have a warrant for your detention, signed by the governor of your province."

She made a spitting sound. "Pepe Ano." His name was Pellipianocio, Italian, but her Spanish converted it to "Joe Asshole."

"I take it he's not popular with the rebels. But he was one of you."

"He inherited a coffee plantation from his uncle and was such a bad farmer he couldn't make a radish grow. You bought his land, you bought him."

She thought that was the truth, and it probably was. "We didn't coerce him," I said, guessing. I didn't know much about the town's or province's history. "Didn't he come to us? Declare himself – "

"Oh, really. Like a hungry dog would come to anybody who put out food. You can't pretend to think that he represents us."

"As a matter of fact, Senora, we were not consulted. Are your soldiers consulted before being given orders?"

"We ... I don't know anything about such matters." That one set the bells off. As she knew, their soldiers were in on the decision-making process. That cut down on their efficiency but did give some logic to calling themselves the Democratic Army of the People.

The helicopter suddenly lurched left and right, accelerating up. I put out a hand and kept her from falling.

"Missile," I said, in touch with the flyboy.

"A pity it missed."

"You're the only living creature aboard this craft, Senora. The rest of us are safe in Portobello."

At that she smiled. "Not so safe, I think. Wasn't that the point of this little kidnapping?"

THE WOMAN WAS ONE of the lucky ninety percent who survived jacking intact, and she did give Alliance questioners the names of three other tenientes who had been in on the Portobello massacre. For her own part in it she was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was sent to the large POW camp in the Canal Zone, the jack in the back of her skull guaranteeing that she wouldn't be part of any conspiracy there.

Unsurprisingly, during the four hours it had taken to get her to Portobello and install the jack, the three other tenientes and their families had dissolved into the bush, driven underground-perhaps to return. Their fingerprints and retinal patterns tagged them as rebels, but there was no real guarantee that the ones on file were authentic. They had had years to effect substitution. Any one of them might show up at the entrance to the camp at Portobello with a job application.

Of course, the Alliance had fired every Hispanic employee at the Portobello camp, and could do the same everywhere else in the city, even the country. But that might be counterproductive in the long run. The Alliance provided one out of three jobs in Panama. Putting those people out of work would probably add one more country to the Ngumi ranks.

Marx and others thought and taught that war was fundamentally economic in nature. No one in the nineteenth century, though, could have foreseen the world of the twenty-first, where half the world had to work for its rice or bread and the other half just lined up in front of generous machines.

THE PLATOON RETURNED to the town just before dawn, with warrants for the three rebel leaders. They entered the houses in groups of three, simultaneously crashing inside in clouds of smoke and vile gas, lowering real estate values but finding no one. There was no effective resistance, and they sped away in ten separate directions.

They rendezvoused at a place about twenty kilometers downhill, a feed store and cantina. The cantina had been closed for hours, but one customer remained, collapsed under one of the outside tables, snoring. They didn't wake him up.

The rest of the mission was an exercise in malice dreamed up by some half-awake genius who was annoyed at not taking any more prisoners that night. They were to go back up the hill and systematically destroy the crops that belonged to the three escaped rebels.

Two of them were coffee planters, so Julian ordered his people to uproot the bushes and leave them in place; presumably they could be replanted the next day.

The third man's "crop" was the town's only hardware store. If Julian had asked, they probably would have been ordered to torch it. So he didn't ask; he and three others just broke down the doors and threw all of the merchandise out on the street. Let the town decide whether they would respect the man's belongings.

Most of the town was tired of dealing with the soldierboys by now, and had gotten the message that the machines weren't going to kill anyone unless provoked. Still, two ambitious snipers came in with lasers and had to be shot, but the soldierboys were able to use tranquilizing darts.

Park, the platoon's new homicidal addition, gave Julian some trouble there. He argued against using the darts-which technically was insubordination under fire, a court-martial offense – and then when he did take aim with the dart, he aimed for the sniper's eye, which would have been fatal. Julian monitored that just in time to send a mental shout, "Cease fire!" and reassign the sniper to Claude, who tranked him in the shoulder.

So as a show of force, the mission was reasonably successful, though Julian wondered what the sense of it was. The townspeople would probably see it as bullying vandalism. Maybe he should have torched the store and sterilized the two farmers' lands. But he hoped the restrained approach would work better: with his laser he wrote a scorched message on the whitewashed wall of the hardware store, translated by Psychops into formal Spanish: " – By rights, twelve of you should perish for the twelve of us you killed. Let there not be a next time."

WHEN I CAME HOME Tuesday night there was a note under my door:

Darling,

The gift is beautiful. I went to a concert last night just so I could dress up and show it off. Two people asked who it was from, and I was enigmatic: a friend.

Well, friend, I've made a big decision, I suppose in part a present to you. I've gone down to Guadalajara to have a jack installed.

I didn't want to wait and discuss it with you because I don't want you to share the responsibility, if something should go wrong. My mind was actually made up by a news item, which I've put on your queue as "law.jack."

Basically, a man in Austin got jacked and fired from his administrative job, then challenged the antijack clause under Texas job discrimination laws. The court ruled in his favor, so at least for

the time being, it's professionally safe for me to go ahead and do it.

I know all about the physical danger, and I also know how unseemly it is for a woman of my years and position to take that risk because of what amounts to jealousy: I can't compete with your memory of Carolyn and I can't share your life the way Condi and the others do-the women you swear you don't love.

No arguments this way. I'll be back on Monday or Tuesday. Do we have a date?

Love, Amelia

I read it over twice and then ran for the phone. There was no answer at her place. So I played back the other messages, and got the one I most feared:

"Senor Class, your name and number were given to us by Amelia Harding as a person to be reached in case of emergency. We are also contacting a Professor Hayes.

"Profesora Harding came here to the Clinica de cirugia restorativa y aumentativa de Guadalajara to have a puente mental, what you call a jack, installed. The operation did not go well, and she is completely paralyzed. She can breathe without help, and responds to visual and auditory stimuli, but cannot speak.

"We want to discuss various options with you. Senora Harding listed your name in lieu of next of kin. My name is Rodrigo Spencer, chief of la division quinirgica para instalacion y extraccion de implantas craniales – Surgical Unit for Installation and Removal of Cranial Implants." He gave his number and the address.

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."

"Absolutely not. Every second you talk is increasing the risk. If you do that you might never return to normal."

I saw him reaching for the switch and grabbed his wrist. "One second." I stood and kissed Amelia, one hand on her breast. There was a momentary storm of shared joy and then she disappeared as I heard the switch click, and I was kissing an inert simulacrum, tears mingling. I sat back down like a sack falling. He unplugged us and didn't say anything, but gave me a stern look and shook his head.

Part of that surge of emotion had been "Whatever the risk, this is worth it," but whether that came from her or me or both of us together, I couldn't say.

A man and a woman dressed in green pushed a cart of equipment into the room. "You two have to go now. Come back in ten, twelve hours."

"I'd like to scrub and watch," Marty said.

"Very well." In Spanish, he asked the woman to find Marty a gown and show him to the limpiador.

I went down to the lobby and out. The sky was reddish-orange with pollution; I used the last of my Mexican money to buy a mask from a vending machine.

I figured I would walk until I found a moneychanger and a city map. I'd never been to Guadalajara before and didn't even know which direction downtown was. In a city twice the size of New York, it probably didn't make much difference. I walked away from the sun.

This hospital area was thick with beggars who claimed they needed money for medicine or treatment; who thrust their sick children at you or showed sores or stumps. Some of the men were aggressive. I snarled back in bad Spanish and was glad I'd bribed the border guard ten dollars to let me bring the puttyknife through.

The children looked wan, hopeless. I didn't know as much about Mexico as I should, living just north of it, but I was certain they had some form of socialized medicine. Not for everyone, obviously. Like the bounty from the nanoforges we graciously allocated to them, I supposed: the people in the front of the line didn't get there by lot.

Some of the beggars pointedly ignored me or even whispered racial epithets in a language they thought I didn't understand. Things had changed so much. We'd visited Mexico when I was in grade school, and my father, who had grown up in the South, gloried in the color blindness here. Being treated like any other gringo. We blame the Ngumi for Mexico's prejuicio, but it's partly America's fault. And example.

I came to an eight-lane divided avenue, clogged with slow traffic, and turned right. Not even one beggar per block here. After a mile or so of dusty and loud low-income housing, I came to a good-sized parking island over an underground mall. I went through a security check, which cost another five dollars for the knife, and took the slidewalk down to the main level.

There were three change booths, offering slightly different rates of exchange, all with different commission arrangements. I did the arithmetic in my head and was not surprised to find that, for everyday amounts, the one with the least favorable exchange rate actually gave the best deal.

Starving, I found a ceviche shop and had a bowl of octopus, little ones with inch-long legs, along with a couple of tortillas and a pot of tea. Then I went off in search of diversion.

There were a half-dozen jack shops in a row, offering slightly different adventures from their American counterparts. Be gored by a bull-no gracias. Perform or receive a sex-change operation, either way. Die in childbirth. Relive the agony of Christ. There was a line for that one; must have been a holy day. Maybe every day's a holy day here.

There were also the usual girly-boy attractions, and with them one that offered an accelerated-time tour of "your own" digestive tract! Restrain me.

A confusing variety of shops and market stalls, like Portobello multiplied a hundred times. The everyday things that an American had delivered automatically had to be bought here-and not for a fixed price, either.

That part was familiar from walking around Portobello. Housewives, a few men, came to the mercado every morning to haggle over the day's supplies. Still plenty here at two in the afternoon. To an outsider, it looks as if half the stalls are scenes of pretty violent argument, voices raised, arms waving. But it's really just part of the social routine, for vendor and customer alike. "What do you mean, ten pesos for these worthless beans? Last week they were five pesos and excellent quality!" "Your memory is fading, old woman. Last week they were eight pesos and so shriveled I couldn't give them away! These are beans among beans!" "I could give you six pesos. I need beans for supper, and my mother knows how to soften them with soda." "Your mother? Send your mother down here and she'll pay me nine pesos," and so on. It was a way to pass the time; the real battle would be between seven and eight pesos.

The fish market was diverting. There was a much greater variety than you found in Texas stores-large cod and salmon that originally came from the cold north Atlantic and Pacific, exotic brightly colored reef fish, wriggling live eels, and tanks of huge Japanese shrimp – all of them produced in town, cloned and force-grown in vats. The few native fresh fish-whitebait from Lake Chapala, mostly-cost ten times as much as the most exotic.

I bought a small plate of those-minnows, sun-dried and marinated, served with lime and hot chile – which would have marked me as a tourist even if I weren't black and dressed like an American.

Counted my pesos and started looking for a gift for Amelia. I'd already done jewelry, to help get us into this mess, and she wouldn't wear ethnic clothing.

A horrible practical whisper told me to wait until after the operation. But I decided that buying the gift was more for me than for her, anyhow. A commercial kind of substitute for prayer.

There was a huge stall of old books, the paper kind and also the earlier versions of view-books-most of them, with formats and power supplies decades out of date, were for collectors of electronic curiosities, not readers.

They did have two shelves of books in English, most of them novels. She'd probably like one, but it posed a dilemma: if a book was well-known enough for me to recognize the title, then she probably already had it, or at least had read it.

I killed about an hour deciding, reading the first few pages of every book there I hadn't heard of. I finally returned to The Long Good-bye, by Raymond Chandler, which was good reading and also had a leather binding, embossed "Midnite Mystery Club."

I sat by a fountain and read for awhile. An engrossing book, a time trip not only for what it was about and the way it was written, but also the physicality of it-the heavy yellowed paper, the feel and musty smell of the leather. The skin of an animal dead more than a century, if it was real leather.

The marble steps weren't all that comfortable, though-my legs fell asleep from butt to knees-so I wandered awhile more. There were more expensive shops on the second floor down, but they included a set of jack booths that cost almost nothing, sponsored by travel agencies and various countries. For twenty pesos, I spent thirty minutes in France.

That was a strange experience. The spoken cues were all in rapid Mexican Spanish, hard for me to follow, but of course the unspoken ones were the same as ever. I walked around Montmartre for awhile, then lounged on a slow barge drifting through the Bordeau region, and finally sat at an inn in Burgundy, feasting on rich cheeses and complex wines. When it was over, I was starving again.

Of course there was a French restaurant right across from the booth, but I didn't even have to look at the menu to know it was beyond me. I retreated back upstairs and found a place with lots of small tables and music that wasn't too loud, and wolfed down a plate of taquitos varios. Then I washed up and finished reading the book there, nursing a beer and a cup of coffee.

When I finished the book it was only eight, still two hours before I could check on Amelia. I didn't want to go hang around the clinic, but the mall was getting oppressively loud as it moved from evening into night-time mode. A half-dozen mariachi bands competing for attention along with the blare and rumble of modern music from the night clubs. Some very alluring women sitting in the windows of an escort service, three of them wearing PM buttons, which meant they were jacked. That would be a great way to spend the next two hours-jacksex and guilt.

I wound up wandering through the residential neighborhood, reasonably confident because of the puttyknife, even though the area was rundown and a bit menacing.

I picked up a bouquet of flowers at the hospital store, half price because they were closing, and went up to the waiting room to wait. Marty was there, jacked into a portable work terminal. He glanced up when I came in, subvocalized something into a throat pickup, and un-jacked.

"It looks pretty good," he said, "better than I would have expected. Of course we won't know for sure until she's awake, but her multiphase EEGs look good, look normal for her."

His tone was anxious. I set the flowers and book down on a low plastic table scattered with paper magazines. "How long till she comes out of it?"

He looked at his watch. "Half an hour. Twelve."

"Doctor around?"

"Spencer? No, he went home right after the procedure. I've got his number if... just in case."

I sat down too close to him. "Marty. What aren't you telling me?"

"What do you want to know?" His gaze was steady but there was still something in his voice. "You want to see a tape of the disconnection? I can promise you'll puke."

"I just want to know what you're not telling me."

He shrugged and looked away. "I'm not sure how much you know. From the most basic, up ... she won't die. She will walk and talk. Will she be the woman you loved? I don't know. The EEGs don't tell us whether she can do arithmetic, let alone algebra, calculus, whatever it is you people do."

"Jesus."

"But look. Yesterday at this time she was on the edge of dying. If she'd been in a little worse shape, the phone call you got would've been whether or not to turn off the respirator."

I nodded; a nurse at Reception had used the same words. "She might not even know who I am."

"And she might be exactly the same woman."

"With a hole in her head because of me."

"Well, a useless jack, not a hole. We put it back in after the disconnection, to minimize mechanical stress on the surrounding brain tissue."

"But it's not hooked up. We couldn't – "

"Sorry."

An unshaven nurse came in, slumped with fatigue. "Senor Class?" I put up a hand. "The patient in 201, she asks for you."

I started down the corridor. "Don't stay. She needs sleep."

"Okay." Her door was open. There were two other beds in the room, but they were empty. She was wearing a cap of gauze, eyes closed, sheet pulled up to her shoulders. No tubes or wires, which surprised me. A monitor over her bed displayed the jagged stalactites of her heartbeat.

She opened her eyes. "Julian." She twisted a hand out from under the sheet and grabbed mine. We kissed gently.

"I'm sorry it didn't work," she said. "But I'll never be sorry for trying. Never."

I couldn't say anything. I just rubbed her hand between both of mine.

"I think I'm... unimpaired. Ask me a question, a science question."

"Uh ... what's Avagadro's Number?"

"Oh, ask a chemist. It's the number of molecules in a mole. You want the number of molecules in an armadillo, that's Armadillo's Number."

Well, if she could make bad jokes, she was partway back to normal. "What's the duration of a delta resonance spike? Pions exciting protons."

"About ten to the minus twenty-third. Give me a hard one?"

"You say that to all the guys?" She smiled weakly. "Look, you get some sleep. I'll be outside."

"I'll be all right. You go on back to Houston."

"No."

"One day, then. What is it, Tuesday?"

"Wednesday."

"You have to be back tomorrow night to cover the seminar for me. Senior seminar."

"We'll talk in the morning." There were plenty of people better qualified.

"Promise me?"

"I promise I'll take care of it." At least with a phone call "You get some sleep now."

Marty and I went down to the machine cantina in the basement. He had a cup of strong Bustelo – stay awake for the 1:30 train-and I had a beer. It turned out to be nonalcoholic, specially brewed for hospitals and schools. I told him about "Armadillo's Number" and all.

"She seems to be all there." He tasted his coffee and put another double sugar in it. "Sometimes people lose bits of memory, that they don't miss for awhile. Of course it's not all loss."

"No." One kiss, one touch. "She has the memory of being jacked for what, three minutes?"

"And there might be something more," he said cautiously. He took two data strings out of his shirt pocket and set them on the table. "These are complete copies of her records here. I'm not supposed to have them; they cost more than the operation itself."

"I could help pay – "

"No, it's grant money. The point is, her operation failed for a reason. Not a lack of skill or care on Spencer's part, necessarily, but a reason."

"Something that could be reversed?"

He shook his head and then shrugged. "It's happened."

"You mean it could be reinstalled? I've never heard of that."

"Because it's so rarely done. Usually not worth the risk. They'll try it if, after the extraction, the patient is still in a vegetative state. It's a chance to re-establish contact with the world.

"In Blaze's case it would be too dangerous, at the present state of the art. And it is as much art as science. But it keeps evolving, and maybe someday, if we find out what went wrong..." He sipped at his coffee. "Probably won't happen, not in the next twenty years. Almost all of the research funding is military, and it's not an area they're deeply interested in. If a mechanic's installation fails, they just draft somebody else."

I tasted the beer again and decided it wasn't going to improve. "She's totally disconnected now? If we jacked, she wouldn't feel anything?"

"You could try it. There's still a connection with a few minor ganglia. A few neurons here and there-when we replace the metal core of the jack, some of them re-establish contact."

"Be worth a try."

"Don't expect anything. People in her condition can go to a jack shop and rent a really extreme one, like a deathtrip, but all they get is a mild hallucinating buzz; nothing concrete. If they just jack with a person, no go-between, there's no real effect. Maybe a placebo effect, if they expect something to happen."

"Do us a favor," I said. "Don't tell her that."

COMPROMISING, JULIAN TOOK the train up to Houston, staying just long enough to cover Amelia's particle seminar-the students weren't wild about having a young postdoc unexpectedly substitute for Dr. Blaze – and then caught a midnight train back to Guadalajara.

As it turned out, Amelia was released the next day, traveling by ambulance to a care facility on campus. The clinic didn't want a patient who was just resting under observation to take up a valuable bed on Friday; most of their high-ticket customers checked in that day.

Julian was allowed to ride with her, which was mostly a matter of watching her sleep. When the sedative wore off, about an hour from Houston, they talked primarily about work; Julian managed to avoid lying to her about what might happen if they jacked in her almost-connected state. He knew she would read all about it soon enough and then they'd have to deal with their hopes and disappointments. He didn't want her to build up some transcendental scenario based on that one beautiful instant. The best that could happen would be a lot less than that, and there would probably be no effect at all.

The care center was shiny on the outside and shabby on the inside. Amelia got the only bed left in a four-bed "suite," inhabited by women twice her age, long-term or permanent residents. Julian helped her settle in, and when it became obvious that he wasn't just working for her, two of the old ladies were ostentatiously horrified at the difference in color and age. The third was blind.

Well, they were out in the open now. That was one good thing that had come from the mess, for their personal lives if not their professional ones.

Amelia hadn't read the Chandler book, and was delighted. It seemed unlikely that she would spend much time in conversation.

Julian was headed for conversation that night, of course, Friday. He decided to show up at the club at least an hour late, so Marty could tell the others about the operations and reveal the sordid truth about him and Amelia. If indeed it was actually secret to anybody there. Straitlaced Hayes knew and had never given a hint.

There was plenty to occupy him before the Saturday Night Special, since he hadn't even checked his mail after reading the note under his door, when he returned from Portobello. An assistant to Hayes had written up a summary of the runs he and Amelia had missed; that would take a few hours' study. Then there were notes of concern, mostly from people he would see that night. It was the sort of news that traveled fast.

Just to make life interesting, there was a note from his father saying he'd like to drop by on his way home from Hawaii, so Julian could get to know "Suze," his new wife, better. Unsurprisingly, there was also a phone message from Julian's mother, wondering where he was, and would he mind if she came down to escape the last of the bad weather? Sure, Mom, you and Suze will get along just fine; think of how much you have in common.

In this case, the easiest course was the truth. He punched up his mother and said she could come down if she wanted, but that his father and Suze were going to be here at the same time. After she calmed down from that, he gave her a quick summary of the past four days' excitement.

Her image on the phone took on an odd appearance as he talked. She'd grown up with sound-only, and had never mastered the neutral expression that most people automatically assumed.

"So you're pretty serious about this old woman."

"Old white woman, Momma." Julian laughed at her indignation. "And I've been telling you for a year and a half how serious we were."

"White, purple, green; doesn't make any difference to me. Son, she's only ten years younger than I am."

"Twelve."

"Oh, thank God, twelve! Don't you see how foolish you look now to the people around you?"

"I'm just glad it's not a secret anymore. And if we look foolish to some people, well, that's their problem, not ours."

She looked away from the screen. "It's me that's the fool, and a hypocrite, too. Mother's got to worry."

"If you'd come down once and meet her, you'd stop worrying."

"I should. Okay. You call me when your father and his playmate have gone on up to Akron – "

"Columbus, Mom."

"Wherever. You call me and we'll work out a time."

He watched her image fade and shook his head. She'd been saying that for more than a year; something always came up. She had a busy life, admittedly, still teaching full-time at a junior college in Pittsburgh. But that obviously wasn't it. She really didn't want to lose her little boy at all, and to lose him to a woman old enough to be her sister was grotesque.

He'd talked to Amelia about their going up to Pittsburgh, but she said she didn't want to force the issue. There was something less simple at work with her, as well.

The two women had opposite attitudes toward his being a mechanic, too. Amelia was plainly worried sick all the time he was in Portobello-much worse now, since the massacre-but his mother treated it as a kind of brainless second job that he had to do, even though it got in the way of his actual work. She never seemed to have any curiosity about what went on down there. Amelia followed his unit's actions with the single-minded intensity of a warboy. (She'd never admitted this, which Julian supposed was to spare him anxiety, but she often slipped and asked questions about things that nobody could have found out if they simply followed the news.)

It suddenly, belatedly, occurred to Julian that Hayes, and probably everybody else in the department, knew or suspected there was something going on because of the way Amelia acted when he was away. They worked hard at (but also had fun) playing the role of "just friends" when they came together at work. Maybe their audience knew the script.

All part of the past now. He was impatient to get to the club and see how people had reacted to the news. But he still had a couple of hours if he was going to give Marty ample time to set them up. He didn't really feel like working, even answering mail, so he flopped down on the couch and asked the cube to search.

The cube had a built-in learning routine that analyzed every selection he made, and from the content of what he liked, constructed a preference profile that it used to search through the eighteen hundred available channels. One problem with that was that you couldn't communicate with the routine; its only input was your choices. The first year or so after he was drafted, Julian had obsessively watched century-old movies, perhaps to escape into a world where people and events were simply good or bad. So now when the thing searched, it dutifully came up with lots of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, and Julian had found through objective observation that it did no good to yell at it.

Humphrey Bogart at Rick's. Reset. Jimmy Stewart headed for Washington. Reset. A tour of the lunar south pole, through the eyes of the robot landers. He'd seen most of it a couple of years before, but it was interesting enough to see again. It also helped deprogram the machine.

EVERYONE LOOKED UP WHEN I walked into the room, but I suppose they would do that under any circumstances. Perhaps they kept looking a little longer than usual.

There was an empty chair at a table with Marty, Reza, and Franklin.

"You get her safely ensconced?" Marty asked.

I nodded. "She'll be out of that place as soon as they let her walk. The three women she's sharing the room with are straight out of Hamlet."

"Macbeth," Reza corrected me, "if you mean crones. Or are they sweet young lunatics about to commit suicide?"

"Crones. She seems okay. The ride up from Guadalajara wasn't bad, just long." The sullen waiter in the artfully stained T-shirt slouched over. "Coffee," I said, then caught Reza's look of mock horror. "And a pitcher of Rioja." It was getting on toward the end of the month again. The guy started to ask for my ration card, then recognized me and slumped away.

"Hope you re-enlist," Reza said. He took my number and punched in the price of the whole pitcher.

"When Portobello freezes over."

"Did they say when she'd be released?" Marty asked.

"No. Neurologist sees her in the morning. She'll call me."

"Better have her call Hayes, too. I told him everything was going to be all right, but he's nervous."

"He's nervous."

"He's known her longer than you have," Franklin said quietly. So had he and Marty.

"So did you see any Guadalajara?" Reza asked. "Fleshpots?"

"No. Just wandered around a little. Didn't get into the old city or out to T-town, what do they call it?"

"Tlaquepaque," Reza said. "I spent an eventful week there one day."

"How long have you and Blaze been together?" Franklin asked. "If you don't mind my asking."

"Together" probably wasn't the word he was searching for. "We've been close for three years. Friends a couple of years before that."

"Blaze was his adviser," Marty said.

"Doctoral?"

"Post-doc," I said.

"That's right," Franklin said with a small smile. "You came from Harvard." Only an Eli could say that with a trace of pity, Julian mused.

"Now you're supposed to ask me whether my intentions are honorable. The answer is we have no intentions. Not until I get out of service."

"And how long is that?"

"Unless the war ends, about five years."

"Blaze will be fifty."

"Fifty-two, actually. I'll be thirty-seven. Maybe that bothers you more than it does us."

"No," he said. "It might bother Marty."

Marty gave him a hard look. "What have you been drinking?"

"The usual." Franklin displayed the bottom of his empty teacup. "How long has it been?"

"I only want the best for both of you," Marty said to me. "You know that."

"Eight years, nine?"

"Good God, Franklin. Were you a terrier in a former life?" Marty shook his head as if to clear it. "That was over long before Julian joined the department"

The waiter sidled over with the wine and three glasses. Sensing tension, he poured as slowly as was practical. We all watched him in silence. "So," Reza said, "how 'bout them Oilers?"

THE NEUROLOGIST WHO CAME to see Amelia the next morning was too young to have an advanced degree in anything. He had a goatee and bad skin. For half an hour, he asked her the same simple questions over and over.

"When and where were you born?"

"August 12, 1996. Sturbridge, Massachusetts."

"What was your mother's name?"

"Jane O'Banian Harding."

"Where did you go to grade school?"

"Nathan Hale Elementary, Roxbury."

He paused. "Last time you said Breezewood. In Sturbridge."

She took a deep breath and let it out. "We moved to Roxbury in '04. Maybe '05."

"Ah. And high school?"

"Still O'Bryant. John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science."

"That's in Sturbridge?"

"No, Roxbury! I went to middle school in Roxbury, too. You haven't – "

"What was your mother's maiden name?"

"O'Banian."

He made a long note in his notebook. "All right. Stand up."

"What?"

"Get out of bed, please. Stand up."

Amelia sat up and cautiously put her feet on the floor.

She took a couple of shaky steps and reached back to hold the gown closed.

"Are you dizzy?"

"A little. Of course."

"Raise your arms, please." She did, and the back of the gown fell open.

"Nice bottom, sweetheart," croaked the old lady in the bed next to her.

"Now I want you to close your eyes and slowly bring your fingertips together." She tried and missed; she opened her eyes and saw that she had missed by more than an inch.

"Try it again," he said. This time the two fingers grazed.

He wrote a couple of words in the notebook. "All right. You're free to go now."

"What?"

"You're released. Take your ration card to the checkout desk on your way out."

"But... don't I get to see a doctor?"

He reddened. "You don't think I'm a doctor?"

"No. Are you?"

"I'm qualified to release you. You're released." He turned and walked away.

"What about my clothes? Where are my clothes?" He shrugged and disappeared out the door.

"Try the cabinet there, sweetheart." Amelia checked all the cabinets, moving with creaky slowness. There were neat stacks of linen and gowns, but no trace of the leather suitcase she'd taken to Guadalajara.

"Likely somebody took 'em," another old lady said. "Likely that black boy."

Of course, she suddenly remembered: she'd asked Julian to take it home. It was valuable, handmade, and there was no place here where it would have been secure.

What other little things had she forgotten? The John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science was on New Dudley. Her office at the lab was 12-344. What was Julian's phone number? Eight.

She retrieved her toiletry kit from the bathroom and got the miniphone out of it. It had a toothpaste smear on the punch-plate. She cleaned it with a corner of her sheet and sat on the bed and punched # – 08.

"Mr. Class is in class," the phone said. "Is this an emergency?"

"No. Message." She paused. "Darling, bring me something to wear. I've been released." She set the phone down and reached back and felt the cool metal disk at the base of her skull. She wiped away sudden tears and muttered "Shit."

A big square female nurse rolled in a gurney with a shriveled little Chinese woman on it. "What's the story here?" she said. "This bed is supposed to be vacant."

Amelia started laughing. She put her kit and the Chandler book under her arm and held her gown closed with the other hand and walked out into the corridor.

IT TOOK ME A while to track Amelia down. Her room was full of querulous old women who either clammed up or gave me false information. Of course she was at Accounts Receivable. She didn't have to pay anything for the medical attention or room, but her two inedible meals had been catered, since she hadn't requested otherwise.

That may have been the last straw. When I brought in her clothes she just shrugged off the pale blue hospital gown. She didn't have anything on underneath. There were eight or ten people in the waiting room.

I was thunderstruck. My dignified Amelia?

The receptionist was a young man with ringlets. He stood up. "Wait! You ... you can't do that!"

"Watch me." She put on the blouse first, and took her time buttoning it. "I was kicked out of my room. I don't have anyplace to – "

"Amelia – " She ignored me.

"Go to the ladies' room! Right now!"

"Thank you, no." She tried to stand on one foot and put a sock on, but teetered and almost fell over. I gave her an arm. The audience was respectfully quiet.

"I'm going to call a guard."

"No you're not." She strode over to him, in socks but still bare from ankles to waist. She was an inch or two taller and stared down at him. He stared down, too, looking as if he'd never had a triangle of pubic hair touch his desktop before. "I'll make a scene," she said quietly. "Believe me."

He sat down, his mouth working but no words coming out. She stepped into her pants and slippers, picked up the gown and threw it into the 'cycler.

"Julian, I don't like this place." She offered her arm. "Let's go bother someone else." The room was quiet until we were well out into the corridor, and then there was a sudden explosion of chatter. Amelia stared straight ahead and smiled.

"Bad day?"

"Bad place." She frowned. "Did I just do what I think I did?"

I looked around and whispered, "This is Texas. Don't you know it's against the law to show your ass to a black man?"

"I'm always forgetting that." She smiled nervously and hugged my arm. "I'll write you every day from prison."

There was a cab waiting. We got in fast and Amelia gave it my address. "That's where my bag is, right?"

"Yeah ... but I could bring it over." My place was a mess. "I'm not exactly ready for polite company."

"I'm not exactly company." She rubbed her eyes. "Certainly not polite."

In fact, the place had been a mess when I went to Portobello two weeks earlier, and I hadn't had time to do anything but add to it. We entered a one-room disaster area, ten meters by five of chaos: stacks of papers and readers on every horizontal surface, including the bed; a pile of clothes in one corner aesthetically balanced by a pile of dishes in the sink. I'd forgotten to turn off the coffeepot when I'd gone to school, so a bitter smell of burnt coffee added to the general mustiness.

She laughed. "You know, this is even worse than I expected?" She'd only been here twice and both times I'd been forewarned.

"I know. I need a woman around the place."

"No. You need about a gallon of gasoline and a match." She looked around and shook her head. "Look, we're out in the open. Let's just move in together."

I was still trying to cope with the striptease. "Uh ... there's really not enough room...."