Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

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.