"Joe Haldeman - Four Short Novels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

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FOUR SHORT NOVELS
by
Joe Haldeman

Remembrance of Things Past


EVENTUALLY IT CAME TO pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money. When you
started to feel the little aches and twinges that meant your body was running down, you just got
in line at Immortality, Incorporated, and handed them your credit card. As long as you had at
least a million bucks тАФ and eventually everybody did тАФ they would reset you to whatever age you
liked.
One way people made money was by swapping knowledge around. Skills could be transferred with a
technology spun off from the immortality process. You could spend a few decades becoming a great
concert pianist, and then put your ability up for sale. There was no shortage of people with two
million dollars who would trade one million to be their villageтАЩs Van Cliburn. In the sale of your
ability, you would lose it, but you could buy it back a few decades or centuries later.
For many people this became the game of life тАФ becoming temporarily a genius, selling your
genius for youth, and then clawing your way up in some other field, to buy back the passion that
had rescued you first from the grave. Enjoy it a few years, sell it again, and so on ad infinitum.
Or finitum, if you just once made a wrong career move, and wound up old and poor and bereft of
skill. That happened less and less often, of course, Darwinism inverted: the un-survival of the
least fit.
It wasnтАЩt just a matter of swapping around your piano-playing and brain surgery, of course.
People with the existential wherewithal to enjoy century after century of life tended to grow and
improve with age. A person could look like a barely pubescent teenybopper, and yet be able to out-
Socrates Socrates in the wisdom department. People were getting used to seeing acne and gravitas
on the same face.
Enter Jutel Dicuth, the paragon of his age, a raging polymath. He could paint and sculpt and
play six instruments. He could write formal poetry with his left hand while solving differential
equations with his right. He could write formal poetry about differential equations! He was an
Olympic-class gymnast and also held the world record for the javelin throw. He had earned
doctorates in anthropology, art history, slipstream physics, and fly-tying.
He sold it all.
Immensely wealthy but bereft of any useful ability, Jutel Dicuth set up a trust fund for
himself that would produce a million dollars every year. It also provided a generous salary for an
attendant. He had Immortality, Incorporated set him back to the apparent age of one year, and keep
resetting him once a year.
In a world where there were no children тАФ where would you put them? тАФ he was the only infant.
He was the only person with no useful skills and, eventually, the only one alive who did not have
nearly a thousand years of memory.
In a world that had outgrown the old religions тАФ why would you need them? тАФ he became like
unto a god. People came from everywhere to listen to his random babbling and try to find a conduit
to the state of blissful innocence buried under the weight of their wisdom.
It was inevitable that someone would see a profit in this. A consortium with a name we would
translate as Blank Slate offered to тАЬdicuthтАЭ anyone who had a certain large sum of what passed for
money, and maintain them for as long as they wanted. At first people were slightly outraged,
because it was a kind of sacrilege, or were slightly amused, because it was such a transparent