Arthur Clarke - Imperial Earth

A little later, the car turned into a driveway which led through beautifully kept lawns. There was a gentle beeping from the control panel, and a sign flashed beneath the steering handle: SWITCH TO MANUAL. George Washington took over, and proceeded at a cautious twenty klicks between flower beds and sculptured bushes, coming to a halt under the portico of an obviously very old building. It seemed much too large for a private house, but rather too small for a hotel, despite the fact that it bore the sign, in lettering so elaborate that it was almost impossible to read: CENTENNIAL HOTEL.

Professor Washington seemed to have an extraordinary knack of anticipating questions before they could be asked.

“It was built by a railroad baron, in the late nineteenth century. He wanted to have somewhere to entertain Congress, and the investment paid him several thousand percent. We’ve taken it over for the occasion, and most of the official guests will be staying here.”

To Duncan’s astonishment—and embarrassment, since personal service was unknown on Titan—his scanty baggage was seized by two black gentlemen wearing gorgeous liveries. One of them addressed him in a soft, musical language of which he could not comprehend a single word.

“You’re overdoing it, Henry,” George Washington remonstrated mildly. “That may be genuine slave patter, but what’s the point if only you linguistic historians can understand it? And where did you get that make-up? I may need some myself.”

Despite this appeal, Duncan still found the reply unintelligible. On their way up in a gilded birdcage of a tiny elevator, Washington commented: “I’m afraid Professor Murchison is entering too thoroughly into the Spirit of ’76. Still, it shows we’ve made some progress. A couple of centuries ago, if you’d suggested to him that he play one of his humbler ancestors, even in a pageant, he’d have knocked your head off. Now he’s having a perfectly wonderful time, and we not be able to get him back to his classes at Georgetown.”

Washington looked at his plump, brown hand and sighed.

“It’s getting more and more difficult to find a genuine black skin. I’m no race snob,” he added hastily, “but it will be a pity when we’re all the same shade of off-white. Meanwhile, I suppose you do have a slightly unfair advantage.”

Duncan looked at him for a moment with puzzled incomprehension. He had never given any more thought to his skin color than to that of his hair; indeed, if suddenly challenged, he would have been hard pressed to describe either. Certainly he had never thought of himself as black; but now he realized, with understandable satisfaction, that he was several shades darker than George Washington, descendant of African kings.

When the door of the hotel suite closed behind him, and it was no longer necessary to keep up appearances, Duncan collapsed thankfully into one of the heavily padded chairs. It tilted backward so voluptuously that he guessed it had been especially designed for visitors from low-gravity worlds. George Washington was certainly an admirable hose and seemed to have thought of everything. Nevertheless, Duncan knew that it would be a long time before he felt really at ease.

Quite apart from the drag of gravity, there were dozens of subtler reminders that he was not on his home world. One was the very size of the room; by Titanian standards, it was enormous. And it was furnished in such luxury as he had never seen in real life, but only in historical plays. Yet that, of course, was completely appropriate; he was living in the middle of history. This mansion had been built before the first man had ventured beyond the atmosphere, and he guessed that most of its fittings were contemporary. The cabinets full of delicate glassware, the oil paintings, the quaint old photographs of stiffly posed and long-forgotten eminences (perhaps the original Washington—no, cameras hadn’t been invented then), the heavy drapes—none of these could have been matched on Titan, and Duncan doubted if their holographic patterns were even stored in the Central Library.

The very communications console looked as if it dated back to the last century. Although all the elements were familiar—the blank gray screen, the alphanumeric keyboard, the cameral lens and speaker grille—something about the design gave it an old-fashioned appearance. When he felt that he could again walk a few yards without danger of collapse, Duncan made his way cautiously to the console and parked himself heavily on the chair in front of it.

The type and serial numbers were in the usual place, tucked away at the side of the screen. Yes, there was a date—2183. It was almost a hundred years old.

Yet apart from a slight fuzziness of the “e” and “a” on the contact pads, there was practically no sign of wear. And why should there be, in a piece of equipment that did not contain a single moving part?

This was another sharp reminder that Earth was an old world, and had learned to conserve the past. Novelty for its own sake was an unlamented relic of centuries of waste. If a piece of equipment functioned satisfactorily, it was not replaced merely because of changes in style, but only if it broke down, or there was some fundamental improvement in performance. The home communications console—or Comsole—had reached its technological plateau in the early twenty-first century, and Duncan was prepared to bet that there were units on Earth that had given continuous service for over two hundred years.

And that was not even one tenth of the history of this world. For the first time in his life, Duncan felt an almost overwhelming sense of inferiority. He had not really believed that the Terrans would regard him as a barbarian from the outer darkness, but now he was not so sure.

Duncan’s Minisec had been a parting gift from Colin, and he was not completely familiar with its controls. There had been nothing really wrong with his old unit, and he had left it behind with some regret; but the casing had become stained and battle-scarred, and he had to agree that it was not elegant enough for Earth.

The ’Sec was the standard size of all such units, determined by what could fit comfortably in the normal human hand. At a quick glance, it did not differ greatly from one of the small electronic calculators that had started coming into general use in the late twentieth century. It was, however, infinitely more versatile, and Duncan could not imagine how life would be possible without it.

Because of the finite size of clumsy human fingers, it had not more controls than its ancestors of three centuries earlier. There were fifty neat little studs; each, however, had a virtually unlimited number of functions, according to the mode of operation—for the character visible on each stud changed according to the mode. Thus on ALPHANUMERIC, twenty-six of the studs bore the letters of the alphabet, while ten showed the digits zero to nine. On MATH, the letters disappeared from the alphabetical studs and were replaced by x, +, ÷, -, =, and all the standard mathematical functions.

Another mode was DICTIONARY. The ’Sec stored over a hundred thousand words, whose three-line definitions could be displayed on the bright little screen, steadily rolling over page by page if desired. CLOCK and CALENDAR also used the screen for display, but for dealing with vast amounts of information it was desirable to link the ’Sec to the much larger screen of a standard Comsole. This could be done through the unit’s optical interface—a tiny Transit-Receive bull’s-eye operating in the near ultra-violet. As long as this lens was in visual range of the corresponding sensor on a Comsole, the two units could happily exchange information at the rate of megabits per second. Thus when the ’Sec’s own internal memory was saturated, its contents could be dumped into a larger store for permanent keeping; or, conversely, it could be loaded up through the optical link with any special data required for a particular job.