The Sea and Summer

by George Turner

  The building, Andra judged, was about 100 meters square and the water at this point – he glanced at the pilot’s dashboard – was something more than thirty meters deep so that what remained, with only three fairly whole stories rearing above the water, was a poor fragment of a once colossal structure. Narrow, shattered balconies ran completely around each floor and to one of these was hooked a sort of gangplank descending a few feet to a floating platform. Marin drew the powercraft alongside and grappled on.

  ‘Best to dress, Artist,’ he suggested as he shrugged into an overall. ‘It is cooler inside.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Andra pulled on shirt and trousers while Lenna, fully dressed because she thought sunbathing an unproductive and dull pursuit, stepped overside on to the platform which rocked to her weight.

  ‘That wouldn’t ride out a mild storm,’ Andra observed.

  ‘The History Department provides a caretaker at each Enclave. The access floats are taken in when need be.’

  ‘After all this time you still study these ruins?’

  ‘There’s no end to it. Divers find new and strange things, new study techniques demand constant scrutiny of the artefacts, fresh interpretations demand wholesale re-examination of the buildings.’

  He was impressed. ‘I’m told that your work in progress overthrows previous conclusions.’

  Suddenly a tutor, she corrected him. ‘Seeks to modify some previous conclusions about social attitudes of the Greenhouse Culture and to suggest that the Sweet/Swill cleavage was less complete than has been assumed.’

  ‘That sounds the sort of information I need.’

  ‘For your playscript?’

  ‘For bridging characters. It would be difficult to present two totally separated strata.’

  She said with tutorial orderliness, ‘We must discuss it later,’ and switched to picnic enthusiasm as she started up the gangplank, ‘Come inside, it’s absolutely fascinating.’

  It was not a word he would have chosen for the naked concrete of the tiny apartment they entered through the balcony window. Bare rooms always seem small, constricted, but to Andra these were claustrophobic. There were three, each about three meters by two and a half, leading into each other, and two half-sized roomlets at one end. He thought that with some knocking out of walls it would make an overnight flat, a pied-à-terre, but not a place to live in. He hazarded, ‘A two-person flat?’

  Behind him Marin laughed without joy. Lenna said, ‘It was intended for a family of four, but there was never enough room and soon no money for building. Seven or eight was common, often more than that.’

  ‘In here! They’d live like animals!’ The words were shocked out of him.

  ‘Animals had more space – they were precious. Think of this: there were seventy floors in the completed tower and we estimate that 70,000 people lived in it.’

  He stared doubtfully around the box of a room.

  ‘That meant,’ Lenna said, ‘when you subtract areas for lightwells, liftwells and stairways, less than four square meters of living space for each individual and his furniture.’

  Andra could not take it in. He imagined eight beds, with chairs and tables, wardrobes and shelves . . . an airship cabin would afford more space . . . ‘Such poverty!’

  Marin spoke like one who sees no need for shock. ‘Throughout history, poverty was the lot of the common man.’

  Lenna glanced at him with mild surprise. ‘Yes, we tend to forget that. We see the monuments and forget the millions who starved to raise them.’

  Andra shivered, not with cold. ‘At least we have eliminated that from the world.’

  ‘The interesting statistic,’ she said drily, ‘is the number of millennia it took us to learn how to do so, though it was always easy and we always knew it.’

  She led the way from the flat into a dark corridor that ran the length of the building. A window at each extremity gave the only light save at the end where they stood; here a battery-fed standard lamp had been set up to illuminate some thirty meters of the length. By its light Andra saw that the cracked, broken, flaked-away walls had at some stage been painted; faint outlines and fainter suggestions of colour spread over every inch of wall space.

  Hesitantly, peering, he asked, ‘Murals?’

  Lenna said, ‘Of a kind,’ and Marin, ‘You’ll see.’

  She went ahead toward the window at the western end. ‘We have managed to reconstruct a section of the wall decorations by computer-enhanced X-ray examination. Bring the lamp, please, Marin.’

  The pilot brought the light down to the last doorway in the corridor, where it sparkled on a dozen meters of extraordinary glitter and confusion.

  ‘They used paint, charcoal, whitewash, aerosol lacquers and anything that would cling and then spread their designs one atop the others. Creative boredom.’

  Indeed so. Andre could recognize nothing entirely, could only perceive hints of design emerging from a chaos of forms and streaks and splotches and dismembered spates of lettering. He studied the lettering, trying to extract words, and could not.

  ‘Language has changed,’ Lenna reminded him.

  He told her irritably, ‘I learned Late Middle English for the reading of Shakespeare originals but I can’t recognize anything here.’

  ‘Poverty, Andra. Education was one of the luxuries that went into the discard. Most of the late Swill neither wrote nor read. Those who did couldn’t spell.’

  The subject common to graffiti the world over appeared again and again in blatant crudity and total lack of draftsmanship, but the finest example, drawn over all the rest and pristine in reproduction, graced the door of the corner flat. In brilliant, impertinent white a huge penis stretched most of the height of the door, balanced on a pair of gargantuan testicles.

  ‘Strangely,’ Lenna said, ‘we know that to have been a child’s joke. The most extraordinary snippets of information survive. We know quite a lot about the man who lived here.’

  ‘That he was proud enough to leave this on his door?’

  ‘We don’t know what he thought. That’s a problem in historical reconstruction, that we know what and usually why but so rarely how the people thought about anything.’

  ‘Written records,’ he protested.

  ‘Those aren’t thoughts so much as afterthoughts, and they generally show it.’ She pushed the door open. ‘We’ve tried to reconstruct this flat from scraps of information on a dozen tapes and files, but we still don’t know the important thing about the Kovacs family, how its members thought from moment to moment. We can only extrapolate – meaning guess.’

  She urged him gently inside.

  His immediate reaction was that nobody in such surroundings could think at all. In the first room were two single beds and between them a roughly carpentered rocking chair; on one side, between the foot of a bed and the end wall, stood a small table which could unfold to some two meters and, leaning behind it, four pews folded flat. The floor was covered with a shiny, patterned material which Andra bent to touch.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They called it plastic linoleum. We had to manufacture a substitute – it wears quickly.’

  Behind him, next to the door, a grey one-and-a-half meter screen filled the available space; below it an array of knobs and terminals was lettered with abbreviations he could not follow.

  ‘Television?’

  ‘They called it a triv; it was a general purpose communication center. They hadn’t advanced to crystal web projection. That’s one of the few things we do better than they.’

  Marin said sharply, ‘We use everything better. We live better, think better.’

  Andra spoke without looking around. ‘Be a good fellow and give your spleen a rest.’

  He moved to the next room. Here were two double-tiered bunks with a chair between and footlockers at the ends. On the walls cartoon pictures danced – anthropomorphized cats, dogs, mice and a large, fat-bellied, ineffably good-natured bear.

  ‘For children?’

>   ‘Surely. Eleven people lived in this flat, most of them children. We suppose they slept two to a bed in here.’

  Something essential was missing. ‘Where did they store their clothes?’

  ‘A short answer might be, what clothes? They had little beyond necessities. Probably they folded them at night and used them as pillows.’

  He shivered again, unable to control pity and a creeping, unreasonable shame. At the same time his planning mind was creating a stage set – a full-width apartment with sections of the next one and at the other end the outdoor balcony – sliding walls, fold downs – the whole thing on turnover with the outer wall on the reverse, with crystal web illusion to give length and perspective – lifts, shifts, turntables, scrims, all in constant motion to allow actors access to flats above and below – and all alive with restless, shabby, desperate, pulsating life . . . odor stimulation to provide a discreet hint of animal sweat at moments of crowded energy . . .

  The third room was comparative luxury – one double bed, one chair, one small cupboard, a table and, surprisingly, a bookcase.

  ‘This was the only concession he allowed himself. A private room to run to.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Kovacs. Billy Kovacs. He was the Tower Boss, a man of great authority, feared and loved.’

  Andra knelt to the books. ‘Encyclopedias, dictionaries, an atlas, children’s primers. For teaching his children?’

  ‘For teaching himself. He had vision of a sort. In an earlier day they might have called him a Renaissance Man.’ Andra pulled at a huge, ancient tome, ‘Don’t. They’re dummies. His own copies were dust long ago – they were old and dated when he owned them.’

  The busy internal note-taker muttered to itself, Now there’s a character I could play – gutter visionary – tall, tough, no, shuffling, slightly hunchbacked with raging eyes, no, stop being obvious, file it for later . . .

  The two small end rooms were respectively a tiny kitchen and a shower recess with lavatory stool. ‘No laundrapool,’ he commented before the foolishness of that struck him.

  Lenna made scrubbing motions. ‘Kitchen sink. Rough soap and muscle power.’

  ‘I can’t take this in. I want to go outside. I’ll look in again in a day or two.’

  Marin said, ‘Try to imagine the smell of eleven grimy bodies, meals cooking and a blocked sewer. The noise of screeching kids and desperate adults bawling at their nerves’ ends.’

  Andra went straight out of the place and back to the powercraft. In the density of the vision conjured by his creativity he was sweat-stinking, revolted, need-driven and guilty before the 70,000 ghosts of Tower Twenty-three.

  2

  The university had been built 1,000 meters up on the forward slopes of the Dandenongs, its south faces looking out over the foothills where the New City sprawled in smug comfort, over the islands which had been the outskirts of the Old City and, further, over the water which was its grave. Its low buildings camouflaged by trees, the university was nearly invisible by day but now, with the sun westering down to the horizon and searching out window glass, it could be detected in brilliant blazes under the green.

  In Lenna’s flat, on the southern rim of the campus, Andra drank her imported coffee – New Guinea Highland, Mutated, very draining on credit – and gazed out over the islands and the bay. After the afternoon calm it was visibly tumultuous, even at this twenty-kilometre remove, grey and streaked and ominous; closer, just outside the panoramic window, branches whipped and shrubs bent before the wind.

  He was a Sydney man, new to this southern phenomenon of an evening gale which lashed the sun down into the water before dying away into silent night. ‘Is it regular, every night?’

  Lenna, fortyish and lazily plump, was content to take her coffee at ease in a lounger. ‘Quite regular. In winter, longer and colder.’

  ‘A trend?’

  ‘Possibly. The meteorologists will not commit themselves. This may be a limited, minor weather cycle but it will take a decade of observation and measurement to be sure.’

  ‘I saw animals swimming in the bay as we came back. Marin said they were seals.’

  She smiled at his unwillingness to ask the obvious question. ‘Yes. They are coming further north as the polar currents edge up the coast.’

  ‘I’ve read’ – he hesitated with the uncertainty of the amateur before a more precisely trained mind, – ‘I’ve read that the Ice Age could strike very quickly.’

  ‘In historical terms, that’s true, but quickly to a historian may mean a couple of centuries.’ He looked ridiculously relieved, she thought, as though he had suspected it of waiting to catch him before bedtime. ‘There will probably be a succession of cold snaps – very sudden and very cold, each lasting a decade or so – before the interglacial ends and the ice closes in. There’s little chance that you will see it happen.’

  ‘I don’t wish to, I like the world as it is.’ But he had been deeply affected by the towers and the sense of an immense past thirty or forty meters below the keel, brought face to face in his creative imagination with the vastness of changes that had metamorphosed a planet as mindlessly as cosmic eruptions destroyed and created stars.

  Lenna said, ‘We know this interglacial is approaching its end. The Greenhouse melted the poles and the glaciers, and those won’t reform overnight, but the conditions that will finally recreate them will freeze the bones of the planet long before.’

  ‘And humanity that has just struggled out of a second Dark Age will have its back to the wall again.’

  ‘Don’t be dramatic about history. We’re very well equipped to endure a million years of cold. Our ancestors weathered an Ice Age in caves and animal skins, hunting with flint-tipped spears. I’ll be surprised if we don’t do reasonably well with insulation technology and fusion power. Besides, the equatorial zone will almost certainly be ice-free and temperate. An Ice Age is no great tragedy – it is in fact the normal state of the planet. We have knowledge and we have the Forward Planning Centers. We’ll make the change smoothly.’

  Outside, the sun vanished and the evening wind slackened perceptibly. The sky darkened. In the foothills, street lights made sudden patterns of habitation.

  Andra made a short, trained, dramatic gesture to the scattered tower Enclaves fading into darkness. ‘As I understand it, if I’ve followed the historical line correctly, they knew what was coming to them just as we know what is ahead of us. Yet they did nothing about it.’

  ‘They fell into destruction because they could do nothing about it; they had started a sequence which had to run its course in unbalancing the climate. Also, they were bound into a web of interlocking systems – finance, democratic government, what they called high-tech, defensive strategies, political bared teeth and maintenance of a razor-edged status quo – which plunged them from crisis to crisis as each solved problem spawned a nest of new ones. There was a tale of a boy who jammed his finger in the leak in the dyke – I think it’s still in kindergarten primers. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the entire planet stood with its fingers plugging dykes of its own creation until the sea washed over their muddled status quo. Literally.’ She gestured. ‘It’s all there for you to read.’

  Andra put down his coffee and crossed the low table (solid ebony, he noted with collector’s envy) where lay the eleven great fat folders titled A Preliminary Survey of Factors Affecting the Collapse of the Greenhouse Culture in Australia.

  Preliminary! There must be 5,000 sheets here, a million words. Who could extract dramatic data from such a torrent? In the terms of his research grant he had just one week . . . Wondering how to put this to her without offense, he asked, gaining time, ‘Was the Australian situation so different from that of the other continents?’

  ‘Possibly better in many respects. I chose Australia for a laboratory specimen because I am here and because covering the world in comparative analysis would swallow my lifetime. Others can check my work against their observations elsewhere.’
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br />   Andra said shyly, exerting conscious charm to cover his wariness of tutorial pride, ‘And I’m afraid that reading all that would swallow my research week.’

  Sunk too far in the lounger, Lenna struggled to her feet, gasping laughter. ‘Heavens, man, I don’t expect you to read it. It’s a specialist work; you’d need a general historical and technical grounding to get anything much out of it.’ She picked out a single folder. ‘I’ve marked passages here which should be useful, but there’s no point in your attacking the whole opus.’

  Thankfully he scanned the subtitle, forbidding enough: The State in balance with the Sweet/Swill dichotomy, but at least he knew what the words meant. ‘Should I start on this tonight?’

  She took it from him. ‘Later, perhaps. There’s something else I’d rather you read first.’ She bit her lip, seeming at a loss for words, as though their positions were mysteriously reversed and she in awe of his special expertise. ‘It is a less . . . formal presentation.’

  Dear light of sanity, but she’s written a bloody play and wants me to read it. Years of ghastly amateur scripts flooded his memory. But how could he refuse his assigned tutor?

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it’s a sort of novel.’

  Better, much better. He wouldn’t have to explain to her that her coddled work was neither stageable nor rescuable. (Besides, he intended to write this play himself.)

  She carried on breathlessly, ‘The thing is, I want a popular audience. I haven’t spent twelve years on this to see it buried in the data files for plunder by students in search of a theme. I want to correct the public idea of what our ancestors were like. All they have is folklore and guesswork and idiotic popular plays that can’t get so much as the clothing right.’

  He sympathized. He had appeared in some of them before he became Andra Andrasson who could pick and choose his roles, demand a Shakespearean revival and get it – and make it pay.

  He said with automatic enthusiasm, ‘That sounds just the thing! I’d love to read it.’ It didn’t matter how bad it might be so long as all the precise, accurate detail could be lifted out of it . . . ‘You said, a sort of a novel.’