New Atlantis

by Lavie Tidhar

  Yet was that true? The world had always been harsh, there were always those who killed and those who were killed. Even in our lasting peace there were isolated murders. There had been one in Tyr, when I attended the Academy… It was the main topic of conversation for months.

  “How long do you think they’ve been dead?” Mowgai said.

  I looked at the corpses. They wore little more than loincloths, and their bodies were decorated with colorful tattoos, of snails and spirals, wolves and bears, and stylized sun and moon. The drowned man’s corpse, in contrast, carried tattoos of what looked like machine blueprints, with an old communication satellite inked into his now-bloodless chest.

  “Two tribes?” I said, dubiously.

  “How long?” Mowgai said. I looked at him and realized what he was saying. None of the corpses was decomposed, and when I knelt down to touch the bloodstains, my finger came away smudged with dirt, and I shivered.

  “Recent,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “What do we do?”

  “This is not our fight, Mai. This is not—”

  I don’t know what he was going to say. At that moment, we heard an eerie over the river, coming from the far bank. A group of people emerged from the trees. They were armed with bows and arrows, and they saw us. But before we could act, a new cry sounded, and we realized that their attention wasn’t on us, but on a second, opposing group, which rose behind us and began to descend. They were too far away to make out clearly, but I had good hunch that, were I to look closely, I would see that one group bore tattoos of animals, and one of machines.

  “What do we d—”

  “Push! Mai, push!”

  There was nothing else for it. We grabbed the first unburned canoe and pushed it into the water. Mowgai hopped in, more nimbly than me. I fell into the water and had to paddle until Mowgai helped me aboard. The canoe wobbled, then stabilized. The two groups of warriors swarmed to the banks of the river on either side and I saw bows raised. Mowgai and I both ducked as arrows whistled through the air, but they were not aimed at us. The wind picked up and the sail billowed and then we were sailing away, downstream, as the river expanded ahead and the Francian wilderpeople grew smaller and smaller in the distance and finally disappeared.

  “To kill for food is nature,” Bill said. “To kill for anger, to kill for hate—to kill with tools—that’s human.”

  “And humans should have gone extinct,” I said, testily. “Yes, you said.”

  We had sailed down that great river, which looped and bent around the swathe of land that was Francia, for many days. We caught fish when we could, and beached when the river quietened. We were unkempt and badly nourished, but we were alive. I was disturbed by what we had witnessed in that ruined town. Mowgai took it more stoically. As a salvager, he was used to sudden and violent death, and to the traps and dangers of the old world. It was a sharp reminder to me of how things had once been. How they could be again, perhaps, one day. And I thought of those two tribes, and the drowned man with the satellite inked on his chest. I thought of him often, in the years that followed.

  Then, one day, we came around a bend in the river and saw the city.

  The nights lengthen, and in the evening of my life, I often stay awake in the dark hours that come before dawn, and I write in my notebooks, and I listen to the silence, and often I remember back to the city of lights.

  It was immense. For days, Mowgai and I wandered its abandoned streets, taking shelter in ruined buildings. Thick vegetation had taken over the city, and packs of wild dogs and cats nested in what had once been churches, museums, office buildings, homes. We became aware of other animals, large game: elephants and giraffes, zebras, lions. Caged once, perhaps, and then escaped when the city fell, and now they populated it. Orchids grew by the side of empty avenues, and it often rained, in thick, humid drops.

  It was when we discovered the island that we first encountered Bill.

  Île de la Cité, I think it was once called. Now it sat in the middle of a much wider river, but a rickety bridge of wood and rope linked it to the south bank all the same. An enormous and crumbling cathedral stood on the island, and monstrous gargoyles and chimeras still stared down from its battlements, but what they looked down on was now a place of desolation—at least as far as people were concerned.

  It was a beautiful, serene place. Elephants congregated by the riverbank, their young spraying water on each other as the adults watched in affectionate amusement. Colorful parakeets flew overhead and thick green vines twisted their way over the old stones and the fallen-down buildings which surrounded a once-majestic square. It was to this square that we wended our way, over the rope bridge. Crocodiles swarmed down below us in the river. When we reached dry land, we saw it—him. The robot.

  The robot stood in front of the great doors of the cathedral. He stood almost motionless, his old, metallic body catching the light of the sun. All around him, a destruction of wild cats had gathered, and they sat staring up at him dreamily, heads on paws, as the robot scattered food for the pack like a benediction.

  At the sound of our footsteps, all the cats turned, and hissed. The robot turned to look. He stood there, then reached into a little satchel he was carrying and brought out one of his cigars, which he proceeded to light. We stopped and watched him.

  “…Humans,” he said at last. His voice was flat. It was a man’s voice, a recording perhaps, made long ago. It was gruff, and had a sort of scratched quality to it. “It has been centuries since I last saw humans.”

  “We’re still around,” Mowgai said.

  The robot seemed to give it some consideration.

  “…Too bad,” he said.

  Like I said at the start, he just wasn’t a very nice sort of person.

  “We could go,” I said.

  “No, no,” he said. “You’re here now.” He blew smoke from his cigar. It was one of his affectations, as we learned. “It is nice to… chat.”

  “Chat,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Nice.”

  “Nice.”

  “Sure. Did I ever tell you I went to the moon?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think you did.”

  A puff. “I did.” A puff. “Long ago.” The recorded cough of someone dead many centuries past. “It was rubbish.”

  “Of course it was,” Mowgai said, beside me, and I had to smile.

  “Nothing but rocks and, well, golf balls, and Teslas. Name’s Bill, by the way,” the robot said. “Well. What’s a name. But you can call me Bill.”

  “Does it stand for something?” Mowgai asked. “Like a model number or a serial number or… ?”

  “No,” the robot said. “It’s just Bill. Well, come along. I’ll show you around. Oh, and watch out for ants.”

  “Ants?” I said.

  “Yes. I don’t like ants,” the robot said.

  We’d climbed Montmartre at dawn. For a few days before, we shadowed the ancient robot as he wandered the abandoned streets of the old Francian capital. How he had survived for so long we had no idea. His own, often rambling account of his life changed with each telling. He had been to the lunar base before the moon fractured. He’d known famous historical figures: Elvis, Gandhi, Pak Kyongni, Lior Tirosh. He served under General Khaw during the Muddy Confluence Uprising. He visited Sneyland.

  How he ended up in the City of Lights even he couldn’t say. Now he wandered its streets and spoke to its cats—he’d made a study of the wild cat population, had followed them through generations, knew each one by lineage, remembered litters, parents and great-grandparents. The cats looked up to him. He was a sort of wild cat messiah.

  “I can help you get to New Atlantis,” he said. “Though I don’t see why you’d bother. I went there once, you know.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “Fishermen who thought themselves gods,” he said. “Barbarians with titles, tracing their bloodlines to the last of the climate-clans. Every man an earl, and every w
oman a duchess, and all their children bastards. I’d avoid the place, if I were you. I don’t like islands.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “They generate their own weather systems,” he said.

  We did not believe his offer at first, but he persisted. I suggested we sail down the river to the sea, but then, how would we cross the ocean to the New Atlantis?

  Mowgai said he’d had enough of water to last a lifetime, that he had never seen nor been in as much water as on this journey and that, when this was over, he would be happy never to see the sea again.

  I said, “Well then, why don’t we just walk.”

  He said, “Now you’re just being petty, Mai.”

  The robot said, “Why don’t you fly?”

  I said, sharply, “What do you mean, fly?” Mowgai and I were both pretty irritated with each other at that moment.

  “Fly, fly,” the robot said. “Up in the air and far away. You know. Voyage aérien?”

  “What?”

  He sighed, the recorded sound of a long-dead man. “I’ll show you,” he said.

  We’d climbed Montmartre at dawn, but it was dusk by the time Bill’s contraption was ready.

  It had been left, carefully packed, in the ruins of the basilica. We’d watched him unpack crates, erect poles, string wires, until a light basket, fit for two or three, stood on the ground. Above it were the burners, and above them, but currently lying on the ground, was the envelope.

  It was a hot air balloon.

  “What?” Bill said, a little defensively. “Everybody needs a hobby.”

  “Flying? You think we can get there by flying?”

  “Just follow the course of the river until you get to the sea,” he said. “New Atlantis lies just beyond what was once a channel. I’ll show you the controls. Try not to die, I suppose.”

  “I thought the sea was bad,” Mowgai said, and shuddered.

  But I loved the idea. When I was a little girl, Grandma Toffle told me the story of the day a pilot arrived in a solar glider. She had landed in the fields near our homes, and exchanged pleasantries and news, and then she took the children for a ride in her aircraft.

  I had never experienced flight.

  The sun was setting over the city of lights when we said our good-byes to the robot. He stood there near-motionless, watching us, and the cats of Montmartre slunk along the old broken stone stairs and came to surround him in a half-circle.

  “Please,” the robot said. “Don’t come back. Two humans in half a millennium of solitude is all that I can bear.”

  I wanted to tell him of the wild tribes we’d encountered downriver. I had the feeling that one day this lost city of gold in the jungle would be rediscovered, that people would fight over its treasures. But I did not have the heart to tell him, and besides, it might never come to pass, I thought. And so we simply said our good-byes, and left the ancient robot to his solitude.

  It is his face I remember still. Raised up to the sky as the hot air balloon rose slowly, the envelope stretching and filling. Mowgai and I held on to the railings of the basket and looked down, where the robot and the cats watched us go.

  We sailed over the city of lights that night, and saw many curious things. A glass pyramid rose out of the ground, and we wondered uneasily which ancient king was buried there, and what they had done to be given such a tomb. We watched the elephants march along the Champs-Élysées, and the monkeys who nestled in the ruins of a stone arch at its end. The city grew small below us. The night fell wholly, and the stars came out, and the broken moon shone down, a stark reminder that once, there were people there.

  The winds propelled us, and we navigated our way along the twisting path of the river, until we came, at dawn, to the estuary where the Seine spills into the sea. And we saw, in the distance, white cliffs rise into the clear blue skies.

  And we knew, then, that we were almost at our destination: We had, at last, discovered the New Atlantis.

  VIII. Breach

  The nights grow long and the days short, and the letters on the page as I write grow dense and small like a bird’s black footprints in ink. The words are blurred through a film of rain, and it is only then that I realize I’m crying.

  The nightjars call. The air is thick with jasmine. I have lived on this Land for eight decades and I love it, dearly. But sometimes I remember New Atlantis, and I remember the tomb, and what was buried there.

  Well, then. Not long to go. When I was a little girl, my mother went missing and Mowgai and I went looking for her, and what we found was Byblos, where the memories of a vanished age are stored. That is another story, for another time, but ever since, I had sought out those memories, inscribed within the time vaults of the ancients, and which are slowly yet inexorably deteriorating…

  “It’s a Bostrom Type III civilization,” Gaw said. “As far as we can tell. There are some peculiarities… Could be a Type IV. We’ve dated it to the last few decades of the age of excess. We’re at stable Breach… We think. Mai, it’s good to see you.”

  “You, too, Gawain,” I said.

  The years since I’d last seen him had been good to Gawain. Gangly as a youth, he moved now with confidence. Tanned from the sun, muscled from a life spent on the water, he was a far cry from the awkward teen I’d known.

  Mowgai and I had flown the hot air balloon to the landmass of old Britannia, and thence followed the Tamesis where it had breached the mainland and flowed into a wide, navigable basin. In the heart of this inland sea were seven islands. We drifted toward them, over open water. Down below we could see canoes moving lazily, sailboats bobbing gaily in their moorings, shacks and sandy beaches and, beyond, the famed white palaces of Hampstead.

  In the event, we couldn’t quite manage a dignified landing: Bill’s explanations regarding this procedure had been vague, and we crash-landed into open sea. Canoes rowed toward us just as I thought we would drown. Hands reached down and lifted us out of the water and into safety, and brought us ashore, to the nearest island, which was called Shooters Hill.

  It is a strange place, the New Atlantis. Life moves at the pace of tides, and the moon is important to them. They grow the cannabis plant there and smoke the dried buds, which they roll ceremoniously into cones of paper, or put into hand-fashioned pipes carved of wood or fired from clay. Of the seven sacred hills, Highgate is their cemetery, Clockhouse the place of science and industry, and Hampstead is where the drylander descendants of the climate-clans reside. Other islands can be seen at low tide, but they are unoccupied. An old city lies down below, and the islanders of Shooters Hill are fisherfolk and salvage divers and beachcombers. They welcomed us openly, and we spent a day in their company, resting and eating of their food, which is abundant, while we waited for word to travel to Gawain. It was only the next day that his boat arrived, and when he stepped onto the sand my heart leaped, for it was good to see an old friend.

  “You made it,” he said. “I knew you would.”

  “How could I resist?” I said, smiling. “But it better be worth it, Gawain.”

  “Oh, I think it will,” he said. “But then, you have some experience with vaults, don’t you? There are not many people who have that.”

  “There are not many vaults,” I said, and he nodded.

  “Do you think you could—?”

  “It’s what I came for,” I said, and he nodded again, and looked relieved.

  “I would not ask one of my own,” he said.

  Mowgai snorted at that, for all that he, too, would never have done it. He noticed my expression, and to his credit looked ashamed. I knew the salvagers feared places where vaults may lie, that they marked them on their maps as Fata Morgana, Do Not Approach. I did not blame them. It is unsettling, to experience the past. And one could easily get trapped there, with the ghosts of the dead. I was nervous, but also excited, for this was what I had traveled all this way for, and what I was born to do. I am a chronicler, and there must always be someone to remember the past as it
was, for how else can the future be made anew?

  “You came a long way,” Gawain said. “Our hospitality is yours, and everything we have. It is rare for us to receive visitors from so far away.”

  “It is a long way to go,” Mowgai said. He looked morosely over the water. I thought that he’d begun to regret accompanying me. “Who knew the world had so much sea in it?”

  Gawain laughed. “Water is the life,” he said. “Once, this was all Land. Now the city lies below the waves, a constant reminder to us of the way the world ended. But we endure, like weeds. Isn’t that what you used to say, Mai?”

  “Old Grandma Mosh used to say it to me…”

  The rhythm of the tides; the percussion of moon and stars. We accompanied Gawain by boat, sailing through serene waters over streets and landmarks buried in the sea: broken bridges that had once spanned Tamesis, Gothic Revival houses of office, a ruined palace where fish swam through long-broken windows. An immense wheel spun in the currents, half-buried in ancient mud. Above water, all was peaceful and quiet, and the hot sun shone down on fisherfolk in their canoes, throwing nets, and on the vast floating gardens of New Atlantis, where they raise kelp. Between the islands there were scores of boats and floating homes, and the smell of cooking and the shrieking laughter of kids were everywhere. The kids of New Atlantis swim like dolphins, and as we passed near Hampstead they came swimming toward us, lithe and tanned and laughing, to stare at us, the foreigners.

  I recognized the place from the memory trinket Gawain had sent me, but I was not prepared for its faded grandeur. Here, the old mansions had been lovingly kept and restored. These ancient buildings were constructed with a variety of limestone from the mainland. They had extensive gardens and manicured lawns that belonged to an earlier era and cooler weather. Into these exclusive surroundings there were nevertheless intrusions of palm trees and frangipani and wild macaws, and sand beaches which surrounded what had once been a hill. I saw pods of dolphins rising in the surf and, looking beyond Hampstead Island, I could see what the islanders called the mainland. In contrast to the islands, this was a place of wide desolation and unchecked growth, and looking far to the north I could see, with a shudder of recognition, the beginning of a wide and featureless gray plain, in which nothing lived and nothing grew and nothing moved.