Again, science fiction guesses at sciences before they are sprung out of the brows of thinking men and women. More, the authors in the field try to guess at machines, which are the fruit of those sciences. Then we try to guess at how mankind will react to those machines, how it will use them, grow with them, and how it will be destroyed by them.
All, all of it fantastic. All, all of it, the story of mankind and inventions, men and machines that step on God’s toes and now, late in the day, say Beg Pardon. To which the Universe says: That’s all right, go build Eden again. Build it on Earth. Build it on the Moon. Build it on out beyond our unreachable solar system; but build it, live in it, take root in it, survive.
GRAND TOUR 2484
On some morning in the year 2484, five hundred incredible years from now, a family named Peregrine, a good name for far-traveling folks, will bound out of bed on the Moon or Mars, or farther out on some colonial pod circling Alpha Centauri, and ask themselves what to do On Vacation.
Home, might be the answer. Home meaning, of course, Earth, where we all started from. The Seedbed Vacation, it might well be called.
Let’s go back, someone suggests, to see what’s left of it. See what we did wrong and then did right.
No, let’s not, half the family argues. There’s nobody left there, only a few genetic retards, so why go back? There are other planets we can visit first. On each one we’ll find something like Earth. Let’s see the other worlds first. After that—maybe—Earth.
So the Peregrines board their Leapfrogs. Leapfrogs? Yes, that is what they might call their fast-as-the-speed-of-light spaceships. Once aboard, they would blast off on not a short vacation at all. It would be a long haul spanning many years, making landfall at impossible places with incredible climates.
But—with familiar architectures!
For what will have happened, of course, as with the westering of Eastern seaboard folks in the mid-nineteenth century, is that people took their architectures with them. As the Europeans spilled over Kansas and died across Arizona, and survived in California, their clapboard houses and picket fences came along. In their dreams, anyway, and in their heads. So when they spat nails and wielded hammers and cut down trees in Sacramento, lo and behold! They re-created Cape Cod and Worcester, Massachusetts.
So, too, as our space travelers go backward and backward down the light spirals toward Earth, they will retrace the dreams of their forefathers who, as they footprinted Mars or named nameless planets far beyond, put up a miniature Empire State Building here, or roofed a French chateau there, along with all the hardware stores, druggerias and pizza palaces that inevitably dog the heels of any caravansary, be it fire rocket or camel.
So on their long day’s journey through night, our vacationers will indeed find the familiar architectural faces of Rome here, Venice there and Waukegan, Illinois, just beyond. So the journey will be a journey not only through space but through time and all the ways we had of living and seeing ourselves in shapes and sizes, in colors and textures, most of them brand new, on Mars or wherever we could make a lean-to and turn it into a Southern Manse or Northern Castle.
All of this, of course, because in the far traveling we will accomplish, we will be forced by time and distance and memory, which hurts, to resurrect the dead in order to go on living. The towns we loved as Earth children will be the towns, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, that we will facade across any halfway-habitable satellite or world. We will carry along stained-glass windows and build entire houses around them. We will tote a brick from the Via Veneto and, halfway to Andromeda, which is too far by several billion years; we will put up an awning and two chairs, and wink at passing Beasts.
In sum, we will travel in 2484 much as we have done in our time, to revisit the Past that strengthens our Present before we turn back to the sometimes uncertain Futures awaiting us.
And as we travel back down through the universe, we will revisit the entire history of mankind. We will cross paths with the vast firework calligraphies we left behind with our rocket exhausts on our way to seeding star worlds with our harvest children.
And depending on which national or ethnic group settled this world or that, we will find the whims and fancies and late-night nostalgias of Arabs who built mosques, or Swiss who cobbled up fake Alps on planets as pancake-flat as Kansas, or Japanese who left a Shinto shrine and a robot factory behind as they said farewell.
Space and the planets in it, light-years apart, will resemble the back lot of a motion picture studio, with its cross-pollinated structures and its ramshackle remembrance.
And arriving back on Earth for what might well be our last visit, we will tour Canaveral, where the gantries, still standing, tossed our flags to the Moon. Then, we’ll go see New York, rebuilt in 1999 and again in 2050, the year they blew up every other block of ugly buildings and planted gardens in their place. The neatest real-estate trick of the age! And then on to Chicago, which finished its rebuilding in 2020 and at last was beautiful. And Los Angeles, which went on growing into the twenty-second century and still had no center.
And then on to Moscow, which finally accepted the true revolution of the twenty-first century: technology.
A trifle of politics but a huge serving of the automobile, the train, the jet, the Xerox and the Fax, the radio, the TV, the videocassette and the telephone instead of the dull hammer and the blunted sickle. Moscow with architectures, by some miracle at last, somewhat lovely. Lovely, wakened from the tomb not long after some democratic-revolutionary kid’s laser-beam toy melted Lenin in his ice-locker to simultaneously free the glacier landlocked population.
But why go on? Obviously, Moscow by A.D. 2233, wasn’t a bad place to visit. You wouldn’t want to go there summers because there are too many American tourists, but…
There you have the grand tour, 2484 style. Back down in time, to a mostly empty Earth, because everyone couldn’t resist heading out and up—or to the New West, as it was called. And the empty cities began to be taken by grass and dust, as the inhabitants of New Earths in separate star systems came back for reunions here in Nantucket or Bombay. Home but no longer home. Mother but no longer mother.
And we turn around and blast back off, up past the Moon and its abandoned colonies, and Mars and its Martians (all with strangely familiar Cherokee faces), we will fix a last stare at the bloodshot eye of Jupiter, ricochet through Saturn’s rings, then head for our home away from home.
What a time and tour it will be, far beyond 1984, which turned out to be a bore and not Big Brother after all.
We, the hyper-ventilating generation, bursting with star-seed, can hardly wait to explode up out-away, so we can come back on a lightship trek for a strange visitation, a peculiar vacation.
And if not I, or you, or our children—who?
OF WHAT IS PAST, OR PASSING, OR TO COME