Kaleidoscope Century

by Barnes, John

  Figure a few years in electronics as an enlisted man; after that, well, if the CP wanted me to stay in the Army, of course I would, and money would keep piling up till I retired at half pay — and with the age jump I was getting out of this, I’d be thirty-six and well-off. Lots of time to do more stuff. Or if Harris’s bosses only wanted some specific things, they might cut me loose, at which point I could use some GI Bill dollars to go through college in a lot of comfort — there would be a fat, untouched, hidden bank account out mere.

  In just the weeks I had been on my own, I was already realizing how much I liked piling up money. Shit, if I’d known how much I was going to like being out of my parents’ house, I’d have been planning to run away.

  Good deal all around. Some risk, but I didn’t have much to lose. When Harris came through the next week, he took me out to a business-type steak house, one of those Fakey Olde Englande places, and as I tucked in a twenty-ounce slab of beef, I told him yes. I came back and told Gwenny that I had said no.

  That night she asked me to undress all the way, and spent a long time kissing and touching my body all over, working herself furiously with both hands before she finally took my penis into her mouth. I stroked her breasts; they were saggy and covered with stretch marks, and the nipples were too big and too red, but I liked their soft, baggy weight in my hands. When she finished, she curled up beside me and we slept next to each other that night, the only time we ever did. I woke up with her scratchy old gray hair in my face, some of her drool on my chest. Though she was asleep, her hand was already stroking my morning erection.

  5.

  I finally finish talking. It’s been three hours. At last I’m sleepy, though my throat’s dry. I toss out the last of the cold coffee and reconstitute an orange juice. Food for a month here, if I want.

  I talk to the werp. “Give me a table of contents or whatever it’s called nowadays.”

  It shows me a list of about seventy topics, each with anywhere from a dozen to a hundred channels in it. I look over the list, and say, “Give me the ads, just the ones for Mars, and make it a general random browse.”

  For half an hour I find out what bread costs, what jobs are hiring, what the housing options are. Then I get an urge and say, “Show me the personal ads. What are the categories?”

  The list is long, but it’s almost all subdivisions under “Sexual Partners — No Emotional Connections Expected” and “Long-Run Relationships with Sex and Emotional Connection.” At least it’s gotten easier to find what interests you.

  “Connections and Memories” is the last category: a bulletin board, mainly, for locating relations and friends, because what with the Die-Off, Eurowar, Diaspora One, War of the Memes, and Diaspora Two, humanity has gotten pretty scattered and there are a lot of cousins out there who have never met, heirs who couldn’t be located, friends who haven’t seen each other in twenty years. “Can we plug into that?” I ask the werp. “Are we online here?”

  “Yes, we’ve got a new account in your new i.d.,” the werp says. “It’s intended to be perfectly secure.”

  “Okay, then scan for any ad seeking any member of the Quare or Couandeau families, or referencing any of my prior aliases.”

  “Shall I prioritize your criterial parameters, and do you want aggregate score order?”

  “Uh, define terms.”

  “Specify terms to be defined.”

  I end up spending another half hour, while I get tireder and tireder, before the machine can make it clear to me that what it means is that it wants to know how it’s supposed to compare indices to decide which ad to give me first.

  Once I understand that, I sit and think for a minute, and then finally, tossing my empty orange juice glass into the trash, I say, “Uh, how many people are there on Mars right now?”

  “Three million one hundred fifty-four thousand eight hundred twenty-two as of one hour ago. Crews may have departed on spacecraft and there has almost certainly been a birth or two, and perhaps a death, in the interval. Should non-citizen personnel on Deimos and Phobos be counted as well?”

  “That’s an adequate approximation already, thank you.” Once they start picking nits, nothing picks nits like an AI.

  I doubt that I have thousands of doppelgangers, first cousins, or people using my old aliases anywhere on a planet with a small population of mostly younger people. “Just ‘OR’ all the conditions together, no priorities, and give me everything you get.”

  “Very well. Stop if I hit what number?”

  “If you hit one hundred, I guess.”

  So after all of the trouble it has put me through, it pulls up a total of six ads. Two Quares, no apparent connection. One Ulysses Grant, ditto. One ad for a Couandeau, but it looks like the family came to Mars from France via the Vermont Reloc Camp.

  And one that is just a phone number, followed by, “Joshua Ali Quare — when you get to Red Sands City, call this number. I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio.”

  I remember exactly where and when I learned that phrase. I don’t even need the help of the werp to pull it up.

  That phrase, always part of always losing always finding Sadi. Our identities changed: full-fledged deep-cover ones changed at every transit, temporary ones constantly. But our Organization passwords never changed because it was the one sure way to find each other.

  “When I see places like this I always wish I was back in New Orleans” was Sadi’s phrase. In newspapers, on walls, little notes … we put them everywhere, and we found each other.

  I remember once, sometime in the middle of the Gray Decade when practically everyone was living on dolework, we’d gotten separated the usual way — he’d had a job to go do in science control, and I’d had a straight strong-arm to put on some politician, way out in the sticks around Spokane Dome, a guy named Bizet who was into good government and no corruption and like that, and who needed it explained to him that he could run his own territory as dean as he wanted it but Spokane was going to have prostitution because that was ours. He was one of those progressive good boys that can’t believe you can do it; he had called the cops, found out who they really worked for when they wouldn’t come out. I beat him pretty good where it wouldn’t show, and he seemed to get the idea. Probably if he was like most of them he’d retire real soon now, start drinking or something.

  I caught up with Sadi in Boston Dome; maybe 2044 just before holding the ice back got impossible? First I saw of him, I was sitting on a bench and he was going by on the other side of the street, silhouetted briefly, between two buildings, against the wet, white wall of the glacier a couple of miles away. “Hey, did I see you at Mardi Gras?” I yelled. He turned to see who it was and I asked, “Don’t you wish you were back in New Orleans?”

  He turned and walked toward me. “Naw. I haven’t seen weather likes this since I was a kid in Ohio,” he said, getting closer. “Jeez, Josh, they really did you up right this time. I’d never have recognized you.”

  “I think that’s the idea,” I said. “Figured you must be in town here since I knew the guy you were controlling was at MIT; so I arranged to have the restoration surgery done here so I could catch up with you.”

  “Well, your timing’s perfect. I hadn’t quite bought a ticket back to the house in Kansas yet, so we can go back together after your surgery.” He looked me up and down. “Cheekbones, lips, hair color … looks like they added some weight?”

  “Yep. It’s a good job this time. But shouldn’t take too much to put me back together.”

  Over lunch in a quiet place we knew, where we could talk without too much risk of listeners, we compared notes. My little escapade with Bizet had been pretty dull, and besides I didn’t want to talk about it much because Sadi and I disagreed on tactics a lot. Knocking Bizet around hadn’t bothered me much, but that wouldn’t have been Sadi’s way. Sadi would have noted that Bizet had a wife, a sister, and two teenaged daughters, and would have done things to one or two of them, for fun, in front of
Bizet; he thought that always increased the pressure, because there are a lot more men who can stand to risk another stomping but there aren’t many who can stand to risk seeing something like that again. Maybe he was right but I didn’t like it. I figured the only asshole screwing up the Organization’s business was Bizet, and it ought to be him that took the damage.

  Call it a point of esthetics or ethics or something. All I knew was, I slept better doing it my way. And I didn’t like it that Sadi would sometimes pick on me about that.

  So I turned the conversation straight to the job Sadi had done. “How’d it go? Did it get wet?”

  “Not very. He’s still alive and he’ll keep working. This time we had something better than threats to use.”

  “I thought threats were your favorites,” I said, teasing him.

  He poured a tall glass of beer and took a long sip. “Now that really depends on how you define favorites. For carrying them out, sure. I like getting turned loose on people, especially civilian dumbfucks. So do you, you know. That’s how we ended up staying with the Organization, it wouldn’t have been that hard to leave — at least if you believe the retired longtimers like Peter, and I do. So sure, threats are my favorite for fun. But for effect — for getting what you want — give me bribes every time. And I had a great bribe for this guy.

  “He was working on CTCs — and you know that’s priority one for us to control or suppress.”

  “Unhhunh. Lucky bastard — what was your bonus on that?”

  “Enough so the next vacation’s on me, bud. Maybe we’ll go up to the Supras and tear things up a little, hunh?”

  “Maybe we will,” I agreed. For some reason I didn’t understand, research into CTCs — closed timelike curves — was just about the biggest deal going for Organization bonuses. They didn’t want anyone to be working on them unless that person was in the Organization.

  The trouble was that as research piled up they were becoming easier and easier, and they were fascinating. A CTC was a loop forward into time; that is, you did something or other to make a “singularity,” and it created a little loop of time sitting right next to our timeline, with one end of the loop at the moment the singularity was created, and the far end of the loop somewhere out in the future. It didn’t provide us with a way to reach the past — the loop could not be thrown in that direction. What it did provide was a way for the future to reach us; within the time loop, you could move on the forward leg of the loop toward the future, at a faster speed than normal time went, then follow the loop till it bent around, traveling rapidly back in time, all the way to the singularity. At the singularity, you got off the loop, into your own timeline — and your own timeline split, into a new one that contained both you and your original self, and an old one in which you vanished the moment you got into the loop.

  Right now it was mostly theory, but the year before the Joule Box — the big collider particle accelerator on the back side of the moon, which could put a full joule of energy on each particle — had managed to make a subatomic singularity. I wasn’t real sure what that was except that the flashchannel kept saying they had put “a billion uranium atoms into a cubic barn.” Sadi said a fermi was a unit of measure, which helped make a little more sense than the picture I had produced in my head, but I didn’t have any idea how small except “real tiny.” Anyway, they had thrown about one hundred electrons into the three-second time loop which that opened up. Ninety thousand electrons had popped out of the singularity, before the hundred went in — meaning that we had somehow captured nine hundred universes’ worth of that set of 100 electrons.

  That was the basis for Sadi’s theory about why the Organization was so interested in CTCs: he said the Organization wanted to have a system where they could send in a few diamonds, chunks of plutonium, or kilos of You-4 tomorrow, causing tons of them to appear today. In theory, he pointed out, you could even use the ones you got back today as your starter.

  My theory was that they wanted to own the first singularity, because it would give them a monopoly on the farthest travel back in time possible (since you couldn’t travel to any time before a singularity had been created).

  Either way, CTCs were an interesting game. The rules were, nobody got to play except the Organization and the physicists it controlled, and we got paid a lot any time we enforced that rule.

  The catch to all that, of course, was that as time went by the science and technology just kept getting better. It didn’t look real promising for keeping everyone else behind forever.

  “So what did you do?” I asked.

  “The Organization told me to offer him a unified theory of something or other, which I had in a notebook. He didn’t believe it, of course, right off the bat, but I told him to take the notebook, free, for a few days, copy it if he wanted, and it worked like a charm. Which I think is one of the things it was a theory about. Anyway, he says it will be years just to work out the implications — and while he’s working on that, he won’t be anywhere near CTCs. Case closed.” He held up his beer and I clinked mine against it. “No more science that we don’t need.”

  “Amen,” I said. Even if I didn’t see much point in the whole CTC thing, I sure knew I wanted the Organization to keep its monopoly on the longtimer technology.

  He grinned at me. “I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio.”

  Automatically I responded, “When I see places like this I always wish I was back in New Orleans.”

  “Perfect,” he said. “After your restoration surgery, you and I recover in New Orleans and spend this bonus.”

  And so we did. The 2040s, the Gray Decade, was hard on a lot of people, of course — worst depression since the 1930s — but we had cash and an employer that was never going out of business. When you’ve got all the money, everyone else is for sale. If I remember New Orleans right, I think we killed somebody.

  I have been staring at the werp for several minutes while I thought about that. The ad is still in front of me, still with its phrase. “I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio.” I shudder. I’m not sure I want to live that way again, do those things again. It’s turning my stomach to remember a lot of it. But I want to see Sadi, if it’s Sadi. I have to see him if it’s him. I tell my werp to copy the ad but not to respond, and then add, “Set up a queue of documents — everything that includes the phrase ‘I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio.’ Wake me at … what time is it?”

  “Nine thirty-four P.M. local.”

  “Wake me at five A.M. local.” I go to bed, and I go to sleep, but I have horrible nightmares and get no rest. The alarm throws me out of bed at five, still tired.

  I reconstitute breakfast, sit down, and start talking to the werp. This is how every day starts for four more days.

  6.

  Some guys say they never forget Basic. I guess I can understand that, if it was your first time away from home, and you weren’t used to people abusing you physically and screaming into your face. For me, it was a lot more consistent and friendly than I was used to. My biggest problem was that I could tell the sergeant was actually concerned about us, and I ended up liking him more than I should have. I felt guilty about what I was in the Army for. Not enough to overcome me with guilt and make me turn Harris in.

  A few months later I was in a tech school, living off base in an apartment I shared with four other guys, with my RX-7 parked out front. I don’t know whatever became of that car, I had it for years, but there’s nothing in my werp to tell me when I lost it or how. I feel a little sad about not knowing where and when it went.

  The promotions came reasonably fast, and I got security dearances without much trouble. Since I didn’t answer letters from my mother, sure enough she complained to her congressman, who relayed it to the Pentagon, and my company commander called me in. When I explained that I was trying to get Communism behind me, my file got all sorts of good things in it.

  That was the last time I was ever
to hear anything of Mama. Guess I thought there would be time to reconcile, because I didn’t know it was “the last time” yet.

  Money was building up in my secret accounts, and I liked working on radar. By the time I was really eighteen (and officially twenty), I had a place of my own a couple of miles from the base, and whenever I was off duty I was in civvies and off to Phoenix for fun. I still didn’t have to touch the hidden account — I was even saving money out of my military pay. Might’ve been the best years of my life.

  One day in November 1989, when I walked into the base lounge, a bunch of men were glued to the screen. “What’s up?”

  “They’re tearin’ down the Berlin Wall, Josh.”

  “Who is?”

  “The Germans. Both sides.”

  I stared at the screen. No trace of a border guard. I remembered that years ago, when they’d told us about the Wall in school, Mama had tried to “straighten me out” about it, pointing out that “oh, sure, some young romantic students that fell for the propaganda are getting killed, and that’s a shame, but most of the people defecting from the East waited to finish advanced professional degrees at government expense before they ‘fled to the freedom of the West.’”

  The contempt in Mama’s voice when she said that phrase had amazed me, left me without words as she went on, “Get real about it, Josh. If they were suffering so much they’d have run for it when they were sixteen or twenty or something. But they stay there for year after year, getting free tuition and advanced training. Then when it’s time for them to start paying back the benefits they received, to be a doctor or engineer for the people who paid to train them, they skip over to the West because the salaries are higher here. The year before they built the Wall, the German Democratic Republic lost practically the whole graduating class of every medical school. Don’t try to tell me doctors have some special love for freedom. We know what doctors love, and it ain’t that. But what they do love — I mean money — oh, there’s plenty of that over here. That’s what they come for. Because they want to make cash, not make people well.”