Finity
by John Barnes
PART ONE
Iphwin Conditions
I am not an imaginative or adventurous person. I am uncomfortable with change of any kind, and most so with highly unpredictable dramatic change. So even though I was looking forward to it, when the morning of my interview at ConTech arrived, I was keyed up and tense. I already knew something unusual would happen to me, something extraordinary could happen to me, and something utterly life-changing just might happen to me.
Had I had the remotest notion of what might happen, I would have assigned it an infinitesimally small probability; had I had any idea of what would actually happen, I’d have done my best to avoid it.
My name is Lyle Peripart, and until that particular morning— it was May 30, 2062, a Friday, and therefore the uncelebrated holiday of Memorial Day—I had lived all my life, except for brief jaunts and vacations around the South Pacific, in the American expatriate community in Auckland, New Zealand. My father’s parents had been Nineteeners—that is, they had come to the Auckland Americatown during the last brief period when the American Reich had opened the door for emigration, in 2019. My mother’s family were directly descended from MacArthur’s Remnant, but as they were by then extremely poor, they were happy to see my mother marry into a family of better-off parvenus.
In 2062 the part of Auckland where I had grown up and still lived was called Little San Diego and supposedly bore some resemblance to the California city destroyed, along with the battered remnant of the Pacific fleet, by a suicide U-boat toting a hundred megatons in 1944; I was sufficiently remote from national history so that as a child I always imagined that I would rather see San Diego as it was now—a very nearly circular bay reaching miles inland from the old coast, the bottom still covered with fragments of glass—than the poor copy that my hometown was said to be.
My childhood was almost embarrassingly uneventful and stereotypical. The American expat settlement was making itself a comfortable, affluent place and an important part of the Enzy economy during those years, and with prosperity came smooth emerald lawns, white picket fences, low brick homes with long straight driveways and basketball hoops on every garage, and everything else it was possible to copy from old movies and photographs, all made out of plastic or nylon. I barely remembered the scruffy settlement of my early childhood, let alone the eternal rusting refugee camp in which my mother had grown up.
By the time I was in my midteens I was like every American expat of my generation: I wanted to assimilate and be a full Kiwi, but I was fiercely proud of the family’s American past. I got my dual citizenship on my eighteenth birthday and took my four-year turn in Her Majesty’s Navy, but every Bataan Day I went down to the Remnant’s Graveyard and said the pledge to Old Glory, then swore the oath, once again, that we would someday, somehow, carry out MacArthur’s unfulfilled promise. My eyes were as apt to get damp at “My Country ’Tis of Thee” as at “God Save the Queen.”
In due time, having been a quiet, studious kid, I turned into a good science student, and from a good science student into a competent but not particularly accomplished scientist. Since the global detente of the 2050s arrived just as I entered graduate school in physics, I was able to join in humanity’s return to the long-interrupted pursuit of pure research. After taking my specialty in graduate school I became an astronomer with an appointment at New Marcus Whitman College in Auckland, moved to a house of my own in Little San Diego, and started to date Helen Perdita, a historian, also an American expat, in our history department.
As I said, Friday, May 30, 2062, started off with at least a promise of being unusual and interesting. It was bright and sunny, and better still, I would be avoiding work today. I was taking a personal day from teaching classes in order to interview for a job that I wanted and thought I was likely to get, and even if I didn’t it was an excuse to run up to Surabaya and enjoy the day there. I hadn’t had the Studebaker Skyjump out of her slip at the harbor in at least two months, which was a very long time to go without that particular pleasure, and though it was hours till takeoff I was already excited at the thought of making a flight.
The Overseas Times was lying in the driveway, about halfway down, as always. This morning I would have time to read as much as I cared to, since my appointment was not until one o’clock.
The main headline was HENRY X TO VISIT AUCKLAND—it had been a while since the Australian king had come to town. Below the fold, the main headline was EFL TO EXPAND TO CHRISTCHURCH, PERTH. I shrugged; I had dutifully learned the rules to American football, but I hadn’t been able to make myself feel any enthusiasm for it. Even the most enthusiastic fans said that the Expat League had been unimpressive lately.
As I was carrying the paper back into the house, my mind already on the frozen breakfast I was going to heat, I stumbled for an instant. When I looked back there was nothing there, but as I regathered the paper under my arm, a small piece of blue paper dropped to the driveway. I bent and picked it up, expecting an advertising flyer, and instead read:
Dear Lyle Peripart,
You ought to stay away from Iphwin. He’s more dangerous than he seems. Take Helen to Saigon, have a nice weekend, and then come back to your regular job.
I’m really telling you this as a friend.
My first thought was that the note might be from Utterword, the department chairman, who had a tendency to use phrases like “I’m really telling you this as a friend.” But Utterword’s style was more to catch you and drag you to his office—what administrator with any political sense was going to put anything like this on paper, even unsigned?
It didn’t seem like a friendly note—the tone was more like a veiled threat. Yet I had no enemies.
I slipped the package of frozen breakfast into the warmer and flipped it on.
I didn’t even know of anyone who disliked me, much, or anyone I had annoyed.
The warmer chimed and the package slid back out.
Now that I thought of it—I stopped to shovel the soft eggs onto the toast, drop the chipped ham and Velveeta over it, sprinkle it with the small packet of A-1, and push the whole mess onto my plate—now that I thought of it, who, besides me, a few clerks at ConTech, and Geoffrey Iphwin himself, knew that I had even applied for a job at ConTech, let alone had an interview today?
The more I thought about it the more acutely it became a puzzle. Maybe someone who was mad at Iphwin? Or maybe at ConTech, trying to keep me from joining up with them? But Iphwin was only offering me the post of “personal statistician” (whatever that might be) and I couldn’t see how that could matter enough for anyone to go to the trouble of sending me a note.
As usual the Overseas Times was blissfully devoid of real news and filled with commentaries on things that did not matter in the slightest. I enjoyed my breakfast sandwich as much as ever, and I treated myself to reading, in full, a discussion of whether too much emphasis was placed on sports in the public schools; an account of how the police had tracked down and captured a mildly deranged man who was sending obscene messages to female ruggers via computer network; a discussion of the politics of converting an underused golf course to a more general outdoor recreation area; and all the other things that reminded me why I liked living in Enzy, a country with “no more history than necessary” as I liked to remark to my fellow expats.
The last bite of the sandwich went down as I was contemplating a spate of letters to the editor about the closing down of the last Christian church within city limits; a few of its little band of elderly parishioners had written, the week before, to admonish everyone that they were at risk of hellfire, and this had sufficiently tickled the Kiwi sense of humor (as deadly seriousness always did) so that there was now a bombardment of sarcastic and silly letters mocking them. I spent a while lingering over these, trying to decide which I liked best; the phrase “rabbi on a stick” had its appeal, but the proposal to treat the entire congregation with aphrodisiacs conjured a more interesting image ...