Kaleidoscope Century

by Barnes, John

  Yet it’s a long-ago crime done to long-dead people. Apart from my records the only thing left of the crime is a few old police files — and so many of those were wiped or altered during the War of the Memes that they might not be true anyway. No way to verify it against Earth records because they’re all controlled by Resuna now. I don’t see why I should feel guilty. But I am bothered that I can’t stop being bothered.

  By now the sun’s going down. Tomorrow, if I wanted to, I could get up early, make a trip into Red Sands City, scout around, and come back.

  But to do that I would have to go to bed early — I’m still sleeping a long time every night — and I don’t. I sit up, zap through records in the werp, drinking coffee and eating an apple pie I reconstituted. Try to pull a story together. The records of five other times I have tried to do this — the earliest in 2080, the most recent just last year — don’t agree with each other. Maybe some of them have memories in them that I’ve now lost, or maybe some are based on documents that I decided were false and threw away. Or is it possible that some of my memories at any given time are not really lost, but just inaccessible?

  If I search on “Weather-Kid-Ohio” as a cluster, I turn up too many cases to read and view tonight; yet I don’t give up.

  “I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio.” I can count a good dozen times I heard that expression, just in my memory. The dark outside the window starts to give me the creeps. The glow off Deimos is a funny color, maybe caused by all those lights I see glowing on its gleaming metal skin. I stand up, draw the curtain, reconstitute more coffee, pour a cup, and continue.

  4.

  “I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio,” the man next to me said. “Jesus, this train station’s cold.”

  “Fuck it,” I said. “If it gets hot it’ll get hot real sudden, and we won’t like that either.”

  Pretty standard remark after so many nukes had gone off, three years or so into the Eurowar. I knew he’d said my password, but I figured I’d make him sweat for the acknowledgment.

  “Do you think we’ll get more snow?” he hinted. Must be amateur, new recruit, couldn’t have much experience. Way he was doing things, wouldn’t get much older.

  I looked sideways at him. Coat fairly new, outermost sweater almost clean, shoes insulated hightops, shredded by long wear, that were a strange shade of brown-gray from a lot of walking in ashes and muck. They maybe were originally waterproof, but they sure weren’t now, not with one dirty black big toenail sticking out of one of them.

  “I’m from Ohio, myself, and the sky always looked like that before it snowed,” I said, giving the countersign. I had amused myself about as much at his expense as I wanted to, and even after my three years of active duty I didn’t know how much fucking around the Organization would tolerate.

  He slid an envelope into my pocket. I waited half an hour, got on the first train that seemed to be headed somewhere, hoped a rocket wouldn’t hit it for a while, and then went into the bathroom. The first bathroom I picked held a dead conductor. Close that door, walk farther down. Next one was unoccupied. I put a newspaper down on the seat, sat down on it, and opened the note the guy had given me.

  A short note like all of them: a British regiment in Amsterdam was showing signs of effectiveness. Go there and kill any two men I thought would do max damage. No more than that. After you bagged two, odds they’d bother to retaliate went up, and we had assets in Amsterdam that they might know about. Just two, preferably in the same incident, could be put down to random sniping or even tourist psychos. Further orders at a specific bench in a public park in Brussels.

  On the way, look in on a missing agent who had married a German politician in Essen. Find out why she’d sent no reports in two years. See why he was still alive.

  This schedule could easily get me killed — I’d have to stay on the same trains for hours to get to the right places at the right times. And every minute a train rolled was a chance for overhead satellites to get a fix and dispatch a deathbird. Usually all one did was stop the train — but now and then a train got wrecked seriously and passengers died, especially from the new Soviet deathbirds that could take out a group of ties just ahead of the train, derailing the works. Besides there were so many tourist psychos out there, playing at being “Resistance Fighters,” it seemed like more trains wrecked than not. And you could always worry that someone had virused the train’s automated driver. That happened a lot too.

  2001 was a year. Nothing worked and 90 percent of the engineers on Earth, probably, were busy figuring out how to keep it from working. Two doctors in Japan announced that they thought they had a way to induce successful immune responses to everything — the “make you well” shot — and the next day one was thrown from a high window and the other was run down, and backed up over, by a dump truck. The physicist in Einstein’s old job published a paper about closed timelike curves — limited time travel; most of his family died in a fire, the rest were shot trying to run out of the burning house. The Nobel Prize for Peace was not awarded. This upset half a dozen ayatollahs (who had felt that they had earned it for brokering a peace between India and Pakistan), so Stockholm was hit with 100 missiles on Christmas morning, seventy-eight people died, and it only made the prime slot on the flashchannel because the motive was novel.

  The price of teenaged slaves in Benelux fell to 1500 rounds of whatever the seller’s weapon took. Police departments couldn’t get new applicants for anything less than the pre-war pay of brain surgeons, usually payable in a mix of gold, offshore electronic funds, antibiotics, and food. The file in my Organization-issued palmtop computer, listing what bonuses were paid for different categories of assassinations, was 75 kb long. Good year for money. Bad year for people.

  The train bumped past a burned-out column of tanks, big old Abramses that must have been hit in the first week of the war. Not safe to try to clear stuff like that out, so they’d been left where they burned.

  I wondered idly if I knew anyone who was rotting in those hulks. Very likely I did. I’d been doing some work on counter-battery-fire control systems, including a system to be installed on the Abrams, at one point, and that meant traveling around and meeting a lot of Abrams crews.

  No helping them now. Or any of the hundreds of thousands of unburied dead still lying around Europe.

  The First and Second Oil Wars had taught everybody a lot of lessons. Mainly how to write SMOT’s, Simulation Modeling Optimizing Targeters, ultrafast programs that ran on microsupers and could make “smart weapons” into “brilliant weapons.”

  Smart weapon: a munition that hit the target more often than not. Old-fashioned bullets and bombs, the kind you saw in WWII movies, were “dumb” — meaning that it took 10,000 rounds to kill one enemy soldier, and a bomb came down within one kilometer of the target. With dumb weapons, misses outweighed hits by factors of hundreds or more. Smart weapons hit more than 50 percent of the time. The number of shots you have to fire to get the target is 1 divided by the percentage of hits; 50 percent means you get it in two shots, instead of a thousand.

  Brilliant weapons: the smart weapon went after the most important thing on the battlefield. A smart artillery round would jump out of a howitzer, look down below it, find a tank, and land on that. But a brilliant artillery round would look down below and pick out the tank that contained a general. Dumb bomb landed somewhere around a power plant, smart bomb went through the roof in the right place to hit a generator, but brilliant bomb hit the generator that was carrying peak load.

  Essentially in the split second before the weapon was launched, the SMOT simulated a thousand, or ten thousand, possible hits and consequences of those hits, picked the one whose result was best for its side and worst for the enemy, and reprogrammed the smart weapon to go do that.

  Nobody realized both sides had SMOTs. The NATO nations had been developing them right along after the First Oil War, confident that they had the only ones. The FSA thought
they had invented the idea after studying Western weaponry during the Oil Wars, and had been scrambling to get them working, especially after the new government had come to power and achieved some kind of stability.

  Pretty soon the pilots and gunners gave up aiming at anything in particular; the SMOT, with its faster reflexes and better ability to evaluate all the data flowing in, could pick out the preferred target within several square miles. So you’d just pop up, fire, and get out of there, not even really knowing what you were shooting at.

  SMOTs got better, and faster, and able to think about more issues at once — tech evolves quickly in wartime, and software evolves faster than other tech. After a while you didn’t really need people in the loop at all; you just sent out a drone to carry the SMOT, weapons, and sensors, linked to a network of SMOTs via encrypted tightbeam, and told it to go make life miserable for the enemy.

  One time, in the middle of getting drunk and high together, Sadi said “every big war begins by slaughtering privates to educate generals.” The Eurowar was different. We slaughtered generals, and presidents and ministers, corporate executives who knew what they were doing, and lately both sides had been nailing engineering talent.

  There were rumors that this new Pope, Paul John Paul, was going to do something for world peace. One of my contacts had laughed and said he must have some divisions no one had heard about. I looked at him blankly, and he tried to explain it was some kind of old joke going back to Stalin. I guess he’d been in the Organization a long time.

  The train rocked on through the winter landscape. At least we had heavy cloud cover and only had to worry about radar satellites. Nowadays most trains were carrying jamming rigs, just like the few airliners still flying. Next year they’d probably have those on city buses too.

  I looked out the window at land that got flatter and flatter. We’d be crossing the Rhine in little time unless — they used to say Murphy hears you.

  I saw it coming — bright silver, like a model airplane with a three-foot wingspan, zigging and bouncing a couple of feet off the snow, skating in toward the train. A deathbird, maybe fired by a mine miles away, dumped in from orbit in a container, or shot out of a robot sub off the North Sea coast. Probably it had started after the train within a few minutes of our starting to move along this line — deathbirds had enormous range but they were not fast, and it might have taken an hour or more on its way, easily.

  I had needed to see only that flash of silver and the strange swirl in the air of the electrostatic propulsion system. I rolled off the seat and down onto the muddy, grimy floor of the railroad carriage.

  The jolt was pretty bad — it took out a group of ties — and derailed us. Floor bucked, slammed against me, belly-lurch of weightlessness before things settled out. Then I was sliding on my stomach over the grit and mud of the train floor, several feet face-first toward the door.

  As soon as the train carriage came to rest, with the car canted over to the side but the door mercifully on the up side and the little lights indicating the power was still on, I jumped up, scrambled back, got my valise, made for the door.

  Only a few people on the train. Safe way to get anywhere nowadays, walk slowly by yourself. So I’d had the carriage to myself.

  As I was opening the outside door, the door to the next car slid open, and a man, in a three-piece suit, came in, already reaching inside his coat. Reflexes kicked in. Draw and fire, fire, fire, fire. He fell over backward.

  Nice. All four shots in the head and chest.

  The man lay sprawled in the up-tilted bank of seats, dead. Something clenched in his hand — his weapon? Might be worth trading up.

  A pocket watch. I shrugged. Call it education — he would not make that mistake again.

  His pocket held a Boy Scout knife, like the one my father had given me, which I had lost sometime before. I took that. He also had an American passport, which I took for resale, and a Missouri driver’s license, worth nothing here so I left it on his body to identify him. The authorities would probably get his body home. Better deal than the conductor was likely to get, since he had looked like a Turk, and they’d probably just cremate him and mail his effects to his relatives.

  I wondered if I was the only survivor of this train. Three men got on alive, one got off alive. The story of Europe lately.

  I climbed out the door onto the side of the train, then down past the overturned wheels to the ground. No sign of any other passengers, so they were hurt and still on the train, or had already gotten away — either way, none off mine. Or they might be already out of the train, waiting to kill me.

  I slid on my butt down into the ditch beside the embankment. Nothing shot at me. I waited a few minutes. Still nothing. Either they had more patience than I or there wasn’t any “they.”

  I climbed back up the embankment and started walking up the track toward the Rhine. Sooner or later I would cross a main road, which would take me to someplace where I could steal a car.

  Stealing a car was getting really tough now that most civilians had White Flag transponders — radio gadget that told satellites and mines that this car was promising to be a noncombatant, give aid to neither side, and obey whoever won. Normally a White Flag wasn’t abused because if they found you driving something with a White Flag on it, and contraband inside, they hanged you on the spot and relayed the owner’s i.d. to everyone, and whoever could do it, on either side, would kill the owner.

  That made it tough to steal a car, but not impossible. Civilian protection systems were far, far behind the military stuff that had been developed during the three years of war, and the Organization had the latest from both sides.

  Twenty minutes later I walked into a little German village, a quiet, sleepy kind of place that had a couple of gas stations, an old shut-down movie theater, and one tiny Catholic church next to one tiny Lutheran church, all surrounded by about fifty houses.

  I needed a car I could work on without being observed. I set the low-energy scanner to look for household protection software it recognized, and my cellular datalink to see what it could find out about security systems purchased here.

  Most of these German households were in hock up to the eyeballs with buying all the various security systems, plus enough guns and ammo to back up the alarms. A good, fully trained Doberman nowadays was renting for more than a chemical engineer made.

  But since these poor bastards just wanted the war to go home and leave them alone, that was what they had predicated their defense on — protecting each individual house. So I could walk right up the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, and though almost everyone telecommuted now to avoid the weapons targeted on transit, nobody was patrolling the streets; they sat in their individual cocoons and waited for the blow to fall on one of them, even though probably half the houses in the village had picked me up on sensors, and the householders were undoubtedly sitting with their hands on their guns, waiting with sweat staining their armpits. If one of them had just not waited to see what I would do, seen what I was and taken one good shot, it would all have been over. But they lacked the balls. They always did.

  The cellular data link spotted my chance a half second ahead of the scanner. Side street not far ahead: integrated home security system with known bug, plus hole in his camera system, angle of approach uncovered.

  I checked again — jackpot — systems analyst for the German government. One of those obscure ministries, likely intelligence work. Probably a small fish, but all the same I could expect to collect a bounty on this one. The Organization was currently under contract to the Sovs, just as if it were the old days, so a German who worked in that ministry was bound to be worth something.

  He probably had gotten this system cheap, and then never bought upgrades because the old one was still keeping people out. The report said he’d registered a marriage to some girl half his age, address unknown, two years before.

  I walked up the path my computer told me to take, and when we were close enough it
seized his house’s cellular link and dropped in a bunch of tranquilizer viruses. Suddenly the house was as dead as any old building. It wouldn’t call the police for help and it would sound no alarms when I broke in. And it would not tell the people inside that its status had changed, either.

  Of course he would know what was up when his door caved in. But I knew I was going to shoot at anything that moved. He had to decide. The advantage was still mine.

  I didn’t have any explosives to do the job with, so I gave the door a good old-fashioned roundhouse kick. The cheap lock broke and it swung open with a ripping, booming noise as the veneer facing on the door tore to shreds and the bolt of the lock cut through the wooden doorframe.

  He came out naked. I pulled the trigger and he went over dead, onto his back. They’d have executed him anyway for letting me steal his car. So what the fuck.

  In the bedroom his wife trying to load a shotgun; she was cute, a brunette with nice little breasts. Probably she’d been out on the street, a runaway or war orphan turning tricks, and he’d bought her services permanently with his techie salary and nice safe house — though she might even think she loved him now. That was pretty common in those days.

  “Put that down,” I said in German.

  She did, and I said, “Kneel. Open your mouth. Shut your eyes.”

  She did, again. Tears were running down her face and she was mouthing some word; I told her to shut up.

  I wanted her to think this was going to be an oral rape. Most women complied, hoping to survive.

  I couldn’t let anyone who had seen me live — composite pictures got more accurate with every witness, and, if I let witnesses live, the time would come when an AI checking street camera records would recognize me. But I could make it quick. I shoved the gun into her open mouth, the muzzle forcing her palate back and up, and pulled the trigger. It made a hideous mess, and the sound hurt my ears in that little room.