The Lost Cities

by Dale Peck

  She stepped abruptly on the platform, which was soft and slightly springy beneath her feet, as though it were carpeted. In fact it was carpeted, but it was more than that.

  It was Charles’s carpet.

  A shiver ran up and down Susan’s spine. But just as quickly there was a reassuring feeling, and Susan knew Charles was okay.

  She turned around, looked deep into the endless, dizzying network of tubes. Far in the distance, she could discern a wavering disc of light, as if a search beam were moving somewhere in the depths of the horse’s body. Susan started to move toward it, and was almost immediately stopped by the distinct feeling that she was forgetting something.

  “You want me to take the carpet?”

  Susan wasn’t sure what the mental equivalent of “duh” was, but that’s what she felt.

  She thought of riding on the carpet, but Charles had never volunteered the information about how it worked, and she had been too proud to ask. Instead she rolled the carpet into a tube and picked up one end experimentally, to see how heavy it was. To her surprise, the entire roll levitated off the ground. She had only to catch hold of a bit of a fringe and draw it along with her like a very tame dog.

  She turned back toward the light, then stopped short. In the time it had taken her to roll up the carpet, the horse had changed dramatically. In place of the endless network of tubes, a long walled galley had appeared. It was narrow, no more than ten or fifteen feet wide, and a single aisle ran down the center between a set of crude wooden benches that lined either side. Susan had seen drawings of the rowing quarters of the ships the Greeks used in the Trojan War, and she was pretty sure that’s what she was looking at, albeit greatly extended—the galley seemed to be hundreds of feet long. As she led the carpet down the aisle, she could almost hear the whine of oars in oarlocks and the groans of slaves leaning into the heavy work of pulling their boat through the waves. Indeed, she could almost feel the boat rocking beneath her feet, although she thought that might be the horse itself, lumbering who knew where across the Island of the Past.

  Suddenly something flashed in the corner of her eye. Susan turned, but it was gone already. Gone, but not gone. Flickering shapes seemed to surround Susan, but every time she turned to look at them they melted away. It was as if a second space seemed to coexist with the rowing quarters. This space was also long and narrow, with a center aisle and seats on either side. No matter how hard she tried, Susan couldn’t make out anything directly. This second space was brighter than the galley—much brighter. Clear cold light streamed in from windows that ran the length of the space.

  That was it! It was an airplane!

  And, just like that, the cabin shimmered into view. The wooden benches of the rowing galley were still visible beneath it, barely, and there was yet another layer on top of it as well. And this layer contained—people. Susan kept whipping her head around, kept seeing them, then having them wink out of sight. But in the fraction of an instant that she could see each face, she could make out expressions of what she at first thought was wonder, but then realized was actually fear. A terror so abject it seemed like a revelation. It seemed to Susan that the faces turned away from hers as she glimpsed them, as if she were what they feared. She wanted to turn from them too, but even when she closed her eyes and clutched Charles’s flying carpet for security she could still see them, still feel their horror and helplessness. And then another feeling came on top of that one.

  Be calm. You are safe here.

  Susan opened her eyes reluctantly. She stared at the floor to avoid the flickering shapes on either side of her.

  “I don’t feel safe.”

  It seemed to Susan that the horse actually whispered her name.

  Susan.

  Susan sniffled slightly, near tears. “Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes it’s not enough to be safe. There are things you don’t want to feel. Things you don’t want to know about.”

  She felt the oddest sensation then: pride. Satisfaction, as well.

  She let herself look up then. However strangely it had come into being, the cabin seemed to be of normal size, and up ahead she could make out the back of a man’s head sitting near the front of the plane. For a moment she let herself hope that it was Pierre Marin—Charles had said the Trojan Horse straddled his house, after all. But even without the negative feeling that came in response to this thought, Susan would have known it wasn’t him. Drift House’s founder was way too short to be seen over the back of an airplane seat.

  Whoever the man was, he didn’t wink out when her eyes lit on him, but remained where he was, a solid form, unwavering. All she could see was the back of his head, but she took great comfort in it for some reason. She could see now that his hair was grayer than Pierre Marin’s, and instead of being pulled back in a ponytail was instead divided into two strands that hung on either side of his face. His being exuded a feeling of calmness and expectation. Waiting.

  “Oh,” Susan said aloud, because she suddenly realized he was waiting for her.

  She hurried toward the front of the cabin, carpet in tow. She ignored the flickering faces on either side of her, ignored the fear in the air and in the pit of her stomach, and only slowed down when she got close to the man, whose bare left arm, pale brown, wrinkled, stuck out from what appeared to be a frayed leather vest.

  Before she could think of what to say, the man turned and smiled at her. He seemed incomprehensibly old. His face was so lined it was like the shell of a walnut, his eyes were so pale they seemed to lack irises. Even the teeth he bared seemed to have been worn down to nubs by untold millennia of use. But the smile itself was warm and… and pleased almost, as if he had been waiting for Susan for a long time.

  “I see you found Charles’s carpet.”

  Susan was nothing if not honest. “I can’t say I found it. I was sort of led to it.”

  “Many people get lost no matter how well they are led, Susan. You did well. Please,” he added then, “have a seat.”

  Susan took the seat across the aisle, because it was closer to her, and because she didn’t mind having a few feet of empty space between her and the man’s wizened arm. For some reason she didn’t think it would do to touch him. It would be sort of like touching a king, or a ghost. She sat, leaving the carpet hanging in the air between them.

  Now that she looked at him more closely, she saw that he was wearing what appeared to be Native American dress, although it was hard to tell if he himself were Native American. He was just too old. He looked at her as well. For a long time, silently, with no expression on his face save for a vague, patient smile. She tried to guess what he was looking for, but couldn’t. She was just Susan, after all. Aside from the carpet, there was nothing unusual about her, or on her, at least that she could see. But she got the sense the man wasn’t looking for a talisman like the Amulet of Babel, but for a more hidden mark. Something inside her.

  The man nodded, and Susan blushed. Had he been reading her mind? But all he said was,

  “Do you know where you are, Susan?”

  Susan glanced back down the aisle. The terrified faces glimmered in and out of vision, and she squinted to ward them off.

  “Um, in a plane?”

  The man’s smile grew slightly wider. “You say it as if you are not sure. If I said the answer was no, would you be surprised?”

  “Well, since I originally got inside a big wooden horse, no, I wouldn’t be too surprised.”

  The old man threw back his head and laughed. “Such an open mind! It is so often the case that when people of your time are confronted by something beyond their experience, they refuse to believe in it. But you see no difference between a real plane and a plane that is a manifestation of your mind. Wonderful, wonderful!”

  Susan waited for the man to say more, and when he didn’t she elected not to ask. She didn’t know much about him, but it seemed pretty clear he would have told her if he’d wanted her to know. And she herself was strangely uncurious. In fact, she wa
s perfectly happy not knowing anything else about this plane, and she decided not to ask any more questions at all. For a girl who’d spent the past several years perfecting her cross-examination techniques, that was a deeply unnatural decision. But Susan figured the old man would say what he was going to say, and not even her most incisive questioning would change that.

  The old man sat patiently while these thoughts flitted through her mind, and when she settled in her seat somewhat he nodded at her, as if she had passed another test. His mouth opened, a single word emerged:

  “Time.”

  Susan felt the word wash over her like a wave—like the wave that had swept Drift House out of the temporal world. Which is to say, she felt as though she’d been torn from her foundation, but also that she’d been taken to her true element.

  The old man nodded again. “Yes. Time, Susan. Time is like a string. It has a beginning and an end. Only one beginning, and only one end, and only one line leading between them. Like a skein of yarn, no matter how tangled the track of time grows, there is still only one line, and no deviation from it, ever.”

  Susan thought about this, and then nodded.

  “The jetty that Karl Olafson unwittingly opened, and that carried you to the Island of the Past, is not true time,” the old man went on, “but a terrible desire carried in the hearts of men since the dawn of creation. The jetty is a manifestation of the eternal human desire to cheat time, to get to the end without going through the middle. As such, it bores directly for each end, circumventing all the loops and tangles and backtracking and knots of time’s natural route, and so bringing things to their end far, far sooner than would otherwise happen.”

  The old man’s words conjured an image in Susan’s mind. She saw a maze filled with a million wrong turns and dead ends, only one path leading from the entrance to the exit. But instead of puzzling the way through, a mental bulldozer simply smashed through from one end straight to the other. That must be what the jetty did.

  The old man was nodding. “You understand, don’t you? Where the jetty passes through time’s true path, it obliterates it.”

  Susan returned the old man’s nod.

  “Yes, but—” She broke off, for a new set of images was flashing in her head: the scenes she had seen on the drawing room wall, right before the temporal wave had struck.

  “You mean the lost cities, don’t you? Troy? Pompeii? Babylon? Roanoke? And… and Osterbygd?” Susan broke off, had to take a deep breath before she could continue. “But New York was there. At least—the towers were.”

  The old man nodded. “We are headed there now, Susan.”

  For a moment Susan’s stomach seemed to shrivel up inside her. “It—it’s the jetty, isn’t it? Not this plane. The jetty destroyed all those cities, and now it’s headed for New York. This plane doesn’t really exist.”

  “In your world, Susan, this plane is the jetty. Just as it was the horse that tricked the Trojans, the volcano that destroyed Pompeii, the simple failure to adapt that ate away the Vikings of Osterbygd.”

  “We have to stop it,” Susan said, jumping up as if she would run to the cockpit and tell the pilot to turn around. “We have to… to stop it.”

  “Susan.” The old man’s voice was calm. “You are stopping it.”

  Susan sank down into her chair. For some reason the old man’s tone was not reassuring. “But am I stopping it in time?”

  The old man looked at her wistfully. “If I were to answer your question temporally, I would say yes. Your parents, your city, will be safe. For now.”

  Susan repeated his words dully. “For now.”

  “The time jetty is not merely a force loosed by an ignorant meddler such as Karl Olafson, Susan. The great temporal manifestations and distortions have been in play for thousands of years, ever since your species first began to wonder about the future—which is to say, ever since they began to think. The rush to the end of time is not simply the desire of a few bad men, but rather an aspect of all human beings. At certain times it is a small part, but at other times it grows larger. Even the tiniest change, when multiplied by the billions of people who live in your time, can produce enormous fluctuations in the temporal flow. You must learn how to control this desire, or the era of humanity will pass in the twinkling of an eye, and your species, like the dodo and the dinosaurs and all those other extinct species, will end up nothing more than an exhibition on the Island of the Past.”

  Without any fanfare, the old man leaned over and opened a door in the side of the plane. Susan wasn’t sure if the door had been there before, or if it were even real—wasn’t there supposed to be a big suck of air when doors opened in flying planes? But all was as calm as before, save that now an expanse of clear blue sky lay before her.

  The old man turned back to Susan and tapped the tube of carpet floating between them.

  “If you just hold on, you should be able to ride it like a log in the water.”

  Susan thought she would have been afraid of the thought of flying out the side of a plane. But she was not. Perhaps she was too overwhelmed. Too numbed by sensory data to do more than take each new thing as it came.

  “That’s it?” she said.

  “That’s all I have to do? Hold on?” Though colorless, the old man’s eyes still managed to twinkle with a bit of mischief. “I’m afraid the real adventure is Charles’s this time around, Susan. All you have to do is hold on, with your hands, and with your heart.” The old man smiled gently. “And when you see Charles, tell him the Wanderer said hello.”

  Susan nodded. She was going to see Charles. Charles had … met this man. This … Wanderer.

  “I will.”

  She stood up and straddled the tube of the carpet. The air outside seemed eerily calm and unmoving. The blue sky beckoned. She tapped the carpet she sat astride.

  “Um, giddyup?”

  The Wanderer’s eyes glowed. “Allow me.”

  He reached for a spot on the carpet behind Susan. She started to turn—she figured it was a good idea to know where the On button was—but before she could there was a whoosh of air. She fell forward breathlessly, not so much holding on to the carpet as clutching it for dear life with her arms and legs. There was a last lingering sense of amusement, and she knew this had been the Wanderer’s—or the Trojan Horse’s—parting joke.

  The carpet was strong and solid beneath her, and despite the speed she could feel the smoothness of her descent. She wasn’t simply falling, she was… sliding almost. In a moment she had caught her breath and even managed to sit up. She gripped a bit of fringe and looked down—and gasped.

  Manhattan lay beneath her, just off to her right. Her city. Her home, in all its glory and might and multiplicity. Ten thousand square city blocks bristling like a porcupine’s quills, surrounded on all sides by glistening water, from the low buildings in the north of the city, Harlem, Washington Heights, to the needle-pointed spires of downtown.

  She gasped again. For there, at the southern tip of Manhattan, were two buildings that no longer existed in her time. They gleamed in the sun, identical, unwavering, real.

  But even as she spotted the pair of towers, a dark cloud formed over them. A huge swirling mass, bigger than the whole island it seemed, blotting out the entirety of the sky, and yet centered directly over the towers. As she watched, a thin line threaded its way out of the center, a harmless string that swelled and swelled and swelled until it was a huge raging tornado ripping out of the sky, reaching straight for buildings.

  It was the jetty.

  For a moment Susan’s heart sank. The Wanderer had lied to her, or he’d been wrong. The jetty was going to smash through Manhattan just as it had smashed through all the other lost cities.

  At the very tip of the jetty, she saw a glint as the sun flashed off a bit of metal. Susan squinted, but she already knew what she would see.

  A plane. Understanding began to fill her brain.

  “No,” she whispered. “Please. No.”

  But th
e universe ignored her plea. The plane smashed into the first building, engulfing it in flames and smoke and shadow.

  “No!” Susan screamed. “You said you would stop it!”

  And, as if in answer to her protest, a dark shape suddenly emerged from the cloud above her. It took her a moment to make out what it was: a horse and rider of impossible mountainous dimensions. It was the Trojan Horse, with the Wanderer seated astride it. The horse’s tail streamed out behind them like a comet, and a javelin in the Wanderer’s hand extended for miles in front.

  Horse with rider charged toward the jetty with a gallop like the loudest thunder Susan had ever heard. Just as the tip of the javelin hit the second building and everything—horse, rider, jetty, and building—disappeared in a brilliant corona of light, Susan squeezed her eyes shut. The afterimage of the explosion burned in her eyes, and though she understood that her city was safe, that the jetty’s path would stop with the towers, she still couldn’t help but wonder: was this victory?

  It was a long time before she could open her eyes. When she did, she saw that the jetty was gone, and the horse and rider. The towers were gone too, a few last wisps of smoke drifting east over the Atlantic, but the rest of Manhattan still lay below her, glittering, safe. A moment ago her city had seemed so huge and awesome, but Susan saw now that it was tiny and fragile like everything else people make, liable to disappear before you even knew what was happening. She looked down on it like a mother hen—or like an eagle, regarding its minuscule nest from the vastness of the sky.

  Her first thought was to try to figure out how to pilot the carpet down there (and without being seen by eight million people) but then she realized that was a moot point. For her city, though safe, was not unchanging. As she watched, it seemed to grow taller beneath her, like sped-up footage of sprouting plants. Taller, ever taller, and thicker, one building crowding against another like bristles in a brush. And then, just as suddenly, they began to shrink, as if they were being pulled back into the ground. Susan realized she was looking into the future, decades, hundreds of years, maybe even thousands. She was seeing the life and death of her city, the growth, the retraction, the inevitable cycle. In the end, in an instant, the city was gone, and only a shimmering green wave of trees and grass covered the island as it must have hundreds of years ago.