Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  ANGELA PENROSE lives in Seattle with her husband. She writes in several genres, but F&SF is her first love. She likes writing for anthologies for the variety, and the challenge of creating to a theme. You can find her at angelapenrosewriter.blogspot.com.

  EIGHTH WONDER

  CHRIS BACHELDER

  1

  When they came, they destroyed.

  2

  They came swimming, paddling, rowing with lumber. Shocked by storm, they rushed in like the water. They broke the locked doors of offices, closets, skyboxes. They splintered wood and smashed glass. The dome roared with de-creation. Bodies floated in the water. Blood tarnished the handles of doors. Drawings and messages covered the walls. Prayers and threats. Parents searched for their children and children searched for their pets. The nights were worse than the days. They rose to the upper decks and hid from one another in the dark. They took refuge. All night, there was crying and barking and the squeak of wet soles running. There was a storm outside the dome and a storm inside. The water, all day and night, splashed softly down the concrete stairs. Fifty thousand seats encircled the calm dark lake.

  3

  It was a Fast Fact that the level of the dome floor was lower than the level of the street. It was a Fun Trivia that the game scheduled for June 15, 1976, was postponed because of a flood.

  4

  It was early spring. The last of the four storms stalled, churned, departed slowly. Some swam away from the dome but many stayed. They formed clans along the club level. Clan membership provided protection but required precious supplies. The food that was found was eaten. The water that was found was drunk. They left the dome for food and supplies but often did not return. There were pirates on Kirby, on 610. There were pirates on the Old Spanish Trail. Swimming was perilous. They still thought of themselves as refugees. The dome, and life itself, seemed temporary.

  5

  What are human beings like? How are they inclined to act? These humans ate dogs, stole one another’s shoes, struck each other with the sharpened legs of chairs. They were vicious and frightened. They drank urine and salt water. They lost their minds with grief and despair and privation. They walked the narrow catwalks along the roof of the dome and then jumped. It was a Fast Fact that it was like jumping from an eighteen-story building. Beneath the dark shallow water was concrete, ruined turf. These humans took care of their babies. They gave food and solace to strangers. They made a chapel in Section 749, an infirmary in Section 763, a nursery in Section 733. They built a long, fast waterslide in one of the external pedestrian ramps. The children waited in line, then slid, screaming.

  6

  They sat in colorful seats and looked down at the event of the water. They lived in the air, and they felt themselves perched high in the heavy dome, suspended by it. They had dim light but no sun. Their skin grew waxy and pallid; their eyes ached with strain. The water did not recede as the refugees believed it would. This would take some time to understand. They thought the water concealed the damage. But the water was the damage.

  7

  It was a Fast Fact that the dome covered nine and a half acres, and yet the sound of the violin carried through the darkness to each section and level. Every night, it was clear and distant. The people cursed and shouted for it to stop. They lay in nests and strained to hear it. Then one night, it stopped. Many days passed. It was not difficult for the people to imagine the destruction of the violin, so small and fragile. Another dead and broken thing, floating. But after a time, it began again, just as suddenly as it had stopped, the same violin or perhaps another one, small sound expanding to fill its container. A pulse, resuming.

  8

  In Section 435, near the water, the electrician lay in the dark and imagined. In the mornings, he woke early and walked the dome, learning it. He passed through even the dangerous sections. He moved lightly, like a thought. He was tall, thin, quiet. His large hands hung nearly to his knees. He did not seem quite real and so no violence came to him. He carried a notebook and a pen. His books were stashed in secret places. Like all electricians, he was awake to the power of the invisible.

  9

  They were still refugees, not residents, so the dome was squalid. The hallways were strewn with trash, excrement, the bones of animals. The still heat was horrible; the stench was worse. The street-fed lake beneath them was filled with broken furniture, rusted metal, floating fish. Boys dropped heavy things from the low sections, hooted at the splash. Some even dived. They swam to the bottom, looking for treasure. Every room had been turned over. In many rooms, the electrician found slashed cardboard boxes spilling glossy programs. He took them, organized them, stashed them. He created a library. He read them at night with a candle he received in exchange for a candy bar. He read the Fast Facts, the Fun Trivia, the Dome History. It was a Dome History that Judge Roy Hofheinz enjoyed watching minor league baseball with his daughter, Dene. After a rainout in the summer of 1952, the disappointed girl asked her father, “Why can’t they play baseball inside?” Hofheinz, the son of a laundry truck driver, was inspired by the Colosseum in Rome, the enormous velaria that protected spectators from the sun. The dome was completed in November 1964. It was the first of its kind. The Eighth Wonder of the World, Hofheinz called it. The electrician blew out his candle. He did not clutch a weapon. Before sleep, he tried to make his mind as large as the dome. The ceiling was 710 feet in diameter. He tried to make the space where something might occur. He had noticed the catwalks. He had noticed the rising water, halfway up the doors of the lobbies, flowing through the hallways of the first level and down the concrete stairs to the dark lake.

  10

  Parents brought their sick children to the infirmary. This is not the infirmary, they were told. The infirmary is in Section 763. The parents looked about. They turned to leave, then turned back. Then what is this? they asked. This is the nursery, they were told.

  11

  Other instruments joined the violin at night. A flute, a clarinet, a French horn. They tried to make something simple and beautiful, but there was too much acreage, too much space between them. They could not synchronize. The concerts were discordant, disconcerting. The electrician lay still and considered it. The musicians stopped or were stopped.

  12

  Others must have read what the electrician read. The soggy programs were scattered throughout the dome. It was a Dome History that the original floor was dirt, the playing field was grass. It was Tifway-419 Bermuda. The grass had been tested in a specially constructed greenhouse at a university. The ceiling was made of 4,796 semitransparent plastic panels to allow sunlight. Grass grew in the dome. The fielders could not catch fly balls because of the sun’s glare off the plastic panels. Outfielders wore sunglasses and batting helmets. Orange baseballs did not solve the problem. The team went on a long road trip while workers painted the ceiling panels a translucent white. The glare was reduced, but the grass died. The team played on dirt that was painted green. The baseballs rolled through the outfield and turned green. A chemical company invented grass made of nylon. The team went on a long road trip while workers installed it over the dirt. The electrician carefully removed the pages and hid them. He had a deep gash across his palm. He tried to keep it clean and wrapped. He blew out his candle. He understood that the dome was the space where the dome could be dreamed.

  13

  Birds lived there, too, in the spaces between beams. They flew through the deep sunless sky. People looked up to watch, but they grew dizzy and had to sit.

  14

  The dome had its first baby. Everyone could hear the birth in the skybox and they felt part of it. There were plenty of doctors. Gifts arrived. Someone made a sturdy crib. Someone made a mobile of feathers. For two days, nobody leaped, nobody fired a gun. Something was wrong with the baby. It didn’t make a sound. It was small and its color was wrong. When it died, even the doctors went to stare into the lake. They had strong assumptions about human life, which they were prepared to have confirme
d. Other babies were born and others were conceived. This was either heroic or foolish, and the parents had no way, except time, to know which. For the babies, the dome was home. At night, between fitful naps, the electrician sketched the dome, the gentle curve of the roof, the crosshatch of catwalk. To save candles, he occasionally drew in the dark, blind, and he awoke in the light to odd lines, impossible arcs. It was a Dome History that people wondered whether clouds would form beneath the roof. He stashed his notebook, ate crackers from plastic packages. He walked, searching for a shoelace, a belt.

  15

  The electrician found a discarded weapon, a hollow metal pole, roughly three feet long, roughly three inches in diameter at its ends. For one day, he pounded the end of the pole with the marble base of a trophy he found in an office closet. The top of the trophy was a gold man riding a gold bull. The end of the pole became flat and sharp. The electrician took the pole and climbed the catwalk to the top of the ceiling. The catwalk was narrow, its railings low. The electrician’s legs grew weak and he struggled for air. He lay down and closed his eyes. He crawled, trying not to look at the water below. Near the top he saw the leapers’ tokens, the notes and letters, photographs, keys, gold bands. A hat, a doll, a child’s shoe. The electrician was careful not to disturb the objects. When he got to the top of the dome, he lay on his back and looked up at the skylight panels. The ceiling side had not been painted. There was a short ladder leading to a small hatch in the roof, just as the electrician knew there would be. He climbed the ladder, opened the hatch, and emerged onto the roof of the dome, squinting. The sun was too bright, too close, too hot. He had not been outside since arriving. He was on top of the sky and beneath it. He did not see another person. The water extended to every horizon. Beside the dome, to the west, was the other stadium, its light stanchions snapped or swaying. In the distance, to the north, was downtown, silver buildings rising from the water, their windows glowing with sun. To the east was ocean, dotted with billboards. Out near Fannin the electrician could see the large helicopter of a relief organization, capsized and nearly submerged. To the south, the overpasses on 610 arched over the flood, crowded with abandoned cars. He walked out onto the roof, onto a rectangular panel, roughly six feet by four feet. The pitch was less steep than the electrician had imagined, though he knew the Fast Fact that the roof of the dome, the dome itself, was built flatter than its original plans. The electrician squatted, and with the flat, sharp end of his metal pole, he began scraping the surface of the white panel. The paint did not peel or chip. He stood and moved to another panel. He squatted and scraped. He moved to another panel. He stood in the heat and wiped his face with his shirt. It was a Dome History that a man on a motorcycle jumped over thirteen cars on January 9, 1971. That a woman beat a man in tennis on September 20, 1973. The electrician returned to the original panel. He went to his hands and knees. Eventually, he scraped a thin white layer of dust. He leaned down and blew it away. The electrician’s body remembered working on his grandfather’s house, twenty years earlier. The same motion, sound. The same patience. Eventually, the tool created a small hole in the paint. He had scraped down to the transparent plastic panel. This—it was a Fast Fact—was Lucite. He put his forehead on the panel and cupped his hands around his eyes. He peered through the small hole into the dome but could only make out a dark blur. He scraped from inside the hole, working outward, making it larger, chipping away larger pieces of paint from the plastic panel. It occurred to him that it would be useful to have a set of scrapers of various widths. He had to squint against the glare. He saw spots. He could feel the sun burning the back of his neck. His sweat dripped into his work. He had no water for his thirst. He smacked mosquitoes, smeared his own blood across his skin. In three hours, he had finished a panel. He was dizzy, delirious. The pole slipped from his hands. Later, he would not remember climbing back into the hatch, walking the catwalks. That night he lay in his nest, shivering and vomiting. He awoke in the infirmary, staring at the ceiling.

  16

  Many of the poems survive. The poetry of the dome is distinguished by its resignation, its rejection of nostalgia, its ambivalence toward the structure, the treatment of humans as animals, and its careful observation of startling juxtaposition and conjunction.

  17

  The electrician returned to the roof. He worked in the mornings and evenings. In a week, he had scraped eight panels. His hands were blistered. The gash in his palm had reopened, bloodying the rags he bound it with. The dome leaked light. A beam moved daily down the seats, across the water, up the seats. It marked the days; it returned the dome to the natural world. The beam was salutary. People sat in the hot bright seats, eyes closed. Others looked upward for the source, squinting and shading their eyes. Many took credit for the sun. The electrician hunted for metal to make more tools. He pounded flat, sharp ends until his neighbors hollered. He was regarded as suspicious, dangerous, making so many sharp things. He stashed the tools with his books and programs. When he visited the clans along the club level, his voice was too quiet. They asked him to speak louder and when he did, they laughed or shouted threats. He wore a yellow construction helmet. He cupped his hands in front of him as he spoke, as if holding something that might leap out. He walked a circle around the dome.

  18

  One morning at dawn, three men were waiting on the roof when the electrician emerged through the hatch. The men held clubs or knives. The catwalk was the electrician’s only escape, but the height still terrified him. He often had to lie down, crawl. He would not be able to run. He was surprised by his terror, his attachment to this life. Please, he said quietly, I just want to work. In the dim light, he could not see them well. What he had thought to be clubs or knives were tools. The next morning, there were nine more, six men and three women. One of the workers attached a wooden handle to his metal scraper, then held the scraping end in the flame of a torch. Others constructed large screens to block the sun. Velaria, thought the electrician. More workers arrived each day. They emerged through the hatch like ants from an anthill. Many did not even know why they were scraping, what they were building, nor did they care. They were happy to feel useful. Many had worked for years before the water and had never felt useful. One good worker could finish two to three panels per day. Several workers were burned by hot steel, several collapsed in the heat, several were sliced by splinters of wood or steel. One man lost an eye. Fights erupted and workers were badly injured by the scrapers. The paint dust blew across the roof and covered their skin and clothes. Those who scraped paint by day could be heard coughing at night. It was a Fast Fact that one worker had died constructing the dome. The poets wrote about Michelangelo on his scaffold. Rain came and washed away the dust and chips of paint. The electrician watched the water flow down the panels of the roof. The panels gradually became clean and clear, and the dome filled with light.

  19

  The yacht salesman stared at the electrician’s drawings of the platform. He nodded, though the sketch was poor and implausible. He left the dome, scouting wood in a yellow raft. He paddled past the other stadium, then north along Kirby. When he tied his raft to a telephone pole, he got a splinter in the tip of his finger. He pulled out the splinter and then looked up at the pole. They were everywhere, they stretched away forever, and yet they had been invisible to him. The heat was nearly unendurable. Paddling back to the dome, the yacht salesman saw the dome in the distance behind the other stadium. He saw the workers spread out across the white hemisphere of the roof. The workers heard a distant buzz in the sky. They all stood, shielded their eyes with their dusty hands. They saw the speck of the airplane to the west. Then it was gone and they knelt again on the panels.

  20

  It was a Fast Fact that the dome’s air conditioning system could circulate 2.5 million cubic feet of air per minute. It was a Fun Trivia that dome engineers claimed they could make it snow.

  21

  The electrician often could not sleep. One night, after meeting wit
h the yacht salesman and the translator, he sat in Section 452, low down by the lake, listening to the soft splash and trickle, the cries of babies. Above, the disk of the full moon was fuzzy through the Lucite. Upper-deck candles looked like stars. There was movement on the catwalk, near the hatch. He thought he saw the hatch open. When he crawled through, clutching a scraper, there was nobody there. Then, in the light of the moon, he saw a head above the distant slope of the roof. For a week, someone had been darkening the panels. Everyone had assumed that the vandal was a teenage boy or a group of teenage boys. But here was a man in his fifties, a former librarian, rubbing a panel with sticky black syrup. He looked up at the electrician but did not stop until he finished the panel. He had covered four. The black material, when dry, had proven more difficult to scrape than the white paint. The librarian stood and said, There. The electrician said, That’s enough. The librarian said, I hate watching you fools. I can’t stand it. All you busy fools. The electrician did not say anything. He led the librarian back to the hatch, and down. He speculated that the librarian had had a good life before the water. It was those who had been content that had the most trouble in the dome.