THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman

We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn’t get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon. It was about 2 A.M. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun-pistol over their heads. It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground. The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent ‘l’HE FOREVER WAR 135 one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared. The girl looked dazedly around, saw the mutilated body of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should have tried to stop her, but I couldn’t find my voice and my feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me. “What hap-” She gasped, seeing the dead man. “Whwhat was he doing?” I just stood there stupefied. I’d certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing • . . there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy. . . but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give freely. Marygay was pulling my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll brainwipe you!” She was tight. I turned and took one step and fell to the concrete. I looked down at the leg that had betrayed me and bright red blood was pulsing out of a small hole in my calf. Marygay tore a strip of cloth from her blouse and started to bind it. I remember thinking it wasn’t a big enough wound to go into shock over, but my ears started to ring and I got lightheaded and everything went red and fuzzy. Before I went under, I heard a siren wailing in the distance.

Fortunately, the police also picked up the girl, who was wandering down the street a few blocks away. They compared her version of the thing with mine, both of us under hypnosis. They let me go with a stern admonition to leave law enforcement up to professional law enforcers. I wanted to get out of the cities: just put a pack on my back and wander through the woods for a while, get my mind straightened out. So did Marygay. But we tried to make arrangements and found that the country was worse 136 Joe Haldeman than the cities. Farms were practically armed camps, the areas between ruled by nomad gangs who survived by making lightning raids into villages and farms, murdering and plundering for a few minutes, and then fading back into the forest, before help could arrive. Still, Britishers called their island “the most civilized country in Europe.” From what we’d heard about France and Spain and Germany, especially Germany, they were probably right. I talked it over with Marygay, and we decided to cut short our tour and go back to the States.~We could finish the tour after we’d become acclimated to the twenty-first century. It was just too much foreignness to take in one dose. The dirigible line refunded most of our money and we took a conventional suborbital flight back home. The high altitude made my leg throb, though it was nearly healed. They’d made great strides in the treatment of gunshot wounds, in the past twenty years. Lots of practice. We split up at Ellis. Her description of commune life appealed to me more than the city; I made arrangements to join her after a week or so, and went back to Washington. 10 I rang the bell and a strange woman answered the door, opening it a couple of centimeters and peering through. “Pardon me,” I said, “isn’t this Mrs. Mandella’s residence?” “Oh, you must be William!” She closed the door and unfastened the chains and opened it wide. “Beth, look who’s here!” My mother came into the living room from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. “Willy.. . what are you doing back so soon?” “Well, it’s-it’s a long story.” “Sit down, sit down,” the other woman said. “Let me get you a drink, don’t start till I get back.” “Wait,” my mother said. “I haven’t even introduced you two. William, this is Rhonda Wilder. Rhonda, William.” “I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “Beth has told me all about you-one cold beer, right?” “Right.” She was likable enough, a trim middle-aged woman. I wondered why I hadn’t met her before. I asked my mother whether she was a neighbor. “Uh. . . really more than that, William. She’s been my roommate for a couple of years. That’s why I had an extra room when you came home-a single person isn’t allowed two bedrooms.” “But why-” “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel that you were putting her out of her room while you stayed here. And you weren’t, actually; she has-” “That’s right.” Rhonda came in with the beer. “I’ve got relatives in Pennsylvania, out in the country. I can stay with them any time.” 137 Joe Ilaicteman “Thanks.” I took the beer. “Actually, I won’t be here long. I’m kind of en route to South Dakota. I could find another place to flop.” “Oh, no,” Rhonda said. “I can take the couch.” I was too old-fashioned male-chauv to allow that; we discussed it for a minute and I wound up with the couch. I filled Rhonda in on who Marygay was and told them about our disturbing experiences in England, how we came back to get our bearings. I had expected my mother to be horrified that I had killed a man, but she accepted it without comment. Rhonda clucked a little bit about our being out in a city after midnight, especially without a bodyguard. We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work. Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone. “Rhonda-” I settled down in the chair across from her. I didn’t know exactly how to put it. “What, ub, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?” She took a long drink. “Good friends.” She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. “Very good friends. Sometimes lovers.” I felt very hollow and lost. My mother? “Listen,” she continued. “You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you’re stuck with it.” She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me. Her voice was softer. “William. . . look, I’m only two years older than you are-that is, I was born two years before-what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B-your mother understands too. It, our. . . relationship, wouldn’t be a secret to anybody else. It’s perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You’ve got to change too.” I didn’t say anything. She stood up and said firmly, “You think, because your mother is sixty, she’s outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now.” Accusation in her eyes. “Especially flOW with you com THE FOREVER WAR 139 ing back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How-old I am, twenty years younger.” Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room. I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.

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