Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  They crossed a lake of warm water, sinking to their waists. Emerging from this, they looked back and saw that the lake had disappeared. They next had to go a mile out of their way to round a crevasse that held a million tons of burning oil. There were fast streams to ford over beds of wet ice, and pitch-black coils of smoke through which they had to charge, emerging on the other side to see that the maze had many more walls.

  Suddenly appearing overhead and vanishing in a roar were the thousands of lifters, flying low through the billowing steam and smoke, their lights flashing along their hundred-foot lengths as they dashed from place to place. Their rotors and jets parted and stirred up the clouds so that small bolts of lightning and trailing thunderclaps followed them across the ice, dragging along like a veil. These would crisscross in strange garlands across the Marrattas and Mrs. Gamely, who soon learned not to flinch as they passed. Hardesty wondered what was going to come of Jackson Mead’s plan now that the great ice lens was irreparably broken, and guessed that the master-builder had gone much deeper than the ice.

  They searched to find a gravedigger on the Isle of the Dead. These were the descendants of Baymen and escapees from what the Baymen had called “hospitals for the congealed.” And they looked it. Because of their skins, their wild beards, their thooid and mangy rawhide lacings, and their expression of jilted, walleyed confusion, they seemed to be fit heirs for their peculiar forebears.

  Hardesty found one burrowing under a huge leaning tree.

  “Bury her,” he commanded, indicating the coffin.

  The gravedigger protested that it was night.

  “You’ll have night for the rest of time, if you don’t start digging,” Hardesty threatened.

  “Pay me.”

  Hardesty dropped coins into the man’s cupped hands.

  There was a grave already waiting. They went to it, and lowered the coffin.

  The grave was filled in well in advance of midnight. They knew they had to hurry, but before they started across the ice, now covered with hot green lakes and soon to be subsumed, they stood for a while, unbelieving. The whole world seemed to be dying. Virginia cried. “Goodbye, Abby,” she said.

  A Golden Age

  IN THE first hours of the new millennium, Peter Lake lay asleep among the machines at The Sun. The mechanics took him at his word. Now that they had seen what he could do, they held him in awe and dared not disturb him. Had he had other followers, supporters, or, for that matter, friends, they might have awakened him just before the stroke of midnight, in expectation of a miracle. But extraordinary events seldom keep appointments with precision, and Peter Lake, entirely alone, slept through the moment when the clock struck twelve and the year 2000 arrived. His right hand covered the wound on his left side, and his mouth was slightly open as he lay half sitting up against a machine that he himself had kicked awake several hours before. There were no clocks in sight, but the clocks of The Sun ticked off their seconds exactly as if nothing had happened. Plants remained in their pots and tubs, and did not become animate or walk about; doors still squeaked when they were opened; and a janitor was spreading some sort of green stuff to catch the dust as he swept.

  The Sun and The Whale were preparing a joint edition, as was the custom when the news warranted, and double the usual number of people were at work. The place had come alive in the dead of night as reporters with shocked expressions came in from all the boroughs to write of what they had seen as their city was destroyed. Because there were so many stories to tell of how the old era had died, the paper the next day was going to be almost as thick as a typical Ghost (The Ghost, however, had been shut down by the power failure). For example, the animals in the zoos and the riding horses in the West Side stables had put up such a racket that they had been freed. Panicked by the fires, they galloped in herds, running up and down the avenues between ranks of burning buildings. When they turned a corner, The Sun reporter wrote, the blurred sight of their smooth pelts and muscular backs suggested a river in flood.

  Compared to people, however, the animals were a study in rectitude and self-control. The streets were filled with racing automobiles. Drivers seeking routes out of the city found them blocked with traffic, people, or debris, and sped as fast as they could to other exits. But there were no exits, and the result was that everyone tried one and then tore off toward the next. Every two-way street or boulevard had automobiles running at ninety and a hundred miles an hour in both directions. When there were crashes, and there were crashes, those who survived simply continued on. Each minute, on any block, a car could be seen hurtling out of control into a storefront or the terrified mobs on the sidewalks. The tension was not alleviated by the fact that every fire engine and police car in the city was rushing to and fro, sirens blaring, and the tanks and helicopters of the militia were using up gasoline in trying to find the islands that Praeger de Pinto had told them to guard.

  The bridges were crowded with uncountable thousands of refugees who streamed across their darkened roadways unaware that the belts of subcities ringing Manhattan had become a single wall of fire. They walked in stunned silence, children on their backs, briefcases and bundles in their hands. The streets became a huge rag-and-bone shop as people carried off an infinite assortment of objects that they wanted to save. Thousands upon thousands fled with books, paintings, candelabras, vases, violins, old clocks, electronic appliances, sacks of silverplate, jewelry boxes, and—wonder of wonders—television sets. The more practical-minded headed north on Riverside Drive, laden with backpacks full of food, tools, and warm clothing. But what real chance, in the dead of winter, in a world turned upside down, did a man with a chainsaw strapped across his back really have?

  Not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of looters swelled into the commercial districts. Because the more ambitious among them contrived to ram bulldozers against bank walls, explosions were heard as cache after cache of dynamite blew open vault after vault. But one boom was impossible to distinguish from another as stores of combustibles were ignited by the fires and the militia blasted out firebreaks around the islands. Overjoyed and overloaded looters moved as slowly as snails, pushing or pulling refrigerators, obese furniture, racks of clothing, and sacks of money. The money sacks were the saddest of orphans, for no sooner had they found a new parent than he was shot and killed and they were adopted by someone else. This was repeated without cease, so that if the money bags had been tracked, the plot would have shown them oscillating like bouncing balls, exquisitely juggled by the powers of insensate greed. All the things abandoned on the street made even the most expensive districts seem like gutted, ruined slums, and it was hard to tell where those with stolen objects in tow thought they were going. Mainly, they moved in circles, wild with happiness that they now had a new this or a new that. Because there were no places left in which to live, those who had stolen furniture would probably never sit or lie on it, but would, instead, spend weeks or months carrying it around on their backs.

  Looters of a different sort joined in intoxicated gangs seeking libertine pleasures in the rubble. The furniture abandoned by those who found it too heavy to carry served as stations for copulation between people of all sexes and all ages. The combinations thus effected of groups and individuals, the willing and the unwilling, were terrible and sad.

  The police did not know whom to shoot or what to defend, since everything appeared to be at odds with everything else, thunder and fire were everywhere, criminals vanished easily into the dark ash-wind, and the streets had filled with lunatics carrying bundles.

  The Sun’s reporters were also able to report on families that held together and defended themselves against the chaos, on acts of selfless charity, and on the brave and the mad who had tried to stop the dissolution. These acts were rare, isolated incidents which did not turn back the tide—not through any fault of their own, but because they were neither auspiciously timed nor placed.

  Witnessing the unraveling of the city, those of Harry Penn’s reporter
s who were not killed (as many of them were) returned to The Sun to write about it. They sensed that this was the proper thing to do, even if everything else had gone to hell, because they knew enough to know that whenever the world ends it always manages to begin again, and they had no intention of being left out.

  While the city burned under skies crawling with dense electrical storms, and his machines worked flawlessly to light The Sun, Peter Lake slept.

  PRAEGER DE PINTO had hardly turned to greet Harry Penn. Standing in the center of the north deck, peering out the window through a pair of night-vision binoculars mounted on a tripod, the mayor was busy. “Who’s watching Island Six?” he asked over the amplification system, almost like a god.

  “I am,” replied a normal human voice from a rank of men to his left: deputy commissioners, staff assistants, and a patrolman or two brought in to shore-up missing spaces, all equipped with night-vision optics just as the mayor was.

  “Do you see the gap in the southwest side?” Praeger asked.

  “I can’t see it now, sir,” was the reply. “The ash is too thick. But I saw it before, and reported it.”

  “Did they acknowledge?”

  “No.”

  “Island Six went off the communications net,” a technician announced.

  “When?” Praeger inquired.

  “Five minutes ago.”

  “Try to get it back on. Eustis, send a man on foot to the command post there, to tell them about that gap. And give him a radio. Island Six is in Chelsea. If he runs, he should make it in twenty minutes.”

  While the city burned below, exchanges like this transpired in utter calm and tranquillity as Praeger and the others worked to maintain their defenses and save as much as they could save. After several hours, they had grown used to a city of flames and smoke. For Praeger de Pinto and his generation, the notion that their future would be spent in quiet command posts and apocalyptic battles was one with which they had been comfortable almost from birth. Most of the men on the high deck were cool and unmoved. This was their task, something they had always expected. The logic of the preceding decades, the wars against dreams and illusions, the life of expectations in themselves, not surprisingly, had led to this. In fact, rising to meet the challenge of its inevitability, they had, at times, actually wanted it.

  But Harry Penn was an old man, who had had different expectations, and he grieved as he watched the tens of thousands of flames flickering in the darkness, seeking out whatever was left to burn. He was deeply hurt by the triumphant clouds of smoke and steam, reflecting orange light as they soared above the city, turning over and unfolding like dough in a baker’s hands. They seemed to be laughing at the ruined burnt-out blocks which they had so cowardly abandoned.

  Unlike the others, Harry Penn remembered the city when it was young. In general, the people had been kinder and more capable than their descendants, and the city itself had been different, innocent. The curve of the carriage roads, long since obliterated; the billow of sails, long since gone; the flanks and manes of horses working on the streets, long gone too; and the shape even of people’s dress, soft and gentle as it was—were, in themselves, a prayer that found continual favor. God and nature had been pleased by the immortal and correct curves, by the horses, by the tentativeness of expression, by the city’s remarkable ability to understand its place in the world, and the city had been rewarded with clear north winds and a dome of deep blue sky. The city that Harry Penn had known and loved had been young and new.

  In a lull, Praeger turned to Harry Penn, and saw that the old man’s face, faintly illuminated by the harsh firelight, was full of pain. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Let’s just say,” Harry Penn answered, “that a lovely child I once knew has grown old and hard, and is now dying an ugly death.”

  “It isn’t so,” said Praeger. “It isn’t dying. This is going to clear the way.”

  “I’m too old,” Harry Penn told him, “too attached to one time, I suppose, ever to lose faith in it.”

  “Look,” Praeger said. “Out there, in the blackness, I see a new city rising, already.”

  Harry Penn looked out, and saw only the past of which he so often dreamed.

  “Of all people,” Praeger continued, “I would have thought that you would see this for what it is. I thought you knew. The Sun publishing, isn’t it?”

  “We’ve never missed a day.”

  “Right now,” Praeger said, “The Sun is the only lighted building in this city—like a beacon.”

  “That’s not so,” Harry Penn replied. “The Sun is dark. The machinery froze, and the mechanics say it will take them six months to fix it. When I left a couple of hours ago everyone was working by candlelight, and we were going to run the joint edition by hand, on the treadle press.”

  “Then you must come with me,” Praeger said as he put his arm around Harry Penn’s shoulders and led him toward the east gallery. He deeply loved the old man.

  At first they saw nothing except a gray cloud sweeping by, filthy with ash and cinders. But then, as if it were being cranked up, the cloud slowly and awkwardly lifted, and a light shone through the last of its dirty skirts.

  Alone in the darkness of Printing House Square, The Sun was lit like a faceted jewel. Astonishingly angular and precisely aligned beams of light radiated from its windows. The floor of the square reflected back a diffuse glow, over which lay the swordlike projections as if they were the branches of a thistle, or the hard metal representations of light in the cross of St. Stephen.

  “There,” Praeger said. “One of the rewards of virtue.”

  But Harry Penn knew better. “Even a thousand years of virtue,” he replied, “are not strong enough to shape the light. Something far greater than virtue . . . must be very close.”

  Then Harry Penn left to go back to The Sun, and Praeger resumed his direction of the difficult battle that was unfolding silently below, and for which he had probably been born.

  WHILE HARRY PENN walked across Printing House Square, he was so taken by The Sun’s light cutting the ash-wind like a surgeon’s scalpel that he didn’t notice that three men were following him. Half hidden by the miasma surging in and out like a tide of polluted water, they were on a course that would cut across his path two hundred feet from the doors of The Sun. They had been able to tell from his gait that he was a very old and wealthy man. The majestic, endearing, and surprising way in which he walked did not only express the optimism of another age, but seemed to telegraph quite clearly that he was carrying a fair amount of money, a gold pocket watch, and, probably, cuff links, a tie bar, or a stickpin. And old upright codgers like Harry Penn didn’t hear too well, their reflexes were shot, and they went down with one quick blow. So the three men who stalked him on the square were not careful of their approach. Had they been Short Tails (which they were not) they would have been very careful. In the Short Tails’ day, hundred-year-old men were, even if greatly at risk because of their age, veterans of the frontier, the Civil War, and other action much rougher than the Short Tails had ever known.

  The three men were sure that they were going to have an easy time. And they almost did, because, some way before The Sun, Harry Penn stopped for breath. But one of Jackson Mead’s huge lifters was flying perilously low among the high towers. Harry Penn turned at its roar and, as it parted the smoke, he saw them. They kept coming. At first he wasn’t sure that he was in danger. Then he saw their knives and blackjacks. His slow and indignant look of surprise both amused and enraged them.

  Having lived for a hundred years, Harry Penn was absolutely fearless. He didn’t shake, he didn’t breathe hard, and he didn’t blink. He considered himself a representative of the era of Theodore Roosevelt, Admiral Dewey, the great soldiers of the Union, the Indian fighters, and (as Craig Binky would say) Wild Bill Buffalo.

  Because his reflexes were really quite slow, he stared at his three assailants for much too long as they came toward him. He was able, however, to summon the past, and
the past emerged to protect him. His eyes sparkled. He smiled. (And he reached into his pocket and pulled out a four-barreled pepperbox handgun.)

  This little machine looked ridiculous and ineffectual. It had the same harmless air as a blunderbuss. They were about to tell him so when he fired the first barrel and knocked down the man closest to him, with a bullet in the solar plexus. The other two were startled, and stopped for a fatal instant in which he shot them, also.

  He stood for a moment, looking at the three bodies over which the fog and smoke arched as they blew past. In all his long life, he had never killed anyone, not even in several wars. He trembled a bit, but then he thought that he was too old to bother. He already knew all the terrible lessons that a younger man might have had to learn after doing such a thing, so he turned around, put the old-fashioned pistol back in his pocket, and walked toward the office.

  The Sun had become a paradigm of light and activity. Isolated by the natural firebreak of Printing House Square, with armed guards in position behind sandbags at the entrances and on the roof (these men had heard Harry Penn’s three shots, but had been unable to see very far into the smoke), with their own source of power, and with their families sheltered in the courtyard and throughout the vast interior of the building, the employees of The Sun worked as they had never worked before.

  As he took the several flights of stairs, Harry Penn was stopped a hundred times by excited young men and women who wanted to show him that they were doing their job and were full of hope. They asked him unnecessary questions, and he answered carefully, so as to encourage them. He knew that to reconcile the festive air at The Sun with what was going on outside, he had only to consider the youth of his reporters.

  At the top of the stairs, he ran into Bedford. “How’d you get the lights on?” he asked.