The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  “This is ridiculous!” Koyinka said, pushing past Kulongo. “Evil spirits! Come on, will you, this is the twenty-second century! I’ll do it, if you want to go through with this nonsense.”

  “All right, pal, let’s get on with it.”

  I handed out the tokens and the three of us went to the nearest three stalls. I cleared a skeleton out of mine, sent it clattering to the floor, and so what, what’s to be scared of in a pile of old dead bones? But I noticed that Lumumba seemed a little green as he cleared the bones out for himself.

  I pulled myself up into the hollowed-out egg and sat down on the padded conch inside. Some kind of plastic covering made the thing still clean and comfortable, not even dusty, after hundreds of years. Those Space-Agers were really something. I dropped the tokens into a little slot in the arm of the couch. Nest to the slot was a lever. The room sparkled blue all around me; somehow that made me feel real good. The couch was comfortable. Koyinka was standing by. I was actually beginning to enjoy it. What was there to be afraid of? Jeez, the professor thought this gave you pure pleasure or something. If he was right, this was really going to be something. If I lived through it.

  I put my right hand on the lever. I saw that the professor and Lumumba were already under their helmets. I fitted the helmet down over my head. Some kind of pad inside it fitted down on my skull all around my head, down to the eyebrows; it seemed almost alive, molding itself to my head like a second skin. It was very dark inside the helmet. Couldn’t see a thing.

  I took a deep breath and pulled the lever.

  The tips of my fingers began to tingle, throbbing with pleasure, not pain! My feet started to tingle, too, and shapes that had no shape, that were more black inside the black, seemed to be floating around inside my head. The tingling moved up my fingers to my hands, up my feet to my knees. Now my arms were tingling. Oh, man, it felt so good! No woman ever felt this good! This felt better than kicking in Lumumba’s face!

  The whirling things in my head, weren’t really in my head, my head was in them, or they were my head, all whirling around some deep dark hole that wasn’t a hole but was something to whirl off into, fall off into, sucking me in and up. My whole body was tingling now. Man, I was the tingling now, my body was nothing but the tingling now.

  And it was getting stronger, getting better all the time; I wasn’t a tingle, I was a glow, a warmth, a throbbing, a fire of pure pleasure, a roaring, burning, whirling fire, sucking, spinning up toward a deep black hole inside me blowing up in a blast of pure feeling so good so good so good—

  Oh, forever whirling, whirling, a fire so good so good so good, and on through into the black hole fire I was burning up in my own orgasm. I was my own orgasm of body-mind-sex-taste-smell-touch-feel, I went on forever forever forever forever in pure blinding burning so good so good so good nothingness blackness dying orgasm forever forever forever spurting out of myself in sweet moment of total pain-pleasure so good so good so good moment of dying pain burning sex forever forever forever so good so good forever so good forever so good forever—

  I pulled the lever and waited in my private darkness. The first thing I felt was a tingling of my fingertips, as if with some mild electric charge; not at all an unpleasant feeling. A similar pleasurable tingle began in my feet. Strange vague patterns seemed to swirl around inside my eyes.

  My hands began to feel the pleasant sensation now, and the lower portions of my legs. The feeling was getting stronger and stronger as it moved up my limbs. It felt physically pleasurable in a peculiarly abstract way, but there was something frightening about it, something vaguely unclean.

  The swirling patterns seemed to be spinning around a bottomless vortex now; they weren’t exactly inside my eyes or my head; my head was inside of them, or they were me. The experience was somehow visual-yet-non-visual, my being spinning downward and inward in a vertiginous spiral toward a black, black hole that seemed inside my self. And my whole body felt that electric tingling now; I felt nothing but the strange, forcefully pleasurable sensation. It filled my entire sensorium, became me.

  And it kept getting stronger and stronger, no longer a tingle, but a pulsing of cold electric pleasure, stronger and stronger, wilder and wilder, the voltage increasing, the amperage increasing, whirling me down and around and down and around toward that terrible deep black hole inside me burning with hunger to swallow myself up, becoming a pure black fire vortex pain of pleasure down and down and around and around…

  Sucking myself up through the terrible black vortex of my own pure pleasure-pain, compressed against the interface of my own being, squeezed against the instant of my own death. Oh! Oh! Death death death. No No pleasure pain death sex orgasm everything that was me popping No! No! On through! becoming moment of death senses flashing pure pleasure pain terror black hole forever forever in this terrible universe was timeless moment of orgasm death total electric pleasure no! no! delicious horrible moment of pure death pain orgasm black hole vortex no! no! no! no—

  Suddenly I was seated on a couch inside a red egg in a room filled with blue sparkles, and I was looking up at Koyinka’s silly face.

  “You all right?” he said. Now, there was a question!

  “Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled. Man, those Space-Agers! I wanted to puke. I wanted to jam that helmet back on my head. I wanted to get the hell out of there! I wanted to live forever in that fantastic perfect feeling until I rotted into the bone pile.

  I was scared out of my head.

  I mean, what happened inside that helmet was the best and the worst thing in the world. You could stay there with that thing on your head and die in pure pleasure thinking you were living forever. Man, you talk about temptation! Those Space-Agers had put a god or a devil in there, and who could tell which? Did they even know which? Man, that crazy jungle-bunny Kulongo was right, after all: there were demons in here that would drink your soul. But maybe the demons were you. Sucking up your own soul in pure pleasure till it choked you to death. But wasn’t it maybe worth it?

  As soon as he saw I was okay, Koyinka ran over to the professor, who was still sitting there with the helmet over his head. That crud Lumumba was out of it already. He was staring at me; he wasn’t mad, he wasn’t exactly afraid, he was just trying to look into my eyes. I guess because I felt what he felt, too.

  I stared back into Lumumba’s big eyes as Koyinka took the helmet off the professor’s head. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t like the black brother one bit more, but there was something between us now, God knows what. The professor looked real green. He didn’t seem to notice us much. Lumumba and I just kept staring at each other, nodding a little bit. Yeah, we had both been someplace no living man should go. The Space-Agers had been gods or demons or maybe something that would drive both gods and demons screaming straight up the wall. When we call them men we don’t mean the same thing we do when we call us men. When they died off, something we’ll never understand went out of the world. I don’t know whether to thank God or to cry.

  It seemed to me that I could read exactly what was going on inside Lumumba’s head; his thoughts were my thoughts.

  “They were a great and terrible people,” Lumumba finally said. “And they were out of their minds.”

  “Pal, they were something we can never be. Or want to.”

  “You know, honkie, I think for once you’ve got a point.”

  There was a strange feeling hovering in the air between Ryan and Lumumba as we made our way back through the subway station and up into the sparkly blue unreal world of the Fuller Dome. Not comradeship, not even grudging respect, but some subtle change I could not fathom. Their eyes keep meeting, almost furtively. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand it at all.

  Had they experienced what I had? Coldly, I could now say that it had been nothing but electronic stimulation of some cerebral centers; but the horror of it, the horror of being forced to experience a moment of death and pain and total pleasure all bound up together and extended toward infinity, ha
d been realer than real. It had indeed been a genuine mystical experience, created electronically.

  But why would people do a thing like that to themselves? Why would they willingly plunge themselves into a moment of pure horror that went on and on and on?

  Yet as we finally boarded the helicopter, I somehow sensed that what Lumumba and Ryan had shared was not what I felt at all.

  As I flew the copter through the dead tombstone skyscrapers toward the outer edge of the Fuller Dome, I knew that I had to get out of this damned tourist business, and fast. Now I knew what was really buried here, under the crazy spooky blue light, under all the concrete, under the stinking saturation smog, under a hole inside a hole in the ground: the bones of a people that men like us had better let lie.

  Our ancestors were gods or demons or both. If we get too close to the places where what they really were is buried, they’ll drink our souls yet.

  No more tours to the subways anyway; what good is the Amazon if I don’t live to get there? If I had me an atom bomb, I’d drop it right smack on top of this place to make sure I never go back.

  As we headed into a fantastic blazing orange-and-purple sunset, toward Milford and modern America—a pallid replica of African civilization huddling in the interstices of a continent of incredible ruins—I looked back across the wide river, a flaming sea below and behind us ignited by the setting sun. The Fuller Dome flashed in the sunlight, a giant diamond set in the tombstone of a race that had soared to the moon, that had turned the atmosphere to a beautiful and terrible poison, that had covered a continent with ruins that overawed the modern world, that had conjured up a demon out of electronic circuitry, that had torn themselves to pieces in the end.

  A terrible pang of sadness went through me as the rest of my trip turned to ashes in my mouth, as my future career became a cadaver covered with dust. I could crawl over these ruins and exhaust the literature for the rest of my life, and I would never understand what the Space-Age Americans had been. Not a man alive ever would. Whatever they had been, such things lived on the face of the earth no more.

  In his simple way, Kulongo had said all that could be said: “Their souls were not as ours.”