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.