Forever Peace - Joe Haldeman

"That must have been terrifying."

She frowned, remembering. "Not really. It was like an enormous ... lassitude, numbness. As if I could move my arms and legs, or speak, if I really had to. But the effort would have been tremendous. That was probably mood drugs, too, to keep me from panicking.

"They kept moving my arms and legs around and shouting nonsense at me. It was probably English, and I just couldn't decipher their accents, in my condition."

She gestured and I handed her the grape juice. She sipped. "If I remember this right... I was really, really annoyed that they wouldn't just go away and let me lie in peace. But I didn't say anything, because I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of hearing me complain. It's an odd thing to remember. I was really being infantile."

"They didn't try the jack?"

She got a faraway look. "No ... Dr. Spencer told me about that later. In my condition it was better to wait and have the first time be with someone I knew. Seconds count, he explained that to you?"

I nodded. "Exponential increase in the number of neural connections."

"So I lay in a darkened room then, for a long time; lost track of time, I suppose. Then all the things that happened before we... we jacked, I thought it was a dream. Everything was suddenly flooded with light and a couple of people lifted me and bit me on the wrists – the IVs-and then we were floating from room to room."

"Riding a gurney."

She nodded. "It really felt like levitation, though-I remember thinking, 'I'm dreaming,' and resolving to enjoy it. An image of Marty floated by, asleep in a chair, and I accepted that as part of the dream. Then you and Dr. Spencer appeared-okay, you were in the dream, too.

"Then it was all suddenly real." She rocked back and forth, remembering the instant we jacked. "No, not real. Intense. Confusing."

"I remember," I said. "The double vision, seeing yourself. You didn't recognize yourself at first."

"And you told me most people don't. I mean you told me in one word, somehow, or no words. Then it all snapped into focus, and we were ..." She nodded rhythmically, biting her lower lip. "We were all the same. We were one ... thing."

She took my right hand in both of hers. "And then we had to talk to the doctor. And he said we couldn't, he wouldn't let us ..." She lifted my hand to her breast, the way it had been that last moment, and leaned forward. But she didn't kiss me. She put her chin on my shoulder and whispered, voice cracking: "We'll never have that again?"

I automatically tried to feed her a gestalt, the way you do jacked, about how she might be able to try again in a few years, about Marty having her data, about the partial re-establishment of neuron connection so we might try, we might try; and a fraction of a second later I realized no, we weren't connected; she can only hear something if I say it.

"Most people never even have it once."

"Maybe they're better off," she said, muffled, and sobbed quietly. Her hand moved up to squeeze my neck and caress the jack.

I had to say something. "Look... it's possible you haven't lost it all. There might be a small fraction of the ability still there."

"What do you mean?" I explained about some of the neurons homing back into the jack's receptor areas. "How much might be there?"

"I don't have the faintest idea. I'd never even heard of it until a couple of days ago." Though I knew with sudden certainty that some of the jills must be that way, unable to make a really deep connection. Ralph had brought back memories of some who had hardly seemed jacked at all.

"We have to try. Where could we ... could you bring the equipment back from Portobello?"

"No, I'd never get it off the base." And be court-martialed, if I tried.

"Hmm ... Maybe we could find a way to sneak into the hospital – "

I laughed. "You don't have to sneak anywhere. Just buy time at one of the jack joints."

"But I don't want that. I want to do it with you."

"That's what I mean! They have double unis-two-person universes. Two people jack in and go someplace together." That's where the jills took their customers. You can screw on the streets of Paris, floating in outer space, riding a canoe down rapids. Ralph had brought us back the weirdest memories.

"Let's go do it."

"Look, you're still beat from the hospital. Why not get a day or two rest and then – "

"No!" She stood up. "For all we know, the connections might be fading while we sit here and talk about it." She picked up the phone off the table and punched two numbers; she knew my cab code. "Outside?"

I got up and followed her to the door, afraid I'd made a big mistake. "Look, don't expect the world."

"Oh, I don't expect anything. Just have to try it, find out." For someone who didn't expect anything, she was awfully eager.

It was infectious. While we waited for the cab, I went from thinking Well, at least we'll find out one way or the other to being sure that there would be at least something there. Marty had said there would be a placebo effect, if nothing more.

I couldn't give the cab a specific address, since I'd only been there once. But I asked whether it knew where the block of jack joints was, just outside the university, and it said yes.

We could have biked there, but it was the neighborhood where that guy had pulled a knife on me – it had started pretty low and gone downhill-and I figured it might be dark by the time we finished our experiment.

It was a good thing the cab turned off the meter while we went through security. The shoe in charge saw our destination and jerked us around for ten minutes, I supposed to watch Amelia's discomfort. Or try to get some sort of rise out of me. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

We had the cab let us off on the near end of the block, so we could walk the length of it and check the menus in each joint. The price was important; payday was two days away for both of us. I made three times as much as she did, but the Mexican excursion had brought me down to less than a hundred bucks. And Amelia was flat.

There were more jills than pedestrians. Some of them offered to join us in a three-way. I hadn't known that was possible. It sounded more confusing than alluring, even under good conditions. And being more intimately linked to the jill than to Amelia would be a disaster.

The place with the best double uni deal was also one of the nicest, or the least sleazy. It was called Your World, and instead of car crashes and executions, it offered a menu of explorations-like the French tour I'd taken in Mexico, but more exotic.

I suggested the underwater tour of the Great Barrier Reef.

"I'm not a good swimmer," Amelia said. "Would that make a difference?"

"Me neither; don't worry. It's like being a fish." I'd done this one. "You don't even think about swimming."

It was a dollar a minute, cash, or two minutes for three dollars, plastic. Ten minutes up front. I paid cash; keep the plastic for emergencies.

A stern-looking fat lady, black with a springy forest of white hair, led us to the booth. It was a small cubicle just over a meter high, with a padded blue mat on the floor, two jack cables hanging from the low ceiling.

"Time start' when the first one plug in. You all want to take your clothes off first, I s'pose. Place been sterilized. You-all have a good time, now."

She turned abruptly and bustled away. "She thinks you're a jill," I said.

"I could use a second income." We entered the place on our hands and knees and when I shut the door the air conditioner started to whir. Then a white-noise generator added a steady hiss.

"Does the light make a difference?"

"It goes off automatically." We helped each other undress and she lay down the right way, on her stomach facing the door.

She was rigid and trembling slightly. "Relax," I said, kneading her shoulders.

"I'm afraid nothing will happen."

"If nothing happens, we'll try it again." I remembered what Marty had said-she really should start off with something like jumping off a cliff. Well, I could tell her that later.

"Here." I slid over a diamond-shaped pillow that supports your face on the chin, cheekbones, and forehead. "This'll help your neck relax." I stroked her back for a minute, and when she seemed looser, I moved the jack interface into place over the metal socket in her head. There was a faint click and the light went out.

Of course after thousands of hours, I didn't need the pillow; I could jack standing up or hanging upside down. I groped for the cable and stretched out so we were touching, arm and hip. Then I jacked in.

The water was warm as blood and it tasted good, salt and seaweed, on my lips, as I breathed it in. I was in less than two meters of water, bright coral formations all around, tiny fish with brilliant colors ignoring me until I came close enough to be a danger. A small green moray eel, face like a cartoon villain, stared at me from a hole in the coral.

Volition is strange when you're jacked like this. I "decided" to go off to the left, although there was nothing obvious there, just a plain of white sand. Actually, the person who had recorded the trip had a good reason to check it out, but the customer wasn't in contact with him or her at that level; nothing but the sensorium, amplified.

Sunlight refracting through the ripples on the surface made a pleasant shimmering pattern on the sand, but that wasn't why we had come here. I hovered over two eye-stalks that poked out of the sand, twitching, agitated. Suddenly the sand exploded underneath me, and to the left and right, and a tiger-striped manta ray flew out from where it had been hiding, under a few centimeters of sand. It was huge, easily three meters wide. I shot forward and grabbed a wing, before it had time to gather speed.

One powerful flap of the wings and we surged forward; another, and we were going faster than any merely human swimmer, the water churning smoothly down my body...

And hers. Amelia was there, definitely but faintly, like a shadow inside me. The turbulence from the fast water made my genitals flutter, but part of me didn't have that; for that part of me the water flowed smoothly tickling between her legs.

Intellectually, I knew that they'd had to merge two strings to create this, and wondered how hard it had been to find a large manta for both the man and the woman or how they'd gotten around it. But mainly I focused on that particular dual sensation and tried to make contact with Amelia through it.

I couldn't, quite. No words, no specificity; just a vague "isn't this thrilling" gestalt that I felt reflected with a different twist, Amelia's personality. There was also a faint different excitement that must have been her realization that we were in contact.

The sand surface fell away in an underwater cliff and the manta dived, the water suddenly cool and the pressure increasing. We lost our grip and went tumbling alone in the dark water.

As we slid slowly upward I felt little butterfly flutterings that I knew were Amelia's hands on me, back in the cubical, and as I became erect it was wetness that wasn't the imaginary ocean around me, and then the ghostly clasp of her legs and a faint pulsing up and down.

It wasn't like Carolyn, where I was her and she was me. It was more like a compelling sexual dream that possessed you while you were half awake.

The water above was like beaten silver, and three sharks scudded there as we floated up. There was a little shiver of fear, though I knew they were harmless, since the string wasn't rated D or I; death or injury. I tried to project to Amelia not to be scared, but I didn't feel any fear from her. She was preoccupied. Her physical presence grew stronger in me, and she wasn't exactly swimming.