Forever Peace (22 page)

"Most of the Ngumi thinks we did it," Marty said, "and just manipulated things to make it look like they did... as you say, no one would do that to their own people. That's proof enough right there."

"You think it was all a cynical plan?" Amelia said. "I can't imagine."

"No, the word we have—this is confidential and unsupported—is that it was one lunatic officer and a few followers. They're all disposed of now, and Ngumi Psychops, such as they are, are doing a lot of smoke and mirrors, proving that for some reason we would want to destroy a school full of innocent children, to make a point. To show how ruthless the Ngumi are, when of course everyone knows they're the army of and for the people."

"And they're buying it?" I asked.

"A lot of Central and South America is. You haven't been watching the news?"

"Off and on. What was the thing with Amnesty International?"

"Oh, the army let one of their lawyers jack into any string he wanted, on condition of confidentiality. He could testify that everyone was genuinely surprised by the atrocity, most people horrified. That's pretty much gotten us off the hook in Europe, and even Africa and Asia. Didn't make the news down south."

Asher and Reza came in together. "Hey, welcome back, you two. Run off and get married?"

"Ran off," Amelia said quickly, "but to work. We've been up in Washington."

"Government business?" Asher said.

"No. But it will be, after the weekend."

"Can we wheedle it out of you? Or is it too technical?"

"Not technical, not the most important part." She turned to Marty. "Is Ray coming?"

"No; he had a family thing."

"Okay. Let's get our drinks. Julian and I have a story to tell."

Once the waiter had delivered the wine and coffee and whiskey and disappeared, Amelia started the tale, the threat of absolute intergalactic doom. I added a few details here and there. Nobody interrupted.

Then there was a long pause. There had probably not been that many consecutive seconds of silence in all the years this group had been getting together.

Asher cleared his throat. "Of course the jury's not in yet. Literally."

"That's true," Amelia said. "But the fact that Julian and Peter got the same results—down to eight significant figures!—using two different starting points and two independent methods ... well, I'm not worried about the jury. I'm just worried about the politics of shutting down such a huge project. And a little worried about where I'll be working next year. Next week."

"Ah," Belda said. "You've done a good job with the trees. Surely you've thought about the forest as well."

"That it's a weapon?" I said, and Belda nodded slowly. "Yes. It's the ultimate doomsday weapon. It has to be dismantled."

"But the forest is bigger than that," Belda said, and sipped her coffee. "Suppose you don't just dismantle it—you destroy it without a trace. You go through the literature and erase every line that relates to the Jupiter Project. And then you have government goons go out and kill everyone who's ever heard of it. What happens then?"

"You tell me," I said. "You're going to."

"The obvious. In ten years, or a hundred, or a million, somebody else will come up with the idea. And they'll be squashed, too. But then in another ten or a million years, somebody else will come up with it. Sooner or later, somebody will threaten to use it. Or not even threaten. Just do it. Because they hate the world enough they want everything to die."

There was another long silence. "Well," I said, "that solves one mystery. People wonder where physical law comes from. I mean, supposedly, all the laws governing matter and energy had to be created with the pinprick that began the Diaspora. It seems impossible, or unnecessary."

"So if Belda's right," Amelia said, "physical law was all in place. Twenty billion years ago, someone pushed the 'reset' button."

"And some billions of years before that," Belda said, "someone had done it before. The universe only lasts long enough to evolve creatures like us." She pointed a V of bony fingers at Amelia and me. "People like you two."

Well, it didn't really solve the first-cause mystery; sooner or later there had to be an actual first time.

"I wonder," Reza said. "Surely in all the millions of galaxies there are other races who've made this discovery. Thousands or millions of times. They evidently have all been psychologically incapable of doing it, destroying us all."

"Evolved beyond it," Asher said. "A pity we haven't." He swirled the ice in his whiskey. "If Hitler had had the button in his bunker... or Caligula, Genghis Khan..."

"Hitler only missed the boat by a century," Reza said. "I guess we haven't evolved past the possibility of producing another one."

"And won't," Belda said. "Aggression's a survival characteristic. It put us at the top of the food chain."

"Cooperation did," Amelia corrected. "Aggression doesn't work against a saber-toothed tiger."

"A combination, I'll grant you," Belda said.

"Cooperation and aggression," Marty said. "So a soldierboy platoon is the ultimate expression of human superiority over the beasts."

"You couldn't tell that by some of them," I said. "Some of them seem to have devolved."

"But allow me to keep this on track." Marty steepled his fingers. "Think of it this way. The race against time has begun. Sometime within the next ten or a million years, we have to direct human evolution away from aggressive behavior. In theory, it's not impossible. We've directed the evolution of many other species."

"Some in one generation," Amelia said. "There's a zoo full of them down the road."

"Delightful place," Belda said.

"We could do it in one generation," Marty said quietly. "Less." The others all looked at him.

"Julian," he said, "why don't mechanics stay in soldierboys for more than nine days?"

I shrugged. "Fatigue. Stay in too long and you get sloppy."

"That's what they tell you. That's what they tell everybody. They think it's the truth." He looked around uneasily. They were the only people in the room, but he lowered his voice. "This is secret. Very secret. If Julian were going back to his platoon, I couldn't say it, because then too many people would know. But I can trust everyone here."

"With a military secret?" Reza said.

"Not even the military knows. Ray and I have kept this from them, and it hasn't been easy.

"Up in North Dakota there's a convalescent home with sixteen inmates. There's nothing really wrong with them. They stay there because they know they have to."

"People you and Ray worked on?" I asked.

"Exactly. More than twenty years ago. They're middle-aged now, and know they'll probably have to spend the rest of their lives in seclusion."

"What the hell did you do to them?" Reza said.

"Eight of them stayed jacked into soldierboys for three weeks. The other eight for sixteen days."

"That's all?" I said.

"That's all."

"It drove them crazy?" Amelia asked.

Belda laughed, a rare sound, not happy. "I'll bet not. I'll bet it drove them sane."

"Belda's close," Marty said. "She has this annoying way of being able to read your mind without benefit of electricity.

"What happens is that after a couple of weeks in the soldierboy, you paradoxically can't be a soldier anymore."

"You can't kill?" I said.

"You can't even hurt anybody on purpose, except to save your own life. Or other lives. It permanently changes your way of thinking, of feeling; even after you unjack. You've been inside other people too long, shared their identity. Hurting another person would be as painful as hurting yourself."

"Not pure pacifists, though," Reza said. "Not if they can kill in self-defense."

"It varies from individual to individual. Some would rather die than kill, even in self-defense."

"Is that what happens to people like Candi?" I asked.

"Not really. People like her are chosen for empathy, for gentleness. You would expect being jacked to enhance those qualities in them."

"You just used random people in the experiment?" Reza asked.

He nodded. "The first one was random paid volunteers, off-duty soldiers. But not the second group." He leaned forward. "Half the second group were Special Forces assassins. The other half were civilians who had been convicted of murder."

"And they all became ... civilized?" Amelia said.

"The verb we use is 'humanized,' " Marty said.

"If a hunter-killer platoon stayed jacked for two weeks," I said, "they'd turn into pussycats?"

"So we assume. This was done before hunter-killers, of course; before soldierboys were used in combat."

Asher had been following this quietly. "It seems to me absurd to assume that the military hasn't duplicated your experiment. Then figured out a way around this inconvenient aberration, pacifism. Humanization."

"Not impossible, Asher, but unlikely. I'm jacked, one-way, with hundreds of military people, from private to general. If anyone was involved in an experiment, or had even heard a rumor of one, I would know."

"Not if everyone in authority was also jacked oneway. And the experimental subjects isolated, like yours, or disposed of."

That was worth a moment of silence. Would military scientists have inconvenient subjects killed?

"I'll admit the possibility," Marty said, "but it's remote. Ray and I coordinate all the military research on soldierboys. For someone to get a project approved, funded, and implemented without our being aware ... possible. But it's possible to flip a coin and come up heads a hundred times in a row."

"Interesting that you bring up numbers, Marty," Reza said. He'd been scribbling on a napkin. "Take a best-case scenario, where you have everyone agreeing to become humanized, and lining up to get jacked.

"First of all, one out of ten or twelve dies or goes crazy. I'm already trying to figure ways to get out of it."

"Well, we don't know—"

"Let me go on just a second. If it's one out of twelve, you're killing six hundred million people to ensure that the rest of them won't kill anybody. You're already making Hitler look like an amateur, by two orders of magnitude."

"There's more, I'm sure," Marty said.

"There is. What do we have, six thousand soldierboys? Say we build a hundred thousand. Everybody has to spend two weeks jacked—and that's after they spend five days getting their brains drilled out and recovering. Call it twenty days per person. Assuming seven billion survive the surgery, that's seven thousand people per machine. It sounds like a hundred forty thousand days to me. That's almost four hundred years. Then we all live happily ever after—the ones who live at all."

"Let me see that." Reza handed the napkin to Marty. He traced the column of figures with his finger. "One thing that's not in here is the fact that you don't need a whole soldierboy. Just the basic brain-to-brain wiring, and IV drips for nourishment. We could set up a million stations, not a hundred thousand. Ten million. That reduces the time scale to four years."

"But not the half-billion deaths," Belda said. "It's academic to me, since I only plan on living a few more years. But it does seem a high price to ask."

Asher pushed the button for the waiter. "This didn't come off the top of your head, Marty. How long have you been thinking about it, twenty years?"

"Something like that," he admitted, and shrugged. "You don't really need the death of the universe. We've been on a slippery slope since Hiroshima. Since World War One, actually."

"A secret pacifist working for the military?" Belda said.

"Not secret. The army tolerates theoretical pacifism— look at Julian—so long as it doesn't interfere with work. Most of the generals I know would call themselves pacifists."

The waiter shambled in and took the order. When he left, I said, "Marty's got a point. It's not just the Jupiter Project. There are plenty of lines of research that could ultimately lead to the planet being sterilized, or destroyed. Even if the rest of the universe is unaffected."

"You're already jacked," Reza said, and finished his wine. "You don't get a vote."

"What about people like me?" Amelia said. "Who try to be jacked and fail? Maybe you can put us in a nice concentration camp, where we can't hurt anybody."

Asher laughed. "Come on, Blaze. This is just a thought experiment. Marty's not seriously proposing—"

Marty slapped the table with his palm. "Damn it, Asher! I've never been more serious in my life."

"Then you're crazy. It's never going to happen."

Marty turned to Amelia. "In the past, it's never been imperative that any one person be jacked. If it became an effort on the order of your Jupiter Project—the Manhattan Project—all the work that's been begging to be done would be done!" To Reza: "The same with your half-billion dead. This isn't something that would have to be implemented overnight. A lot of cautious, controlled research, refinement of techniques, and the casualty rate would dwindle, maybe to zero."

"Then to put it in the least kind terms," Asher said, "you're accusing the army of murder. Granted, that's what they're supposed to do, but it's supposed to be people on the other side." Marty looked quizzical. "I mean, if you have thought all along that jacking installation could be made safe, why hasn't the army held off on making new mechanics until it is safe?"

"It's not the army who's a murderer, you're saying. It's me. Researchers like me and Ray."

"Oh, don't get dramatic. I'm sure you've done your best. But I've always felt the human cost of the program was way too high."

"I agree," Marty said, "and it's not just the one-in-twelve installation casualties. Mechanics have an unacceptably high death rate from stroke and heart attack." He looked away from me. "And suicide, during their enlistment or after."

"The death rate for soldiers is high," I said. "That's not news. But it's part of the argument: get rid of soldiering as an occupation.

"Suppose we could develop a way that jacking was a hundred percent successful, with absolutely no casualties. There's still no way you could get everyone to do it. I can just see the Ngumi lining up to have their heads drilled by a bunch of Alliance demon-scientists! Hell, you couldn't even convert our own military. Once the generals found out what you were doing, you'd be history. You'd be compost!"