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 30th 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 goodbye, 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.
He found peace among the wallabies and dingoes. A kangaroo began to follow him around, and he accepted it as a pet, sharing his rehydrated KFC and fish and chips with it.
Life was a pleasantly sterile and objectless quest. Custer and his kangaroo quartered the outback, turning over rocks just to bother the things underneath. The kangaroo was loyal, which was a liability, but at least it couldn’t talk, and its a
ttachment to Custer was transparently selfish, so they got along. He taught it how to beg, and, by not rewarding it, taught it how to whimper.
One day, like Robinson Crusoe, he found footprints. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, he hastened in the opposite direction.
But the footprinter had been watching him for some time, and outsmarted him. Knowing he would be gone all day, she had started miles away, walking backwards by his camp, and knew that his instinct for hermitage would lead him directly, perversely, back into her cave.
Parky Gumma had decided to become a hermit, too, after she read about Custer’s audacious gesture. But after about a year she wanted a bath, and someone to love her so she wouldn’t die, in that order. So under the wheeling Milky Way, on the eve of the 31st Century, she stalked backwards to her cave, and squandered a month’s worth of water sluicing her body, which was unremarkable except for the fact that it was clean and the only female one in two hundred thousand square miles.
Parky left herself unclothed and squeaky clean, carefully perched on a camp stool, waiting for Custer’s curiosity and misanthropy to lead him back to her keep. He crept in a couple of hours after sunrise.
She stood up and spread her arms, and his pet kangaroo boinged away in terror. Custer himself was paralyzed by a mixture of conflicting impulses. He had seen pictures of naked women, but never one actually in the flesh, and honestly didn’t know what to do.
Parky showed him.
The rest is the unmaking of history. That Parky had admired him and followed him into the desert was even more endearing than the slip and slide that she demonstrated for him after she washed him up. But that was revolutionary, too. Custer had to admit that a year or a century or a millennium of that would be better than keeling over and having dingoes tear up your corpse and spread your bones over the uncaring sands.
So this is Custer’s story, and ours. He never did get around to liking baths, so you couldn’t say that love conquers all. But it could still conquer death.
© 2000, 2003 by Joe Haldeman.
First appeared in French as “Quatre courts roman” in Destination 3001.
Originally published in English in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
LUCIUS SHEPARD
Lucius Shepard (August 21, 1943 – March 18, 2014) was an American writer. Classified as a science fiction and fantasy writer, he often leaned into other genres, such as magical realism. His work is infused with a political and historical sensibility and an awareness of literary antecedents.
Shepard embraced many different themes throughout his career. In his early work, he wrote extensively about Central America. This included clearly science-fictional stories about near future high-tech jungle war (such as "R&R" and "Salvador"), as well as stories that seemed more in line with magic realism. Many of these, such as "Black Coral" (which concerns an American living on an island off of Honduras) and "The Jaguar Hunter" (the story of a man whose wife's debt forces him to hunt a mythical black jaguar which his people consider sacred), explore cultural clashes. Shepard traveled extensively in Central America and lived there for a time.
Lucius Shepard may have been the most popular and influential new writer of the ’80s, rivaled only by William Gibson, Connie Willis, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Although his novels have been generally well received, he has had greater impact with his short fiction, an unusual situation these days. Shepard made his first sale to Terry Carr’s Universe in 1983, and the rest of the decade would see a steady stream of bizarre and powerfully compelling stories that would persist through the ’90s as well, stories such as the landmark novella “R&R,” which won him a Nebula Award in 1987; “The Jaguar Hunter”; “Black Coral”; “A Spanish Lesson”; “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule”; “Shades”; “Aymara”; “A Traveler’s Tale”; “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket”; “On the Border”; “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter”; and “Barnacle Bill the Spacer,” which won him a Hugo Award in 1993. Shepard also won the John W. Campbell Award in 1985 as the year’s Best New Writer. In 1988, he picked up a World Fantasy Award for his monumental short-story collection, The Jaguar Hunter, following it in 1992 with a second World Fantasy Award for his second collection, The Ends of the Earth.
Shepard has made something of a specialty in writing vividly and knowingly about future war in stories such as “Shades” and “Delta Sly Honey,” as well as melding stories such as “Fire Zone Emerald” and the above-mentioned “R&R” into his well-known novel Life During Wartime—one of the field’s most chilling speculations about a possible future “Vietnam.” Perhaps his best handling of the theme, though, is in the harrowing story that follows, in which he shows us that we do learn from the experience of war—the only question is: learn what?
Salvador, by Lucius Shepard
Hugo Nomination for Best Short Story 1985
Three weeks before they wasted Tecolutla, Dantzler had his baptism of fire. The platoon was crossing a meadow at the foot of an emerald-green volcano, and being a dreamy sort, he was idling along, swatting tall grasses with his rifle barrel and thinking how it might have been a first-grader with crayons who had devised this elementary landscape of a perfect cone rising into a cloudless sky, when cap-pistol noises sounded on the slope. Someone screamed for the medic and Dantzler dove into the grass, fumbling for his ampules. He slipped one from the dispenser and popped it under his nose, inhaling frantically; then, to be on the safe side, he popped another—“A double helpin’ of martial arts,” as DT would say—and lay with his head down until the drugs had worked their magic. There was dirt in his mouth, and he was very afraid.
Gradually his arms and legs lost their heaviness, and his heart rate slowed. His vision sharpened to the point that he could see not only the pinpricks of fir blooming on the slope, but also the figures behind them, half-obscured by brush. A bubble of grim anger welled up in his brain, hardened to a fierce resolve, and he started moving toward the volcano. By the time he reached the base of the cone, he was all rage and reflexes. He spent the next forty minutes spinning acrobatically through the thickets, spraying shadows with bursts of his M-18; yet part of his mind remained distant from the action, marveling at his efficiency, at the comic-strip enthusiasm he felt for the task of killing. He shouted at the men he shot, and he shot them many more times than was necessary, like a child playing soldier.
“Playin’ my ass!” DT would say. “You just actin’ natural.” DT was a firm believer in the ampules; though the official line was that they contained tailored RNA compounds and pseudoendorphins modified to an inhalant form, he held the opinion that they opened a man up to his inner nature. He was big, black, with heavily muscled arms and crudely stamped features, and he had come to the Special Forces direct from prison, where he had done a stretch for attempted murder. The palms of his hands were covered by jail tattoos—a pentagram and a horned monster. The words DIE HIGH were painted on his helmet. This was his second tour in Salvador, and Moody—who was Dantzler’s buddy—said the drugs had addled DT’s brains, that he was crazy and gone to hell.
“He collects trophies,” Moody had said. “And not just ears like they done in ’Nam.”
When Dantzler had finally gotten a glimpse of the trophies, he had been appalled. They were kept in a tin box in DT’s pack and were nearly unrecognizable; they looked like withered brown orchids. But despite his revulsion, despite the fact that he was afraid of DT, he admired the man’s capacity for survival and had taken to heart his advice to rely on the drugs.
On the way back down the slope they discovered a live casualty, an Indian kid about Dantzler’s age, nineteen or twenty, black hair, adobe skin, and heavy-lidded brown eyes. Dantzler, whose father was an anthropologist and had done fieldwork in Salvador, figured him for a Santa Ana tribesman; before leaving the States, Dantzler had pored over his father’s notes, hoping this would give him an edge, and had learned to identify the various regional types. The kid had a minor leg wound and was wearing fatigue pants and a faded Coke Adds Life T-
shirt. This T-shirt irritated DT no end.
“What the hell you know ’bout Coke?” he asked the kid as they headed for the chopper that was to carry them deeper into Morazán Province. “You think it’s funny or somethin’?” He whacked the kid in the back with his rifle butt, and when they reached the chopper, he slung him inside and had him sit by the door. He sat beside him, tapped out a joint from a pack of Kools, and asked, “Where’s Infante?”
“Dead,” said the medic.
“Shit!” DT licked the joint so it would burn evenly. “Goddamn beaner ain’t no use ’cept somebody else know Spanish.”
“I know a little,” Dantzler volunteered.
Staring at Dantzler, DT’s eyes went empty and unfocused. “Naw,” he said. “You don’t know no Spanish.”
Dantzler ducked his head to avoid DT’s stare and said nothing; he thought he understood what DT meant, but he ducked away from the understanding as well. The chopper bore them aloft, and DT lit the joint. He let the smoke out his nostrils and passed the joint to the kid, who accepted gratefully.
“Qué sabor!” he said, exhaling a billow; he smiled and nodded, wanting to be friends.
Dantzler turned his gaze to the open door. They were flying low between the hills, and looking at the deep bays of shadow in their folds acted to drain away the residue of the drugs, leaving him weary and frazzled. Sunlight poured in, dazzling the oil-smeared floor.
“Hey, Dantzler!” DT had to shout over the noise of the rotors. “Ask him whass his name!”
The kid’s eyelids were drooping from the joint, but on hearing Spanish he perked up; he shook his head, though, refusing to answer. Dantzler smiled and told him not to be afraid.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 31
