Imperial Earth

by Clarke, Arthur C.

  It was small — its wingspan could not have been more than ten centimeters — and it traced wavering, zigzag patterns through the air, often seeming about to land on a low bush or patch of grass, then changing its mind at the last moment. Like a living jewel, it blazed with all the colors of the rainbow; its beauty struck Duncan like a sudden revelation. Yet at the same time he found himself asking what purpose such exuberant — no, arrogant — loveliness could possibly serve.

  "What is it?" he whispered to his companion, as the creature swept aimlessly back and forth a couple of meters above the grass.

  "Sorry," said George. "I can't identify it. I don't think it's indigenous, though I may be wrong. We get a lot of migrants nowadays, and sometimes they escape from collectors — breeding them's been a popular hobby for years." Then he stopped. He had suddenly understood the real thrust of Duncan's question. There was something close to pity in his eyes when he continued, in quite a different tone of voice: "I should have explained — it's a butterfly."

  But Duncan scarcely heard him. That iridescent creature, drifting so effortlessly though the air, made him forget the ferocious gravitational field of which he was now a captive. He started to run toward it — with the inevitable result.

  Luckily, he landed on a clean patch of grass.

  * * * * *

  Half an hour later, feeling quite comfortable but rather foolish, Duncan was sitting in the centuries-old farmhouse with his bandaged ankle stretched out on a footstool, while Mrs. Washington and her two young daughters prepared lunch. He had been carried back like a wounded warrior from the battlefield by a couple of tough farm workers who handled his weight with contemptuous ease, and also, he could not help noticing, radiated a distinct aroma of Charlemagne...

  It must be strange, he thought, to live in what was virtually a museum, even as a kind of part-time hobby; he would have been continually afraid of damaging some priceless artifact — such as the spinning wheel that Mrs. Washington had demonstrated to him. At the same time, he could appreciate that all this activity made a good deal of sense. There was no other way in which you could really get to understand the past, and there were still many people on Earth who found this an attractive way of life. The twenty or so farm workers, for example, were here permanently, summer and winter. Indeed, he found it rather hard to imagine some of them in any other environment — even after they had been thoroughly scrubbed...

  But the kitchen was spotless, and a most attractive smell was floating from it. Duncan could recognize very few of its ingredients, but one was unmistakable, even though he had met it today for the first time in his life. It was the mouth-watering fragrance of newly baked bread.

  It would be all right, he assured his still slightly queasy stomach. He had to ignore the undeniable fact that everything on that table was grown from dirt and dung, and not synthesized from nice, clean chemicals in a spotless factory. This was how the human race had lived for almost the whole of its history; only in the last few seconds of time had there been any alternative.

  For one gut-wrenching moment, until Washington had reassured him, he had feared that he might be served real meat. Apparently it was still available, and there was no actual law against it, thought many attempts had been made to pass one. Those who opposed Prohibition pointed out that attempts to enforce morality by legislation were always counterproductive; if meat were banned, everybody would want it, even if it made them sick. And anyway, this was a perversion which did harm to nobody... Not so, retorted the Prohibitionists; it would do irreparable harm to countless innocent animals, and revive the revolting trade of the butcher. The debate continued, with no end in sight.

  Confident that lunch would present mysteries but no terrors, Duncan did his best to enjoy himself. On the whole he succeeded. He bravely tackled everything set before him, rejecting about a third after one nibble, tolerating another third, and thoroughly appreciating the remainder. As it turned out, there was nothing that he actively disliked, but several items had flavors that were too strange and complicated to appeal to him at first taste. Cheese, for example — that was a complete novelty. There were about six different kinds, and he nibbled at them all. He felt that he could get quite enthusiastic about at least two varieties, if he worked on it. But that might not be a good idea, for it was notoriously difficult to persuade the Titan food chemists to introduce new patterns into their synthesizers.

  Some products were quite familiar. Potatoes and tomatoes, it seemed, tasted much the same all over the Solar System. He had already encountered them, as luxury products of the hydroponic farms, but had always found it difficult to get enthusiastic about either, at several solars a kilogram.

  The main dish was — well, interesting. It was something called steak and kidney pie, and perhaps the unfortunate name turned him off. He knew perfectly well that the contents were based on high-protein soya; Washington had confessed that this was the only item not actually produced on the farm, because the technology needed was too elaborate. Nevertheless, he could not manage more than a few bites. It was too bad that every time he tried to take a mouthful, he kept thinking of the phrase ‘kidney function’ and its unhappy associations. But the crust of the pie was delicious, and he polished off more than half of it.

  Dessert was no problem. It consisted of a large variety of fruits, most of them unfamiliar to Duncan even by name. Some were insipid, others very pleasant, but he felt that all were perfectly safe. The strawberries he thought especially good, though he turned down the cream that was offered with them when he discovered, by tactful questioning, exactly how it was made.

  HE was comfortably replete when Mrs. Washington produced a final surprise — a small wooden box containing a wax honeycomb. As long as he could remember, Duncan had been familiar with that term for lightweight structures; it required a mental volte-face to realize that this was the genuine, original item, constructed by Terran insects.

  "We've just started keeping bees," explained the professor. "Fascinating creatures, but we're still not sure if they're worth the trouble. I think you'll like this honey — try it on this crust of new bread."

  His hosts watched him anxiously as he spread the golden fluid, which he thought looked exactly like lubricating oil. He hoped it would taste better, but he was now prepared for almost anything.

  There was a long silence. Then he took another bite — and another.

  "Well?" asked George at last.

  "It's — delicious — one of the best things I've ever tasted."

  "I'm so pleased," said Mrs. Washington. "George, be sure to send some to the hotel for Mr. Makenzie."

  Mr. Makenzie continued to sample the bread and honey, very slowly. There was a remote and abstracted expression on his face, which his delighted hosts attributed to sheer gastronomical pleasure. They could not possibly guessed at the real reason.

  Duncan had never been particularly interested in food, and had made no effort to try the occasional novelties that were imported into Titan. The few times that any had been pressed upon him, he had not enjoyed them; he still grimaced at the memory of a reputed delicacy called caviar. He was therefore absolutely certain that never before in his life had he tasted honey.

  Yet he recognized it at once; and that was only half the mystery. Like a name that is on the tip of the tongue, yet eludes all attempts to grasp it, the memory of that earlier encounter lay just below the level of consciousness. It had happened a long time ago — but when, and where? For a fleeting moment he almost took seriously the idea of reincarnation. You, Duncan Makenzie, were a beekeeper in some earlier life on Earth...

  Perhaps he was mistaken in thinking he knew the taste. The association could have been triggered by some random leakage between mental circuits. And anyway, it could not possibly be of the slightest importance...

  He knew better. Somehow, it was very important indeed.

  21

  History Lesson

  Of all the old cities, it was generally agreed that Paris and Washington offered the b
est combination of beauty, culture, history — and convenience. Unlike such largely random aggregations as London and Rome, which had defied millennia of planning, they had been adapted fairly easily to automatic transportation. Could he have risen from his tomb in Arlington, the luckless Pierre Charles L'Enfant would have been proud indeed to have discovered how well he had laid the ground for a technology centuries in his future.

  Though an official car was available whenever he wished, Duncan preferred to be as independent as possible. Coming from an aggressively egalitarian society, he never felt quite happy when he was afforded special privileges — except, of course, those he had earned himself. Now that his sprained ankle was no longer paining him he had no excuse for using personal transport, and one could never know a city until one had explored it on foot.

  Like any ordinary tourist — and Washington expected the incredible total of five million before the end of July — Duncan rode the glideways and autojitneys, gaping at the famous buildings and remembering the great men who had lived and worked here for half a thousand years. In the five-kilometer-long rectangle from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, and from the Washington Monument to the White House, no changes had been permitted for more than a century. To ride the shuttle from Constitution Avenue and back along Independence, on the south side of the Mall, was to take a journey through time.

  And time was the problem, for Duncan could spare only an hour or two a day for sightseeing. His planned schedule had already been wrecked by a factor that he had refused to take seriously, despite numerous warnings. Instead of his usual six, he needed no fewer than ten hours of sleep every day. This was yet another side effect of the increased gravity, and there was nothing he could do about it; his body stubbornly insisted on the additional time, to overcome the extra wear and tear. Eventually, he knew, he would make a partial adaptation, but he could hardly hope to manage with less than eight hours. It was maddening to have come all this way, to one of the most fascinating places on Earth, and to be compelled to waste more than forty percent of his life in unconsciousness.

  As with most off-worlders, his first target had been the National Museum of Astronautics on the Mall, because it was here that his own history had begun, that day in July 1969. He had walked past the flimsy and improbable hardware of the early Space Age, and had taken his seat with several hundred other visitors in the Apollo Rotunda just before the beginning of the half-hourly show.

  There was nothing he had not seen many times before, yet the old drama still gripped him. Here were the faces of the first men to ride these crazy contraptions into space, and the sound of their actual voices — sometimes emotionless, sometimes full of excitement — as they spoke to their colleagues on the receding Earth. Now the air shook with the crackling roar of a Saturn launch, magically re-created exactly as it had taken place on that bright Florida morning, three hundred and seven years ago — and still, in many ways, the most impressive spectacle ever staged by man.

  The Moon drew closer — not the busy world that Duncan knew, but the virgin Moon of the twentieth century. Hard to imagine what it must have meant to the peoples of that time, to whom the Earth was not only the center of the Universe, but — even to the most sophisticated — still the whole of creation...

  Now Man's first contact with another world was barely minutes ahead. It seemed to Duncan that he was floating in space, only meters away from the spidery Lunar Module, bristling with antennas and wrapped in multicolored metal foil. The simulation was so perfect that he had an involuntary urge to hold his breath, and found himself clutching the handrail, seeking reassurance that he was still on Earth.

  "Two minutes, twenty seconds, everything looking good. We show altitude about 47,000 feet..." said Houston to the waiting world of 1969, and to the centuries to come. And then, cutting across the voice of Mission Control, making a montage of conflicting accents, was a speaker whom for a moment Duncan could not identify, though he knew the voice...

  "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

  Even back in 1969, that was already a voice from the grave; the President who had launched Apollo in that speech to Congress had never lived to see the achievement of his dream.

  "We're now in the approach phase, everything looking good. Altitude 5,200 feet."

  And once again that voice, silenced six years earlier in Dallas:

  "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people..."

  "Roger. Go for landing. 3,000 feet. We're go. Hang tight. We're go. 2,000 feet. 2,000 feet..."

  "And why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal...? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? WE CHOOSE TO GO TO THE MOON!"

  "200 feet, 4½ down, 5½ down, 160, 6½ down, 5½ down, 9 forward, 120 feet, 100 feet, 3½ down, 9 forward, 75 feet, thing still looking good..."

  "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one that we intend to win!"

  "Forward, forward 40 feet, down 2½, kicking up some dust, 30 feet, 2½ down, faint shadow, 4 forward, 4 forward, drifting to the right a little... Contact light. O.K. engine stopped, descent engine command override off... Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

  The music rose to a crescendo. There before his eyes, on the dusty Lunar plain, history had lived again. And presently he saw the clumsy, spacesuited figures climb down the ladder, cautiously test the alien soil, and utter the famous words:

  "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

  As always, Duncan listened for that missing “a” before the word “man,” and as always, he was unable to detect it. A whole book had been written about that odd slip of the tongue, using as its starting point Neil Armstrong's slightly exasperated "That's what I intended to say, and that's what I thought I said."

  All this, of course, was simulation — utterly convincing, and apparently life-sized by the magic of holography — but actually contrived in some studio by patient technicians, two centuries after the events themselves. There was Eagle, glittering in the fierce sunlight, with the Stars and Stripes frozen motionless beside it, just as it must have appeared early in the Lunar morning of that first day. Then the music became quiet, mysterious... something was about to happen. Even though he knew what to expect, Duncan felt his skin crawling in the ancient, involuntary reflex which Man had inherited from his hirsute ancestors.

  The image faded, dissolved into another — similar, yet different. In a fraction of a second, three centuries had dropped away.

  They were still on the Moon, viewing the Sea of Tranquility from exactly the same vantage point. But the direction of the light had changed, for the sun was now low and the long shadows threw into relief all the myriads of footprints on the trampled ground. And there stood all that was left of Eagle — the slightly peeled and blistered descent stage, standing on its four outstretched legs like some abandoned robot.

  He was seeing Tranquility Base as it was at this instant — or, to be precise, a second and a quarter ago, when the video signals left the Moon. Again, the illusion was perfect; Duncan felt that he could walk out into that shining silence and feel the warm metal beneath his hands. Or he could reach down into the dust and lift up the flag, to end the old debate that he reerupted in the Centennial Year. Should the Stars and Stripes be left where the blast of the takeoff had thrown it, or should it be erected again? Don’t tamper with history, said some. We're only restoring it, said others...

  Something was happening just beyond the fenced-off area, at the very limits of the 3-D scanners. It was shockingly incongruous to see any movement at all at such a spot; the Duncan remembered that the Sea had lost its tranquility at least two centuries ago. A busful of tourists was slowly circling the landing site, its occu
pants in full view through the curving glass of the observation windows. And though they could not see him, they waved across at the scanners, correctly guessing that someone on Earth was watching at this very moment.

  The interruption should have destroyed the magic, yet it did not. Nothing could detract from the skill and courage of the pioneers; and they would have been happy to know that, where they had first ventured, thousands could now travel in safety and in comfort.

  That, in the long run, was what History was all about.

  22

  Budget

  "Today I walked at least three kilometers, and was on my feet for over two hours. I'm beginning to felt that life is possible on Earth..."

  "But I must be careful not to overdo it, and I'm still using glideways and transporters most of the time. This means that I've not visited the White House or the Capitol, which can only be entered on foot. But I've been to the Museum of Technology and the National Gallery of Art. They have transport cubicles that you can program yourself, so there's no need to waste time on exhibits that don't interest you. Of course, I could stay in the hotel and take a holovision tour anywhere, but that would be ridiculous. I could do that any time, back at home..."

  "I must remember that I'll be replaying these words twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred years from now, when this visit to Earth is a dim memory. So it may be a good idea to describe a typical day — if there is such a thing! — here at the Centennial Hotel."

  "I wake up at six-thirty and listen to the radio news summary while I'm having my bath. Then I dial the Comsole for any messages that have arrived during the night — usually there are half a dozen. Not many people know I'm here yet, but I've had quite a few offers of hospitality and have been asked to speak to a number of social and cultural groups. I suspect Ambassador Farrell is behind most of these."

  "Then I set the news abstractor to print out anything that's happened in my area of interest, and scan the result. That doesn't take long, since I give TITAN as the main heading, and we're never in the news. If I want to know what's happening at home, I call the Embassy and get the daily dispatch. Usually that makes me rather homesick, especially when my friends and family are being reported. Which is most days..."