Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

Of course, she noticed me. "Hey, Jack!" She stepped onto the path and I stopped the bike. "I got something you can ride."

"Maybe later," I said. "You're lookin' good." Actually, she wasn't. Her face and posture showed a lot of stress; the telltale pink in her eyes tagged her as a cherrybomb user.

"Half price for you, honey." I shook my head. She grabbed on to my handlebars. "Quarter price. Been so long since I done it jacked."

"I couldn't do it jacked." Something made me honest, or partly so. "Not with a stranger."

"So how long would I be a stranger?" She couldn't hide the note of pleading.

"Sorry." I pushed off onto the grass. If I didn't get away fast, she'd be offering to pay me.

The other hookers had watched the exchange with various attitudes: curiosity, pity, contempt. As if they weren't all addicts of one kind or another, themselves. Nobody had to fuck for a living in the Universal Welfare State. Nobody had to do anything but stay out of trouble. It works so well.

They had legalized prostitution in Florida for a few years, when I was growing up. But it went the way of the big casinos before I was old enough to be interested.

Hooking's a crime in Texas, but I think you have to be a real nuisance before they lock you up. The two cops who watched the jill proposition me didn't put the cuffs on her. Maybe later, if they had the money.

Jills usually get plenty of work. They know what it feels like to be male.

I pedaled past the college-town stores, with their academic prices, into town. South Houston was not exactly savory, but I was armed. Besides, I figured that bad guys kept late hours, and would still be in bed. One wasn't.

I leaned the bike up against the rack outside of the liquor store and was fiddling with the cranky lock, which was supposed to take my card.

"Hey boy," a deep bass voice said behind me. "You got ten dollars for me? Maybe twenny?"

I turned around slowly. He was a head taller than me, maybe forty, lean, muscle suit. Shiny boots up to his knees and the tightly braided ponytail of an Ender: God would use that to haul him up to heaven. Soon, he hoped.

"I thought you guys didn't need money."

"I need some. I need it now."

"So what's your habit?" I put my right hand on my hip. Not natural or comfortable, but close to the putty-knife. "Maybe I got some."

"You don't got what I need. Got to buy what I need." He drew a long knife with a slender wavy blade from his boot.

"Put it away. I got ten." The silly dagger was no match for a puttyknife, but I didn't want to perform a dissection out here on the sidewalk.

"Oh, you got ten. Maybe you got fifty." He took a step toward me.

I pulled out the puttyknife and turned it on. It hummed and glowed. "You just lost ten. How much more you want to lose?"

He stared at the vibrating blade. The shimmering mist on the top third was as hot as the surface of the sun. "You in the army. You a mechanic."

"I'm either a mechanic or I killed one and took his knife. Either way, you want to fuck with me?"

"Mechanics ain't so tough. I was in the army."

"You know all about it, then." He took a half-step to the right, I think a feint. I didn't move. "You don't want to wait for your Rapture? You want to die right now?"

He looked at me for a long second. There was nothing in his eyes. "Oh, fuck you anyhow." He put the knife back in his boot, turned, and walked away without looking back.

I turned off the puttyknife and blew on it When it was cool enough, I put it back and went into the liquor store.

The clerk had a chrome Remington airspray. "Fuckin' Endie. I would've got him."

"Thanks," I said. He would've gotten me too, with an airspray. "You got six Dixies?"

"Sure." He opened the case behind him. "Ration card?"

"Army," I said. I didn't bother with the ID.

"Figured." He rummaged. "You know they got a law I got to let the fuckin' Endies in the store? They never buy anything."

"Why should they?" I said. "World's going up in smoke tomorrow, maybe the next day."

"Right. Meanwhile they steal y' blind. All I got's cans."

"Whatever." I was starting to shake a little. Between the Ender and this trigger-happy clerk I'd probably come closer to dying than I ever would in Portobello.

He put the six-pack in front of me. "You don't want to sell that knife?"

"No, I need it all the time. Open fan mail with it."

That was the wrong thing to say. "Got to say I don't recognize you. I follow the Fourth and Sixteenth, mainly."

"I'm Ninth. Not nearly as exciting."

"Interdiction," he said, nodding. The Fourth and Sixteenth are hunter-killer platoons, so they have a considerable following. Warboys, we call their fans.

He was a little excited, even though I was just Interdiction. And Psychops. "You didn't catch the Fourth last Wednesday, did you?"

"Hey, I don't even follow my own outfit. I was in the cage then, anyhow."

He stopped for a moment with my card in his hand, struck dumb by the concept that a person could live nine days in a row inside a soldierboy and then not jump straight to the cube and follow the war.

Some do, of course. I met Scoville when he was out of the cage once, here in Houston for a warboy "assembly." There's one every week somewhere in Texas – they haul in enough booze and bum and squeak to keep them cross-eyed for a long weekend, and pay a couple of mechanics to come in and tell them what it's really really like. To be locked inside a cage and watch yourself murder people by remote control. They replay tapes of great battles and argue over fine points of strategy.

The only one I've ever gone to had a "warrior day," where all of the attendees-all except us outsiders – dressed up as warriors from the past. That was kind of scary. I assumed the tommy guns and flintlocks didn't function; even criminals were reluctant to risk that. But the swords and spears and bows looked real enough, and they were in the hands of people who had amply demonstrated, to me at least, that they shouldn't be trusted with a sharp stick.

"You were going to kill that guy?" the clerk said conversationally.

"No reason to. They always back off." As if I knew.

"But suppose he didn't."

"It wouldn't be a problem," I heard myself saying. "Take his knife hand off at the wrist. Call 9-1-1. Maybe they'd glue it back on upside down." Actually, they'd probably take their time responding. Give him a chance to beat the Rapture by bleeding to death.

He nodded. "We had two guys last month outside the store, they did the handkerchief thing, some girl." That was where two men bite down on opposite corners of a handkerchief, and have at each other with knives or razors. The one who lets go of the handkerchief loses. "One guy was dead before they got here. The other lost an ear; they didn't bother to look for it." He gestured. "I kept it in the freezer for awhile."

"You're the one who called the cops?"

"Oh yeah," he said. "Soon as it was over." Good citizen.

I strapped the beer onto the rear carrier and pedaled back toward the gate.

Things are getting worse. I hate to sound like my old man. But things really were better when I was a boy. There weren't Enders on every corner. People didn't duel. People didn't stand around and watch other people duel. And then police picked up the ears afterward.

NOT ALL ENDERS HAD ponytails and obvious attitudes. There were two in Julian's physics department, a secretary and Mac Roman himself.

People wondered how such a mediocre scientist had come out of nowhere and brown-nosed his way into a position of academic power. What they didn't appreciate was the intellectual effort it took to successfully pretend to believe in the ordered, agnostic view of the universe that physics mandated. It was all part of God's plan, though. Like the carefully falsified documents that had put him in the position of being minimally qualified for the chairmanship. Two other Enders were on the Board of Regents, able to push his case.