Fortunately, Serena is now ageing faster than I am. Helplessly watching her smile, my overcoat around my shoulders, I wait for her to die and set me free.
1976
The Ultimate City
All winter, while he worked on the sailplane, Halloway had never been certain what drove him to build this dangerous aircraft, with its ungainly wings and humpback fuselage. Even now, as he crouched in the cockpit during the final seconds before his first flight, he was still unsure why he was perched on the steep cliffs above the Sound, waiting to be catapulted into the overlit water. The tapered wings shivered in the cold air, as if the aircraft were trying to rip open the cockpit and eject its foolhardy pilot on to the beach below.
It had taken since dawn for Halloway and his helpers - the crowd of ten-year-olds who formed an enthusiastic claque and coolie-gang - to drag the sailplane from the barn behind his grandfather's house and secure it to the catapult. By the time they reached the cliffs the other contestants in the gliding championship had been aloft for hours. From his cockpit Halloway could see a dozen of the brightly painted craft hanging above his head in the calm sky.
On the ground, by contrast, the turbulent air sweeping up the face of the cliffs seemed to have broken loose from a tornado. Exhausted by the effort of carrying the glider, the boys hung limply from the wings like a line of ballast bags. At any moment a sudden gust would sweep them all into the air together.
In front of Halloway were thirty feet of miniature railway-track and the steel cable linking the sailplane to the sandfilled trolley at the edge of the cliff which would either pull the craft apart or, with luck, catapult it into the air. Halloway signalled the boys aside, and gripped the catapult release lever in both hands. Once again he reminded himself that the Wright Brothers' first sustained flights, little more than a hundred years earlier, had also been launched by catapult.
'Thanks, everybody - now stand back!' he shouted above the wind. One of the smallest boys was still clinging absentmindedly to the port wing-tip. 'Jamie, let go, for God's sake! Take off!'
As the trolley lurched forward, dragging the sailplane after it like a startled bird, Halloway felt the sudden strength of the huge wings and knew already that the aircraft would be the most successful of all those his father had designed before his death. At the edge of the cliffs the trolley hurtled down its track. Halloway released the towing cable, and the glider rose steeply, carried upwards by a cold hand, almost falling on to its back in the rush of wind. The dunes and the beach reeled away to starboard, taking the world from him. The cheers of the spectators were lost in the shrill soughing of the slipstream.
Thirty seconds later, Halloway had climbed a turbulent staircase that carried him in a right-hand spiral to a height of a thousand feet. Abruptly everything around him had become quiet. Little more than a whisper, the wind sucked softly at the fabric of the glider. The heat from the sun stung his blond skin, but Halloway ignored the pain and trimmed the glider into a stable attitude. As always, his father's design had been without error. After the first yawing subsided he began to move the glider across the sky, almost feeling his father's presence in its powerful span. The sailplane soared like a condor in the thermals, dominating the other competitors now far below. Relaxed and happy now, Halloway sat back, ready to preside generously over his domain.
Halloway had begun to build the sailplanes two years earlier. After his parents' death he had moved to his grandfather's house, and for a long while had been reluctant to return to his old home. The charred remains of the sauna where his mother and father had died lay untouched below the derelict sail of the solar energy rig. The hundreds of occluded mirrors, fused by the intense heat of the fire, towered fifty feet above the calcinated roof tiles, an all too melancholy memorial.
One evening, while discussing the annual gliding competition, which the residents of Garden City organized in order to let a little civilized rivalry into their pastoral lives, his grandmother mentioned that Halloway's father had been a keen amateur pilot during the last days of powered aviation. On an impulse Halloway borrowed the keys to the house and wandered through the gutted rooms. Only the studio and workshop, separated from the house by an arm of the canal which irrigated his parents' market garden, had escaped the fire. The shelves were filled with relics of his father's restless mind - antique gear-boxes and carburettors, mementoes of the vanished petroleum age, and the designs for a series of progressively more ambitious sailplanes. The half-completed skeleton of a small glider still lay on its trestles in the workshop.
Halloway pored over the blueprints for months, intrigued by his father's casual but clear calligraphy. The marginal jottings formed a running diary of the rich inner life of this endlessly inventive man, by a bitter irony killed beside his wife in his own home by the overloaded circuitry of an advanced solar device he had designed himself. Like some pastoral Leonardo, he had sat in his studio in the centre of this placid market garden. As the canals flowed between the greenhouses filled with flowers and vegetables, as the waterwheels turned and the hundreds of solar sails silently drained light from the sun, he had devised ever more complex tidal-energy pumps and solar batteries, refuse recycle units and windmills. His real passion, though, apart from his curious interest in old internal-combustion engines, was for these gliders.
All that first winter Halloway had examined the blueprints, feeling the contours of his father's mind in these graceful airframes and wing designs. Several of the aircraft featured extensive control-surfaces, strengthened fuselage-members far in excess of any wing-loading they might need, almost as if they were designed to carry some secret cargo. But Halloway began with the most basic of the gliders. Fortunately, the art and practice of carpentry had reached an advanced level in Garden City. Where an earlier generation of teenage boy learned to strip a carburettor or re-set a distributor, the young of Garden City were expert by the age of twelve in joining and flitching and dovetailing. Within a month his group of eager assistants had helped him to build his first modest sailplane, ready in time for the summer's gliding championship.
As he urged them on, however, watching them cut and stitch the fabric, plane and polish the struts and stringers, Halloway had known already that the competition was only an excuse. He was driven by some other need, connected not so much with his father as with the metal relics, the superchargers embedded in lucite, the fuel pumps and speedometers that lay around the studio like the ornaments of a shrine dedicated to the vanished spirit of the Otto Cycle.
Long before he became a skilled pilot, Halloway had been able to outfly his rivals, as much by pure aggression as by airmanship. None of the other competitors would rise to his baiting, let alone put up a fight. Although the championships were the climax of the year's flying, the other pilots were happy to award him the prize. When he banked and dived towards the beach, chasing the faster thermals behind the dunes, the two gliders he forced aside made way for him without complaint. Their pilots, a thirty-five-year-old architect whom Halloway was always beating at tennis, and an elderly hydrographer with a red beard, had both visited the workshop to watch the construction of this huge glider, and warned him of the impossibility of launching such a craft.
Both had been suitably impressed by Halloway's catapult. They were clearly glad to see Halloway succeed - too glad, in fact. If they had not been so naturally lacking in deceit they might have questioned his motives for building this elaborate craft - not that he would have been able to answer them - but Halloway's blond hair and guileless blue eyes turned aside any suspicion. Eager for action at all costs, yet shy and very much the dreamer, Halloway had a natural talent for rallying people around him.
At the same time, he liked to provoke the crowd. Looking down at the spectators with their picnic hampers among the dunes, the officials gazing at the sky from their canvas chairs, Halloway imagined himself as a World War II fighter ace, diving out of the sun and raking these amiable neighbours with bursts of machine-gun fire. The whole bucolic landscap
e of Garden City, this elegant but toy-like world of solar sails and flower-filled gardens, the serene windmills and gently nodding reduction gear of the tidal-power machines - all these cried out for a Pearl Harbor.
Surprised by this strain of aggression in himself, Halloway checked his temper. Most of the three hundred spectators he had known since childhood, intelligent, civilized and kindly people who had done their best to care for him since his parents' death, and enjoyed being shocked by his desperado stunts.
They were all watching him now, hands shielding their eyes from the sun. The coolie-gang of small boys squatted on the catapult rails, obviously waiting for Halloway to astonish them.
A mile away, across the Sound, the steep concrete walls of an artificial island rose from the sea like the hull of a cruise liner. The island was a former naval station, a collection of rusting metal buildings around a lighthouse. Although little more than swimming distance away, Halloway had noticed that few people in Garden City were aware of the island, as if they mentally assigned it to the tower blocks of the old metropolis on the opposite shore of the Sound. The previous summer Halloway had rowed out to the island, winding through the dangerous labyrinth of tidal power pontoons and rocker arms that separated the beach from the sea. In the pump-room below the lighthouse he found the huge diesel engines that once powered the warning beacon, each the size of a steam locomotive.
But even his surprise at the enormous latent power of these metal beasts paled before his first real sight of the city. He stood on the rusting catwalk, hands gripping the rail to stop himself from diving into the cold waters of the Sound and setting off to the far shore. The vast office-blocks, many over a hundred storeys high, formed a silent congregation, more remote and yet closer to him than ever before.
Below him, as the glider climbed the thermals, the first people in the crowd were standing up among their picnic hampers, the officials waving their chequered flags at Halloway. Already they had guessed that he intended to circle the lighthouse. Halloway climbed away from them, making use of the strong updraughts that rose from the heated greenhouses, solar reflectors and rooftops, the warm canals and clay tennis-courts. Already he was looking down, not only at the naval island, but at the distant towers of the city.
When Halloway reached the naval island half an hour later the shoreline of Garden City was far behind him, the lines of solar reflectors forming strips of metallic glitter. He had meant to impress everyone by making a few circuits of the lighthouse before returning, but as he soared above the water he could feel the wind carrying him further across the Sound. At any moment it would be too late to turn back. He waited for the glider to bank to port or starboard, but the sailplane pressed on across the deep water. Already Halloway could see the canyons opening among the officeblocks of the city, an abandoned dream waiting to be re-occupied. Shadow and sunlight alternated between the buildings, as if flashing some kind of cryptic message to him. But Halloway knew that he had made his decision, and why all winter he had been building this strange aircraft.
***
Borne along by the fronts of warm air, Halloway and his glider made their transit of the Sound. The opposing shorelines had begun to converge, and little more than three miles of water separated the beach communities from the deserted quays and motor-routes of the city suburbs. Exhilarated in a way he had never known before, Halloway gripped the control stick with his knees, and stretched out his arms to seize the vivid air. He was not alone in the sky. On all sides flights of wild birds were crossing the Sound - pintails and white-fronted geese, mallard and harlequin duck. A colony of herring gulls moved below him, changing course when they passed Halloway as if guiding him through the crowded air. No longer hunted by the vegetarian inhabitants of Garden City, immense congregations of water birds thrived around the uninhabited shores of the Sound, in the mud-flats, lagoons and sloughs between the market settlements and the old metropolis.
Ahead of him, across the mercury surface of the sea, a collapsed suspension bridge lay like a drowned saurian in the gateway of the Sound. The last of the market gardens gave way to uncultivated scrubland. The canals petered out among the sandhills. Ten miles from the city, by some unwritten rule, as if they were aware that the physical spell of the metropolis might still intimidate them, the last inhabitants to leave their factories, offices and apartment houses had marked out a no-man'sland to separate themselves from their pasts. Halloway remembered his grandfather's lurid account (the old man was only too keen to be tricked into these reminiscences) of how the city, like a thousand others around the globe, had gradually come to a halt and shut itself down for ever. When the world's reserves of fossil fuels had finally been exhausted, when the last coal silos were empty and the last oil-tankers had berthed, the power-stations and railway systems, production lines and steel-works had closed for the last time and the post-technological era had begun.
By then, twenty-five years earlier, there had been few people left anyway. By some unconscious perception of their own extinction, the huge urban populations of the late twentieth century had dwindled during the previous decades. Halloway's parents had been among the last to leave, abandoning their apartment - the only one still occupied - in one of the high-rise blocks that Halloway could see now emerging from the haze beyond the ruined suspension bridge. Perhaps it was this longpostponed departure that had separated his father from the other inhabitants of Garden City. The small but determined parties of colonists - doctors, chemists, agronomists and engineers - had set out into the rural backwaters determined to build the first scientifically advanced agrarian society. Within a generation they, like countless similar communities around other major cities, had successfully built their pastoral paradise, in a shot-gun marriage of Arcadia and advanced technology. Here each home was equipped with recycling and solar-energy devices, set in its own five acres of intensely cultivated market garden, a self-supporting agricultural paradise linked to its neighbours by a network of canals and I conduits, the whole irrigated landscape heated and cooled, powered and propelled by a technology far more sophisticated in every respect than that of the city they had abandoned, but a technology applied to the waterwheel, the tidal pump and the bicycle.
He had reached the western limits of the Sound. A thousand feet below was the broken back of the bridge. Halloway circled a large ceramics works on the southern shore, letting the hot air reflected from the roof-tiles lift him as high as possible before he made the crossing to the city. The downtown office-blocks and apartment-houses were still nearly ten miles away, but facing him across the bridge was a built-up area of dockyards, suburban department stores, car parks and motor-route intersections. Moored to the quays were line upon line of rusting freighters and oiltankers, their hulls like husks.
For the first time, as he steered the glider across the bridge, Halloway could see the cars, hundreds of the dusty vehicles lining the quaysides, parked in the empty side-streets on flattened tyres. Immense roads ran everywhere, causeways of steel and concrete that moved like some kind of serpentine sculpture through complex interchanges. Traces of these broad decks, never less than six lanes wide, were still to be found in Garden City - on an intact halfmile section behind his grandfather's house the inhabitants staged their annual bicycle rally.
Needless to say, there were no cars in Garden City. If there had been, Halloway often thought with a kind of blank bitterness, his mother and father would still be alive. Despite their severe burns, they might still have been saved by the intensive-care unit at the hospital three miles away. The fastest transport available had been the village fireappliance. This brilliantly designed land-yacht, fitted with the most efficient system of metal sails ever devised, and with an advanced magnetic suspension invented by a local electrical engineer, achieved a top speed of six miles an hour. By the time they reached the hospital, their distraught son tearing at the aluminium sails in a frenzy, the Halloways were already in deep shock and died the next day.
As he crossed the ruined br
idge, losing height in the cold air over the water, Halloway counted the cars in the parking lots along the quays. Scores had been abandoned on the bridge approach-roads when their owners set out on foot. The salt air had stripped away their roofs and body panels, exposing the engines and steering gear. Halloway had seen automobile engines before, in the encyclopaedias of industrial archaeology at the village school. Once, as a boy of ten, he had entered his father's workshop and found him running an old gasolene engine. The violent but controlled noise, the juddering motion that shook the work-bench and timber walls, and the heady fumes like a black gas - an intoxicating smell at once dirty and exhilarating - had almost knocked him off his feet. What he remembered above all, before his father switched off the engine and crated it away for the last time, was the overwhelming energy of this machine, the power and excitement beyond anything else in their sophisticated Arcadia. And yet, as his father told him, this was no more than the power unit of a small lawnmower.
Not that there was any taboo against gasolene engines, nor for that matter against oil- or coal-fired steam engines. There was merely a tacit understanding that for two hundred years proto-industrial man had pillaged the earth's natural resources, and these relics were unwelcome reminders of an unhappy history. Beyond this were boredom and indifference - the inhabitants of Garden City were aware that their technology, their advanced horticulture and their casual winning of energy from the sun, the wind and the tides, had progressed far ahead of anything the age of oil and coal had achieved, with its protein-hungry populations, its limitless pollution of air, soil and sea.
The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1 Page 125