Dayworld Breakup Read online

  * * *

  Praise for the Dayworld Series:

  “A painstakingly created future world of military precision, Dayworld is…every bit as appealing as the Riverworld saga.”

  —Booklist

  “Another of Farmer’s striking mythic variations on civilization and its discontents.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Farmer’s best book in years.”

  —Locus

  “A tightly-plotted, often exciting yarn…solid, assured…absorbing!”

  —Kirkus

  * * *

  Philip José Farmer is one of the great names in science fiction world-wide. “There’s no such thing as a bad Farmer novel,” says Science Fiction Chronicle. And his major work of the last decade has been the Dayworld series—“an important work from a major author” said Fantasy Review. The Dayworld series (Dayworld, Dayworld Rebel) followed his best-selling success with the classic Riverworld saga.

  Now at last the trilogy is complete, with the publication of DAYWORLD BREAKUP.

  One of the bestselling writers of SF for the last thirty years, called by critic Leslie Fiedler perhaps the greatest of them all, Farmer’s trademark has been the large-scale, multi-volume saga, huge in concept and scope, wild and wonderful, jam-packed with action and mind-boggling SF ideas, heroic in character. His Dayworld, the New Era world of the year 3000 and beyond, the over-populated future in which the population is turned to stone in hibernation for six days out of the week and revived to live only one in seven, for hundreds of years, is just such a huge concept.

  Established and chronicled in the two previous books. Dayworld is now at a moment of terminal crisis. One man, William Duncan (aka Jeff Caird), holds the key to the chains that bind the world, and he is determined to loose them and bring down the whole civilization. For the population has steadily decreased but the figures have been kept secret so that the administrators can retain absolute power. Now Duncan, the daybreaker who lives seven days a week, with the help of his sometime lover, Panthea Snick, is determined to expose the plot and reveal the discovery of longer lifespan, awakening all the world at once. But he must run, hide, fight, kill to stay free long enough to do it.

  In the classic mold of Robert A. Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 and A. E. Van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops, Farmer tells a tale of revolution that climaxes one of the great epics of the decade in SF.

  Philip José Farmer lives in Peoria, IL.

  Tor books by Philip José Farmer

  The Cache

  Dayworld Breakup

  Father to the Stars

  Greatheart Silver

  The Other Log of Phileas Fogg

  The Purple Book

  Stations of the Nightmare

  Time’s Last Gift

  Traitor to the Living

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  DAYWORLD BREAKUP

  Copyright © 1990 by Philip José Farmer

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  49 West 24th Street

  New York, N.Y. 10010

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 0-312-85035-2

  First edition: June 1990

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my first great-grandchild, Zachary Joel Gittrich, born September 6, 1988

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  A Foreword Which Is also an Afterword

  by Ariel Cairdsdaughter

  My father used to introduce me as my daughter, the historian.

  Jefferson Cervantes Caird never dreamed that, some day, he would be a prominent person in videobooks and rank with Robin Hood, William Tell, George Washington, and many other fictional, semi-fictional, and very real characters in legends and history. Nor did he anticipate that his daughter would be researching his life.

  Why should I, his child, have to research him? Don’t I know him through and through, have at my fingertips all the facts of his life from birth to now?

  No, I do not. For one thing, I seldom saw him after I got out of high school.

  For another thing, I no more knew that he had many lives, not just one life, than anybody else.

  As for his very early life, what he knew about it was a lie. Only his parents knew the truth. After they died, no one knew. My father was ignorant of the truth, though it may have kept itself hidden deep in his memory, inaccessible to any callup code.

  Another thing about his story. It would not have happened before the middle of the 1st century N.E., what the ancients called the 21st century A.D. And what he did took place over two thousand years later.

  Two thousand obyears, that is. That’s a term, obyears, no longer used in official calculations or in everyday conversation. There is no longer a distinction between obtime and subtime. That is, between objective time and subjective time. We’re back to the system of the ancients when we talk of time. All things return, but they’re not what they were.

  In the old days, which we then called the New Era, we grew up in what was called the Dayworld, We were accustomed to it from the time we became old enough to have understanding. It seemed quite natural.

  Now, schoolchildren have to be taught about the Dayworld: stoners for people, the division of the living into sevenths, and the difference between obtime and subtime. To the children, it’s fascinating history, though I suppose they’re still like schoolchildren everywhere and any time. They’d rather be out playing.

  Still, the world before they were born must seem as strange to them as the pre-New Era world was to me when I was a child. Now that I’m fifty years old, physiologically, that is, but actually three hundred and fifty years old as the Earth circles the sun, the post-New Era seems strange to me.

  They learn that the world was once divided nationally, that there were many states each of which had its own government. Then they learn that, after a long and bloody struggle, there was a world government. Even after all the deaths from this war, eight billion people lived on this planet. In another hundred years, obtime, there would be ten billion. Maybe eleven. The planet could not support this many, especially since the pollution and ravaging of forests was swiftly poisoning all life.

  But the invention popularly called the stoner was brought into practical use. The suspension of molecular movement in living bodies by the application of electrical power changed society enormously and changed the face of the Earth. For the better, in most respects. In other respects, no.

  The world population was divided into sevenths, and
each seventh would live one day of the week. The other six days it would be in the stoner containers, its life in a sort of suspended animation, though it really was not suspended. It was frozen. Tuesday’s people, for example, would have to enter these coffinlike containers sometime before midnight. They would be “stoned,” and shortly thereafter, Wednesday’s people would be unstoned. And so on. The following Tuesday, that day’s citizens would be “unstoned” and would take up their interrupted living.

  There you were. Every day, only 1.1 billion would be eating and drinking food and water resources, emptying only 1.1 billion people’s wastes, and so on.

  But eight billion overall was still too much. So the world government imposed an almost inescapable birth control, and the population began dwindling toward the number the government thought that the planet could handle without ill effects. Even today, despite our many freedoms, parents know they cannot have more than two children unless the government lifts the limits temporarily in certain areas. But the most any couple can have is three.

  The Dayworld was not Utopia. Utopia is impossible because innate human nature is non-Utopian. The majority of people accepted the system, though there was a certain amount of resentment and grumbling. Also, there was much fraud, lying, and struggle for power in the government hierarchy. No getting away from that. I do not doubt at all that it’s still going on. The government, like all governments throughout history, needs to be watched carefully and to be checked, straightened out. In that respect, things have not changed at all. The governed must govern the governors.

  In those days, there were “daybreakers,” the discontented and the outright criminal persons who slipped away from the confines of the once-a-week living. Few of them escaped the police, euphemistically called the organics and referred to by the citizens as “ganks.” When caught, a daybreaker was sent to a rehabilitation institution. If he could not be rehabbed, he was stoned permanently.

  Among these daybreakers was my father. But he differed from the others. He had a powerful, though secret, organization to help him, to give him a different identity for each day of the week, and to maintain these IDs. Long before Jeff Caird was born, a Tuesday citizen, a scientist named Immerman had discovered a means for slowing down aging. With this, a person whose normal lifespan was one hundred years could live seven hundred years. But since the stoner system allowed a person to live seven times his normal lifespan, Immerman could use his ASF (age-slowing factor) to live fourteen hundred years.

  He kept the ASF to himself and some family members. Later, the ASF was given to members of his expanding secret organization, the “immers.” Jeff Caird, his grandson and great-grandson, was a courier for the immers. He “broke day,” assuming an ID for each day so that he could carry messages the immers did not want to go through any electronic channels. He also performed certain duties for the immer chiefs, duties which they did not want the lesser immers to know about.

  Eventually, my father became these seven personae. Then Panthea Snick, a detective, accidentally got on his trail. While tracking him, she was captured by the immers.

  Immerman was now a World Councillor with the fake ID of David Jimson Ananda. His grandson, Jeff Caird, had become involved with Snick and was now a danger to the immers. Immerman ordered that his grandson be killed.

  So much for family feeling and loyalty.

  At the same time, Caird’s seven personae were battling for control of his body. The immers, aware of this, deemed him to be a double danger to them.

  Though Caird was caught, he could tell his captors nothing about his previous activities. Even the irresistible truth drug used could not make him reveal his illegal activities. He had suffered a psychic breakdown and had a new persona which had no memory of the previous seven personae. Then he got out of the supposedly escape-proof prison and fled to Los Angeles State from Manhattan State.

  During his long odyssey, he rescued Snick from a stoner warehouse. She had been stoned and placed there after being railroaded in a secret illegal trial by the government. This was done at the circuitous instigation of Immerman (now the World Councillor Ananda). He was afraid that she would not be able to keep quiet about her knowledge of the immers.

  My father (now calling himself Duncan), Snick, and a companion were captured by Ananda in Los Angeles. But my father and Snick killed Ananda’s bodyguards and overpowered him. Using a drug, TM, Caird extracted from Ananda a secret override command. This enabled him to broadcast a TV message all over the world without being cut off by the government. He revealed some of the truth about the world government’s misuse of its power, its lies, and the existence of the age-slowing factor.

  Duncan (that is, my father, Jeff Caird) and Snick fled from Ananda’s suite on the top floor of one of Los Angeles’s city-towers. By then the police, the ganks, were hurrying to the tower.

  The following is an account of his and Snick’s adventures from that moment. As you will see, much of it has had to be reconstructed. We don’t know what Caird was thinking during this time. Nor did we know why he fell into his final persona (we thought it was his final).

  In a way, it was his final. But from then on, he grew into an adult, mentally speaking. And the scientists have good reason to believe that his character traits are those of his original persona, Jefferson Caird. But, as you will see, that was not his original character.

  My father still does not remember the strange sea change into the genuinely original persona. However, long after the events described below, the scientists used a new and highly advanced technique which enabled them to reach back and display the brain waves of that period. It is not really thought-reading. It’s a long and expensive and, for the subject, painful process. But the mental activity shown on the CRTs enabled the scientists to interpret more or less exactly what happened during that extremely crucial event in my father’s life.

  Thus, they can be given herein with a great deal of assurance that this is what actually happened.

  NOTE: The events leading up to Dayworld Breakup are described fully in Dayworld and its sequel, Dayworld Rebel, by Philip José Farmer.

  1

  Running away was also running toward.

  Duncan, sprinting across the rooftop of the tower, thought of how true that old Chinese proverb was. Wherever he went in his flight from the organic police, the “ganks,” he would find others. They were a horde of locusts. He and Panthea Snick, his fellow refugee, were the crops the locusts meant to devour.

  “Not if I can help it!” he said, gasping.

  “What?” she said close behind him.

  He did not reply. He had to save his breath. But his anger was not a thing to need conserving. It had long been a red tide building up in him, pulled by the moon of the injustices he had suffered. His wrath beat at his reason and discretion and threatened to smash them.

  The low night clouds pulsed with the light reflected from the towers of Los Angeles. In all of the twenty monoliths rising from the waters of the L.A. basin, lights were flashing on and off and sirens were screaming like animals caught in traps. These were the last warning for Monday’s citizens to go into their stoners. There they became as hard as diamonds, unconscious until next Monday. At eight minutes to midnight, only a handful of today’s citizens would not be in their cylinders. These were the Monday-interim ganks who stayed at their posts until relieved shortly after midnight by the Tuesday-morning interim police.

  Today’s interim ganks had seen on the wallscreens in the precinct stations and the streetscreens the messages which Duncan had transmitted. Since the override circuits were still working (and would until the engineers found out how to stop them), Tuesday’s interim ganks would also see the screen messages and the printouts. And so would Tuesday’s citizens when they stepped out of their stoners.

  Citizens of the World!

  Your government has kept secret from you a formula for slowing aging by a factor of seven. If you had this, you could live seven times longer. The World Council and ot
her high officials are using this to prolong their own lives. They are denying you this formula. Here is the formula.

  Below this were the chemical formulae and the instructions for making the age-slowing factor.

  The second message:

  Citizens of the World!

  Your government has lied to you for a thousand obyears. The world population is not eight billion. It is only two billion. Repeat: two billion. This artificial division of humankind into seven days is not necessary. Demand the truth. Demand that you be allowed to return to the natural system of life. If the government resists, revolt! Do not be satisfied with the lies of the government. Revolt!

  Authorized message by David Jimson Ananda. A.k.a. Gilbert Ching Immerman. Also authorized and transmitted by Jefferson Cervantes Caird.

  Duncan and Snick ran across the rooftop toward an access structure at the east end of the tower. It was over two hundred yards to the structure from the hatchway out of which they had climbed. They had to get there before organic airboats landed on the rooftop or the ganks who had stormed the suite on the floor below the rooftop came up the ladder.

  Duncan stopped, breathing heavily, at the metal cube which was the access housing to the staircase. Snick joined him; she was breathing less heavily. They stood with their right shoulders against the door of the access house. He pointed up and out into the darkness westward. Whirling orange lights, faintly illuminating a dark form below them, were speeding through the air toward the rooftop.

  “They’ll land near the open hatch,” he said. “They’ll talk to the ganks in Ananda’s apartment. Then they’ll look in all the access houses. They know we came up to the roof.”

  She said, “They’ll order the lights turned on up here. We’ll have to get an airboat. It’s our only chance.”

  He knew what she was thinking. If they opened the door now, they would be revealed in the light that would stream from the access-house interior. When the airboat ganks came, they would see them and would radio to those in the apartment on the level below to get to the staircase.