Forever Peace - Joe Haldeman

The sun comes up fast in Portobello, and for the couple of minutes that tableau lasted, thousands of still people and one machine in thoughtful communion, the street began to glow, gold and rose.

Two shoes in hospital whites came up with a stretcher.

Claude unjacked and gently lowered the body into their care. " – This is Juan Jose de Cordoba," he said in Spanish. " – Remember his name. The first casualty of the last war."

He took the little girl's hand and they walked toward the entrance.

THEY DID CALL IT The Last War, perhaps too optimistically, and there were tens of thousands more casualties. But Marty had predicted the course of it and the outcome pretty accurately.

The POWs, who collectively called themselves Los Liberados, "the Freed," actually absorbed Marty and his group, and led the way to peace.

They started out with an impressive display of intellectual force. They deduced from first principles the nature of the signal that would turn off the Jupiter Project, and used a small radio telescope in Costa Rica to bleep the signal out there-saving the world, as an opening move in an enterprise that resembled a game as much as a war. A game whose goal was to discover its own rules.

A lot that happened over the next two years was difficult for we merely normal people to understand. In a way, the conflict ultimately would be almost Darwinian, one ecological niche contested by two different species. Actually, we were subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens pacificans, because we could interbreed. And there never was any doubt that pacificans was going to win in the long run.

When they began to isolate us "normals," who would be the subnormals in less than a generation, Marty asked me to be the chief liaison for the ones in the Americas, who would be populating Cuba, Puerto Rico, and British Columbia. I said no, but eventually gave in to wheedling. There were only twenty-three normals in the world who had once had the experience of jacking with the humanized. So we would be a valuable resource to the other normals who were filling up Tasmania, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, and so on. I supposed eventually we would be called "islanders." And the humanized would take over our former name.

Two years of chaos stubbornly resisting the new order. It all sort of crystallized that first day, though, after Claude had taken the little girl in to jack completely two-way with her brothers and sisters in Building 31.

It was about noon. Amelia and I were dog-tired, but unwilling, almost unable, to sleep. I certainly was never going to sleep in that room again, though an orderly had come by and discreetly told me that it had been "tidied up." With buckets and scrub brushes and a body bag or two.

A woman had come by with baskets of bread and hard-boiled eggs. We spread a sheet of newspaper on the steps and assembled lunch, slicing the eggs onto the bread.

A middle-aged woman came up smiling. I didn't recognize her at first. "Sergeant Class? Julian?"

"Buenos dias," I said.

"I owe you everything," she said, her voice shaking with emotion.

Then it clicked, her voice and face. "Mayor Madero."

She nodded. "A few months ago, you saved me from killing myself, aboard that helicopter. I went to la Zona and was conectada, and now I live; more than live. Because of your compassion and swiftness.

"All the time I was changing, these past two weeks, I was hoping you would still be alive so that we could, as you say, jack together." She smiled. "Your funny language.

"And then I come here and find out that you live but have been blinded. But I have been with those who knew you and loved you when you could see into each other's hearts."

She took my hand and looked at Amelia and offered her other hand. "Amelia... we also have touched for one instant."

So the three of us held hands in a triangle, a silent circle. Three people who almost threw away their lives, for love, for anger, for grief.

"You ... you," she said. "No hay palabras. There are no words for this." She let go of our hands and walked toward the beach, wiping her eyes in the brightness.

We sat and watched Madero for some time, our bread and eggs drying in the sun, her hand clenched tight in mine.

Alone, together. The way it always used to be.

THE END

THE FOREVER WAR

Faultless advanced military technology, fascinating aliens, and a dangerously believable future Earth ... a book that's damn near perfect – Peter F. Hamilton

Private William Mandella is a reluctant hero, drafted into an elite military unit to fight in a distant interstellar war against an unknowable and unconquerable alien enemy. Mandella will perform his duties and, as he survives, rise through the ranks, but his greatest test will come when he returns to Earth. Because of the effects of relativity, every time he comes home after a few months' tour of duty, centuries have gone by on Earth, making him and his fellows ever more isolated from the world for whose future they are fighting.

B Format Paperback £6.99

1 85798 808 6

Out in January 2000 from Victor Gollancz FOREVER FREE

The long awaited sequel to The Forever War

'If there was a Fort Knox for science fiction writers who really matter, we'd have to lock Haldeman up there' – Stephen King

William Mandella and his partner Marygay survived a war which should never have been. They lived long enough to see humanity changed beyond all recognition. The human race has evolved into Man, a group mind similar to the alien Taurans that William and Marygay used to fight.

But Man's society doesn't feel right. The veterans are treated as specimens, a baseline that humanity can return to if Man's continuing evolution goes badly wrong. The old soldiers decide to hijack a spaceship and plot a 40,000 light-year-long journey to nowhere and back: an attempt to escape to the future using relativity in the hope that something, anything will have changed.

Royal Hardcover £16.99 January

0 575 06853 1