Better Angels (13 page)

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.

“Who are those people?” Lizette asked quietly after she and Mike left them behind.

“Ectomorphic exotherms,” Mike said grumpily.

“What?”

“Skinny lizard people,” Mike explained. “Spikers. Blue Spike users. What they’re doing is ‘chasing the blue dragon.’ They inhale that blue-gray smoke. It’s supposed to keep them from being ‘blue and draggin’, as they put it.”

Lizette glanced narrowly at him.

“I take it you don’t approve?”

“It’s not for me to approve or disapprove,” he said with a shrug. “I’m just not a speeder. Not a go-fast kind of guy, that’s all. My bet is, once they’re all hot-wired, they’ll go through that World’s Fair thing again—only they’ll run through it. For a faster flash. As if it weren’t infodense enough already.”

They passed among the professor and students Mike had seen on video feed earlier, then stepped around the language-gaming Chrysantha and several of her friends. Hooked into the infosphere through their boards, they were generally oblivious to the physical world around them. A few of that group, mostly younger guys, had split out of Chrysantha’s circle and were idly bauudysurfing, checking out v-porn in the infosphere.

Mike saw several of his acquaintances sprawled on a constellation of couches round a table, not far from the sliding door that opened onto the balcony. On the table in their midst, near the veggies and chips and breads and dips, was a dropper bottle of KL 235. Mike said hi and introduced Lizette. As he sat down it irked him, somewhere at the edges of his consciousness, that almost the only friends he had made here on the coast were KL users, gateheads. He didn’t let it bother him too much, however.

Lizette bent down and whispered in his ear that she was going to talk to their host, if Mike didn’t mind. Mike didn’t mind, and Lizette stepped out onto the balcony beside the sharply (if anachronistically) dressed old Sakler, still within earshot. Part of Mike’s focus went with her.

“—the great revenge tragedy that is American politics,” Sakler was saying, “I can’t tell whether the politicians are narrow-mindedly shrewd, or shrewdly narrow-minded.”

Lizette introduced herself and the conversation spun off in another direction. Mike’s focus shifted back and forth from the balcony to the couches, so that he only caught bits of the conversation in both places.

“—spend my days now working and playing on this twenty-acre spread,” he heard Sakler say. “Learning the ways of the gentleman farmer—though I’m neither a gentleman nor a farmer. ‘Yup, September tells the plants October’s coming soon,’ so the trees know they better fruit up, in the orchard out back.”

“Do I make reality,” asked an armchair philosopher in the KL group, “or does reality make me, you know?”

“—a shaman cleverly disguised as a college professor!” Becky Starr said with a loud laugh from over in the group around Professor Paulson.

“—big old party house,” Sakler said. “It’s modeled after the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite Park. I built it with my own hands, out of wood from my own land’s trees—not redwoods, but the pines on my inland property.”

“Free the Heart of the World!” someone shouted from the far end of the room, apropos of nothing and everything.

“Most of the busy people I know,” the armchair KL supplier-philosopher continued, “if they ever relaxed long enough to take a good look at their lives, they’d probably kill themselves.”

“—expensive?” Sakler said. “Sure. Money hasn’t been a problem for me for the last dozen years. Sued the Army, the Department of Defense and the U.S. government for addicting me to cigarettes and nicotine while I was in the service. I came from a smoking household but I was a health nut.”

Someone else on the balcony asked something Mike couldn’t quite make out.

“—no, never smoked at all before I went into the military. Lasted six years in the Army before I gave in. For years I was living right across the street from the Surgeon General, yet every time I requested a non-smoking billet the higher-ups just laughed in my face. Six years in barracks full of smokers, six years of dirt cheap cigarettes in the BX, six years of breaks where we were always told, ‘Smoke if you’ve got ‘em.’ Six years before I broke down and started smoking. When I got out six years after that, I was a full-blown nicotine fiend and Viet vet. Eventually the jury saw it my way, to the tune of twenty million bucks, after the lawyer fees were paid—a very pleasant tune indeed.”

The bottle and dropper of KL came around to Mike at last, and he ritually partook of a few drops. Not long afterward, Lizette came in and sat down on the couch beside him. He and a couple others in the group talked her into—“No pressure, no pressure”—a very small dose.

After that, time smeared and blurred for them both. Mike remembered the KL group (most of them bent quite a bit beyond trapezoid by the chemical) eruditely arguing the nature of Santa Claus. For what seemed like hours.

Was the jolly man in red and white—

A) a single magical master elf and judge/accountant/keeper of lists who in a single night sequentially visited all homes in Christendom to dole out gifts on the basis of the potential recipients’ having “passed” or “failed” according to the simplistic criteria of certain ethical tests?

B) millions of parents acting in parallel, who independently bought gifts, hid gifts, dispensed gifts under trees, all on the basis of household income, gift affordability, and sense of familial obligation, while falsely attributing all this covert multiple parallel activity to an open singular sequential fiction with eight tiny reindeer?

C) a singular Catholic saint noted for his gift-giving?

D) the time-eroded remnant of circumpolar shamanic ritual practice, in which myriad shamans, over thousands of years, claimed to climb from this world via a tree, then to “fly” between the worlds through the ingestion of hallucinogens present in circumpolar strains of the red and white (Santa’s colors) mushroom, Amanita muscaria, helped along the way by tryptamine “elves”—said mushroom often being located as a result of the shaman’s noting the “flying” (i.e., Amanita-affected) behavior of reindeer which had consumed the mushroom, the deer then often being killed and the urine in their bladders drunk off because it concentrated the hallucinogenic properties from the mushrooms the deer had eaten, so that the shaman might experience a swifter and stronger “flight”?

From shamanic healers to toys under the trees—what a long strange trip, Mike remembered thinking. He didn’t know if he fully believed any of the explanations, or even a combination of all of them.

After all the smeared hours, he at last found himself alone on the roof of Sakler’s party house with Lizette, looking up at the stars, while the holojections of the 1939 World’s Fair continued to glow softly in the meadow to the south of them. Lizette was using a planisphere Art Sakler had loaned her to pick out summer constellations and stars—the Big and Little Dippers, Polaris, Scorpius, Cygnus, Hercules, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Vega in Lyra, several more. Earlier, in the first hour or so after sunset, they might have seen the satellites, Lizette explained. Even now they could still catch an occasional faint glimmer of the orbital habitat, steadily abuilding in cislunar space.

“The heaven of faith is disappearing into the night sky of commerce,” Mike said, finally starting to come down off the KL. “Nature is disappearing into Culture. Reality is disappearing into Simulation. Response is disappearing into Stimulation. Time is disappearing into Space. Death is disappearing into Life. Neanderthals like me are disappearing into
Homo sapiens sapiens
—”

Lizette whacked him on the head with her little borrowed planisphere.

“It’s not that bad,” she said, staring out at the stars and pushing him back down on his back. “You just haven’t looked at it in the right way.”

“Oh?” Mike asked, rubbing his head. “And what might the ‘right way’ be?”

“On what’s going to be a moonless, cloudless night,” she began, laying her head down on his chest, “drive out of the city, any and all cities, to where it will be dark enough to see the Milky Way clearly. Mountains and deserts are best. Go there before the sun goes down. Watch the sunset and you can see the sun isn’t setting—the Earth you thought was so unmoving is rotating on its axis. Watch the stars come out, and realize they never left, they’ve been there all the time—it’s just that you’ve been blinded by nearer lights.”

“I thought you were just an engineering major,” Mike said, lifting himself up on his hands so that Lizette’s head was cradled against his stomach, her eyes looking up at his. “Not a poet and a philosopher.”

“Give me a chance,” she said in a husky voice, “and I’ll surprise you.”

They found themselves moving inexorably toward a kiss, like a pair of stars swinging into binary partnership, spiraling more tightly into each other’s gravity. Just as their lips were about to touch, however, a horrendous clatter and cracking and shouting sounded from the nearest balcony. Startled, they slid down to the edge of the roof.

“What happened?” Mike asked of a small crowd of party-fatigued young people on the balcony.

“Two hazardously wasted guys just got into a fight,” said a man with a shaved head and a Van Dyke beard. “They broke through the railing and fell.”

“Who were they?” Lizette asked.

Someone down on the second floor balconies called up an answer, but Mike couldn’t make out whether that person had said “Bikers” or “Spikers.”

“Are they okay?” the bald man with the little beard called down.

“They must be,” said someone down on the first floor. “They’re still fighting.”

* * * * * * *

Holocaust of Dreams