Forever Peace (13 page)

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.