New Atlantis

Copyright © 2019 by Lavie Tidhar
All rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2020 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

Originally published in 2019 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Cover design © 2020 Sarah Anne Langton.

ISBN 978-1-625674-96-8

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

I. The Message

II. The Roads Must Roll

III. The Sun Harvest

IV. The Tomb

V. The Ceremony Of Innocence

VI. Shipwrecked

VII. La Ville Lumière

VIII. Breach

IX. The Drowned World

Epilogue

About the Author

Other Books by Lavie Tidhar

Prologue

Listen.

Outside, the skies darken. The male nightjars’ voices rise and fall in their churring songs, and they blend harmoniously with the chirps of the field crickets. My daughter’s children and their friends run laughing on the paths. I long to join them.

It is Chuseok, the festival of the harvest moon. I can smell jasmine, lilac, and the deep, rich scent of the small pink flowers of the Arbre de Judée tree which grows outside my window, and which I planted there as a little girl with my mother, long ago.

My name is Mai. I have lived on this Land for eighty-four years and I love it, deeply. I was born here, and it was here that I learned to write: which is to say, to attempt to give shape to the world. And so it is here that I write this, the chronicle of a life spent under the broken moon, of a life spent on this Land, from which we all come and to which we all return, but for those few of us who once tried to go to the stars.

I wish to go outside, to join my daughter and my granddaughter and my grandson, to watch the paper lanterns as they light up the night sky. The moon is broken, but it is still the moon. The Earth was broken, and billions died, but we endured, the way weeds do.

This festival, like all our celebrations, is a mélange. When the earth shook and the seas rose and the sky was rent and the moon broke, the survivors of our species came from all corners, by paths both perilous and desperate to this place. I could give you the old names of things, but I can tell you where it is by what it grows: pines and weeping boletes, wild thyme and wood sorrels, dandelions, jasmine…

I wish to go and join them, but the days grow short and the nights long, and I write this in the light of a lantern adapted from an old mortar shell, the sides cut out and fitted with old glass that was itself salvaged. My mother was a salvager, journeying each autumn, after the harvest moon, along the old roads where the vehicles of the ancients rusted in their millions, and on to the ancient ruined cities, where only salvage and junk and a few old machines, still alive, remained. Each year, I would hold my father’s hand and watch her go. The salvagers departed for months at a time and returned in spring, bringing back with them all that was still usable. I longed to go with her, and to see the ocean, and to smell the salt in the air and see not just Land, but Sea. And one year I did that, too, and one year she disappeared, and I searched for her… But that is another story, for another time. I never became a salvager, it was not in me; but I did become, in lieu, a chronicler of sorts.

But I digress. My daughter calls me to come out. I do not want to miss the lanterns. Later, we’ll eat baked flatbread, olives, winter kimchee, watermelons. We’ll drink young, red wine. The flowers bloom. My father told me, Never pick a flower. Let them grow where they are. We keep the plants, and, in our clumsy way, we try not to trespass upon the planet.

So hush. This happened long ago, in my third decade on the Land.

A message came, one day, from the place we now call the New Atlantis, where the seven sacred islands lie…

I reluctantly went on a long, hard journey. I encountered loss, and I found love. I saw the sun harvest in Suf and the fabled floating Isles of the Nesoi, and I suffered shipwreck. I met the mad robot, Bill, and I saw the ruins of La Ville Lumière. I visited Atlantis.

Then I came back.

That is the story.

Everything else, as the old poet once said, is just details.

I. The Message

It had been a cold and shivery winter and I had been restless through much of it. The fog lay heavy on the Land in nighttime, and the yellow light of the broken moon struggled to illuminate the landscape through it. I took long midnight walks through the silent Land, observing spun spider webs glittering with tiny drops of dew like hardened diamonds, and snails that communicated silently with each other in the mulch of leaves, their retractable tentacles raised in complex greeting.

Ants whispered softly through the forest, marching across fallen pine needles, over the raised roots of ancient trees. In the stream that ran beyond our homes, the eels slithered through the water on their way back to the distant sea. All was quiet, but for the faraway call of a migrating cormorant. The birds traveled to our shelter in winter, but left again in the spring, to go north and west. I was restless, desirous of something I could not put a word to. An irritability I was unable to shake off drove me through much of that winter, and my father took to finding shelter in his library, where he pored over ancient manuscripts my mother had salvaged for him in the ancient cities of the coast. Turning the pages of an illustrated atlas of the old world, he’d glare at me over the glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. “What you need,” he’d say, “is a purpose, Mai. And stop stomping quite so much! I can barely hear myself think.”

“But I don’t!” I’d say, and stomp my feet, the way I had when I was little, and he’d soften at my frustration and smile his old smile and say, “Would you like me to tell you a story?”

My mother, the salvager, ever practical, had a use for maps only if they were current. Salvager maps were makeshift, continuous works-in-progress. They marked known nests of wild machines, where a river had shifted, where a new road had been hewn, where there was danger, where there was salvage. My father, by contrast, dreamed of the world as it had been, not as it was. For hours he would trace winding blue paths on the ancient maps, and speak to me in the language of long-vanished waterways: “Bosporus, Mother Volga’s Watershed, Pearl River, the Lower Blue Nile…”

My mother salvaged scrap and debris, anything from the old world that could be repurposed. She was a stoic, practical woman. She hated waste. My father, by contrast, was a man given to daydreams and stories. He was endlessly fascinated by those missing decades, by the centuries before them, that glittering time of consumption and excess, when the roads were laid all across the flesh of the Earth and a billion petroleum-fed travel-pods crawled like fat beetles along them. Only their scars were left to us.

I stayed restless all throughout that winter. I tilled the soil in the fields and helped Aislinn Khan, Mowgai’s mother, in the bakery, enjoying the warmth of the oven and the silence of the predawn night that lay as thick as a blanket over the houses and their sleeping inhabitants. I helped Elder Simeon oil the gears of the small mill on the brook, surrounded by his pets: tiny, intricate clockwork automata of ducks and geese, a peacock, a cat, a turtle. From the mill I could look out to the low-lying hills beyond the brook, past Elder Simeon’s house, where as children Mowgai and I would imagine they formed the shape of a vast, reclining manshonyagger, a buried giant forever sleeping, a snatch of nightmare from the old age.

I waited, for what I didn’t know. Perhaps for spring. Mowgai was a salvager now, and he and the others were gone with my mother, to the Blasted Plains, to the ruined cities by the coast.

I read old books, I played backgammon and bao and cap sa with my neighbors, I dug fleshy cyclamen bulbs out of the soil to replant, and drove my father deeper and deeper into his study. I had just come off three years in New Byblos working on the Extinction Lists, and off a relationship I had thought would last, but didn’t.

As the days lengthened and the nights grew short, flocks of storks began to migrate across the brightening skies, black-and-white, black-and-white on the thermal winds.

It was on a day such as this, the air still cold in the shade but the sun warm, and the air filled with the fragrance of spring, that I saw a familiar bird shape circle in the sky overhead. It was a gray spot against the sky, and as it descended, I recognized it as Hornbill, a wild drone Mowgai had rescued from a malfunctioning replicator nest in the Blasted Plains and raised as his own. It was far into its life cycle by this time and spent much of its days nestled unmoving as it absorbed sunlight, but I knew how attached Mowgai was to it.

If it was here, Mowgai and the other salvagers couldn’t be far behind.

Could they?

Hornbill spotted me and gracefully descended. It opened its vicious-looking beak and Mowgai’s familiar voice emerged. The message was brief and addressed to me. It said they were on course for return but were still two or three weeks away. I could hear wind behind them, the crying wail of wild dogs far in the distance, the rattle of shifting pebbles underfoot. Mowgai sounded tense, yet I could imagine him smiling. I smiled on hearing his voice, in the happiness of recognition.

“Mai…” He paused there. I heard my mother’s voice in the background, saying something I couldn’t decipher, and Old Peculiar’s grunt in reply. “There’s been a message for you.”

That pause again, the hiss of wind. Hornbill blinked at me, his mottled gray hide thickening to black as it began to power down. The old machine was tired. I tried to think of who would contact me. For a moment I thought of Ifrim, back in Byblos, and felt a pang of loss.

“From beyond the sea.” I could hear exhaustion in his voice. “Meet at the way station.”

Then the sound faded, and the old drone powered down, trusting me to carry it. I returned to my parents’ house, left Hornbill to nest on the roof, and went inside to hunt for my father in his library.

“Beyond the sea?” my father said, doubtfully. He brewed us tea, fresh sage leaves and just a hint of honey in the water. We watched the rain outside, but it was a final gust of winter, and I could see new shoots on the plants, and the flowering trees. I could smell the coming spring, as though the Land and everything upon it were holding their breath in delighted anticipation. It was the season of rebirth, of joy. “What is there beyond the sea?”

“There are other places than these,” I said. I paced around the room. I hated mystery. Or did I? My father looked at me and shook his head.

“You’ve been like a caged bird all winter,” he said.

“We don’t cage birds,” I said, irritably.

“Then perhaps it is that you, too, should fly,” he said, and smiled, and blew on his tea in the way that had always annoyed me, even as a kid. He took a sip, and kept the smile, and I was forced to smile, too.

“Francia, Albion…” he said musingly. “Or does the message mean Afri? Misr, Carthage…”

“Your geography is as muddled as your history,” I said, laughing. But the truth was that I longed to go—somewhere, anywhere. The restlessness I’d felt all winter had vanished, and in its place came a clear, pure determination.

My father took another sip of his tea and looked up at me with guileless eyes.

“So when do we leave?” he said.

The journey out wasn’t hard. We followed the stream, enjoying the waking Land, the blooming flowers, the new warmth in the air. Bees buzzed lazily about us. It was, though I did not realize it at the time, the last such journey I would take with my father. He was in good health, his steps long and assured, yet unhurried. He seemed determined to enjoy the long hike, and his joy was infectious. For all that he loved old books and their stories of the past, he was a child of the Land and he loved it wholeheartedly. As we walked he told me stories, the way he had when I was but a girl: of huge flying machines that crossed over the oceans; of vast, glittering temples where every manner of thing was put on display and could be had for the asking; of a planet filled with a humanity that was always rushing, hungry, filled with a giddy need and an uncontrollable energy. He’d stop to show me flowers: poppy, wolf’s bane, wild thyme. We skirted anthills, saw shy deer observe us in the distance. In the night, we built a fire and sat around it, and I told him of my time in Tyr, where they sing still of the old days, and of my work in Byblos. I did not speak of Ifrim, and my father did not ask. Some wounds heal slowly.

In this manner we traveled for some days, at last departing the brook for a path left by generations of salvagers. The ground began to rise here, and my father walked more slowly, and at night we saw foxes, jackals, once a wildcat. One day we saw the paw prints of a bear not far from where we’d made camp for the night.

Then we reached a steeper incline, and as we crested it we saw below us the way station.

My father is long gone now, and buried in the Land he loved. His flesh has fed and nourished others, the plants and worms which are our friends and neighbors. The chill of the nights often invades my bones now, and many years have passed, and yet it seems so fleetingly, as though it had only just happened. And I am glad I had that time with him.

The way station was a sturdy construction of timber and stone, and smoke rose from its chimney. I could see distant figures standing outside, and they resolved as we descended the slope into familiar shapes and faces. I hugged Mowgai as my father held my mother in his arms and twirled her round in a dance. Old Peculiar, as gnarled and hard as an ancient olive tree, stood to one side and watched us with his usual inscrutable expression. He was a man of few words and rare smiles. Mowgai, by contrast, was slight, spindly, never still. “Full of nettles and brambles,” as old Grandma Mosh always said. When he was young, he undertook the long journey to Tyr, where they still maintain a fascination with the old age, and there he was equipped with the composite exoskeleton that allowed him to walk, in however crablike a fashion.

“Mai!”

I hugged him again. “You were gone a long time,” I said. “I was getting restless.”

He smiled. “I may have a cure for that,” he said.

Then it was my mother I was holding, feeling the strength in her, her arms around me, and I buried my head in the crook of her neck, the way I had as a girl. She smelled of campfires and sweat and toil, of the road.

“I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you, too.”

It was a bright morning. Blue-winged butterflies chased each other above the lavender and rosebushes. By the side of the house I saw the salvagers’ carts, laden with scrap. A lemon tree provided shade. We sat on the veranda, drinking lemonade Mowgai had made, eating flatbread cooked on the fire, and salty, hard goats’ cheese with a dip of olive oil and fried wild thyme and sumac. I remember it so vividly, even after all this time: my father’s laugh, my mother’s murmured voice, Mowgai’s grin, the creak of Old Peculiar’s rocking chair.

“Well?” I said, at last. Conversation had ebbed and a pleasant sleepiness overtook us. Old Peculiar’s head dropped on his chest and he began to snore, and my mother and father, by tacit agreement, left us to be on their own. Mowgai rose on his spidery legs and scuttled elsewhere. He returned with a travel-worn satchel and we went a short way off, to sit on the boulders in the shade of a pine, the way we had when we were children.

What I extricated from the satchel was a small and cheap-looking pendant on a chain. I held it up to the light, wondering.

It was a memory trinket, of the sort that were sold by the thousands in the old age, when there were still such things as currency. Back then, it was easy enough to simulate recollection, encode the brain’s electric signals into off-the-rack virtualities that could be played back whenever one desired. It looked old, and it was only then that I noticed an inscription had been added to the belly of the device, and it read, For Mai.

I looked at Mowgai in question.

“It came to Tyr by coast-hugger,” he said, “and from there by one of the Green Caravanserai, which we encountered between Suf and the Plains.” He shrugged. “It’s for you. The message was quite clear on that.”

Still I held it dangling by the chain. “Where did it come from?”

He shrugged.

I reached. My hand closed over the locket, my fingers tightening around the scratched combo of plastic and metal. It felt warm. I put the old neuromodulator to my temple.

Translation was gradual.

…Light, growing around me. It had a different quality, a brighter white. It was the sort of light that erased shadows. I heard seagulls cry in the distance, smelled salt and tar. Beyond the window I could see palm trees, the sea.

…Islands.

A faint recollection, as though I knew where I was…

“Mai.”

I was looking into a mirror. The face that looked back at me wasn’t my own.

…He ran his hand over his short hair, self-conscious. He was about my age, and I knew him then, though he had grown from the boy I used to know.

“It’s Gaw.”

He smiled at the reflection—at me—then turned back to the window. I could see boats in the distance, white sails, a pod of dolphins. We were somewhere higher than the sea.

“We found something. A millennial vault, we think. It’s buried deep under the sea, in the strata of the old city… Could you come?”

His gaze lingered on the sea, and I thought I saw, or perhaps I imagined, a dark spot in the water, as though something immense and old underneath were casting its shadow upward. Then he turned back to the mirror, and I found myself gazing into his eyes. “I heard about your work in Byblos, on the Extinction Lists. Even here, we sometimes get word… It would be good to see you again.”

He blinked. My sight went dark, returned, went dark again. For a moment longer, I thought I glimpsed another vision entirely: a sunken city, divers moving like drab fish through murky water, piercing the depths with torchlight; fallen masonry, a shoal of silver fish swimming through the remnants of a crumbling marble arch. And something down below even farther, like a sort of manhole cover but not, a metal sphere that sucked the light around it, and I felt myself falling toward it, as if this memory, added later, belonged to one of the divers.

Then the quality of the light changed again, and I was sitting back under the pine tree, in the sunshine, holding the trinket. And I thought about Gawain, the way I’d known him back at the academy in Tyr, more than a decade ago, and a wash of memories—my own, this time—flooded me. I sat there quietly, then put the trinket away and smiled at Mowgai.

“How would you like to go on a journey?” I said.

II. The Roads Must Roll

“It is said the harvest will be plentiful in Gomrath this spring,” Mowgai said. “And that a heron was spotted for the first time in centuries near Esh.”

We had been traveling for days. For a while yet we were still in the world as I mostly knew it, with its familiar terrain of good, black earth, and in the bloom of early spring, so that we rose each morning to the sight of thousands of pink and purple cyclamens, red poppies, yellow daisies, and blue-and-white lupines which stood stiffly like guards in the breeze.

“It is also said a vast sea monster washed ashore in Sidon, dead upon the sand, and that a manshonyagger of old was seen near Dor-Which-Fell-To-Ruin,” Mowgai said, and shrugged. “But such stories are often told and there is seldom truth in them.”

“The sea monster, perhaps,” I said, thinking of the ocean and its mysteries. I smiled at him, imagining our faraway destination. The New Atlantis lay beyond the sea. “If we’re lucky, we might get to see one.”

He shuddered. “Salvagers survive by avoiding danger, not running headlong toward it,” he said.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “So my mother always tells me.”

“And you never listen,” he said, but he smiled when he said it.

At night we made camp under the stars. The broken moon hung in the sky. Fractured by some enormous, violent force of the old age, gravity kept it in roughly the same lemon shape, the broken chunks all drawn together into the semblance of the old moon.

I often imagined those few humans who had set foot on it, in the time of the great excess, when we had imagined ourselves masters of the cosmos, and dreamed that everything, sooner or later, would be possible. We had left our mark in space. Debris and junk in orbit, dead satellites, dead dreams. Golf balls and a flag on the lunar surface, footsteps in ancient dust. A few robotic probes, crash-landed on other planets. Litter, really. It marked us as a species.

At last we came to the frayed edges of a great forest. The trees thinned as we walked, and their branches grew ever more twisted and gnarly until they resembled grotesque scarecrows, and the ground between them became shorn and bare and hard. The sun beat down ruthlessly, and then we were through the last of the trees and it was there: the first of the Blasted Plains.

It stretched out to the horizon, never ceasing, never changing. It was a great big barren silence scarred into the Land, and on it nothing lived, and nothing moved, yet I knew the Plains could be deceiving.

Things did live and move within that continental vastness of annihilated Land. There were whole gigantic cities lost within the Plains, where only salvagers would venture. It was a dead place, but even the dead crawl with maggots, and flies, and worms.

Bisecting the Plain was a road.

I looked at Mowgai, and he looked back at me with measured calm. The road seemed endless from our vantage point. It cut through the Plain and disappeared in the distance. We began walking toward it, across the Plain itself, and I was startled as I had been before on coming here at how sound ceased: no birds, no chirping insects, no rustle of leaves. It was a desolation.

Reaching the road felt almost a relief, even a victory, as illusory as it was. As you came closer to it, step by halting step, it grew, until there came a moment when you realized just how immense and foreign it truly was. This was not a natural path, but a remnant of the old age. It was a sort of hyper-highway, fifty lanes across at its widest points, with concrete walls between opposing lanes of traffic. The ancient Romans had built roads that outlasted the fall of an empire. The age of excess built grander and more imposing than anything the Romans could ever have imagined, but it did not build to last.

The ruined old highway stretched out across the barren Plain. Its surface had long since deteriorated and the concrete slabs that served as guards had broken and crumbled in many places. Any markings that may have been made on the road were long vanished, and old signs, made of cheap metal rusted and eaten by the elements, lay crumbling on the ground.

A countless number of vehicles littered the road, their wheels now rotted to nothing. Most of their outermost skin of thin sheet metal had similarly rusted and was blown in the wind. Engines, broken down but still recognizable as such. Shattered panels of glass, so you had to tread carefully wherever you went. Worse were the cheap seat cushions, made of a mass-manufactured polymer. Before, they would have been hidden under another material, perhaps leather. The polymer did not decay, even after centuries. Headlights and taillights. Batteries. Plastic bottles, and everything else that was plastic. It was a graveyard of decay, but some of these things survived. They had outlived the vast majority of the human race that birthed them, back in the old age, and as old as they were, I knew they would outlive me, and my children, and my children’s children down the generations.

Attempts had been made in the past to sweep parts of the road. A thin trail like a snail’s path through the debris. In other regions of the Land, nature had reclaimed the old roads. But from the Blasted Plains nature itself shied away, and I shivered as I stepped through the gap in the concrete and onto the road.

Mowgai had no such qualms. He surveyed our environment with a quiet confidence, and I imagined I even saw joy in his eyes. It was why I could never be a salvager. I liked stories, safe from a distance. But salvagers had to thrive in the part of our world that we found most distasteful. Its slowly dying past, lying all about us, a poisoned gift from our dead ancestors.

“It’s horrible,” I said.

Mowgai looked slowly around the ancient highway, from one distant edge of it to another. His exoskeletal arms made that little involuntary dance he sometimes did, which meant excitement.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

I punched him in the arm and he laughed and pulled away, rubbing the flesh where I’d hit him. “Ow!”

“I’ll never understand you, Mowgai.”

“It’s not so bad,” he said. “Compared to the rest of it.”

At that we both lost our smiles. It was so quiet there, on the road. I suddenly, desperately wanted to hear birds again. Instead, we began to walk.

It is not easy to traverse the old roads. Once upon a time, traveling along one of these routes would have been a matter of routine, a pleasant drive of some hours from destination to destination, with stops for refreshments along the way, each person ensconced in their own personal pod, thousands upon thousands of them all traveling at once.

Now, it was a harrowing, slow journey, and with each footstep I took, I felt the oppressive silence of the Plains press down on me. It would be a journey of many days before this Plain ended, and in a way, they never truly did. They spread, like a malignant tumor, all across the planet.

We marched for a day. Worse than the silence were the bursts of inexplicable sound, the sense of… things darting at the corner of your eye. Ghosts from a vanished age. We came across one of them at last as the day lengthened. It was a pitiful thing, a spiderlike creature lying on its back. It was dying. Mowgai prodded it with a stick, dispassionately.

“They used to sweep the roads for debris,” he said. “Cleaning machines. There were nests along the old highways, printing them out whenever they were needed.” He prodded the thing again. “Short life-span, but they’re durable enough. Useless for salvage, though.”

We went around the dying machine. When night came we didn’t build a fire, but sat in silence against the crumbling concrete boulders. I sat there looking up at the sky, and at the stars, so many stars. We took turns sleeping, one of us always keeping watch, but we were not disturbed.

The next day we came to an intersection and followed an arm of the old road to an abandoned facility, the ruins of which were still standing. It was where passengers would have stopped in the past for refreshments or to recharge their vehicles with gas.

“Are you ready?” Mowgai said.

I took a deep breath. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

In the old station, the salvagers had stashed a store of equipment and durable foods, and we ate, if sparingly. There was water, stale but clean. Then we strapped on the bulky backpacks of provisions and rolled the sails onto the road.

We were going skate-sailing.

“I heard,” Mowgai said, “that one of the old religions had a day so holy that even operating a vehicle was, for just one day in the year, prohibited. Imagine it, Mai. For one day, as the Land breathed with relief, all those millions of people abandoned the roads at the same time. No vehicle passed. All that surface area was, however fleetingly, reclaimed. Children, going out there onto terrain denied them. Couples, walking hand in hand. Old people strolling, perhaps remembering when it was all still grass. For one day, all those empty roads.”

I tried to picture them, all those vanished people. I looked about me, at the empty road. A swept path, clear of debris, lay ahead of us. The road stretched to the horizon.

“And now,” I said, “it’s ours alone.”

“You remember how to do it, right?” he said.

“I’ll manage.”

He shot me a final glance and a nod. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

And with that, I leaned into the wind, and Mowgai did the same, and then we were sailing. The wind pushed at us and I maneuvered the sail, slowly at first and then gathering speed. The board ran over the old road as we slalomed along the swept path, avoiding debris. The wind rushed in my hair and against my face, and for the first time on the road I felt a rush of exhilaration take me as we sped down that old, empty highway. From a distance, I thought, we must look so strange, two tiny human figures sail-skating against that vast black-tar wound in the Land. All about us the silent remains of vehicles rotting in the sun, but we were free, and gathering speed; and in this way we sailed beyond the sunset.

III. The Sun Harvest

The Convocation of Suf had once, I think, been a prosperous trading town on the shores of an inland river. But that river was long gone, and now Suf inhabited a wide strip of greenery that snaked its way between two of the Blasted Plains like a sort of boundary hedge. To anyone coming from my own home, Suf would have seemed a peculiar abode indeed, a place of esoteric preoccupations, eccentric architecture, and a strange disregard for the dangers of the past.

We had ridden hard along the ancient road, and it was with relief that we reached at last the boundary of the Plain. What had caused them, what awful weapon or disaster had imprinted on them this vast and unchanging desolation, I didn’t know. Such knowledge was lost, and I hoped it would stay gone forever. One moment we were sail-skating-sailing along the road and in the next instant the boundary changed and the Land was renewed. Immediately the road teemed with life again. Birds chirped, and insects crawled, and the ruined travel-pods of old were filled with earth and flowers, and the roots of gnarled trees pushed through the surface of the road and hindered our progress. I had never been so glad to see a tree.

We disentangled ourselves from the sails and folded them carefully, and continued our journey on foot. I’d forgotten what it was like to be on Land. The smell of spring overwhelmed me. There were so many flowers growing by the side of the road—orchids and tulips and African Moons, lilies and begonias and Bleeding-Heart vine—and their perfume and their profusion of colors made me glad again, for the first time in days.

The flowers were enough to sustain whole colonies of bees, which darted lazily this way and that, gathering nectar, and their humming filled the air. Bright sunlight fell everywhere. The flowers were of a different kind from those in my home. They belonged in warmer climes than ours.

But it was always sunny in Suf.

Already on the way we began to discern their famed statues, towering spirals and fractal curves all made from the discarded junk of the ancients, some of it preserved over centuries, some of it buried deep in the sea or on the Plains. They were fashioned from aluminum cans and plastic toy ducks, glass bottles and windshields, polystyrene foam boxes, wrenches and hammers and spoons, keys and watches and screws and clips and spray bottles. They were made of the past. And they were given shapes, some surreal, some familiar. One looked like rain, falling down between the leaves of the trees, until you looked closer and saw that the drops were ancient coins. Another was a giant DNA double helix rising into the sky fabricated entirely from cans that people had probably, in centuries past, drunk from. Another resembled fine mist and must have been made from plastic bags. There were still storms out on the Plains where the bags fled through the air, millions of them, and to be caught in such a storm was every salvager’s nightmare, for many were known to have been trapped and buried in the assault of innocuous bags that had once held groceries or garbage, and now flew like silent ghosts to choke and murder the unwary in their ephemeral grip. We passed in this way between the sculptures, and all about us the flowers bloomed, bees hummed, birds called and worms burrowed and the sun shone. The sun always shone, in Suf.

Then we passed through a hole punched in the hull of a vast submersible ship of yore, lying on its side half-buried in the ground.

Beyond was the Convocation.

Suf sat on a series of low-lying hills. It had the deep photosynthesis-green of cacti and the intense yellow of rice and the fiery red of cayenne. Where there had once been a dock there still remained the stylized fortifications, cranes rising over a riverbed filled now with lettuce, arugula, radicchio, spinach, and cress. Shade netting kept the sunlight from the plants, a dark green river of them flowing away from the Convocation. Suf itself resembled a series of cubes piled on top of each other, and they were scattered about all over the hills, seemingly at random. It was only when you came closer that you realized the houses had been built with lovingly restored shipping containers, of the sort that had once traveled the globe.

I tried to imagine it. The oceans calm, and the great ships, bigger than the biggest whale, sailing on them as though it were the simplest thing in the world to cross the planet. Each vast ship holding thousands of containers. Thousands of ships, millions of containers, the wealth of a planet carried so casually, as though it meant nothing; and perhaps it hadn’t, then.

We followed the path up the hill. It was a shock to see so many people again. A friend of mine, Miguel, who I knew from Tyr, came out of his house to welcome us. We embraced warmly.

“Mai,” he said. “It is good to see you again.”

“And you,” I said, laughing. “Your hair is shorter, Miguel. When I last saw you, it was down below your shoulders.”

He ran his hand over his scalp and grimaced. “Age comes to us all, Mai. To some sooner than others… You haven’t changed one bit.”

“Liar!”

He laughed, and so did I.

“I heard you did good work in New Byblos,” he said. “On the Extinction Lists.”

“I hope so.”

“How’s Ifrim?”

“I don’t know.”

“…Oh.” He looked at me a moment longer, then squeezed my shoulder. “Come on in, come on in. Will you be staying long?”

“We’re just passing through, Miguel.”

“Going to Tyr?”

“And then farther.”

He turned and looked at me sharply. “Farther? How much farther?”

I said, “Beyond the sea.”

That day we ate the way they eat in Suf. Their homes are temples of vegetation, in which every manner of flora is grown in rich mulch, illuminated by the stored light of the sun. We ate chargrilled kebabs of chunky butternut squash, stir-fried beans with long slices of chilies, peppers stuffed with tomatoes and rice and flavored with numerous herbs, pastries as delicate as air filled with potatoes and mushrooms, and for dessert we had papaya with fresh lime, and pineapple slices, and bananas cooked in sugar and alcohol and set aflame. There was wine, too, from the extensive vineyards they keep inside their growtainer-estates.

That day, too, I washed properly for the first time since we’d left the way station. Aqueducts run through Suf and feed into washing houses and pools, and the water is always hot. They grow their own soaps, in Suf. I luxuriated in the hot baths, feeling scrubbed and clean and healthy. Miguel swam to me then and, laughing, lifted me up, until I turned and put my arms around him.

“But how much farther?” he said, after we parted from our kiss.

“The New Atlantis.”

“Mai… I thought it was a myth, that place.”

“It’s real. And they need me.”

His fingers ran down my naked back. “There is plenty of need for a chronicler here, in Suf,” he said.

“I can feel your need hard enough, Miguel,” I said, laughing. After that we didn’t talk for a while; at least not in words.

Later, as we floated in the water, the sun had gone down and the night sky came out and brought with it the stars. It was very still, and peaceful.

“Stay,” he said. “It is not so bad, here.”

“No,” I said. “No, it is not so bad. But my path leads elsewhere.”

He sighed. “I know,” he said. “It always has, Mai.”

We climbed out of the baths and dried and dressed under the stars and the broken moon. Holding hands, we wandered along the alleyways. It is a curious place, Suf, with its cubist homes and its rare flowers. There is a saying in Suf that their home belongs to orchids, and the people are merely their guests.

The streets thronged with conversation and laughter. Music played everywhere as people set up impromptu bands. Children ran laughing and screaming through the warm alleyways, playing salvagers and robots, and hide-and-seek, and dead man’s bluff. I saw people emerge from their homes, holding what looked like origami flowers in their hands. As we walked, more and more people emerged, all traveling in the same direction, until we became a stream of humanity flowing along the path, until we reached the end of the Convocation and the top of the hill and I saw, below us, the Great Solar Plain of Suf.

What the area had once been—homes? Industrial zones? A municipal park?—I never knew. The past had been erased from it, and in its stead, the residents of Suf had laid down miles of sun-sheeting composed of cross-linked layers of a solid-state polymer, able to absorb and retain sunlight. The Solar Plain was dark and silent now, in the night, but clearly illuminated by the silver light of the moon, which turned everything ethereal. Holding hands, we descended to the Plain with the others. Someone passed me one of the origami flowers. As we approached, I saw that there were narrow pathways between the orderly rows of sheeting. As each person passed, they swept their arm over the suncatchers. As they did so, the stored solar energy leaped from the charged molecules of the polymer and into the flowers themselves. The devices flared with bright, warmth-giving light. One by one the lights came on, and when it was my turn, I, too, swept my arm over the sheets and cupped the light of the sun between my fingers. The petals of the flowers opened with the light. When I looked up, dazzled, I saw that the entire Solar Plain was no longer dark but awash with sunlight, and I saw that each of us was an atom, and we were all bound together in one great, complex molecule. Beside me, Miguel’s face was rapt, raised upward, bathed in illumination.

I held his hand, and, in this fashion, we traversed the Great Solar Plain of Suf, in the time of the sun harvest.

The next day we said our good-byes. The path ahead was difficult and long, and New Atlantis beckoned from its mythical white cliffs and palm-tree-covered coves, as if to say, Hurry, Mai, hurry.

“Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,” the old poet once wrote. And who was to say, who was to say—

And as I write this now, I think again of seagulls crying over foreign shores, a body facedown in the water, and the sound of barnacle-covered chains scraping slowly against each other…

But not yet, not now, and maybe never. Some memories I know I’d be happier to forget. Not everything the storyteller writes is true…

I’m sorry. I digress. The next day we left, Mowgai and I, and the road ahead was long, and there were ants, and shipwrecks, and there was treasure, of a sort. There always is, isn’t there, in such stories?

As for Miguel, he, too, is gone now, having passed of old age, but not before he lived and laughed and loved, and worked the Land, and fathered children. I remember him, fondly.

Stay. The nights grow long and light is precious, but the old hand that holds the pen still, in the act of writing, remembers.

And I was glad then, and I am glad now, that I got to see the famed sun harvest, and hold the light of a star in the palm of my hand; however briefly it lasted.

IV. The Tomb

“As we move, remember to stay within the rough zone of influence of the Caravanserai,” Iqbal said. “Don’t go wandering off, and never lose line of sight. This area’s been active recently. There’ve been reports of increased wild machine activity. Oh, and take this.”

He pushed a stubby, makeshift device into my hand. It looked like a tear-shaped bottle, of the sort they once used to feed babies with.

“What’s that?”

“It’s an EMP gun. If you see anything move, use it. It should scramble most Level Three and below entities, at least long enough for you to get away.”

“And if it’s a Level Four?”

He shrugged. “Run?”

“Would that do any good?”

“Might make you feel better, for the second or so before they catch you.”

We were traveling across the Blasted Plains that lie between Suf and the ea. There were no roads of the ancients here, nothing to mark the landscape. Just miles and miles of blasted grey dust, where nothing lived and nothing moved.

The Green Caravanserai was all around us. It was an ever-rolling assemblage of people, wagons, trucks, and elephants, with sheets of suncatchers fixed to everything, and big, colorful tents rolled up in the back of the slow-moving vehicles. Children ran in between, playing, human and elephant both. It was a never-silent procession, and at any given time, someone was cooking, someone else sleeping, and on the perimeter armed lookouts kept a constant watch.

We had joined the Caravanserai outside Suf. They were headed to the seaports beyond the Plains, and we were glad for the safety they offered. The Green Caravanserais were not like other human communities on the Land. They were tightly knit clans of people and elephants both, assimilated into a single tribe. It was the old philosopher, Aristotle, who said that the elephant was the animal which surpasses all others in wit and mind. After the time of the great excess, and the destruction it had wrought, we had come to see our place on this Land differently from our ancestors. We enslaved no animal, and seldom killed even for food. It was not that we denied our nature. But when we killed, we did so reluctantly and with need, and when we had to do so, it was nakedly, without tools. We coexisted, but we no longer ruled, for our rule before had brought disaster with it.

The Green Caravanserais never stood still for long. They wandered the Land, between sea and interior, across highlands and valleys and the bad, forgotten places of the world. Crossing the Blasted Plains back and forth made them hardy and practical. They were not salvagers, but they used salvage when they needed to. They were not killers, yet they knew death. No one knows death like an elephant.

Iqbal and Mowgai moved side by side, easy in each other’s company. I envied them that easy camaraderie. I saw the backs of their hands often touched as they walked.

At night we made camp, the tents going up and fires burning as food cooked. Goats wandered around the encampment. There were always goats, traveling with the Caravanserais. They were tireless explorers, sure-footed and strong, with an excellent memory even in the changeless geography of the Plains, and often went ahead of the Caravanserai as scouts.

I sat by the fire, exchanging stories with Amir, one of the men. He had curls of black hair and a quick smile, and in the firelight I saw the long scar that ran from his index finger and all the way up his arm. He saw me look and smiled again. Like I said, the expression came to him easily.

“Tank repair drone,” he said. “At least, I think that’s what the thing was. This happened a long way from here, near Esh. Clawed me right up the arm, opened the skin to the bone.” He shrugged. “I feel sorry for the old machines,” he said. “We made so many of them, in the old age, and made them strong, and self-repairing, and intelligent. And then we made them serve. When the world changed… all they knew was war.”

“How did you get out?” I said.

“It was a unit with distributed brains,” he said. “I snapped off one arm, and then the other, and the other after that… It was old, it broke easy. It’s only the claws were still sharp.” He stared into the fire. “It itches, sometimes,” he said. Then, “Do you go to Tyr?”

“To Tyr, at first. I hope to find a ship there that will take me past the Pillars of Hercules, if they still stand.”

“You wish to go beyond them?” He sounded horrified.

I took out the old memory trinket Gaw had sent me and showed it to him. “Have you seen one of these before?”

“There are many, littering the old places,” he said. “Some like to use them, to experience the old age. But many of the memories have been corrupted, and when they do work it can be like a drug. I have seen people succumb to it, forget their life, the Land… All for what? A memory of shopping?”

I looked at the flames. A goat came and nudged my shoulder until I gave her a chunk of my flatbread. “They made beautiful things, too,” I said, quietly. “Music and art and magic. They had so much power… too much of it.”

He gestured at the Plains beyond our encampment. “And this is what it brought us,” he said.

“Yes.”

“So what memory does your trinket hold?” he said.

“A request for help. For me.”

“From faraway.”

“From the New Atlantis.” It was my turn to shrug. “I dream of it, sometimes,” I said. “Seagulls cry over white chalk cliffs, and the air is humid and warm, scented with vegetation. I see a figure walk along the shore, but I cannot make out its face. The sunlight is behind it, and everything’s so bright…”

“It sounds nice,” he said.

“Then why do I feel as though something terrible is going to happen?”

He laughed as he turned to me and took my hands in his. “The terrible thing’s the past,” he said. “And that, that’s already happened.”

We spent the night together. We rose early, with the sun. The camp was already in motion, tents struck, breakfast cooking, solar sheeting spread out to catch every drop of sunlight. I noticed Mowgai’s cot was empty and had not been slept in. A short while later, I saw him return with Iqbal, and they were holding hands, and I smiled to myself. I’d thought I remembered they had a history.

Days into nights we traveled in this way across the never-changing Plains, with the calls of the elephants and the bleating of goats, the chatter of humans, the smell of smoke and dung and sweat, and the sun beating down, and I longed for the sea.

The Plains stretched in all directions. It was like traveling on the surface of the moon and, like on the moon, we began to discern the remnants of old war machines scattered across the landscape. Ancient tanks, sticking out of the gray dust at odd angles. The remains of rocket batteries strewn around, with ancient warheads pointing in all directions. A field of crashed airplanes, the rotting debris of jet engine turbines glaring like baleful eyes. For a time, too, the lookouts felt an increased presence of live machines. They stalked us in the night, and once, from a great distance, I thought or imagined I saw a manshonyagger, a walking man-shaped figure so tall that, had it but lifted its arm, it could have swept aside the clouds.

Then the presences of all the wild machines ceased, abruptly, and all signs of the old war were erased from the part of the Plains we traversed as though they had never existed. I thought nothing of it, at first; until we found the anthill.

The call came for me out of the night. I was sitting by the fire when Iqbal materialized by my side and motioned for me to follow him. I rose and he led me between the elephants to the perimeter of the camp. “We found something,” he said.

I followed him wordlessly away from the camp. It felt odd, after so many days and nights, to be out of the Caravanserai. The darkness suddenly felt very large and the night sky endlessly wide. The moonlight made everything stand out in stark relief, and our shadows walked by our sides. Iqbal moved with silent confidence, leading me across the plain until we came abruptly upon Mowgai and Amir and three others, who were all armed.

“What is it?” I said, whispering. At first, no one answered. Then they stirred, and I followed again until we came upon a large shape looming out of the ground ahead.

“It’s a hill,” I said.

“We’ve been this way before,” Iqbal said.

“So?”

“There was no hill here then.”

I looked at it. It was illuminated clearly enough by the moonlight, roughly conical in shape and as tall as ten men. As I looked I saw that it had many openings, some as small as a finger, others as wide as an arm. It was silent and still and nothing came in or out of the openings.

“What is it?”

“We hoped you might know. You’re the chronicler, Mai.”

“Is it artificial?” Iqbal asked.

“If so, it’s not human-made,” I said, and felt uneasy.

“Some remnant of the war?”

“It could be nothing,” I said. “Just a natural formation in the land.”

“This is no Land, Mai. You know that. Nature has no foothold here.”

“What is it made of?”

“I came close enough to take a sample,” Amir said. “As far as I can tell, it’s made of the same material as the Plains, but that material has been broken down and re-formed by some unknown process.”

“Is that possible?”

Beside me, Iqbal shrugged. “It must be.”

“Leave it be,” I said. “There are enough mysteries in the world. What’s one more, among them?”

Mowgai nodded. He looked uneasy. “I agree with Mai,” he said.

“It’s just a hill,” Amir said. He turned to me and flashed me a grin and, before any of us could stop him, he ran toward it, his gait smooth and easy as his long legs covered the distance. We could only watch as he reached it, stopped. He rested his hands on the incline of the structure and then began to climb it, finding foothold and purchase in the openings I’d noticed. He scrambled up it easily, illuminated by the moonlight, until he reached the top and crouched there, suspended.

“There’s a hole here!” he shouted back. “A circular opening, large enough to fit a person. I can’t see inside—”

It was then that I saw the ants.

They began to emerge from the hill’s openings, rapidly. There was nothing to distinguish them from other ant species, but they moved with speed, and in a sort of coordinated, military fashion. Tiny bodies advancing under the light of the moon…

“Amir, run!”

He laughed. Then he saw them, but he did not appear unduly worried at first. Nevertheless, he began to climb down. The ants swarmed from the entrance at the top now, and from what I began to think were defensive encampments around it. Amir lost his footing and began to fall, but he never made it down. The ants swarmed him from all directions at once. In moments, they had covered him entirely. We could only watch in horrified silence as Amir’s body began to move upward, dragged along the hill’s incline, until he once more reached the top. For one moment longer he lingered there, suspended. Then he was simply gone, pulled down into the hole, and all the while he never uttered another sound.

We stood there, numb. The ants disappeared as quickly as they’d arrived, and the hill stood, silent and empty under the moonlight, until we turned away.

We left him there.

We had to. Inadvertently, we had invaded another species’ home.

That night there was mourning in the Caravanserai, and the elephants gathered around Iqbal, touching him with their trunks, expressing puzzlement and sorrow. There was not even a body for them to bury, and anyway there were no leaves on the Plains with which to cover a body.

A small expedition set out again to the hill. They stayed at a respectful distance, and there they left an offering, by way of an apology: some food, and parts of old machines, and flowers.

That night, by the fire, I mourned Amir, and thought of my mother. She traversed these selfsame lawless lands each year, in search of salvage. She had seen friends and colleagues die, and sometimes people simply disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. It was a hard life, for a hardy people: but I had never experienced this myself, nor have I ever heard of life returning to the Plains, and I was troubled by the way in which it happened. What it meant, I didn’t know.

The next morning we left at first light, the elephants calling mournfully to each other and the humans subdued.

“I thought nothing lived on the Blasted Plains,” I said.

Iqbal said, “So did we.”

We reached Tyr several hard weeks later, and my heart was lifted by the smell of the sea. I had missed it, and the cry of the gulls and the sharp scent of salt and tar in the air made me long for the journey still ahead. The radiance of the sun reflected in the calm blue water, inscribing a message written in sparkles of light, in a language I wished I could decipher. I could have easily lingered longer in Tyr, waiting for a coast-hugger.

But I remembered the night it happened, and the one that followed. For as we made camp that second night, I called to Mowgai, quietly, and he agreed to come. We sneaked out of the camp, against protocol, and doubled back, crossing the miles in silence, with only the broken moon to light our way.

And when we got there, I could see that there were lights burning in that anthill. The beams burst out of the openings in all directions, though nothing moved, and nothing stirred, and no sound emerged from the place that was, that must have been, Amir’s tomb. We watched it for a long moment before we turned away. It felt as though, for just a moment, we were witnessing events on an alien planet.

There was only one more stop after that: the place where we had left the offering. I knelt down by the colorful plaited mat, and looked.

The food, and the flowers, had been left unclaimed.

“What are they?” Mowgai said.

“Ants.”

“But—”

I felt awfully tired, then. “I don’t know.”

The food and the flowers remained untouched, just like I said. But all of the machine parts—those the ants had taken.

V. The Ceremony Of Innocence

The Academy of Tyr rests on the highest point of the old town, overlooking the port below. Tyr had once been deep inland. Now the sea rose up to its foundations, and waves whispered between half-drowned arches, and some of the old town could still be seen, beneath the waves. Fish now swam where once there had been streets and homes. The Cathedral of Tyr is the largest structure of the old town, and its dome rises out of the water at low tide, and some say its bells can still be heard on moonlit nights, tolling when all in the town are sleeping. It is a restless city, some say. Filled with ghosts, say others. I do not know the truth of it but that Tyr is a city still engaged with the past, a city in which the present and the future are dim and tenebrous things.

Its twisting lanes are of great antiquity. Its houses of stone have weathered the storms and the rise of the sea and the breaking of the moon. To these were added more modern structures, simple exoskeletons of wood and bamboo and cloth, rising around and above the old buildings. Its sewers often smell of strange alchemical odors, which mix not entirely unpleasantly with the aroma of fish and other sea creatures, which the residents of Tyr devour with a great appetite. It is a place, also, where some of the old religions are still preserved, in however makeshift and haphazard a way. Some still pray in the direction of drowned Mecca, some speak each year of the next being in Jerusalem-Which-Vanished, and some pray still to a figure of a man bound with thorns on a rosy cross. It is a place of argument, of learning, of constant chatter and debate in the town squares and in its numerous coffee houses and tearooms, yet it is also a place where it is easy to disappear, get lost, find oneself in an unknown, quiet blind alley, and be startled anew by an unexpected sign, an ancient statue or a sundial or a graveyard filled with a cacophony of roses, blue and red and pink.

It was to Tyr that I came, years earlier, as a student, and it was from Tyr—from its academy, which as I said dominates the highest peak above the harbor—that I graduated. It was there that I first met Gawain, a foreigner from a faraway land, from beyond the sea. Atlantis, we would say, laughing, and he would say, No, no, in our tongue its name remains Britannia.

Mowgai and I arrived in Tyr with the Green Caravanserai. I was glad to see it—glad, too, for the smell of the sea. It had always made me long for travel, and adventure. The minarets of Tyr rise into the sky above the port, itself the color of a memory trinket recording tuned to some implausible recollection. We found shelter at a small hotel near the harbor and said our good-byes to the Caravanserai. Iqbal wanted to take the matter of the anthill to the Profesoura, that informal body of the learned—they are an argument upon themselves, like the discordant notes of a badly tuned orchestra, yet they represent, to us, a sort of collective memory, an active form of preserving. Which did not mean I envied Iqbal when he went to present to them his question. Professors, I always found, are best handled individually, or not at all.

The morning after our arrival, we wended our way down to the port. We needed to find a coast-hugger, yet there were none moored behind the breakers, and the port master told us it might be some days before one arrived.

“The Hermit Crab’s out beyond Gorgon’s Point,” the port master said. She scratched her temple, hidden under her thick braids of hair. The water was still and the air hazy with humidity. “The Albatross went searching for the Isles of the Nesoi a fortnight back. Idlewild’s exchanging in the ports of Turkiye. I don’t know, Mai. You may be stuck here a while. Besides, where you want to head? No ship goes that far out.”

“What about Gawain?” I said. “You remember him, Elle. The day he came.”

“Damn, Mai,” she said, and the smile she gave me had something wistful in it. “I remember the ship when it arrived. The Fikturiya, out of New Atlantis. She was a salvage-ship, nothing we’d seen around here in all the time I’d been at Sea. Hammered together out of wood and sheet metal and hope, with sails as old as the end of the world and just as ugly. How it made that journey, there is no one alive in Tyr who could tell you. Abandon-tech, I think. Verboten stuff, from the old days. That thing had power.”

“They do things differently there,” I said, but quietly.

“It isn’t right, Mai,” she said. But a smile was playing at the corners of her mouth, and I could see her tanned, rough hands open and close as though she were picturing herself steering the old vessel along the coast of Francia. “It isn’t right, but she would get you there, a ship like that.”

I thought about Gawain. A sort of barbarian-prince, we called him, teasingly. A tall, gangly youth with wild hair, and tales of ancient households enclosed in dryland forts, somewhere so distant we could barely imagine it. The ship that brought him, the Fikturiya, named after some ancient queen of his people, had stayed in port a month or so before taking her leave. Gawain claimed they had sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and visited the floating Isles of the Nesoi; that they had seen monsters rise to the surface from the deeps in open seas, vast creatures casting shadows miles wide with eyes as large as sailboats. Sailors’ tales, of the sort you’d hear in any port’s bars. We never did fully know him. He was one of us, a student and a bright one at that, but some of the past had clung to him in a way that it hadn’t to the rest of us.

“He was part-Sea,” Elle said. “He was part-Sea, and when you sail out far enough, when there is no more Land, it is as though the world had never changed, because time moves differently out there—past, present, future are erased and there is only Sea.”

She was always a bit of mystic when she got going, Elle. She dreamed of tankers and container ships, the great old metal beasts that crossed the seas with careless ease, back when people still thought they ruled the planet. Instead she ruled over a fishing port from which small dhows and schooners sailed over what had once been Land, passing blithely above drowned streets and towns, watery graveyards in which the bones of the dead rose and fell in whispers.

“Stay for lunch,” Elle said. Mowgai excused himself, and I knew he would haunt the wharf-side hostelries where the salvagers congregated. Ocean salvage was a different discipline from Mowgai’s own, and there were few who did it. It was possible our best bet would be to find a salvage-ship to take us at least part of the way to our destination.

I remained behind, and the port master and I adjourned to her offices by the harbor wall. Elle brought out fresh bread and an assortment of pickled vegetables, some cheese, a platter of fried whitebait. She watched me with amusement as I passed on the fish.

“Everything we take, whether Land or Sea, is nevertheless taken,” she said.

“I realize that,” I said.

“We are still animals. We still evolved to eat other species.”

“And look where it brought the people of before,” I said.

“We are not them,” she said. It was an old argument. “We only take a little, and only with need.”

“And I don’t need to eat the fish,” I said.

She laughed, conceding my point. “But they are so tasty.”

“What of the Nesoi?” I said.

“The Nesoi won’t help you,” Elle said. “Mai… why do you need to go?”

“To Atlantis?”

“Yes,” she said, with a scowl. “To Atlantis.”

“Gawain asked—”

“Gawain!” she said. “And do you trust him?”

“Trust him? I’m needed, Elle. And it’s my job.”

“To dig into the past.”

“Someone has to tell the stories of the dead.”

“I could take you,” she said, out of nowhere.

“What?”

“I grow restless here, watching over fisherfolk. I know you, Mai. You want adventure. Well… perhaps I do, too.”

“That far?” I said. “No one in living memory—”

“The Atlantids did it, when they brought over Gawain.” She scowled again. “You think what they can do, we of Tyr can’t do, and better?”

“They make use of old technology, their interpretation of the Covenant is looser than most.”

“I could take you,” she said.

“How?”

“The Argosy is currently moored off Helicon,” she said. I knew that was a nearby island. “She was built by my aunt, and by me. When I was a girl, we took her as far as Jezreel and back, and saw Harmegiddon rise out of the sea. It could make the journey, I’d stake my life on it.”

“You’d have to, if you went.”

“Well?” she said.

“I would not like to put you in danger,” I said, and she snorted.

“Have some more wine,” she said, pouring red from the bottle into our glasses. I accepted. As we sat there watching the harbor, I noticed more and more people gathering by the quayside. They came solemnly, alone or in small groups, all congregating at the same spot and looking out to sea. The sight brought back memories, and I was sure I had been witness to it before, but what were they doing?

“You don’t remember?” Elle said. “It’s the Linking of the Cables. They do it every year… We went once, remember? It’s just an excuse to have a drink.” I noticed she’d finished her glass and was topping it up as we spoke. And indeed, the people on the quay looked festive. Streamers and banners and drinks were brought out. It had the air of an impromptu carnival.

“Linking?”

“The submarine cables. You know. The cobweb?”

Once upon a time, the world was very large, and then it grew very small, and then it grew large again. In the time when it was very small, it was because everything moved rapidly from point to point, and there were so many people that they always needed to talk to each other, and for that purpose they had woven a sort of web that linked them to each other; but each delicate silk thread was actually a sort of thin, extremely long cable that ran along the bottom of the sea from coast to distant coast. Those cables carried the bulk of this global conversation, and they were protected from the raging storms by being deep, deep under the sea.

“Can you see it? Is it coming?”

“Not yet. Wait…”

It was long gone, the cobweb. The ravages of time had done their work, the earthquakes and the storms and the volcanic eruptions had torn that beautiful, delicate shape that once spanned the world. Once the world was big, and then it grew small, and then it grew big again. Torn threads, a great silence. But the people of Tyr remembered what it was like, in the old days, and so they reenacted the great Joining, the way it had once been celebrated all across the world – the linking, the joining together.

“It’s coming!”

I could see it, then, the small boat bobbing on the waves, dragging in its wake a thin, long thread of wire. When it reached the shore, they began to haul the cable up and out of the water. Once, it would have run for thousands of miles, allowing someone in Yurop to talk to Afriq or Sneyland in an instant. And there came a solemn procession from the Land, carrying the other part of the cable, the host body, and the two processions, of Land and Sea, came toward each other with measured steps, and a band struck up music.

Then it happened, just like it had all those centuries before. The two cables met, and were Joined. And that was it—that was how it happened, though back then no one had paid much attention to the process of joining, and it had happened quietly, out of sight, just a bunch of workmen bringing up the cable from the sea, without fanfare.

It was a symbolic gesture, nothing more. The underwater cable linked nowhere now, and the machines that had sustained that worldwide conversation had been mute for centuries, not even useful salvage. Yet there was something moving about this reenactment, and for a moment I was lost in daydream, trying to imagine a world where you were always present as a node on an ever-shifting, never-silent, spun-silk cobweb that enveloped the planet.

Then the celebrations began in earnest, and I drank my wine, and Elle smiled at me crookedly over the rim of her glass and said, “So?”

I sighed. “How soon can we leave?” I said.

Another memory trinket waited for me when I returned to the inn. Who had left it there, I didn’t know. It had the same old, scratched quality as the last, and I was not surprised to discover my name inscribed into the casing. Mai. I put it to my temple. Transition was instantaneous this time…

“Mai.” I could see Gawain in the mirror again. His body lithe, dark from the sun, and there were new scars on his chest and abdomen. He smiled at his reflection—at me. “If you get this then you’ve made it to Tyr, at least, and I hope you’re on your way. I had hoped to send a ship to greet you, but that decision was overruled. The Plantagenet will be waiting just beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It can meet you there and escort you the rest of the way… We no longer enter the Medius Sea.” An expression I couldn’t decipher crossed his face, as of old, remembered pain. “But it should be safe for you to do so.”

He looked out of the window, as he had before, and there was a disorienting change of perspective, as though for just a moment I was seeing events through the eyes of a seabird plunging rapidly from the windowsill down toward the sea. The beach rose sharply ahead and then the bird plunged into the water, and my perception changed yet again. Once more, I saw the divers moving sluggishly through the water, and the ruins of tall skyscrapers jutting out of the sand at the bottom.

“These used to be our docklands,” his voice said in my ear, startling me. “The great ships came and went from the docks, and an empire had spread all over the planet. Then came the great shortening, and a new kind of web rose—”

Once again, we sank deeper in the dark water, and once again I saw shoals of silver fish, darting in tandem until they resembled a silver screen blowing in a wind; I saw the skyscrapers of metal and glass lying on their sides, their windows broken, crustaceans scuttling under barnacle-covered desks. Telephones rotted, their lines trailing like entrails.

And I could see them, I could see them all. The cables were thin and ethereal. They lay along the floor of what had once been river, was now open sea. They converged onto this spot, onto these Docklands, like the threads of a spider’s web, and I realized this place had once been a major hub, a point on the global cobweb. I followed the gently undulating threads in the water, how they shone against the light of my diver’s helmet, how they were still… extant.

And I saw, deep down below, a shuttered metal eye, the hidden opening to a buried vault. I saw the cables rising from it, like the tentacles of a squid, like a mesh of threads. There was something inside it, something living, and again I felt myself falling, falling toward it, and for just one brief moment I thought I could see it—And I was plunged, without warning, into the world of before, and living streets where people trudged through gusts of rain, people in thick coats and hoods with goggles protecting their eyes, bent over as they pushed against the storm. The sky overhead was a perfect dome of clouds, a hurricane sky. There was no sun, no moon, no stars. And I realized I was walking among them, on the street, through dirty puddles, and I could smell ozone and smoke, dung—somewhere nearby, someone cooking meat on a grill. A vehicle came into sight, flashing lights, and a man and a woman in uniforms stepped out, blocking my way.

“Your papers, miss.”

“Papers?”

I saw them reaching for objects on their hips—I thought, horrified, could those be guns?

“Your identification, please, miss.”

“But I don’t have identification—” I began to say, when the skies cracked open with thunder, and the world was torn in half and began to burn like an old, flammable document. I shot upward, until I was a fragment of light in Gawain’s green, gold-speckled eyes.

“We tunneled a breach into the vault,” he said. “But it didn’t go well. You saw… Well, I’m not sure what you saw. It’s interacting with our equipment in ways we can’t really account for.” His smile in the mirror was apologetic. “Please, come.”

“Wait,” I wanted to say, “Gaw—”

But it was just a recording. Wasn’t it? For a moment I saw confusion in his eyes, as though he’d heard me. Then everything went blank and I came to in my own body, and a beating pain in my head, and I felt the bile rise in my throat, until I threw up all over the floor. Red wine and bread and cheese… I took deep, gulping breaths of air.

When I gingerly touched the memory trinket again, it was inert.

Several days later, on a clear, balmy day, with the salt spray of the sea fresh in the air and the winds high and favorable, we sailed out of the harbor of Tyr, heading west. Seagulls cried overhead, and as the old city receded in the distance I felt a sharp pang of loss. What lay beyond, I couldn’t know. We would try to sail close to shore, follow the coastline along the wilderness, but beyond this point, few had ventured in recent memory, and all the maps were vague. What did “Beware a Pod of Globsters” mean, or “Here Be Dagon”?

There were annotations on the map, dotted lines crisscrossing themselves, tracing the last known movements of the Nesoi. There were small human settlements marked beyond Tyr, but these grew sparse and then vanished entirely as the only annotation left on the map was one simple word.

Wilderness.

VI. Shipwrecked

Ship’s Diary, Day 3

Pirate birds with long hooked bills soar high overhead. Storm petrels in the distance patter impossibly on the surface of the sea, and I admire the way they move, how they seem to walk on water. I say, ‘I’ve never seen something like this before.’

Beside me Mowgai, not displaying much enthusiasm for bird-watching. Face greenish, his exoskeleton struggles onboard the ever-moving ship, the sloping deck, the toss and sway of the waves. The sky overhead is a dark blue, with few clouds, but Elle’s face is troubled as she scans the distance with a pair of ancient binoculars.

“Is something the matter?” I say.

“Something is always the matter,” she says.

I leave her to it. Up in the crow’s nest Dain gives a short, sharp whistle, but what it signifies I do not know. We are only three days’ sail from Tyr, yet the world is already transmogrified, changed. The Land is a thick swash of dense, vibrant greens. Primordial forest, nothing like the gentle woodlands of my home. The sea is a green-blue pond. It is a window: Through its depths we can see the rooftops of sunken homes, wide highways traversed now only by shoals of fish. Clonal colonies of Neptune grass undulate gently in fields stretching in every direction. I try to imagine all that is hidden there, lives preserved, drowned worlds beyond measure. Bellman on the prow pulls up a mahi-mahi with his rod and grunts as the heavy fish flops onto the deck.

Yesterday we’d dropped anchor by a shore settlement where they spoke the common tongue with an accent unfamiliar to any of us, though they knew Tyr well and had met salvagers like Mowgai in the past. It had felt odd sitting there in their nasara, the communal space under the great banyan tree, with the fire burning, discussing the world beyond. They spoke of strange sightings on the horizon during the Blood Moon, of submersible machines which haunted still the silent cities of the Down Below, of the time a pod of whales was beached onshore, like sailors seduced to their deaths by the siren call of another time. In their stories the sea was unfathomable, a blank map without borders or compass points. Perhaps they were right. The world was changed, its maps irreversibly redrawn. Who was to say what sailed the seas, or what new life arose from the debris of the old age?

Day 5

I had taken to catnapping in a hammock on the deck. At night, the stars overhead seem so close that all you have to do is reach out a hand and touch them. A river of stars… This is what happened:

A cool night. The ship slowed down, by degrees, and I heard Elle and Bellman talking in low voices. I went to join them at the prow.

“What is it?”

Elle pointed. Choking our forward motion was a sea of weeds. Their fronds moved as though by sentience, stroking the hull of the ship. The ship near stalled. The broken moon was very bright in the sky, and it erased the farther stars. I started—

Something grated against the hull of the Argosy. Poseidon weed. Neptune grass. A single organism made up of countless clones. As an entity it was near immortal, and I thought it must have seen the age of excess rise and fall, seen the Sneylanders’ empire and the Romans before them, seen it all—

“What was that?”

“What was w—” I began to say. The wave came out of nowhere. It rose over the hull and came rushing at me, knocking me off my feet.

“Mai, hold my h—!”

It swept me overboard and my breath caught, and I fell.

Into water as warm as a bath…

The reeds held me like a child.

I felt myself submerging in the water, slowly… The fronds of weeds stroked my face. It felt so peaceful.

I fell…

Day 7

Our location is uncertain, and there is no sight of land. Elle is convinced, however, that an outpost of the Nesoi is nearby. She has been poring for hours over intricate clockwork devices, the nature of which I do not know. The sky is overcast, and a fierce wind is blowing. Mowgai had strapped himself to the mast, like Odysseus. The poor man has nothing left to throw up.

…I fell. Into a world I can’t describe, an ever-shifting chiaroscuro. Alien voices spoke nonsense words. The weeds prodded me, curious. They were trying to understand me, I think, just as I failed to understand them. An ancient organism, living and evolving under the broken moon…

Will you let us pass? I thought.

No reply, but a sort of whispered melody, like the cooing of adults at a child. Then, abruptly, it was over, and I felt hands pulling me, roughly, and I was taken from that warm embrace and—

“Damn it, Mai! Breathe! Breathe!”

I spluttered salt water, took in gasps of air. The moon shone down and I laughed, lying there, drenched, on the deck.

“Are we moving?”

“We…” She looked surprised. “Yes,” she said.

“Good,” I said, and closed my eyes.

Day 8

“There!” Elle says. She points into the darkness. I see nothing, at first. Then a dark shape, eerily illuminated by the moon. A coastal outline, and were those lights, coming into being?

The ship glides toward that floating island. I had never thought to see them. A harbor, opening—I would say natural, but they are not natural, exactly. Coral, engineered to grow a certain way? The island floats upon the sea. Moonlight bathes the scene, reflecting twisted trees, a path, silent figures standing on the shore.

The ship comes to rest and we step out, even Mowgai. I see three figures come toward us. Humanoid, but different… Tall and willowy, like trees, their arms are branches, their fingers leaves. How delicate they are, I think. Only their eyes are comprehensible as fauna, silver-speckled, with a yellow sheen, it’s hard to say if they’re mammals or reptilian—

Welcome.

We stand onshore. Do we follow them inland? There are many stories told of the floating Isles of the Nesoi. The coral gleams in strands of rich and ethereal colors. It is alive, the whole island is alive—a clonal colony like the Poseidon weed but, unlike that entity, it is more animal than plant. The islands are hermaphrodites, they reproduce out on the open sea. The Nesoi are captains… some say, polyps.

Do we follow? Their arms move as though underwater, their eyes gleam so strangely. And somehow we are no longer standing on the shore, but following the path into the Mimsy, the coral flowers undulate around us, the porous ground breathes and the pools are warm, and a smell I can’t identify washes over us, the very air perfumed as by some alien scent. Deeper and deeper into the island we go.

Day—

…and I awoke and found me here, on the cold hills—

…back on board the Argosy. How long we’d dwelt in the Mimsy it was impossible to tell. The timekeeping instruments Elle had consulted all disagreed with each other. It was as though we had been in a pleasant, years-long dream, yet woken up from it with only an instant having passed. Had we dwelt on the island, or was it just an illusion? I’d seen things, a sort of technology, I think, of the kind they had only begun to develop in the final decades of the old age, a sort of bioinformatics or biorobotics interface. I’d seen the jubjub birds and heard, in the distance, the call of the frumious bandersnatch…

“What was that?” I said.

“The Nesoi,” Elle said, simply.

As I try to remember it the details fade, but I had learned something there, something important, if only I could remember it! A warning, I think, of my journey’s ultimate end. Some words come back to me as we set sail again, under the new moon. Not all history must needs be remembered.

I wonder what it means.

Day 3 (redux)

Elle squints at the horizon, her face uneasy. All seems peaceful. The shore is empty of any and all human habitation. We are somewhere off the coast of Francia, I think. The surface of the sea is almost preternaturally calm. There are no birds in the sky.

“What is it?” I say.

“A storm.”

I almost laugh. But Mowgai, standing with her, wears a troubled expression.

“What… sort of storm?” I say. He has his salvager face on, I think, uneasily. It is something that turns warm, compassionate Mowgai into a cold, efficient machine, something that can survive in the old parts of the world.

“The instruments picked up a submarine explosion an hour ago, nor’-nor’-west.”

“An explosion?”

“Perhaps a better word is an eruption,” Mowgai says.

“I don’t understand.”

“The instruments are picking up a large heavy body, moving rapidly, against the current.”

“Moving in our direction, Mai.”

“But—”

I see then how fleeting the Argosy’s movement is on the calm sea, how we’re heading to shore, how Bellman and the crew attempt to stir us in a pattern, like traces of lying eights, of infinity.

“It’s all right,” Elle says, “we’re on course to shore and if we’re right, it will only hit in twenty-three min—”

This is when things go rapidly wrong.

The first indication that something is wrong is when a dark mountain rises out of the seawater straight ahead, between us and the shore. Its slopes are a glossy black and the water roils around it. Then a giant appendage snakes from the thing and makes for the ship, and for just a moment, I see something, two bright orbs of light, open in the cliff-face vista of the creature, and I think, with sudden horror—they’re eyes.

Then the tentacle hits, the terminal pad smashing into the masts, and the rest of the long shape follows, and overhead I see carpal suckers opening and closing. The manus slams into the deck and shatters wood like kindling, and I lose my balance and fall, and roll, along the broken deck toward the railings.

“Mai!”

But Mowgai’s even more helpless than me, trapped on his back, his exoskeleton moving helplessly, the way the mahi-mahi had, when was it? When we’d set out, when we’d had such high hopes of success… I see Elle and Bellman swept aside as the giant thing comes rising once again above us, I see its beak—what is it, where did it come from, the sea is full of such unnamed things, had it evolved or was it wrought to semblance of a life by machine science? The age of excess was so very, very good at the science of killing…

I crawl for Mowgai. I almost reach him, my hand grasps his, I pull—

The mountain rises above the Argosy, two giant eyes like sleepy moons look down, tentacular clubs rise all about the ship—a nightmare of sailors in story and song all down the ages—hadn’t Pliny the Elder written of such a thing? But why am I thinking of Pliny the Elder, I wonder, in a daze—the ship is sinking, the ocean all around us, but I don’t let go of Mowgai’s hand, and together, together we are pushed on the waves, until inhuman voices wake us as we dr—

Day—

These are the last words I shall write in this diary. We are stranded on the coast of Francia. The Argosy lies broken on the shore. It washed up onto the debris line in bits and pieces. Of the crew, two are missing, but Elle is unharmed, and Bellman escaped with just a broken arm. Mowgai and I are bruised, yet well enough to travel.

Elle will not go farther. She is determined to rebuild the Argosy and sail her back to Tyr. “I built her with my own two hands and I will rebuild her again if it kills me,” she says. I have half a mind to suspect she intends to sail back via the Isles of the Nesoi. There is a coral-like quality about her, sometimes, a new, faraway look in her eyes… I wish I could join her, for in truth, the lure of those mysterious islands calls to me, also, and their spell lies heavy on my mind.

Not so Mowgai, to whom the Nesoi are but another trap awaiting the unwary traveler. He, in turn, is fascinated by the monster that attacked us. He speaks of “militarized Octopus giganteus,” and “biomech kaiju,” and “Level III Boojums,” and draws diagrams in the sand I and the others do our best to ignore. I think he, too, has fallen under the spell of the sea, but his dreams are of hunting a Snark—whatever it may be.

My own path lies elsewhere. I am haunted by images of the buried vault under New Atlantis, and of a memory that isn’t mine. Not all history must needs be remembered, the Nesoi told me, yet I think they’re wrong. It is my task to remember and to tell. It is the telling of our stories which makes us human.

Mowgai will come with me. The others remain. At dawn, tomorrow, we set off into the wilderness. Yurop lies ahead of us, thick with foliage, a world as wild and unexplored as an alien planet. We shall have to traverse this land—this Land—until we reach the ocean that lies on the other side of this continent. What awaits us, I do not know. I shall hug Elle good-bye, and hope we meet again. I am leaving this salt-stained notebook as a record, however jumbled, of our sea voyage. If you find it, know this: My name is Mai. I have lived upon this Land for five-and-thirty years. And I am going to the New Atlantis.

VII. La Ville Lumière

“Humans,” Bill said, “should have gone extinct.”

It wasn’t a very nice thing to say, but then Bill wasn’t a very nice… person.

We were standing high on top of the hill that was once called Montmartre, and all below us the city of lights was swaddled in jungle.

Hunter drones flew in formation over a wrought-iron tower jutting at an odd angle from the ground. The city was still alive with light. Clouds of fireflies rose through the foliage and from on high the city looked aflame with festive luminescence. In the glow of the setting sun, Bill’s metal body shone. His joints creaked when he moved and streaks of rust covered his chest like scars, but he was surprisingly agile and infinitely resourceful: By his own account, he had survived on his own in La Ville Lumière for centuries.

Bill was the first humanoid robot I’d ever met. Having encountered him, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to meet another.

Bill took a long draw on a stick of rolled paper stuffed with leaves, which he had set on fire at one end. He drew smoke and blew it out in perfect rings into the sky. Beside me Mowgai coughed, but Bill ignored him.

“After a meal, there’s nothing like a good cigar,” he said.

He was sexless, of course, but that is not to say without gender. There was something of the men of old about Bill, however he might protest. He was a creature of the age of excess, and with all the arrogance that came with it.

“We survived,” I said. “And now we live in harmony with the Land. We no longer upset the ecology of the planet the way we—”

He shook his head. “For how long?” he demanded. “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

He looked pretty satisfied with himself as he said it, as much as a robot can be said to look satisfied.

“Where is that from?” Mowgai said.

“From a very old, holy book,” Bill said. He turned and glared at us—I want to say, accusingly. “Sooner or later you will be fruitful and multiply again, and fill the Earth. You’ve nearly destroyed it once. You should not be allowed to do it again.”

“Surely every species has a right to live,” I said. “Even humans.”

“Right? Living isn’t a right,” Bill said. “It’s a responsibility.”

He was an old robot, and there was no arguing with him. Below us, giraffes moved gently through Place Pigalle, and a herd of elephants was framed against the dying sun in the distance. In the trees by the ruins of the old church where we stood, small, silver monkeys chattered to each other excitedly.

“Ah, Paree!” Bill said, and he drew, contentedly, on his cigar.

We’d crossed the wildlands of Francia on foot. From the coast our journey was slow, hot, and bothersome. Hordes of mosquitoes plagued our every step. Snakes slithered underfoot. Branches and vines blocked our way and we resorted to hacking through the foliage with bush knives. All my muscles ached, and Mowgai’s exoskeleton struggled in the confines of the jungle, moving sluggishly with dirt clogging up its delicate joints, or where it snagged on an extended vine—it was as though the very flora were actively working against us.

In all this time we did not see human habitation, though now and then we’d come across the remnants of the old age, buried in the mulch of the forest: rooftops and glass bottles and rusted machines, and stone walls that still stood, unexpectedly, in what once might have been a farmhouse or a town, but was now overtaken with vegetation.

I knew Francia was much like the rest of the world now was. It was incredible how quickly humanity’s footsteps on the planet could be erased. Homes and buildings meant to last forever were wiped away like chalk, and in their place came other species, fungi, birds, cherry trees, wolves.

It was the wolves we heard, at night, howling in the distance. Once we came upon a bear in a clearing, but it merely snorted at us. Once we saw an anthill and gave it a wide berth. It was Mowgai, with his salvager’s senses, who found a path for us which led at last out of the thicket and onto the remnants of an old highway.

When the Romans at last abandoned their colony of Britannia, they had left behind their roads. Centuries later, those ancient highways still remained, etched into the land, still traversed by a people who knew nothing of their vanished builders. This Francian highway was much the same, and it made it easier for us to travel.

We ate gathered berries, fruit, nuts on our way. Mowgai set traps, reluctantly, and for the first time in years I was forced to eat meat. We caught birds, a wild rabbit, squirrels. As we traversed the road, we came upon the remnants of old towns, some remarkably well preserved. I was enchanted by the sight of medieval cathedrals and brutalist office buildings, still surviving, choked by vines and inhabited by wildlife. In one town we came at last upon a vast, majestic river, and the remnants of an old pier. I remembered the old maps of this territory. This must be the Sequana, or Seine, and I knew that if we followed it, it could take us all the way to the coast which faced the New Atlantis.

We stood on the remnants of an old pier and saw, in the undergrowth, a curious sight. Amid the carcasses of drowned, ruined boats were several canoes moored against the bank, dugouts made of oak, with crude-fashioned sails. Mowgai and I exchanged glances, for this was the first sign we had seen of the presence of human beings in this wilderness. As we came closer, however, we saw clearly the signs of a battle. Two of the canoes had been set on fire and their sails were blackened rags flapping in the wind. There were traces of old blood on the pier, dark patches that had soaked into the stone. We moved cautiously, and it was then that we found the corpses.

There were three of them, two men and a woman. The woman and one of the men had been shot in the back with crude-looking arrows. The second man, however, had suffered a different, crueler fate. His feet and hands bound with thick rope, he had been moored to an ancient metal hook set into the stones, then tossed just beyond the pier into the water. He must have lain there, half-submerged, for hours, trying to crawl away, drowning by degrees. When we pulled him out, we saw that some creature in the water had been dining on his face. The corpse was white, all his blood had spilled into the water.

I was sick into the river. Mowgai, grim-faced, moved about the scene, examining the other two who had died there. When I recovered enough, I joined him. I felt ill. Such things were no longer possible, surely. We had evolved, as a species, beyond this kind of needless killing, beyond war.

Yet was that true? The world had always been harsh, there were always those who killed and those who were killed. Even in our lasting peace there were isolated murders. There had been one in Tyr, when I attended the Academy… It was the main topic of conversation for months.

“How long do you think they’ve been dead?” Mowgai said.

I looked at the corpses. They wore little more than loincloths, and their bodies were decorated with colorful tattoos, of snails and spirals, wolves and bears, and stylized sun and moon. The drowned man’s corpse, in contrast, carried tattoos of what looked like machine blueprints, with an old communication satellite inked into his now-bloodless chest.

“Two tribes?” I said, dubiously.

“How long?” Mowgai said. I looked at him and realized what he was saying. None of the corpses was decomposed, and when I knelt down to touch the bloodstains, my finger came away smudged with dirt, and I shivered.

“Recent,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What do we do?”

“This is not our fight, Mai. This is not—”

I don’t know what he was going to say. At that moment, we heard an eerie over the river, coming from the far bank. A group of people emerged from the trees. They were armed with bows and arrows, and they saw us. But before we could act, a new cry sounded, and we realized that their attention wasn’t on us, but on a second, opposing group, which rose behind us and began to descend. They were too far away to make out clearly, but I had good hunch that, were I to look closely, I would see that one group bore tattoos of animals, and one of machines.

“What do we d—”

“Push! Mai, push!”

There was nothing else for it. We grabbed the first unburned canoe and pushed it into the water. Mowgai hopped in, more nimbly than me. I fell into the water and had to paddle until Mowgai helped me aboard. The canoe wobbled, then stabilized. The two groups of warriors swarmed to the banks of the river on either side and I saw bows raised. Mowgai and I both ducked as arrows whistled through the air, but they were not aimed at us. The wind picked up and the sail billowed and then we were sailing away, downstream, as the river expanded ahead and the Francian wilderpeople grew smaller and smaller in the distance and finally disappeared.

“To kill for food is nature,” Bill said. “To kill for anger, to kill for hate—to kill with tools—that’s human.”

“And humans should have gone extinct,” I said, testily. “Yes, you said.”

We had sailed down that great river, which looped and bent around the swathe of land that was Francia, for many days. We caught fish when we could, and beached when the river quietened. We were unkempt and badly nourished, but we were alive. I was disturbed by what we had witnessed in that ruined town. Mowgai took it more stoically. As a salvager, he was used to sudden and violent death, and to the traps and dangers of the old world. It was a sharp reminder to me of how things had once been. How they could be again, perhaps, one day. And I thought of those two tribes, and the drowned man with the satellite inked on his chest. I thought of him often, in the years that followed.

Then, one day, we came around a bend in the river and saw the city.

The nights lengthen, and in the evening of my life, I often stay awake in the dark hours that come before dawn, and I write in my notebooks, and I listen to the silence, and often I remember back to the city of lights.

It was immense. For days, Mowgai and I wandered its abandoned streets, taking shelter in ruined buildings. Thick vegetation had taken over the city, and packs of wild dogs and cats nested in what had once been churches, museums, office buildings, homes. We became aware of other animals, large game: elephants and giraffes, zebras, lions. Caged once, perhaps, and then escaped when the city fell, and now they populated it. Orchids grew by the side of empty avenues, and it often rained, in thick, humid drops.

It was when we discovered the island that we first encountered Bill.

Île de la Cité, I think it was once called. Now it sat in the middle of a much wider river, but a rickety bridge of wood and rope linked it to the south bank all the same. An enormous and crumbling cathedral stood on the island, and monstrous gargoyles and chimeras still stared down from its battlements, but what they looked down on was now a place of desolation—at least as far as people were concerned.

It was a beautiful, serene place. Elephants congregated by the riverbank, their young spraying water on each other as the adults watched in affectionate amusement. Colorful parakeets flew overhead and thick green vines twisted their way over the old stones and the fallen-down buildings which surrounded a once-majestic square. It was to this square that we wended our way, over the rope bridge. Crocodiles swarmed down below us in the river. When we reached dry land, we saw it—him. The robot.

The robot stood in front of the great doors of the cathedral. He stood almost motionless, his old, metallic body catching the light of the sun. All around him, a destruction of wild cats had gathered, and they sat staring up at him dreamily, heads on paws, as the robot scattered food for the pack like a benediction.

At the sound of our footsteps, all the cats turned, and hissed. The robot turned to look. He stood there, then reached into a little satchel he was carrying and brought out one of his cigars, which he proceeded to light. We stopped and watched him.

“…Humans,” he said at last. His voice was flat. It was a man’s voice, a recording perhaps, made long ago. It was gruff, and had a sort of scratched quality to it. “It has been centuries since I last saw humans.”

“We’re still around,” Mowgai said.

The robot seemed to give it some consideration.

“…Too bad,” he said.

Like I said at the start, he just wasn’t a very nice sort of person.

“We could go,” I said.

“No, no,” he said. “You’re here now.” He blew smoke from his cigar. It was one of his affectations, as we learned. “It is nice to… chat.”

“Chat,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Nice.”

“Nice.”

“Sure. Did I ever tell you I went to the moon?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think you did.”

A puff. “I did.” A puff. “Long ago.” The recorded cough of someone dead many centuries past. “It was rubbish.”

“Of course it was,” Mowgai said, beside me, and I had to smile.

“Nothing but rocks and, well, golf balls, and Teslas. Name’s Bill, by the way,” the robot said. “Well. What’s a name. But you can call me Bill.”

“Does it stand for something?” Mowgai asked. “Like a model number or a serial number or… ?”

“No,” the robot said. “It’s just Bill. Well, come along. I’ll show you around. Oh, and watch out for ants.”

“Ants?” I said.

“Yes. I don’t like ants,” the robot said.

We’d climbed Montmartre at dawn. For a few days before, we shadowed the ancient robot as he wandered the abandoned streets of the old Francian capital. How he had survived for so long we had no idea. His own, often rambling account of his life changed with each telling. He had been to the lunar base before the moon fractured. He’d known famous historical figures: Elvis, Gandhi, Pak Kyongni, Lior Tirosh. He served under General Khaw during the Muddy Confluence Uprising. He visited Sneyland.

How he ended up in the City of Lights even he couldn’t say. Now he wandered its streets and spoke to its cats—he’d made a study of the wild cat population, had followed them through generations, knew each one by lineage, remembered litters, parents and great-grandparents. The cats looked up to him. He was a sort of wild cat messiah.

“I can help you get to New Atlantis,” he said. “Though I don’t see why you’d bother. I went there once, you know.”

“Of course you did.”

“Fishermen who thought themselves gods,” he said. “Barbarians with titles, tracing their bloodlines to the last of the climate-clans. Every man an earl, and every woman a duchess, and all their children bastards. I’d avoid the place, if I were you. I don’t like islands.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“They generate their own weather systems,” he said.

We did not believe his offer at first, but he persisted. I suggested we sail down the river to the sea, but then, how would we cross the ocean to the New Atlantis?

Mowgai said he’d had enough of water to last a lifetime, that he had never seen nor been in as much water as on this journey and that, when this was over, he would be happy never to see the sea again.

I said, “Well then, why don’t we just walk.”

He said, “Now you’re just being petty, Mai.”

The robot said, “Why don’t you fly?”

I said, sharply, “What do you mean, fly?” Mowgai and I were both pretty irritated with each other at that moment.

“Fly, fly,” the robot said. “Up in the air and far away. You know. Voyage aérien?”

“What?”

He sighed, the recorded sound of a long-dead man. “I’ll show you,” he said.

We’d climbed Montmartre at dawn, but it was dusk by the time Bill’s contraption was ready.

It had been left, carefully packed, in the ruins of the basilica. We’d watched him unpack crates, erect poles, string wires, until a light basket, fit for two or three, stood on the ground. Above it were the burners, and above them, but currently lying on the ground, was the envelope.

It was a hot air balloon.

“What?” Bill said, a little defensively. “Everybody needs a hobby.”

“Flying? You think we can get there by flying?”

“Just follow the course of the river until you get to the sea,” he said. “New Atlantis lies just beyond what was once a channel. I’ll show you the controls. Try not to die, I suppose.”

“I thought the sea was bad,” Mowgai said, and shuddered.

But I loved the idea. When I was a little girl, Grandma Toffle told me the story of the day a pilot arrived in a solar glider. She had landed in the fields near our homes, and exchanged pleasantries and news, and then she took the children for a ride in her aircraft.

I had never experienced flight.

The sun was setting over the city of lights when we said our good-byes to the robot. He stood there near-motionless, watching us, and the cats of Montmartre slunk along the old broken stone stairs and came to surround him in a half-circle.

“Please,” the robot said. “Don’t come back. Two humans in half a millennium of solitude is all that I can bear.”

I wanted to tell him of the wild tribes we’d encountered downriver. I had the feeling that one day this lost city of gold in the jungle would be rediscovered, that people would fight over its treasures. But I did not have the heart to tell him, and besides, it might never come to pass, I thought. And so we simply said our good-byes, and left the ancient robot to his solitude.

It is his face I remember still. Raised up to the sky as the hot air balloon rose slowly, the envelope stretching and filling. Mowgai and I held on to the railings of the basket and looked down, where the robot and the cats watched us go.

We sailed over the city of lights that night, and saw many curious things. A glass pyramid rose out of the ground, and we wondered uneasily which ancient king was buried there, and what they had done to be given such a tomb. We watched the elephants march along the Champs-Élysées, and the monkeys who nestled in the ruins of a stone arch at its end. The city grew small below us. The night fell wholly, and the stars came out, and the broken moon shone down, a stark reminder that once, there were people there.

The winds propelled us, and we navigated our way along the twisting path of the river, until we came, at dawn, to the estuary where the Seine spills into the sea. And we saw, in the distance, white cliffs rise into the clear blue skies.

And we knew, then, that we were almost at our destination: We had, at last, discovered the New Atlantis.

VIII. Breach

The nights grow long and the days short, and the letters on the page as I write grow dense and small like a bird’s black footprints in ink. The words are blurred through a film of rain, and it is only then that I realize I’m crying.

The nightjars call. The air is thick with jasmine. I have lived on this Land for eight decades and I love it, dearly. But sometimes I remember New Atlantis, and I remember the tomb, and what was buried there.

Well, then. Not long to go. When I was a little girl, my mother went missing and Mowgai and I went looking for her, and what we found was Byblos, where the memories of a vanished age are stored. That is another story, for another time, but ever since, I had sought out those memories, inscribed within the time vaults of the ancients, and which are slowly yet inexorably deteriorating…

“It’s a Bostrom Type III civilization,” Gaw said. “As far as we can tell. There are some peculiarities… Could be a Type IV. We’ve dated it to the last few decades of the age of excess. We’re at stable Breach… We think. Mai, it’s good to see you.”

“You, too, Gawain,” I said.

The years since I’d last seen him had been good to Gawain. Gangly as a youth, he moved now with confidence. Tanned from the sun, muscled from a life spent on the water, he was a far cry from the awkward teen I’d known.

Mowgai and I had flown the hot air balloon to the landmass of old Britannia, and thence followed the Tamesis where it had breached the mainland and flowed into a wide, navigable basin. In the heart of this inland sea were seven islands. We drifted toward them, over open water. Down below we could see canoes moving lazily, sailboats bobbing gaily in their moorings, shacks and sandy beaches and, beyond, the famed white palaces of Hampstead.

In the event, we couldn’t quite manage a dignified landing: Bill’s explanations regarding this procedure had been vague, and we crash-landed into open sea. Canoes rowed toward us just as I thought we would drown. Hands reached down and lifted us out of the water and into safety, and brought us ashore, to the nearest island, which was called Shooters Hill.

It is a strange place, the New Atlantis. Life moves at the pace of tides, and the moon is important to them. They grow the cannabis plant there and smoke the dried buds, which they roll ceremoniously into cones of paper, or put into hand-fashioned pipes carved of wood or fired from clay. Of the seven sacred hills, Highgate is their cemetery, Clockhouse the place of science and industry, and Hampstead is where the drylander descendants of the climate-clans reside. Other islands can be seen at low tide, but they are unoccupied. An old city lies down below, and the islanders of Shooters Hill are fisherfolk and salvage divers and beachcombers. They welcomed us openly, and we spent a day in their company, resting and eating of their food, which is abundant, while we waited for word to travel to Gawain. It was only the next day that his boat arrived, and when he stepped onto the sand my heart leaped, for it was good to see an old friend.

“You made it,” he said. “I knew you would.”

“How could I resist?” I said, smiling. “But it better be worth it, Gawain.”

“Oh, I think it will,” he said. “But then, you have some experience with vaults, don’t you? There are not many people who have that.”

“There are not many vaults,” I said, and he nodded.

“Do you think you could—?”

“It’s what I came for,” I said, and he nodded again, and looked relieved.

“I would not ask one of my own,” he said.

Mowgai snorted at that, for all that he, too, would never have done it. He noticed my expression, and to his credit looked ashamed. I knew the salvagers feared places where vaults may lie, that they marked them on their maps as Fata Morgana, Do Not Approach. I did not blame them. It is unsettling, to experience the past. And one could easily get trapped there, with the ghosts of the dead. I was nervous, but also excited, for this was what I had traveled all this way for, and what I was born to do. I am a chronicler, and there must always be someone to remember the past as it was, for how else can the future be made anew?

“You came a long way,” Gawain said. “Our hospitality is yours, and everything we have. It is rare for us to receive visitors from so far away.”

“It is a long way to go,” Mowgai said. He looked morosely over the water. I thought that he’d begun to regret accompanying me. “Who knew the world had so much sea in it?”

Gawain laughed. “Water is the life,” he said. “Once, this was all Land. Now the city lies below the waves, a constant reminder to us of the way the world ended. But we endure, like weeds. Isn’t that what you used to say, Mai?”

“Old Grandma Mosh used to say it to me…”

The rhythm of the tides; the percussion of moon and stars. We accompanied Gawain by boat, sailing through serene waters over streets and landmarks buried in the sea: broken bridges that had once spanned Tamesis, Gothic Revival houses of office, a ruined palace where fish swam through long-broken windows. An immense wheel spun in the currents, half-buried in ancient mud. Above water, all was peaceful and quiet, and the hot sun shone down on fisherfolk in their canoes, throwing nets, and on the vast floating gardens of New Atlantis, where they raise kelp. Between the islands there were scores of boats and floating homes, and the smell of cooking and the shrieking laughter of kids were everywhere. The kids of New Atlantis swim like dolphins, and as we passed near Hampstead they came swimming toward us, lithe and tanned and laughing, to stare at us, the foreigners.

I recognized the place from the memory trinket Gawain had sent me, but I was not prepared for its faded grandeur. Here, the old mansions had been lovingly kept and restored. These ancient buildings were constructed with a variety of limestone from the mainland. They had extensive gardens and manicured lawns that belonged to an earlier era and cooler weather. Into these exclusive surroundings there were nevertheless intrusions of palm trees and frangipani and wild macaws, and sand beaches which surrounded what had once been a hill. I saw pods of dolphins rising in the surf and, looking beyond Hampstead Island, I could see what the islanders called the mainland. In contrast to the islands, this was a place of wide desolation and unchecked growth, and looking far to the north I could see, with a shudder of recognition, the beginning of a wide and featureless gray plain, in which nothing lived and nothing grew and nothing moved.

We skirted Hampstead and sailed eastward, following the vanished channel of old Tamesis.

How do I describe the site to you?

Even after all these years, a shudder of recognition runs through me… and I awake at night with an ache, a sense of loss like a ghost limb.

Well, then. Let me try.

It was dusk when we approached the salvage operation…

Heavy platforms floating on the water, dark towers, searchlight beams illuminating the sea. Divers moving below the surface, their lights leaving a faint trail in their passing. A broken dome deep down below… I saw a diving bell lowered into the water from one of the platforms, heard the scraping of heavy metal chains… I knew this from the memory Gawain had sent me.

“It will be cold,” I said. Mowgai looked uncomfortable.

“I don’t ask you to follow me farther,” I said to him, gently. “Only to wait for me to come back.”

“If you come back…” he said.

“I will.”

“Promise?”

He smiled and so did I, though we both knew my survival wasn’t something that could any longer be guaranteed.

“Promise,” I said.

I dressed slowly in the heavy suit as the diving bell was raised from the depths, and then Gawain and I climbed inside. It smelled dank, and when we spoke our voices sounded distorted, as though somehow filtered through a machine. I took a deep breath as we were plunged into the water. Through the small window I could see the murky waters of the sea, and the lights of the divers bobbing in the currents. Streets, houses, the remnants of a bridge all came into view. I shivered.

Gawain said, “This isn’t quite how I expected to meet you again, Mai.”

“No,” I said.

“I kept thinking I would go back, then something always intervened. But I never—”

“I know,” I said, gently. “Me, too.”

His shoulders slumped and he looked relieved. I thought of the past, how it is always out of reach, forever, and yet how vivid it remains to us, the living. Gawain and I had been together, for a while. I was glad neither of us resented how it ended, or that it had.

“I wouldn’t have come, otherwise,” I said.

“I know. I hoped you would.”

We smiled, together, something of the old, awkward teenage intimacy restored. It was quiet inside the diving bell, and our words when we spoke echoed back at us from the metal walls.

“Tell me about the vault,” I said. “How large is the Bostrom Field?”

“As large as a city, we think,” he said. “The old city. With as many as fifty thousand souls, maybe.”

“Sentient?”

“45.67 on the Markram Scale, according to the readouts.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

We descended through the layers of water to the seafloor. We docked with the makeshift dome that had been erected there, over the buried vault, and went across.

Inside, you could feel the chill. It wasn’t the ocean pressing down on you from above, not even the dead weight of broken history that littered the seabed, nothing as metaphorical as that. It was the vault itself. Like many others like it, it had been constructed some time in the dying decades of the age of excess, when for one glorious era it seemed everything was possible. As the planet died we had reached for the stars, and as the seas writhed in pain we sought to colonize them, and as species died in their thousands, humans sought immortality: immortality of flesh, immortality of mind.

It was cold because the vault was cold. It was colder inside the vault than the cosmic background temperature of space itself. Behind multiple shielding and cooling chambers, the quantum processing strata existed in a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. It was powered by Fleischmann reactors sunk deep into the bedrock and kept operational by a rat-brained (17.05 Markram) self-repair system of Turings. I mean, these are the details, more or less. Other vaults used noncompatible systems, anything from Narula spaces to Artaud one-shots, and most were meant to last forever… But forever, as it turns out, is a long time.

The truth was, they were the last, sad gasp of a dying race, a repeating act of hubristic hope that was simply more refuse the human species had littered on the planet. But I loved them—their quirky world-building and their slowly deteriorating insides, unwitnessed by any living being. Populated by echoes and ghosts, they were images of the past caught in amber, and there was no way I would have missed this one. I’d traveled a long, hard way to the New Atlantis. But what interested me wasn’t the laid-back island life above water. It was the world that had been buried centuries past in the dead drowned city.

All around us in the subaquatic base people were moving; machines had been attached to the metal surface of the buried dome and I could hear the high-pitched whine of drilling, and taste rust on my tongue. I admired the New Atlanteans’ equipment, the delicate computational machinery that did not look like salvage—they looked new.

“So it’s true,” I said. “You still… manufacture.”

“That sounds like an accusation,” Gawain said, but he squirmed a little. “We respect the pact. But we are still… a civilization, Mai.”

“I did not come here to argue,” I said.

I’d seen machines like this before, but those had been old, lovingly repaired and maintained. These cast a spell around them, reading out data from the buried vault. I longed to use them.

“It is hard,” I said. “To give up the toys of the past.”

“We had these built purely for this excavation,” he said.

“And you’ve made Breach.”

“We have. Do you… ?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

They’d penetrated into the vault with a micron-wide tunnel. A seeking tendril plugged into the unit, establishing just the tiniest foothold, analyzing the vault’s protocols, then monitoring the outer layer. It was at Breach but there was one final act that could take place, and I was willing to do it. This was what the old astronauts must have felt like, I often thought, as they got ready to blast off into space. You never knew if the rocket wasn’t about to explode underneath you.

“Are you ready?” he said. “There is no rush, we could go back to the surface and you could rest for a day or a week or a—”

“I’m ready,” I said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

I changed and lay down in the submersion tank and made myself comfortable, then reached across and took the small grip in my hand. The Injection would fire a massive burst of qubit data down the thin band and into the core. I’d be the first to see this world in centuries… if I survived Translation.

The machines would construct a Minsky shell copy of my consciousness which would be injected into the vault. In theory, I would remain behind, able to Waldo the shell-me… but entanglement and Heisenberg fluctuations meant things were never that clear-cut. If I weren’t careful, it would be me who became the ghost in the old machine.

I took a deep breath, and then I laughed and pressed the button, and everything went dark.

And then, just like that, I was elsewhere.

IX. The Drowned World

Elsewhere.

The world loses definition and returns with the taste of blue, a shriek of salt, a flash of musical notes from a popular song no one has played in centuries. The world tastes of pain and soapsuds.

I fall.

The sky is rent asunder and static devours the horizon. A bridge like a clean black line spans a low-resolution river. The world takes on definition, blocks of buildings, tiny figures moving jerkily in the streets between.

I fall.

The world explodes around me. Color returns, but everything is so gray. Bostrom worlds are meant to be happy places, the last refuge of the climate-clans rich into a make-believe world. Tiny hidden microworlds scattered deep underground in shelters built to weather nuclear storms. They never did count enough on entropy, though.

I fall.

The world gains and loses definition. Termites crawl across the sky. A diseased river flows down below…

I fall.

I—we stood at the north end of the Blackfriars Bridge, ghosting on a local host. Local data flooded into my-our consciousness. I knew, for example, that had once been a great bridge that spanned the river from south to north, but that by now it was reduced to a pile of rubble still, somehow, just standing up, and that a makeshift rope bridge that ran along its five spans was the only way to cross it in relative safety. I could see, from where I stood, the fishing nets that hung from the bridge, and the objects caught in them: debris, blowing in a powerful wind.

I wore a parka, heavy-soled boots, thick gloves, and goggles over my eyes to protect them from the wind. The sky was a gray and impenetrable expanse of clouds through which sunlight filtered wanly. It was the sort of sky you get during a hurricane, but here it looked permanent. Small figures moved nimbly over the bridge, pulling up ropes and nets, scavengers looking for salvage.

“You! You there!”

I turned, and saw them. There were five of them, thin, scraggly, dressed much as I was. They moved with a loping gait, into the wind. Coming my way.

“You there! Stand where you are!”

I began to back away. I saw them reach for weapons. Ahead of me I saw a domed cathedral but there were holes in the dome and the road leading up to it was filled with tenement buildings, and more figures came out at the shouts, and they stared in my direction but made no move either way.

“Outsider! Outsider!”

Thiels, I thought, with a sense of horror. I should have anticipated this. A Level IV Bostrom world slowly degrading to a Level III, and its inhabitants, at least some of them knowing, or at least suspecting, their world was a simulation—

They wanted out. My arrival would have been a shot of data powerful enough to send checksums awry all across the virtuality. They’d pinpointed me quickly—too quickly.

“Stop or we’ll shoot!”

I started to run, away from the river, away from the Thiels. They gave chase. I had to assume sentience, but sentience does not equate kindness or mercy. I could feel my lifeline back to the Up and Out, but it was a thin, wispy thread, and I had come too far, and I needed to see, and to know! This world had been closed off for centuries, and the things it could teach me about the past outweighed any personal danger—even death. I could imagine I-me in the Up and Out, plugged in, twitching, drooling, neural networks quantum-entangled with the I-we local host’s data-field.

Then the pop pop pop of projectile weapons discharging, and I heard a swarm of bees fly around me and one stung me on the arm. I spun around and my body screamed in pain. The bullet had burned through the parka and grazed the skin, drawing blood. I tasted rust.“What are you doing!” I shouted. “Stop that!”

“Get her!”

They came swaggering up the path from the river. I knew the people of the past had a mad violence about them, I knew violence was a part of being human, I had even experienced the past before, in other Markram worlds, in Byblos and elsewhere… but I’d never been shot before.

“That hurt!”

“It’s going to hurt a lot more when we’re done with you,” the one who seemed to be their leader said. He came forward, not hurrying, and he’d removed his goggles and behind them one eye was a black orb, and the other a sharp blue that stared at me. “You’re from out there. We want out, do you understand? Out!”

“But that’s…” I stopped, helpless.

“What?” he demanded. “What!”

“But that’s not possible,” I said, softly. “You’re… you’re Markram minds, 45.67 to maybe 62.18 peak. You’re digitally native, man!”

He pointed his gun at me. His single eye was blue and clear and, I thought, quite mad.

“You have no bodies,” I said. “No physicality. If you truly believe you’re a simulation… then what is there for you in the world beyond?”

His face twisted, in anger or pain. As though he had expected that answer. But what could I tell him? I think he knew.

“Then shut it down,” he said. “Shut it down!”

“What happened here?” I said. “It can’t always have been like this.”

“It was beautiful, once,” he said. “Then it started to revert. This, what you see? The storms, the dead river, the blind sky—this is how it was outside.”

There was nothing I could say to him.

“What happened to the people of our time?” he asked me, then. He must have been a man of power, in the Up and Out, before he brain-mapped himself and Translated into the time vault.

“They died,” I said. I had no reason to lie to him. “Most of them. A few survived. The moon broke, and there’s no one on Mars now but a few dead robots, rusting in the winds. Most people died. The seas rose, the earth shook… Now there’s just a handful of us. But we endure. Like… weeds.”

“Weeds?” he said. “Weeds? We ruled the world!”

“Well,” I said. “I guess we don’t do that, anymore.”

I turned my back on him. I had nothing left, and my arm hurt. I half-expected a bullet in the back, to finish me off. But he did nothing, and I simply walked away.

For months I wandered this shell of a town. Remember, in the Up and Out, this place was buried underwater, a ruin of antiquity. Here I had the chance of seeing it the way it was, the way it lived, even in its final days. Its denizens lived as all people live. It was a city on the edge of climate-collapse, yet it functioned still. In the Regent’s Park allotments, they raised beets and cabbages and dug for potatoes, men and women braced against the winds, and autonomous Asimovs, old and rusted, swept the constant debris off the city streets. It was easy, after a time, to forget that one existed in a simulation. And, of course, it wasn’t, not quite. It was a world upon itself, a pocket universe. To its residents it was real and, after all, isn’t reality what we think it is? They lived, they died, they endured. We are all just weeds.

I spent much of my time in what was left of the British Museum, poring over documents with the semblance of old paper, but mostly I needed to interact with the people who lived in the town. I was to be their only witness to the outside.

I was at the Amundsen Arms…

The pub off Leicester Square was lit with tallow candles…

The smell of underground vegetation, fungi, and the river… People moving in the near-dark, the sound of loud laughter, the smell of spilled beer, a haze of smoke from cigarette sticks. They grew mostly marijuana; tobacco such as I believe was plentiful once did not grow in that city, in that time. Most of their agriculture was underground, in the old tunnels where the trains once passed. A fire burning in the hearth…

I liked it there.

It was then that I saw him.

He came in through the door and the storm outside and shook his hair loose and smiled. His eyes were Hyla-frog green. He was tall, he had to stoop a little under the low ceiling. When he walked he had the slightly bow-legged gait of a Mudlark. He crossed the room and people parted for him. Above the bar, a television set was flickering, a political broadcast from Mrs. Equitone in No. 10. He perched himself at the bar, easily; the bartender brought him a shot glass without being asked and he drank it. He looked around, and saw me, and smiled.

I never meant for it to happen, but the past has always held such an attraction…

“I’m Kay,” he said.

What is real? This question often bothers me, more so now, as age hobbles my progress through time. All lives are finite, and someday, I think, the human race shall fade, at last, and it will be the ants who take over the planet. But perhaps this has always been their world, and only our arrogance led us to assume otherwise…

The nights grow long and I miss the light, and my bones ache. Age brings with it a thousand small pains. It is pain that tells us we are still alive.

This is the story. I told it to you back at the start. I reluctantly went on a long, hard journey. I encountered loss, and I found love…

It is a curious thing. How do you define love? How do you quantify it? We know the weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, electromagnetism. But where does love feature in a unified field theory of the universe? Do ants love? Do stars?

Kay was real to me, as real as pottery shards or the wind, as necessary as sunlight. He was a Mudlark, hunting for salvage on the banks of Tamesis, which they called the Thames. It was a dangerous, laborious job, but he did it gladly. He saw himself as an archaeologist, I think, digging up the past. Buried in the mud he’d find Roman coins and plastic dolls, a Georgian necklace, unexploded ordnance, a Norman bronze horse, a comical mouse on a key ring wearing red pants and white gloves, and polycarbonate disks with reflective surfaces that caught the light and broke it into tiny rainbows.

But what is love? Some say it is merely a projection of our imagination—a miniature virtuality constructed in the neuron-firing pathways of the brain. That every existence is a solitary one, that we are each of us a simulation, and how do we trust anything we see, or feel?

But to be human, I think, is to love—to love and to hate, also. We have always possessed such a great capacity for emotion that it spilled over the entire world and nearly killed it.

Was Kay real? Was I?

For months I lived in that city, in that time. At times, I wished never to leave it. With Kay I explored its hidden passageways—they did not burn their dead but processed them using Wiigh-Mäsak promation, to cultivate the soil. With him, I crossed the rickety bridges in the constant storms, and visited the south bank, where wild, mutated animals roamed. Once, we visited the British Library, as it was called, but it, or its simulacrum, had burned to the ground in centuries past, and all I could find of its books were some blackened fragments.

Was he real?

Was I?

But seven months into my stay in the city, we lay high in a room overlooking the water. A storm raged on the horizon in purple swirls, and lightning flashed, illuminating a tentacled monster rising, for just a moment, out of the toxic river. It was warm and humid inside the room. We made love and, when we were replete, I felt something change in me, then, traveling up the pipe from I-we to I, and I sighed…

“What is it?” he said.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m just happy.”

He stroked my face. “You will go soon.”

“No,” I said. “No, I won’t leave you.”

“But you will,” he said. And, “It’s all right.”

“How can it be all right? Kay… do you ever miss it? What was before? Don’t you ever want to fix the world?”

“I like it here,” he said. “This is my world. And I am me, not someone else’s ghost.”

“Don’t you worry the world might be decaying? That it will… stop working, one day?”

“Don’t all worlds do that?” he said. “And, Mai, didn’t endlessly trying to fix everything just get us here in the first place?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know, anymore.”

“Come here,” he said, and he held me in his arms, and sang as we watched the storm chase dark birds across the sky. At least I thought they were birds. His song was soft and sad, and I didn’t know the words. After a time I fell asleep and, in the morning, he was gone.

I went looking for him and found him by the river. He had waded into the water and was sifting through the nets half-buried in the mud. I called to him, but the winds snatched away the sound. I felt terribly sad then, and I didn’t know why. He looked so perfect, standing there. His back was to me, but I thought he was happy. This was his world.

The wave came out of nowhere. Perhaps it was a product of a delayed tsunami effect from a quake, or perhaps it was the world-system itself. It rose over so that it almost looked still, a Hokusai wave. Then it crashed on him and he vanished.

“Kay! Kay!”

I started to run to him. The chill of the water bit me. The wind tore at my face. I felt people watch me, silently, from the tenements. I was mad with shock, with grief. I pulled on my lifeline, and the world froze. I tore the clouds open. For the first time in centuries the sun shone down on the city of London.

“I will rip you apart, piece by piece, until you give him back to me!”

Nothing answered my call. The world was still. It was indifferent to what I wanted. You cannot take on a world, and win. I saw the Thiels stand on the embankment. They watched the hole I had punched through their world. Then, one by one, they, too, turned their backs on me and walked away. I guess they’d finally realized they’d find nothing on the other side.

My lifeline pulled. The world rushed back into being. The clouds closed over the sun. The river calmed. I felt myself yanked like a doll on a string. The world lost definition. It tasted cobalt blue and I heard cinnamon cry.

I fell, up.

They pulled me out of the immersion tank. I was weak from the long period of submersion. My legs would not support me and I threw up all over the floor. Mowgai was there, holding me up. I tasted rust and yellow, which tastes like fresh mulberry leaves.

Inside me, something kicked.

And that’s really all there is to it. I received a message from the New Atlantis, and I went there, and I saw the sights. I visited the past, for a little while…

I fell in love.

I suppose the sort of love I’d had with Kay was one that we both knew was fleeting. Passion burns strongest when it is doomed. I loved, I lost…

But something of him remained. Some sort of entanglement I can’t explain, and never sought to. I was sick each morning, and then it passed. Mowgai would look at me sideways, but say nothing. We dwelt on Shooters Hill, all throughout that long summer, as my belly swelled and I felt myself engulfed in sunlight. The seagulls called across the shores of New Atlantis… I wrote the chronicle of old London, the one preserved still in the amber of the time vault deep under the waves.

When my daughter was born the pain was almost unbearable, but when I held her to my chest for the first time and felt her warmth, I knew this was heaven, or as close to it as we can get, on Earth.

Then I went back.

Epilogue

Night has fallen, and the children run, shrieking and laughing, outside, between the homes. I look out of my window and see the paper lanterns rise into the sky like fireflies. Their lights do not dispel the dark but complement it. The nightjars call, and I smell jasmine, wild thyme, and roses.

My name is Mai. I have lived on this Land for eighty-four years and I love it, deeply.

My daughter calls. My grandchildren burst into the room and run to me, climbing on my knees. I love them, too, with a love that almost hurts. I think I am fortunate. And when I go into the dark, my atoms will remain, to feed the fields and flowers. I’ve known rain and I’ve known sun, and once I saw the Isles of the Nesoi, and once I visited the New Atlantis…

I experienced loss, and I found love.

Then I went back.

Everything in between, as the old poet said, is just details.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama (2011), The Violent Century (2013), the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), and the Campbell Award winning Central Station (2016), in addition to many other works and several other awards. His latest novels are Unholy Land and debut children’s novel Candy. He works across genres, combining detective and thriller modes with poetry, science fiction and historical and autobiographical material. His work has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick by the Guardian and the Financial Times, and to Kurt Vonnegut’s by Locus.

ALSO BY LAVIE TIDHAR

NOVELS

The Tel Aviv Dossier*

Osama*

The Violent Century

A Man Lies Dreaming*

Unholy Land

THE BOOKMAN HISTORIES

The Bookman

Camera Obscura

The Great Game

also available in omnibus form as The Bookman Histories

NOVELLAS

The Vanishing Kind*

Cloud Permutations*

Jesus & the Eightfold Path*

Gorel & the Pot-Bellied God*

COLLECTIONS

Black Gods Kiss*

HebrewPunk

The Apex Book of World SF (as editor)

The Apex Book of World SF 2 (as editor)

The Apex Book of World SF 3 (as editor)

*available as a JABberwocky ebook

THANK YOU FOR READING

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