And a good thing, too, Ardith thought.
“And a good thing, too,” her son said. “I’ll get to Earth just in time to pick Jasmeen up. She wants our baby born on Pallas. She also wants me to take her hunting again. Of course that’s what got us in a family way the first time. Shared work is an aphrodisiac. Llyra says, win or lose, she’ll take time off to write about what happened aboard the City of Newark.”
Also on Pallas, Ardith found herself hoping. She’d be packing up the lab about then and would want some company. Rosalie and Julie had promised to help her. Three generations of Ngu women in one room—five if they could get together with Jasmeen and Tieve. Absolutely amazing.
With practical immortality there was a lot more of that around the corner.
On the 3DTV screen before them, Llyra stepped onto the ice, lifted her arms in salute to the audience, and began her long, exhausting routine. What a life it had been for her, her mother thought. And what a life still lay ahead of her.
What a life still lay ahead for all of them!
EPILOGUE: THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandius, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandius”
The guard said, “Pardon me, Miss Ngu, may I please have your autograph?”
Llyra stood on the slowly-moving slidewalk with her husband Morgan and their three children, taking in the amazing sight of the famous Leaning Monument of Washington. The guard—who was no more than a ticket-taker, in point of fact—had apparently run all the way from his glass booth at the entrance of the Mall to catch up with them. Now the man bent over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath, as well.
By special arrangement with the Seaboard Weather Control Company—a holosign over the entrance had informed them—the onetime capital city of the Old United States and East America was kept authentically hot and humid all year round. As a result, all of them—including the guard, it appeared—felt authentically sticky and uncomfortable.
“Sure,” Llyra told him cheerfully over the alarming sound of his wheezing. “Are you all right? Do you have something for me to write on?”
He levered himself upright again, looking flushed. Except for a fringe of reddish hair above his ears, he was totally bald, and bright pink from his chin almost to the back of his neck. He needn’t have been bald, of course—practically nobody in the rest of the Solar System was these days—old-fashioned laws forbidding genetic therapy had long since been repealed, or were simply ignored, but the East American people largely remained prejudiced against “fooling Mother Nature”.
He fished around in his antique gold-buttoned blazer—a patch on the breast pocket displayed a System-famous company logo surrounded by the legend, “EjTofz Entertainment Enterprises”—producing a scrap of paper.
“I’m okay, thanks, Miss Ngu,” he told her, looking to her husband, as well. “I’m originally from Flagstaff, see? Old Arizona? Eighteen years I’ve lived and worked in the D.C. and I’m still not used to the damn artificial climate.” He glanced down at the children. “Pardon my French.”
Morgan laughed. “That’s okay—Fred.” He’d looked at the man’s nametag. “We speak a lot of French, ourselves.” In his way, Morgan was just as illustrious a personality as his wife, but she was the one who got asked for her autograph and he’d long since grown accustomed to it.
Llyra spoke up. “Sorry, Fred. Where are my manners? My husband, Morgan Trask, my son Emerson, my daughter Julia, and our baby daughter Ardie in the pram.” As she spoke, she signed the paper scrap, dating it July 2, 2145. A sudden wave of nausea and foreboding swept through her, as it did sometimes—she’d had another hijacking nightmare last night and awakened shaken and sweaty—but she struggled to ignore it.
“It’s very nice to meet you all.” said the guard, shaking hands with the couple’s eight-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. “Thank you, Miss Ngu. You know, we see quite a few celebrities here, but … ” He held up the autograph. “Well, my wife will be so pleased.” He departed at a considerably more leisurely pace than he’d arrived.
They all looked up at the monument again, sitting about a hundred yards away. The only thing holding the tower up seemed to be a pair of structural carbon cables, stretching from the pyramidal top, against the direction it was leaning, and anchored in the ground. They were smaller, but similar, Llyra realized, to the big cable, over 22,500 miles long, that they’d ridden down on from synchronous orbit this morning.
It was hard to believe that, in times past, thousands of groups—military veterans, racial minorities, trade organizations, labor unions, animal rights advocates, and environmentalists like the Sierra Club, All Worlds Are Earth, and the Mass Movement—had rallied here, sometimes by the millions, to state their case and make their demands. Now it was just a huge empty space Llyra and her family had, almost to themselves.
“EjTofz Entertainment Enterprises must be too cheap to spring for antigravs,” Morgan observed. He’d pronounced the name “Eye-Tovs”. Llyra thought it must be Hungarian or Lithuanian or Serbo-Croatian or something. The company had just bought the entire city—everything inside the legendary Beltway—intending to make a theme park out of it.
“They’re still relatively expensive,” Llyra replied. “And power hogs.”
“Yeah, but if nothing is done to prevent it, someday this monument will collapse, leaving a long, broken line of rubble—the Washington Wall.”
Between them and the monument, a life-sized hologram in quaint early 19th century clothing politely introduced itself as Parson Mason Weems. It spoke of General Washington, about the monument itself, and apologized for an apparently famous untruth it had once told about a hatchet and a cherry tree in its biography of the first American president.
“Just think.” Llyra said. “One little fib, not quite three and a half centuries ago and he’ll be apologizing for it until the sun burns out.”
Morgan laughed.
“When Washington retired after two terms,” the hologram continued, “He—”
“Be quiet, now.” Llyra’s husband told the hologram. “And please go away.”
The hologram promptly vanished.
Morgan Trask was tall by nearly anybody’s standard, six feet nine inches. Although he was heavily muscled and in excellent condition, strangers usually thought of him as skinny, owing to the proportions involved. He had strong Nordic features—although most of his ancestors were Irish—and long blond hair presently pulled back in a ponytail. He wore what served as casual street clothes in the Moon’s largest city, Armstrong (to natives of Earth they looked like pajamas or surgical scrubs) and a small, potent plasma pistol on his right hip.
Born and raised in what might as well have been an interplanetary colony, a village built under an atmospheric dome east of L’Anse Aux Meadows on the northernmost tip of the Great Northern Peninsula of the Unanimous Consent Confederation of Newfoundland, Morgan had been the Solar System’s Olympic champion in men’s figure skating a dozen years ago.
Now he turned to his wife, catching the eye of his two older offspring, as well. The third, baby Ardie, was in her stroller, more or less oblivious to anything except her toes. “Somebody told me once that when Washington was a Revolutionary genera
l, the Continental Congress put him on an expense account, rather than paying him a salary, which he used to buy livestock for the farm he shared with Martha.”
The baby began to fuss a little, interrupting her father’s story. Increasing the flow of the air curtain that protected her child from the climate and flying insects, Llyra raised her eyebrows. “Is that true?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know—just what somebody told me. When he got elected President, he wanted the same deal but they turned him down.”
“Gosh, I wonder why.”
Twenty-eight year old Llyra Ngu Trask was nearly as tall as her husband, six feet seven inches, and similarly muscled, although with all of the curves appropriate to her sex. She, too, had been an Olympic gold medalist, in women’s figure skating, at the age of sixteen. Blond and fair, with just the faintest hint of her Asian forbears in her hazel eyes, her height was nothing extraordinary where she came from. She’d been born and brought up on the terraformed asteroid Pallas, at one twentieth of a standard Earth gravity. It had taken her years to work up to skating on Earth, but in the end, she’d been the first female to perform a quintuple Salchow in a one-gee field.
For the past ten years, she and her husband had been coaching young Olympic hopefuls, as well as future show skaters, at the Robert and Virginia Heinlein Memorial Ice Skating Arena—”the Heinlein”—in Armstrong City in the Moon. The waiting list for their services, famous from Mercury to Pluto, was long and those on it would now be disappointed.
They had returned to Earth with their three small children for what could possibly be the last time, to see a few sights they thought were important. After Washington, their plan was to visit a handful of other North American cities and pay a visit to Morgan’s parents in Newfoundland, before heading for Egypt. Next month they would board the C.C.V. Prometheus, bound for an ancient alien interstellar jump device recently discovered at the edge of the Solar System. It would take them to another star system and the beautiful Earthlike planet, Paradise.
Those who wished to retain a sense of perspective had named the planet’s single extraordinarily dark and smooth-surfaced moon “Parking Lot”.
One sight they wanted their children to see was the former capital of the former United States of America, the last government of any consequence on Earth, and the end of eight or ten thousand years of dismal coercive history. EjTofz Entertainment Enterprises had begun its renovation of the mostly abandoned city by restarting the famous moving walkways that took visitors from one point of interest to another.
As they’d seen, holograms of important biographers acted as guides to the various monuments and memorials. Cameras, computers, and other electronics were welcome in the park (in a city that had once required a police permit for a camera tripod) but only at their owners’ risk. Uncountable trillions of electronics-eating antisurveillance nanites were still active from about a century ago, when people finally grew tired of being scrutinized and eavesdropped on constantly by the government.
“Mommy, what’s that?” Emerson asked suddenly.
“Don’t point, dear, it’s not polite. Anyway, your eyes are better than mine. I can’t quite—why, I think it looks like somebody in a hoverchair.”
The instant the whole family turned to look, the figure took a right angle and vanished behind a statue of Hillary Rodham Clinton that, in the style of her times, had been made from crushed aluminum cans.
“Maybe somebody from your neck of the woods, Honey,” Morgan suggested. “Somebody who can’t tolerate the new treatments for gravity.” All five of them had suffered numerous injections, tests, physical therapy, and other indignities to be here, including the baby.
“Maybe,” Llyra answered. There was something unsettling about that figure, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. “Let’s go have some lunch, shall we? I saw a little cafe over by the Schwartzenegger Pavilion.”
—TWO—
“You think there’s bugs in there?” Llyra’s five year old daughter Julia asked as they approached the next memorial on their itinerary, a site mostly known, these days, for its appearance on antique coins and currency.
Not all such collectibles were rare. During its final days, the East American government had cast this particular president’s likeness into a thermoplastic five million dollar coin, circulating enough of them, went an old joke, to fill one of the smaller Great Lakes. In the end, the vast majority of them had been shipped to West American thermal depolymerization plants where they’d been broken down into petroleum.
Emerson gave his sister a nasty snicker.
“This is a good climate,” said Morgan, “for all kinds of nasty bugs.”
They’d seen some of the city proper, before coming to the Mall. So far they’d visited the apartment building where Wesley Snipes had supposedly lived in the twentieth century movie Murder at 1600, the basement parking garage where “Deep Throat” had met reporters Woodward and Bernstein, and a Catholic girls’ school where the barricaded twenty-first century President Horton Willoughby had finally been persuaded to surrender and resign from office over the Martian scandal.
There was still a military tank—long since rusted and inert—standing at every important intersection of the city, left over from the turbulent final days of the Homeland Security era. It was difficult for Morgan and Llyra to keep their 8-year-old son and 5-year old daughter from climbing them—it looked like fun for adults, as well.
Later this afternoon they planned to visit the Hall of Fictional Presidents, with its host of robotic and holographic images from Raymond Massey to Harrison Ford, Gene Hackman, Ronny Cox, and Martin Sheen.
“And snakes!” Emerson added excitedly. “I wanna see some snakes!”
One of the few drawbacks to living in the Moon was that the Trasks and other children like them could only see wild animals by going to the zoo. The boy devoured everything he could read and watch on the subject. He was especially interested in predatory mammals. That had been one of many reasons Llyra and Morgan had decided to head for the stars, and a new planet. On Paradise, the kids could climb mountains, run through the woods, paddle through swamps, and see new life very few children—or adults, for that matter—had ever seen. There was some danger in that, of course, but pioneers like Arctic colonists and Pallatians welcomed it, for the freedom and opportunity that came with it.
The monument before them was a gigantic rectangular building entirely surrounded by columns. Inside, one of the presidents sat on what was unmistakably a throne, looking down at the visitors who came to see him. The monument, however, was overgrown with semitropical weeds and vines, beneath which two centuries of grafitti had left not a square inch of stone unmarked. One of the columns at the entrance was broken, leaving a gap like a missing tooth in the face of a street tramp.
Before they came within fifty yards of the memorial, another holofigure appeared before them, both of its arms extended, palms outward.
“I’m sorry,” said the hologram. “The public may not enter this structure, as it’s overrun with dangerous insects, snakes, rats, and bats.”
“Bats!” exclaimed both older children at the same time, Emerson with excitement, Julia in apparent horror. In that moment, Llyra felt that same nameless dread wash through her again. It had been like this for half of her life, ever since her ill-fated journey to Mars. She shook it off, as she always did, and concentrated instead on the hologram.
“I was Thomas DiLorenzo,” the figure wore an early twenty-first century jacket and tie, “one of Abraham Lincoln’s last biographers. Over the past century or so, the man’s image and place in history have become somewhat tarnished, as it has become clearer what he did and why. Fundamentally, he allowed six hundred twenty thousand individual human beings to die violently—and many more to be wounded, raped, and impoverished—in order to preserve an artificial political construct.”
“But he freed—” Llyra began. Earth history wasn’t her strong suit.
“A claim,” the
hologram went on, “was often made that Lincoln ended slavery, but not only did his Emancipation Proclamation free nobody, all throughout the war, Washington’s capitol dome was being renovated—by slaves. Lincoln stated frankly that if he could have preserved the Union by keeping slavery in place, he would have done so. What he did, instead, was to spread it everywhere across America, by introducing military conscription and income taxation, the two most pernicious forms of slavery, ones that continued for another hundred and … “
The hologram’s voice was overpowered by a roaring noise overhead. They all looked up to see one of the new antigrav shuttles—its underbelly polished like a great curved mirror—clawing its way into the midday sky, headed for the Moon, or possibly one of the Lagrange positions.
Some people still preferred spaceships to the orbital elevator the Trask family had ridden down on. Those like the vessel overhead were faster and more direct, but a great deal more expensive. The Trasks had taken a small space hopper from Armstrong City in the Moon to the pinnacle of the nearest space elevator—there were now six of these, altogether, every one of them built by Llyra’s father, who had also terraformed Ceres—and ridden it to Fernandina in the Galapagos Islands on the Earth’s equator. From there, a hypersonic atmospheric cruiser had flown them to Baltimore in East America. After visiting the system-famous H.L. Mencken Shrine, they’d taken an almost empty hoverbus to what had been the capital of the world’s most powerful nation.
Antigrav technology, a leftover, archaeologically, from some ancient civilization gone for a billion years, had come back from the stars with Mankind’s first interstellar exploratory vessel, the Fifth Force. The shuttle overhead was lifted by antigrav, but driven by fusion engines that human beings had invented all by themselves. The lower portion of the vessel’s hull was reflective because, for a great many years, the dying East American government had taken to using tactical lasers to shoot down aircraft it believed had violated its airspace.