The time: the mid 22nd century The place: at sea, close to the southern coast of the country still known as the United States.
The ship's name is Lethe - Forgetfulness. Oblivion. Concealment. Her deadweight tonnage is over 160,000 tons. She was among the largest freighters ever built, capable of transporting almost 15,000 standard cargo containers. Lethe had another name then… Paradiso.
Lethe was one of the five rivers of Hades; anyone who drank from its waters experienced total forgetfulness.
As you will soon see, to forget - though meant as a punishment, can be a blessing while it lasts, and a curse once it is stripped away.
I am not sure how I came to be on this craft; I have trouble remembering anything more than four or five weeks in the past, once it passes from my immediate experience. I am told this is an excellent quality to have for the Refugee Service.
I wake up. I look at my rough-whiskered face in the comically cliché half-broken mirror in my cabin. I’m neither especially old nor you. Grey shows in the beard. Maybe my hair is thinning, maybe not. I’m told I am thirty-five years old. Maybe I am, maybe this is only official information, because insurance rates go up once you turn thirty-six.
My cabin mate, Odie, says the captain, white patriarchial beard and scarred bald head and all, is officially thirty-five as well. “We are all thirty-five,” he laughs.
He can’t remember anything four or five weeks ago either, unless it is right before him.
We are all swimming in forgetfulness, we who ride the Lethe.
My world is simple – I sleep in a cabin toward the stern, below the superstructure but above the deep containers where the bulk grain, water, hydroponics and other necessities of our floating ecosystem are keep. We top off on some items up periodically; others – depending on local groundside need and the season – we drop off at port along with the refugees.
The refugees… they travel as such poor mistreated ones have for most of a century – in the stacked containers. We use modified ones – oh, it’s all civilized now – no stowing away in containers meant for brass bolts and ball bearings and lead-painted toys. It’s not four-star. It’s crowded to the estimated limit of human mental health – but space is no longer the problem it once was.
They just don’t make refugees like they used to.
I’m out of my cabin, moving forward, following others (I am a few steps late for muster), up ladder wells, up to the murky, muggy dawn. The weather has been calm the past few days – I vaguely remember rough weather – water from the sky, wind, spray coming over the frightful pitching and yawing rails of the Lethe. It seems like a dream. I know what storms are. I just don’t… KNOW them.. until one happens. Then I remember my training. I remember everything useful for the task.. until I no longer need it. Then I forget.
I am told that this, too, is a very good quality to have in the Service.
Four sections forward and five ladders up, I come to a midships clearing among the container stacks, sixty meters abeam and thirty meters lengthwise. The stacks, with fenced access ways, rise up like 10 story tenements.
The salty muggy smell hits me like a rude cousin – we are close to shore now. The festering of rot and smoke and the pinching aroma of industry.
I should clarify; I am not here to eat, I am here to serve. For the next short (or dog) shift, three-fifths of the ship’s complement of five thousand will be maintaining order and serving the last onboard meal to our current roster of passengers.
For four weeks, we had crossed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and made north for North America. This much I can remember – we have run the same course, back and forth, many times. Unlike many other areas of the planet, there are still plenty of refugees in South Asia. The nuclear wars destroyed many people, rendered many more unqualified for transportation. Still, in the far south – Karnada, Tamil Nadu – there are people to save.
Odie told me of China – for a time, the Service went there, during their Second Revolution. The new regime is very strong – they do not want or require our aid. So the Service went elsewhere. Different values, I suppose.
I see Odie now, he sees me and waves me over. He motions at the vat of red curry. “Taste this, see if it’s not too spicy.” He laughs lightly.
I shrug and reach for the ladle, scooping out a bit to taste. Odie stops me after a few tastes. “OK, that’s enough. Save some for the refugees” he whispers urgently. He looks around, then laughs some more. “OK, no more jokes. I need more rice from the galley and that means you’re a mule today.”
I groan. The rice pots weighed north of sixty pounds each when full…and the galley was below decks. Two levels.
“The price of being late,” Odie scolds.
For the next several hours, I am in a state of Lethe-like oblivion. I like physical work. It comes easy. After the initial change of gears I am hefting the rice pots, full ones up, empty ones down, like clockwork. With 10,000 containers occupied, we currently have 200,000 refugees onboard.
That is why so many of the crew are running rice and spooning curry. And dishes – I glance at some of my crewmates, recycling plastic and metalware as fast as they can. There is nowhere near enough stowage for a quarter-million table settings. The same glass, or spoon, or plate, will do tenfold duty tonight.
Odie is in his own routine – a silent, sullen one. Something is wrong. I do not remember him everbeing like this. I wonder if it is my malady. No… I would remember this, I tell myself. Odie has never been this way.
I touch his shoulder. He bolts up as if tased. “What’s the matter, Odie?” I ask.
His eyes are full of …I do not know the word for it. Something more than fear. Something more than anger. Something related and yet more. I can’t remember it; I give up trying. Again, something I don’t need to remember.
Outside my training.
“Don’t eat too much curry tonight,” Odie whispers harshly.
“What?”
Before he can speak again one of the officers, a new butter-bar, steps up. “I’m here to relieve you, Ramirez,” he says.
Odie shudders, composes him. He turns around and salutes. “Relieved, sir,” Odie says and walks off. He turns toward the far rail, going faster and faster, practically dancing through the crowd of servers on this side of the foldout tables.
I look back at the replacement crew. “What’s your name?” I ask him.
“My name is SIR to you, meat!” he says. “Go get more rice.”
Meat?
“Sir,” I reply, and continue ferrying rice to the tables. There is another hour of mess for the passengers.
I remember this much of my training.
After an hour, the officer – his name is Carrier – no first name – puts up a hand. “No more. Serve yourself some chow.” He waves absently at the curry.
“Yes, sir!” I am famished. I acquire a bowl – still almost scalding to the touch from so many cleanings through the evening and pile the curry on rice. I look around and see they’re serving beer – a diluted pale ale – along with non-alcoholic drinks. I look surreptitiously about. Other crew – all similarly low in rank to myself – are either happily feeding their faces, washing their meals down with rice, or dozing off happily.
That alone would be worrisome – asleep or nodding off on watch? I look up – and there is Carrier, staring right past me at the other ratings, arms folded, smiling. He is probably pleased he and his fellows worked half of us to exhaustion.
“Yes, go ahead and pour yourself a drink, meat,” Carrier says to me. Why is he calling me that? It’s the sort of thing someone says to a newbie. I’ve been on this ship…
How long have I been on Lethe? I forget.
I sit down; the men beside me – all men… for some reason, that’s never been remarkable to me until just now… are either slowly drinking or fully asleep.
I start into the curry. Ordinarily we eat separately from the passengers – separate mess, separate menus – but the final night is special. I assume it is. I don’t remember the last one very well.
However, over the past few weeks Odie has asked me to taste the curry, to make sure it was alright. First a very little bit, then more and more. At first it made me ill, very sick, then less so. This much I remember. I suppose it was so constant I never forgot.
Don’t eat too much of the curry,” Odie had warned. I remember this. I wonder why; it tastes just the same. Still, it seemed important to him. I focus on the rice and the beer and pace myself with the curry.
I look up over my upturned plastic cup of beer to see Second Lieutenant Carrier looking down at me. He is not smiling – well, he is, in that his mouth is formed into a smile. His eyes, though… his eyes are sending a much different message.
So is the sidearm in his right hand.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Carrier asks. “Come to think of it, you don’t remember you, do you?”
I set the drink down slowly, place my hands on my knees. “Sir, I have this condition.”
The lieutenant waves the gun, waving away the excuse. “You have this conditioning, meat! Your memory is made to decay on purpose! It’s supposed to be a punishment.”
Punishment… the word raises a terrible dread.
I look to my right. Teams are lifting unconscious men and loading them onto gurneys. A shadow passes overhead – a dock crane. Over the next eighteen to twenty hours, the cranes will deposit every refugee pod on the docks. We saved so many from certain starvation. We nursed and fed them back to health. Some have even become expectant mothers. A good life awaits them; these will be green pastures for them.
“Where are they….”
“Where are they going, you are about to ask?” Carrier leans close, practically spitting in my face. “The same place you are going, meat!” He roars. “Finally, your sentence will be carried out.”
Something in me remembers. Maybe this is important to my training. “I did something terrible… before?”
Carrier nods savagely. “Oh, yes. That you did.”
Another officer arrives. It is another lieutenant, a first lieutenant. “Carrier, why is your sidearm drawn?”
Carrier stands up. “Just having a conversation with the mea … with the rating, here.”
“You’re talking to him. Now? Why?” The officer glances down. “Put the damn gun in your holster, before someone sees you!”
“Yes, sir,” Carrier says.
The new officer glances down. “He’s not unconscious. Even a taste of the sedative should have knocked him out.”
I look to my right as the last of my fellow crew are rolled away.
“I’d been tasting the curry all voyage .. it tasted the same to me, ” I offer up helpfully. It’s important to be helpful to officers. Part of the training.
“He’s built up a tolerance,” Carrier cries out. “That damn bleeding heart Ramirez…”
“Odie?” I ask. “He only gave me a little bit, just to make sure it was ok.” I make to get up, but fall back. “Whoa. Dizzy.”
Carrier chuckles. “Alright, it’s all good. He’s just a big feller with an ace up his sleeve but that’s not enough to keep the sleepies away.”
“Very well,” the other lieutenant says. “As you were. And Carrier..”
“Sir?”
“I need to borrow your sidearm. Just until he is sent packing.”
“Ronnie, please…”
“Sidearm – it’s a request. A favor.” Ronnie paused. “Please don’t make me fill out the paperwork for ordering you.”
Carrier passed over his gun. He sits on his heels beside me. I can barely see. We both watch the shadow of “Ronnie” vanish around a stack of container pods.
“You won’t remember a word of this. You probably won’t even have a mind left when they start, ah, editing you.”
“Edit?” Something in the tone terrified me. Then I remembered the word for what Odie’s eyes held a few hours earlier: Horror.
“Yep… seems that a long time ago, our grandparents dropped the ball a few times. The climate went bad, everywhere. It happened all at once, over the course of a few years. Almost all farm animals everywhere suffered. They were all placed in factories – chickens, cows, zebus – I guess that’s a kind of cow – the works. Then the airborne leukemia struck. All those critters in tight spaces. Whoosh. All gone.
“Now, who would it be that would have a problem with good hard-working people getting a taste of meat now and then? Who, would you think? There was hardly any left, really, even the industrialized kind. Only the rich could afford it. Maybe a little bit for a family that saved up. Soldiers got to eat, of course.. they had to.
“Which brings me to you, Sergeant Damon Calaeno, who came home after the conclusion of hostilities with the Qaidi in Uganda.
“The plague hadn’t crossed the Atlantic the day before. Then you returned home.”
I am shaking. I remember … a battle beside an ocean – no, a huge lake – Lake Victoria. The airfield.. .it was famous several times over… Entebbe. We had been winning; the introduction of the Brazilians to the theater had completely changed the game.
Dammit, we were winning!
Then the disease changed. We had all seen the miserable dying animals. Not all died – but almost all did. The ones that remained were resistant. There would be herds again.
But the elephants died. The giraffe. The eland. All of them .And horses, always so vulnerable… perhaps 1 in 100 zebra survived. Some Burchell’s. No Grevy’s.
How did I know such things? I remember a book I read as a child. I had loved being in Africa, to occasionally see the pictures alive.
No, now more.
I mentioned the disease… an airborne form of leukemia. It had crossed from major mammal to mammal, one family after another. It went to cattle … to everywhere. It lingered for a while among zebras. Then.. it jumped. It became a human disease.
It was temporary for us; perhaps we – we, not they – were the original source for it. It was like a bad case of strep.
But it was highly contagious, just like strep.
So, we returned. Everyone in my unit had it. We fanned out across the country on leave, before we were to redeploy to the next most important war … Nigeria, it was supposed to be.
“They died so fast,” Carrier was sobbing. “My dogs, the horses… oh, the horses.” He had collapsed beside me. I remained still; I had no choice; the slow poison had frozen me.
“Remember… now…” I mumble out.
Carrier glances up sharply. “Good. Because it killed so much more than animals you know that.” He shudders. “You were the first case they say.. the Patient Zero.”
“Devastated… me…” I answer. It had. Somehow, we know. Somehow, I knew. There was no crime on the books for what we did, but someone had to pay. Most of my men … they took their own lives. I commanded, once. I had a memory.
Then they took that away, and placed me here, in Oblivion.
“How long…Carrier?”
“You want to know how long you have been here?”
I nod.
“It’s the year 2138, meat. Two Thousand. One Hundred. Thirty. Eight.”
“Can’ be.” I’m thirty-five, officially. That was really far in the future, something screams…. But how far? That would make me….what? I don’t know!
“Yep. Do you remember when Entebbe was?”
This was hard. My life before ‘35’ was a blank.
“I’ll save you the trouble, meat. They can rejuvenate you, Sergeant. They did. The price is your mind goes – you can’t be both immortal and stay yourself. People like me, we pace it out. It’s great for space voyages. Just go to sleep and stay hale and whole and … forget. Then you come off the Lethe – they named the ship after it – and you gradually get yourself back.
“The curry’s an antidote, not a poison.”
I let this sink in. So it was not a death sentence. “Why… now?”
“The powers that be figure a hundred years of Service was enough.” Carrier leans in. “I don’t agree, by the way, but… at least I have the satisfaction of knowing everyone you will ever remember – in a few days – is dead and gone.”
“But if everyone has this..”
“Not everyone does, Calaeno. Not everyone deserves it. Has enough to pay for it. Your family was blacklisted. None had it. None had reproductive rights granted, either. They’re all gone.”
“Why.. hate .. so much?”
“You really don’t remember me yet, Sergeant? I was in your platoon. I came home poisoned because of you.
“And until last year, I worked beside you here on the horror show of a ship!”
“So… “ I gather my strength to answer back “You and me… all we have left of… old world?”
Carrier nods, sobbing. “They blacklisted my family too. All gone - even the ones that could have been.”
I find energy to shed tears at that. My sisters.. their sons and daughters would have been the last Calaenos. Without the longevity treatments they would have died decades ago.
“You called me… by name.” I add.
Carrier laughs sadly. “That I did, Sergeant.”
“Not meat.”
“So… not going to be turned to.. hamburger or something in .. curry?”
“Hell, no. Meat’s illegal. Everyone’s vegetarian now anyway. They feed the refugees Lethe to rejuvenate them before arrival in America.”
“How… progressive of them.”
Carrier laughs. “Yep, looks like the vegans won the culture wars. Even thinking about meat will get your social rating demerited.”
“For moment, thought you wanted to kill me.”
“So did Lieutenant Warren.” Carrier sighed. “I did, for a bit. But you’re right: You’re all I’ve got. Besides, we’ve done time together.”
“Tired. Just want to sleep.” Then I fell asleep.
---
Carrier stood up, waved a team over.
“Sir?” The leader asked.
“Has the main convoy headed out?”
“Fifteen minutes ago. Um… they’re going to wonder about this unaccounted one.”
“Well.. you know how it is. Exposure to Subcontinent Refugees and their gear over the past century. Radiologicals built up in his system, too much for the Lethe treatments to overcome. He’ll exist… but he won’t be, ah, suitable for the black market.”
“And if the buyers… demand an audit. Or get one?”
Carrier fished out two sizeable nuggets – pure diamonds, compliments of his last asteroid mining expedition. Even in the mid 22nd century, 500 carat stones were remarkable.
“Take an extra day dose of Lethe, will you? Just to be safe,” Carrier said.
“I’ll remember to forget the whole thing. We all will, at these rates.”
“Thank you.”
“So, where do we send Mr. Calaeno?”
“Somewhere I can never betray him, if I start having second thoughts.”
“Very well. He won’t stay invisible for long – he is rather, ah, notorious, even now.”
“Yes… but we’ll give him his chance to come to terms with the world he helped create.” Carrier says no more. The men go away, and he watches them drive off.
“You be meat, soon enough, Sergeant. Sooner or later you will stop for too long…”
Carrier smiles.
It was always best to hunt for prey - it tasted better that way. Like... like revenge.