Smith's Monthly #16

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “Nostalgia 101” was first published in 2001 in a slightly different form in Millennium 3001 from DAW Books, edited by Marin H. Greenburg and Russell Davis.

  NOSTALGIA 101

  ONE

  We left the domed city of Portland through the western gate, moving along the old Columbia River bed. Centuries ago, ice had jammed up the Columbia Gorge to the east of Portland, forming an ice field that stretched for a thousand kilometers. Nothing existed in, on, or under that ice field. It moved and shifted too much to be safe.

  The wind bit at my shield-protected face, cutting through even my special thermal suit. An unprotected human body in this cold would die in less than a minute. A bad suit tear could kill if not fixed quickly enough.

  The danger of being out of the dome always excited me, got my heart racing, made all the research and work leading up to this trip worth it. I loved going out of the domes, had since I was a kid a few hundred years before. Just as everyone did when leaving a dome directly into the snow, we got the standard lecture of too much time in the cold can kill, too much time free-breathing can kill, and on and on. Exciting stuff the first time, the two hundredth time, it was real boring.

  “Rees, can you hear me, son?” the Professor asked through the com-link in my ear. “Stay to the right and in the river basin.”

  I was leading, Lara followed me, then Torman, then Jeanette, then the Professor. Five sleds, five self-contained living units if they had to be. We didn’t plan on being out long enough to use those features.

  “Will do, sir,” I said.

  I always addressed Professor Barren Stanton as sir. I never called him by name. I didn’t feel I had the right to call a man almost a thousand years old by his name. Besides, he insisted he be called Professor or sir and who was I to argue?

  As I accelerated away from the base of the dome, the wind force field on the front of the hoversled rose into place, blocking any blowing snow and ice from hitting my environmental suit. I eased the sled up to one hundred and twenty and settled there, the agreed-upon speed.

  The snow-covered terrain sped past in a blur. There was really nothing to see, since the ice and snow had killed everything hundreds of years ago. I clicked on the hoversled autopilot controls and sat back, adjusting the controls only when I thought the computer needed the help to make a bend in the riverbed.

  Thankfully, mankind had discovered the cooling of the sun hundreds of years before it happened and had prepared, after a period of panic and religious insanity. As the sun’s cooling phase started, some people had left the planet, moving into self-sustaining stations closer to the sun. Some day I hoped to visit one of those stations on vacation from my job managing a restaurant. I just hadn’t had the chance yet.

  Other groups had built large spaceships, Generation Ships as they were called, and simply headed off slowly toward other stars in search of a new home, one that wasn’t about to be covered in ice. Nothing had been heard from those ships in hundreds of years. Nothing was expected for hundreds more.

  Most of the population of Earth had decided to stay and wait the sun’s cooling phase out. With the help of nanites back in the early twenty-first century, humans now lived thousands of years, maybe longer. No one was sure, since only a thousand years had passed. With nanites, humans had time to wait for the melt. Scientists predicted the sun would start into a heat-up cycle in less than five hundred years. I wouldn’t even be as old as the professor by then.

  TWO

  It took just over an hour for us to reach the frozen Pacific. Millions and millions of humans lived under the frozen oceans of the planet, in the depths near thermal trenches, in domes that hugged the ocean floors like ancient coral. I had been into an ocean dome twice and both times didn’t like the damp feel and the darkness that seemed to creep in from all sides.

  I liked surface domes, with the intense white of the snow and the constant of the deep blue sky in the day and star fields at night. Surface domes were kept clear, ocean domes opaque. I loved the openness, the whiteness of everything. I had been born in the Reno dome three years short of two hundred years ago. I sure didn’t feel that old, especially around the Professor. Nevertheless, on my two hundredth birthday, I planned on closing the restaurant and throwing a private birthday party for myself. I always figured that starting a person’s third century of living should be celebrated and I planned on doing just that.

  How could anyone get anything done in a short seventy to one hundred years of living? I worked full time, sure, had had a couple of marriage contracts with women, but basically, I was still in school, and would be off and on for another thirty years. Only after finishing all my classes would I feel really ready to contribute to society.

  This class had become a prerequisite to any professional jobs above waiting tables. Nostalgia 101. The problem with living a long time had not been boredom, as many had predicted, but nostalgia.

  Dreams and thoughts of a time that seemed better, seemed more comfortable, seemed easier, often pulled a normally productive human down to a complete standstill. Or worse, it made them collectors of things from the long dead past. Collectors wasted dome space, inflated prices of worthless things, and basically contributed nothing to the forward progress of society.

  Five hundred years ago, nostalgia had become such a debilitating factor in society that suicide became the main cause of death above accidents. Classes were mandated to cure the problem. Hospitals were set up to treat the worst inflicted. Living basically forever was a wonderful thing, as long as you remained looking into the promise of the future.

  For me, the dreaded nostalgia so far hadn’t become a factor. I liked new everything, didn’t collect anything, and didn’t even much like old movies. I was happy with my life now, but even still, I had to take the class, prepare myself for the time when nostalgia might take me over.

  I turned south along the old Pacific shoreline and kicked the speed up to two hundred kilometers per hour, skimming over the frozen ocean surface. The others followed at safe distances.

  I couldn’t imagine being born into a pre-dome life, back before nanites. But as the professor said, this expedition was going to help me with that lack of understanding. We were in search of a home he had known existed when he was born. A cave home that had survived the big Pacific fault quake of 2067. He claimed that after the quake, the house had been closed down and sealed by its owners. It might be possible that artifacts from over a thousand years ago were still in that home.

  The problem was, of course, finding it under the hundreds of feet of snow and ice, using only records from three coastline shifts before the freeze. The five of us had signed up for this class with the professor four years ago. We had traveled the world searching through ancient stored information and books, arguing, learning, pinpointing what we thought might be the exact location of the home.

  One of the main things I had learned in the process was that looking into the past was a very time-consuming and expensive thing to do. Why anyone would do it as a hobby was beyond me. It had to be a sickness, of that I was sure.

  Now, we were approaching the agreed-upon site, the one place all our research led us to believe we might find the old building and thus discover something about ourselves, human history, and more importantly, nostalgia.

  THREE

  My screens showed I had almost reached our destination.

  I slowed and turned the sled toward the slopes and ice cliffs that indicated the old coastline. Hundreds of thousands of people had lived along this ocean’s shores before the freeze. I had seen images of these places, old movies of walking on sandy beaches. I just couldn’t imagine it. My entire life had been in the comforts of the domes and the white nothingness of the snow.

  I eased my sled up onto a slight incline and then stopped when my computer told me I had arrived at the right coordinates. I did a quick sounding of the slopes and cliffs above me, checking for any chances of ice slides, then signaled the all clear.

  “Well done, so
n,” Professor Stanton said to me as he pulled up his sled beside the rest of ours. I nodded and stayed on my sled. I could monitor all the progress of the search from there on the sled’s screens.

  Torman and Lara already had out their equipment and were scanning the ice field below us. They looked almost identical in their environmental suits and masks. We all looked the same, even the Professor.

  “There’s something down there,” Lara said, her voice level.

  I could feel the excitement of a possible find surge through me. Could we get lucky enough to actually find the old cave house so quickly?

  I watched the information come over my screens. The details were correct, the shape of the opening that we had trained to look for, the age of the blockage in the cave mouth. All fit. Thirty-six meters down.

  But something about the ice and snow around it didn’t seem right. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

  “We have found it,” Professor Stanton said, his voice flat as always. “Jeanette, are you ready?”

  “I am, Professor,” she said.

  I could hear the excitement in her voice. She was the youngest of the four of us at just under one hundred and fifty. Like me, her job in the Portland dome was to manage a restaurant. I would have been interested in a contracted relationship with her if she hadn’t already been in contract with another woman. And she seemed neutral to me, so I never pushed anything.

  “Then, open us a path to the cave home.”

  Jeanette moved her sled back away from the hill, then watching her screens instead of the white in front of her, she turned on her heat drill attached to the front of her sled.

  I watched as the drill melted the ice, fusing it into a ten meter in diameter tunnel down toward the cliff house.

  The tunnel formed very quickly, almost too quickly.

  I ran a few non-connected scans of the snow and area we were in. I could see traces of the remains of other closed-up tunnels.

  Many others.

  Maybe thousands.

  Jeanette drilled down right along the path of a former tunnel, which caused her much easier digging.

  I said nothing about my findings, but I instantly lost the excitement I had been feeling about the find.

  Excitement that Professor Stanton had warned me to contain.

  He had said, “From this excitement comes nostalgia, and from nostalgia comes death. As a society, we must never look back. We must always look to the future. It is in the future that the true excitement lays.”

  Realizing that this wasn’t an original find, that we were only going over the same stuff a hundred or thousand classes before us had gone over, made the professor’s point very clearly.

  Finally, Jeanette reached the mouth of the cave and shut off the tunneling device.

  Professor Stanton climbed off his sled for the first time and using hover pads on his feet, moved to the mouth of the tunnel. “Shall we take a look at the past?” he said.

  I wondered if he said the exact same thing to every class he taught. More than likely, he did. I didn’t know if I should be angry at the years we had spent researching to find this place. I wasn’t sure of the point of that part of the lesson.

  I sat there as the others went to join the Professor.

  “Are you coming, son?” he asked after a moment.

  “Wouldn’t it just be easier to look at the images recorded by earlier classes?”

  The others spun to look at me through their environmental visors, but the Professor just nodded. “Yes, it would be, Rees. But that’s not the point of this class, is it?”

  “I’d be very interested in what exactly the point might be,” I said.

  “To give each and every one of you an understanding of nostalgia. That was in the course description. I’m sure you read it.”

  “By going to an old site where hundreds, maybe thousands have been before?”

  “Of course,” the Professor said. “History is where people have been before. Did you expect anything different?”

  I started to say something, then realized he was right.

  He went on. “Nostalgia is the disease that makes us continually want to be where others have been before, where we have been before.”

  “And what’s the point of wanting that?” Jeanette asked.

  “There is no point,” the Professor said. “True excitement is always the unknown ahead. Torman, Lara, you saw in your scans that there had been many tunnels here before us.”

  “We did,” Lara said.

  Torman nodded.

  “How did you feel?” the Professor asked.

  “Disappointed,” Lara said.

  “Tricked,” Torman said.

  “And you, Jeanette, you saw it as well. How did you feel?”

  “The same,” she said, nodding.

  “Yet, for the last few years, our mission in this class was to find this cave house in which people had lived, where people had been before. What is the difference that others had visited this site in the last hundred years, or a thousand years ago when it was built?”

  I was starting to see his point. “The search for anything in the past is always the search for where someone else has been.”

  “Exactly, son,” Professor Stanton said.

  “But no one has been to tomorrow yet,” Jeanette.

  Professor Stanton nodded. “Now are you starting to understand why nostalgia is so dangerous? You just spent almost four years of your time to discover a place that others had been to, that others had lived in. Couldn’t your time and money have been spent so much more constructively?”

  I nodded, as did the others. Point made.

  “So,” Professor Stanton said, indicating the tunnel “anyone want to take a look at the past?”

  “Why bother those who are dead and buried?” Jeanette said.

  We all agreed with her and she closed up the shaft so that the next class might have its object lesson.

  “Come in for one final discussion next week,” Professor Stanton said. “I can safely say, you all passed with top marks.”

  After a few minutes, I turned my sled back north up the coastline, setting the speed at two hundred kilometers per hour. I had to admit, I was glad we hadn’t wasted any more time going down that hole. It would be nice to get back in the dome, maybe check in with the restaurant and see how the dinner rush was doing.

  And it felt very good passing this class. Now, I could sign up for my next class. “The Proper Use of Nanites in a Sexual Act.”

  That promised to be very informative.

  Stout, the owner of the Garden Lounge, always thought he could control the time machine disguised as a jukebox by keeping it unplugged.

  Then one day the jukebox started up without power and a visitor from the future asked a very important favor. A favor that would not only save lives, but maybe everyone.

  SHE ARRIVED WITHOUT A SONG

  A Jukebox Story

  ONE

  “Stout!”

  The shout wasn’t really something I paid much attention to. I was standing with my back to the bar working on my bar order that needed to be done by three in the afternoon or the four regulars behind me weren’t going to be drinking this weekend.

  “Stout! You had better turn around real quick!”

  That was Big Carl’s voice and in all the years he had been coming into the Garden Lounge, I had never heard him raise his voice until now.

  I spun around to find all four regulars turned and staring to my left. And they all looked shocked.

  Big Carl, the farthest down the bar to the right looked almost panicked.

  Fred and Billy, both retired older men in for an afternoon “bracer” as Fred liked to call his drink, looked like they had seen a ghost.

  Richard, my friend who sometimes helped me out behind the bar when I needed a break was on the right and leaning back as if he was trying to move away from something that might bite him.

  It took me a moment to see what they were starin
g at. Then it hit me like a hammer and I had to catch myself against the back bar.

  The jukebox was on!

  That jukebox was never to be plugged in or turned on unless I did it. And everyone knew that. At least everyone sitting at the bar at the moment and there was no one else in the bar on this sunny July afternoon. Even in the faint light of some of the booths, I knew no one else was in here. In the summer, when someone came in or left, the bright sunshine from outside lit up the normally fairly dark Garden Lounge like the insides of a spotlight.

  And every time a person came in they had to stop, let the door close, and then let their eyes adjust before moving.

  The jukebox was on.

  Not possible.

  For a second I thought it was one of my regulars playing a joke on me, but they all looked as shocked as I felt and they knew I wouldn’t consider anyone messing with the jukebox any kind of joke at all.

  So I clicked off the stereo behind the bar and eased toward where the old Wurlitzer jukebox sat tucked behind a planter off the open end of the bar.

  It was out of sight from most of the tables in the bar and on busy nights I just covered it with an old gray cloth to keep anyone from deciding to plug it in and play a song when I wasn’t looking.

  That old jukebox was very special. It could take a person back to the actual memory of the song being played. And the person, while there, while the song was playing, could change the memory, their own history if they wanted.

  And that made the jukebox frighteningly dangerous. It only got turned on for the seven friends that knew about it on Christmas Eve every year, friends who understood the danger of tinkering with their own past in the slightest.

  But there the jukebox sat on this hot July afternoon, lights bright, the hum of whatever secret time travel device was inside it filling the now deadly silent bar.