by Joe Haldeman
Born 1990 in a mean little Arkansas strip-mining town. Formal education terminated in 2005, with his escape from a state reformatory. Ten years of odd jobs on one side of the law or the other. Escalating ambition and power; by the age of thirty-five, billionaire chairman of a diversified, mostly legitimate, corporation. Luck, he called it.
One planet was not enough. About a week before his fortieth birthday, Harrison fired his board of directors and liquidated an awesome fortune. He sank every penny of it into the development and exploitation of the Adams-Beeson drive. Brought space travel to anyone who could afford it. Bought a chunk of the Moon to give them someplace to go. Pleasure domes, retirement cities, safaris for the jaded rich. Made enough to buy the votes to initiate the terraforming of Mars.
As the first trickle of water crawled down the Great Rift Valley, Harrison lay in his own geriatrics hospital, in Copernicus City, in his hundred and twentieth year. The excitement may have hastened his passing.
“Move it move it move it!” Down the long white corridor two orderlies pushed the massive cart, drifting in long skips in the lunar gravity, the cart heavy with machines surrounding a frail wisp of a human body: dead cyborg of D. Thorne Harrison. Oxygenated fluorocarbon coursing through slack veins, making the brain think it still lived.
Through the bay doors of the cryonics facility, cart braked to a bumpy stop by the cold chamber, tubes and wires unhooked and corpse slid without ceremony inside. Chamber locked, pumped, activated: body turned to cold quartz.
“Good job.” Not in the futile hope of future revival.
The nuts had a field day.
Harrison had sealed his frozen body into a time/space capsule, subsequently launched toward the center of the Galaxy. Also in the capsule were stacks of ultrafiche crystals (along with a viewer) that described humankind’s nature and achievements in exhaustive detail, and various small objects of art.
One class of crackpots felt that Harrison had betrayed humanity, giving conquering hordes of aliens a road map back to Earth. The details of what they would do to us, and why, provided an interesting refraction of the individual crackpot’s problems.
A gentler sort assumed a priori that a race of aliens able to decipher the message and come visit us must necessarily have evolved away from aggression and other base passions; they would observe; perhaps help.
Both of these groups provided fuel for solemn essays, easy master’s theses, and evanescent religions. Other opinions:
“Glad the old geezer got to spend his money the way he wanted to.”
“Inexcusable waster of irreplaceable artistic resources.”
“He could have used the money to feed people.”
“Quixotic gesture; the time scale’s too vast. We’ll be dead and gone long before anybody reads the damned thing.”
“I’ve got more important things to worry about.”
None of the above is true.
Supposedly, the miniature Adams-Beeson converter would accelerate the capsule very slowly for about a century, running out of fuel when the craft had attained a small fraction of the speed of light. It would pass the vicinity of Antares in about five thousand years.
The capsule had a preprogrammed signal generator, powered by starlight. It would accumulate power for ten years at a time, then bleat out a message at the 21-centimeter wavelength. The message lasted ninety minutes and would be repeated three times; any idiot with a huge radio telescope and the proper ontological prejudices could decode it: “I am an artifact of an intelligent race. My course is thus and so. Catch me if you can.”
Unfortunately, the craft carried a pretty hefty magnetic field, and ran smack-dab into Maxwell’s Equations. Its course carried it through a tenuous but very extensive cloud of plasma, and through the years it kept turning slowly to the right, decelerating. When it came out of the cloud it was pointed back toward the Earth, moving at a very modest pace.
In twenty thousand years it passed the place where Earth had been (the Sun having wandered off in the natural course of things) and continued to crawl, out toward the cold oblivion between the galaxies. It still beeped out its code every decade, but it was a long time before anybody paid any attention.
I woke up in great pain, that didn’t last.
“How do you feel?” asked a pretty young nurse in a starched green uniform.
I didn’t answer immediately. There was something wrong. With her, with the hospital room, the bed. The edges were wrong. Too sharp, like a bad matte shot at the cubies.
“How do you feel?” asked a plain, middle-aged nurse in a starched green uniform. I hadn’t seen the change. “Is this better?”
I said it didn’t make much difference. My body, my body was a hundred years younger. Mind clear, limbs filled with springy muscle. No consciousness of failing organs. I am dead, I asked her; told her.
“Not really,” she said and I caught her changing: shimmerclick. Now a white-haired, scholarly-looking doctor, male. “Not any more. You were dead, a long time. We rebuilt you.”
I asked if he/she would settle on one shape and keep it; they pulled me out of a capsule, frozen solid?
“Yes. Things went more or less as you planned them.”
I asked him what he meant by more or less.
“You got turned around, and slowed. It was a long time before we noticed you.”
I sat up on the bed and stared at him. If I didn’t blink he might not change. I asked him how long a time?
“Nearly a million years. 874,896 from the time of launch.”
I swung to the floor and my feet touched hot sand.
“Sorry.” Cold tile.
I asked him why he didn’t show me his true form. I am too old to be afraid of bogeymen.
He did change into his true form and I asked that he change back into one of the others. I had to know which end to talk to.
As he became the doctor again, the room dissolved and we were standing on a vast plain of dark brown sand, in orderly dunes. The vague shadow in front of me lengthened as I watched; I turned around in time to see the Milky Way, rather bright, slide to the horizon. There were no stars.
“Yes,” the doctor said, “we are at the edge of your galaxy.” A sort of sun rose on the opposite horizon. Dim red and huge, nebulous at its boundaries. An infrared giant, my memory told me.
I told him that I appreciated being rebuilt, and asked whether I could be of some service. Teach them of the ancient past?
“No, we learned all we could from you, while we were putting you back together.” He smiled. “On the contrary, it is we who owe you. Can we take you back to Earth? This planet is just right for us, but I think you will find it dull.”
I told him that I would very much like to go back to Earth, but would like to see some of his world first.
“All of my world is just like this,” he said. “I live here for the lack of variety. Others of my kind live in similar places.”
I asked if I could meet some of the others.
“I’m afraid that would be impossible. They would refuse to see you, even if I were willing to take you to them.” After a pause he added, “It’s something like politics. Here.” He took my hand and we rose, his star shrinking to a dim speck, disappearing. The Galaxy grew larger and we were suddenly inside it, stars streaming by.
I asked if this were teleportation.
“No, it’s just a machine. Like a spaceship, but faster, more efficient. Less efficient in one way.”
I started to ask him how we could breathe and talk, but his weary look cut me off. He seemed to be flickering, as if he were going to change shape again. But he didn’t.
“This should be interesting,” he said, as a yellow star grew brighter, then swelled to become the familiar Sun. “I haven’t been here myself in ten, twelve thousand years.” The blue-and-green ball of Earth was suddenly beneath us, and we paused for a moment. “It’s a short trip, but I don’t get out often,” he said, apologetically.
As we drifted to the surface
, it was sunset over Africa. The shape of the western coast seemed not to have changed much.
The Atlantic passed beneath us in a blur and we came to ground somewhere in the northeastern United States. We landed in a cow pasture. Its wire fence, improbably, seemed to be made of the same shiny duramyl I remembered from my childhood.
“Where are we?” I asked.
He said we were just north of Canaan, New York. There was a glideway a few kilometers to the west; I could find a truck stop and catch a ride. He was flickering very fast now, and even when he was visible I could see the pasture through him.
“What’re you talking about?” I said. “They wouldn’t, don’t, have truck stops and glideways a million years in the future.”
He regarded me with fading scorn and said we were only five or ten years in my future; after the year of my birth, that is. Twenty at the outside. Didn’t I know the slightest thing about relativity?
And he was gone.
A fanner was walking toward me, carrying a wicked-looking scythe. There was nothing in the pasture to use it on, but me.
“Good morning,” I said to him. Then saw it was afternoon.
He walked to within striking distance of me and stopped, grim scowl. He leaned sideways to look behind me. “Where’s the other feller?”
“Who?” I’d almost said I was wondering that myself. “What other fellow?” I looked back over my shoulder.
He rubbed his eyes. “Damn contacts. What’re you doin’ on my propitty anyhow?”
“I got lost.”
“Don’t you know what a fence is?”
“Yes, sir, I’m sorry. I was coming to the house to ask directions to Canaan.”
“Why you out walkin with a funny costume on?” I was wearing a duplicate of the conservative business suit Harrison was buried in.
“It’s the style, sir. In the city.”
He shook his head. “Kids. You just go over that fence yonder,” he pointed, “and head straight ’til you get to the road. Mind you don’t touch the fence an’ watch out for my God damn beans. You get to the road and Canaan’s to the left.”
“Thank you, sir.” He had turned and was stumping back to the farmhouse.
In the truck stop, the calendar read 1995.
It’s not easy to stay penniless in New York City, not if you have a twenty-year-old body and over a century’s worth of experience in separating people from their money.
Within a week, the man who had been Harrison was living in a high-class flat behind the protection of the East Village wall, with enough money stacked away to buy him time to think.
He didn’t want to be Harrison again, that he knew for sure. Besides the boredom of living the same life over, he had known (as Harrison) by the time he was fifty that his existence was not a particularly happy one, physically addicted to the accumulation of wealth and power, incapable of trusting or being trusted.
Besides, Harrison was a five-year-old in Arkansas, just beginning the two decades of bad luck that would precede a century of nothing going wrong.
He had this sudden cold feeling.
He went to the library and looked up microfiches of the past few years’ Forbes and Bizweek. And found out who he was, by omission.
For less than a thousand dollars, he gave himself a past. A few documents to match counterfeit inserts in government data banks. Then a few seemingly illogical investments in commodities, that made him a millionaire in less than a year. Then he bought a failing electronics firm and renamed it after himself: Lassiter Electronics.
He grew a beard that he knew would be prematurely white.
The firm prospered. He bought a plastics plant and renamed it Lassiter Industries. Then the largest printing out-fit in Pennsylvania. A fishery after that.
In 2010 he contrived to be in a waterfront crap game in Galveston, where he lost a large sum to a hard-eyed boy who was fairly good at cold-rolling dice. Lassiter was better, but he rolled himself crapouts. It was two days after Harrison’s twentieth birthday, and his first big break.
A small bank, then a large one. An aerospace firm. Textiles. A piece of an orbital factory: micro-bearings and data crystals. Now named Lassiter, Limited.
In 2018, still patiently manufacturing predestination, he hired young D. Thorne Harrison as a time-and-motion analyst, knowing that all of his credentials were false. It would give Harrison access to sensitive information.
By 2021 he was Junior Vice-President in charge of production. By 2022, Vice-President. Youngest member of the board, he knew interesting things about the other board members.
In 2024, Harrison brought to Lassiter’s office documents proving that he had voting control of 51% of Lassiter, Limited. He had expected a light. Instead, Lassiter made a cash settlement, perplexingly small, and dropped out of sight.
With half his life left to live, and money enough for much longer, Lassiter bought comfortable places in Paris, Key West, and Colorado, and commuted according to the weather and season. He took a few years for a leisurely trip around the world. His considerable mental energies he channeled into the world of art, rather than finance. He became an accomplished harpsichordist, and was well-known among the avant-garde for his neopointillist constructions: sculptures of frozen light, careful laser bursts caught in a cube of photosensitive gel. Beautiful women were fascinated by this man who had done so well in two seemingly antagonistic fields.
He followed Harrison’s fortunes closely: the sell-out in 2030, buying out the Adams-Beeson drive (which seemed like a reckless long shot to most observers), sinking a fortune in the Moon and getting it back a hundredfold.
And as the ecologic catalyzers were being seeded on Mars, Harrison an old man running out of years to buy, Lassiter lay dying in Key West:
In the salt breeze on an open veranda, not wanting to clutter up his end with IV tubes and rushing attendants and sterile frigid air, he had sent his lone nurse away on an errand that would take too long, his last spoken words calm and reassuring, belying the spike of pain in his chest. The house downstairs was filled with weeping admirers, friends he had not bought, and as the pale blue sky went dark red, he reckoned himself a happy man, and wondered how he would do it next time, thinking he was the puppeteer, even as the last string was pulled.
Juryrigged
For three semesters I did graduate work in computer science at the University of Maryland, so it was inevitable, perhaps unfortunately, that sooner or later I’d write a story with a computer as the main character. This is it.
In terms of action, this is probably the most complicated story I’ve ever written, even though most of the action is just electrons slipping to and fro. I was a little concerned that it might be too complicated, but it did sell, and to a good market.
I took the story to a writers’ conference in Baltimore—six or seven of us who met every few months to tear each other’s work apart—and didn’t expect any mercy, since we were fairly savage with one another (in a friendly way, oh yes), and it seemed to me that a story about a computer would be pretty vulnerable to sarcasm.
To my surprise, everyone liked it. I was so pleased that I got careless, and explained to them what the underlying structure of it was.
For the rest of the week, it was “Joe’s God-damned Boolean algebra story.”
L. Henry Kennem put a tiny speck of Ultramarine Blue into the gob of white on his palette. He mashed it around until it was thoroughly mixed, and smiled. Perfect for the underside.
Henry was painting a gesso-on-gesso picture of a pile of eggs in a white bowl on a white saucer, on a white table-top, lit uniformly from every side. It was a tour-de-force of technique; though an uncharitable observer might have pointed out that from any distance greater than three feet, it was only a slightly smudged white canvas.
But Henry was untouched by the foibles of critics, more immune than any artist in any less perfect age could have been. For in the Citizen’s Capitalism of America (and about everywhere else, for that matter), he was a painte
r, by damn—Occupational Code 509 827 63; Artist, paints, free-lance—and he got a government check every two weeks for doing what he had shown the most aptitude for, twenty years ago at the magic age of fourteen. All he had to do, to keep off the relief rolls, was produce at least one painting a year.
He’d already done his painting this year, and it made him feel like a very good citizen to be doing another. This one was quite a challenge, too; Henry hadn’t seen a real egg in many years—his paycheck was adequate but not enough to justify buying gourmet food—and, disdaining photographs, he was working from memory. His eggs were a little too spherical.
The door chimed softly and Henry gave a gentle curse and set his palette under the no-dry field. He kept the brush in his hand and went to answer the door.
The viewer showed three men in business clothes—dark blue capes and matching jocstraps—maybe customers, looking for something to brighten up their office. Henry thought of the twenty-eight canvases languishing unsold in his study and how nice it would be to splurge and buy an egg. He composed his features into a look of quiet interest and thumbed the door open.
“Louis Henry Kennem?” The short fellow in the middle did the talking, while the other two stared.
“Yes, indeed, sirs. What can I do for you?”
“Government business,” the little one said and produced a card-badge with the legend “Occupational Classification Board”. “We have some good news for you.”
“Oh—well, come in, come in.” Good news, maybe. The two big fellows didn’t look like harbingers of joy. They walked in silently, as if on oiled bearings, expressions never changing as they took in the carefully-planned disorder of his living room-studio.
“Can I get you gentlemen coffee or something?”
“No, thank you. We won’t be long. Neither will you, as a matter of fact. You’re to come with us.” He plopped down on the sofa-roll. “Please have a seat.” The other two remained standing. Henry had a strong impulse to bolt out the door, but instead he perched on a neowood sawhorse.