Now Tyler. She was one of the murderers, too, having remorselessly killed three people in one year for money, to support a drug habit. That was just before cash became obsolete in the States; she had been captured in a routine check when she tried to emigrate to a country that had both paper pesos and designer drugs. Her crimes were older than Julian was, and although she didn't deny legal or moral responsibility for them, they literally had been done by a different person. The DD doper who lured three pushers into bed and killed them there, as a favor for their boss, was just a vivid melodramatic memory, like a movie you saw a few hours ago. For the peaceful part of her day, Tyler was part of the Twenty, as they still called themselves in their minds, even though four had died; other times she worked as an arbitrageur, bartering and buying commodities in dozens of different countries, Alliance and Ngumi. With their own nanoforge, the Twenty could survive without wealth – but then if the machine asked for a cup of praseodymium, it was nice to have a few million rupees close to hand, so Tyler could buy it without having to go through a lot of tiresome paperwork.
The others came in more rapidly, or seemed to, once Julian got over the initial strangeness.
As each of the fifteen presented himself or herself, another part of the vast, but now not endless, structure became clear. When they all had logged in, the ocean was more like an inland sea, huge and complex, but thoroughly mapped and navigable.
And they sailed together for what seemed like hours, in a voyage of mutual exploration. The only one they had ever jacked with outside the Twenty was Marty, who was a sort of godfather figure, remote because he only jacked one-way with them now.
Julian was a vast treasure of quotidian detail. They were hungry for his impressions of New York, Washington, Dallas – every place in the country had been drastically changed by the social and technological revolution, the Universal Welfare State, that the nanoforge had wrought. Not to mention the endless Ngumi War.
The nine who had been soldiers were fascinated with what the soldierboy had become. In the pilot program they had been taken from, the primitive machines were little more than stick men with one laser finger. They could walk around and sit or lie down, and open a door if the latch was simple. They all knew from the news what the current machines were capable of doing, and in fact three of them were warboys, after a fashion. They couldn't go to the conventions, but they followed units and jacked into soldierboy crystals and strings. It was nothing like being jacked two-way with an actual mechanic, though.
Julian was embarrassed by their enthusiasm but could share their amused feedback at his embarrassment. He was familiar enough with that from his platoon.
A lot of it became more and more familiar-feeling as he grew used to the scale of it. It wasn't only that the Twenty had been together so long; they had also been around a long time. At thirty-two, Julian was the oldest in his platoon by several years; all together, they had less than three hundred years of experience. The aggregate age of the Twenty was well over a thousand, a lot of that time spent in mutual contemplation.
They weren't exactly a 'group mind,' but they were a lot closer to that state than Julian's platoon. They never argued, except for amusement. They were gentle and content. They were humane … but were they quite human?
This was the question that had been in the back of Julian's mind from the time Marty first described the Twenty: maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.
The others picked up on this worry and said no, we're still human in all the ways that count. Human nature does change, and the fact that we've developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise, there would be no universe. Unless we're the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there's no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we're the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Someone does have to be first.
But maybe the first is always the last.
They caught the hopefulness that Julian was protecting with pessimism. You're much more idealistic than us, Tyler pointed out. Most of us have killed, but none of us was driven to attempt suicide by remorse over the act.
Of course there were a lot of other factors, which Julian didn't have to explain. He was cushioned by wisdom and forgiveness – and suddenly had to get out!
He pulled the plug and was surrounded but alone, fifteen people staring down at the wildflowers. Staring into their collective soul.
He checked his watch and was shocked. Only twelve minutes had actually passed during all those seeming hours.
One by one they unjacked. Mendez kneaded his face and grimaced. 'You felt outnumbered.'
'That's part of it … out-gunned. All of you are so good at this, it's automatic. I felt, I don't know, out of control.'
'We weren't manipulating you.'
Julian shook his head. 'I know. You were being very careful that way. But I felt like I was being absorbed anyhow. By … by my own willingness. I don't know how long I could stay jacked with you before becoming one of you.'
'And that would be such a bad thing?' Ellie Frazer said. She was the youngest, almost Amelia's age, beautiful hair prematurely white.
'Not for me, I think. Not for me personally.' Julian studied her quiet beauty and knew, along with everyone else, exactly how desperately she desired him. 'But I can't do it yet. The next stage of this project involves going back to Portobello with a set of false memories, infiltrating the command cadre. I can't be as … obviously different as you are.'
'We know that,' she said. 'But you could still spend a lot more time with us–'
'Ellie,' Mendez said gently, 'turn off the goddamned pheromones. Julian knows what's best for him.'
'I don't, actually. Who would? Nobody's ever done anything like this before.'
'You have to be cautious,' Ellie said in a way that was reassuring and infuriating: we know exactly what you think, and though you're wrong, we'll go along with it.
Marc Lobell, the chess master and wife murderer who had stayed out of the circle to answer the phone, ran pounding over the little bridges and skidded to a stop in front of them.
'A guy in uniform,' he said, panting. 'Here to see Sergeant Class.' 'Who is it?' Julian said.
'A doctor,' he said. 'Colonel Zamat Jefferson.'
Mendez, in all the authority of his own black uniform, came along with me to meet Jefferson. He stood up slowly when we walked into the shabby foyer, setting down a Reader's Digest half his age. 'Father Mendez; Colonel Jefferson,' I said. 'You went to some trouble to find me.'
'No,' he said, 'it was some trouble to get here, but the computer tracked you down in a few seconds.'
'To Fargo.'
'I knew you'd take a bicycle. There was only one place to do that at the airport, and you left them an address.'
'You pulled rank.'
'Not on civilians. I showed them my ID and said I was your doctor. Which is not false.'
'I'm okay now. You can go.'
He laughed. 'Wrong on both counts. Can we sit?'
'We have a place,' Mendez said. 'Follow me.'
'What is "a place"?' Jefferson said.
'A place where we can sit.' They looked at each other for a moment and Jefferson nodded.
Two doors down the corridor, we turned into an unmarked room. It had a mahogany conference table with overstuffed chairs and an autobar. 'Something to drink?'
Jefferson and I wanted water and wine; Mendez asked for apple juice. The bar wheelie brought our orders while we were sitting down.
'Is there some way we can help each other?' Mendez said, folding his hands on his small paunch.
'There are some things Sergeant Class might shed some light on.' He stared at me for one second. 'I suddenly made full colonel and had orders cut for Fort Powell. Nobody in Brigade knew anything
about it; the orders came from Washington, some "Medical Personnel Redistribution Group."'
'This was a bad thing?' Mendez said.
'No. I was gratified. I've never been happy with the Texas and Portobello posting, and this move took me back to the area where I grew up.
'I'm still in the middle of moving, settling in. But I was going through my appointment calendar yesterday, and your name came up. I was scheduled to jack with you and see how well the antidepressants are working.'
'They're working fine. Are you traveling thousands of miles to check up on all your old patients?'
'Of course not. But I punched up your file out of curiosity, almost automatically – and what do you know? There's no record of your having contemplated suicide. And it seems you have new orders cut, too. Authorized by the same major general in Washington who cut my orders. But you're not part of the "Medical Personnel Redistribution Group"; you're in a training program for assimilation into command structure. A soldier who wanted to commit suicide because he killed someone. That's interesting.
'And so I trace you down to here. A rest home for old soldiers who aren't so old, and some of whom aren't soldiers.'
'So you want to lose your colonelcy,' Mendez said, 'and go back to Texas? To Portobello?'
'Not at all. I'll risk telling you this: I didn't go through channels. I don't want to rock the boat.' He pointed at me. 'But I have a patient here, and a mystery I'd like to solve.'
'The patient's fine,' I said. The mystery is something that you don't want to be involved in.'
There was a long, thick silence. 'People know where I am.'
'We don't mean to threaten you, or frighten you,' Mendez said. 'But there's no way you have the clearance to be told about this. Julian can't let you jack with him, for that reason.'
'I have top-secret clearance.'
'I know.' Mendez leaned forward and said quietly: 'Your ex-wife's name is Eudora and you have two children – Pash, who's in medical school in Ohio, and Roger, who's in a New Orleans dance company. You were born on 5 March 1990 and your blood type is 0-Negative. Do you want to know your dog's name?'
'You're not threatening me with this.'
'I'm trying to communicate with you.'
'But you're not even in the military. Nobody here is, except Sergeant Class.'
'That should tell you something. You have top-secret clearance and yet my identity is concealed from you.'
The colonel shook his head. He leaned back and drank some wine. 'There's been time enough for somebody to find out these things about me. I can't decide whether you're some kind of super-spook or just one of the best bullshit artists I've ever come across.'
'If I were bluffing, I'd threaten you now. But you know that, and that's why you said what you just said.'
'And so you threaten me by making no threat.'
Mendez laughed. 'Takes one to know one. I will admit to being a psychiatrist.'
'But you're not in the AMA database.'
'Not anymore.'
'Priest and psychiatrist is an odd combination. I don't suppose the Catholic Church has any record of you, either.'
'That's harder to control. It would be cooperative of you not to check.'
'I don't have any reason to cooperate with you. If you're not going to shoot me or throw me in a dungeon.'
'Dungeon's too much paperwork,' Mendez said. 'Julian, you've jacked with him. What do you think?'
I remembered a thread from the common mind session. 'He's completely sincere about doctor-patient confidentiality.'
'Thank you.'
'So if you left the room, he and I could talk patient-to-doctor. But there's a catch.'
'There is indeed,' Mendez said. He remembered the thread as well. 'A trade you might not want to make.'
'What's that?'
'Brain surgery,' Mendez said.
'You could be told what we're doing here,' I said, 'but we'd have to make it so that no one could learn it from you.'
'Memory erasure,' Jefferson said.
'That wouldn't be enough,' Mendez said. 'We'd have to erase the memory of not only this trip and everything associated with it, but also your memories of treating Julian and people who knew him. That's too extensive.'
'What we'd have to do,' I said, 'is take out your jack and fry all the neural connections. Would you be willing to give that up forever, to be let in on a secret?'
'The jack is essential to my profession,' he said. 'And I'm used to it, would feel incomplete without it. For the secret of the universe, maybe. Not for the secret of St Bartholomew's Home.'
Someone knocked on the door and Mendez said to come in. It was Marc Lobell, holding a clipboard over his chest.
'May I have a word with you, Father Mendez?'
When Mendez left, Jefferson leaned over toward me. 'You're here of your own free will?' he said. 'No one's coerced you?'
'No one.'
'Thoughts of suicide?'
'Nothing could be farther from my mind.' The possibility was still back there, but I wanted to see how this turned out. If the universe ceased to exist, it would take me with it anyhow.
I suspected that that would be the attitude of someone resigned to suicide, and that realization may have shown on my face.
'But something's bothering you,' Jefferson said.
'When did you last meet someone with nothing bothering him?' Mendez came through the door alone, carrying the clipboard. A lock on the door clicked behind him.
'Interesting.' He asked the bar for a cup of coffee and sat down. 'You've taken a month's leave, Doctor.'
'Sure, moving.'
'People expect you back in what, a day or two?'
'Soon.'
'What people? You're not married or living with anyone.'
'Friends. Colleagues.'
'Sure.' He handed the clipboard to Jefferson.
He glanced at the top sheet and the one under it. 'You can't do this. How could you do this?' I couldn't read what was on either sheet, but they were some sort of signed orders.
'Obviously, I can. As to how,' he shrugged. 'Faith can move mountains.'
'What is it?'
'I'm TDY'ed here for three weeks. Vacation canceled. What the hell is going on?'
'We had to make a decision while you were still in the building. You've been invited to join our little project here.'
'I decline the invitation.' He tossed the clipboard down and stood up. 'Let me out of here.'
'Once we've had a chance to talk, you'll be free to stay or go.' He opened a box inlaid in the table's surface and unreeled a red jack and a green one. 'One-way.'
'No way! You can't force me to jack with you.'
'Actually, that's true.' He gave me a significant look. 'I couldn't do anything of the sort.'
'I could,' I said, and pulled the knife out of my pocket. I pushed the button and the blade flicked out and then began to hum and glow.
'Are you threatening me with a weapon? Sergeant?'
'No, I'm not. Colonel.' I raised the blade to my neck and looked at my watch. 'If you aren't jacked in thirty seconds, you'll have to watch me cut my own throat.'
He swallowed hard. 'You're bluffing.'
'No. I'm not.' My hand started to tremble. 'But I suppose you've lost patients before.'
'What is so goddamned important about this thing?'
'Jack and find out.' I didn't look at him. 'Fifteen seconds.'
'He will, you know,' Mendez said, 'I've jacked with him. His death will be your fault.'
He shook his head and walked back to the table. 'I'm not sure of that. But you seem to have me trapped.' He sat down and slid the jack in.
I turned off the knife. I think I was bluffing.
Watching people who are jacked is about as interesting as watching people sleep. There was nothing to read in the room, but there was a notepad and stylus, so I wrote a letter to Amelia, outlining what had been going on. After about ten minutes, they started to nod regularly, so I finished the letter qu
ickly, encrypted it and sent it.
Jefferson unjacked and buried his face in his hands. Mendez unjacked and stared at him.
'It's a lot to assimilate all at once,' he said. 'But I really didn't know where to stop.'
'You did right,' Jefferson said, muffled. 'I had to have it all.' He sat back and exhaled. 'Have to link with the Twenty now, of course.'
'You're on our side?' I said.
'Sides. I don't think you have a snowball's chance. But yes, I want to be part of it.'
'He's more committed than you are,' Mendez said.
'Committed but not convinced?'
'Julian,' Jefferson said, 'with all due respect for your years as a mechanic, and all the suffering you've gone through for what you've seen … for having killed that boy … it may be that I know more about war and its evil than you do. Secondhand knowledge, admittedly.' He scraped sweat off his forehead with the blade of his hand. 'But the fourteen years I've spent trying to put soldiers' lives back together make me a pretty good recruit for this army.'
I wasn't really surprised at that. A patient doesn't get too much unguarded feedback from his therapist – it's like a one-way jack with a few controlled thoughts and feelings seeping back – but I knew how much he hated the killing, and what the killing did to the killers.
Amelia shut down her machine for the day and was stacking papers, ready to go home, long bath and a nap, when a short bald man tapped on her office door. 'Professor Harding?'
'What can I do for you?'
'Cooperate.' He handed her an unsealed plain envelope. 'My name is Harold Ingram, Major Harold Ingram. I'm an attorney for the army's Office of Technology Assessment.'
She unfolded three pages of fine print, 'So would you care to tell me in plain English what this is all about?'
'Oh, it's very simple. A paper that you co-authored for the Astrophysical Journal was found to contain material germane to weapons research.'
'Wait. That paper never got past peer review. It was rejected. How could your office hear of it?'
'I honestly don't know. I'm not on the technical end.'
She scanned the pages. '"Cease and desist"? A subpoena?'