Generations
by Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl’s current principal activity is traveling around the world as much as possible—he visited his seventh (and last, because that’s all there are) continent in 2004, and hopes to get to his fifty-first and fifty-second countries in 2006—but he keeps on writing when he can find the time. His short story collection, Platinum Pohl, out this year from Tor, is his one hundred and thirty-fifth book. His one hundred and thirty-sixth will be a novel, Underneath the Mountain, in which he will bring the ruined old city of Pompeii back to life. In his first tale for us in more than ten years, he takes a harrowing look at the future and a legacy that may be passed on.
* * * *
Stephen Avedon, B.Sc., M. Ed.
The truth of the matter is that I knew Sheila Carrington was out of my class from the first moment I saw her. That was when we were stuck in the waiting area at LAX, made to mark time until our plane, which had been delayed getting in because of bad weather, would open its doors. What I noticed first, of course, was that she looked very trim and blonde and pretty. The other thing I noticed was that she was busy fending off a plump guy in the next seat who was hitting on her.
I could see right away that she was definitely first class.
And first class is where she went when we boarded the plane, too. I didn’t. I was back in steerage, where the seats are constructed for nobody over five feet five and there’s always a line for the toilets. Even when the flying is smooth, which this time it wasn’t.
The captain turned the seat-belt sign off at cruising altitude, but five minutes later he turned it back on again. “Folks,” he said on the horn, his voice deep and, of course, basically Texan, “I really hate to say it but the radar’s telling us that this next little bit of air’s going to be kind of bumpy. So what we have to ask you to do is return to your seats and fasten your belts. Hopefully the turbulence won’t be that long. Then I’m looking for a smooth ride all the way to JFK.”
He didn’t get what he was looking for, though. The sign was off for maybe ten minutes or so over Arizona, and then it was back on all the way over New Mexico. Even when the sign was off the ride wasn’t really smooth.
That didn’t bother me much. I don’t get airsick, and I was watching the movie, anyway. I barely noticed when the stews began to stagger around and slop us our lunch, choice of some kind of chicken or some kind of beef, until all of a sudden the whole damn airplane took a kind of unexpected roller-coaster dip and slide. Somebody’s salad went flying across the aisle and landed in the lap of the lady next to me. So did the stew who was trying to serve it. She caught herself just as she was following the salad into the lady’s lap.
Then it got worse.
I’d never had a ride quite like that. For a pretty long time after that first scary drop, the stews were scurrying around to get their carts locked down and themselves strapped into their seats, and nobody from the cockpit was saying anything to us at all. Meanwhile the plane was flopping this way and that and making unpleasant little squeaky and scrapy noises. When the bouncing around eased off a little we got the captain back on the horn. He was more apologetic than ever. There was nothing in the world to worry about, he told us, but there were rules they had to follow. One of the rules was that when an aircraft had been subjected to that much turbulent stress they were supposed to land and check it out before proceeding, so our first landing wasn’t going to be at JFK but at Kansas City International. When we got there—the passengers clapped like crazy as we touched down—they made us all get off and sit in the waiting area by the gate.
That was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
The thing is, just as I was reaching for a magazine to read, that nice-looking blonde woman from first class plunked herself down into the seat beside me. “May I?” she asked. But she was already there, and anyway there wasn’t any real question about whether she might or might not.
Actually, one of the reasons I’d taken that package tour to Yosemite was that I was sort of hoping to meet some nice, maybe kind of Helen-Hunt-looking, woman to replace the one who’d dumped me at Easter. That hadn’t happened.
It wasn’t entirely because of my good looks and savoir faire that the woman from first class had joined me, though. Mostly she was trying to get away from the plump little fellow I’d noticed with her before, who was in paper products and had a company hotel suite waiting for him in New York ... and had already been refused a fourth Cosmopolitan by the stew, even before the worst of the turbulence hit us. I didn’t care why she picked that seat. I was just happy to have her there.
I stayed happy, too. Even when I learned that she was some kind of Wall Street lawyer, and so really, definitely out of the class of a physics teacher from Brooklyn Technical High School. Putting it in numerical terms, that’s to say about a quarter of a million dollars a year out of my class. Only, because God was being good to me that day, it turned out that her own high school had actually been Brooklyn Tech. She had been majoring in the civil engineering courses, before she changed her mind and decided she was never in this world going to be happy as an engineer and so wound up in Harvard and Harvard Law and the kind of a job that kept flying her all over the place to negotiate merger contracts and IPOs.
She remembered some of her old Tech teachers. I was able to tell her which ones were still there and which ones were retired, and how Mrs. Einborg was still as fat as ever and Miss Kornfeld never did get married, and that the food in the cafeteria was all different now—not so much of the french fries any more, more two-percent milk than Coke—but not really a lot better.
We were there in that airport for nearly three hours. There was plenty of nonstop pissing and moaning from most of the stranded passengers, but those were three very good hours for me. They finally let us get back on the plane—”Good as new, folks, they’ve checked everywhere and there’s no trace of structural damage at all”—and by that time I had her name—”Just call me Sheila”—and she had given me her phone number.
Actually the kind of money Sheila was pulling down didn’t make as much difference as I was afraid it might.
Loaded or not, Sheila was not a high-maintenance date. She didn’t mind that we didn’t go to Twenty-one for lunch and Vail for a skiing weekend. Probably she’d had enough of those things to last her, and anyway there were a lot of things we found to do in New York even on a teacher’s salary. Up to the Cloisters on one Saturday, to the planetarium at the Natural History museum on another. Old movies at MOMA. Swimming at Jones Beach a couple of times in the summer. We went there in her car because it was a Beamer convertible and a lot more comfortable than my old Corolla, but she politely asked me to do the driving and didn’t criticize when I did.
It was a good time. Well, actually it was the best time I’d ever had in my life. The only thing we ever quarreled about was which movie to watch on her industrial-sized television, and we generally settled that by the flip of a coin. When we were in my own place Sheila had no interest in watching the Mets lose their ordained 60 percent of their games, but she was content to let me watch them in one of the two little rooms of my apartment while she curled up in the window of the other, reading one of my physics texts or science magazines. They were recreational reading for her. She still had all of the curiosity about how the universe worked that had made her twelve-year-old self take the entrance exam for Tech. The career had gone a different way, but the interest hadn’t left her. Still fascinated her, in fact. She couldn’t believe what weirdnesses had come along in, say, cosmology since she was in school. Branes? Dark matter? Dark energy, for Christ’s sake? The one that really pulled her cork, though, was the announcement that some of the most distant galaxies weren’t slowing down as they fled away from us, as gravitational attraction should have made them do, but were actually speeding up in the universal expansion. “That,” she told me, “is crap, Steve. It doesn’t make sense. Somebody’s made a pretty stupid mistake.” And then, when I explained to her about all the observational evidence, and how many separate sources it had come from, she sighed. “Oh, hell, hon,” she said. “I don’t get any of this at all. Maybe I should sign up for some night courses at CUNY.”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll tutor you.”
I did, too. I tutored the hell out of her, all that spring and summer and fall and well into the winter. And the only times that were better than the times when we were walking around the Park and talking, or staying up late to watch Jon Stewart on the “Daily Show” and talking, or lingering over a Japanese or Greek or Indian meal—always pretty cheap places, but places where they didn’t mind if we stayed a while, holding hands—the only times that were better than those when we were out of bed, I’m saying, were the times when we were in. That was better than I’d ever had it and, bless her heart, Sheila said it was for her, too.
And then it was Christmas, and we went out to the Island to meet her parents.
That was a little scary. The Carringtons seemed to be happy enough about Sheila and me, though. The only problem I could detect anywhere in the world was still the fact that she made so much more money than I did.
Then it was New Year’s. Not just your average New Year’s, remember, because this was Happy New Millennium time. The year that was coming up was 2001, and everything was going to be different.
I hoped so, anyway. So when the ball dropped and we had done that first formal New Year’s kiss I said, “I wish it could stay this way forever.” And Sheila rubbed her cheek against mine and didn’t say anything, and I said, “I love you, hon.”
She said, “I know.”
I said, “I can’t imagine a life without you in it.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she sat up, wearing the face she always wore when she could see I was stalling about something, and said, “Oh, shut the fuck up, Steve. If you want to ask me something for Christ’s sake go ahead and ask it.”
So I did. I said, “Sheila, will you marry me?”
“Damn straight I will,” she said. “My mom would kill me if I didn’t, anyway.”
So then we kissed some more, and then she sat back, looking almost as pleased with herself as I was with me. “Actually,” she said, patting her hair back into some kind of shape, “it’s probably a good idea for us to get married, because I kind of think I’m pregnant.”
Silvie Avedon Khoshaba
My Dad never wanted me to become a physicist because there wasn’t any money in it. So I didn’t do it. I married one, though, and I never regretted it. I didn’t marry Ron because he was a scientist, or at least I don’t think that was the reason. I married Ron because he was a hunk, and because I liked the guy a lot, and maybe mostly because he was a hell of a fine folk dancer.
That’s where we met, in the little park by the river where our group danced on Tuesday nights in the summer—where my father let me go because there isn’t anything very sexy about folk dancing and where I didn’t mind going without having a date to bring me, because most of the other girls didn’t have one either. Ron and I were both regulars, so I danced with him pretty often. I did my best, trying to be inconspicuous about it, to get next to him when we did the Hora or the Miserlou. I liked the way he spun me around when we were doing that kind of dance. I especially liked the way he did those falling-down-drunk kinds of Greek dances that are for men only, and those of us who weren’t men could have a pretty good time sitting on the grass and checking out the beefcake.
I didn’t take him seriously, though. How could I?
It wasn’t really the fact that he was an Arab, even if an American-born Arab, that worried me, but I couldn’t help noticing that he was getting along in years. He must have been at least thirty-five or thirty-six. To me that was Methuselah. I was seventeen. I hadn’t even been drafted yet, and he was a lieutenant-colonel, which I knew because sometimes that winter, when we were doing our dancing in the basement of the Y and the skinheads were cruising the streets, he’d show up in uniform so the skinheads wouldn’t start something he’d have to finish.
Anyway, what happened was that at one of the Tuesdays toward the end of the summer it rained.
The rain had let up a little after dinner. Most of us hopefuls showed up at eight anyway on the chance the rain wouldn’t start up again. We hadn’t even finished the first Israeli Hora when it began to come down again. The most hopeful of us didn’t give up. We retreated to our cars to wait the rain out, and as I didn’t have a car I joined Ron in his. We talked for a while. Then we began to kiss and, hey, like they say, the rest is history.
We didn’t rush into anything. We sneaked around for a year and a bit before I decided I wanted something more permanent than an occasional afternoon in the bed in Ron’s BOQ at the fort. So I told Dad I wanted to marry this Iraqi-American leaf colonel.
Dad stopped eating when I said that. I’d waited for dinner to tell him, and I’d had our part-time cook make his favorite sauerbraten with red cabbage and potato pancakes, just the way he liked it. He sat for a while rubbing his forehead and looking into space, but not at me. I knew what he was doing—that is, he was rehearsing all the mistakes he’d made bringing me up as a single parent. Lately he’d been doing that a lot. (He hadn’t really done that bad a job, you know. When my mother got killed and left him stuck with a two-month-old squalling baby he took a year off and changed my diapers himself. Fortunately there was plenty of money from the indemnities, so he could easily afford a full-time nursemaid, and it all worked out all right. I wasn’t wild, you know. I didn’t do drugs or anything, but on the other hand I hadn’t been a virgin since my sixteenth birthday, and Dad kind of suspected that was the case.)
Finally he said, “I thought you hated Arabs. Because of your mom, I mean.”
“Ron was born in Duluth, Minnesota,” I told him. “You don’t get much more American than Ron Khoshaba.”
“He’s in the weapons-analysis corps,” Dad said. “He could be sent to a combat area any time.”
“So could I,” I said. “After I was inducted, I mean. So could you, even.”
That wasn’t very likely. Dad was way deep down in the reserve-activation list on account of being a teacher. He didn’t argue about it, though. He just sighed. “I wish you hadn’t lost your mom so early,” he said meditatively, and then, “Oh, hell, I guess you probably know what you’re doing. All right. You’ve got my blessing. I’d appreciate it if you’d wait until you were, say, nineteen, though.”
We did wait. Ron wouldn’t have it any other way, because he still had that old-world reverence for fathers. Anyway, we were still getting it on a couple of times a week in Ron’s BOQ suite.
There was some disputation about the wedding. Dad and I would have been happy with a justice of the peace. Ron put his foot down. “When my parents came to America they became Lutherans. They had me baptized as a Christian and I guess I still am one. Anyway, you’ve got a minister right across the road, don’t you?”
We did. We had Billy de Blount’s father and Dr. de Blount was definitely a minister—Presbyterian instead of Lutheran, sure, but, once we gave in on the church wedding, Ron didn’t make a fuss about denominations. Rev. de Blount was an old friend, well, sort-of friend. He had talked my dad into sending me to his Sunday school when I was ten, and sometimes he took Billy and me to some G-rated Disney movie or for a soda at Friendly’s Ice Cream. I finally put a stop to that. Although Billy was two years younger than I he had a serious crush on me, and it got annoying.
I think Dad was a little worried that Ron would pull rank on him, since Ron was doing real physics research and Dad was only a high-school teacher getting ready to retire. That didn’t happen. Ron wasn’t like that. I wouldn’t have married him if he was, and anyway the kind of research Ron was doing wasn’t anything like the kind Dad had always wished he could be doing himself. The War took care of that. Ron was pretty anal about security, so he never exactly told me what he was doing, but some of his assistants weren’t as cautious. So I knew. Basically he was sniffing around captured Islamic positions for traces of radionuclides that didn’t belong there. Their checking for isotopes was done down to the parts per trillion level, in the hope that they could keep track of what the Arabs had up their sleeves. And what made Ron go into physics in the first place was exactly the same thing that had done it for Dad. They both had wanted to know what rules the universe ran by. They still did. They spent a lot of after-dinner hours talking about what the Australians and the Scandinavians were doing.
Which wasn’t much. Since so many American facilities got merged or shut down entirely due to the War not a lot was happening in theoretical physics. It wasn’t actually that much better in most of the rest of the world, either. The Europeans were too busy fighting their own war against the terrorists, with the Islamists a lot closer to European heartlands were to ours. They barely even kept CERN going. And, maybe because they no longer had anybody important to compete against, I guess the Russians and the Chinese had more or less lost interest.
That seemed to piss my father off even more than it did Ron. “You’re too young to remember,” he’d tell me, “but I was around when places like Fermilab and Stanford and Bell Labs were turning up new stuff every day. You don’t know about Bell Labs, do you? They invented the transistor there, and Claude Shannon developed his information theories, and Rudi Kampfner invented the traveling-wave tube and God knows what all else. It wasn’t the Arabs that did the Labs in, either. It was just corporate greed.”
And so on and on, the two of them taking turns in their nightly deploring contest. I loved them both. Quite a lot, in fact. But sometimes I did wish that they would now and then look on the bright side.
Because, you know, we didn’t have that bad a life. My father and I had lived all my life in the big house on the shore that my mother bought for the family just before she got killed. I loved the place. When Dad turned it over to Ron and me as a wedding present I cried. He said it was too much house for a single man. Even with the part-time help we’d always had from the town it was too much house for me, too, but then Ron hired a couple of refugees named Bruce and Rebecca so I could get on with school. Dad didn’t move out. Ron wouldn’t let him. So Dad took over the maid’s quarters on the third floor, had his own sitting room and bath and, quite unnecessarily, kitchen. That meant that the servants had to sleep in the place we fixed up for them in the basement, but it wasn’t that bad, really. Anyway they didn’t mind. It was undoubtedly better than the plastic tents in the Hessa Hissa camp they’d lived in, back in the Sudan, until the lightning struck and they got that visa to America.
By then I was twenty, going on twenty-one, and just about to start my second year at the local community college. My major wasn’t physics. English lit. I still loved listening to Ron and Dad talk about the black holes and the quarks and all, though not enough to have any wish to follow in their footsteps. Thus, an English lit major. The war was going badly, as usual, but we had plenty to eat and plenty of time on our own—well, I mean when Ron hadn’t been sent off to poke around Barcelona or Marseilles or Haifa or some other place that we had just recaptured from Islam, before the Islamists recaptured it back. And not counting the optional, but not very optional, third weekend of every month. That’s what we spent in our voluntary (but not very voluntary) training with the Citizens’ Defense Corps, learning how to make a Molotov cocktail to throw at an Arab tank, if one ever appeared in New Jersey. None ever did. Even the servants had to sign up for the CDC, or risk losing their green cards. They didn’t mind. They hadn’t forgotten what it was like in Dafur. They had a pretty good practical idea of what Arab tanks could do, too, and anyway all the CDC stuff was entertainingly theoretical. None of us was likely to be called up.
Dad wasn’t teaching regularly any more, but he still took on one or two physics classes a semester. It would have made sense for him to take a little flat in Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights, but he wasn’t willing to abandon the house Mom had bought for us. Commuting, though, was a problem. Mom had had her own arrangements, at least when the weather was halfway decent. A hydrofoil would come and pick her up at our little dock and whisk her right across New York Bay to the Battery Park City pier in lower Manhattan, and it didn’t even cost her anything because the company paid for the whole thing. Dad wouldn’t do that. He didn’t have a rich company to pick up the check for him, though he really could have afforded it if he’d wanted to. He said it was because it was too extravagant, but I think it was because it reminded him too much of my mother.
So he got up early every morning he had classes and drove himself in to Brooklyn across the Verrazano. That shot his whole coalcohol ration, but I never used all of mine up and Ron had a surplus—got a field-grade officer’s ration to begin with, and was often enough deployed to somewhere where he couldn’t use it. So Dad got all the coupons he needed. Besides, we walked a lot when the weather let us.
That was one of the reasons I hated to see the summer come to an end. Well, that and the vine-ripe tomatoes and the corn, of course. Labor Day was pretty much the cutoff for us. We didn’t celebrate the holiday by marching in any parade, but it was the alarm-clock ring that told us to get ready for cold weather and school. When I sat on the porch that day, I could see that the seed pods were beginning to drop off the catalpas. Dad and Ron were nursing their beers in one corner of the porch, talking particle physics, as usual, and debating whether to go in for what might be their last swim of the summer. I was on the porch steps trying to get a head start on the school year by reading the American lit text ahead of time. I heard somebody go “pssst”—yes, literally “pssst”—from behind the hydrangea bushes. The only person I knew who would say “pssst” was Billy de Blount. I sighed, turned the book off and stood up. I kept my voice low and said, “For God’s sake, Billy, why don’t you show yourself like a normal human being?”
He stood up enough so that I could see his head. “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” he ordered. “I just didn’t want to disturb your dad and—” he jerked a thumb in Ron’s direction—”him.”
I have to admit that in some ways I didn’t altogether mind having a teenager who had such a crush on me that he hated even to say my husband’s name. Still, he really was a pest.
“You disturbed me,” I informed him. “What do you want? And come out of those damn bushes.”
He didn’t come out from behind the hydrangeas. If he had, Ron and Dad could have seen him, and that was something Billy tried to avoid. He did answer the question, though. He peered at a piece of paper in his hand that looked familiar—actually, it turned out to be a page from my father’s notebook—and asked, “What is ortho-positronium?”
I held out my hand. “Give me that.”
He made a face, but he passed it over. It was a list in Dad’s sloppy handwriting:
g c Fine structure constant Ortho-positronium decay Planck’s constant
The list didn’t make a lot more sense to me than it had to Billy. “Where’d you get it?” I demanded.
He hung his head, the way he did. “It was on the lawn. I picked it up. Anyway, when your dad and him were writing this stuff down they were talking about God, and I wondered—”
“You wondered if they were getting religion?”
He didn’t answer that, just scowled. Then he said, “So what does it mean?”
“How the hell would I know? Why don’t you ask them?”
That time he just pointed, but it answered the question, sort of. Ron and Dad had made their decision. They were already stripped to their shorts, on the way down to the river.
Of course, Billy wouldn’t have asked them anything anyhow, since that would have meant actually speaking to my husband. But it made his point. “All right,” I said. “I’ll ask them when I get a chance. But next time you come to the door and knock. Okay? I’m tired of you sneaking around the house.” And then, as he started to turn away, still scowling—he scowled a lot, for a teenager—I had to add, “You sure they were actually talking about God?”
Rebecca had made one of Ron’s favorites for supper that night—hamburger Stroganoff, where it didn’t matter how tough that range-fed beef was because it had been ground to about the consistency of a Big Mac. I didn’t ask the question while we were eating. What we talked about was how muddy the river was getting, and whether our eel population was ever going to recover from the depredations we had waged on it in the bad times before rationing started, when you had to know somebody to get a pork chop at the Safeway. And then we talked about how I felt about starting another school year, and why Ron had to make a quick trip to some damn island in the Caribbean next week. He wouldn’t say the “why,” of course. He wouldn’t even say which island, but Rebecca had already been told to pack both his snorkel and his hill-climbing boots, so I was pretty sure it was Jamaica.
Then Rebecca cleared everything away and Ron tipped the last of the bottle of Peruvian merlot into our glasses. I thought that was a good time to ask them about what Billy had said.
They both looked puzzled. “He thought we were talking about God?” Ron said, and Dad said, “Let me see that paper.”
When he looked at it he began to laugh. He passed it to Ron, who laughed just about as much. Then Ron leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. He turned to Dad. “You want to show her the book, Steve?”
Still grinning, my father reached over to where he had left his shoulder bag, and pulled out a book. What I mean to say here is a paper book. With the data printed on it in ink. The cover told me its title was The Universe Next Door, and it was written by someone named Marcus Chown. “I’ve had this for thirty years,” Dad informed me. “So when this story about the Moon came along I remembered it and pulled it down to show Ron.”
“What story about the Moon?” I asked, but Ron was already talking.
“A lot of it’s out of date, of course, but the guy had some interesting ideas,” he said.
“Always did,” Dad agreed. “Best science writer there was.”
I gave them both a look, about ten seconds apiece of my don’t-be-such-pains-in-the-ass,—will-you? look. “Ortho-positronium,” I reminded them.
“Oh, sorry,” Ron apologized. “It’s just that it takes a little explaining. Ortho-positronium is—I guess you could call it an element? Sort of, anyway?” He was looking at Dad, who shrugged. “All right,” Ron said, “let’s say it’s some kind of an element. A very simple one. Like hydrogen. Only instead of being made of an electron and a proton, the way hydrogen is, positronium is made of an electron and a positron. You know what a positron is?”
Dad gave him an indignant look. “Of course she knows what a positron is.”
I did, more or less—it was like an electron, only it had a positive charge, like a proton, instead of the electron’s negative one. I nodded because I was actually understanding what they were talking about. And then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t, because they began talking about mirror matter and it didn’t really sound as though they were talking to me. “Oh, hell,” I said, holding out my hand. “Why don’t you just give me the damn book?”
Having the actual book in my hands was better, but not a whole lot better. I was getting lost in stuff about time running backward and baby universes being born, and my father’s thirty-year-old scribblings in the margins of the pages didn’t help. Then it occurred to me to use the index. That was a lot like looking something up on my screen, though a lot slower, but then I did find out what they were talking about.
There turned out to be more than one kind of positronium, but the kind they were talking about was called ortho-positronium, never mind why. Ortho-positronium was something that got made in particle accelerators, and after it was made it didn’t stick around very long. It lived for.000000142 of a second, after which it blew up into three photons and was gone. Or, anyway, that’s when it was supposed to do it, but when they came down to measure the time exactly, the damn thing dissolved into photons one tenth of a percent faster than that.
Big deal, right? But they seemed to be sure about the numbers, God knows why, so I kept on reading and—after a lot of really weird stuff about mirror universes and such—I came to some talk about a man named Edward Harrison.
Harrison had an idea that might explain the discrepancy. Suppose, he said, that there’s a really advanced race of space aliens, off somewhere in infinite space and time. Suppose one of them wants to understand how the whole universe works. How would they go about it?
Well, if they were like human scientists, Harrison reasoned, they would make something like a computer model that they could study. Only, since they were really advanced superbeings, they would make a really good model. In fact it would be so good in all its details that it would contain every last aspect of the real universe.
Including, for example, us.
And the “us” in that model universe would have no idea they were nothing but computer simulations, as indeed we did not.
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