The Best of Joe Haldeman (65 page)

“Huh-uh. We’re not that close.”

“Funny.” He took a pair of small binoculars out of his coat pocket and switched them on. The stabilizers hummed as he scanned along the horizon. Still looking at nothing, he said, “A surveillance camera saw you go into a coffeehouse in Georgetown with him last Wednesday. The Lean Bean.”

Oh shit. “Yeah, I remember that. So?”

“The camera didn’t show either of you coming out. You’re not still there, so you must have left through the service entrance.”

“He was parked in the alley out back.”

“Not in his own car. It had a tracer.”

“So I’m not my brother’s car’s keeper. It must have been somebody else’s. What did he—”

“Or a rental?”

That much, I could give up. “Not a rental. It was clapped-out and full of junk.”

“You didn’t recognize it?”

I shook my head. Actually, I’d assumed it was Hugh’s. “Why did you have a tracer on his car?”

“What did you talk about?”

“Business. How bad it is.” Hugh’s a diver; not much winter work. Idle hands do the devil’s work, I guess. “We just had a cup of coffee, and he drove me home.”

“And what did you do when you got home?”

“What? I don’t know. Made dinner.”

He put the binoculars down on the railing and pulled out a little sound recorder. “This is what you did.”

It was a recording of me phoning my landlord, saying I’d found a cheaper place and would be moving out before Christmas.

“That was at six twenty-five,” he said. “When you got home from the coffeehouse, you must have gone straight to the phone.”

I had, of course. “No. But I guess it was the same day. That Wednesday.”

He picked up the binoculars again and scanned the middle distance. “It’s okay, Johnson.”

The big man slammed me against the guardrail, hard, then tipped me over and grabbed my ankles. I was gasping, coughing, trying not to vomit, dangling fifty feet over the icy water.

“Johnson is strong, but he can’t hold on to you forever. I think it’s time for you to talk.”

“You can’t...you can’t do this!”

“I guess you have about a minute,” he said, looking at his watch. “Can you hold on a minute?” I could see Johnson nod, his upside-down smile.

“Let me put it to you this way. If you can tell us where Hugh Oliver went, you live. If you can’t, you have this little accident. It doesn’t matter whether it’s because you don’t know, or because you refuse to tell. You’ll just fall.”

My throat had snapped shut, paralyzed. “I—”

“You’ll either drown or freeze. Neither one is particularly painful. That bothers me a little. But I can’t tell you how little guilt I will feel.”

Not the truth!
“Mexico. Drove to Mexico.”

“No, we have cameras at every crossing, with face recognition.”

“He knew that!”

“Can you let go of one ankle?” He nodded and did, and I dropped a sickening foot. “Mexico returns terrorists to us. He must have known that, too.”

“He was going to Europe from there. Speaks French.”
Quebec.

He shrugged and made a motion with his head. The big man grabbed the other ankle and hauled me back. My chin snapped against the railing, and my shoulder and forehead hit hard on the gravel.

“Yeah, Europe. You’re lying, but I think you do know where he is. I can send you to a place where they get answers.” He rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “Maybe I’ll go along with you. It’s warm down there.”

Cuba. Point of no return.

My stomach fell. Even if I knew nothing about Hugh, I knew too much about them.

They couldn’t let me live now. They’ll pull out their answers and bury me in Guantanamo.

Johnson picked me up roughly. I kicked him in the shin, tore loose, ran three steps, and tried to vault over the edge. My hurt shoulder collapsed, and I cartwheeled clumsily into space.

Civil disobedience. What would the water feel like?

Scalding. Then nothing.

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO “FOUR SHORT NOVELS”

This is another “thousand years in the future” story, but its genesis was more specific than “For White Hill.” The French publisher Flammarion asked Robert Silverberg to put together an anthology of stories called
Destination 3001,
and he asked me for one.

The deadline wasn’t for a year or so, and so I decided to sit on it for awhile, trusting that sooner or later something would hatch.

I don’t often know exactly when a story idea occurs to me, but in this case I do: I was doing a pretty serious bicycle ride, “interval training,” going up hills faster than one would normally, trying to get to the top before cranking down into granny gears. The structure of the story came to me in one hyperoxygenated flash. By the time I finished the last hill, I knew what the first and last sections were going to be, and roughly what would go in between. As soon as I got home, I scribbled down some notes about it.

I couldn’t write the story right away, because I was pushing a novel deadline
(The Coming),
trying to finish it before flying off to the World Science Fiction Convention in Australia.

Finished the novel and got through the whirlwind convention, and settled down to relax for awhile on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, snorkeling and sunbathing with a bunch of friends united in our admiration of science fiction, topless sunbathers, and Australian beer. Some indomitable Puritan tropism made me take out my notebook in the mornings and finish this story.

FOUR SHORT NOVELS

Remembrance of Things Past

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money. When you started to feel the little aches and twinges that meant your body was running down, you just got in line at Immortality, Incorporated, and handed them your credit card. As long as you had at least a million bucks — and eventually everybody did — they would reset you to whatever age you liked.

One way people made money was by swapping knowledge around. Skills could be transferred with a technology spun off from the immortality process. You could spend a few decades becoming a great concert pianist, and then put your ability up for sale. There was no shortage of people with two million dollars who would trade one million to be their village’s Van Cliburn. In the sale of your ability, you would lose it, but you could buy it back a few decades or centuries later.

For many people this became the game of life — becoming temporarily a genius, selling your genius for youth, and then clawing your way up in some other field, to buy back the passion that had rescued you first from the grave. Enjoy it a few years, sell it again, and so on ad infinitum. Or
finitum,
if you just once made a wrong career move, and wound up old and poor and bereft of skill. That happened less and less often, of course, Darwinism inverted: the un-survival of the least fit.

It wasn’t just a matter of swapping around your piano-playing and brain surgery, of course. People with the existential wherewithal to enjoy century after century of life tended to grow and improve with age. A person could look like a barely pubescent teenybopper, and yet be able to out-Socrates Socrates in the wisdom department. People were getting used to seeing acne and
gravitas
on the same face.

Enter Jutel Dicuth, the paragon of his age, a raging polymath. He could paint and sculpt and play six instruments. He could write formal poetry with his left hand while solving differential equations with his right. He could write formal poetry
about
differential equations! He was an Olympic-class gymnast and also held the world record for the javelin throw. He had earned doctorates in anthropology, art history, slipstream physics, and fly-tying.

He sold it all.

Immensely wealthy but bereft of any useful ability, Jutel Dicuth set up a trust fund for himself that would produce a million dollars every year. It also provided a generous salary for an attendant. He had Immortality, Incorporated set him back to the apparent age of one year, and keep resetting him once a year.

In a world where there were no children — where would you put them? — he was the only infant. He was the only person with no useful skills and, eventually, the only one alive who did not have nearly a thousand years of memory.

In a world that had outgrown the old religions — why would you need them? — he became like unto a god. People came from everywhere to listen to his random babbling and try to find a conduit to the state of blissful innocence buried under the weight of their wisdom.

It was inevitable that someone would see a profit in this. A consortium with a name we would translate as Blank Slate offered to “dicuth” anyone who had a certain large sum of what passed for money, and maintain them for as long as they wanted. At first people were slightly outraged, because it was a kind of sacrilege, or were slightly amused, because it was such a transparent scheme to gather what passed for wealth.

Sooner or later, though, everyone tried it. Most who tried it for one year went back for ten or a hundred, or, eventually, forever. After some centuries, permanent dicuths began to outnumber humans — though those humans were not anything you would recognize as people, crushed as they were by nearly a thousand years of wisdom and experience. And jealous of those who had given up.

On 31 December, A.D. 3000, the last “normal” person surrendered his loneliness for dicuth bliss. The world was populated completely by total innocents, tended by patient machines.

It lasted a long time. Then one by one, the machines broke down.

~ * ~

Crime and Punishment

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they were so horrible that society had to dispose of them. Other than the occasional horrible person, the world was in an idyllic state, everyone living as long as they wanted to, doing what they wanted to do.

This is how things got back to normal.
 

People gained immortality by making copies of themselves, farlies, which were kept in safe places and updated periodically. So if you got run over by a truck or hit by a meteorite, your farlie would sense this and automatically pop out and take over, after prudently making a farlie of itself. Upon that temporary death, you would lose only the weeks or months that had gone by since your last update.

That made it difficult to deal with criminals. If someone was so horrible that society had to hang or shoot or electrocute or inject him to death, his farlie would crop up somewhere, still bad to the bone, make a farlie of itself, and go off on another rampage. If you put him in jail for the rest of his life, he would eventually die, but then his evil farlie would leap out, full of youthful vigor and nasty intent.
 

Ultimately, if society felt you were too horrible to live, it would take preemptive action: check out your farlie and destroy it first. If it could be found. Really bad people became adept at hiding their farlies. Inevitably, people who were really good at being really bad became master criminals. It was that, or die forever. There were only a few dozen of them, but they moved through the world like neutrinos: effortless, unstoppable, invisible.

One of them was a man named Bad Billy Beerbreath. He started the ultimate crime wave.

There were Farlie Centers where you would go to update your farlie — one hundred of them, all over the world — and that’s where almost everybody kept their farlies stored. But you could actually put a farlie anywhere, if you got together enough liquid nitrogen and terabytes of storage and kept them in a cool dry place out of direct sunlight.