8
I hadn’t given it too much thought, but of course we were celebrities on Earth: the first vets home from the war. The Secretary General greeted us at Kennedy and we had a week-long whirl of banquets, receptions, interviews, and all that. It was enjoyable enough, and profitable — I made a million K’S from Time-Life/Fax — but we really saw little of Earth until after the novelty wore off and we were more or less allowed to go our own way.
I picked up the Washington monorail at Grand Central Station and headed home. My mother had met me at Kennedy, suddenly and sadly old, and told me my father was dead. Flyer accident. I was going to stay with her until I could get a job.
She was living in Columbia, a satellite of Washington. She had moved back into the city after the Ration War having moved out in 1980 — and then failing services and rising crime had forced her out again.
She was waiting for me at the monorail station. Beside her stood a blond giant in a heavy black vinyl uniform, with a big gunpowder pistol on his hip and spiked brass knuckles on his right hand.
“William, this is Carl, my bodyguard and very dear friend.” Carl slipped off the knuckles long enough to shake hands with surprising gentleness. “Pleasameecha Misser Mandella.”
We got into a groundcar that had “Jefferson” written on it in bright orange letters. I thought that was an odd thing to name a car, but then found out that it was the name of the high-rise Mother and Carl lived in. The groundcar was one of several that belonged to the community, and she paid 100K per kilometer for the use of it.
I had to admit that Columbia was rather pretty: formal gardens and lots of trees and grass. Even the high-rises, roughly conical jumbles of granite with trees growing out at odd places, looked more like mountains than buildings. We drove into the base of one of these mountains, down a well-lit corridor to where a number of other cars were parked. Carl carried my solitary bag to the elevator and set it down.
“Miz Mandella, if is awright witcha, I gots to go pick up Miz Freeman in like five. She over West Branch.”
“Sure, Carl, William can take care of me. He’s a soldier, you know.” That’s right, I remember learning eight silent ways to kill a man. Maybe if things got really tight, I could get a job like Carl’s.
“Righty-oh, yeah, you tol’ me. Whassit like, man?”
“Mostly boring,” I said automatically. “When you aren’t bored, you’re scared.”
He nodded wisely. “Thass what I heard. Miz Mandella, I be ’vailable anytime after six. Righty-oh?”
“That’s fine, Carl.”
The elevator came and a tall skinny boy stepped out, an unlit joint dangling from his lips. Carl ran his fingers over the spikes on his knuckles, and the boy walked rapidly away.
“Gots to watch out fer them riders. T’care a yerself, Miz Mandella.”
We got on the elevator and Mother punched 47. “What’s a rider?”
“Oh, they’re just young toughs who ride up and down the elevators looking for defenseless people without bodyguards. They aren’t too much of a problem here.”
The forty-seventh floor was a huge mall filled with shops and offices. We went to a food store.
“Have you gotten your ration book yet, William?” I told her I hadn’t, but the Force had given me travel tickets worth a hundred thousand “calories” and I’d used up only half of them.
It was a little confusing, but they’d explained it to us.
When the world went on a single currency, they’d tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration books, so they’d made the new currency K’s, kilocalories, because that’s the unit for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalories of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread. So they instituted a sliding “ration factor,” so complicated that nobody could understand it. After a few weeks they were using the books again, but calling food kilocalories “calories” in an attempt to make things less confusing. Seemed to me they’d save a lot of trouble all around if they’d just call money dollars again, or rubles or sisterces or whatever … anything but kilocalories.
Food prices were astonishing, except for grains and legumes. I insisted on splurging on some good red meat: 1500 calories worth of ground beef, costing 1730K. The same amount of fakesteak, made from soy beans, would have cost 80x.
I also got a head of lettuce for 140K and a little bottle of olive oil for 175K. Mother said she had some vinegar. Started to buy some mushrooms but she said she had a neighbor who grew them and could trade something from her balcony garden.
At her apartment on the ninety-second floor, she apologized for the smallness of the place. It didn’t seem so little to me, but then she’d never lived on a spaceship.
Even this high up, there were bars on the windows. The door had four separate locks, one of which didn’t work because somebody had used a crowbar on it.
Mother went off to turn the ground beef into a meatloaf and I settled down with the evening ’fax. She pulled some carrots from her little garden and called the mushroom lady, whose son came over to make the trade. He had a riot gun slung under his arm.
“Mother, where’s the rest of the Star?” I called into the kitchen.
“As far as I know, it’s all there. What were you looking for?”
“Well … I found the classified section, but no ‘Help Wanted.’ ”
She laughed. “Son, there hasn’t been a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in ten years. The government takes care of jobs … well, most of them.”
“Everybody works for the government?”
“No, that’s not it.” She came in, wiping her hands on a frayed towel. “The government, they tell us, handles the distribution of all natural resources. And there aren’t many resources more valuable than empty jobs.”
“Well, I’ll go talk to them tomorrow.”
“Don’t bother, son. How much retirement pay you say you’re getting from the Force?”
“Twenty thousand K a month. Doesn’t look like it’ll go far.”
“No, it won’t. But your father’s pension gave me less than half that, and they wouldn’t give me a job. Jobs are assigned on a basis of need. And you’ve got to be living on rice and water before the Employment Board considers you needy.”
“Well, hell, it’s a bureaucracy — there must be somebody I can pay off, slip me into a good—”
“No. Sorry, that’s one part of the UN that’s absolutely incorruptible. The whole shebang is cybernetic, untouched by human souls. You can’t—”
“But you said you had a job!”
“I was getting to that. If you want a job badly enough, you can go to a dealer and sometimes get a hand-me-down.”
“Hand-me-down? Dealer?”
“Take my job as an example, son. A woman named Hailey Williams has a job in a hospital, running a machine that analyzes blood, a chromatography machine. She works six nights a week, for 12,000K a week. She gets tired of working, so she contacts a dealer and lets him know that her job is available.
“Some time before this, I’d given the dealer his initial fee of 50,000K to get on his list. He comes by and describes the job to me and I say fine, I’ll take it. He knew I would and already has fake identification and a uniform. He distributes small bribes to the various supervisors who might know Miss Williams by sight.
“Miss Williams shows me how to run the machine and quits. She still gets the weekly 12,000K credited to her account, but she pays me half. I pay the dealer ten percent and wind up with’ 5400K per week. This, added to the nine grand I get monthly from your father’s pension, makes me quite comfortable.