Kaleidoscope Century

by Barnes, John

  The result was what everyone else was calling a “new moral force.” The Organization didn’t concern itself with that kind of crap. What we knew was that UNRRA-2, Global Hydrogen, NihonAmerica, EuroNihon, Americ-Euro, and all the other Reconstruction PSCs shut us out no matter what we tried to do. From the top down everyone insisted on squeaky-clean operations. There were more stool pigeons and straight arrows than the world had ever seen before, and those dumbfucks were ruining it for everyone else.

  We still had a finger in the indocoms, the old factory/mall/apartment complex setups that had emerged right after the war, but the ones mat couldn’t afford to get domed were shutting down, and most of them were losing people into the domes anyway.

  So we were left recruiting where we could and not where we chose. That meant the vags — pissed-off people in the woods, many of them useless lunatics, thugs, and cranks of course. Most were people who had had a comfortable life before the Eurowar, wanted compensation, and weren’t coming in till they got it.

  They were usefully stupid. Driven by their “right” to their old houses, businesses, jobs, prestige, whatever, they would fight to the death rather than accept that all that was gone, united by the conviction that the Reconstruction authorities had cheated them of their “freedom.” You take your malcontents where you can find them.

  The other force in the mix was cybertao, the only religious movement that looked like it might challenge Ecucatholicism. Of course nobody knew who the author of Forks in Time had been — the cybertaoists believed it had somehow grown in the net itself, like primitive life forming in the primordial soup — but it had spread rapidly among Western agnostics and atheists, and seemed to be absorbing (or being absorbed by) Buddhism and Taoism in the Far East.

  Even when it began to recruit some Christians, mostly Protestants who had lapsed after their churches re-merged with Rome, Pope PJP had been careful not to condemn it too harshly, apparently not wanting to start any new religious wars, and the cybertaoists referred to Ecucatholicism as “special case literalism,” meaning as far as I could tell that the viewpoint was okay with them, if narrow. Unfortunately all that tolerance meant that thus far there had been no overt clashes, just some garden-variety bigotry.

  Even the appearance of a second cybertao text, accepted at once by virtually all cybertaoists as authentic, last year, had not led to any further clashes. Surfaces in Opposition was just as tolerant in spirit as Forks in Time.

  In the briefing I was reading, the Organization admitted neither group was much to work with. Most of the vags could have been richer now than they had been before the war (assuming they were all telling the truth, a pretty big assumption) if they had been willing to go to work for the PSCs. They were genuine losers, misfits who couldn’t forget that they had once thought of themselves as superior. And the cybertaoists were highly principled and at least as pacifistic as the old Quakers. (Who, of course, were all Ecucatholic now.)

  But if the two could be put together, so vag rage and cybertao influence could somehow merge, maybe we could get something going again. As a program it wasn’t a boil on Bolshevism’s butt, but it was a better bet than anything else.

  Something thudded off the diskster window; I looked up from my reading. Might have been a duck, passing through, or might have been a rock, thrown by some vag. No trace of it now. Might as well not have happened.

  The view out the window was dizzying at 300 mph, but I sat and watched it roll by a long time. Everywhere, empty crumbling buildings. Twice, smoke, from campfires perhaps. Once a diskster going the other way. The world had gotten empty, outside the domes.

  A month later I was squatting in a field with five of the most unpleasant people I’ve ever met. And I’m not fussy, either. But for me to hate you more than I hated these guys, you’d have to be my blood kin.

  I was giving them a one-more-time-through on the drill. The Condor would come in from the south, like they always did, gliding gently down to its landing field. Most of the Condor pilots took pride in landing with the tanks full; the engines were only supposed to be auxiliary.

  Karen, a squat, dark-haired woman, wanted to argue that the Condors didn’t have to come from the south and might not come from the south — after all they were really just space shuttles, space shuttles the Japanese had stolen the plans for from us, and space shuttles flew out of Cape Canaveral, didn’t they? Which way was Cape Canaveral from here?

  “South,” I said firmly. “And it’s not coming from Canaveral. It’s taking off from the drop station attached to the Quito Geosync Cable, about a hundred miles above Quito, Ecuador. Which is also south. So it will come from the south.”

  “Are you sure?” Karen asked. “That doesn’t sound right. I think I learned different in school. They’ve changed everything in school nowadays but that doesn’t make false true.”

  “Quite sure,” I said. “Okay, now, James, when do you lock onto it?”

  “When he starts final approach. When his landing gear are all the way down.”

  “Why not sooner?”

  “Because they’ll get a fix on me and we’ll all get blown up, Brandon. Everybody knows that.”

  I doubted it but didn’t say so. “And then what?”

  “Put the rocket through the landing gear, so that the shrapnel will probably get a control surface too. Then when it undershoots the field and crashes, because the pilot didn’t pull out, we run forward and get stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?” I demanded of the others.

  “Gold, silver, hard currency, hostages if any are alive,” they all recited. The hard part. I didn’t have much faith it would come out right.

  Our lookout, in the tree above us, whistled. He’d seen the bright flash in the blue sky that meant a Condor was coming in.

  The part of the plan that was up to James went perfectly. He snapped his rocket launcher to his shoulder, sighted, locked the radar on, squeezed the trigger, and dove for the ground as soon as the rocket got off. The little rocket, no bigger than a paper-towel tube, zipped out to the Condor, now just spreading its wings to their widest position, and nailed the landing gear. Fragments streaked in all directions. Suddenly the big ship flipped over on its back and fell out of the sky, its tail section whirling off toward the landing field. The vags got up and ran to the crushed, broken body of the plane, more than a mile away, getting strung out and separated. Didn’t matter much since there was no one to shoot at us.

  Then it all turned to shit. Too much loot of the kind they really wanted, the things they thought were theirs by right — so instead of going after the hard stuff, the jewelry, safe deposit boxes, or even wedding bands and gold teeth, they swarmed into that shattered fuselage, kicking the dead and the dying aside in order to grab Italian shoes, Rolexes, pre-war hats, anything at all that stood for the vanished world.

  When Karen ran out the door with dozens of shoes, I shot her. Even that didn’t restore discipline; they weren’t paying enough attention to notice.

  I walked back to camp. I’d be in trouble with the Organization if I shot my whole cadre, but if I stayed I’d have to.

  Three months later I helped them lug a four-hundred-pound rocket up a godforsaken hillside to launch into a fortified village full of corporados and their kids. We scored a direct hit on the duck pond. I’m sure it was a crushing defeat from the ducks’ point of view.

  We blew a couple of disksters off the road, and they got back on again, unhurt. Since a diskster was not in contact with the ground, the impact got used up moving the diskster, not crushing it. Probably we spilled some people’s dinners.

  At the end of eight months we had murdered about two hundred people — most of them on the two Condors we had brought down — and blown up or otherwise destroyed a hundred million dollars of property. And they still weren’t bothering to send the Army after us, since the Georgia state troopers already had us mostly licked.

  I used some of that initiative we were supposed to use, slipped away in the middle of
the night, and dropped a self-repeating message into the net that would circle around the world a few times (to lose its connection to me) and then pop up in the Georgia Patrol’s in box and tell them where to get my particular group of vags. Total achievement, as I reported to the Organization, was some pointless pain and suffering (not even fun to inflict), some trivial robbery, and a precipitate drop in the Georgian vag population.

  I spent another pointless year around Louisville Ruin, trying to be a cybertao prophet and get a Stochastic Jihad going. Lots of luck; it seemed to be difficult, within cybertao, to say much in favor of hurting people.

  I wish I remember when I hooked up with Sadi in all that time. I don’t think he was with me at the first but I’m sure he was around by the next time I transited. He was another longtimer with the Organization, brown-haired, blue-eyed, tall and slender, an elegant sort of guy, the kind we all wished we were when we were sixteen. He had seven thousand books on his werp, all from the Everyman’s Library, and had read about half of them, in cliffotated editions. He looked sort of like an old Nazi poster.

  He had read more books and knew more facts than anyone I’d ever spent any time around, but I don’t know that he could do more than dredge up stuff he’d read. He tended to remember one or two sentences about everything; I had a feeling that things were probably more complicated than that.

  I do know he was there more than once when I woke up after transiting. I saw him transit, more than once, too. I don’t know if you’d call that love, but when I think how much it would have helped to have Sadi or someone like him this past transit, waking up here on Mars, I think being friends all those years with Sadi might have been the closest to love I ever got. Him or Alice. Fuck if I know.

  5.

  No time at all to get my accounts moved and receded — could have done it over the wire, didn’t want to take chances; in person means you can code fingerprints and DNA, nail it down every possible way.

  I’m rich, this time, but I have no friends.

  I could reply to that ad. If I wanted. But what would I be getting into? I call up an AI and start asking questions.

  When I think about it, personals are surprisingly scarce. So much, of the human race has vanished one way or another, and so much of it didn’t exactly exist in the first place (figuring there must be a lot of false i.d.‘s in there). Why aren’t more of us looking for each other? There should be zillions of personals.

  Finally I find out why not. There are several references to the Copy Transference Recovery Database. Since “copy transference” is a cybertao term for what happens when you die but your ideas live on (like Jesus or Elvis), or for what happens in a religious service when people “get the spirit” — I’m not sure which — my first thought is that it’s a religious thing, but it’s showing up as a government function.

  The Copy Transference Recovery Database turns out to be what I was looking for — a giant database with all the data known about every human being who ever lived, compiled as a chronological list of facts with the inconsistencies noted. Access is free to anyone.

  I play around at first. Find somebody there have been thousands of biographies of — Hitler. There’s a huge, almost day-to-day account, tons of film, all flat and almost all black and white. Zeus shows up with a note that not all the stories fit together and he probably is entirely mythical. Holden Caulfield, who I remember from some book in school, is in there with the note that he’s known to be fictional, though the name has been used as an alias at least eighteen times. Well, at least they seem to be getting things straight enough.

  I grit my teeth and try Joshua Ali Quake.

  My service record includes a note that I was suspected of having killed those men in Prague, a further note that I was believed to be KGB/Organization, and a final note that I might have been the Josh Quare that turned up in Quito, but if so I was unusually well preserved. No notes about my possibly being Brandon Smith or the later lives; instead it just notes that I checked into private care, that a woman named Katrina Triste checked me out and moved me to some place unknown, and that I vanished. One cop dropped in a memo titled “Speculative Note.” He thought the Organization found and killed me.

  Katrina Triste. So that was her name. Then. If she’s still alive, she’s older than me, but only by about ten years on the average. At worst she’s had to make it through a couple of years of being eighty-five.

  I check the other aliases and sure enough, a lot of it agrees with at least some of the stuff in my werp. I download it all to the werp and set up an automatic cross-reference. It only takes four minutes and next time after transit will be that much easier.

  I check out Alice Schwartz, back up to find her as Alice Childs and Alice Quare. I had no idea about the number of times she’d been arrested while living with me, always for something she could pay a fine for (mostly selling a feel to a vice cop). Looks like she stayed married to Schwartz for a few years, just like in my notes. So good to confirm anything.

  Then there’s a period when she’s married to Hutchins Dyen, one of the Dyen Microlntelligence family, a family of Supra Berlin plutocks. She has twins by him, the marriage lasts awhile. He gets rid of her and keeps the twins. Probably losing her looks, not the breeder she was, getting into the bottle too often.

  The record notes that she disappeared during the War of the Memes, like a lot of people and records. But I’m ahead of the records on that — she departed on the Flying Dutchman. I drop the note in and after a moment it says the records do link up validly, and thanks me.

  Of course. Sadi. I type Edward Sadi Trichin. Then all the aliases that my records show he ever used. Then I search by every incident I know Sadi was involved in where cops or soldiers got called in. Zil every time. Nobody and nothing can vanish that completely. Can it? But Sadi, who is all through my records from about 2020 to just before 2078 — a man who lived for decades, spent money, committed crimes, made contracts, forged i.d.‘s, enlisted in armies (even voted a few times, god knows why) — Sadi is gone.

  “Hey, buddy, every time you transit, somebody either stops a war or starts one,” Sadi was saying. We were sitting out on a back porch on the little house he had built way out in one of the bison ranges. Hard to believe all this had ever been farmland. Now they tracked the bison from orbit, and robots harvested them.

  The land-use regs said your house couldn’t be right on a migration route and had to be at least a mile from all other human structures. We’d had good-sized herds passing by all fall. Maybe the bison had changed their migration route without telling the government.

  “Yeah, I suppose.” I pulled down another beer. Notre Dame was playing OSU in low grav — with the new hose-line systems it only took a day to go to the moon, and the forty-three-man lunar version of the game was a lot more exciting since it allowed for real aerial work, leaping over the opposing line, and the pop-up QB. “I don’t know, though, Sadi. How long have we both been with the Organization? And people I knew back when are chiefs now. We’re still a couple of dumb field grunts. The money’s not bad, the life’s not bad, I’m not complaining. I just wish they’d ask me, once, for the hell of it, just to make me think they care what I think, before they threw a war. Especially since I don’t get what this one’s going to be about.”

  He reached for the chessboard. “Okay, let me see if I can show you what’s going on.”

  “You don’t know how to play chess,” I pointed out.

  “I’m just going to use the pieces to show you.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. But you still don’t know how to play chess.”

  “I’m just going to use the pieces to show you. Then if you want to play chess, you can play with yourself. You’ve been playing with yourself a lot lately, bud, and so have I, so after I get this explained to you about the war, let’s talk about what we do about getting laid. Talk about violence, gotta talk about sex to balance.”

  Late October, 2048. I was due for transit in three weeks. I had been living under the
name Ulysses Grant, which was a small joke for me, and since the USA was long defunct and anyway Ulysses was such a popular men’s name in the late 1990s (which people would have judged to have been when I was born), not many people noticed. The occasional history buff was about it.

  This transit was going to be the same old drill: Sadi would check me through a bunch of phony aliases and hospitals for six months, then help me get restarted once I recovered. We’d have eight years till Sadi transited, and then I’d do the same for him.

  The only complication this time was that it was about time to relocate. I hated giving up the house out here on the Plains — we’d been coming back to it for more than twenty years, by switching ownership between our i.d.‘s — and I hated, more than that, to see things coming to an end, but according to the Organization, it was just as inevitable as the Eurowar, Long Boom, Great Crash, and Gray Decade had been. They had a team of experts some place that figured out what was inevitable, I suppose.

  Sadi and I had bought this place early in the Long Boom, shortly after the Organization re-found me and we partnered up. When the Crash of 2032 had hit, the house was paid for and most of our money was in cash, the ideal way to go through a depression.

  “The thing to remember is that in a deep depression, the prices will fall to historic lows,” Sadi had often said. I’m sure he’d read that in a book someplace. He always made it sound like he was my investment counselor or something, and his foresight was why so much of what we owned was cash in safes in secure places. When the real reason was to keep cops and tax guys off us.

  Well, whatever the reason, all that cash would buy eleven times as much in 2048 as it had in 2031. At least we’d had some fun during the Gray Decade even if no one else had. It had made us richer than ever, and who’s going to argue with that?

  “Did you ever pass through here in the old days?” Sadi asked, “back when there were still interstates and McDonald’s and little towns and that? When you could get your kicks on Route 66?”