Kaleidoscope Century

by Barnes, John

I’d never complained about how she handled her life. I remembered being in my teens, and how much I liked getting into pointless trouble. The clothes and makeup were coming out of what she made at her after-school job, serving booze in a topless bar near the cablehead. I covered necessities but they didn’t come to much. I had just asked that she not make too much noise in her room, and keep most of the trash in there.

  Hell, we were just roommates — it had been a long time since she’d wanted an adult to pay any attention to her. I was tough on only one point: I expected her to go to school and I expected her to do her homework. Naturally that was what she got herself into a snarl about all the time. Well, in another three weeks she would graduate, and then we’d have to find something else to fight about.

  I sighed. “Okay, okay. I know. I didn’t go. And there are lots of good jobs now that don’t require college, or even a high school diploma. That’s what happens when you kill everybody over forty, and then ten years later you kill the best-educated people. It’s a big world full of opportunity. But there are still more opportunities with the degree than without, and kid, I like you, for god knows what reason. And the situation won’t last — colleges are reopening and those diplomas will start to matter again. All I said was I’d pay, not that I’d make you go. Hell, I can’t make you go.”

  She nodded. “That’s sweet. But I’ve got a job that pays plenty.”

  “Showing men your tits.”

  “Yeah. Is that why you come in there with your friends all the time?”

  “Point to you, Alice.”

  “Shit, you know where you found me. You never tried to make me behave myself. I hope you don’t think I’m blushing and fainting about it all.” She faced the mirror and fluffed her dark curls, then put in the little static-electricity clip that would keep it all inflated for the night. “Josh, you made a kind and generous offer. I said no. If you want to know why not, it’s because I’m not going to fit in there or be comfortable. I know I’m an okay student in high school, I know I could do college if I wanted to work at it, and I don’t want to work at it. I want to do my own stuff. I love you, you know, and I owe you my life, but I’ve got things of my own to get done, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said glumly. “Well, it’s okay, I mean I’m not just saying that — but the offer’s open as long as I’ve got the money.”

  “I know,” she said. “Look, uh — friends?”

  “Always.”

  She hugged me — I was always afraid the foam would end up stuck on my clothes, but that never happened — and said, “Okay.”

  She was out the door a couple minutes later. I quit worrying about it and got into the shower.

  Scrubbing in the hot shower, I told myself that I was thinking too much about the fact that in just under six years, I would slip into another six blank months. I had never told Alice about all that, and for some reason I didn’t want to.

  We had had to stay together for several years, because INS was a bunch of suspicious bastards. By the time I had gotten the job on the hang crew for the Quito Geosync Cable, and we were down in Ecuador where nobody would have paid much attention, we were used to each other.

  Well, all right, I would miss her. If I paid for her schooling she might leave earlier but she’d stay in touch for longer afterwards. And I just plain wanted to know what was up with her. Sentimental dork, I know, but might as well admit it.

  Then too, if she’d take my offer, she could be two years into a good job — an engineer or something — by the next time I was going to transit. Maybe by then I could tell her. That way I’d have somebody to take care of me through transit and help me recover memories afterward. That would be good. That would be the best.

  I turned off the shower. Supposedly next year, when Quito Geosync Cable was built, they’d be moving a lot of us on to build Kilimanjaro, and from there on to Singapore. A few guys were going to be shipped up to space to build Supra New York and the transfer ships, and a few others would be moved over to the Deepstar Project.

  There was more work in the world than there were people to do it, but we still had millions living in refugee camps because there weren’t enough people to teach them the needed skills, or enough transport to get them to where they were needed. Still, every month you met guys fresh from the camps, and they said that though life was hard there, there was plenty of hope — they needed people so badly that everyone’s number would come up sooner or later.

  Funny thing. World full of crime and violence. A lot of people had lost everything. Civilization wrecked. Ecosystem still thrashing. And more hope now than at any time in my life before. Hope is weird.

  I pulled on my own gear. Physically I was thirty-five, and the work on the cable was keeping me in great shape. We had finished the steel up into the stratosphere earlier the year before — the great truss like a six-legged, hex-shaped Eiffel Tower that thrust nineteen miles into the sky, clutching Mount Cotopaxi like a huge talon.

  If the world had had the time and resources, the way to do this would have been to design the special equipment and the robots, and only then begin building. But we didn’t have the time, so we built it anyway, climbing around on that crazy spiderweb of girders in our heavy, awkward pressure suits. The project killed workers now and then — suit leaks, falling stuff, squashed between moving members, every so often the Long Dive. But I never heard of anybody quitting because of that.

  All of us got to be muscled like apes because there weren’t machines to do the special jobs. And if you were thirty-five, single, ready to party till it killed you, and had great muscles, Quito in 2012 was the place to be. The Ecuadorian government knew a pile of loot when they saw it, and NihonAmerica, Global Hydrogen, and the other big PSCs had bought everybody right down to beat cops and garbage collectors. If we did anything that endangered the project, provoked mob violence, or was just too big to ignore, they could throw us in jail forever or just have us shot behind the barracks. But if it wasn’t anything big, it wasn’t anything at all.

  Saturday nights were the nights when you could buy anything if you had the money, and anything short of a major civil insurrection was regarded as blowing off some steam.

  So my little squabble with Alice was nothing, realty, as far as I was concerned. I wanted her to have the best things that could be managed, but I knew she could look out for herself — she was smart and would work. That was all it took during Reconstruction.

  I suppose I still miss those times. What I remember of them. At least the documents from the werp seem that way.

  I pulled on my going-out clothes: big white Cavalier shirt, tight black ringmaster coat, plush burgundy clingpants that started about as low as was practical for trousers, and spiked black boots. I put in a couple of big hoop earrings and checked myself in the mirror, pushing back the black hair falling in loose curls around my face. “Arrrrgh,” I said, grinning at my own image — a crazed pirate.

  I wondered idly for a second if the Organization was really gone, or if it had just lost track of me somehow. That reminded me of my looted account from nine years before, but it was only a shadow of a resentment — I was comfortable and well off now, and I had time to get more socked away before another transit.

  Well, time to go out and strut my stuff again. I took the air injector and gave myself a power dose of my personal mix: Immunobooster so that I could fend off any new strains of AIDS or syph, of which there were still plenty. Wake-me-up shot of gressor. Slow-acting alcohol metabolizer so I could get drunk and not wake up hung over. Performance lifter because I knew that even in great shape, I wasn’t necessarily able to keep up with some of the younger girls. To-the-limit dose of You-4, which was just coming in that decade and was already the Big New Drug Menace.

  One good thing the war had done was that not only had it caused molecular tailoring develop a long way, it had forced the technology to disperse into millions of garage labs, and nothing and no one had been able to shut them down since. Labs that had been making ecow
eapons in 2003 and 2004, getting cash from any of a dozen governments, were still in business — but now they had moved over to the private sector. There were still drug laws, and people who took the old shit, but the only reason for either was tradition.

  I swallowed a candy bar in two bites to give the shot something to run on, rinsed my mouth, and headed out.

  Everyone knew Spanish by then, but the language of the Galley Alley had stayed English. Plenty going on — a lot of girls, standing around waiting to get money spent on them. A few of them might actually be whoring, but most were just out for fun and didn’t see any reason why they should need to carry money when so many nice men would buy them everything.

  A lot of guys dressed like me checking them out.

  Gaggles of new workers just down from Norty or up from Argentina, still in their issue coveralls because they hadn’t yet gotten out to spend the wages in the shopping district, wandering around with their eyes and wallets wide open.

  The BFH Lesbian Brigade were out in their cammies, holding hands or clutching their bats, but so cheerful about it all that you’d have to be pretty stupid to be afraid of them. Sure, if you tried raping some poor girl around them, you’d wake up with a fractured skull, but it would serve you right.

  One of them I knew from my crew waved and dashed over to say hello. “So what’s the news, Josh?”

  “Flat zil so far. I just got out. You check the posting for next week? The crew’s all the way topside.”

  “Yuck,” she said firmly, running her hand over her shaved head. “Extra half hour commuting each way.”

  “Positive-definite,” I said. “We’ve gotta lean on Joe Schwartz about that portal-to-portal thing — what kind of a shop steward is he, anyway? And I think since we’ve gotta suit up at the bottom we should get the pressure suit wage for it.”

  “Yep. Joe will whine, you know — he’s always trying to be reasonable with the PSCs, as if.”

  “Hey, Syd!” one of the Brigade yelled.

  “Gotta run!” she said, and scooted back to her group with a wave of her bat.

  I waved after her and turned back to look over the Alley. Right on the equator, the sun goes down bang at 6:00 P.M. and comes back up bang at 6:00 A.M., every day, all year round. So the sky was already dark, the narrow strip I could see of it, anyway. The street glowed in the red and yellow glare from the long rows of advertising signs. I’d already had a good blast from the injector, so I wasn’t up for either of the chem bars I was facing; the next shop over was a restaurant but I wasn’t planning to eat just yet, either. A couple drinks might be nice …

  The You-4, starting to hit, made all the women dead solid gorgeous. Not that they needed any help. Those were great years if you had the body to get any — besides Confoam, there were oddy pants, those wonderful little poufs of gauze that went from just above the crack of the butt to an inch or two down the thighs and swished like poetry, and great thigh-high cling boots, and everything else you could think of. It was also one of those great periods when there’s no VD they can’t treat, and everyone has the time and the money.

  Four girls, classmates of Alice I think, all waved at me as they went by, and although objectively they looked about like any other teenagers, under the You-4 they were the four hottest pieces I’d ever seen in my life. I drifted into the bar — the most wonderful bar, filled with terrific people who I was dying to meet — and ordered a marvelous bottle of Bud from the bartender. He brought it right away — so fast! the man was a saint! — and the first sip told me that this was the best bottle old Augie Busch had ever made.

  The You-4 hit harder. I worked hard not to start giggling. I loved this stuff but I didn’t want other people laughing at me. I sat down on the bar stool, which caressed my bottom like the firm hands of a trained Thai masseuse, and let the Bud soak into me and blur out the acute edges of pleasure.

  Great to be alive. After a while, the band started up, and my Bud was about gone, so I decided to dance; those were the years of the Boink, so everyone had an oversized belt loop on each side of their clingpants or oddy, to give your partner something to hang on to. And if you were on You-4, so that sensations were enhanced hundreds of times, the Boink was the best dance ever invented.

  I spent an hour or so floating from partner to partner, watching as the women got themselves off on me, sometimes feeling the little surge of a pseudorgasm — one of You-4’s better side effects — hit me as well.

  About the time I was thinking seriously that I was hot and wanted another beer, this girl Myndi, a school friend of Alice’s, came up to me and asked me to Boink. They were starting kind of a long number, and I was tired and hot — but on the other hand, Myndi was a nice-looking redhead, one of the tall, rangy, horsey kind, with big floppy tits on a totally fatless body. So I said yes.

  She really pushed hard into the grinds. I might have wondered what someone that young wanted with someone like me, but between You-4 and gressor, I couldn’t imagine, just then, that any woman didn’t.

  She came on me a couple of times when the music hit crescendos, and at the end she wrapped her arms around me and jammed her tongue into my mouth. My hands slipped under the cuffs of her oddy pants, caressing her butt, and she pressed closer.

  So after that it was natural to get her a drink — Myndi was seventeen, a year younger man Alice, but there wasn’t much concern about age along Galley Alley, for drinking or anything else. And then after she’d put down a couple of pink things with little paper umbrellas, and I’d had another couple of Buds, it seemed pretty natural to go back to my place. We staggered in trying to be quieter than usual, because even though Alice and I sure knew the other person was having sex, I wasn’t sure how she’d feel about my nailing one of her school friends.

  It was one great fuck, and it lasted a long time. The enhancer let me manage two more times before I settled into kneeling between her legs and licking until she finally said she was satisfied. By the time she said that, I was sore and tired like I’d spent the night boxing bare-knuckled — and losing — and I didn’t care if I never saw that devil’s-mouth tattoo that she had in her crotch again.

  I woke up late the next morning, to discover that I was being had again; she had climbed aboard while I was asleep. This time I wasn’t on all the drugs, and I could see that she was young, but also that she didn’t seem to be involved with me, just pumping away (though she certainly seemed to be enjoying it). I came in a minute or so. She went down on me to clean it up. When she came up she kissed me and started to get dressed.

  “That was great,” she said, as she sprayed a fairly modest Confoam top on, “I thought I was doing Alice a big favor but that was pretty nice. I guess older guys do know more. Maybe sometime again, hunh?”

  “Uh, wait a sec,” I said, trying to figure it out, but she had already given me a little wave and gone out the bedroom door. I grabbed a pair of sweat pants and yanked them on, but by the time I got out of the bedroom she was gone. I stood there for a stupid second before I recalled that she had said she thought she was doing Alice a favor, which meant Alice had asked her to —

  I turned and looked around the apartment. Light was coming in from the three big windows, and sunlight was splashing in from the kitchen window, so it must be past 3:00 P.M.

  No spill of makeup bottles across the coffee table. No laundry basket full of filmy nothings. I knocked on her door — an odd, hollow sound. When I looked inside the bed was made for the first time since I had stopped cleaning in there. Closet open and empty. Plenty of dust and stain on the end tables and dresser, but nothing else.

  The note on the bed said she was going to be staying with Joe Schwartz, the union guy for my section. I looked at that and started to laugh.

  Syd had been right. I’d have to talk to him. Well, I could hardly fault his taste — let alone that after all, he was only ten years older than she was, and considering how much older than Myndi I was, I was hardly in a position to pick on Joe about it. I wondered if Alice h
ad set Myndi on me as a going-away present, or a diversion? She’d certainly been diverting.

  It bothered me that she hadn’t told me what she was up to. But then, being Alice, she was probably afraid she’d get my blessing.

  3.

  I am sitting on this bench at the maglev stop, just thinking and letting my eyes roam around the red sand hills of Mars, with dark brown streaks from which a thousand tiny stars glint and glitter. The bioextractors are replacing oxygen with sulfur and creating surface deposits of pyrites wherever the dust is deep enough. A lot of Mars will glitter for a few years, until the wind and rain spread soil over it, and then those cracks and pits where the dust used to lie will become the permeable beds through which groundwater will rise and fall. At least that’s what the werp tells me.

  I wonder whether, a thousand years from now, when the glittering pyrite beds are being covered up, there will be people who will miss them. Right now, this century, it’s pretty.

  The sun’s warm through the bubble helmet. Suit temp control’s good, I’m not really sweaty. Where was this back when I was doing space rigging? Oh, well, that’s the nature of things. As long as it was just working stiffs, nobody was going to bother making suits comfortable.

  I wonder about what to do with what’s in the werp. One part of me argues that I ought to wipe the works, write ten short paragraphs, and bury the werp and the space allocation box someplace. Next time around start clean — after all, the poor bastard, whoever I have become, will be sixty-five physically. I know he could live a long time after that, but why not just let him live comfortably confused, troubled only by the occasional nightmare or haunting dream?

  I can’t bear to part with the space allocation box, or with the tangle of stuff in the werp. It might have been different if I had never known it existed, but now that I do it seems like it’s the one thing that absolutely has to go on.

  Once my life gets back underway, then I’ll be less hung up on this, I’m sure. Part of the problem was having nothing to do but this. It must have been even worse that first time, when I just had the paper notes and had to fake my way through the hospital without knowing what was going on. I think I remember I was afraid and upset, but of course that vague memory could be nothing more than my making it up. It seems convincing, but maybe I just know myself well enough to know what details will make it convincing to me. After a long life, even with six memory erases, you know what a hospital smells like (bad) and how doctors and nurses treat people without money (like frozen shit on a stick).