Kaleidoscope Century

by Barnes, John

  Something about the thought of the argument with Mama made me think about the kitchen back home, the way it smelled, the rows on rows of books she’d read, and the framed pictures of her father and grandfather. A little lump rose in my throat. No one here was going to notice. Everyone else was getting choked up too.

  On the screen a couple of blonde girls were sitting on the Wall, prying off chunks with a crowbar and tossing them down to the crowd. They looked like any two girls you could find in any bar in Phoenix, any weekend. Probably they were just as political.

  “That’s fucking it,” one of the soldiers said. “But I bet we all end up unemployed. Three years from now the Army’s gonna be half its size.”

  “You mean our Army?” another asked. “Dream on, babe. There’s plenty of ragheads out there that still hate us. We’ll just be switching who we fight is all. More sun and sand. Kind of a beach Army.”

  “Shut up, I’m trying to hear,” came from a couple corners of the room.

  I watched them dancing and waving flags, all the stuff that’s now familiar in most people’s history lessons, and I kept thinking how much it was like what Mama had told me the Revolution would be like.

  I felt sick and sad and sorry. I didn’t even know if Grandpa was still alive, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to call them and tell them I was sorry. So I never picked up the phone, just went home to my apartment.

  It wasn’t that big a surprise when a couple of months later, the deposits into the secret account stopped arriving. I didn’t let it worry me, much. I could sit on the money I already had, while the trail got colder. Meanwhile I had a good job and I could keep doing that.

  By the time of the First Oil War, in 1991, it no longer seemed strange; the USSR was just another nation, more like a big run-down Sweden than anything else. I went over to Saudi, spent some months of boredom at a station that led data to a Patriot battery, and came back with a good tan and a lot of extra pay. They threw a parade for us.

  As I did every quarter, I checked the balance in the secret account, using a bank-by-modem system. This time, there was a new deposit.

  I don’t think I was surprised, or not surprised. It seemed to imply nothing, other than, perhaps, that the KGB had gotten its act back together. I leaned back and looked over the place; comfortable apartment in a big bland complex, cheap but new furniture, blue Arizona sky outside, framed beer-company prints on the walls (mostly of women who weren’t old enough to drink legally, not wearing much). The audio rig was big, new, and expensive, the television huge. I was thinking about buying a house to hold all my stuff. Life was probably not going to get better.

  I was watching that big TV a few months later, when all the channels were carrying the news of the Second Revolution (they were still calling it a “coup” that day) in Moscow. The tanks had Parliament surrounded, there were crowds everywhere, and no one knew what was going to happen next.

  It happened I was watching at the big moment, and on CBS rather than CNN, so I saw it from the rear view and therefore saw the famous picture of Captain Alexei Nemonynov before I knew that he, and the picture, would be famous.

  God knows what Yeltsin was thinking. Probably nothing at all. He was said to be stubborn. But he climbed up on a tank, like he was going to walk right up to Parliament, right over all those massed weapons. He had gotten two steps when Nemonynov climbed up from the other side and stood in his way.

  No microphone picked it up, so we have only Nemonynov’s word for what they said. He said later he ordered Yeltsin to get down off the tank, go home, and stop making a fool of himself. I’ve often thought how much better things could have been, for the world and everybody, if Yeltsin had taken that advice.

  But he didn’t. From the camera behind him, you could see him nod firmly, twice, and then take a step forward, his silver-white hair shining. The pistol in Nemonynov’s fist barked, a hard flat sound. Bloody flesh sprayed from Yeltsin’s back. He fell backwards, off the tank, to the ground, shot through the guts.

  The cameraman must have been so startled that he didn’t point the camera down at the dying Yeltsin for a long moment. Instead, I — and millions at the same time, and later almost everyone — saw Captain Alexei Nemonynov calmly put the pistol away, heave a sigh, take two steps forward, and spit twice on Yeltsin’s twitching body.

  As if that had been the signal, four soldiers rushed up, rifles reversed, and surrounded Yeltsin. Methodically, with the full force of their bodies, the soldiers put their rifle butts to work on him. The rifles rose and fell, rose and fell. The audio channel picked up the thuds on wet flesh. The soldiers’ backs blocked the cameras’ view — we could only guess from the dull, heavy impacts, and little sprays of stood.

  Nemonynov drew his pistol again and pointed it. The CBS camera went dead.

  For the next hour, I flicked from channel to channel. Some cameras were still on to show the incendiary shells tearing into Parliament. Even the next morning one guy was still uploading footage to satellite of the bodies strewn all around the streets from Red Square to the Moskva.

  I figured my phone would ring sooner or later, but it didn’t, though the payments kept right on rolling in, as Bush moved troops into the old Warsaw Pact nations that September. The cash continued to flow when Oil War Two dared and I was temporarily loaned to the ayatollahs to train their technicians for the defense of Teheran. The money kept piling up during the Christmas Crisis when Red Army unite started to defect to the various Free Communist governments and Marines went ashore in the Baltics.

  On December 19, 1991, one week after getting back stateside from Iran, I parked my RX-7 in longterm storage in Fayetteville, reported at Fort Bragg, and got on the plane for Klaipeda. We were going to be setting up radar pickets for the UN’s No-Fly Zone over western Russia, and everybody was figuring war in April.

  The Rising might have been inevitable, but it didn’t look that way then. It was nearly as big a surprise as everything since the autumn of 1989 had been.

  My memories of the big celebrations all over Europe in January are a pleasant blur, but I still remember how amazed I was to realize I would be back in California in plenty of time to vote in the primaries. Not that anyone could work up much concern about the elections. Nobody could have beaten George Bush that year, and Bob Kerry didn’t seem to try. It was the first all-state sweep since George Washington’s second term. They didn’t even interrupt television programming for it much.

  And still the money continued to come in, and still no one called me. So I just let myself enjoy fiddling around with radar. Every time clearances were reviewed I got closer to my goal of working on Stealth detection.

  Not like I was bored. I had a couple of acquaintances to go for a beer with, and there were lots of movies to rent. And the early nineties were great years for music, all the bands stopped playing boomer shit. I got a lot of new CD’s and a great rig to play them on.

  Best of all, I was good-looking and didn’t mind spending money, at least as long as the girl put out. So I didn’t have much trouble getting the kind of girl I was interested in. Generally I’d go out with a girl until I’d fucked her enough times to deaden my curiosity, then drop her — if she hadn’t already taken herself out of the picture once it became clear mat I didn’t talk much, didn’t care much what went on in anyone else’s life, and was mainly interested in sex. The ones who were looking for someone like me sometimes ended up as semi-friends; the ones who were looking for a “relationship” usually hated me afterwards, like they hated any guy that didn’t give them what they wanted.

  There was AIDS, but the old, easy-to-prevent kind. I used up a lot of rubbers.

  When the visit I had been expecting came at last, I had just gotten Cyssi out of the place that morning — another high school girl, I was getting old for them but they had such perfect little bodies and they were so afraid of acting young that they’d do anything to prove they were grown up. Probably high school kids thought of her as average or even plain, but th
at’s because high school kids are only looking at each other. She had a tiny waist, big tits, a dark tan, and a big pouf of dyed-red hair, and that had been more than good enough for me to overlook the zits and crooked teeth.

  I gave her a long kiss at the door, getting another good feel in under her loose, flowing top, and she did one of those pouty little poses. “Call me?”

  “Of course,” I said, and let a hand slide down over her hip, probing at the cuffs of her cutoffs, stroking her through her black hose. “You’re not in any trouble with your folks?”

  “Oh, as if. Like they give a shit. Not.” She pouted again. “You didn’t call till Thursday last week.”

  “I was working.”

  “All the time?”

  “All right, I’ll call.” We kissed again and she went out the door, walking quickly away on the concrete walkways that made up the second floor of Park Electra, the complex I lived in — I heard her Doc Martens clomping into the distance.

  I had just gotten the dishwasher going and the vacuum out when someone knocked.

  Harris, with a man who didn’t look like anyone. I opened the door wide for them, and the nondescript man turned to Harris and said, “This is him, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Go wait in the car.”

  Harris left without saying goodbye, or even hello. I never saw him again.

  The nondescript man turned back to me, came in, closed the door and said, “You’ve got a pretty comfortable life. It’s time to start earning it.”

  I nodded. “You need a drink or coffee or anything?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover today. Let me just fill you in, tell you what’s going on, and then go. Feel free to ask questions about any part you don’t understand of course.”

  “Of course.”

  He gestured for me to sit on my couch, and then sat beside me and opened his brief case. “As you know, things got unsuitable for the organization during the last year. Large parts of our infrastructure had to be sacrificed, not just because our assets were in the USSR and were seized by tile New Provisional Government, but also because for security reasons we had to cut traceable connections. But the procedure is complete — we no longer have significant overlaps with the Party, State, or Army. In fact we’re no longer even based in Moscow.

  “You might say we’re doing what Bush wants us to. We’re privatizing and moving into being a purely capitalist enterprise. We have a number of clients interested in Stealth, and our penetration is good enough to assure us you will be on one of the detection projects soon. When you are, you will begin to receive brief communiqués, mostly questions, in a brown manila envelope that will be on the upper shelf of your kitchen cabinet. Check that shelf once a day after your promotion comes through. Give me your apartment key for a moment.”

  I did. He took it off the key ring, dropped it into a box, and pushed a button. A loud beep. He handed me the key back without a sound, and I returned it to its ring. I didn’t appreciate them coming in without asking, but I had decided long ago to let them have as much of me as they wanted. After all I had no gripe about the pay.

  “When you find a list of questions, write out the answers — in handwriting — and put that in the envelope, along with the list itself. Make no copies of anything. Do not ever use a typewriter or word processor of any kind for this. Answer the questions by the indicated date, but don’t compromise yourself to do it. If there’s something you can’t find out or don’t know by the date, include a note to that effect.

  “That’s it, for that part of the work. Any questions? You’ll get a copy of the same instructions in every envelope.”

  “No questions,” I said, and got up to show him to the door — but he caught my wrist.

  “There’s one other thing,” he said, and pulled out something that looked like a ray gun from a cheap sci-fi movie. He saw how startled I looked. I think he smiled. “It’s an air-injector,” he said. “You’re getting a vaccination. Give me your arm.”

  Figuring that these people could arrange for me to have a life sentence, or maybe a lethal injection, whenever they wanted, I didn’t give him a fight, not even an argument. I wonder about that. If I had, would he have said, “Fine, die of mutAIDS?” Probably not, since CDC had not named mutAIDS yet, and besides that wasn’t the Organization’s term for it. For that matter, I don’t remember whether anyone was calling it the Organization officially yet; I think they’d dropped the term KGB since that stood for Committee for State Security, and the Organization was no longer a committee, there was no longer any such state, and it wasn’t interested in anybody’s security.

  Probably I didn’t think at all. I just stuck out my arm. He pushed the injector against my bare skin, not roughly, but firmly enough to make sure he had contact. The little gadget made a poofing sound, my arm stung for an instant.

  Done. Just like that.

  “What’s it a vaccination against?” I asked.

  “Three things,” he said. His inflection was flat, and he spoke fast, like he’d said this a lot of times before. “You won’t believe me at first, but because you had that shot, you will never come down with AIDS — though within a few months you’ll begin to test HIV-positive. Don’t worry, it won’t kill your job with the secure project — one of your old girlfriends has gotten infected recently, and it will be assumed that’s where you got it. But don’t worry. You couldn’t get AIDS now if you tried, nor can you transmit it.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.” At least I could be careless when I felt like it, or when the woman wanted to be.

  “Secondly, it’s a memory enhancer. You will find for the next several years that you don’t forget anything. You’ll remember every word you read or hear exactly, and everything you see exactly as it is. You’ll still have to study to learn new things, because you have to be able to use the information as well as recall it — but you won’t have to memorize anything again. As a side-benefit, you’ll be able to learn languages very rapidly.”

  “You said for several years. Then I need a booster?”

  He shook his head. “No. That’s the third effect, which is caused by the same stuff that improves your memory. Some years from now — we don’t know exactly when — you’re going to come down with a bad fever, muscle aches, nausea, the worst case of flu you’ve ever had. It will last a few months. At the end of that time, your body will have done a fairly complete renewal of itself. You’ll have dropped several years in biological age. But you will also have lost most of the memories from the years since this injection. That process will repeat indefinitely — live fifteen years with perfect memory, drop ten, lose all recent memory. So make sure, this time and every time, you keep good records of everything important in your personal life, all the time.” He got up to go. “Good luck. Welcome to active duty. Your pay will triple, and we’re seeing what we can do about the eighteen months when we didn’t pay you.”

  I thanked him because it made as much sense as any-titling, and asked, “Where did you get all these things?”

  “Which things?”

  “In the injector.”

  He shrugged. “They don’t tell me much more than they tell you. My guess would be that it’s the results of some of our special research and development work, and we probably got most of that out of the USSR before the Rising. It’s not at all perfect, obviously — life extension and memory enhancement is great but the side effects aren’t desirable for our purposes, let alone yours. If things had gone better, I’m sure we wouldn’t be trying it yet.”

  He closed his briefcase, got up, and left. A couple of days later I noticed a squib in a newspaper about an unidentified body found in a parking lot, money still in his wallet. The description matched Harris, but I wasn’t about to call the morgue and offer to come in and identify him. And maybe I’m remembering a dream about something I was afraid happened. After all, Harris was a small fish.

  7.

  For the rest of it, there’s the history
books. First reports of a rapidly acting, airborne mutant HIV, December 1993. Riots and panics all over. South Central LA blew up. Then on January 28, 1994, President Bush was found dead in bed. He had been ill for about three weeks before, and probably contagious since July.

  There’s a principle that most people are only about six contacts away from anyone else in the world, and it’s true, but the reason’s that few people are more than three contacts away from their national leaders. Think about it; chances are you know some local politician, who knows some national politician, who knows the national leader, and all the national leaders know each other.

  My guess is the Organization targeted Bush. Having that on the werp, if they’re still around, ought to draw some attention. Why I want their attention, I have no idea, except that fifteen years from now I will be back in this position again. What if I’d just as soon die? Who would be better at killing me than the Organization?

  Morbid thought. But that advertisement could be the Organization. I have enough memories, and the werp has dragged up enough fragments, to convince me that they’re probably still around.

  Anyway, when Bush died of mutAIDS, since most of the US was only a few contacts away from him, it meant everyone was infected, from babies to grandmothers, everywhere.

  Every schoolchild now learns three things about it: fatalities were concentrated in those over forty years old. MutAIDS confers permanent immunity to AIDS, which is why nowadays they give it to newborn infants deliberately. And in 1994, the year of the Die-Off, Planet Earth lost 10 percent of its citizens between February and August. All that’s in the books.