by D B Hartwell
“What do I care about all that?” Joan says, viciously. “It’s where he’s taking me, and that’s all. He’ll buy me dinner and we’ll sing some patriotic songs. I’m not going to lynch anybody.” She dabs on her French perfume, fiercely.
Linda lies back. She isn’t hungry. She’s never hungry. She always eats at the bakery—the Bundts don’t mind—any order that was wrong, or any bread that would have been left over. Sometimes they even gave her cakes or bread to bring home. She rubs her feet. She’s very lucky really. But as Joan goes out the door she feels like crying. Even if she did meet somebody, how could they ever afford to marry? How could they hope for a house of their own?
In the Papers (4)
SEA MONKEYS WILL ASTOUND YOUR FRIENDS!
• • • •
PRESIDENT SAYS WE MUST ALL PULL TOGETHER
In Seattle today in a meeting with
• • • •
TAKE A LUXURY AIRSHIP TO THE HOLY CITY
• • • •
CAN THE ECONOMY EVER RECOVER?
Since the Great Depression the country has been jogging through a series of ups and downs and the economy has been lurching from one crisis to another. Administrations have tried remedies from Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lindbergh’s Belt Tightening but nothing has turned things around for long. Economists say that this was only to be expected and that this general trend of downturn was a natural and inevitable
• • • •
NEW HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER “REICHSMARSHALL” STARRING MARLON BRANDO
In the Line (2)
When Sue was seventeen she’d had enough of school. She had a boyfriend who promised to find her a job as a dancer. She went off with him to Cleveland. She danced for a while in a topless club, and then in a strip joint. The money was never quite enough, not even after she started turning tricks. She’s only thirty-four, but she knows she looks raddled. She’s sick. Nobody wants her anymore. She’s waiting in the line because there’s nowhere else to go. They feed you and take you off in trucks to make a new start, that’s what she’s heard. She can see the truck. She wonders where they go.
In the Papers (5)
ARE NEW HOME PERMANENTS AS GOOD AS THEY SAY?
Experts say yes!
• • • •
NEW WAYS TO SAVE
• • • •
PRESIDENT SAYS: THERE IS NO WITCH-HUNT
Despite what communists and union organizers may claim, the President said today
Getting By (3)
The Bundts like to play the radio in the cafe at breakfast time. They talk about buying a little television for the customers to watch, if times ever get better. Mr. Bundt says this when Linda cautiously asks for a raise. If they had a television they’d be busier, he thinks, though Linda doesn’t think it would make a difference. She serves coffee and bacon and toast and listens to the news. She likes music and Joan likes Walter Winchell. She should ask Joan how she reconciles that with going to rallies. Winchell famously hates Hitler. Crazy. Linda can’t imagine feeling that strongly about an old man on the other side of the world.
Later, when Cindy and her friends are giggling over milkshakes and Linda feels as if her feet are falling off, a man comes in and takes the corner table. He orders sandwiches and coffee, and later he orders a cake and more coffee. He’s an odd little man. He seems to be paying attention to everything. He’s dressed quite well. His hair is slicked back and his clothes are clean. She wonders if he’s a detective, because he keeps looking out of the window, but if so he seems to pay just as much attention to the inside, and to Linda herself. She remembers what Joan said, and wants to laugh but can’t. He’s a strange man and she can’t figure him out.
She doesn’t have to stay late and close up, and the man follows her out when she leaves. There’s something about him that makes her think of the law way before romance. “You’re Linda,” he says, outside. She’s scared, because he could be anybody, but they are in the street under a street light, there are people passing, and the occasional car.
“Yes,” she admits, her heart hammering. “What do you want?”
“You’re not a Bundt?”
“No. They’re my employers, that’s all,” she says, disassociating herself from them as fast as she can, though they have been good to her. Immediately she has visions of them being arrested. Where would she find another job?
“Do you know where the Bundts come from?”
“Germany,” she says, confidently. Bundt’s German Bakery, it says, right above their heads.
“When?”
“Before I was born. Why aren’t you asking them these questions?”
“It was 1933.”
“Before I was born,” Linda says, feeling more confident and taking a step away.
“Have you seen any evidence that they are Jews?”
She stops, confused. “Jews? They’re German. Germans hate Jews.”
“Many Jews left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power,” the man says, though he can’t be much older than Linda. “If the Bundts were Jews, and hiding their identity, then if you denounced them—”
He stops, but Linda has caught up with him now. If she denounced them she would be given their property. The business, the apartment above it, their savings. “But they’re not, I’ve never—they serve bacon!” she blurts.
“You’ve never seen any evidence?” he asks, sadly. “A pity. It could be a nice business for you. You’re not Jewish?”
“Welsh,” she says. “My grandfather was a minister.”
“I thought not, with that lovely blonde hair.” It’s more washed out than it should be, but her hair is the dishwater blonde it always has been, the same as Joan’s, the same as their mother.
“I might have some evidence,” he says, slowly. “But any evidence I had would be from before they came here, from Germany. Some evidence that they were still Jews, if you’d seen anything, would be enough to settle it. The court would deport them back to Germany and award us their business. You could run it, I’m sure you could. You seem to be doing most of the work already.”
“I just serve,” she says, automatically. Then, “What sort of thing would I have noticed? If they were Jewish, I mean?”
Temptation settles over her like a film of grease and hope begins to burn in her heart for the first time in a long time.
In the Line (3)
If you’re black you’re invisible, even in the soup line. The others are shrinking away from me, I can’t deny it. They wouldn’t give us guns to fight even when the Japanese were shelling the beaches up and down the California coast. I left there then and came East, much good it did me. If I’d known how invisible I’d be here, I’d have stayed right there in Los Angeles. Nobody there ever chased after me and made me run, nobody there threatened to string me up, and I had a job that made a little money. I never thought I’d be standing in this line, because when I get to the head of it I know they’ll separate me out. Nobody knows what happens to us then, they take us off somewhere and we don’t come back, but I’m desperate, and what I say is, wherever it is they got to feed us, don’t they? Well, don’t they?
In the Papers (6)
ANOTHER FACTORY CLOSING
• • • •
PEACE TALKS IN LONDON AS JAPAN AND THE REICH DIVIDE UP RUSSIA
Will there be a buffer state of “Scythia” to divide the two great powers?
• • • •
BATTLE IN THE APPALACHIANS: NATIONAL GUARD REINFORCEMENTS SENT IN
President says it is necessary to keep the country together
• • • •
OWNERS GUN DOWN STRIKERS IN ALABAMA
Sixty people were hospitalized in Birmingham today after
• • • •
ESCAPE TO OTHER WORLDS WITH SCIENCE FICTION
New titles by Frederik Pohl and Alice Davey
CORY DOCTOROW Born in Toronto and now resident in London, Cory Doctorow is equally famous as an SF writer and as a political
activist focused on issues—copyright overreach, freedom in one’s computing devices, the innovation-quashing tendencies of economic incumbents—that are, for many people, still in the realm of SF. It is perhaps fitting that he is the only person, thus far, to have won both of the genre’s awards that happen to be named after the brilliant, irascible editor John W. Campbell, because all of Doctorow’s several careers have been powered by doing exactly as Campbell always urged his authors to do: “ask the next question.”
Doctorow’s early short fiction won him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000; not long after that, he published his first novel, the Locus Award—winning Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. With his publisher’s acquiescence, he released his own free-of-charge Creative Commons—licensed e-text of the novel simultaneously with its commercial release, and he has continued to do this for all of his novels and other books since. In 2008, he published his first YA novel, the New York Times bestselling Little Brother, a story of tech-savvy teenagers fighting back against an overweening “homeland security” regime in an American future that could be next Tuesday. It won widespread acclaim, including the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Since then he has published more fiction for young readers and for adults, including 2013’s Homeland, a sequel to Little Brother. In addition to writing SF, he is a coeditor of the megapopular site Boing Boing and a columnist for The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and Locus. He also travels nearly constantly as a speaker and organizer.
Written for a festschrift in honor of Frederik Pohl, “Chicken Little” contains jet-packs, a likable protagonist, and an immortal zillionaire brain-in-a-vat. It also asks a number of “next questions”—about the nature of happiness, about whether imposed happiness is really worse than free will, and about the possibility that the super-rich are slowly speciating away from the rest of us, retiring into heaven and pulling the ladder up as they go.
CHICKEN LITTLE
The first lesson Leon learned at the ad agency was: nobody is your friend at the ad agency.
Take today: Brautigan was going to see an actual vat, at an actual clinic, which housed an actual target consumer, and he wasn’t taking Leon.
“Don’t sulk, it’s unbecoming,” Brautigan said, giving him one of those tight-lipped smiles where he barely got his mouth over those big, horsey, comical teeth of his. They were disarming, those pearly whites. “It’s out of the question. Getting clearance to visit a vat in person, that’s a one-month, two-month process. Background checks. Biometrics. Interviews with their psych staff. The physicals: they have to take a census of your microbial nation. It takes time, Leon. You might be a mayfly in a mayfly hurry, but the man in the vat, he’s got a lot of time on his hands. No skin off his dick if you get held up for a month or two.”
“Bullshit,” Leon said. “It’s all a show. They’ve got a brick wall a hundred miles high around the front, and a sliding door around the back. There’s always an exception in these protocols. There has to be.”
“When you’re 180 years old and confined to a vat, you don’t make exceptions. Not if you want to go on to 181.”
“You’re telling me that if the old monster suddenly developed a rare, fast-moving liver cancer and there was only one oncologist in the whole goddamned world who could make it better, you’re telling me that guy would be sent home to France or whatever, ‘No thanks, we’re OK, you don’t have clearance to see the patient’?”
“I’m telling you the monster doesn’t have a liver. What that man has, he has machines and nutrients and systems.”
“And if a machine breaks down?”
“The man who invented that machine works for the monster. He lives on the monster’s private estate, with his family. Their microbial nations are identical to the monster’s. He is not only the emperor of their lives, he is the emperor of the lives of their intestinal flora. If the machine that man invented stopped working, he would be standing by the vat in less than two minutes, with his staff, all in disposable, sterile bunny suits, murmuring reassuring noises as he calmly, expertly fitted one of the ten replacements he has standing by, the ten replacements he checks, personally, every single day, to make sure that they are working.”
Leon opened his mouth, closed it. He couldn’t help himself, he snorted a laugh. “Really?”
Brautigan nodded.
“And what if none of the machines worked?”
“If that man couldn’t do it, then his rival, who also lives on the monster’s estate, who has developed the second-most-exciting liver replacement technology in the history of the world, who burns to try it on the man in the vat—that man would be there in ten minutes, and the first man, and his family—”
“Executed?”
Brautigan made a disappointed noise. “Come on, he’s a quadrillionaire, not a Bond villain. No, that man would be demoted to nearly nothing, but given one tiny chance to redeem himself: invent a technology better than the one that’s currently running in place of the vat-man’s liver, and you will be restored to your fine place with your fine clothes and your wealth and your privilege.”
“And if he fails?”
Brautigan shrugged. “Then the man in the vat is out an unmeasurably minuscule fraction of his personal fortune. He takes the loss, applies for a research tax credit for it, and deducts it from the pittance he deigns to send to the IRS every year.”
“Shit.”
Brautigan slapped his hands together. “It’s wicked, isn’t it? All that money and power and money and money?”
Leon tried to remember that Brautigan wasn’t his friend. It was those teeth, they were so disarming. Who could be suspicious of a man who was so horsey you wanted to feed him sugar cubes? “It’s something else.”
“You now know about ten thousand times more about the people in the vats than your average cit. But you haven’t got even the shadow of the picture yet, buddy. It took decades of relationship-building for Ate to sell its first product to a vat-person.”
*And we haven’t sold anything else since,* Leon thought, but he didn’t say it. No one would say it at Ate. The agency pitched itself as a powerhouse, a success in a field full of successes. It was the go-to agency for servicing the “ultra-high-net-worth individual,” and yet . . .
One sale.
“And we haven’t sold anything since.” Brautigan said it without a hint of shame. “And yet, this entire building, this entire agency, the salaries and the designers and the consultants: all of it paid for by clipping the toenails of that fortune. Which means that one more sale—”
He gestured around. The offices were sumptuous, designed to impress the functionaries of the fortunes in the vats. A trick of light and scent and wind made you feel as though you were in an ancient forest glade as soon as you came through the door, though no forest was in evidence. The reception desktop was a sheet of pitted tombstone granite, the unreadable smooth epitaph peeking around the edges of the old-fashioned typewriter that had been cunningly reworked to serve as a slightly less old-fashioned keyboard. The receptionist—presently ignoring them with professional verisimilitude—conveyed beauty, intelligence, and motherly concern, all by means of dress, bearing, and makeup. Ate employed a small team of stylists that worked on all public-facing employees; Leon had endured a just-so rumpling of his sandy hair and some carefully applied fraying at the cuffs and elbows of his jacket that morning.
“So no, Leon, buddy, I am not taking you down to meet my vat-person. But I will get you started on a path that may take you there, someday, if you’re very good and prove yourself out here. Once you’ve paid your dues.”
Leon had paid plenty of dues—more than this blow-dried turd ever did. But he smiled and snuffled it up like a good little worm, hating himself. “Hit me.”
“Look, we’ve been pitching vat-products for six years now without a single hit. Plenty of people have come through that door and stepped into the job you’ve got now, and they’ve all thrown a million ideas in the air, and every one came smashing to earth.
We’ve never systematically cataloged those ideas, never got them in any kind of grid that will let us see what kind of territory we’ve already explored, where the holes are . . .” He looked meaningfully at Leon.
“You want me to catalog every failed pitch in the agency’s history.” Leon didn’t hide his disappointment. That was the kind of job you gave to an intern, not a junior account exec.
Brautigan clicked his horsey teeth together, gave a laugh like a whinny, and left Ate’s offices, admitting a breath of the boring air that circulated out there in the real world. The receptionist radiated matronly care in Leon’s direction. He leaned her way and her fingers thunked on the mechanical keys of her converted Underwood Noiseless, a machine-gun rattle. He waited until she was done, then she turned that caring, loving smile back on him.
“It’s all in your work space, Leon—good luck with it.”
• • • •
It seemed to Leon that the problems faced by immortal quadrillionaires in vats wouldn’t be that different from those facing mere mortals. Once practically anything could be made for practically nothing, everything was practically worthless. No one needed to discover anymore—just combine, just invent. Then you could either hit a button and print it out on your desktop fab or down at the local depot for bigger jobs, or if you needed the kind of fabrication a printer couldn’t handle, there were plenty of on-demand jobbers who’d have some worker in a distant country knock it out overnight and you’d have it in hermetic FedEx packaging on your desktop by the morning.
