Eventually one of them—a freighter full of frozen buffalo meat from Omaha, Nebraska bound for Lagrange Five—had been shot down and crashed, wiping out the town of Bricktown, New Jersey. Several heavily armed parties of West Americans had infiltrated the laser installations and destroyed them. Now the lower hulls of spaceships were polished, partly as decoration, but partly as a reminder and a warning.
The hologram continued its lecture through the ragged noise of the swiftly climbing vessel, but it was a movement in the corner of her eye that suddenly captured all of Llyra’s attention. “Don’t look now,” she told her family quietly, “but that person in the hoverchair is back.”
The apparition was closer now, less than a hundred yards away. The chair was big and bulky, technology at least a century out of date. Despite the temperature and humidity, the figure in it was swathed in a heavy blanket, with a scarf over its head and a muffler around its neck.
Once again, as Morgan and the children turned, the chair lurched abruptly to one side and vanished behind a commemorative stele dedicated to Helen McClellan Willoughby, sometimes known as the “Fist Lady”.
Llyra discreetly checked the weapon she carried under her short jacket, a hypervelocity .11 caliber electric pistol. She’d been one of several hundred victims aboard a hijacked spaceliner when she was younger. Half a lifetime later, she was still having nightmares about it and had solemnly sworn that she would never let herself be disarmed again.
Although she and Morgan strove to live as normal a life as they could, especially for the sake of their children, they were both as famous as any figure skating champions had ever been, and they were accustomed—and tried to stay prepared for—odd behavior from the public. Llyra had experienced trouble before with innocent but overly enthusiastic fans, and even genuine stalkers, although learning that she could handily defend herself and her family usually discouraged them.
“Next on your itinerary,” said the hologram, “is the monument to one of the last Chief Executives of the United States—although by then, most people called it East America—President-for-Life Maxwell Promise.”
—THREE—
The Trask family had not lingered long at the Maxwell Promise “memorial”. It was a grim, windowless cube, one hundred old-fashioned meters on a side, constructed of welded and riveted metal at least six inches thick. Nobody seemed to remember anymore what was on the inside. One small door apparently required a special electronic ID card to open it, but such cards had not existed for decades. In the open, there were surveillance cameras every couple of yards around the perimeter, gutted long ago by technology-devouring nanobots. There were doubtless many hidden cameras and microphones, as well, equally non-functional.
The sides of the huge, imposing building were scorched and scored by firebombs and grenades, pocked-marked by bullets. The holographic guide to Promise’s life and time, an exiled historian who had lived in the Moon, had taken perverse delight in describing the way the man’s lifeless body had been dragged through the streets by his bodyguards, to demonstrate to the public beyond question that he had finally been deposed.
Gratefully, the family shook the dreary hologram off and skipped ahead to the monument dedicated to the best-remembered of the American presidents, Thomas Jefferson, whose ideas and ideals had finally triumphed after nearly three bleak centuries of shrinking human freedom.
“It could never have happened,” opined Jefferson’s holographic biographer, one Albert Jay Nock, a man dressed in early twentieth century clothing, “without the other Settled Worlds to preserve his memory and his ideas, to practice what he preached, and, eventually, to bring it back home to Earth. Jefferson had his predecessors—his close friend Thomas Paine certainly influenced him strongly, as did Trenchard and Gordon, the authors of Cato’s Letters—and he had his successors, but he was the very first to tell a king where to get off.”
“What about William Tell?” said Emerson, irreverently.
Perhaps she was biased, Llyra thought, but it was a beautiful building, sparkling white, circular in floorplan, with a graceful domed roof supported by columns, and a classic stoa or covered porch. Three short flights of gentle steps led to the entrance. Inside the center of the monument, a bronze statue of the third president stood—there was no throne in this place—under his own words, inscribed high on the wall above him: “I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of men.”
a small group of individuals was busy sweeping the floor, cleaning the walls and columns, gently polishing the coppery brown statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence. “Any of the workers you see around you,” explained the holographic biographer, Nock, which had followed them inside, “represent Thomas Jefferson clubs from all over North America, the planet Earth, and even the Solar System, who, since the collapse of the East American government and Park Service, have taken it upon themselves to clean the monument and maintain it in good repair.”
“That’s kind of nice,” said Morgan.
“Unfortunately,” added the hologram, “those groups, at least here in North America, seem to be dwindling in number and enthusiasm. It’s feared this monument may eventually begin to decay like all the others here.”
A cool, mildly swampy-smelling breeze blew in from the front of the monument, off a small body of water called the Jefferson Basin. Turning to look out over the water, Llyra saw one of the strangest sights she’d ever seen. It was that mysterious hoverchair person again, and the chair was somehow climbing on a dozen mechanical legs, awkwardly and haltingly, up the lowest tier of steps leading to the monument.
She’d known that such a thing was possible, but had never actually seen it before. Among the other Settled Worlds, individuals who were seriously injured or ill depended on medical technologies that had often been outlawed on Earth, relying, as well, on gravity that was only a fraction of the Earth’s to help them recover. What was more, on Pallas, sick and healthy people alike commonly used so-called “flying belts”.
“I’m going to see what this is all about,” she told her husband, sweeping away the feeling of dread and panic that had arisen in her. He put out a hand and brushed her arm, but didn’t try to stop her. Instead, as she descended the two flights of stairs, he watched her back.
The person in the chair had seen her coming. As soon as the chair reached the landing between the first and second flights, it pivoted and headed back toward the basin again. Before Llyra could catch up—a scattering of other tourists on the steps looked at her oddly—it had reached the slidewalk and sped away on a cushion of compressed air.
Morgan and the children joined her on the landing.
“I don’t know,” she told her husband, sitting on the steps. “Maybe it’s just me. But this business is giving me the oddest, unsettled feeling.” Something about it kept reminding her of her girlhood ordeal.
“It isn’t just you, kiddo. We’re definitely being followed by somebody with what my old psychology professor at Memorial called an ‘approach-avoidance’ problem. You know we could skip the rest of this, and go back to Baltimore. I’m having a hankering for a big seafood dinner—stuffed red snapper, maybe, or broiled lobster. What do you say?”
She shook her head. “It goes against my grain, is what I say. If we do that, I’ll always wonder what it was all about. Wouldn’t you, too?”
Sitting down beside her, he laughed. “Other people can have all the psychological problems their little hearts desire, my love. They’re absolutely free, and the supply is endless. All I give a damn about is you and these street urchins we seem to have picked up somewhere.” He tousled the hair of his son, who looked up at him with trusting eyes, then hugged his older daughter. “I’ll be happy just to get them—and you, too—away from this pathologically civilized planet.”
“Spoken like a true Newfoundlander,” Llyra said. He laughed again and began whistling “The Star of Logy Bay”, his favorite Newfoundland song.
; The truth was that, coming from the tiny town of Curringer on Pallas, she shared his feelings on the subject completely. She’d grown up flying hundreds of miles by herself, over an untamed wilderness haunted by dangerous animal predators, just to skate on a frozen pond, and she longed for her children to be able to thrive in such an environment.
“So what do you say,” Morgan asked, “shall we shuffle back to Baltimore?”
“I believe that’s ’shuffle off to Buffalo‘, my dear—and not on your life. There’s a mystery here of some kind that has to be solved before we move on, Morgan, or I’ll never feel right about it.” She put a hand on his arm. “And I need you to back my play, all right?”
“He’s sunk,” Emerson stage-whispered to his sister. Julia nodded, giggling.
Morgan straightened his back, attempting to regain some dignity. “Unaccustomed as I am to thinking of myself as anybody’s sidekick—even yours, darling girl—when have I ever failed to back your play?”
“Very well, let’s go on with the tour and see what happens.”
—FOUR—
Morgan was the first to notice and comment on the fact that the automated slidewalks seemed to be taking them from monument to monument in a pattern that made no sense. Washington’s tipsy obelisk was at the opposite end of the Mall from the weed-grown Lincoln Memorial. Promise’s scorched metal cube was on the opposite side of Jefferson’s gleaming memorial, which was all the way back, around the Basin.
“I’ll bet I know why, too,” Llyra suggested. “Millions of people used to come here. Some centralized computer somewhere is running a program designed to prevent too many tourists at a time from visiting any one of the memorial sites. Each time we stop somewhere and start again, it takes us to the least-crowded site that we haven’t seen yet.”
Morgan grinned and nodded. “All that, and she’s good-looking, too.”
“But there’s hardly anybody at all here today, Mommy,” Emerson protested.
“That’s right, dear,” she told the eight year old. “But the system isn’t quite smart enough to realize that, so it keeps shifting us all over the place as if it were a hundred years ago and there were still thousands of people sightseeing on the Mall.” Llyra looked to her husband. “I guess that’s sort of a parable about government in general, isn’t it? Or a metaphor. Govern, and if there’s no real governing to do, then govern anyway. I’m glad we Pallatians gave it up.”
“You gave it up before you had it,” he agreed. “And we Newfies headed north to get away from it. Though not before the Canadian federal government raped the outports.” It was an old story and a bitter one that began with the seal fishery being outlawed at the behest of a handful of Hollywood stars—throwing thousands out of work—and nearly ended with a formerly proud, hardworking, outdoor people being into the fetid capital city of St. John’s and put on welfare.
Until the northern colony movement began in protest.
Now the family came to the Ronald Reagan Memorial, probably the most photographed object in North America, a hundred-foot titanium statue of a western-style rider on horseback, with the traditional high-heeled, pointed-toed boots and spurs, broad-brimmed hat, bib-front shirt, calfskin vest, and fringed leather chaps over his jeans.
About the former president’s waist in an elaborately tooled belt, he wore a pair of giant single action Colt .44/40 revolvers. There was a colossal Model 1892 Winchester, presumably chambered for the same cartridge, in his saddle scabbard. The alloy had turned purple over the years—or had been that color to begin with—but in a triumph of art and science, both of the horse’s front feet were high in the air.
Unfortunately, the monument was thickly covered with decades’ worth of bird lime, and there were nests in the cowboy hat, the saddlebow, and the lariat coiled on the saddle horn. There were also the inevitable grafitti, and everything on the stature below eye level looked as if it had been pounded on and dented with a thousand sledgehammers.
Llyra wasn’t certain what the monument was supposed to signify, and Morgan, who grasped it intuitively, was at a loss to explain it to her verbally. Emerson shouted “It’s a cowboy!” which seemed enough explanation to him. He loved western movies and was looking forward to having his own horse—or some alien equivalent—when they reached Paradise.
Julia, perhaps with her grandfather Adam’s instinctive eye for engineering, wanted somebody to tell her why the horsie didn’t fall down.
“Cantilevers,” her brother told her smugly.
“Why can’t it lever?” she asked.
Emerson peered at her suspiciously. She returned an innocent look, but was not too young, not in this family, anyway, to make atrocious puns.
“What do you know about this guy Reagan?” Llyra asked. Morgan was from what had once been Canada, and might not be expected to know about this man, but all she knew about Earth history herself was that her ancestors had left the planet to avoid seeing any more of it being made.
Morgan said, “I know my granddad used to go on and on about him. He gave people an illusion of liberty, an illusion of progress, an illusion he was getting government off their backs, while all the time it grew larger and freedom shrank. He was proof, to Granddad, that politicians are all evil, no matter what they mean to be. That’s why civilizations fall and this place is a ghost town. It reminds me of Palenque, somehow, a deserted Mayan capital I visited when I was a teenager.”
“That’s pretty harsh, don’t you think?” She winked at him.
“Reagan and his administration made possible every government atrocity that happened to Americans afterward. He shifted their war on drugs into high gear and destroyed the Bill of Rights. That’s what’s harsh, not telling the truth about him. This monument to him is a joke.”
Llyra shook her head. It took a lot to make her husband lose his sense of humor. Then again, his grandfather had been close to him and still was. He had taught Morgan to fish and hunt and survive in the Arctic.
In many of the same ways that Morgan’s grandfather had mentored him, Jasmeen Khalidov, a second generation Martian colonist of Chechen extraction, had been Llyra’s girlhood companion and role model, part time sister and, at need, part time mother, as well. Everything Llyra knew about figure skating she had learned from Jasmeen, or they had learned together on the long, hard road from Pallas’s one twentieth of a gee to Earth. Only a few years older than Llyra, the two had more or less grown up together, especially during the dark ordeal that had been the hijacking of the spaceliner Newark by environmental terrorists.
No one had been particularly surprised when Llyra’s older brother Wilson had proposed to Jasmeen, married her, and carried her off with Tieve, his daughter from a previous tragic relationship, to his large and growing fleet of asteroid-hunting ships which had recently begun to work the previously unexplored Kuiper Belt region of the Solar System.
Now the two were talking seriously about following Llyra and Morgan to the stars, to the system Paradise was a part of. There were asteroids there, too, to be hunted, captured, and mined, and planets in need of protection from them. Jasmeen would be so surprised—and delighted, her former protégé hoped—to learn that the fourth child Llyra had been carrying for eight weeks so far would be named after her.
Llyra shook her head. Woolgathering again, she scolded herself. This pilgrimage seemed to be engendering entirely too much of that kind of thing. They were about to leave for the next stop on the tour, when the figure in the hoverchair appeared again from around one end of the Reagan monument, where it had been concealed by an outsized hoof.
This time the apparition bore straight for them. Morgan put all three children behind him and laid a hand on the plasma weapon at his waist, while Llyra stood to one side, well prepared to set up a crossfire.
The figure raised both its hands, crossing them and waving them, as if to say, “Don’t shoot!” Then it reversed itself and disappeared around the horse once more. By the time the Trasks followed it, it was gone.
Agai
n.
—FIVE—
The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial lay on the opposite side of the Basin inlet from the Jefferson Memorial, as well s the opposite side of the political spectrum. Instead of a single great structure, it was composed of a series of low outdoor “rooms” full of bronze sculpture and relief carvings, each of which had been intended to commemorate a distinct phase in Roosevelt’s presidency, from the Great Depression through the Second World War, and formed a sort of half-maze along the shore. At one time it was said to have been the most popular of the attractions along the Mall. I was empty and neglected now.
Weeds grew up between the paving blocks.
Dry waterfalls and fountains gathered leaves that had obviously been there for years, rotting and turning into black soil. Again, grafitti defaced the monument, blotting out the former president’s famous sayings that had been inscribed there late in the twentieth century.
“Look, Mommy and Daddy, a doggie!” It was Julia who was excited this time, rushing to the oversized bronze replica of Roosevelt’s famous Scottie Fala, not noticing the dramatically cloaked president sitting to its left. Llyra thought it didn’t look quite as cute once the scale was established. The expression on its face seemed rather menacing.
Roosevelt struck her in much the same way. Whoever had created this memorial had imagined the man as benevolent, but Llyra knew—because Morgan had told her—that, imitating several of his predecessors, his policies had actually prolonged the economic crisis for twelve years. In the end, to bail his failed administration out, the man had done all he could to precipitate an unnecessary war that killed sixty million people, worldwide, and left Europe and Japan in ruins.
That was what Morgan said, anyway.
The sculpture here was fascinating, though, she thought. Llyra’s mother, a scientist specializing in finding new uses for asteroidal materials, had taken to sculpture recently, using the iron, nickel, cobalt, and other metals so abundant in the Asteroid Belt. The sculptures in this place were of traditional material, but the long line of hungry men waiting to be fed, for example, was beautifully done, and the voluminously caped president looked like a fictional arch-villain.
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