by John Barnes
As it happened, it was more than a decade until Madame Pierre presented James Pierre with any issue, and so memory was dim and hard to retrieve, old comrades long lost touch with, and government records hopeless, by the time it came time to name his firstborn. He knew the very last had been named Brown, and to save his soul, after nine months of wracking his brains and pulling at his memory, James could not remember what the first name had been; either he had forgotten or more likely he just hadn’t been trying very hard to remember.
On the day when Mr. Brown died on his stretcher, James Pierre had still had a long day ahead of him, as far as he knew. He had expected to be running for many more wounded, since fighting was fierce, brutal, and continual, but had broken an ankle in a chuck hole and not recovered until after VE Day, and thus the last man he carried had simply not stuck in his memory, except for his very ordinary last name; when Madame Pierre became pregnant, twelve years after the war, it was a miracle that he remembered even that much of the name (and local folk rather often suggested that in fact the name of a nearby grocer might have been more appropriate). But a promise, especially to the dead, was a promise, and James Pierre believed in consistency.
Brown Pierre had been a painfully bright student, good at arguing with his father—a good thing, because it was the only way he ever got any paternal approval. Between attending lycée and being grilled by the immense, obese voracious reader/eater in the corner, Brown Pierre had formed a deep devotion to intellectual consistency—the only thing that ever got him a little peace and time off the hook—and his devotion grew to be still more fierce than his father’s.
Like many tenderhearted people, Brown Pierre had come to like animals and the country better than people and towns. By the time he arrived in the United States to take advantage of the other side of his dual citizenship, at the age of eighteen, he was what one might expect: a devoted vegan, a radical, a Deep Ecologist—and absolutely brilliant at anything having to do with words, numbers, or ideas.
In the summer of 1992, he had just been released from prison after serving his full time for having liberated an entire fish hatchery into the San Angelo River, and was seriously thinking about seeing how long he could survive in a loincloth in the Canadian arctic, thereby having as little impact as possible on the environment, and putting himself to an interesting challenge. That was the moment when some ideas in geometry and physics, with which he had long been playing, popped into the front of his mind, and to his surprise, he thought of a very simple device, for which he would need only the sorts of parts that one could easily shoplift from hobby shops or cannibalize from the nonfunctioning radio alarm clock beside his bed.
In a few hours, in the drab little SRO hotel room that his parole officer had steered him into, working with screwdrivers, needlenose pliers, and masking tape as his basic tools, Brown Pierre had built a Gaudeamus machine. And within three hours of that, a representative of an alien species, something that looked very much like a hairy fireplug with an elephant’s trunk emerging from its top, had arrived to ask him how much of what goods, services, or information he’d be willing to take in trade for his planet.
Now, Brown Pierre had had all greed shamed and humiliated out of him at an early age; he was, in his way, though he hated people, perfectly altruistic and absolutely incorruptible. He wanted to do only what was good, as he understood the good. At the same time, since he had formed the opinion that intelligent life, left to itself, would always destroy its home environment, plus any other biosphere it could reach, and slaughter other animals—that that was in the nature of intelligence and that intelligence was therefore a kind of cancer in the life of the universe—Brown Pierre had no reason to like or trust the alien. Most probably the hairy fireplug that stood before him came from a planet where hundreds of other species of squat, hairy things had been hunted to extinction, experimented on, tortured, cooked, and skinned; the alien could not possibly be here for Brown Pierre’s benefit, and therefore the things to do were to avoid being cheated by the alien, and to cheat it.
He therefore said that he would have a proposal exactly twenty-four hours later. He stayed up most of the night perfecting his exact request. The alien, luckily for Pierre, was actually a Nrwyk, a species dedicated to conservation and preservation, and was immediately delighted with Brown Pierre’s proposals, so much so that the two of them negotiated for a much longer period, since neither could quite believe how much the other agreed with him or hyr. (This is following the standard protocol, Travis tells me, for denoting the genders of Nrwyk as she/he/hy/shi, his/her/hys/shis, and her/him/hyr/shir.) By the time that Travis, Hale, and Logan were hearing this story, Brown Pierre had actually become friends of a sort with the Nrwyk, at least as much friends as Brown Pierre was capable of being with anything.
Brown Pierre and the representative of Nrwyk had arranged a simple three-part contract:
Brown Pierre was to receive one matter copier, with perpetual maintenance, capable of producing exact to the atom copies of any object that would fit within its thirty-centimeter spherical hopper. This of course meant that he could immediately produce perfect counterfeit money (as long as he was careful to dispose of the identical serial numbers at different places), as well as do such things as duplicate jewelry for pawning. He admitted that it was more than a month before he realized he would seldom need to buy frozen vegetables again.
His second request was more complex; he wanted a singularity machine—a device that would simply answer any question he asked, if the answer were knowable at all. Sure enough, the aliens were advanced past the singularity, and again the machine came with a perpetual warranty. He could now know anything he could think to ask, if it were knowable at all.
In return for this, the Nrwyk would receive the Earth at the end of Brown Pierre’s lifetime, with a special conservation easement: not one inch of it was to be built upon or used for any new purpose by any intelligent species. Every bit of land, sea, or sky that had fallen into human disuse must be left wild forever.
And so, for reasons that Ted Kasczynski might have understood, and with infinite wealth and knowledge at his command, Brown Pierre had set out to depopulate and deindustrialize the Earth, as far as he could, and to live as long as possible while doing so. He intended to fail to some extent, because the continuing existence of the humans would serve as a possible last-ditch protection for both the contract with the Nrwyk and for the Earth itself.
Had he tried to raise an army or even a small band of radicals to do the job for him, he would not have stood a chance, he explained. The experience of a lifetime had taught him that he was the only person whom he could trust. Followers would have betrayed him. The use of force would have invited retaliation. But as it stood, he thought he stood an excellent chance.
While he thought intelligent life was a mistake and human beings a particularly big mistake, he recognized that we were animals, and he did not want to hurt us. He also thought that there was no putting the toothpaste back in the tube; human beings had moved species around and disrupted ecologies everywhere, and if the whole human race all just vanished tomorrow, things would still be an appalling mess, and the environment as a whole, along with many innocent creatures, would suffer horribly as the adjustments worked themselves out.
What was needed was not the extinction of the old human race, but the creation of a new human race that would voluntarily dwindle to almost nothing while restoring the natural ecology. And he recognized, as well, that people could not be threatened into any such thing.
After long thought, he settled on his plan, and asked the singularity machine for the necessary knowledge. One of the first fruits was the Gaudeamus pill, which would achieve two things—getting everyone laid frequently and well, and gradually abolishing secrecy. He had been doing his best to pump it into large corporate and governmental projects ever since.
Now, the longer he went on, the more I realized we were learning everything we needed to know in the course of that endle
ss lecture. So we kind of figured we’d stay there, especially since old Brown Pierre was waving that gun around.
At last that car horn, on the SUV, started honking. Brown Pierre had just been explaining about why the ancient Skeptics and Cynics were misnamed and that this had contributed to centuries of misunderstanding the human predicament. Or maybe that when you watch Snow White you can understand how Disney Corporation ended up owning so many ski areas. I’m not quite sure which of those points was getting made. Lena says it was another one of those things about feet and he was staring at her open-toed slippers, and she would have noticed that more than any of us would have noticed anything else, so maybe she’s right.
Anyway, so there Brown Pierre was, in the middle of laying out some grand important point, when—beep! beep! beeep! Over and over and over.
“Damn, I’m sorry, Brown—may I call you Brown?—that’s the car alarm,” Hale said. “The off switch is under the glove compartment, passenger side. And we left it unlocked.”
Brown Pierre glanced at Lena’s bare toes and obviously decided he wasn’t going to get her to go out there. Before he went, he looked over the cuffs and locks on Hale, and then on me. The car kept right on beeping. Finally Pierre went out to turn it off. He opened the passenger side door, and something huge and gray-brown shot out. Brown Pierre hit the thick snow on his back, hard enough to slam his head some, sending snow arcing ten feet in all directions. His gun went off into the air as Beeper clamped down on his wrist and shook it like a rat.
Beeper delicately sat down on Brown Pierre’s now-gunless gun arm, put a forepaw on Pierre’s chest, and stared suggestively at his throat. We couldn’t quite make out words but it sounded like Brown Pierre was talking to Beeper; Beeper seemed to be enjoying hearing it—many dogs like being talked to—but I didn’t think he was going to be persuaded.
“Do you suppose that poor dog is being lectured about the political semiotics of women’s footware?” Lena asked. She went into the workroom for a moment, came back with bolt cutters, and uncuffed us. “And just for the record, I took a fist full of Gaudeamus with him, every single day, which meant I actually knew what was going on in that mind. Talk about ‘it was a nasty job but someone had to do it’—next time someone else can. I honestly think I was the closest thing to real love the poor bastard ever encountered.”
Hale shrugged. “Well, if someone has to listen to Brown Pierre, better Beeper than us. He doesn’t understand a word of it and doesn’t expect to. Now, Beeper will hold him—”
There was a shimmer in the air. All Thumbs climbed down out of it, a gadget that looked like a spaghetti colander and was actually an automatic weapon clutched in one hand. He was followed by all the Irwin brothers, even Elvis. We should have realized that once Brown Pierre took Lena out of that pocket universe in his garage (which he was merely using as a superstorage shed and lab) her transponders would get hold of All Thumbs. Later Hale and I agreed that the reason we didn’t think of it was either because we knew we’d rescue ourselves, or because we were busy focusing on our cuffs and Pierre’s gun. For that matter, All Thumbs had delayed too—he didn’t want to jump through with any of his merry men until he knew Pierre wouldn’t get a shot off first.
“How did Beeper know to set off the car alarm?” I asked Hale.
“There is no car alarm. He likes to just sit there, hitting the horn in rhythm, when he gets bored. That’s why most people can’t stand to work with him.”
“And he can do that kind of perfect rhythm?”
“It doesn’t have to be perfect—just better than the person hearing it.”
“Is it all right to admit I’m impressed?” I asked Hale.
“On Beeper’s behalf, I’ll do my best to accept it politely.”
“If there’s a point to that, other than to tell me a silly adventure story, I’m not seeing it.”
“Well, it’s late, you’re tired, your guy choked at the acting competition, and you haven’t had enough beer to stimulate your imagination, is all. You’d see it if you were feeling better. See, what happened was, King Kong. It was beauty killed the beast. Lena gave Brown Pierre his first real human experience, and the poor guy melted. When we went out there we found that he was giggling and telling Beeper what a good boy he was. All of a sudden he didn’t want to silence the world, or to be all alone.
“And the guy is smart, and having fun now that he’s getting the hang of working with people. That sex-telepathy pill was a damn funny case; he invented it, or told the singularity machine to invent it, with the idea that if he put enough of that stuff into the bloodstreams of enough tech people, they would feel too good to stay up all night working on the new gadget. His idea was they might start to think maybe they can just knock off early and take the wife up a nice trail in the park, especially since they would even know that the wife would like that. Soon, every time they took more Gaudeamus, more secrets are more likely to leak, so the value of secret knowledge and of being way ahead goes way down. Pretty soon innovation would wither for lack of interest.”
“Sounds complicated and slow.”
“That’s how Brown Pierre likes things.” He rested his boots on my bed and added, “You have to remember that he’s crazy as a bedbug. So what he did was, he invented the pill that would cure him. He’d missed out on encountering people as people, spent all his time with them as audience and enemy. So he came up with exactly what he needed to take, but he’d only taken it for test purposes … and then along came Lena. Good-bye heart for Brown Pierre, eh?
“But just now he couldn’t be happier. He’s letting loose a mix of recreational drugs and some long-term viruses that modify things about people—increase lifespan, decrease fertility, increase emotional sensitivity and general serotonin level, decrease aggression … pills and diseases to spread love and happiness through the bloodstream of the world. He thinks he can have us all fit to handle a Gaudeamus machine, by the time that we all have one—February 4, 2011.”
“He’s working like a talented arsonist,” I said, sitting up. “Gotta pee. You figured you could tell the story on one bladder, but you didn’t reckon on that bladder being middle-aged.”
I splashed cold water on my face and looked at the clock before going back out; I’d been listening to this silly story for an hour and a half. It was really late and I really wanted my sleep.
And just possibly this indicated that I was getting old.
My eyes itched. I took my contacts out, splashed water on my face again, dried it. Maybe I could get him to wrap this up quickly or something?
When I went back out into my room, he was gone. He’d left one Fat Tire in my fridge, with a note on hotel stationery, rubberbanded around the neck:
For a guy who tells stories, bud, you really don’t like to listen to them. Catch me outside the “Self-Promotion and Performance Art” workshop on Friday, at noon, if you got time. Meanwhile, drink this, turn the lights out, lie down, and don’t set your alarm. You look like you need some sleep, old man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I think it was probably Travis’s calling me an old man that got me to go to that workshop, which turned out to be taught by Jenapha Lee, who was old buddies with one of the professional theatre liaisons for the conference. There are people who have an onstage personality that is utterly different from the offstage, and she was the best example of that I’ve ever seen. She sparkled, she charmed, she smiled, she encouraged, and the kids and faculty were eating out of her hand.
Her basic subject was how to make people think they wanted a performance artist, given how poisoned the well was by hostile and stupid media types. “Yeah,” she said, “well-noted genius art critic Garry Trudeau drew a naked lady with a pumpkin on her head a few years ago, and ever since, tell any five random people you’re a performance artist, and one of them will show you he’s, like, so totally hip by mentioning a pumpkin on the head. The first thing you gotta do, number one, is not take that crap for a second.” She leaned forward, ene
rgized. “Every movement and every artistic idea that gets anywhere stops apologizing and start asserting. You watch that Penelope Spheeris movie, that girl who says everybody should have blue hair? Right idea. Not ‘Oh I have blue hair to express myself.’ Not ‘Oh if you understand it right you’ll see there’s a good reason for me to dye my hair blue.’ Not even ‘I feel free to have blue hair.’ What you gotta say is, ‘Where’s your fucking blue hair and why the fuck should I listen to a dumb fuck whose hair isn’t even blue?’ So you get somebody that says pumpkin on the head, don’t say ‘Oh, it’s not really like that.’ Don’t try to explain what a naked lady with a pumpkin on her head might be a comment on. Just go right in and make ’em feel like they shat on a Picasso.”
“Um, um …” a young woman bouncing up and down with excitement, in the front row, said.
“Um what, babe? We only got an hour and I gotta make you brilliant by the end of it.”
I filed that away as a usable lecture joke for when questions got long-winded; I was liking Jenapha Lee more every second, especially since three of my students were in the room and their eyes were lighting up too.
“Um,” the girl said, “how do you make them feel like they shat on Picasso.” I don’t think she meant to emphasize that word so hard. It immediately pegged her as being from some small religious college someplace, making her first real escape into the bigger world, still pumped about getting to swear in public around people who apparently swore all the time.
Jenapha Lee sat back and smiled. “That guy next to you just rolled his eyes and told you not to ask your question and I heard him whisper, ‘C’mon, shut up.’” She leaned forward, focusing her attention on a young man with a thick wad of unruly black hair that looked like he’d rolled over on a tribble in his sleep. “Oh, look at me. Oh, I’m very special. I’m a guy, and I’m good-looking, and I know all about thee-YATER. I am so clever. Clever me. And I have a girl. And she is getting out of line. So I am cleverly going to shut her down and teach her that she is my property and I am important and I have nothing to learn—”