New Atlantis

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  When he had to get up to go to the bathroom he moved like a ninety-year-old. He couldn’t stand straight, but was all bent out of shape, and shuffled. I helped him put on clean clothes. When he lay down on the bed again, a sound of pain came out of him, like tearing thick paper. I went around the room putting things away. He asked me to come sit by him and said I was going to drown him if I went on crying. “You’ll submerge the entire North American continent,” he said. I can’t remember what he said, but he made me laugh finally. It is hard to remember things Simon says, and hard not to laugh when he says them. This is not merely the partiality of affection. He makes everybody laugh. I doubt that he intends to. It is just that a mathematician’s mind works differently from other people’s. Then when they laugh, that pleases him.

  It was strange, and it is strange, to be thinking about “him,” the man I have known for ten years, the same man, while “he” lay there changed out of recognition, a different man. It is enough to make you understand why most languages have a word like “soul.” There are various degrees of death, and time spares us none of them. Yet something endures, for which a word is needed.

  I said what I had not been able to say for a year and a half: “I was afraid they’d brainwash you.”

  He said, “Behavior mod is expensive. Even just the drugs. They save it mostly for the VIPs. But I’m afraid they got a notion I might be important after all. I got questioned a lot the last couple of months. About my ‘foreign contacts.’” He snorted. “The stuff that got published abroad, I suppose. So I want to be careful and make sure it’s just a Camp again next time, and not a Federal Hospital.”

  “Simon, were they . . . are they cruel, or just righteous?”

  He did not answer for a while. He did not want to answer. He knew what I was asking. He knew by what thread hangs hope, the sword, above our heads.

  “Some of them . . .” he said at last, mumbling.

  Some of them had been cruel. Some of them had enjoyed their work. You cannot blame everything on society.

  “Prisoners, as well as guards,” he said.

  You cannot blame everything on the enemy.

  “Some of them, Belle,” he said with energy, touching my hand — “some of them, there were men like gold there — ”

  The thread is tough; you cannot cut it with one stroke.

  “What have you been playing?” he asked.

  “Forrest, Schubert.”

  “With the quartet?”

  “Trio, now. Janet went to Oakland with a new lover.”

  “Ah, poor Max.”

  “It’s just as well, really. She isn’t a good pianist.”

  I make Simon laugh, too, though I don’t intend to. We talked until it was past time for me to go to work. My shift since the Full Employment Act last year is ten to two. I am an inspector in a recycled paper bag factory. I have never rejected a bag yet; the electronic inspector catches all the defective ones first. It is a rather depressing job. But it’s only four hours a day, and it takes more time than that to go through all the lines and physical and mental examinations, and fill out all the forms, and talk to all the welfare counselors and inspectors every week in order to qualify as Unemployed, and then line up every day for the ration stamps and the dole. Simon thought I ought to go to work as usual. I tried to, but I couldn’t. He had felt very hot to the touch when I kissed him good-bye. I went instead and got a black-market doctor. A girl at the factory had recommended her, for an abortion, if I ever wanted one without going through the regulation two years of sex-depressant drugs the fed-meds make you take when they give you an abortion. She was a jeweler’s assistant in a shop on Alder Street, and the girl said she was convenient because if you didn’t have enough cash you could leave something in pawn at the jeweler’s as payment. Nobody ever does have enough cash, and of course credit cards aren’t worth much on the black market.

  The doctor was willing to come at once, so we rode home on the bus together. She gathered very soon that Simon and I were married, and it was funny to see her look at us and smile like a cat. Some people love illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It’s men who make laws, and enforce them, and break them, and think the whole performance is wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore them. You could see that this woman, like a man, actually enjoyed breaking them. That may have been what put her into an illegal business in the first place, a preference for the shady side. But there was more to it than that. No doubt she’d wanted to be a doctor, too; and the Federal Medical Association doesn’t admit women into the medical schools. She probably got her training as some other doctor’s private pupil, under the counter. Very much as Simon learned mathematics, since the universities don’t teach much but Business Administration and Advertising and Media Skills any more. However she learned it, she seemed to know her stuff. She fixed up a kind of homemade traction device for Simon very handily and informed him that if he did much more walking for two months he’d be crippled the rest of his life, but if he behaved himself he’d just be more or less lame. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d expect to be grateful for being told, but we both were. Leaving, she gave me a bottle of about two hundred plain white pills, unlabeled. “Aspirin,” she said. “He’ll be in a good deal of pain off and on for weeks.”

  I looked at the bottle. I had never seen aspirin before, only the Super-Buffered Pane-Gon and the Triple-Power N-L-G-Zic and the Extra-Strength Apansprin with the miracle ingredient more doctors recommend, which the fed-meds always give you prescriptions for, to be filled at your FMA-approved private enterprise friendly drugstore at the low, low prices established by the Pure Food and Drug Administration in order to inspire competitive research.

  “Aspirin,” the doctor repeated. “The miracle ingredient more doctors recommend.” She cat-grinned again. I think she liked us because we were living in sin. That bottle of black-market aspirin was probably worth more than the old Navajo bracelet I pawned for her fee.

  I went out again to register Simon as temporarily domiciled at my address and to apply for Temporary Unemployment Compensation ration stamps for him. They, only give them to you for two weeks and you have to come every day; but to register him as Temporarily Disabled meant getting the signatures of two fed-meds, and I thought I’d rather put that off for a while. It took three hours to go through the lines and get the forms he would have to fill out, and to answer the ’crats’ questions about why he wasn’t there in person. They smelled something fishy. Of course it’s hard for them to prove that two people are married and aren’t just adultering if you move now and then and your friends help out by sometimes registering one of you as living at their address; but they had all the back files on both of us and it was obvious that we had been around each other for a suspiciously long time. The State really does make things awfully hard for itself. It must have been simpler to enforce the laws back when marriage was legal and adultery was what got you into trouble. They only had to catch you once. But I’ll bet people broke the law just as often then as they do now.

  ~

  The lantern-creatures came close enough at last that we could see not only their light, but their bodies in the illumination of their light. They were not pretty. They were dark colored, most often a dark red, and they were all mouth. They ate one another whole. Light swallowed light all together in the vaster mouth of the darkness. They moved slowly, for nothing, however small and hungry, could move fast under that weight, in that cold. Their eyes, round with fear, were never closed. Their bodies were tiny and bony behind the gaping jaws. They wore queer, ugly decorations on their lips and skulls: fringes, serrated wattles, featherlike fronds, gauds, bangles, lures. Poor little sheep of the deep pastures! Poor ragged, hunch-jawed dwarfs squeezed to the bone by the weight of the darkness, chilled to the bone by the cold of the darkness, tiny monsters burning with bright hunger, who brought us back to life!

  Occasionally, in the wan, sparse illumination of one of the lantern-creatures, we caught a momentary gli
mpse 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 o
f 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.