The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  Cedric waited for Caresse to offer him an invitation to live with her. But he waited in vain. Had he pushed her affection and charity too far? When she finally spoke, her comment was noncommital and only vaguely comforting.

  “Don’t worry, Cedric, it’ll all work out.”

  Cedric tried to be macho about his plight. But his fear leaked out.

  “Right, sure, it all will. But I’m just a little scared, is all.”

  * * * *

  Like most of the developed, a-som world, the United States of America now boasted a birth-rate which fell well below replacement levels, the culmination of longterm historical trends that had begun a century ago, and which a-som tech had only accelerated. Had immigration not kept the melting pot full, the country would have become radically depopulated in a few generations.

  Children could not take anti-somnolence drugs until puberty, a condition which nowadays statistically occured on the average around age twelve. Their juvenile neurological development required sleep, periods in which the maturing brain bootstrapped itself into its final state. This process had proven to be one of the few vital, irreplaceable functions of sleep. (And even if infants and toddlers had been able to take a-som drugs, no sane parent would have wanted them awake 24/7.)

  Consequently, parenting had acquired another massive disincentive. The hours when children had to sleep had formerly been shared by their parents in the same unconscious state. No particular sacrifice had been required on the part of the adults. But now, staying home with archaically dormant children constituted cruel and unusual punishment, robbing adults of all the possibilities that a-som opened up. More than ever, adults concerned with careers or intent on socializing and indulging their interests regarded child-raising as a jail term.

  The child-care industry had adapted and boomed in response. Battalions of nannies specializing in the guardianship of sleeping children now circulated throughout the country, supporting the flexible lifestyles of absent mothers and fathers. Amateur babysitters had gone the way of paperboys. But the job, while essential, was still regarded as unskilled labor. The low pay for babysitting reflected this classification.

  Sinking down through the vocation-sphere, the black flag on his UCV denying him employment everywhere he turned, Cedric Swann had finally found employment as one of these rugrat guardians.

  Ironically, the intermediary between Cedric and his employer, TotWatch, Inc., were the timebrokers Fintzy Beech and Bunshaft. Cedric had reluctantly continued his registration with his ex-employer, acknowledging that FB&B did offer the best deals. And apparently, the firm’s ire at Cedric did not impede its greed for another warm body to meet the quotas of its clients—if any client would have him.

  Desperate for money, Cedric had specified an open-ended availability as a nanny. Children were asleep at all bells of all watches. Their schooling was just as freeform as their parents’ lives. Class time—a small fraction of total learning hours disbursed across various modalities of instruction—was brokered out to public and private schools that operated around the clock.

  Today, Cedric had a gig over in his old neighborhood. The contrast with his own new residence couldn’t have been greater, and the irony was not lost on him.

  After selling his condo and most of his furniture and possessions, Cedric had found a cheap apartment in Chinatown, above a dank, smelly business that biocultured shark fins for the restaurant trade. Now all his clothes smelled of brine and exotic nutrient feedstuffs, and his view was not of the Golden Gate Bridge, but rather the facade of a martial-arts academy, where a giant hardlight sign endlessly illustrated deadly drunken-master moves.

  As for his a-som doses, Cedric had managed to stay supplied. But only by abandoning the brand-name sixth-generation pills he had been taking and switching to a generic fifth-generation prescription. The lesser drugs maintained his awareness fairly well. At least he couldn’t detect any changes in his diurnal/nocturnal consciousness; but then again, that was like trying to measure a potentially warped ruler with itself. Although occasionally his limbs did feel as if they were wrapped in cotton batting, and his tongue would stick to the roof of his mouth.

  Leaving his apartment at first bell of the first watch, Cedric used his Palimpsest to find the location of the nearest Yellow Car. One of the ubiquitous miniature rental buggies was parked just a block away, and Cedric was grateful for small miracles. He could have taken a crosstown bus, or even have walked to save money, but he felt that his spirits would benefit from a small indulgence.

  Cedric missed so many things that had vanished from his life. Naturally he missed his luxurious home and lifestyle. The sensations engendered by those material losses had been expected. But more surprisingly, Cedric missed being a timebroker, the buzz he had gotten from collating supply and demand, from filling a San Diego trope-fab with eager workers or making the San Jose Burning Man a success. Now he felt powerless, isolated, unproductive. Watching sleeping larvae! How had he fallen so far?

  But if not for Caresse’s continued affection and support, Cedric would’ve have felt a lot worse. Having her as his girlfriend had been his mainstay. Caresse continually reminded him that the black flag on his UCV would expire at the end of five years or at the repayment of all his debts, whichever came first, and that all he had to do was stick it out that long. Her optimistic outlook was invaluable. And the free bodyrubs and sex didn’t hurt either. They were supposed to hook up after Cedric’s gig later, in fact, and Cedric was counting the minutes till then.

  Climbing into the Yellow Car, Cedric started it with his Palimpsest. He noticed with irritation the low-fuel reading on the car’s tank, due to an inconsiderate prior driver, and swore at the necessity for stopping at a refueling station. But then again, he could top off his Palimpsest with butane as well.

  The dusk-tinged streets of San Francisco on this lovely late-spring evening were moderately thronged with busy citizens. There were no such phenomena as “rush hours” or “off-hours” any longer. The unsynchronized mass impulses of the citizenry, mediated by the timebrokers, resulted in a statistically even distribution of activity across all watches. No longer did one find long queues at restaurants at “dinner time” or lines at the DMV. With every hour interchangeable, and everything functioning continuously, humanity had finally been freed from the tyranny of the clock.

  After hitting the pumps, Cedric made good time to his destination. The large glass-walled house where Cedric was to babysit commanded a fine view of the Bay, and Cedric felt a flare of jealousy and regret.

  Alex and Brian Holland-Nancarrow greeted Cedric pleasantly. Both of the slim, moddishly accoutred men shared an expensively groomed appearance that bespoke plenty of surplus cash—as if the house weren’t proof enough of that.

  “We’re in a bit of a hurry, Cedric. But let us show you a few things you’ll need while you’re here. As you know from TotWatch, we have two children, Xiomara and Tupac. They’re both asleep already. Here’s their bedroom.”

  Reverently, the fathers opened the bedroom door a crack to allow Cedric to peer within. The unnaturally darkened chamber, the smell of children’s breath and farts, the sound of coma-like breathing —these all induced in Cedric a faint but distinct nausea. It was like looking into a morgue or zombie nest, or a monkey cage at the midnight zoo. He could barely recall his own youthful sleeping habits, and the prospect of ever sleeping himself again made him want to vomit.

  “We have a security kibe, and you’ll have to give it a cell sample. Just put your finger there—perfect! We’re heading up to a wine-tasting in Sonoma, and we should be back by four bells of the midwatch. Feel free to have nocturne with whatever you find in the fridge. There’s some really superior pesto we just whipped up, and baby red potatoes already boiled.”

  “Fine, thanks, have a great time.”

  The Holland-Nancarrows departed in a crimson Wuhan Peony, and Cedric thumbed his nose at them once they were safely out of sight.

  Back inside, he looked for
ways to amuse himself. He watched a few minutes of a Giants game on his Palimpsest, but the experience was boring when he didn’t have any money riding on the contest. He prolonged the meditative drinking of a single boutique beer from the house’s copious stock, but eventually the bottle gurgled its last. He made a dutiful trip to the bedroom and witnessed the children—shadowy lumps—sleeping as monotonously as before. Cedric shuddered.

  Eventually, Cedric found himself poking around the family flatscreen. The display device occupied a whole wall, and somehow even vapid entertainment was more entrancing at that size.

  And that’s when he found that the Holland-Nancarrows had departed so hurriedly that they had left their system wide open. They had never logged off.

  After hesitating a moment, Cedric decided to go exploring. He paged through their mail, but discovered only bland trivia about people he didn’t know. He discovered what Alex and Brian did for a living: they designed facials for freethinkers. In effect, they were cyber-beauticians.

  Then Cedric stumbled across a bookmark for a Cuban casino. Apparently, his hosts had recently placed a few amateur bets.

  Cedric hesitated. In the pit of his stomach and down to his loins, a familiar beast was awaking and growling and stretching its limbs.

  Just a small visit, to taste the excitement. He could lurk without playing.

  Yeah. And the Mars colony would find life someday.

  Under Cedric’s touch, the screen filled with a first-person-shooter image of the casino floor. Cedric was telefactoring a kibe, whose manipulators would emerge into his field of vision when he reached for something. Cedric wheeled the kibe toward the blackjack tables, his favorite game.

  Cedric started betting small at first. The wagers came, of course, from the cyber-purse of the Holland-Nancarrows. If he drained the purse of too much money, they’d spot the loss and track down the bets to a time when they weren’t home. But if he won, he’d leave the purse at its original value and transfer the excess to his own pockets. They’d never have occasion to check.

  And of course, he would win. And win big!

  The hours sped by as Cedric played with feverish intensity. His skills had not left him, and he was really in the zone. The cards favored him as well. Lady Luck had her hands down his pants. Pretty soon, he had racked up ten thousand dollars of the casino’s money. Only a drop toward lifting his debts, but certainly the best-paying babysitting gig he had ever had.

  Cedric left the casino and squirted the funds to his account. No one would ever be the wiser.

  He was opening a second celebratory beer when the police arrived.

  “Cedric Swann, we have a warrant for your arrest. Please come with us.”

  “But—but I didn’t do anything—”

  “The Holland-Nancarrow freethinker swears otherwise.”

  On the big wallscreen appeared the facial of the house’s freethinker: an image of ex-President Streisand. “That’s the man, officers.”

  The house’s freethinker! But who would set a freethinker to monitor legitimate transactions originating in-house?

  Paranoid parents, obviously.

  Who the hell could think as deviously as a breeder?

  * * * *

  Cedric’s possessions now amounted to a single scuffed biomer suitcase of clothing and his Palimpsest. Cedric and his suitcase called a single room in a flophouse in the Mission District their home. The flophouse was a rhizome-diatom hybrid, taking form as a soil-rooted silicaceous warren of chambers, threaded with arteries and nerves that served in place of utilities, all grown in place on a large lot where several older structures had stood until a terrorist attack demolished them. The site had been officially decontaminated, but Cedric wasn’t sure he believed that. Why had no one snapped up the valuable midtown real estate, leaving the lot for such a low-rent usage? In any case, Cedric felt like a bacteria living inside a sponge.

  He supposed that such a lowly status was merely consonant with society’s regard for him, after his latest fuckup.

  Instead of meeting Caresse at a restaurant as they had planned, Cedric met her on the night of his arrest at the jailhouse where he had been taken by the cops. She came to bail him out, and he accepted her charity wordlessly, realizing there was nothing he could say to exculpate himself. He had been caught red-handed while submitting to his implacable vice.

  Caresse had been silent also, except for formalities with the police. Cedric fully expected her to explode with anger and recriminations when he got into her car. But the calm disdain she unloaded on him was even more painful.

  “You obviously have no regard for yourself, and none for me. I’ve tried to be understanding, Cedric, really, I have. I don’t think any woman could have cut you more slack, or tried harder to help you reform. But this is the absolute end. I’ve put up your bail money so that you could be free to plan your defense—as if you have any—and so that you wouldn’t have to be humiliated by being in prison. But that’s the end of the road for you and me. I can’t have anything else to do with you in the future. Whatever existed between us is gone, thanks to your weak-willed selfishness.”

  Cedric looked imploringly at Caresse’s beautiful profile with its gracefully sculpted jawline. She did not turn to spare him a glance, but kept her eyes resolutely on the busy midnight city street. He knew then that he had truly lost her forever, realized he had never fully appreciated her love. But he had neither the energy nor hope to contest her death sentence on their relationship.

  “I’m sorry, Caresse. I never meant to hurt you. Can you drop me off at my place?”

  “Of course. I’ve got just enough time before my yoga class.”

  The Holland-Nancarrows declined to press for any jail-time for Cedric, considering that they had not actually lost any money, nor had their precious children been harmed by the bad man. (The casino took back Cedric’s winnings on the basis of identity misrepresentation by the player.) But that did not stop the judge hearing Cedric’s case from imposing on Cedric a huge fine and five years’ probation. Cedric’s own court-appointed freethinker lawyer had not been receptive to the notion of an appeal.

  Worst of all the repercussions of his crime, however, was that Cedric was double black-flagged, denied employment even as a nanny.

  He had no choice but to go on welfare.

  The welfare rolls of the sleeplessly booming USA economy had been pared to historic lows. Only the most vocationally intransigent or helpless indigents lived off the government dole.

  And now Cedric was one of this caste. Unclean. Unseen.

  And a sleeper as well. A living atavism.

  The dole didn’t cover a-som drugs. Not even the fourth-generation, expired-shelf-date stuff shipped to Third World countries.

  Being a sleeper was hell. It wasn’t that sleepers were persecuted against, legally or in a covert manner. Nor were they held in contempt. No, sleepers were just simply ignored by the unsleeping. They were deemed irrelevant because they couldn’t keep up. They were living their lives a third slower than the general populace. After a night’s unconsciousness, a sleeper would awake to discover that he had a new congressional representative, or that the clothes he had worn yesterday were outmoded. New buzzwords were minted while he slept, new celebrities crowned, new political crises defused. The changes were not always so radical, but even on a slow Tuesday night they were incremental. Day by day, sleepers fell further and further behind the wavefront of the culture, until at last they were living fossils.

  Cedric could hardly believe that such was now his fate.

  After his sentencing and his removal to the flophouse, once he had consumed the last of his a-som scrip, Cedric had managed to stay desperately awake for a little over forty-eight hours, thanks to massive coffee intake, some Mexican amphetamines purchased on a street corner, and a cheap kibe massage that left him reeking of machine lubricant from a leaky gasket on the kibe.

  The ancient sensations flooding his mind and body exerted at first a kind of grim and perve
rse fascination. The whole experience was like watching the tide reclaim a sand castle. Sitting in his tiny room, on an actual bed, he monitored his helpless degeneration. His concentration wavered and faded, his limbs grew unwieldy, his speech confused. Despite raging against his loss, Cedric ultimately had no choice but to succumb.

  And then he dreamed.

  He had forgotten dreaming, the nightly activity of his childhood.

  Forgotten that some dreams were nightmares.

  He awoke from that initial sleep shaking and drenched with sweat, the night terrors mercifully fading from memory. He retained only vague images of teeth and crushing weights, falling through space and scrabbling for handholds.

  Cedric got up from bed, dressed and went out into the streets.

  Kibes running errands or patrolling for lawbreakers mingled with the many humans. The Mission District was not populated entirely by charity-case sleepers. Many of the people on the street were citizens in fine standing. Here was a colorful clique of tawny Polynesian immigrants, adapting to life away from their sea-swamped island homes. Their happy, bright-eyed faces seemed to mock him. From Cedric’s new vantage point down in the underbelly of the a-som society, everyone looked wired and jazzed up, restlessly active, spinning their wheels in a perpetual drag race toward an ever-receding finish line.

  But having this vision didn’t mean he still wouldn’t rejoin his ex-peers in a second.

  Cedric was convinced that everyone could smell the sleep-stench rising from him, spot his saggy eyelids from a block away. Eating in a cheap diner that allowed him to stretch his monthly money as far as possible, Cedric resolved to kill himself rather than go on like this.

  But he didn’t. In a week, a month, he re-learned how to function with a third of his life stolen by sleep, and became resigned to an indefinitely prolonged future of this vapid existence.