New Atlantis Read online

  New Atlantis

  Copyright © 2019 by Lavie Tidhar

  All rights reserved.

  Published as an ebook in 2020 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

  Originally published in 2019 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  Cover design © 2020 Sarah Anne Langton.

  ISBN 978-1-625674-96-8

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  I. The Message

  II. The Roads Must Roll

  III. The Sun Harvest

  IV. The Tomb

  V. The Ceremony Of Innocence

  VI. Shipwrecked

  VII. La Ville Lumière

  VIII. Breach

  IX. The Drowned World

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Books by Lavie Tidhar

  Prologue

  Listen.

  Outside, the skies darken. The male nightjars’ voices rise and fall in their churring songs, and they blend harmoniously with the chirps of the field crickets. My daughter’s children and their friends run laughing on the paths. I long to join them.

  It is Chuseok, the festival of the harvest moon. I can smell jasmine, lilac, and the deep, rich scent of the small pink flowers of the Arbre de Judée tree which grows outside my window, and which I planted there as a little girl with my mother, long ago.

  My name is Mai. I have lived on this Land for eighty-four years and I love it, deeply. I was born here, and it was here that I learned to write: which is to say, to attempt to give shape to the world. And so it is here that I write this, the chronicle of a life spent under the broken moon, of a life spent on this Land, from which we all come and to which we all return, but for those few of us who once tried to go to the stars.

  I wish to go outside, to join my daughter and my granddaughter and my grandson, to watch the paper lanterns as they light up the night sky. The moon is broken, but it is still the moon. The Earth was broken, and billions died, but we endured, the way weeds do.

  This festival, like all our celebrations, is a mélange. When the earth shook and the seas rose and the sky was rent and the moon broke, the survivors of our species came from all corners, by paths both perilous and desperate to this place. I could give you the old names of things, but I can tell you where it is by what it grows: pines and weeping boletes, wild thyme and wood sorrels, dandelions, jasmine…

  I wish to go and join them, but the days grow short and the nights long, and I write this in the light of a lantern adapted from an old mortar shell, the sides cut out and fitted with old glass that was itself salvaged. My mother was a salvager, journeying each autumn, after the harvest moon, along the old roads where the vehicles of the ancients rusted in their millions, and on to the ancient ruined cities, where only salvage and junk and a few old machines, still alive, remained. Each year, I would hold my father’s hand and watch her go. The salvagers departed for months at a time and returned in spring, bringing back with them all that was still usable. I longed to go with her, and to see the ocean, and to smell the salt in the air and see not just Land, but Sea. And one year I did that, too, and one year she disappeared, and I searched for her… But that is another story, for another time. I never became a salvager, it was not in me; but I did become, in lieu, a chronicler of sorts.

  But I digress. My daughter calls me to come out. I do not want to miss the lanterns. Later, we’ll eat baked flatbread, olives, winter kimchee, watermelons. We’ll drink young, red wine. The flowers bloom. My father told me, Never pick a flower. Let them grow where they are. We keep the plants, and, in our clumsy way, we try not to trespass upon the planet.

  So hush. This happened long ago, in my third decade on the Land.

  A message came, one day, from the place we now call the New Atlantis, where the seven sacred islands lie…

  I reluctantly went on a long, hard journey. I encountered loss, and I found love. I saw the sun harvest in Suf and the fabled floating Isles of the Nesoi, and I suffered shipwreck. I met the mad robot, Bill, and I saw the ruins of La Ville Lumière. I visited Atlantis.

  Then I came back.

  That is the story.

  Everything else, as the old poet once said, is just details.

  I. The Message

  It had been a cold and shivery winter and I had been restless through much of it. The fog lay heavy on the Land in nighttime, and the yellow light of the broken moon struggled to illuminate the landscape through it. I took long midnight walks through the silent Land, observing spun spider webs glittering with tiny drops of dew like hardened diamonds, and snails that communicated silently with each other in the mulch of leaves, their retractable tentacles raised in complex greeting.

  Ants whispered softly through the forest, marching across fallen pine needles, over the raised roots of ancient trees. In the stream that ran beyond our homes, the eels slithered through the water on their way back to the distant sea. All was quiet, but for the faraway call of a migrating cormorant. The birds traveled to our shelter in winter, but left again in the spring, to go north and west. I was restless, desirous of something I could not put a word to. An irritability I was unable to shake off drove me through much of that winter, and my father took to finding shelter in his library, where he pored over ancient manuscripts my mother had salvaged for him in the ancient cities of the coast. Turning the pages of an illustrated atlas of the old world, he’d glare at me over the glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. “What you need,” he’d say, “is a purpose, Mai. And stop stomping quite so much! I can barely hear myself think.”

  “But I don’t!” I’d say, and stomp my feet, the way I had when I was little, and he’d soften at my frustration and smile his old smile and say, “Would you like me to tell you a story?”

  My mother, the salvager, ever practical, had a use for maps only if they were current. Salvager maps were makeshift, continuous works-in-progress. They marked known nests of wild machines, where a river had shifted, where a new road had been hewn, where there was danger, where there was salvage. My father, by contrast, dreamed of the world as it had been, not as it was. For hours he would trace winding blue paths on the ancient maps, and speak to me in the language of long-vanished waterways: “Bosporus, Mother Volga’s Watershed, Pearl River, the Lower Blue Nile…”

  My mother salvaged scrap and debris, anything from the old world that could be repurposed. She was a stoic, practical woman. She hated waste. My father, by contrast, was a man given to daydreams and stories. He was endlessly fascinated by those missing decades, by the centuries before them, that glittering time of consumption and excess, when the roads were laid all across the flesh of the Earth and a billion petroleum-fed travel-pods crawled like fat beetles along them. Only their scars were left to us.

  I stayed restless all throughout that winter. I tilled the soil in the fields and helped Aislinn Khan, Mowgai’s mother, in the bakery, enjoying the warmth of the oven and the silence of the predawn night that lay as thick as a blanket over the houses and their sleeping inhabitants. I helped Elder Simeon oil the gears of the small mill on the brook, surrounded by his pets: tiny, intricate clockwork automata of ducks and geese, a peacock, a cat, a turtle. From the mill I could look out to the low-lying hills beyond the brook, past Elder Simeon’s house, where as children Mowgai and I would imagine they formed the shape of a vast, reclining manshonyagger, a buried giant forever sleeping, a snatch of nightmare from the o
ld age.

  I waited, for what I didn’t know. Perhaps for spring. Mowgai was a salvager now, and he and the others were gone with my mother, to the Blasted Plains, to the ruined cities by the coast.

  I read old books, I played backgammon and bao and cap sa with my neighbors, I dug fleshy cyclamen bulbs out of the soil to replant, and drove my father deeper and deeper into his study. I had just come off three years in New Byblos working on the Extinction Lists, and off a relationship I had thought would last, but didn’t.

  As the days lengthened and the nights grew short, flocks of storks began to migrate across the brightening skies, black-and-white, black-and-white on the thermal winds.

  It was on a day such as this, the air still cold in the shade but the sun warm, and the air filled with the fragrance of spring, that I saw a familiar bird shape circle in the sky overhead. It was a gray spot against the sky, and as it descended, I recognized it as Hornbill, a wild drone Mowgai had rescued from a malfunctioning replicator nest in the Blasted Plains and raised as his own. It was far into its life cycle by this time and spent much of its days nestled unmoving as it absorbed sunlight, but I knew how attached Mowgai was to it.

  If it was here, Mowgai and the other salvagers couldn’t be far behind.

  Could they?

  Hornbill spotted me and gracefully descended. It opened its vicious-looking beak and Mowgai’s familiar voice emerged. The message was brief and addressed to me. It said they were on course for return but were still two or three weeks away. I could hear wind behind them, the crying wail of wild dogs far in the distance, the rattle of shifting pebbles underfoot. Mowgai sounded tense, yet I could imagine him smiling. I smiled on hearing his voice, in the happiness of recognition.

  “Mai…” He paused there. I heard my mother’s voice in the background, saying something I couldn’t decipher, and Old Peculiar’s grunt in reply. “There’s been a message for you.”

  That pause again, the hiss of wind. Hornbill blinked at me, his mottled gray hide thickening to black as it began to power down. The old machine was tired. I tried to think of who would contact me. For a moment I thought of Ifrim, back in Byblos, and felt a pang of loss.

  “From beyond the sea.” I could hear exhaustion in his voice. “Meet at the way station.”

  Then the sound faded, and the old drone powered down, trusting me to carry it. I returned to my parents’ house, left Hornbill to nest on the roof, and went inside to hunt for my father in his library.

  “Beyond the sea?” my father said, doubtfully. He brewed us tea, fresh sage leaves and just a hint of honey in the water. We watched the rain outside, but it was a final gust of winter, and I could see new shoots on the plants, and the flowering trees. I could smell the coming spring, as though the Land and everything upon it were holding their breath in delighted anticipation. It was the season of rebirth, of joy. “What is there beyond the sea?”

  “There are other places than these,” I said. I paced around the room. I hated mystery. Or did I? My father looked at me and shook his head.

  “You’ve been like a caged bird all winter,” he said.

  “We don’t cage birds,” I said, irritably.

  “Then perhaps it is that you, too, should fly,” he said, and smiled, and blew on his tea in the way that had always annoyed me, even as a kid. He took a sip, and kept the smile, and I was forced to smile, too.

  “Francia, Albion…” he said musingly. “Or does the message mean Afri? Misr, Carthage…”

  “Your geography is as muddled as your history,” I said, laughing. But the truth was that I longed to go—somewhere, anywhere. The restlessness I’d felt all winter had vanished, and in its place came a clear, pure determination.

  My father took another sip of his tea and looked up at me with guileless eyes.

  “So when do we leave?” he said.

  The journey out wasn’t hard. We followed the stream, enjoying the waking Land, the blooming flowers, the new warmth in the air. Bees buzzed lazily about us. It was, though I did not realize it at the time, the last such journey I would take with my father. He was in good health, his steps long and assured, yet unhurried. He seemed determined to enjoy the long hike, and his joy was infectious. For all that he loved old books and their stories of the past, he was a child of the Land and he loved it wholeheartedly. As we walked he told me stories, the way he had when I was but a girl: of huge flying machines that crossed over the oceans; of vast, glittering temples where every manner of thing was put on display and could be had for the asking; of a planet filled with a humanity that was always rushing, hungry, filled with a giddy need and an uncontrollable energy. He’d stop to show me flowers: poppy, wolf’s bane, wild thyme. We skirted anthills, saw shy deer observe us in the distance. In the night, we built a fire and sat around it, and I told him of my time in Tyr, where they sing still of the old days, and of my work in Byblos. I did not speak of Ifrim, and my father did not ask. Some wounds heal slowly.

  In this manner we traveled for some days, at last departing the brook for a path left by generations of salvagers. The ground began to rise here, and my father walked more slowly, and at night we saw foxes, jackals, once a wildcat. One day we saw the paw prints of a bear not far from where we’d made camp for the night.

  Then we reached a steeper incline, and as we crested it we saw below us the way station.

  My father is long gone now, and buried in the Land he loved. His flesh has fed and nourished others, the plants and worms which are our friends and neighbors. The chill of the nights often invades my bones now, and many years have passed, and yet it seems so fleetingly, as though it had only just happened. And I am glad I had that time with him.

  The way station was a sturdy construction of timber and stone, and smoke rose from its chimney. I could see distant figures standing outside, and they resolved as we descended the slope into familiar shapes and faces. I hugged Mowgai as my father held my mother in his arms and twirled her round in a dance. Old Peculiar, as gnarled and hard as an ancient olive tree, stood to one side and watched us with his usual inscrutable expression. He was a man of few words and rare smiles. Mowgai, by contrast, was slight, spindly, never still. “Full of nettles and brambles,” as old Grandma Mosh always said. When he was young, he undertook the long journey to Tyr, where they still maintain a fascination with the old age, and there he was equipped with the composite exoskeleton that allowed him to walk, in however crablike a fashion.

  “Mai!”

  I hugged him again. “You were gone a long time,” I said. “I was getting restless.”

  He smiled. “I may have a cure for that,” he said.

  Then it was my mother I was holding, feeling the strength in her, her arms around me, and I buried my head in the crook of her neck, the way I had as a girl. She smelled of campfires and sweat and toil, of the road.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  “I missed you, too.”

  It was a bright morning. Blue-winged butterflies chased each other above the lavender and rosebushes. By the side of the house I saw the salvagers’ carts, laden with scrap. A lemon tree provided shade. We sat on the veranda, drinking lemonade Mowgai had made, eating flatbread cooked on the fire, and salty, hard goats’ cheese with a dip of olive oil and fried wild thyme and sumac. I remember it so vividly, even after all this time: my father’s laugh, my mother’s murmured voice, Mowgai’s grin, the creak of Old Peculiar’s rocking chair.

  “Well?” I said, at last. Conversation had ebbed and a pleasant sleepiness overtook us. Old Peculiar’s head dropped on his chest and he began to snore, and my mother and father, by tacit agreement, left us to be on their own. Mowgai rose on his spidery legs and scuttled elsewhere. He returned with a travel-worn satchel and we went a short way off, to sit on the boulders in the shade of a pine, the way we had when we were children.

  What I extricated from the satchel was a small and cheap-looking pendant on a chain. I held it up to the light, wondering.

  It was a memory trinke
t, of the sort that were sold by the thousands in the old age, when there were still such things as currency. Back then, it was easy enough to simulate recollection, encode the brain’s electric signals into off-the-rack virtualities that could be played back whenever one desired. It looked old, and it was only then that I noticed an inscription had been added to the belly of the device, and it read, For Mai.

  I looked at Mowgai in question.

  “It came to Tyr by coast-hugger,” he said, “and from there by one of the Green Caravanserai, which we encountered between Suf and the Plains.” He shrugged. “It’s for you. The message was quite clear on that.”

  Still I held it dangling by the chain. “Where did it come from?”

  He shrugged.

  I reached. My hand closed over the locket, my fingers tightening around the scratched combo of plastic and metal. It felt warm. I put the old neuromodulator to my temple.

  Translation was gradual.

  …Light, growing around me. It had a different quality, a brighter white. It was the sort of light that erased shadows. I heard seagulls cry in the distance, smelled salt and tar. Beyond the window I could see palm trees, the sea.

  …Islands.

  A faint recollection, as though I knew where I was…

  “Mai.”

  I was looking into a mirror. The face that looked back at me wasn’t my own.

  …He ran his hand over his short hair, self-conscious. He was about my age, and I knew him then, though he had grown from the boy I used to know.

  “It’s Gaw.”

  He smiled at the reflection—at me—then turned back to the window. I could see boats in the distance, white sails, a pod of dolphins. We were somewhere higher than the sea.

  “We found something. A millennial vault, we think. It’s buried deep under the sea, in the strata of the old city… Could you come?”

  His gaze lingered on the sea, and I thought I saw, or perhaps I imagined, a dark spot in the water, as though something immense and old underneath were casting its shadow upward. Then he turned back to the mirror, and I found myself gazing into his eyes. “I heard about your work in Byblos, on the Extinction Lists. Even here, we sometimes get word… It would be good to see you again.”