30
Dekker didn't see Ven Kupferfeld again for a while—that is, he saw her, and he even spoke to her in class when he had to, and she responded, amiably enough, in the same way. That was all. Ven seemed content to wait Dekker's mood out. Neither of them referred to the Civil War virt they had watched together, and neither made any moves toward spending an evening together again. It was as though it had never happened.
It had happened, though. It had left Dekker DeWoe in a turmoil, and it was not without effect. It even interfered with his work, so that Annetta Bancroft reprimanded him for daydreaming in front of the whole class. When it was over she stopped him on his way out. "What's your trouble, DeWoe?" she asked, not unkindly.
He shrugged. "I've had a lot on my mind," he said.
She watched him for a moment. "I know about your father," she said, and paused invitingly. He didn't respond. She waited a moment, then became businesslike. "Whatever it is, we'd better deal with it. According to your chart you're about due for a psych interview anyway, so I made an appointment for you tonight. Report to Dr. Kalem. If something's bothering you, let her try to help you straighten it out. You've done well so far. Don't blow it now."
He considered for a moment, then said, "Thanks." He almost meant it; he could see that the woman was trying to help him, and it was not her fault that she couldn't.
Dekker didn't expect much from the interview with Dr. Merced Kalem, either, and didn't get any more than he had expected. It was routine. He wasn't asked to strip, this time, and he was prepared for the usual tests and harassment while he was being tested. When Kalem sat him down afterward and began questioning him about any problems he might be having, Dekker was prepared. Taking his cue from what Annetta Bancroft had said, he was ready with the story of his father's death and his worries about the possible effects of competition with the farm habitats, and the name of Ven Kupferfeld never once came up.
Neither did the subject of war; and when the doctor released Dekker he was fairly sure that the woman was not going to make any irremediable entries on his record. He was even, he saw, through in time to get the scraps of a late dinner at the dining hall.
He ate quickly and alone, and when he was finished he felt better. There was nothing real to worry about, he told himself. All right, Ven Kupferfeld had some repulsive aspects to her character; what of it? Most people did—if they were not Martians, anyway—and none of those hidden, aberrant, animal lusts and yearnings really mattered, because they were what all the socializing training and hostility-reduction sessions were supposed to deal with. The sessions obviously worked, too. They weren't as good as docility training on Mars, granted, but what on Earth was? And the results were clear: Even Earthies didn't fight wars anymore.
He was so convinced that he had worked all his problems out that he was surprised when, back in his quarters, he found Toro Tanabe looking at him with barely hidden concern. "How did it go?" Tanabe asked.
Dekker shrugged. "The usual stuff. Kalem's not as much of a bitch as McCune, anyway."
"Few are," Tanabe agreed, but even the self-centered Toro Tanabe was not willing to let it go at that. He studied Dekker for a moment, then confronted his roommate. "It is obvious to me that something is really troubling you. What is it?" he asked.
"Nothing," Dekker said. Then he changed his mind. "Well, there was something I saw the other night," he admitted. "Tanabe, have you ever heard of virtuals of wars? I mean the kind that have scenes of really bloody stuff, with people getting their guts blown out and all, right before your eyes?"
Tanabe looked surprised, then amused. "But of course, DeWoe. I sometimes almost forget that you are a Martian and do not know what everyone knows. These are what they call 'snuff virts.' They come in many varieties. Not just wars, but stories that are filled with all kinds of torture and death, and mob violence and murders and rapes and—listen, DeWoe, I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I do not myself care for them, but unfortunately it seems that there are many who do. There is no city on Earth where they cannot be bought."
"That's shocking! They kill people in those things!"
Tanabe laughed out loud at that. He raised his hand to cover his mouth, and said, "Oh, DeWoe, you are priceless. Do you think all those people are actually killed? But you underestimate the virt technicians. Most of the most violent parts are merely computer simulations, of course. It is remarkable how real they can be made to seem."
"Most of them?"
Tanabe looked uneasy. "Well, it is of course against the law to really kill people for the sake of making a virt. Still—remember, I am only repeating gossip—they do say that sometimes some of the killings are—what should I say?—unedited. That is, perhaps some of the deaths are real—though of course I suppose the actors do not know this when they are hired for the jobs. I do not know if this is true." He hesitated. Then, delicately, "You have seen such a virt yourself?"
Dekker nodded, and Tanabe sighed.
"I told you that woman would eat you, DeWoe," he said.
The trouble was that Dekker had enjoyed being with Ven Kupferfeld. He missed her. It wasn't just that he missed their very rewarding lovemaking, either, though he did miss that a lot and increasingly; he missed touching her, and talking to her, and knowing that they would meet and make love and talk again. He missed the very differences that divided them: how often did he get the chance to talk intimately with someone as unlike himself as Ven Kupferfeld? Not that she wasn't wrong. She was. But it was fascinating to see how deeply her sense of Tightness had led her into wrong channels.
And, then, she was always there. In class he could see her at her assigned workstation, halfway around the tank from his own. The top of her fair head was always visible as she bent over her board; from his viewpoint she was out past the tank's glowing image of the planet Saturn, with eight or nine bright purple comets clustered near her. She never looked up at him—not when he saw, anyway. She was all business. Whatever else Ven Kupferfeld was, Dekker reminded himself, she was a diligent student and a hard worker. She deserved to get what she wanted—
Though not, he thought, everything she seemed to want.
Over his head, Annetta Bancroft's voice came from his speaker. "Your turn, DeWoe. On the mark, your board goes live. Mark."
The keypad before him blinked at a dozen places, in different colors of light, then was still. Out in the tank the great virtual orrery that represented the solar system and all its parts was his to control. He knew that it was moving, each object in its own individual orbit, though of course he could not see any motion of the planets themselves. Even Mercury, which revolved around the Sun in only eighty-eight days, crept imperceptibly in the display. In all the huge tank there were only a few signs of movement. Dekker could see Mars's two natural moons, and its three close-orbital stations, crawling around the planet, and two of the comets close to perihelion were actually visibly in motion.
Those comets were the first objects Dekker checked on his board. Both trajectories were optimal.
That was a reprieve, because it was at perihelion that the control had to be most exact and unforgiving. If the comet did not come up from its close solar pass with the right vector and velocity, it could lead to serious trouble. Then the Co-Mars Two controllers would have all they could do to correct the last leg of its flight to rendezvous with Mars. Sometimes they couldn't, and a whole expensive comet, with all its investment of time and equipment, was irretrievably lost—well, not absolutely irretrievably, maybe, because at some later time it would reach aphelion and begin to fall back again.
But that time might not be for a century.
When they broke for lunch, Dekker had ordered four burns, two of them on a single comet—3P-T38's damned orbital elements had still been wrong after the first burn—and confirmed, with the aid of the computers, that the other eighteen comets in his charge needed no immediate corrections. He nodded to Annetta Bancroft as he passed her at the door. "Sorry about the extra burn," he said. She shrugged.
"You had an unstable comet," she said. "I checked against the Co-Mars controller. She had problems with 3P-T38, too."
That was a relief. Dekker knew that sometimes the placement by the snake handlers was not exact, or the comet itself had pockets of loosely compacted material that the sensors had missed; he would have to watch that particular comet carefully in the next session.
She held out a hand to delay him. "Dr. Kalem passed you," she told him. He nodded; of course, he had assumed that, since he was still in her class. She didn't let it go at that, though. She said, "You don't want to let your balls get in the way of your studies, DeWoe. I don't have to tell you that, do I?"
"No."
"But I'm telling you anyway, right?" she said. "Ven Kupferfeld's good, too. I'd like to see you both pass, because you're the kind of people we need out there. I'll be going back myself soon, they tell me, and I'd be happy to have either of you to work with. But," she said, "maybe not both of you in the same place."
That was the end of the conversation. When Bancroft dismissed him, Dekker replayed it in his mind all the way to the dining hall, trying to figure out what hidden message the instructor had been trying to give him. And what an Earthie trick that was! On Mars people came right out and said what they had on their minds—if it wasn't offensive, anyway. Why couldn't Earthies do the same?
By the time he got to the mess hall his classmates had filled three tables and there were no seats left at any of them. Shiaopin Ye gave him an apologetic grin, but that was more than compensated by the look of acute hostility he got from Jay-John Belster.
He sat down by himself . . . and was surprised, a few minutes later, when someone put a tray on the table across from his own. And when he looked at the person he saw that it was Ven Kupferfeld.
"Hi," she said brightly.
He grunted a response. She smiled. "You're still mad at me. You really didn't like my virt, right? I guess it was pretty bloody, for a first experience. Did you think it was real?"
He shrugged, and she went on persuasively. "But, Dek, it couldn't be, could it? They didn't have virtual-recording equipment in the 1860s. It's just a reenactment, you know? The kind they make for collectors."
Dekker put down his fork and stared at her. "But people buy these things?"
"Of course people buy these things! Not everybody is a weakling who can't stand—" She stopped herself. "Sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I just meant people have different tastes."
Dekker began to eat again, thinking it over. Then he swallowed his mouthful of potatoes and killed-animal gravy and said, "Well, what we saw was real once, wasn't it? The virt people didn't make all that up. If people are sick enough to want to watch make-believe murder that's sad; but when this actually happened it was real."
"That's just history, Dekker!"
"That's the kind of history we're supposed to have outgrown," he corrected.
She shook her head. "Dekker, you just don't understand. War isn't just killing. Sure, there were a lot of casualties in the Seven Days—that's why it's a famous battle—but not every battle was that way. Some of the biggest victories in history have been won without firing a shot. Look at the way Adolf Hitler conquered Austria and Czechoslovakia. He rolled his tanks right in. Nobody got killed; there wasn't any resistance at all, because everybody knew it wouldn't do any good. Look at how the United States licked the Russians. Didn't fire a shot. Just the fact that they could do it won for them."
Dekker considered that for a moment, then shook his head. "It doesn't make any difference. I don't know much about wars, but, statistically, how many wars would you say were won without killing people? One out of ten maybe?"
Ven admitted, "Not that many. No. Usually both sides take casualties. But wars can be."
"Supposing that's so, even then, the only reason they win is because they can kill people. Whether they actually do it doesn't matter much. Murder is wrong, Ven. Force is wrong."
"Even to do something right?"
It seemed to Dekker, looking across the table at her, that she was prettier than ever as she argued her case. Fairness made him give her the chance to say what was on her mind—fairness, yes, and perhaps also, to a tiny extent, the way the faint hint of her perfume crossed the table to him.
"Who is to judge what's 'right'?" he asked.
"Everyone has to judge that for himself, of course. Even if it's just you, and most of the world thinks you're crazy—maybe even especially if that's so. Dek, do you know what a terrorist is?"
He looked at her with wry amusement; how the woman did switch around in arguments! "Of course I know what a terrorist is. You used to have them here. I know what a dinosaur is, too, and they're both extinct."
She put her elbows on the table, surrounding her cooling lunch, and leaned forward to look into his face. "Maybe that doesn't appeal to me as much as it does to you. Would it be so bad to have a Tyrannosaurus rex around now and then? Can't you imagine one of those great big things crashing through a jungle somewhere?"
Dekker laughed. "So you could shoot it, like the lion."
She looked startled, then almost angry. "Damn it, Dekker! Watch what you say where people might be listening; that's an extraditable offense."
"Sorry. It's just that killing seems to get into a lot of what you want to talk about."
"Why shouldn't it? Killing's natural. We do it ourselves, or we pay butchers to do it for us—or else we wouldn't have any meat to eat. Terrorists are natural, too."
"Oh, hell, no," he protested. "I've read enough of your history for that Terrorists set bombs and hijacked planes and killed innocent people."
"True," she said, "but it's your history, too, isn't it? Where do Martians come from?"
He shifted uncomfortably. "You've got a point to make, I suppose. What is it?"
"The point is that terrorism is what you do when the odds against you are so overwhelming that you don't have any choice. Do you know where Israel is?"
"Next to Egypt somewhere?" he guessed.
"Close enough. It's a great little country, Dekker; Grandy Jim took me there, too, because he wanted to see what terrorists looked like after they won. The terrorists were running that country, Dek, or at least their descendants were. They didn't call them politicians anymore. They called them statesmen. But it was the terrorists—the Stern Gang, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, and so on—that set the bombs and killed the innocent people and gave them the country in the first place. You were in Kenya! So you know about the Mau Mau and Jomo Kenyatta—the father of his country, they called him later on. After they'd finished calling him a vicious murderer."
He finished his mashed potatoes before he spoke. She waited him out. Finally he said, "I don't care what you call killers. Killers is what they still are. I'm sorry, Ven. We just don't agree."
After a moment she said, "What a pity," and got up, leaving her meal untouched.