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.