by Barnes, John
She looked as good as thirty-five-year-olds that took care of themselves used to look. I watched her loop around in the central space. She mostly just shook those big tits, no art to it at all, so I figured if I flagged down the fat blonde in the fox rig and sent word that that was my choice, it would be no trouble.
Figure again. “Anastasia never B-drinks,” she said. “Is there anyone else you like?”
“Can I just send her a drink and have you point me out to her?” I asked. I had assumed it would be easy, but when had anything connected with that girl been easy?
“We can try that. She might take a look at you before she just takes the drink and stays in the dressing room. Then again she might not. She tends to treat customers like shit, you know? Like the bitch is too good for anybody. I don’t mind telling you the owner’s pissed because Anastasia turns away business, and she won’t peddle ass on the bid board, either. Treats the place like a fuckin’ job if you know what I mean. No kind of hostess.”
About five minutes later Alice came out, in a dressing gown, and sat down next to me. She didn’t say anything right away, but she took another drink when I offered one. I flagged the blonde in the fox rig, who seemed to be pissed at Alice. Younger women always seem to think they have the right to be the most attractive person present, and they get mad if a guy wants somebody older.
After a minute or two I said, “You remind me of someone I saw in a picture a lot, a real long time ago.”
She sipped at the little ladylike drink — something that looked like lemonade — and said, “Funny, you remind me a lot of somebody I knew a long time back, myself. I don’t know if he ever had any kids or anything. You any relation to Josh Quare?”
“Uh, you could say that. He was my dad but I never knew him all that well. Wasn’t home much.”
“What happened to him?” She leaned forward.
“He died working outside on one of the transfer ships, trailed off into the exhaust. I don’t even remember which transfer ship. It was a long time ago.” That ought to be vague enough, if she checked, but for good measure I added, “I think he was working under some other name.”
She sighed. “My first husband’s retired now, on Mars, but he was an officer of the Vacuum Workers Union a few years back. He’d have a record of a guy who died outside. Maybe I could track him through that. Or do you know any more about him?”
“Not a thing, and I’m not even sure that’s right. My mom’s dead too and the thing about Dad dying was one of the last things I heard from her, so I never got any other information. Like I said, I didn’t know him well anyway.”
“Well, you’re the image of him,” she said. “When were you born?”
I was in the fog of booze and You-4, just coming down off of it, but I had to answer that one fast, and I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I also knew I’d picked up Alice in the Eurowar and she’d left before she was twenty, so I said, “2012, it’s just the gray hair throwing you. I’m just a kid really. And of course I’ve been outside a lot, on the ships and the supras. Would you be, uh, Alice?”
“I used to be. Yeah, I guess so. Alice was the name I grew up under. Your father was my stepdad.” She peered at me closely. “You look a lot like him but you sure didn’t inherit his genes for aging. It took me a long time to figure it but just from stuff he let slip I figured out he was ten years older than he looked. But you’re ten years younger than you look. You don’t mind my saying that, do you? I mean, you look okay, distinguished and everything, but if you’re only about thirty-five … well, you’ve had a hard life I guess, or something.”
“Or something. No offense taken.” I took a long, slow sip of that cheap champagne — to really appreciate it you had to have your hand on some bim’s leg, I guess — and considered. “Yeah, Dad had a lot of pictures of you that he’d taken at one time or another. Four or five, I mean.” That was how many were in my werp. “When I was growing up there were five pictures of you on the wall.”
“Well,” she said. “I guess we can both see how we’ve turned out. I work in these places, and you come into them.”
“Probably his influence,” I agreed. Long, awkward silence. I tried thinking about things I could do next.
Start with the craziest possible idea: tell her.
No.
See if I could take her to bed — or even get her alone and make her do something, just to see what it was like? No again. “You ever have any kids?” I asked.
“Three,” she said. “Two of them by a rich guy that wanted me for his toy, but didn’t want his kids raised by a bim. He handed them over to the nanny, first thing. One kid that used to write now and then, that I had back when I thought I was going to get on the Flying Dutchman and travel with my first husband. I think that kid gave up on me.”
To fill the silence I asked, “So what became of them?”
“The older boy’s exec officer for the Dutchman now; you remember those officers that stopped the mutiny last year? Well, he was one of them. That’s how he got promoted up from the engine room really fast. I guess that if he was one of the loyalists, that means he probably helped push some of those mutineers out the airlock like they showed on flashchannel. I scan the ship news for his name; I never wrote back to him so he stopped writing, I think after his dad stopped making him write. Last picture I have of the kid, right before he stopped writing, is from his first date, some kind of a prom or something. I sure hope he didn’t marry her because she looked like the puddle you’d get in the road after a four-day ugly-storm. But still he turned out better than the other two. The boy I had by the rich guy is working on drinking himself to death, last I knew, and messing around with a lot of You-4 and all that, middle-aged and fat at thirty and looks like hell and never had to do a useful thing in his life. He’ll probably dry out after his old man dies and he inherits. The youngest is on about her fifth divorce. ‘Fraid I’m just a pile of fucked-up genes. Murderers, drunks, losers … must be my genes because I didn’t raise any of them.”
“You don’t seem like a bad sort to roe,” I said.
“You haven’t seen much of me. Just those pictures and whatever Josh told you.”
“He always spoke very kindly of you,” I said. It sounded like a line in an old movie. Like something I ought to say.
She nodded, sniffed. I saw her eyes were wet. “He would have.”
In zero g, if you want to get out of a chair, you have to unfasten the belt, and though my hand groped tentatively for the fastening, I didn’t unlatch it. The moment passed too fast for me to reach and touch or hold her. Don’t know why I wanted to. Must’ve been a memory or something. Probably when she was little I’d had to do that a lot. Maybe because I liked her or maybe just to keep her quiet. Kids are that way.
It made me feel disoriented. Already I was thinking, right now I’m about her age physically and next year I will be ten years younger. It’s like everyone’s falling down into the well where you start as a baby at the top and you end as a corpse at the bottom, only I get to climb back up every now and then, so I see people whizzing by, people who start out behind me and plunge on down into the darkness ahead of me where I can’t see where they go. And here she goes, into the dark ahead.
I have a memory of introducing that kid to her first bathtub in years. It was weeks before I could get her to spend less than an hour in it every night. Alice used to scrub in that hot water till she looked like she’d been boiled. I have another memory of that harsh-smelling Reconstruction soap in her thin black hair, and the feel of her bony arms wrapped around my neck. I think she had a nightmare and I needed to get her back to sleep.
We had a couple more drinks. She proposed a toast “to Josh.” It made some kind of sense. The guy she was drinking to had been a better guy than me.
It got later, I got tireder, and after a while we had nothing to say except we both missed Joshua. That was all poetic and stupid like a movie. Still, I was drunk enough to appreciate it.
I paid to wal
k her home early — which meant the owner thought I’d bought her for the night. Probably it got Alice slightly out of trouble and anyway it got her out of there early. The way she thanked me, over and over, on the way, was pathetic.
I let Alice go home by herself when we got to the tram station. We were already out of things to talk about. At the tram station, she hugged me once and said I was a prince. We knew we’d never hear from each other again.
The whole thing had cost me a pile of money, but spending a pile of money was what I needed to do just then. Call it a good night’s work. When I got back to the room Sadi and I were sharing, I told him that Alice had been on vacation so I’d just stayed in the club and gotten some action off a dancer. I didn’t think Sadi — or anyone else — would get a chance to hose Alice while he was here; “sorry about that,” I added.
“Oh, well,” he said, and got that faraway look in his eyes like he always did when he was going to make a joke that I wouldn’t get, usually jokes about philosophy and that, ” ‘The best-planned lays of mice and men,’ you know.”
4
To Be Born?
1.
Sadi’s gone from the records. Must have been erased during the War of the Memes. Likely a traceraser — whenever he died or went undercover, a self-replicating program woke up and hunted through the net to destroy any reference to him.
Usually you can still find the person afterwards: gaps in serial numbers, money flowing in and out of banks without specific accounts, parents who wrote down one child more than the system can find, all that. The Copy Transference Recovery Database has nine hundred million numbered trails in the records without names — tracks left by tracerasers. Some of those must have started as fake i.d.‘s, some as real people. It doesn’t matter to the system. The name has vanished, but the chain of holes in the records still says “someone was here, once.”
I run a big search across all nine hundred million. Even with a superMPP built into everyone’s werp these days, it takes three full minutes to get back to me.
Not one of those numbered personae could have been Sadi. Not one probable hit in the search. Must have been a damned good traceraser.
Most can only wipe a name, but this one, after it nailed all the names, went back and built false continuers — hundreds of fake i.d.‘s linked to points all over the chain of recorded events that was Sadi. It not only erased the name and made a hole in the records, it went back and filled in the hole.
So Sadi was important enough for the Organization to send a very sophisticated traceraser after him. Maybe he’s still alive, maybe even still with the Organization. “I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio.” Sadi himself? Some cop who cracked an Organization file? Most likely, the Organization has found me again.
One problem with having a screwed-up memory, and only the kind of record that I can manage to keep in the werp with my lousy writing skills, is that I don’t know who I did what to and when. Sadi, or the Organization, or a cop, or for all I know that German chick’s kids, might be out to kill me, hire me, anything.
I have to reply to that ad, but the idea scares the hell out of me. What if it’s Sadi? What if it’s not?
I hope his password’s as burned into his memory and as scattered through his records as “I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio” is for me.
My little white cubicle has no window. I need to get out. If there’s a rebate for not using all my time, it’ll track my account down sooner or later.
Walking around Red Sands City, letting my mind drift. Weird stuff I’d rather not think about. Put an audio tour guide on the werp.
Red Sands City is a third-generation Martian city, settled mostly by native-born Martians. It looks down onto the crater floor below, so that one edge of the enclosure’s much higher than the other. The whole town’s on five excavated ledges plus the rim — the transparent enclosure is in the shape of a gigantic slug just crawling up over the cliff, so water will gather in the top part of the enclosure, filling the little artificial lake on the cliff top.
Within the giant slug: tidy square straight streets, staircases, escalators, all the buildings squarish, pink concrete, Disney cliff dwellers. Outside the enclosure: disorderly mess of q-huts, little pressure domes, pressurized c-block buildings, trash heaps, Sears Marshacks like the one I woke up in. The jumbled heap’s plastered all over with solar collectors and baby MAMs, interwoven with thumpered dirt trails, rutted and pitted because nowadays it rains every couple of months.
I watch for a while. Not much difference in the activity inside or out. People in pressure suits outside don’t look any more busy, or any less, than people inside on the walkways. Probably there’s more illegal stuff out there, and probably the illegal stuff in here is worth more money. That’s usually the pattern.
I could go full legit this time, retire, drift through the next fifteen years without doing a thing. Today I’m feeling that lazy. I sit on a park bench up by the top-level lake, stretch my legs out, and look over the city.
After a while I tell the werp “Place an ad. ‘Connections and Memories’ section. ‘Seeking tall male comma thin comma brownish hair comma uh probably gray comma uh vet colon Murphy’s Comsat Avengers comma we had a house once in Kansas comma Louie Miller disappeared dear comma quote marks When I see places like this I always wish I was back in New Orleans close quote marks.’ Finished. Take out the uhs. Post that and alert me if anything comes in on it.”
I sit back on the bench and bask some more. In a while I’ll take the elevator down; I can afford any of the three hotels in town. I wonder how I got such a large pile of cash together as an ecoprospector. Reviewing the werp I see again that the life before this, as James Norren, I woke up from transit with my accounts intact but no sign of the Organization. I got into ecoprospecting for no reason I can find evidence of, made a lot of big strikes, spent almost nothing.
There are fewer records of my most recent life than there are of my first two lives, before I had a werp. I think about that. I can prove it was quiet. I can’t prove it was unhappy.
I’ve gone legit before. And life wasn’t half bad, if the werp is to be believed. But I know the werp can’t be believed. I hope not, there’s three places in there where I confess to killing Sadi, one where I say I killed Alice, one where I say Sadi did.
But that doesn’t mean any particular thing in that werp isn’t true.
But it can’t be trusted.
But.
I laugh at it all and stretch. A mother walking with her kid stares at me for a second, as if I might be dangerous. Well, that’s the way, I guess.
Somewhere down in Red Sands City I could probably get some gambling, some You-4, gressors, a whore. It would be something to do, but it would take energy. I’d rather sit here on this bench and soak up energy.
People move fast on Mars. A lot of them in here are half running. Out beyond the enclosure the dust plumes of the trucks streak along. Funny, it’s not like life’s short. With extension technology everybody makes it to 100 or so, and before the transfer ships left the solar system talk was they had found a way to live to be 250 or 300.
Probably all the scurrying around, the way people run out to meet the trucks and race up staircases, is a combination of low gravity and just the way Martians are: everything needs to get done right now. Figure they’re making a whole living world out of a barren one, there’s a lot to get done.
Then suddenly I remember a very dark night on Mars, years ago when they were all very dark, when there was so much less air that it wasn’t much different from the moon … darker still because I was sitting, with hundreds of thousands of others, on Olympus Mons. And as the thought comes back, I remember the rest of it.
With the collapse and disappearance of the Organization, our suppression of closed timelike curve research must have stopped. And apparently it was an area pretty ripe for study, because the people on the transfer ships got it figured out in just the short years it
took them to get out of the inner part of the solar system.
The big barrier to time travel was always causality, the same reason nothing could go faster than light. You can’t have the effect modifying the cause, just as people traveling back in time and shooting their grandfathers before they had any children was unworkable. But there was a kind of loophole — you could travel into the future faster than regular time. Traveling close to light-speed would do that. And it didn’t matter, really, which time you traveled along as long as you traveled along some time or other.
That part confuses me, so I ask the werp. It explains time splits and curves back: where there’s a singularity, a place where matter becomes so dense that it isn’t exactly in the universe we know anymore, but the place it occupied still is. I don’t get that part very well.
Anyway, out of a singularity come a whole bunch of lines of time, very much like the line of time that we and the whole universe are in, except that for the “subtimes” both their beginning and their end is at the moment the singularity was created. Those little subtimes start out into the future just like regular time, but they gradually curve backwards until finally they are going all the way backward (relative to our time) and end up at the place where they began. It’s sort of like we’re on the only highway that goes anywhere, and there are all these big looping exit ramps that come off the interstate of time, but then just swing around and feed back onto the highway right where they left it.
What that means in practical terms is that while you can’t reach your own past, you can make it possible for your future to reach you. When it does, there’s no grandfather paradox — because what happens is, you get two futures. So you make a singularity, and later have children, and they have children. One grandchild decides to get rid of the rest of the family, gets into that loop, rides it forward as it curves around until it rejoins his own past, and then shoots you. Then, as an adult, he lives on into the future that you never see, which doesn’t contain his parents. But because on the whole trip nobody ever moved backwards in the time line they were in, he has parents and grandparents in his personal past, and he continues to exist.