The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  “From that angle it seemed impossible to tell whether I was seeing a civilization rising toward an unguessable pinnacle of the future or watching a civilization that had passed its peak—but had yet to know it—already sliding down the hill of history towards the boneyard…

  “One day I stood on another high point looking down on another city; the hill was the Acropolis, the city was Athens.

  “Behind me, tourists from nations that had not risen from barbarism when Greece was the pinnacle of human history crawled over the ruins like scavenger ants.

  “Once before, a great people had risen above the timeless morass of human superstition and stood on a pillar of science, reason, and logic. And proclaimed themselves the crown of creation.

  “Now, below me, in the rather seedy modern city of Athens, the descendants of these proud men sold rosaries and ikons and souvenirs of a past they no longer comprehended at the foot of the monument to their past greatness.”

  The Lost Continent

  I felt a peculiar mixture of excitement and depression as my Pan African jet from Accra came down through the interlocking fringes of the East Coast and Central American smog banks above Milford International Airport, made a slightly bumpy landing on the east-west runway, and taxied through the thin blue haze toward a low, tarnished-looking aluminum dome that appeared to be the main international arrivals terminal.

  Although American history is my field, there was something about actually being in the United States for the first time that filled me with sadness, awe, and perhaps a little dread. Ironically, I believe that what saddened me about being in America was the same thing that makes that country so popular with tourists, like the people who filled most of the seats around me. There is nothing that tourists like better than truly servile natives, and there are no natives quite so servile as those living off the ruins of a civilization built by ancestors they can never hope to surpass.

  For my part—perhaps because I am a professor of history and can appreciate the parallels and ironies—! not only feel personally diminished at the thought of lording it over the remnants of a once-great people, but it also reminds me of our own civilization’s inevitable mortality. Was not Africa a continent of so-called “underdeveloped nations” not two centuries ago when Americans were striding to the moon like gods?

  Have we in Africa really preserved the technical and scientific heritage of Space-Age America intact, as we like to pretend? We may claim that we have not repeated the American feat of going to the moon because it was part of tire overdevelopment that destroyed Space-Age civilization, but few reputable scientists would seriously contend that we could go to the moon if we so chose. Even the jet in which I had crossed the Atlantic was not quite up to the airliners the Americans had flown two centuries ago.

  Of course, the modern Americans are still less capable than we of recreating twentieth-century American technology. As our plane reached the terminal, an atmosphere-sealed extension ramp reached out creakily from the building for its airlock. Milford International was the port of entry for the entire northeastern United States; yet, the best it had was recently obsolescent African equipment. Milford itself, one of the largest modern American towns, would be lost next to even a city like Brazzaville. Yes, African science and technology are certainly now the most advanced on the planet, and some day perhaps we will build a civilization that can truly claim to be the highest the world has yet seen, but we only delude ourselves when we imagine that we have such a civilization now. As of the middle of the twenty-second century, Space-Age America still stands as the pinnacle of man’s fight to master his environment. Twentieth-century American man had a level of scientific knowledge and technological sophistication that we may not fully attain for another century. What a pity he had so little deep understanding of his relationship to his environment or of himself.

  The ramp linked up with the plane’s airlock, and after a minimal amount of confusion we debarked directly into a customs control office, which consisted of a drab, dun-colored, medium-sized room divided by a line of twelve booths across its width. The customs officers in the booths were very polite, hardly glanced at our passports, and managed to process nearly a hundred passengers in less than ten minutes. The American government was apparently justly famous for doing all it could to smooth the way for African tourists.

  Beyond the customs control office was a small auditorium in which we were speedily seated by courteous uniformed customs agents. A pale, sallow, well-built young lady In a trim blue customs uniform entered the room after us and walked rapidly through the center aisle and up onto the little low stage. She was wearing, face-fitting atmosphere goggles, even though the terminal had a full seal.

  She began to recite a little speech; I believe its actual wording is written into the American tourist-control laws.

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the United States of America. We hope you’ll enjoy your stay in our country, and we’d like to take just a few moments of your time to give you some reminders that will help make your visit a safe and pleasurable one.”

  She put her hand to her nose and extracted two small transparent cylinders filled with gray gossamer. “These are government-approved atmosphere filters,” she said, displaying them for us. “You will be given complimentary sets as you leave this room. You are advised to buy only lifters with the official United States Government Seal of Approval. Change your filters regularly each morning, and your stay here should in no way impair your health. However, it is understood that all visitors to the United States travel at their own risk. You are advised not to remove your filters, except inside buildings or conveyances displaying a green circle containing the words FULL ATMOSPHERE SEAL.”

  She took off her goggles, revealing a light red mask of welted skin that their seal had made around her eyes. “These are self-sealing atmosphere goggles,” she said. “If you have not yet purchased a pair, you may do so in the main lobby. You are advised to secure goggles before FT leaving this terminal and to wear them whenever you venture out into the open atmosphere. Purchase only goggles bearing the Government Seal of Approval, and always take care that the seal is air-tight.

  “If you use your filters and goggles properly, your stay in the United States should be a safe and pleasant one. The government and people of the United States wish you a good day, and we welcome you to our country.”

  We were then handed our filters and guided to the baggage area, where our luggage was already unloaded End waiting for us. A sealed bus from the Milford International Inn was already waiting for those of us who had booked rooms there, and porters loaded the luggage on the bus while a representative from the hotel handed out complimentary atmosphere goggles. The Americans were ; most efficient and most courteous; there was something : almost unpleasant about the way we moved so smoothly from the plane to seats on a bus headed through the almost empty streets of Milford toward the faded white plastic block that was the Milford International Inn, by far the largest building in a town that seemed to be mostly small houses, much like an African residential village. Perhaps what disturbed roe was the knowledge that Americans were so good at this sort of thing strictly out of necessity. Thirty percent of the total American Gross National Product comes from the tourist industry.

  I keep telling my wife I gotta get out of this tourist business. In the good old days, our ancestors would’ve given these African brothers nothing but about eight feet of rope. They’d’ve shot off a nuclear missile and blasted all those black brothers to atoms! If the damned brothers didn’t have so much loose money, I’d be for riding every one of them back to Africa on a rail, just like the Space-Agers did with their black brothers before the Panic.

  And I bet we could do it, too. I hear there’s ail kinds of Space-Age weapons sitting around in the ruins out West. If we could only get ourselves together and dig them out, we’d show those Africans whose ancestors went to the moon while they were still eating each other.

  But, i
nstead, I found myself waiting with my copter bright and early at the International Inn for the next load of customers of Little Old New York Tours, as usual. And I’ve got to admit that I’m doing pretty well off of it. Ten years ago, I just barely had the dollars to make a down-payment on a used ten-seat helicopter, and now the thing is all paid off, and I’m shoveling dollars into my stash on every day-tour. If the copter holds up another ten years—and this is a genuine Space-Age American Air Force helicopter restored and converted to energy cells in Aspen, not a cheap piece of African junk—I’ll be able to take my bundle and split to South America, just like a tycoon out of the good old days. They say they’ve got places in South America where there’s nothing but wild country as far as you can see. Imagine that! And you can buy this land. You can buy jungle filled with animals and birds. You can buy rivers full of fish. You can buy air that doesn’t choke your lungs and give you cancer and taste like fried turds even through a brand-new set of filters.

  Yeah, that’s why I suck up to Africans! That’s worth spending four or five hours a day in that New York hole, even worth looking at subway dwellers. Every full day-tour I take in there is maybe twenty thousand dollars net toward South America. You can buy ten acres of prime Amazon swampland for only fifty-six million dollars. I’ll still be young ten years from now, I’ll only be forty. I take good care of myself, I change my filters every day just like they tell you to, and I don’t use nothing but Key West Supremes, no matter how much the damned things cost. I’ll have at least ten good years left; why, I could even live to be fifty-five! And I’m gonna spend at least ten of those fifty-five years someplace where I can walk around without filters shoved up my nose, where I don’t need goggles to keep my eyes from rotting, where I can finally die from something better than lung cancer.

  I picture South America every time I feel the urge to tell off those brothers and get out of this business. For ten years with Karen in that Amazon swampland, I can take their superior-civilization crap and eat it and smile back at ’em afterward.

  With filters wadded up my nose and goggle seals bruising the tender skin under my eyes, I found myself walking through the blue haze of the open American atmosphere, away from the second-class twenty-second-century comforts of the International Inn, and toward the large and apparently ancient tour helicopter. As I walked along with the other tourists, I wondered just what it was that had drawn me here.

  Of course, Space-Age America is my specialty, and I had reached the point where my academic career virtually required a visit to America, but, aside from that, I felt a personal motivation that I could not quite grasp. No doubt, I know more about Space-Age America than all but a handful of modern Americans, but the reality of Space-Age civilization seems illusive to me. I am an enlightened modern African, five generations removed from the bush; yet I have seen films—the obscure ghost to woof Las Vegas sitting in the middle of a terrible desert clogged with vast mechanized temples to the God of Chance; Mount Rushmore, where the Americans carved an entire landscape into the likenesses of their national heroes; the Cape Kennedy National Shrine, where rockets of incredible size are preserved almost intact—which have made me feel like an ignorant primitive trying to understand the minds of gods. One cannot contemplate the Space Age without concluding that the Space-Agers possessed a kind of sophistication which we modern men have lost. Yet they destroyed themselves.

  Yes, perhaps the resolution of this paradox was what I hoped to find here, aside from academic merit. Certainly, true understanding of the Space-Age mind cannot be gained from study of artifacts and records—if it could, I would have it. A true scholar, it has always seemed to me, must seek to understand, not merely to accumulate knowledge. No doubt, it was understanding that I sought here…

  Up close, the Little Old New York Tours helicopter was truly impressive—an antique ten-seater built during the Space-Age for the military by the look of it, and lovingly restored. But the American atmosphere had still been breathable even in the cities when it was built, so I was certain that this copter had only a filter system of questionable quality, no doubt installed by the contemporary natives in modern times. I did not want anything as flimsy as all that between my eyes and lungs and the American atmosphere, so I ignored the FULL ATMOSPHERE SEAL sign and kept my filters in and my goggles on as I boarded. I noticed that the other tourists were doing the same.

  Mike Ryan, the native guide and pilot, had been recommended to me by a colleague from the University of Nairobi. A professor’s funds are quite limited, of course—especially one who has not attained significant academic stature as yet—and the air fares ate into my already meager budget to the point where all I could afford was three days in Milford, four in Aspen, three in Needles, five in Eureka, and a final three at Cape Kennedy on the way home. Aside from the Cape Kennedy National Shrine, none of these modern American towns actually contained Space-Age ruins of significance. Since it is virtually impossible, and, at any rate, prohibitively dangerous, to visit major Space-Age ruins without a helicopter and a native guide, and since a private copter and guide would be far beyond my means, my only alternative was to take a day-tour like everyone else.

  My Kenyan friend had told me that Ryan was the best guide to Old New York that he had had in his three visits. Unlike most of the other guides, he actually took his tours into a subway station to see live subway dwellers. There are reportedly only a thousand or two subway dwellers left; they are nearing extinction. It seemed like an opportunity I should not miss. At any rate, Ryan’s charge was only about five hundred dollars above the average guide’s.

  Ryan stood outside the helicopter in goggles, helping us aboard. His appearance gave me something of a surprise. My Kenyan informant had told me that Ryan had been in the tour business for ten years; most guides who had been around that long were in terrible shape. No filters could entirely protect a man from that kind of prolonged exposure to saturation smog; by the time they’re thirty, most guides already have chronic emphysema, and their lung-cancer rate at age thirty-five is over fifty percent. But Ryan, who could not be under thirty, had the general appearance of a forty-year-old Boer; physiologically, he should have looked a good deal older. Instead, he was short, squat, had only slightly graying black hair, and looked quite alert, even powerful. But, of course, he had the typical American grayish-white pimply pallor.

  There were eight other people taking the tour, a full copter. A prosperous-looking Kenyan who quickly introduced himself as Roger Koyinka, traveling with his wife; a rather strange-looking Ghanaian in very rich-looking old-fashioned robes and his similarly clad wife and young son; two rather willowy and modishly dressed young men who appeared to be Luthuliville dandies, and the only other person in the tour who was traveling alone, an intense young man whose great bush of hair, stylized dashiki, and gold earring proclaimed that he was an Amero-African.

  I drew a seat next to the Amero-African, who identified himself as Michael Lumumba rather diffidently when I introduced myself. Ryan gave us a few moments to get acquainted—I learned that the Ghanaian was named Kulongo, that Koyinka was a department store executive from Nairobi, that the two young men were named Ojubu and Ruala—while he checked out the helicopter, and then seated himself in the pilot’s seat, back toward us, goggles still in place, and addressed us without looking back through an internal public address system.

  “Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your Little Old New York Tour. I’m Mike Ryan, your guide to the wonders of Old New York, Space-Age America’s greatest city. Today you’re going to see such sights as the Fuller Dome, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and, as a grand finale, a subway station still inhabited by the direct descendants of the Space-Age inhabitants of the city. So don’t just think of this as a guided tour, ladies and gentlemen. You are about to take part in the experience of a lifetime—an exploration of the ruins of the greatest city built by the greatest civilization ever to stand on the face of the earth.”

  “Stupid arrogant
honkie!” the young man beside me snarled aloud. There was a terrible moment of shocked, shamed embarrassment in the cabin, as all of us squirmed in our seats. Of course, the Amero-Africans are famous for this sort of tastelessness, but to be actually confronted with this sort of blatant racism made one for a moment ashamed to be black.

  Ryan swiveled very slowly in his seat. His face displayed the characteristic red flush of the angered Caucasian, but his voice was strangely cold, almost polite: “You’re in the United States now, Mr. Lumumba, not in Africa. I’d watch what I said if I were you. If you don’t like me or my country, you can have your lousy money back. There’s a plane leaving for Conakry in the morning.”

  “You’re not getting off that easy, honkie,” Lumumba said. “I paid my money, and you’re not getting me off this helicopter. You try, and I go straight to the tourist board, and there goes your licence. ”

  Ryan stared at Lumumba for a moment. Then the flush began to fade from his face, and be turned his back on us again, muttering, “Suit yourself, pal. I promise you an interesting ride.”

  A muscle twitched in Lumumba’s temple; he seemed about to speak again. “Look here, Mr. Lumumba,” I whispered at him sharply, “we’re guests in this country, and you’re making us look like boorish louts in front of the natives. If you have no respect for your own dignity, have some respect for ours.”