Kaleidoscope Century Read online

  “You going to press charges?” Paula asked. She was big on knowing the official way to do everything. “What he did’s illegal, you know. He can’t be hitting you that way. You’re his son.”

  I shrugged. “Mama would lie for him. He’d get acquitted. And they’d make me go back to live with him. Do you still have furnished rooms, Gwenny?”

  She looked at me closely then, a piercing stare that seemed to see farther into me than I had known existed. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I do. You know if you rent a room and then move back home next week, the money’s gone? And you’re going to have to pay for the whole term of the rental agreement, even if you don’t stay that long?”

  “Yeah, I know all that,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going back there, ever. He’ll kill me if I stay there. How much is it?”

  “My smallest one’s eighty-five a month. If you and what’s in those bags is all you’re gonna have in it, it might suit. You get two towels and two sets of sheets and things, and keeping them clean’s up to you — laundry-mat’s round the corner. One shelf in the common fridge, privileges to use the stove, but you got to get your own pans and dishes. Usually I get some student at the university who’s really broke to take the deal.”

  “Well, I’m a student, I guess,” I said, “though I’m not sure how safe it’ll be for me to go to school. I want that high school diploma for a job … ” The world suddenly seemed to reel, and I almost fell.

  Gwenny caught me, in her strong arms — she was taller than I was and muscular — and said, “You’ve just had a pretty awful shock. I think we better get you up to the room, get you settled in, and then in honor of your being a new tenant and all, we might just find you a meal on the house, or some coffee if you’re not hungry.”

  I felt myself blushing all over; I hadn’t meant to faint, and now I could feel tears burning down over my cheeks. None of the women seemed to notice. Gwenny guided me back outside, up the exterior steps, and then down the hall to my new home.

  In a room about fifteen feet square she had a small bed, two end tables, an old kitchen table, two chairs, and a wardrobe without a door. We got the business of money and keys taken care of, and she told me not to worry about the security deposit. “I’m not worried, Josh, I mean, where would you go?”

  Five days later I stopped going to school because I got another job in addition to the one at McDonald’s. I was a mechanic’s helper at a gas station; at least it meant I could work on cars. Between the two jobs I could afford my car, insurance, and room, with a little extra left over. Mostly I put that extra in my new, me-only bank account. If I wasn’t exactly set for life, I had the RX-7 to drive around in.

  I kept the brass key Mama had given me in my pocket all the time. I was always pulling it out when I meant to pull out my building key, car key, or room key — but I didn’t mind. At night, I put it in a special place on the end table, so that if I woke up I could see the key from my bed, by the light of the diner’s sign.

  3.

  I sit back and look at what I’ve written. I can’t believe how long it took, and it all looks stupid and wrong. I know what story I meant to tell, but all the first paragraph says is “Mama was black, Daddy was white, and he used to hit us both a lot. So I left when I turned sixteen and he said I had to pay rent. I stayed with a woman named Gwenny.” There’s too much about fixing up the RX-7, and a list of the kinds of bowties Grandpa Couandeau used to wear, and like that. I set down all these details but it doesn’t make a story.

  And there’s just two and a half pages and most of what I remember isn’t there. Maybe I write more, this time around, but I sure don’t write any better.

  I stretch, yawn, feel the way my shoulders cramp. God, I didn’t get down a thing about Harris. And I don’t know how much of this I’m making up. I suppose the thing to do is to put today’s date on what I just finished writing, so I do that. Now at least I’ll know I wrote it long after the fact — god, more than a century — and that it’s a mix of things I remember, things I think I remember, stuff I figured out from older documents, and god knows what-all.

  Maybe tomorrow I’ll just talk into the machine. Meanwhile I’m tired and I’ve had too much coffee. I get up and pace around, wondering if there’s any equivalent of TV. If they’ve got flashchannel or something somewhere, maybe, then I could get caught up on what’s going on.

  It’s also high time for a shower. At least the water seems to be on its first trip through. I use the bathrobe as my towel and spread it out so that it’ll dry.

  If I were at normal weight the clothes would probably fit pretty well. As it is they hang on me in a loose, baggy way that reminds me of the “gangsta” clothes a lot of kids my age-wore, back in the last part of the twentieth century. That makes me laugh, looking at this old man in too-big shirt and sagging pants in the mirror.

  Still much too awake and wondering when I’ll feel like sleeping, I put the makings of another big meal into the reconstitutor, and then put some more effort into looking for a television, a holobox, or even just a flashchannel reader. Finally I have a vague memory that things aren’t separate anymore, and I sit back down at the werp and play around for a minute on the menus.

  Sure enough, the werp’s also the receiver. I turn it to the “News and Views Basic” channel, since that has no surcharge and I’m not sure who is picking up the bills on any of this, or how much money I have, if any. Then I set the werp a little distance away from me. One thing TV had that these don’t, you could take up a whole room with a TV so nobody had to talk and it didn’t feel empty. This way leaves you sitting in a lonely little spot, just you and the werp screen a couple of feet apart with the rest of the room empty. Not to mention I have already looked at the werp all day.

  The reconstitutor rings, and I get out the meal — goat meatloaf, potatoes, asparagus, beets. Probably healthy as all shit but what do I know? I remember Woody Allen had a movie, a real old one I saw once. A health nut woke up in the future and it turned out all the things like hot fudge, steak, and cigars were what was really good for you.

  No hot fudge or steak among the stacked meals in the fridge. No beef at all, in fact. Are cows extinct or am I Hindu?

  I dim the room lights and power up the werp. It’s almost like TV. Sort of comforting, but I wish the screen were bigger so I could put it farther away.

  Well, one thing hasn’t changed: whenever you tune in to a news channel the first thing you get is weather from someplace nowhere near you. In this case it’s a weather report for North America on Earth. There are no borders. It sounds like whatever runs the Earth is called Resuna. At first I think Resuna is the name of the government, then that maybe everyone on Earth is named Resuna. When they stop talking about it I’m more confused than when they started. A lot of what the voices are talking about is storms blowing in off “Hudson Glacier” menacing the “Floridas.” That makes me take a second glance, and now I see that there’s a splash of big islands where the peninsula used to be. To judge from the square shape of some of them, they’re probably doing something like the old Dutch dike-and-polder system to get the land rebuilt, and it looks like it must have been going on for a while.

  Now that I am looking for changes in the land, I see that the Great Lakes drain through the Ohio and the Hudson; the big white blob at the end of the St. Lawrence must be ice? Pretty clearly Lake Ontario has expanded enough so that Oneida Lake is just a bay, and Chatauqua Lake has been gobbled in the same way by Erie. The main drains must be through the Mohawk and the Beaver.

  I wonder when I got to know that area so well, and I have a sudden flash of tents pitched in the snow, of men on skis with rifles. Murphy’s Comsat Avengers, that’s who I was with. I was in that outfit with Sadi.

  I noticed, when I was first browsing through and looking at all the pictures, that there were a few of me from when I was Euri Frederickson, around 2060-something. I call them up now. The pictures show me grizzled, middle-aged, on skis, wearing a pale blue uniform un
der an open white parka, rifle in hand.

  They switch to a weather report for South America. I don’t remember anything about the geography there except that I am pretty sure that the passage between South America and Antarctica wasn’t ice-covered when I was growing up, and I don’t think there used to be big glaciers in the middle of the continent.

  A little box pops up in one corner to say “Option Point” and I reach out and push a key combination on the keyboard before I can think about what the box means or what I might be doing. I sit back, take a big bite of meatloaf, and wonder what my fingers remembered that I didn’t.

  The screen clears and there’s an anchorman sitting there, saying “Hello, Mars. Here’s the quick break — “

  What follows is much like any smalltown covers-the-county FM station, back in the 1980s. A fire in Red Sands City, inside the main habitat. They had to vent some atmosphere and re-pump to pressure. Olympia reports a rash of petty theft. The Planning Council of Marinerburg announced yesterday that the sea level had risen another 120 cm in the last year and that within ten years the water should be up to the piers. Today local elections are being contested in several places, and the current General Coordinator of Mars is in minor political trouble over some complex financial dealings years back, when she had headed up the Port Authority for Deimos.

  I can’t tell how long people have been living here, but at least I get some idea where the water and air are coming from. They broadcast a list of times and targets for the next day — scheduled impacts for about a hundred chunks of comets and carbonaceous chondrites.

  I have to spend a long minute thinking how I knew what a carbonaceous chondrite is. Despite my best efforts I still have no idea where that knowledge had entered my brain from.

  But I do know: it’s an asteroid made up of a lot of rocky and tarry stuff, along with the usual bits of iron. They are being used as feedstocks for life on Mars. The Development Corporation’s crashing fifty-metric-ton chunks of them, dozens at a time, into the South Pole, to make feeding grounds for the oxyliberators. It also releases vast quantities of planet-warming CO2 and water. Later in the Martian year, at the equinox, they will switch to the North Pole — they always bombard the pole that’s having winter, forcing much of the carbon dioxide and water back into the atmosphere.

  I hoped the big meal and a little time watching the news would knock me out, but it hasn’t helped. I’m still wide awake, trying to piece together memories, documents, memories of documents, and documents of memories … “History is a dull party at which we struggle to fall asleep,” I say, out loud, quoting Sadi, then realize I’ve thought about him ten times, and I don’t know — I ask the werp. “Who’s Sadi?”

  “Reference document list appears offscreen, want it brought up to front?” the werp asks, in my voice.

  “Yes,” I say. I didn’t know it could do that. Considering it’s more than twenty years old and obviously it’s used to me, it looks like the memory holes are bigger than ever.

  I read the documents it pulls up for me for ten minutes or so. Sadi was my best friend, maybe my only friend, for forty or fifty years at least. The documents are all from the middle of the twenty-first century.

  I remember one time Sadi and I got a special mission: the last time we ever talked face to face with Murphy, and one of the few times we had any direct conversation with One True. That was in the War of the Memes.

  The thought is so sudden and so unasked-for that I don’t quite know what to do with it. I ask myself, “Who is Sadi?” again, and bust right out laughing there in the Marshack, with no one else to see me or share the joke.

  Not know Sadi? Might as well ask who was Mama or who is Santa Claus or Ronald McDonald. There’s a lot I can’t remember, of course, about him, but he was so much — I reach for the memory, and this time, for once, more impressions come, the confusion lifts like fog in the sun, and the story hangs together in my head.

  Murphy was the colonel — that was the title he gave himself, anyway — of Murphy’s Comsat Avengers, Inc., the private mercenary regiment that Sadi and I were in during the War of the Memes. Instantly my fingers are flying over the werp keys: what’s a meme, when did we leave the organization, what’s a comsat avenger —

  The answers don’t make any more sense than they did before, right away, but I have a feeling that a few things from 2064 are falling into place, documents fitting to memories and vice versa. I keep thinking and reading. “Comsat Avengers” because Murphy was an old vag (vug?) who had been in a business selling access to comsats before the supras (supras? just a minute ago I knew what those were) were built.

  Supras put comsats out of business, right. So Murphy, crazy as a syphilitic ferret, started out to destroy the people who built the supras. Gotcha. Complete losing cause. Trying to kill the whole world government. By the late 2040s Murphy was down to fifteen aging nuts like himself, all hiding out in a UN Mandated Wilderness Area, pretending to be Castro or Robin Hood or somebody like that.

  Then 2049 rolls around and we’re in the War of the Memes. All of a sudden there’s money for a guy like Murphy, as long as he’ll let someone else tell him what to attack. He goes to work for One True and the Organization orders Sadi and I to join him —

  One True. Something about that term made me shudder.

  So we worked for One True in the War of the Memes.

  That sounds like whatever One True was, it was a meme, whatever a meme was.

  I ask the werp, “Do you have a dictionary?”

  “Of which languages?”

  “English will do fine, I think. Define meme.”

  “There are over thirty definitions.”

  “Give me all of ‘em — uh, no, hold on — give me the ones that are nouns.”

  “Meme. Noun. Obsolete meaning coined originally by Richard Dawkins, twentieth century, by analogy to ‘gene’, to mean fundamental communicable ideas, such as melodies, pottery patterns, literary forms, taboos, fashions, superstitions, customs, et cetera. Also obsolete: fundamental force opposing gene in Walter Koch’s philosophic formulation ELPIS. Also obsolete: compelling musical motif, in neojazz and parahop styles of music. Also obsolete: fixation, addiction, compulsion. Also obsolete — “

  “Uh, how about just the meaning in the context of War of the Memes?” I ask.

  “Meme. Noun. Any of several thousand very large self-replicating artificial intelligences capable of functional copy transference across operating system boundaries, including but not limited to electronic, optical-switching, biological, and text-record operating systems.”

  I think about that. “Smart viruses?” I ask. “And does ‘biological systems’ mean ‘human brains’?”

  “The term virus is long obsolete in a context applied to computing; in its biological sense it is inapplicable here. Biological systems in this case is not limited to human brains as chimpanzee or dolphin brains theoretically — “

  “Close enough,” I say. “It’s coming back now, thanks.”

  I remember it now. In what had been upstate New York, in 2064. The War of the Memes was down to about twenty-five competing memes worldwide, and just over half the world population was carrying some dominant meme — some program running in their heads had replaced whatever personality grew there naturally. One True was doing pretty well. It had North America east of the Missouri and north of the Tennessee, plus little scattered bases everywhere else.

  It was the best deal going. Because it was so secure, One True had an area it could set aside for R&R for its mercenaries — so we sometimes got a real break. And though most troops had to worry about getting memed by putting themselves under a meme’s control, we at least had Murphy, who was crazed and paranoid and did everything to prevent One True from communicating with us directly.

  “Oh, I’m glad he does all that,” Sadi said. “I mean, I have no desire at all to end up as one more copy of One True, and I don’t want to see it happen to you either, bud. But I can’t help being a little sorry that w
e never get to talk to it.”

  “Why? What do you or I have to say to a meme? ‘So why is it you want to run my body?’ “

  He laughed, leaning back in the sun. God, he was a handsome man even then, past his prime; the white streaks in his brown hair ran along his temples like a comic book hero’s, his blue eyes still looked deep into you, and his long, slim body didn’t have an extra ounce of fat. “But there’s that other side. Memes live forever and have such a variety of experiences. Which isn’t a bad way to describe us longtimers.”

  Longtimers? I think to myself. I knew what those were a minute ago too. I get up, stretch, relax my muscles and shake out my body, then stretch out on the bed, trying to daydream the experience back into my body, trying to forget I’m on Mars and reach fifty years into my scrambled, uncertain memories. Where and when did we have that conversation? And since it was pretty much the kind of idle chatter that Sadi and I shared all the time, what made this one stand out? I was thinking something about the only time we talked to Murphy and to One True … I relax, shut my eyes, try not to force it, try to just listen inside my head —

  We were sitting outside our cabin in Put-in-Bay on a nice June day, a few weeks after the Battle of Minneapolis Ruin, when we’d thrown the forces of Free American back from the edges of One True’s territory, pursuing them all the way back to Fargo Dome.

  That had been fun; Fargo Dome hadn’t been hit significantly before, and the loot was terrific. Not to mention Sadi and I had grabbed one whole sorority house at the University of North Dakota, turned the ugly ones over to One True and spent three days serbing the pretty ones before Murphy called the unit back in and we had to hang all of them. Not the way we’d have done it — Sadi always said that when you played with someone like that for a while the least you could do was give them an individual death and then remember it forever. Not really esthetic or special, but still there was something about doing them all in an hour, in one mass hanging, chick after chick hoisted kicking into the air, all of them naked, the ones yet to be done cowering in the corner, bruised, bloody, crying for their mothers — I still got stiff thinking about it.