file:///C|/3226%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Terry%20Bisson%20-%20Greetings.txt
"Thomas always was."
· · · · ·
That night Pam cooked pasta. Cliff brought out a bottle of wine from his own vineyard.
"It must have been Africa," he said. He showed them the article in The Economist. A new vaccine
had reduced the infant mortality rate and therefore, it was speculated, adjustments would have to
be made in the death rates in the "developed" countries.
Tom had never had a problem with this before. Neither had Cliff. America had reaped the benefits
of selective underdevelopment for hundreds of years. Now they were making up for it.
But tonight, drinking Cliff's Willamette Valley pinot noir and looking out over the golf course,
Tom found it alarming that someone else's good fortune was his bad luck. Did this mean that life
was a zero-sum game after all; and that the humanistic, liberal philosophy that had guided him and
Cliff for most of their fifty-odd years as friends, was false; based on a false premise—that the
greatest good for all and the greatest good for one were in some sort of deep, unwritten, unspoken
but unbreakable harmony? Now the world, lopsided or not, was about to spin on without him.
It was, quite literally, unimaginable.
"I think they're after the opposition," Pam was saying. "The bastards."
"We're hardly the opposition," Cliff pointed out. "In fact, you might recall we're among those who
supported the hemlock laws as a progressive move; a willingness to think and act in global terms."
"But not the Brigades," said Tom. "Not those smiling, marching fuckers with their little flags."
"What about the Resistance?" Pam asked.
"That's an urban legend," said Cliff.
"Wishful thinking," said Tom. "A token opposition at best. Look, there's no point in talking about
how to beat this. We're not kids. I'll be seventy-one in August. I've had my three score and ten."
"So has Cliff," said Pam, who was sixty-six herself. "I still say there's something fishy about
it. How many friends do we have who've gotten Greetings?"
"Guy Frakes, from the firm," said Cliff.
"Not exactly a friend. And he was almost eighty," said Pam.
"Seventy-seven," said Cliff.
"That's what he told you."
"You're not going to get that many anyway," said Cliff. "The Brigades are just a symbol, showing
our willingness to adjust the death rate rationally. Most of the quota is made up by DNRs and end-
term care reductions."
"And it's all guys," said Tom. "That was a great victory of the women's movement."
"Huh?" said Pam, showing her teeth.
"Look, it's a law of nature. All this does is put us into some sort of compliance," Tom said. He
was amazed, listening to himself, at how self-assured he sounded. "Besides, we already decided
what to do about this. Remember? We talked about it."
"You mean last summer, at the beach house," said Pam. "You guys were stoned."
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