Living bodies, besides his own, he forewent. This was a trial run, the ship well-nigh minimal. He expected his tour of the Solar System would take a year or two, maybe three if he got really fascinated. That was hardly a blink of time.
Nevertheless, already impatience quivered in him.
FROM THE height where it nestled, the shop overlooked the Great Valley of the Appalachians. Forest covered the land below, multitudinously green, a-ripple with wind. Slender spearshafts rose from among the trees, hundreds of meters tall, hundreds in number, each bearing a crown. Far down and across, made hazy by remoteness, the woods gave way to an immensity of lawns. There towers and lower buildings stood widely spaced. Iridescence played over their fantastical shapes.
Tu Shan knew the elven country for an illusion. He had seen the various, always precise forms of those trees close up. They lived not to leaf, flower, and fruit, but to grow materials that no natural plant ever made. The park held— not factories—a technocomplex where another kind of growth went on, atom by atom under the control of giant molecules, tended by machines and overseen by computer, wombs of engines and vessels and other things once made by hands wielding tools. The shafts were rectennas, receiving solar energy beamed as microwaves from collector stations on the moon. He spied it overhead, a wan crescent nearly lost in the blue, and remembered that “overhead” was also an illusion.
Once men sought enlightenment, escape from the mirage that is the world. Today they held that the phantasm was all there was.
Tu Shan trudged down the knob of rock where the aircab had found a spot to let him out. The shop was a pleasant sight before him, a house in antique style, timber walls and shake roof. Several pines reared behind it. The wind brought their sun-warmed fragrance to him.
He knew it wasn’t actually a shop. Bardon usually prepared his electronic displays here because this was where he lived more than anywhere else. However, Express Service took them to his customers, who were scattered across the globe.
He had seen the cab descend and waited on his porch. “Well, howdy,” he called. “Haven’t heard from you in quite a spell.” After a pause, “Goldurn, five years, I bet. Maybe more. Time sure flies, don’t it?”
Tu Shan kept still until he reached the other man. He wanted to study him. Bardon had changed. He remained tall and lanky, but he had discarded shirt and trousers hi favor of a fashionable scintillant gown; his hair was dressed into ram’s-horn curves; when he smiled, his mouth glittered. Yes, he too had decided it was unattractive to regrow outworn teeth every century or so, and gotten the celis in his jaws modified to produce diamond.
His handshake was the same as before. “What’ve you been up to, friend?” A trace of mountaineer drawl lingered. Perhaps he cultivated it. The past kept some small glamour.
Not respect. How could anyone revere old age when everyone was perpetually young?
“I tried farming,” Tu Shan said.
“What? … Hey, come in, come in, and we’ll have a drink. Man, it is good to see you again.”
Tu Shan noticed how Bardon avoided noticing the box he carried.
Most furniture he recognized, but otherwise the interior of the house had become rather stark. It held no trace of wares, nor of a woman. That made for a sense of emptiness, when Anse and June Bardon had been together for as long as he had known them, but Tu Shan felt shy of inquiring.
He took a chair. His host splashed whiskey into glasses— .that, at least, was a constant—and settled down facing him.
“You farmed, you say?” Bardon asked. “What do you mean?”
“I sought… independence.” Tu Shan groped for words. He despised self-pity. “This modern world, I am not at home here. I spent all the basic share I had, together with my savings, and pledged the rest, to buy some hectares in Yunnan that nobody else wanted very much. And animals, and—”
Bardon stared. “You went clear back to subsistence farmin’?”
Tu Shan smiled lopsidedly. “Not quite. I knew that was impossible. I meant to trade what I did not eat for things I Deeded and could not make myself. I thought home-grown produce would have a novelty value. But no. It became a hard and bitter existence. And the world crowded in anyhow. At last they wanted my land for a recreation lodge. I did not ask what kind. I was glad, then, to sell for a tiny profit.”