New Atlantis (3 page)

Occasionally, in the wan, sparse illumination of one of
the lantern-creatures, we caught a momentary glimpse of other, large, unmoving
shapes: the barest suggestion, off in the distance, not of a wall, nothing so
solid and certain as a wall, but of a surface, an angle . . . Was it there?

Or something would glitter, faint, far off, far down.
There was no use trying to make out what it might be. Probably it was only a
fleck of sediment, mud or mica, disturbed by a struggle between the
lantern-creatures, flickering like a bit of diamond dust as it rose and settled
slowly. In any case, we could not move to go see what it was. We had not even
the cold, narrow freedom of the lantern-creatures. We were immobilized, borne
down, still shadows among the half-guessed shadow walls. Were we there?

The lantern-creatures showed no
awareness of us. They passed before us, among us, perhaps even through us
— it was impossible to be sure. They were not
afraid, or curious.

Once something a little larger than a hand came crawling
near, and for a moment we saw quite distinctly the clean angle where the foot
of a wall rose from the pavement, in the glow cast by the crawling creature,
which was covered with a foliage of plumes, each plume dotted with many tiny,
bluish points of light. We saw the pavement beneath the creature and the wall
beside it, heartbreaking in its exact, clear linearity, its opposition to all
that was fluid, random, vast, and void. We saw the creature’s claws, slowly
reaching out and retracting like small stiff fingers, touch the wall. Its
plumage of light quivering, it dragged itself along and vanished behind the
corner of the wall.

So we knew that the wall was there; and that it was an
outer wall, a housefront, perhaps, or the side of one of the towers of the
city.

We remembered the towers. We remembered the city. We had
forgotten it. We had forgotten who we were; but we remembered the city, now.

~

When I got home, the FBI had already been there. The computer
at the police precinct where I registered Simon’s address must have flashed it
right over to the computer at the FBI building. They had questioned Simon for
about an hour, mostly about what he had been doing during the twelve days it
took him to get from the Camp to Portland. I suppose they thought he had flown
to Peking or something. Having a police record in Walla Walla for hitchhiking
helped him establish his story. He told me that one of them had gone to the
bathroom. Sure enough I found a bug stuck on the top of the bathroom door
frame. I left it, as we figured it’s really better to leave it when you know
you have one, than to take it off and then never be sure they haven’t planted
another one you don’t know about. As Simon said, if we felt we had to say
something unpatriotic we could always flush the toilet at the same time.

I have a battery radio — there are so many work stoppages
because of power failures, and days the water has to be boiled, and so on, that
you really have to have a radio to save wasting time and dying of typhoid — and
he turned it on while I was making supper on the Primus. The six o’clock
All-American Broadcasting Company news announcer announced that peace was at
hand in Uruguay, the president’s confidential aide having been seen to smile at
a passing blonde as he left the 613th day of the secret negotiations in a villa
outside Katmandu. The war in Liberia was going well; the enemy said they had
shot down seventeen American planes but the Pentagon said we had shot down
twenty-two enemy planes, and the capital city — I forget its name, but it hasn’t
been habitable for seven years anyway — was on the verge of being recaptured
by the forces of freedom. The police action in Arizona was also successful. The
Neo-Birch insurgents in Phoenix could not hold out much longer against the
massed might of the American army and air force, since their underground supply
of small tactical nukes from the Weathermen in Los Angeles had been cut off.
Then there was an advertisement for Ped-Cred cards, and a commercial for the
Supreme Court: “Take your legal troubles to the Nine Wise Men!” Then there was
something about why tariffs had gone up, and a report from the stock market,
which had just closed at over two thousand, and a commercial for U.S. Government
canned water, with a catchy little tune: “Don’t be sorry when you drink/It’s
not as healthy as you think/Don’t you think you really ought to/Drink coo-ool,
puu-uure U.S.G. water?” — with
three sopranos in close harmony on the last line. Then, just as the battery
began to give out and his voice was dying away into a faraway tiny whisper, the
announcer seemed to be saying something about a new continent emerging.

“What was that?”

“I didn’t hear,” Simon said, lying with his eyes shut and
his face pale and sweaty. I gave him two aspirins before we ate. He ate little,
and fell asleep while I was washing the dishes in the bathroom. I had been
going to practice, but a viola is fairly wakeful in a one-room apartment. I
read for a while instead. It was a best seller Janet had given me when she
left. She thought it was very good, but then she likes Franz Liszt too. I don’t
read much since the libraries were closed down, it’s too hard to get books; all
you can buy is best sellers. I don’t remember the title of this one, the cover
just said “Ninety Million Copies in Print!!!” It was about smalltown sex life
in the last century, the dear old 1970s when there weren’t any problems and
life was so simple and nostalgic. The author squeezed all the naughty thrills
he could out of the fact that all the main characters were married. I looked at
the end and saw that all the married couples shot each other after all their
children became schizophrenic hookers, except for one brave pair that divorced
and then leapt into bed together with a clear-eyed pair of government-employed
lovers for eight pages of healthy group sex as a brighter future dawned. I went
to bed then, too. Simon was hot, but sleeping quietly. His breathing was like
the sound of soft waves far away, and I went out to the dark sea on the sound
of them.

I used to go out to the dark sea, often, as a child, falling
asleep. I had almost forgotten it with my waking mind. As a child all I had to
do was stretch out and think, “the dark sea . . . the dark sea . . .” and soon enough I’d
be there, in the great depths, rocking. But after I grew up it only happened
rarely, as a great gift. To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it,
to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it — what greater gift?

~

We watched the tiny lights come
and go around us, and doing so, we gained a sense of space and of direction
— near and far, at least, and higher and lower. It
was that sense of space that allowed us to became aware of the currents. Space
was no longer entirely still around us, suppressed by the enormous pressure of
its own weight. Very dimly we were aware that the cold darkness moved, slowly,
softly, pressing against us a little for a long time, then ceasing, in a vast oscillation. The empty darkness flowed slowly
along our unmoving unseen bodies; along them, past them; perhaps through them;
we could not tell.

Where did they come from, those dim, slow, vast tides?
What pressure or attraction stirred the deeps to these slow drifting movements?
We could not understand that; we could only feel their touch against us, but in
straining our sense to guess their origin or end, we became aware of something
else: something out there in the darkness of the great currents: sounds. We
listened. We heard.

So our sense of space sharpened and localized to a sense
of place. For sound is local, as sight is not. Sound is delimited by silence;
and it does not rise out of the silence unless it is fairly close, both in
space and in time. Though we stand where once the singer stood we cannot hear
the voice singing; the years have carried it off on their tides, submerged it.
Sound is a fragile thing, a tremor, as delicate as life itself. We may see the
stars, but we cannot hear them. Even were the hollowness of outer space an
atmosphere, an ether that transmitted the waves of sound, we could not hear the
stars; they are too far away. At most if we listened we might hear our own sun,
all the mighty, roiling, exploding storm of its burning, as a whisper at the
edge of hearing.

A sea wave laps one’s feet. It is the shock wave of a
volcanic eruption on the far side of the world. But one hears nothing.

A red light flickers on the horizon. It is the reflection
in smoke of a city on the distant mainland, burning. But one hears nothing.

Only on the slopes of the volcano, in the suburbs of the
city, does one begin to hear the deep thunder, and the high voices crying.

Thus, when we became aware that we were hearing, we were
sure that the sounds we heard were fairly close to us. And yet we may have been
quite wrong. For we were in a strange place, a deep place. Sound travels fast
and far in the deep places, and the silence there is perfect, letting the least
noise be heard for hundreds of miles.

And these were not small noises. The lights were tiny,
but the sounds were vast: not loud, but very large. Often they were below the
range of hearing, long slow vibrations rather than sounds, The first we heard
seemed to us to rise up through the currents from beneath us immense groans,
sighs felt along the bone, a rumbling, a deep uneasy whispering.

Later, certain sounds came down
to us from above, or borne along the endless levels of the darkness, and these
were stranger yet, for they were music. A huge, calling, yearning music from
far away in the darkness, calling not to us.
Where are you? I am here.

Not to us.

They were the voices of the
great souls, the great lives, the lonely ones, the voyagers. Calling. Not often
answered.
Where are you? Where have you gone?

But the bones, the keels and girders of white bones on icy
isles of the South, the shores of bones did not reply.

Nor could we reply. But we listened, and the tears rose
in our eyes, salt, not so salt as the oceans, the world-girdling deep bereaved
currents, the abandoned roadways of the great lives; not so salt, but warmer.

I am here. Where have you gone?

No answer.

Only the whispering thunder from below.

But we knew now, though we could not answer, we knew
because we heard, because we felt, because we wept, we knew that we were; and
we remembered other voices.

~

Max came the next night. I sat on the toilet lid to
practice, with the bathroom door shut. The FBI men on the other end of the bug
got a solid half hour of scales and doublestops, and then a quite good
performance of the Hindemith unaccompanied viola sonata. The bathroom being
very small and all hard surfaces, the noise I made was really tremendous. Not a
good sound, far too much echo, but the sheer volume was contagious, and I
played louder as I went on. The man up above knocked on his floor once; but if I
have to listen to the weekly All-American Olympic Games at full blast every
Sunday morning from his TV set, then he has to accept Paul Hindemith coming up
out of his toilet now and then.

When I got tired I put a wad of cotton over the bug, and
came out of the bathroom half-deaf. Simon and Max were on fire. Burning,
unconsumed. Simon was scribbling formulae in traction, and Max was pumping his
elbows up and down the way he does, like a boxer, and saying “The e - lec -
tron emis - sion . . .” through his nose, with his eyes narrowed, and his mind
evidently going light-years per second faster than his tongue, because he kept
beginning over and saying “The e - lec - tron emis - sion . . .” and pumping his
elbows.

Intellectuals at work are very strange to look at. As strange
as artists. I never could understand how an audience can sit there and
look
at a fiddler rolling his eyes and biting his
tongue, or a horn player collecting spit, or a pianist like a black cat
strapped to an electrified bench, as if what they
saw
had anything to do with the music.

I damped the fires with a quart of black-market beer — the
legal kind is better, but I never have enough ration stamps for beer; I’m not
thirsty enough to go without eating — and gradually Max and Simon cooled down.
Max would have stayed talking all night, but I drove him out because Simon was
looking tired.

I put a new battery in the radio and left it playing in the
bathroom, and blew out the candle and lay and talked with Simon; he was too
excited to sleep. He said that Max had solved the problems that were bothering
them before Simon was sent to Camp, and had had fitted Simon’s equations to (as
Simon put it) the bare facts, which means they have achieved “direct energy
conversion.” Ten or twelve people have worked on it at different times since
Simon published the theoretical part of it when he was twenty-two. The
physicist Ann Jones had pointed out right away that the simplest practical
application of the theory would be to build a “sun tap,” a device for
collecting and storing solar energy, only much cheaper and better than the
U.S.G. Sola-Heetas that some rich people have on their houses. And it would
have been simple only they kept hitting the same snag. Now Max has got around
the snag.

I said that Simon published the theory, but that is
inaccurate. Of course he’s never been able to publish any of his papers, in
print; he’s not a federal employee and doesn’t have a government clearance. But
it did get circulated in what the scientists and poets call Sammy’s-dot, that
is, just handwritten or hectographed. It’s an old joke that the FBI arrests
everybody with purple fingers, because they have either been hectographing
Sammy’s-dots, or they have impetigo.

Anyhow, Simon was on top of the mountain that night. His
true joy is in the pure math; but he had been working with Clara and Max and
the others in this effort to materialize the theory for ten years, and a taste
of material victory is a good thing, once in a lifetime.