New Atlantis Read online

  He blinked. My sight went dark, returned, went dark again. For a moment longer, I thought I glimpsed another vision entirely: a sunken city, divers moving like drab fish through murky water, piercing the depths with torchlight; fallen masonry, a shoal of silver fish swimming through the remnants of a crumbling marble arch. And something down below even farther, like a sort of manhole cover but not, a metal sphere that sucked the light around it, and I felt myself falling toward it, as if this memory, added later, belonged to one of the divers.

  Then the quality of the light changed again, and I was sitting back under the pine tree, in the sunshine, holding the trinket. And I thought about Gawain, the way I’d known him back at the academy in Tyr, more than a decade ago, and a wash of memories—my own, this time—flooded me. I sat there quietly, then put the trinket away and smiled at Mowgai.

  “How would you like to go on a journey?” I said.

  II. The Roads Must Roll

  “It is said the harvest will be plentiful in Gomrath this spring,” Mowgai said. “And that a heron was spotted for the first time in centuries near Esh.”

  We had been traveling for days. For a while yet we were still in the world as I mostly knew it, with its familiar terrain of good, black earth, and in the bloom of early spring, so that we rose each morning to the sight of thousands of pink and purple cyclamens, red poppies, yellow daisies, and blue-and-white lupines which stood stiffly like guards in the breeze.

  “It is also said a vast sea monster washed ashore in Sidon, dead upon the sand, and that a manshonyagger of old was seen near Dor-Which-Fell-To-Ruin,” Mowgai said, and shrugged. “But such stories are often told and there is seldom truth in them.”

  “The sea monster, perhaps,” I said, thinking of the ocean and its mysteries. I smiled at him, imagining our faraway destination. The New Atlantis lay beyond the sea. “If we’re lucky, we might get to see one.”

  He shuddered. “Salvagers survive by avoiding danger, not running headlong toward it,” he said.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “So my mother always tells me.”

  “And you never listen,” he said, but he smiled when he said it.

  At night we made camp under the stars. The broken moon hung in the sky. Fractured by some enormous, violent force of the old age, gravity kept it in roughly the same lemon shape, the broken chunks all drawn together into the semblance of the old moon.

  I often imagined those few humans who had set foot on it, in the time of the great excess, when we had imagined ourselves masters of the cosmos, and dreamed that everything, sooner or later, would be possible. We had left our mark in space. Debris and junk in orbit, dead satellites, dead dreams. Golf balls and a flag on the lunar surface, footsteps in ancient dust. A few robotic probes, crash-landed on other planets. Litter, really. It marked us as a species.

  At last we came to the frayed edges of a great forest. The trees thinned as we walked, and their branches grew ever more twisted and gnarly until they resembled grotesque scarecrows, and the ground between them became shorn and bare and hard. The sun beat down ruthlessly, and then we were through the last of the trees and it was there: the first of the Blasted Plains.

  It stretched out to the horizon, never ceasing, never changing. It was a great big barren silence scarred into the Land, and on it nothing lived, and nothing moved, yet I knew the Plains could be deceiving.

  Things did live and move within that continental vastness of annihilated Land. There were whole gigantic cities lost within the Plains, where only salvagers would venture. It was a dead place, but even the dead crawl with maggots, and flies, and worms.

  Bisecting the Plain was a road.

  I looked at Mowgai, and he looked back at me with measured calm. The road seemed endless from our vantage point. It cut through the Plain and disappeared in the distance. We began walking toward it, across the Plain itself, and I was startled as I had been before on coming here at how sound ceased: no birds, no chirping insects, no rustle of leaves. It was a desolation.

  Reaching the road felt almost a relief, even a victory, as illusory as it was. As you came closer to it, step by halting step, it grew, until there came a moment when you realized just how immense and foreign it truly was. This was not a natural path, but a remnant of the old age. It was a sort of hyper-highway, fifty lanes across at its widest points, with concrete walls between opposing lanes of traffic. The ancient Romans had built roads that outlasted the fall of an empire. The age of excess built grander and more imposing than anything the Romans could ever have imagined, but it did not build to last.

  The ruined old highway stretched out across the barren Plain. Its surface had long since deteriorated and the concrete slabs that served as guards had broken and crumbled in many places. Any markings that may have been made on the road were long vanished, and old signs, made of cheap metal rusted and eaten by the elements, lay crumbling on the ground.

  A countless number of vehicles littered the road, their wheels now rotted to nothing. Most of their outermost skin of thin sheet metal had similarly rusted and was blown in the wind. Engines, broken down but still recognizable as such. Shattered panels of glass, so you had to tread carefully wherever you went. Worse were the cheap seat cushions, made of a mass-manufactured polymer. Before, they would have been hidden under another material, perhaps leather. The polymer did not decay, even after centuries. Headlights and taillights. Batteries. Plastic bottles, and everything else that was plastic. It was a graveyard of decay, but some of these things survived. They had outlived the vast majority of the human race that birthed them, back in the old age, and as old as they were, I knew they would outlive me, and my children, and my children’s children down the generations.

  Attempts had been made in the past to sweep parts of the road. A thin trail like a snail’s path through the debris. In other regions of the Land, nature had reclaimed the old roads. But from the Blasted Plains nature itself shied away, and I shivered as I stepped through the gap in the concrete and onto the road.

  Mowgai had no such qualms. He surveyed our environment with a quiet confidence, and I imagined I even saw joy in his eyes. It was why I could never be a salvager. I liked stories, safe from a distance. But salvagers had to thrive in the part of our world that we found most distasteful. Its slowly dying past, lying all about us, a poisoned gift from our dead ancestors.

  “It’s horrible,” I said.

  Mowgai looked slowly around the ancient highway, from one distant edge of it to another. His exoskeletal arms made that little involuntary dance he sometimes did, which meant excitement.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  I punched him in the arm and he laughed and pulled away, rubbing the flesh where I’d hit him. “Ow!”

  “I’ll never understand you, Mowgai.”

  “It’s not so bad,” he said. “Compared to the rest of it.”

  At that we both lost our smiles. It was so quiet there, on the road. I suddenly, desperately wanted to hear birds again. Instead, we began to walk.

  It is not easy to traverse the old roads. Once upon a time, traveling along one of these routes would have been a matter of routine, a pleasant drive of some hours from destination to destination, with stops for refreshments along the way, each person ensconced in their own personal pod, thousands upon thousands of them all traveling at once.

  Now, it was a harrowing, slow journey, and with each footstep I took, I felt the oppressive silence of the Plains press down on me. It would be a journey of many days before this Plain ended, and in a way, they never truly did. They spread, like a malignant tumor, all across the planet.

  We marched for a day. Worse than the silence were the bursts of inexplicable sound, the sense of… things darting at the corner of your eye. Ghosts from a vanished age. We came across one of them at last as the day lengthened. It was a pitiful thing, a spiderlike creature lying on its back. It was dying. Mowgai prodded it with a stick, dispassionately.

  “They used to sweep the roads for debris,
” he said. “Cleaning machines. There were nests along the old highways, printing them out whenever they were needed.” He prodded the thing again. “Short life-span, but they’re durable enough. Useless for salvage, though.”

  We went around the dying machine. When night came we didn’t build a fire, but sat in silence against the crumbling concrete boulders. I sat there looking up at the sky, and at the stars, so many stars. We took turns sleeping, one of us always keeping watch, but we were not disturbed.

  The next day we came to an intersection and followed an arm of the old road to an abandoned facility, the ruins of which were still standing. It was where passengers would have stopped in the past for refreshments or to recharge their vehicles with gas.

  “Are you ready?” Mowgai said.

  I took a deep breath. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

  In the old station, the salvagers had stashed a store of equipment and durable foods, and we ate, if sparingly. There was water, stale but clean. Then we strapped on the bulky backpacks of provisions and rolled the sails onto the road.

  We were going skate-sailing.

  “I heard,” Mowgai said, “that one of the old religions had a day so holy that even operating a vehicle was, for just one day in the year, prohibited. Imagine it, Mai. For one day, as the Land breathed with relief, all those millions of people abandoned the roads at the same time. No vehicle passed. All that surface area was, however fleetingly, reclaimed. Children, going out there onto terrain denied them. Couples, walking hand in hand. Old people strolling, perhaps remembering when it was all still grass. For one day, all those empty roads.”

  I tried to picture them, all those vanished people. I looked about me, at the empty road. A swept path, clear of debris, lay ahead of us. The road stretched to the horizon.

  “And now,” I said, “it’s ours alone.”

  “You remember how to do it, right?” he said.

  “I’ll manage.”

  He shot me a final glance and a nod. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  And with that, I leaned into the wind, and Mowgai did the same, and then we were sailing. The wind pushed at us and I maneuvered the sail, slowly at first and then gathering speed. The board ran over the old road as we slalomed along the swept path, avoiding debris. The wind rushed in my hair and against my face, and for the first time on the road I felt a rush of exhilaration take me as we sped down that old, empty highway. From a distance, I thought, we must look so strange, two tiny human figures sail-skating against that vast black-tar wound in the Land. All about us the silent remains of vehicles rotting in the sun, but we were free, and gathering speed; and in this way we sailed beyond the sunset.

  III. The Sun Harvest

  The Convocation of Suf had once, I think, been a prosperous trading town on the shores of an inland river. But that river was long gone, and now Suf inhabited a wide strip of greenery that snaked its way between two of the Blasted Plains like a sort of boundary hedge. To anyone coming from my own home, Suf would have seemed a peculiar abode indeed, a place of esoteric preoccupations, eccentric architecture, and a strange disregard for the dangers of the past.

  We had ridden hard along the ancient road, and it was with relief that we reached at last the boundary of the Plain. What had caused them, what awful weapon or disaster had imprinted on them this vast and unchanging desolation, I didn’t know. Such knowledge was lost, and I hoped it would stay gone forever. One moment we were sail-skating-sailing along the road and in the next instant the boundary changed and the Land was renewed. Immediately the road teemed with life again. Birds chirped, and insects crawled, and the ruined travel-pods of old were filled with earth and flowers, and the roots of gnarled trees pushed through the surface of the road and hindered our progress. I had never been so glad to see a tree.

  We disentangled ourselves from the sails and folded them carefully, and continued our journey on foot. I’d forgotten what it was like to be on Land. The smell of spring overwhelmed me. There were so many flowers growing by the side of the road—orchids and tulips and African Moons, lilies and begonias and Bleeding-Heart vine—and their perfume and their profusion of colors made me glad again, for the first time in days.

  The flowers were enough to sustain whole colonies of bees, which darted lazily this way and that, gathering nectar, and their humming filled the air. Bright sunlight fell everywhere. The flowers were of a different kind from those in my home. They belonged in warmer climes than ours.

  But it was always sunny in Suf.

  Already on the way we began to discern their famed statues, towering spirals and fractal curves all made from the discarded junk of the ancients, some of it preserved over centuries, some of it buried deep in the sea or on the Plains. They were fashioned from aluminum cans and plastic toy ducks, glass bottles and windshields, polystyrene foam boxes, wrenches and hammers and spoons, keys and watches and screws and clips and spray bottles. They were made of the past. And they were given shapes, some surreal, some familiar. One looked like rain, falling down between the leaves of the trees, until you looked closer and saw that the drops were ancient coins. Another was a giant DNA double helix rising into the sky fabricated entirely from cans that people had probably, in centuries past, drunk from. Another resembled fine mist and must have been made from plastic bags. There were still storms out on the Plains where the bags fled through the air, millions of them, and to be caught in such a storm was every salvager’s nightmare, for many were known to have been trapped and buried in the assault of innocuous bags that had once held groceries or garbage, and now flew like silent ghosts to choke and murder the unwary in their ephemeral grip. We passed in this way between the sculptures, and all about us the flowers bloomed, bees hummed, birds called and worms burrowed and the sun shone. The sun always shone, in Suf.

  Then we passed through a hole punched in the hull of a vast submersible ship of yore, lying on its side half-buried in the ground.

  Beyond was the Convocation.

  Suf sat on a series of low-lying hills. It had the deep photosynthesis-green of cacti and the intense yellow of rice and the fiery red of cayenne. Where there had once been a dock there still remained the stylized fortifications, cranes rising over a riverbed filled now with lettuce, arugula, radicchio, spinach, and cress. Shade netting kept the sunlight from the plants, a dark green river of them flowing away from the Convocation. Suf itself resembled a series of cubes piled on top of each other, and they were scattered about all over the hills, seemingly at random. It was only when you came closer that you realized the houses had been built with lovingly restored shipping containers, of the sort that had once traveled the globe.

  I tried to imagine it. The oceans calm, and the great ships, bigger than the biggest whale, sailing on them as though it were the simplest thing in the world to cross the planet. Each vast ship holding thousands of containers. Thousands of ships, millions of containers, the wealth of a planet carried so casually, as though it meant nothing; and perhaps it hadn’t, then.

  We followed the path up the hill. It was a shock to see so many people again. A friend of mine, Miguel, who I knew from Tyr, came out of his house to welcome us. We embraced warmly.

  “Mai,” he said. “It is good to see you again.”

  “And you,” I said, laughing. “Your hair is shorter, Miguel. When I last saw you, it was down below your shoulders.”

  He ran his hand over his scalp and grimaced. “Age comes to us all, Mai. To some sooner than others… You haven’t changed one bit.”

  “Liar!”

  He laughed, and so did I.

  “I heard you did good work in New Byblos,” he said. “On the Extinction Lists.”

  “I hope so.”

  “How’s Ifrim?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “…Oh.” He looked at me a moment longer, then squeezed my shoulder. “Come on in, come on in. Will you be staying long?”

  “We’re just passing through, Miguel.”

 
; “Going to Tyr?”

  “And then farther.”

  He turned and looked at me sharply. “Farther? How much farther?”

  I said, “Beyond the sea.”

  That day we ate the way they eat in Suf. Their homes are temples of vegetation, in which every manner of flora is grown in rich mulch, illuminated by the stored light of the sun. We ate chargrilled kebabs of chunky butternut squash, stir-fried beans with long slices of chilies, peppers stuffed with tomatoes and rice and flavored with numerous herbs, pastries as delicate as air filled with potatoes and mushrooms, and for dessert we had papaya with fresh lime, and pineapple slices, and bananas cooked in sugar and alcohol and set aflame. There was wine, too, from the extensive vineyards they keep inside their growtainer-estates.

  That day, too, I washed properly for the first time since we’d left the way station. Aqueducts run through Suf and feed into washing houses and pools, and the water is always hot. They grow their own soaps, in Suf. I luxuriated in the hot baths, feeling scrubbed and clean and healthy. Miguel swam to me then and, laughing, lifted me up, until I turned and put my arms around him.

  “But how much farther?” he said, after we parted from our kiss.

  “The New Atlantis.”

  “Mai… I thought it was a myth, that place.”

  “It’s real. And they need me.”

  His fingers ran down my naked back. “There is plenty of need for a chronicler here, in Suf,” he said.

  “I can feel your need hard enough, Miguel,” I said, laughing. After that we didn’t talk for a while; at least not in words.

  Later, as we floated in the water, the sun had gone down and the night sky came out and brought with it the stars. It was very still, and peaceful.

  “Stay,” he said. “It is not so bad, here.”