Where am I? An image casts itself to the surface of her mind: the city of Wyke, resplendent under a gold-flecked autumn sky, reflected up at her from the waters of the Humber as it flows its slow course.
Unreal city…
I am not here at all, Doris thinks to herself, and her inner voice sounds strange to her, unlike itself, faint and full of wonderment, as if she were yet a girl and the world still new to her, as if she had never poured pints of ale or scrubbed down floorboards or sluiced out pigsties to make a living.
The book is from Mother Clare’s library, Saira is saying. She takes Doris’s hand and squeezes it. All the sisters know of it—the Abbey was always a place of learning and so it is still. Sister Ursula and I—Mother Clare set us to work making fair copies. Many of the books she has accrued are too delicate for study. She wants us to save them—before the knowledge they contain is withered away. William Dearborn—
The witchfinder?
Saira nods. He seized on me the night of the storm, when there was no one to witness. He offered me amnesty if I were to give up Mother Clare. To confess her as a witch, I mean, he and that snake of a curate, Roland Parfitt. They want to see her influence erased and her body burned. Afterwards they will torch the library. But the law states no man may enter the Abbey and retain the king’s favour. William Dearborn knows this, and so for now he is powerless. I am afraid for the future, though. Men such as Dearborn will always find a way to set themselves above the law, sooner or later. We have to move fast.
I don’t understand, Doris says, why the man is so exercised. Heaven knows book-learners are few and becoming fewer. Why not decry this ancient volume as a children’s fantasy? A tale of gods and monsters? His task would be accomplished and no harm done.
You know the answer as well as I, Beth says impatiently. Dearborn lives for witch-burnings—one might say he has a calling. And besides, it is not just the book. Saira found something else. From other of the books she has worked on, she believes it to be some manner of communications device—a machine that enables the exchange of voices over hundreds of miles. This sounds like witchcraft to you and me, so take a moment to imagine how it might sound to William Dearborn. There is a lad on the estate, the son of our foreman Diggory Palmer. He has a gift for mending machinery—in the matter of repairing our farm implements his talents have often proved invaluable. Diggory swears he knows not whence the boy’s gift arises and begs me not to speak of it—I imagine he fears the witchfinder and his court of rubes.
I have told the man he is safe here, Beth continues, and I have with Saira’s agreement asked him if his son might help to determine the purpose of this find. The foolish boy is thrilled, of course. On fire with purpose. So this is where we are. As for the book, I have taken the time to think on it, and although parts of the text are yet obscure to me its meaning as a whole seems self-apparent: Wyke is founded in the ruins of an earlier city. Time crushes the present moment into dust, and yet the fragments of all earlier times remain. Any wife who has lost a husband has knowledge of this—how one life stamps its mark in the hide of another, how even with the passage of years the scars may still be seen. Sister, I know you have questioned my choices. You have found me wanting in resolution, and heaven knows your lot has been harsh, but I did truly love my little Rachel and I loved my Malcolm too. I came to love him more than I imagined. Now he is gone I need your wisdom more than ever. If this storm has torn many asunder, might it not bring others together? If I have been bitter and overly judgemental, please forgive me. Let us build something new.
A new city, Doris wonders. A new city, in the ruins of the old. Her sister’s forthright speech astounds her, her capacity for change. The accumulated griefs, the minor slights, the unspoken distrust—might they be swept out to sea on the tide, with the flotsam of Ravensword?
As girls and young women, the idea of magic had been as basic and unsurprising to the sisters as the idea of bread. The years between put paid to that. Now magic had been returned to them in the form of a pile of papers and a broken machine.
Can a machine perform magic? writes Saira in her journal late in the evening. From the time I first learned to listen at keyholes, I have been aware of the priests’ distrust of human-made miracles. As if to wonder at human achievement is to deny the idea of the spiritual, the idea of God. As if to strive after higher knowledge is to willingly embrace the devil’s business. I have contemplated their point of view and found no merit in it. Rather, I have discerned in their insistence on human innocence a mendacious desire to preserve the structures of power. If sheep begin to think for themselves, what purpose the shepherd? And what is to become of the farmer when sheep refuse to be exploited for their meat and wool?
The priests depend on human submissiveness for their credibility. A godly city is a city in thrall, and easily ruled. Mother Clare says: God’s purpose is not immediately apparent to humans, and to men least of all. Learning is a form of enlightenment, and what is enlightenment but prayer, answered?
In the time before the dark, the city flourished. Wyke continued to reinvent itself, its structures fashioned from human ambition, its spirit imagined into being through human communion with a higher power. Its energy fuelled by the clash of kings and angels, bishops and generals, shopkeepers and highwaymen, merchants and slaves.
The merchants brought the rats, says Mother Clare, and the rats brought the plague. The city crumbled and the churchmen lamented the devilish prevalence of human sin. The plague is divine retribution, they wailed in their pulpits, the idea of plague as a natural phenomenon a heretical negation of the idea of God.
The dreaded pestilence, raging through the shipyard tenements and the poorhouses, the garrison and the workhouse, the slums of Ravensword and Humberside, the mills the slaughterhouse the almshouse, the cottages of washerwomen and of textile workers, ill-lit, running with mildew, infested with rats.
Knowledge, says Mother Clare, is a dangerous thing, not because it comes from the devil but because it runs in harness with the need to act. To speak of a pestilence spread by vermin—by fleas on rats—is to suggest that the plague is down to cause and effect. A calamity whose course might be stopped or altered by human action.
Where does that leave God? demands Dearborn the witchfinder.
God helps those who help themselves, says Mother Clare.
The city is war and the city is peace and the city is icicles hanging from roofs on a January morning. The storm-surge and the gale, the tearing might of the River Humber, the glinting of sunlight on the steaming flanks of the estuary sands. The city is books and women reading, children racing across the rooftops on a summer’s night. Stars in the firmament and rats in the gutter, pestilence and the death of mothers and the birth of poets. The city is slate and iron and glass, the city is granite. The stench of horse dung and motors roaring, the sparring of philosophers in the coffee house, the contemplative silence of mathematicians in the library reading room. The cursing of sailors and the singing of drunkards, the sighs of harlots and the praying of nuns. The jewels the coal the fire the slate the water the wood the brass the nails the grain the cord the disdain the mercy the magnificence and the ruin. The prisons and palaces, convents and collieries, whorehouse and bakery, the palace and the playhouse and the officers’ mess. The love of me for you and you for me. The past and the future and the heavenly now. The being and the dying. The written and the read.
Doris is shocked at how young he is, the boy, this son of a foreman with a preternatural knowledge of machines. Twelve, maybe thirteen. Fourteen years old at the most, and he is small for his age, the boy, leave him out in a winter’s gale and he will blow clean away.
The lad is christened Diggory, the same as his father. The thing on the bench in front of him looks more like a carton of junk than anything working, a mute assemblage of metal coils and wooden pegs, inexplicable forms fashioned from a dark brown material the boy calls baker-light.
Doris remembers how she and Beth had found such ru
diments occasionally, objects that wormed their way to the surface of the earth in the wake of a rainstorm. A smooth red drinking cup, a hollow dwarf with a long white beard, what looked like coat buttons. Witch-finds, Beth had called them. Jokingly or not jokingly, what these things were or where they had come from they never dared ask.
Young Diggory calls his found machine a radio receiver. For capturing voices, he explains, for luring music down out of the aether as my father lures trout from their shaded hideaways among the sedge.
He shows them how to activate the machine by twisting a handle, skilfully forged from a length of wire. Explains how the turning of the handle converts the body’s energy into an invisible fuel called electrical power.
How might you know this? asks Doris, astounded. She feels once again cast adrift in a world moved on without her.
There are books that speak of it, the boy replies. He shrugs, as if the existence of such miraculous volumes were common knowledge. Beth seizes the glimmering handle with her ungloved hand, thrusting it downwards then pulling it round then around again.
Like churning butter! she exclaims.
Like you would know, Doris thinks, entranced.
Diggory nods at Beth then depresses a lever. Doris hears a muted crackling, like the far-off movement of waves upon a distant shore.
Wait, the lad says, just a moment. He begins twisting a wooden toggle—one half of a clothes peg—and cocks his head to one side.
A voice rises up from the jumbled detritus and the voice is singing. Doris jumps back in fear.
…was all my joy, Greensleeves was my delight…
The voice stutters and disappears, rises again from the ruins.
Greensleeves was all my joy…
Witchcraft, Derenrice whispers. Her heart is pounding. She feels ashamed at falling back on such prejudice, yet other words have failed her.
Not witchcraft, Saira says quietly. She rests her hand on Doris’s arm. A new idea, or an old one. The voice of the future.
The voice from the aether is faint yet stalwart, sweet as a rose.
Does he know we are listening? Does he know where we are?
I do not think so, young Diggory answers. Not yet, anyway. All this means is that someone elsewhere has learned to construct and operate a similar machine. We have still to learn how such machines may one day talk together.
He frowns, the gesture granting his features the gravitas of a much older man. The machine lets out a crackle and then falls silent.
Is it broken? Saira asks.
It has lost the signal, that’s all. But it will come back.
Beth grabs Doris’s hand, her face alight with excitement. Doris imagines herself a girl again, with the whole of life a mystery to be solved.
Of all the apostles, Doris has always found most sympathy with Doubting Thomas. In the past she has seen this preference as a moral weakness, a bulwark against the pain of disappointment. And yet the world is bigger and stranger than she has imagined. She believes she would find comfort in confiding her astonishment to Mother Clare.
Charlie Jane Anders
MARISOL got into an intense relationship with the people on The Facts of Life, to the point where Tootie and Mrs. Garrett became her imaginary best friends and she shared every last thought with them. She told Tootie about the rash she got from wearing the same bra every day for two years, and she had a long talk with Mrs. Garrett about her regrets that she hadn’t said a proper goodbye to her best friend Julie and her on-again/off-again boyfriend Rod, before they died along with everybody else.
The panic room had pretty much every TV show ever made on its massive hard drive, with multiple backup systems and a fail-proof generator, so there was nothing stopping Marisol from marathoning The Facts of Life for sixteen hours a day, starting over again with season one when she got to the end of the bedraggled final season. She also watched Mad Men and The West Wing. The media server had tons of video of live theater, but Marisol didn’t watch that because it made her feel guilty. Not survivor’s guilt; failed playwright guilt.
Her last proper conversation with a living human had been an argument with Julie about Marisol’s decision to go to medical school instead of trying to write more plays. (“Fuck doctors, man,” Julie had spat. “People are going to die no matter what you do. Theater is important.”) Marisol had hung up on Julie and gone back to the premed books, staring at the exposed musculature and blood vessels as if they were costume designs for a skeleton theater troupe.
The quakes always happened at the worst moment, just when Jo or Blair was about to reveal something heartfelt and serious. The whole panic room would shake, throwing Marisol against the padded walls or ceiling over and over again. A reminder that the rest of the world was probably dead. At first, these quakes were constant, then they happened a few times a day. Then once a day, then a few times a week. Then a few times a month. Marisol knew that once a month or two passed without the world going sideways, she would have to go out and investigate. She would have to leave her friends at the Eastland School, and venture into a bleak world.
Sometimes, Marisol thought she had a duty to stay in the panic room, since she was personally keeping the human race alive. But then she thought: what if there was someone else living, and they needed help? Marisol was pre-med, she might be able to do something. What if there was a man, and Marisol could help him repopulate the species?
The panic room had nice blue leather walls and a carpeted floor that felt nice to walk on, and enough gourmet frozen dinners to last Marisol a few lifetimes. She only had the pair of shoes she’d brought in there with her, and it would seem weird to wear shoes after two barefoot years. The real world was in here, in the panic room—out there was nothing but an afterimage of a bad trip.
* * *
Marisol was an award-winning playwright, but that hadn’t saved her from the end of the world. She was taking pre-med classes and trying to get a scholarship to med school so she could give cancer screenings to poor women in her native Taos, but that didn’t save her either. Nor did the fact that she believed in God every other day.
What actually saved Marisol from the end of the world was the fact that she took a job cleaning Burton Henstridge’s mansion to help her through school, and she’d happened to be scrubbing his fancy Japanese toilet when the quakes had started—within easy reach of Burton’s state-of-the-art panic room. (She had found the hidden opening mechanism some weeks earlier, while cleaning the porcelain cat figurines.) Burton himself was in Bulgaria scouting a new location for a nano-fabrication facility, and had died instantly.
When Marisol let herself think about all the people she could never talk to again, she got so choked up she wanted to punch someone in the eye until they were blinded for life. She experienced grief in the form of freak-outs that left her unable to breathe or think, and then she popped in another Facts of Life. As she watched, she chewed her nails until she was in danger of gnawing off her fingertips.
* * *
The door to the panic room wouldn’t actually open when Marisol finally decided it had been a couple months since the last quake and it was time to go the hell out there. She had to kick the door a few dozen times, until she dislodged enough of the debris blocking it to stagger out into the wasteland. The cold slapped her in the face and extremities, extra bitter after two years at room temperature. Burton’s house was gone; the panic room was just a cube half-buried in the ruins, covered in some yellowy insulation that looked like it would burn your fingers.
Everything out there was white, like snow or paper, except powdery and brittle, ashen. She had a Geiger counter from the panic room, which read zero. She couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened to the world, for a long time, until it hit her—this was fungus. Some kind of newly made, highly corrosive fungus that had rushed over everything like a tidal wave and consumed every last bit of organic material, then died. It had come in wave after wave, with incredible violence, until it had exhausted the last of its food s
upply and crushed everything to dust. She gleaned this from the consistency of the crud that had coated every bit of rubble, but also from the putrid sweet-and-sour smell that she could not stop smelling once she noticed it. She kept imagining she saw the white powder starting to move out of the corner of her eye, advancing toward her, but when she would turn around there was nothing.
“The fungus would have all died out when there was nothing left for it to feed on,” Marisol said aloud. “There’s no way it could still be active.” She tried to pretend some other person, an expert or something, had said that, and thus it was authoritative. The fungus was dead. It couldn’t hurt her now.
Because if the fungus wasn’t dead, then she was screwed—even if it didn’t kill her, it would destroy the panic room and its contents. She hadn’t been able to seal it properly behind her without locking herself out.
“Hello?” Marisol kept yelling, out of practice at trying to project her voice. “Anybody there? Anybody?”
She couldn’t even make sense of the landscape. It was just blinding white, as far as she could see, with bits of blanched stonework jutting out. No way to discern streets or houses or cars or anything, because it had all been corroded or devoured.
She was about to go back to the panic room and hope it was still untouched, so she could eat another frozen lamb vindaloo and watch season three of Mad Men. And then she spotted something, a dot of color, a long way off in the pale ruins.
The bottle was a deep oaky green, like smoked glass, with a cork in it. And it was about twenty yards away, just sitting in one of the endless piles of white debris. Somehow, it had avoided being consumed or rusted or broken in the endless waves of fungal devastation. It looked as though someone had just put it down a second ago—in fact, Marisol’s first response was to yell “Hello?” even louder than before.
When there was no answer, she picked up the bottle. In her hands, it felt bumpy, like an embossed label had been worn away, and there didn’t seem to be any liquid inside. She couldn’t see its contents, if there were any. She removed the cork.
Out of the Ruins Page 8
