A Reasonable World

31

The island of Singapore, only some 387 square miles in area, was the most valuable piece of real estate on earth. There was no room for the poor except in vertical slums managed by the government. These were in the Tanglin district, discreetly concealed by a row of high-rise government office buildings windowless on the north side. By means of shore patrols, detect-and-destroy machines at harbor and airports, and frequent sweeps, the government headed by General Sun Pak had kept the island free of symbionts. Everything impossible in the rest of the world was now possible here. Murder was common. Every taste in illicit sex could be satisfied in one or more of the city’s two thousand bordellos. One of the most famous was Evans’ Hideaway; its slogan was “Thank Evans for Little Girls.”

Here, out of cock-fighting, bareknuckle prizefighting, and Russian roulette, a new game evolved. It was described in a tourist brochure of the time:

The player Norville Quinn wrote in his memoirs:

A man walked into White Cloud Outfitters in Seattle and started looking over the racks of jeans at the front of the store. He was poorly dressed and wore a backpack. Grace Timmons, the manager, watched him go into the dressing room with three pairs of jeans and come out with two, which he brought to the counter.

Timmons took the card he handed her, put it into the scanner and looked at the readout. “It says here this card was canceled last June,” she said. “Denver Co-op? Did they kick you out?”

“Let’s say I left.”

“And you haven’t hooked up with anyone since?”

“No. I hurt my back.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. What kind of work did you do before?”

“Construction.”

“No office skills?”

“No.”

“I understand the toy factory down at the end of Western Avenue is hiring. Maybe you could get a job doing-light assembly.”

“Look, I don’t have to do anything.” He turned to leave.

“Just a moment. You know, of course, that your picture is in the computer.”

“So what? You can’t put me in jail.”

“No, but two or three sturdy young lads could throw you in the river. I’m not saying that would happen, but think about it. Good day.”

Bubbles of memory . . . This is Kim at fifteen, when she gained all that weight. This is her mother, that same year, with her hair dyed red. Isn’t that a funny hat? This is Cletus Robinson of Savannah at the age of seven. The squint was corrected by an operation the following year. This is President Otis before his heart attack. This is Emelia Switt writing the first sentence of her first novel. This is a rabbit named Bunny, the pet of Olivia Eveling of Okemos, Michigan. This is Dan Cowper out hunting with his dog. The dog’s name is Bruce. They didn’t catch anything that day, but the cold autumn air was great, and there was a fine sunset. This is Regina Dingwall on her eightieth birthday, surrounded by her five living children, seventeen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. Regina was part of the problem, but we forgive her. This is Norbert Spanbogen getting laid in New Orleans. He came down with the clap shortly afterward. This is Miss McDevitt finding something nasty in her weather shoes. This is Arpad Adjarian resigning his commission. Some of his relatives have emigrated to France, and he intends to join them. This is John Stevens working on his book of translations. His hair is white.

From the time Kim was nine or ten, Stevens had fallen into the habit of taking her with him on occasional business trips. He took her to museums and zoos, arboretums, amusement parks, restaurants; he liked to watch her when she saw new things. A complicity grew up between them. Once she asked, “Do you think people should tell the truth?”

“Always? No.”

“Why not?”

“Because sometimes the truth just makes people unhappy. I try to tell you the truth, though, because I want you to trust me.”

“Do you love Mama?”

“Yes, I love your mother.”

“Then why do you go away with Signorina Lamberti?” “I love your mother, but I like other women, including Signorina Lamberti. Teufelsdreck.”

“What does that mean?”

“Devil’s dirt. It means that l am annoyed.”

He knew she was unhappy at school. He had had many talks with teachers, and the trouble was not academic. “She just doesn’t seem to warm up to the other children,” the teachers said. Contrasting this with her evident pleasure in his own company, Stevens was secretly flattered. He thought of her as a companion, someone to whom he could be more and more open as she grew into maturity.

When she was fifteen, Kim started gaining weight. Her boyishness disappeared; she became oblong in silhouette. Julie took her frantically to one doctor after another; Kim resented the examinations and the diets which never did any good. She grew more withdrawn, even from Stevens. Her grades declined. When she was sixteen, after many conferences with Julie, Stevens took her out of school and let her study by holo. She spent most of her time in her room, or walking alone with her dog, a golden retriever who had never liked Stevens, in the woods behind their house in Ontario.

“What’s going to become of her?” Julie said. “In a year or two she ought to be going out with boys, dating.”

“That will come soon enough,” Stevens said. He could not hide his disappointment. His bright companion was gone; in her place there was a bloated, unattractive teenager. More and more often he remembered his own bitterly unhappy childhood. “She’ll grow out of it,” he said.

Every now and then he saw something about Palladino in the net. There was one incident that suggested that his former employers might have taken his advice: a waiter had spilled a plate of lasagna on Palladino’s head in a Berlin restaurant. Then nothing. In the holo, Palladino seemed to have put on some flesn. His skin was smooth, shining; he looked like a happy Buddha.

There had not been a reliable census anywhere in the world since the turn of the century, but some analysts, working from satellite data, had estimated that world population was down to 3.5 billion. Stress on the environment had abated somewhat during the last decade, and there were even signs that ocean biota were recovering. Atmospheric pollution was markedly better, but the damage to the ozone layer was apparently irreversible; climatic changes and flooding of coastal cities had caused much hardship.

Since the early teens, national governments had been falling apart. Quietly, without any fuss, states, provinces and prefectures stopped paying much attention to the central government. By 2020 there really wasn’t any Spain, only Catalonia, Andalucia, and so on, and there was no France, only Normandy, Brittany, and the other old kingdoms. Yugoslavia and the RSFSR broke up into ethnic territories. In North America, first the southern states seceded, then the eastern, then the western. The new political units were just the old ones which had always clung to their identity, but even these could not stop the tide of dissolution. Smaller and smaller units took their place: counties, subprefectures, townships, villages. What government remained was organized by volunteers; when people saw a need for something, sometimes (not always) it got done.

Many things that had required national funding and control could not be done. Weapons stockpiles rusted in place; the orbits of the abandoned space stations decayed. Highways and bridges fell into disrepair. Harbors silted up. Airports were abandoned. It was a good thing that the SWT network now covered most of the Earth, because there was no other easy way to get around anymore.

The jails had emptied long ago and the wardens had taken up other occupations. Even local ordinances could not be enforced with any regularity, because an offender could get into a SWT capsule and be three thousand miles away in twenty-two seconds.

All the nightmares of the doom-criers were coming to pass. Respect for authority and tradition was gone; people were looking out for themselves and their families. Taxes could not be collected. Industries closed down; schools closed, churches and government offices stood empty.

According to some, hosts of unborn children were adrift through the atmosphere, keening their regret. Millions of little Anthonys and Marys, Gretchens and Borises, were lost forever. Among them were three notable musicians, two poets, seven ax murderers, six mathematicians, four actors, ten baseball players, ten presidents, and a great number of basically undistinguished people. They were not born. They did not add their bulk to the human mass. They did not send their feces into the rivers and oceans. The wind did not even whisper their names.

Stevens had foreseen the panic that came when the stock exchanges closed down, and had stockpiled as much food as he could; he had also converted his holdings into gold and precious stones, which still had a fairly stable value.

Kim left home when she was eighteen to join a commune in Kathmandu, and a year later she married a former CV inmate, Geoffrey Barlow-Geller. Stevens realized that the reason for his own marriage no longer existed, and he contemplated a separation; then Julie became gravely ill.

In 2020 her condition was diagnosed as systemic lupus erythematosus. She underwent a cloned kidney transplant at Smith Memorial Hospital in Toronto, where her recovery was slow. The medical bills came to over two million new dollars. Stevens sold all that he had.

It was out of the question for him to look for a job; there were no jobs even for younger people with work histories. In March he went to the director of the Toronto Moneyless District and asked to be accepted as a member.

“And what can you contribute, Mr. Kauffman?” she asked. “You realize that at this stage we have to worry about such things.”

“I am a translator of poetry.”

“And that’s all?”

“I’m afraid so.” Stevens stood up to leave. “Thank you for your patience.”

“Wait a minute. Are you the Peter Kauffman who helped organize the first moneyless group?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t know if your translations are any good, but we will certainly accept you. Welcome back, Mr. Kauffman.”

The District didn’t have much, but it was enough. Food staples were in fair supply, although there were recurrent shortages. There was plenty of housing, and the District had its own power and water. Stevens brought Julie home to the modest house they had given him and nursed her himself. There were no servants, of course, but a volunteer student came in several times a week to help him.

Stevens savored the irony: he was now completely dependent on the moneyless movement which he had once considered an aberration to be exploited, and which he had abandoned with relief ten years ago.

Intrigued, he spent part of his free time investigating the organization of the District. The membership was now more than three hundred thousand, growing by ten percent a year; it included a number of small manufacturers and suppliers, farmers, orchardists and dairy operators, construction people, doctors and nurses. Some of these were indoctrinated supporters, but the majority were people who had turned to the moneyless group because nothing else was working.

“My hospital went right down the slide,” one doctor told him. “They couldn’t get the capital for improvements, and the patients didn’t have enough money. At least this way I can go on treating people, and I don’t have to starve doing it.”

Stevens kept working at his translations of Villon. They were published under a pseudonym in the spring of 2022, and had a modest success. Ecclesiasticus said, “The Poems of Francois Villon, translated by Arthur Raab, is one of the best versions I’ve seen. Particularly notable is his recasting of the famous Ballade of the Hanged, in several ways better than Payne or Swinburne, into which the translator, while dealing effortlessly with the formidable problems of rhyme and scansion, has even managed to introduce his own name as an acrostic —unless, dare I suspect, the ‘RAAB’ turned up by itself, and the author adopted it as a pseudonym in order to impress us with his powers?”

Stevens smiled.

When his doctors talked about various ailments and annoyances, they said, “That’s your age,” as if in becoming sixty-three he had committed some fault which, if he had been more prudent, he might have avoided.

Perhaps if he had paid more attention, the years would not have gone so fast. In his childhood a school year had been an eternity, the summer vacation inconceivably far off; when it actually came, it always seemed a miracle. Was it the boredom of childhood that made it last so long? If so, perhaps it was no favor to give children more freedom and happiness.

Sixty-three was the “grand climacteric,” a term that had amused him when he first came across it. Like menopause, climacterics were critical points in a person’s life, and they were all odd multiples of seven— seven, twenty-one, thirty-five, forty-nine ... except for the last one, which, for some reason, was eighty-one. The authors of the system had not thought it necessary to go beyond that point, and no doubt they were right.

The joke was one of perspective: at twenty-one, life looked like an expanding cone; at sixty-three, seen from the other direction, it was a shape rather like a lozenge. There had never been time to do all that he wanted to do; that had been a naive illusion. He looked now at young people, with their improbably smooth complexions, and realized that they didn’t know and could not be told.

He remembered that Newland had spoken about this very subject aboard Sea Venture, at one of their last meetings before Stevens had killed him. What had Newland said? Something platitudinous and kind. After all, what else could he have said? “Seize the moment as it flies”? Stevens had always done that, but the moments had slipped away just the same.

When he was dying in the fall of 2024, the observers came and clustered in his brain, and for a moment before consciousness faded, he thought he saw them: little luminous points speaking to him without words. They were saying something he could not understand, but he thought, It’s all right.