Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  The young man hesitated, then asked carefully, “How long is it, sir, since you were in Metro?”

  The shock of it returned and brought a buzzing to Wellfleet’s ears. He had gone into Metro shortly after it was destroyed. He had gone in with the impossible hope of finding his mother and Joanne. After a short time among the ruins he had lost his way and had vomited from the stench of the decomposing bodies. He had never gone near the place again.

  Gervais’s voice now became urgent. “It might make problems if I went out to see you, but you can certainly see me. There’s a transporter service into Metro and it passes the place where you’ve been located. You know that, I suppose?”

  “Somebody told me about it.”

  “You must come in to look at these papers. I told you I’m lost in them, but I’ve made a kind of catalogue. There are nearly a thousand personal letters. All kinds of photographs. Diaries and journals. And the narratives! I’ve never seen anything like them. Some by Timothy Wellfleet. Many by Dr. Dehmel – many diaries from him. Not much from your mother.” He paused. “There are a lot of items called tapes. Would you know what they are?”

  “Yes. I won’t try to explain it to you, but I even have two machines and possibly those tapes would fit them.”

  “I think they were planning a book,” Gervais said, “but I’m very confused. Much of the language I don’t understand very well, and some is in a language I don’t even recognize. Timothy seems to have been the one who was to put the book together. He writes in a wild kind of way and I can’t understand much of it.”

  “From what I’ve heard of him I’m not surprised you can’t understand him. I never knew him personally. But Conrad Dehmel! He married my mother when my sister and I were seven years old. We were twins. I called him Uncle Conrad. He was what was called an historian. He was even an archaeologist for a time.”

  “A what?”

  “They used to dig up lost cities. Something like you seem to be doing now. He spent a long time studying the records of one of them. I can’t remember the name of the place but it was in the Sahara Desert somewhere.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “I was only a schoolboy when Uncle Conrad died and I can’t answer that question. I suppose there was another time when the cities broke down and the people abandoned them. There might have been a war. There were always wars. Uncle Conrad spoke and wrote in five different languages. All I know about his earlier life is that it was a miracle he was not liquidated in one of our own wars. He knew a lot. He knew an enormous lot.”

  “Were there many people like him when you were young?”

  “In Europe there were quite a few.”

  “But if there were men with all that knowledge, why couldn’t they stop what happened?”

  Wellfleet gave a rueful laugh. “I used to hear Uncle Conrad say those very words himself. He belonged to something called the Club of Rome. The members were afraid of what was coming and made plans to avert it, but it made no difference at all. When everyone’s having a ball, who wants to stop the music?”

  He knew that Gervais did not understand him but he made no attempt to explain further. It would do no good if he tried. Then Gervais mentioned still another name.

  “There’s a girl here. Her name is Esther Stahr. Did you know her?”

  “I never heard of her.”

  “She was one of Timothy’s girls and she seems to have been his partner for a time in something I can’t understand. There’s a lot of record about their conversations. She says several times that in those days the real power was hidden. What does that mean – conspiracies in the Bureaucracy?”

  Wellfleet broke into a laugh that sounded to Gervais slightly insane.

  “It’s not your fault, but I can’t possibly make you understand what it used to be like in the world. I know the Diagram told you that it was about this time that we cracked up. I can’t deny there’s some real truth in that. But let me tell you there never was a time in the history of the Galaxy – I don’t suppose you even know what that word means – never such a time as when I was young. It was marvellously exciting. Anything could happen. You name it – anything. It was a golden age. The golden age of the Common Man. Nothing like it had ever happened before and nothing like it will ever happen again.”

  He stopped and after a pause he heard Gervais ask quietly, “But if this was a golden age, why did it destroy itself?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! Anyway this Esther Stahr, whoever she was, what she said was right. The bureaucracies – we called them governments – it wasn’t them that mattered. It was the geniuses. Vehicles out in space with equipment so sophisticated they could photograph gophers sitting in front of their holes. Anything was possible. The efficiency was unbelievable. Of course, there were a few accidents. That spaceship that got away from them – yes, that spaceship. But of course you know about that.”

  “Spaceship? What do you mean – spaceship?”

  “Are you telling me you don’t know about that?”

  “I never heard that word.”

  “That God-damned Third Bureaucracy! Yes, that’s right. Now I remember. It was one of their forbidden words. Do you know what space is?”

  “Mr. Wellfleet, of course I know what space is.”

  “Okay, but this spaceship. It aborted. It got clean out of control. Afterwards, their computers – you don’t know what they were but never mind – they buzzed like beehives and still the boys couldn’t find out what went wrong. Then they gave up and issued that communiqué, and brother, was it ever beautiful! I remember it word for word. Listen and I’ll tell you. ‘Exhaustive check-outs on every detail of Mission U.E. 31 – that meant Universe Explorer No. 31 – confirm abort self-inducted. It is therefore assumed that an unknown factor was operative in this abort.’ Then they handed out the usual crap about sympathy for the families and about not letting this balls-up interfere with the continuation of the space program. And now you tell me you never even heard the name of it!”

  Gervais had not been able to understand more than half of the old man’s vocabulary. Wellfleet went on.

  “This mission was special because there were two girls aboard. Two guys and two girls. Women were getting into everything then and they organized a big protest against the space program. Why should men get the high of being shot out there and no women? It wasn’t fair, they said. By this time the organizers were getting worried because everyone was getting bored by the space trips, so they said okay, this one will be different. The idea took on. Nobody said it officially, but maybe they’d be having sex out there in space and would it be possible when they were weightless? We were all agog and then it aborted.” Wellfleet paused. “You know, that thing about the unknown factor bugs me to this day. Those girls and boys still out there wandering through the light years on account of that unknown factor. Of course, they may have sailed into the sun and been burned to death.”

  There was a long silence until Gervais said, “Is this really true?”

  “I told you, didn’t I?”

  “But are you sure it happened just as you said?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” The old voice became querulous. “You came to me, I didn’t come to you. I’ve been badly treated. Everyone my age has been shucked off into nowhere. Well, let me tell you there are still a few of us left and we’ve seen things you can’t even imagine. And let me tell you something else. We were young too, once.”

  In another silence Gervais heard the old man breathing noisily. Then he said shyly, “My friends call me André.”

  Startled, Wellfleet asked if he rated as one of his friends.

  “If you’ll permit me.”

  The old man almost choked up. “If I’ll permit you! Thank you, André. Thank you very much for that. It almost makes me feel human again.”

  “And now,” Gervais said, “when will you be coming into Metro to take over these papers?”

  Wellfleet hesitated. “I don’t know.”

  “Is
your health not good enough?”

  “I’m not sure I want to see those papers.”

  “But why not? I can’t understand you.”

  “André, it was such a long time ago. There is something you’ll never understand till you’re as old as I am. Everyone I ever knew and cared about was destroyed. After that came the years of virtual slavery teaching lies in the Diagram in order to eat. Then they declared me inoperative and put me out into this compound. I suppose I should be grateful for that, but I’m not.”

  There was a silence. Then Gervais’s voice became almost commanding: “I’m asking you to come back to life again. I want you to make a book out of this. Thousands will read it and you’ll be alive again.”

  “Did you say a book!”

  “I said a book. Even under the Diagram there were printing presses. Now they can be used for something real. They can be used for the truth.”

  “It’s too late.”

  The young man’s voice became even more commanding. “You can’t do this to yourself, Mr. Wellfleet. It will be awful if you back out.”

  The old man sighed, then he gave an incredulous laugh. “I thought everyone real was dead, and then you appear! For years I’ve tried to forget I was ever inside Metro.” He laughed again. “It’s marvellous to hear a young man’s voice again after all these years. Okay, André why not? When do you want me?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be here waiting for you. I want you here because we have a mock-up of the nucleus of a new city and I want you to see it. So tomorrow it is?”

  “If I don’t go in tomorrow I probably never will. Is it true that Metro’s all overgrown now?”

  “A lot of it is, but some large fragments of the ruins are jutting up all over the place. There’s been a lot of excavating and levelling in the old center – that’s where I’m located. I should warn you that it isn’t pretty. But in time it will be cleaned up.”

  Gervais explained in detail how he could be found in Metro, and it was with a feeling of not knowing where or when he was that the old man heard the names of the very streets that had been his haunts when he was young. The streets were no longer thoroughfares but their names had remained. He knew there was nothing new in this. Place names had always been the most permanent things in the short little human story.

  THREE

  After deactivating the instrument, Wellfleet went outside and sat on the chair near the lilac. Yesterday he had been low and used up as though his soul had arthritis, but now beauty was returning to him in waves. Those he had loved in his youth had not vanished after all. Somebody else knew they had existed. Perhaps in time many would know, for André had asked him to write their story.

  The lilac candles nodded in a stir of wind. These ones were white, full-bodied, and of a fine original rootstock. He remembered some lines his mother had repeated to him one evening in spring when he was a child and couldn’t sleep:

  When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

  And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

  I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring …

  But he was not mourning now, he was feeling almost joyous. He smiled to himself as he remembered those experts who had predicted that a time would soon come when there would be no more animals or birds or lilac trees. As usual, they had been wrong. A later generation of experts explained their survival by proving that they had developed better adaptation techniques. A farmer he had known had put it more simply: “The buggers have learned to hide so well it takes you half a day to find them.”

  He fell into a reverie. He remembered passages of poetry and surges of music and he was thankful that the period was over when he could not bear to listen to the symphonies in his record collection because they so terribly increased his sense of loss for the great coherent time in which they were born. Even before the Destructions he had felt like this. Finally his thoughts returned to André Gervais, who had been born so many years after the Great Fear; many years even after the Destructions.

  Nobody of André’s age could imagine what the Great Fear had been like. There had been a few others in the pre-scientific past which psychologists said were caused by sexual hallucinations, but none of them were as uncanny as this one. During it he had even tried to deny its presence, but he had known, like everyone else, that suddenly everything had become unreal. So what could he say to André if the young man asked him to explain the Great Fear? André was sure to ask him some time because this was one of the folk legends the people were conscious of today. Tell him that the planners had planned the people into paralysis? Tell him that every problem the Bureaucracy tried to solve only produced four or five worse ones? Tell him that the metros went out of control? André had seen photographs of those colossal cities, but he could have no idea of what they had really been like. Or simply tell him that the Smiling Bureaucracy reached the end of its rope and was replaced by the Second Bureaucracy which was probably insane?

  The mists had lifted and as the sun heated the air he remembered the line about the earth abiding forever. He burst into a gale of laughter as he recalled a famous scientist explaining that it had not abided forever; that it was, as earth, only about eight billion years old, give or take a few billion either way. This was something he would not bother telling André.

  A delicious languor spread through him as he watched the parent robins flying in and out of the lilac where their little ones were waiting in the nest for the worms. He rose, stretched, and went inside, and after a light lunch of a composite he lay down to doze. The emotions of the morning had left him happy but fatigued.

  Fully dressed he lay on his cot and closed his eyes, and while he was still half asleep and half awake Joanne returned to him again. It was the night they had met in the empty house they had found. He was not promiscuous then, for she was his only woman. Her hips were moving slowly, lovingly, sinuously, with the twilight soft on her head as he lay on his back watching and loving her intense little face and her shoulders the color of mother-of-pearl, and then the peace came and she was curled up beside him as they both fell asleep.

  How long he slept he did not know because his watch had stopped, but the position of the sun told him it was late afternoon. Again he went outside and sat in his chair and watched the robins at work in their last shift of the day.

  After he had made and eaten his supper he went outside again and watched the sun go down. Twilight darkened away from the corona of burnt-orange in the west, and when finally it was dark the perfume of the lilacs was stronger than ever. The atmosphere was so clear he could imagine himself able to recognize the spaces between the constellations. The stars owned the sky completely, for the moon, still carrying its quota of plastic national flags, was on the other side of the earth in its intimate hideousness and distant beauty.

  He thought how pleasant it would be if André and his friends, and their successors and the successors of their successors, actually did manage to create a new city on the ruins of the old one. He could not believe they would, but it was pleasant to think about it. One thing at least was sure: it would be several generations before they could put together the technical equipment to turn it into a metro.

  In his childhood in the pre-Metro city the evening star had shone like a pharos over the gap where the great street curved up through the pass in the mountain that was the city’s heart. Year after year that star had welcomed the breadwinners home from their daily work. It had been one of the many friendly things that had made his city the most beloved on the continent to those who knew it. They never understood what the star had meant to them until a developer blotted it out with another huge oblong of concrete and glass. Not long afterwards the local bureaucracy renamed the historic old place Metro.

  FOUR

  Next morning he waited at the embarkation point for the LIMT – they still called it that, the Linear Induction Motor Transporter. Its princip
les had been discovered when he was a schoolboy but nobody had done anything about it so long as they still had enough oil.

  When the transporter arrived he climbed aboard and noticed that it was cleaner than it had been the last time he had used it. That was seven years ago when he had travelled thirty kilometers east to visit an acquaintance in another compound. He had been allowed three vouchers a year for the transporter but had used hardly any of them. He looked out the window at farmland that seemed more prosperous than the last time he had seen it. They stopped in a number of villages and he saw some horses and wagons on their streets. The transporter continued westward toward the ruins of Metro. In the outer grid, the section originally named the South Shore Development Zone, some buildings seemed at least half intact, but they looked tired and ill-used and reminded him of the faces of men who had spent years in prison. The broken shell of a high oblong building stood alone, but closer to the river the concrete was visible only as a kind of outcropping.

  Across the river, nearly five kilometers distant, was a wide tumble of grassy mounds with many fragments of buildings jutting out of it and the contours looking like mountain foothills. The invincible grass, the all-concealing and all-healing grass, had mantled the wreckage of Metro, had made it look soft and green and shadowed in the hollow places. One bridge only was intact and the transporter swept silently across it. The river was violet-colored and shivered in patches of wind. The transporter followed the old curving route into the heart of what once was the Old City. There were thousands of birds. Red-winged blackbirds balanced on shrubs and long stalks of coarse grass, in the softer grass robins hunted for worms, and many seagulls were white against the green of the mounds. He had been told that fish had returned to the river after nearly a century.

  The transporter passed through this eerie beauty and entered a hideous area of about four square kilometers. Most of it was bare and acrid-looking and reminded him of the parking lots of his boyhood. He noticed deep, raw cavities and recognized them as the foundation holes dug by the developers who had destroyed the Old City and built a metro on top of it. On the edge of one of these he saw a dusty pile of debris and realized it was composed of human bones and broken skeletons. It might have been on the edge of this very hole that young Gervais had found the boxes with those papers he was so excited about.