The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  Mrs. Lindstrom puffed nervously on her joint while Johnny continued to suck happily on his lollipop. “Well… I was sort of afraid to, Dr. Braden,” she admitted. “I know it sounds silly, but I was afraid that if you changed his prescription to what the school wanted, you’d stop the paxum. I didn’t want that—I think it’s more important for Johnny to continue to feel universal love than to increase his attention span or any of that stuff. You’re not going to stop the paxum, are you?”

  “Quite the contrary, Mrs. Lindstrom,” Dr. Braden said. “I’m going to increase his dose slightly and give him ten milligrams of orodalamine daily. He’ll submit to the necessary authority of his teachers with a sense of trust and love, rather than out of fear.”

  For the first time during the visit, Mrs. Lindstrom smiled. “Then it all really is all right, isn’t it?” She radiated happiness born of relief.

  Dr. Braden smiled back at her, basking in the sudden surge of good vibrations. This was his peak experience in pediatrics; feeling the genuine gratitude of a worried mother whose fears he had thoroughly relieved. This was what being a doctor was all about. She trusted him. She put the consciousness of her child in his hands, trusting that those hands would not falter or fail. He was proud and grateful to be a psychedelic pediatrician. He was maximizing human happiness.

  “Yes, Mrs. Lindstrom,” he said soothingly, “everything is going to be all right.”

  In the chair in the corner, Johnny Lindstrom sucked on his lollipop, his face transfigured with boyish bliss.

  There were moments when Bill Watney got a soul-deep queasy feeling about psychedelic design, and lately he was getting those bad flashes more and more often. He was glad to have caught Spiegelman alone in the designers’ lounge; if anyone could do anything for his head, Lennie was it. “I dunno,” he said, washing down fifteen milligrams of lebemil with a stiff shot of bourbon, “I’m really thinking of getting out of this business.”

  Leonard Spiegelman lit a Gold, with his fourteen-carat-gold lighter—nothing but the best for the best in the business—smiled across the coffee table at Watsey, and said quite genially, “You’re out of your mind, Bill.”

  Watney sat hunched slightly forward in his easy chair, studying Spiegelman, the best artist Psychedelics, Inc., had, and envying the older man—envying not only his talent, but his attitude toward his work. Lennie Spiegelman was not only certain that what he was doing was right, he enjoyed every minute of it. Watney wished he could be like Spiegelman. Spiegelman was happy; he radiated the contented aura of a man who really did have everything he wanted.

  Spiegelman opened his arms in a gesture that seemed to make the whole designers’ lounge his personal property. “We’re the world’s best-pampered artists,” he said. “We come up with two or three viable drug designs a year, and we can live like kings. And we’re practicing the world’s ultimate art form; creating realities. We’re the luckiest mothers alive! Why would anyone with your talent want out of psychedelic design?”

  Watney found it difficult to put into words, which was ridiculous for a psychedelic designer, whose work it was to describe new possibilities in human consciousness well enough for the biochemists to develop psychedelics which would transform his specs into styles of reality. It was humiliating to be at a loss for words in front of Lennie Spiegelman, a man he both envied and admired. “I’m getting bad flashes lately,” he finally said, “deep flashes that go through every style of consciousness that I try, flashes that tell me I should be ashamed and disgusted about what I’m doing.”

  Oh-oh, Lennie Spiegelman thought, the kid is coming up with his first case of designer’s cafard. He’s floundering around with that no-direction-home syndrome and he thinks it’s the end of the world. “I know what’s bothering you, Bill,” he said. “It happens to all of us at one time or another. You feel that designing psychedelic specs is a solipsistic occupation, right? You think there’s something morally wrong about designing new styles of consciousness for other people, that we’re playing God, that continually altering people’s consciousness in ways only we fully understand is a thing that mere mortals have no right to do, like hubris, eh?”

  Watney flashed admiration for Spiegelman—his certainty wasn’t based on a thick ignorance of the existential doubt of their situation. There was hope in that, too. “How can you understand all that, Lennie,” he said, “and still dig psychedelic design the way you do?”

  “Because it’s a load of crap, that’s why,” Spiegelman said. “Look, kid, we’re artists—commercial artists at that. We design psychedelics, styles of reality; we don’t tell anyone what to think. If people like the realities we design for them, they buy the drugs, and if they don’t like our art, they don’t. People aren’t going to buy food that tastes lousy, music that makes their ears hurt, or drugs that put them in bummer realities. Somebody is going to design styles of consciousness for the human race; if not artists like us, then a lot of crummy politicians and power freaks.”

  “But what makes us any better than them? Why do we have any more right to play games with the consciousness of the human race than they do?”

  The kid is really dense, Spiegelman thought. But then he smiled, remembering that he had been on the same stupid trip when he was Watney’s age. “Because we’re artists, and they’re not,” he said. “We’re not out to control people. We get our kicks from carving something beautiful out of the void. All we want to do is enrich people’s lives. We’re creating new styles of consciousness that we think are improved realities, but we’re not shoving them down people’s throats. We’re just laying out our wares for the public.—right doesn’t even enter into it. We have a compulsion to practice our art. Right and wrong are arbitrary concepts that vary with the style of consciousness, so how on earth can you talk about the right and wrong of psychedelic design? The only way you can judge is by art aesthetic criterion—are we producing good art or bad?”

  “Yeah, but doesn’t that vary with the style of consciousness, too? Who can judge in an absolute sense whether your stuff is artistically pleasing or not?”

  “Jesus Christ, Bill, I can judge, can’t I?” Spiegelman said. “I know when a set of psychedelic specs is a successful work of art. It either pleases me or it doesn’t.”

  It finally dawned on Watney that that was precisely what was eating at him. A psychedelic designer altered his own reality with a wide spectrum of drugs and then designed other psychedelics to alter other people’s realities. Where was anyone’s anchor?

  “But don’t you see, Lennie?” he said. “We don’t know what the hell we’re doing. We’re taking the human race on an evolutionary trip, but we don’t know where we’re going. We’re flying blind.”

  Spiegelman took a big drag on his joint. The kid was starting to get to him.; he was whining too much. Watney didn’t want anything out of line—just certainty! “You want me to tell you there’s a way you can know when a design is right or wrong in some absolute evolutionary framework, right?” he said. “Well, I’m sorry, Bill, there’s nothing but us and the void and whatever we carve out of it. We’re our own creations; our realities ate our own works of art. We’re out here all alone.”

  Watney was living through one of his flashes of dread, and he saw that Spiegelman’s words described its content exactly. “But that’s exactly what’s eating at me!” he said. “Where in hell is our basic reality?”

  “There is no basic reality. I thought they taught that in kindergarten these days.”

  “But what about the basic state? What about the way our reality was before the art of psychedelic design? What about the consciousness style that evolved naturally over millions of years? Damn it, that was the basic reality, and we’ve lost it!”

  “The hell it was!” Spiegelman said. “Our pre-psychedelic consciousness evolved on a mindless random basis. What makes that reality superior to any other? Just because it was first? We may be flying blind, but natural evolution was worse—it was an idiot process without an ounce of
consciousness behind it.”

  “Goddamn it, you’re right all the way down the line, Lennie!” Watney cried in anguish. “But why do you feel so good about it while I feel so rotten? I want to be able to feel the way you do, but I can’t.”

  “Of course you can, Bill,” Spiegelman said. He abstractly remembered that he had felt like Watney years ago, but there was no existential reality behind it. What more could a man want than a random universe that was anything he could make of it and nothing else? Who wouldn’t rather have a style of consciousness created by an artist than one that was the result of a lot of stupid evolutionary accidents?

  He says it with such certainty, Watney thought. Christ, how I want him to be right! How I’d like to face the uncertainty of it all, the void, with the courage of Lennie Spiegelman! Spiegelman had been in the business for fifteen years; maybe he had finally figured it all out.

  “I wish I could believe that,” Watney said.

  Spiegelman smiled, remembering what a solemn jerk he himself had been ten years ago. “Ten years ago, I felt just like you feel now,” he said. “But I got my head together and now here I am, fat and happy and digging what I’m doing.”

  “How, Lennie, for Christ’s sake, how?”

  “Fifty mikes of methalin, forty milligrams of lebemil and twenty milligrams of peyotadrene daily,” Spiegelman said. “It made a new man out of me, and it’ll make a new man out of you.”

  “How do you feel, man?” Kip said, taking the joint out of his mouth and peering intently into Jonesy’s eyes, Jonesy looked really weird—pale, manic, maybe a little crazed. Kip was starting to feel glad that Jonesy hadn’t talked him into taking the trip with him.

  “Oh, wow,” Jonesy croaked, “I feel strange, I feel really strange, and it doesn’t feel so good…”

  The sun was high in the cloudless blue sky, a golden fountain of radiant energy filling Kip’s being. The wood and bark of the tree against which they sat was an organic reality connecting the skin of his back to the bowels of the earth in an unbroken circuit of protoplasmic electricity. He was a flower of his planet, rooted, deep in the rich soil, basking in the cosmic nectar of the sunshine.

  But behind Jonesy’s eyes was some kind of awful gray vortex. Jonesy looked really bad. Jonesy was definitely floating on the edges of a bummer.

  “I don’t feel good at all,” Jonesy said. “Man, you know, the ground is covered with all kinds of hard dead things and the grass is filled with mindless insects and the sun is hot, man. I think I’m burning.”

  “Take it easy, don’t freak. You’re on a trip, that’s all,” Kip said from some asshole superior viewpoint. He just didn’t understand, he didn’t understand how heavy this trip was, what it felt like to have your head raw and naked out here. Like cut off from every energy flow in the universe—a construction of fragile matter, protoplasmic ooze is all, isolated in an energy vacuum, existing in relationship to nothing but empty void and horrible mindless matter.

  “You don’t understand. Kip,” he said. “This is reality, the way it really is, and, man, it’s horrible, just a great big ugly machine made up of lots of other machines; you’re a machine, I’m a machine—it’s all mechanical clockwork. We’re just lumps of dead matter run by machinery, kept alive by chemical and electric processes.”

  Golden sunlight soaked through Kip’s skin and turned the core of his being into a miniature stellar phoenix. The wind, through random blades of grass, made love to the bare soles of his feet. What was all this machinery crap? What the hell was Jonesy gibbering about? Man, who would want to put himself in a bummer reality like that?

  “You’re just on a bummer, Jonesy,” he said. “Take it easy. You’re not seeing the universe the way it really is, as if that meant anything. Reality is all in your head. You’re just freaking out behind nothing.”

  “That’s it, that’s exactly it! I’m freaking out behind nothing. Like zero. Like cipher. Like the void. Nothing is where we’re really at.”

  How could he explain it—that reality was really just a lot of empty vacuum that went on to infinity in space and time? The perfect nothingness had minor contaminations of dead matter here and there. A little of this matter had fallen together through a complex series of random accidents to contaminate the universal deadness with trace elements of life, protoplasmic slime, biochemical clockwork. Some of this clockwork was complicated enough to generate thought, consciousness. And that was all there ever was or would ever be anywhere in space and time. Clockwork mechanisms rapidly running down in the cold black void. Everything that wasn’t dead matter already would end up that way sooner or later.

  “This is the way it really is,” Jonesy said. “People used to live in this bummer all the time. It’s the way it is, and nothing we can do can change it.”

  “I can change it,” Kip said, taking his pillbox out of his pocket. “Just say the word. Let me know when you’ve had enough and I’ll bring you out of it. Lebemil, peyotadrene, mescamil, you name it.”

  “You don’t understand, man, it’s real. That’s the trip I’m on. T haven’t taken anything at all for twelve hours, remember? It’s the natural state, it’s reality itself, and, man, it’s awful. It’s a horrible bummer. Christ, why did I have to talk myself into this? I don’t want to see the universe this way. Who needs it?”

  Kip was starting to get pissed off—Jonesy was becoming a real bring-down. Why did he have to pick a beautiful day like this to take his stupid nothing-trip?

  “Then take something already,” he said, offering Jonesy the pillbox.

  Shakily, Jonesy scooped out a cap of peyotadrene and a fifteen-milligram tab of lebemil and wolfed them down dry. “How did people live before psychedelics?” he said. “How could, they stand it?”

  “Who knows?” Kip said, closing his eyes and staring straight at the sun, diffusing his consciousness into the universe of golden orange light encompassed by his eyelids. “Maybe they had some way of not thinking about it.”

  PHASE THREE

  Those Who Survive

  Introduction

  So here we come full circle round to a kind of condensed version of the magical mystery tour of the ruins of America that I decided I wasn’t going to write. “Sierra Maestra,” “A Thing of Beauty,” and “The Lost Continent” all in their various ways depict futures in which America as we know or dream it—the pre-eminent nation of the world, the economic colossus, the leading edge of the human future—has fallen.

  Science fiction, after all, is the literature of multiple futures, and we cannot gaze clear-eyed at our possible futures without admitting of the possibility of tragedy. Indeed even the most optimistic literature—and optimistic science fiction in particular—that doesn’t ground its optimism in the acknowledgement of the possibility of tragedy rings as hollow as a television commercial for condominiums in tomorrow. In the moral universe of space adventure, the good, the true, and the brave always prevail. In the real world, however, the good guys can fuck up. Or even learn that they weren’t the good guys after all.

  Yet though these stories admit of the possibility of tragedy, I don’t think you can call them nihilistic or devoid of hope. Because, to our constant surprise, life goes on after tragedy. There are always those who will survive. Perhaps with their possibilities diminished, perhaps with their noble aspirations destroyed, perhaps tortured by the memory of the lost golden age of their ancestors, perhaps exercising their courages in a smaller arena. But still surviving with hopes and dreams of their own.

  The Empire of the Pharaohs is dust, the Golden Age of Greece is a memory and a setting of rotting ruins, and the Glory that was Rome is now just the capital of Italy. But Egyptians and Greeks and Romans survive to brood on the past and contemplate the possibilities of the post-imperial future.

  Introduction to

  Sierra Maestra

  For years the title “Sierra Maestra” rattled around my brain, linked to an image that haunted me. An aging revolutionary from the 1960s sitting high up on a
mountaintop contemplating his imminent return to the world below in long-delayed triumph, like Fidel Castro about to make his final push on Batista after all those years up in the Sierra Maestra.

  An image and a title do not a story make, and they didn’t become one till one day in New York, staying in Charles Platt’s vacant apartment with Dona Sadock in the middle of severe transcoastal staggers and hassles that kept us moving from one base camp in the city to another and made us feel like refugees.

  A news break comes on the radio to the effect that Cass Elliot has died. She choked to death on a sandwich in the middle of a come-back tour.

  I knew Mama Cass after the Mamas and the Papas broke up about the time a lot of people’s 1960s California fantasies were evaporating in the sere sun of the 1970s. Like many, she was making the transition from being a culture star to taking care of business, getting her career in show biz order. What you’d expect, with IRS hassles and manager numbers and bookings and the usual stuff that goes with just being an entertainer instead of a myth riding in limousines.

  But she was proving herself a survivor, rescuing herself from the debris of the countercultural collapse. And then she chokes to death on a sandwich.

  I had known Mama Cass and Dona had known others in her karmic position and had had a little taste of it herself, and somehow this story was becoming archetypal for a generation.

  Survivors ourselves in a certain sense, we identified with survivors, but Dona retained a certain Byronic sentiment for the myth of the fallen mighty. She reflected dourly on the number of faded countercultural heroes who had died recently in less than a blaze of glory. Jim Morrison, heart attack. Jimi Hendrix, choked on his own puke. Janis Joplin, ODed. Phil Ochs, suicide. Brian Jones, drowned in his own swimming pool.