by Barnes, John
The notes say the Catholic Workers were pretty good to me, but I don’t really believe it. I’ve been around too many handout windows to believe anybody gives you decent treatment unless they’re going to make cash off you. It isn’t the poor they buy off, but their own oversensitive consciences. Probably I was just too young to notice them being condescending.
The maglev arrives almost silently, even with my outside microphones amped up. A shimmer of white above the trough-shaped metal track, far off in the distance. Something flashes bright white in the sun. Breaking out of the distant hills, there it is, slithering to the station at high speed. A voice in my earphones says, “Please acknowledge that you are the passenger who requested a train stop. You have twenty seconds to acknowledge. Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen … “
“I acknowledge,” I said.
“Number of people in your party?”
“One.”
“Number of bags you are carrying, and will you need extra time for loading?”
“One shoulder bag,” I said, “and once I’m aboard you can start again.”
“Thank you, sir. Please stay behind the blue line until the train comes to a complete stop.”
I walk up to where a blue line appears on the ground, as if it had been painted there very precisely. The train keeps coming. I take a moment to kneel and lift a pebble from the blue line. It turns red-brown as soon as I pick it up; I throw another pebble onto the line and see it turn blue instantly.
Oh, well, I wasn’t planning to work as an engineer this trip around. I only need to know what things do, not how they do it.
The train comes to a stop with a low hiss, making less noise than the brakes on some cars I’ve owned. It’s huge — at least forty feet wide by a hundred long. At first, coming in at such speed, it looked pure white, but now I see it’s smeared with fine dust.
One of the last cars stops in front of me, and the whole train sinks a few inches as the pedestals settle silently onto the track. “You may board now. Please board quickly. Thank you,” the voice of the train says in my ears.
I walk forward and enter the car’s airlock; the door snugs tight behind me. There’s a thud I feel through my feet as the train shoots air into the lock, and then the inner door opens. I walk through, unlocking and lifting my helmet.
My cabin’s the third one on the right. It’s supposed to be for up to four people, so it has two fold-down beds, a long bench seat attached to the wall facing the windows, a small washstand, shower, and toilet, and a table that folds into the wall. I pull down the table and unfold the seats.
Red Sands City is a few hundred kilometers away, I would judge, since it takes something more than an hour to get there. The maglev pulls up inside the enclosure, so I won’t need the pressure suit there; I strip the suit off, shower, and dress, which kills half an hour of the journey.
By the time that I’m clean and dressed, we are passing a lot of “ranches” — the word doesn’t mean exactly what it would on Earth, because these people don’t raise things to sell, they tend the genetically tailored wildlife that is slowly populating Mars. They get a salary for that.
My memory twinges. On Earth, for most of my life, “ranchers” were guys who looked after whichever buffalo happened to wander across their land. The older meaning’s nearly gone except in books and movies.
I order soup and a sandwich. About the time I toss the napkin aside and drop the tray into the return slot, the enclosure of Red Sands City is dancing in the heat rising from the plain ahead. I straighten things up, get the pressure suit into its bag, and wait for the warning bell that means we’re decelerating into the city. I get off onto a wide platform, no different from any other train platform, looking out over the treetops inside the enclosure, from which hard white spires and steeples occasionally poke up, to the blackened sky, much of the harsh daylight screened out, where the city enclosure arches.
4.
“It took us a long time to find you,” she explained. “By the time we did you were about ready to transit again.”
“Transit?”
“The age reversal thing. So anyway, we just watched you to see what you set up, and here we were, waiting for you. You have a heap of back pay and interest coming.”
“I’ll say.” I took a long sip of coffee and a bite of doughnut. The first time I had come out of transit starving and broke, this time I was rich. At least if I took this deal.
I had awakened facing the blonde woman I had met under the bridge years before. She looked maybe five years older than she had then, and I looked five years younger. Aging at different times and in different directions. Confusing.
Now, a week after waking up, here I was, spending May 2017 in a big, comfortable hotel room, eating like an ox on an unlimited room-service tab. The Organization had found me again.
While I was unconscious they had moved me here and done the coverage on “Brandon Smith,” the new i.d. I had established for myself, so that the i.d. was a lot more airtight than what I’d done.
I still had not learned this woman’s name. From what I could read of my past experiences in the pile of letters, still photos, holos, and scrap paper, I had never known her name. Apparently I had thought she was “the bitch who ran off with everything I owned,” except when I thought it was somebody named Peter, except when I thought it was the Organization itself.
“Not that I don’t want to work for the Organization,” I said. “I’m confused because looking me up to give me the money that was owed to me, and then taking care of me during recovery, doesn’t sound a lot like the Organization in my notes, or what I remember from back when we were the KGB. I mean, we used to be the KGB, but here you are acting like the Salvation Army.”
She smiled. “We haven’t been the KGB for a long time, and we absorbed a bunch of other outfits, so we don’t really have a single origin anymore. When your home country joined the Pope’s Global Concord in 2008, we picked up a lot of good people, sometimes whole offices, from several of their agencies. In other places there were existing groups that merged with us.”
“Like the Mafia?”
“Yes, and national liberation movements that had lost their mass base but not their cadres and weapons. Smugglers with no borders. Mercenaries with no rogue governments to hire them. The world was full of people who still had means but no ends, Joshua — I guess we should practice calling you Brandon.”
I was sure she had pretended to slip and use my real name so that it would seem more like we were old friends. Or had I — seen her with her head shaved, in coveralls — I wasn’t sure what that memory was.
“So I know you can’t prove that I should trust you, but make me a case,” I said.
She fluffed up her thick blonde hair. Who’d have thought that style would keep coming back? “All right, I’ll tell you the whole story. It happens I was there for a lot of it, so you can believe me — but if you’d rather not, well … “
“Let’s hear it.”
Something flew by the window — a big private car, somebody with a license to fly inside Manhattan Dome, I figured — and I glanced sideways at it, watching it descend to land on the roof of the old World Trade Center, a kilometer below. When I looked up, the blonde woman was staring off into space, toward the translucent wall of the Dome some miles away. Two thirds of the way up one of the central pillars, we could see a long way in all directions, but since vags tended to cluster by the dome wall, people looking out tended to stare into the distance, the way you’d put on a thousand-yard stare when you passed a beggar on the street, when I was a kid.
“Well,” she said, “the Organization, capitalized, works a lot like any other organization, not capitalized. So we favored seniority, and like the military outfits, we tended to value combat time, and of course people with more energy and vigor … so longtimers, people like you and I tended to do better.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed, “except that our experience all goes away every fifteen years.”
�
��Not all of it. We have each other. We can be each other’s memories. Do you remember a quiet little guy that traveled under the name Peter?”
“I have notes about him in my own records.” As you goddamn well know.
“Well, he made station chief for Paris, right when the old people up at the top were getting to be afraid of us. They were looting accounts and erasing i.d.‘s while longtimers transited, hoping to slowly eliminate us. They thought if they killed us it would leave more trail than if we just vanished, the way a lot of agents were vanishing voluntarily and going to work for the Reconstruction.” She sighed, turned her head, stretched like a yawning kitten — sexy as all shit and intended to be. “So … Peter and a few others he could find made their move. Peter pulled a coup about two years after you were cut loose. And then we started the long, difficult process of finding all the other longtimers who had been thrown away.”
“It just went from ‘them’ to ‘we’ ” I pointed out. “You’re with the longtimers?”
“Oh, pos-def.” Kidslang. It made sense for her to use it — she must be past fifty but she was clearly vain and playing at being young. “To the lim.”
Trying to needle her, I asked, “Uh, just how old are you right now?”
She grinned. “Chronologically I’m fifty-eight. Just went through another transition two years ago. Not bad, hunh?”
“Not bad at all. So the longtimers are in charge now?”
“Pos-def, and we’re slowly adding more of us, both by recruiting new young people and by finding our lost ones. We want every single longtimer to come in with us, and we’re prepared to offer a lot.”
“This is probably stupid of me to ask,” I said, “but just what happens if you get one that won’t come in for any reason at all?”
“I don’t know.”
“It hasn’t happened?”
Shrug. “It has. When it does I report it and go on my way.”
“The old Organization, the one I knew, would have killed them,” I said. I had about made my mind up to throw in with them, but I wanted to know the worst thing they might do.
She nodded. “No question. The old Organization would. And I don’t suppose you remember Peter, but I worked a couple cases with him, and I shudder when I think about things he did. He didn’t get to be a longtimer till he was past forty, so he spent a lot of time in the old KGB, back before it was the Organization. I can’t imagine he’s changed that much. But I don’t really know. What they tell me, and tell me to tell you, is that the last thing they want to do is draw attention to their existence, and so the next best thing to a longtimer that works for them is a longtimer who goes quietly through life without raising any eyebrows. Mysterious murders of people who have only recently established i.d.‘s would trigger all kinds of investigation. We don’t want that. So supposedly we leave them alone, keep tabs on them, wait fifteen years or so, and try again when they’re waking up again.”
I thought about that. It might even be true. When the truth works just as well as a lie, sometimes people tell you the truth. It made me wonder — “Did you contact me after my last transit, and did I say no?”
“Everyone asks that. No, we didn’t find you until about a year and a half before this transit. By that time you were working construction on Supra Tokyo, and we don’t have many ins up there. We were trying to figure out how to get to you when you conveniently came back down to Singapore and established a new i.d. — damn good job for working all by yourself, by the way, the trick with setting up credit card records for your fake father was brilliant. We only cracked it because we were watching you. We figured we owed you a decent room, at least, so we moved you here — and here we are.”
I would never know if that story was false, or true. Just one more thing to take on faith. You wake up ten years older, with a few scraps of evidence for a thirty-year life you don’t remember, and here you are. Over and over, if this was all to be believed.
She stayed the night. I suppose it was standard practice; she told me that I was a lot better in bed than I’d been under a bridge. I had only remembered that we’d talked.
I took the job.
Two weeks later, early in the morning, I was on a highspeed diskster to Atlanta Dome. First-class compartment. The disksters were new — I didn’t remember them, but I might never have ridden one, since I had mostly been up at Supra Tokyo for a couple of years.
A diskster was an electrostatic aircraft that took advantage of ground effect, and looked a lot like a flying saucer.
The little MAM power plant in them — about the size of the engine in my old RX-7 — could put out more power than all the engines of three 747s, and the radar and AI pilot let the diskster move along at close to 300 mph on the old freeways, since it could dodge obstructions faster than any human driver, run over river surfaces, fly short distances, and at last resort brush things like deer aside. They were a great ride — the kind of luxury that had last existed on the old ocean liners.
As we cruised out the 57th Street Door (I turned around like any tourist to gawk at the five-story-high door rolling back down like the garage doors of my childhood) and across the river into Weehawken Ruin, I saw a flash off to the side. I turned to look and saw men running for cover. A moment later, a rocket, probably out of a patrolling helicopter, had blasted the place where their mortar was set up. The diskster, meanwhile, stepped sideways hard, sloshing the coffee on my tray and making the tray itself slide along the polished wood table, so that I had to catch it. I didn’t see the shell splash — I think it landed behind us.
I muttered “Nice shot, guys,” and went back to my breakfast. Vags were making the best efforts they could, which wasn’t much.
I sat back to enjoy the ride. At first we ran down the Hudson, close to the Jersey side to avoid the rougher water out in the bay, but shortly we were rounding the Statue of Liberty, what was left of her after the blast that had hit Jersey City just after the war — no one ever seemed to settle whether a smuggled bomb, a delayed long-range cruise missile, or just a whoopsie with a piece of surplus hardware had converted Miss Liberty into twentieth-century art. You could tell what the shape was supposed to be, but rusting steel stuck out here and there, the surface was strangely mottled where parts had melted and run, and the skeleton had twisted hard as the statue lost its torch, so that now it looked more like she was doing a dance of mourning over New Jersey.
We zipped up the earth ramp onto the old Jersey Turnpike and we were on our way south. I poured more coffee from the little pot they provided, and settled back to read with my new toy, a brand-new Reconstruction Standard Issue Werp.
My previous life, apparently, I’d concentrated on having fun. I had gotten on to Reconstruction work early, and adopted a daughter for some reason I couldn’t fathom, though it looked like we’d been out of touch for a while. She was listed as Mrs. Joe Schwartz, Supra Berlin, though the last note I had from her, four years before, said she was planning to get a divorce because apparently Schwartz had decided to accept a permanent post on the Flying Dutchman, and besides she’d found “a new guy, a really nice guy, I mean Joe’s kind and he works hard but this is so different from anything I’ve known.”
She’d had to give up her visiting rights to her kid, who I’d never seen. Reading between the lines, it sounded like the nice guy was a plutock, and I figured I’d done a good job of raising Alice. Given a choice between a five-year-old son and a rich husband, she’d made the choice that made sense. That was sort of a relief since I remembered her as kind of sentimental.
With an inward groan I turned back to review the material for my mission. I already knew it thoroughly but I kept hoping it would look better. The job was so bizarre — an Organization guy in charge of getting a bunch of libertarian bandits to join a new religion — that the better I understood it, the more confusing it got.
The reason we’d gotten into this business was that Reconstruction was going too far too fast. We had no problem with rich people — they make be
tter customers or better victims, take your pick. But the refugee camps and the indocoms, where our power base was, were shrinking rapidly as the main economy began to absorb people faster and faster, and we were having very little luck with keeping our low-level people once they moved into the domes or up to the supras.
And we couldn’t seem to get a toehold outside Earth orbit. There’d been a genuine lynching at Ceres Base the year before. The locals had pushed nine of our organizers naked out the airlock. Worse still, our reprisal strike against EuroNihon had been caught before it accomplished anything and the whole team was now in jail.
Behind the whole disaster that Reconstruction was turning into was PJP, Pope Paul John Paul. He’d gotten his prestige by brokering the peace settlement that ended the Eurowar, which is to say, he’d started out by costing us plenty. But the Ecucatholic Movement he had launched at the same time was the kicker.
The policy documents frankly admitted the Organization had misread Ecucatholicism. They had thought it was mere PR, or a recruiting method. By the time the Organization learned how much more it was, it was too late for shooting the Pope to solve the problem.
By canonizing practically every Protestant leader since the Reformation, and then establishing the principle of “surface forms and deep forms,” whatever that was (apparently a lot of theologians were turning out book after book explaining it), PJP had somehow gotten millions of Protestants to come back under the Roman umbrella. Realizing that there was now a Saint Brigham Young and a Saint Mary Baker Eddy gave me an idea of how far things had gone.
