The city, such as it was, didn’t dwindle off into suburbs. It’s an oasis, and where the green stopped, the houses stopped.
I drove very cautiously at first. My car in LA is restricted to autopilot, and it had been several years since I was last behind a steering wheel. A little exhilarating.
After about thirty kilometers, the road suddenly got very rough. Braz suggested that we’d left the state of Console Verde and had entered Pretorocha, whose tax base wouldn’t pay for a shovel. I gave the wheel to him after a slow hour, when we got to the first pile of tailings. Time to take the first twenty pills.
I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew the unsupervised use of the aqualethe remedy was discouraged, because some people had extreme reactions. I’d given Braz an emergency poke of sedative to administer to me if I really lost control.
Rubble and craters. Black grit over everything. Building ruins that hadn’t weathered much; this place didn’t have much weather. Hot and dry in the summer, slightly less hot and more dry in the winter. We drove around and around and absolutely nothing happened. After two hours, the minimum wait, I swallowed another twenty.
Pretorocha was where they said I’d lost my finger, and it was where the most Confederación casualties had been recorded. Was it possible that the drug just didn’t work on me?
What was more likely, if I properly understood the literature, was one of two things: one, the place had changed so much that my recovering memory didn’t pick up any specifics; two, that I’d never actually been here.
That second didn’t seem possible. I’d left a finger here, and the Confederación verified that; it had been paying for the lost digit for thirty years.
The first explanation? Pictures of the battle looked about as bleak as this blasted landscape. Maybe I was missing something basic, like a smell or the summer heat. But the literature said the drug required visual stimuli.
“Maybe it doesn’t work as well on some as on others,” Braz said. “Or maybe you got a bad batch. How long do we keep driving around?”
I had six tubes of pills left. The drug was in my system for sure: cold sweat, shortness of breath, ocular pressure. “Hell, I guess we’ve seen enough. Take a pee break and head back.”
Standing by the side of the road there, under the low hot sun, urinating into black ash, somehow I knew for certain that I’d never been there before. A hellish place like this would burn itself into your subconscious.
But aqualethe was strong. Maybe too strong for the remedy to counter.
I took the wheel for the trip back to Console Verde. The air-conditioning had only two settings, frigid and off. We agreed to turn it off and open the non-bulletproof windows to the waning heat.
There was a kind of lunar beauty to the place. That would have made an impression on me back then. When I was still a poet. An odd thing to remember. Something did happen that year to end that. Maybe I lost it with the music, with the finger.
When the road got better I let Braz take over. I was out of practice with traffic, and they drove on the wrong side of the road anyhow.
The feeling hit me when the first buildings rose up out of the rock. My throat. Not like choking; a gentler pressure, like tightening a necktie.
Everything shimmered and glowed. This was where I’d been. This side of the city.
“Braz...it’s happening. Go slow.” He pulled over to the left and I heard warning lights go click-click-click.
“You weren’t...down there at all? You were here?”
“I don’t know! Maybe. I don’t know.” It was coming on stronger and stronger. Like seeing double, but with all your body. “Get into the right lane.” It was getting hard to see, a brilliant fog. “What is that big building?”
“Doesn’t have a name,” he said. “Confederación sigil over the parking lot.”
“Go there...go there...I’m losing it, Braz.”
“Maybe you’re finding it.”
The car was fading around me, and I seemed to drift forward and up. Through the wall of the building. Down a corridor. Through a closed door. Into an office.
I was sitting there, a young me. Coal black beard, neatly trimmed. Dress uniform. All my fingers.
Most of the wall behind me was taken up by a glowing spreadsheet. I knew what it represented.
Two long tables flanked my work station. They were covered with old ledgers and folders full of paper correspondence and records.
My job was to steal the planet from its rightful owners—but not the whole planet. Just the TREO rights, Total Rare Earth Oxides.
There was not much else on the planet of any commercial interest to the Confederación. When they found a tachyon nexus, they went off in search of dysprosium nearby, necessary for getting back to where you came from, or continuing farther out. Automated probes had found a convenient source in a mercurian planet close to the nexus star Poucoyellow. But after a few thousand pioneers had staked homestead claims on Seca, someone stumbled on a mother lode of dysprosium and other rare earths in the sterile hell of Serarro.
It was the most concentrated source of dysprosium ever found, on any planet, easily a thousand times the output of Earth’s mines.
The natives knew what they had their hands on, and they were cagey. They quietly passed a law that required all mineral rights to be deeded on paper; no electronic record. For years, 78 mines sold two percent of the dysprosium they dug up, and stockpiled the rest—as much as the Confederación could muster from two dozen other planets. Once they had hoarded enough, they could absolutely corner the market.
But they only had one customer.
Routine satellite mapping gave them away; the gamma ray signature of monazite-allenite stuck out like a flag. The Confederación deduced what was going on, and trained a few people like me to go in and remedy the situation, along with enough soldiers to supply the fog of war.
While the economy was going crazy, dealing with war, I was quietly buying up small shares in the rare earth mines, through hundreds of fictitious proxies.
When we had voting control of 51 percent of the planet’s dysprosium, and thus its price, the soldiers did an about-face and went home, first stopping at the infirmary for a shot of aqualethe.
I was a problem, evidently. Aqualethe erased the memory of trauma, but I hadn’t experienced any. All I had done was push numbers around, and occasionally forge signatures.
So one day three big men wearing black hoods kicked in my door and took me to a basement somewhere. They beat me monotonously for hours, wearing thick gloves, not breaking bones or rupturing organs. I was blindfolded and handcuffed, sealed up in a universe of constant pain.
Then they took off the blindfold and handcuffs and those three men held my arm and hand while a fourth used heavy bolt-cutters to snip off the ring finger of my left hand, making sure I watched. Then they dressed the stump and gave me a shot.
I woke up approaching Earth, with medals and money and no memory. And one less finger.
~ * ~
Woke again on my bunk at the inn. Braz sitting there with a carafe of melán, what they had at the inn instead of coffee. “Are you coming to?” he said quietly. “I helped you up the stairs.” Dawn light at the window. “It was pretty bad?”
“It was ...not what I expected.” I levered myself upright and accepted a cup. “I wasn’t really a soldier. In uniform, but just a clerk. Or a con man.” I sketched out the story for him.
“So they actually chopped off your finger? I mean, beat you senseless and then snipped it off?”
I squeezed the short stump gingerly. “So the drug would work.
“I played guitar, before. So I spent a year or so working out alternative fingerings, formations, without the third finger. Didn’t really work.”
I took a sip. It was like kava, a bitter alkaloid. “So I changed careers.”
“You were going to be a singer?”
“No. Classical guitar. So I went back to univers
ity instead, pre-med and then psychology and philosophy. Got an easy doctorate in Generalist Studies. And became this modern version of the boatman, ferryman... Charon—the one who takes people to the other side.”
“So what are you going to do? With the truth.”
“Spread it around, I guess. Make people mad.”
He rocked back in his chair. “Who?”
“What do you mean? Everybody.”
“Everybody?” He shook his head. “Your story’s interesting, and your part in it is dramatic and sad, but there’s not a bit of it that would surprise anyone over the age of twenty. Everyone knows what the war was really about.
“It’s even more cynical and manipulative than I thought, but you know? That won’t make people mad. When it’s the government, especially the Confederación, people just nod and say, ‘more of the same.’”
“Same old, we say. Same old shit.”
“They settled death and damage claims generously; rebuilt the town. And it was half a lifetime ago, our lifetimes. Only the old remember, and most of them don’t care anymore.”
That shouldn’t have surprised me; I’ve been too close to it. Too close to my own loss, small compared to others’.
I sipped at the horrible stuff and put it back down. “I should do something. I can’t just sit on this.”
“But you can. Maybe you should.”
I made a dismissive gesture and he leaned forward and continued with force. “Look, Spivey. I’m not just a backsystem hick—or I am, but I’m a hick with a rusty doctorate in macroeconomics—and you’re not seeing or thinking clearly. About the war and the Confederación. Let the drugs dry out before you do something that you might regret.”
“That’s pretty dramatic.”
“Well, the situation you’re in is melodramatic! You want to go back to Earth and say you have proof that the Confederación used you to subvert the will of a planet, to the tune of more than a thousand dead and a trillion hartfords of real estate, then tortured and mutilated you in order to blank out your memory of it?”
“Well? That’s what happened.”
He got up. “You think about it for awhile. Think about the next thing that’s going to happen.” He left and closed the door quietly behind him.
I didn’t have to think too long. He was right.
Before I came to Seca, of course I searched every resource for verifiable information about the war. That there was so little should have set off an alarm in my head.
It’s a wonderful thing to be able to travel from star to star, collecting exotic memories. But you have no choice of carrier. To take your memories back to Earth, you have to rely on the Confederación.
And if those memories are unpleasant, or just inconvenient...they can fix that for you.
Over and over.
~ * ~
INTRODUCTION TO “COMPLETE SENTENCE”
MIT’s journal Technology Review asked me to write a short-short story, under a thousand words. I have a sentimental attachment to MIT—have taught there in the fall since 1983—so I would have written the story even if they hadn’t offered, let me see (counting up on fingers) exactly ten times the word rate of a science fiction magazine.
I also sent it to the experts at Writers Digest magazine, along with an entry fee, for their annual short-short story writing contest. They took my paper clip and didn’t even give it an honorable mention.
Of course I wouldn’t have included it in this collection if I shared that low opinion. I value brevity and drama. Sometimes a story does have to be long. Sometimes it should be sudden as a slap.
COMPLETE SENTENCE
T
he cell was spotless white and too bright and smelled of chlorine bleach. “So I’ve had it, is what you’re saying.” Charlie Draper sat absolutely still on the cell bunk. “I didn’t kill Maggie. You know that better than anybody.”
His lawyer nodded slowly and looked at him with no expression. She was beautiful, and that sometimes helped with a jury, though evidently not this time. “We’ve appealed, of course.” Her voice was a fraction of a second out of synch with her mouth. “It’s automatic.”
“And meaningless. I’ll be out before they open the envelope.”
“Well.” She stepped over to the small window and looked down at the sea. “We went over the pluses and minuses before you opted for virtual punishment.”
“So I serve a hundred years in one day—”
“Less than a day. Overnight.”
“—and then sometime down the pike some other jury decides I’m innocent, or at least not guilty, and then what? They give me back the hundred years I sat here?”
He was just talking, of course; he knew the answer. There might be compensation for wrongful imprisonment. A day’s worth, though, or a century? Nobody had yet been granted it; virtual sentencing was too new.
“You have to leave now, counselor,” a disembodied voice said. She nodded, opened her mouth to say something, and disappeared.
That startled him. “It’s already started?”
The door rattled open, and an unshaven trusty in an orange jumpsuit shambled in with a tray. Behind him was a beefy guard with a shotgun.
“What’s with the gun?” he said to the trusty. “This isn’t real; I can’t escape.”
“Don’t answer him,” the guard said. “You’ll wind up in solitary, too.”
“Oh, bullshit. Neither of you are real people.”
The guard stepped forward, reversed the weapon, and thumped him hard on the sternum. “Not real?” He hit the wall behind him and slid to the floor, trying to breathe, pain radiating from the center of his chest.
~ * ~
As the cell walls and Draper faded, a nurse gently wiggled the helmet until it came off her head. It was like a light bicycle helmet, white. With a warm gloved hand, she helped her sit up on the gurney.
She looked over at Draper, lying on the gurney next to hers. His black helmet was more complicated, a thick cable and lots of small wires. The same blue hospital gown as she was wearing. But he had a catheter, and there was a light black cable around his chest, hardly a restraint, held in place by a small lock with a tag she had signed.
The nurse set her white helmet down carefully on a table. “You don’t want to drive or anything for a couple of hours.” She had a sour expression, lips pursed.
“No problem. I have Autocar.”
She nodded microscopically. Rich bitch. “Take you where your things are.”
“Okay. Thank you.” As she scrunched off the gurney, the gown slid open, and she reached back to hold it closed, feeling silly. Followed the woman as she stalked through the door. “I take it you don’t approve.”
“No, ma’am. He serves less than one day for murdering his wife.”
“A, he didn’t murder her, and B, it will feel like a hundred years.”
“That’s what they say.” She turned with eyes narrowing. “They all say they didn’t do it. And they say it feels like a long time. What would you expect them to say? ‘I beat the system and was in and out in a day’? Here.”
As soon as the door clicked shut, she opened the locker and lifted out her neatly folded suit, the charcoal grey one she had appeared to be wearing in the cell a few minutes before.
~ * ~
The blow had knocked the wind out of him. By the time he got his voice back, they were gone.
The tray had a paper plate with something like cold oatmeal on it. He picked up the plastic spoon and tasted the stuff. Grits. They must have known he hated grits.
“They didn’t say anything about solitary. What, I’m going to sit here like this for a hundred years?” No answer.
He carried the plate over to the barred window. It was open to the outside. A fall of perhaps a hundred feet to an ocean surface. He could hear faint surf but, leaning forward, couldn’t see the shore, even with the cold metal bars pressing against his forehead. The air smelled of seaweed
, totally convincing.
He folded the paper plate and threw it out between the bars. The grits sprayed out and the plate dipped and twirled realistically, and fell out of sight.
He studied the waves. Were they too regular? That would expose their virtuality. He had heard that if you could convince yourself that it wasn’t real—completely convince your body that this wasn’t happening—the time might slip quickly away in meditation. Time might disappear.
But it was hard to ignore the throbbing in his chest. And there were realistic irregularities in the waves. In the trough between two waves, a line of pelicans skimmed along with careless grace.
The Best of Joe Haldeman Page 62
