Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls

by Phyllis Irene Radford

  Might be regression, I think, watching Sarge. But if it’s that, they found a way to focus it, and she’s been through history’s greatest hits.

  “Shadows on the wall,“ she says. “Ash. Inferno. You don’t feel the rads, they swear you don’t, but even in the suit, my skin feels weird. Like it’s crawling. Everything’s burned. Everything. Blasted — blown to hell and away.“

  Kosinski’s dimensional warp is a little swirl of not-quite-there in the middle of the table. Mwalunga is finishing off something poisonously green. I shoot them a look and reach for Sarge. Got to be careful not to break her the way I broke the first glass tonight, picking it up in fingers that don’t look any different but, by Waldo, are.

  She’s just a little thing, always was. She doesn’t fight, and good thing, too. She could throw me through the wall if she wanted to. I ease her up and point her toward the door.

  She’s still talking, still swaying, on her feet now, never quite falling down. “Great king,“ she says. “King of kings. King of Hatti. Come — I have need — your son —“ Then shifts. “So kill the little bastard. So kill him dead. Put a bullet right through his brain.“ And shifts. “And we took Acre, we held it, we drove out the Saracen — for God and Holy Sepulcher.“

  I put Sarge to bed, pull off her boots, and think about the rest, but I’m not so sure of my hands yet. I’d rip something. She hasn’t stopped talking. It’s quieter now, a mutter that gets faster, then slows down, then speeds up again.

  If something was wrong, the techs would be there, making fixes. There isn’t even a yellow alert in her file on the net. This is normal, then — within the parameters.

  Some parameters.

  I start to head back to my own quarters, but one way and another I end up sitting by Sarge’s bed. I don’t need sleep; I’ve got a module that takes care of that. Fifty hours to go before I have to access the dream files, process and purge them. So I sit, and I watch Sarge.

  Sarge and I go back a long way. Sarge bailed me and half a platoon of peacekeepers out of a major breach of the peace on No-Name. I got Sarge out of trouble on Seljuk, when that pretty boy announced he was having their baby and she was going to marry him or be flayed by a committee of mullahs. No-Name’s slag now. The boy on Seljuk decanted the baby and robbed the mosque and headed for the Rim, where he’s seducing Rimmers and running a handy little blackmail business on the side.

  And Sarge and I are on Sheol Four, getting an upgrade. They’ll ship us out, who knows where, wherever there’s peace to keep.

  Time was when I’d be wild to get back out there, walk on thin edges, negotiate or fight. That’s long time since. I’m an old hand, been everywhere, seen everything, died often enough to know there’s no guts or glory in it.

  Sarge is in deep dreamstate. Her muttering’s gone subvocal. I don’t bother to listen to it. I’ve got an eye on her, an eye on the net where she’s a tight small node, security-tagged till there’s no Sarge left to find. That doesn’t upset me. She’d find the same thing if she tried to access me. I’ve got codes that could get me straight in. I don’t try them.

  I do an end run instead. I wiggle past a couple of nodes, slide under a nexus, and come in the back way.

  It’s a battle. Don’t ask me where. When is easier. They’re at the AK-and-napalm stage, and they’re killing one another with brisk efficiency. Everybody’s in desert camouflage. No telling who’s who. It’s blistering hot. It’s bloody. Something next to my foot turns out to be a fragment of skull and a wide, surprised brown eye.

  This is your standard taped-memory sequence, subspecies Horrors of War.

  Except there’s an emphasis that I haven’t seen before. It’s the small things that come into focus. The skull fragment, the eye. The flies on a corpse. The corpse’s hand, stretching toward a low stone cylinder that might be a well.

  I can smell the blood-and-shit-and-sweet stench of death. Dust, sweat, something sharp that goes with ancient projectile weapons. I can’t tell you how I know that. Taped in, then.

  Still, that’s fairly standard. We’re supposed to know why we keep the peace. War has no glory. Death by violence has no honor. The best death is death in old age, in bed: a peaceful letting go.

  What’s different about this tape is how it feels.

  It feels like hell.

  Hell’s a superstition. Hell’s also a place — anyplace that’s been a killing ground. Hell’s the killing, and the quiet after the killing.

  Sarge is in hell. Hell that doesn’t stop. Doesn’t let up. Killing ground after killing ground. Men in furs killing one another with clubs. Men in iron killing one another with spears. Men in camo killing one another with guns. Men in ecosuits killing one another with beamers.

  I rip myself out by the roots. It’s that bad — that deep. I almost trigger the alarms, but some reflex keeps me going along the right pathways, back and out and into the safety of my own aching head.

  I have to sit and breathe for a long time. Just to feel the air blasting in and out of my lung implants, the creak of reinforced ribs, the twitch of servoed hands into fists.

  Sarge hasn’t moved. She’s deep in her private hell. Her augment that nobody knows about. Her experimental ethical module.

  I get up. She twitches, but not at anything I’m doing. I get out of there.

  oOo

  I find Kosinski in bed with Mwalunga. Mwalunga’s on top. I wait for a pause in the proceedings. Mwalunga says something uncomplimentary in Derridan. Kosinski says calmly, “Next time you come in, watch out for the timeloop by the door.“

  I hadn’t even noticed it. Not that I’d have noticed if I had, if you know what I mean. Timeloops are infinite, unless someone shuts them off.

  I check the chrono in my head. No, no loop delay. Luck’s a bitch, but sometimes she’s a lazy bitch. She hasn’t given me the back of her hand. This time. Took Peaceforce to do that, abducting my vocal apparatus and not putting it back when I need it.

  I do what I can with what I’ve got. I pull them both to their feet. They’re class 10 augments to my class 40: featherweights.

  Kosinski blinks. Mwalunga’s still pissed, but he asks me, “What’s wrong? You’ve got the subtext from hell.“

  I nod so hard my head near pops off.

  Kosinski says, “Don’t do that. You’ll blow a module.“

  And Mwalunga says, “You’ve been hacking again. They’ve upped the ante for that. Third offense, termination.“

  I passed offense number three a long time ago.

  The net’s there. The whole planet’s a network, with nodes wherever there’s wetware. I can’t use it, even using hacker’s tricks. What I’m thinking about can’t go anywhere there’s a chance I’ll get caught.

  Mwalunga and Kosinski exchange glances. Kosinski’s hand moves in front of his prick. He could be scratching his balls, or he could be telling me in quicksign, Sarge. We know.

  My hands are still present and accounted for, even if my larynx isn’t. What’s going on?

  Mwalunga goes to the cleaner to wash his hands. They’re answering me while he scrubs the sex-sweat off. Experiment. New peace initiative. Teaching module. War’s hell, right? Nobody believes it, everybody wants it. This shows them what they’re really wanting.

  Mwalunga doesn’t hack the net. He doesn’t spy, either. Mwalunga reads subtext. He reads subtext like nobody else but another adept-class Radical Semioticist. Peaceforce knows that, it’s what they use him for, but I don’t think it quite processes the datum that Mwalunga doesn’t stop reading subtext when he’s told to. He keeps right on doing it till he gets to the bottom of it. If there is a bottom. Which is a religious argument on Derrida, and not something I need to worry about right now.

  My head’s aching worse than ever. I scrape my hands through the stubble on my scalp. Why Sarge?

  Teacher, Kosinski signs, flopping back on the bed. You’d never know he’s got plasteel bones, or much of any bones at all, the way he moves.

  But she’s trapped.
I’m so agitated I forget to be sneaky, come right out in quicksign. She’s in a loop. She can’t get out. It’s hell in there!

  War is hell, Mwalunga signs, with the qualifier that says cliché, squatting on the floor to comb his mane of hair and put it up in a braid.

  I snarl and squat to face him. I’m bigger. Was to begin with, even before the augments. I know I look mean. Mwalunga doesn’t pay any attention. My subtext has all the menace of a kitten’s, Mwalunga told me once. That’s why, he also told me, I can be as big and ugly as I am, and still make it as a negotiator. Intimidation goes just so far; some people don’t care if you kill them, as long as they stick to their brain-dead principles. But a big, ugly, killer-augmented, sweet-talking peacekeeper can work them around.

  I can’t even talk at the moment, except in sign. They’ll break her, I tell Mwalunga.

  They don’t think so, his fingers say, working his hair into its plait.

  They don’t think so! I sign, so ferociously I almost knock myself down.

  Mwalunga shrugs.

  I swivel till I’m head-on with Kosinski. He’s playing with himself, kind of absent, kind of meditative. Saying in quicksign around his big ruddy cock, If we interfere, we’re in shit, pure grade.

  I’m too disgusted to say anything. I lever myself up and head for the door — veering around the timeloop and barely evading the nexus that Kosinski didn’t bother to warn me about.

  oOo

  It’s almost firstlight. A couple of moons are up. Sun One’s on its way. Sun Two will take a while yet. I can see the sky from Sarge’s quarters. She has an outer berth, with windows that she keeps turned on all the time. She likes to see out, she says. She’s a claustrophobe. Blanked walls make her nervous.

  Sarge hasn’t changed much since I ran out on her. Maybe she’s a little grayer in the face. There’s no alert on her net-signature, no more than there was before.

  It’s not disconnected. I check that first thing. She’s logged on. No error codes. No loose connections. As far as the net knows, Sarge is in perfectly normal and acceptable condition.

  I suppose she is, for a peacebreaker sentenced to a term in hell. She’s not in any physical pain. Her indicators are all in the safe range.

  None of them measures psychological or psychic damage. The net doesn’t monitor for that. Freedom of will, you know. Thought control is a crime under Peaceforce regulations.

  And what, I’d like to know, do they call this?

  oOo

  She’s talking again. Same words as before. “Old stories. Old, old stories. Never a new one. Always old. Old.“

  I take her hand. She doesn’t rip my arm off; doesn’t respond at all.

  “Burning,“ she says. “The burning ground. Shiva dances in ash and embers. Dances sitting. Sitting shiva. A god mourns the dead, and mourning, laughs.“

  Teaching module, Mwalunga said. I laugh, a hiss in my empty throat. Ethical module, the net told me. Teaching ethics. Teaching hell. They’ll put whole worldsful of savages through this, make them into keepers of the peace. Or punish the peacebreakers, educate them with a perfectly nonviolent and profoundly convincing distillation of human history.

  Who was it who said that the essence of humanity is hate? Never mind.

  “Hell,“ says Sarge. Her voice is clear. She sounds like herself. I start, and grab at hands I’m already holding so tight the bones would break if they weren’t plasteel. She’s still in the dreamstate, still trapped in her loop. Her voice got loose, that’s all. “Hell is perfect boredom,“ she says. “Hell is red horror repeated until it grays into ennui. I’m bored, Hamid. I’m bored out of my skull.“

  Hamid is the name of the boy on Seljuk, the boy with the beautiful face and the blackmailer’s heart. So she remembers him. I didn’t know.

  He’d be a perfect candidate for this new module.

  She’s running a fever. Her indicators show it, mark it, but don’t tag it for treatment. She’s quiet for a while, her breathing short and sharp.

  She was all right last night. Twitchy, I remember. Pale, a bit. Short-spoken, but Sarge isn’t your sweet-talker, not like me when I’ve got the equipment to do it with. We’re all rough around the edges when we’re post-op, anyway. She got strange near closing time in the bar, when she started talking about stories. Stories are Mwalunga’s game. Sarge doesn’t tell them, or talk about them. She lives them.

  That’s what she’s doing now, if you want to think of it that way. Living somebody else’s stories. Old ones. Old wars, old battles. Old hells.

  I don’t read subtext, like Mwalunga, or twist the fabric of the universe, like Kosinski. I fight when I have to, negotiate when I can. And I watch, and I see what the net won’t register. Sarge isn’t going to make it out of this loop.

  I fire the datum through the net. The net doesn’t send anything back.

  I don’t expect it to. The message is a formality. Going by the rules. Following procedure. Grasping at straws.

  I can’t do a thing. I can’t do a damned fucking thing. Blow up Peaceforce Central? Crash the net? Sabotage the C-in-C’s vat?

  Sure, and see what good it does Sarge. That’s another thing they did to me. Installed a failsafe commonsense module. A good peacekeeper not only knows when to fight and when to negotiate, she knows when there’s nothing she can do — nothing that will make the least difference in the worlds.

  I can’t scream. I can pound my head against the wall, but that gets tiring after a while. I file protests with every office I can get an access code for. I charge Peaceforce with injustice, ineptitude, incompetence, the sheer incomprehensible randomness of an experiment gone to hell and dragging a good soldier with it.

  All it gets me is another headache.

  “Enkidu,“ Sarge says. “Enkidu, my brother, my heart.“

  She’s gone deep, deeper than it would ever be safe to follow. I tell myself she’s not talking to me. She doesn’t even know there’s a world outside of her module.

  “We’ll live forever,“ she says. “We two. Do you remember, Hephaistion? The tomb, the sacrifice: Achilles and Patroklos in the same grave. They never died, not in memory. No more shall we.“

  Her voice is getting thready. The net registers something, finally: dip in power in the pulmonary system.

  Every alarm in the net should be going off. System failure — I know what it looks like. We all do. But not here on Sheol, in the quiet, with no enemy but the net, and no weapon but the module.

  I’m doing things. I don’t remember them any longer than it takes to do them. Desperate things. Futile things. Things that never work, not for complete systemic shutdown.

  oOo

  Peaceforce is shocked. Peaceforce is apologetic. It had no idea its experimental module would run a shunt around the safeguards in the hardware and the wetware — cancel the alarms in the net, lock the subject into a permanent downward spiral.

  I’m cynical, I suppose. I don’t believe much of what they tell me. Except that Sarge is dead, and won’t be brought back. Can’t, they say. The module took too much out of her template. They suspect a sequence of code somewhere in a subroutine. Instead of protecting the personality matrix, it ate holes in it, wrote itself over them, and then imploded.

  The experiment failed, Peaceforce tells me. They regret, it’s a shame, how unfortunate, they recommend a catharsis module. I still don’t have my larynx back, but I show them where they can stuff their fucking module, and net-hack myself a berth on a ship going out, I don’t care where.

  oOo

  Kosinski and Mwalunga and I close down the bar the night before my ship heads out. Peaceforce gave me my larynx back, with modifications. I’m supposed to go easy on it. I haven’t, in fact, said a word. I’ve gotten used to not talking.

  Kosinski and Mwalunga have gotten used to me not talking. They sit across from me at the table we always sit at, over by the bartender’s coffin. Kosinski has figured out a potable version of nullspace, a kind of anti-anti-matter. Mwalunga is reciting th
e Angalta Kigalshe in Sumerian. He told me the refrain in Standard before he started chanting:

  From heaven above to hell below,

  To the Netherworld she descended.

  I drink Kosinski’s creation, which tastes like nothing and everything, with a touch of primordial soup, and listen to words as old as human memory. Inanna went down to hell to rescue her lover, and gave up everything she had, and died horribly. But she bribed her way free, and her lover too, and they came back to the land of the living. Like us — most of us — when we’re killed in the line of duty. They ship our templates back to Sheol Four, and they reconstruct us, augments and all, and we go out again, and die again, keeping the peace.

  When Inanna was a goddess in Sumer, when Nineveh was new, when Tyre was a raw young town on a rock in a sea that boiled off in a firefight a thousand years ago, that’s not what they called it. They called it waging war.