“Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgment. Earth is not the same place you left.”
He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, smiling. “Most of you have something on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war. Your income puts you in a ninety-two-percent income-tax bracket: thirty-two thousand might last you about three years if you’re careful.
“Eventually you’re going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There are not that many jobs available. The population of Earth is nearly nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed.
“Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now going to be twenty-one years older than you. Many of your relatives will have passed away. I think you’ll find it a very lonely world.
“But to tell you something about this world, I’m going to turn you over to Captain Sin, who just arrived from Earth. Captain?”
“Thank you, General.” It looked as if there was something wrong with his skin, his face; and then I realized he was wearing powder and lipstick. His nails were smooth white almonds.
“I don’t know where to begin.” He sucked in his upper lip and looked at us, frowning. “Things have changed so very much since I was a boy.
“I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph. . . to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?” Nobody. “That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is.
“Most governments encourage homosexuality-the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual countries-they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.”
That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.
“As the General said, the population of the world is nine billion. It’s more than doubled since you were drafted. And nearly two-thirds of those people get out of school only to go on relief.
“Speaking of school, how many years of public schooling did the government give you?”
He was looking at me, so I answered. “Fourteen.”
He nodded. “It’s eighteen now. More, if you don’t pass your examinations. And you’re required by law to pass your exams before you’re eligible for any job or Class One relief. And brother-boy, anything besides Class One is hard to live on. Yes?” Hofstadter had his hand up.
“Sir, is it eighteen years public school in every country? Where do they find enough schools?”
“Oh, most people take the last five or six years at home or in a community center, via holoscreen. The UN has forty or fifty information channels, giving instruction twenty-four hours a day.
“But most of you won’t have to concern yourselves with that. If you’re in the Force, you’re already too smart by half.”
He brushed hair from his eyes in a thoroughly feminine gesture, pouting a little. “Let me do some history to you.
I guess the first really important thing that happened after you left was the Ration War.
“That was 2007. A lot of things happened at once. Locust plague in North America, rice blight from Burma to the South China Sea, red tides all along the west coast of South America: suddenly there just wasn’t enough food to go around. The UN stepped in and took over food distribution. Every man, woman, and child got a ration booklet, allowing them to consume so many calories per month. If tha went over ther monthly allotment, tha just went hungry until the first of the next month.”
Some of the new people we’d picked up after Aleph used “tha, ther, thini” instead of “he, his, him,” for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal
“Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over. They kept the rationing, but it’s never been really severe again.