The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  By the time we touched down, Ito seemed to be floating in his seat with rapture. “So beautiful!” he sighed. “Such a sense of history and venerability. Ah, Mr. Harris, what noble deeds were done in this Yankee Stadium in bygone days! May we set foot on this historic playing field?”

  “Of course, Mr. Ito.” It was beautiful. I didn’t have to say a word; he was doing a better job of selling the moldy, useless heap of junk to himself than I ever could.

  We got out of the jumper and tramped around through the tangled vegetation while scruffy pigeons wheeled overhead and the immensity of the empty stadium gave the place an illusion of mystical significance, as if it were some Greek ruin or Stonehenge, instead of just a mined old baseball park. The grandstands seemed choked with ghosts; the echoes of great events that never were filled the deeply shadowed cavernous spaces.

  Mr. Ito, it turned out, knew more about Yankee Stadium than I did, or ever wanted to. He led me around at a measured, reverent pace, boring my ass off with a kind of historical grand tour.

  “Here Al Gionfrido made his famous World Series catch of a potential home ran by the great DiMaggio,” he said, as we reached the high crumbling black wall that ran around the bleachers. Faded numerals said “405.” We followed this curving overgrown wall around to the 467 sign in left center field. Here there were three stone markers jutting up out of the old playing field like so many tombstones, and five copper plaques on the wall behind them, so green with decay as to be illegible. They really must’ve taken this stuff seriously in the old days,, as seriously as the Japanese take it now.

  “Memorials to the great heroes of the New York Yankees,” Ito said. “The legendary Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle… Over this very spot, Mickey Mantle drove a ball into the bleachers, a feat which had been regarded as impossible for nearly half a century. Ah…”

  And so on. Ito tramped all through the underbrush of the playing field and seemed to have a piece of trivia of vast historical significance to himself for almost every square foot of Yankee Stadium. At this spot, Babe Ruth had achieved his sixtieth home run; here Roger Maris had finally surpassed that feat; over there Mantle had almost driven a ball over the high roof of the venerable Stadium. If was staggering how much of this trivia he knew, and, how much importance it all had in his eyes. The tour seemed to go on forever. I would’ve gone crazy with boredom if it wasn’t so wonderfully obvious how thoroughly sold he was on the place. While Ito conducted his love affair with Yankee Stadium, I passed the time by counting yen in my head. I figured I could probably get ten million out of him, which meant that my commission would be a cool million. Thinking about that much money about to drop into my hands was enough to keep me smiling for the two hours that Ito babbled on about home runs, no-hitters, and triple plays.

  It was late afternoon by the time he had finally saturated himself and allowed me to lead him back to the jumper, I felt it was time to talk business, while he was still under the spell of the stadium, and his resistance was at low ebb.

  “It pleasures me greatly to observe the depths of your feeling for this beautiful and venerable stadium, Mr. Ito,” I said. “I stand ready to facilitate the speedy transfer of title at your convenience.”

  Ito started as if suddenly roused from some pleasant dream. He cast his eyes downward, and bowed almost imperceptibly.

  “Alas,” he said sadly, “while it would pleasure me beyond all reason to enshrine the noble Yankee Stadium upon my grounds, such a self-indulgence would only exacerbate my domestic difficulties. The parents of my wife ignorantly consider the noble sport of baseball an imported American barbarity. My wife unfortunately shares in this opinion and frequently berates me for my enthusiasm for the game, Should I purchase the Yankee Stadium, I would become a laughing stock in my own household, and my life would become quite unbearable.”

  Can you beat that? The arrogant little son-of-a-bitch wasted two hours of my time dragging around this stupid heap of junk, babbling all that garbage and driving me half-crazy, and he knew he wasn’t going to buy it all the time! I felt like knocking his low-posture teeth down his unworthy throat. But I thought of all those yen I still had a fighting chance at and made the proper response: a rueful little smile of sympathy, a shared sigh of wistful regret, a murmured “Alas.”

  “However,” Ito added brightly, “the memory of this visit is something I shall treasure always. I am deeply in your debt for granting me this experience, Mr. Harris, For this alone, the trip from Kyoto has been made more than worthwhile.”

  Now, that really made my day.

  I was in real trouble, I was very close to blowing the biggest deal I’ve ever had a shot at. I’d shown Ito the two best items in my territory, and, if he didn’t find what he wanted in the northeast, there were plenty of first-rate pieces still left in the rest of the country—top stuff like the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Disneyland Matterhorn, the Salt Lake City Mormon Tabernacle—and plenty of other brokers to collect that big fat commission.

  I figured I had only one more good try before Ito started thinking of looking elsewhere: the United Nations building complex. The U.N. had fallen into a complicated legal limbo. The United Nations had retained title to the buildings when they moved their headquarters out of New York, but when the U.N. folded, New York State, New York City, and the federal government had all laid claim to them, along with the U.N.’s foreign creditors. The Bureau of National Antiquities didn’t have clear title, but they did administer the estate for the federal government. If I could palm the damned thing off on Ito, the Bureau of National Antiquities would be only too happy to take his check and let everyone else try to pry the money out of them. And once he moved it to Kyoto, the Japanese government would not be about to let anyone repossess something that one of their heavyweight citizens had shelled out hard yen for.

  So I jumped her at Mach one point seven to a hover at three hundred feet over the greasy waters of the East River due east of the U.N. complex at Forty-Second Street. At this time of day and from this angle, the U.N. buildings presented what I hoped was a romantic Japanese-style vista. The Secretariat was a giant glass tombstone dramatically silhouetted by the late afternoon sun as it loomed massively before us out of the perpetual gray haze hanging over Manhattan; beside it, the slow sweeping curve of the General Assembly gave the grouping a balanced calligraphic outline. The total effect seemed similar to that of one of those ancient Japanese Torii gates rising out of the foggy sunset, only done on a far grander scale.

  The insurrection had left the U.N. untouched—the rebels had had some crazy attachment for it—and from the river, you couldn’t see much of the grubby open-air market that had been allowed to spring up in the plaza, or the honky-tonk bars along First Avenue. Fortunately, the Bureau of National Antiquities made a big point of keeping the buildings themselves in good shape, figuring that the federal government’s claim would be weakened if anyone could yell that the bureau was letting them fall apart.

  I floated her slowly in off the river, keeping at the three-hundred-foot level, and started my pitch. “Before you, Mr. Ito, are the United Nations buildings, melancholy symbol of one of the noblest dreams of man, now unfortunately empty and abandoned, a monument to the tragedy of the U.N.’s unfortunate demise.”

  Flashes of sunlight, reflected off the river, then onto the hundreds of windows that formed the face of the Secretariat, scintillated intermittently across the glass monolith as I set the jumper to circling the building. When we came around to the western face, the great glass façade was a curtain of orange fire.

  “The Secretariat could be set in your gardens so as to catch both the sunrise and sunset, Mr. Ito,” I pointed out. “It’s considered one of the finest examples of twentieth-century utilitarian in the world, and you’ll note that it’s in excellent repair.”

  Ito said nothing. His eyes did not so much as flicker. Even the muscles of his face seemed unnaturally wooden. The jumper passed behind the Secretariat again, which eclipsed both the sun and its giant
reflection; below us was the sweeping gray concrete roof of the General Assembly.

  “And, of course, the historic significance of the U.N, buildings is beyond measure, if somewhat tragic—”

  Abruptly, Mr. Ito interrupted, in a cold, clipped voice. “Please forgive my crudity in interjecting a political opinion into this situation, Mr, Harris, but I believe such frankness will save you much wasted time and effort and myself considerable discomfort.”

  All at once, he was Shiburo Ito of Ito Freight Boosters of Osaka, a mover and shaper of the economy of the most powerful nation on earth, and he was letting me know it. “I fully respect your sentimental esteem for the late United Nations, but it is a sentiment I do not share. I remind you that the United Nations was born as an alliance of the nations which humiliated Japan in a most unfortunate war, and expired as a shrill and contentious assembly of pauperized beggar-states united only in the dishonorable determination to extract international alms from more progressive, advanced, self-sustaining, and virtuous states, chief among them Japan, I must therefore regretfully point out that the sight of these buildings fills me with nothing but disgust, though they may have a certain intrinsic beauty as abstract objects.”

  His face had become a shiny mask and he seemed a million miles away. He had come as close to outright anger as I had ever heard one of these heavyweight Japs get; he must be really steaming inside. Damn it, how was I supposed to know that the U.N. had all those awful political meanings for him? As far as I’ve ever heard, the U.N. hasn’t meant anything to anyone for years, except an idealistic, sappy idea that got taken over by Third Worlders and went broke. Just my rotten luck to ran into one of the few people in the world who were still fighting that one!

  “You are no doubt fatigued, Mr. Harris,” Ito said coldly. “I shall trouble you no longer. It would be best to return to your office now. Should you have further objects to show me, we can arrange another appointment at some mutually convenient time.”

  What could I say to that? I had offended him deeply, and, besides, I couldn’t think of anything else to show him. I took the juniper to five hundred and headed downtown over the river at a slow one hundred, hoping against hope that I’d somehow think of something to salvage this blown million-yen deal with before we reached my office and I lost this giant goldfish forever.

  As we headed downtown, Ito stared impassively out the bubble at the bleak ranks of high-rise apartment buildings that lined the Manhattan shore below us, not deigning to speak or take further notice of my miserable existence. The deep orange light streaming in through the bubble turned his round face into a rising sun, straight off the Japanese flag. It seemed appropriate. The crazy bastard was just like his country: a politically touchy, politely arrogant economic overlord, with infinitely refined aesthetic sensibilities inexplicably combined with a packrat lust for the silliest of our old junk. One minute Ito seemed so superior in every way, and the next he was a stupid, childish sucker. I’ve been doing business with the Japanese for years, and I still don’t really understand them. The best I can do is guess around the edges as to whatever their inner reality actually is, and hope I hit what works. And this time out, with a million yen or more dangled in front of me, I had guessed wrong three times and now I was dragging my tail home with a dissatisfied customer whose very posture seemed designed to let me know that I was a crass, second-rate boob, and that he was one of the lords of creation!

  “Mr. Harris! Mr. Harris! Over there! That magnificent structure!” Ito was suddenly almost shouting; his eyes were bright with excitement, and he was actually smiling.

  He was pointing due south along the East River. The Manhattan bank was choked with the ugliest public housing projects imaginable, and the Brooklyn shore was worse: one of those huge, sprawling, so-called industrial parks, low, windowless buildings, geodesic warehouses, wharves, a few freight-booster launching pads. Only one structure stood out; there was only one thing Ito could’ve meant: the structure linking the housing project on the Manhattan side with the industrial park on the Brooklyn shore.

  Mr. Ito was pointing to the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “The… ah… bridge, Mr. Ito?” I managed to say with a straight face. As far as I knew, the Brooklyn Bridge had only one claim to historicity: it was the butt of a series of jokes so ancient that they weren’t funny anymore. The Brooklyn Bridge was what old comic conmen traditionally sold to sucker tourists—greenhorns or hicks they used to call them—along with phony uranium stocks and gold-painted bricks.

  So I couldn’t resist the line: “You want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, Mr. Ito?” It was so beautiful; he had put me through such hassles, and had finally gotten so damned high and mighty with me, and now I was in effect calling him an idiot to his face and he didn’t know it.

  In fact, he nodded eagerly in answer like a straight man out of some old joke and said, “I do believe so. Is it for sale?”

  I slowed the jumper to forty, brought her down to a hundred feet, and swallowed my giggles as we approached the crumbling old monstrosity. Two massive and squat stone towers supported the rusty cables from which the bed of the bridge was suspended. The jumper had made the bridge useless years ago; no one had bothered to maintain it and no one had bothered to tear it down. Where the big blocks of dark gray stone met the water, they were encrusted with putrid-looking green slime. Above the waterline, the towers were whitened with about a century’s worth of bird shit.

  It was hard to believe that Ito was serious. The bridge was a filthy, decayed, reeking old monstrosity. In short, it was just what Ito deserved to have sold to him.

  “Why, yes, Mr, Ito,” I said, “I think I might be able to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  I put the jumper on hover about a hundred feet from one of the filthy old stone towers. Where the stones weren’t caked with seagull guano, they were covered with about an inch of black soot. The roadbed was cracked and pitted and thickly paved with garbage, old shells, and more bird shit; the bridge must’ve been a seagull rookery for decades. I was mighty glad that the juniper was airtight; the stink must’ve been terrific.

  “Excellent!” Mr. Ito exclaimed. “Quite lovely, is it not? I am determined to be the man to purchase the Brooklyn Bridge, Mr. Harris.”

  “I can think of no one more worthy of that honor than your esteemed self, Mr. Ito,” I said with total sincerity.

  About four months after the last section of the Brooklyn Bridge was boosted to Kyoto, I received two packages from Mr. Shiburo Ito. One was a mailing envelope containing a mini-cassette and a holo slide; the other was a heavy package about the size of a shoebox wrapped in blue rice paper.

  Feeling a lot more mellow toward the memory of Ito these days with a million of his yen in my bank account, I dropped the mini into my playback and was hardly surprised to hear his voice.

  “Salutations, Mr. Harris, and once again my profoundest thanks for expediting the transfer of the Brooklyn Bridge to my estate. It has now been permanently enshrined and affords us all much aesthetic enjoyment and has enhanced the tranquility of my household immeasurably. I am enclosing a holo of the shrine for your pleasure. I have also sent you a small token of my appreciation, which I hope you will take in the spirit in which it is given. Sayonara.”

  My curiosity aroused, I got right up and put the holo slide in my wall viewer. Before me was a heavily wooded mountain which rose into twin peaks of austere, dark gray rock. A tall waterfall plunged gracefully down the long gorge between the two pinnacles to a shallow lake at the foot of the mountain, where it smashed onto a table of flat rock, generating perpetual billows of soft mist which turned the landscape into something straight out of a Chinese painting. Spanning the gorge between the two peaks like a spiderweb directly over the great falls, its stone towers anchored to islands of rock on the very lip of the precipice, was the Brooklyn Bridge, its ponderous bulk rendered slim and graceful by the massive scale of the landscape. The stone had been cleaned and glistened with moisture; the cables and roadbed were o
vergrown with lush green ivy. The holo had been taken just as the sun was setting between the towers of the bridge, outlining it in rich orange fire, turning the rising mists coppery, and sparkling in brilliant sheets on the falling water.

  It was very beautiful.

  It was quite a while, before I tore myself away from the scene, remembering Mr. Ito’s other package.

  Beneath the blue paper wrapping was a single gold-painted brick. I gaped. I laughed. I looked again.

  The object looked superficially like an old brick covered with gold paint. But it wasn’t. It was a solid brick of soft, pure gold, a replica of the original item, perfect in every detail.

  I knew that Mr. Ito was trying to tell me something, but I still can’t quite make out what.

  Introduction to

  The Lost Continent

  Here is a story whose genesis I can pinpoint with total accuracy. I recorded the two moments that created the story in a piece called “The Renaissance of Unreason” soon after I returned to the US from Europe. It was published in Knight magazine and later collected in a book called Fragments of America which was published by an outfit called Now Library Press, which was a scam concocted by Roger Lovin, by which he had conned a porn king into coming out with a line of “counterculture type books” under his editorship. Somehow this publishing history epitomizes a non sf aspect of my career, and that it should serve as a fade-out for these ramblings seems appropriate, just as “The Lost Continent” seems the perfect curtain for The Star Spangled Future.

  “Once I stood on a ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains watching the sun set into the Pacific west of the city of Los Angeles. The huge, bright, new metropolis spread out before me in a crescent that stretched out before me along the coastline between the foot of the mountains and the shore—from Malibu in the north seemingly to San Diego in the south, out of sight beyond the horizon. As I watched the sun go down over America’s shiniest, glossiest, most-up-to-date metropolis, the changing angle of the sun’s rays playing over the rooftops of this giant city, dwarfed at the foot of a very minor range of mountains, created the illusion of motion in the forest of buildings that was Los Angeles. The city seemed to be moving on the interface of space and time—either rising like the golden future from the sands of the shoreline, or sinking slowly into the primordial ooze of the ocean depths like lost Atlantis.