“Come on,” Roland said.
“All right, tell me. Would you go back to the illusion of so-called privacy laws, which only gave the rich and powerful a monopoly on secrecy?”
Crat glowered. “Maybe. At least when they had a … monopoly, they weren’t so dumpit rude! People could at least pretend they were being left alone.”
Remi nodded, impressed with Crat’s brief eloquence. “There’s something to that. Who was it said life’s just an illusion, anyway?”
The gremper smiled and answered dryly. “Only every transcendental philosopher in history.”
Remi lifted his shoulders. “Oh, yeah, him. It was on the tip of my tongue.”
The old man burst out laughing and slapped Remi on the knee. In an odd way, Remi felt warmed by the gesture, as if it didn’t matter that they disagreed in countless ways or that a gap of half a century yawned between them.
“Damn,” the gremper said. “I wish I could take you back to those days. The guys in my outfit … the guys would’ve liked you. We could’ve shown you some times.”
To his amazement, Remi believed him. After a momentary pause, he asked, “Tell us … tell us about the guys.”
The three of them deliberated later, some distance from the tree, as dusk shadows began stretching across the park. Of course the old man left his big-ear unplugged while they passed judgment. He looked up when they returned to squat before him.
“We decided on a penalty for the way you invaded our privacy,” Roland said, speaking for all.
“I’ll accept your justice, sirs,” he said, inclining his head.
Even Crat grinned as Roland passed sentence. “You gotta come back here again next week, same time, and tell us more about the war.”
The old man nodded—in acceptance and obvious pleasure. “My name is Joseph,” he said, holding out his hand. “And I’ll be here.”
Over the next few weeks he kept his promise. Joseph told them tales they had never imagined, even after watching a thousand hypervideos. About climbing the steep flanks of the Pennine Alps, for instance, and then the Bernese Oberland—slogging through gas and bugs and radioactive mud. He described digging out booby traps nearly every meter of the way, and prying out the bankers’ mercenaries every ten or so. And he told them of his comrades, dying beside him, choking in their own sputum as they coughed their lungs out, still begging to be allowed to press on though, to help bring the Last War to an end.
He told them about the fall of Berne and the last gasp of the Gnomes, whose threat to “take the world down” with them turned out to be backed by three hundred cobalt-thorium bombs … which were defused only when Swiss draftees finally turned their rifles on their own officers and emerged from their shattered warrens, hands high over their heads, into a new day.
As spring headed toward summer, Joseph commiserated over the futility of high school, even under a “new education plan” that forced on students lots of supposedly “practical” information, but never did a guy any good anyway. He held them transfixed talking about the way girls used to be, back before they were taught all that modern crap about psychology and “sexual choice criteria.”
“Boy crazy, that’s what they were, my young tomodachis. No girlie wanted to be caught for even a minute without a boyfriend. It was where they got their sense of worth, see? Their alpha to omega. They’d do anything for you, believe most anything you said, so long as you promised you loved ’em.”
Remi suspected Joseph was exaggerating. But that didn’t matter. Even if it was all a load of bull semen, it was great bull semen. For the first time in his life, he contemplated the prospect of getting older—actually living beyond twenty-five—with anything but a vague sense of horror. The idea of someday being like Joseph didn’t seem so bad … as long as it took a long time happening, and providing he got to do as much as Joseph had along the way.
It was the profession of soldiering that fascinated Roland. Its camaradarie and traditions. Crat loved hearing about faraway places and escape from the tight strictures of urban life.
But as for Remi, he felt he was getting something more … the beginnings of a trust in time.
Joseph was a great source of practical advice, too—subtle verbal put-downs nobody here in Indiana had heard in years, but which would burrow like smart bombs dropped among the gang’s foes, only to blow up minutes, even hours, later with devastating effect. One day they met the same group of Ra Boys in the park and left them all scratching their heads in confusion, reluctant even to think of tackling Settlers anytime soon.
Roland talked about joining the Guard, maybe trying for one of the peacekeeping units.
Remi began tapping history texts from the Net.
Even Crat seemed to grow more reflective, as if every time he was about to lose his temper, he’d stop and think what Joseph would say.
No one worried overmuch when Joseph failed to show up one Saturday. On the second unexplained absence though, Remi and the others grew concerned. At home, sitting at his desk comp, Remi wrote a quick ferret program and sent it into the Net.
The ferret returned two seconds later with the old man’s obituary.
The mulching ceremony was peaceful. A few detached-looking adult grandchildren showed up, looking eager to be elsewhere. If they had been the sort to cry, Remi, Roland, and Crat would have been the only ones shedding tears.
Still, he had been old. “If any man’s led a full life, it was me,” Joseph once said. And Remi believed him.
I only hope I do half as well he thought.
So it came as a shot from the sky when Remi answered the message light on his home comp one evening, and found logged there a terse note from Roland.
OUR NAMES LISTED IN PROGRAM GUIDE FOR A NET SHOW …
“Right!” Remi laughed. The law said whenever anyone was depicted, anywhere in the Net, it had to go into the listings. That made each weekly worldwide directory bigger than all the world’s libraries before 1910.
“Probably some Quayle High senior’s doing a Net version of the yearbook …”
But his laughter trailed off as he read the rest.
IT’S ON A REMINISCENCE DATABASE FOR WAR VETS. AND GUESS WHO’S LISTED AS AUTHOR …
Remi read the name and felt cold.
Now, don’t jump to conclusions, he told himself. He might’ve just mentioned us … a nice note about getting to know three young guys before he died.
But his heart raced as he sought the correct Net address, sifting through layer after layer, from general to specific to superspecified, until at last he arrived at the file, dated less than a month ago.
THE REMEMBRANCES OF JOSEPH MOYERS: EPILOGUE: MY LAST WEEKS—ENCOUNTERS WITH THREE CONFUSED YOUNG MEN.
This was followed by full sight and sound, plus narration, beginning on that afternoon when they had met and held impromptu court where an elm tree shaded them from the glaring sky.
Perhaps someone neutral would have called the account compassionate, friendly. Someone neutral might even have described Joseph’s commentary as warm and loving.
But Remi wasn’t neutral. He watched, horrified, as his image, Roland’s, and Crat’s were depicted in turn, talking about private things, things spoken as if to a confessor, but picked up anyway by some hidden, hi-fidelity camera.
He listened, numbed, as Joseph’s editorial voice described the youths who shared his final weeks.
“… had I the heart to tell them they were never going to Patagonia or Antarctica? That the New Lands are reserved for refugees from catastrophe nations? And even so there isn’t enough thawed tundra to go around?
“These poor boys dream of emigrating to some promised land, but Indiana is their destiny, now and tomorrow …”
I knew that, Remi thought, bitterly. But did you have to tell the world I was dumb enough to have a dream? Dumpit, Joseph! Did you have to bare it all to everybody?
A neutral party might have reassured Remi. The old man hadn’t told very many people. It was in the nature o
f the Net, that vast ocean of information, that most published missives were read by only one or two others besides the author himself. Maybe one percent were accessed by a hundred or more. And fewer than one piece in ten thousand ever had enough viewers, worldwide, to fill even a good size meeting hall.
Perhaps all that had gone through Joseph’s mind when he made this last testament … that it would be seen by only a few old men like himself and never come to his young friends’ attention. Perhaps he never understood how far ferret-tech had come, or that others, who had grown up with the system, might use the directories better than he.
Remi knew it wasn’t very likely Joseph’s memoirs would work their way up, through good reviews and word of mouth, to best-seller status. But that hardly mattered. It could happen. For all the old man knew, Remi’s nonchalant ramblings and dreams could be sifted by a million voyeurs or more!
“Why, Joseph?” he asked, hoarsely. “Why?”
Then another face came on screen. Delicate features framed in white. It was a voice Remi had managed to purge from memory, until now.
“I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t be interested in a man so egotistical as to insist, in a world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately needed. If you haven’t done the right thing, can you point to some great accomplishment or virtue …?”
Remi screamed as he threw the unit through his bedroom window.
Strangely, Roland and Crat didn’t seem to grasp what he was so upset about. Perhaps, for all their stylish talk, they didn’t really understand privacy. Not really.
They worried, though, over his listlessness and learned not to speak of Joseph when each of them received small royalty checks in their accounts, for their parts in what was fast becoming a small-time social-documentary classic. They spent their shares on their diverging interests, while Remi took his out in cash and gave it to the next NorAChuGa he met … for the Trillion Trees.
And so there came a day when he encountered, once again, a small band of Ra Boys in the park, this time without his friends, without any company but his loneliness.
This time the odds mattered not at all. He tore them up, top to bottom, using sarcasm like a slug rifle, assaulting them as he might have taken on Gnome mercenaries, had he been born in a time when there was honorable work for brave men to do and an evil that could be grappled with.
To the Ra Boys’ amazement it was he who demanded to exchange net codes. It was he who challenged them to a rendezvous.
By the time Remi actually met them later, in the darkness behind the monorail tracks, however, they’d done their own net research, and understood.
Understanding made their greeting solemn, respectful. Their champion exchanged bows with Remi across the makeshift arena, and even held back for a while, letting his clumsy opponent draw honorable blood before it was time at last to end it. Then, dutifully, one tribesman to another, he gave Remi what he desired most in the world.
For weeks afterward, then, the Ra Boys spoke his name in honor under the Sun.
The Sun, they said, was where at last he had settled.
The Sun was the final home of warriors.
Living species adapt when individuals stumble onto new ways of doing things and pass on those new ways to their descendants. This is generally a slow process. Sometimes, however, a species accidentally opens a door to a whole new mode of existence, and then it flourishes, pushes aside its competition, and brings on many changes.
Sometimes those changes benefit more than just itself.
In the beginning, the Earth’s atmosphere contained copious amounts of nitrogen, but not in a form living things could easily turn to protein. Soon however, an early bacterium hit on the right combination of chemical tricks—enabling it to “fix” nitrogen straight from the air. The advantage was profound, and that bacterium’s descendants proliferated. But other species profited too. Some plants grew tiny knobs on their roots, to shelter and succor the inventive microbes, and in return they received the boon of natural fertilizer.
In a similar way, once upon a time, the ancestor of all grasses fell upon a way to cover soil like a carpet, with tough, fibrous leaves that soak up nearly every ray of sunlight. Other plants were driven back by an onslaught of grasses, some even to extinction. But for certain animals-—those making the right counter-adaptations—the advent of grass opened opportunities. Ungulates, with multiple stomachs and the knack of chewing cud, could graze on the tough stems and so spread onto uplands and plains formerly barren of much animal life.
So, too, when flowering plants arrived some ferns had to retire, but the victors shared their new prosperity with all the crawling, flying, creeping things that came to feed on nectar and pollinate them. Into newborn niches spread a multitude of novel forms … insects, birds, mammals …
Of course, sometimes a species’ invention only benefited itself. Goats developed an ability to eat almost anything, right down to the roots. Goats proliferated. Deserts spread behind them.
Then another creature appeared, one whose originality was unprecedented. Its numbers grew. And in its wake some other types did flourish. The common cat and dog. The rat. Starlings and pigeons. And the cockroach. Meanwhile, opportunity grew sparse for those less able to share the vast new niches—huge expanses of plowed fields and mowed lawns, streets and parking lots …
The coming of the grasses had left its mark indelibly on the history of the world.
So would the Age of Asphalt and Concrete.
• HOLOSPHERE
Jen Wolling found the Ndebele Rites of Gaia charming. The canton’s Kuwenezi Science Collective pulled out all the stops, sparing nothing to put on a show of their piety. To watch the lavish torchlight celebration under a midnight moon, one might imagine they were commemorating Earth Day itself, and not just a going-away party for one old woman they had known barely a fortnight.
Dancers in traditional costumes capered and whirled before the dignitaries’ dais, stamping bare feet on the beaten ground to the tempo of pounding drums. Feathered anklets flapped like agitated captive birds. Spears thudded on shields as men in bright loincloths leaped in apparent defiance of gravity. Women in colorful dashikis waved bound sheaves of wheat, specially grown in hothouses for this out-of-season observance.
Jen appreciated the dancers’ lithe beauty, taut and powerful as any stallion’s. Perspiration flew in droplets or smeared to coat their dark brown bodies in a gleaming, athletic sheen. Their rhythm and power were mighty, exultory, and marvelously sexual, which brought a smile to Jen’s lips. Although tonight’s purpose was to venerate a gentle metaphoric goddess, the choreography had been co-opted from much older rites having to do with fertility and violence.
“It’s far, far better than in the days of neocolonialism,” the tall ark director said to her. Sitting cross-legged to her left, he had to lean close to be heard over the percussive cadence. “Back then, the Ndebele and other tribes maintained troupes of professional dancers to pander to tourists. But these young men and women practice in their spare time simply for the love of it. Few outsiders ever get to see this now.”
Jen admired the way the torchlight glistened on Director Mugabe’s brow, his tight-coiled hair. “I’m honored,” she said, crossing her arms over her heart and giving a shallow bow. He grinned and returned the gesture. Side by side, they watched rows of young “warriors” take terrific risks, exchanging whirling spears to the delight of clapping women and children.
Venerable and ancient this dance might be, but there was no correlation here with the primitive. Jen had just spent two weeks consulting with Kuwenezi’s experts, learning all about Ndebele Canton’s plans for new animal breeds better able to endure the challenging and ever-changing environment of southern Africa. They, in turn, had listened attentively to her own ideas about macroecological management. After all, Jen had virtually invented the field.
By now of course, it had accumulated all the trappings of a maturing technology, with enough details to leave a solitary dr
eamer-theoretician like her far behind. Specific analyses she left to younger, quicker minds these days.
Still, she occasionally managed to surprise them all. If Jen ever ceased being able to shock people, it would be time to give up this body’s brief manifestation and feed her meager store of phosphorus back into the Mother’s great mulch pile.
She recalled the expression on that fellow B’Keli’s face when, during her third and final lecture, she had begun talking about … specially designed mammalian chimeras … incorporating camels’ kidneys … birds’ lungs … bear marrow … chimps’ tendon linkages … Even Director Mugabe, who claimed to have read everything she’d written, was staring glassy-eyed by the end of her talk. Her conclusion about … the rough love of viruses … seemed to have been too much even for him.
When the house lights had come on, she was greeted with stunned silence from the packed crowd of brown faces. There was, at first, only one questioner—a very young man whose northern, Yoruba features stood out amid the crowd of Southern Bantu. The boy’s arms and face were bandaged, but he showed no outward sign of pain. All through the talk he had sat quietly in the front row, gently stroking a small baboon and her infant. When Jen called on him, he lowered his hand and spoke with a completely stunning Canadian accent, of all things.
“Doctor … are you sayin’ that—that people might someday be as strong as chimpanzees? Or be able to sleep through winter, like bears?”
Jen noticed indulgent smiles among the audience when the boy spoke, though Mugabe’s expression was one of mixed relief and angst. Anxiety that such an untutored member of their community had been the only one to offer the courtesy of a question. Relief that someone had done so in time.
“Yes. Exactly,” she had replied. “We have the entire human genome fully catalogued. And many other higher mammals. Why not use that knowledge to improve ourselves?
“Now I want to make clear I’m talking about genetic improvement here, and there are limits to how far one can go in that direction. We’re already by far the most plastic of animals, the most adaptable to environmental influences. The real core of any self-improvement campaign must remain in the areas of education and child-rearing and the new psychology, to bring up a generation of saner, more decent people.