by Barnes, John
“I want to power up a werp and check the situation. If the numbers don’t look good we bail. And from now on we watch for when we should get out, before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
He shuddered — or maybe it was a spasm. “I don’t think the memes — or the meme, let’s face it, One True or something descended from it’s going to win — will let any uninfected minds exist after the war’s over. I think once the profit’s been made from the wars, we want to get out to where the radio delay’s significant.”
“Space?” I asked. The memes had not been able to take hold in the terraforming projects, the asteroid cities, or the transfer ships because radio lag provided a natural barrier. A meme needed to interact with what it was infecting, quickly enough so that the person or AI under attack would accept the responses for an instant or two without question. An AI or person who was more than a few light-seconds away had too much time to think between responses for the meme to get a grip. It helped too that when the War of Papal Succession had turned into the War of the Memes, the space people had seen what was coming and started all kinds of quarantine measures so that nobody could send them a whole copy of a meme.
“Space,” Sadi agreed. “And the question is, when is it time to jump? Figure Earth is going to be effectively cut off from space at the end of the war. This Resuna idea that One True has won’t work if ideas are dribbling in from space and stirring the pot, because the idea of Resuna is everybody gets the same personality, and if some of them are talking outside the system they won’t stay the same. So no question in my mind, once Earth is all Resuna there’s going to be an embargo, blockade, call it what you want but money in our Earth bank accounts won’t be worth crap. The question is when we want to take our muster out, catch the next transfer ship, and end up rich out in the solar system somewhere. And if we wait too long, we’ll end up here as happy little processors running One True, thinking One True thoughts and doing whatever it likes.”
“Well, then maybe we should jump now,” I suggested.
“I’ve thought about that too.” He glanced down. The flickeret shone off his face, making it look warm, though nowadays in upstate New York it rarely got above freezing on a summer night. “But let’s be honest about this one, bud, hunh? If we wanted to play it safe we’d have gotten out a while ago. We’re as rich as we could ever need to be, you know. We ought to just bag it.”
“Let’s.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Naw.” I hadn’t thought about it for anything like as long as he had, of course, but then thinking about things for a long time was something he did for fun. I didn’t want to be one more copy of One True, and as soon as Sadi pointed it out it was obvious — stay on Earth and I would be, sure as all hell. Yeah, when I left there’d be no coming back. But that doesn’t matter when you really have to leave. I’ve had houses I loved but if they were on fire I left.
He sighed. “Just like that. Should’ve figured you would. Can we still run the werp real quick? I just figured out what numbers would tell us when to jump, I think. We could just pop onto a flashchannel for a second, depth it to get statistics — and you know stats are safe, they have no power to compel attention at all — and be back out before anyone knows we’ve been in.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself, but why bother with the numbers? No point in waiting around when running out now will work just as well. And it seems to me that any number you get off a flashchannel has probably been buggered a dozen ways by memes, for their own purposes.”
Sadi said, “You’re right in principle.”
Sadi always said “You’re right in principle” just before he did something dumb or pointless. “You want to check?” I asked. “Keep it short.”
“Sure, sure.” He uncased his werp, set it up so we could both see it, turned it on, passworded it, waited a second. A picture sprang up on the screen, I don’t know what of. I sat back for a long breath. The edge of my little frame cot pressed my leg, my pants were rubbing my thighs, I could feel the very slight tingle of some grain of pollen that I was just a tiny bit allergic to in my left sinus, the one that runs between your nose and your mouth —
I knew!
Sadi was not my friend he had never been he had never intended to be what he was was a useless parasite who talked too much and always talked down to me like I was a goddamn moron or something and he’d shat all over my memory of what I had done to that German girl that poor kid I’d raped her mouth in front of her babies and then shot her dead with my sperm still dripping from her lips and that had made me feel like shit like total evil I had been burned by guilt and he’d just laughed at that laughed at my guilt at her babies just encouraged that just wanted to hear about it because it got him so fucking hot and horny to hear about that girl she was so young and so pretty and she was probably devoted to that poor stupid fuck who rescued her I blew his head off and then I found she was just getting fucked when he got up to see who had kicked down his door so I was hot to see her like that and I kidnapped her and killed her kids except I kept the girl and raised her and named her Alice and that was all Sadi’s fault he wanted me to tell him those things and that Alice left home when I raped her like I had her mom and Sadi made me take him to the club at SNY and afterwards he fucked Alice and told me how it was she was a snotty bitch he said so he had to hit her and hit her and then it felt so good when she sobbed he got done he cut her up bad and then slapped her around and humiliated her he married her that summer and they didn’t invite me he made all the guests do her on the floor he spread himself out and had them all do him he had eaten my shit and deserved to that was what he wanted I had had such a good time been such a good boy done good things done things good grew up killing and raping he made me feel bad about it I wasn’t innocent when he was done I was always in fear of him that was why I did it he made me ashamed of what I had done he made me like it he did it all because he knew it was bad for me he did it all to make me evil to make me not guilty to leave me without the love of God and now I saw Little Lord Jesus look down from the sky Jesus and Lenin and my mother Sadi raped Mama Sadi raped Mister Harris Sadi raped Grandpa Couandeau Sadi made me say I wasn’t sorry Sadi kept me from going home Sadi was evil Sadi was all evil Sadi evil Sadi evil Sadi evil Sadi evil Sadi evil flashed into my brain in less time than it takes a breath to catch. Just as I was vowing to Jesus that I would not let Sadi lead me astray anymore, just as I was understanding that I had a personal commission from Comrade Lenin to deal with Sadi’s betrayal, just as I was calling Mama and telling her I’d be home for a visit —
That son of a bitch grabbed my throat and tried to choke me.
I struck back, hard, with everything I had. We got our grips and sank them in. Our little shelter went crashing and rolling. He tried to dig out my eye with his thumb; I got a hand free and slammed him in the side of the neck. He beat the back of my head against the hard edge of my cot frame; I kicked him in the belly, turned him over, got a full nelson, and pressed with the whole strength of my body …
The human neck is strong, and Sadi was a big, strong man in good condition. It takes a lot to break a neck, but I did it.
His neck crunched like a joint of frozen beef breaking in half, and I wrenched and twisted his head, bucking it back and forth to make sure the spinal cord severed.
I felt his body go limp. For good measure I slipped into a carotid grip and held it for a two-minute count, as hard as I could. When I finally dropped his battered, twisted body onto the floor of our shelter, among the strewn mass of our possessions, his face was contused by the internal blood pressure I had cranked up on his neck.
I put my head back and laughed, laughed, laughed, for the pieces that made me up had at last found each other again, after migrating into these two bodies and then calling up the third piece, and it was a good trick on Sadi and me, and it was funny to see him dead like that —
And then, too late, the chasers won out. Sadi was dead. My hands
were still warm from where they had clutched his body to squeeze the life out of it. The last laugh strangled as I fell to the floor of the tent, weeping, screaming, clawing my face with my nails.
3.
It’s past lunch time before we’re really done with each other’s bodies. We call up room service but otherwise we just lounge around in the afterglow.
No question. Katrina and Sadi are the same person, and physically she’s in her mid-twenties or so.
“All right,” I say, “you owe me some explanations.”
“Oh, I agree,” she says, her voice purring and warm. She snuggles against me and adds, “After a nap, you know.”
Drifting off to sleep I think I will wake up and discover that this whole thing’s a hallucination. But when I wake Sadi’s in my arms. Her eyes are open. We rise without speaking.
It’s three in the afternoon. “Let’s get dressed and take a long walk,” she says. “I’ll tell you everything, but we have tons and tons of time. There’s no reason to rush anything anymore.”
We end up on the bench, up by the lake, where I sat yesterday. I suppose if anyone looks at us they must think I’m her grandfather, or maybe her customer. She checks something on her werp and says, “Okay, there’s no listening device within a hundred meters, and we have the net bugged — if anyone starts recording us the werp will sing out. Say something distinctive.”
“Uh, clap your hands if you don’t believe in fairies?”
“That’s if you do. Every time some child somewhere says ‘I don’t believe in fairies,’ a fairy falls down dead.”
“Well, you would know children’s literature better than I would. It looks like you just got out of childhood. It’s been awhile for me.”
She giggles. “Yeah, I suppose so. All right. I have three great big bombs to drop on you, things that will change everything, and I’m just trying to think what order I should go in. I guess I’ll start with the smallest bomb first, the obvious one. If it had been entirely up to me I’d have always worn this female body, but I got the surgery in the early years of the Long Boom, because when I got assigned to go out among the vags, back in 2021, it just seemed like being an attractive woman would be dangerous. So I figured, well, here’s one whole lifetime as a male and then at the next transit the sex change will undo — that happens, you know, as part of the regeneration — and that will be fine. But instead I ended up partnered with you, and — well, it’s hard to explain. You got to be important to me.”
“That’s not hard to explain,” I say. “You got to be important to me, too.”
“Yeah, I know. Well, anyway, the thing was, it was a male-to-male friendship and I wanted to make sure it kept going. So I managed to get some stuff through a back channel to keep the sex change from undoing, and I went through transit, and there you were, taking care of me.”
“You looked like hell,” I said, remembering, “but it felt good to care for you. And it was such a relief when you finally were lucid and could talk again.”
She nodded. “That’s what it’s like for us, isn’t it? We need the care and the help and we need it from someone we can count on. Anyway, men once I’d done it the first time, decided to be a man, I found there were other advantages. The male body is clumsy and awkward but it’s a good body for violence, and that was mainly what we were going to do. And obviously it’s the only body for serbing, I never much cared for sex like this but you know all those old teat feminist bitches were right, it is about power. I love the way they look after you’re done with them, you know, girls or boys, you’ve stolen their soul, left your mark on them forever. Do you remember some of the things we did?”
“Just what comes up when I look in the werp.” I look out over the terraces of Red Sands City, full of quiet people doing their quiet business, and say, “I know I enjoyed a lot of it but all mat stuff’s behind us now. Earth is two billion Resunas without crime or violence, and the space cities and the ships were never very violent or dangerous. I don’t see what there could be another war about. I think it’s probably about time to put all that shit behind us, don’t you? And to tell you the truth what I remember, and read off the werp, of my past two lives is that I slept a lot better and it didn’t feel awful to be me.”
She sighs and snuggles against me. “Yeah,” she says, “it was always a little trouble to get you back into having fun whenever you transited. You’ll see when we take you through revival.”
“Revival? Is that what the process is called that makes you, uh — “
“The apparent age I am? You bet. Congratulations, you just set off bomb number two, the middle-sized bomb. Here’s the short on the deal: you get to live a lot longer than you thought you would, and do it with a young, healthy body. Not available commercially and with luck never to be discovered elsewhere — we’ve got people working on making sure that it’s not discovered independently, you remember, the same kind of work you and I used to do on CTCs.” She giggles. “Remember Doctor What’s-his-dick and his little wifey and their daughter? That kind of thing. Every so often just for kicks I go along on one. It’s almost as much fun to watch, I think; like I said I was never into that male body but I love that feeling of male power.
“Anyway, yes, we have the revival technique now. Works on any longtimer. I don’t understand a lot of it, but apparently if your body already knows how to transit, then they can push you into a transit, and then make the transit go all the way to completion so that you end up with a completely new body, instead of about a ten-year regeneration. While they do that there’s some stuff they do with the brain so that not only do you keep all your memories, you get all your old ones back.”
“You mean like now, you have a perfect memory till the next time you transit?”
She beams at me. “You don’t suppose the Organization stopped doing research after the longtimers took over? They found a way to bring back all your memories — except for the transits themselves — completely accurately. Including your memories of what you thought happened while you were still reconstructing them after every transit, if you see what I mean. You’ll be able to remember both what you believed and what was actually true, and keep them sorted out, just the way you know the difference between what was a dream, what was real, and what you remember from someone else’s stories. Not perfectly — most people get a few false memories out of it — but good enough so that you can figure out what actually happened to you. Your past life’s going to make some sense to you, finally.”
My eyes get wet, yet I don’t feel much inside. She holds and cuddles me for a little while and though I still don’t feel much, I sob a few times. “Completely normal,” she says. “You never forgot those things, you see; it was more like every time you transited, the pointers got reset so that you couldn’t find most of them. It’s all still in there, wanting to come out, and you want it back, so even though you don’t ‘know’ what’s in there, you’re emotionally overwhelmed by the possibility of getting it back. It comes out physiologically but you can’t touch the feelings yet. It will all be a lot clearer and easier to deal with once you go through revival.”
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“You go into the tank for six months and have a lot of nice dreams. The time passes like nothing. Then you come out and you’ll remember everything. And you’ll be physically somewhere between nineteen and twenty-five. For maybe a month after that you’ll need to sleep a lot to sort it all out. And even though your memories are very clear at that point, you’ll spend a few years finding which ones you want to access — there will be just too many to go through all at once. But that’s all the trouble it is. And after that you’re just like anybody, except of course that you’re living for hundreds of years, physically in your mid-twenties. You’re going to love it, Josh — I’ve talked to you in the future, and you’re going to have so much fun.”
“You’ve talked with me?” I take a very deep breath, lean way back onto the park bench, and let it out.
She
smiles at me again; she has hardly stopped smiling. “I said I was going to drop three bombs on you. Number one was my being a woman. Number two was revival. But number three is bigger than both. Have you gotten around in your reading and remembering to recalling where the transfer ships went?”
I think about it and I do remember — and once again, I’m overwhelmed. The fleet of five transfer ships, out at 100 AU from the sun, set off a matter-compression explosion mat created a singularity, the base point of a “closed timelike curve” — a thousand-year loop into the future. Now any spacecraft could simply take a turn over into the adjoining, backward-running temporary universe which had extended out into the future from that singularity. And once in that backward-running universe, anything could move back in time as far as the original singularity, re-cross to our universe, and thus enter its own past.
Of course you needed a really big nuclear bomb for the initial energy to establish the singularity. Bad idea to make a big singularity — one large enough spatially for the five-kilometer by one-kilometer cylinder that was a transfer ship, and extending a thousand years or more into the future — anywhere within the solar system, so they’d waited to construct their singularity for a couple of years until they got out to 100 AU.
With the singularity in solar orbit, the transfer ships would be able to return to that point in solar orbit at any time within the thousand years before it merged back into ordinary time. It was the doorway back.
That doorway built, the five ships — each with its crew of ten thousand — had scattered to the nearest stars where the light-speed probes, launched fifty years before for Deepstar, indicated solar systems which had both habitable worlds and minable asteroids. Drives running flat out, the transfer ships would reach the star systems they were heading for in a couple of centuries. That would give them some more centuries to get civilization under way around the new stars before dispatching fast ships back to the Earth system, traveling toward Earth backwards in time around the closed timelike curve. The hope was that a huge, technologically advanced force from the future could at least help the colonies to confine One True to Earth, and perhaps by the time the ships came back, they might even be able to think about invading and freeing the Earth itself.