In the heart of this empty area the transporter stopped and he and seven other men got out. These others were all young.
Wellfleet stood still, looked around, and felt weird. Metal standards had been erected with the names of the excavated streets, and just as André had told him, they were the same names the streets had borne when he was young. For a moment he felt faint and had to lean against the nearest standard.
It had once been such a wonderful city, even though it had been made ugly many years before the Destructions came. He was standing in front of what once had been the campus of the university. Even during his time as a student the towers of glass and concrete had been built up around it, yet he had been happy there. He remembered walking slowly down the university avenue from a late lecture talking about Plato with his professor. He remembered lying on the grass with friends on warm autumn days. Then it came over him that it was on this very spot that he had first met Joanne. Now it was buried in rubble, for when the Destructions came the glass and concrete of the high buildings had been blasted in all directions.
“I must stop remembering,” he whispered. “I didn’t come here to remember.”
He steadied himself and walked slowly to the address André had given him and finally emerged from the ruins into a cleared area near the river. There he counted twenty-one new buildings set around a square with infant trees growing in front of them. In one of these buildings he found his new friend.
André Gervais was a strongly built, vivacious man, short-haired and clean-shaven, with a pale olive complexion. He was about seven centimeters shorter than Wellfleet and seemed very young. What Gervais saw was a gray-bearded man stooped in the shoulders and gaunt, with loose gray hair receding from a high, rectangular forehead with a prominent vein on the left side. The nose was also long and there was a slight twist in it, as though it once had been broken. The eyes were gray, resigned and watchful and to Gervais unfathomable. He felt awe at what those eyes must have seen, but he also thought that if this pathetic survivor had anyone who cared for him, or for whom he himself might care, he would look distinguished. He held out both his hands and the old man took them gratefully.
FIVE
John Wellfleet was experiencing a sensation he had seldom known in the past forty years; it was happiness. Gervais had introduced him to a few of his colleagues, had showed him the two heavy cast-iron boxes with the name and the dates cut into their flanks, and had left him alone with them while he went off to work in another room.
He had also left him alone with the mock-up of the nucleus of the new city and Wellfleet had been studying it. The influence of the books they had found on Renaissance architecture was obvious, yet there was a real difference. These buildings, if they were ever made, would give out a suggestion of surprise, of delight, even of wings in the air. And he thought – it could be possible! Yes, it could. One of them might be a genius. Having been papfed on lies and bureaucracy, having rejected both, perhaps their native wits were free. Free as no native wits had been for more than a century in his own time, for all of his own contemporaries had had to labor under such a monstrous weight of information and theories that an elephant the size of Mount Everest would not have been able to digest it all.
Looking out the window he was surprised to see some ships at a few docks near by. He had heard in a vague way that trade was reviving farther down the river where the communities had been too small to have been worth destroying. Gervais came in and his face was expectant.
“This could be wonderful,” Wellfleet said, pointing to the mockup.
Gervais smiled. “It is wonderful. A wonderful man imagined it. But I don’t think you believe it will ever be real.”
Wellfleet hesitated. “Pay no attention to anything I say. I’ve seen everything I valued ruined. I’m not a good witness. However –” he hesitated again, then said, “cities aren’t planned, you know. They grow.”
“On a site like this a city is sure to grow. Were you ever in Florence?”
“I thought you’d ask me that. The Florence I saw was a museum.”
“But this I can’t understand. If your people had examples like Florence, why did they build those metros?”
Wellfleet smiled. “My dear André, they just grew. Nobody planned them. They were the places where the power was, and for most of us life in them was marvellously exciting. The old people never had much of a chance, but who cared about them?”
The young man had not been listening to him. His fine-drawn face was rapt as he talked of his dream.
“What we’re going to do isn’t new. We’ve read about it. We don’t have to live in these ruins all our lives. A city is born. If it’s a beautiful city it grows. Men with wonderful ideas come to it and live there. They meet each other and exchange ideas and the city itself becomes a kind of genius. This could never happen in a metro.”
Wellfleet said nothing; did not even permit his face a flicker of expression. Obviously the young man had found some books about ancient Athens and Florence. He did not tell him that the Athens he himself had known had a population seven times larger than the Athens of Pericles and that the traffic jams in Florence had been deafening. He heard Gervais asking if the metros had choked themselves to death, and if that was why they had died. The conversation frustrated him and he shook his head.
“Look, André, they might well have choked themselves to death, but they were blown to pieces before they got around to it. What difference does it make? There’s never been anything immortal in a city. Some great ones withered away and were forgotten. Many were destroyed by wars. There were always wars. I saw a city that was destroyed by trees. Once it had been a city of a million people, but when I saw it the only inhabitants were rats and the cobras that crawled into the ruins to eat them. I don’t know why the people abandoned it. Maybe a war. Maybe a pestilence. I don’t know. But the trees grew up and rived that city apart. I saw it with a lovely girl of the region. Dark eyes and skin the color of old ivory. She was so supple. Even her bones were pliant. A few years later the bomber planes came and after them came the politicians. I’m sure she never survived, but I’d hate to think she was burned alive by napalm. When Florence was the most cultivated city in Europe they used to burn people alive to support the religion, and they did it individually and with great ceremony. In my time the burning was completely technocratic. The bomb-aimers never saw the people they burned to death. However, let’s change the subject. Tell me – is the Bureaucracy working with you people in this?”
He listened with some scepticism while André explained that the whole character of the Bureaucracy had changed now that people of his own generation had become a part of it. Wellfleet did not mention that so far as his own generation was concerned, the Bureaucracy was behaving the same as ever. Why not? When he had been André’s age, the young had never given a thought to the old people. While André continued to talk he was looking out the window to the river.
There it still was, that wonderful stream born in the lake-chain flowing at high water down its channel to the distant sea. Pure and wind-flecked it poured through the green mounds and the outcroppings of mangled steel and concrete. He knew, as he was sure André did not, that this was the youngest of the world’s great rivers, yet was much older than the earliest city ever built. In the long story of the earth, it too would probably be mortal.
Gervais stopped talking and Wellfleet said quietly, “I can’t believe it was all useless.”
“I don’t think I follow you.”
“All the human energy expended here. All the human love. It was delightful to watch the children on their little skis on the mountain. Tell me, André – are you married?”
“For two years.”
“Any children?”
A shy smile. “The first one is on its way. What of your own children?”
“I don’t know.”
Gervais looked puzzled, and Wellfleet’s eyes were steady on his.
“I mean, I don’t know whe
ther they’re alive or dead. I had two children, and then they went off with their mother when she left me for another man. Don’t look so surprised. That happened pretty often in those days. It was almost routine. I may even have had one more child, but I’m not sure.”
Wellfleet swayed slightly in his chair and Gervais looked at him anxiously and asked if he was all right.
“It’s nothing. It will pass in a moment. I’m not used to luxury any more. For so long a time, emotions have been a luxury I couldn’t afford.”
Gervais got to his feet. “You’re probably hungry and it’s lunchtime. I’ve got a treat for you, I think.”
“Yes, lunch would be fine. I’m not hungry – but yes, it would be excellent.”
“This time I can promise it will be. One of my friends caught a salmon last night.”
“Where did he find the salmon?”
“Out there, of course.” He pointed to the river. “Didn’t you know there are thousands of salmon in the river now?”
“Good God!” Wellfleet also got to his feet. “When I was your age that river was an open sewer mixed up with every kind of chemical waste you could imagine. If the Destructions brought salmon back to the rivers, maybe they were worth while after all. I haven’t tasted salmon for fifty years.”
When he joined the others at the table he was ravenous. It had been nearly twenty years since he had tasted any food that had not been processed.
Afterwards Gervais filled a small case with papers from the heavy iron boxes.
“You may as well take these back with you today,” he said. “They’ll do for a start. The boxes would be far too heavy for you to carry and I wouldn’t dare trust them to the public service from Metro to Outside. But don’t worry about them. Two of our people are going out in your direction the day after tomorrow and they’ll deliver the whole lot to you.”
Gervais walked with him to the transporter embarkation point and waved to him after he had got aboard. The transporter moved off and when it was across the river the old man closed his eyes. He could hardly believe what had happened to him today. He had broken a routine as deadening as a prison term and he was at once elated and tired out. “Am I really back in the world again? Am I really?” And a little later he thought, “Are people really becoming kind again?” He was afraid to fall asleep least he sleep on past his compound.
SIX
Two weeks later his four peony bushes were in bloom and it was pleasant to have still another witness that the invisible time-clocks in the plants and migratory birds had paid no attention to what mankind had been doing to itself. He went into Metro again and this time he discovered something priceless, that he was at least a quarter as valuable to André as André had become to him. After his own children had left, the need of young people had grown in him so that the lack of them had become an ache. Now he was experiencing an intoxicating emotion: the pleasure of an old man when he discovers that a young man wishes to learn from him.
“I want to know where the truth is,” André had said in their first conversation, and how could he answer such a question? Could any important truth come out of these papers he had been given?
“There’s an enormous quantity of material in those boxes,” he said. “I’m not one-tenth through reading it. Yes, they’re genuine. There’s no possible doubt of that. Your lists were a help, but the whole package is in confusion. It’s all got to be sifted and pieced together and some of it is as distant from me as the last pages are from you. There’s also the problem of language. Conrad Dehmel has left a long section written in German. I used to speak German fairly well, but I’ve forgotten so much I’ll have to relearn it. Fortunately I’ve got a dictionary.”
“So you think it will take a long time?”
“Two years at least. Perhaps longer. And that’s another problem. I’m not young any more. But the worst thing is that I can’t believe that anyone alive today will be interested in these people. After hundreds of millions have vanished, why should they be?”
“No, John, you’re wrong. Absolutely wrong. Can’t you understand what it means that you’re the only person I ever met who was alive in those days?”
It was another fine day, the sun was bright on the river and huge white clouds were floating slowly out of the west.
“Yes, I was certainly alive then,” Wellfleet said quietly, “but I was too young to be involved in anything these characters were doing. When Timothy was famous I was barely fourteen. By the time I reached college the mood had changed and Timothy was forgotten. Don’t get any romantic ideas about me, André. I wasn’t a very good example of my generation. Most of the others deserved a better chance, but I’m not sure I deserved anything better than what I got. For a time I was hooked on hash – that was a drug we smoked. I had no ambition and I used to wander around the world. Once in London I met this Welsh girl. Her father had been a miner, but she had education and she sang like an angel. The only job she wanted was to teach small children. Her name was Valerie.” He paused, thinking back. “After we’d lived together for a week she said, ‘Let’s go to India’ – just like that. We hadn’t anything you could call money but we didn’t care. We’d be going to warm climates and we’d sleep in bedrolls on the ground if there were no youth hostels. Maybe we’d be able to get a few short-term jobs. We didn’t, of course, but we did get to India. Valerie was so frank and open about everything. ‘You won’t mind if I love other boys besides you?’ she said. ‘And of course you must love other girls besides me.’ Is it like that now?”
Gervais looked at him almost with pity. “No,” he said.
“She was so graceful, André. She was really a joyous girl who lived for every moment. Waking up with her in the mornings was always exciting. Once in the foothills of the mountains I woke up and she wasn’t there and I nearly went crazy. I ran around in all directions calling her name and all I heard was my own voice echoed back from the cliffs. Finally I heard her call me and guess where I found her. There was a stream pouring down from a bowl in the rocks where the water was white with foam and there was Valerie stark naked in the pool. This was the highest mountain range in the world. The water came down from the high glaciers to the foothills where the climate was tropical. Pure cold water and blazing sunshine. Is this boring you?”
André just looked at him.
“This was a lyric,” the old man went on. “She had golden hair and blue eyes and I’ll never forget how she laughed. But the strange thing was that I never really knew her. When we returned to Europe she said goodbye to me and I found out she could be quite hard. I’d never suspected that. She told me to think of it as a lovely holiday but now it was over and she was going to marry someone else. He was an older man with a lot of money. I was devastated, but I knew I had no right to complain.”
“Was she the mother of one of your children?”
“No. And she never wrote to me again. I decided to come home and got a job as a teacher in what we called a high school. Then I married a woman I never should have married.” He shrugged. “I already told you about that.”
There was a long silence and finally Wellfleet nodded towards the pages on which he had assembled a tentative work plan.
“This material seems awfully patchy to me. I’m not sure I can find any real pattern in it. But that’s not the main problem. The real problem is to make anyone believe there ever was a world like these people lived in. Sometimes I find it hard to believe it myself.”
He got up and cupped his chin in his hand, feeling the bristle of his beard in his palm.
“The problem is where to begin,” he said.
“Why not at the beginning?”
“But where is the beginning in all this stuff? Conrad Dehmel when he was a boy? That was in another country in a time I knew very little about when I was young. I know much more about it now because I was Outside when the Destructions came and I had a great many books. One priceless one – we called it an encyclopedia.” He looked at André steadily. “I’m still
confused about these papers. I don’t know for sure whether there’s a story in them or not, though I think there is. Voices in time, that’s what they are, and who cares about any of them now?”
“You care about them yourself, don’t you?”
Wellfleet sighed. “I’m beginning to care very much, but in a way you may not be able to understand. They’ve made me ask so many questions I should have asked when I was young. Questions about myself. I’m involved in this too, and it troubles me.”
“Do it, John, and you won’t feel alone any more.”
“I may feel even more so.” He rose to his feet. “There’s another problem and it’s serious. If I write this I’ll have to write it for myself. This will mean there’ll be all kinds of things I’ll talk about that nobody today can understand. It’s going to require a glossary, and you’ll have to help me with that. When it’s finished – if it ever is – you must read it and note down every item that needs explaining.”
“That sounds easy enough.”
“Wait and see. I don’t think you’ll find it so.” He paused. “There’s one thing more. Those tapes I explained to you. Most of them are what we called audiotapes and by good luck they fit my old machine. But several are videotapes.” He explained to Gervais what they were. “From the date on one of them I think it’s of vital importance. They’ll be useless unless I can have the use of a projector. I’ll describe it to you and if you make enquiries you may find one somewhere. I took courses in what we called Communications and if one turns up, I’ll be able to use it.”
Voices in Time Page 6
