The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  GIGO, garbage in, garbage out—a maxim of computer programmers. The quality of the input data determines the quality of the output no matter how good the data processor. But when it comes to the magic human data processing program called creativity, you can look at it more positively, since humans are able to synergize mutations not implicit in the data.

  Nevertheless the data does determine the quality and frequency of creative mutation, statistically speaking. The more of it there is, the denser it is, the more varied and complex, the higher the incidence of creative synergy. Of mutation. Of invention. Of science fiction. Of a sense of self-creating our futures.

  And if we look at America as the input data, as a dynamic data bank, the external information system of internal creation, we begin to see why America is such a science fiction reality, indeed why science fiction may now be emerging as a characteristic American literature while it emerges as a transnational literature at the same time.

  America was set up as a laboratory and a model for a future which the world has not yet attained. A transnational future. A future in which the peoples of the world mingle and interbreed genetically and psychically.

  Not a melting pot, but a fusion plasma where all the cultures, wisdoms, and evils of all the peoples in the world are jammed together in a high energy state all the time. In everyone’s head. The peoples of the Earth flooded into the emptiness of America, filling it with their genes and their cultures and their ways of looking at the world. Almost immediately, this forced transnationalism began to mutate because of its very complex and compacted mix. Only in America are the elements of scores of national realities so thoroughly mingled, geographically and culturally.

  This American fusion plasma is so complex and dense that it keeps generating new complexity and increased density, so that it never stabilizes into a fixed cultural matrix, an American national style. Bits and pieces of the cultures of the world forever fuse into new American elements and with the flood of American mutations.

  America is something new under this sun. Not so much a nation at all as a precog flash of the future of the species, the leading edge of the evolution of world man. Which, of course, is also what science fiction Is all about.

  And that’s how The Star Spangled Future ended up writing itself.

  One of the things that had historically limited science fiction to its peculiar ghettoized state was the tendency of science fiction writers to live in the pocket reality of the world of science fiction, a cozy familiar Ruritania where you have a secure patent of nobility, and where the input of the real world comes third hand and creates mutations not of realities but of previous science fiction. Indeed, it is common for citizens of the Grand Duchy of SF to speak disdainfully of the “mundane” world outside the borders of the magic kingdom.

  But I grew up outside this realm. I didn’t even know it existed until I had published a first novel. What ever gestalt of input made me a science fiction writer, it came from general American reality, not the subculture of science fiction. At a stage when other new science fiction writers were doing their extracurricular bullshitting in fanzines, I was doing mine in the underground press. Sure, I read a lot of science fiction, but American realities seemed far more science fictional to me than spaceships and alien planets.

  Mundane? Oh really?

  You be the judge. In The Star Spangled Future, you will find fourteen stories written over the span of a decade in many places and many headspaces, and all of them about “mundane” America, not spaceships and other worlds. I wrote them believing that I was simply writing disconnected science fiction stories from whatever came into my head. Most of them were first published in the usual science fiction markets. And they all turn out to be about America, the leading edge of the possible futures unfolding around us right here where we live.

  After all, that was what was coming into my head, that’s the mother lode of science fiction realities—the American fusion plasma of which we are creatures—and all we have to do is keep ourselves open to it. That’s where I get my crazy ideas, Charley, and that’s my definition of science fiction.

  We have seen the future and it is us.

  PHASE ONE

  Science Fiction Time

  Introduction

  By any rational criteria, it’s Science Fiction Time in America right now; hence the title of this section of The Star Spangled Future. We have seen the future and it is us, I said just a moment ago, but of course we all know that there’s no such thing as the future at all. There are many multiple futures struggling to be born at any given moment, nowhere more so than in America. Some of them are worthy of our aspiration while others are trying to crawl out from under wet rocks, and in the multiplex American reality none of them exactly precludes any of the others.

  So for all any of us know, any of the stories in this section could be happening right now. The present and the future have a very fuzzy boundary in these times. Consider that in America, right now, we know that:

  Mass media has impressed comic book heroes like Superman into the Jungian unconscious. Death, sex, and power dance to the beat of an electric guitar. Cancer has become such a dreaded metaphor for bad karma that there are those who seriously believe it is the result of bad karma itself. Religion, psychotherapy, and marketing have created scores of specimens of new kinds of cults vying with mutated Eastern imports for landlordship of the New Jerusalem. Sports events have replaced tribal warfare as the mythic area for local chauvinism. History is molded on national television. Men are seriously launching a political movement to build cities in space.

  Science Fiction Times indeed! Who knows how close fiction is to unfolding realities? I saw the “Holy War on 34th Street” nearly break out on more than one occasion. There is now a doctor in Texas using a kind of cancer therapy based on the transmogrification of disease into inner myth, a treatment based literally on fantasy itself which has shown some positive results. And there are people learning to consciously craft their dreams.

  Where does science fiction end and the “real world” begin? Figure it out for yourself if you can. Lotsa luck! But don’t expect to come up with a simple answer while you read these stories.

  Introduction to

  Carcinoma Angels

  In a funny kind of way, this story is sort of true; the disease, character, and mythic imagery have been changed, though not necessarily to protect the innocent.

  I once contracted a fatal disease called toxic hepatitis in a hospital. Ran a temperature of 106° for days. Supposedly fatal, and certainly the moral equivalent of about 1000 mikes an hour of acid on intravenous drip. Convinced I was being tortured for secret information by Russian spies, supposedly near death, and weighing in at 115 pounds, I became possessed of strange powers indeed.

  I leapt out of bed, snatched up a bedpan, and used it as a weapon to fend off two burly aides, gained control of the room telephone, and while defending it by force, scummed and bullshitted my way through telephone operators and underlings using an imperious voice and a series of made-up priority codes I was convinced were real and got a Pentagon general woken up by his home red phone in the middle of the night. I started to gibber at this dazed and disoriented general about spies and plots. Then the orderlies grabbed me, shot me full of thorazine, and hung up what they thought was a dead phone on the sucker.

  By the time the Pentagon had satisfied itself that the hospital was not a KGB front—and everyone did speak with middle European accents, come to think of it—my fog had cleared, my fever broke, and I was recovering with a rapidity that was pretty eerie to the doctors…

  Carcinoma Angels

  At the age of nine, Harrison Wintergreen first discovered that the world was his oyster when he looked at it sidewise. That was the year when baseball cards were in. The kid with the biggest collection of baseball cards was it. Harry Wintergreen decided to become it.

  Harry saved up a dollar and bought one hundred random baseball cards. He was in luck—one of them was the ve
ry rare Yogi Berra. In three separate transactions, he traded his other ninety-nine cards for the only other three Yogi Berras in the neighborhood. Harry had reduced his holdings to four cards, but he had cornered the market in Yogi Berra. He forced the price of Yogi Berra up to an exorbitant eighty cards. With the slush fund thus accumulated, he successively cornered the market in Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Pee Wee Reese and became the J. P. Morgan of baseball cards.

  Harry breezed through high school by the simple expedient of mastering only one subject—the art of taking tests. By his senior year, he could outthink any testwriter with his gypsheet tied behind his back and won seven scholarships with foolish ease.

  In college, Harry discovered Girls. Being reasonably goodlooking and reasonably facile, he no doubt would’ve garnered his fair share of conquests in the normal course of events, But this was not the way the mind of Harrison Wintergreen worked.

  Harry carefully cultivated a stutter, which he could turn on or off at will. Few girls could resist the lure of a good-looking, well-adjusted guy with a slick line who nevertheless carried with him some secret inner hurt that made him stutter. Many were the girls that tried to delve Harry’s secret, while Harry delved them.

  In his sophomore year, Harry grew bored with college and reasoned that the thing to do was to become Filthy Rich. He assiduously studied sex novels for one month, wrote three of them in the next two which he immediately sold at a thousand a throw.

  With the $3,000 thus garnered, he bought a shiny new convertible. He drove the new car to the Mexican border and across into a notorious bordertown. He immediately contacted a disreputable shoeshine boy and bought a pound of marijuana. The shoeshine boy of course tipped off the border guards, and when Harry attempted to walk across the bridge to the states, they stripped him naked. They found nothing and Harry crossed the border. He had smuggled nothing out of Mexico, and in fact had thrown the marijuana away as soon as he bought it.

  However, he had taken advantage of the Mexican embargo on American cars and illegally sold the convertible in Mexico for $15,000.

  Harry took his $15,000 to Las Vegas and spent the next six weeks buying people drinks, lending broke gamblers money, acting in general like a fuzzy-cheeked Santa Claus, gaining the confidence of the right drunks and blowing $5,000.

  At the end of six weeks he had three hot market tips which turned his remaining $10,000 into $40,000 in the next two months.

  Harry bought 400 crated government surplus jeeps in four one-hundred-jeep lots at $10,000 a lot and immediately sold them to a highly disreputable Central American Government for $100,000.

  He took the $100,000 and bought a tiny island In the Pacific, so worthless that no government had ever bothered to claim it. He set himself up as an independent government with no taxes and sold twenty one-acre plots to twenty millionaires seeking a tax haven at $100,000 a plot. He unloaded the last plot three weeks before the United States, with U.N. backing, claimed the island and brought it under the sway of the Internal Revenue Department.

  Harry invested a small part of his $2,000,000 and rented a large computer for twelve hours. The computer constructed a betting schema by which Harry parlayed his $2,000,000 into $20,000,000 by taking various British soccer pools to the tune of $18,000,000.

  For five million dollars, he bought a monstrous chunk of useless desert from an impoverished Arabian sultanate. With another two million, he created a huge rumor campaign to the effect that this patch of desert was literally floating on oil. With another three million, he set up a dummy corporation which made like a big oil company and publicly offered to buy his desert for seventy-five million dollars. After some spirited bargaining, a large American oil company was allowed to outbid the dummy and bought a thousand square miles of sand for $100,000,000.

  Harrison Wintergreen was, at the age of twenty-five, Filthy Rich by his own standards. He lost his interest in money.

  He now decided that he wanted to Do Good. He Did Good. He toppled seven unpleasant Latin American governments and replaced them with six Social Democracies and a Benevolent Dictatorship. He converted a tribe of Borneo headhunters to Rosicrucianism. He set up twelve rest homes for over-age whores and organized a birth control program which sterilized twelve million fecund Indian women. He contrived to make another $100,000,000 on the above enterprises.

  At the age of thirty, Harrison Wintergreen had had it with Do-Gooding. He decided to Leave His Footprints in the Sands of Time. He Left His Footprints in the Sands of Time. He wrote an internationally acclaimed novel about King Farouk. He invented the Wintergreen Filter, a membrane through which fresh water passed freely, but which barred salts. Once set up, a Wintergreen Desalinization Plant could desalinate an unlimited supply of water at a per-gallon cost approaching absolute zero. He painted one painting and was instantly offered $200,000 for it. He donated it to the Museum of Modern Art, gratis, He developed a mutated virus which destroyed syphilis bacteria. Like syphilis, it spread by sexual contact. It was also a mild aphrodisiac. Syphilis was wiped out in eighteen months. He bought an island off the coast of California, a five-hundred-foot crag jutting out into the Pacific. He caused it to be carved into a five-hundred-foot statue of Harrison Wintergreen.

  At the age of thirty-eight, Harrison Wintergreen had Left sufficient Footprints in the Sands of Time. He was bored. He looked around greedily for new worlds to conquer.

  This then, was the man who, at the age of forty, was informed that he had an advanced, well-spread and incurable case of cancer and that he had one year to live.

  Wintergreen spent the first month of his last year searching for an existing cure for terminal cancer. He visited laboratories, medical schools, hospitals, clinics, Great Doctors, quacks, people who had miraculously recovered from cancer, faithhealers and Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes. There was no known cure for terminal cancer, reputable or otherwise. It was as he suspected, as he more or less even hoped. He would have to do it himself.

  He proceeded to spend the next month setting things up to do it himself. He caused to be erected in the middle of the Arizona desert an air-conditioned walled villa. The villa had a completely automatic kitchen and enough food for a year. It had a five-million-dollar biological and biochemical laboratory. It had a three-million-dollar microfilmed library which contained every word ever written on the subject of cancer. It had the pharmacy to end all pharmacies: a liberal supply of quite literally every drug that existed—poisons, pain-killers, hallucinogens, dandricides, antiseptics, antibiotics, viricides, headache remedies, heroin, quinine, curare, snake oil—everything. The pharmacy cost twenty million dollars.

  The villa also contained a one-way radiotelephone, a large stock of basic chemicals, including radioactives, copies of the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, the Book of the Dead, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the I Ching and the complete works of Wilhelm Reich and Aldous Huxley. It also contained a very large and ultra-expensive computer. By the time the villa was ready, Wintergreen’s petty cash fund was nearly exhausted.

  With ten months to do that which the medical world considered impossible, Harrison Wintergreen entered his citadel.

  During the first two months, he devoured the library, sleeping three hours out of each twenty-four and dosing himself regularly with benzedrene. The library offered nothing but data. He digested the data and went on to the pharmacy.

  During the next month, he tried Aureomycin, bacitracin, stannous fluoride, hexylresercinol, cortisone, penicillin, hexachlorophene, shark-liver extract and seven thousand three hundred and twelve assorted other miracles of modern medical science, all to no avail. He began to feel pain, which he immediately blotted out and continued to blot out with morphine. Morphine addiction was merely an annoyance.

  He tried chemicals, radioactives, viricides, Christian Science, Yoga, prayer, enemas, patent medicines, herb tea, witchcraft and yogurt diets. This consumed another month, during which Wintergreen continued to waste away, sleeping less and less and taking more
and more benzedrene and morphine. Nothing worked. He had six months left.

  He was on the verge of becoming desperate. He tried a different tack. He sat in a comfortable chair and contemplated his navel for forty-eight consecutive hours.

  His meditations produced a severe case of eyestrain and two significant words: “spontaneous remission.”

  In his two months of research, Wintergreen had come upon numbers of cases where a terminal cancer abruptly reversed itself and the patient, for whom all hope had been abandoned, had been cured. No one ever knew how or why. It could not be predicted, it could not be artificially produced, but it happened nevertheless. For want of an explanation, they called it spontaneous remission. “Remission,” meaning cure. “Spontaneous,” meaning no one knew what caused it.

  Which was not to say that it did not have a cause.

  Wintergreen was buoyed; he was even ebullient. He knew that some terminal cancer patients had been cured. Therefore terminal cancer could be cured. Therefore, the problem was removed from the realm of the impossible and was now merely the domain of the highly improbable.

  And doing the highly improbable was Wintergreen’s specialty.

  With six months of estimated life left, Wintergreen set jubilantly to work. From his complete cancer library, he culled every known case of spontaneous remission. He coded every one of them into the computer—data on the medical histories of the patients, on the treatments employed, on their ages, sexes, religions, races, creeds, colors, national origins, temperaments, marital status, Dun and Bradstreet ratings, neuroses, psychoses and favorite beers. Complete profiles of every human being ever known to have survived terminal cancer were fed into Harrison Wintergreen’s computer.

  Wintergreen programmed the computer to run a complete series of correlations between 10,000 separate and distinct factors and spontaneous remission. If even one factor—age, credit rating, favorite food, anything—correlated with spontaneous remission, the spontaneity factor would be removed.