Thumbprints

by Pamela Sargent

  “Are there any other unchanged people left?” she whispered to her Link, but the Net could not answer her question. The compulsion to remain as she was, to continue her searches, was strong, and she wondered if she was doing a penance for earlier misdeeds of her own, or atoning for the mistakes of all humankind. She would have to keep on searching until she was certain there was no one left for her to rescue, and that time might never come.

  The sky was growing gray in the east. She beckoned to the three people. “Come with me,” she said, and was relieved to see them all get to their feet, ready to follow her. She would have human companions for a while, to guide and nurture, and perhaps these people would not choose to leave her, to vanish into the Net. She could hope for that, and if that hope ended in disappointment, she could begin a new search for other survivors.

  “There is no one else,” and the voice saying those words surrounded her, but she would not believe that, not now, not yet. She waited as the man covered the embers of the fire with handfuls of dirt, then led the three toward her tent.

  When she awoke again, she knew once more what had happened.

  “Show me what is,” she said, hoping that this time she would not retreat into yet another search.

  Earth was a great physical desert, part of a rejected reality. All oases were within, secret meeting places bright and green, where beings without bones swam in lakes of glass, surrounded by the night of faint hurrying galaxies.

  Afterword

  “He [Augustus] was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle ... while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion ... Nor did the provinces dislike that condition of affairs, for they distrusted the government ... because of the rivalries between the leading men and the rapacity of the officials, while the protection of the law was unavailing, as they were continually deranged by violence, intrigue, and finally by corruption.”

  – Tacitus, Book I of The Annals

  Maybe our circumstances aren’t quite so dire yet, out here in the provinces of Rome, but they’re not entirely unlike those that prevailed almost two thousand years ago, when the Roman historian Tacitus wrote the above words. Whether or not our current ruler is truly Augustan or else more closely resembles other emperors is something for others to judge. The sports writer Charles Pierce has charmingly dubbed him “Emperor C-Plus Augustus”; I’ll resist making my own comparisons, tempting as they are. But since the man isn’t entirely unopposed by other contenders for his position, perhaps he’ll be leaving office and retiring from public life by the time you read these words.

  One can always hope.

  In the meantime, the provincial city in which I live, Albany, New York, a city that’s often been the target of jokes and disparaging remarks, turns out to be a pretty good vantage point from which to view the follies and tragedies of our empire. As a state capital, only one hundred and a half miles up the Hudson River from one of our two Romes, it even mimics some of the features found in our second Rome, the one that lies along the banks of the Potomac – namely, a distrusted government, rapacious or at least well-compensated officials, a reasonably numerous group of people willing to be slaves as long as they can hang on to their cynicism as consolation: at least we know what’s up. We have a number of fine bars and restaurants, probably because our lobbyists and public servants need decent places in which to chow down and hold fundraisers and campaign events. We even have our own monumental public buildings, among them a structure modeled on the Parthenon that houses offices of the New York State Education Department, a Capitol building with a staircase that evokes Versailles, and the Empire State Plaza, a grandiose marble expanse complete with towers that is reminiscent of the set design for the 1930s science fiction film Things To Come and that art critic Robert Hughes described as a prime example of “an architecture of coercion.”

  It’s an old city, one of the oldest in the United States; the Dutch were here in the 1600s, trading with the Mohawks for beaver pelts. Any new construction in the downtown areas usually requires having a team of archaeologists precede the bulldozers. When I was a child, Freihofer’s, one of our enduring local businesses, still delivered many of its baked goods in picturesque horse-drawn carts. The reverence for the old extended to the local political institutions; Albany was run by one of the longest-lived political machines in the country, and its distaste for innovation and modernity produced a mayor who remained in office for over four decades as well as a stultifying atmosphere, or so it seemed to me.

  As a child, I dreamed of getting away from the place, and managed to live elsewhere for most of my adult life. Once in a while, I would run into another former Albanian; almost always, we would congratulate each other on having escaped. But the Albany I returned to a few years ago wasn’t the city I had fled, and if I haven’t exactly come to love the place, I have, somewhat to my surprise, developed a kind of rueful affection for my home town.

  “[Albany] is centered squarely in the American and the human continuum, a magical place where the past becomes visible if one is willing to track the multiple incarnations of the city’s soul. I confront even a single street corner and there emerges an archetypal as well as an historical context in which to view the mutations of its trees, its telephone poles.”

  – William Kennedy, O Albany!

  Even construction of the Empire State Plaza, which destroyed old neighborhoods, displaced thousands of people, and dramatically altered Albany’s skyline, didn’t wipe out the past; I can still wander a number of streets where almost nothing seems to have changed, where old row houses and mansions that are now museums have been restored and remodeled. People here are now looking to the future; just this week, our local paper had yet another front-page story about plans for the University at Albany’s hoped-for nanotechnology research center, and the Albany Medical Center is setting up a laboratory to research vaccines that might be needed in case of a bioterrorism attack. But the layers of the past are still clearly visible.

  Lately, I’ve been thinking that my early imprinting with Albany may have left some tracks in my own work.

  My first published works, and much of what I’ve written since, were published as science fiction, a classification that seems entirely appropriate, but I could never entirely shake off the past even when I was trying my best to envision future societies. In fact, anybody writing science fiction is well advised to be a student of history, and many such writers are; if you’re going to write about the future, you need to have some sense of where that future came from. Another feeling I picked up from my colleagues of thirty years ago, when I was young and green and often felt as if I’d fallen into the writing of science fiction largely by accident, was that science fiction mattered. There were, after all, a number of anecdotes about science fiction readers who had become physicists working on nuclear weapons, or to cite a more hopeful example, science fiction fans who ended up as engineers, research scientists, even as astronauts. The world could be remade, and your writing might even, in some small way, help to remake it.

  I picked up some of this attitude by osmosis, but it was a feeling that I never completely shared, even after years of writing. My childhood environment, and the community in which I lived, had offered an entirely different lesson: that I had to live in the world as it was and adapt to it. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Albanians lived in a feudal society controlled by landed Dutch patroons, who even told their tenant farmers how to vote, a situation that persisted into the early nineteenth century; some have argued that this kind of arrangement accounts for much of our psychology and local political history.

  Trying to look into the future when I was younger, with the eyes of a futurist, or a science fiction writer, usually made me feel disoriented. Now I more often feel like someone who is trapped in a world that has somehow branched off from the main timeline. In the central continuum, there are settlements on the moon, we’re getting ready to go to Mars, and t
here are no conflicts in the Middle East because alternative energy sources have freed us from dependence on oil. Those earlier visions of the future, now part of our past, seem as extravagant as the monumental architecture of the Empire State Plaza, a site so costly and disruptive in the building that nothing like it is likely ever to be built again in this country. That entire complex now seems a dream of a future that may never come to pass.

  “Utmost Bones,” one of the stories in this collection, is an uncharacteristic one for me, since it’s set in a distant far future. In fact it grew out of some of my earlier work, specifically the books known as my “Venus” trilogy. I first thought of writing this trilogy during the 1970s, although the first volume, Venus of Dreams, wasn’t published until 1986. Venus of Shadows, which came out in 1988, shows some of the influence of my Albany heritage; somewhat to my surprise, it became a kind of political novel, and politics of the sort you don’t learn about in civics classes is a blood sport in these parts. Because of various personal and professional difficulties, the third Venus novel, Child of Venus, wasn’t published until 2001, and by then I assumed that, after twenty-five years of living in this invented world, I was unlikely to visit it again in my fiction.

  But I did, and fairly quickly. “Venus Flowers at Night,” one of the stories included here, grew out of that trilogy, and so did “Utmost Bones,” although more obliquely. Though the setting is Earth, I think of “Utmost Bones” as taking place millennia after the terraforming of Venus, when the great accomplishments of our species lie far in the past, when history really has ended. I can hope that this tale isn’t somehow a metaphorical rendering of our current historical situation.

  “Originals” is also set in a future world quite unlike our own, but here I was trying for humor, while also alluding to some of my favorite recipes in this story. I kept closer to the present day in “Out of Place” and “Shrinker,” and suspect both of these stories bear the marks of one of my earliest exposures to science fiction and fantasy, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone television series.

  As a child, I was an avid viewer of Twilight Zone, and didn’t become acquainted with other kinds of science fiction until later in life. I still think of that series as a good introduction to some of the characteristic themes of science fiction (a far better one than most televised science fiction these days, and more accessible to people unfamiliar with the genre), and when I say “theme,” I’m not just referring to time travel, space travel, or contact with aliens. I’m thinking of that sense that things could be different, that our world is only one of many possible worlds, and also of the pain of regret, that futile hope of being able to return to the past to mend the fabric of the future. “If Ever I Should Leave You,” one of my early efforts, was my attempt to do a new turn on that most classic of science fictional themes, time travel.

  “Gather Blue Roses,” the oldest story included here, was written at the very beginning of my career as a published writer. I also kept close to the present day in this one, while using some relatively recent history to heighten my narrator’s affliction. This may make it sound as though I knew what I was doing when I wrote the story, which wasn’t the case. “Gather Blue Roses” was one of those rare stories that came to me all at once, and almost seemed to write itself at one sitting. That, as any writer will tell you, almost never happens. Nearly twenty years later, it happened to me again, with “Amphibians,” and it was only after I finished this story that I realized I had been writing it almost exactly ten years after my own father’s death.

  “Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”

  – James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

  “Thumbprints,” the title story of this collection, is the most recent of the stories in this book. I’m old enough to recall a time when writers were, or seemed to be, much closer to the center of the culture, when what they did and who they were seemed to matter more than they do now. Some writers still matter, can still be seen as iconic cultural figures, but usually only if they are Stephen Kings or J. K. Rowlingses, honored as much or more for their overwhelming commercial success and dominance in the marketplace as for the virtues of their work.

  A writer has only his individual voice to offer, and it seemed to me that those voices, in all their variety and idiosyncrasy, were more valued in years past. But maybe I was remembering imperfectly and only conjuring up some imagined Golden Age, as those living during the height of an empire might long for their lost idealized republic. After all, Herman Melville, another native of Albany, New York, was much abused by the publishers of his day, winning honor as one of our greats only after his death.

  If an original writer is successful enough these days, the tendency in the publishing business is to look for more of the same rather than for another original voice; too much success, and such a writer may even spawn a new commercial subgenre or category. The narrator of “Thumbprints” spends at least as much time thinking about her critical reception and commercial prospects as she does about the demands of her writing.

  “To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task…and possibly a tragic one.”

  – Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

  As a child, I devoured historical novels, and during the 1980s, set out to write one myself. Writing science fiction turned out to be good training for such work. What writers of historical fiction and science fiction have in common is that they must write convincingly about societies and characters that are quite different from those inhabiting the familiar world of the reader. Writing about Genghis Khan and his Mongols in my 1993 novel Ruler of the Sky was something like writing about an alien invasion from the point of view of the aliens.

  Three of the stories in this collection can be seen as offshoots of that novel. “Erdeni’s Tiger” and “Spirit Brother” are historical fantasies, in which a few of the characters from Ruler of the Sky appear, while “Climb the Wind” is a science fiction story that happens to be set in present-day Mongolia. In a more indirect way, Ruler of the Sky also inspired me to write a novel of alternative American history, Climb the Wind, which shares nothing with the story included here except a title; I needed a good title, so stole one of my own. But the saga of Genghis Khan, who united the Mongol tribes and then won an empire, definitely lay behind my alternate history about a Lakota chief who seeks the same end.

  The Mongol empire, vast as it was, didn’t last long. Its most enduring legacy was the damage it did to the civilizations that lay to its west, among them Central Asia, Persia, and the Middle East, and to China, then the richest and most advanced civilization in the world. I thought of that past often during the past few years. One of the scenes in Ruler of the Sky takes place in Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, but even the Mongols left the impressive stone Buddhas that overlook that region standing; it took the Taliban to destroy them. More recently, there’s been some debate about whether the Mongols or some of our contemporaries did more damage to Baghdad’s cultural artifacts.

  “Venus Flowers at Night” is centered around a character from my “Venus” trilogy, one who appears in the novels only as a legendary historical figure. In the background of those novels, I had assumed that global warming would bring about drastic changes in Earth’s climate, that much of the twenty-first century would be marked by wars over resources, and that sometime in the twenty-second century, most of the world would be dominated by a relatively benign but still controlling Islamic regime. I have never thought of myself as a prognosticator, but wonder now if the future somehow cast its shadow into the past, when I first thought of these novels over two decades ago.

  “Venus Flowers at Night,” which I began writing in the late summer of 2001, is told from the point of view of a Muslim official visiting my future America on a diplomatic mission. Because I wanted to use some local color, and show a little of how global warming might a
ffect a landscape familiar to me, I decided to bring my central character by boat to New York City and then up the Hudson River to Albany. On the morning of September 11, my fictional Muslim official had traveled as far as Upper New York Bay and was near lower Manhattan. I was just getting ready to write my next scene when my sister called me from her office to tell me that New York City was being attacked. I ran to my television and turned it on in time to see the second of the World Trade Center towers come down.

  One day later, barricades were going up around the State Capitol and the Empire State Plaza and more state troopers were on duty there as guards. I soon got used to going through metal detectors, having my bags and packages x-rayed and sometimes searched, and my feet scanned with a wand whenever I went to the conveniently located (for me, anyway) post office in the lobby of the Capitol building. Albany, like many provincial cities, can have an inflated idea of its own importance, so it’s hard to tell if all of these security measures are really necessary, or will even do much good, but in these times, they have become standard operating procedure.

  It was a while before I understood what had elicited my newfound affection for my home town. I had at last felt how vulnerable its monuments, its narrow streets and ribbons of highways, its parks and people in fact were, and how impermanent this city, and the empire it is a part of, actually are. It came to me then how fervently I hoped for this place and all of the others connected to it to survive to a better time.