A Separate War and Other Stories (9 page)

I watched him pedal laboriously away, and ordered another beer and a cannoli. Maybe I could finish it before he got back, using the beer as a distraction.

A few minutes later, he showed up at the intersection. He held up three fingers. He turned around, and behind his back, two fingers in a V.

I'd finished most of the cannoli by the time he returned. “You want the rest of that?”

I pushed it toward him. “You held up three fingers and had two behind your back.”

He nodded slowly and nibbled at the pastry. “Suppose you don't tell people about the intergalactic real estate man. Suppose you just say ‘I'm psychic. You go do anything at the corner of Sixth and University, and I'll look at this piece of plastic and tell you what it is.'”

“They'd say I had a hidden camera.”

He sipped his beer. “Wouldn't do you any good if you were sitting in a newspaper office. A television station.”

“A laboratory,” I said. “I want scientists to pay attention.”

“Uh-huh. First you got to
get
their attention.” He drank half the beer and set it down hard. “What time you get off work?”

“Five.”

“Got a card? A business card?” I fished through my purse and gave him one. “I know some people,” he said. “I'll call you.”

He showed up right at five in a car driven by a younger man. It was a dusty old black Chevrolet with a magnetic sign on the door advertising a local television station. A black car in Florida? Cheap, I presumed.

The boy had a big smile, and I couldn't blame him for that. Looking forward to some fun. He said they had a thing, a “spot,” scheduled for right after the six-thirty commercial. I said that was fine and reached in to shake his hand. That's when I saw the second young man in the back with a bulky camera.

“Randall Armitage,” the driver said to me. “Have you ever met me before?”

“No,” I said apologetically. “I don't watch much television. What is this?”

“He's taking a movie of you, uncut from now until the demonstration. Is that all right? John Buford Marshall.”

I shrugged. He didn't have air-conditioning, but it wasn't that far to the station. I got in and sneezed from the dust. “Let's go,” I said. “Don't spare the horses.”

We parked near the entrance to the TV station and the driver helped the cameraman, carrying a heavy battery for him. They both walked backwards, taking a picture of me crunching down the gravel walk. “This is not going to be very exciting,” I said. “Walking.”

“It's not part of the show,” Jeremiah Phipps said. “It's for the scientists afterwards.” Randall gave an unambiguous smirk. That firmed my resolve. I wanted to see the look on their faces later.

We sat down in a studio that was shabby everywhere the camera couldn't see. The announcer's desk itself was clean and smelled of lemon furniture polish. “Can I get you a coffee?” Randall asked, and I nodded, laying out the three pictures. A woman with a clipboard sat down behind us all without introducing herself.

The coffee smelled great, but as I raised it to my lips I asked, “Will I be able to go to the bathroom?”

“'Fraid not,” the cameraman said. “Not until after the thing.”

I set it down. “I'll explain about the three pictures,” I said.

“Just the one, please,” John Buford said. “The one we can verify.”

“Okay.” I peered into it. “It's rush hour, of course. Tourists crawl up Sixth Avenue and find they can't turn left on University. Horns honking, as if
that
ever did any good.” I looked up. “Of course anybody could tell you that.

“There's a short man wearing a straw boater walking a huge dog across the street. It's a Great Dane.”

“You should send someone out with a walkie-talkie,” Jeremiah said.

Randall nodded but said no. “This is a television thing. Not a radio thing.”

“We can do it later,” the cameraman said neutrally. “Can you explain how this happened?”

“Sure.” I wondered which one of them was in charge. I talked to the camera. “About eleven-thirty today, a strange-looking man walked into my real estate office. I'm a realtor for Star Realty on Thirteenth Street.” A plug wouldn't hurt.

So I just plunged into the story and told it as accurately as I could remember. I held the sheet up to the camera and described what I could see and smell and hear. Randall looked at me sort of like he was studying a bug. Marshall looked more charitable. The silent woman with the clipboard left.

“We're going to do a simple test first,” he said. “I'm going to stand at the intersection and write something on this big sheet of paper.” A poster board, actually. “Nobody knows what I'm going to write—
I
don't even know, yet. You tell us what you see. Then our other portable camera, like this one, will show it.”

“Okay. Just point the paper north on Sixth. Or turn it around a couple of times.”

He left with a teenage boy. “Kind of stupid,” I said. “He could have left a note behind. He could have told me hours ago what he was going to write.”

The cameraman smiled. “You don't know television, ma'am. People trust the camera.”

“They do,” Jeremiah said. “Not like they read books anymore.” I could hear a woman reading the news to the camera in the next room.

After a few minutes, John Buford Marshall smoothed his tie and another man came in to operate the camera. Bright lights snapped on. “Ma'am?” I went up to join him, and a woman powdered us both. While she was doing it, he said, “Let me have an oblique two-shot here with space in the lower corner for Randall's insert.”

“You got it, boss.” Maybe he was the boss. After a minute, the man in the shadows said, “In five.” Three green lights, an orange and then a red.

“Thank you, Thelma,” he said, and conspicuously looked at his watch, in spite of the fact that there were clocks everywhere. “Thank you for the explanation of this ordinary woman's extraordinary talent. Do you see our reporter, Mrs. Hockfield?”

“Oh, yes. He's standing on the sidewalk outside the music store on University. He's talking to the cameraman.” I held the plastic close. “Can't quite hear. Still a lot of traffic.”

“He should start writing…now.” He did, a moment later, and then turned the board around. “It doesn't make any sense.”

“Just tell us what you think it says.”

“No ‘think' about it. It says SHE IS A THETAN.”

Jeremiah Phipps said a word I don't think they allow on television.

“Ten seconds now, and the external camera.” I was watching his face instead of the monitor. His eyes bugged out in a most gratifying way. “How…how did you…what's a Thetan?”

“I'm sure I don't know. I'm certainly
not
one! I'm a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.”

“Here come the phones,” Jeremiah Phipps said. One in the main office rang stridently. Two in the studio blinked angry red lights. “I think you're going to find out more than you ever wanted to know about Thetans.”

 

It was kind of a joke. It turned out that Jeremiah Phipps knew Randall through science fiction—he was a “fan,” not a writer, and Randall decided to play a little science-fictional joke on Phipps.

Over the next few days I heard a lot about Thetans and L. Ron Hubbard, another science-fiction writer who discovered this religion, or made it up, Dianetics or Scientology. After news of the message “SHE IS A THETAN” got around—especially after the networks picked it up—I had twenty or thirty Scientologists a day come by the office.

As I say, you have to be a people person in this business, and part of that is to live and let live when it comes to religion. In my heart of hearts I don't suppose I really
believe
any of it, not even the Episcopalianism I grew up with—that dried up when my husband died young—but anything that gets you through the day is all right by me. These Scientologists had some pretty strange things to say, and I don't pretend I could follow it all, but they seemed moral and good-hearted.

And they believed me. I couldn't get any scientists past the Thetan thing, but that was all right. The Scientologists believed me. And they bought houses. Boy, did they buy houses. I got gold pins for most property sold every year from 1967 until I retired in 1981. Houses weren't that easy to sell in Gainesville then, in the middle of the state, equally far from the ocean and the Gulf.

After I retired, the Scientologists would still come by. They'd look at the pictures, which I had hanging on the wall, and some of them would claim to see things. Maybe, I don't know.

The picture that was the near past started to change as workers appeared and put a railroad through. That would be back in the 1850s, right in the same place, what would become Sixth and University. If I lived to be into my nineties, I'd see the Civil War come in. They had a battle there.

That wouldn't show up, though, until after August 14, 2017. When we'd all be exterminated, if old Baldy was to be believed. I hadn't been able to get anybody but Jeremiah Phipps interested in that, and he passed long ago.

But before he died, he gave me an idea. It might work.

 

I turned seventy-eight in 2017, some the worse for wear but no complaints. On August 14 I put on my best Sunday dress and sat in the living room with a pitcher of iced tea.

Just before noon, Baldy knocked on the door and then walked through it, like mist. He hadn't changed.

“Do not get up. I can see it is not easy.”

“Thank you.” He mopped at his face with a big handkerchief and looked around my rather crowded house. Never could get rid of stuff.

“So what's it going to be?” I said. “Big explosion? Poison gas?”

“What would you prefer?”

“Ice, I suppose, like the poet said. It's been so damned hot.”

“I could ask for ice.” He sat down on the couch. “May I?”

“Help yourself.” He poured a glass of iced tea and drank most of it.

He patted his lips with the handkerchief. “We might as well begin the…”

“Wait. I want to talk to the Council again.”

“To what end? You will just bother them.”

“You brought them before. This is much more serious.”

“Oh, not really. Not to me.” He looked annoyed, but he clapped his hands twice. The Council appeared, two seated next to him and a third, perhaps the one I spoke to half a century before, standing in front of the coffee table.

“What is it
this
time?” she said with asperity.

“When last we talked,” I said carefully, “you said that your property laws were similar to ours.”

“In some ways, yes.”

“We have a thing called ‘adverse possession.' Squatter's rights.”

“I know of this,” she said.

“You live on a piece of property for a length of time, continuously, without permission of the owner. ‘Open and notorious.' Is that us?”

“That could be argued, of a species that accidentally evolved on a planet owned by someone else. But the agreement with
his
species”—she nodded at Baldy—“is the primary one, and was only contingent on their profoundly changing the environment. The ecology.”

“That's what he said.” I got to my feet, joints popping, and crossed over to the window. I threw the curtains open with a dramatic swoosh.

The sea glittered on the horizon.

“This was a hundred miles inland fifty years ago. Now it's an island. In fifty years, we've changed the Earth's ecology more than his people did in fifty thousand. Five hundred thousand.”

She looked out over the sea and nodded.

“But we
planned
it,” Baldy said.

“So did we,” I said. “Everybody knew it was going to happen.” Perhaps not so soon, I didn't say.

She looked at me, and her brow furrowed. “She's telling the truth.” To Baldy: “Her case is stronger than yours.” The three of them disappeared.

Baldy sat in silence for a moment. He finished his tea and stood up. He went to the window, and nodded.

“Clever. But we do have time on our side. We will return after you are extinct.” He stepped to the door. “You will have your ice by then, I think.”

He disappeared in a wisp.

I guess we can handle the ice when it happens.

It's a funny thing. When you live on the beach you hardly ever go swimming. I thought this afternoon I might.

(2004)

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.

Most people didn't know this; in fact, it was forbidden knowledge. Nobody knew how to make Farlie Centers anymore, either. They were all built during the lifetime of Joan Farlie, who had wandered off with the blueprints after deciding not to make a copy of himself, himself.

Bad Billy Beerbreath decided to make it his business to trash Farlie Centers. In its way, this was worse than murder, because if a client died before he or she found out about it, and hadn't been able to make a new farlie (which took weeks)—he or she would die for real, kaput, out of the picture. It was a crime beyond crime. Just thinking about this gave Bad Billy an acute pleasure akin to a hundred orgasms.

Because there were a hundred Bad Billy Beerbreaths.

In preparation for his crime wave, Bad Billy had spent years making a hundred farlies of himself, and he stored them in cool dry places out of direct sunlight, all around the world. On 13 May 2999, all but one of those farlies jump-started itself and went out to destroy the nearest Farlie Center.

By noon, GMT, police and militia all over the world had captured or killed or subdued every copy (but one) of Bad Billy, but by noon every single Farlie Center in the world had been leveled, save the one in Akron, Ohio.

The only people left who had farlies were people who had a reason to keep them in a secret place. Master criminals like Billy. Pals of Billy. They all were waiting at Akron, and held off the authorities for months, by making farlie after farlie of themselves, like broomsticks in a Disney cartoon, sending most of them out to die, or “die,” defending the place, until there were so many of them the walls were bulging. Then they sent out word that they wanted to negotiate, and during the lull that promise produced, they fled en masse, destroying the last Farlie Center behind them.

They were a powerful force, a hundred thousand hardened criminals united in their contempt for people like you and me, and in their loyalty to Bad Billy Beerbreath. Somewhat giddy, not to say insane, in their triumph after having destroyed every Farlie Center, they went on to destroy every jail and prison and courthouse. That did cut their numbers down considerably, since most of them only had ten or twenty farlies tucked away, but it also reduced drastically the number of police, not to mention the number of people willing to take up policing as a profession, since once somebody killed you twice, you had to stay dead.

By New Year's Eve,
A.D.
3000, the criminals were in charge of the whole world.

Again.

WAR AND PEACE

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they wanted to, or could be talked into it. That made it very hard to fight wars, and a larger and larger part of every nation's military budget was given over to psychological operations directed toward their own people:
dulce et decorum est
just wasn't convincing enough anymore.

There were two elements to this sales job. One was to romanticize the image of the soldier as heroic defender of the blah blah blah. That was not too hard; they'd been doing that since Homer. The other was more subtle: convince people that every individual life was essentially worthless—your own and also the lives of the people you would eventually be killing.

That was a hard job, but the science of advertising, more than a millennium after Madison Avenue, was equal to it, through the person of a genius named Manny O'Malley. The pitch was subtle, and hard for a person to understand who hasn't lived for centuries, but shorn of Manny's incomprehensible humor and appeal to subtle pleasures that had no name until the thirtieth century, it boiled down to this:

A thousand years ago, they seduced people into soldiering with the slogan, “Be all that you can be.” But you have
been
all you can be. The only thing left worth being is
not
being.

Everybody else is in the same boat, O'Malley convinced them. In the process of giving yourself the precious gift of nonexistence, share it with many others.

It's hard for us to understand. But then we would be hard for them to understand, with all this remorseless getting and spending laying waste our years.

Wars were all fought in Death Valley, with primitive hand weapons, and the United States grew wealthy renting the place out, until it inevitably found itself fighting a series of wars
for
Death Valley, during one of which O'Malley himself finally died, charging a phalanx of no-longer-immortal pikemen on his robotic horse, waving a broken sword. His final words were, famously, “Oh, shit.”

Death Valley eventually wound up in the hands of the Bertelsmann Corporation, which ultimately ruled the world. But by that time, Manny's advertising had been so effective that no one cared. Everybody was in uniform, lining up to do their bit for Bertelsmann.

Even the advertising scientists. Even the high management of Bertelsmann.

There was a worldwide referendum, utilizing something indistinguishable from telepathy, where everybody agreed to change the name of the planet to Death Valley, and on the eve of the new century,
A.D.
3000, have at each other.

Thus O'Malley's ultimate ad campaign achieved the ultimate victory: a world that consumed itself.

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, so long as just one person loved them. The process that provided immortality was fueled that way.

Almost everybody can find someone to love him or her, at least for a little while, and if and when that someone says good-bye, most people can clean up their act enough to find yet another.

But every now and then you find a specimen who is so unlovable that he can't even get a hungry dog to take a biscuit from his hand. Babies take one look at him and get the colic. Women cross their legs as he passes by. Ardent homosexuals drop their collective gaze. Old people desperate for company feign sleep.

The most extreme such specimen was Custer Tralia. Custer came out of the womb with teeth, and bit the doctor. In grade school he broke up the love-training sessions with highly toxic farts. He celebrated puberty by not washing for a year. All through middle school and high school, he made loving couples into enemies by spreading clever vicious lies. He formed a Masturbation Club and didn't allow anybody else to join. In his graduation yearbook, he was unanimously voted “The One Least Likely to Survive, If We Have Anything to Do with It.”

In college, he became truly reckless. When everybody else was feeling the first whiff of mortality and frantically seducing in self-defense, Custer declared that he hated women almost as much as he hated men, and he reveled in his freedom from love, his superior detachment from the cloying crowd. Death was nothing compared to the hell of dependency. When, at the beginning of his junior year, he had to declare what his profession was going to be, he wrote down “hermit” for first, second, and third choices.

The world was getting pretty damned crowded, though, since a lot of people loved each other so much they turned out copy after copy of themselves. The only place Custer could go and be truly alone was the Australian outback. He had a helicopter drop him there with a big water tank and crates of food. They said they'd check back in a year, and Custer said don't bother. If you've decided not to live forever, a few years or decades one way or the other doesn't make much difference.