Joe Haldeman - Four Short Novels

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FOUR SHORT NOVELS

Joe Haldeman

Remembrance of Things Past

EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money. When you

started to feel the little aches and twinges that meant your body was running down, you just got

in line at Immortality, Incorporated, and handed them your credit card. As long as you had at

least a million bucks — and eventually everybody did — they would reset you to whatever age you

liked.

One way people made money was by swapping knowledge around. Skills could be transferred with a

technology spun off from the immortality process. You could spend a few decades becoming a great

concert pianist, and then put your ability up for sale. There was no shortage of people with two

million dollars who would trade one million to be their village’s Van Cliburn. In the sale of your

ability, you would lose it, but you could buy it back a few decades or centuries later.

For many people this became the game of life — becoming temporarily a genius, selling your

genius for youth, and then clawing your way up in some other field, to buy back the passion that

had rescued you first from the grave. Enjoy it a few years, sell it again, and so on ad infinitum.

Or finitum, if you just once made a wrong career move, and wound up old and poor and bereft of

skill. That happened less and less often, of course, Darwinism inverted: the un-survival of the

least fit.

It wasn’t just a matter of swapping around your piano-playing and brain surgery, of course.

People with the existential wherewithal to enjoy century after century of life tended to grow and

improve with age. A person could look like a barely pubescent teenybopper, and yet be able to out-

Socrates Socrates in the wisdom department. People were getting used to seeing acne and gravitas

on the same face.

Enter Jutel Dicuth, the paragon of his age, a raging polymath. He could paint and sculpt and

play six instruments. He could write formal poetry with his left hand while solving differential

equations with his right. He could write formal poetry about differential equations! He was an

Olympic-class gymnast and also held the world record for the javelin throw. He had earned

doctorates in anthropology, art history, slipstream physics, and fly-tying.

He sold it all.

Immensely wealthy but bereft of any useful ability, Jutel Dicuth set up a trust fund for

himself that would produce a million dollars every year. It also provided a generous salary for an

attendant. He had Immortality, Incorporated set him back to the apparent age of one year, and keep

resetting him once a year.

In a world where there were no children — where would you put them? — he was the only infant.

He was the only person with no useful skills and, eventually, the only one alive who did not have

nearly a thousand years of memory.

In a world that had outgrown the old religions — why would you need them? — he became like

unto a god. People came from everywhere to listen to his random babbling and try to find a conduit

to the state of blissful innocence buried under the weight of their wisdom.

It was inevitable that someone would see a profit in this. A consortium with a name we would

translate as Blank Slate offered to “dicuth” anyone who had a certain large sum of what passed for

money, and maintain them for as long as they wanted. At first people were slightly outraged,

because it was a kind of sacrilege, or were slightly amused, because it was such a transparent

scheme to gather what passed for wealth.

Sooner or later, though, everyone tried it. Most who tried it for one year went back for ten

or a hundred, or, eventually, forever. After some centuries, permanent dicuths began to outnumber

humans — though those humans were not anything you would recognize as people, crushed as they were

by nearly a thousand years of wisdom and experience. And jealous of those who had given up.

On 31 December, A.D. 3000, the last “normal” person surrendered his loneliness for dicuth

bliss. The world was populated completely by total innocents, tended by patient machines.

It lasted a long time. Then one by one, the machines broke down.

Crime and Punishment

EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO PASS that no one ever had to die, unless they were so horrible that

society had to dispose of them. Other than the occasional horrible person, the world was in an

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idyllic state, everyone living as long as they wanted to, doing what they wanted to do.

This is how things got back to normal.

People gained immortality by making copies of themselves, farlies, which were kept in safe

places and updated periodically. So if you got run over by a truck or hit by a meteorite, your

farlie would sense this and automatically pop out and take over, after prudently making a farlie

of itself. Upon that temporary death, you would lose only the weeks or months that had gone by

since your last update.

That made it difficult to deal with criminals. If someone was so horrible that society had to

hang or shoot or electrocute or inject him to death, his farlie would crop up somewhere, still bad

to the bone, make a farlie of itself, and go off on another rampage. If you put him in jail for

the rest of his life, he would eventually die, but then his evil farlie would leap out, full of

youthful vigor and nasty intent.

Ultimately, if society felt you were too horrible to live, it would take preemptive action:

check out your farlie and destroy it first. If it could be found. Really bad people became adept

at hiding their farlies. Inevitably, people who were really good at being really bad became master

criminals. It was that, or die forever. There were only a few dozen of them, but they moved

through the world like neutrinos: effortless, unstoppable, invisible.

One of them was a man named Bad Billy Beerbreath. He started the ultimate crime wave.

There were Farlie Centers where you would go to update your farlie — one hundred of them, all

over the world — and that’s where almost everybody kept their farlies stored. But you could

actually put a farlie anywhere, if you got together enough liquid nitrogen and terabytes of

storage and kept them in a cool dry place out of direct sunlight.

Most people didn’t know this; in fact, it was forbidden knowledge. Nobody knew how to make

Farlie Centers anymore, either. They were all built during the lifetime of Joao Farlie, who had

wandered off with the blueprints after deciding not to make a copy of himself, himself.

Bad Billy Beerbreath decided to make it his business to trash Farlie Centers. In its way, this

was worse than murder, because if a client died before he or she found out about it, and hadn’t

been able to make a new farlie (which took weeks) — he or she would die for real, kaput, out of

the picture. It was a crime beyond crime. Just thinking about this gave Bad Billy an acute

pleasure akin to a hundred orgasms.

Because there were a hundred Bad Billy Beerbreaths.

In preparation for his crime wave, Bad Billy had spent years making a hundred farlies of

himself, and he stored them in cool dry places out of direct sunlight, all around the world. On 13

May 2999, all but one of those farlies jump-started itself and went out to destroy the nearest

Farlie Center.

By noon, GMT, police and militia all over the world had captured or killed or subdued every

copy (but one) of Bad Billy, but by noon every single Farlie Center in the world had been leveled,

save the one in Akron, Ohio.

The only people left who had farlies were people who had a reason to keep them in a secret

place. Master criminals like Billy. Pals of Billy. They all were waiting at Akron, and held off

the authorities for months, by making farlie after farlie of themselves, like broomsticks in a

Disney cartoon, sending most of them out to die, or “die,” defending the place, until there were

so many of them the walls were bulging. Then they sent out word that they wanted to negotiate, and

during the lull that promise produced, they fled en masse, destroying the last Farlie Center

behind them.

They were a powerful force, a hundred thousand hardened criminals united in their contempt for

people like you and me, and in their loyalty to Bad Billy Beerbreath. Somewhat giddy, not to say

insane, in their triumph after having destroyed every Farlie Center, they went on to destroy every

jail and prison and courthouse. That did cut their numbers down considerably, since most of them

only had ten or twenty farlies tucked away, but it also reduced drastically the number of police,

not to mention the number of people willing to take up policing as a profession, since once

somebody killed you twice, you had to stay dead.

By New Year’s Eve, A.D. 3000, the criminals were in charge of the whole world.

Again.

War and Peace

EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO PASS that no one ever had to die, unless they wanted to, or could be

talked into it. That made it very hard to fight wars, and a larger and larger part of every

nation’s military budget was given over to psychological operations directed toward their own

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