The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  The inner airlock door opened into an ancient square-cross-sectioned tunnel made of rotting gray concrete. The air, even through filters, tasted horrible: very thin, somehow crisp without being at all bracing, with a chemical undertone, yet reeking with organic decay odors. Breathing was very difficult; it felt like we were at the fifteen-thousand-foot level.

  “I’m not telling you all this for my health,” Ryan said as he moved us out of the airlock. “I’m telling it to you for your health: don’t mess with these people. Look and don’t touch. Listen, but keep your mouths shut. They may seem harmless, they may be harmless, but no one can he sure. That’s why not many guides will take people down here. I hope you all have that straight.”

  The last remark had obviously been meant for Lumumba, but he didn’t seem to react to it; he seemed subdued, drawn up inside himself. Perhaps Ryan was right—perhaps in some unguessable way, Lumumba was afraid. It’s impossible to really understand these Amero-Africans.

  We moved off down the corridor. The overhead lights—at least in this area—were clearly modern, probably installed when the airlock had been installed, but it was possible that the power was actually provided by the fusion reactor that had been installed centuries ago by the Space-Agers themselves. The air we were breathing was produced by a Space-Age atmosphere plant that had been designed for actual space stations! It was a frightening, and at the same time, a thrilling feeling: our lives were dependent on actual functioning Space-Age equipment. It was almost like stepping back in time.

  The corridor made a right-angle turn and became a downward-sloping ramp. The ramp leveled off after a few dozen feet, passed some crumbling rums, inset into one of the walls—apparently a ruined shop of some strange sort with massive chairs bolted to the floor and pieces of mirror still clinging to patches of its walls—and suddenly opened out into a wide, low, cavelike space lit dimly and erratically by ancient Space-Age perma-bulbs which still functioned in many places along the grime-encrusted ceiling.

  It was the strangest room—if you could call it that—that I had ever been in. The ceiling seemed horribly low, lower even than it actually was, because the room seemed to go on under it indefinitely, in all sorts of seemingly random directions. Its boundaries faded off into shadows and dim lights and gloom; I couldn’t see any of the far walls. It was impossible to feel exactly claustrophobic in a place like that, but it gave me an analogous sensation without a name, as if the ceiling and the floor might somehow come together and squash me.

  Strange figures shuffled around in the gloom, moving, about slowly and aimlessly. Other figures sat singly or in small groups on the bare filthy floor. Most of the subway dwellers were well under five feet tall. Their shoulders were deeply hunched, making them seem even shorter, and their bodies were thin, rickety, and emaciated under the tattered and filthy scraps of multicolored rags which they wore. I was deeply shocked. I don’t really know what I had expected, but I certainly had not been prepared for the unmistakable aura of diminished humanity which these pitiful creatures exuded even at a distant first glance.

  Immediately before us was a kind of concrete hut. It was pitted with what looked like bullet scars, and parts of it were burned black. It had tiny windows, one of which still held some rotten metal grillwork. Apparently it had been a kind of sentry-box, perhaps during the Panic of the Century itself. A complex barrier cut off the section where we stood from the main area of the subway station. It consisted of a ceiling-to-floor metal grillwork fence on either side of a line of turnstiles. On either side of the line of turnstiles, gates in the fence clearly marked exit in peeling white-and-black enamel had been crudely welded shut; by the look of the weld, perhaps more than a century ago.

  On the other side of the barrier stood a male subway dweller wearing a kind of long shirt patched together out of every conceivable type and color of cloth and rotting away at the edges and in random patches. He stood staring at us, or at least with his deeply squinted expressionless eyes turned in our direction, rocking back and forth slightly from the waist, but otherwise not moving. His face was unusually pallid even for an American, and every inch of his skin and clothing was caked with an incredible layer of filth.

  Ignoring the subway dweller as thoroughly as that stooped figure was ignoring us, Ryan led us to the line of turnstiles and extracted a handful of small greenish yellow coins from a pocket.

  “These are subway tokens,” he told us, dropping ten of the coins into a small slot atop one of the turnstiles. “Space-Age money that was only used down here. It’s good in all the vending machines, and in these turnstiles. The subway dwellers still use the tokens to get food and water from the machines. When I want more of these things, all I have to do is break open a vending machine, so don’t worry, admission isn’t costing us anything. Just push your way through the turnstiles like this…”

  He demonstrated by walking straight through the turnstile. The turnstile barrier rotated a notch to let him through when he applied his body against it.

  One by one we passed through the turnstile. Michael Lumumba passed through immediately ahead of me, then paused at the other side to study the subway dweller, who had drifted up to the barrier, Lumumba looked down at the subway dweller’s face for a long moment; then a sardonic smile grew slowly on his face, and he said, “Hello, honkie, how are things in the subway?”

  The subway dweller turned his eyes in Lumumba’s direction. He did nothing else.

  “Hey, just what are you, some kind of cretin?” Lumumba said as Ryan, his face flushed red behind his pallor, turned in his tracks and started back toward Lumumba. The subway dweller’s face did not change expression; in fact, it could hardly have been said to have had an expression in the first place. “I think you’re a brain-damage case, honkie.”

  “I told you not to talk to the subway dwellers!” Ryan said, shoving his way between Lumumba and the subway dweller.

  “So you did,” Lumumba said coolly. “And I’m beginning to wonder why.”

  “They can be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous? These little moronic slugs? The only thing these brainless white worms can be dangerous to is your pride. Isn’t that it, Ryan? Behold the remnants of the great Space-Age honkies! See how they haven’t tile brains left to wipe the drool off their chins—”

  “Be silent!” Kulongo suddenly bellowed with the authority of a chief in his voice. Lumumba was indeed silenced, and even Ryan backed off as Kulongo moved near them. But the self-satisfied look that Lumumba continued to give Ryan was a weapon that he was wielding, a weapon that the American obviously felt keenly.

  Through it all, the subway dweller continued to rock back and forth, gently and silently, without a sign of human sentience.

  Goddamn that black brother Lumumba and goddamn the stinking subway dwellers! Oh, how I hate taking these Africans down there. Sometimes I wonder why the hell I do it. Sometimes I feel there’s something unclean about it all, something rotten. Not just the subway dwellers, though those horrible animals are rotten enough, but taking a bunch of stinking African tourists in there to look at them, and me making money off of it. It’s a great selling point for the day-tour. Those black brothers eat it up, especially the cruds like Lumumba, but if I didn’t need the money so bad, I wouldn’t do it. Call it patriotism, maybe. I’m not patriotic enough not to take my tours to see the subway dwellers, but I’m patriotic enough not to feel too happy with myself about it.

  Of course, I know what it is that gets to me. The subway dwellers are the last direct descendants of the Space-Agers, in a way the only piece of the Space Age still alive, and what they are is what Lumumba said they are: slugs, morons, and cretins. And physical wrecks on top of it. Lousy eyesight, rubbery bones, rotten, teeth, and if you find one more than five feet tall, it’s a giant. They’re lucky to live to thirty. There’s no smog in the recirculated chemical crap they breathe, but there’s not enough oxygen in the long run, either, and after two centuries of sucking in its own gunk, God only knows exact
ly what’s missing and what there’s too much of in the air that the subway life-support system puts out. The subway dwellers have just about enough brains left to keep the air plant and the hydroponics and stuff going without really knowing what the hell they’re doing. Every one of them is a born brain-damage case, and year by year the air keeps getting crummier and crummier and the crap they eat gets lousier and lousier, and there are fewer and fewer subway dwellers, and they’re getting stupider and stupider. They say in another fifty years they’ll be extinct. They’re all that’s left of the Space-Agers, and they’re slowly strangling their brains in their own crap.

  Like I keep telling Karen, the tourist business is a rotten way to earn a living. Every time I come down into this stinking hole in the ground, I have to keep reminding myself that I’m a day closer to owning a piece of that Amazon swampland. It helps settle my stomach.

  I led my collection of Africans further out into the upper level of the station. It’s hard to figure out just what this level was during the Space Age—there’s nothing up here but a lot of old vending machines and ruined stalls and garbage. This level goes on and on in all directions; there are more old subway entrances leading into it than I’ve counted. I’ve been told that during the Space Age thousands of people crowded in here just on their way to the trains below, but that doesn’t make sense. Why would they want to hang around in a hole in the ground any longer than they had to?

  The subway dwellers, of course, just mostly hung around doing what subway dwellers do—stand and stare into space, or sit on their butts and chew their algae-cake, or maybe even stand and stare and chew at the same time, if they’re real enterprising. Beats me why the Africans are so fascinated by them…

  Then, a few yards ahead of us, I saw a vending machine servicer approaching a water machine. Now, there was a piece of luck! I sure didn’t get to show every tour what passed for a “Genuine Subway Dweller Ceremony.” I decided to really play it up. I held the tourists off about ten feet from the water machine so they wouldn’t mess things up, and I started to give them a fancy pitch.

  “You’re about to witness an authentic water machine servicing by a subway dweller vending machine servicer,” I told them as a crummy subway dweller slowly inched up to a peeling red-and-white water machine dragging a small cart which held four metal kegs and a bunch of other old crap. “During the Space Age, this machine dispensed the traditional Space-Age beverage, Coca-Cola—still enjoyed in some parts of the world—as you can see from some of the lettering still on the machine. Of course, the subway dwellers have no Coca-Cola to fill it with now.”

  The subway dweller took a ring of keys out of the cart, fitted one of them into a keyhole on the face of the machine after a few tries, and opened a plate on the front of the machine. Tokens came tumbling out onto the floor. The subway dweller got down on its hands and knees, picked up the tokens one by one, and dropped them into a moldy looking rubber sack from the cart.

  “The servicer has now removed the tokens from the water machine. In order to get a drink of water, a subway dweller drops a token into the slot in the face of the machine, pulls the lever, and cups his hands inside the little opening.”

  The subway dweller opened the back of the water machine with another key, struggled with one of the metal kegs, then finally lifted it and poured some pretty green-looking water into the machine’s tank.

  “The servicers buy the water from the reclamation tenders with the tokens they get from the machines. They also service the food machines with algae-cake they get from the hydroponic tenders the same way.”

  The vending machine servicer replaced the back plate of the water machine and dragged its cart slowly off further on into the shadows of the station toward the next water machine.

  “How do they make the tokens?” Koyinka asked.

  “Nobody makes tokens,” I told him. “They’re all left over from the Space Age.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. How can they run an economy without a supply of new money? Profits always bring new money into circulation. Even a socialist economy has to print new money each year.”

  Huh? What the hell was he talking about? These damned Africans!

  “I think I can explain,” the College professor said “According to Kusongeri, the subway dwellers do not have a real money economy. The same tokens get passed around continually. For instance, the servicers probably take exactly as many tokens out of a water machine as they have to give to the reclamation tenders for the water in the first place. No concept of profit exists here.”

  “But then why do they bother with tokens in the first place?”

  The professor shrugged. “Ritual, perhaps, or—”

  “Why does a bee build honeycombs?” Lumumba sneered. “Why does a magpie steal bright objects? Because they think about it—or because it’s just the nature of the animal? Don’t you see, Koyinka, these white slugs aren’t people, they’re animals! They don’t think. They don’t have reasons for doing anything. Animals! Stupid pale white animals! The last descendants of the Space-Age honkies, and they’re nothing but animals! That’s what honkies end up like when they don’t have black men to think for them, how—”

  Red sparks went off in my head. “They were good enough to ride your crummy ancestors back to Africa on a rail, you black brother!”

  “You watch your mouth when you’re talking to your betters, honkie!”

  “Mr. Lumumba!” the professor shouted. Koyinka looked ready to take a swing at me, Kulongo had moved toward Lumumba and looked disgusted. The Luthuliville fruits were wrinkling their dainty noses. Christ, we were all a hair away from a brawl. A thing like that could kill business for a month, or even cost me my licence. I thought of that Amazon swampland, blue skies and green trees and brown earth as far as the eye could see…

  I kept thinking of the Amazon as I unballed my fists and swallowed my pride, and turned my back on Lumumba and led the whole lousy lot of them deeper into the upper level of the station.

  Man, I just better give them about another twenty minutes down here and get the hell out before I tear that Lumumba to pieces. I had half a mind to take him back in there to that electric people-trap and jam one of those helmets on his head and leave him there. Then we’d see how much laughing he’d do at the Space-Agers!

  The tension kept building between Ryan and Lumumba as we continued to move among the subway dwellers; it was so painfully obvious that it was only a matter of time before the next outburst that one might have almost expected the wretched creatures who inhabited the subways to notice it.

  But it was also rather obvious that the subway dwellers had only a limited perception of their environment and an even more limited conceptualization of interpersonal relationships. It would be difficult to say whether or not they were capable of comprehending anything so complex as human emotion. It would be almost as difficult to say whether or not they were human.

  The vending machine servicer had performed a complicated task, a task somewhat too complex for even an intelligent chimpanzee, though conceivably a dolphin might have the mental capacity to master it if it had the physical equipment. But no one has been able to say clearly whether or not a dolphin should be considered sapient; it seems to be a borderline situation.

  Lumumba had obviously made up his mind that the subway dwellers were truly subhuman animals. As Ryan led us past a motley group of subway dwellers who squatted on the bare floor mechanically eating small slabs of some green substance, Lumumba kept up a loud babble, ostensibly to me, but actually for Ryan’s benefit.

  “Look at the dirty animals chewing their cud like cows! Look what’s left of the great Space-Agers who went to the moon—a few thousand brainless white slugs rotting in a sealed coffin!”

  “Even the greatest civilization falls sometime,” I mumbled somewhat inanely, trying to soften the situation, for Ryan was clearly engaged in a fierce straggle for control of his temper. I could understand why Ryan and Lumumba hated each other, but why did Lu
mumba’s remarks about the subway dwellers hurt Ryan so deeply?

  As we walked further on in among the rusting steel pillars and scattered groups of ruminating subway dwellers, I happened to pass close to a female subway dweller, perhaps four and a half feet tall, stooped and leathery with stringy gray hair, and dressed in the usual filthy rags. She was inserting a token into the slot of a vending machine. She dropped the coin and pulled a lever under one of the small broken windows that formed a row above the trough of the machine. A green slab dropped down into the trough. The female subway dweller picked it up and began chewing on it.

  A sense of excitement came over me. I was determined to actually speak with a subway dweller. “What is your name?” I said slowly and distinctly.

  The female subway dweller turned her pale expressionless little eyes in my direction. A bit of green drool escaped from her lips. Other than that, she made no discernible response.

  I tried again. “What is your name?”

  The creature stared at me blankly. “Whu… ee… na…” she finally managed to stammer in a flat, dull monotone.

  “I told you people not to talk to the damned subway dwellers!”

  Ryan had apparently noticed what I was doing; he was rushing toward me past Michael Lumumba. Lumumba grabbed him by the elbow. “What’s the matter, Ryan?” he said. “Do the animals bite?”

  “Get your slimy hand off me, you black brother!” Ryan roared, ripping his arm out of Lumumba’s grasp.

  “I’ll bet you bite, too, honkie,” Lumumba said. “After all, you’re the same breed of animal they are.”

  Ryan lunged at Lumumba, but Kulongo was on him in three huge strides, and hugged him from behind with a powerful grip. “Please do not be as foolish as that man, Mr. Ryan,” he said softly. “He dishonors us all. You have been a good guide. Do not let that man goad you into doing something that will allow him to disgrace your name with the authorities.”