by Matt Ruff
The space beyond the Gate was not so much a lobby as a roofed canyon, with balconied setback cliffs rising on either side. Artificial cataracts split the balconies at intervals, while illuminated fountains and manicured trees and shrubbery lined the canyon floor. In tribute to Babylon’s famous hanging gardens, ceramic flats of lush, genetically engineered ivy depended from the ceiling on long cords; Electric Hummingbirds flitted from vine to vine, watering them a few drops at a time, fanning dust from their leaves, and occasionally careening out of control and smacking into the cliffs.
The canyon ended in a circular domed chamber, large enough to contain the basilica dome of St. Peter’s with clearance at the top for an angry Swiss Guardsman plus crossbow. A weighty copper sphere, representing the earth, hung suspended by a chain from the ceiling’s apex; it dangled within a meter of the arched back and shoulders of a colossus, whose face bore the expression of a slave freeing himself from lifelong bondage, a blend of joy, hope, pride, righteousness, and a hard kernel of insanity. A chiseled tablet at the base of the statue declared: ATLAS SHRUGS.
“What do you think, Ayn?” Joan asked. She held the Electric Lamp above her head to give the genie a better view.
“I think,” said Ayn, with an air of sincere deliberation, “that if you could love the man whose mind created this . . . if you could identify with his values sufficiently to marry him . . . there may still be hope for you. Your involvement in so-called ‘liberal’ causes such as environmentalism marks you as an altruist and a muscle-mystic, but perhaps you are not beyond redemption. I will have to tutor you in the virtue of selfishness.”
“Oh good,” said Joan. “That.”
Kangaroo Control
“So you claim that your Objectivist philosophy is completely consistent,” said Kite, as New Babel’s third-tier elevator bank transported them between the 120th and 180th floors, “and that anyone who accepts even the smallest fraction of it must axiomatically accept all of it.”
“That is correct,” Ayn Rand said.
“Which could be interpreted to mean that anyone who believes in the power of reason, who sees herself as rational, must axiomatically agree with everything you say.”
“Since I’m right,” Ayn said, “why shouldn’t all rational people agree with me?”
“Yes . . . and it follows, as E. Lee follows Robert, that anyone who doesn’t agree with you is by definition irrational.”
“If such a person were unable to demonstrate a specific error in my premises, or reveal an unresolved contradiction in my conclusions, yes, they would be irrational—and if they persisted in denying reality after the truth had been explained to them, they would also be immoral.”
“And you first conceived of this philosophy when?”
“Eons ago. I have held the same philosophy for as long as I can remember. The only intellectual debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle; the entire history of Western thought from the fourth century B.C. onward reduces to a struggle between Aristotelian logic and the mysticism of Plato.”
“And now you’ve come along to fill the gaps in Aristotle’s system.”
“To purge it of the vestiges of Platonism. ‘Plato is dear to us,’ Aristotle is recorded as saying, ‘but the truth is dearer still.’ The first part of that statement is errant sentiment; Plato is not dear, he is contemptible. Only the truth is dear. Truth as apprehended by a reasoning consciousness.”
“Through common sense, in other words.”
“Sense, yes. Common, no. In fact it’s appallingly rare.”
“But that’s the part I don’t understand, Miss Rand,” said Kite. “Forgive my irreverence, but given what you seem to believe, I’m not sure why it is that you advocate individual freedom at all.”
“Freedom from coercion is prerequisite to the reasoning process. No man can think at the point of a gun.”
“Well, but when you say that you’ve held the same philosophy for as long as you can remember, that sounds to me as if you’re really saying you were born knowing everything you ever needed to know, that you’ve never been wrong. And when you add on top of that that you’re the first philosopher with something original to say since Aristotle—that’s a dry patch of what, twenty-four centuries?—you aren’t making a very strong case for allowing ordinary people to think for themselves.”
“No one can force men to accept reason,” Ayn said. “That’s an altruist’s contradiction in terms! Men are always free to deny reality if they so choose—but if they so choose, they must live with the consequences. Such men have no right to the fruits of my intellect.”
“These consequences,” Kite said. “Would they include—”
“Failure,” Ayn Rand said. “The ultimate consequence of denying reality is always failure. Scratch a worthless bum and you’ll discover an irrational man.”
“Floor one-eighty,” the elevator announced.
“I think I understand you now,” said Kite.
According to Lonny Matsushida’s blueprint, the finished Babel would comprise five hundred floors, with a Phoenix-like pinnacle bringing the aggregate height to fifty-eight hundred and thirty-one feet. At present, the tower was fully glassed-in only up to the 189th floor; erection of the bare steel structural framework had advanced to the level of the 228th floor. It was to this zenith that Joan, Kite, and Ayn Rand ascended in search of Harry Gant’s mother, Winifred Gant, forewoman to the Babel construction project. They rode a construction worker’s cage lift for the last stretch, Kite and Joan wearing hard hats given them by the lift’s operator, an Automatic Servant named Melvin 261.
At Babel’s crown, steel beams and girders were lifted into place by kangaroo cranes, so named because they were anchored to moveable platforms that could be elevated on hydraulic jacks, allowing the cranes to leapfrog skyward along with the building’s superstructure. There was also a kangaroo control center, or KCC: a weatherproof bunker containing a supercomputer, monitoring equipment, and communication facilities that linked Winnie Gant to every member of the construction team.
Many Automatic Servants were employed in the building process, of course, but union rules and state law deemed that a substantial portion of the work be reserved for humans. Up at the top that meant Native Americans, mostly, New York and Canadian Mohawks whose sense of balance and fearlessness at high altitudes was the stuff of urban legend. The Mohawk assistant foreman was an old-timer named Jim Wolverine who’d worked with Winnie since 1975, when she’d first joined the trade as an apprentice welder. They’d been sweethearts their first two years together, a romance whose embers had never entirely cooled; marriage had even been discussed at one point, before Jerry Gant entered the picture in 1978. Joan sometimes wondered, and not just in terms of his acrophobia, how Harry might have been different with an Amerind for a father.
“Jimmy,” Winnie Gant said now, speaking into a walkie-talkie, “get up on two-twenty-seven in the northeast quarter, would you? Warner 990 just got blown over the side again.” One of the monitor screens showed an Automatic Construction Worker swinging from the end of a safety line, smiling despite the long drop beneath it. “After you reel him in send him to the shop to get his gyros checked.”
“Maintenance problems with the Servants?” Joan asked.
“The usual crap,” Winnie replied. She was a big woman, still muscular at sixty-eight; it was easy to see where Harry got his beefcake. “Exposure to the elements, standard wear and tear. But I’ll choose an android casualty over a real one any day of the week.”
“No serious accidents?”
“No deaths, thank God. I’ve been running tight safety regs on this one. Of course you do have the inevitable power tool or lunchbox getting booted over the side and sailing right past the catch tarpaulins. You know it’s funny, taxis seem to be a magnet for falling objects; we’ve totaled the engine blocks on two Checkers so far.”
Kite raised an eyebrow. “Does your insurance cover that sort of damage?”
“Nah. We just cut power to the ele
vators and they can’t reach us to sue us.” She winked. “So what brings you calling, Joan? You and Junior aren’t getting back together, are you?”
“Uh . . . not in any matrimonial sense, no,” Joan said. “We might. . . have coffee.”
“Well, no pressure,” Winnie promised. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Actually,” Joan said, “my friend Kite and I, and Ayn here”—she patted the Electric Lamp—“came by to see Jerry. But when I rang him up, he couldn’t tell me what floor you’re living on.”
“Oh,” said Winnie. She laughed. “That’s Harry’s fault. As a perk for my foreing the site, he wanted to give us an apartment as high up in the building as possible, which of course keeps changing week by week. Moving crew comes in every so often and bumps our stuff up another few stories. I don’t have any problem adjusting—right-brain thinker—but Jerry has to page me for directions every time he goes out. Tell you what, my lunch break’s almost here, so I’ll walk you down.” She nodded at the Lamp. “What is that, anyway?”
“It’s my new guiding light,” said Joan.
“What store did you get it at? Jerry could use an Electric Guide.”
“I’m a philosopher,” Ayn Rand said.
“Huh,” said Winnie Gant. “Huh. Neat idea. Jerry could probably use one of those, too.”
The Sign of the Dollar
If Harry Gant had inherited his physique from his mother, he got his love of clutter—and of toys—from his dad.
Retired now from teaching, Jerry Gant devoted much of his time to the collection of old periodicals: full sets if he could get them, in the original print format if possible. Neatly arranged on shelves throughout the huge apartment—neatly arranged not by Jerry, who left to his own devices would just have heaped them randomly along the wall, but by the omnipresent movers who were making it so hard for him to remember where he lived—were thousands of back issues of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, The Saturday Evening Post, Graham’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury, Life, Scribner’s, Godey’s Ladies’ Book, etc., many of which Joan had never heard of, but which Kite eyed with undisguised nostalgia.
“That’s the latest addition,” Jerry said, indicating a metal cabinet whose drawer-trays contained the entirety of the Wall Street Journal on microfilm. “You wouldn’t think it, but they have some marvelous human interest stories tucked in among the financial reports. Historical chestnuts, some of them, the sort of nifty anecdotes that don’t make it into mainstream history texts. Did you know, for instance, that during World War II the Allies were considering building an aircraft carrier out of ice?”
“Did the originator of this idea,” Kite asked, “have a short last name?”
“Why yes, I believe he did. I can’t quite remember it offhand, though . . .”
“I can guess,” said Kite.
“Why microfilm?” Joan asked.
“Hmm? Well, it’s a daily. The apartment’s not that big. In fact the apartment gets a little smaller every week.”
“But don’t they have the Wall Street Journal on disk or datatape?”
Jerry Gant shrugged. “They might. But I like threading the little spools.”
“OK, Mr. Genius Professor,” Winnie Gant said, entering the hallway. She used a clothespin to clip a scrap of notepaper to one of Jerry’s suspenders. “Our floor number is written down here on one side, and on the back is a map to get to the elevator, with all the tiger pits and quicksand marked. Try not to lose it before tonight.”
“Yes, Mother,” Jerry said, not the least intimidated by her gruff tone. This was one of the traits that had attracted Winnie to him in the first place—that despite being physically slight, he was rarely frightened or intimidated by anything. “I know part of it is just that he doesn’t separate present reality from history that well,” Winnie had confessed to Joan once. “But I’ve seen muggers and attack dogs walk away from him because they couldn’t get him to take them seriously. It’s a special kind of strength.”
“I have to go back up,” she said now, inclining her head to kiss Jerry goodbye. Ayn Rand fidgeted uncomfortably in her Lamp; Joan realized that this sight—the mother of an acknowledged prodigy standing half a head taller than her husband—didn’t quite fit the Objectivist paradigm of heroic man and hero-worshipping woman. But soon enough Winnie had left the apartment, clapping Joan on the shoulder in passing, and Ayn sought to shore up her impression of the Gants with a compliment.
“I approve of your suspenders,” she said, editing the clothespin and note out of her appraisal. Jerry’s suspenders were bright red, overprinted with a pattern of gold dollar signs.
“Well thank you!” Jerry said. “Winnie got them for me on sale. I dropped twenty pounds on this old grapefruit diet out of the Post—controlled malnutrition, really—and buying these was less trouble than taking in all my trouser waists. I probably won’t keep the weight off, anyway.”
“As a historian,” Ayn Rand continued, “no doubt you are aware that the sign of the dollar was created by superimposing the initials of the United States. As such, I’ve always thought it the perfect symbol for the free trader, the man of vision. Men such as your son.”
“Harry’s a good boy,” Jerry agreed. “That story about the dollar sign’s creation, though, I’m afraid that’s not true.”
Ayn’s smile froze. “I beg your pardon?”
“Well, I’ve heard the initials theory before, of course, and I can see how it might be appealing to an avid Americophile. But that very element of appeal is grounds for suspicion. The rule of thumb in origins folklore is that the more romantic an explanation seems to be, the more likely it is to be wrong.”
“Are you suggesting that the dollar sign is not composed of the initials U.S.?”
“Not suggesting. I’ve read the Oxford monograph on the topic, and a more lighthearted essay in Harper’s. The word dollar is Bohemian in origin, of course, from Joachimsthaler, or ’thaler, a silver coin first minted in 1519 under the direction of the German Count of Schlick. The dollar sign, on the other hand, is almost certainly a consequence of Thomas Jefferson’s modeling of the U.S. dollar on the Spanish piece of eight, or peso, which was in common circulation in the American colonies at the time of the Revolution.”
“Peso!” Ayn burst out. “Peso!”
“Yes, peso. The symbol is probably shorthand for pesos: not a ‘U’ over an ‘S,’ but a hastily drawn P over an S. That, or simply a corruption of the number eight. By the way, did you know that Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the turkey the national bird instead of the eagle?”
“That is preposterous!”
“Oh no, it’s documented. Franklin—”
“Shorthand for pesos! Ridiculous! You can’t have proof of this.”
“Not absolute proof, no. It’s history, not calculus. But the preponderance of evidence—”
“’Preponderance of evidence!’” Ayn spat. “Statistics, you mean! That’s not proof! My explanation is inarguably more rational. You can’t say it isn’t!”
Jerry Gant frowned. “I believe I just did.”
“Time out, folks,” Joan suggested. She rang down the curtain on the debate by draping an embroidered linen napkin over the Electric Lamp globe. “What do you make of this, Jerry?”
“Hmm,” Jerry said, examining the napkin. “That’s from the 33 Club. Did Harry buy you a membership?”
Joan shook her head. “The 33 Club,” she said. “Is that in Atlantic City?”
“No. Anaheim, California. It’s in Disneyland.”
Exchanging glances with Kite, Joan asked: “Only in Disneyland, or is there another one in Paris Euro Disney?”
“No, there’s only one.” Jerry smiled. “Club 33 is a unique historical anomaly, my favorite kind.” He nodded at the puzzle box that Kite was carrying. “What else do you have to show me?”
A Bowl Full of Berf-oh Pee-stow
“So this Club 33 was originally intended as a private dining hall for Disney’s hon
ored guests?”
“Foreign dignitaries and the like,” Jerry confirmed. “Also scientists—Disney was in love with technology. In fact there’s even a legend, not true, that Disney had his corpse cryogenically frozen in hopes of being resurrected sometime in the future. In wilder versions of the myth the cryostorage facility is said to be hidden under the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, a few doors down from Club 33.”
“Not true?” said Joan.
“According to his death certificate, Disney was actually cremated,” Jerry told her. “His ashes are interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. A number of researchers in my field have gone there and checked.”
“Excuse me for asking this, Mr. Gant,” Kite Edmonds said, “but what exactly is your field? What branch of history do you teach?”
“High school social studies,” he said, putting audible quotes around the last two words. “Glorified geography. That’s behind me now, thank goodness—not that I didn’t love the kids, but the seven-to-four daily schedule, plus faculty meetings, was always much too structured and time consuming for my taste, even with summer vacations thrown in. I prefer a more flexible situation, like paid retirement. As for my field, my B.A. from New Jersey State was interdisciplinary: adoxographic American cultural history combined with investigative folklore anthropology.”
“Alligators in the Sewers 101,” Joan translated.
“There were alligators in the sewers,” Jerry Gant said. “There really were.”
“Believe me,” said Joan, “I know.”
Jerry slotted the Betamax videocassette and the eight-track tape into appropriate playback machines. His workroom was an elephant’s graveyard of outmoded audio-visual equipment, scavenged and restored tools of the investigative folklorist’s art. You never knew what crucial piece of trivia might be buried in the vinyl grooves of a 78 rpm record or coiled on the magnetic scytale of a reel-to-reel tape; and besides, it was fun to thread the little spools, to turn the hand-crank on the side of the Victrola and watch the tone arm dance to the music of the past.
