The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

by Cory Doctorow

  I had the pack with me. I’d built them new bodies, better suited to the quiet life among the cultists. The bodies resembled furry mechanical squirrels. They could crawl all over you without freaking you out or making you feel threatened, which was exactly what I wanted from them. They were still frisky, even though they had aged a little and become a little less experimental, a little more prone to hanging around the Carousel and its immediate grounds. The canisters containing their nervous systems and brains could keep them alive for some time yet, I was sure, but they wouldn’t live forever. Lucky little bastards.

  It was crisp autumn and the leaves were ten million flaming colors, crunching underfoot as we sought out the kombuchas. I was bending to inspect something that Pepe had found—Pepe still loved to have more than one PoV, so I’d given him four squirrels to drive at once—and when I looked up, I was staring into her boots, lace-up numbers, old fashioned with thick waffle-soles.

  I kept looking up. She was a woman, in her mid-thirties. Her hair had grown out into an irregular mob of curls, her round face rosy-cheeked from the chilly weather. Fine lines radiated out from her drawn-up bow lips, and her eyes had small lines to match at their corners.

  “Hello,” I said. She wasn’t a wirehead, I could tell that just by looking at the hair. They liked to wear it short so as not to interfere with the antenna.

  “Jimmy?” she said, putting her hand to her chest. She was wearing a smart cowl that breathed gently around her, keeping her warm and dry.

  I cocked my head, trying to place her. She looked so familiar, but I couldn’t place her, not exactly—

  “Jimmy!” she said, and grabbed me in a hard hug. There was a woman under that cowl, boobs and hips. She was a whole head taller than me. But the smell was the same. Or maybe it was the hug.

  “Lacey!” I said, and squeezed back, barely getting my arms around her.

  She practically lifted me off my feet, and she squeezed so hard that all the breath went out of me.

  “Lacey!” I croaked, “easy there!”

  She set me down, a little reluctantly, and took a step back. “Jesus Christ, Jimmy, you haven’t changed at all?

  I shrugged. “Immortal,” I said.

  She put her hand to her chest and looked at me, her mouth open. “Yeah, of course,” she said. “Immortal.”

  “I’m trying to cure it,” I said. “Not all the way. But I thought if I could age up to, you know, eighteen or so …”

  “Jimmy,” she said, “please stop talking about this for now. I’m out of weirdness quotient for the day.”

  I had some snacks in my bag—the tortillas and tomatoes that the cult favored for staple crops—so I sat down and spread out my picnic tarp and offered her a seat, then something to eat.

  She sat down and we ate together. We used to do this, back in Detroit, sneak picnics together out in the boonies, in an abandoned building or, in a pinch, cupped in one of my mecha’s hands. We fell into the easy rhythm of it as though no time at all had passed since then. For me, none had—at least not physically.

  I told her about the zepp ride and the daisy cutters, about the slow landing and my settling in here, bound to the Carousel, not wanting to abandon it.

  She got a little misty when she remembered the attack on Detroit. “I remember the zeppelin lifting off, and all the explosions in the sky. I was hiding under something—a truck, I think—and trying to keep the goat from going crazy. What was her name? Louisa?”

  “Moldavia,” I said. I couldn’t believe she didn’t remember that. It was like yesterday to me.

  “Moldavia! We ate her, you know. I remember that now. Mom and Dad couldn’t get their silk into India and the farm took a turn for the worse and—”

  She broke off and rolled up another chopped tomato salad in another tortilla, sprinkled some basil and cilantro on it from the little herb bag I kept.

  “What happened afterward?” I asked. “What happened to Detroit?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, well. The wumpuses came, of course. Took about two weeks for them to get through it all, and when they were done, there were so many of them that they mostly ate each other for another week, which was really gross, but when that was done, there was just good land. We farmed it for a while. Mostly redwoods. Big ones—four-hundred-footers. Anything for a carbon-credit. They were cheap and easy.”

  I closed my eyes and rocked back on my tailbone. I’d stood by the Carousel for twenty years because, somewhere in my mind, I expected that Dad would be getting the museum back together and that wherever the Carousel was, he would come. He wouldn’t abandon it.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I expected that Dad was alive, immortal, coming for me. That we’d have our immortality together. It was lonely, being the only one.

  “Redwoods,” I finally said. It came out in a croak.

  “Big mutant ones,” she said, eating her burrito, apparently oblivious to me. “Didn’t last, of course. What does? They all got some kind of blight that petrified them where they stood. We think it was some kind of exotic mesoite that traded their carbon for calcium, harvesting the good stuff for who-knows-what. It went top down, so it took a while for us to notice. For a while, they all stayed upright, white and chalky. Then they crumbled until they were nothing but powder, which blew away.”

  “What doesn’t?” I said. I was still thinking of Dad. I knew I’d get over it, though. Brain plasticity.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Mom and Dad hung in there with the rest of the Treehuggers for a while, but I wasn’t going to stay there forever, I knew that much. I went west on my sixteenth, got as far as the Oregon coast. Kept in touch with the parents for a while, but they moved to Bangalore when I was about twenty-five and so that was it for them and me. I dated this guy who found me a job maintaining these weird brain-scanners at a research facility and I did that for a while too, which would have given my parents seizures if they knew. I probably stayed in that job for longer than I would have, just for that reason.

  “But the people who ran the research station got bored or went broke—they didn’t ever tell us peons—and one day they didn’t show up for work. We all kept coming in and cleaning the floors and keeping the machines running and signing for deliveries for a week, but then we figured that they weren’t coming back. So I hit the road again (the boyfriend didn’t last as long as the job) and now I’m here. And so are you!”

  She ate another burrito. She could really put them away.

  She told me more minutiae from the road, places she’d been and people she’d met, talking for a long, long time. So long that I started to shiver as the sun dipped low. The pack whined around me, climbing up on my lap and my shoulders and head. Lacey was oblivious to the passage of time, her cowl keeping her warm. I had one like it that I’d bought from a traveler a couple years before, but I didn’t wear it much—it was too big for me and it tripped me up a little.

  “We got to get going,” I said. “I’m freezing.”

  She stopped talking and looked around. There was something hunted in her look. She stood up and slapped at her cowl to knock the crumbs off it and then she looked around again.

  “So,” she said. “So. Nice to see you again, Jimmy. Really nice! You can send me e-mail or something sometime if you want to. Good luck with everything.”

  I stopped folding up the tarp and putting away the leftovers. “Why? Where are you going?”

  She looked around for a third time, then pointed south. “That direction looks promising. Do you know what’s there?”

  I followed her finger through the woods. “About half a day’s walk will get you down to Jordan Lake. Nice places around there. Holiday cottages. Keep on going and you’ll hit Myrtle Beach, eventually. Might take you a week or two. Where are you headed, anyway?”

  “It was really great to see you.” She grabbed me in another one of those hugs, so fierce that I couldn’t breathe for a moment.

  “Where are you going?” I said again, once she’d released me.<
br />
  She felt in her cowl and found a hanky, blew her face on it and wiped away all the stuff she’d started leaking all of a sudden.

  “I just go,” she said, finally. “That’s all I’ve done for the past two years, Jimmy. I just go, and keep going. All the places are different, but they’re all the same, too. Nothing’s like what I’m looking for.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll know it when I see it. I just hope that I find it soon.”

  “If you go off that way, you’re going to end up walking all night before you get to a hotel.”

  She laughed. “I don’t really … use … hotels,” she said. “I stay out here, with all the nature. Product of my upbringing. Once a Treehugger …”

  I hadn’t had a real conversation in ten years. It was a million-to-one chance, running into Lacey in the woods. Also: maybe she knew a little more about Detroit?

  “Why don’t you come over to my place?” I said at last. “I’ve got plenty of room. I promise you, my place isn’t the same.”

  She crouched down and looked in my eyes. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Jimmy,” she said. “But thank you.”

  We didn’t really argue. We hardly discussed it. But somehow, she ended up taking my hand and letting me lead her back home, ducking the occasional wirehead on the way.

  Back in Detroit, my dad had reconstructed the Carousel’s elaborate concrete ramp and queue area, but I didn’t have the resources to do that here, so to get up on my Carousel’s apron, you had to scramble up a chest-high wall that shielded the machinery beneath the stage and seats. I got myself up—the pack skittered up around me, scaling the wall as though it were horizontal—and then I helped Lacey up. Her hands were strong and her palms were dry, her fingertips calloused and raspy on my wrists.

  “This way,” I said, and led her inside.

  Of course, I wasn’t running the show at the time. I don’t, usually. Not that I have power woes—the cell that Dad fitted it with won’t run out of isotopes for a couple centuries yet, but it saves wear-and-tear on the parts, and those can be a bitch to replace.

  The Carousel is designed to seat six audiences at once, rotating continuously around the stage in 60-degree wedges. Between each stage is a little baffle that soaks up the noise from the adjoining set and provides a little space for the operators to hide out from the customers. At least, that’s how I used it. I suppose I could have set my bed up on one of the stages, or on the sloping auditorium aisles. I could have even removed some of the painstakingly restored seats. But all that felt wrong, after all the work that Dad put into getting it all so cherry and pristine.

  So I kept my bedroll in the gap between the first two scenes, and my clothes and things between the remaining gaps. The pack’s canisters were stashed under the stage in the third scene, which held a little maintenance hollow where we’d always kept tools and such.

  Lacey laughed when I let her in. “You live here?”

  “I forget, did you ever get to ride this?”

  “No, but I remember when you brought it back. We all came out to watch the mechas carry it through our forest. You knocked down a bunch of trees to make way.”

  I shrugged. “It’s a wide load.”

  “So what’s it do?”

  I showed her, turning it on and then rushing to sit down next to her. The lights went down and the curtains parted, and a spotlight played over the old “General Electric” logo. I loved that logo. Imagine a time when there were companies that made their fortune being generally electrical! These days, electrical stuff was very specific indeed.

  The narration started. Dad told me that the actor’s name was Jean Shepherd, and I’d heard his spiel a billion times, so often that I sometimes mixed up his calm, warm baritone with my memory of my father’s voice, the two all blended in my infinitely plastic mind. The narrator welcomed us to Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress and told us some of its history, then started with the real heavy philosophy: “The challenge always lies ahead. And as long as man dreams and works and builds together, these years too can be the best time of your life.”

  I looked at Lacey to see if she’d noticed the way that the voice-over had just dropped that on us. The challenge always lies ahead. Progress! She was looking heavy-lidded, but attentive.

  The curtains parted and we got to the first scene. Dad—not my dad, the dad on stage—was wearing a cravat and fanning himself with a newspaper. The dog lay at his feet, doing comedy barks. Dad told us all about the miracle of his ice-box (“holds fifty pounds of ice!”) and his gas lamps. Then the lights came up on the scrim scenes on the wings of the stage and we got to meet Mom, who was ironing. Mom complained that even though it only takes five hours to do the laundry with her new “wash-day marvel,” her spare time is taken up with canning and cleaning the oven. This is supposed to be funny.

  Then the other side lit up and we got to meet Jimmy. Not me—the son. His name is also Jimmy. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. After all, I’d been around for years before Dad got the Carousel. And Mom probably wouldn’t have let him name me after an old robot. Probably.

  Jimmy was looking through a stereoscope at pornography—well, pictures of hoochie-coochie girls—and Dad gave him a good-natured ribbing. I’d seen this scene hundreds of times, but this time, sitting next to Lacey, remembering our necking sessions, it made me a little uncomfortable.

  The remaining scenes introduced Sister (in a corset, worrying that she is “indecent”) and Grandma and Grandpa, listening to a “talking machine” with their pet parrot.

  Then it was over and the singing started, “There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow/Shining at the end of every day!” and the stage rotated. We came around to the next scene—the 1920s and electricity—and I heard a sound from Lacey, beside me. She was snoring. Her head was down on her chest and she was sleeping soundly. Her lips were parted a little and her face looked worried in sleep. I realized that she’d looked worried since I’d met her.

  I got up and stopped the ride, resetting all the shows and powering them down. From the six slices of the Carousel, I heard the robots ceasing their spiels and going to sleep. The pack—who didn’t much care for the show—came out of hiding and began to race around the aisles, nipping at each others’ heels.

  Lacey was going to have to sleep somewhere. I hadn’t really thought about that. I went and checked out my narrow bed. I’d filled the space between two stages with a pile of pillows. It was comfortable enough. Did it smell bad? Maybe it did. The shower was outside, in a little prefab building I’d bought off a traveler, and I didn’t always remember to use it.

  Lacey probably had some kind of bed, anyway. I got up and grabbed her pack. It felt like it was full of rocks. Man, she had to be strong. Another perk of adulthood—of mortality.

  I gave her shoulder a little shake, and her head lolled and she snored. I gave her another shake, a little harder this time. Her eyes opened a crack, then she straightened up slowly and opened and closed her mouth a few times.

  “It’s been a long day,” she said. “Sorry, Jimmy.”

  I showed her my bed and she laughed. “It’s like the den of some burrowing animal.”

  I felt obscurely ashamed. Twenty years here and I had practically nothing to show for it. The pack’s new bodies. The maintenance I’d done on the Carousel. My pathetic pile of pillows.

  She put her arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. “It’s great,” she said. “It’s just the kind of thing I would have loved, twenty years ago.” That made me feel even worse. I slumped.

  “Poor Jimmy,” she said. “You’re very generous to offer me a place to sleep, you know.”

  “Do you have a bed in your pack?”

  She nodded. “I do, indeed. But screw it. It’s a pain to set up. I don’t need it here. Besides, I’m so tired I could drop where I stand. Where’s the bathroom?”

  I told her, warning her to keep a low profile—I wasn’t sure how
I was going to explain her to the cultists, who’d want her to get a wire in her head if she wasn’t just passing through—and started to dig through my clothes, looking for enough stuff to make another bed out of between two of the other theater-sections.

  She came back, shivering a little, clapping her hands together. “Cold around here at night,” she said, before casually pulling her cowl over her head, then stripping off her sweater—spidergoat silk, it looked like—and then her tights. Just as quick as that, she was naked.

  I’d never seen a naked woman before. I know that sounds silly, but physiologically, I was still a little kid. I didn’t have a girlfriend. Every now and again, I’d get a little curious about it, feel something that might be horniness, like an itch somewhere in my lower belly, but most of the time I didn’t think about sex. The cultists had plenty of sex, but behind closed doors. Once I’d seen some pornography that a traveler had brought through, but she’d snatched it away as soon as she noticed me eyeballing it, warning me that this wasn’t the kind of thing a kid like me should be looking at. I didn’t bother to explain my unique chronological circumstances.

  My eyes were flicking from one part of her to another. Her breasts. Her thighs. The curls at her pubis. I’d seen Dad naked every now and again, but not for decades. I’d seen pubic hair before, but it had never been this interesting. She had little tufts of hair in her armpits, too. So much hair!

  She seemed not to notice me staring, but she eventually turned away and bent to rummage in her pack. Her genitals winked at me as she did. I realized that I had an erection, a strange little boner in my pants. I got them now and again, and they were usually just a nuisance, something that got in the way.

  She straightened up, holding a long shirt that she slipped into. It hung down to her thighs.

  “All right,” she said. “Me to bed. You sleep left or right?”

  It took me a minute to get that she was asking me a question. I blinked a couple times. “What?”

  “Left or right side of the bed? I can do either.”

  I fumbled for words. “I’m going to sleep over there.” I pointed at the pile of clothes I’d been assembling.