By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  Douglas’s gnarled fingers idly sort through the wintergreen he picked this morning, spurn the jar of sugar that stands nearby. All his life Douglas has made wintergreen tea from fresh maple sap, which requires no sweetening. But this spring he journeyed with drill and hammer and tap and bucket to his only remaining maple tree, and found it dead. He has bought maple-flavored sugar for his birthday tea, but he knows it will not be the same. Then again, next spring he may find no wintergreen.

  So many old familiar friends have failed to reappear in their season lately—the deer moss has gone wherever the hell the deer went to, crows no longer raid the compost heap, even the lupens have decreased in number and brilliance. The soil, perhaps made self-conscious by its conspicuous isolation, no longer bursts with life.

  Douglas realizes that his own sap no longer runs in the spring, that the walls of his house ring with no voice save his own. If a farm surrounded by wasteland cannot survive, how then shall a man? It is my birthday, he thinks, how old am I today?

  He cannot remember.

  He looks up at the goddamelectricclock (the family’s two-hundred-year-old-cuckoo clock, being wood, did not survive the Panic Winter of ’94), reads the date from its face (there are no longer trees to spare for fripperies like paper calendars), sits back with a grunt. 2049, like I thought, but when was I born?

  So many things have changed in Douglas’s lifetime, so many of Life’s familiar immutable aspects gone forever. The Danielses to the east died childless: their land now holds a sewage treatment plant. On the west the creeping border of Annapolis Royal has eaten the land up, excreting concrete and steel and far too many people as it went: Annapolis is now as choked as New York City was in Douglas’s father’s day. Economic helplessness has driven Douglas back up the North Mountain, step by inexorable step, and the profits (he winces at the word) that he reaped from selling off his land parcel by parcel (as, in his youth, he bought it from his ancestors) have been eaten away by the rising cost of living. Here, on his last fourteen acres, in the two-story house he built with his own hands and by Jesus wood, Douglas Bent Jr. has made his last stand.

  He questions his body as his father taught him to do, is told in reply that he has at least ten or twenty more years of life left. How old am I? he wonders again, forty-five? Fifty? More? He has simply lost track, for the years do not mean what they did. It matters little; though he may have vitality for twenty years more, he has money for no more than five. Less, if the new tax laws penalizing old age are pushed through in Halifax.

  The water has begun to boil. Douglas places wintergreen and sugar in the earthenware mug his mother made (back when clay was dug out of the backyard with a shovel), moves the pot from the stove, and pours. His nostrils test the aroma: to his dismay, the fake smells genuine. Sighing from his belly, he moves to the rocking chair by the kitchen window, places the mug on the sill, and sits down to watch another sunset. From here Douglas can see the Bay, when the wind is right and the smoke from the industrial park does not come between. Even then he can no longer see the far shores of New Brunswick, for the air is thicker than when Douglas was a child.

  The goddamclock hums, the mug steams. The winds are from the north—a cold night is coming, and tomorrow may be one of the improbable “bay-streamer” days with which Nova Scotia salts its spring. It does not matter to Douglas: his solar heating is far too efficient. His gaze wanders down the access road which leads to the highway; it curves downhill and left and disappears behind the birch and alders and pine that line it for a half mile from the house. If Douglas looks at the road right, he can sometimes convince himself that around the bend are not strip-mining shells and brick apartment-hives but arable land, waving grain and the world he once knew. Fields and yaller dogs and grazing goats and spring mud and tractors and barns and goat berries like stockpiles of B-B shot…

  Douglas’s mind wanders a lot these days. It has been a long time since he enjoyed thinking, and so he has lost the habit. It has been a long time since he had anyone with whom to share his thoughts, and so he has lost the inclination. It has been a long time since he understood the world well enough to think about it, and so he has lost the ability.

  Douglas sits and rocks and sips his tea, spilling it down the front of his beard and failing to notice. How old am I? he thinks for the third time, and summons enough will to try and find out. Rising from the rocker with an effort, he walks on weary wiry legs to the living room, climbs the stairs to the attic, pausing halfway to rest.

  My father was sixty-one he recalls as he sits, wheezing, on the stair when he accepted euthanasia. Surely I’m not that old. What keeps me alive?

  He has no answer.

  When he reaches the attic, Douglas spends fifteen minutes in locating the ancient trunk in which Bent family records are kept. They are minutes well spent: Douglas is cheered by many of the antiques he must shift to get at the trunk. Here is the potter’s wheel his mother worked; there the head of the axe with which he once took off his right big toe; over in the corner a battered peavey from the long-gone sawmill days. They remind him of a childhood when life still made sense, and bring a smile to his grizzled features. It does not stay long.

  Opening the trunk presents difficulties—it is locked and Douglas cannot remember where he put the key. He has not seen it for many years, or the trunk for that matter. Finally he gives up, smashes the old lock with the peavey, and levers up the lid (the Bents have always learned leverage as they got old, working efficiently long after strength has gone). It opens with a shriek, hinges protesting their shattered sleep.

  The past leaps out at him like the woes of the world from Pandora’s Box. On top of the pile is a picture of Douglas’s parents, Douglas Sr. and Sarah, smiling on their wedding day, Grandfather Lester behind them near an enormous barn, grazing cattle visible in the background.

  Beneath the picture he finds a collection of receipts for paid grain bills, remembers the days when food was cheap enough to feed animals, and there were animals to be fed. Digging deeper, he comes across canceled checks, insurance policies, tax records, a collection of report cards and letters wrapped in ribbon. Douglas pulls up short at the hand-made rosary he gave his mother for her fifteenth anniversary, and wonders if either of them still believed in God even then. Again, it is hard to remember.

  At last he locates his birth certificate. He stands, groaning with the ache in his calves and knees, and threads his way through the crowded attic to the west window, where the light from the setting sun is sufficient to read the fading document. He seats himself on the shell of a television that has not worked since he was a boy, holds the paper close to his face and squints.

  “May twelfth, 1989,” reads the date on the top.

  Why, I’m sixty years old he tells himself in wonderment. Sixty. I’ll be damned.

  There is something about that number that rings a bell in Douglas’s tired old mind, something he can’t quite recall about what it means to be sixty years old. He squints at the birth certificate again.

  And there on the last line, he sees it, sees what he had almost forgotten, and realizes that he was wrong—he will be getting a birthday present today after all.

  For the bottom line of his birth certificate says, simply and blessedly, “…Expiry Date: May twelfth, 2049.”

  Downstairs, for the first time in years, there is a knock at the door.

  TIN EAR

  Call them Stargates if you want to. The term was firmly engraved in the public’s mind, by science fiction writers with a weakness for grandiose jargon, fully fifty years before the first Spatial Anomaly was discovered and the War started. If you do call them Stargates, you probably call us Stargate Keepers, or Keepers for short.

  But we call ’em ’Holes, for short, and we call ourselves Wipers.

  It’s all in how you look at it, of course. If we ever got to enter one, instead of just watching them and mopping up what comes out, we might have a different name for them—or if not, at least a different name
for ourselves. “…and cheap ones, too,” as the joke goes.

  But the Enemy’s drones keep popping out at irregular intervals, robot-destroyer planetoids with simple but straightforward programs written somewhere on the far side of hyperspace. So, in addition to the heroes who get to go after the source—and keep failing to return—somebody has to mount guard over every known ’Hole, to sound the alarm when a drone comes through, and hopefully to neutralize it (before it neutralizes us). The War is still, after twenty years, at the stage where intact prizes are more valuable than confirmed kills. Data outworth debris, and will for decades to come.

  For the Enemy, apparently, as much as for us, or I wouldn’t be here. The first Enemy drone I ever saw could certainly have killed us both, if it had wanted to.

  It was well that Walter and I inhabited separate Pods. We didn’t get along at all. The only things we had in common were (a) an abiding hatred for the government which had drafted us into this sillyass suicidal employ (“…before we had a chance to volunteer like gentlemen,” we always added) and (b) a deep enjoyment of music.

  But all Wipers share these two things. One of the few compensations our cramped and claustrophobic Pods feature are their microtape libraries and excellent playback systems (you can’t read properly on combat status). And so it was possible for Walter and me to spend endless hours within the same general volume of space, listening to separate masterpieces over our headphones and arguing only occasionally. Walter had no sense of humor whatsoever, despised anyone who did, loathed any music of satirical, parodying or punning nature, and therefore was impossible to discuss music with. Or anything much.

  But you can listen to a lot of good music if you have nothing else to do.

  I was seventeen hours into Wagner’s Ring Des Niebelungen, thoroughly exhausted but with the end in sight, when Walter’s commlaser overrode my headphones. “George.”

  “Wha?” I yelled, but there was too much cacophony. We both had to kill our tapes. Damned if he didn’t have Siegfried on himself, which annoyed me—I was certain, without asking, that he liked Wagner for all the wrong reasons.

  “Alert status,” he said, yanking me from music back to reality.

  “Right.” I slapped switches and reached out to touch my imitation rabbit’s foot. So the ’Hole was puckering up, eh? A noble death might lie seconds away. With all possible speed I joined Walter in training all the considerable firepower we possessed on the ’Hole.

  And the bastard popped out a couple thousand miles to one side of the ’Hole and bagged us both. Unheard of; still unexplained. Even Abacus Al, the computer you can count on, was caught flat-footed. Tractor beam grabs me, clang!, reels in fast, CLANG!, half a billion Rockies’ worth of Terran hardware on alien flypaper, slump, body goes limp in shock-webbing, ping!, lights go out.

  “George,” Walter was saying in my headphones, “are you all right?”

  “I’ll see,” I replied, but by then some sort of anti-laser device must’ve been interposed by the drone-planetoid which held us captive, for the headphones went dead. I sighed and checked my Pod. It was on its gyrostabilized tail, “upright.” All my video screens were dead, except for the one that showed me about twenty degrees of starry space straight “overhead”—my location with reference to Walter was unknown. This was serious if I intended to live, which I did. But before I tried the radio I inspected my weapons control systems (dead in all directions except “up”), main drive (alive, but insufficient to pry me loose), and my body (alive and apparently unharmed). Then I heated up the radio on standard emergency band.

  “Down one freak, Cipher A,” I said crisply and quickly, getting it all out before static jammed that frequency. Then I dialed ’er down to the next frequency on the “standard” list, instructed Abacus Al the AnaLogic to convert to Cipher A before transmitting. “Walter?”

  “Here.” Flat, mechanical voice—Als rendition of human speech, just like what Walter was hearing from me.

  “Simpleton machine.”

  “Yah.”

  “Capture, not kill. Programmed to immobilize us, disarm us, blind us, and prevent meaningful communication between us. As soon as it dopes out Cipher A, it’ll…”

  A million pounds of frying bacon drowned me out. I dropped freak by the same interval again and shifted to Cipher B, allegedly a much tougher cipher to break. They call it “the best nonperfect cipher possible.”

  Walter was waiting on the new freak. “It’s essential,” he began at once, “that we determine whether this drone-planetoid is a Mark I or a Mark II.”

  “Damn right,” I agreed. “If we can work out our relative positions we’ve at least got options.”

  And a roar of static threw Cipher B out the window.

  Both types of Enemy planetoid have only the two tractor beams—but the relative positions of them are one of the chief distinguishing features from the outside. If this was a Mark I, we could both throw full power to our drives—and while they wouldn’t be sufficient to peel us loose, their energies should cross, like surgical paired-lasers, at the center of the planetoid, burning out its volitional hardware. If this were Mark the Second, the same maneuver would have our drives cross in the heart of the power-plant and distribute the component atoms of all three of us across an enormous spherical volume of space. But how could we compute our positions blind, on a sphere with no agreed-upon poles or meridians anyhow, and communicate them to each other’s computers without tripping the damned planetoid’s squelch-program? The cagey son of a bitch had cracked Cipher B too easily—apparently it was programmed to jam anything that it computed to be “exchange of meaningful information” whether it could decipher it or not. That suggested that Cipher C, the Perfect Cipher might be the only answer.

  The perfect cipher (really a code-cipher) was devised way back in the 1900s, and has never been improved upon. You have a computer generate an enormous run of random numbers, in duplicate. You give a copy of the printout to each communicator, and down the column of random numbers they go, each writing out the alphabet, one letter to each number, over and over again. For each successive letter they want to encipher and send, they jump down to the next alphabet-group in line, select the random number adjacent to the desired letter, and transmit that number. A savvy AnaLogic deduces pauses, activates voder: communication. The cipher cannot be broken by any one not in possession of an identical list of random numbers, for it produces utterly no pattern. (We had a code by the way, a true code, in which prearranged four-letter groups stood for various prearranged phrases. But not a phrase on the list applied to our situation—I Love the Army—and using a series of exclusively four-letter groups would have tipped off the alien computer that a code was in use.)

  But Cipher C had one flaw that I could see, and so I hesitated before dialing the frequency again. If we lost this chance we were effectively deaf and dumb as well as blind. Oh God, I prayed give Walter just this once, and for no more than fifteen minutes, at least half a brain. I dialed the new freak.

  “…got to take starsights,” he was saying. “It’s the only way to…”

  “SHUT UP!”

  “Eh?”

  “No sound; Listen. Heed. Okay? Carefully. Yes, ‘sights,’ but do not under any circumstances repeat any phrase or word-group I use. Comprende?”

  I breathed a silent prayer.

  “Why shouldn’t I repeat any phrase or word-group you use?” Walter asked, puzzlement plain even through voder.

  “GODDAMMIT,” I roared, but I was addressing only another roar of static. Groups with identical numbers of characters, in repeated sequence, were the only clue the Enemy computer had needed. It was “meaningful communication,” so it was jammed.

  One more standard band left on the list. If we had to hunt for each other on offbeat frequencies, it could take forever to establish contact.

  I scratched a telemetry contact and consulted Abacus Al. “How,” I programmed, “can I communicate meaningful information without communicating meaningful in
formation?”

  That’s the kind of question that makes most computers self-destruct, like an audio amplifier with no output connected. But Al is built to return whimsy with whimsy, and his sense of humor is as subtle as my own. “WRITE A POEM,” he replied, “OR SING A SONG.”

  I snorted.

  “No good,” I punched. “Can’t use words.”

  “HUM,” Al printed.

  A nova went off in my skull.

  I crosswired the microtape library in Al’s belly to the radio in his rump, and had him activate the last standard frequency. It was live but silent: Walter had finally figured out his previous stupidity. He waited for me to come up with inspiration this time.

  I keyed the opening bars of an ancient Beatles’ song. “We Can Work It Out.” In clear. And then killed it before the melody repeated.

  A long silence, while Walter slowly worked it out in his thick head. Come on, dummy, I yelled in my head, give me something to work with!

  And my headphones filled with the strains of the most poignant song from Cabaret: “Maybe This Time.”

  Thank God!

  I keyed Al’s starchart displays and thought hard. The chunk of sky I saw was useless unless I could learn what Walter was seeing over his own head—the two combined would give us a fix. I couldn’t see the ’Hole, and I had to assume he couldn’t either, or he’d have surely mentioned it already.

  Or would he? Anyone with half a brain would have…

  I keyed in the early twenty-first-century Revivalist dirge, “Is There a Hole in Your Bucket?” and hoped he wouldn’t think I was requesting a damage report.

  He responded with the late twenty-first-century anti-Revivalist ballad, “The Sky Ain’t Holy No More.”

  Okay, then. Back to the Beatles. “Tell Me What You See.”

  Walter paused a long time, and at last gave up and sent the intro to Donald MacLean’s Van Gogh song—the line that goes, “Starry, starry night…” He was plainly stymied.