2. The Job Seekers
It was one thousand, two hundred, and twenty-four steps to the top of Vårberg Radio Tower, which was built down to bedrock above the highest point near the city of Österholm. Rolf Pohl could feel every one of those steps as he climbed, first shouldering, then clutching, and finally just bumping and lifting the heavy, Russian-made jetpack up to the top. The flying device was a technological antique—not just old by the standards of the late eighth millennium, but old for many of the civilizations that had come and gone before Rolf’s. Under the circumstances, however, it was the best a panEuropan civilian could obtain.
Despite the cold east wind coming through the tower’s lattice structure in the predawn darkness, he was sweating. That was because both he and his first-pair partner, Anja Varden, wore flight suits that combined layers woven from various aromatic polyamide fibers designed for flame, impact, and abrasion resistance, plus a layer of metal foil for direct heat deflection. All that, plus heavy jump boots, a full-face crash helmet, and the fifteen-kilogram jetpack, made climbing a lot of work.
“How you doing, sweetheart?” he called to Anja, climbing behind him.
“Better than you … Least I’m not … thumping my pack … up the stairs.”
In fact, Anja probably was doing better than him. Although Rolf was taking the lead this morning, it was she who had introduced him to paravaning. The sport consisted of climbing to some high place, strapping on an illegal jetpack, jumping off, and with any luck soaring high over the landscape for as long as its liter of kerosene held out. It was the closest thing to flying free, like a bird—a noisy, heavy, clumsy bird with scorched legs—but still it was flying. Anja loved paravaning. Rolf loved Anja. So he tried to love it, too.
At the top of the stairs, standing on the four-meter-square platform, Rolf swung the pack up to his shoulders, looped and cinched the straps around his chest and between his legs, and then helped Anja with hers. They flipped out the stubby vanes, which gave their bodies some measure of stability and control in flight, toggled the pre-igniter switches on each other’s packs, and then stepped aside so their wing tips would not clash together. Rolf adjusted the visor on his helmet, trying not to imagine how much he would need its protection if the Russian engine, which was one step above a ramjet—well, half a step, with an electric blower—failed to ignite.
“Ready on one,” Rolf said. “Two.”
“Three!” Anja shouted and leapt.
The first ten or fifteen meters were always straight down in free fall. Rolf desperately thumbed the igniter switch built into his left glove. He heard the long, central tube of the jet cough once, twice, and then burn with a pulsing roar behind him. At first he merely accelerated toward the ground, but he rolled the vane flaps around and up with the knurled knob built into his right glove. They caught the air sharply and yanked him out of his dive. In three seconds he was pointed toward the sky; the streetlights of the city with their dappled reflections in its canals dropped away beneath him.
“Tack Gud!” he whispered, although Anja wouldn’t hear him over the roar of their engines. Then aloud, for her sake, as if she could hear, “Hee-yah!”
He glanced over and saw that she was soaring, too, five meters off to his right and three meters above him. But then, in the pearly dawn sky above and beyond her, Rolf could see two fast-moving shadows. They tracked the couple at a leisurely pace, moving silently through the air.
Rolf recognized members of the Lokala Polisen. They were hanging easily in the straps of their government-issue electrostatic packs. This was a separate and advanced technology, different from the jetpacks, and kept secret so that only the police and armed forces of the panEuropan respubliki could fly like birds and catch criminals on the wing.
Because of the ramjet’s warbling thunder, the flying patrol didn’t bother using their loud hailers to tell Rolf and Anja they were caught and must land if they could. Instead, the nearer polis just smiled and made a pushing-down motion with his hand.
Rolf nodded and looked below to find a clear space where he could land.
Anja resisted and fed more power into her pack, trying for more altitude.
The polis let Rolf approach the intersection of two broad and empty avenues, hit the ground running on his feet, and kill his engine. Then he looked up, searching the sky for Anja.
The polis shot a wad of klibbiga goo into the throat of her ramjet, and when it stopped pulsing and she started tumbling, they expertly threw an expandable net, caught her with it, and lowered her to the ground half a block away.
Rolf’s and Anja’s packs were impounded and they were taken to Österholm Central Receiving, fingerprinted—again—and placed in a holding cell. At three in the afternoon, they appeared before a magistrate for determination of their fine and sentencing. By four o’clock, Bjorn and Katje Varden had come downtown to bail them out—again—and drive them to the little flat that Rolf and Anja shared just off the Strandvägen. Rolf tried to apologize to Anja’s parents for the inconvenience, but Bjorn laughed at the episode, because he was rich and his daughter was, well … interesting. Anja simply frowned, totally unrepentant and eager to go paravaning again soon—or attempt some other high-risk, antisocial stunt. Katje just clucked, smoothed her daughter’s hair, and tried to hold her hand.
That was the end to an almost perfect day. Or at least those first thirty-four seconds had qualified as perfect: soaring free, like a bird.
———
Anja Varden sat hip-to-hip on the loveseat with Rolf, her first-pair, in their little flat in Österholm. Between them they held his writing tablet, displaying the Catalog of First-Quarter Occupations. These were job opportunities, along with each position’s educational and vocational requirements, available to citizens of Europa Nord between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, living anywhere from Nord Italia to the Arctic Circle. Anja and Rolf were seeking actual, paid employment, first, because their twenty-fifth birthday was coming up—his on Sesto 27, hers on Septo 3—and second, because the magistrate who adjudicated their latest arrest for dangerous and disorderly conduct had sentenced them to either take full-time jobs or commit to two years of community service at the state’s discretion. Being paid to work seemed the wiser course. The only trouble was, they wanted to find jobs that would let them stay together—and that was a problem.
In an age when modern medicine enabled the average person to live two or three centuries—multiple lifetimes in terms of the original human stock—no one was expected to do the same work, practice the same skills, meet the same challenges, and make the same decisions, over and over, for decade after decade after decade. So the full Catalog was segmented by age quadrants. Some occupations tracked to higher skill levels, requiring richer attainments and deeper commitments in the second, third, and fourth quarters of a person’s working life. Others remained entry-level and allowed even an older worker to change tracks, learn new skills, and gain varied experiences. Since most First Occupations were beginner level, suitable for a young person with no established roots or deep personal commitments, they generally also required either a relocation, training at a regional facility, or extensive travel.
None of these positions was particularly designed for committed couples, because no one expected young people not even halfway into their first century to enter a first-pair bonding or stay together longer than a few months, certainly not more than a decade or two. But Anja and Rolf had bonded early. They had been älsklingar, or sweethearts, and lovers since they met in sixth form. Most young moderns with an enhanced lifespan didn’t join in their first formal pair-bonding until thirty-five years of age. And even then they understood it would not last without an official renewal at sixty years. But Anja and Rolf knew their own minds and hearts. And their parents—well, hers anyway, who had been young first-pairers themselves—had agreed to the match. Rolf’s mother and father had not been so sure, although they did not oppose his choice.
So now they scrolled through the Catalog, looking for positions that would admit bonded pairs or at least were compatible in place and time.
“There,” Anja said, pointing.
“Konzert violinist?” he said.
“You studied music in third, and you play the violin.”
“I studied music theory. And I play the violin badly.”
“Surely,” she said, “you could practice and learn to play better.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But still not good enough to pass an audition.”
“You’d be playing inside a big, warm concert hall and sitting down.”
“True, that would be much nicer than getting conscripted as a soldier.”
Military service was the basic choice open to both men and women, mostly for those without education or ambition: join the army for ten years, train in rough conditions somewhere above the frost line, get sent to some unstable hellhole in South America or Central Asia if war broke out, and then end up ten years behind their cohort, professionally, when they were demobilized. Besides, neither Anja nor Rolf cared all that much for forced discipline and rigid authority.
Most people chose serialized careers that could build a lifetime of work: musician to konzert mästare to composer; or actor to play director to film producer; and even plumbers went on to become sanitation engineers and city planners.
“But that big, warm concert hall will not always be in Österholm,” Rolf pointed out. “Musicians have to take bookings all over. So, while I would enjoy traveling with you, and I would like to see the capitals of Europa, unless you qualified for the same orchestra—”
“I flunked rhythm sticks in playschool,” Anja said.
“—we would always be in different places. Besides, if I auditioned and failed, you know what that would mean.”
“Soldater,” she said glumly. “With the extension.”
“Right. We can still find something to do together.”
“We could teach. We both have adequate credits.”
“But they might not send us to the same schools.”
“Surely they would recognize our official pairing.”
“They don’t have to, not at this level. Besides, look at the postings,” he said, tapping the screen. “Mathematics in Norrköping. Astronomy in Gothenburg. Economics in Tallinn. Even if we both qualified, and even with universal transit passes, we would still spend our free time traveling to meet each other someplace rather than being together.”
“We could farm,” she said. “They let you do that as a couple.”
Rolf scrolled through the agricultural section of the Catalog. “There’s an opening for a breeding pair at a commune in Boden and … one in Koryakino.”
“Where’s that?”
“Russia, I think.”
“So, the Arctic Circle or Russia,” she said.
“Could be nice in the summer. Short growing season.”
“Farming is boring. And I don’t want to raise a child in a commune.”
“We could file to extend our educations and study archeology,” he proposed. “If we took the same ancient language set, and specialized in the same period, then they’d have to send us together.”
“But where?” Anja asked. “One of the old impact sites in the Far East?”
“The Chinese had a very advanced culture. We could learn a lot there.”
“Mandarin is hard. Their script is worse. Too much like missionary work.”
While they stared at the screen, it chimed. A gap appeared between School Teacher and Surfactant Mechanic. A new line appeared, Station Keeper (Temporal).
“What’s that?” Anja asked.
Rolf clicked on the posting.
“ ‘Exotic Climes, Exciting Times!’ ” he read aloud from the metadata that opened on the screen. “ ‘Manage a travelers’ hostel in foreign lands. Arrange forward transit for interesting and important guests. Negotiate deeds and permits with local authorities. Perform light technical duties. Full housing allowance with all expenses paid. No previous hospitality experience required. Will train for position. Ideal situation for young pairings with adventurous spirits.’ ”
Anja liked the sound of that, especially the part about adventure—and the paid expenses. The position would leave all of their supplemental stipend for amenities, like a new set of paravanes and crash suits. “Sounds interesting, don’t you think?”
“Sounds dangerous,” he said. “Who posted it? Europa Tours?”
She reached over and scrolled down. “Just says, ‘ITS’ ”
“Maybe it’s ‘International Travel Service?’ ”
“It could be something like that.”
———
After Rolf and Anja had submitted their school transcripts and formal applications for the jobs in the hotel business—and hoped their local convictions for paravaning and other pranks wouldn’t automatically show up in the online records—they heard nothing for three whole days. On the fourth day, they received acknowledgement and greetings from a Signore Salvatore Pescatore at the still cryptically named ITS Centre in Genevra, along with two electronic passes on the noon hyperbolic to the Schweizisk Republic for the next day, and an address in the Malombré District with instructions to report at one in the afternoon.
The Swiss autotaxi spoke panEuropan but had some trouble with their Nordisk accents. The machine finally dropped them and their luggage at what it insisted was the right address. Malombré might once have been a fashionable—or even livable—place, part of Genevra’s international urban center, but that was perhaps a hundred years ago. Now it was a ruin of abandoned residential blocks displaying cracked bricks, oxidized aluminum window frames, and broken and soot-streaked glass. The only intact building was right across from where the taxi left them, and it was more of a warehouse than a travel office. The exterior was a patchwork of weathered copper panels and sun-bleached ceramic tiles, with no signs, display windows, or other commercial features.
“Is this even a place of business?” Rolf asked.
“And does it have a front door?” Anja asked.
They walked along the outer edge of the building, which extended right to the curbside, until they found a rectangle of lighter gray metal which turned out to be painted steel. It had no handle and no comm pad. But in the upper left corner of the door frame Rolf detected a dull bulge that might have been a spider’s abandoned egg case, except that the shiny oval of a lens at its center faced down toward the street. Rolf pointed and waved toward it, and Anja joined in his antics with a manic grin on her face.
The door clicked and swung inward.
“I guess we’re expected,” he said.
The light strips in a bare, white corridor, two meters wide and about fifteen meters long, came on as they entered. Along its length they discovered recessed doors on five-meter spacings, alternating each side of the corridor, but without any explanatory signage. Each door had a number, but the numbers were maddeningly nonsequential and none of them started with “1.” Rolf and Anja stopped moving after they passed the third door, and after twenty seconds—Rolf found he was counting subconsciously—the lights went out, leaving them in the dark.
“For Frigg’s sake, what is this?” he asked.
“Halloo?” Anja called. “Anybody here?”
The lights came back on and the next door down the corridor opened inward. At last a human face appeared: that of a round little man with a bald head circled by a fringe of gray hair. He peered at them from under bushy eyebrows. Old-fashioned, metal-framed eyeglasses—worn instead of prosthetic surgeries—magnified his coolly intelligent eyes. His mouth was framed by a strange brush of unshaven hair along his upper lip. He was wearing a suit of clothing that came in three separate pieces: some kind of inner jacket with lots of buttons and doubly secured by a gold chain across his stomach, an outer jacket with wide folds at his breast that extended up around his neck, and pantaloons that reached down to his ankles over shiny black boots that Rolf suspected might be made of animal skin. The suit pieces were all of the same woven, patterned material that looked too heavy and hot for the summer’s day outside—although the air inside the building was being mechanically cooled. Under all that clothing, the man wore a blouse of hard-finished white cloth with a curious neck sash of colored silk tied under two wide flaps that poked out below his chin. Rolf had only seen pictures of such clothing in books—old books, crumbling volumes in a museum, which had been retrieved from archeological digs in North America.
“You are Rolf Pohl and Anja Varden from Stockholm,” the man said. “Right?”
“Österholm,” Rolf corrected him. “It hasn’t been called Stockholm for—”
“Yes, of course. Right!” The man blinked. “It is easy to get confused.”
“Are you Salvatore Pescatore?” Anja asked. “We were supposed to meet—”
“Yes, that’s a name you might as well use,” he said. “Do come in … please.”
He led them into a small square room with only one other door, on the opposite wall. The room, like the corridor outside, had bare white walls, but here someone had hung a pair of decorative paintings. At the room’s center was a plain steel table and three steel chairs, two on the side where they entered, one on the side toward the second door. Signore Pescatore indicated they should take the two together and went around the table, seating himself in the third chair. It seemed to Rolf as if he was guarding that side of the room and the way leading further into the building.
“You two are what—married—is it?” the man asked, squinting at them.
“No, just a first-pairing,” Anja said. “According to the Nordisk custom.”
“Were you joined through a church service?” he asked. “By any chance?”
Rolf knew people—old people, mostly of rural origins—who still went to the Luterite Church in Österholm, although none of them could tell him how Luterism differed from Catolism or Presbysm, or even describe the doctrines they were supposed to be learning there. The churches were quiet places with high ceilings, beautiful colored glasswork, and soothing music. That was enough for some people.
“No,” Rolf said. “It was a registered civil pairing.”
“We can fix that,” the man replied, “if anyone should ask.”
“This is about the hotel job?” Anja said. “Booking guests? Arranging travel?”
“Well, running a hostel is part of it—the least part, actually,” Signore Pescatore said. “Do you like to travel? Gain new experiences? An open, flexible attitude is most important in this position.”
“We were just talking about that!” Rolf began excitedly.
“Rolf and I never had the chance to travel,” Anja said more soberly. “As students, we worked hard at learning what we would need to know in life.”
“So you look forward to seeing new places? Meeting new people? New ideas?”
“I’ve always wanted to see the capitals of Europe,” Rolf put in. “Genevra’s a first for me—”
“Excellent! Really excellent,” the man said. “The capitals are what is planned for our first wave. Of course, we do have a rather limited selection right now. Rome is already taken, by the way.”
“Rome?” Rolf said, utterly baffled.
That place, once the center of ancient Europa, back before the steam engine, during the time before the ending of the world, had taken a major impact in the Fire Strike. Although most of the continent had been resettled and rebuilt in the five millennia since then, no one had tried to reclaim Rome. The old city had disappeared into a crater two hundred kilometers wide that bisected central Italy, then filled with magma, and finally subsided into a shallow, glass-lined bay in the broken coastline.
“Is it some other place you’re referring to?” Rolf asked. “A new Rome, perhaps? Somewhere else?”
“No, I mean the forum of the Caesars, the city where all roads meet, just—well, before the Fire Strike of twenty-six thirteen anno Domini.”
“But you’re saying,” Anja interjected, “that Rome is … already … ‘taken.’ ” Of the two of them, she was always the quick one with the good ear.
“That’s right,” the man replied. “I can offer you London, old London Town, in medieval England. That’s—well, that’s pretty much it. London is to be our next venture. We’re branching out, you see. And the Board of Governors feels England is the next logical step. Old London, that is, also before the Fire Strike—although you would actually survive it there, if you should happen to live so long. We’ve chosen the fifteenth century because the records that survive, as well as archeological digs in previous generations, suggest that England stops being a backwater then and becomes a really interesting part of old Europa—the Tudor family, the Reformation, Shakespeare, the Civil War—all sorts of good things follow.”
“ ‘Venture,’ ” Anja repeated. “ ‘Branch out.’ What are you talking about?”
“Why, it’s our virtual network, of course. We are adding a new node.”
“Then ITS doesn’t really stand for ‘International Travel Service’?”
“Oh, no!” Salvatore Pescatore laughed. “Well, pretty close.”
“Oh, I’ve read about this!” Rolf Pohl suddenly realized.
“So! You represent InterTime Systems,” Anja said.
“Didn’t our ad say temporal station keeping?”
“ ‘A traveler’s hostel in foreign lands.’ ”
“And in earlier times,” he agreed.
———
Signore Pescatore then thanked Anja and Rolf for coming, bid them a pleasant journey, and walked out through the door at the back of the room. For a moment, Anja didn’t know what to expect, until a severe young woman came into the room.
“Hello! My name is Silvestri,” she said, making it neither a given nor a family name. “I will be your personnel counselor while you are here in Genevra.”
She was dressed in more conventional clothing than Pescatore’s—a gray parasilk jumpsuit belted at the waist. She seemed barely older than they were, implying that she, too, might be doing her First Occupation. However, now that everyone expected to live a healthy couple of centuries, and with readily available cosmetic therapies, a woman could stay young-looking forever. Silvestri, however, seemed to want to deny her natural beauty by wearing her black hair mannishly short, brushed high into a wave at the front, then lacquered back around her ears. Her eyes were agate-gray and hard.
“Will you please fill these out,” she said, handing them writing tablets with preloaded forms. “And complete the psychological profiles.” Then she also left through the rear door.
Anja saw that information from her application and school records had already been entered into appropriate blanks on her tablet. And, yes, in the space marked “Convictions” was a concise summary of her escapades. She finished entries in the other parts of the form, then turned to the psychology test.
“Oj!” Rolf said after he, too, had scrolled to that page.
“What is all this?” Anja asked as she silently read.
The first multiple-choice question was “I would rather: (A) solve a math puzzle, or (B) learn a foreign language.” Followed by “I would rather: (A) eat an uncooked lizard, or (B) sleep outdoors in a rainstorm.” The first of the questions to be answered on a sensitivity scale from “Always” to “Never” was “I like to know what’s going to happen next.” The second was “I like to know what’s expected of me.” From these innocent beginnings, the questions in each category only became more intimate and more personally daunting and … disgusting.
“I guess traveling into the past can be pretty gruesome.”
“This sounds like going into the army,” Rolf said darkly.
After they completed the last questions on the profile, the tablets went dark and that inner door opened. The Silvestri woman took Anja through and headed off in one direction down an inner corridor. A young man in a jumpsuit led Rolf the other way.
They arrived at another numbered but unsigned door to a room that was part medical facility, part gymnasium. First, Silvestri tested and recorded Anja’s biometrics, including heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, and oxygen content. Next, she drew a blood sample, and Anja hoped some enzyme or other wouldn’t betray her secret. Then the woman had Anja run on a treadmill until her legs wobbled, after which she was made to perform tests of strength and agility, and finally—when she was too tired to see straight—solve mechanical puzzles involving perception, visual acuity, and manual dexterity.
At the end of the hour, Silvestri brought her back to the room, where Rolf was already waiting. He looked flushed and exhausted, too, and she guessed he had been put through similar tests. Then the ITS personnel withdrew and left them alone.
“I notice,” Rolf said, “they haven’t asked us questions about the hotel business, travel planning, accounting, or anything to do with the actual job.”
“Right,” Anja said. “And nothing about our knowledge of history or languages.”
“Probably because the assignment’s open-ended. We’ll just plunk down in the middle of a primitive country, among virtual savages, and try to make do. So … whatever this is, it’s going to be dangerous.”
“Yeah, ‘if we should live so long,’ ” she replied. “But do you like the idea …?”
———
Before he would answer Anja’s question, Rolf was conscious that the room probably had listening points. Their private conversation would probably be monitored and become part of the interview process. He stood and walked around, studying the pictures on opposite walls, to see if either of them concealed microphones.
The first one was a cityscape centered on a building whose second floor was fronted with great, square windows—except for the middle one, which was larger and had been built out into a balcony. A crowd of a thousand or more people in drab clothing stood in the street, all looking up toward that balcony. And there a bald-headed man in a gray uniform with black flashes and gold shoulder boards spoke with his arm raised. The painting meant nothing to Rolf, but then he realized from the image’s clarity and depth of field that it was not a painting at all but a photograph taken with a pixel-dense camera.
“It would be a lot like doing archeology,” he said to Anja, thinking of the picture’s implications, “but without all the dusty digging. We wouldn’t just be studying the past. We’d be living in it. Although maybe we could sign up here in Genevra and just, you know, visit?”
“That’s not the job description,” she replied. “They want ‘station keepers.’ Other people—probably real archeologists and historians—will do all the visiting.”
The second picture showed a canal, like those separating the islands of Österholm. But here he saw white and pink stucco buildings, not their own city’s familiar brick and granite. And these houses were built right out to the edge of the water, wall touching wall, with arches and balconies that overlooked the surface traffic. Floating on the water—instead of skimming over it like the jet-powered vattenskalbaggar on their canals—were long, slim black boats steered by a single oarsman. Something clicked in Rolf’s memory, and he realized this, too, was a modern photograph, but of Venice, Italy. That city had been destroyed by a tsunami traveling the length of the Adriatic Sea during the Fire Strike.
“Maybe,” Rolf went on, “we could get jobs coordinating their travels into the past. Or working on the technology involved. They must need engineers. I did take that survey course in architectural engineering.”
“I don’t know. Time travel probably involves a lot of mathematics.”
“And I was never very good at that,” Rolf said.
“Not my favorite subject, either.”
“I suppose a lot of other couples have answered the posting,” he said.
“That’s probably why they gave us an afternoon appointment.”
“Anyway, it’s not like these people will actually pick us.”
Anja shrugged. “Everyone else might back out.”
“Then we could still do the farm thing …”
“But isn’t that just, oh … surviving?”
“You think this will be fun?”
“It certainly could be.”
———
Because it was almost evening, and because no decision had yet been made on their application, Silvestri called for a taxi to take Anja and Rolf to a hotel in Genevra Centrum for the night. The woman asked them to return at ten the following morning for the results of their interview. “But whatever ITS decides,” she said, “you will be compensated for your time.”
When they were alone again, Anja slumped. “That was good-bye.”
“It didn’t sound encouraging,” Rolf agreed.
Anja became moderately more hopeful when they arrived at the hotel. In contrast to the dingy warehouse in a burned-out section of the city, the building’s façade was built up, layer upon layer, of clean, white stone inset with narrow, clear-glass windows. The receptionist at the front desk was polite and, after only two tries, managed to speak to them in a fairly unaccented Nordisk dialect. “Enjoy your stay at Hotel Metropol,” he called as the bellhop carried their bags toward the lift.
Their room was, by the standards of their flat off the Strandvägen, palatial. The windows—the room had two of them, one with a balcony—looked out from ten stories high on a pretty lake pulsing with a tall water spout. The lavatory and toilet facilities were actually in a separate room, not just hidden behind movable screens. The console offered a variety of electronic entertainments and, for a wonder, concealed a tiny icebox with sweet and salty snacks, including sour marshmallow and pickled herring, and two brands of the good German beers.
Anja decided she could live with the overnight suspense. But, despite whatever misgivings Rolf might be feeling, she knew what decision she wanted to hear.