by Barnes, John
“She says you don’t sell her,” I said.
“Does she? She’s a liar and a whore. If she’s what you want, I’ll take your money and give you a place to do her, but I ain’t holding her down for you.”
“Is she what’s on special?” I said. “I think that poor kid’s all you’ve got, and I don’t buy children.”
“Ha,” he said. Probably in daylight his teeth were brown and yellow, but in this light his mouth just opened and closed like a hole. The tips of the stubble of his beard glinted silver. What the hell did he have around his neck? Quite a chain it was on — something he wanted to make sure he kept. His mouth gaped wide at me in a grin that I think was meant to let me know we were getting down to serious business. “I got a bunch of goodies. You want synthak, you want screamies, you want hemp, you want Big Angel or Little Angel or even old-fashioned heroin … it’s all here. Just say the word and I’ll say the price. Screamies cheap enough so you can hire a chick to relieve you on the down side — that’s pretty special.”
“I’m thrilled,” I said.
“Got these,” he added, and his arm stuck out as far as he could comfortably reach; something clinked and tinkled at the end of it, in the shadows. “No picking but I’ll give you whatever’s closest to a match.”
He brought his hand nearer to the lantern. Seven DoD-issue dog tags hung from his hand; I was looking at a fortune — it would get most people to North America and into their new lives at least two years early.
“Real?” I asked.
“Real enough,” he said. “Twenty kay in pre-war francs, or one hundred gold dollars, Amex same as hard stuff.”
I was carrying thirty kay of pre-war. “Fakes,” I said, bluntly. “The real thing’s worth sixty times that, and you know it.”
“Can’t fault an old dealer for trying,” he said smugly, his hand still holding out the glistening tags. Probably they were solder copies — the cheapest way to make a fake tag was to press a real one in a wet flour and salt mixture, then pour liquid solder into the image. You could put an ordinary black shirt button on the back for the readout.
It wouldn’t fool anyone who saw it in good light — but that wasn’t what you had here. These were to be sold to some poor bastard who was so high that he was throwing money around at random; he’d buy the tag, have a grand dream that as soon as he came down he could go to a re-pat camp for a comfy bed, good food, and a ride to the States … and then wake up hung over, minus his money, with a chunk of solder glued to a button. “The special on screamies is real,” the man said, “and I got a little hooch here where you can wrap up in some blankets to stay warm. Go for a nice ride on a screamie, ten kay, and on the down side, the little chick’s not bad — and she’s just eight kay.”
“Let me see the fake tags again,” I said. “I might want to deal some of them myself if you can cut me a wholesale price.”
“Twenty per cent discount,” he said, “if you take them all.” He extended his arm, holding them out to me.
I grabbed his wrist and yanked as hard as I could, whirling to drive my knee hard in the face. His nose and lips made a wet squash against my knee cap.
He cried out, and when I stomped down in the blanket by his side, his hand was already on something heavy and hard. But I’d hit him hard enough so that he didn’t have much of a grip, my foot had smashed his fingers, and in a second I’d reached under the blanket and wrestled the heavy thing out of his hand. I gave him a couple more kicks and ordered him to lay quiet and keep his hands stretched out in front of him in the light.
Just putting my hand under that blanket had made my fingers smell bad. My knee stung. For nothing. Of all the useless things, the weapon he’d been concealing was a NATO 9mm, at least ten years of no maintenance, clip empty, corrosion visible in the light of the lantern. He tried to pull a hand back, I ground my heel on it. He sobbed and said, “Please.”
I told him to behave.
Well, this was a fiasco. I’d hoped to get a usable weapon out of this, which would have been the first step to getting out of the tents. I felt like using the useless thing to club him senseless, especially because something about the way he was treating his little helper pissed me off.
A thought grabbed me. I reached down and under his collar, took a grip, and yanked hard, pulling the loop of thin steel chain over his head. Probably I scraped his lips, ears, and nose with it.
“Give that back,” he whispered quietly, “please give that back.”
“What did you do to get it?” I asked. “Kill some GI? You don’t look like you’ve got the nerve, unless you killed him while he was sleeping. You a tagrat, shit-boy?”
“No, no, I … I just found it.”
“Found it on a body, I bet,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s it — “
“A body that just happened to be in a casket you dug up, by any chance? A casket that just happened to be at Chartres?” I asked. Part of the fun of this was that he had no idea what was really affecting me — which meant he didn’t know what answer might make me pissed off enough to stomp him to death.
The joke was, I didn’t give a shit, except for the pleasure I was taking in his terror. He could be killing and eating GIs for all I cared, or strangling them in alleys to get their ears for trophies. I’d killed them myself, during the war, for worse reasons.
And it looked like I had guessed right about him. The one place for getting a tag that was easy, no matter how gutless you were — as long as you weren’t also squeamish — was in Chartres. Close to where four thousand American paratroops had all been hit in midair with Soviet body-temperature-seeking bullets was a big burial ground that the French had thrown together in a hurry, using the least possible money and effort, after the bodies had lain out for a couple of years. Being French, or busy, or just bureaucrats, they had ignored the request from USDoD to return all the tags. They’d crammed the bodies into pine boxes, stacked those five deep, and bulldozed a lot of broken concrete over the whole thing. There would be a lot of campaign mileage made off that in the States, for sure.
Anyone who wanted a tag only had to throw concrete chunks aside for a while, then start breaking open boxes. Somewhere amid the remains in there, there very likely was a precious dog tag. Sometimes more than one. Our heroic French ally hadn’t been too careful about getting it one boy to a box.
If that tag matched you well enough, and your English could pass, presto, a ticket to the land of opportunity.
“That’s what I make my living with,” he said. “Please.”
“You’ve still got six fakes to sell,” I said, “if I didn’t break them. They’ll be lying around in the alley someplace. And all those drugs, and the girl.”
“Fuck,” he said. I could hear tears in his voice.
“Ain’t life a bitch,” I said, and walked off a couple of steps, just in time to turn around and kick him hard in the ribs as he went to get to his feet. He rolled over and bellowed, “Ow! What was that for?”
“For fun,” I said. “I just like having you know I did that, and you never got even. You never even had the guts to think about it. Remember that. Think about it when you get around to jumping from that high window or opening your wrists — and be sure you go ahead. I’m keeping the gun, too, I’m afraid you’ll bruise yourself with it.”
I strode out of the alley, and heaved the gun in a high arc into the dark. Likely it would land on a roof. Chances were the tag wouldn’t match me, but I could sell it to a dealer for good money.
It had been a great evening. Besides getting the tag, I had come out looking for excitement, I had found it, and I hadn’t spent a dime. I enjoyed making him think I wasn’t afraid of him, but of course what I was dealing with here was a cornered rat, and I could just as easily have gotten myself killed fucking with him like that, especially if he had been carrying a weapon that worked.
That was the whole appeal; if I’d picked the wrong guy I’d have gotten shot. My ears were ringing from adrenaline and I
thought maybe now I would go find something to get high on, or maybe a whore.
I was aware of the girl just when she came up beside me. “You really did him right.”
“Not much of a way to talk about your father,” I said.
“Him? Shit.”
“He’s not your father?”
“Naw. Dad was GI, or that’s what Mom said. She was a college student over here, and she got pregnant. Too ashamed to marry the guy or maybe she never knew which one it was.” She said it so firmly that I was sure it was a lie; probably her mother was one of those “students” who just lived in Europe on parental money for several years, not bothering to enroll anywhere, let alone study. That used to be fairly cheap. “Spent all her time getting high and listening to music. She never went out or learned a word of French. Mom didn’t last long in the war.”
“How long have you been on your own?” I asked.
“Mom died in the first missile raid on Paris. But I’m never on my own. I always find somebody I can work for.”
“Did that old bastard really — “
“He’d take the money, then we’d both run and split up. I got caught a couple times. But it’s not like I did it for the money. Just a couple times someone paid him, and then caught me. It wasn’t like he meant to sell me.”
We came up on a streetlight, and I turned and lifted her bony little chin. She might be eleven. Go hungry long enough and puberty gets delayed. Maybe even twelve. I bet she didn’t know, either, by now. Her American English was pretty good, so I figured her mother probably was what she described. I just didn’t think her father was; probably her mother told her that to give her another claim to American citizenship.
Yeah, that was a mother for you — anything you needed, as long as it was a lie that didn’t cost anything.
There were a lot of kids like this scrawny brat in front of me, kids nobody kept track of, who either found some adult that was nice to them, or just died.
I turned away from the girl and looked down at the tag. I could manage to match it — at least this guy John Quids had my blood type. I pressed the little dot for a read, and projected it on the snow in front of me, shading the image with my body. I could match Quids for height, weight, and age, near enough. If they checked prints or DNA of course I was dead but I heard they were loading ships pretty fast.
And then I saw the dependent list. He had a daughter; his wife in the States was an unfit mother, and he had sole custody. “Hey kid,” I said, but then I looked around and she was nowhere in sight. “Hey kid,” I said again, louder in case she was walking away. “I need a little girl to be named Alice.”
Long silence.
I thought, fuck me, I’m going to have to find another kid, but then she reappeared in the glare of the streetlight beside me. “Are you gonna do father bullshit?”
“You mean like make you clean your room?”
“Like that. Do I get a room? All my own?”
“Possibly,” I said. “I wasn’t planning to have a daughter. But you know, you’re going to die if you stay over here. It’s a miracle you’ve lasted this long. And the food and bunks will be better in the repat camps.”
She thought for a moment, and then took my hand. Unselfconsciously — probably no one had ever told her not to — she put her other thumb into her mouth. We walked some way before she said, “Yeah, I would like to be named Alice.”
3
Slouches Toward Bethlehem
1.
Did I really get Childs’s tag that way? It makes sense, but I seem to remember what he looked like. Wait. Pull up the file on the werp. The read button on that tag has long since gone dead, but somewhere back there I copied the image onto the werp. Sure enough, the face and expression I remember is the one in the werp. Probably I was talking to the image from the button, the two times that I have recordings where it sounds like I was talking to him.
I’d rather not have been a target. And besides, GIs learned early to avoid being alone with anyone who looked like them.
It’s the seventh day I’ve been awake and able to remember. I’m up early again. After probing around in the werp, I find myself thinking I’d rather get moving. The werp shows that I have a good pile of cash, enough to live on a year or more if I have to, even in comfort.
But Martians, like most space people, despise idle wealth, so I probably won’t do that. Never make yourself too noticeable to the neighbors. So off to find my funds and then find a place for me to be and a thing for me to do. Ecoprospecting, maybe, that wasn’t so bad the last time.
I don’t know if I will come back here or not, so I run all the clothes through the fresher in the corner and pack them in my valise. Then I put all the mementos back in the space allocation box. I seem to know the list of them without trouble as I check them off. Matchbook, key, knife, picture, dog-tag, chess piece, napkin. I look over them one more time, dose the space allocation box, and slide it into the valise. Still plenty of room in there, so I slide in the werp also. The valise has a shoulder strap and I can carry the whole works without difficulty — it masses only about twelve kilos or so, which means it weighs only as much as five kilos does on earth.
I will leave nothing of mine behind except the Marshack itself and the food in the fridge. Maybe I’ll be back — free food and a free place to stay, just a short ride away on the maglev, and the fact that nobody’s here yet means no one has found this hideout. But more likely I won’t come back. It’s not a good habit to come back to where you’ve been. I have no trouble remembering that, either.
I’m pulling on the pressure suit as the sun comes up. I go through the written checklist carefully, even though my hands are executing all the moves faster than I can read them and think them.
When I open the outer airlock door, the first rays of the sun are glowing on the boulders, and a few little patches of shore grass are twitching in the light breeze. The sky’s pale pink. I walk farther and crank up the helmet’s outside mike so I can hear. Wind in the grass, slap and splash of waves, wind whistling around the little shack by the shore. Like the beach at home, if Earth’s home anymore. If my records are right I haven’t been there in about forty years, not since One True went cellular and massively parallel, converting itself to Resuna.
I wonder if that little girl in the hologram’s Alice. I think so but why didn’t I write it down?
I think that at other times, when I had a slightly different set of memories and more of them were about her, I missed her terribly. By now, of course, she’s long dead of old age — I have a short note from the day I heard that she died, in 2095, or 2096 — why is there a discrepancy? Anyway, she was a hundred two years old.
The trail hasn’t been used in months but there’s so little growing stuff that it doesn’t matter — it’s only wind and the occasional rainstorm that erases the passage of people, so far, on Mars. There would have been a time when it was only the wind … I wonder idly, remembering the one time I visited the Apollo 11 site, if they’re doing anything to preserve that from the moon’s new wind and water (in fact, it was on low ground … might it end up at the bottom of a lake or something?).
Jesus, I think, I was one year old when that happened. I was born when no one on Earth had set foot on another world. Can’t be many of us left. A few physical freaks, a few plutocks who got the very earliest life-extension treatments, a few Organization longtimers. Maybe they should just let the Apollo 11 site sink beneath the waves. Would it matter to anyone?
The trail climbs at a gentle angle over a high ridge. Loose gravel and stone around. Not much on the path. I have a vague memory of a machine, something called a “thumper,” that you use to make these paths.
I sit down on a boulder by the path, reach into the valise, pull out the connector, jack it into the werp and then into the data port on the pressure suit. Zip up the valise, pull it onto my shoulder, get going again. Now I can talk to my werp if I want to.
Encyclopedia search shows that yes, there’s a gadg
et called a thumper — it looks like a lawnmower and slams the dirt hard enough to compact it. So much of the Martian surface can be mistaken for other parts that even though it’s firm enough in its native state to walk or drive on, it’s important to have a pathway to follow. I look down at the trail and see that every few feet there’s a little number “166704 1842” fused right into the sand, probably burned in with a laser.
It makes sense — that way if paths cross you know which are yours.
It’s only going to be about fifteen minutes to the station, then half an hour or so to wait there, supposedly, and finally just about an hour’s ride into Red Sands City. Plenty of time to think and remember.
I tell the werp to read me some more about Alice.
2.
“Yeah, college, why the fuck not?” I said to her.
“You’re not my Dad.”
“You tell me that all the time, but I notice you don’t mind it when I buy you school clothes and groceries, you don’t object when I pick up the whole rent, and — “
“Oh, fuck off, Josh.” Alice sounded tired. “I’ve told you before I want to get a full-time job, and split expenses.” She extended her hand and studied the nail silvering; it looked perfect to me, but I suppose the real point was that she didn’t have to look at me.
Alice hadn’t grown up beautiful, but I doubt she cared. She’d learned how to get boys with the body she had. And she liked what anyone likes at her age — frying out brain cells, fucking around, and sneering at everybody that isn’t young and good-looking.
She was wearing her hair in a NeoFormal, which is what I could have told her was known as “Big Hair” when I was her age. Her lips were painted vivid pink, her eyelids almost black, and she had just set a streak of Confoam over her breasts and snugged on a pair of gauzy pink oddy pants, dressing for a typical Saturday night in the foreigner section of Quito.