New Atlantis (2 page)

~

It was dark for so long, so very long. We were all blind.
And there was the cold, a vast, unmoving, heavy cold. We could not move at all.
We did not move. We did not speak. Our mouths were closed, pressed shut by the
cold and by the weight. Our eyes were pressed shut. Our limbs were held still.
Our minds were held still. For how long? There was no length of time; how long
is death? And is one dead only after living, or before life as well? Certainly
we thought, if we thought anything, that we were dead; but if we had ever been
alive, we had forgotten it.

There was a change. It must
have been the pressure that changed first, although we did not know it. The
eyelids are sensitive to touch. They must have been weary of being shut. When
the pressure upon them weakened a little, they opened. But there was no way for
us to know that. It was too cold for us to
feel anything. There was nothing to be seen. There was black.

But then — “then,” for the
event created time, created before and after, near and far, now and then
—“then” there was the light. One light. One
small, strange light that passed slowly, at what distance we could not tell. A
small, greenish white, slightly blurred point of radiance, passing.

Our eyes were certainly open, “then,” for we saw it. We
saw the moment. The moment is a point of light. Whether in darkness or in the
field of all light, the moment is small, and moves, but not quickly. And “then”
it is gone.

It did not occur to us that there might be another
moment. There was no reason to assume that there might be more than one. One
was marvel enough: that in all the field of the dark, in the cold, heavy,
dense, moveless, timeless, placeless, boundless black, there should have
occurred, once, a small slightly blurred, moving light! Time need be created
only once, we thought.

But we were mistaken. The difference between one and more
than one is all the difference in the world. Indeed, that difference is the
world.

The light returned.

The same light, or another one? There was no telling.

But, “this time,” we wondered about the light: Was it
small and near to us, or large and far away? Again there was no telling; but
there was something about the way it moved, a trace of hesitation, a tentative
quality, that did not seem proper to anything large and remote. The stars, for
instance. We began to remember the stars.

The stars had never hesitated.

Perhaps the noble certainty of their gait had been a mere
effect of distance. Perhaps in fact they had hurtled wildly, enormous
furnace-fragments of a primal bomb thrown through the cosmic dark; but time and
distance soften all agony. If the universe, as seems likely, began with an act
of destruction, the stars we had used to see told no tales of it. They had been
implacably serene.

The planets, however . . . We began
to remember the planets. They had suffered certain changes both of appearance
and of course. At certain times of the year Mars would reverse its direction
and go backward through the stars. Venus had been brighter and less bright as
she went through her phases of crescent, full, and wane. Mercury had shuddered
like a skidding drop of rain on the sky flushed with daybreak. The light we now
watched had that erratic, trembling quality. We saw it, unmistakably, change
direction and go backward. It then grew smaller and fainter; blinked — an eclipse? — and
slowly disappeared.

Slowly, but not slowly enough for a planet.

Then — the third “then!” — arrived
the indubitable and positive Wonder of the World, the Magic Trick, watch now,
watch, you will not believe your eyes, mama, mama, look what I can do —

Seven lights in a row, proceeding fairly rapidly, with a
darting movement, from left to right. Proceeding less rapidly from right to
left, two dimmer, greenish lights. Two-lights halt, blink, reverse course,
proceed hastily and in a wavering manner from left to right. Seven-lights
increase speed, and catch up. Two-lights flash desperately, flicker, and are
gone.

Seven-lights hang still for some while, then merge
gradually into one streak, veering away, and little by little vanish into the
immensity of the dark.

But in the dark now are growing
other lights, many of them: lamps, dots, rows, scintillations — some near at hand, some far. Like the stars, yes, but
not stars. It is not the great Existences we are seeing, but only the little
lives.

~

In the morning Simon told me something about the Camp, but
not until after he had had me check the apartment for bugs. I thought at first
he had been given behavior mod and gone paranoid. We never had been infested.
And I’d been living alone for a year and a half; surely they didn’t want to
hear me talking to myself? But he said, “They may have been expecting me to
come here.”

“But they let you go free!”

He just lay there and laughed at me. So I checked everywhere
we could think of. I didn’t find any bugs, but it did look as if somebody had
gone through the bureau drawers while I was away in the Wilderness. Simon’s
papers were all at Max’s, so that didn’t matter. I made tea on the Primus, and
washed and shaved Simon with the extra hot water in the kettle — he had a thick
beard and wanted to get rid of it because of the lice he had brought from Camp
— and while we were doing that he told me about the Camp. In fact he told me
very little, but not much was necessary.

He had lost about 20 pounds. As he only weighed 140 to start
with, this left little to go on with. His knees and wrist bones stuck out like
rocks under the skin. His feet were all swollen and chewed-looking from the
Camp boots; he hadn’t dared take the boots off, the last three days of walking,
because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get them back on. When he had to
move or sit up so I could wash him, he shut his eyes.

“Am I really here?” he asked. “Am I here?”

“Yes,” I said. “You are here. What I don’t understand is how
you got here.”

“Oh, it wasn’t bad so long as I kept moving. All you need is
to know where you’re going — to have someplace to go. You know, some of the
people in Camp, if they’d let them go, they wouldn’t have had that. They couldn’t
have gone anywhere. Keeping moving was the main thing. See, my back’s all
seized up, now.”

When he had to get up to go to the bathroom he moved like a
ninety-year-old. He couldn’t stand straight, but was all bent out of shape, and
shuffled. I helped him put on clean clothes. When he lay down on the bed again,
a sound of pain came out of him, like tearing thick paper. I went around the
room putting things away. He asked me to come sit by him and said I was going
to drown him if I went on crying. “You’ll submerge the entire North American
continent,” he said. I can’t remember what he said, but he made me laugh
finally. It is hard to remember things Simon says, and hard not to laugh when
he says them. This is not merely the partiality of affection. He makes
everybody laugh. I doubt that he intends to. It is just that a mathematician’s
mind works differently from other people’s. Then when they laugh, that pleases
him.

It was strange, and it is strange, to be thinking about “him,”
the man I have known for ten years, the same man, while “he” lay there changed
out of recognition, a different man. It is enough to make you understand why
most languages have a word like “soul.” There are various degrees of death, and
time spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed.

I said what I had not been able to say for a year and a
half: “I was afraid they’d brainwash you.”

He said, “Behavior mod is expensive. Even just the drugs.
They save it mostly for the VIPs. But I’m afraid they got a notion I might be
important after all. I got questioned a lot the last couple of months. About my
‘foreign contacts.’” He snorted. “The stuff that got published abroad, I
suppose. So I want to be careful and make sure it’s just a Camp again next
time, and not a Federal Hospital.”

“Simon, were they . . . are they cruel, or just righteous?”

He did not answer for a while. He did not want to answer. He
knew what I was asking. He knew by what thread hangs hope, the sword, above our
heads.

“Some of them . . .” he said at last, mumbling.

Some of them had been cruel. Some of them had enjoyed their
work. You cannot blame everything on society.

“Prisoners, as well as guards,” he said.

You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

“Some of them, Belle,” he said with energy, touching my hand
— “some of them, there were men like gold there — ”

The thread is tough; you cannot cut it with one stroke.

“What have you been playing?” he asked.

“Forrest, Schubert.”

“With the quartet?”

“Trio, now. Janet went to Oakland with a new lover.”

“Ah, poor Max.”

“It’s just as well, really. She isn’t a good pianist.”

I make Simon laugh, too, though I don’t intend to. We talked
until it was past time for me to go to work. My shift since the Full Employment
Act last year is ten to two. I am an inspector in a recycled paper bag factory.
I have never rejected a bag yet; the electronic inspector catches all the
defective ones first. It is a rather depressing job. But it’s only four hours a
day, and it takes more time than that to go through all the lines and physical
and mental examinations, and fill out all the forms, and talk to all the
welfare counselors and inspectors every week in order to qualify as Unemployed,
and then line up every day for the ration stamps and the dole. Simon thought I
ought to go to work as usual. I tried to, but I couldn’t. He had felt very hot
to the touch when I kissed him good-bye. I went instead and got a black-market
doctor. A girl at the factory had recommended her, for an abortion, if I ever
wanted one without going through the regulation two years of sex-depressant
drugs the fed-meds make you take when they give you an abortion. She was a
jeweler’s assistant in a shop on Alder Street, and the girl said she was
convenient because if you didn’t have enough cash you could leave something in
pawn at the jeweler’s as payment. Nobody ever does have enough cash, and of
course credit cards aren’t worth much on the black market.

The doctor was willing to come at once, so we rode home on
the bus together. She gathered very soon that Simon and I were married, and it
was funny to see her look at us and smile like a cat. Some people love
illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It’s men who make
laws, and enforce them, and break them, and think the whole performance is
wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore them. You could see that this woman,
like a man, actually enjoyed breaking them. That may have been what put her
into an illegal business in the first place, a preference for the shady side.
But there was more to it than that. No doubt she’d wanted to be a doctor, too;
and the Federal Medical Association doesn’t admit women into the medical
schools. She probably got her training as some other doctor’s private pupil,
under the counter. Very much as Simon learned mathematics, since the
universities don’t teach much but Business Administration and Advertising and
Media Skills any more. However she learned it, she seemed to know her stuff.
She fixed up a kind of homemade traction device for Simon very handily and
informed him that if he did much more walking for two months he’d be crippled the
rest of his life, but if he behaved himself he’d just be more or less lame. It
isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to be grateful for being told, but we both
were. Leaving, she gave me a bottle of about two hundred plain white pills,
unlabeled. “Aspirin,” she said. “He’ll be in a good deal of pain off and on for
weeks.”

I looked at the bottle. I had never seen aspirin before,
only the Super-Buffered Pane-Gon and the Triple-Power N-L-G-Zic and the
Extra-Strength Apansprin with the miracle ingredient more doctors recommend,
which the fed-meds always give you prescriptions for, to be filled at your
FMA-approved private enterprise friendly drugstore at the low, low prices
established by the Pure Food and Drug Administration in order to inspire
competitive research.

“Aspirin,” the doctor repeated. “The miracle ingredient more
doctors recommend.” She cat-grinned again. I think she liked us because we were
living in sin. That bottle of black-market aspirin was probably worth more than
the old Navajo bracelet I pawned for her fee.

I went out again to register Simon as temporarily domiciled
at my address and to apply for Temporary Unemployment Compensation ration
stamps for him. They, only give them to you for two weeks and you have to come
every day; but to register him as Temporarily Disabled meant getting the
signatures of two fed-meds, and I thought I’d rather put that off for a while.
It took three hours to go through the lines and get the forms he would have to
fill out, and to answer the ’crats’ questions about why he wasn’t there in
person. They smelled something fishy. Of course it’s hard for them to prove
that two people are married and aren’t just adultering if you move now and then
and your friends help out by sometimes registering one of you as living at
their address; but they had all the back files on both of us and it was obvious
that we had been around each other for a suspiciously long time. The State
really does make things awfully hard for itself. It must have been simpler to
enforce the laws back when marriage was legal and adultery was what got you
into trouble. They only had to catch you once. But I’ll bet people broke the
law just as often then as they do now.

~

The lantern-creatures came close enough at last that we
could see not only their light, but their bodies in the illumination of their
light. They were not pretty. They were dark colored, most often a dark red, and
they were all mouth. They ate one another whole. Light swallowed light all together
in the vaster mouth of the darkness. They moved slowly, for nothing, however
small and hungry, could move fast under that weight, in that cold. Their eyes,
round with fear, were never closed. Their bodies were tiny and bony behind the
gaping jaws. They wore queer, ugly decorations on their lips and skulls:
fringes, serrated wattles, featherlike fronds, gauds, bangles, lures. Poor
little sheep of the deep pastures! Poor ragged, hunch-jawed dwarfs squeezed to
the bone by the weight of the darkness, chilled to the bone by the cold of the
darkness, tiny monsters burning with bright hunger, who brought us back to
life!