Actually, it may have demonstrated all of the above, or maybe just that a particle-physics practicum is not a place where you discuss personal feelings.
When they tried to bring a camera into my classroom, I called a shoe and had them evicted. It was the first time in my academic career that being a sergeant meant more than being an instructor, however junior.
Likewise, I was able to commandeer two shoes to keep the reporters at a distance when I went out. But for almost a week they did have at least one camera watching me, which kept me away from Amelia. Of course, she could just walk into my apartment building as if she were visiting someone else, but the possibility that someone would make a connection-or happen to see her walking into my own apartment-was too great to risk. There were still some people in Texas who would be unhappy about a white woman who had a black man, fifteen years younger, for a lover. There might even be some people in the university who would be unhappy about it.
The newsies seemed to have lost interest by Friday, but Amelia and I went to the club separately, and I brought along my shoes to stand guard outside.
We overlapped trips to the bathroom, and managed a quick embrace unobserved. Otherwise, most of my apparent attention went to Marty and Franklin.
Marty confirmed what I had suspected. "The autopsy showed that your second's jack was disconnected by the same blast that killed him. So there's no reason for it to have felt any different to you than just being unplugged."
"At first, I didn't even realize he was gone," I said, not for the first time. "The input from the rest of my platoon was so strong and chaotic. The ones whose seconds were hurt but still alive."
"But it wouldn't be as bad for them as being fully jacked to someone who died," Franklin said. "Most of you have gone through that."
"I don't know. When somebody dies in the cage, it's a heart attack or stroke. Not being ripped open by buckshot. A light jack may only feed back, say, ten percent of that sensation, but it's a lot of pain. When Carolyn died..." I had to clear my throat. "With Carolyn it was just a sudden headache, and she was gone. Just like coming unjacked."
"I'm sorry," Franklin said, and filled both our glasses. The wine was a duped Lafite Rothschild '28, the wine of the century, so far.
"Thanks. It's years now." I sipped the wine, good but presumably beyond my powers of discrimination. "The bad part, a bad part, was that it didn't occur to me that she'd died. Nor to anybody else in the platoon. We were just standing on a hill, waiting for a snatch. Thought it was a comm failure."
"They knew at the company level," Marty said.
"Of course they did. And of course they wouldn't tell us, risk our screwing up the snatch. But when we popped, her cage was empty. I found a medic and she said they'd done a brain scan and there wasn't enough to save; they'd taken her down to autopsy already. Marty, I've told you this more than once before. Sorry."
Marty shook his head in commiseration. "No closure. No leave-taking."
"They should've popped you all, once you were in place," Franklin said. "They can snatch cold 'boys as easily as warm ones. Then you would've at least known, before they took her away."
"I don't know." My memory of the whole thing is cloudy. They knew we were lovers, of course, and had me tranked before I was popped. A lot of the counseling was just drug therapy with conversation, and after a while I wasn't taking the drugs anymore and I had Amelia there in place of Carolyn. In some ways.
I felt a sudden pang of frustration and longing, partly for Amelia after this stupid week of isolation, partly for the unattainable past. There would never be another Carolyn, and not just because she was dead. That part of me was dead, too.
The talk moved on to safer areas, a movie everybody but Franklin had hated. I pretended to follow it. Meanwhile, my mind went round and round the suicide track.
It never seems to surface while I'm jacked. Maybe the army knows all about it, and has a way of suppressing it; I know I'm suppressing it myself. Even Candi only had a hint.
But I can't keep this up for five more years, all the killing and dying. And the war's not going to end.
When I feel this way I don't feel sad. It's not loss, but escape-it's not whether, but when and how.
I guess after I lose Amelia is the "when." The only "how" that appeals to me is to do it while jacked. Maybe take a couple of generals with me. I can save the actual planning for the moment. But I do know where the generals live in Portobello, Building 31, and with all my years jacked it's nothing to slide a comm thread to the soldierboys who guard the building. There are ways I can divert them for a fraction of a second. Try not to kill any shoes on my way in.
"Yoo-hoo. Julian? Anybody home?" It was Reza, from the other table.
"Sorry. Thinking."
"Well, come over here and think. We have a physics question that Blaze can't answer."
I picked up my drink and moved over. "Not particle, then."
"No, it's simpler than that. Why does water emptying out of a tub go one direction in the Northern Hemisphere and the other in the Southern?"
I looked at Amelia and she nodded seriously. She knew the answer, and Reza probably did, too. They were rescuing me from the war talk.
"That's easy. Water molecules are magnetized. They always point north or south."
"Nonsense," Belda said. "Even I would know it if water were magnetized."
"The truth is that it's an old wives' tale. You'll excuse the expression."
"I'm an old widow," Belda said.
"Water goes one way or the other depending on the size and shape of the tub, and peculiarities of the surface near the outlet. People go through life believing the hemisphere thing without noticing that some of the basins in their own house go the wrong way."
"I must go home and check," Belda said. She drained her glass and unfolded slowly out of the chair. "You children be good." She went to say good-bye to the others.
Reza smiled at her back. "She thought you looked lonely there."
"Sad," Amelia said. "I did, too. Such a horrible experience, and here we are bringing it up all over."
"It's not something they covered in training. I mean, in a way they do. You get jacked to strings recorded while people died, first in a light jack and then deeper."
"Some jackfreaks do it for fun," Reza said.
"Yeah, well, they can have my job."
"I've seen that billboard." Amelia hugged herself.
"Strings of people dying in racing accidents. Executions."
"The under-the-counter ones are worse." Ralph had tried a couple, so I'd felt them secondhand. "Our backups who died, their strings are probably on the market by now."
"The government can't – "
"Oh, the government loves it," Reza broke in. "They probably have some recruitment division that makes sure the stores are full of snuff strings."
"I don't know," I said. "Army's not wild about people who are already jacked."
"Ralph was," Amelia said.
"He had other virtues. They'd rather have you associate the specialness of being jacked with being in the army."
"Sounds really special," Reza said. "Somebody dies and you feel his pain? I'd rather – "
"You don't understand, Rez. You get larger in a way, when somebody dies. You share it and" – the memory of Carolyn suddenly hit me hard – "well, it makes your own death less earthshaking. Someday you'll buy it. Big deal."
"You live on? I mean, they live on, in you?"
"Some do, some don't. You've met people you'd never want to carry around in your head. Those guys die the day they die."
"But you'll have Carolyn forever," Amelia said.
I paused a little too long. "Of course. And after I die, the people who've been jacked to me will remember her too, and pass her down."
"I wish you wouldn't talk like that," Amelia said. Rez, who had known for years that we were together, nodded. "It's like a boil you keep picking at, like you were getting ready to die all the time."