The Best of Joe Haldeman (79 page)

Perhaps it’s a literary crime of some significance, to take a dramatic statement of thirteen words, which pound home like nails into a soldier’s coffin—and expand it into a science-fiction novella. I think Sassoon would forgive me for making a living.

SLEEPING DOGS

he cab took my eyeprint and the door swung open. I was glad to get out. No driver to care how rough the ride was, on a road that wouldn’t even be called a road on Earth. The place had gone downhill in the thirty years I’d been away.

Low gravity and low oxygen. My heart was going too fast. I stood for a moment, concentrating, and brought it down to a hundred, then ninety. The air had more sulfur sting than I remembered. It seemed a lot warmer than I remembered that summer, too, but then if I could remember it all I wouldn’t have to be here. My missing finger throbbed.

Six identical buildings on the block, half-cylinders of stained pale green plastic. I walked up the dirt path to number 3: Offworld Affairs and Confederatión Liaison. I almost ran into the door when it didn’t open. Pushed and pulled and it reluctantly let me inside.

It was a little cooler and less sulfurous. I went to the second door on the right, Travel Documents and Permissions, and went in.

“You don’t knock on Earth?” A cadaverous tall man, skin too white and hair too black.

“Actually, no,” I said, “not public buildings. But I apologize for my ignorance.”

He looked at a monitor built into his desk. “You would be Flann Spivey, from Japan on Earth. You don’t look Japanese.”

“I’m Irish,” I said. “I work for a Japanese company, Ichiban Imaging.”

He touched a word on the screen. “Means number one. Best, or first?”

“Both, I think.”

“Papers.” I laid out two passports and a folder of travel documents. He spent several minutes inspecting them carefully. Then he slipped them into a primitive scanning machine, which flipped through them one by one, page by page.

He finally handed them back. “When you were here twenty-nine Earth years ago, there were only eight countries on Seca, representing two competing powers. Now there are 79 countries, two of them off-planet, in a political situation that’s...impossible to describe simply. Most of the other 78 countries are more comfortable than Spaceport. Nicer.”

“So I was told. I’m not here for comfort, though.” There weren’t many planets where they put their spaceports in nice places.

He nodded slowly as he selected two forms from a drawer. “So what does a ‘thanatopic counselor’ do?”

“I prepare people for dying.” For living completely, actually, before they leave.

“Curious.” He smiled. “It pays well?”

“Adequately.”

He handed me the forms. “I’ve never seen a poor person come through that door. Take these down the hall to Immunization.”

“I’ve had all the shots.”

“All that the Confederación requires. Seca has a couple of special tests for returning veterans. Of the Consolidation War.”

“Of course. The nanobiota. But I was tested before they let me return to Earth.”

He shrugged. “Rules. What do you tell them?”

“Tell?”

“The people who are going to die. We just sort of let it catch up with us. Avoid it as long as possible, but…”

“That’s a way.” I took the forms. “Not the only way.”

I had the door partly open when he cleared his throat. “Dr. Spivey? If you don’t have any plans, I would be pleased to have midmeal with you.”

Interesting. “Sure. I don’t know how long this will take...”

“Ten minims, fifteen. I’ll call us a floater, so we don’t have to endure the road.”

The blood and saliva samples took less time than filling out the forms. When I went back outside, the floater was humming down and Braz Nitian was watching it land from the walkway.

It was a fast two-minute hop to the center of town, the last thirty seconds disconcerting free fall. The place he’d chosen was Kaffee Rembrandt, a rough-hewn place with a low ceiling and guttering oil lamps in pursuit of a 16th-century ambience, somewhat diluted by the fact that the dozens of Rembrandt reproductions glowed with apparently sourceless illumination.

A busty waitress in period flounce showed us to a small table, dwarfed by a large self-portrait of the artist posed as “Prodigal Son with a Whore.”

I’d never seen an actual flagon, a metal container with a hinged top. It appeared to hold enough wine to support a meal and some conversation.

I ordered a plate of braised vegetables, following conservative dietary advice—the odd proteins in Seca’s animals and fish might lay me low with a xeno-allergy. Among the things I didn’t remember about my previous time here was whether our rations had included any native flesh or fish. But even if I’d safely eaten them thirty years ago, the Hartford doctor said, I could have a protein allergy now, since an older digestive system might not completely break down those alien proteins into safe amino acids.

Braz had gone to college on Earth, UCLA, an expensive proposition that obligated him to work for the government for ten years (which would be fourteen Earth years). He had degrees in mathematics and macroeconomics, neither of which he used in his office job. He taught three nights a week and wrote papers that nine or ten people read and disagreed with.

“So how did you become a thanatopic counselor? Something you always wanted to be when you grew up?”

“Yeah, after cowboy and pirate.”

He smiled. “I never saw a cowboy on Earth.”

“Pirates tracked them down and made them walk the plank. Actually, I was an accountant when I joined the military, and then started out in pre-med after I was discharged, but switched over to psychology and moved into studying veterans.”

“Natural enough. Know thyself.”

“Literally.” Find thyself, I thought. “You get a lot of us coming through?”

“Well, not so many, not from Earth or other foreign planets. Being a veteran doesn’t correlate well with wealth.”

“That’s for sure.” And a trip from Earth to Seca and back costs as much as a big house.

“I imagine that treating veterans doesn’t generate a lot of money, either.” Eyebrows lifting.

“A life of crime does.” I smiled and he laughed politely. “But most of the veterans I do see are well off. Almost nobody with a normal life span needs my services. They’re mostly for people who’ve lived some centuries, and you couldn’t do that without wealth.”

“They get tired of life?”

“Not the way you or I could become tired of a game, or a relationship. It’s something deeper than running out of novelty. People with that little imagination don’t need me. They can stop existing for the price of a bullet or a rope—or a painless prescription, where I come from.”

“Not legal here,” he said neutrally.

“I know. I’m not enthusiastic about it, myself.”

“You’d have more customers?”

I shrugged. “You never know.” The waitress brought us our first plates, grilled fungi on a stick for me. Braz had a bowl of small animals with tails, deep-fried. Finger food; you hold them by the tail and dip them into a pungent yellow sauce.

It was much better than I’d expected; the fungi were threaded onto a stick of some aromatic wood like laurel; she brought a small glass of a lavender-colored drink, tasting like dry sherry, to go with them.

“So it’s not about getting bored?” he asked. “That’s how you normally see it. In books, on the cube..

“Maybe the reality isn’t dramatic enough. Or too complicated to tell as a simple drama.

“You live a few hundred years, at least on Earth, you slowly leave your native culture behind. You’re an immortal—culturally true if not literally— and your non-immortal friends and family and business associates die off. The longer you live, the deeper you go into the immortal community.”

“There must be some nonconformists.”

“‘Mavericks,’ the cowboys used to say.”

“Before the pirates did them in.”

“Right. There aren’t many mavericks past their first century of life extension. The people you grew up with are either fellow immortals or dead. Together, the survivors form a society that’s unusually cohesive. So when someone decides to leave, decides to stop living, the arrangements are complex and may involve hundreds of people.

“That’s where I come in, the practical part of my job: I’m a kind of overall estate manager. They all have significant wealth; few have any living relatives closer than great-great-grandchildren.”

“You help them split up their fortunes?”

“It’s more interesting than that. The custom for centuries has been to put together a legacy, so called, that is a complex and personal aesthetic expression. To simply die, and let the lawyers sort it out, would trivialize your life as well as your death. It’s my job to make sure that the legacy is a meaningful and permanent extension of the person’s life.

“Sometimes a physical monument is involved; more often a financial one, through endowments and sponsorships. Which is what brings me here.”

Our main courses came; Braz had a kind of eel, bright green with black antennae, apparently raw, but my braised vegetables were reassuringly familiar.

“So one of your clients is financing something here on Seca?”

“Financing me, actually. It’s partly a gift; we get along well. But it’s part of a pattern of similar bequests to non-immortals, to give us back lost memories.”

“How lost?”

“It was a military program, to counteract the stress of combat. They called the drug aqualethe. Have you heard of it?”

He shook his head. “Water of what?”

“It’s a linguistic mangling, or mingling. Latin and Greek. Lethe was a river in Hell; a spirit drank from it to forget his old life, so he could be reincarnated.

“A pretty accurate name. It basically disconnects your long-term memory as a way of diverting combat stress, so-called post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“It worked?”

“Too well. I spent eight months here as a soldier, when I was in my early twenties. I don’t remember anything specific between the voyage here and the voyage back.”

“It was a horrible war. Short but harsh. Maybe you don’t want the memory back. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ we say here.”

“We say that, too. But for me...well, you could say it’s a professional handicap. Though actually it goes deeper.

“Part of what I do with my clients is a mix of meditation and dialogue. I try to help them form a coherent tapestry of their lives, the good and the bad, as a basic grounding for their legacy. The fact that I could never do that for myself hinders me as a counselor. Especially when the client, like this one, had his own combat experiences to deal with.”

“He’s, um, dead now?”

“Oh, no. Like many of them, he’s in no particular hurry. He just wants to be ready.”

“How old is he?”

“Three hundred and ninety Earth years. Aiming for four centuries, he thinks.”

Braz sawed away at his eel and looked thoughtful, “I can’t imagine. I mean, I sort of understand when a normal man gets so old he gives up. Their hold on life becomes weak, and they let go. But your man is presumably fit and sane.”

“More than I, I think.”

“So why four hundred years rather than five? Or three? Why not try for a thousand? That’s what I would do, if I were that rich.”

“So would I. At least that’s how I feel now. My patron says he felt that way when he was mortal. But he can’t really articulate what happened to slowly change his attitude.

“He says it would be like trying to explain married love to a babe just learning to talk. The babe thinks it knows what love is, and can apply the word to its own circumstances. But it doesn’t have the vocabulary or life experience to approach the larger meaning.”

“An odd comparison, marriage,” he said, delicately separating the black antennae from the head. “You can become unmarried. But not undead.”

“The babe wouldn’t know about divorce. Maybe there is a level of analogy there.”

“We don’t know what death is?”

“Perhaps not as well as they.”