25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 48
talking about were the old kind, the Fahrenheit kind. One hundred on
the old scale might be forty or forty-five real degrees, she figured. But
he might be having some appercept trouble, or maybe even a boil-over
in the metabolism line. She leaned over and checked the master chair
readout. Everything looked okay. He must just be excited about getting
to go to the city.
The car that the Armistice Centennial people had sent was waiting out
front. It had a hinged gate and a wheelchair ramp so she could roll him
right into it. The driver looked like an android, though he probably
wasn't. Uncle James sat quietly, murmuring to himself, as the car
pulled away from the curb and headed down the hill toward the freeway.
"We in the city yet?" he asked, after a time. "We're just reaching the
bridge, Uncle."
"The bridge is broken. That was the first thing they bombed in the war."
"There's a new bridge now," Carlotta said. The new bridge was older
than she was, but she didn't see much purpose in telling him that.
She swung him around to face the window and pointed it out to him, a
delicate, flexible ribbon of airy suspension cable swaying in the
breeze. It was like a bridge of gla.s.s. The shattered pylons of the old
bridge that rose from the bay alongside it seemed as ponderous as
dinosaur thighs.
"Some bridge," he muttered. "Looks like a piece of rope."
"It'll get us there," she told him.
According to the center records, he had been taken to San Francisco for
his hundredth birthday, He hadn't been much of anywhere since. Just
sitting in his chair, doing nothing, living on and on. If you called that
living. Old James had outlasted his son by more than a century-he had
been killed at the age of something like twenty-two in the War of San
Francisco, during the raid by the Free State of Mendocino. He had
outlived his grandson, too, victim of an unexplained sniper attack while
visiting Monterey, h.e.l.l of a thing, to outlive your own grandson.
James's closest relative was his great-granddaughter, who lived in Los
Angeles and hadn't come north in decades, And then Carlotta.