The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (5 page)

Dad had loved the Carousel. Not in the “I love chocolate” sense of love. In the “I love you, darling, and I want to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you” sense. Disney World, where the Carousel ended up some time after the ’64 World’s Fair, had not fared well in the Mecha Wars. All of the Animal Kingdom and Epcot were fused-glass ruins, and most of the Magic Kingdom had burned down. But the Carousel had been only a little scuffed, its control systems fused from EMP weapons.

Dad and I spent a week separating the Carousel from its foundations. It was like digging an old tree out of a forest—digging a wide circle around it, taking the whole root ball with it. In the Carousel’s case, it was the control apparatus for the show, spanning two basement levels beneath it. The entire Magic Kingdom was built two stories off the ground, specifically to leave room for the control systems. Over the years, these systems had sprawled sideways and downward, retrofitted solid-state controllers replacing the original mechanicals. We took lots of pictures—visual and millimeter-wave radar—of the whole setup and e-mailed them to a little cluster Dad had that could evolve itself to solve complex vision problems. Overnight, they mailed us back clean architectural as-built diagrams that helped a lot.

Dad had a lot of older, less collectable mechas he kept around for duty like this. We’d driven down to Florida on the path of the old I-75 in a platoon of these things, each of us driving at the head of a column of lumbering beasts that were slaved to our control units. They weren’t much to look at, they weren’t all that smart, but those big boys were
strong
. Twenty-two of them lifted and carried the Carousel all the way home to Detroit. The pack were in a frenzy once we got back, delighted to have me around again. They’d patrolled the museum-city while we were away, e-mailing me with anything urgent that they didn’t know how to cope with. That was before the wumpuses, so there wasn’t much by way of risk to our humble home.

Once we got the Carousel home, we set to work restoring it. Dad was insistent that we not fix it
too
well. In a couple of the scenes, the Dad robot was really weird around the neck, its cervical controllers bulging at the flesh like it had swallowed a wheel-rim, sideways. I was pretty sure we could do better than that, but Dad insisted that that was part of the charm, and so I printed a new controller that was an exact match. I even resisted the temptation to replace the glassy, weird eyeballs with something vat-grown from one of my kits.

“It’s not supposed to be realistic, Jimmy,” he said. “You need to understand that.”

I didn’t understand it at the time, but I came to understand it eventually. It was the show. It had a dream-like quality, a kind of ethereal logic that seemed perfectly sensible in the show, but which evaporated when the show ended, like the secret technique for levitating evaporating as you wake from sleep.

Each of the four sequences showed the progress that technology made, generation to generation. A wood stove turns into an electric range, then a self-cleaning range, then a voice-controlled microwave oven. At every turn, the world
progressed
, got
better
. The problems posed by each stove got solved. We had lots of different sound-tracks we could run for the ride—it had been redesigned several times—but the original one held the key for me: “At every turn in our history there was always someone saying, ‘Turn back. Turn back.’ But there is no turning back. Not for us. Not for our carousel. The challenge always lies ahead. And as long as man dreams and works and builds together, these years too can be the best time of your life.”

I lived in the future that they were talking about in the ride, but we didn’t have “progress” anymore. We’d outgrown progress. What we had was
change
. Things changed whenever anyone wanted to change them: design and launch a fleet of wumpuses, or figure out a way to put an emotional antenna in your head, or create a fleet of killer robots, or invent immortality, or gengineer your goats to give silk. Just do it. It’ll catch on, or it won’t. Maybe it’ll catch itself on. Then the world is . . . different. Then someone else changes it.

The status quo doesn’t protect itself; it needs defending if it’s going to stay put. The problem is that technology gives more of an advantage to an attacker than to a defender. A defender needs to mount a perfect defense. An attacker needs to find one hole in the defense. So once technology gets going, anything can be knocked down—evil doesn’t stand—but nothing much can be erected in its place. Look at Dad’s museum.

I’ve thought about leaving North Carolina and heading back to Detroit, believe me I have. But the cult isn’t so bad. They’re all nice and friendly and they come as close to stability as anything I’ve ever experienced. Plus they’re pretty good with medical technology, and their biologists don’t mind if I ask them nosy, ignorant questions about curing my immortality—at least enough to get my testicles to descend.

Twenty years have gone by and I have two—count ’em, two—pubic hairs. I call them Yeti and Sasquatch. I am as flexible as a ten-year-old—I can get my forehead down on my knee or clasp my arms over my shoulder—and I can run around all day. But like I said, I can’t stay interested in much for longer than a few days. My brain and body are so plastic that I can’t manage to do anything that requires any kind of stability. I’m like the perfect metaphor for the whole world.

No one knows how to deimmortalize me yet. All I want is a little bit of it, a little bit of aging. A couple more years. Life’s pretty good at eighteen, it seems to me. Eighteen would be a good age.

- - -

I didn’t recognize Lacey when I saw her. It had been twenty years, and the years had changed her.

I was out in the bush, looking for wild mushrooms. Mostly you got kombucha, big ones, and they made delicious tea. Supposedly they were a little hallucinogenic, but it appeared that my marvelous immortal liver didn’t much care to have me enter a state of elevated reality, so all I got out of it was tea. It was good tea, though.

I had the pack with me. I’d built them new bodies, better suited to the quiet life among the cultists. The bodies resembled furry mechanical squirrels. They could crawl all over you without freaking you out or making you feel threatened, which was exactly what I wanted from them. They were still frisky, even though they had aged a little and become a little less experimental, a little more prone to hanging around the Carousel and its immediate grounds. The canisters containing their nervous systems and brains could keep them alive for some time yet, I was sure, but they wouldn’t live forever. Lucky little bastards.

It was crisp autumn and the leaves were ten million flaming colors, crunching underfoot as we sought out the kombuchas. I was bending to inspect something that Pepe had found—Pepe still loved to have more than one PoV, so I’d given him four squirrels to drive at once—and when I looked up, I was staring into her boots, lace-up numbers, old fashioned with thick waffle-soles.

I kept looking up. She was a woman, in her mid-thirties. Her hair had grown out into an irregular mob of curls, her round face rosy-cheeked from the chilly weather. Fine lines radiated out from her drawn-up bow lips, and her eyes had small lines to match at their corners.

“Hello,” I said. She wasn’t a wirehead, I could tell that just by looking at the hair. They liked to wear it short so as not to interfere with the antenna.

“Jimmy?” she said, putting her hand to her chest. She was wearing a smart cowl that breathed gently around her, keeping her warm and dry.

I cocked my head, trying to place her. She looked so familiar, but I couldn’t place her, not exactly—

“Jimmy!” she said, and grabbed me in a hard hug. There was a woman under that cowl, boobs and hips. She was a whole head taller than me. But the smell was the same. Or maybe it was the hug.

“Lacey!” I said, and squeezed back, barely getting my arms around her.

She practically lifted me off my feet, and she squeezed so hard that all the breath went out of me.

“Lacey!” I croaked, “easy there!”

She set me down, a little reluctantly, and took a step back. “Jesus Christ, Jimmy, you haven’t changed
at all
.”

I shrugged. “Immortal,” I said.

She put her hand to her chest and looked at me, her mouth open. “Yeah, of course,” she said. “Immortal.”

“I’m trying to cure it,” I said. “Not all the way. But I thought if I could age up to, you know, eighteen or so . . .”

“Jimmy,” she said, “please stop talking about this for now. I’m out of weirdness quotient for the day.”

I had some snacks in my bag—the tortillas and tomatoes that the cult favored for staple crops—so I sat down and spread out my picnic tarp and offered her a seat, then something to eat.

She sat down and we ate together. We used to do this, back in Detroit, sneak picnics together out in the boonies, in an abandoned building or, in a pinch, cupped in one of my mecha’s hands. We fell into the easy rhythm of it as though no time at all had passed since then. For me, none had—at least not physically.

I told her about the zepp ride and the daisy cutters, about the slow landing and my settling in here, bound to the Carousel, not wanting to abandon it.

She got a little misty when she remembered the attack on Detroit. “I remember the zeppelin lifting off, and all the explosions in the sky. I was hiding under something—a truck, I think—and trying to keep the goat from going crazy. What was her name? Louisa?”

“Moldavia,” I said. I couldn’t believe she didn’t remember that. It was like yesterday to me.

“Moldavia! We ate her, you know. I remember that now. Mom and Dad couldn’t get their silk into India and the farm took a turn for the worse and—”

She broke off and rolled up another chopped tomato salad in another tortilla, sprinkled some basil and cilantro on it from the little herb bag I kept.

“What happened afterward?” I asked. “What happened to Detroit?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, well. The wumpuses came, of course. Took about two weeks for them to get through it all, and when they were done, there were so many of them that they mostly ate each other for another week, which was really gross, but when that was done, there was just good land. We farmed it for a while. Mostly redwoods. Big ones—four-hundred-footers. Anything for a carbon-credit. They were cheap and easy.”

I closed my eyes and rocked back on my tailbone. I’d stood by the Carousel for twenty years because, somewhere in my mind, I expected that Dad would be getting the museum back together and that wherever the Carousel was, he would come. He wouldn’t abandon it.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I expected that Dad was alive, immortal, coming for me. That we’d have our immortality together. It was lonely, being the only one.

“Redwoods,” I finally said. It came out in a croak.

“Big mutant ones,” she said, eating her burrito, apparently oblivious to me. “Didn’t last, of course. What does? They all got some kind of blight that petrified them where they stood. We think it was some kind of exotic mesoite that traded their carbon for calcium, harvesting the good stuff for who-knows-what. It went top down, so it took a while for us to notice. For a while, they all stayed upright, white and chalky. Then they crumbled until they were nothing but powder, which blew away.”

“What doesn’t?” I said. I was still thinking of Dad. I knew I’d get over it, though. Brain plasticity.

“Yeah,” she said. “Mom and Dad hung in there with the rest of the Treehuggers for a while, but I wasn’t going to stay there forever, I knew that much. I went west on my sixteenth, got as far as the Oregon coast. Kept in touch with the parents for a while, but they moved to Bangalore when I was about twenty-five and so that was it for them and me. I dated this guy who found me a job maintaining these weird brain-scanners at a research facility and I did that for a while too, which would have given my parents seizures if they knew. I probably stayed in that job for longer than I would have, just for that reason.

“But the people who ran the research station got bored or went broke—they didn’t ever tell us peons—and one day they didn’t show up for work. We all kept coming in and cleaning the floors and keeping the machines running and signing for deliveries for a week, but then we figured that they weren’t coming back. So I hit the road again (the boyfriend didn’t last as long as the job) and now I’m here. And so are you!”

She ate another burrito. She could really put them away.

She told me more minutiae from the road, places she’d been and people she’d met, talking for a long, long time. So long that I started to shiver as the sun dipped low. The pack whined around me, climbing up on my lap and my shoulders and head. Lacey was oblivious to the passage of time, her cowl keeping her warm. I had one like it that I’d bought from a traveler a couple years before, but I didn’t wear it much—it was too big for me and it tripped me up a little.

“We got to get going,” I said. “I’m freezing.”

She stopped talking and looked around. There was something hunted in her look. She stood up and slapped at her cowl to knock the crumbs off it and then she looked around again.

“So,” she said. “So. Nice to see you again, Jimmy. Really nice! You can send me e-mail or something sometime if you want to. Good luck with everything.”

I stopped folding up the tarp and putting away the leftovers. “Why? Where are you going?”

She looked around for a third time, then pointed south. “That direction looks promising. Do you know what’s there?”

I followed her finger through the woods. “About half a day’s walk will get you down to Jordan Lake. Nice places around there. Holiday cottages. Keep on going and you’ll hit Myrtle Beach, eventually. Might take you a week or two. Where are you headed, anyway?”

“It was really great to see you.” She grabbed me in another one of those hugs, so fierce that I couldn’t breathe for a moment.

“Where are you going?” I said again, once she’d released me.

She felt in her cowl and found a hanky, blew her face on it and wiped away all the stuff she’d started leaking all of a sudden.