Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Ouch, Mike thought. Even if that test might well be true in the world of Sex and The Single Planet, that was still a pretty harsh line to take. Apparently the mind behind the roving camera thought so too, for the lens moved on, settling at last on a young black woman Mike recognized as his fellow graduate student, Becky Starr. She was speaking to a pale woman with red hair going gray, whom Mike also recognized—Professor Paulson.

  “Last night,” said Becky, “you said there is no life after death because so many people believe in that idea, yet no one has found evidence for it. I would say there is life after death because no one has found evidence of it, yet so many people believe in it. The best evidence for life after death is belief in life after death.”

  The professor smiled and began to answer but Mike had already dumped that frame and returned to Chrysantha.

  “I’m there,” he said, “but how do I get there?”

  “You’re still at your ritual humiliation for money?” Chrys asked.

  “If by that you mean am I still at work on campus,” Mike said with a frown, “then the answer is yes.”

  “Directions are at the bottom of your v-space,” Chrysantha said. Mike nodded.

  “Okay if I bring a date?” he asked. “My friend Lizette is coming in from back home.”

  Chrysantha shrugged.

  “It’s an open party,” she said. “Bring whomever you like, so long as they know how to party.”

  “Great,” Mike said. “Oh, and here’s something for your ‘consciousness’ koffeeklatsch: The idea that consciousness is an essentially social and linguistic phenomenon is an essentially fascist conception.”

  Chrysantha frowned and gave him a withering stare.

  “Language may be overrated,” she said with a small shrug, “but then, you have to use language to express that, don’t you?”

  Mike laughed and signed off. Removing his eye-phones, he saw that Lizette was already standing in the doorway of his cubicle, a dark-haired young woman dressed in a black and blue fractal-patterned summer dress, a bit road-weary but still smiling.

  His office system, abhorring a vacuum, promptly flung up SBN-TV, busy covering another Traditional Values rally.

  “Church, Kitchen, Children! Church, Kitchen, Children!” bellowed a white male Reverend Somebody, leading the chant for an audience composed mostly of women. By their dress and demeanor the audience members looked to be part of the long-suffering, hard-working Excluded Middle Class that the right-wing populists loved to play to, assuring them that their true greatness had been stolen—sucked away by the parasitic godless-decadent wealthy above them and the parasitic shiftless-sensual poor below them—but they could get it all back if they just followed the right virtuous leader with the right virtuous ideas.

  “Kirche, Küche, Kinder,” Mike said tiredly. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He found their website and sent them one of his canned obnoxious responses:

  GOALS FOR WOMEN: FILL IN THE BLANK

  “Produce babies and educate them according to ____

  doctrine.... Support men’s activities in whatever

  roles the leadership deems necessary...maintain

  family-orientated values.”

  The missing phrase is: A) Christian religious B) Nazi

  party C) Communist party D) All of the above.

  “It’s ‘D’, right?” Lizette asked.

  “Probably could be,” Mike said, “but historically, it’s not. The correct answer is ‘B.’ They’re the words of a Nazi party activist in the 1930s. I found them in an old book by Koonz called Mothers in the Fatherland.”

  He shut the system off and turned to Lizette.

  “Welcome back to normal space,” she said as he got up from his chair.

  “I don’t know how ‘normal’ it is,” Mike said, hugging her. This was always the awkward part. Since they had never officially dated—her parents’ “Be ye not yoked with an unbeliever” disapproval somehow always in effect—sharing a kiss raised too many questions, pushed too many boundaries. Hugs were safely neutral, so long as they weren’t too prolonged. “This is Humboldt, you know—you’re not in Kansas anymore, kiddo. How long were you waiting?”

  “A few minutes,” Lizette said, taking his arm as they walked and he steered her out of the Humanities complex.

  “Thanks for going to the trouble of driving all the way out to the coast from back home,” Mike said as they walked toward her electric in the parking lot.

  “No problem,” Lizette said. “I’m kind of interested in finding out what was so not-in-Kansas-anymore about Northern California, at the moment.

  “If you really want to know,” Mike said, sensing a perfect opening and segue, “I’ve got a standing invitation to a party in the redwoods down by the Eel River, at the Sakler cabin. See the natives engaged in their quaint tribal rituals! In their natural habitat!”

  “Sounds like a time,” Lizette said with a smile as they got into her car. “You navigate and I’ll drive.”

  They drove off campus, through Bayside and into Eureka, past Time Zone, the big “time”-themed super mall—Burgertime, Clothestime, Funtime, Time Out Sports Bar, Time Squared Clock Shop, all the rest. They continued past Loleta and into the narrow strip of redwoods still standing around the Eel, Lizette marvelling at the big trees all along their river drive. Mike tried to sound jaded and worldly-wise, but those trees had never ceased to impress him, either.

  “Turn down here,” Mike said when they came to a large gravel road leading down into the forest and on toward the river. They drove along the unpaved road until they came to a broad open meadow beside the river, along the edges of which were already parked a number of vehicles. More striking, however, was the tall holojection floating at the center of the meadow: a slender white spire labeled “Trylon” and a snowy orb captioned “Perisphere,” looming ahead of them, gigantic even among the redwoods. Holojected blimps and dirigibles floated above the large geometric figures of Trylon and Perisphere.

  “Hey! I’ve seen this before somewhere!” Lizette said, pleased, gazing at the perfect image of the spire and orb, with something called the “Helicline” ramping down around them.

  “Must be a theme party,” Mike said. He headed toward the broad path that, further on, led toward a large, barracks-like “cabin” in the distance, on a rise overlooking the meadow.

  The two of them had barely stepped onto the path when another holojection appeared. A man of considerable years, dressed in a dark suit and tie of a rather conservative cut, topped by a snapbrim hat, stood looking at himself in a full-length antique mirror.

  “Art Sakler,” Mike said, nodding from Lizette to the holo. “Our host.”

  “Yes,” said the holo man looking into the holo mirror approvingly. “Just what the well-dressed time traveler would be wearing in 1939.”

  The holo Sakler turned toward them and touched his hat in greeting.

  “The Future has a Past, my friends. Welcome to the past of my future. Shall we take a stroll down Time Travel Lane?”

  The apparition began to walk up the path, away from them, toward the house. Mike and Lizette followed, impressed by the realism of the holo.

  “Welcome to the 1939 World’s Fair,” holo Sakler said, gesturing expansively. “Those structures over there, the ‘Egg, Spike, and Ramp,’ as one wag called them, dominate the fairscape as the Fair dominated American popular culture in that year. Like tens of millions of other Americans, I was there seventy-five years ago. Unlike most of them, I can’t really remember it. But also, unlike most of them, I’m still alive.”

  Something else now caught their eye: a floating holo of a color picture, one showing an infant being held by an old man, perhaps the child’s grandfather, with the Trylon and Perisphere in the distance behind them.

  “In the summer of 1939, when my parents and grandparents took me to the World’s Fair with them, I was only a few months old,” the holo host said. “I think I now very strongly resemble the old man in the photo, don’t y
ou? Almost as if the infant had grown up to become his own grandfather.”

  As they walked along, Fair memorabilia flashed into the air before them. The Trylon and Perisphere-adorned orange and blue high-modern Official Souvenir Book. Fair clocks and plates and puzzles and radios. Heinz pickle pins. A crop of GM-Futurama “I Have Seen The Future” pins.

  “I spent my childhood with these small solid memories,” the holo host continued. “The 1939 World’s Fair was the high-water mark of American technological optimism, the great high mass of faith in progress. The futurismo of the Trylon and Perisphere were a visible manifestation of the power of technology and the authority of hope which permeated everything at that World’s Fair.”

  More memorabilia flashed up in front of Mike and Lizette—flyers, brochures, programs. On the meadow around them drawings and photos morphed into three dimensions and became spectacular gardens, buildings, sculptures, corporate and government pavilions, amusements and themes. The Official Souvenir Book, drifting by them again, became a talking book. Mike and Lizette caught phrases and snatches from its pages, fallen open to the oxymoronic captions describing GM’s futurama.

  “A vast miniature cross-section of America as it may conceivably appear two decades hence...,” the talking book intoned. “35,738 square feet...largest scale-model ever constructed...contains more than a million trees of eighteen species...500,000 houses of individual design...50,000 scale-model automobiles, of which 10,000 travel in full view over super-highways, speed lanes, and multi-decked bridges.”

  “Temple of the In/Car/Nation,” the holo host said with a smirk, then covered his mouth with one hand as if he’d said something he shouldn’t have, and fell silent.

  Now, before them and all about the Trylon and Perisphere, the whole of the crowded Fair appeared in all its wonder, a candied holographic confection of the Future’s Past, ready to be consumed by the present. Mike and Lizette walked into it like children walking into someone else’s dreams, or into history, which amounted to the same thing. They watched as their holo host grabbed “one frankfurter with everything” at Swift & Company’s streamlined superairliner building, then some ice cream over by Sealtest’s triple shark-finned edifice, paying for both with antique liberty coins.

  Strolling about the Fair grounds yet moving only a few steps along the actual path, Mike and Lizette saw how wind-shaped so much of the World of the Fair appeared. Buildings that looked as if they had been designed in wind tunnels. Frank R. Paul melanges of fins and keels and flanges, spirals and helices and domes. Towers topped with zeppelin-mast spires. An airstream wonderland waiting for the inevitable arrival of Northrop flying-wings and Bel Geddes tear-drop cars.

  Their holo host stopped them at the base of the Trylon and gestured for them to examine it closely.

  “I’ve rediscovered the Fair’s secret,” their holo host explained triumphantly. “Like everything else, the Trylon was intended to look smoothly mass-produced, machine-precise and slipstream-slick. Look at it up close, though. The surface is rough, see? Stuccoed with all the ‘smoothness’ of jesso over burlap.”

  Their holo host stood up and gestured broadly enough to take in the whole of the Fair.

  “Beneath its assembly-line dreams of aerodynamic cowls and zero-drag farings,” Sakler’s holo image said, “the great exhibition is actually hand-crafted—a prototype of the shape of things to come, not a production model. The Future is best viewed from a distance.”

  Still, there was something irresistible for Mike and Lizette as they stepped with their holo host into the American Museum of Natural History/Longines-Witnauer Watch Company’s “Theatre of Time and Space” for a grandiose tour of the universe. The same was true when they approached the Chrysler Motors Building in the Transportation Zone and made their way through its “Rocketport” display—especially when they literally bumped into Albert Einstein there.

  “Pardon me, professor,” their holo host said quickly.

  “No problem, no problem,” the Nobel laureate said with a distracted smile, turning back to lean on a railing and watch yet again as the Rocketgun simulated another blastoff into tomorrow, with full noise-and-light special effects, followed by a quiet moment of appropriate awe, then thunderous applause.

  From there it was on to a quick tour of the Town of Tomorrow. Then a visit to the Immortal Well with its streamlined Time Capsule, intended to preserve the world of the 1930s for the people of 6939 A.D.

  “Too bad nobody took exact notes on where the Immortal Well’s time capsule is located,” their holo host footnnoted. “Once the Fair was demolished, no one was able to relocate the capsule. By the 1970s the time capsule’s location had been completely lost.”

  From the Immortal Well, they went inside the Westinghouse Building to see the robots—Elektro the Moto-Man and his Moto-Dog, Sparko—perform. After that it was on to see and hear General Electric’s ten-million volt indoor lightning bolt show, then on to Consolidated Edison’s block-long “City of Light” diorama. Walking past NCR’s enormous cash register ringing up its daily Fair Attendance tally, they moved on toward the lighter entertainment of the Amusement Zone. The Parachute Jump. Nature’s Mistakes. Arctic Girls’ Temple of Ice. Amazon Warriors in No Man’s Land. The Congress of Beauty. Admiral Byrd’s Penquin Island. Aquacades and safari shows and tribal extravaganzas. Scantily-clad tableau women posing for the exotic Living Magazine Covers of the future. Mike and Lizette enjoyed it all, kids again at a planetary county fair.

  When they had wandered through the great squares and avenues, alongside the Lagoon of Nations, past the pavilions of states and governments, beneath the fireworks, they came finally to the reflecting pool beneath the Perisphere, at just the moment the great Voice of that orb began to sound its eerie tocsin over the emptying Fair.

  “As Yogi Berra once said, ‘It’s always hard to predict, especially about the future’,” the holojected Art Sakler remarked, seated on the edge of the reflecting pool, his lips broadening into a smile that was still sad and world-weary somehow. “Tragic to think that the 1939 World’s Fair had barely ended its first summer before the faith in progress that had buoyed it up like a flood began to quickly ebb. Germany invaded Poland, pushing forward a war and holocaust in which most of my European relatives died. That war ended in mushroom clouds sprouting over Japanese cities, locking the world for almost fifty more years into the mushroom fallout cellar of the Cold War. Then resource redistribution wars and various modes of terrorism, masked as ethnic, neo-tribal, and religious conflict.”

  The dapper old man with the snapbrim hat sighed, then brightened.

  “Yet I still have some of that faith and hope of the Fair in me, even after all these years,” he said. “Maybe since I was too young to learn it consciously, I took it in unconsciously, hope with a somewhat bitter taste, like a mother’s milk. After all these years I’m also learning that it’s always hard to predict, even about the past. That too has to be iterated and re-iterated, fed back, looped around the strange attractor of our personal time, our time-travelling memory, in order to remain real.”

  With a sad smile their holo host gave a wave of his hand, once. Quicker than a fog the Fair disappeared, to be replaced with the sprawl of that part of contemporary New York which now occupied the Fair’s former site. With a second wave of their host’s hand, the holo of contemporary New York disappeared as well, leaving Mike and Lizette standing in front of Art Sakler’s three storey, twelve-thousand square foot “cabin”/party-house, backed by the redwoods and bathed in sunset light. On the balconies and tree decks stood loose knots of people, from whom arose a smattering of applause aimed at Mike and Lizette. The well-dressed elderly man in the snapbrim hat waved a third time.

  “Hello!” called Art Sakler, in the flesh. “Congratulations on having survived my World’s Fair gauntlet. Come on in—come on up!”

  Lizette glanced at Mike as they headed for the nearest door into the big log house.

  “Definitely not in Kansas anymore,” she
said. “Who is this wizard, that can afford holos like that?”

  “You can ask Art yourself,” Mike said as they climbed a spiral staircase.

  On the second floor their progress was slowed by a a cluster of inebriated undergraduates having a good-natured argument.

  “—all bullshit,” said one, a blocky young man with short-cropped hair. “Take the Ice Trade, for example.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the willowy blonde woman he was “discussing” the issue with.

  “The Romans had ice,” the young man shot back. “The Egyptian pharaohs had ice. No refrigeration systems—and no ancient astronauts or ice-aliens either. Trade! What the market will bear! That must’ve been a helluva job—climbing a glacier on Kilimanjaro, cutting blocks of ice for a distant pharaoh—”

  The jam on the helical staircase broke up and they moved on to the third floor. Across a long half-lit barroom and out a set of sliding glass doors they saw their host, but they would have to make their way through the crowded room to reach him, through a place noisy with music and with people eating and drinking and party-talking.

  Mike and Lizette made their way through a circle of thin, pallid people who, despite the warmth of the summer evening, huddled round a fire in the great barroom fireplace. The people in the circle were passing among them a sheet of aluminum foil folded in a V which cradled a large pinch of something. One of the group, a bespectacled red-haired boy in faux prison togs, was running the flame of a lighter under the foil, beneath the big pinch of stuff, until a thick, slow snake of smoke began to ooze down the V of the foil.

  “Come on!” said a young black woman in a tight, knee-length red dress, thin as a famine survivor and anxious as a junkie about to score. “Chase that serpent and pass it on! I don’t want it to be subclinical by the time it reaches me—”

  The bespectacled boy vigorously inhaled before passing foil and lighter on to the next person in the circle.