Forever Peace - Joe Haldeman Page 0,79

that’s just part of the programming, right? In theory, you could short-circuit it.”

“Ah.” He nodded slowly. “I see where you’re heading.”

“That’s right. If you could get around that injunction, you could say, in effect, ‘Re-create the Jupiter Project for me,’ and if it had access to the raw materials, and the information, it could do it.”

“As an extension of one person’s will.”

“That’s right.”

“My God.” He drank the rum and set the glass down hard. “My God.”

“Everything,” I said. “A trillion galaxies disappear if one maniac says the right sequence of words.”

“Marty has a lot of faith in the monsters he created,” Mendez said, “to let us share this knowledge.”

“Faith or desperation. Guess I got a mixture of both from him.”

“You hungry?”

“What?”

“You want dinner now, or should we all jack first?”

“That’s what I’m hungry for. Let’s do it.”

He stood up and brought his hands together in two explosive claps. “Big room,” he shouted. “Marc, you stay out and keep watch.” We followed everyone to a double door on the other side of the atrium. I wondered what I was getting myself into.

* * *

julian was used to being ten people at once, but it was stressful and confusing at times, even with people you had grown close to. He didn’t really know what to expect, linking with fifteen men and women he’d never met, who had been jacked together for twenty years. That would be alien territory even without Marty’s pacifistic transformation. Julian had used his horizontal liaison to weakly link with other platoons, and it was always like breaking in on a family discussion.

Eight of these had been mechanics, at least, or protomechanics. He was more nervous about the others, the assassins and murderers. More curious about them, too.

Maybe they could teach him something about living with memories.

The “big room” held a ring-shaped table surrounding a holo pit. “Most of us get together here for the news,” Mendez said. “Movies, concerts, plays. Fun to have all the different points of view.”

Julian wasn’t sure about that. He’d mediated too many firestorms in his platoon, where one person came up with a strong opinion that divided the ten into two bickering camps. It took about a second to start, and sometimes an hour to sort out.

The walls were dark mahogany and the table and its chairs were fine-grained spruce. A slight whisper of linseed oil and furniture polish. In the pit, an image of a forest clearing, dappled sunlight on wildflowers.

There were twenty seats. Mendez offered Julian a chair and sat down next to him. “You might want to plug in first,” he said, “let people come in one at a time and introduce themselves.”

“Sure.” Julian realized this had all been rehearsed. He stared at the wildflowers and plugged himself in.

Mendez was the first one, waving a silent hello. The link was strange, powerful in a way he’d never come close to experiencing. It was startling, like seeing the sea for the first time—and it was like a sea in a literal way; Mendez’s consciousness floated in a seemingly endless expanse of shared memory and thought. And he was comfortable with it the way a fish is comfortable with the sea, moving through its invisibility.

Julian tried to communicate his reaction to Mendez, along with a sense of rising panic; he wasn’t sure whether he could manage two such universes, let alone fifteen. Mendez said it actually gets easier with more, and then Cameron plugged in to prove it.

Cameron was an older man, who had been a professional soldier for eleven years when he volunteered for the project. He had gone to a sniper school in Georgia, and trained for long-distance murder with a variety of weapons. Mostly he had used the Mauser Fernschiesser, which could target people around a corner or even over the horizon. He had fifty-two kills, and separate grief for each of them, and a single large pang for the humanity he had lost with the first shot. He also remembered the exhilaration the kills had given him, at the time. He had fought in Colombia and Guatemala, and automatically made a connection with Julian’s jungle days, absorbing and integrating them almost instantly.

Mendez was still there, too, and Julian was aware of his immediate connection with Cameron, casually sorting through what the soldier had taken from his new contact. That part was not so alien, except for the speed and completeness of it. And Julian could understand why the totality could become more clear as more people joined: all

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