Joe Haldeman - Old Twentieth

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Old Twentieth
Old Twentieth
Joe Haldeman
For Gay and Rusty and Judith: Travelers in an antique van
CONTENTS
Prologue: 1915
1. Wine and Time
2. The Beginning of History
3. Aspera
A Memory
4. Departure Time
5. Memory Tricks
1918
6. Trouble in the Big City
1929
A Memory
7. Memento Mori
8. Leave This Troubled World Behind
1933
9. Meeting of Minds
10. Timing
1939
11. Mating
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Old Twentieth
12. Questions
1943
A Memory
13. Doppelgängers
14. Calls
Wild Year
15. Duck!
16. Causes of Death
17. Loving, Leaving
1957
18. Anger Management
19. Revelations
20. Conspiracy
Wild Year: 1968
21. Family Planning
22. Slide into Darkness
1989
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Old Twentieth
PROLOGUE
1915
The smell of death is always with you, like a rotten oily stain in the back of your mouth. Rum won't
burn it out and a cheap cigar won't cover it. An unwelcome condiment with every mouthful of
rations.
It had never been worse than today. Thousands of dead baking and rotting under the Gallipoli sun,
and me on the burial detail.
Three days ago, the Turks had gathered what they thought was an overwhelming force and attacked
us around three in the morning, quietly, which was unusual—normally they'd be screaming Allah
this and Allah that, bugles blaring.
But we had been warned and were ready for them, and it was a pigeon shoot. For most of the Anzac
line, they had one to two hundred yards to cover between our trenches and theirs. Very few of them
made it even close enough to throw a bomb, although some few did get close enough to find out
what an Aussie can do with a bayonet in his hand and nothing at his back but a cliff that falls to the
sea.
So No Man's Land became a charnel field in which hundreds of wounded men whispered or groaned
or shouted for help, and none came. To give aid would be suicide. Snipers on both sides had clear
shots at every square inch of blasted ground, and the best of them could hit any square inch they
wanted.
But the Turks as well as we knew that we were separated by a cauldron of pestilence no less than
misery. If those corpses were not burned or buried soon, we would all be in danger of infection. So
there was a temporary access of common sense, as sometimes can happen in any war, even this
absurd one: their generals met ours under a white flag and agreed on a nine-hour truce to bury the
dead and retrieve such wounded as had survived. We traded artillery and rifle fire all night, but soon
after dawn it sputtered out.
At six-thirty, we chosen few (most of us, including me, chosen because of insubordination) set out to
do our grisly duty. It was cold, and the rain poured like a waterfall, but we were glad for both, for
temporarily mitigating the smell.
We eyed our opposite numbers, the Turks on burial detail, with suspicion at first, but as time went by
we came to regard one another with something approaching camaraderie, just a gang of men forced
into nine hours of the most repulsive and distressing sort of hard labor. We used pick mattocks to
loosen the rocky soil and dug three long communal graves, one for Anzac and one for the first few
thousand Turkish bodies, and one for the rest of the Turks and the large number of both who couldn't
be identified.
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Old Twentieth
By ten the rain had stopped and the sun was glaring down. The bodies were in ghastly shape, many
of them paralyzed in a posture of running, bayonet-fixed rifles at port arms or thrust out in attack, as
if some magic spell had frozen them in midaction. Most of them were in a state of rigor mortis, and
it took two or even three of us to drag a body to the lip of the trench and tip it in. It's odd how much
heavier dead men are than live; any one of us could have carried any one of them to safety during a
fight. It's as if when the vital spark departs, it takes with it some physical lightness, like helium or
hydrogen gas, that in life keeps us separate from the ground, the earth, until it's time for us to join it.
I was working the middle trench, arguably the worst, since it was mostly unidentifiable fragments,
and you didn't even have the respite of carrying weapons and identification discs back to where the
sentries stood guard. The man on the other side whispered, "Tommy! Tommy!" I almost told him I
was no bloody pom, but then was mesmerized by the sight of the pint of whiskey he was holding out.
He pointed to the unbroken seal and pantomimed smoking.
There were only three or four fags left in my packet, probably fewer than he would want. Without
looking in it, I scaled it to him across the narrow valley of death.
He snatched it handily and peered inside, scowling, but then shrugged and smiled and gently tossed
the bottle over.
I cracked the seal and held the bottle up to him in toast. "Here's to your bad aim tomorrow."
He smiled and nodded, I supposed not understanding, and as I took a sip, with an addict's haste he lit
one of the cigarettes in a cloud of sulfur. He inhaled deeply, and let the smoke roll seductively out of
his nostrils, eyes closed, thoughtful. Then he stared down at our handiwork. "Bloody fucking show,"
he said slowly, and I wished I knew the same in Turkish. A little hoarse from the whiskey, I
whispered, "Selamunalekum," which I was told meant Peace to you in Turkish. He bowed slightly,
perhaps with irony, fingertips touching, and we both went back about our business.
If you had to fight someone, the Turks were not bad. They were fierce but not cruel, unlike the
Germans in whose service they were offering their lives. If it weren't for the bloody Boche we could
all throw down our arms and go home.
By three-thirty we had all of the corpses and pieces of corpses in the ground, and dirt and rocks
mounded up over them. Presumably they were at peace. I've never made up my mind about that. We
stood smoking, and I shared around the last of the bottle with three of my mates.
There was a miscalculation that fortunately did not prove fatal. The Turks' watches were eight
minutes faster than ours. Someone who spoke Turkish saw them lining up to leave and got it sorted
out.
At a few minutes till four, a single shot rang out. Everyone fell silent as it echoed. We stared at the
Turks, and they at us, in a moment of shared terror: tens of thousands of rifles, loaded and cocked,
looking down at us from both sides. There could have been a minute of crossfire that added several
hundred to the ones we had just planted. But the silence lengthened, and we went back to the
business of gathering and leaving.
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Old Twentieth
I clambered back up the slope with a bundle of Enfields tied together with three blood-soaked belts,
and was safe in a deep trench when the firing started again. I started toward my post, but realized the
armorer was less than a hundred yards down the trench, so I turned and hurried in that direction, to
drop off the rifles and get back.
It's true that you don't hear the one that hits you. The closest Turkish artillery battery would often
shoot at a very high angle, double or triple charge of powder, in hopes of dropping a round directly
into a trench. That evidently happened to me.
I'm suddenly airborne, floating rather than flying, through sudden ringing quiet, and before I hit the
ground I have a sense of how badly I've been wounded.
I slam against a parapet and slide to the bottom of the trench. Pain so great it's like numbness, like
ice. I roll over to look down the trench and see my leg there, shredded, beside the still-intact bundle
of rifles. My other leg is only hanging on by a scrap of flesh, splintered bone sticking out of raw
meat. In between, nothing but gore, my manhood carried off in the blast.
My face feels as if someone had hit it hard with a shovel. I reach up with my right hand, missing two
fingers and the thumb, and touch soft bloody pulp where my nose used to be. All my front teeth and
upper jaw have been blown off. My lower jaw makes a grinding noise when I move it.
In the rush of pain, a silent cymbal crash from head to toe, there is something like peace. This won't
last long. It's all up for me. I'll know all the answers soon enough.
Bruce has appeared out of nowhere. He must have been nearby; the round landed just yards from our
post. But there's not a mark on him. He's taken his belt and mine and is making two tourniquets.
I try to tell him no, it's a waste of bloody time, just let me be. But I can't make words, just grunting
vowels and jaw grind.
"It'll be all right, Jake," he says. "You can't die here."
I demonstrably am, I want to tell him.
A number of people have gathered around. I vaguely hear the clatter of intense rifle fire. Another
shell whines in and impacts not far away. A Sten chatters briefly.
Bruce holds out his hands and someone pours a panniken of water over them, rinsing away my
blood. "Something to show you."
He wipes his hands dry on his tunic and pulls out a small packet wrapped in brown paper. He slips
off the twine, and I see that it's a stack of tinted postal cards.
What the hell, Bruce? I would say if I could.
"Take heed, now," he says, and displays one after another. The Eiffel Tower. The Taj Mahal. The
Washington Monument. Times Square. They start to fade and I turn my head sideways so as not to
vomit blood on the pictures.
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Old Twentieth
Bruce crabs around in the dirt and holds my head up so I can focus on the images. They're a blur,
now, though—and out of the blur a woman's face appears.
Diane? Why would I think of Diane?
"Look, Jacob," her face says to me. "You have to get hold of yourself. Just look at the goddamned
pictures."
My tongue explores the ridge of shattered bone where my teeth used to be. I wish I could tell her to
go away.
"You can't die here," Bruce repeats. He holds the pictures out, fanned like a poker hand. "Where
would you most like to go?"
Big Ben. It must be cool in London, this time of year.
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Old Twentieth
ONE
WINE AND TIME
My family has a tradition, going back to the nineteenth century, that whenever a child was born
(only a male child, originally), the father would buy a case of promising wine of that year's vintage.
The first bottle would be opened on the child's birthday, eighteen years later. The other eleven
bottles he or she would open to commemorate important occasions, and if any remained when he or
she died, it would be passed on to the next generation.
Father's grandfather was the luckiest of our line, born in 1945. His father presciently bought a case of
Château Mouton-Rothschild, the "Victory Vintage" celebrating the end of World War II. It was two
dollars a bottle, and became the wine of the century.
His luck wouldn't last, though. He went off to war himself, a professional soldier in an
unprofessional conflict, and didn't live to see his only son, my grandfather.
Of the ten precious bottles Grandfather inherited, along with a case of some forgotten 1973 vintage,
four were passed on to my father. He left me one of them.
I would carry it to the stars.
My father died in what they now call the Immortality War, or just the War—a worldwide class
struggle precipitated by the Becker-Cendrek Process, which at the time seemed to have made
obsolete the idea of death by natural causes. A few months after you take the BCP pill, your body
becomes a self-repairing machine.
There's a limit to its repairing ability, of course. After my father was captured by the enemy fundies,
he was tied to a pole, drenched in gasoline, and set afire, and stopped being immortal a few years
after he began. Most of us suffered similar fates if we were caught, and the War became increasingly
vicious on both sides.
It ended quietly with Lot 92, a biological agent that was never given, nor ever needed, a dramatic
name. It killed 7 billion people in a month, leaving the world safe for 200 million immortals.
Most of the enemy died in their sleep. At the time, I felt that that was too good for them. I resented
the backbreaking and disgusting labor of finding their bodies and hauling them out for disposal, at
first burying them, then consigning them to huge pyres.
The people who killed my father had sent my mother and me a cube of his death. So it didn't greatly
bother me, at sixteen, to warm my hands in the heat of their flames.
That was more than two hundred years ago, and now I feel sadness rather than anger. The first BCP
pills were incredibly expensive; my father had sold two of the 1945 Mouton-Rothschild bottles, each
worth as much as a millionaire's mansion, to give the three of us the ambiguous gift of provisionally
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eternal life. Not one person in a thousand could then afford the treatment. War was inevitable, and so
was its ferocity, and so, I think, was its outcome.
There have been countless scenarios about how the War could have been averted, most of them
involving secrecy. The cost of the BCP decreased by a factor of ten after a year and a half; when the
War was no-holds-barred on, BCP cost less than a hundredth of its original price. That was still out
of reach to anybody not wealthy, but the trend was obvious, and if the world were rational, people
would have patiently waited for the price to come down another factor of ten, of a hundred.
But the world was even less rational then than now, and it became common knowledge, among the
ignorant, that the pill cost only pennies to manufacture—so the obscenely rich were becoming even
richer, withholding life from ordinary people. Populist politicians and fundamentalist religious
leaders made that a cause célèbre, and they had access to all the tools of the science that were not
called "mind control" only because, as advertising, it sold products for industry and policies for
government.
The paradox is that if there actually had been a conspiracy among the rich, and they had agreed to
keep BCP secret, war might have been averted. Keep the stuff underground until the per-unit cost
came down to where most people could afford it. But the price couldn't come down until a lot of
people bought it at the obscenely high rate, financing the company's research and development and
production facilities. So it was heavily advertised and propagandized, until there wasn't one person
on the planet who didn't know that millionaires and movie stars and grafting politicians could all buy
a pill that gave them life everlasting.
It was only a small step from there to "they're withholding it from us," and another small step to
"let's go get it." Even though when war broke out, there wasn't enough to treat one person in a
thousand.
It ended with Lot 92, which sought out everyone who wasn't immortal and stopped their hearts
within minutes.
The world of 2047—the year the War started—seems faraway and quaint, now, but it actually was a
bewilderingly complex set of interlocking systems, and after the War, 97 percent of the people who
had run it were gone. The 3 percent who were left comprised most of the world's leaders, certainly
its financial leaders, but it was light on the rank and file who did daily administration and
maintenance, and nobody was left alive who did small-engine repair or lawn care or waited on
tables. They were the more or less invisible lubricant that had kept daily life running smoothly.
Without them, the world ground to a halt.
The extremity of our situation was hidden at first by sheer magnitude—production and supply were
largely automated, and the system was set up to serve thirty times as many people as existed. There
were food and drink in plenty, and of course shelter was no problem, the planet one large ghost town.
There was no produce, with no truckers and few farmers, but there was a cornucopia of frozen and
dehydrated food. Then the power went out, here and there and almost everywhere, and the frozen
food spoiled. People who would never call themselves looters ransacked stores and institutions for
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packaged food to make it through the winter.
There was little violence, most of us sick of it from the War, and a lot of sharing, once it was
obvious that there was enough food to go around for several years, if it was distributed rationally. In
most regions, co-ops grew together to centralize food supplies, and they formed the nucleus for local
governments.
Some areas, where the people had been mostly Christian or Moslem or Hindu fundies, had such a
sparse and scattered population that they became deserted, people moving naturally to be with other
people. A few large cities, like New York, London, and Tokyo, attracted enough people with
technical know-how that they were able to cobble together a simulacrum of what had been normal
life—at least to the extent of fairly reliable running water and electricity, and communication lines
reopened all around the world.
People knew the clock was ticking. They could only live for a few years as scavengers on the corpse
of the old world. They rolled up their sleeves and started to rebuild.
Immortality certainly helped that. They weren't building a new world for their children and some
abstract posterity. They were cleaning up the mess so they could live in comfort in the coming
centuries and millennia.
I was not much help at first. I was sixteen at the end of the War, with almost no formal education,
having been seven when the world fell apart.
My mother and I walked about three hundred miles, to New York, trying to find me a school. We
must have been a sight, me pulling a kid's little red wagon full of food and ammunition, my mother
carrying a backpack and a shotgun. I had a pistol and a rifle, and was alternately excited and scared
at the prospect of using them, but as it turned out, we had no trouble with humans. Several times we
had to shoot dogs, who roamed in feral packs, and once a bear, in upstate New York.
That was close. My mother emptied the shotgun at it, seven buckshot shells just pissing it off, before
I killed it with a lucky shot through the eye.
Before that, we had sort of enjoyed strolling through the countryside. We decided to move faster.
Central Park was rank and wild. People lived there, but kept their distance. Three uniformed police
officers were waiting for us when we emerged onto Eighth Avenue; they nervously told us we had to
surrender our weapons, or turn around and go back to where we came from. That raised my mother's
libertarian hackles and didn't set well with my teenaged hormones, but you could see the sense of it.
New York was an actual city, with nearly a million people. There had to be law and order.
They gave us information in exchange for our guns, and we spent a couple of days standing in lines,
becoming citizens of the brave new world. We got a two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, and my
mother, given a choice of several jobs, went into hospital administration—immortals didn't get sick,
but they still broke bones and had babies—and I was put in the tenth grade and given an early-
morning job as a garbage collector. I sort of wished we'd stayed in Maine.
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There weren't many children right after the War. A lot of people had to live with the memory of
watching their families die, having bought immortality for themselves first, figuring there was plenty
of time for the kids.
The kids got Lot 92 instead.
The population of New York doubled and redoubled over the next few years. It was the only large
city in the east that had survived the War largely intact. Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington were
burned-out, blasted ruins, so if you wanted big-city life you drifted to New York.
Of course, a lot of the people who came were predators in search of prey. In 2059, the entire City
Council was murdered during a meeting, and a group of armed thugs who styled themselves the Mob
tried to take over the city. It was like a gruesome comedy; they thought they had control of the police
force, but really had only infiltrated the top. The volunteer beat cops spread through the
neighborhoods giving back all the weapons they had confiscated. Mother and I got ours, but never
had to use them. Mob rule was over in less than a day, the bodies of fifteen ex-mobsters hanging
from a makeshift gibbet at the end of Wall Street, and a new volunteer Council was sitting a week
later.
We were allowed to decide whether to keep our guns. We kept the shotgun and handed the other two
back for the City's use.
All the rest of that summer I would go down with the other kids and monitor the progress of decay
on the Wall Street bodies. By fall, there were only partial skeletons with a few sun-bleached rags of
clothing. One day they disappeared, replaced by a plaque.
The next year I started college, which was no distinction. For years, every young person would go
straight from high school to NYU, to provide something like meaningful employment for the
thousands of professors who would otherwise be in the labor pool. I tried civil engineering but
wound up fascinated by mathematics, and ten years later had a Ph.D. in Virtuality. Which would
lead eventually to my taking the rarest bottle of wine in the world to another world.
Getting there was not straightforward.
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摘要：

OldTwentiethOldTwentiethJoeHaldemanForGayandRustyandJudith:TravelersinanantiquevanCONTENTSPrologue:19151.WineandTime2.TheBeginningofHistory3.AsperaAMemory4.DepartureTime5.MemoryTricks19186.TroubleintheBigCity1929AMemory7.MementoMori8.LeaveThisTroubledWorldBehind19339.MeetingofMinds10.Timing193911.Ma...

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