Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

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.

I bought a small plate of those-minnows, sun-dried and marinated, served with lime and hot chile – which would have marked me as a tourist even if I weren't black and dressed like an American.

Counted my pesos and started looking for a gift for Amelia. I'd already done jewelry, to help get us into this mess, and she wouldn't wear ethnic clothing.

A horrible practical whisper told me to wait until after the operation. But I decided that buying the gift was more for me than for her, anyhow. A commercial kind of substitute for prayer.

There was a huge stall of old books, the paper kind and also the earlier versions of view-books-most of them, with formats and power supplies decades out of date, were for collectors of electronic curiosities, not readers.

They did have two shelves of books in English, most of them novels. She'd probably like one, but it posed a dilemma: if a book was well-known enough for me to recognize the title, then she probably already had it, or at least had read it.

I killed about an hour deciding, reading the first few pages of every book there I hadn't heard of. I finally returned to The Long Good-bye, by Raymond Chandler, which was good reading and also had a leather binding, embossed "Midnite Mystery Club."

I sat by a fountain and read for awhile. An engrossing book, a time trip not only for what it was about and the way it was written, but also the physicality of it-the heavy yellowed paper, the feel and musty smell of the leather. The skin of an animal dead more than a century, if it was real leather.

The marble steps weren't all that comfortable, though-my legs fell asleep from butt to knees-so I wandered awhile more. There were more expensive shops on the second floor down, but they included a set of jack booths that cost almost nothing, sponsored by travel agencies and various countries. For twenty pesos, I spent thirty minutes in France.

That was a strange experience. The spoken cues were all in rapid Mexican Spanish, hard for me to follow, but of course the unspoken ones were the same as ever. I walked around Montmartre for awhile, then lounged on a slow barge drifting through the Bordeau region, and finally sat at an inn in Burgundy, feasting on rich cheeses and complex wines. When it was over, I was starving again.

Of course there was a French restaurant right across from the booth, but I didn't even have to look at the menu to know it was beyond me. I retreated back upstairs and found a place with lots of small tables and music that wasn't too loud, and wolfed down a plate of taquitos varios. Then I washed up and finished reading the book there, nursing a beer and a cup of coffee.

When I finished the book it was only eight, still two hours before I could check on Amelia. I didn't want to go hang around the clinic, but the mall was getting oppressively loud as it moved from evening into night-time mode. A half-dozen mariachi bands competing for attention along with the blare and rumble of modern music from the night clubs. Some very alluring women sitting in the windows of an escort service, three of them wearing PM buttons, which meant they were jacked. That would be a great way to spend the next two hours-jacksex and guilt.

I wound up wandering through the residential neighborhood, reasonably confident because of the puttyknife, even though the area was rundown and a bit menacing.

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.