Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

"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.