The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  “You stick to your pleasures, and I’ll stick to mine,” he told me, speaking more calmly, but obviously savoring his own bitterness. “I’m here for the pleasure of seeing the descendants of the stinking honkies who kicked my ancestors out grovel in the putrid mess they made for themselves. And I intend to get my money’s worth.”

  I started to reply, but then restrained myself. I would have to remain on civil terms with this horrid young man for hours. I don’t think I’ll ever understand these Amero-Africans and their pointless blood-feud. I doubt if I want to.

  I started the engines, lifted her off the pad, and headed east into the smog bank trying hard not to think of that black brother Lumumba. No wonder so many of his ancestors were lynched by the Space-Agers! Sometime during the next few hours, that crud was going to get his…

  Through by cabin monitor (this Air Force Iron was just loaded with real Space-Age stuff) I watched the stupid looks on their flat faces as we headed for what looked like a solid wall of smoke at about one hundred miles per hour. From the fringes, a major smog bank looks like that—solid as a steel slab—but once you’re inside there’s nothing but a blue haze that anyone with a halfway decent set of goggles can see right through.

  “We are now entering the East Coast smog bank, ladies and gentlemen,” I told them. “This smog bank extends roughly from Bangor, Maine, in the north to Jacksonville, Florida in the south, and from the Atlantic coastline in the east to the slopes of the Alleghenies in the west. It is the third largest smog bank in the United States.”

  Getting used to the way things look inside the smog always holds ’em for a while. Inside a smog bank, the color of everything is kind of washed-out, grayed, and blued. The air is something you can see, a mist that doesn’t move; it almost sparkles at you. For some reason, these Africans always seem to be knocked out by it. Imagine thinking stuff like that is beautiful, crap that would kill you horribly and slowly in a couple of days if you were stupid or unlucky enough to breathe it without filters.

  Yeah, they sure were a bunch of brothers! Some executive from Nairobi who acted like just being in tin-same copter with an American might give him and his wife lung cancer. Two rich young fruits from Luthuliville who seemed to be traveling together so they could congratulate themselves on how smart they both were for picking such rich parents. Some professor named Balewa who had never been to the States before, but probably was sure he knew what it was all about. A backwoods jungle-bunny named Kulongo who had struck it rich off uranium or something, taking his wife and kid on the grand tour. And, of course, that creep, Lumumba. The usual load of African tourists. Man, in the good old days, these niggers wouldn’t have been good enough to shine our shoes!

  Now we were flying over the old state of New Jersey. The Space-Agers did things in New Jersey that not even the African professors have figured out. It was weird country we were crossing: endless patterns of box-houses, all of them the same, all bleached blue-gray by two centuries of smog; big old freeways jammed with the wreckage of cars from the Panic of the Century; a few twisted gray trees and a patch of dry grass here and there that somehow managed to survive in the smog.

  And this was western Jersey; this was nothing. Further east, it was like an alien planet or something. The view from the Jersey Turnpike was a sure tourist-pleaser. It really told them just where they were. It let them know that the Space-Agers could do things they couldn’t hope to do. Or want to.

  Yeah, the Jersey lowlands are spectacular, all right, but why in hell, did our ancestors want to do a thing like that? It really makes you think. You look at the Jersey lowlands and you know that the Space-Agers could do about anything they wanted to…

  But why in hell did they want to do some of the things they did?

  There was something about actually standing in the open American atmosphere that seemed to act directly on the consciousness, like kit. Perhaps it was the visual effect. Ryan had landed the helicopter on a shattered arch of six-lane freeway that soared like the frozen contrail of an ascending jet over a surreal metallic jungle of amorphous Space-Age rubble on a giant’s scale—all crumbling rusted storage tanks, ruined factories, fantastic mazes of decayed valving and piping—filling the world from horizon to horizon. As we stepped out onto the cracked and pitted concrete, the spectrum of reality changed, as if we were suddenly on the surface of a planet circling a bluer and grayer sun. The entire grotesque panorama appeared as if through a blue-gray filter. But we were inside the filter; the filter was the open American smog and it shone in drab sparkles all around us. Strangest of all, the air seemed to remain completely transparent while possessing tangible visible substance. Yes, the visual effects of the American atmosphere alone are enough to affect you like some hallucinogenic drug: distorting your consciousness by warping your visual perception of your environment.

  Of course, the exact biochemical effects of breathing saturation smog through filters are still unknown. We know that the American atmosphere is loaded with hydrocarbons and nitrous oxides that would kill a man in a matter of days if he breathed them directly. We know that the atmosphere filters developed toward the end by the Space-Agers enable a man to breathe the American atmosphere for up to three months without permanent damage to his health and enable the modern Americans—who have to breathe variations of this filtered poison every moment of their lives—to often live to be fifty. We know how to duplicate the Space-Age atmosphere filters, and we more or less know how their complex catalytic fibers work, but the reactions that the filters must put the American atmosphere through to make it breathable are so complex that the only thing we can say for sure of what comes out the other side is that it usually takes about four decades to kill you.

  Perhaps that strange feeling that came over me was a combination of both effects. But, for whatever reasons, I saw that weird landscape as if in a dream or a state of intoxication: everything faded and misty and somehow unreal, vaguely supernatural.

  Beside me, staring silently and with a strange dignity at the totally artificial vista of monstrous rusted ruins, stood the Ghanaian, Kulongo. When he finally spoke, his wife and son seemed to hang on his words, as if he were one of the old chiefs dispensing tribal wisdom.

  “I have never seen such a place as this,” Kulongo said. “In this place, there once lived a race of demons or witch-doctors or gods. There are those who would call me an ignorant savage for saying this thing, but only a fool doubts what he sees with his eyes or his heart. The men who made these things were not human beings like us. Their souls were not as our souls.”

  Although he was putting it in naive and primitive terms, there was the weight of essential truth in Kulongo’s words. The broken arch of freeway on which we stood reared like the head of a snake whose body was a six-lane road clogged with the rusted corpses of what had been a regionwide traffic-jam during the Panic of the Century. The freeway led south, off into the fuzzy horizon of the smog bank, through a ruined landscape in which nothing could be seen that was not the decayed work of man; that was not metal or concrete or asphalt or plastic or Space-Age synthetic. It was like being perched above some vast rained machine the size of a city, a city never meant for man. The scale of the machinery and the way it encompassed the visual universe made it very clear to me that the reality of America was something that no one could put into a book or a film.

  I was in America with a vengeance. I was overwhelmed by the totality with, which the Space-Agers had transformed their environment, and by the essential incomprehensibility—despite our sophisticated sociological and psycho-historical explanations—of why they had done such a thing and of how they themselves had seen it. “Their souls were not as our souls” was as good a way to put it as any.

  “Well, it’s certainly spectacular enough,” Ruala said to his friend, the rapt look on his face making a mockery of his sarcastic tone.

  “So it is,” Ojubu said softly. Then, more harshly: “It’s probably the largest junk heap in the world.”

  The tw
o of them made a halfhearted attempt at laughter, which withered almost immediately under the contemptuous look that the Kulongos gave them; the timeless look that the people of the bush have given the people of the towns for centuries, the look that said only cowardly fools attempt to hide their fears behind a false curtain of contempt, that only those who truly fear magic need to openly mock it.

  And again, in their naive way, the Kulongos were right. Ojubu and Ruala were just a shade too shrill, and, even while they played at diffidence, their eyes remained fixed on that totally surreal metal landscape. One would have to be a lot worse than a mere fool not to feel the essential strangeness of that place.

  Even Lumumba, standing a few yards from the rest of us, could not tear his eyes away.

  Just behind us, Ryan stood leaning against the helicopter. There was a strange power, perhaps a sarcasm as well, in his words as he delivered what surely must have been his routine guide’s speech about this place.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now standing on the New Jersey Turnpike, one of the great highways that linked some of the mighty cities of Space-Age America. Below you are the Jersey lowlands, which served as a great manufacturing, storage, power-producing, and petroleum refining and distribution center for the greatest and largest of the Spage-Age cities, Old New York. As you look across these incredible ruins—larger than most modern African cities—think of this: all of this was nothing to the Space-Age Americans but a minor industrial area to be driven through at a hundred miles an hour without even noticing. You’re not looking at one of the famous wonders of Old New York, but merely at an unimportant fringe of the greatest city ever built by man. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re looking at a very minor work of Spage-Age man!”

  “Crazy damned honkies…” Lumumba muttered. But there was little vehemence or real meaning in his voice, and, like the rest of us, he could not tear his eyes away. It was not hard to understand what was going through his mind. Here was a man raised in the Amero-African enclaves on an irrational mixture of hate for the fallen Space-Agers, contempt for their vanished culture, fear of their former power, and perhaps a kind of twisted blend of envy and identification that only an Amero-African could fully understand. He had come to revel in the sight of the ruins of the civilization that had banished his ancestors, and now he was confronted with the inescapable reality that the “honkies” whose memory he both hated and feared had indeed possessed power and knowledge not only beyond his comprehension, but applied to ends which his mind was not equipped to understand.

  It must have been a humbling moment for Michael Lumumba. He had come to sneer and had been forced instead to gape.

  I tore my gaze away from that awesome vista to look at Ryan; there was a grim smile on his pale, unhealthy face as he drank in our reactions. Clearly, he had meant this sight to humble us, and, just as clearly, it had.

  Ryan stared back at me through his goggles as he noticed me watching him. I couldn’t read the expression in his watery eyes through the distortion of the goggle lenses. All I understood was that somehow some subtle change had occurred in the pattern of the group’s interrelationships. No longer was Ryan merely a native guide, a functionary, a man without dignity. He had proved that he could show us sights beyond the limits of the modern world. He had reminded us of just where we were, and who and what his ancestors had been. He had suddenly gained secondhand stature from the incredible ruins around him, because, in a very real way, they were his ruins. Certainly they were not ours.

  “I’ve got to admit they were great engineers,” Koyinka, the Kenyan executive, said.

  “So were the ancient Egyptians,” Lumumba said, recovering some of his bitterness. “And what did it get them? A fancy collection of old junk over their graves—exactly what it got these honkies,”

  “If you keep it up, pal,” Ryan said coldly, “you may get a chance to see something that’ll impress you a bit more than these ruins.”

  “Is that a threat or a promise, Ryan?”

  “Depends on whether you’re a man… or a boy, Mr, Lumumba.”

  Lumumba had nothing to say to that, whatever it all had meant. Ryan appeared to have won a round in some contest between them.

  And when we followed Ryan back into the helicopter, I think we were all aware that for the next few hours, this pale, unhealthy American would be something more than a mere convenient functionary. We were the tourists; he was the guide.

  But as we looked over our shoulders at the vast and overwhelming heritage that had been created and then squandered by his ancestors, the relationship that those words described took on a new meaning. The ancestral ruins off which he lived, were a greater thing in some absolute sense than the totality of our entire living civilization. He had convinced us of that, and he knew it.

  That view across the Jersey lowlands always seems to shut them up for a while. Even that crud, Lumumba. God knows why. Sure it’s spectacular, bigger than anything these Africans could ever have seen where they come from, but when you come right down to it, you gotta admit that Ojubu was right—the Jersey lowlands are nothing but a giant pile of junk. Crap. Space-Age garbage. Sometimes looking at a place like that can piss me off. I mean, we had some ancestors. They built the greatest civilization the world ever saw, but what did they leave for us? The most spectacular junk piles in the world, air that does you in sooner or later even through filters, and a continent where seeing something alive that people didn’t put there is a big deal. Our ancestors went to the moon, they were a great people, the greatest in history, but sometimes I get the feeling they were maybe just a little out of their minds. Like that crazy “Merge with the Cosmic All” thing I found that time in Grand Central—still working after two centuries or so; it must do something besides kill people, but what? I dunno, maybe our ancestors went a little over the edge, sometimes…

  Not that I’d ever admit a thing like that to any black brothers! The Space-Agers may have been a little bit nuts, but who are these Africans to say so, who are they to decide whether a civilization that had them beat up and down the line was sane or not? Sane according to whom? Them, or the Space-Agers? For that matter, who am I to think a thing like that? An ant or a rat living off their garbage. Who are nobodies like us and the Africans to judge people who could go to the moon?

  Like I keep telling Karen, this damned tourist business is getting to me. I’m around these Africans too much. Sometimes, if I don’t watch myself, I catch myself thinking like them. Maybe it’s the lousy smog this far into the smog bank—but hell, that’s another crazy African idea!

  That’s what being around these Africans does to me, and looking at subway dwellers five times a week sure doesn’t help, either. Let’s face it, stuff like the subways and the lowlands is really depressing. It tells a man he’s a nothing. Worse, it tells him that people who were better than he is still managed to screw things up. It’s just not good for your mind.

  But as the copter crested the lip of the Palisades ridge and we looked out across that wide Hudson River at Manhattan, I was reminded again that this crummy job had its compensations. If you haven’t seen Manhattan from a copter crossing the Hudson from the Jersey side, you haven’t seen nothing, pal. That Fuller Dome socks you right in the eye. It’s ten miles in diameter. It has facets that make it glitter like a giant blue diamond floating over the middle of the island. Yeah, that’s right, it floats. It’s made of some Space-Age plastic that’s been turned blue and hazy by a couple of centuries of smog, it’s ten miles wide at the base, and the goddamned thing floats over the middle of Manhattan a few hundred feet off the ground at its rim like a cloud or a hover or something. No motors, no nothing. It’s just a hemisphere made of plastic panels and alloy tubing and it floats over the middle of Manhattan like half a giant diamond all by itself. Now, that’s what I call a real piece of Space-Age hardware!

  I could hear them suck in their breath behind me. Yeah, it really does it to you. I almost forgot to give them the spiel. I mean, who wants to? What can you
really say to someone while he’s looking at the Fuller Dome for the first time?

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you are now looking at the world-famous Fuller Dome, the largest architectural structure ever built by the human race. It is ten miles in diameter. It encloses the center of Manhattan Island, the heart of Old New York. It has no motors, no power source, and no moving parts. But it floats in the air like a cloud. It is considered the First Wonder of the World.”

  What else is there to say?

  We came in low across the river toward that incredible floating blue diamond, the Fuller Dome, parallel to the ruins of a great suspension bridge which had collapsed and now hung in fantastic rusted tatters half in and half out of the wafer. Aside from. Ryan’s short guidebook speech, no one said a word as we crossed the water to Manhattan.

  Like the moon landing, the Fuller Dome was one of the peak achievements of the Space Age, a feat beyond the power of modern African civilization. As I understood it, the Dome held itself aloft by convection currents created by its own greenhouse effect, though this has always seemed to me the logical equivalent of a man lifting himself by his own shoulders. No one quite knows exactly how a dome this size was built, but the records show that it required a fleet of two hundred helicopters. It took six weeks to complete. It was named after Buckminster Fuller, one of the architectural geniuses of the curly Space Age, but it was not built till after his death, though it is considered his monument. But it was more than that; it was staggeringly, overwhelmingly beautiful.

  We crossed the river and headed toward the rim of the Fuller Dome at about two hundred feet, over a shoreline of crumbling docks and the half-sunken hulks of rusted-out ships; then over a wide strip of elevated highway filled with the usual wrecked cars; and finally we slipped under the rim of the Dome itself, an incredibly thin metal hoop floating in the air from which the Dome seemed to blossom like a soap bubble from a child’s bubble pipe.