By Carol Van Strum
John Quincy Masefield told people all his life that he was no relation to any poet or politician. “Never ran for office or read a damn poem my whole life,” he boasted. Until his 148th birthday, that is. Then such a boast, had he made it, would have been false.
The day began inauspiciously. The only notice of what day it was came from the Remote Elder Minder unit by his bed, which added a hollow, “Many happy returns of the day, sir,” to its metallic version of Jeeves announcing breakfast. Even worse, in a misguided attempt at celebration, the robot housekeeper had prepared a wall display of relics of John Quincy Masefield’s long life. It was a depressing display: a cap worn in some forgotten zero-gravity tournament of his youth; a framed printout of his first million-dollar balance sheet; bridal trinkets from two failed marriages (“Learned that lesson at least,” he thought); and something he’d never seen before, a book inscribed to his son, John, so long dead he could scarcely conjure the child’s face.
“To Robert John-John Masefield, for Excellence in Literature,” the inscription read. He must have been excellent indeed, Masefield thought, wondering why he remembered so little of the boy or his award. Books were exceedingly rare in exo-colonies, sent as ballast in supply ships long ago from Mother Earth and treasured as remnants of a lost world. Idly, but with due care, he opened the book and viewed the typeset quatrains and couplets with disgust. Poetry! Of all things! He turned pages, looking in vain for honest prose, and was about to shut the book when some lines caught his eye.
Angrily, he read the lines again, heedless of the stanzas that followed. “Yearneth? Bullshit,” he told the book.
He’d never yearned to live forever, or even to live long. An accident of gamma rays and DNA, the sages said: some colonists had very short lives despite every medical advance, and a rarer few lived for centuries without a single cloned organ. One of Masefield’s more profitable enterprises – back in the glory days of profit — had been sifting through genomes and mitochonrial debris for clues to this phenomenon.
“Yearneth? Ha!” he said again. “Grief, eh? You threatening me?” he asked the book. Had it not been so valuable, he might have thrown it across the room.
Thus began his 148th birthday. No living thing wished him well that morning. When a lovely young woman arrived in the afternoon bearing flowers, he thought she’d rung the wrong doorbell.
John Quincy Masefield had been an old fart for so long, no one was left alive who remembered he’d ever been young. He was so old he’d won the Last Wish Foundation grant five times already and had refused every time, furious at the implied resentment of his longevity. “Last wish? Don’t you just wish!” he’d thundered. There was, too, the added taint of charity. “Never gave a dime away, never accepted one neither,” he bragged. Which was strictly true, perhaps, since his wealth had been measured in millions or billions, certainly not in dimes. All gone now, of course, along with everything and everyone he’d bought with it. The Last Wish grant was therefore a double insult.
This time was different. Maybe he was tired of being old, and certainly his first experience of poetry had been unnerving. Besides, the young woman was too charming, too polite, and just too damn sexy to refuse. Even at 148, John Quincy Masefield had an eye for a good looker.
“I am your Last Wish Guide and Companion,” she announced, presenting the bouquet.
John Quincy Masefield looked at the card accompanying the flowers. “Also Georgiana. Also? What kind of name is that?” he asked.
“It’s my name,” she said, “straight from the Literature.”
Having avoided any and all literature his entire life, John Quincy Masefield had no grounds to challenge her certainty.
Now she stood beside him in an alien landscape, her tawny hair glittering in the unguarded light, her healthy young figure both tragic and alluring. As always, she caught his glance and her face lit up with genuine affection. She patted his shoulder, cold comfort to the nagging stabs of regret that plagued him when he looked at her.
His Last Wish had been to visit the old home planet before he died. The exo-planet colony of his birth was the only home he’d ever known, but like all exo-natives, he’d grown up on the stories of ancient, beloved, and much-lamented Earth. So many of the stories seemed more like fantasy than history; he could not imagine how so many thousands of species of plant and animal could ever have existed on one spinning ball of rock. All he had known were the few dozen species brought by the original colonists, which had evolved very little in centuries of desperate nurture since the Descension.
As a child, John Quincy Masefield had gazed in uncomprehending awe at the precious, radiation-shielded Tabernacle which had safely carried eggs, sperm, cloned embryos, and germ plasm to seed a new world with Life. He had admired statues of the eight pioneers who had brought the Tabernacle through light-years of space-time from a home they could never return to. Later, in the reckless thrills of acquisition and capital growth, he had completely forgotten his origins, even through the awful depression of the 420s A.D.1 and the Moneyless Economy that emerged from the wreckage. Now he stood on the seared home of his ancestors with a beautiful, lissome woman young enough to be his great-great-great granddaughter, and fought against tears.
Long ago this barren dust teemed with people smart enough to harness electromagnetism and invent machines to use it, but not smart enough to restrain their lust for ever more machines and ever more people to sell them to. They were clever enough to split atoms to produce ever more energy for their machines, but not wise enough to reject an energy source that produced lethal radioactive wastes. Instead, they oh-so-cleverly packaged up the waste and shot it, at great expense, into the sun.
The con men who dreamed that one up grew rich as Croesus, thought Masefield, but all their wealth couldn’t save them when Earth passed through the orbit of the deadly debris cloud they had created. Within days all life on the planet was extinguished; he had viewed over and over the final, tragic transmits from Houston.
“Be careful what you wish for, lest your wish be granted,” the old saying went. They had warned him, in writing, and he had signed their waivers: the Foundation would send him to Earth but it was a one-way ticket; he could never return. It was not for himself he felt such unfamiliar regret.
“Why?” he had asked, waking from suspended animation and finding Also Georgiana beside him. “Why did they send you, too?”
“It’s my job,” she said. “A D.P. has no choice.”
“A D.P.? What’s that?”
“A Disposable Person,” she explained.2
“Disposable? Like a robot, you mean?” he asked in surprise.
“No, not a robot,” she said. “Prick me and I bleed, just like Shylock.”
“You’re a detective?” he said, remembering films from ancient Earth.
She laughed. “No, not a detective. A human, but not legally.”
“One of those illegals, then,” Masefield said. Illegals were exo-humans conceived and born without license.
“Well, not exactly,” she said. “Non-legal is a more accurate term. It is not illegal for me to exist, but I do not have the protection of the law.”
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“But I am not sorry.” Also Georgiana beamed her smile on him. “I am well taught. The classics of literature and music, the sciences, the mathematics, the dance, the basic skills of cookery and mechanics and medicine. I am trained to be useful and kind. And I like you,” she added simply.
That made it so much worse, John Quincy Masefield thought. For the first time in his 148 years, he had read a poem, albeit an infuriating one, and met a person who actually liked him. Now they were both stranded here, light-years from home.
Untroubled by this fate, Also Georgiana opened a soft, glittering scroll and scanned it eagerly. Masefield glanced at the map emerging on the scroll.
“So where are we?” he asked.
“Someplace called Blanding Hills.” She gazed around the lifeless, monotone-gray landscape, looking for anything that might qualify as a hill.
“Is that a building?” he said, pointing.
“It says it is a club house. I will learn what that is.”
They walked slowly toward the building. The dusty soil crinkled under their feet like tiny broken eggshells, puffing out dust with every step. Also Georgiana unfurled her scroll further, studying the glittering data lines as she walked.
“It is a club house for golf,” she said, still reading. “Golf was a game played with a ball that players hit with a stick called a club. The object of the game was to hit the ball into small holes in the dirt.” She looked up, puzzled. “It does not say what a club house is. Maybe it is where they stored the sticks.”
The building protruded from drifts of cindery dust that had mounded up against its sides. It was made of stone and concrete, with a gaping hole where once a door had hung. Most of the windows had fallen out of corroded frames, but one large one by the doorway was intact, its glass sand-blasted a milky grey by centuries of scouring winds. Inside, more dust had drifted over what might once have been furniture but was now vague mounds. They waded through the crispy dust to a closed door and kicked enough dust away to open it.
The room beyond was a surprise. For one thing, there was almost no dust, just a fine powdery layer as if the owner forgot to wipe things down. Light from the doorway gleamed on wood and metal golf clubs, plastic-wrapped gloves, boxed golf shoes, and packages of golf balls. Sagging metal racks held paper-dry, intact clothing: skirts, socks, knee pants, odd sawed-off trousers, shirts with strange fauna embroidered on them. On a long counter were shrink-wrapped score books, pencils, golf tees, and two standing racks of golfing caps. On and under a plastic chair was a thick layer of the crackling, cindery dust, which rustled in the sudden air movement from the open doorway.
Also Georgiana shone a flashlight on another door. This one had a sign on it: “Blandings Worldwide Golf Museum.” She opened the door and jumped back in surprise. In the flashlight beam, pairs of eyes glared at them from animal heads mounted on the wall. Cautiously, she entered, Masefield close behind, peering at the incomprehensible exhibits. The animal heads were severed from their bodies and mounted on plaques, with small labels identifying their species and long-vanished countries of origin: an elk from Oregon with a golf ball embedded in one eye socket; a red deer from Scotland with a ball impaled on its antler; a crocodile from Africa with its jaws clamped on a golf ball; a cow with a ball lodged in one ear. Standing on the floor was a preserved emu with a golf ball stuck in its throat, and on a long table was a python with four golf-ball shaped bulges in its length. Beside the python was a large toad impaled by a long stake with a flag on it.
Among the animal heads were framed photographs of foxes and seagulls stealing golf balls from unnaturally green paths, a grouse sitting on a next of golf balls, a bear carrying a golf club in its mouth. Silently, Also Georgiana and Masefield backed out of the museum and closed the door.
“The rules do not explain those,” Also Georgiana said, peering at her scroll. “Perhaps they were earlier versions of the game. And there is a thing called a water hazard. I think we need to find that.”
She took from her pack a miniature version of the exo-Tabernacle and examined the sealed compartments inside.
“Is that your job, too – re-seeding Earth?” John Quincy Masefield asked.
“Not officially. I volunteered.”
He looked at the carefully labeled compartments.
“There’s no human tissue,” he said.
Also Georgiana glanced toward the museum door. “No. Let these evolve on their own. Maybe they’ll do it better this time.”
She closed the container, placed it reverently in her pack, and picked up a plastic bucket of golf balls. Masefield smiled. He selected two golf clubs from the wall rack and placed a cap on her head, then one on his own.
The crunch of feet on cindery dust faded away, the two figures dwindled on the murky horizon, and the ancient clubhouse was silent once again. Well, almost. The stillness was broken by the distant “tock” of metal against a dimpled ball. For the first time in nearly 500 years, sounds of laughter – one old, one young – rang out on the dead planet.
[1] A.D. = After Descension, day one of colonization.
[2] Disposable Persons are individuals cloned from leftover embryos when the donor dies before needing transplants. Their legal status is undefined; they are sterilized and used as disposable for high risk work and Last Wish projects.