by Barnes, John
But in my memory now she’s wearing a black sweater and a long skirt. As if maybe I’d kept her alive for a while. Or made her strip and then —
Did I actually serb her? I’m sure I accurately remember killing her. But did I serb her first? If I did I think that was the first time. I’d heard other agents talking about it; the nasty little Fourth Balkan War had given us the word, because it had been the Serbs who had discovered and exploited the same thing everyone had always known, that rape, destroying a person while leaving the body alive, was often more effective than simple killing, just as wounding enemy troops had always cost the opposing general more than killing them. Some Organization people regarded it as a perk, some as a trademark, some as just one more tool. All of them said, “You gotta try it.”
Was that the first time I tried it? Am I forgetting that? Surely not. I was in a hurry. I needed that car. I couldn’t be completely sure that all the alarms were out. I didn’t have a second to spare. Even if I had wanted to, or been the type, surely I wouldn’t have, not that one, not then.
But then, how rational was I at that moment?
I can’t settle it out. The blonde woman who gave me the information — what was her face like? It tends to blur into Gwenny, into the German housewife, into Sadi if I’m not careful. Sometimes I think she was there, that the two of us tied up the German housewife and I raped her while the blonde woman watched. It’s all slipping away from me as I grab at it, and what I write to straighten it out makes it worse.
I seem to remember every document I read or see, now, from my werp, exactly, as if I had a perfect movie with sound for the whole time since I woke up. The memory enhancement must still be working. If I had just, while the memories were perfect, managed to set down some, accurately, for every year since about 1990 … well, I didn’t.
And I can tell that I don’t have the skills to do that this time around, either. The records I am making don’t look like my memories, but like all the other records in the werp.
It’s late now, and I don’t set the clock. When I get up there will be sun. I will make coffee and see if I can get further with my memories.
Tomorrow for sure I will go to bed early, so that I can catch the maglev into Red Sands City. “I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio.” The phrase in that personal ad just keeps coming back to me. If I were to pull out of here, move my bank accounts, jump to some other town, and then answer the ad … would I be safe? From what?
6.
Several of the documents I have on the werp use the same phrase for it: “I missed everything.” I suppose you could say that. I went into a Catholic Worker hospital in Madrid in March 2003, war still going. I had ditched all the i.d. except the stuff that was going to go into a locker at the hospital, plus an envelope that I told them was a letter from my mother that I wanted in my bedside table.
Late in September I woke up for the third time I could remember, exhausted, seven kilos lighter.
Ten years younger.
No war.
Two thirds of the beds on the ward were empty. The TV by my bed didn’t have any flashchannel controls but it could get the main screen signal for AFFC, CNNFlash, NYTFlash, and ObsrChanl. But they were useless — I had no idea what the Mutual Surrender was, or that there had been a war, or what a Public Services Corporation was, though I got from context that it had something to do with the UN.
More puzzling was the fact that the American President, the Soviet General Commissioner, the Japanese PM, and half a dozen other people were in Rome at a meeting chaired by Pope Paul John Paul (American media loved to call him PJP) and it sounded like fighting — what fighting? — had stopped everywhere.
Every Japanese and Korean shipping company that could manage it were putting the few ships that had survived the roving air torpedoes — and weren’t needed to feed their own people — to the job of getting a couple of million American soldiers home, along with all the millions of refugees who had been invited to help resettle North America. There was a new mutAIDS outbreak in the States, so there was even more room once people were vaccinated.
Lots of reference to “indocoms,” to the “Global Habitability Report,” and to “the coming Rebound Winter in which we expect to lose millions despite our best efforts.” As far as I could figure it, an indocom was an apartment building linked to a mall linked to a factory, where you had to be a member to live and work there; the Ecucatholics, who were apparently Pope PJP’s people, were building a lot of them, and it sounded as if, mysteriously, there weren’t many other churches anymore, though the few there were didn’t like the Ecucatholics much. I wasn’t sure who wrote the Global Habitability Report, or who they wrote it for, but it must be highly respected because every politician referred to it at least twice per minute. For some reason it was going to get really cold this winter. That was about all I could get, even though I had nothing to do but lie there, eat soup and bread, and watch the TV.
The Catholic Workers were nice about letting me stay until I recovered more. The “letter from mother” told me why I wanted to get my metal box from hospital storage and look through it. A few days later, I had read everything scribbled into several notebooks, and listened to five audio tapes. I was in shape to move around, so I tried going to the three addresses I was supposed to check in Madrid.
First: empty, door hanging open by a single hinge.
Second: bombed out.
Third: street number that had never existed according to everyone in the neighborhood.
I had ten phone numbers. Tried dialing all of them, all disconnected.
Well, supposedly I had money. I already knew what was likely to happen, but just the same I went to the Estacion Chamartin, the biggest train station in Madrid — they had just restored service to Paris two weeks before — and got into line for an ATM.
When I finally got to the head of the line, I punched in my new codes to access my bank accounts in the name of Jason Tester, and much to my surprise, the banks did have a record of Jason Tester. All the account numbers were valid — but all the accounts came out overdrawn. Besides the valise (two spare shirts, some socks, underwear, the jewelry box with its keepsakes), the clothes I was wearing, and the change in my pockets, I owned less than nothing — fourteen thousand dollars in bad checks were out there looking for me.
I did a general query, and it showed that all my accounts had been cleaned out on 9 June 2003 between 5:08 and 5:12 GMT, from an ATM in Stockholm. Four months ago. While I was lying in the hospital, not knowing where I was. Then about twenty checks, all dated 8 June 2003, had come in between 9 June and 11 June. The checks had all been written to Stockholm businesses as well, and the businesses with English names all had names like “Reality Associates,” “Information, Incorporated,” and “Business Operations, Limited.” The blonde woman — or Peter — or anyone in the Organization, who had access to the account numbers, had also had access to the security codes. Somebody had decided they needed that money more than I did.
No good pissing off the growing line behind me. I knew everything I needed to know. I logged off and walked out into the echoing railroad station.
Before the war they’d had card tracers, I recalled vaguely, a system so that if you checked in with a bad card the cops nearest you were immediately alerted. I didn’t know whether they still did, or whether the Spanish authorities were even interested in catching debt skippers, but anyway the Jason Testor papers were no use at all, and I still had my old Joshua Quare papers.
You lose almost all the facts, you don’t lose motor skills, you don’t lose attitude. I went around a corner, pulled out a pencil, and wrote down all the ATM codes in the back of the Jason Testor passport. Then I wandered down a couple of alleys, talked with a few guys on the street, and eventually met Raul, who looked something like me and thus like the picture of Jason Tester on the passport.
After we’d haggled a while, and he’d pawed over the passport thoroughly, I agreed to accept the price
of a week’s hotel room for it. He asked where I’d gotten it. I told him I’d taken it off an American who was drunk and passed out in an alley.
He asked if I was selling ATM cards, and I said I had been planning to take them to a hack shop, one of those places where they could jack into the net illegally, submit the card code, and then break data security to watch the machine try to check the number — thus getting the access code. Usually at those places they split the proceeds fifty-fifty.
“I will give you triple what I’ve paid you already,” Raul said, “for the cards. I think I have a way to hack them more economically.”
He was an amateur; he couldn’t help touching the pocket where he’d put the passport.
I let him talk me into the deal. He was off like a bunny to the ATM the minute he’d handed me the cash and I’d handed him the cards.
The cash in hand wouldn’t get me to Paris by itself, but it was a dandy start. I figured if I could get to the main American repat center in Paris, with luck, as a civilian in a needed specialty, I could get repatriated within a few months. After I got home, either the Organization would find me again and I’d have an income, or I could take my skills and go make a living — radar and electronics were going to be in demand for decades. For that matter I wasn’t a bad hand at software, either, though they said hand-coding was about to die out for good.
For tonight, anyway, and maybe for a couple days following, I’d check into a YMCA or whatever other kind of secure shelter they had — no sense spending cash when I didn’t need more than that. Meanwhile I figured I’d take a look around.
I had been walking only a few blocks when I saw the big banner on the side of the building: SALVATION ARMY REORIENTATION LIBRARY. I went inside and discovered the guy at the desk was an American, a wrinkled guy with white hair, thick glasses, and a heavy accent in his Spanish. He seemed relieved to have someone to talk to in English, and he was proud and eager to talk about what they did. “It’s really the most useful thing we can do for people right now, since there’s not much actual starvation anymore, and with so many dead there’s plenty of housing, you know. So we run a temporary shelter around the corner, and we provide this place because so many people were so cut off from their usual information channels by the war that they’re having a hard time adjusting.”
“Er, I think I’d like to apply for the temporary shelter,” I said. “And a hard time adjusting how?”
He shrugged. “The world has changed a lot. Plenty of people were unhooked from the news for long periods of time. They need a place where they can just look up what all happened and read about it.”
I grinned at him and said, “I think I’ve found where I need to be. Can I get set up in the shelter and then come back here?”
“Sure, we’re open hours yet. We close at five, dinner at the shelter’s at six — “
“Prayer service’s at seven,” I said. “I can tell some things haven’t changed.”
His eyes twinkled. “When were you — “
“Oh, my old man used to hit me and lock me out,” I explained. “I slept at the Salvation Army some when I was a kid.”
His smile was warm and friendly. “Well, we’re here if you need us. But I sure hope your luck changes.”
“Me too.”
I got myself checked in at the refugee shelter, stashed my gear, kept my cash with me, and came back to the Reorientation Library to read. For the next several days I stayed at the shelter, ate thin soup and bread there and food from sidewalk vendors during the day, and spent my time reading in the library. They never even really hassled me about going to prayer service.
One of the ways I had always frustrated my mother and her father was that though I was quick enough at learning, and bright enough, I just never saw anything all that interesting in books. But for those few days, I was a great student. I had to know what kind of world I had ended up in, especially since, besides my missing six months due to fever, most of my memories from 1992 forward were gone.
The Reorientation Library was mostly just books and newspapers on CD-ROM, with older issues and books available over the wire. I read pretty fast — a perfect memory helps — and thought pretty hard. And now that I had a better handle on things, I could see that I had been more right than I knew: with my technical skills I was going to do pretty well in the new world that was forming, now that Pope PJP had apparently put some peace together.
I would always be able to get work because you can’t operate in space without radar, and humanity was going to space — no choice about it. Even with all the deaths thus far, there were way too many people for the food we could grow, and the various blasts, blights, worms, sterilizers, viruses, and so forth were still mutating rapidly, so no crop of anything was safe on the ground — space offered the only perfect quarantine.
Besides, the American and Soviet weather weapons had apparently blown a bunch of methane into the atmosphere, caused teratons of carbon dioxide to dissolve in the oceans, moved the jet streams and created some condition they were calling the Super-Niño … the list was long and I couldn’t follow all of it, but the weather was going to set records for hot and cold, drought and flood, wind and snow and hail, everywhere for the next few decades. You couldn’t count on a factory or a power plant on Earth’s surface — before it was finished it might be buried under ice, the river that cooled it might dry up, it might not be able to get materials over the sea or via roads.
They were caught in an even deeper bind: the plants they needed would have to be big — bigger even than the giant ones in East Asia that had been built in the last few years — and there could be no more giant plants. The total ecology of the Earth was now “thrashing.”
I spent a day looking up “thrashing,” tracing its meaning from the time I had been in high school forward, and that was an interesting little education all by itself.
The word “thrashing” started out in computer science, migrated into music and fashion, and had now become a stock term in environmental news — which had changed a lot too while I had been unconscious.
Back at the dawn of computers, when they first invented parallel processing and time sharing and all the other ways for a computer to run more than one program at once, they discovered that as the work load got bigger and more complex, the system spent more and more time just moving work in and out of the processors, until eventually you hit the point where system management was taking up so much time and space mat the system wasn’t doing any work anymore. That was called “thrashing.”
Kids with skateboards and guitars in Silicon Valley picked it up from their nerdy fathers and used it to mean “going out of control” — especially going out of control by switching off the outside world, and just banging to the rhythm in your own head. For them it was a good thing. When I was in Army tech school, I used to say that some of the programs we had to work on were headbangers — you could tell because instead of doing any useful work, they’d rather thrash.
“Thrashing” had become a bad thing again while I had been lying in the hospital. Just as a computer system, when it was working right, used some power and processing space to keep itself running, but mostly processed outside stuff, Planet Earth, when it was working right, used some of its energy to keep nutrients and vital materials moving around, but plowed most energy back into binding more energy and making more life. Wild, natural ecosystems, left to themselves, ran sizable surpluses of bound energy, which became essential to other ecosystems.
Not now. Huge flows of heat and chemical energy, almost none bound in the biosphere. Like a computer that couldn’t decide what to do next, frantically busy while nothing got done, the Earth as a whole was thrashing. “Thrashing” was about every tenth word in the International Herald-Tribune environmental news section.
“Environmental news” was another measure of how much things had changed. It had started as a back-page thing in newspapers, read mostly by kids, and now was the thickest part of the paper. At a corner newsst
and one day I saw an issue of El Pais with front-page news that four whales had been spotted in the South Atlantic and that the USS Rickover was on its way there — the world’s biggest submersible carrier to save four animals. The same front page also featured a long, complicated story about bottom temperatures and dissolved oxygen in the Mediterranean.
The world had awakened to the environment beyond the dreams of the Earthies I could remember from ten years ago. We could hardly help it — because taken by itself, the environmental news was a death sentence. The four and a half billion people left alive after mutAIDS and the Eurowar couldn’t afford large-scale agriculture or industrial facilities anymore, at least not as we had known them in the past. Zero surplus production from Earth’s environment anywhere anymore. Anything we did might make the situation worse. No risking big industry or big agriculture.
But we had way too many people to just turn into hunter-gatherers and survive. In fact, because they needed more land, energy, and minerals per pound of stuff produced, the Third World was much more expensive to operate, in per capita environmental terms, than the First World. If we wanted to live, somehow we had to achieve a living standard far above that of Japan or pre-war Germany, for everyone on Earth, without building industrial facilities anywhere on Earth — and as fast as possible.
That was the loophole: “anywhere on Earth.” Everything we needed — energy and raw materials — was available in space. Apparently people at NASA and a lot of other space agencies had been studying that since 1975, and they knew it would work. As I was sitting in that library, the leaders of the Earth were meeting in Rome to figure out how to do it. Fast.
A couple of new gadgets that had come out of the war would make it easier — the protonic/lithium reactor, which didn’t emit neutrons and therefore didn’t make materials around it radioactive, meant at least we could build non-polluting power plants on Earth to drive the launchers, which would give us a temporary (but risky) way to keep the lights on while we moved everything into space.