Kaleidoscope Century Read online

  “About anything you like,” Sadi said. “I just need to look like I’m trying to persuade you. If you want to delay a while to tell me about why you won’t cooperate, then delay. Tell me about your fucking childhood if you want.”

  He was in, I thought. It never occurred to them, once they saw that Sadi was unmemed, that he’d be carrying a microphone so that One True could listen in. And the only way to take over a system, be it mind or meme (how much difference was there, now, anyway?) was to know it well. They were about to give themselves up, know it or not.

  The old man sighed. “I don’t suppose you’ll understand this, but in a certain sense I’m on your side. Not on One True’s, but I can tell, you’re a mercenary, right, from one of the free companies? Mind if I know which one?”

  Sadi would have had a big grin as he said, “Murphy’s Comsat Avengers. Great unit, fucking-A.”

  “Bet it is. I’ve heard of you all. Well, you all know that you could retire any time by deciding to start running One True. And One True takes pretty good care of the people who run copies of it; you’d be comfortable.”

  “I might do that someday,” Sadi said.

  “You might but you probably won’t. Mostly people like you live free for a few years and then die. That’s the choice you all make, isn’t it?”

  That bothered me a little, as I sat listening in the next room. Close to what Sadi and I had been saying to each other. I had a sudden intuition that this old guy was much more dangerous than he seemed to be.

  The old guy went on. “Well, I can understand why a lot of people choose to run a meme, to invite it into their existence. Really, I do; there are plenty of people out there whose own personalities will never allow them any happiness, who tie themselves in one knot after another, people for whom the biggest curse in the world is freedom of choice because they’re programmed to keep choosing wrong and blaming themselves for it. There’s no meme out there that’s as cruel to the people running it as their own personalities would be. They should have the choice to pick up one, even though that’s the last choice they can ever make.

  “But you and I — or you and this Yuri, if that’s really his name, and Monica, and me, probably your Murphy if he’s still alive, all of us — for some reason we’re fussy. We want to make those choices. The thought of not making them makes us even more unhappy than our own failures. We can’t help it, we only want happiness we can get for ourselves, as ourselves, by our own efforts and choices. And if it’s not possible we’ll go right on being mean and miserable rather than accept a meme to alter us. Do we all have that in common?”

  “I’m listening,” Sadi said.

  “Well, that’s what the Freecybers are about. They’re memes that respect individuality, personhood, the soul, whatever. Memes against memes, or liberator memes, or whatever you call them. You get a Freecyber, and if you aren’t already memed, it won’t invade; if you are, it attacks the one you have and tries to put you back together. If you don’t like it you can always get back into contact with the one you had. Freedom for the mind … “

  “Now I understand,” Sadi said. One strange crunching noise. Two low spat!s. He had shot them.

  Rushed in too late. Sadi was a deadly shot, and this was point blank with the target tied up.

  He had crushed the microphone in his pocket; that had been the crunching noise. Then he had put the pistol to their heads and pulled the trigger. They hadn’t cried out or anything; they looked peaceful. “Think they understood?” Sadi asked. Tears running down his cheeks. I’d never seen that before.

  “I’m not sure I did.”

  “They won the argument,” he said. “Though I bet One True got everything it needed already, anyway. But it didn’t get them and that’s something.”

  “We work for it,” I reminded him.

  “We work for us,” he said. “At least I hope so. Come on.”

  As we skied away, the sun was just rising. Early September, but the snow on the ground was already a month old. Someday soon this would all be under a glacier.

  Low boom behind us. We turned to see the walls falling in and fresh flames lashing up from the wreckage; we’d spent some care and effort in planting charges.

  Tears, still, trickling from under his goggles. “It was a whole house full of books and comfortable places to read,” he said. “And it, and they, are out of the world. But One True didn’t get them. That’s something.”

  “Was what they said about Freecybers true?”

  “I doubt it. Everything out there in the noosphere mutates pretty fast. Whatever they started out to do, I think the Freecybers are probably just like any other memes now, replicating because they can, spreading out any old way, taking over and running things, no doubt believing themselves to have the best of intentions. But those two people in that big house, surrounded by all that civilization, sitting in there trying to keep some of us free … well, I think they believed it. That’s the other reason we had to kill them. Not just that One True would have taken them over, but that they’d have found out they were wrong, and I wanted them to believe right to the end.” He sighed and wiped his eyes.

  We didn’t usually touch much; Sadi got weird about it. But I reached forward and started to rub his back, and he leaned back against me. There’s hardly anything more awkward than embracing on skis, but we managed. He sobbed a long time, and I held him, still not really understanding, watching the burning wreckage of the house behind me, the leaping flares lighting the snow in oranges and reds against the pale indigo glow that dean snow gets at dawn. I wondered if all those books were in flames yet, and that made me think of Mama and Grandpa Couandeau and their houses full of books, and damn if I wasn’t crying myself.

  I’m sitting here looking at the wall, into space, into the empty spot in front of my eyes, at any old thing; tears are running down my face and I’ve been sitting in one position so long that my rump is stiff and I feel cold, though the Marshack seems to have perfect temperature regulation. I get up, stretch, put up with the cramping, stinging annoyance of a leg gone to sleep. “To sleep, perchance to dream, aye there’s the rub,” I say out loud. Sadi used to say that when I would get afraid of falling asleep because I knew I would have nightmares. And then he’d rub my back. It’s a quote from something I think.

  Since I can’t sleep, I brew more coffee, and ask the werp, “Help request, uh, how do I record audiovisual?”

  “Turn me sideways so my camera points at you,” the werp says. I wonder if they all talk like their owners, or if they imitate whatever voice they hear, or what.

  “Okay,” I say, “Record this as an AV document. Put a date, time, and place on it.”

  “Ready to record, no editing,” the machine says, in my voice. I swallow the first hot sip of coffee and begin.

  4.

  I had been living over Gwenny’s for some months and it wasn’t the worst deal in the world. By now I had three jobs, or four depending on what you counted. The garage was full-time, but I still worked at McDonald’s three evenings a week, and in the morning before I went to work, I did some mopping and scrubbing at Gwenny’s, getting things ready for the breakfast shift. She gave me breakfast and a few off on the rent for that, and the cash piled up higher in my bank account.

  The fourth job wasn’t exactly a job, but if a job is work and work is doing something you wouldn’t usually do, to get things you want, it was a job. A couple nights a week Gwenny would come up to my room; we would say nothing about it, before, during, or after, but she would undress, stretch out on the bed beside me, undo my pants, and then finger herself while she sucked my penis. Sometimes I’d stroke her breasts or put a finger inside her, but usually I just lay back and thought about girls I knew from school or ones I knew from hanging out at the mall. It took my mind off Gwenny’s fat old stretch-marked body, badly done makeup, and graying hair. She never asked me to do anything, though I would have if she had.

  Sometimes, when she’d done as much as she wanted, she’d fi
nish me with her hand, and her other hand would rest on my cheek. Then she’d usually tell me I was a “beautiful, beautiful boy.” Just like that. Always “beautiful” twice.

  If I wasn’t feeling well or said I was tired, she’d kiss my cheek and go away without doing anything. But I rarely turned her away. It felt good and she seemed to like it. I never did know what she was getting out of the experience, except that she called me a “beautiful, beautiful boy.” She wasn’t jealous — I had girls up in my room now and then, the kind that are impressed with a boy their own age who has a car, money, and place of his own. That never made Gwenny jealous or anything.

  I don’t think she was sentimental, either, though sometimes when I got in late from a McDonald’s shift, and there were no customers in the diner, the two of us would just sit in a booth and watch CNN, her hand resting on my thigh and her head leaned on my shoulder. Verna and Paula never said a tiling about that.

  Not love, but I liked Gwenny better than I liked anyone else on Earth.

  One night we’d just finished, and she was pushing her heavy, soft breasts into place in her too-small bra, sitting on my bed. My hand was still wet with having gotten her off, and I had just tucked in and zipped up. I knew I smelled of her scent, and would need to take a shower tonight; I was considering whether to go down to the diner with Gwenny and catch the news and some coffee first. About as normal as nights were in that little room, with the light from the diner sign coming in through the thin yellow curtain bright as day.

  I got up, switched on the light, stuffed my shirt down into my pants. Gwenny was struggling around getting her bulky sweatshirt back on over her head.

  A knock at the door.

  We glanced at each other. I opened the door a crack and found Harris — the guy who traveled for the CP, the one that Mama and Grandpa were so impressed with. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi, I’m not dressed,” I answered, improvising.

  “Okay. I’ve got a proposition for you, something you might want to think about. Meet you downstairs in the diner in a few?”

  “Sure,” I said, figuring I needed to get the door closed and this would get him away.

  “What’s good there? You eaten yet this evening?”

  “I’ve eaten, but I’ll take coffee when I join you,” I said. “Try the pizzaburger. See you in a few.” I closed the door.

  Footsteps thudded down the short hallway, then the scraping of him padding down the steep stairway on the thick lumpy carpet “Who’s he?” Gwenny asked.

  “Friend of my mother’s. He travels in business,” I said. “I don’t even know how he knew I was living here.”

  “Oh, your mom knows,” Gwenny said. “She was pretty frantic until she found out you were here and had a place to live and so on.”

  “How’d she find out?”

  “I called her and told her, silly. I just thought, if I had a beautiful, beautiful son like you, no matter how estranged we got, I’d want to know he was all right. She doesn’t know much more than that you’re here and you have a job. Maybe this guy Harris will have some work for you?”

  “Very likely,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it till then. Once I left home I’d dropped everything connected with the Communist Party. Now, if I wanted to, I could let the Party go completely. They couldn’t make me do anything; if I wanted to leave the Party forever, I could just listen politely to Harris and send him on his way. I resolved to keep that in mind as I talked to him. “But I’ve got three jobs already, and I’m not hurting for money. It would have to be something worthwhile.”

  Gwenny nodded. “He’s not a fag, is he?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She smiled. “Good. I don’t mind telling you, I hate fags. They do things to young boys, ones that aren’t queer, I mean, so that they’re never quite the same again. The money can’t be worth it.”

  “It wouldn’t be that kind of thing. He’s a very old friend of my mom and my grandpa.”

  She nodded, obviously relieved, and got up, giving me a quick hug on her way out the door. I followed her out, locked my door, and crossed over to the common bathroom to wash.

  When I got down there, Harris had ordered a pot of coffee for the table and two cups. He was taking small, neat bites off his pizzaburger.

  He wore an old but good suit, the kind that shows just a little bit of wear for a long time before it stops being presentable, dark blue with pin stripes. His tie was bright red, which wasn’t exactly a signal any more, but it wasn’t not a signal to the older members of the Party, and by that point in “the development of the historical situation,” the Party was mostly old people. For some reason, I noticed that his black wingtips were older, but well-cared-for, polished mirror-bright, and obviously expensive. I took a seat across from him.

  “Your mom asked me to look in on you,” he said. I suppose that might have been true, but I also knew that in the little world they both lived in, Harris was too important to do something like that just for niceness or as a favor. And I’d always thought he seemed like a pretty cold fish.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Probably about time I did this anyway. Life’s a lot better since I’m out of that place.”

  “I think your mom would agree with you,” Harris said, “but she couldn’t help worrying. It’s good to know that you’re all right.” He took another couple of bites of the pizzaburger and chewed systematically. “I guess you’ve got a job, or maybe more than one?”

  “Three,” I said. “Two of them are just part-time.”

  “Still in school?”

  “Nah. No time and I wasn’t good at it. I figure I’ll wait a while and then get a GED or something, maybe after that do some time at a community college. For right now it’s more important to get established so I don’t have to go back to that place.”

  Harris nodded. “Your mother and grandfather seem to agree with you about that. Some of the other members have been trying to persuade your mother to do something more permanent about her situation.”

  “Like get a divorce?”

  “Just exactly like that.” He took another bite, chewed and swallowed it, and then delicately lifted a couple of french fries to his mouth. “There are those of us who have been telling her that for years.”

  “She won’t leave him,” I said, glancing around the diner. “I wish to god she would but she won’t.” Gwenny was back at the cash register, conspicuously a long way from being able to hear us. No one else around. Probably Verna had been warned off. “Nobody will hear us if you say anything,” I said quietly, “and it will be a lot less conspicuous than if you go up to my room.”

  Harris nodded. “Good thought. All right, here’s what you might want to consider. Legally your whole existence would get a lot easier if you were two years older. You could get a chauffeur’s license and drive a cab or limo for a living, you could take the GED right away for a high school diploma, in general it would be a better deal. And with your technical aptitude, there’s something you could consider doing for us. I don’t need to mention that we’re generous to our friends, but let me add that if it works out right, there’d be very few ties to us and not much chance anyone would ever know. It’s money and a good start in the world if you want it.”

  I shrugged. “What do I have to do?”

  “If you say yes, about two weeks from now you’ll get a big package in the mail. None of it’s classified stuff for anyone. In fact you’ll also find there are a couple of math and science books in the package so you can look things up as needed. You’re going to master a lot of stuff about radar. Since you’ll be studying more, you might want to drop one job — we’ll be glad to replace whatever you were making there, with double the pay, cash, so no taxes get taken out.

  “Learn the stuff in the package thoroughly. A couple of months after you get the package, you’ll meet a man named Brian who wants to sell you fake i.d., as if it were just for getting into bars. You can recommend Brian to a friend or two if you like.

&nbs
p; “The trick is, that Ld.‘s going to be a lot more solid than a normal get-into-bars one. You’re going to be exactly two years older, which means you’ll be eligible to do what we want you to do — enlist in the Army.”

  I half-laughed; it certainly wasn’t what I’d been expecting.

  He smiled too. “You’re going to ace all kinds of aptitude tests, thanks to the studying,” he added, “and thus you will end up, sooner or later, in one of the Stealth programs. Money will quietly trickle into a couple of accounts we’ll set up for you. And then one day we’ll ask you for some things, which you will provide.”

  “Got it,” I said. “How long do I have to think?”

  “I’ll be back by here in about a week,” Harris said. “If you’re interested, talk to me then.”

  We shook hands, and he paid for the food and left. “Was it any kind of offer?” Gwenny asked.

  “Something Mama set up for me,” I explained. “I don’t think I’ll take it — a lot of travel and stuff. I’m sure I’ll be around here a few more months at least.”

  “I’m kinda glad. I’d miss you,” Gwenny said.

  I had decided to take Harris’s offer. But since it would be months before I enlisted, and everything up till then was under wraps, I figured I might as well preserve the deal I had. “It would involve a lot of traveling,” I said. “Like he does. He’ll be coming back in a week with some more details, but I don’t think I’ll take the deal.”

  “It’s not selling drugs, is it?” Gwenny asked.

  “Naw.”

  That night I lay awake — not long, as I worked hard in those days and it was never much trouble to get to sleep — and let my eyes rest on the key Mama had given me.

  I guess regular American guys would have been shocked, but I grew up understanding that the USA had to fall, that it was the center of world capitalism and the target. And men as I got to know Party members, I was exposed to a lot of cynicism too, because by the 1980s the CP was running short on believers and long on opportunists. So I don’t think I had much in the way of patriotism, and I’d never had it, and I knew perfectly well mat if Harris said the CP would do it, you’d have to go to the Mafia for a better guarantee.