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    Old Twentieth
    Old Twentieth
    Old Twentieth
    Ebook293 pages4 hours

    Old Twentieth

    By Joe Haldeman

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The twentieth century lies hundreds of years in humanity’s past. But the near-immortal citizens of the future yearn for the good old days—when people’s bodies were susceptible to death through disease and old age. Now, they immerse themselves in virtual reality time machines to explore the life-to-death arc that defined existence so long ago. 

    Jacob Brewer is a virtual reality engineer, overseeing the time machine’s operation aboard the starship Aspera. But on the thousand-year voyage to Beta Hydrii, the eight-hundred member crew gets more reality than they expect when people entering the machine start to die.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateAug 2, 2005
    ISBN9781101220221
    Old Twentieth
    Author

    Joe Haldeman

    Joe Haldeman began his writing career while he was still in the army. Drafted in 1967, he fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the Fourth Division. He was awarded several medals, including a Purple Heart. Haldeman sold his first story in 1969 and has since written over two dozen novels and five collections of short stories and poetry. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for his novels, novellas, poems, and short stories, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the Rhysling Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His works include The Forever War, Forever Peace, Camouflage, 1968, the Worlds saga, and the Marsbound series. Haldeman recently retired after many years as an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his wife, Gay, live in Florida, where he also paints, plays the guitar, rides his bicycle, and studies the skies with his telescope. 

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    Reviews for Old Twentieth

    3.5/5

    136 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Old Twentieth was a very pleasant surprise. I wanted to pick a book in the library I had heard nothing about, in addition to reading those off my very long "must read" list. I was aware that Joe Haldeman had written the famous Forever War (that's on the must read list) , so I decided to check it out.

      Old Twentieth is the story of a future Earth where a new drug has been developed that grants virtual immortality, save from a violent death. This drug is very expensive, and a movement soon arises among everyone who is not super rich to stop sale of the drug, or make it more widely available. This breaks out into Civil War, resulting in the development of a gas that kills nearly everyone who is not immortal. All of this is told from the perspective of the main character, who was a teen during the war, and whose father was killed by the anti-immortals. Fast forward several years, and you see that a group of ships have been built to venture to the closest star. Though the trip will take a few thousand years, since everyone is immortal, it is a more realistic goal. The main character chooses to join the voyage. He is in charge of the virtual reality machines, which, it is hoped, will mitigate the psychological effects of the trip.

      With me so far? The plot is not nearly as complicated as it sounds. I had no trouble following Haldeman's premise, which is a mark in favor of his writing ability. What plays out is a novel that deals with the effects of being turned immortal versus being born immortal, time travel (essentially virtual reality set in the past is a form of time travel), artificial intelligence, and human nature.

      Be warned, up until the very end, you will think you see the finish coming. You will believe the ending is cliched down to the second to last page. If the ending I felt coming had been Haldeman's ending, I would have been disappointed, and the book probably would have only gotten three stars. Luckily, Haldeman leaves the reader with a poignant and melancholy finish. The last book that left me with such a feeling was the brilliant

      (rest of the review coming)
    • 4/5
      Hundreds of year in the future, humanity is nearly immortal and they immerse themselves in virtual reality times machines to explore explore the past. During a thousand-year voyage to Beta Hydrii the 800-member crew begin to die as the time machine becomes sentient. Very interesting, like all of Joe Haldeman's novels.

    Book preview

    Old Twentieth - Joe Haldeman

    PROLOGUE

    1915

    The smell of death is always with you, like a rotten oily stain in the back of your mouth. Rum won’t burn it out and a cheap cigar won’t cover it. An unwelcome condiment with every mouthful of rations.

    It had never been worse than today. Thousands of dead baking and rotting under the Gallipoli sun, and me on the burial detail.

    Three days ago, the Turks had gathered what they thought was an overwhelming force and attacked us around three in the morning, quietly, which was unusual— normally they’d be screaming Allah this and Allah that, bugles blaring.

    But we had been warned and were ready for them, and it was a pigeon shoot. For most of the Anzac line, they had one to two hundred yards to cover between our trenches and theirs. Very few of them made it even close enough to throw a bomb, although some few did get close enough to find out what an Aussie can do with a bayonet in his hand and nothing at his back but a cliff that falls to the sea.

    So No Man’s Land became a charnel field in which hundreds of wounded men whispered or groaned or shouted for help, and none came. To give aid would be suicide. Snipers on both sides had clear shots at every square inch of blasted ground, and the best of them could hit any square inch they wanted.

    But the Turks as well as we knew that we were separated by a cauldron of pestilence no less than misery. If those corpses were not burned or buried soon, we would all be in danger of infection. So there was a temporary access of common sense, as sometimes can happen in any war, even this absurd one: their generals met ours under a white flag and agreed on a nine-hour truce to bury the dead and retrieve such wounded as had survived. We traded artillery and rifle fire all night, but soon after dawn it sputtered out.

    At six-thirty, we chosen few (most of us, including me, chosen because of insubordination) set out to do our grisly duty. It was cold, and the rain poured like a waterfall, but we were glad for both, for temporarily mitigating the smell.

    We eyed our opposite numbers, the Turks on burial detail, with suspicion at first, but as time went by we came to regard one another with something approaching camaraderie, just a gang of men forced into nine hours of the most repulsive and distressing sort of hard labor. We used pick mattocks to loosen the rocky soil and dug three long communal graves, one for Anzac and one for the first few thousand Turkish bodies, and one for the rest of the Turks and the large number of both who couldn’t be identified.

    By ten the rain had stopped and the sun was glaring down. The bodies were in ghastly shape, many of them paralyzed in a posture of running, bayonet-fixed rifles at port arms or thrust out in attack, as if some magic spell had frozen them in midaction. Most of them were in a state of rigor mortis, and it took two or even three of us to drag a body to the lip of the trench and tip it in. It’s odd how much heavier dead men are than live; any one of us could have carried any one of them to safety during a fight. It’s as if when the vital spark departs, it takes with it some physical lightness, like helium or hydrogen gas, that in life keeps us separate from the ground, the earth, until it’s time for us to join it.

    I was working the middle trench, arguably the worst, since it was mostly unidentifiable fragments, and you didn’t even have the respite of carrying weapons and identification discs back to where the sentries stood guard. The man on the other side whispered, Tommy! Tommy! I almost told him I was no bloody pom, but then was mesmerized by the sight of the pint of whiskey he was holding out. He pointed to the unbroken seal and pantomimed smoking.

    There were only three or four fags left in my packet, probably fewer than he would want. Without looking in it, I scaled it to him across the narrow valley of death.

    He snatched it handily and peered inside, scowling, but then shrugged and smiled and gently tossed the bottle over.

    I cracked the seal and held the bottle up to him in toast. Here’s to your bad aim tomorrow.

    He smiled and nodded, I supposed not understanding, and as I took a sip, with an addict’s haste he lit one of the cigarettes in a cloud of sulfur. He inhaled deeply, and let the smoke roll seductively out of his nostrils, eyes closed, thoughtful. Then he stared down at our handiwork. Bloody fucking show, he said slowly, and I wished I knew the same in Turkish. A little hoarse from the whiskey, I whispered, Selamunalekum, which I was told meant Peace to you in Turkish. He bowed slightly, perhaps with irony, fingertips touching, and we both went back about our business.

    If you had to fight someone, the Turks were not bad. They were fierce but not cruel, unlike the Germans in whose service they were offering their lives. If it weren’t for the bloody Boche we could all throw down our arms and go home.

    By three-thirty we had all of the corpses and pieces of corpses in the ground, and dirt and rocks mounded up over them. Presumably they were at peace. I’ve never made up my mind about that. We stood smoking, and I shared around the last of the bottle with three of my mates.

    There was a miscalculation that fortunately did not prove fatal. The Turks’ watches were eight minutes faster than ours. Someone who spoke Turkish saw them lining up to leave and got it sorted out.

    At a few minutes till four, a single shot rang out. Everyone fell silent as it echoed. We stared at the Turks, and they at us, in a moment of shared terror: tens of thousands of rifles, loaded and cocked, looking down at us from both sides. There could have been a minute of crossfire that added several hundred to the ones we had just planted. But the silence lengthened, and we went back to the business of gathering and leaving.

    I clambered back up the slope with a bundle of Enfields tied together with three blood-soaked belts, and was safe in a deep trench when the firing started again. I started toward my post, but realized the armorer was less than a hundred yards down the trench, so I turned and hurried in that direction, to drop off the rifles and get back.

    It’s true that you don’t hear the one that hits you. The closest Turkish artillery battery would often shoot at a very high angle, double or triple charge of powder, in hopes of dropping a round directly into a trench. That evidently happened to me.

    I’m suddenly airborne, floating rather than flying, through sudden ringing quiet, and before I hit the ground I have a sense of how badly I’ve been wounded.

    I slam against a parapet and slide to the bottom of the trench. Pain so great it’s like numbness, like ice. I roll over to look down the trench and see my leg there, shredded, beside the still-intact bundle of rifles. My other leg is only hanging on by a scrap of flesh, splintered bone sticking out of raw meat. In between, nothing but gore, my manhood carried off in the blast.

    My face feels as if someone had hit it hard with a shovel. I reach up with my right hand, missing two fingers and the thumb, and touch soft bloody pulp where my nose used to be. All my front teeth and upper jaw have been blown off. My lower jaw makes a grinding noise when I move it.

    In the rush of pain, a silent cymbal crash from head to toe, there is something like peace. This won’t last long. It’s all up for me. I’ll know all the answers soon enough.

    Bruce has appeared out of nowhere. He must have been nearby; the round landed just yards from our post. But there’s not a mark on him. He’s taken his belt and mine and is making two tourniquets.

    I try to tell him no, it’s a waste of bloody time, just let me be. But I can’t make words, just grunting vowels and jaw grind.

    It’ll be all right, Jake, he says. You can’t die here.

    I demonstrably am, I want to tell him.

    A number of people have gathered around. I vaguely hear the clatter of intense rifle fire. Another shell whines in and impacts not far away. A Sten chatters briefly.

    Bruce holds out his hands and someone pours a panniken of water over them, rinsing away my blood. Something to show you.

    He wipes his hands dry on his tunic and pulls out a small packet wrapped in brown paper. He slips off the twine, and I see that it’s a stack of tinted postal cards.

    What the hell, Bruce? I would say if I could.

    Take heed, now, he says, and displays one after another. The Eiffel Tower. The Taj Mahal. The Washington Monument. Times Square. They start to fade and I turn my head sideways so as not to vomit blood on the pictures.

    Bruce crabs around in the dirt and holds my head up so I can focus on the images. They’re a blur, now, though—and out of the blur a woman’s face appears.

    Diane? Why would I think of Diane?

    Look, Jacob, her face says to me. You have to get hold of yourself. Just look at the goddamned pictures.

    My tongue explores the ridge of shattered bone where my teeth used to be. I wish I could tell her to go away.

    You can’t die here, Bruce repeats. He holds the pictures out, fanned like a poker hand. Where would you most like to go?

    Big Ben. It must be cool in London, this time of year.

    ONE

    WINE AND TIME

    My family has a tradition, going back to the nineteenth century, that whenever a child was born (only a male child, originally), the father would buy a case of promising wine of that year’s vintage. The first bottle would be opened on the child’s birthday, eighteen years later. The other eleven bottles he or she would open to commemorate important occasions, and if any remained when he or she died, it would be passed on to the next generation.

    Father’s grandfather was the luckiest of our line, born in 1945. His father presciently bought a case of Château Mouton-Rothschild, the Victory Vintage celebrating the end of World War II. It was two dollars a bottle, and became the wine of the century.

    His luck wouldn’t last, though. He went off to war himself, a professional soldier in an unprofessional conflict, and didn’t live to see his only son, my grandfather.

    Of the ten precious bottles Grandfather inherited, along with a case of some forgotten 1973 vintage, four were passed on to my father. He left me one of them.

    I would carry it to the stars.

    My father died in what they now call the Immortality War, or just the War—a worldwide class struggle precipitated by the Becker-Cendrek Process, which at the time seemed to have made obsolete the idea of death by natural causes. A few months after you take the BCP pill, your body becomes a self-repairing machine.

    There’s a limit to its repairing ability, of course. After my father was captured by the enemy fundies, he was tied to a pole, drenched in gasoline, and set afire, and stopped being immortal a few years after he began. Most of us suffered similar fates if we were caught, and the War became increasingly vicious on both sides.

    It ended quietly with Lot 92, a biological agent that was never given, nor ever needed, a dramatic name. It killed 7 billion people in a month, leaving the world safe for 200 million immortals.

    Most of the enemy died in their sleep. At the time, I felt that that was too good for them. I resented the backbreaking and disgusting labor of finding their bodies and hauling them out for disposal, at first burying them, then consigning them to huge pyres.

    The people who killed my father had sent my mother and me a cube of his death. So it didn’t greatly bother me, at sixteen, to warm my hands in the heat of their flames.

    That was more than two hundred years ago, and now I feel sadness rather than anger. The first BCP pills were incredibly expensive; my father had sold two of the 1945 Mouton-Rothschild bottles, each worth as much as a millionaire’s mansion, to give the three of us the ambiguous gift of provisionally eternal life. Not one person in a thousand could then afford the treatment. War was inevitable, and so was its ferocity, and so, I think, was its outcome.

    There have been countless scenarios about how the War could have been averted, most of them involving secrecy. The cost of the BCP decreased by a factor of ten after a year and a half; when the War was no-holds-barred on, BCP cost less than a hundredth of its original price. That was still out of reach to anybody not wealthy, but the trend was obvious, and if the world were rational, people would have patiently waited for the price to come down another factor of ten, of a hundred.

    But the world was even less rational then than now, and it became common knowledge, among the ignorant, that the pill cost only pennies to manufacture—so the obscenely rich were becoming even richer, withholding life from ordinary people. Populist politicians and fundamentalist religious leaders made that a cause célèbre, and they had access to all the tools of the science that were not called mind control only because, as advertising, it sold products for industry and policies for government.

    The paradox is that if there actually had been a conspiracy among the rich, and they had agreed to keep BCP secret, war might have been averted. Keep the stuff underground until the per-unit cost came down to where most people could afford it. But the price couldn’t come down until a lot of people bought it at the obscenely high rate, financing the company’s research and development and production facilities. So it was heavily advertised and propagandized, until there wasn’t one person on the planet who didn’t know that millionaires and movie stars and grafting politicians could all buy a pill that gave them life everlasting.

    It was only a small step from there to they’re withholding it from us, and another small step to let’s go get it. Even though when war broke out, there wasn’t enough to treat one person in a thousand.

    It ended with Lot 92, which sought out everyone who wasn’t immortal and stopped their hearts within minutes.

    The world of 2047—the year the War started—seems faraway and quaint, now, but it actually was a bewilderingly complex set of interlocking systems, and after the War, 97 percent of the people who had run it were gone. The 3 percent who were left comprised most of the world’s leaders, certainly its financial leaders, but it was light on the rank and file who did daily administration and maintenance, and nobody was left alive who did small-engine repair or lawn care or waited on tables. They were the more or less invisible lubricant that had kept daily life running smoothly. Without them, the world ground to a halt.

    The extremity of our situation was hidden at first by sheer magnitude—production and supply were largely automated, and the system was set up to serve thirty times as many people as existed. There were food and drink in plenty, and of course shelter was no problem, the planet one large ghost town.

    There was no produce, with no truckers and few farmers, but there was a cornucopia of frozen and dehydrated food. Then the power went out, here and there and almost everywhere, and the frozen food spoiled. People who would never call themselves looters ransacked stores and institutions for packaged food to make it through the winter.

    There was little violence, most of us sick of it from the War, and a lot of sharing, once it was obvious that there was enough food to go around for several years, if it was distributed rationally. In most regions, co-ops grew together to centralize food supplies, and they formed the nucleus for local governments.

    Some areas, where the people had been mostly Christian or Moslem or Hindu fundies, had such a sparse and scattered population that they became deserted, people moving naturally to be with other people. A few large cities, like New York, London, and Tokyo, attracted enough people with technical know-how that they were able to cobble together a simulacrum of what had been normal life—at least to the extent of fairly reliable running water and electricity, and communication lines reopened all around the world.

    People knew the clock was ticking. They could only live for a few years as scavengers on the corpse of the old world. They rolled up their sleeves and started to rebuild.

    Immortality certainly helped that. They weren’t building a new world for their children and some abstract posterity. They were cleaning up the mess so they could live in comfort in the coming centuries and millennia.

    I was not much help at first. I was sixteen at the end of the War, with almost no formal education, having been seven when the world fell apart.

    My mother and I walked about three hundred miles, to New York, trying to find me a school. We must have been a sight, me pulling a kid’s little red wagon full of food and ammunition, my mother carrying a backpack and a shotgun. I had a pistol and a rifle, and was alternately excited and scared at the prospect of using them, but as it turned out, we had no trouble with humans. Several times we had to shoot dogs, who roamed in feral packs, and once a bear, in upstate New York.

    That was close. My mother emptied the shotgun at it, seven buckshot shells just pissing it off, before I killed it with a lucky shot through the eye.

    Before that, we had sort of enjoyed strolling through the countryside. We decided to move faster.

    Central Park was rank and wild. People lived there, but kept their distance. Three uniformed police officers were waiting for us when we emerged onto Eighth Avenue; they nervously told us we had to surrender our weapons, or turn around and go back to where we came from. That raised my mother’s libertarian hackles and didn’t set well with my teenaged hormones, but you could see the sense of it. New York was an actual city, with nearly a million people. There had to be law and order.

    They gave us information in exchange for our guns, and we spent a couple of days standing in lines, becoming citizens of the brave new world. We got a two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, and my mother, given a choice of several jobs, went into hospital administration—immortals didn’t get sick, but they still broke bones and had babies—and I was put in the tenth grade and given an early-morning job as a garbage collector. I sort of wished we’d stayed in Maine.

    There weren’t many children right after the War. A lot of people had to live with the memory of watching their families die, having bought immortality for themselves first, figuring there was plenty of time for the kids.

    The kids got Lot 92 instead.

    The population of New York doubled and redoubled over the next few years. It was the only large city in the east that had survived the War largely intact. Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington were burned-out, blasted ruins, so if you wanted big-city life you drifted to New York.

    Of course, a lot of the people who came were predators in search of prey. In 2059, the entire City Council was murdered during a meeting, and a group of armed thugs who styled themselves the Mob tried to take over the city. It was like a gruesome comedy; they thought they had control of the police force, but really had only infiltrated the top. The volunteer beat cops spread through the neighborhoods giving back all the weapons they had confiscated. Mother and I got ours, but never had to use them. Mob rule was over in less than a day, the bodies of fifteen ex-mobsters hanging from a makeshift gibbet at the end of Wall Street, and a new volunteer Council was sitting a week later.

    We were allowed to decide whether to keep our guns. We kept the shotgun and handed the other two back for the City’s use.

    All the rest of that summer I would go down with the other kids and monitor the progress of decay on the Wall Street bodies. By fall, there were only partial skeletons with a few sun-bleached rags of clothing. One day they disappeared, replaced by a plaque.

    The next year I started college, which was no distinction. For years, every young person would go straight from high school to NYU, to provide something like meaningful employment for the thousands of professors who would otherwise be in the labor pool. I tried civil engineering but wound up

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