Contents

1. DEFINITIONS
2. SPECULATIVE (ANTI)UTOPIAS
1. THOMAS MORE – UTOPIA (1516) (excerpts)
2. TOMMASO CAMPANELLA – THE CITY OF THE SUN (1602) (excerpts)

Speculative
3. FRANCIS BACON – NEW ATLANTIS (1626) (excerpts)
4. YEVGENY ZAMYATIN – WE (1924) (excerpts)
5. ALDOUS HUXLEY – BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) (excerpts)
6. GEORGE ORWELL – NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) (excerpts)

fiction 7. ANTHONY BURGESS – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962) (excerpts)

3. THE DARK SIDE OF PROGRESS

8. JAMES G. BALLARD – “THE CONCENTRATION CITY” (1957)
9. CHUCK PALAHNIUK – FIGHT CLUB (1996) (excerpts)
2sw 10. DON DELILLO – COSMOPOLIS (2003) (excerpts)

summer semester 4. APPROACHING THE END(S)

2023/24
11. H.G. WELLS – THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) (excerpts)
12. DMITRY GLUKHOVSKY – METRO 2033 (2005) (excerpts)
13. CORMAC MCCARTHY – THE ROAD (2006) (excerpts)
14. WILLIAM GIBSON – NEUROMANCER (1984) (excerpts)
15. NEAL STEPHENSON – SNOW CRASH (1992) (excerpts)

course pack 5. CLI-FI AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

16. RICHARD JEFFERIES – AFTER LONDON (1885) (excerpts)
17. H. G. WELLS – THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1896) (excerpts)
18. JEFF VANDERMEER – ANNIHILATION (2014) (excerpts)

6. ALTERNATIVE (HI)STORIES
19. PHILIP K. DICK – THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962) (excerpts)
20. JOANNA RUSS – ”WHEN IT CHANGED” (1972)
21. BERNARDINE EVARISTO – BLONDE ROOTS (2009) (excerpts)

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 1. DEFINITIONS

2
There are at least two principal ways to write speculative fiction--write about The thought experiment, the ‘what if?’ (which Darko Suvin calls the ”novum”),
people, or write about gadgets. […] There is another type of honest-to-goodness is crucial to all sf, and has led to the most popular alternative interpretation of
science fiction story that is not usually regarded as science fiction: the story of ‘sf’: speculative fiction.
people dealing with contemporary science or technology. We do not ordinarily
mean this sort of story when we say "science fiction"; what we do mean is the Farah Mendlesohn, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction
speculative story, the story embodying the notion "just suppose" or "What
would happen if." In the speculative science fiction story accepted science and
established facts are extrapolated to produce a new situation, a new framework
for human action. As a result of this new situation, new human problems are SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional
created—and our store is about how human beings cope with those new "novum" (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic.
problems..
Darko Suvin, 1979
Robert A. Heinlein, ”On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” 1947

A little-known but none the less key development in the history of the genre, I
would argue, occurred in 1600 when Giordano Bruno the Nolan was burned at
the stake by the Catholic Inquisition in Rome. Bruno’s crime had been to argue
that the universe was infinite and contained innumerable worlds – an example
of speculative rather than empirical science, and accordingly science-fictional.
The issues that have arisen from the “science” of SF lead numerous critics and
authors over the twenty-first century to shift toward substitute labels and
reconceptualizations, with speculative fiction now the dominant alternative. SF,
too, has come to be a convenient shorthand symbol for the entire aesthetic
category, precisely because it sidesteps the entire science v. speculative debate
while still recognizing some inherent coherence to the concept itself

Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction Eric Carllink, Gerry Canavan, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction

We bow to the fact that much of what passes for science fiction these days is
nearer fantasy. SF can, after all, be imagined to stand for science fantasy, as it
can for speculative fiction.

Brian W. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree

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 2. SPECULATIVE (ANTI)UTOPIAS

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1. THOMAS MORE – UTOPIA (1516) (excerpts)
If any man has a mind to visit his friends that live in some other town, or desires to travel
and see the rest of the country, he obtains leave very easily from the Syphogrant and
Tranibors, when there is no particular occasion for him at home. Such as travel carry
with them a passport from the Prince, which both certifies the licence that is granted for
travelling, and limits the time of their return. They are furnished with a waggon and a
slave, who drives the oxen and looks after them; but, unless there are women in the
company, the waggon is sent back at the end of the journey as a needless encumbrance.
While they are on the road they carry no provisions with them, yet they want for
nothing, but are everywhere treated as if they were at home. If they stay in any place
longer than a night, every one follows his proper occupation, and is very well used by
those of his own trade; but if any man goes out of the city to which he belongs without
leave, and is found rambling without a passport, he is severely treated, he is punished
as a fugitive, and sent home disgracefully; and, if he falls again into the like fault, is
condemned to slavery. If any man has a mind to travel only over the precinct of his own
city, he may freely do it, with his father’s permission and his wife’s consent; but when
he comes into any of the country houses, if he expects to be entertained by them, he
must labour with them and conform to their rules; and if he does this, he may freely go
over the whole precinct, being then as useful to the city to which he belongs as if he
were still within it. Thus you see that there are no idle persons among them, nor
pretences of excusing any from labour. There are no taverns, no alehouses, nor stews
among them, nor any other occasions of corrupting each other, of getting into corners,
or forming themselves into parties; all men live in full view, so that all are obliged both
to perform their ordinary task and to employ themselves well in their spare hours; and
it is certain that a people thus ordered must live in great abundance of all things, and
these being equally distributed among them, no man can want or be obliged to beg. […]
It is certain that all things appear incredible to us in proportion as they differ
from known customs; but one who can judge aright will not wonder to find that, since
their constitution differs so much from ours, their value of gold and silver should be
measured by a very different standard; for since they have no use for money among
themselves, but keep it as a provision against events which seldom happen, and
between which there are generally long intervening intervals, they value it no farther
than it deserves—that is, in proportion to its use. So that it is plain they must prefer iron
either to gold or silver, for men can no more live without iron than without fire or water;
but Nature has marked out no use for the other metals so essential as not easily to be
dispensed with. The folly of men has enhanced the value of gold and silver because of
their scarcity; whereas, on the contrary, it is their opinion that Nature, as an indulgent
parent, has freely given us all the best things in great abundance, such as water and
earth, but has laid up and hid from us the things that are vain and useless. […]
These and such like notions have that people imbibed, partly from their
education, being bred in a country whose customs and laws are opposite to all such
foolish maxims, and partly from their learning and studies—for though there are but few
in any town that are so wholly excused from labour as to give themselves entirely up to
their studies (these being only such persons as discover from their childhood an
extraordinary capacity and disposition for letters), yet their children and a great part of
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the nation, both men and women, are taught to spend those hours in which they are
not obliged to work in reading; and this they do through the whole progress of life. They
have all their learning in their own tongue, which is both a copious and pleasant
language, and in which a man can fully express his mind; it runs over a great tract of
many countries, but it is not equally pure in all places. They had never so much as heard
of the names of any of those philosophers that are so famous in these parts of the world,
before we went among them; and yet they had made the same discoveries as the
Greeks, both in music, logic, arithmetic, and geometry. But as they are almost in
everything equal to the ancient philosophers, so they far exceed our modern logicians
for they have never yet fallen upon the barbarous niceties that our youth are forced to
learn in those trifling logical schools that are among us. They are so far from minding
chimeras and fantastical images made in the mind that none of them could comprehend
what we meant when we talked to them of a man in the abstract as common to all men
in particular (so that though we spoke of him as a thing that we could point at with our
fingers, yet none of them could perceive him) and yet distinct from every one, as if he
were some monstrous Colossus or giant; yet, for all this ignorance of these empty
notions, they knew astronomy, and were perfectly acquainted with the motions of the
heavenly bodies; and have many instruments, well contrived and divided, by which they
very accurately compute the course and positions of the sun, moon, and stars. But for
the cheat of divining by the stars, by their oppositions or conjunctions, it has not so much
as entered into their thoughts. They have a particular sagacity, founded upon much
observation, in judging of the weather, by which they know when they may look for rain,
wind, or other alterations in the air; but as to the philosophy of these things, the cause
of the saltness of the sea, of its ebbing and flowing, and of the original and nature both
of the heavens and the earth, they dispute of them partly as our ancient philosophers
have done, and partly upon some new hypothesis, in which, as they differ from them,
so they do not in all things agree among themselves. […]
They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his own
advantage as far as the laws allow it, they account it piety to prefer the public good to
one’s private concerns, but they think it unjust for a man to seek for pleasure by
snatching another man’s pleasures from him; and, on the contrary, they think it a sign
of a gentle and good soul for a man to dispense with his own advantage for the good of
others, and that by this means a good man finds as much pleasure one way as he parts
with another; for as he may expect the like from others when he may come to need it,
so, if that should fail him, yet the sense of a good action, and the reflections that he
makes on the love and gratitude of those whom he has so obliged, gives the mind more
pleasure than the body could have found in that from which it had restrained itself. They
are also persuaded that God will make up the loss of those small pleasures with a vast
and endless joy, of which religion easily convinces a good soul.
Thus, upon an inquiry into the whole matter, they reckon that all our actions,
and even all our virtues, terminate in pleasure, as in our chief end and greatest
happiness; and they call every motion or state, either of body or mind, in which Nature
teaches us to delight, a pleasure. Thus they cautiously limit pleasure only to those
appetites to which Nature leads us; for they say that Nature leads us only to those
delights to which reason, as well as sense, carries us, and by which we neither injure any
other person nor lose the possession of greater pleasures, and of such as draw no
troubles after them. […]
2. TOMMASO CAMPANELLA – THE CITY OF THE SUN (1602) (excerpts)
The greater part of the city is built upon a high hill, which rises from an extensive plain,
but several of its circles extend for some distance beyond the base of the hill, which is
of such a size that the diameter of the city is upward of two miles, so that its
circumference becomes about seven. On account of the humped shape of the mountain,
however, the diameter of the city is really more than if it were built on a plain.
It is divided into seven rings or huge circles named from the seven planets, and
the way from one to the other of these is by four streets and through four gates, that
look toward the four points of the compass. Furthermore, it is so built that if the first
circle were stormed, it would of necessity entail a double amount of energy to storm the
second; still more to storm the third; and in each succeeding case the strength and
energy would have to be doubled; so that he who wishes to capture that city must, as it
were, storm it seven times. For my own part, however, I think that not even the first wall
could be occupied, so thick are the earthworks and so well fortified is it with
breastworks, towers, guns, and ditches. […]
This race of men came there from India, flying from the sword of the Magi, a race of
plunderers and tyrants who laid waste their country, and they determined to lead a
philosophic life in fellowship with one another. Although the community of wives is not
instituted among the other inhabitants of their province, among them it is in use after
this manner: All things are common with them, and their dispensation is by the authority
of the magistrates. Arts and honors and pleasures are common, and are held in such a
manner that no one can appropriate anything to himself. They say that all private
property is acquired and improved for the reason that each one of us by himself has his
own home and wife and children. From this, selflove springs. For when we raise a son to
riches and dignities, and leave an heir to much wealth, we become either ready to grasp
at the property of the State, if in any case fear should be removed from the power which
belongs to riches and rank; or avaricious, crafty, and hypocritical, if anyone is of slender
purse, little strength, and mean ancestry. But when we have taken away selflove, there
remains only love for the State. […]
Nay, indeed. For it is worth the trouble to see that no one can receive gifts from another.
Whatever is necessary they have, they receive it from the community, and the
magistrate takes care that no one receives more than he deserves. Yet nothing
necessary is denied to anyone. Friendship is recognized among them in war, in infirmity,
in the art contests, by which means they aid one another mutually by teaching.
Sometimes they improve themselves mutually with praises, with conversation, with
actions, and out of the things they need. All those of the same age call one another
brothers. They call all over twenty-two years of age, fathers; those that are less than
twenty-two are named sons. Moreover, the magistrates govern well, so that no one in
the fraternity can do injury to another.
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As many names of virtues as there are among us, so many magistrates there are among
them. There is a magistrate who is named Magnanimity, another Fortitude, a third
Chastity, a fourth Liberality, a fifth Criminal and Civil Justice, a sixth Comfort, a seventh
Truth, an eighth Kindness, a tenth Gratitude, an eleventh Cheerfulness, a twelfth
Exercise, a thirteenth Sobriety, etc. They are elected to duties of that kind, each one to
that duty for excellence in which he is known from boyhood to be most suitable.
Wherefore among them neither robbery nor clever murders, nor lewdness, incest,
adultery, or other crimes of which we accuse one another, can be found. They accuse
themselves of ingratitude and malignity when anyone denies a lawful satisfaction to
another of indolence, of sadness, of anger, of scurrility, of slander, and of lying, which
curseful thing they thoroughly hate. Accused persons undergoing punishment are
deprived of the common table, and other honors, until the judge thinks that they agree
with their correction. […]
Certainly not. For no one wants either necessaries or luxuries. Moreover, the race is
managed for the good of the commonwealth, and not of private individuals, and the
magistrates must be obeyed. They deny what we hold — viz., that it is natural to man to
recognize his offspring and to educate them, and to use his wife and house and children
as his own. For they say that children are bred for the preservation of the species and
not for individual pleasure, as St. Thomas also asserts. Therefore the breeding of
children has reference to the commonwealth, and not to individuals, except in so far as
they are constituents of the commonwealth. And since individuals for the most part
bring forth children wrongly and educate them wrongly, they consider that they remove
destruction from the State, and therefore for this reason, with most sacred fear, they
commit the education of the children, who, as it were, are the element of the republic,
to the care of magistrates; for the safety of the community is not that of a few. […]
For with them deformity is unknown. When the women are exercised they get a clear
complexion, and become strong of limb, tall and agile, and with them beauty consists in
tallness and strength. Therefore, if any woman dyes her face, so that it may become
beautiful, or uses high-heeled boots so that she may appear tall, or garments with trains
to cover her wooden shoes, she is condemned to capital punishment. But if the women
should even desire them they have no facility for doing these things. For who indeed
would give them this facility? Further, they assert that among us abuses of this kind arise
from the leisure and sloth of women. By these means they lose their color and have pale
complexions, and become feeble and small. For this reason they are without proper
complexions, use high sandals, and become beautiful not from strength, but from
slothful tenderness. And thus they ruin their own tempers and natures, and
consequently those of their offspring. Furthermore, if at any time a man is taken captive
with ardent love for a certain woman, the two are allowed to converse and joke together
and to give one another garlands of flowers or leaves, and to make verses. But if the
race is endangered, by no means is further union between them permitted. Moreover,
the love born of eager desire is not known among them; only that born of friendship.
[…]
3. FRANCIS BACON – NEW ATLANTIS (1626) (excerpts)
"They have also many wise and excellent laws touching marriage. They allow no
polygamy. They have ordained that none do intermarry or contract, until a month be
past from their first interview. Marriage without consent of parents they do not make
void, but they mulct it in the inheritors: for the children of such marriages are not
admitted to inherit above a third part of their parents' inheritance. I have read in a book
of one of your men, of a Feigned Commonwealth, where the married couple are
permitted, before they contract, to see one another naked. This they dislike; for they
think it a scorn to give a refusal after so familiar knowledge: but because of many hidden
defects in men and women's bodies, they have a more civil way; for they have near every
town a couple of pools, (which they call Adam and Eve's pools,) where it is permitted to
one of the friends of the men, and another of the friends of the woman, to see them
severally bathe naked." […]
"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have. For I will impart unto
thee, for the love of God and men, a relation of the true state of Salomon's House. Son,
to make you know the true state of Salomon's House, I will keep this order. First, I will
set forth unto you the end of our foundation. Secondly, the preparations and
instruments we have for our works. Thirdly, the several employments and functions
whereto our fellows are assigned. And fourthly, the ordinances and rites which we
observe.”
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of
things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things
possible." […]
"We have high towers; the highest about half a mile in height; and some of
them likewise set upon high mountains; so that the vantage of the hill with the tower is
in the highest of them three miles at least. And these places we call the Upper Region;
accounting the air between the high places and the low, as a Middle Region. We use
these towers, according to their several heights, and situations, for insolation,
refrigeration, conservation; and for the view of divers meteors; as winds, rain, snow,
hail; and some of the fiery meteors also. And upon them, in some places, are dwellings
of hermits, whom we visit sometimes, and instruct what to observe.”
"We have great lakes, both salt, and fresh; whereof we have use for the fish
and fowl. We use them also for burials of some natural bodies: for we find a difference
in things buried in earth or in air below the earth, and things buried in water. We have
also pools, of which some do strain fresh water out of salt; and others by art do turn
fresh water into salt.” […]
"We have also means to make divers plants rise by mixtures of earths without
seeds; and likewise to make divers new plants, differing from the vulgar; and to make
one tree or plant turn into another.”
"We have also parks and enclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds which we
use not only for view or rareness, but likewise for dissections and trials; that thereby we
may take light what may be wrought upon the body of man. Wherein we find many
strange effects; as continuing life in them, though divers parts, which you account vital,
be perished and taken forth; resuscitating of some that seem dead in appearance; and
the like. We try also all poisons and other medicines upon them, as well of chirurgery,
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as physic. By art likewise, we make them greater or taller than their kind is; and
contrariwise dwarf them, and stay their growth: we make them more fruitful and
bearing than their kind is; and contrariwise barren and not generative. Also we make
them differ in colour, shape, activity, many ways. We find means to make commixtures
and copulations of different kinds; which have produced many new kinds, and them not
barren, as the general opinion is. We make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies,
fishes, of putrefaction; whereof some are advanced (in effect) to be perfect creatures,
like bests or birds; and have sexes, and do propagate. Neither do we this by chance, but
we know beforehand, of what matter and commixture what kind of those creatures will
arise.” […]
"We have also furnaces of great diversities, and that keep great diversity of
heats; fierce and quick; strong and constant; soft and mild; blown, quiet; dry, moist; and
the like. But above all, we have heats, in imitation of the Sun's and heavenly bodies'
heats, that pass divers
inequalities, and (as it were) orbs, progresses, and returns, whereby we produce
admirable effects. Besides, we have heats of dungs; and of bellies and maws of living
creatures, and of their bloods and bodies; and of hays and herbs laid up moist; of lime
unquenched; and such like. Instruments also which generate heat only by motion. And
farther, places for strong insulations; and again, places under the earth, which by nature,
or art, yield heat. These divers heats we use, as the nature of the operation, which we
intend, requireth. […]
"We have also helps for the sight, far above spectacles and glasses in use. We
have also glasses and means to see small and minute bodies perfectly and distinctly; as
the shapes and colours of small flies and worms, grains and flaws in gems, which cannot
otherwise be seen, observations in urine and blood not otherwise to be seen. We make
artificial rain-bows, halo's, and circles about light. We represent also all manner of
reflexions, refractions, and multiplications of visual beams of objects.” […]
"These are (my son) the riches of Salomon's House. For the several
employments and offices of our fellows; we have twelve that sail into foreign countries,
under the names of other nations, (for our own we conceal); who bring us the books,
and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call Merchants
of Light. We have three that collect the experiments which are in all books. These we
call Depredators. We have three that collect the experiments of all mechanical arts; and
also of liberal sciences; and also of practices which are not brought into arts. These we
call Mystery-men.” […]
And when he had said this, he stood up; and I, as I had been taught, kneeled down, and
he laid his right hand upon my head, and said; "God bless thee, my son; and God bless
this relation, which I have made. I give thee leave to publish it for the good of other
nations; for we here are in God's bosom, a land unknown." And so he left me; having
assigned a value of about two thousand ducats, for a bounty to me and my fellows. For
they give great largesses where they come upon all occasions. […]
4. YEVGENY ZAMYATIN – WE (1924) (excerpts)
First Entry
TOPICS :
A Proclamation
The Wisest of Lines
A Poem
I shall simply copy, word for word, the proclamation that appeared today in the One
State Gazette:
The building of the Integral will be completed in one hundred and twenty
days. The great historic hour when the first Integral will soar into cosmic
space is drawing near. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors
subdued the entire terrestrial globe to the power of the One State. Yours
will be a still more glorious feat: you will integrate the infinite equation of
the universe with the aid of the fire-breathing, electric, glass Integral. You
will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be
living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of
reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically
infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy. But
before resorting to arms, we shall try the power of words. In the name of
the Benefactor, therefore, we proclaim to all the numbers of the One
State: Everyone who feels capable of doing so must compose tracts, odes,
manifestoes, poems, or other works extolling the beauty and the grandeur
of the One State. This will be the first cargo to be carried by the Integral.
Long live the One State, long live the numbers, long live the Benefactor!
I write this, and I feel: my cheeks are burning. Yes, to integrate the grandiose cosmic
equation. Yes, to unbend the wild, primitive curve and straighten it to a tangent—an
asymptote—a straight line. For the line of the One State is the straight line. The great,
divine, exact, wise straight line— the wisest of all lines.
I, D-503, Builder of the Integral, am only one of the mathematicians of the One
State. My pen, accustomed to figures, does not know how to create the music of
assonances and rhymes. I shall merely attempt to record what I see and think, or, to be
more exact, what we think (precisely so—we, and let this We be the title of my record).
But since this record will be a derivative of our life, of the mathematically perfect life of
the One State, will it not be, of itself, and regardless of my will or skill, a poem? It will. I
believe, I know it.
I write this, and my cheeks are burning. This must be similar to what a woman
feels when she first senses within herself the pulse of a new, still tiny, still blind little
human being. It is I, and at the same time, not I. And for many long months it will be
necessary to nourish it with my own life, my own blood, then tear it painfully from myself
and lay it at the feet of the One State.
But I am ready, like every one, or almost every one, of us. I am ready.
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Second Entry
TOPICS:
Ballet
Square Harmony
X
Spring. From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild, invisible plains, the wind brings
yellow honey pollen of some unknown flowers. The sweet pollen dries your lips, and
every minute you pass your tongue over them. The lips of all the women you see must
be sweet (of the men, too, of course). This interferes to some extent with the flow of
logical thought.
But the sky! Blue, unblemished by a single cloud. (How wild the tastes of the
ancients, whose poets could be inspired by those absurd, disorderly, stupidly tumbling
piles of vapor!) I love—I am certain I can safely say, we love—only such a sterile,
immaculate sky. On days like this the whole world is cast of the same impregnable,
eternal glass as the Green Wall, as all our buildings. On days like this you see the bluest
depth of things, their hitherto unknown, astonishing equations—you see them even in
the most familiar everyday objects.
Take, for instance, this. In the morning I was at the dock where the Integral is
being built, and suddenly I saw: the lathes; the regulator sphere rotating with closed
eyes, utterly oblivious of all; the cranks flashing, swinging left and right; the balance
beam proudly swaying its shoulders; the bit of the slotting machine dancing up and
down in time to unheard music Suddenly I saw the whole beauty of this grandiose
mechanical ballet, flooded with pale blue sunlight.
And then, to myself: Why is this beautiful? Why is dance beautiful? Answer:
because it is unfree motion, because the whole profound meaning of dance lies precisely
in absolute, esthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our
forebears abandoned themselves to dance at the most exalted moments of their lives
(religious mysteries, military parades), it means only one thing: the instinct of
unfreedom is organically inherent in man from time immemorial, and we, in our present
life, are only consciously....
I will have to finish later: the annunciator clicked. I looked up: O-90, of course.
In half a minute she'll be here, for our daily walk.
Dear O! It always seems to me that she looks exactly like her name: about ten
centimeters shorter than the Maternal Norm, and therefore carved in the round, all of
her, with that pink O, her mouth, open to meet every word I say. And also, that round,
plump fold on her wrist, like a baby's.
When she came in, the flywheel of logic was still humming at full swing within
me, and I began, by sheer force of inertia, to speak to her about the formula I had just
established, which encompassed everything—dance, machines, and all of us.
"Marvelous, isn't it?" I asked.
"Yes, marvelous." O-90 smiled rosily at me. "It's spring."
Well, wouldn't you know: spring ... She talks about spring. Women ... I fell silent.
Downstairs, the avenue was full. In such weather, the afternoon personal hour is used
for an additional walk. As always, the Music Plant played the "March of the One State"
with all its trumpets. The numbers walked in even ranks, four abreast, ecstatically
stepping in time to the music-hundreds, thousands of numbers, in pale blue unifs, with
golden badges on their breasts, bearing the State Number of each man and woman. And
I—the four of us—but one of the innumerable waves in this mighty stream. On my left,
O-90 (if this were being written by one of my hairy ancestors a thousand years ago, he
probably would have described her by that funny word "mine"); on my right, two
numbers I did not know, male and female.
Blessedly blue sky, tiny baby suns in every badge, faces unshadowed by the
insanity of thoughts ... Rays. Do you understand that? Everything made of some single,
radiant, smiling substance. And the brass rhythms: "Ta-ta-ta-tam! Tata- ta-tam!" Like
brass stairs gleaming in the sun, and every step taking you higher and higher, into the
dizzying blue.... And again, as this morning at the dock, I saw everything as though for
the first time in my life: the straight, immutable streets, the glittering glass of the
pavements, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent houses, the square harmony
of the gray-blue ranks. And I felt: it was not the generations before me, but I—yes, I—
who had conquered the old God and the old life. It was I who had created all this. And I
was like a tower, I dared not move an elbow lest walls, cupolas, machines tumble in
fragments about me.
Then—a leap across the centuries, from + to -. I remembered (evidently an
association by contrast) —I suddenly remembered a picture I had seen in a museum:
one of their avenues, out of the twentieth century, dazzlingly motley, a teeming crush
of people, wheels, animals, posters, trees, colors, birds. . . . And they say this had really
existed—could exist. It seemed so incredible, so preposterous that I could not contain
myself and burst out laughing.
And immediately, there was an echo—laughter— on my right. I turned: a flash
of white—extraordinarily white and sharp teeth, an unfamiliar female face.
"Forgive me," she said, "but you looked at everything around you with such an
inspired air, like some mythical god on the seventh day of creation. It seems to me you
are sure that even I was created by you, and by no one else. I am very flattered…"
All this—without a smile; I would even say, with a certain deference (perhaps
she knew that I am the Builder of the Integral). But in the eyes, or in the eyebrows—I
could not tell—there was a certain strange, irritating X, which I could not capture, could
not define in figures.
For some odd reason, I felt embarrassed and tried, in a rather stumbling
manner, to explain my laughter to her logically. It was entirely clear, I said, that this
contrast, this impassable abyss between the present and the past...
"But why impassable?" (What white teeth!) "A bridge can be thrown across an
abyss. Just think: drums, battalions, ranks— all this has also existed in the past; and,
consequently..."
"But of course!" I cried. (What an astonishing coincidence of ideas: she spoke
almost my own words, the words I had written down before our walk.) "You understand,
even ideas. And this is because nobody is 'one,' but 'one of.' We are so alike..."
She: "Are you sure?"
I saw her eyebrows raised to her temples at a sharp angle, like the pointed horns of an
X, and again I was confused. I glanced right, left, and...
On my right—she, slender, sharp, stubbornly pliant, like a whip, I-330 (I could
see her number now); on my left—O, altogether different, all curves, with that childish
fold on her wrist; and at the other end of our row, a male number I did not know—
strange, doubly bent somehow, like the letter S. All of us so different...
That one on the right, I-330, seemed to have intercepted my flustered glance,
and with a sigh she said, "Yes… Alas!"
9
Actually, this "alas" was entirely appropriate. But again there was that
something in her face, or in her voice. ,. . And with a sharpness unusual for me, I said,
"No reason for 'Alas.' Science progresses, and it is obvious that, if not now, then in fifty
or a hundred years ..."
"Even everyone's noses ..."
"Yes," I almost shouted, "noses. If there is any ground for envy, no matter what
it is ... If I have a button-nose and another ..."
"Oh, your nose is 'classical,' as they used to say in olden times. But your hands...
No, let us see, let us see your hands!"
I detest to have anyone look at my hands: all hairy, shaggy—a stupid atavism. I
held out my hand and said, as indifferently as I could, "An ape's hands."
She glanced at my hands, then at my face. "A most interesting conjunction."
She weighed me with her eyes as on a scale, and the horns flicked again at the corners
of her eyebrows.
"He is registered with me." O-90's lips opened rosily, with eager joy.
I wished she had kept silent—this was altogether out of place. Generally, this
dear O . . . how shall I put it ... her tongue is wrongly timed; the speed of the tongue
should always be some seconds behind the speed of thought, but certainly not the other
way around.
At the end of the avenue, the bell on the Accumulator Tower was loudly striking
seventeen. The personal hour was over. I-330 was leaving with the S-shaped male
number. His face somehow inspired respect, and now it seemed familiar. I must have
met him somewhere, but where?
In parting, I-330 said with another of her X-smiles, "Come to auditorium 112
the day after tomorrow."
I shrugged. "If I am assigned to that auditorium ..."
And she, with an odd certainty, "You will be."
The woman affected me as unpleasantly as an irresolvable irrational member that has
somehow slipped into an equation. And I was glad to remain for at least a few moments
alone with dear O.
Hand in hand, we crossed four lines of avenues. At the corner she had to turn
right, and I, left.
"I'd like so much to come to you today and let down the blinds. Today, right
now . . ." O timidly raised her round, blue-crystal eyes to me.
How funny she is. What could I say to her? She had come to me only the day
before, and she knew as well as I did that our next sexual day was the day after
tomorrow. It was simply a case of her usual "words ahead of thought"—like the
occasional (and sometimes damaging) premature supply of a spark to a motor.
Before we parted, I kissed her lovely blue eyes, unshadowed by a single cloud,
two -- no, let me be precise — three times. […]
As schoolchildren we all read (perhaps you have, too) that greatest literary monument
to have come down to us from ancient days—"The Railway Guide." But set it side by side
with our Table, and it will be as graphite next to a diamond: both consist of the same
element—carbon—yet how eternal, how transparent is the diamond, how it gleams!
Whose breath will fail to quicken as he rushes clattering along the pages of "The Railway
Guide"? But our Table of Hours! Why, it transforms each one of us into a figure of steel,
a six-wheeled hero of a mighty epic poem. Every morning, with six-wheeled precision,
at the same hour and the same moment, we— millions of us—get up as one. At the
same hour, in millionheaded unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison we
end it And, fused into a single million-handed body, at the same second, designated by
the Table, we lift our spoons to our mouths. At the same second, we come out for our
walk, go to the auditorium, go to the hall for Taylor exercises, fall asleep....
I shall be entirely frank: even we have not yet found an absolute, precise
solution to the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from sixteen to seventeen, and from
twenty-one to twenty-two, the single mighty organism breaks up into separate cells;
these are the Personal Hours designated by the Table. In these hours you will see
modestly lowered shades in the rooms of some; others will walk with measured tread
along the avenue, as though climbing the brass stairs of the March; still others, like
myself now, are at their desks. But I am confident—and you may call me an idealist and
dreamer—I am confident that sooner or later we shall fit these Personal Hours as well
into the general formula. Some day these 86,400 seconds will also be entered in the
Table of Hours.
I have read and heard many incredible things about those times when people
still lived in a free, i.e., unorganized, savage condition. But most incredible of all, it seems
to me, is that the state authority of that time—no matter how rudimentary —could
allow men to live without anything like our Table, without obligatory walks, without
exact regulation of mealtimes, getting up and going to bed whenever they felt like it
Some historians even say that in those times the street lights burned all night, and
people walked and drove around in the streets at all hours of the night.
Try as I may, I cannot understand it. After all, no matter how limited their
intelligence, they should have understood that such a way of life was truly mass
murder—even if slow murder. The state (humaneness) forbade the killing of a single
individual, but not the partial killing of millions day by day. To kill one individual, that is,
to diminish the total sum of human lives by fifty years, was criminal. But to diminish the
sum of human lives by fifty million years was not considered criminal.
Isn't that absurd? Today, any ten-year-old will solve this mathematical-moral
problem in half a minute. They, with all their Kants taken together, could not solve it
(because it never occurred to any of the Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, i.e.,
ethics based on subtraction, addition, division, and multiplication).
And wasn't it absurd that the state (it dared to call itself a state!) could leave
sexual life without any semblance of control? As often and as much as anyone might
wish. . . . Totally unscientific, like animals. And blindly, like animals, they bore their
young. Isn't it ridiculous: to know agriculture, poultry-breeding, fish-breeding (we have
exact information that they knew all this), yet fail to go on to the ultimate step of this
logical ladder-is child-breeding; fail to establish such a thing as our Maternal and
Paternal Norms.
It is so absurd, so unbelievable, that I am afraid, as I write this, that you, my
unknown readers, will think me a malicious joker. I am afraid you may decide that I am
merely trying to mock you, telling you utter nonsense with a straight face. But, to begin
with, I am incapable of jokes, for every joke contains a lie as an implicit function.
Secondly, our One State Science asserts that this was how the ancients lived, and our
State Science never errs. Besides, where would state logic have come from at a time
when men were living in the condition of freedom—the condition of animals, apes, the
herd? What could be expected of them, when even in our time the wild, apelike echo
still occasionally rises from somewhere below, from some shaggy depth?
10
Fortunately, only on rare occasions. Fortunately, they are only breakdowns of
minor parts which can easily be repaired without halting the eternal, grandiose
movement of the entire Machine. And to expel the warped bolt, we have the skilled,
heavy hand of the Benefactor and the experienced eyes of the Guardians. […]
O was to come in an hour. I felt pleasantly and beneficially excited. At home I stepped
hurriedly into the office, handed in my pink coupon, and received the certificate
permitting me to lower the shades. This right is granted only on sexual days. At all other
times we live behind our transparent walls that seem woven of gleaming air—we are
always visible, always washed in light We have nothing to conceal from one another.
Besides, this makes much easier the difficult and noble task of the Guardians.
For who knows what might happen otherwise? Perhaps it was precisely those strange,
opaque dwellings of the ancients that gave rise to their paltry cage psychology. "My (sic!)
home is my castle." What an idea! […]
Well, today's One State Gazette announces that the day after tomorrow there will be a
celebration of Justice at the Plaza of the Cube. This means that once again some number
has disturbed the operation of the great State Machine; again something has happened
that was unforeseen, unforecalculated. […]
I opened a heavy, creaking, opaque door, and we stepped into a gloomy, disorderly place
(they called it an "apartment"). The same strange "royal" musical instrument—and again
the wild, disorganized, mad music, like the other time—a jumble of colors and forms. A
white flat area above; dark blue walls; red, green, and orange bindings of ancient books;
yellow bronze—chandeliers, a statue of Buddha; furniture built along lines convulsed in
epilepsy, incapable of being fitted into an equation.
I could barely endure all that chaos. […]
Night. Green, orange, blue. Red royal instrument. Orangeyellow dress. The bronze
Buddha. Suddenly he raises his heavy bronze eyelids, and sap begins to flow from them,
from Buddha. And sap from the yellow dress, and drops of sap trickling down the mirror,
and from the large bed, and the children's beds, and now I myself, flowing with sap —
and some strange, sweet, mortal terror....
I woke: soft, bluish light, glimmer of glass walls, glass chairs and table. This
calmed me; my heart stopped hammering. Sap, Buddha ... what nonsense! Clearly I must
be ill. I have never dreamed before. They say that with the ancients dreaming was a
perfectly ordinary, normal occurrence. But of course, their whole life was a dreadful
whirling carousel— green, orange, Buddhas, sap. We, however, know that dreams are a
serious psychic disease. And I know that until this moment my brain has been a
chronometrically exact gleaming mechanism without a single speck of dust. But now ...
Yes, precisely: I feel some alien body in my brain, like the finest eyelash in the eye. You
do not feel your body, but that eye with the lash in it—you can't forget it for a second...
[…]
Yes, this Taylor was unquestionably the greatest genius of the ancients. True, his thought
did not reach far enough to extend his method to all of life, to every step, to the twenty-
four hours of every day. He was unable to integrate his system from one hour to twenty-
four. Still, how could they write whole libraries of books about some Kant, yet scarcely
notice Taylor, that prophet who was able to see ten centuries ahead? […]
I hid behind my newspaper—it seemed to me that everyone was staring at me—and
instantly forgot about the eyelash, the gimlets, everything. The news I read was so
upsetting that it drove all else out of my mind. There was but one short line: "According
to reliable sources, new traces have been discovered of the elusive organization which
aims at liberation from the beneficent yoke of the State."
"Liberation?" Amazing, the extent to which criminal instincts persist in human
nature. I use the word "criminal" deliberately. Freedom and crime are linked as
indivisibly as ... well, as the motion of the aero and its speed: when its speed equals zero,
it does not move; when man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear.
The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom. And now, just as we
have gotten rid of it (on the cosmic scale, centuries are, of course, no more than "just"),
some wretched halfwits ... […]
"I have served and will continue to serve knowledge," I frowned. I neither like nor
understand jokes, and R-13 has the bad habit of joking.
"Oh, knowledge! This knowledge of yours is only cowardice. Don't argue, it's
true. You're simply trying to enclose infinity behind a wall, and you are terrified to glance
outside the wall. Yes! Just try and take a look, and you will shut your eyes. Yes!"
"Walls are the foundation of all human ..." I began. R spurted at me like a
fountain. O laughed roundly, rosily. I waved them off—laugh if you please, it doesn't
matter to me. […]
"Fortunately, the antediluvian ages of all those Shakespeares and Dostoyevskys, or
whatever you call them, are gone," I said, deliberately loudly. […]
According to the descriptions that have come down to us, something similar was
experienced by the ancients during their "religious services." But they worshiped their
own irrational, unknown God; we serve our rational and precisely known one. Their God
gave them nothing except eternal, tormenting searching; their God had not been able
to think of anything more sensible than offering himself as sacrifice for some
incomprehensible reason. We, on the other hand, offer a sacrifice to our God, the One
State—a calm, reasoned, sensible sacrifice. Yes, this was our solemn liturgy to the One
State, a remembrance of the awesome time of trial, of the Two Hundred Years' War, a
grandiose celebration of the victory of all over one, of the sum over the individual. […]
Eleventh Entry
TOPICS : No, I cannot, I'll simply write, without a plan
Evening. A light mist The sky is hidden by a milky-golden veil and you cannot see what is
above, beyond it The ancients knew that God— their greatest, bored skeptic—was
there. We know that there is only a crystal-blue, naked, indecent nothing. But now I do
not know what is there: I have learned too much. Knowledge, absolutely sure of its
infallibility, is faith. I had had firm faith in myself; I had believed that I knew everything
within myself. And now...
11
I stand before a mirror. And for the first time in my life—yes, for the first time—
I see myself clearly, sharply, consciously. I see myself with astonishment as a certain
"he." Here am I— he: black eyebrows, etched in a straight line; and between them, like
a scar, a vertical fold (I don't know whether it was there before). Steel-gray eyes,
surrounded by the shadow of a sleepless night. And there, behind this steel... it turns
out that I have never known what is there. And out of "there" (this "there" is at the same
time here and infinitely far), out of "there" I look at myself—at him—and I know: he,
with his straight eyebrows, is a stranger, alien to me, someone I am meeting for the first
time in my life. And I, the real I, am not he. […]
It was again the old R: thick, sputtering lips, spraying saliva, and a fountain of words.
"You see" […] that ancient legend about paradise ... Why, it's about us, about today. Yes!
Just think. Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or
freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative. Those idiots chose freedom,
and what came of it? Of course, for ages afterward they longed for the chains. The
chains—you understand? That's what world sorrow was about For ages! And only we
have found the way of restoring happiness. ... No, wait listen further! The ancient God
and we—side by side, at the same table. Yes! We have helped God ultimately to conquer
the devil—for it was he who had tempted men to break the ban and get a taste of
ruinous freedom, he, the evil serpent. And we, we've brought down our boot over his
little head, and—crrunch! Now everything is fine—we have paradise again. Again we are
as innocent and simple-hearted as Adam and Eve. No more of that confusion about good
and evil. Everything is simple—heavenly, childishly simple. The Benefactor, the Machine,
the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians—all this is good, all this is sublime, magnificent,
noble, elevated, crystally pure. Because it protects our unfreedom—that is, our
happiness. […]
At the moment when I felt the Guardian Angel behind my back, I was enjoying a sonnet
entitled "Happiness." I think I will not be mistaken if I say that it is a poem of rare and
profound beauty of thought. Here are its first four lines:
Eternally enamored two times two.
Eternally united in the passionate four,
Most ardent lovers in the world-
Inseparable two times two. ..
And so on—about the wise, eternal bliss of the multiplication table. […]
I wondered at the ancients who had never realized the utter absurdity of their literature
and poetry. The enormous, magnificent power of the literary word was completely
wasted. It's simply ridiculous—everyone wrote anything he pleased. Just as ridiculous
and absurd as the fact that the ancients allowed the ocean to beat dully at the shore
twenty-four hours a day, while the millions of kilogrammometers of energy residing in
the waves went only to heighten lovers' feelings. But we have extracted electricity from
the amorous whisper of the waves; we have transformed the savage, foam-spitting
beast into a domestic animal; and in the same way we have tamed and harnessed the
once wild element of poetry. Today, poetry is no longer the idle, impudent whistling of
a nightingale; poetry is civic service, poetry is useful. […]
 However, on the Fortieth cross-town avenue, we have succeeded in erecting a
With an enormous effort, I finally tore my eyes away from the glass underfoot, and temporary barrier of high-voltage waves. And I hope that we shall conquer. More than
suddenly the golden letters of MEDICAL OFFICE burst into my face. […] At a single bound that—I am certain we shall conquer. Because Reason must prevail.
I swung across the steps, slammed the door firmly behind me, and took a deep breath.
I felt: I had not breathed since morning, my heart had not been beating—and it was only
now that I had taken my first breath, only now that the sluices in my breast had opened.
There were two of them: one short, with tubby legs, weighing the patients with
his eyes as though lifting them on horns; the other paper-thin, with gleaming scissor-
lips, his nose a finest blade. . . . The same one. I rushed to him as to someone near and
dear, mumbling about insomnia, dreams, shadows, a yellow world. The scissor-lips
gleamed, smiled.
"You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul."
A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. We sometimes use the words "soul-
stirring," "soulless," but "soul" ... ?
"Is it... very dangerous?" I muttered.
"Incurable," the scissors snapped. […]
"But why, why suddenly a soul? I've never had one, and suddenly ... Why . .. No
one else has it, and I. . . ?" I clung even more violently to the thin hand; I was terrified of
losing the lifeline. "Why? Why don't you have feathers, or wings-only shoulder blades,
the base for wings? Because wings are no longer necessary, we have the aero, wings
would only interfere. Wings are for flying, and we have nowhere else to fly: we have
arrived, we have found what we had been searching for. Isn't that so?"
I nodded in confusion. He looked at me with a scalpel-sharp laugh. The other
heard it, pattered in from his office on his tubby feet, lifted my paper-thin doctor, lifted
me on his horn-eyes.
"What's the trouble? A soul? A soul, you say? What the devil! We'll soon return
to cholera if you go on that way." […]

On, the following day, I, D-503, went to the Benefactor and told him everything I knew
about the enemies of happiness. How could it have seemed so difficult before?
Incredible. The only explanation I can think of is my former sickness (the soul).
In the evening of the same day, I sat (for the first time) at the same table with
the Benefactor in the famous Gas Chamber. She was to testify in my presence. The
woman smiled and was stubbornly silent. I noticed she had sharp and very white teeth,
and that was pretty.
Then she was placed under the Bell. Her face became very white, and since her
eyes are dark and large, it was very pretty. When they began to pump the air out of the
Bell, she threw her head back, half closed her eyes; her lips were tightly shut—it
reminded me of something. She looked at me, gripping hard the arms of the chair—
looked until her eyes closed altogether. Then she was pulled out, quickly restored with
the aid of electrodes, and placed once more under the Bell. This was repeated three
times—and still she did not say a word. Others brought with that woman were more
honest: many of them began to speak after the very first time. Tomorrow they will all
ascend the stairs to the Benefactor's Machine.
This cannot be postponed, because in the western parts of the city there is still
chaos, roaring, corpses, beasts, and— unfortunately—a considerable group of numbers
who have betrayed Reason.

12
5. ALDOUS HUXLEY – BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) (excerpts)
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words,
CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World
State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. […]
“And this,” said the Director opening the door, “is the Fertilizing Room.” […]
His fordship Mustapha Mond! The eyes of the saluting students almost popped out of
their heads. Mustapha Mond! The Resident Controller for Western Europe! One of the
Ten World Controllers. One of the Ten. and he sat down on the bench with the D.H.C.,
he was going to stay, to stay, yes, and actually talk to them. straight from the horse’s
mouth. Straight from the mouth of Ford himself. […]
“You all remember,” said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, “you all remember, I
suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk. History,” he
repeated slowly, “is bunk.” […]
Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet.
The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these poor pre-moderns
were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily,
didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with
the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the
lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the
uncertainties and the poverty-they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly
(and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could
they be stable? […]
“Even an Epsilon .” Lenina suddenly remembered an occasion when, as a little girl at
school, she had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware, for the first
time, of the whispering that had haunted all her sleeps. She saw again the beam of
moonlight, the row of small white beds; heard once more the soft, soft voice that said
(the words were there, unforgotten, unforgettable after so many night-long
repetitions): “Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even
Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else.
We can’t do without any one.” […]
The President made another sign of the T and sat down. The service had begun. The
dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the table. The loving cup of
strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, “I
drink to my annihilation,” twelve times quaffed. Then to the accompaniment of the
synthetic orchestra the First Solidarity Hymn was sung.
“Ford, we are twelve; oh, make us one,
Like drops within the Social River,
Oh, make us now together run
As swiftly as thy shining Flivver.” […]
“My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of
nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly
organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.
Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where
there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be
resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended-there, obviously, nobility and
13
heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is
taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. […] And if ever, by some unlucky
chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why there’s always soma to give
you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile
you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only
accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training.
Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can
be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity
without tears – that’s what soma is.”
“But the tears are necessary. Don’t you remember what Othello said? ’If after
every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.’
There’s a story one of the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mátaski. The young
men who wanted to marry her had to do a morning’s hoeing in her garden. It seemed
easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply
couldn’t stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could-he got the girl.”
“Charming! But in civilized countries,” said the Controller, “you can have girls
without hoeing for them, and there aren’t any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got
rid of them all centuries ago.”
The Savage nodded, frowning. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you.
Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ’tis
better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms
against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. But you don’t do either. Neither
suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.” […]
“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want
freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be
unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have
syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to
live in constant apprehension of what may happen to- morrow; the right to catch
typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long
silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last. […]
That evening the swarm of helicopters that came buzzing across the Hog’s Back was a
dark cloud ten kilometres long. The description of last night’s orgy of atonement had
been in all the papers.
“Savage!” called the first arrivals, as they alighted from their machine. “Mr.
Savage!”
There was no answer.
The door of the lighthouse was ajar. They pushed it open and walked into a
shuttered twilight. Through an archway on the further side of the room they could see
the bottom of the staircase that led up to the higher floors. Just under the crown of the
arch dangled a pair of feet. […]
6. GEORGE ORWELL – NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) (excerpts)
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his
chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through
the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of
gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a
coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted
simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five,
with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the
stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and
at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the
economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting
several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the
enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived
that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the
caption beneath it ran. […]
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew,
even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work,
towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague
distaste—this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of
the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should
tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas
of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their
windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy
garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust
swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places
where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of
wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember:
nothing remained of his childhood except a series of brightlit tableaux occurring against
no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak —was startlingly different from
any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white
concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston
stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the
three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH […]
14
He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which
formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some
huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull,
battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost,
to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and
two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make
that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity
of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their
philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not
that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after
all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works?
Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in
the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then? […]
They sat down on two iron chairs, side by side but not too close together. He saw that
she was about to speak. She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately
crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed.
‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.
‘I betrayed you,’ he said.
She gave him another quick look of dislike.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something something you can’t
stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to
somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it
was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But
that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other
way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to
happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about
is yourself.’
‘All you care about is yourself,’ he echoed.
‘And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel the same.’
There did not seem to be anything more to say. […]
The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and
slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back
to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful
dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any
longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as
snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. […]
He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
7. ANTHONY BURGESS – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962) (excerpts)
"What's it going to be then, eh?"
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim.
Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what
to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar
was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos
were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget,
newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus
something else. They had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against
prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you
could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches
which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His
Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you
could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and
make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this
evening I'm starting off the story with.
Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view
of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him
swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-
violent on some shivering starry greyhaired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the
till's guts. But, as they say, money isn't everything.
The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion, which in those days was a
pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crotch
underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of a design you could viddy
clear enough in a certain light, so that I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a
rooker (a hand, that is), Georgie had a very fancy one of a flower, and poor old Dim had
a very hound-and-horny one of a clown's litso (face, that is). Dim not ever having much
of an idea of things and being, beyond all shadow of a doubting thomas, the dimmest of
we four. Then we wore waisty jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up
shoulders ('pletchoes' we called them) which were a kind of a mockery of having real
shoulders like that. Then, my brothers, we had these off-white cravats which looked like
whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a sort of a design made on it with a fork. We wore our
hair not too long and we had flip horrorshow boots for kicking. [...]
It was round by the Municipal Power Plant that we came across Billyboy and his
five droogs. Nowin those days, my brothers, the teaming up was mostly by fours or fives,
these being like autoteams, four being a comfy number for an auto, and six being the
outside limit for gang-size. Sometimes gangs would gang up so as to make like malenky
armies for big night-war, but mostly it was best to roam in these like small numbers.
Billyboy was something that made me want to sick just to viddy his fat grinning litso, and
he always had this von of very stale oil that's been used for frying over and over, even
when he was dressed in his best platties, like now. They viddied us just as we viddied
them, and there was like a very quit kind of watching each other now. This would be real,
15
this would be proper, this would be the nozh, the oozy, the britva, not just fisties and
boots. Billyboy and his droogs stopped what they were doing, which was just getting
ready to perform something on a weepy young devotchka they had there, not more than
ten, she creeching away but with her platties still on. Billyboy holding her by one rooker
and his number-one, Leo, holding the other. They'd probably just been doing the dirty
slovo part of the act before getting down to a malenky bit of ultra-violence. When they
viddied us a-coming they let go of this boo-hooing little ptitsa, there being plenty more
where she came from, and she ran with her thin white legs flashing through the dark,
still going "Oh oh oh". I said, smiling very wide and droogie: "Well, if it isn't fat stinking
billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil?
Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou."
And then we started […]
"Ah, the old vitamins, eh?" And I clickclicked at her but she took no notice. All
she did was to slam the needle into my left arm, and then swishhhh in went the vitamin
stuff. [...] Where I was wheeled to, brothers, was like no sinny I had ever viddied before.
True enough, one wall was all covered with silver screen, and direct opposite was a wall
with square holes in for the projector to project through, and there were stereo speakers
stuck all over the mesto. [...] But then all I could like notice was how weak I seemed to
be, and I put that down to changing over from prison pishcha to this new rich pishcha
and the vitamins injected into me. [...] What happened now was that one white-coated
veck strapped my gulliver to a like head-rest, singing to himself all the time some vonny
cally pop-song. "What's this for?" I said. And this veck replied, interrupting his like song
an instant, that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the screen. [...] And
then, O my brothers, the film-show started off with some very gromky atmosphere music
coming from the speakers, very fierce and full of dis-cord. [...]
Now all the time I was watching this I was beginning to get very aware of a like
not feeling all that well, and this I put down to the under-nourishment and my stomach
not quite ready for the rich pishcha and vitamins I was getting here. [...] This time the
film jumped right away on a young devotchka who was being given the old in-out by first
one malchick then another then another then another, she creeching away very gromky
through the speakers and like very pathetic and tragic music going on at the same
time.[..]The pains I felt now in my belly and the headache and the thirst were terrible,
and they all seemed to be coming out of the screen. So I creeched: "Stop the film! Please,
please stop it! I can't stand any more." And then the goloss of this Dr. Brodsky said:
"Stop it? Stop it, did you say? Why, we've hardly started."
A Clockwork Orange glossary:

Britva Razor Russian: britva/razor

Crast Steal Russian: krast/steal
Creech Scream Russian: kreechat/scream
Deng Money Russian: dengi/money
Devotchka Girl Russian: devochka/girl
Drencrom A drug Invented slang: adrenochrome?
Droog Friend Russian: droog/friend
Goloss Voice Russian: golos/voice
Gromky Loud Russian: gromkii/loud
Gulliver Head Russian: golova/head
Horrorshow Good, well Russian: khorosho/good
Hound-and-Horny corny Rhyming Slang: corny
Mesto Place Russian: mesto/place
Moloko Milk Russian: moloko/milk
Mozg Brain Russian: mozg/brain
Nozh Knife Russian: nozh/knife
Oozy Chain Russian: uzh/snake (?)
Sinny Movies, film Invented slang: from cinema
Smeck Laugh (n.) Russian: smekh/a laugh
Starry Old, ancient Russian: stariyi/old
Peet To Drink Russian: pit/to drink
Platties Clothes Russian: platye/clothes
Ptitsa Girl Russian: ptitsa/bird
Skorry Quick, quickly Russian: skori/quick
Tolchock To hit Russian: tolchok/a push, shove
Veck Guy Russian: chelovyek/person, man
Vellocet A drug Invented slang: Amphetamine
Veshch Thing Russian: vesh/thing
Viddy To see Russian: vidyet/to see
Von Smell (n.) Russian: von/stench
Yarbles Balls, testicles Russian: yarblicka/apples

16
 3. THE DARK SIDE OF PROGRESS

17
8. JAMES G. BALLARD – “THE CONCENTRATION CITY” (1957)
Noon talk on Millionth Street:
"Sorry, these are the West millions. You want 9775335th East."
"Dollar five a cubic foot? Sell!"
"Take a westbound express to 495th Avenue, cross over to a Redline elevator
and go up a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal. Carry on south from there and you'll find
it between 568th Avenue and 422nd Street."
"There's a cave-in down at KEN county! Fifty blocks by twenty by thirty levels."
"Listen to this-'PYROS STAGE MASS BREAKOUT! FIRE POLICE CORDON BAY COUNTY!'"
"It's a beautiful counter. Detects up to .005 percent monoxide. Cost me three
hundred dollars."
"Have you seen those new intercity sleepers? Takes only ten minutes to go up
three thousand levels!"
"Ninety cents a foot? Buy!"
"You say the idea came to you in a dream?" the voice jabbed out.
"You're sure no one else gave it to you?"
"No," M. said flatly. A couple of feet away from him a spot lamp threw a cone
of dirty yellow light into his face. He dropped his eyes from the glare and waited as the
sergeant paced over to his desk, tapped his fingers on the edge, and swung around on
him again.
"You talked it over with your friends?"
"Only the first theory," M. explained quietly. "About the possibility of flight."
"But you told me the other theory was more important. Why keep it quiet from
them?"
M. hesitated. Outside somewhere a trolley shunted and clanged along the
elevated. "I was afraid they wouldn't understand what I meant."
The sergeant laughed sourly. "You mean they would have thought you really
were crazy?"
M. shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Its seat was only six inches off the floor
and his thighs and lumbar muscles felt like slabs of inflamed rubber. After three hours
of cross-questioning, logic had faded and he groped helplessly. "The concept was a little
abstract. There weren't any words for it."
The sergeant snorted. "I'm glad to hear you say it." He sat down on the desk,
watched M. for a moment and then went over to him.
"Now look," he said confidentially. "It's getting late. Do you still think both
theories are reasonable?"
M. looked up. "Aren't they?"
The sergeant turned angrily to the man watching in the shadows by the
window.
"We're wasting our time," he snapped. "I'll hand him over to Psycho. You've
seen enough, haven't you, Doc?"
The surgeon stared thoughtfully at his hands. He was a tall heavy-shouldered
man, built like a wrestler, with thick coarsely lined features.
He ambled forward, knocking back one of the chairs with his knee.
"There's something I want to check," he said curtly. "Leave me alone with him
for half an hour."
18
The sergeant shrugged. "All right," he said, going over to the door. "But be
careful with him."
When the sergeant had gone the surgeon sat down behind the desk and stared
vacantly out of the window, listening to the dull hum of air through the huge ninety-foot
ventilator shaft which rose out of the street below the station. A few roof-lights were
still burning and two hundred yards away a single policeman slowly patrolled the iron
catwalk running above the street, his boots ringing across the darkness.
M. sat on the stool, elbows between his knees, trying to edge a little life back
into his legs.
Eventually the surgeon glanced down at the charge sheet.
Name: Franz M.
Age: 20.
Occupation: Student.
Address: 3599719 West 783rd Str., Level 549-7705-45 KNI (Local).
Charge: Vagrancy.
"Tell me about this dream," he said slowly, idly flexing a steel rule between his hands as
he looked across at M.
"I think you've heard everything, sir," M. said.
"In detail."
M. shifted uneasily. "There wasn't much to it, and what I do remember isn't too
clear now."
The surgeon yawned. M. waited and then started to recite what he had already
repeated twenty times.
"I was suspended in the air above a flat stretch of open ground, something like
the floor of an enormous arena. My arms were out at my sides, and I was looking down,
floating-"
"Hold on," the surgeon interrupted. "Are you sure you weren't swimming?"
"No," M. said. "I'm certain I wasn't. All around me there was free space. That
was the most important part about it. There were no walls. Nothing but emptiness.
That's all I remember."
The surgeon ran his finger along the edge of the rule.
"Go on."
"Well, the dream gave me the idea of building a flying machine. One of my
friends helped me construct it."
The surgeon nodded. Almost absently he picked up the charge sheet, crushed
it with a single motion of his hand, and flicked it into the wastebasket.
"Don't be crazy, Franz!" Gregson remonstrated. 'They took their places in the chemistry
cafeteria queue. "It's against the laws of hydrodynamics. Where would you get your
buoyancy?"
"Suppose you had a rigid fabric vane," Franz explained as they shuffled past the
hatchways. "Say ten feet across, like one of those composition wall sections, with
handgrips on the ventral surface. And then you jump down from the gallery at the
Coliseum Stadium. What would happen?"
"You'd make a hole in the floor. Why?"
"No, seriously."
 "If it was large enough and held together you'd swoop down like a paper dart."
"Glide," Franz said. "Right." Thirty levels above them one of the intercity
expresses roared over, rattling the tables and cutlery in the cafeteria. Franz waited until
they reached a table and sat forward, his food forgotten.
"And say you attached a propulsive unit, such as a battery-driven ventilator fan,
or one of those rockets they use on the Sleepers. With enough thrust to overcome your
weight. What then?"
Gregson shrugged. "If you could control the thing, you'd ... " He frowned at
Franz. "What's the word? You're always using it."
"Fly."
"Basically, Mattheson, the machine is simple," Sanger, the physics lector, commented as
they entered the Science Library. "An elementary application of the Venturi Principle.
But what's the point of it? A trapeze would serve its purpose equally well, and be far less
dangerous. In the first place consider the enormous clearances it would require. I hardly
think the traffic authorities will look upon it with any favor."
"I know it wouldn't be practicable here," Franz admitted. "But in a large open
area it should be."
"Allowed. I suggest you immediately negotiate with the Arena Garden on Level
347-25," the lector said whimsically. "I'm sure they'll be glad to hear about your
scheme."
Franz smiled politely. "That wouldn't be large enough. I was really thinking of
an area of totally free space. In three dimensions, as it were."
Sanger looked at Franz curiously. "Free space? Isn't that a contradiction in
terms? Space is a dollar a cubic foot." He scratched his nose. "Have you begun to
construct this machine yet?"
"No," Franz said.
"In that event I should try to forget all about it. Remember, Mattheson, the task
of science is to consolidate existing knowledge, to systematize and reinterpret the
discoveries of the past, not to chase wild dreams into the future."
He nodded and disappeared among the dusty shelves.
Gregson was waiting on the steps.
"Well?" he asked.
"Let's try it out this afternoon," Franz said. "We'll cut Text Five Pharmacology. I
know those Fleming readings backward. I'll ask Dr. McGhee for a couple of passes."
They left the library and walked down the narrow, dimly lit alley which ran
behind the huge new Civil Engineering laboratories. Over 75 percent of the student
enrollment was in the architectural and engineering faculties, a meager 2 percent in
pure sciences. Consequently the physics and chemistry libraries were housed in the
oldest quarter of the University, in two virtually condemned galvanized hutments which
once contained the now closed Philosophy School.
At the end of the alley they entered the university plaza and started to climb
the iron stairway leading to the next level a hundred feet above. Halfway up a white-
helmeted FP checked them cursorily with his detector and waved them past.
"What did Sanger think?" Gregson asked as they stepped up into 637th Street
and walked across to the Suburban Elevator station.
"He's no use at all," Franz said. "He didn't even begin to understand what I was
talking about."
19
Gregson laughed ruefully. "I don't know whether I do."
Franz took a ticket from the automat and mounted the Down platform. An
elevator dropped slowly toward him, its bell jangling.
"Wait until this afternoon," he called back. "You're really going to see
something."
The floor manager at the Coliseum initialed the two passes.
"Students, eh? All right." He jerked a thumb at the long package Franz and
Gregson were carrying. "What have you got there?"
"It's a device for measuring air velocities," Franz told him.
The manager grunted and released the stile.
Out in the center of the empty arena Franz undid the package and they
assembled the model. It had a broad fanlike wing of wire and paper, a narrow strutted
fusilage and a high curving tail.
Franz picked it up and launched it into the air. The model glided for twenty feet
and then slithered to a stop across the sawdust.
"Seems to be stable," Franz said. "We'll tow it first."
He pulled a reel of twine from his pocket and tied one end to the nose.
As they ran forward the model lifted gracefully into the air and followed them
around the stadium, ten feet off the floor.
"Let's try the rockets now," Franz said.
He adjusted the wing and tail settings and fitted three firework display rockets
into a wire bracket mounted above the wing.
The stadium was four hundred feet in diameter and had a roof two hundred
and fifty high. They carried the model over to one side and Franz lit the tapers.
There was a burst of flame and the model accelerated off across the floor, two
feet in the air, a bright trail of colored smoke spitting out behind it. Its wings rocked
gently from side to side. Suddenly the tail burst into flames. The model lifted steeply and
looped up toward the roof, stalled just before it hit one of the pilot lights, and dived
down into the sawdust.
They ran across to it and stamped out the glowing cinders.
"Franz!" Gregson shouted. "It's incredible! It actually works."
Franz kicked the shattered fuselage.
"Of course it works," he said impatiently, walking away. "But as Sanger said,
what's the point of it?"
"The point? It flies! Isn't that enough?"
"No. I want one big enough to hold me."
"Franz, slow down. Be reasonable. Where could you fly it?"
"I don't know," Franz said fiercely. "But there must be somewhere.
Somewhere!"
The floor manager and two assistants, carrying fire extinguishers, ran across the
stadium to them.
"Did you hide that match?" Franz asked quickly. "They'll lynch us if they think
we're pyros."
Three afternoons later Franz took the elevator up 150 levels to 677- 98, where the
Precinct Estate Office had its bureau.
 "There's a big development between 493 and 554 in the next sector," one of
the clerks told him. "I don't know whether that's any good to you. Sixty blocks by twenty
by fifteen levels."
"Nothing bigger?" Franz queried.
The clerk looked up. "Bigger? No. What are you looking for? A slight case of
agoraphobia?"
Franz straightened the maps spread across the counter.
"I wanted to find an area of more or less continuous development. Two or three hundred
blocks long."
The clerk shook his head and went back to his ledger. "Didn't you go to
Engineering School?" he asked scornfully. "The City won't take it. One hundred blocks is
the maximum."
Franz thanked him and left.
A southbound express took him to the development in two hours. He left the
car at the detour point and walked the three hundred yards to the end of the level.
The street, a seedy but busy thoroughfare of garment shops and small business
premises running through the huge ten-mile-thick BIR Industrial Cube, ended abruptly
in a tangle of ripped girders and concrete. A steel rail had been erected along the edge
and Franz looked down over it into the cavity, three miles long, a mile wide, and twelve
hundred feet deep, which thousands of engineers and demolition workers were tearing
out of the matrix of the City.
Eight hundred feet below him unending lines of trucks and rail cars carried away
the rubble and debris, and clouds of dust swirled up into the arc lights blazing down from
the roof.
As he watched a chain of explosions ripped along the wall on his left and the
whole face suddenly slipped and fell slowly toward the floor, revealing a perfect cross-
section through fifteen levels of the City.
Franz had seen big developments before, and his own parents had died in the
historic QUA County cave-in ten years earlier, when three master pillars had sheared
and two hundred levels of the City had abruptly sunk ten thousand feet, squashing half
a million people like flies in a concertina, but the enormous gulf of emptiness still made
his imagination gape.
All around him, standing and sitting on the jutting terraces of girders, a silent
throng stared down.
"They say they're going to build gardens and parks for us," an elderly man at
Franz's elbow remarked in a slow patient voice. "I even heard they might be able to get
a tree. It'll be the only tree in the whole county."
A man in a frayed sweat shirt spat over the rail. "That's what they always say.
At a dollar a foot promises are all they can waste space on."
Below them a woman who had been looking out into the air started to simper
nervously. Two bystanders took her by the arms and tried to lead her away. The woman
began to thresh about and an FP came over and dragged her away roughly.
"Poor fool," the man in the sweat shirt commented. "She probably lived out
there somewhere. They gave her ninety cents a foot when they took it away from her.
She doesn't know yet she'll have to pay a dollar ten to get it back. Now they're going to
start charging five cents an hour just to sit up here and watch."
20
Franz looked out over the railing for a couple of hours and then bought a postcard from
one of the vendors and walked back thoughtfully to the elevator.
He called in to see Gregson before returning to the student dormitory.
The Gregsons lived up in the West millions on 985th Avenue, in a top three-
room flat right under the roof. Franz had known them since his parents' death, but
Gregson's mother still regarded him with a mixture of sympathy and suspicion, and as
she let him in with her customary smile of welcome he noticed her glancing quickly at
the detector mounted in the hall.
Gregson was in his room, happily cutting out frames of paper and pasting them
onto a great rickety construction that vaguely resembled Franz's model.
"Hullo, Franz. What was it like?"
Franz shrugged. "Just a development. Worth seeing."
Gregson pointed to his construction. "Do you think we can try it out there?"
"We could do." Franz sat down on the bed, picked up a paper dart lying beside
him, and tossed it out of the window. It swam out into the street, lazed down in a wide
spiral and vanished into the open mouth of a ventilator shaft.
"When are you going to build another model?" Gregson asked.
"I'm not."
Gregson swung round. "Why? You've proved your theory."
"That's not what I'm after."
"I don't get you, Franz. What are you after?"
"Free space."
"Free?" Gregson repeated.
Franz nodded. "In both senses."
Gregson shook his head sadly and snipped out another paper panel. "Franz,
you're crazy."
Franz stood up. "Take this room," he said. "It's twenty feet by fifteen by ten.
Extend its dimensions infinitely. What do you find?"
"A development."
"Infinitely! "
"Nonfunctional space."
"Well?" Franz asked patiently.
"The concept's absurd."
"Why?"
"Because it couldn't exist."
Franz pounded his forehead in despair. "Why couldn't it?"
Gregson gestured with the scissors. "It's self-contradictory. Like the statement
'I am lying.' Just a verbal freak. Interesting theoretically, but it's pointless to pr ess it for
meaning." He tossed the scissors onto the table. "And anyway, do you know how much
free space would cost?"
Franz went over to the bookshelf and pulled out one of the volumes. "Let's have
a look at your street atlas."
He turned to the index. "This gives a thousand levels. KNI County, one hundred
thousand cubic miles, population thirty million."
Gregson nodded.
Franz closed the atlas. "Two hundred fifty counties, including KNI, together
form the 493rd Sector, and an association of fifteen hundred adjacent sectors comprise
the 298th Local Union."
 He broke off and looked at Gregson. "As a matter of interest, ever heard of it?"
Gregson shook his head. "No. How did-“
Franz slapped the atlas onto the table. "Roughly 4 x 1015 cubic Great-Miles."
He leaned on the window ledge. "Now tell me: what lies beyond the 298th Local Union?"
"Other Unions, I suppose," Gregson said. "I don't see your difficulty."
"And beyond those?"
"Further ones. Why not?"
"Forever?" Franz pressed.
"Well, as far as forever is."
"The great street directory in the old Treasury Library on 247 th Street is the
largest in the County," Franz said. "1 went down there this morning. It occupies three
complete levels. Millions of volumes. But it doesn't extend beyond the 598th Local
Union. No one there had any idea what lay further out. Why not?"
"Why should they?" Gregson asked. "Franz, what are you driving at?"
Franz walked across to the door. "Come down to the Bio-History Museum. I'll
show you."
The birds perched on humps of rock or waddled about the sandy paths between the
water pools.
"ARCHAEOPTERYX," Franz read off one of the cage indicators. The bird, lean
and mildewed, uttered a painful croak when he fed a handful of beans to it.
"Some of these birds have the remnants of a pectoral girdle," Franz said.
"Minute fragments of bone embedded in the tissues around their rib cages."
"Wings?"
"Dr. McGhee thinks so."
They walked out between the lines of cages.
"When does he think they were flying?"
"Before the Foundation," Franz said. ''Three hundred billion years ago."
When they got outside the Museum they started down 859th Avenue. Halfway
down the street a dense crowd had gathered and people were packed into the windows
and balconies above the Elevated, watching a squad of Fire Police break their way into
a house.
The bulkheads at either end of the block had been closed and heavy steel traps
sealed off the stairways from the levels above and below. The ventilator and exhaust
shafts were silent and already the air was stale and soupy.
"Pyros," Gregson murmured. "We should have brought our masks."
"It's only a scare," Franz said. He pointed to the monoxide detectors which were
out everywhere, their long snouts sucking at the air. The dial needles stood safely at
zero.
"Let's wait in the restaurant opposite."
They edged their way over to the restaurant, sat down in the window, and
ordered coffee. This, like everything else on the menu, was cold. All cooking appliances
were thermostated to a maximum 95°F., and only in the more expensive restaurants
and hotels was it possible to obtain food that was at most tepid.
Below them in the street a lot of shouting went up. The FP's seemed unable to
penetrate beyond the ground floor of the house and had started to baton back the
crowd. An electric winch was wheeled up and bolted to the girders running below the
21
curb, and half a dozen heavy steel grabs were carried into the house and hooked around
the walls.
Gregson laughed. "The owners are going to be surprised when they get home."
Franz was watching the house. It was a narrow shabby dwelling sandwiched
between a large wholesale furniture store and a new supermarket. An old sign running
across the front had been painted over and evidently the ownership had recently
changed. The present tenants had made a halfhearted attempt to convert the ground
floor room into a cheap stand-up diner.
The FP's appeared to be doing their best to wreck everything and pies and
smashed crockery were strewn all over the pavement.
"Crowd's pretty ugly," Franz said. "Do you want to move?"
"Hold on."
The noise died away and everyone waited as the winch began to revolve. Slowly
the hawsers wound in and tautened, and the front wall of the house bulged and
staggered outward in rigid jerky movements.
Suddenly there was a yell from the crowd.
Franz raised his arm.
"Up there! Look!"
On the fourth floor a man and woman had come to the window and were
looking down frantically. The man helped the woman out onto the ledge and she
crawled out and clung to one of the waste pipes.
The crowd roared, "Pyros! You bloody pyros!"
Bottles were lobbed up at them and bounced down among the police. A wide
crack split the house from top to bottom and the floor on which the man was standing
dropped and catapulted him backward out of sight.
Then one of the lintels in the first floor snapped and the entire house tipped
over and collapsed.
Franz and Gregson stood up involuntarily, almost knocking over the table.
The crowd surged forward through the cordon. When the dust had settled
there was nothing left but a heap of masonry and twisted beams. Embedded in this was
the battered figure of the man. Almost smothered by the dust he moved slowly, painfully
trying to free himself with one. hand, and the crowd started roaring again as one of the
grabs wound in and dragged him down under the rubble.
The manager of the restaurant pushed past Franz and leaned out of the window, his
eyes fixed on the dial of a portable detector.
Its needle, like all the others, pointed to zero.
A dozen hoses were playing on the remains of the house and after a couple of
minutes the crowd shifted and began to thin out.
The manager switched off the detector and left the window, nodding to Franz.
"Damn pyros. You can relax now, boys."
Franz pointed at the detector.
"Your dial was dead. There wasn't a trace of monoxide anywhere here. How do
you know they were pyros?"
"Don't worry, we knew." He smiled obliquely. "We don't want that sort of
element in this neighborhood."
Franz shrugged and sat down. "I suppose that's one way of getting rid of them."
 The manager eyed Franz unpleasantly. "That's right, boy. This is a good five-
dollar neighborhood." He smirked to himself. "Maybe a six-dollar now everybody knows
about our safety record."
"Careful, Franz," Gregson warned him when the manager had gone. "He may
be right. Pyros do take over small cafes and food bars."
Franz stirred his coffee. "Dr. McGhee estimates that at least fifteen percent of
the City's population are submerged pyros. He's convinced the number's growing and
that eventually the whole City will flame out."
He pushed away his coffee. "How much money have you got?"
"On me?"
"Altogether. "
"About thirty dollars."
"I've saved up fifteen," Franz said thoughtfully. "Forty-five dollars; that should
be enough for three or four weeks."
"Where?" Gregson asked.
"On a Supersleeper."
"Super-!" Gregson broke off, alarmed. "Three or four weeks! What do you
mean?"
'There's only one way to find out," Franz explained calmly. "I can't just sit here
thinking. Somewhere there's free space and I'll ride the Sleeper until I find it. Will you
lend me your thirty dollars?"
"But Franz-"
"If I don't find anything within a couple of weeks I'll change tracks and come
back."
"But the ticket will cost ... " Gregson searched "... billions.
Forty-five dollars won't even get you out of the Sector."
"That's just for coffee and sandwiches," Franz said. "The ticket will be free ."
He looked up from the table. "You know ... "
Gregson shook his head doubtfully. "Can you try that on the Supersleepers?"
"Why not? If they query it I'll say I'm going back the long way around. Greg, will
you?"
"I don't know if I should." Gregson played helplessly with his coffee. "Franz, how
can there be free space? How?"
"That's what I'm going to find out," Franz said. "Think of it as my first physics
practical."
Passenger distances on the transport system were measured point to point by the
application of a = Vb2 + c2 + d2. The actual itinerary taken was the passenger's
responsibility, and as long as he remained within the system he could choose any route
he liked.
Tickets were checked only at the station exits, where necessary surcharges
were collected by an inspector. If the passenger was unable to pay the surcharge-ten
cents a mile-he was sent back to his original destination.
Franz and Gregson entered the station on 984th Street and went over to the
large console where tickets were automatically dispensed.
Franz put in a penny and pressed the destination button marked 984. The
machine rumbled, coughed out a ticket, and the change slot gave him back his coin.
22
"Well, Greg, good-bye," Franz said as they moved toward the barrier. "I'll see
you in about two weeks. They're covering me down at the dormitory. Tell Sanger I'm on
Fire Duty."
"What if you don't get back, Franz?" Gregson asked. "Suppose they take you off
the Sleeper?"
"How can they? I've got my ticket."
"And if you do find free space? Will you corne back then?"
"If I can."
Franz patted Gregson on the shoulder reassuringly, waved and disappeared
among the commuters.
He took the local Suburban Green to the district junction in the next county.
The Greenline train traveled at an interrupted 70 mph and the ride took two and a half
hours.
At the Junction he changed to an express elevator which got him up out of the
Sector in ninety minutes, at 400 mph.
Another fifty minutes in a Through-sector Special brought him to the Mainline
Terminus which served the Union.
There he bought a coffee and gathered his determination together.
Supersleepers ran east and west, halting at this and every tenth station. The next arrived
in seventy-two hours' time, westbound.
The Mainline Terminus was the largest station Franz had seen, a vast mile-long
cavern tiered up through thirty levels. Hundreds of elevator shafts sank into the station
and the maze of platforms, escalators, restaurants, hotels, and theaters seemed like an
exaggerated replica of the City itself.
Getting his bearings from one of the information booths Franz made his way up
an escalator to Tier 15, where the Supersleepers berthed. Running the length of the
station were two gigantic steel vacuum tunnels, each two hundred feet in diameter,
supported at thirty-foot intervals by massive concrete buttresses.
Franz walked slowly along the platform and stopped by the telescopic gangway
that plunged into one of the airlocks.
Two hundred and seventy degrees true, he thought, all the way, gazing up at
the curving underbelly of the tunnel. It must come out somewhere. He had forty-five
dollars in his pocket, sufficient coffee and sandwich money to last him three weeks, six
if he needed it, time anyway to find the City's end.
He passed the next three days nursing coffees in any of the thirty cafeterias in
the station, reading discarded newspapers and sleeping in the local Red trains, which
ran four-hour journeys around the nearest sector. •
When at last the Supersleeper came in he joined the small group of Fire Police
and municipal officials waiting by the gangway, and followed them into the train. There
were two cars: a sleeper which no one used, and a day coach.
Franz took an inconspicuous corner seat near one of the indicator panels in the
day coach, pulled out his notebook and got ready to make his first entry.
1st Day: West 270°. Union 4,350.
"Coming out for a drink?" a Fire Captain across the aisle asked. "We have a ten-
minute break here."
"No thanks," Franz said. "I'll hold your seat for you."
 Dollar five a cubic foot. Free space, he knew, would bring the price down. There
was no need to leave the train or make too many inquiries. All he had to do was borrow
a paper and watch the market averages.
2nd Day: West 270°. Union 7,550.
"They're slowly cutting down on these Sleepers," someone told him. "Everyone
sits in the day coach. Look at this one. Seats sixty, and only four people in it. There's no
need to move around. People are staying where they are. In a few years there'll be
nothing left but the suburban services."
Ninety-seven cents.
At an average of a dollar a cubic foot, Franz calculated idly, it's so far worth
about $4 X 1027
"Going on to the next stop, are you? Well, good-bye, young fellow."
Few of the passengers stayed on the Sleeper for more than three or four hours.
By the end of the second day Franz's back and neck ached from the constant
acceleration. He got a little exercise walking up and down the narrow corridor in the
deserted sleeping coach, but had to spend most of his time strapped to his seat as the
train began its long braking runs into the next station.
3rd Day: West 270°. Federation 657.
"Interesting, but how could you demonstrate it?"
"It's just an odd idea of mine," Franz said, screwing up the sketch and dropping
it in the disposal chute. "Hasn't any real application."
"Curious, but it rings a bell somewhere."
Franz sat up. "Do you mean you've seen machines like this? In a newspaper or
a book?"
"No, no. In a dream."
Every half-day's run the pilot signed the log, the crew handed it over to their
opposites on an eastbound sleeper, crossed the platform, and started back for home.
One hundred twenty-five cents.
$8 X 1033
4th Day: West 270°. Federation 1,255.
"Dollar a cubic foot. You in the estate business?"
"Starting up," Franz said easily. "I'm hoping to open a new office of my own."
He played cards, bought coffee and rolls from the dispenser in the washroom,
watched the indicator panel and listened to the talk
around him.
"Believe me, a time will come when each union, each sector, almost I might say,
each street and avenue will have achieved complete local independence. Equipped with
its own power services, aerators, reservoirs, farm laboratories ... "
The car bore.
$6 X 1075
5th Day: West 270°. 17th Greater Federation.
23
At a kiosk on the station Franz bought a dip of razor blades and glanced at the
brochure put out by the local chamber of commerce.
"Twelve thousand levels, ninety-eight cents a foot, unique Elm Drive, fire safety
records unequaled . . . "
He went back to the train, shaved and counted the thirty dollars left. He was
now ninety-five million Great-Miles from the suburban station on 984th Street and he
knew he couldn't delay his return much longer. Next time he'd save up a couple of
thousand.
$7 x 10127
7th Day: West 270°. 212th Metropolitan Empire.
Franz peered at the indicator.
"Aren't we stopping here?" he asked a man three seats away. "I wanted to find
out the market average."
"Varies. Anything from fifty cents a-"
"Fifty!" Franz shot back, jumping up. "When's the next stop? I've got to get off!"
"Not here, son." He put out a restraining hand. "This is Night Town. You in real
estate?"
Franz nodded, holding himself back. "I thought ... "
"Relax." He came and sat opposite Franz. "It's just one big slum. Dead areas. In
places it goes as low as five cents. There are no services, no power."
It took them two days to pass through.
"City Authority are starting to seal it off," the man told him.
"Huge blocks. It's the only thing they can do. What happens to the people inside
I hate to think."
He chewed on a sandwich. "Strange, but there are a lot of these black areas.
You don't hear about them, but they're growing. Starts in a back street in some ordinary
dollar neighborhood; a bottleneck in the sewage disposal system, not enough ash cans,
and before you know it-a million cubic miles have gone back to jungle. They try a relief
scheme, pump in a little cyanide, and then-brick it up. Once they do that they're closed
for good."
Franz nodded, listening to the dull humming air.
"Eventually there'll be nothing left but these black areas. The City will be one
huge cemetery. What a thought!"
10th Day: East 90°. 755th Greater Metropolitan-
"Wait!" Franz leaped out of his seat and stared at the indicator panel.
"What's the matter?" someone opposite asked.
"East!" Franz shouted. He banged the panel sharply with his hand but the lights
held. "Has the train changed direction?"
"No, it's eastbound," another of the passengers told him. "Are you on the wrong
train?"
"It should be heading west," Franz insisted. "It has been for the last ten days."
"Ten days!" the man exclaimed. "Have you been on this Sleeper for ten days?
Where the hell are you going?"
Franz went forward and grabbed the car attendant.
 "Which way is this train going? West?"
The attendant shook his head. "East, sir. It's always been going east."
"You're crazy," Franz snapped. "I want to see the pilot's log."
"I'm afraid that isn't possible. May I see your ticket, sir?"
"Listen," Franz said weakly, all the accumulated frustration of the last twenty
years mounting inside him. "I've been on this ... "
He stopped and went back to his seat.
The five other passengers watched him carefully.
"Ten days," one of them was still repeating in an awed voice.
Two minutes later someone came and asked Franz for his ticket.

"And of course it was completely in order," the police surgeon commented.

He walked over to M. and swung the spot out of his eyes. "Strangely enough
there's no regulation to prevent anyone else doing the same thing. I used to go for free
rides myself when I was younger, though I never tried anything like your journey."
He went back to the desk.
"We'll drop the charge," he said. "You're not a vagrant in any indictable sense,
and the Transport authorities can do nothing against you. How this curvature was built
into the system they can't explain. Now about yourself. Are you going to continue this
search?"
"I want to build a flying machine," M. said carefully. "There must be free space
somewhere. I don't know ... perhaps on the lower levels."
The surgeon stood up. "I'll see the sergeant and get him to hand you over to
one of our psychiatrists. He'll be able to help you with that dream."
The surgeon hesitated before opening the door. "Look," he began to explain
sympathetically, "you can't get out of time, can you? Subjectively it's a plastic dimension,
but whatever you do to your- you a probationary release. Don't worry, the psychiatrists
will straighten everything out for you."
When the surgeon had left, M. stared emptily at the floor, too exhausted to feel
relieved. He stood up and stretched himself, walking unsteadily around the room.
Outside the last pilot lights were going out and the patrolman on the catwalk
under the roof was using his torch. A police car roared down one of the avenues crossing
the street, its rails screaming. Three lights snapped on along the street and then one by
one went off again.
M. wondered why Gregson hadn't come down to the station. Then the calendar
on the desk riveted his attention. The date exposed on the flyleaf was the twelfth of
August. That was the day he had started off on his journey.
Exactly three weeks ago.
Today!

Take a westbound Green to 298th Street, cross over at the intersection and get a Red
elevator up to Level 237. Walk down to the station on Route 175, change to a 438
suburban and go down to 795th Street. Take a Blueline to the Plaza, get off at 4th and
275th, turn left at the roundabout and ...
You're back where you started from. $HELL X 10n.

24
9. CHUCK PALAHNIUK – FIGHT CLUB (1996) (excerpts)
Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying,
the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were
best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.
The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says "We really
won't die."
With my tongue I can feel the silencer holes we drilled into the barrel of the gun.
Most of the noise a gunshot makes is expanding gases, and there's the tiny sonic boom
a bullet makes because it travels so fast. To make a silencer, you just drill holes in the
barrel of the gun, a lot of holes. This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below
the speed of sound.
You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow off your hand.
"This isn't really death," Tyler says. "We'll be legend. We won't grow old."
I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires.
The building we're standing on won't be here in ten minutes. You take a 98percent
concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of
sulfuric acid. Do this in an ice bath. Then add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper.
You have nitroglycerin.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive. A lot of folks mix
their nitro with cotton and add Epsom salts as a sulfate. This works too. Some folks, they
use paraffin mixed with nitro. Paraffin has never, ever worked for me.
So Tyler and I are on top of the Parker-Morris Building with the gun stuck in my
mouth, and we hear glass breaking. Look over the edge. It's a cloudy day, even this high
up. This is the world's tallest building, and this high up the wind is always cold. It's so
quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do
the little job you're trained to do.
Pull a lever.
Push a button.
You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.
One hundred and ninety-one floors up, you look over the edge of the roof and the
street below is mottled with a shag carpet of people, standing, looking up. The breaking
glass is a window right below us. A window blows out the side of the building, and then
comes a file cabinet big as a black refrigerator, right below us a six-drawer filing cabinet
drops right out of the cliff face of the building, and drops turning slowly, and drops
getting smaller, and drops disappearing into the packed crowd.
Somewhere in the one hundred and ninety-one floors under us, the space monkeys
in the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are running wild, destroying every scrap
of history.
That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways.
With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you
can only talk in vowels.
We're down to our last ten minutes.
25
Another window blows out of the building, and glass sprays out, sparkling flock-of-
pigeons style, and then a dark wooden desk pushed by the Mischief Committee emerges
inch by inch from the side of the building until the desk tilts and slides and turns end-
over-end into a magic flying thing lost in the crowd.
The Parker-Morris Building won't be here in nine minutes. You take enough blasting
gelatin and wrap the foundation columns of anything, you can topple any building in the
world. You have to tamp it good and tight with sandbags so the blast goes against the
column and not out into the parking garage around the column.
This how-to stuff isn't in any history book.
The three ways to make napalm: One, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen
orange juice concentrate. Two, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and diet cola. Three,
you can dissolve crumbled cat litter in gasoline until the mixture is thick.
Ask me how to make nerve gas. Oh, all those crazy car bombs.
Nine minutes.
The Parker-Morris Building will go over, all one hundred and ninety-one floors, slow
as a tree falling in the forest. Timber. You can topple anything. It's weird to think the
place where we're standing will only be a point in the sky.
Tyler and me at the edge of the roof, the gun in my mouth, I'm wondering how clean
this gun is.
We just totally forget about Tyler's whole murder-suicide thing while we watch
another file cabinet slip out the side of the building and the drawers roll open midair,
reams of white paper caught in the updraft and carried off on the wind.
Eight minutes.
Then the smoke, smoke starts out of the broken windows. The demolition team will
hit the primary charge in maybe eight minutes. The primary charge will blow the base
charge, the foundation columns will crumble, and the photo series of the Parker-Morris
Building will go into all the history books.
The five-picture time-lapse series. Here, the building's standing. Second picture, the
building will be at an eighty-degree angle. Then a seventy-degree angle. The building's
at a forty-five-degree angle in the fourth picture when the skeleton starts to give and
the tower gets a slight arch to it. The last shot, the tower, all one hundred and ninety-
one floors, will slam down on the national museum which is Tyler's real target.
"This is our world, now, our world," Tyler says, "and those ancient people are dead."
If I knew how this would all turn out, I'd be more than happy to be dead and in
Heaven right now.
Seven minutes. […]
You wake up at Air Harbor International.
Every takeoff and landing, when the plane banked too much to one side, I prayed for
a crash. That moment cures my insomnia with narcolepsy when we might die helpless
and packed human tobacco in the fuselage.
This is how I met Tyler Durden.
You wake up at O'Hare.
You wake up at LaGuardia.
 You wake up at Logan.
Tyler worked part-time as a movie projectionist. Because of his nature, Tyler could
only work night jobs. If a projectionist called in sick, the union called Tyler.
Some people are night people. Some people are day people. I could only work a day
job.
You wake up at Dulles.
Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a business trip. I prayed for wind shear
effect. I prayed for pelicans sucked into the turbines and loose bolts and ice on the
wings. On takeoff, as the plane pushed down the runway and the flaps tilted up, with
our seats in their full upright position and our tray tables stowed and all personal carry-
on baggage in the overhead compartment, as the end of the runway ran up to meet us
with our smoking materials extinguished, I prayed for a crash.
You wake up at Love Field.
In a projection booth, Tyler did changeovers if the theater was old enough. With
changeovers, you have two projectors in the booth, and one projector is running.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
The second projector is set up with the next reel of film. Most movies are six or seven
small reels of film played in a certain order. Newer theaters, they splice all the reels
together into one five-foot reel. This way, you don't have to run two projectors and do
changeovers, switch back and forth, reel one, switch, reel two on the other projector,
switch, reel three on the first projector.
Switch.
You wake up at SeaTac.
I study the people on the laminated airline seat card. A woman floats in the ocean,
her brown hair spread out behind her, her seat cushion clutched to her chest. The eyes
are wide open, but the woman doesn't smile or frown. In another picture, people calm
as Hindu cows reach up from their seats toward oxygen masks sprung out of the ceiling.
This must be an emergency.
Oh.
We've lost cabin pressure.
You wake up, and you're at Willow Run.
Old theater, new theater, to ship a movie to the next theater, Tyler has to break the
movie back down to the original six or seven reels. The small reels pack into a pair of
hexagonal steel suitcases. Each suitcase has a handle on top. Pick one up, and you'll
dislocate a shoulder.
They weigh that much.
Tyler's a banquet waiter, waiting tables at a hotel, downtown, and Tyler's a
projectionist with the projector operator's union. I don't know how long Tyler had been
working on all those nights I couldn't sleep.
The old theaters that run a movie with two projectors, a projectionist has to stand
right there to change projectors at the exact second so the audience never sees the
break when one reel starts and one reel ran out. You have to look for the white dots in
the top, right-hand corner of the screen. This is the warning. Watch the movie, and you'll
see two dots at the end of a reel.
26
"Cigarette burns," they're called in the business.
The first white dot, this is the two-minute warning. You get the second projector
started so it will be running up to speed.
The second white dot is the five-second warning. Excitement. You're standing
between the two projectors and the booth is sweating hot from the xenon bulbs that if
you looked right at them you're blind. The first dot flashes on the screen. The sound in
a movie comes from a big speaker behind the screen. The projectionist booth is
soundproof because inside the booth is the racket of sprockets snapping film past the
lens at six feet a second, ten frames a foot, sixty frames a second snapping through,
clattering Gatling-gun fire. The two projectors running, you stand between and hold the
shutter lever on each. On really old projectors, you have an alarm on the hub of the feed
reel.
Even after the movie's on television, the warning dots will still be there. Even on
airplane movies.
As most of the movie rolls onto the take-up reel, the take-up reel turns slower and
the feed reel has to turn faster. At the end of a reel, the feed reel turns so fast the alarm
will start ringing to warn you that a changeover is coming up.
The dark is hot from the bulbs inside the projectors, and the alarm is ringing. Stand
there between the two projectors with a lever in each hand, and watch the corner of
the screen. The second dot flashes. Count to five. Switch one shutter closed. At the same
time, open the other shutter.
Changeover.
The movie goes on.
Nobody in the audience has any idea.
The alarm is on the feed reel so the movie projectionist can nap. A movie
projectionist does a lot he's not supposed to. Not every projector has the alarm. At
home, you'll sometimes wake up in your dark bed with the terror you've fallen asleep in
the booth and missed a changeover. The audience will be cursing you. The audience,
their movie dream is ruined, and the manager will be calling the union.
You wake up at Krissy Field.
The charm of traveling is everywhere I go, tiny life. I go to the hotel, tiny soap, tiny
shampoos, single-serving butter, tiny mouthwash and a single-use toothbrush. Fold into
the standard airplane seat. You're a giant. The problem is your shoulders are too big.
Your Alice in Wonderland legs are all of a sudden miles so long they touch the feet of
the person in front. Dinner arrives, a miniature do-it-yourself Chicken Cordon Bleu
hobby kit, sort of a put-it together project to keep you busy.
The pilot has turned on the seat-belt sign, and we would ask you to refrain from
moving about the cabin.
You wake up at Meigs Field.
Sometimes, Tyler wakes up in the dark, buzzing with the terror that he's missed a
reel change or the movie has broken or the movie has slipped just enough in the
projector that the sprockets are punching a line of holes through the sound track.
 After a movie has been sprocket run, the light of the bulb shines through the sound
track and instead of talk, you're blasted with the helicopter blade sound of whop whop
whop as each burst of light comes through a sprocket hole.
What else a projectionist shouldn't do: Tyler makes slides out of the best single
frames from a movie. The first full frontal movie anyone can remember had the naked
actress Angie Dickinson.
By the time a print of this movie had shipped from the West Coast theaters to the
East Coast theaters, the nude scene was gone. One projectionist took a frame. Another
projectionist took a frame. Everybody wanted to make a naked slide of Angle Dickinson.
Porno got into theaters and these projectionists, some guys they built collections that
got epic.
You wake up at Boeing Field.
You wake up at LAX.
We have an almost empty flight, tonight, so feel free to fold the armrests up into the
seatbacks and stretch out. You stretch out, zigzag, knees bent, waist bent, elbows bent
across three or four seats. I set my watch two hours earlier or three hours later, Pacific,
Mountain, Central, or Eastern time; lose an hour, gain an hour.
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. […]
The security taskforce guy explained everything to me.
Baggage handlers can ignore a ticking suitcase. The security task force guy, he called
baggage handlers Throwers. Modern bombs don't tick. But a suitcase that vibrates, the
baggage handlers, the Throwers, have to call the police.
How I came to live with Tyler is because most airlines have this policy about vibrating
baggage.
My flight back from Dulles, I had everything in that one bag. When you travel a lot,
you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts. Two black trousers. The bare
minimum you need to survive.
Traveling alarm clock.
Cordless electric razor.
Toothbrush.
Six pair underwear.
Six pair black socks.
It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the
security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight. Everything was in that bag. My
contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue stripes. One blue tie with red stripes. These are
regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie.
A list of all these things used to hang on the inside of my bedroom door at home.
Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet
for widows and young professionals. The marketing brochure promised a foot of
concrete floor, ceiling, and wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned-up
television. A foot of concrete and air conditioning, you couldn't open the windows so
even with maple flooring and dimmer switches, all seventeen hundred airtight feet
would smell like the last meal you cooked or your last trip to the bathroom.
27
Yeah, and there were butcher block countertops and low-voltage track lighting.
Still, a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets the battery
on her hearing aid go and has to watch her game shows at full blast. Or when a volcanic
blast of burning gas and debris that used to be your living-room set and personal effects
blows out your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your condo,
only yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the cliffside of the building.
These things happen.
Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles
and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple,
hard-working indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever, well, these dishes all get
blown out by the blast. Picture the floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to
shreds in the hot wind.
Fifteen floors over the city, this stuff comes flaming and bashing and shattering down
on everyone's car. […]
Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda coffee
tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a
circle. Well they were splinters, now.
My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was
trash, now.
And I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit
in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA
furniture catalogue.
We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern.
Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain.
We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and
environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti.
All that sitting in the bathroom.
The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe.
The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that.
The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.
Hemlig hat boxes. Yes.
The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this.
The Mommala quilt-cover set. Design by Tomas Harila and available in the following:
Orchid.
Fuschia.
Cobalt.
Ebony.
Jet.
Eggshell or heather.
It took my whole life to buy this stuff.
The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables.
My Steg nesting tables.
 You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy
the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at
least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect
bed. The drapes. The rug.
Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they
own you. […]
Tyler and I agreed to meet at a bar.
The doorman asked for a number where the police could reach me. It was still
raining. My Audi was still parked in the lot, but a Dakapo halogen torchiere was speared
through the windshield.
Tyler and I, we met and drank a lot of beer, and Tyler said, yes, I could move in with
him, but I would have to do him a favor.
The next day, my suitcase would arrive with the bare minimum, six shirts, six pair of
underwear.
There, drunk in a bar where no one was watching and no one would care, I asked
Tyler what he wanted me to do.
Tyler said, "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." […]
Two screens into my demo to Microsoft, I taste blood and have to start swallowing.
My boss doesn't know the material, but he won't let me run the demo with a black eye
and half my face swollen from the stitches inside my cheek. The stitches have come
loose, and I can feel them with my tongue against the inside of my cheek. Picture snarled
fishing line on the beach. I can picture them as the black stitches on a dog after it's been
fixed, and I keep swallowing blood. My boss is making the presentation from my script,
and I'm running the laptop projector so I'm off to one side of the room, in the dark.
More of my lips are sticky with blood as I try to lick the blood off, and when the lights
come up, I will turn to consultants Ellen and Walter and Norbert and Linda from
Microsoft and say, thank you for coming, my mouth shining with blood and blood
climbing the cracks between my teeth.
You can swallow about a pint of blood before you're sick.
Fight club is tomorrow, and I'm not going to miss fight club.
Before the presentation, Walter from Microsoft smiles his steam shovel jaw like a
marketing tool tanned the color of a barbecued potato chip. Walter with his signet ring
shakes my hand, wrapped in his smooth soft hand and says, "I'd hate to see what
happened to the other guy."
The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.
I tell Walter I fell.
I did this to myself.
Before the presentation, when I sat across from my boss, telling him where in the
script each slide cues and when I wanted to run the video segment, my boss says, "What
do you get yourself into every weekend?"
28
I just don't want to die without a few scars, I say. It's nothing anymore to have a
beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a
dealer's showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste.
The second rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.
Maybe at lunch, the waiter comes to your table and the waiter has the two black
eyes of a giant panda from fight club last weekend when you saw him get his head
pinched between the concrete floor and the knee of a two-hundred pound stock boy
who kept slamming a fist into the bridge of the waiter's nose again and again in flat hard
packing sounds you could hear over all the yelling until the waiter caught enough breath
and sprayed blood to say, stop.
You don't say anything because fight club exists only in the hours between when
fight club starts and when fight club ends.
You saw the kid who works in the copy center, a month ago you saw this kid who
can't remember to three-hole-punch an order or put colored slip sheets between the
copy packets, but this kid was a god for ten minutes when you saw him kick the air out
of an account representative twice his size then land on the man and pound him limp
until the kid had to stop. That's the third rule in fight club, when someone says stop, or
goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over. Every time you see this kid, you
can't tell him what a great fight he had.
Only two guys to a fight. One fight at a time. They fight without shirts or shoes. The
fights go on as long as they have to. Those are the other rules of fight club.
Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world. Even if you told the
kid in the copy center that he had a good fight, you wouldn't be talking to the same man.
Who I am in fight club is not someone my boss knows.
After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down.
Nothing can piss you off. Your word is law, and if other people break that law or question
you, even that doesn't piss you off.
In the real world, I'm a recall campaign coordinator in a shirt and tie, sitting in the
dark with a mouthful of blood and changing the overheads and slides as my boss tells
Microsoft how he chose a particular shade of pale cornflower blue for an icon.
The first fight club was just Tyler and I pounding on each other.
It used to be enough that when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn't
toeing my five-year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Someday I'd
be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and car. Really, really
nice, until the dust settled or the next owner. Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is
falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw.
Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer.
Tyler never knew his father.
Maybe self-destruction is the answer. […]
It's in the newspaper today how somebody broke into offices between the tenth and
fifteenth floors of the Hein Tower, and climbed out the office windows, and painted the
south side of the building with a grinning five story mask, and set fires so the window at
the center of each huge eye blazed huge and alive and inescapable over the city at dawn.
 In the picture on the front page of the newspaper, the face is an angry pumpkin,
Japanese demon, dragon of avarice hanging in the sky, and the smoke is a witch's
eyebrows or devil's horns. And people cried with their heads thrown back.
What did it mean?
And who would do this? And even after the fires were out, the face was still there,
and it was worse. The empty eyes seemed to watch everyone in the street but at the
same time were dead.
This stuff is in the newspaper more and more.
Of course you read this, and you want to know right away if it was part of Project
Mayhem.
The newspaper says the police have no real leads. Youth gangs or space aliens,
whoever it was could've died while crawling down ledges and dangling from windowsills
with cans of black spray paint.
Was it the Mischief Committee or the Arson Committee? The giant face was probably
their homework assignment from last week.
Tyler would know, but the first rule about Project Mayhem is you don't ask questions
about Project Mayhem.
In the Assault Committee of Project Mayhem, this week Tyler says he ran everyone
through what it would take to shoot a gun. All a gun does is focus an explosion in one
direction.
At the last meeting of the Assault Committee, Tyler brought a gun and the yellow
pages of the phone book. They meet in the basement where fight club meets on
Saturday night. Each committee meets on a different night:
Arson meets on Monday.
Assault on Tuesday.
Mischief meets on Wednesday.
And Misinformation meets on Thursday.
Organized Chaos. The Bureaucracy of Anarchy. You figure it out. […]
Tyler asked what I was really fighting.
What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I
wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests.
Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on
supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to
eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see.
I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. […]
I wanted to breathe smoke.
Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.
I wanted to burn the Louvre. I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe
my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.
This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.
It was at breakfast that morning that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
We wanted to blast the world free of history.
29
We were eating breakfast in the house on Paper Street, and Tyler said, picture
yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf
course.
You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller
Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-
degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and
every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages
as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside
the cage bars at night.
"Recycling and speed limits are bullshit," Tyler said. "They're like someone who quits
smoking on his deathbed."
It's Project Mayhem that's going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely
induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission
long enough for the Earth to recover.
"You justify anarchy," Tyler says. "You figure it out."
Like fight club does with clerks and box boys, Project Mayhem will break up
civilization so we can, make something better out of the world.
"Imagine," Tyler said, "stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks
of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will
last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wristthick kudzu vines that wrap the
Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up through the dripping forest canopy
and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of
venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching
eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles."
This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and rightaway
destruction of civilization. […]
"I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived," he says, his face
outlined against the stars in the driver's window, "and these men are pumping gas and
waiting tables."
The drop of his forehead, his brow, the slope of his nose, his eyelashes and the curve
of his eyes, the plastic profile of his mouth, talking, these are all outlined in black against
the stars.
"If we could put these men in training camps and finish raising them.
"All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction.
"You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives
to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need.
Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't
really need.
"We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we
have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great
depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
"We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show
them courage by frightening them.
 "Napoleon bragged that he could train men to sacrifice their lives for a scrap of "I said that if you talked about me behind my back, you'd never see me again," Tyler
ribbon. said. "We're not two separate men. Long story short, when you're awake, you have the
"Imagine, when we call a strike and everyone refuses to work until we redistribute control, and you can call yourself anything you want, but the second you fall asleep, I
the wealth of the world. take over, and you become Tyler Durden."
"Imagine hunting elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of But we fought, I say. The night we invented fight club.
Rockefeller Center. […] "You weren't really fighting me," Tyler says. "You said so yourself. You were fighting
everything you hate in your life." […]
This was something Tyler talked about, how since England did all the exploration and
built colonies and made maps, most of the places in geography have those secondhand The first time I met Tyler, I was asleep.
sort of English names. The English got to name everything. Or almost everything. I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the
Like, Ireland. plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored
New London, Australia. with my job and my furniture, and I couldn't see any way to change things.
New London, India. Only end them.
New London, Idaho. I felt trapped.
New York, New York. I was too complete.
Fast-forward to the future. I was too perfect.
This way, when deep-space exploitation ramps up, it will probably be the megatonic
corporations that discover all the new planets and map them.
The IBM Stellar Sphere.
The Philip Morris Galaxy.
Planet Denny's.
Every planet will take on the corporate identity of whoever rapes it first.
Budweiser World. […]

Six minutes, total, and we were done.

"Remember this," Tyler said. "The people you're trying to step on, we're everyone
you depend on. We're the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve
your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you're asleep. We drive the
ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything
about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every
part of your life.
"We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday
we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just
learning this fact," Tyler said. "So don't fuck with us."
The space monkey had to press the ether down, hard on the commissioner sobbing
and put him all the way out.
Another team dressed him and took him and his dog home. After that, the secret
was up to him to keep. And, no, we didn't expect any more fight club crackdown.
His esteemed honor went home scared but intact.
"Every time we do these little homework assignments," Tyler says, "these fight club
men with nothing to lose are a little more invested in Project Mayhem."
Tyler kneeling next to my bed says, "Close your eyes and give me your hand."
I close my eyes, and Tyler takes my hand. I feel Tyler's lips against the scar of his kiss.

30
10. DON DELILLO – COSMOPOLIS (2003) (excerpts)
Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five. What
did he do when this happened? He did not take long walks into the scrolling dawn. There
was no friend he loved enough to harrow with a call. What was there to say? It was a
matter of silences, not words. […]
There was no answer to the question. He tried sedatives and hypnotics but they made
him dependent, sending him inward in tight spirals. Every act he performed was self-
haunted and synthetic. The palest thought carried an anxious shadow. What did he do?
He did not consult an analyst in a tall leather chair. Freud is finished, Einstein's next. He
was reading the Special Theory tonight, in English and German, but put the book aside,
finally, and lay completely still, trying to summon the will to speak the single word that
would turn off the lights. Nothing existed around him. There was only the noise in his
head, the mind in time.
When he died he would not end. The world would end. […]
He walked through the apartment, forty-eight rooms. He did this when he felt hesitant
and depressed, striding past the lap pool, the card parlor, the gymnasium, past the shark
tank and screening room. He stopped at the borzoi pen and talked to his dogs. Then he
went to the annex, where there were currencies to track and research reports to
examine.
The yen rose overnight against expectations. […]
He went outside and crossed the avenue, then turned and faced the building where he
lived. He felt contiguous with it. It was eightynine stories, a prime number, in an
undistinguished sheath of hazy bronze glass. They shared an edge or boundary,
skyscraper and man. It was nine hundred feet high, the tallest residential tower in the
world, a commonplace oblong whose only statement was its size. It had the kind of
banality that reveals itself over time as being truly brutal. […]
He put on his sunglasses. Then he walked back across the avenue and approached the
lines of white limousines. There were ten cars, five in a curbside row in front of the
tower, on First Avenue, and five lined up on the cross street, facing west. The cars were
identical at a glance. […]
He liked the fact that the cars were indistinguishable from each other. He wanted such
a car because he thought it was a platonic replica, weightless for all its size, less an object
than an idea. But he knew this wasn't true. This was something he said for effect and he
didn't believe it for an instant. He believed it for an instant but only just. He wanted the
car because it was not only oversized but aggressively and contemptuously so,
metastasizingly so, a tremendous mutant thing that stood astride every argument
against it.
His chief of security liked the car for its anonymity.
31
Long white limousines had become the most unnoticed vehicles in the city. He
was waiting on the sidewalk now, Torval, bald and no-necked, a man whose head
seemed removable for maintenance.
"Where?" he said.
"I want a haircut."
"The president's in town."
"We don't care. We need a haircut. We need to go crosstown."
"You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches."
"Just so I know Which president are we talking about?"
"United States. Barriers will be set up," he said. "Entire streets deleted from the
map."
"Show me my car," he told the man. […]
The car ran into stalled traffic before it reached Second Avenue. He sat in the club chair
at the rear of the cabin looking into the array of visual display units. There were medleys
of data on every screen, all the flowing symbols and alpine charts, the polychrome
numbers pulsing. He absorbed this material in a couple of long still seconds, ignoring the
speech sounds that issued from lacquered heads. There was a microwave and a heart
monitor. He looked at the spycam on a swivel and it looked back at him. He used to sit
here in hand-held space but that was finished now The context was nearly touchless. He
could talk most systems into operation or wave a hand at a screen and make it go blank.
[…]
"All this optimism, all this booming and soaring. Things happen like bang. This and that
simultaneous. I put out my hand and what do I feel? I know there's a thousand things
you analyze every ten minutes. Patterns, ratios, indexes, whole maps of information. I
love information. This is our sweetness and light. It's a fuckall wonder. And we have
meaning in the world. People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do." […]
He looked at Chin, adrift in his jump seat, lost in rambling thought.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-two. What? Twenty-two."
"You look younger. I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it
began to change."
"I don't feel younger. I feel located totally nowhere. I think I'm ready to quit,
basically, the business."
"Put a stick of gum in your mouth and try not to chew it. For someone your age,
with your gifts, there's only one thing in the world worth pursuing professionally and
intellectually. What is it, Michael? The interaction between technology and capital. The
inseparability."
"High school was the last true challenge," Chin said.
The car drifted into gridlock on Third Avenue. The driver's standing orders were
to advance into blocked intersections, not hang feebly back.
"There's a poem I read in which a rat becomes the unit of currency."
 "Yes. That would be interesting," Chin said.
"Yes. That would impact the world economy."
"The name alone. Better than the dong or the kwacha."
"The name says everything."
"Yes. The rat," Chin said.
"Yes. The rat closed lower today against the euro."
"Yes. There is growing concern that the Russian rat will be devalued."
"White rats. Think about that."
"Yes. Pregnant rats."
"Yes. Major sell-off of pregnant Russian rats."
"Britain converts to the rat," Chin said.
"Yes. Joins trend to universal currency."
"Yes. U.S. establishes rat standard."
"Yes. Every U.S. dollar redeemable for rat."
"Dead rats."
"Yes. Stockpiling of dead rats called global health menace. […]
The car stopped dead and he got out and stretched. Traffic ahead was a long liquid
shimmer of idling metal. He saw Torval walking toward him.
"Imperative that we reroute."
"The situation is what."
"This. We have flood conditions in the streets ahead. State of chaos. This. The
question of the president and his whereabouts. He is fluid. He is moving. And wherever
he goes, our satellite receiver reports a ripple effect in the traffic that causes mass
paralysis. This also. There is a funeral proceeding slowly downtown and now deflecting
westward. Many vehicles, numerous mourners on foot. And finally this. We have a
report of imminent activity in the area.
"Activity."
"Imminent. Nature as yet unknown. […]”
Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation
of agreements that made the city operational. Who steps aside for whom, who looks or
does not look at whom, what level of umbrage does a brush or a touch constitute? No
one wanted to be touched. There was a pact of untouchability. Even here, in the huddle
of old cultures, tactile and close-woven, with passersby mixed in, and security guards,
and shoppers pressed to windows, and wandering fools, people did not touch each
other. […]
"We want to think about the art of money-making," she said.
She was sitting in the rear seat, his seat, the club chair, and he looked at her
and waited.
"The Greeks have a word for it." He waited.
"Chrimatistikos," she said. "But we have to give the word a little leeway. Adapt
it to the current situation. Because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become
32
wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its
narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself." […]
"And property follows of course. The concept of property is changing by the day, by the
hour. The enormous expenditures that people make for land and houses and boats and
planes. This has nothing to do with traditional self-assurances, okay. Property is no
longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful
display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price
you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million
dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating
bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights?
The regulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors that tell you how you feel when
you look at yourself in the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One
hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it's worth it. The number justifies
itself." […]
"Oh and this car, which I love. The glow of the screens. I love the screens. The glow of
cybercapital. So radiant and seductive. I understand none of it."
She spoke in near whispers and wore a persistent smile, with cryptic variations.
"But you know how shameless I am in the presence of anything that calls itself
an idea. The idea is time. Living in the future. Look at those numbers running. Money
makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of
capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours,
measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently."
He said, "There's something I want to show you."
"Wait. I'm thinking."
He waited. Her smile was slightly twisted.
"It's cyber-capital that creates the future. What is the measurement called a
nanosecond?"
"Ten to the minus ninth power."
"This is what."
"One billionth of a second," he said.
"I understand none of this. But it tells me how rigorous we need to be in order
to take adequate measure of the world around us."
"There are zeptoseconds."
"Good. I'm glad."
"Yoctoseconds. One septillionth of a second."
"Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system.
The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the
future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential. The future becomes
insistent. This is why something will happen soon, maybe today," she said, looking slyly
into her hands. "To correct the acceleration of time. Bring nature back to normal, more
or less." […]
He stood behind her, pointing over her shoulder. Beneath the data strips, or tickers,
there were fixed digits marking the time in the major cities of the world. He knew what
she was thinking. Never mind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before
the eye. The speed is the point. Never mind the urgent and endless replenishment, the
way data dissolves at one end of the series just as it takes shape at the other. This is the
point, the thrust, the future. We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as
pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of
the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in
astonishment.
She said, "Does it ever stop? Does it slow down? Of course not. Why should it?”
[…]

"Doubt. What is doubt? You don't believe in doubt. You've told me this. Computer power
eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We
used to know the past but not the future. This is changing," she said. "We need a new
theory of time." […]

"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."

"Its own grave-diggers," he said.
"But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people
are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is
nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside."
The camera tracked a cop chasing a young man through the crowd, an image
that seemed to exist at some drifting distance from the moment.
"The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are
necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are
marketdriven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to
invigorate and perpetuate the system."
"You know what anarchists have always believed."
"Yes."
"Tell me," she said.
"The urge to destroy is a creative urge."
"This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old
industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed. Old
markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future." […]

"You've been talking about the future being impatient. Pressing upon us."
"That was theory. I deal in theory," she said sharply.
He turned away from her and watched the screens. The top tier of the
electronic display across the avenue showed this message now:

A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE WORLD. THE SPECTER OF CAPITALISM

33
 4. APPROACHING THE END(S)

34
11. H.G. WELLS – THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) (excerpts)
But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?...
Are we or they Lords of the World?...
And how are all things made for man?...
KEPLER, The Anatomy of Melancholy
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world
was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as
mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they
were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope
might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With
infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene
in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the
microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources
of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as
impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those
departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars,
perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across
the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that
perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious
eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth
century came the great disillusionment. […]
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the
nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there
far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since
Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter
from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time's beginning
but nearer its end. […]
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them at least as alien and
lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits
that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem that this too is the
belief of the minds upon Mars. Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still
crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals. […]
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter
destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished
bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human
likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by
European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to
complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? Many people had heard of the
35
cylinder, of course, and talked about it in their leisure, but it certainly did not make the
sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done. […]
[…] I looked again out of the open window. In one night the valley had become a valley
of ashes. The fires had dwindled now. Where flames had been there were now
streamers of smoke; but the countless ruins of shattered and gutted houses and blasted
and blackened trees that the night had hidden stood out now gaunt and terrible in the
pitiless light of dawn. Yet here and there some object had had the luck to escape--a
white railway signal here, the end of a greenhouse there, white and fresh amid the
wreckage. Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate
and so universal. And shining with the growing light of the east, three of the metallic
giants stood about the pit, their cowls rotating as though they were surveying the
desolation they had made. […]
The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions of ornament and decorum were
necessarily different from ours; and not only were they evidently much less sensible of
changes of temperature than we are, but changes of pressure do not seem to have
affected their health at all seriously. Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in the
other artificial additions to their bodily resources that their great superiority over man
lay. We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our
guns and sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians
have worked out. They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies
according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry
or an umbrella in the wet. […]
Here the scenery changed from the strange and unfamiliar to the wreckage of the
familiar: patches of ground exhibited the devastation of a cyclone, and in a few score
yards I would come upon perfectly undisturbed spaces, houses with their blinds trimly
drawn and doors closed, as if they had been left for a day by the owners, or as if their
inhabitants slept within. The red weed was less abundant; the tall trees along the lane
were free from the red creeper. I hunted for food among the trees, finding nothing, and
I also raided a couple of silent houses, but they had already been broken into and
ransacked. I rested for the remainder of the daylight in a shrubbery, being, in my
enfeebled condition, too fatigued to push on.
All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians. I encountered
a couple of hungry looking dogs, but both hurried circuitously away from the advances I
made them. Near Roehampton I had seen two human skeletons--not bodies, but
skeletons, picked clean--and in the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones
of several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though I gnawed parts of these
in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from them. After sunset I struggled on along
the road towards Putney, where I think the Heat-Ray must have been used for some
reason. And in the garden beyond Roehampton I got a quantity of immature potatoes,
sufficient to stay my hunger. From this garden one looked down upon Putney and the
river. […]
For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood
there alone, the last man left alive. Hard by the top of Putney Hill I came upon another
skeleton, with the arms dislocated and removed several yards from the rest of the body.
As I proceeded I became more and more convinced that the extermination of mankind
was, save for such stragglers as myself, already accomplished in this part of the world.
The Martians, I thought, had gone on and left the country desolated, seeking food
elsewhere. Perhaps even now they were destroying Berlin or Paris, or it might be they
had gone northward. […]
I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was
in extremity; but now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with
the darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I,
who had talked with God, crept out of the house like a rat leaving its hiding place--a
creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our
masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely,
if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity--pity for those witless souls
that suffer our dominion. […]
I went on into a little bower, and sat down.
"It is all over with humanity," I said. "If they can do that they will simply go
round the world."
He nodded.
"They will. But---- It will relieve things over here a bit. And besides----" He
looked at me. "Aren't you satisfied it is up with humanity? I am. We're down; we're
beat."
I stared. Strange as it may seem, I had not arrived at this fact--a fact perfectly obvious
so soon as he spoke. I had still held a vague hope; rather, I had kept a lifelong habit of
mind. He repeated his words, "We're beat." They carried absolute conviction.
"It's all over," he said. "They've lost one--just one. And they've made their
footing good and crippled the greatest power in the world. They've walked over
us. The death of that one at Weybridge was an accident. And these are only
pioneers. They kept on coming. These green stars--I've seen none these five or
six days, but I've no doubt they're falling somewhere every night. Nothing's to
be done. We're under! We're beat!"
I made him no answer. I sat staring before me, trying in vain to devise some
countervailing thought.
"This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than
there's war between man and ants."
Suddenly I recalled the night in the observatory.
"After the tenth shot they fired no more--at least, until the first cylinder came."
"How do you know?" said the artilleryman. I explained. He thought.
"Something wrong with the gun," he said. "But what if there is? They'll get it
right again. And even if there's a delay, how can it alter the end? It's just men and ants.
There's the ants builds their cities, live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until the men
36
want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That's what we are now--
just ants. Only----"
"Yes," I said.
"We're eatable ants." [...]
The artilleryman looked at me for a moment.
"There won't be any more blessed concerts for a million years or so; there won't
be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds at restaurants. If it's amusement
you're after, I reckon the game is up. If you've got any drawing-room manners or a dislike
to eating peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck 'em away. They ain't
no further use."
"You mean----"
"I mean that men like me are going on living--for the sake of the breed. I tell
you, I'm grim set on living. And if I'm not mistaken, you'll show what insides you've got,
too, before long. We aren't going to be exterminated. And I don't mean to be caught
either, and tamed and fattened and bred like a thundering ox. Ugh! Fancy those brown
creepers!"
"You don't mean to say----"
"I do. I'm going on, under their feet. I've got it planned; I've thought it out. We
men are beat. We don't know enough. We've got to learn before we've got a chance.
And we've got to live and keep independent while we learn. See! That's what has to be
done."
I stared, astonished, and stirred profoundly by the man's resolution.
"Great God!" cried I. "But you are a man indeed!" And suddenly I gripped his
hand.
"Eh!" he said, with his eyes shining. "I've thought it out, eh?"
"Go on," I said.
"Well, those who mean to escape their catching must get ready. I'm getting
ready. Mind you, it isn't all of us that are made for wild beasts; and that's what it's got
to be. That's why I watched you. I had my doubts. You're slender. I didn't know that it
was you, you see, or just how you'd been buried. All these--the sort of people that lived
in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way--they'd
be no good. They haven't any spirit in them--no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and
a man who hasn't one or the other--Lord! What is he but funk and precautions? They
just used to skedaddle off to work--I've seen hundreds of 'em, bit of breakfast in hand,
running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they'd get
dismissed if they didn't; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to
understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn't be in time for dinner; keeping
indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with the wives they
married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that
would make for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world. Lives
insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on Sundays--fear of the hereafter.
As if hell was built for rabbits! Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice
roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing
about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they'll come and be caught cheerful.
They'll be quite glad after a bit. They'll wonder what people did before there were
Martians to take care of them. And the bar loafers, and mashers, and singers - I can
imagine them. I can imagine them," he said, with a sort of sombre gratification. […]
He paused.
"Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; train them to do
tricks--who knows?-- get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed.
And some, maybe, they will train to hunt us."
"No," I cried, "that's impossible! No human being----"
"What's the good of going on with such lies?" said the artilleryman. "There's
men who'd do it cheerful. What nonsense to pretend there isn't!"
And I succumbed to his conviction.
"If they come after me," he said; "Lord, if they come after me!" and subsided
into a grim meditation.
I sat contemplating these things. I could find nothing to bring against this man's
reasoning. In the days before the invasion no one would have questioned my intellectual
superiority to his--I, a professed and recognised writer on philosophical themes, and he,
a common soldier; and yet he had already formulated a situation that I had scarcely
realised.
"What are you doing?" I said presently. "What plans have you made?"
He hesitated.
"Well, it's like this," he said. "What have we to do? We have to invent a sort of
life where men can live and breed, and be sufficiently secure to bring the children up.
Yes--wait a bit, and I'll make it clearer what I think ought to be done. The tame ones will
go like all tame beasts; in a few generations they'll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded,
stupid--rubbish! The risk is that we who keep wild will go savage--degenerate into a sort
of big, savage rat. . . . You see, how I mean to live is underground. I've been thinking
about the drains. Of course those who don't know drains think horrible things; but under
this London are miles and miles--hundreds of miles--and a few days rain and London
empty will leave them sweet and clean. The main drains are big enough and airy enough
for anyone. Then there's cellars, vaults, stores, from which bolting passages may be
made to the drains. And the railway tunnels and subways. Eh? You begin to see? And we
form a band—able-bodied, clean-minded men. We're not going to pick up any rubbish
that drifts in. Weaklings go out again."
"As you meant me to go?"
"Well--I parleyed, didn't I?"
"We won't quarrel about that. Go on."
"Those who stop obey orders. Able-bodied, clean-minded women we want
also--mothers and teachers. No lackadaisical ladies--no blasted rolling eyes. We can't
have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and
mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of
disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race. And they can't be happy. Moreover, dying's
none so dreadful; it's the funking makes it bad. And in all those places we shall gather.
Our district will be London. And we may even be able to keep a watch, and run about in
37
the open when the Martians keep away. Play cricket, perhaps. That's how we shall save
the race. Eh? It's a possible thing? But saving the race is nothing in itself. As I say, that's
only being rats. It's saving our knowledge and adding to it is the thing. There men like
you come in. There's books, there's models. We must make great safe places down deep,
and get all the books we can; not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science books.
That's where men like you come in. We must go to the British Museum and pick all those
books through. Especially we must keep up our science—learn more. We must watch
these Martians. Some of us must go as spies. When it's all working, perhaps I will. Get
caught, I mean. And the great thing is, we must leave the Martians alone. We mustn't
even steal. If we get in their way, we clear out. We must show them we mean no harm.
Yes, I know. But they're intelligent things, and they won't hunt us down if they have all
they want, and think we're just harmless vermin." […]
Where there was no black powder, it was curiously like a Sunday in the City, with the
closed shops, the houses locked up and the blinds drawn, the desertion, and the
stillness. In some places plunderers had been at work, but rarely at other than the
provision and wine shops. A jeweller's window had been broken open in one place, but
apparently the thief had been disturbed, and a number of gold chains and a watch lay
scattered on the pavement. I did not trouble to touch them. Farther on was a tattered
woman in a heap on a doorstep; the hand that hung over her knee was gashed and bled
down her rusty brown dress, and a smashed magnum of champagne formed a pool
across the pavement.
She seemed asleep, but she was dead. […]
The farther I penetrated into London, the profounder grew the stillness. But it was not
so much the stillness of death--it was the stillness of suspense, of expectation. At any
time the destruction that had already singed the northwestern borders of the
metropolis, and had annihilated Ealing and Kilburn, might strike among these houses
and leave them smoking ruins. It was a city condemned and derelict… […]
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men might have foreseen had not terror
and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since
the beginning of things--taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But
by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no
germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many--those that cause putrefaction
in dead matter, for instance--our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no
bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our
microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they
were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was
inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and
it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as
they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain. […]
I turned and looked down the slope of the hill to where, enhaloed now in birds, stood I go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes
those other two Martians that I had seen overnight, just as death had overtaken them. across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have
The one had died, even as it had been crying to its companions; perhaps it was the last seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life
to die, and its voice had gone on perpetually until the force of its machinery was in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day
exhausted. They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, in the before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue
brightness of the rising sun. through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to
see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sight-
All about the pit, and saved as by a miracle from everlasting destruction, stretched the seers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing
great Mother of Cities. […] children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent,
under the dawn of that last great day…
The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin. The survivors of the
people scattered over the country--leaderless, lawless, foodless, like sheep without a
shepherd--the thousands who had fled by sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life,
growing stronger and stronger, would beat again in the empty streets and pour across
the vacant squares. Whatever destruction was done, the hand of the destroyer was
stayed. All the gaunt wrecks, the blackened skeletons of houses that stared so dismally
at the sunlit grass of the hill, would presently be echoing with the hammers of the
restorers and ringing with the tapping of their trowels. At the thought I extended my
hands towards the sky and began thanking God. […]

A question of graver and universal interest is the possibility of another attack from the
Martians. I do not think that nearly enough attention is being given to this aspect of the
matter. At present the planet Mars is in conjunction, but with every return to opposition
I, for one, anticipate a renewal of their adventure. In any case, we should be prepared.
It seems to me that it should be possible to define the position of the gun from which
the shots are discharged, to keep a sustained watch upon this part of the planet, and to
anticipate the arrival of the next attack. […]

At any rate, whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of the human future
must be greatly modified by these events. We have learned now that we cannot regard
this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never
anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space. It may
be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion from Mars is not without its
ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which
is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are
enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal of
mankind. It may be that across the immensity of space the Martians have watched the
fate of these pioneers of theirs and learned their lesson, and that on the planet Venus
they have found a securer settlement. Be that as it may, for many years yet there will
certainly be no relaxation of the eager scrutiny of the Martian disk, and those fiery darts
of the sky, the shooting stars, will bring with them as they fall an unavoidable
apprehension to all the sons of men. […]

38
12. DMITRY GLUKHOVSKY – METRO 2033 (2005) (excerpts)
Dear Muscovites and guests to our capital!
The Moscow metro is a form of transportation
which involves a heightened level of danger.
- A notice in the metro
CHAPTER 1 - The End of the Earth
„Who’s there? Artyom - go have a look!‟
Artyom rose reluctantly from his seat by the fire and, shifting the machine gun
from his back to his chest, headed towards the darkness. He stood right at the edge of
the lighted area and then, as loudly and threateningly as he could, he clicked the slide
on his gun and shouted gruffly, „Stop! Password!‟
He could hear quick, staccato footsteps in the darkness where moments ago
he’d heard a strange rustle and hollow-sounding murmurings. Someone was retreating
into the depths of the tunnel, frightened away by Artyom’s gruff voice and the rattling
of his weapon. Artyom hurriedly returned to the fire and flung an answer at Pyotr
Andreevich:
„Nope, no one came forward. No response, they just ran off.‟
„You idiot! You were clearly told. If they don’t respond, then shoot
immediately! How do you know who that was? Maybe the dark ones are getting closer!‟
„No . . . I don’t think they were people . . . The sounds were really strange . . .
And the footsteps weren’t human either. What? You think I don’t know what human
footsteps sound like? And anyway, when have the dark ones ever run off like that? You
know it yourself, Pyotr Andreevich. Lately they’ve been lunging forward without
hesitation. They attacked a patrol with nothing but their bare hands, marching straight
into machine-gun fire. But this thing, it ran off straight away . . . Like some kind of scared
animal.‟
„All right, Artyom! You’re too smart for your own good. But you’ve got
instructions - so follow them, don’t think about it. Maybe it was a scout. And now it
knows how few of us are here, and how much ammunition they’d need . . . They might
just wipe us out here and now for fun. Put a knife to our throat, and butcher the entire
station, just like at Polezhaevskaya - and all just because you didn’t get rid of that rat . .
. Watch it! Next time I’ll make you run after them into the tunnel!‟
It made Artyom shudder to imagine the tunnel beyond the seven-hundredth
metre. It was horrifying just to think about it. No one had the guts to go beyond the
seven-hundredth metre to the north. Patrols had made it to the five-hundredth, and
having illuminated the boundary post with the spotlight on the trolley and convinced
themselves that no scum had crossed it, they hastily returned. Even the scouts - big guys,
former marines - would stop at the six hundred and eightieth metre. They’d turn their
burning cigarettes into their cupped palms and stand stock-still, clinging to their night-
vision instruments. And then, they’d slowly, quietly head back, without taking their eyes
off the tunnel, and never turning their backs to it.
39
They were now on patrol at the four hundred and fiftieth metre, fifty metres
from the boundary post. The boundary was checked once a day and today’s inspection
had been completed several hours ago. Now their post was the outermost and, since
the last check, the beasts that the last patrol might have scared off would have certainly
begun to crawl closer once again. They were drawn to the flame, to people . . .
Artyom settled back down into his seat and asked, „So what actually happened
at Polezhaevskaya?‟
Although he already knew this blood-curdling story (from the traders at the
station), he had an urge to hear it again, like a child who feels an irrepressible urge to
hear scary stories about headless mutants and dark ones who kidnap young children.
„At Polezhaevskaya? What, you didn’t hear about it? It was a strange story.
Strange and frightening. First their scouts began disappearing. Went off into the tunnels
and didn’t come back. Granted, their scouts are completely green, nothing like ours, but
then again, their station’s smaller, a lot less people live there . . . well, used to live there.
So anyway, their scouts start disappearing. One detachment leaves - and vanishes. At
first they thought something was holding them up - up there the tunnel twists and turns
just like it does here . . .‟ Artyom felt ill at ease when he heard these words. „And neither
the patrols, nor those at the station could see anything, no matter how much light they
threw at it. No one appeared - for half an hour, then for an hour, then two. They
wondered where the scouts could have gone - they were only going one kilometre in.
They weren’t allowed to go any further and anyway, they aren’t total idiots . . . Long
story short, they couldn’t wait to find out. They sent reinforcements who searched and
searched, and shouted and shouted - but it was all in vain. The patrol was gone. The
scouts had vanished. And it wasn’t just that no one had seen what had happened to
them. The worst part was that they hadn’t heard a sound . . . not a sound. There was no
trace of them whatsoever.‟
Artyom was already beginning to regret that he had asked Pyotr Andreevich to
recount the story of Polezhaevskaya. Pyotr Andreevich was either better informed, or
was embellishing the story somewhat; but in any case, he was telling details of the sort
that the traders couldn’t have dreamed, despite being masters and true enthusiasts of
story-telling. The story’s details sent a chill over Atrium’s skin, and he became
uncomfortable even sitting next to the fire. Any rustlings from the tunnel, even the most
innocent, were now exciting his imagination.
„So, there you have it. They hadn’t heard any gunfire so they decided that the
scouts had simply left them - maybe they were dissatisfied with something, and had
decided to run. So, to hell with them. If it’s an easy life they want, if they want to run
around with all kinds of riff-raff, then let them run around to their hearts‟ content. It
was simpler to see it that way. Easier. But a week later, yet another scout team
disappeared. And they weren’t supposed to go any further than half a kilometre from
the station. And again, the same old story. Not a sound, not a trace. Like they’d vanished
into thin air. So then they started getting worried back at the station. Now they had a
real mess on their hands - two squadrons had disappeared within a week. They’d have
to do something about it. Meaning, they’d have to take measures. Well, they set up a
cordon at the three-hundredth metre. They dragged sandbags to the cordon, set up
machine guns and a spotlight - according to the rules of fortification. They sent a runner
to Begovaya - they’d established a confederation with Begovaya and 1905 Street.
Initially, October Field had also been included, but then something had happened, no
one knows exactly what - some kind of accident. Conditions there had become
unliveable, and everyone had fled.
„Anyway, then they sent a runner to Begovaya, to warn them that, as they said,
trouble was afoot, and to ask for help, should anything happen. The first runner had only
just made it to Begovaya - and the people there were still considering their answer -
when a second runner arrived at Begovaya, lathered in sweat, and said that their
reinforced cordon had perished to a man, without firing a single shot. Every last one of
them had been slaughtered. And it was as if they’d been butchered in their sleep - that’s
what was scary! But they wouldn’t have fallen asleep, not after the scare they’d had, not
to mention the orders and instructions. At this point, the people at Begovaya
understood that if they did nothing, the same story would begin in their neck of the
woods as well. They equipped a strike force of veterans, about a hundred men, machine
guns, and grenade launchers. Of course, that all took a bit of time, about a day and a
half, but all the same, they dispatched the group to go and help. And when the group
entered Polezhaevskaya, there wasn’t a living soul to be seen. There weren’t even
bodies - just blood everywhere. There you go. And who knows who the hell did it. I, for
one, don’t believe that humans are capable of such a thing.‟
„And what happened to Begovaya?‟ Artyom’s voice sounded unusual, unlike
him.
„Nothing happened to them. They saw what the deal was, and exploded the
tunnel that led to Polezhaevskaya. I hear forty metres‟ worth of tunnel is collapsed;
there’s no digging through it without special machinery, and even with machinery, I bet
you wouldn’t get very far . . . And where are you going to find that kind of machinery,
anyway? Our machinery rotted away fifteen years ago already . . .‟
Pyotr Andreevich fell silent, gazing into the fire. Artyom gave a loud cough and
said,
„Yeah . . . I should’ve shot the thing, of course . . . I was an idiot.‟
A shout came from the south, from the direction of the station:
„Hey there, at the four-hundredth metre! Everything OK there?‟
Pyotr Andreevich folded his hands into the shape of a megaphone and shouted
in reply:
„Come closer! We’ve got a situation here!‟
Three figures approached in the tunnel, from the station, their flashlights
shining - probably patrol members from the three-hundredth metre. Stepping into the
light of the fire, they put out their flashlights and sat down.
„Hi there, Pyotr! So it’s you here. And I’m thinking to myself - who’d they send
off to the edge of the earth today?‟ said the senior patrolman, smiling and shaking a
cigarette from his pack.
„Listen, Andryukha! One of my guys saw someone up here. But he didn’t get to
shoot . . . It hid in the tunnel. He says it didn’t look human.‟
„Didn’t look human? What did it look like, then?‟ Andrey turned to Artyom.
40
„I didn’t even see it . . . I just asked for the password, and it ran right off, heading
north. But the footsteps weren’t human - they were light, and very quick, as if it had four
legs instead of two . . .‟
„Or three!‟ winked Andrey, making a scary face.
Artyom choked, remembering the stories about the three-legged people from
the Filevskaya line where some of the stations went up to the surface, and the tunnel
didn’t run very deep at all, so they had almost no protection from the radiation. There
were three-legged things, two-headed things and all kinds of weird shit crawling all over
the metro from those parts.
Andrey took a drag of his cigarette and said to his men, „All right, guys, since
we’re already here why don’t we sit down for a while? If any three-legged things crawl
up on these guys again, we’ll lend a hand. Hey, Artyom! Got a kettle?‟
Pyotr Andreevich got up and poured some water from a canister into a beat-
up, soot-covered kettle, and hung it over the flame. In a few minutes, the kettle began
to whistle as it came to a boil. The sound, so domestic and comforting, made Artyom
feel warmer and calmer. He looked around at the men who were sitting at the fire: all
of them strong dependable people, hardened by the challenging life they led here. You
could trust men like these; you could count on them. Their station always had the
reputation for being the most successful along the entire line - and that was all thanks
to the men gathered here, and to others like them. They were all connected to each
other with warm, almost brotherly bonds.
Artyom was just over twenty years old and had come into the world when life
was still up there, on the surface. He wasn’t as thin and pale as the others who’d been
born in the metro, who wouldn’t dare go up to the surface for fear of radiation and the
searing rays of the sun, which are so ruinous for underground dwellers. True, even
Artyom, as far as he could remember, had been on the surface only once, and then it
was only for a moment - the background radiation there had been so bad that anyone
who got a bit too curious would be completely fried within a couple of hours, before
he’d even managed to enjoy a good stroll, and see his fill of the bizarre world that lay on
the surface.
He didn’t remember his father at all. His mother had been with him until he was
five years old. They lived at Timiryazevskaya. Things had been good, and life had gone
smoothly and peacefully, until Timiryazevskaya fell victim to a rat infestation.
One day, huge, grey, wet rats poured from one of the tunnels on the dark side
of the station without any warning. It was a tunnel that plunged off to the side, a
disregarded branch of the primary northern leg, which descended to great depths, only
to become lost in the complex network of hundreds of corridors - freezing, stinking
labyrinths of horror. The tunnel stretched into the kingdom of rats, where even the most
hopeless adventurer wouldn’t dare to go. Even a wanderer who was lost and couldn’t
find his way using underground maps and paths, would stop at this threshold, sensing
instinctively the black and sinister danger emerging from it, and would have rushed away
from the gaping crevasse of that entrance as though from the gates of a plague-infested
city.
 No one bothered the rats. No one descended into their dominions. No one
dared to violate their borders.
They came to the people.
Many people perished that day, when a living torrent of gigantic rats - bigger
than had ever been seen at either the stations or in the tunnels - had flooded through
the cordons and the station, burying all of its defenders and its population, muffling their
dying screams with the mass of its bodies. Consuming everything in their path - the
living, the dead, and their own fallen comrades - the rats tore ahead, further and further,
blindly, inexorably, propelled by a force beyond human comprehension.
Only a few men remained alive. No women, no old men or children - none of
the people who would normally have been saved first, but rather five healthy men who
had managed to keep ahead of the death-wreaking torrent. And the only reason they’d
outrun it was because they’d happened to be standing near a trolley, on watch in the
southern tunnel. Hearing the shouts from the station, one of them sprinted to see what
had happened. Timiryazevskaya was already perishing when he caught sight of it as he
entered the station. At the station’s entrance, he understood what had happened from
the first rivulets of rats seeping onto the platform and he was about to turn back,
knowing that he couldn’t possibly help those who were defending the station, when
suddenly his hand was seized from behind. He turned around and a woman, her face
contorted with horror, pulling insistently at his sleeve, shouted, in an effort to overcome
the many-voiced choir of despair, „Save him, soldier! Have mercy!‟
He saw that she was handing him a child’s hand, a small, chubby hand, and he
grabbed the hand without even thinking that he was saving someone’s life. And, pulling
the child behind him and then picking him up and tucking him under his arm, he raced
off with the frontrunner rats in a race with death - forward through the tunnel, where
the trolley was waiting with his fellow patrolmen. He started to shout at them from afar,
from a distance of fifty metres or so, telling them to start up the trolley. Their trolley
was motorized, the only one of its kind in the surrounding ten stations, and it was only
because of it that they were able to outrun the rats. The patrolmen raced forward, and
flew through the abandoned station of Dmitrovskaya at full speed, where a few hermits
had sought shelter, just managing to shout to them: „Run! Rats!‟ (Without realizing that
there was no chance of the hermits saving themselves.) As they approached the cordons
of Savyolovskaya (with whom, thank God, they had peaceful arrangements), they
slowed down so they wouldn’t be fired at. They would have been taken for raiders at
such high speed. And they shouted at the top of their lungs to the guards, „Rats! The
rats are coming!‟ They were prepared to keep running right through Savyolovskaya, and
further along the line, prepared to beg to be let through, as long as there was
somewhere further to go, as long as the grey lava hadn’t inundated the entire metro.
But luckily, there was something at Savyolovskaya that would save them, the
station and perhaps the entire Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya branch. They were nearly
at the station, soaked in sweat, shouting at the Savyolovskaya guards about their narrow
escape from death. Meanwhile, the guards at the post were quickly pulling the cover off
of some kind of impressive-looking piece of kit.
41
It was a flame-thrower, assembled by the local craftsmen from spare parts -
homemade, but incredibly powerful. When the first ranks of rats became visible,
gathering force, and you could hear the rustling and the scratching of a thousand rats‟
paws from the darkness, the guards fired up the flame-thrower. And they didn’t turn it
off until the fuel was spent. A howling orange flame filled the tunnel for tens of metres
and burned the rats, burned them all, without stopping, for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes.
The tunnel was filled with the repulsive stench of burnt flesh and the wild screeching of
rats. And behind the guards of Savyolovskaya, who had become heroes and had earned
fame along the entire metro line, the trolley came to a stop, cooling down. On it were
the five men who had fled from Timiryazevskaya station, and there was one more - the
child they had saved. A boy. Artyom.
The rats retreated. Their blind will had been broken by one of the last
inventions of human military genius. Humans had always been better at killing than any
other living thing.
The rats flowed backwards and returned to their enormous kingdom, whose
true dimensions were known to no one. All of these labyrinths, lying at incredible depth,
were so mysterious and, it seemed, completely useless for the functioning of the metro.
It was hard to believe, despite the assurances of various persons of authority on the
matter, that all of this was built by ordinary metro-builders.
One such person of authority had once worked as a conductor’s assistant on an
electric train in the old days. There were hardly any of his kind left and they were greatly
valued, because at first they had proven to be the only ones who could find their way
around. And they didn’t give in to fear the moment they found themselves outside the
comfortable and safe capsules of the train, in the dark tunnels of the Moscow metro, in
these stone bowels of the great metropolis. Everyone at the station treated the
conductor’s assistant with respect, and taught their children to do the same; it was for
that reason, probably, that Artyom had remembered him, remembered him all his life:
a thin, haggard man, emaciated by the long years of work underground who wore a
threadbare and faded metro employee uniform that had long ago lost its chic but that
he donned with the same pride a retired admiral would feel when putting on his parade
uniform. Even Artyom, still just a kid at that time, had seen a certain dignity and power
in the sickly figure of the conductor’s assistant …
Of course he did. For all those who survived, the employees of the metro were
like local guides to scientific expeditions in the jungles. They were religiously believed,
they were depended upon completely, and the survival of everyone else depended on
their knowledge and skill. Many of them became the heads of stations when the united
system of government disintegrated, and the metro was transformed from a complex
object of civil defence, a huge fallout shelter, into a multitude of stations unconnected
by a single power, and was plunged into chaos and anarchy. The stations became
independent and self-sufficient, distinctive dwarf states, with their own ideologies and
regimes, their own leaders and armies. They warred against each other, they joined to
form federations and confederations. They became metropolitan centres of rising
empire one day, only to be subjugated and colonized the next, by their erstwhile friends
or slaves. They formed short-term unions against a common threat, only to fall at each
other’s throats again with renewed energy the moment that threat had passed. They
scrapped over everything with total abandon: over living spaces, over food - over the
plantings of albuminous yeast, the crops of mushrooms that didn’t require any sunlight,
the chicken coops and pig-farms, where pale subterranean pigs and emaciated chicks
were raised on colourless underground mushrooms. They fought, of course, over water
- that is, over filters. Barbarians, who didn’t know how to repair filtration systems that
had fallen into disuse, and were dying from water that was poisoned by radiation, threw
themselves with animal rage upon the bastions of civilized life, at the stations where the
dynamo-machines and small home-made hydroelectric stations functioned correctly,
where filters were repaired and cleaned regularly, where, tended by the caring female
hands, the damp ground was punctuated with the little white caps of champignons, and
well-fed pigs grunted in their pens.
They were driven forward, in their endless and desperate onslaught, by an
instinct for self-preservation, and by that eternal revolutionary principle: conquer and
divide. The defenders of successful stations, organized into battle-ready divisions by
former military professionals, stood up to the assaults of vandals, to the very last drop
of their blood. They went on to launch counter-attacks and won back every metre of the
inter-station tunnels with a fight. The stations amassed their military power in order to
answer any incursions with punitive expeditions; in order to push their civilized
neighbours from territory that was important for sustaining life, if they hadn’t managed
to attain these agreements by peaceful means; and in order to offer resistance to the
crap that was climbing out of every hole and tunnel. These were strange, freakish, and
dangerous creatures, the likes of which might well have brought Darwin himself to
despair with their obvious lack of conformity to the laws of evolutionary development.
As much as these beasts might differ from the animals humans were used to, and
whether they had been reborn under the invisible and ruinous rays of sunlight, turned
from inoffensive representatives of urban fauna into the spawn of hell, or whether they
had always dwelled in the depths, only now to be disturbed by man - still, they were an
evident part of life on earth. Disfigured, perverted - but a part of life here all the same.
And they remained subject to that very same driving impulse known to every organic
thing on this planet.
Survive. Survive at any cost.
Artyom accepted a white, enamelled cup, in which some of their homemade
station tea was splashing around. Of course, it wasn’t really tea at all, but an infusion of
dried mushrooms and other additives. Real tea was a rarity. They rationed it and drank
it only at major holidays, and it fetched a price dozens of times higher than the price of
the mushroom infusion. Nevertheless, they liked their own station brew and were even
proud enough of it to call it „tea.‟ It’s true that strangers would spit it out at first, since
they weren’t used to its taste; but soon they got used to it. And the fame of their tea
spread beyond the bounds of their station - even the traders came to get it, one by one,
risking life and limb, and soon after their tea made it down the whole metro line - even
the Hanseatic League had started to become interested in it and great caravans of the
magical infusion rolled towards VDNKh. Cash started to flow. And wherever there was
money, there were weapons, there was firewood and there were vitamins. And there
42
was life. Ever since they started making the very same tea at VDNKh, the station had
begun to grow strong; people from the nearby stations moved to the station and
stretches of track were laid to the station; prosperity had come. They were also very
proud of their pigs at VDNKh, and legend had it that it was precisely from this station
that the pigs had entered the metro: back at the very beginning of things when certain
daredevils had made their way to the „pig-breeding pavilion‟ at the Exhibition and
managed to herd the animals back down to the station.
„Listen, Artyom - how are things going with Sukhoi?‟ asked Andrey, drinking his
tea with small, cautious sips and blowing on it carefully.
„With Uncle Sasha? Everything’s fine. He came back a little while ago from a
hike down the line with some of our people. An expedition. As you probably know.‟
Andrey was about fifteen years older than Artyom. Generally speaking, he was
a scout, and rarely stood at a watch nearer than the four hundred and fiftieth metre,
and then only as a cordon commander. And here they’d posted him at the three-
hundredth metre, with good cover, but all the same, he felt the urge to head deeper,
and made use of any pretext, any false alarm, to get closer to the darkness, closer to the
secret. He loved the tunnel and knew its branches very well but, at the station, he felt
uncomfortable among the farmers, the workers, the businessmen and the
administration - he felt unneeded, perhaps. He couldn’t bring himself to hoe the earth
for mushrooms, or, even worse, stuff the fat pigs at the station’s farms with mushrooms,
standing up to his knees in manure. And he couldn’t be a trader either - he’d been unable
to stand traders from the day he was born. He had always been a soldier, a warrior, and
he believed with all his soul that this was the only occupation worthy of a man. He was
proud that he had done nothing his entire life but defend the stinking farmers, the fussy
traders, the administrators who were business-like to a fault, and the women and
children. Women were attracted to his arrogant strength, to his total confidence in
himself, to his sense of calm in relation to himself and those around him (because he
was always capable of defending them). Women promised him love, they promised him
comfort, but he could only feel comfortable beyond the fiftieth metre, beyond the
turning point, where the station lights were hidden. And the women didn’t follow him.
Why not?
Now he’d warmed up nicely as a result of the tea, and he removed his old black
beret and wiped his moustache, damp from the steam, with his sleeve. Then he began
to question Artyom eagerly for news and rumours from the south, brought by the last
expedition, by Artyom’s stepfather - by the very man who, nineteen years ago had torn
Artyom from the rats at Timiryazevskaya, unable to abandon a child, and had raised him.
„I myself might know a thing or two, but I’ll listen with pleasure, even for a
second time. What - do you mind?‟ insisted Andrey.
He didn’t have to spend any time persuading him: Artyom himself enjoyed
recalling and retelling his stepfather’s stories - after all, everyone would listen to them,
their mouths agape.
„Well, you probably know where they went . . .‟ began Artyom.
 „I know they went south. They’re so top-secret, those “hikers” of yours,‟
laughed Andrey. „They are special missions of the administration, you know!‟ he winked
at one of his people.
„Come on, there wasn’t anything secret about it,‟ Artyom waved his hand
dismissively. „The expedition was for reconnaissance, the collection of information . . .
Reliable information. Because you can’t believe strangers, the traders who wag their
tongues at us at the station - they could be traders or they could be provocateurs,
spreading misinformation.‟
„You can never trust traders,‟ grumbled Andrey. „They’re out for their own
good. How are you supposed to know whether to trust one - one day he’ll sell your tea
to the Hansa, and the next he’ll sell you and your entrails to someone else. They may
well be collecting information here, among us. To be honest, I don’t particularly trust
ours either.‟
„Well, you’re wrong to go after our own, Andrey Arkadych. Our guys are all OK.
I know almost all of them myself. They’re people, just like people anywhere. They love
money, too. They want to live better than others do, They’re striving towards
something,‟ said Artyom, attempting to defend the local traders.
„There it is. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. They love money. They want
to live better than everyone else does. And who knows what they do when they go off
into the tunnel? Can you tell me with certainty that at the very next station they aren’t
recruited by agents? Can you - or not?‟
„Which agents? Whose agents did our traders submit to?‟
„Here’s what I’ll say, Artyom. You’re still young, and there’s a lot you don’t
know. You should listen to your elders - pay attention, and you’ll stick around a bit
longer.‟
„Someone has to do their work! If it weren’t for the traders, we’d be sitting
here without military supplies, with Berdan rifles, and we’d be tossing salt at the dark
ones and drinking our tea,‟ said Artyom, not backing down.
„All right, all right, We’ve got an economist in our midst . . . Simmer down now.
You’d do better to tell us what Sukhoi saw there. What’s going on there with the
neighbours? At Alekseevskaya? At Rizhskaya?‟
„At Alekseevskaya? Nothing new. They’re growing mushrooms. And what is
Alekseevskaya anyway? A farmyard, that’s all . . . So they say.‟ Then Artyom lowered his
voice in light of the secrecy of the information he was about to give: „They want to join
us. And Rizhskaya isn’t against it either. They’re facing growing pressure over there from
the south. There’s a sombre mood - everyone’s whispering about some sort of threat,
everyone’s afraid of something, but of what, nobody knows. It’s either that there’s some
sort of new empire at the far end of the line, or that They’re afraid of the Hansa, thinking
they might want to expand, or it’s something else altogether. And all of these barnyards
are starting to cuddle up to us. Rizhskaya and Alekseevskaya both.‟
„But what do they want, in concrete terms? What are they offering? ‟ asked
Andrey.
„They want to create a federation with us that has a common defence system,
to strengthen the borders on both ends, to establish constant illumination inside the
43
inter-station tunnels, to organize a police force, to plug up the side tunnels and
corridors, to launch transport trolleys, to lay a telephone cable, to designate any
available space for mushroom-growing . . . They want a common economy - to work,
and to help each other, should it prove necessary.‟
„And where were they when we needed them? Where were they when there
was vermin crawling at us from the Botanical Gardens, from Medvedkov? When the dark
ones were attacking us, where were they?‟ growled Andrey.
„Don’t jinx us, Andrey, be careful!‟ interceded Pyotr Andreevich. „There aren’t
any dark ones here for the time being, and all’s well. It wasn’t us who defeated them.
Something happened that was of their own doing, it was something among themselves,
and now they’ve quietened down. They might be saving up their strength for now. So a
union won’t hurt us. All the more so, if we unify with our neighbours. It’ll be to their
benefit, and for our good as well.‟
„And we’ll have freedom, and equality, and brotherhood!‟ said Andrey
ironically, counting on his fingers.
„What, you don’t want to listen?‟ asked Artyom, offended.
„No, go ahead, Artyom, continue,‟ said Andrey. „We’ll have it out with Pyotr
later. This is a long-standing argument between us.‟
„All right then. And, they say that their chief supposedly agrees. Doesn’t have
any fundamental objections. It’s just necessary to consider the details. Soon there’ll be
an assembly. And then, a referendum.‟
„What do you mean, a referendum? If the people say yes, then it’s a yes. If they
say no, then the people didn’t think hard enough. Let the people think again,‟ quipped
Andrey.
„Well, Artyom, and what’s going on beyond Rizhskaya?‟ asked Pyotr
Andreevich, not paying attention to Andrey.
„What’s next? Prospect Mir station. Well, and it makes sense that it’s Prospect
Mir. That’s the boundary of the Hanseatic League. My stepfather says that everything’s
still the same between the Hansa and the Reds - they’ve kept the peace. No one there
gives a thought to the war anymore,‟ said Artyom.
„The Hanseatic League‟ was the name of the „Concord of Ring Line Stations.‟
These stations were located at the intersection of all the other lines, and, therefore of
all the trade routes. The lines were linked to one another by tunnels, which became a
meeting place for businessmen from all over the metro. These businessmen grew rich
with fantastic speed, and soon, knowing that their wealth was arousing the envy of too
many, they decided to join forces. The official name was too unwieldy though, and
among the people, the Concord was nicknamed the „Hansa‟ (someone had once
accurately compared them to the union of trade cities in Medieval Germany). The short
word was catchy, and it stuck. At the beginning, the Hansa consisted of only a few
stations; the Concord only came together gradually. The part of the Ring from Kievskaya
to Prospect Mir, what’s called the Northern Arc, and that included Kurskaya, Taganskaya
and Oktyabrskaya. Then Paveletskaya and Dobrynskaya joined in and formed another
Arc, the Southern Arc. But the biggest problem and the biggest hindrance to uniting the
Northern and Southern Arcs was the Sokol Line.
 The thing was, Artyom’s stepfather told him, the Sokol line was always sort of
special. When you glance at the map, your attention is immediately drawn to it. First of
all, it’s a straight line, straight as an arrow. Secondly, it was marked in bright red on
metro maps. And its station names contributed too: Krasnoselskaya, Krasne Vorota,
Komsomolskaya, Biblioteka imena Lenina and Leninskie Gori. And whether it was
because of these names or because of something else, the line would draw to itself
everyone who was nostalgic for the glorious Soviet past. The idea of a resurrection of
the Soviet state took easily there. At first, just one station returned to communist ideals
and a socialist form of rule, and then the one next to it, and then people from the tunnel
on the other side caught wind of this optimistic revolution and chucked out their
administration and so on and so on. The veterans who were still alive, former Komsomol
men and Party officials, permanent members of the proletariat - they all came together
at the revolutionary stations. They founded a committee, responsible for the
dissemination of this new revolution and its communist idea throughout the metro
system, under the almost Lenin-era name of „Interstational.‟ It prepared divisions of
professional revolutionaries and propagandists and sent them to enemy stations. In
general, little blood was spilt since the starving inhabitants of the Sokol line were
thirsting for the restoration of justice, for which, as far as they understood, apart from
unjustified egalitarianism, there was no other option. So the whole branch, having flared
up at one end, was soon engulfed by the crimson flames of revolution. The stations
returned to their old, Soviet names: Chistye Prudy became Kirovskaya again; Lubyanka
became Dzerzhinskaya; Okhotnyi Ryad became Prospect Marx. The stations with neutral
names were renamed with something more ideologically clear: Sportivnaya became
Kommunisticheskaya; Sokolniki became Stalinskaya; Preobrazhenskaya Ploshchhad
where it all began, became Znamya Revolutsya. And the line itself, once Sokol, was now
called by most the „Red Line‟ - it was usual in the old days for Muscovites to call their
metro lines by their colours on the map anyway, but now the line was officially called
the „Red Line.‟
But it didn’t go any further.
When the Red Line had formed itself and had ideas about spreading itself
through the metro, patience quickly wore thin at other stations. Too many people
remembered the Soviet era. Too many people saw the agitators that were sent by the
Interstational throughout the metro as a tumour that was metastasising, threatening to
kill the whole organism. And as much as the agitators and propagandists promised
electricity for the whole metro, that by joining with the Soviet powers they would
experience real communism (it was unlikely that this had come from any actual slogan
of Lenin’s - it was so exploitative), people beyond their boundaries weren’t tempted.
The Interstational sloganeers were caught and thrown back to their Soviet territory.
Then the Red leadership decided that it was time to act more resolutely: if the rest of
the metro wouldn’t take up the merry revolution flame then they needed to be lit from
underneath. Neighbouring stations, worried about the strengthening communist
propaganda, also came to the same conclusion. Historical experience demonstrates well
that there isn’t a better way of injecting communist bacilli into an area than with a
bayonet.
44
And the thunder rumbled.
The coalition of anti-communist stations, directed by the Hansa, broke the Red
Line and wanting to close the Ring circle took up the call. The Reds, of course, didn’t
expect the organized resistance and overestimated their own strength. The easy victory
they had anticipated couldn’t even be seen in their distant future. The war turned out
to be long and bloody, wearing on and on - meanwhile, the population of the metro
wasn’t all that large . . . It went on for almost a year and a half and mostly consisted of
battles for position involving guerrilla excursions and diversions, the barricading of
tunnels, the execution of prisoners, and several other atrocities committed by either
side. All sorts of things happened: Army operations, encirclement, the breaking of
encirclement, various feats, there were commanders, heroes and traitors. But the main
feature of this war was that neither of belligerent parties could shift the front line any
considerable distance.
Sometimes, it seemed that one side was gaining an edge, would take over an
adjacent station, but their opponent resisted, mobilized additional forces - and the
scales were tipped to the other side.
But the war exhausted resources. The war eliminated the best people. The war
was generally exhausting. And those that survived grew tired of it. The revolutionary
government had subtly replaced their initial problems with more modest ones. In the
beginning, they strove for the distribution of socialist power and communistic ideas
throughout the underground but now the Reds only wanted to have control over what
they saw as the inner sanctum: the station called Revolution Square. Firstly, because of
its name and secondly because it was closer than the any other station in the metro to
the Red Square and to the Kremlin, the towers of which were still adorned with ruby
stars if you believed the brave men who were so ideologically strong that they broke the
surface just to look at them. But, of course, there at the surface, near the Kremlin, right
in the centre of the Red Square was the Mausoleum. Whether Lenin’s body was still
there or not, no one knew, but that didn’t really matter. For the many years of the Soviet
era, the mausoleum had ceased to be a tomb and had become its own shrine, a sacred
symbol of the continuity of power.
Great leaders of the past started their parades there. Current leaders aspired
to it. Also, they say that from the offices of the Revolution Square station there are
secret passages to the covert laboratories of the mausoleum, which lead directly to the
coffin itself.
The Reds still had Prospect Marx, formerly Okhotnyi Ryad, which was fortified
and had become a base from which attacks on Revolution Square were launched. More
than one crusade was blessed by the revolutionary leadership and sent to liberate this
station and its tomb. But its defenders also understood what meaning it held for the
Reds and they stood to the last. Revolution Square had turned into an unapproachable
fortress. The most severe and bloody fights took place at the approach to the station.
The biggest number of people was killed there. There were plenty of heroics, those that
faced bullets with their chests, and brave men who tied grenades to themselves to blow
themselves up together with an enemy artillery point, and those that used forbidden
flame-throwers against people . . . Everything was in vain. They recaptured the station
for a day but didn’t manage to fortify it, and they were defeated, retreating the next day
when the coalition came back with a counterattack.
Exactly the same thing was happening at Lenin Library. That was the Reds‟ fort
and the coalition forces repeatedly tried to seize it from them. The station had huge
strategic value because they could split the Red Line in two parts there, and then they
would have a direct passage to the three other lines with which the Red Line doesn’t
intersect anywhere else. It was the only place. It was like a lymph gland, infected with
the Red plague, which would then be spread across the whole organism. And, to prevent
this, they had to take the Lenin Library, had to take it at any cost.
But as unsuccessful as the Reds‟ attempts were to take Revolution Square, the
efforts of the coalition to squeeze them out of Lenin Library were equally fruitless.
Meanwhile, people were tiring of the fight. Desertion was already rife, and there were
incidents of fraternization when soldiers from both sides laid down their arms upon
confrontation . . . But, unlike the First World War, the Reds didn’t gain an advantage.
Their revolutionary fuse fizzled out quietly. The coalition didn’t fare much better:
dissatisfied with the fact that they had to constantly tremble for their lives, people
picked themselves up and went off in whole family groups from the central stations to
the outer stations. The Hansa emptied and weakened. The war had badly affected trade;
traders found other ways around the system, and the important trading routes because
empty and quiet . . .
The politicians, who were supported by fewer and fewer soldiers, had to
urgently find a way to end the war, before the guns turned against them. So, under the
strictest of secret conditions and at a necessarily neutral station, the leaders from enemy
sides met: the Hansa president, Loginov, and the head of the Arbat Confederation,
Kolpakov.
They quickly signed a peace agreement. The parties exchanged stations. The
Red Line received the dilapidated Revolution Square but conceded the Lenin Library to
the Arbat Confederation. It wasn’t an easy step for either to make. The confederation
lost one of its parts along with its influence over the north-west. The Red Line became
punctuated since there was now a station in the middle of it that didn’t belong to it and
cut it in half. Despite the fact that both parties guaranteed each other the right to free
transit through their former territories, that sort of situation couldn’t help but upset the
Reds . . . But what the coalition was proposing was too tempting. And the Red Line didn’t
resist. The Hansa gained more of an advantage from the agreement, of course, because
they could now close the Ring, removing the final obstacles to their prosperity.
They agreed to observe the status quo, and an interdiction about conducting
propaganda and subversive activities in the territory of their former opponent. Everyone
was satisfied. And now, when the cannons and the politicians had gone silent, it was the
turn of the propagandists to explain to the masses that their own side had managed an
outstanding diplomatic feat and, in essence, had won the war.
Years have passed since that memorable day when the peace agreement was
signed. It was observed by both parties too - the Hansa found in the Red Line a
favourable economic partner and the latter left behind its aggressive intentions:
comrade Moskvin, the secretary general of Communist party of the Moscow
45
Underground in the name of V.I.Lenin, dialectically proved the possibility of constructing
communism in one separate metro line. The old enmity was forgotten.
Artyom remembered this lesson in recent history well, just as he strived to
remember everything his stepfather told him.
„It’s good that the slaughter came to an end,‟ Pyotr Andreevich said. „It was
impossible to go anywhere near the Ring for a year and a half: there were cordons
everywhere, and they would check your documents a hundred times. I had dealings
there at the time and there was no way to get through apart from past the Hansa. And
they stopped me right at Prospect Mir. They almost put me up against a wall.‟
„And? You’ve never told us about this, Pyotr . . . How did it work out?‟ Andrey
was interested.
Artyom slouched slightly, seeing that the story-teller’s flashlight had been
passed from his hands. But this promised to be interested so he didn’t bother to butt in.
„Well . . . It was very simple. They took me for a Red spy. So, I’m coming out of the tunnel
at Prospect Mir, on our line. And Prospect is also under the Hansa. It’s an annexe, so to
speak. Well, things aren’t so strict there yet - they’ve got a market there, a trading
zone. As you know, it’s the same everywhere with the Hansa: the stations on the Ring
itself form something like their home territory. And the transfer passages from the Ring
stations are like radials - and they’ve put customs and passport controls there . . .‟
„Come on, we all know that, what are you lecturing us for . . . Tell us instead
what happened to you there!‟ Andrey interrupted him.
„Passport controls,‟ repeated Pyotr Andreevich, sternly drawing his eyebrows
together, determined to make a point. „At the radial stations, they have markets,
bazaars . . . Foreigners are allowed there. But you can’t cross the border - no way. I got
out at Prospect Mir, I had half a kilo of tea with me . . . I needed some ammunition for
my rifle. I thought I’d make a trade. Well, turns out They’re under martial law. They
won’t let go of any military supplies. I ask one person, then another - they all make
excuses, and sidle away from me. Only one whispered to me: “What ammunition, you
moron . . . Get the hell out of here, and quick - they’ve probably already informed on
you.” I thanked him and headed quietly back into the tunnel. And right at the exit, a
patrol stops me, and whistles ring out from the station, and still another detachment is
running towards us. They ask for my documents. I give them my passport, with our
station’s stamp. They look at it carefully and ask, “And where’s your pass?” I answer,
surprised, “What pass?” It turns out that to get to the station, you’re obliged to get a
pass: near the tunnel exit there’s a little table, and they have an office there. They check
identification and issue a pass when necessary. They’re up to their ears in bureaucracy,
the rats . . .
„How I made it past that table, I don’t know . . . Why didn’t the blockheads stop
me? And now I’m the one who has to explain myself to the patrol. So this muscle-head
stands there with his shaved skull and his camouflage and says, “He slipped past! He
snuck past! He crept past!” He flips further through my passport, and sees the Sokol
stamp there. I lived there earlier, at Sokol . . . He sees this stamp, and his eyes all but
filled with blood. Like a bull seeing red. He jerked his gun from his shoulder and roars,
“Hands above your head, you scum!” His level of training was immediately apparent. He
grabs me by the scruff of my neck and drags me across the entire station, to the pass
point in the transfer passage, to his superior. And he says, threateningly, “Just you wait,
all I need is to get permission from command - and you’ll be against the wall, spy.” I was
about to be sick. So I try to justify myself, I say, “What kind of a spy am I? I’m a
businessman! I brought some tea from VDNKh.” And he replies that he’ll stuff my mouth
full of tea and ram it in with the barrel of his gun. I can see that I’m not very convincing,
and that, if his brass gives their approval, he’ll lead me off to the two-hundredth metre,
put my face to the pipes, and shoot me full of holes, in accordance with the laws of war.
Things weren’t turning out too well, I thought . . . We approached the pass point, and
this muscle-head of mine went to discuss the best place to shoot me. I looked at his
boss, and it was as if a burden fell from my shoulders: it was Pashka Fedotov, my former
classmate - we’d remained friends even after school, and then we’d lost track of each
other . . .‟
„Well fuck! You scared the hell out of me! And I already thought you were done
for, that they’d killed you,‟ inserted Andrey venomously, and all of the men who were
gathered tightly around the campfire at the four hundred and fiftieth metre burst into
friendly laughter.
Even Pyotr Andreevich himself, first glancing angrily at Andrey, couldn’t restrain
himself and smiled. Laughter sounded along the tunnel, giving birth, somewhere in its
depths, to a distorted echo, a sinister screech that sounded unlike anything . . . And
everyone gradually fell silent upon hearing it.
From the depths of the tunnel, form the north, the suspicious sounds were
rather distinct now: there were rustlings and light rhythmic steps.
Andrey, of course, was the first to hear them. He went silent instantly and
waved a hand to signal the others to be quiet too, and he picked up his machine gun
from the ground and jumped up from where he was sitting.
Slowly undoing his safety catch and loading a cartridge, his back to the wall, he
silently moved from the fireside into the tunnel. Artyom got up too - he was curious to
see who he had missed the last time but Andrey turned back and frowned at him angrily.
He stopped at the border of the darkness, put his gun to his shoulder and lay down flat
shouting, „Give me some light!‟
One of his guys, holding a powerful accumulator flashlight, which had been
assembled from old car headlights, turned it on, and the bright beam ripped through the
darkness. Snatched from the darkness, a fuzzy silhouette appeared on the floor for a
second. It was something small, something not really scary looking, something which
rushed back to the north.
Artyom couldn’t restrain himself and he cried out:
„Shoot! It’s getting away!‟
But for some reason Andrey did not shoot. Pyotr Andreevich got up too,
keeping his machine gun at the ready, and shouted:
„Andryukha! You still alive?‟
The guys sitting at the fire whispered in agitation, hearing the lock of Andrey’s
gun slide back. Finally Andrey appeared in the light of the flashlight, dusting off his
jacket.
46
„Yes, I’m alive, I’m alive!‟ he said, laughing.
„Why you snorting?‟ Pyotr Andreevich asked him suspiciously.
„It had three feet! And two heads. Mutants! The dark ones are here! They’ll cut
our throats! Shoot, or they’ll get away! Must have been a lot of them! Must have!‟
Andrey continued to laugh.
„Why didn’t you shoot? Fine, my young man might not have but he’s young,
didn’t get it. But why did you mess it up? You’re not new to this, after all. You know what
happened at Polezhaevskaya?‟ asked Pyotr Andreevich angrily when Andrey had
returned to the fire.
„Yes I’ve heard about Polezhaevskaya a dozen times!‟ Andrey waved him away.
- „It was a dog! A puppy, not even a dog . . . It’s already the second time it’s tried to get
close to the fire, towards the heat and the light. And you almost took him out and now
you’re asking me why I’m being too considerate. Knackers!‟
„How was I supposed to know it was a dog?‟ Artyom had taken offence. „It gave
out such sounds . . . And then, a week ago they were talking about seeing a rat the size
of a pig.‟
„You believe in fairy tales! Wait a second and I’ll bring you your rat!‟ Andrey
said, throwing his machine gun over his shoulder and walking off into the darkness.
A minute later, they heard a fine whistle from the darkness. And then a voice
called out, affectionately, coaxingly:
„Come here, come here little one, don’t be afraid!‟
He spent a long time convincing it, about ten minutes, calling it and whistling
to it and then finally his figure appeared again in the twilight.
He returned to the fire and smiled triumphantly as he opened his jacket. A
puppy fell out onto the ground, shivering, piteous, wet and intolerably dirty, with matted
fur of an indistinct colour, and black eyes full of horror, and flattened ears.
Once on the ground, he immediately tried to get away but Andrey’s firm hand
grabbed it and held it in place. Petting it on its head, he removed his jacket and covered
the little dog.
„The puppy needs to be warmed up,‟ he explained.
„Come on, Andrey, it’s a fleabag!‟ Pyotr Andreevich tried to bring Andrey to his
senses. „And he might even have worms. And generally you might pick up an infection
and spread it through the station . . .‟
„OK, Pyotr, that’s enough, stop whining. Just look at it!‟ And he pulled back the
flaps of his jacket showing Pyotr the muzzle of the puppy that was still shivering either
out of fear or cold. „Look at its eyes - those eyes could never lie!‟
Pyotr Andreevich looked at the puppy sceptically. They were frightened eyes
but they were undoubtedly honest. Pyotr Andreevich thawed a bit.
„All right . . . You nature-lover . . . Wait, I’ll find something for him to chew on,‟
he muttered and started to look in his rucksack.
„Have a look, have a look. You never know, maybe something useful will grow
from it - a German Shepherd for example,‟ Andrey said and moved the jacket containing
the puppy closer to the fire.
 „But where could a puppy come from to get here? There aren’t any people in „You guys . . . There’s no point in talking about the dark ones. The last time we
that direction. Only dark ones. Do the dark ones keep dogs?‟ one of Andrey’s men, a were sitting like this and talking about them, they crawled up. Other guys have told me
thin man with tousled hair who hadn’t said anything until now asked as he looked that the very same thing happened to them. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, I’m not
suspiciously at the puppy who had dozed off in the heat. superstitious - but what if it’s not? What if they can sense it? Our shift’s almost over
„You’re right, of course, Kirill,‟ Andrey answered seriously. „The dark ones already, what do we need these shenanigans for at the last minute?‟
don’t keep pets as far as I know.‟ „Yeah, actually . . . It’s probably not worth it,‟ seconded Artyom.
„Well how do they live then? What do they eat, anyway?‟ asked another man, „OK, that’s enough, man, don’t chicken out on us! We’ll get there in the end!‟
scratching his unshaven jaw with a light, electric crackling sound. said Andrey, trying to cheer up Artyom but not really succeeding in convincing him.
He was tall and obviously battle-hardened, broad-shouldered and thickset, with a The mere thought of the dark ones sent an unpleasant shiver through everyone,
completely shaven head. He was dressed in a long and well-sewn leather cloak, which, including Andrey, although he tried to hide it. He didn’t fear humans of any kind: not
in this day and age, was a rarity. bandits, not cutthroat anarchists, not soldiers of the Red Army. But the undead
„What do they eat? They say they eat all kinds of junk. They eat carrion. They disgusted him, and it wasn’t that he was afraid of them, but that he couldn’t stay calm
eat rats. They eat humans. They’re not picky, you know,‟ answered Andrey, contorting when he thought about them or indeed any other danger.
his face in disgust. Everyone fell quiet. A heavy, oppressive silence came over the men grouped
„Cannibals?‟ asked the man with the shaved head, without a shadow of around the fire. The knobbly logs in the fire were crackling, and to the north, a muted,
surprise - and it sounded as though he’d come across cannibals before. deep-chested croaking sound in the tunnel could be heard from time to time in the
„Cannibals . . . They’re not even human. They’re undead. Who knows what the distance, as if the Moscow metro were the giant intestine of some unknown monster.
hell they are! It’s good they don’t have weapons, so we’re able to fend them off. For the And these sounds were really terrifying.
time being. Pyotr! Remember, six months ago we managed to take one of them
captive?‟
„I remember,‟ spoke up Pyotr Andreevich. „He sat in our lock-up for two weeks,
wouldn’t drink our water, didn’t touch our food, and then croaked.‟
„You didn’t interrogate him?‟ asked the man.
„He didn’t understand a word we said, in our language. They’d speak plain
Russian to him, and he’d keep quiet. He kept quiet the entire time. Like his mouth was
full of water. They’d beat him too, and he said nothing. And they’d give him something
to eat, and he’d say nothing. He’d just growl every once in a while. And he howled so
loudly just before he died that the whole station woke up . . .‟
„So how’d the dog get here anyway?‟ Kirill reminded them.
„Who the hell knows how it got here . . . Maybe it ran away from them. Maybe
they wanted to eat it. It’s about two kilometres to here. Couldn’t a dog have run here
from there? Maybe it belongs to someone. Maybe someone was coming from the north
and fell on the dark ones. And the little dog managed to get away. Doesn’t matter
anyway how she got here. Look at her yourself. Does she look like a monster? Like a
mutant? No, she’s a little puppy dog, nothing special. And she’s drawn to people - that
means she’s used to us. Otherwise why would she have tried three times to get close to
the fire?‟
Kirill went silent, thinking through the argument. Pyotr Andreevich filled up the
kettle with water from the canister, and asked: „Anyone want more tea? Let’s have a
final cup, soon it’ll be time for us to be relieved.‟
„Tea - now you’re talking! Let’s have some,‟ Andrey said. The others became
animated at the idea as well.
The kettle came to a boil. Pyotr Andreevich poured another cup for those who
wanted it, and made a request:
47
13. CORMAC MCCARTHY – THE ROAD (2006) (excerpts)
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch
the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray
each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming
away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed
away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and
looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd
wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light
playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost
among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water
dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the
days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay
a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth
from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as
the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what
it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones
cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that
pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low
moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.
With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and
squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the
month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were
moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything
paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He
studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees.
Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He
lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose
on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there
holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew
only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never
spoke.
When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and
folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their
plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread
the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took 3
the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy
sleep. He'd pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the
blankets. He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This
48
was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned
in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.
I'm right here.
I know.
An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried
knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the cart
and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle
mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his
shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty. Below in the
little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a
burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along
the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world
entire.
They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon a
roadside gas station. They stood in the road and studied it. I think we should check it
out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about them. They
crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps. The cap was gone
and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a
rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The pumps standing with
their hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact. The door to the service bay was
open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one wall. He went through the
drawers but there was nothing there that he could use. Good half-inch drive sockets. A
ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A metal barrel full of trash. He went into
the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in the door. A metal desk, a
cashregister. Some old automotive manuals, swollen and sodden. The linoleum was
stained and curling from the leaking roof. He crossed to the desk and stood there. Then
he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father's house in that long ago.
The boy watched him. What are you doing? he said.
A quarter mile down the road he stopped and looked back. We're not thinking, he said.
We have to go back. He pushed the cart off the road and tilted it over where it could not
be seen and they left their packs and went back to the station. In the service bay he
dragged out the steel trashdrum and tipped it over and pawed out all the quart plastic
oilbottles. Then they sat in the floor decanting them of their dregs one by one, leaving
the bottles to stand upside down draining into a pan until at the end they had almost a
half quart of motor oil. He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a
rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the
long gray dawns. You can read me a story, the boy said. Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I
can.
On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred
and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road
and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly
in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadow-lands
stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned. Farther along
were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and
weathered. At the top of the hill they stood in the cold and the wind, getting their
breath. He looked at the boy. I'm all right, the boy said. The man put his hand on his
shoulder and nodded toward the open country below them. He got the binoculars out
of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of
a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste. Nothing
to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can. The boy leaned on the
cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the
glasses. It's raining. Yes, the man said. I know.
They left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope
through the dark poles of the standing trees to where he'd seen a running ledge of rock
and they sat under the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow across
the valley. It was very cold. They sat huddled together wrapped each in a blanket over
their coats and after a while the rain stopped and there was just the dripping in the
woods.
When it had cleared they went down to the cart and pulled away the tarp and got their
blankets and the things they would need for the night. They went back up the hill and
made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around
the boy trying to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless dark come
to enshroud them. The gray shape of the city vanished in the night's onset like an
apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the wind. Then they walked
out to the road and he took the boy's hand and they went to the top of the hill where
the road crested and where they could see out over the darkening country to the south,
standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any sign of a fire or
a lamp. There was nothing. The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more
than a mote of light and after a while they walked back. Everything too wet to make a
fire. They ate their poor meal cold and lay down in their bedding with the lamp between
them. He'd brought the boy's book but the boy was too tired for reading. Can we leave
the lamp on till I'm asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we can.
He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His
face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian.
Can I ask you something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we're still going south.
Yes.
So we'll be warm.
49
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what?
Nothing. Just okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.
I'm going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?
Yes. That's okay.
And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence.
The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the
void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its
shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If
only my heart were stone.
He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose
while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out
through the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched
coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his
face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you
a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a
soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.
They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to hand on
the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly
burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash
and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather.
Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put
into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want
to forget.
There was a lake a mile from his uncle's farm where he and his uncle used to go in the
fall for firewood. He sat in the back of the rowboat trailing his hand in the cold wake
while his uncle bent to the oars. The old man's feet in their black kid shoes braced
against the uprights. His straw hat. His cob pipe in his teeth and a thin drool swinging
from the pipebowl. He turned to take a sight on the far shore, cradling the oarhandles,
taking the pipe from his mouth to wipe his chin with the back of his hand. The shore
was lined with birchtrees that stood bone pale against the dark of the evergreens
beyond. The edge of the lake a riprap of twisted stumps, gray and weathered, the
windfall trees of a hurricane years past. The trees themselves had long been sawed for
firewood and carried away. His uncle turned the boat and shipped the oars and they
drifted over the sandy shallows until the transom grated in the sand. A dead perch
lolling belly up in the clear water. Yellow leaves. They left their shoes on the warm
painted boards and dragged the boat up onto the beach and set out the anchor at the
end of its rope. A lardcan poured with concrete with an eyebolt in the center. They
walked along the shore while his uncle studied the treestumps, puffing at his pipe, a
manila rope coiled over his shoulder. He picked one out and they turned it over, using
the roots for leverage, until they got it half floating in the water. Trousers rolled to the
knee but still they got wet. They tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed
back across the lake, jerking the stump slowly behind them. By then it was already
evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and
windowlights coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had
spoken a word. This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days
upon.
They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill
country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate highway
below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder.
Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf
to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened
shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and
blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen
beyond the murk. They were days fording that cauterized terrain. The boy had found
some crayons and painted his facemask with fangs and he trudged on uncomplaining.
One of the front wheels of the cart had gone wonky. What to do about it? Nothing.
Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were
long and dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the
stones. To take your life. He held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail
breath in the blackness.
He woke to the sound of distant thunder and sat up. The faint light all about, quivering
and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot. He pulled the tarp about them and
he lay awake a long time listening. If they got wet there'd be no fires to dry by. If they
got wet they would probably die. The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless
and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up.
No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in
that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations
in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No
fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness,
50
counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something
nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite.
Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the
universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a
ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He
looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched
it expire there like the last host of Christendom. They pushed on together with the tarp
pulled over them. The wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing. Gray slush by
the roadside. Black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash. No more balefires
on the distant ridges. He thought the bloodcults must have all consumed one another.
No one traveled this road. No road- agents, no marauders. After a while they came to a
roadside garage and they stood within the open door and looked out at the gray sleet
gusting down out of the high country.
They collected some old boxes and built a fire in the floor and he found some tools and
emptied out the cart and sat working on the wheel. He pulled the bolt and bored out
the collet with a hand drill and resleeved it with a section of pipe he'd cut to length with
a hacksaw. Then he bolted it all back together and stood the cart upright and wheeled
it around the floor. It ran fairly true. The boy sat watching everything.
In the morning they went on. Desolate country. A boar-hide nailed to a barndoor. Ratty.
Wisp of a tail. Inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters, dried and dusty
among the wan slats of light. There could be something here, the boy said. There could
be some corn or something. Let's go, the man said. Mostly he worried about their shoes.
That and food. Always food. In an old batboard smokehouse they found a ham
gambreled up in a high corner. It looked like something fetched from a tomb, so dried
and drawn. He cut into it with his knife. Deep red and salty meat inside. Rich and good.
They fried it that night over their fire, thick slices of it, and put the slices to simmer with
a tin of beans. Later he woke in the dark and he thought that he'd heard bulldrums
beating somewhere in the low dark hills. Then the wind shifted and there was just the
silence.
14. WILLIAM GIBSON – NEUROMANCER (1984) (excerpts)
PART ONE – CHIBA CITY BLUES
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
"It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way
through the crowd around the door of the Chat. "It's like my body's developed this
massive drug deficiency." It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a
bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two
words in Japanese.
Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a
tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a web work of East
European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely
tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose
cheekbones were ridged with Joe boys," Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with
his good hand. "Maybe some business with you, Case?"
Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.
The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age
of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm
whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-
function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. "You are too much
the artiste, Herr Case." Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his
overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. "You are the artiste of the slightly
funny deal."
"Sure," Case said, and sipped his beer. "Somebody's gotta be funny around
here. Sure the fuck isn't you." […]
The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever
known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique
supplanted monthly, and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that
Memphis hotel.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the
speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still
he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no
console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But
the dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo and he'd cry for it, cry
in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his
hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to
reach the console that wasn't there. […]
Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy a rustler, one of the best in
the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends
in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth
51
and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied
consciousness into the con sensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief he'd
worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software
required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich
fields of data.
He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd never make. He stole
from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence
in Amsterdam. He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now.
He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told
him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because--still smiling-- they
were going to make sure he never worked again.
They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron,
he hallucinated for thirty hours.
The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.
In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain
relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own
flesh. […]
Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-
halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn't see the
lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo
of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled
above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes
dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a
narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei
its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead,
the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky. […]
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored
researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling
and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile
surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you
but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or
kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment
for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate
protocol. […]
Friday night on Ninsei.
He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop called
Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a
dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the
back of the man's right hand. circuits of tanks and war planes. "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced
Was it authentic? if that's for real, he thought, he's in for trouble. If it wasn't, daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught
served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks
microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged
would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic. in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights,
The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was a gaijin crowd. receding...." […]
Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary tourists hunting pleasures no
guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct
species of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire and commerce.
There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei
enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place
as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain sense
in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't
there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology
itself. […]

She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her
sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones,
framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the fletcher were
slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy.
The nails looked artificial. "I think you screwed up, Case. I showed up and you
just fit me right into your reality picture."
"So what do you want, lady?" He sagged back against the hatch.
"You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly, Case. My name's Molly.
I'm collecting you for the man I work for. Just wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt
you "
"That's good."
"'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just the way I'm wired."
She wore tight black glove leather jeans and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte
fabric that seemed to absorb light. "If I put this dart gun away, will you be easy, Case?
You look like you like to take stupid chances."
"Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem."
"That's fine, man." The fletcher vanished into the black jacket. "Because you try
to fuck around with me, you'll be taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life."
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a
barely audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their
housings beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew. […]

"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games," said the voice-over, "in early
graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-
dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns,
demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals- cold blue military footage
burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire con. trot
52
15. NEAL STEPHENSON – SNOW CRASH (1992) (excerpts)
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to
here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform
is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce
off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts
through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony
extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of
telephone books.
When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals
in cash, but someone might come after him anyway -- might want his car, or his cargo.
The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry;
it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when
you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on
electricity.
The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in
Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a
delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator
with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on
that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon
had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of
burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding
this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get
nothing but trouble from the Deliverator. […]
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role
model. This is America . People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a
problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no
one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in
the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-
drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're
making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once
our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and
dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the
Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a
broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity --
y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
53
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a
mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's
report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his
cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no
cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty
minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The
Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his
standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it:
homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-
related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and
waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can't you guys tell time?
Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed industry.
People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors
unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda , Guanajuato, South Jersey
, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they
had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes.
Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-
stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-
class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the
place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in
their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone
call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life,
liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. Sent psychologists out to
these people's houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview,
hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy,
inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put
them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so
perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn't respond without committing a venial sin. […]
The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape,
audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke
based on the latest highly publicized disaster.
He uploads it to the CIC database -- the Library, formerly the Library of Congress,
but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word
"congress" means. And even the word "library" is getting hazy. It used to be a place full
of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and
magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which
is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more
up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more
sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference
between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this
happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by-
out a big fat stock offering. […] 30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes.
So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his The sky and the ground are black, like a computer screen that hasn't had
computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this anything drawn into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and the Street is
imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance.
It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It. But people in Hiro's neighborhood are very good programmers, so it's tasteful. The
houses look like real houses, There are a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright reproductions and
Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. some fancy Victoriana.
It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected So it's always a shock to step out onto the Street, where everything seems to
in the lenses of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are be a mile high. This is Downtown, the most heavily developed area. If you go couple of
walking up and down it. hundred kilometers in either direction, the development will taper down to almost
The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by the nothing, just a thin chain of streetlights casting white pools on the black velvet ground.
computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery's Global But Downtown is a dozen Manhattans, embroidered with neon and stacked on top of
Multimedia Protocol Group. The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way each other.
around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand In the real world-planet Earth, Reality, there are somewhere between six and
kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-
Earth. stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer;
The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who these people have more money than all of the others put together. Of these billion
recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens to be a power potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers,
of 2^16 power to be exact -- and even the exponent 16 is equal to 2, and 4 is equal to and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street
22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given
of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that's time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway,
how many digits a computer can recognize. One of those digits is 0, and the other is 1. by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at
Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s by each other, and any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City. […]
subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly recognizable to a hacker.
Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can
build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks,
signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light
shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are
ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.
The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -- it's just a
computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere -- none of
these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available
to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the
Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off
into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the
graphic representations -- the user interfaces -- of a myriad different pieces of software
that have been engineered by major corporations. In order to place these things on the
Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have
had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors,
the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes
into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and
expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist. […]

54
 5. CLI-FI AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

55
16. RICHARD JEFFERIES – AFTER LONDON (1885) (excerpts)
The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves
a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after
London ended, so that all the country looked alike. […]
In the autumn, as the meadows were not mown, the grass withered as it stood,
falling this way and that, as the wind had blown it; the seeds dropped, and the bennets
became a greyish-white, or, where the docks and sorrel were thick, a brownish-red. The
wheat, after it had ripened, there being no one to reap it, also remained standing, and
was eaten by clouds of sparrows, rooks, and pigeons, which flocked to it and were
undisturbed, feasting at their pleasure. As the winter came on, the crops were beaten
down by the storms, soaked with rain, and trodden upon by herds of animals. […]
Footpaths were concealed by the second year, but roads could be traced, though as
green as the sward, and were still the best for walking, because the tangled wheat and
weeds, and, in the meadows, the long grass, caught the feet of those who tried to pass
through. Year by year the original crops of wheat, barley, oats, and beans asserted their
presence by shooting up, but in gradually diminished force, as nettles and coarser plants,
such as the wild parsnips, spread out into the fields from the ditches and choked them.
[…]
No fields, indeed, remained, for where the ground was dry, the thorns, briars, brambles,
and saplings already mentioned filled the space, and these thickets and the young trees
had converted most part of the country into an immense forest. Where the ground was
naturally moist, and the drains had become choked with willow roots, which, when
confined in tubes, grow into a mass like the brush of a fox, sedges and flags and rushes
covered it. […]
By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where
a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path.
The ditches, of course, had long since become full of leaves and dead branches, so that
the water which should have run off down them stagnated, and presently spread out
into the hollow places and by the corner of what had once been fields, forming marshes
where the horsetails, flags, and sedges hid the water. […]
From an elevation, therefore, there was nothing visible but endless forest and marsh.
On the level ground and plains the view was limited to a short distance, because of the
thickets and the saplings which had now become young trees. The downs only were still
partially open, yet it was not convenient to walk upon them except in the tracks of
animals, because of the long grass which, being no more regularly grazed upon by sheep,
as was once the case, grew thick and tangled. […]
56
In the first years after the fields were left to themselves, the fallen and over-ripe corn
crops became the resort of innumerable mice. They swarmed to an incredible degree,
not only devouring the grain upon the straw than had never been cut, but clearing out
every single ear in the wheat-ricks that were standing about the country. Nothing
remained in these ricks but straw, pierced with tunnels and runs, the home and
breeding-place of mice, which thence poured forth into the fields. Such grain as had
been left in barns and granaries, in mills, and in warehouses of the deserted towns,
disappeared in the same manner.
When men tried to raise crops in small gardens and enclosures for their
sustenance, these legions of mice rushed in and destroyed the produce of their labour.
Nothing could keep them out, and if a score were killed, a hundred more supplied their
place. […]
Almost worse than the mice were the rats, which came out of the old cities in such vast
numbers that the people who survived and saw them are related to have fled in fear.
This terror, however, did not last so long as the evil of the mice, for the rats, probably
not finding sufficient food when together, scattered abroad, and were destroyed singly
by the cats and dogs, who slew them by thousands, far more than they could afterwards
eat, so that the carcases were left to decay. […]
The dogs, of course, like the cats, were forced by starvation into the fields, where they
perished in incredible numbers. Of many species of dogs which are stated to have been
plentiful among the ancients, we have now nothing but the name. The poodle is extinct,
the Maltese terrier, the Pomeranian, the Italian greyhound, and, it is believed, great
numbers of crosses and mongrels have utterly disappeared. There was none to feed
them, and they could not find food for themselves, nor could they stand the rigour of
the winter when exposed to the frost in the open air. […]
The bulls are savage beyond measure at certain seasons of the year. If they see men at
a distance, they retire; if they come unexpectedly face to face, they attack. […] The white
or dun bull is the monarch of our forests.
With wild times, the wild habits have returned […].
For the first few years after the change took place there seemed a danger lest the foreign
wild beasts that had been confined as curiosities in menageries should multiply and
remain in the woods. But this did not happen.
Some few lions, tigers, bears, and other animals did indeed escape, together
with many less furious creatures, and it is related that they roamed about the fields for
a long time. They were seldom met with, having such an extent of country to wander
over, and after a while entirely disappeared. If any progeny were born, the winter frosts
must have destroyed it, and the same fate awaited the monstrous serpents which had
been collected for exhibition. […]
In the castle yard at Longtover may still be seen the bones of an elephant which was
found dying in the woods near that spot. […]
So far as this, all that I have stated has been clear, and there can be no doubt that what
has been thus handed down from mouth to mouth is for the most part correct. When I
pass from trees and animals to men, however, the thing is different, for nothing is
certain and everything confused. None of the accounts agree, nor can they be altogether
reconciled with present facts or with reasonable supposition; yet it is not so long since
but a few memories, added one to the other, can bridge the time, and, though not many,
there are some written notes still to be found. I must attribute the discrepancy to the
wars and hatreds which sprang up and divided the people, so that one would not listen
to what the others wished to say, and the truth was lost.
Besides which, in the conflagration which consumed the towns, most of the
records were destroyed, and are no longer to be referred to. And it may be that even
when they were proceeding, the causes of the change were not understood. Therefore,
what I am now about to describe is not to be regarded as the ultimate truth, but as the
nearest to which I could attain after comparing the various traditions.
Some say, then, that the first beginning of the change was because the sea
silted up the entrances to the ancient ports, and stopped the vast commerce which was
once carried on. It is certainly true that many of the ports are silted up, and are now
useless as such, but whether the silting up preceded the disappearance of the
population, or whether the disappearance of the population, and the consequent
neglect caused the silting, I cannot venture to positively assert.
For there are signs that the level of the sea has sunk in some places, and signs
that it has become higher in others, so that the judicious historian will simply state the
facts, and refrain from colouring them with his own theory as Silvester has done. Others
again maintain that the supply of food from over the ocean suddenly stopping caused
great disorders, and that the people crowded on board all the ships to escape starvation,
and sailed away, and were no more heard of.
It has, too, been said that the earth, from some attractive power exercised by
the passage of an enormous dark body through space, became tilted or inclined to its
orbit more than before, and that this, while it lasted, altered the flow of the magnetic
currents, which, in an imperceptible manner, influence the minds of men. Hitherto the
stream of human life had directed itself to the westward, but when this reversal of
magnetism occurred, a general desire arose to return to the east. And those whose
business is theology have pointed out that the wickedness of those times surpassed
understanding, and that a change and sweeping away of the human evil that had
accumulated was necessary, and was effected by supernatural means. The relation of
this must be left to them, since it is not the province of the philosopher to meddle with
such matters.
All that seems certain is, that when the event took place, the immense crowds
collected in cities were most affected, and that the richer and upper classes made use
of their money to escape. Those left behind were mainly the lower and most ignorant,
so far as the arts were concerned; those that dwelt in distant and outlying places; and
57
those who lived by agriculture. These last at that date had fallen to such distress that
they could not hire vessels to transport themselves. The exact number of those left
behind cannot, of course, be told […]. Of what became of the vast multitudes that left
the country, nothing has ever been heard, and no communication has been received
from them. For this reason I cannot conceal my opinion that they must have sailed either
to the westward or to the southward where the greatest extent of ocean is understood
to exist, and not to the eastward as Silvester would have it in his work upon the
`Unknown Orb', the dark body travelling in space to which I have alluded. None of our
vessels in the present day dare venture into those immense tracts of sea, nor, indeed,
out of sight of land, unless they know they shall see it again so soon as they have reached
and surmounted the ridge of the horizon. Had they only crossed to the mainland or
continent again, we should most likely have heard of their passage across the countries
there.
It is true that ships rarely come over, and only to two ports, and that the men
on them say (so far as can be understood) that their country is equally deserted now,
and has likewise lost its population. But still, as men talk unto men, and we pass
intelligence across great breadths of land, it is almost certain that, had they travelled
that way, some echo of their footsteps would yet sound back to us. Regarding this
theory, therefore, as untenable, I put forward as a suggestion that the ancients really
sailed to the west or to the south.
As, for the most part, those who were left behind were ignorant, rude, and
unlettered, it consequently happened that many of the marvellous things which the
ancients did, and the secrets of their science, are known to us by name only, and, indeed,
hardly by name. […]
With certain machines worked by fire, they traversed the land swift as the swallow glides
through the sky, but of these things not a relic remains to us. What metal-work or wheels
or bars of iron were left, and might have given us a clue, were all broken up and melted
down for use in other ways when metal became scarce. […]
Where are the wonderful structures with which the men of those days were lifted to the
skies, rising above the clouds? These marvellous things are to us little more than fables
of the giants and of the old gods that walked upon the earth, which were fables even to
those whom we call the ancients. […]
The reason why so many arts and sciences were lost was because, as I have
previously said, the most of those who were left in the country were ignorant, rude, and
unlettered. […]
The cunning artificers of the cities all departed, and everything fell quickly into
barbarism; nor could it be wondered at, for the few and scattered people of those days
had enough to do to preserve their lives. Communication between one place and
another was absolutely cut off, and if one perchance did recollect something that might
have been of use, he could not confer with another who knew the other part, and thus
between them reconstruct the machine. In the second generation even these disjointed
memories died out. […]
Now, in briefly recounting the principal divisions of men, I will commence with those
who are everywhere considered the lowest. These are the Bushmen, who live wholly in
the woods. Even among the ancients, when every man, woman, and child could exercise
those arts which are now the special mark of nobility, i.e. reading and writing, there was
a degraded class of persons who refused to avail themselves of the benefits of
civilization. They obtained their food by begging, wandering along the highways,
crouching around fires which they lit in the open, clad in rags, and exhibiting
countenances from which every trace of self-respect had disappeared. These were the
ancestors of the present men of the bushes. […] Face to face the Bushman is never to
be feared; a whole `camp' or tribal family will scatter if a traveler stumbles into their
midst. It is from behind a tree or under cover of night that he deals his murderous blow.
[…]
Under the name of gipsies, those who are no often called Romany and Zingari were well
known to the ancients. Indeed, they boast that their ancestry goes back so much farther
than the oldest we can claim, that the ancients themselves were but modern to them.
[…] They remained apart, and still continue after civilization has disappeared, exactly the
same as they were before it commenced. […]
parts which were built upon low ground are marshes and swamps. Those houses that
were upon high ground were, of course, like the other towns, ransacked of all they
contained by the remnant that was left; the iron, too, was extracted. Trees growing up
by them in time cracked the walls, and they fell in. Trees and bushes covered them; ivy
and nettles concealed the crumbling masses of brick. […]
Thus the low-lying parts of the mighty city of London became swamps, and the higher
grounds were clad with bushes. The very largest of the buildings fell in, and there was
nothing visible but trees and hawthorns on the upper lands, and willows, flags, reeds,
and rushes on the lower. These crumbling ruins still more choked the stream, and
almost, if not quite, turned it back. If any water ooze past, it is not perceptible, and there
is no channel through to the salt ocean. It is a vast stagnant swamp, which no man dare
enter, since death would be his inevitable fate.
There exhales from this oozy mass so fatal a vapour that no animal can endure
it. The black water bears a greenish-brown floating scum, which for ever bubbles up
from the putrid mud of the bottom. When the wind collects the miasma, and, as it were,
presses it together, it becomes visible as a low cloud which hangs over the place. The
cloud does not advance beyond the limit of the marsh, seeming to stay there by some
constant attraction; and well it is for us that it does not, since at such times when the
vapour is thickest, the very wildfowl leave the reeds, and fly from the poison. There are
no fishes, neither can eels exist in the mud, nor even newts. It is dead.

Since the change their numbers have greatly increased, and were they not always at war
with each other, it is possible that they might go far to sweep the house people from the
land. But there are so many tribes, each with its king, queen, or duke, that their power
is divided, and their force melts away. […] These kings and dukes are absolute autocrats
within their tribe, and can order by a nod the destruction of those who offend them. […]

The gipsies are everywhere, but their stockades are most numerous in the
south, along the sides of the green hills and plains, and especially round Stonehenge,
where, on the great open plains, among the huge boulders, placed ages since in circles,
they perform strange ceremonies and incantations. They attack every traveller, and
every caravan or train of waggons which they feel strong enough to master, but they do
not murder the solitary sleeping hunter or shepherd like the Bushmen. They will, indeed,
steal from him, but do not kill, except in fight. […]
Vengeance is their idol. If any community has injured or affronted them, they
never cease endeavouring to retaliate, and will wipe it out in fire and blood generations
afterwards. There are towns which have thus been suddenly harried when the citizens
had forgotten that any cause of enmity existed. Vengeance is their religion and their
social law, which guides all their actions among themselves. […]

For this marvellous city, of which such legends are related, was after all only of brick,
and when the ivy grew over and trees and shrubs sprang up, and, lastly, the waters
underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown. At this day all those
58
17. H. G. WELLS – THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1896) (excerpts)
Introduction
ON February the First 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when
about the latitude 1' S. and longitude 107' W.
On January the Fifth, 1888 -- that is eleven months and four days after -- my
uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, who certainly went aboard the Lady Vain
at Callao, and who had been considered drowned, was picked up in latitude 5' 3" S. and
longitude 101' W. in a small open boat of which the name was illegible, but which is
supposed to have belonged to the missing schooner Ipecacuanha. He gave such a
strange account of himself that he was supposed demented. Subsequently he alleged
that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape from the Lady Vain. His case
was discussed among psychologists at the time as a curious instance of the lapse of
memory consequent upon physical and mental stress. The following narrative was found
among his papers by the undersigned, his nephew and heir, but unaccompanied by any
definite request for publication.
The only island known to exist in the region in which my uncle was picked up is
Noble's Isle, a small volcanic islet and uninhabited. It was visited in 1891 by H. M. S.
Scorpion. A party of sailors then landed, but found nothing living thereon except certain
curious white moths, some hogs and rabbits, and some rather peculiar rats. So that this
narrative is without confirmation in its most essential particular. With that understood,
there seems no harm in putting this strange story before the public in accordance, as I
believe, with my uncle's intentions. There is at least this much in its behalf: my uncle
passed out of human knowledge about latitude 5' S. and longitude 105' E., and
reappeared in the same part of the ocean after a space of eleven months. In some way
he must have lived during the interval. And it seems that a schooner called the
Ipecacuanha with a drunken captain, John Davies, did start from Africa with a puma and
certain other animals aboard in January, 1887, that the vessel was well known at several
ports in the South Pacific, and that it finally disappeared from those seas (with a
considerable amount of copra aboard), sailing to its unknown fate from Bayna in
December, 1887, a date that tallies entirely with my uncle's story.
CHARLES EDWARD PRENDICK.
"In the Dingey of the 'Lady Vain'" (The Story written by Edward Prendick.)
I DO not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss
of the "Lady Vain." As everyone knows, she collided with a derelict when ten days out
from Callao. The long-boat, with seven of the crew, was picked up eighteen days after
by H. M. gunboat "Myrtle," and the story of their terrible privations has become quite
as well known as the far more horrible "Medusa" case. But I have to add to the published
story of the "Lady Vain" another, possibly as horrible and far stranger. It has hitherto
been supposed that the four men who were in the dingey perished, but this is incorrect.
I have the best of evidence for this assertion: I was one of the four men. […]
For an endless period, as it seemed to me, I lay with my head on the thwart watching
the schooner (she was a little ship, schooner- rigged fore and aft) come up out of the
sea. She kept tacking to and fro in a widening compass, for she was sailing dead into the
59
wind. It never entered my head to attempt to attract attention, and I do not remember
anything distinctly after the sight of her side until I found myself in a little cabin aft.
There's a dim half-memory of being lifted up to the gangway, and of a big red
countenance covered with freckles and surrounded with red hair staring at me over the
bulwarks. I also had a disconnected impression of a dark face, with extraordinary eyes,
close to mine; but that I thought was a nightmare, until I met it again. I fancy I recollect
some stuff being poured in between my teeth; and that is all. […]
"The Man Who Was Going Nowhere"
After a day of alternate sleep and feeding I was so far recovered as to be able to get
from my bunk to the scuttle, and see the green seas trying to keep pace with us. I judged
the schooner was running before the wind. Montgomery -- that was the name of the
flaxen-haired man -- came in again as I stood there, and I asked him for some clothes.
He lent me some duck things of his own, for those I had worn in the boat had been
thrown overboard. They were rather loose for me, for he was large and long in his limbs.
He told me casually that the captain was three-parts drunk in his own cabin. As I
assumed the clothes, I began asking him some questions about the destination of the
ship. He said the ship was bound to Hawaii, but that it had to land him first.
"Where?" said I.
"It's an island, where I live. So far as I know, it hasn't got a name." […]
"The Strange Face"
WE left the cabin and found a man at the companion obstructing our way. He was
standing on the ladder with his back to us, peering over the combing of the hatchway.
He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a
hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders. He was dressed in dark-blue serge,
and had peculiarly thick, coarse, black hair. I heard the unseen dogs growl furiously, and
forthwith he ducked back, -- coming into contact with the hand I put out to fend him off
from myself. He turned with animal swiftness.
In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me
profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming
something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed as big
white teeth as I had ever seen in a human mouth. His eyes were bloodshot at the edges,
with scarcely a rim of white round the hazel pupils. There was a curious glow of
excitement in his face. […]
Montgomery's movement to follow me released my attention, and I turned and looked
about me at the flush deck of the little schooner. I was already half prepared by the
sounds I had heard for what I saw. Certainly I never beheld a deck so dirty. It was littered
with scraps of carrot, shreds of green stuff, and indescribable filth. Fastened by chains
to the mainmast were a number of grisly staghounds, who now began leaping and
barking at me, and by the mizzen a huge puma was cramped in a little iron cage far too
small even to give it turning room. Farther under the starboard bulwark were some big
hutches containing a number of rabbits, and a solitary llama was squeezed in a mere box
of a cage forward. The dogs were muzzled by leather straps. The only human being on
deck was a gaunt and silent sailor at the wheel. […]
However, I was glad to avert what was uncommonly near a scuffle, even at the price of
the captain's drunken ill-will. I do not think I have ever heard quite so much vile language
come in a continuous stream from any man's lips before, though I have frequented
eccentric company enough. I found some of it hard to endure, though I am a mild-
tempered man; but, certainly, when I told the captain to "shut up" I had forgotten that
I was merely a bit of human flotsam, cut off from my resources and with my fare unpaid;
a mere casual dependant on the bounty, or speculative enterprise, of the ship. He
reminded me of it with considerable vigour; but at any rate I prevented a fight. […]
"At the Schooner's Rail"
"If I may say it," said I, after a time, "you have saved my life."
"Chance," he answered. "Just chance."
"I prefer to make my thanks to the accessible agent."
"Thank no one. You had the need, and I had the knowledge; and I injected and
fed you much as I might have collected a specimen. I was bored and wanted something
to do. If I'd been jaded that day, or hadn't liked your face, well -- it's a curious question
where you would have been now!" […]
"The Evil-Looking Boatmen"
From him my eyes travelled to his three men; and a strange crew they were. I saw only
their faces, yet there was something in their faces -- I knew not what -- that gave me a
queer spasm of disgust. […] They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed
as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen.
The white-haired man, who I knew was a good six feet in height, sat a head
below any one of the three. I found afterwards that really none were taller than myself;
but their bodies were abnormally long, and the thigh-part of the leg short and curiously
twisted. At any rate, they were an amazingly ugly gang, and over the heads of them
under the forward lug peered the black face of the man whose eyes were luminous in
the dark. […]
The three muffled men, with the clumsiest movements, scrambled out upon the sand,
and forthwith set to landing the cargo, assisted by the man on the beach. I was struck
especially by the curious movements of the legs of the three swathed and bandaged
boatmen, -- not stiff they were, but distorted in some odd way, almost as if they were
jointed in the wrong place. The dogs were still snarling, and strained at their chains after
these men, as the white- haired man landed with them. The three big fellows spoke to
one another in odd guttural tones, and the man who had waited for us on the beach
began chattering to them excitedly -- a foreign language, as I fancied -- as they laid hands
on some bales piled near the stern. Somewhere I had heard such a voice before, and I
could not think where. […]
"Montgomery says you are an educated man, Mr. Prendick; says you know
something of science. May I ask what that signifies?"
I told him I had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done
some researches in biology under Huxley. He raised his eyebrows slightly at that.
"That alters the case a little, Mr. Prendick," he said, with a trifle more respect
in his manner. "As it happens, we are biologists here. This is a biological station, of a
sort." […]
60
"The Locked Door"
"I'm sorry to make a mystery, Mr. Prendick; but you'll remember you're uninvited. Our
little establishment here contains a secret or so, is a kind of Blue-Beard's chamber, in
fact. Nothing very dreadful, really, to a sane man; but just now, as we don't know you."
"Decidedly," said I, "I should be a fool to take offence at any want of
confidence."
He twisted his heavy mouth into a faint smile -- he was one of those saturnine
people who smile with the corners of the mouth down, -- and bowed his
acknowledgment of my complaisance. […]
"We usually have our meals in here," said Montgomery, and then, as if in doubt,
went out after the other. "Moreau!" I heard him call, and for the moment I do not think
I noticed. Then as I handled the books on the shelf it came up in consciousness: Where
had I heard the name of Moreau before? […]
Was this the same Moreau? He had published some very astonishing facts in connection
with the transfusion of blood, and in addition was known to be doing valuable work on
morbid growths. Then suddenly his career was closed. He had to leave England. A
journalist obtained access to his laboratory in the capacity of laboratory-assistant, with
the deliberate intention of making sensational exposures; and by the help of a shocking
accident (if it was an accident), his gruesome pamphlet became notorious. On the day
of its publication a wretched dog, flayed and otherwise mutilated, escaped from
Moreau's house.
It was in the silly season, and a prominent editor, a cousin of the temporary
laboratory-assistant, appealed to the conscience of the nation. It was not the first time
that conscience has turned against the methods of research. The doctor was simply
howled out of the country. It may be that he deserved to be; but I still think that the
tepid support of his fellow-investigators and his desertion by the great body of scientific
workers was a shameful thing. Yet some of his experiments, by the journalist's account,
were wantonly cruel. He might perhaps have purchased his social peace by abandoning
his investigations; but he apparently preferred the latter, as most men would who have
once fallen under the overmastering spell of research. He was unmarried, and had
indeed nothing but his own interest to consider. […]
Yet surely, and especially to another scientific man, there was nothing so horrible in
vivisection as to account for this secrecy; and by some odd leap in my thoughts the
pointed ears and luminous eyes of Montgomery's attendant came back again before me
with the sharpest definitione. […] What could it all mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely
island, a notorious vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?
"The Crying of the Puma"
"Moreau!" said I. "I know that name."
"The devil you do!" said he. "What an ass I was to mention it to you! I might
have thought. Anyhow, it will give you an inkling of our – mysteries. […]
"Montgomery," said I, suddenly, as the outer door closed, "why has your man
pointed ears?"
 "Damn!" he said, over his first mouthful of food. He stared at me for a moment,
and then repeated,
"Pointed ears?"
"Little points to them," said I, as calmly as possible, with a catch in my breath;
"and a fine black fur at the edges?"
He helped himself to whiskey and water with great deliberation. "I was under
the impression that his hair covered his ears."
"I saw them as he stooped by me to put that coffee you sent to me on the table.
And his eyes shine in the dark." […]
A sharp, hoarse cry of animal pain came from the enclosure behind us. Its depth and
volume testified to the puma. […]
The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had
found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I
believe -- I have thought since -- I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering
finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. […]
"The Thing in the Forest"
From this I was aroused, after I know not how long, by a rustling amidst the greenery on
the other side of the stream. For a moment I could see nothing but the waving summits
of the ferns and reeds. Then suddenly upon the bank of the stream appeared Something
-- at first I could not distinguish what it was. It bowed its round head to the water, and
began to drink. Then I saw it was a man, going on all- fours like a beast.
I was startled by a great patch of vivid scarlet on the ground, and going up to it
found it to be a peculiar fungus, branched and corrugated like a foliaceous lichen, but
deliquescing into slime at the touch; and then in the shadow of some luxuriant ferns I
came upon an unpleasant thing, -- the dead body of a rabbit covered with shining flies,
but still warm and with the head torn off. I stopped aghast at the sight of the scattered
blood. Here at least was one visitor to the island disposed of! There were no traces of
other violence about it. It looked as though it had been suddenly snatched up and killed;
and as I stared at the little furry body came the difficulty of how the thing had been
done. The vague dread that had been in my mind since I had seen the inhuman face of
the man at the stream grew distincter as I stood there. I began to realise the hardihood
of my expedition among these unknown people. The thicket about me became altered
to my imagination. Every shadow became something more than a shadow, -- became an
ambush; every rustle became a threat. Invisible things seemed watching me. […]
Before me, squatting together upon the fungoid ruins of a huge fallen tree and still
unaware of my approach, were three grotesque human figures. One was evidently a
female; the other two were men. They were naked, save for swathings of scarlet cloth
about the middle; and their skins were of a dull pinkish-drab colour, such as I had seen
in no savages before. They had fat, heavy, chinless faces, retreating foreheads, and a
scant bristly hair upon their heads. I never saw such bestial-looking creatures. […]
The three creatures engaged in this mysterious rite were human in shape, and yet
human beings with the strangest air about them of some familiar animal. Each of these
creatures, despite its human form, its rag of clothing, and the rough humanity of its
61
bodily form, had woven into it -- into its movements, into the expression of its
countenance, into its whole presence -- some now irresistible suggestion of a hog, a
swinish taint, the unmistakable mark of the beast. […]
What on earth was he, -- man or beast? What did he want with me? I had no weapon,
not even a stick. Flight would be madness. At any rate the Thing, whatever it was, lacked
the courage to attack me. Setting my teeth hard, I walked straight towards him. I was
anxious not to show the fear that seemed chilling my backbone. I pushed through a
tangle of tall white-flowered bushes, and saw him twenty paces beyond, looking over
his shoulder at me and hesitating. I advanced a step or two, looking steadfastly into his
eyes.
"Who are you?" said I.
He tried to meet my gaze. "No!" he said suddenly, and turning went bounding away from
me through the undergrowth. Then he turned and stared at me again. His eyes shone
brightly out of the dusk under the trees. […]
"The Hunting of the Man"
IT came before my mind with an unreasonable hope of escape that the outer door of my
room was still open to me. I was convinced now, absolutely assured, that Moreau had
been vivisecting a human being. All the time since I had heard his name, I had been trying
to link in my mind in some way the grotesque animalism of the islanders with his
abominations; and now I thought I saw it all. The memory of his work on the transfusion
of blood recurred to me. These creatures I had seen were the victims of some hideous
experiment. […]
"The Sayers of the Law"
I realised that I had to repeat this idiotic formula; and then began the insanest ceremony.
The voice in the dark began intoning a mad litany, line by line, and I and the rest to
repeat it. As they did so, they swayed from side to side in the oddest way, and beat their
hands upon their knees; and I followed their example. I could have imagined I was
already dead and in another world. That dark hut, these grotesque dim figures, just
flecked here and there by a glimmer of light, and all of them swaying in unison and
chanting,
"Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
"Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
"Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
"Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
"Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?"
And so from the prohibition of these acts of folly, on to the prohibition of what I thought
then were the maddest, most impossible, and most indecent things one could well
imagine. A kind of rhythmic fervor fell on all of us; we gabbled and swayed faster and
faster, repeating this amazing Law. Superficially the contagion of these brutes was upon
me, but deep down within me the laughter and disgust struggled together. We ran
through a long list of prohibitions, and then the chant swung round to a new formula.
"His is the House of Pain.
"His is the Hand that makes.
"His is the Hand that wounds.
"His is the Hand that heals."
And so on for another long series, mostly quite incomprehensible gibberish to me about
Him, whoever he might be. I could have fancied it was a dream, but never before have I
heard chanting in a dream.
"His is the lightning flash," we sang. "His is the deep, salt sea."
A horrible fancy came into my head that Moreau, after animalising these men, had
infected their dwarfed brains with a kind of deification of himself. However, I was too
keenly aware of white teeth and strong claws about me to stop my chanting on that
account.
"His are the stars in the sky."
At last that song ended. I saw the Ape- man's face shining with perspiration; and my eyes
being now accustomed to the darkness, I saw more distinctly the figure in the corner
from which the voice came. It was the size of a man, but it seemed covered with a dull
grey hair almost like a Skye-terrier. What was it? What were they all? Imagine yourself
surrounded by all the most horrible cripples and maniacs it is possible to conceive, and
you may understand a little of my feelings with these grotesque caricatures of humanity
about me. […]
"Doctor Moreau Explains"
"You admit that the vivisected human being, as you called it, is, after all, only
the puma?" said Moreau. He had made me visit that horror in the inner room, to assure
myself of its inhumanity.
"It is the puma," I said, "still alive, but so cut and mutilated as I pray I may never
see living flesh again.” […]
The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals,
humanised animals, -- triumphs of vivisection. […]
"Yes. These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes.
To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my life has been devoted. I have
studied for years, gaining in knowledge as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am
telling you nothing new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no
one had the temerity to touch it. It is not simply the outward form of an animal which I
can change. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature, may also be made to
undergo an enduring modification, -- of which vaccination and other methods of
inoculation with living or dead matter are examples that will, no doubt, be familiar to
you. A similar operation is the transfusion of blood, -- with which subject, indeed, I
began. These are all familiar cases. Less so, and probably far more extensive, were the
operations of those mediaeval practitioners who made dwarfs and beggar-cripples,
show-monsters, -- some vestiges of whose art still remain in the preliminary
manipulation of the young mountebank or contortionist. […] But perhaps my meaning
grows plain now. You begin to see that it is a possible thing to transplant tissue from one
part of an animal to another, or from one animal to another; to alter its chemical
reactions and methods of growth; to modify the articulations of its limbs; and, indeed,
to change it in its most intimate structure. […]
"But," said I, "I still do not understand. Where is your justification for inflicting
all this pain? The only thing that could excuse vivisection to me would be some
application- "
62
"Precisely," said he. "But, you see, I am differently constituted. We are on
different platforms. You are a materialist."
"I am not a materialist," I began hotly.
"In my view -- in my view. For it is just this question of pain that parts us. So
long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so
long as pain underlies your propositions about sin, -- so long, I tell you, you are an
animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels. This pain -- "
I gave an impatient shrug at such sophistry.
"Oh, but it is such a little thing! A mind truly opened to what science has to
teach must see that it is a little thing. It may be that save in this little planet, this speck
of cosmic dust, invisible long before the nearest star could be attained -- it may be, I say,
that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur. But the laws we feel our way
towards -- Why, even on this earth, even among living things, what pain is there?" […]
"To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter," he
continued. "The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature. I have
gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was pursuing;” […]
“There's something they call the Law. Sing hymns about 'all thine.' They build
themselves their dens, gather fruit, and pull herbs -- marry even. But I can see through
it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that
perish, anger and the lusts to live and gratify themselves” […]
"Concerning the Beast Folk"
I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things which had seemed
unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me. I suppose
everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.
Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual to keep my general
impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures
who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself
asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging
home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-bear woman's vulpine, shifty
face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before
in some city byway. […]
"The Man Alone"
So I drifted for three days, eating and drinking sparingly, and meditating upon all that
had happened to me, -- not desiring very greatly then to see men again. […] It is strange,
but I felt no desire to return to mankind. I was only glad to be quit of the foulness of the
Beast People. And on the third day I was picked up by a brig from Apia to San Francisco.
Neither the captain nor the mate would believe my story, judging that solitude and
danger had made me mad; and fearing their opinion might be that of others, I refrained
from telling my adventure further, and professed to recall nothing that had happened
to me between the loss of the "Lady Vain" and the time when I was picked up again, --
the space of a year. […]
My trouble took the strangest form. I could not persuade myself that the men and
women I met were not also another Beast People, animals half wrought into the
outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert, -- to show
first this bestial mark and then that. […]

Then I look about me at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright;
others dull or dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere, -- none that have the calm
authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them;
that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger
scale. I know this is an illusion; that these seeming men and women about me are indeed
men and women, -- men and women for ever, perfectly reasonable creatures, full of
human desires and tender solicitude, emancipated from instinct and the slaves of no
fantastic Law, -- beings altogether different from the Beast Folk. Yet I shrink from them,
from their curious glances, their inquiries and assistance, and long to be away from them
and alone. […]

I have withdrawn myself from the confusion of cities and multitudes, and spend my days
surrounded by wise books, -- bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls
of men. I see few strangers, and have but a small household. My days I devote to reading
and to experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of
astronomy. There is -- though I do not know how there is or why there is -- a sense of
infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think,
in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles
of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I
hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends. EDWARD
PRENDICK.

63
18. JEFF VANDERMEER – ANNIHILATION (2014) (excerpts)
01: INITIATION
The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just
before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-
gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the
ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the
country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our
expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our
predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks.
Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the
threat.
There were four of us: a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a
psychologist. I was the biologist. All of us were women this time, chosen as part of the
complex set of variables that governed sending the expeditions. The psychologist, who
was older than the rest of us, served as the expedition’s leader. She had put us all under
hypnosis to cross the border, to make sure we remained calm. It took four days of hard
hiking after crossing the border to reach the coast.
Our mission was simple: to continue the government’s investigation into the
mysteries of Area X, slowly working our way out from base camp.
The expedition could last days, months, or even years, depending on various
stimuli and conditions. We had supplies with us for six months, and another two years’
worth of supplies had already been stored at the base camp. We had also been assured
that it was safe to live off the land if necessary. All of our foodstuffs were smoked or
canned or in packets. Our most outlandish equipment consisted of a measuring device
that had been issued to each of us, which hung from a strap on our belts: a small
rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle. If the hole glowed red,
we had thirty minutes to remove ourselves to “a safe place.” We were not told what the
device measured or why we should be afraid should it glow red. After the first few hours,
I had grown so used to it that I hadn’t looked at it again. We had been forbidden watches
and compasses.
When we reached the camp, we set about replacing obsolete or damaged
equipment with what we had brought and putting up our own tents. We would rebuild
the sheds later, once we were sure that Area X had not affected us. The members of the
last expedition had eventually drifted off, one by one. Over time, they had returned to
their families, so strictly speaking they did not vanish. They simply disappeared from
Area X and, by unknown means, reappeared back in the world beyond the border. They
could not relate the specifics of that journey. This transference had taken place across a
period of eighteen months, and it was not something that had been experienced by prior
expeditions. But other phenomena could also result in “premature dissolution of
expeditions,” as our superiors put it, so we needed to test our stamina for that place.
We also needed to acclimate ourselves to the environment. In the forest near
base camp one might encounter black bears or coyotes. You might hear a sudden croak
64
and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a poisonous
snake, of which there were at least six varieties. Bogs and streams hid huge aquatic
reptiles, and so we were careful not to wade too deep to collect our water samples. Still,
these aspects of the ecosystem did not really concern any of us. Other elements had the
ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered
eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted
wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used
to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-needle loam.
Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea
and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound
seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so
dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards
of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas,
toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and
the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning.
The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be
understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside
you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
As noted, we found the tower in a place just before the forest became
waterlogged and then turned to salt marsh. This occurred on our fourth day after
reaching base camp, by which time we had almost gotten our bearings. We did not
expect to find anything there, based on both the maps that we brought with us and the
water-stained, pine-dust-smeared documents our predecessors had left behind. But
there it was, surrounded by a fringe of scrub grass, half-hidden by fallen moss off to the
left of the trail: a circular block of some grayish stone seeming to mix cement and
ground-up seashells. It measured roughly sixty feet in diameter, this circular block, and
was raised from ground level by about eight inches. Nothing had been etched into or
written on its surface that could in any way reveal its purpose or the identity of its
makers. Starting at due north, a rectangular opening set into the surface of the block
revealed stairs spiraling down into darkness. The entrance was obscured by the webs of
banana spiders and debris from storms, but a cool draft came from below.
At first, only I saw it as a tower. I don’t know why the word tower came to me,
given that it tunnelled into the ground. I could as easily have considered it a bunker or a
submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on
the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and
sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the
lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it
inland. I saw this in vast and intricate detail as we all stood there, and, looking back, I
mark it as the first irrational thought I had once we had reached our destination.
“This is impossible,” said the surveyor, staring at her maps. The solid shade of
late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they
would have had otherwise. The sun was telling us that soon we’d have to use our
flashlights to interrogate the impossible, although I’d have been perfectly happy doing
it in the dark.
 “And yet there it is,” I said. “Unless we are having a mass hallucination.”
“The architectural model is hard to identify,” the anthropologist said. “The
materials are ambiguous, indicating local origin but not necessarily local construction.
Without going inside, we will not know if it is primitive or modern, or something in
between. I’m not sure I would want to guess at how old it is, either.”
We had no way to inform our superiors about this discovery. One rule for an
expedition into Area X was that we were to attempt no outside contact, for fear of some
irrevocable contamination. We also took little with us that matched our current level of
technology. We had no cell or satellite phones, no computers, no camcorders, no
complex measuring instruments except for those strange black boxes hanging from our
belts. Our cameras required a makeshift darkroom. The absence of cell phones in
particular made the real world seem very far away to the others, but I had always
preferred to live without them. For weapons, we had knives, a locked container of
antique handguns, and one assault rifle, this last a reluctant concession to current
security standards.
It was expected simply that we would keep a record, like this one, in a journal,
like this one: lightweight but nearly indestructible, with waterproof paper, a flexible
black-and-white cover, and the blue horizontal lines for writing and the red line to the
left to mark the margin. These journals would either return with us or be recovered by
the next expedition. We had been cautioned to provide maximum context, so that
anyone ignorant of Area X could understand our accounts. We had also been ordered
not to share our journal entries with one another. Too much shared information could
skew our observations, our superiors believed. But I knew from experience how
hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and
breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was
a self-immolating desire for the truth.
“I’m excited by this discovery,” the psychologist interjected before we had
discussed the tower much further. “Are you excited, too?” She had not asked us that
particular question before. During training, she had tended to ask questions more like
“How calm do you think you might be in an emergency?” Back then, I had felt as if she
were a bad actor, playing a role. Now it seemed even more apparent, as if being our
leader somehow made her nervous.
“It is definitely exciting … and unexpected,” I said, trying not to mock her and
failing, a little. I was surprised to feel a sense of growing unease, mostly because in my
imagination, my dreams, this discovery would have been among the more banal. In my
head, before we had crossed the border, I had seen so many things: vast cities, peculiar
animals, and, once, during a period of illness, an enormous monster that rose from the
waves to bear down on our camp.
The surveyor, meanwhile, just shrugged and would not answer the
psychologist’s question. The anthropologist nodded as if she agreed with me. The
entrance to the tower leading down exerted a kind of presence, a blank surface that let
us write so many things upon it. This presence manifested like a low-grade fever,
pressing down on all of us.
65
I would tell you the names of the other three, if it mattered, but only the
surveyor would last more than the next day or two. Besides, we were always strongly
discouraged from using names: We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and
“anything personal should be left behind.” Names belonged to where we had come
from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.
***
Originally our expedition had numbered five and included a linguist. To reach the border,
we each had to enter a separate bright white room with a door at the far end and a
single metal chair in the corner. The chair had holes along the sides for straps; the
implications of this raised a prickle of alarm, but by then I was set in my determination
to reach Area X. The facility that housed these rooms was under the control of the
Southern Reach, the clandestine government agency that dealt with all matters
connected to Area X.
There we waited while innumerable readings were taken and various blasts of
air, some cool, some hot, pressed down on us from vents in the ceiling. At some point,
the psychologist visited each of us, although I do not remember what was said. Then we
exited through the far door into a central staging area, with double doors at the end of
a long hallway. The psychologist greeted us there, but the linguist never reappeared.
“She had second thoughts,” the psychologist told us, meeting our questions
with a firm gaze. “She decided to stay behind.” This came as a small shock, but there
was also relief that it had not been someone else. Of all of our skill sets, linguist seemed
at the time most expendable.
After a moment, the psychologist said, “Now, clear your minds.” This meant she
would begin the process of hypnotizing us so we could cross the border. She would then
put herself under a kind of self-hypnosis. It had been explained that we would need to
cross the border with precautions to protect against our minds tricking us. Apparently
hallucinations were common. At least, this was what they told us. I no longer can be sure
it was the truth. The actual nature of the border had been withheld from us for security
reasons; we knew only that it was invisible to the naked eye.
So when I “woke up” with the others, it was in full gear, including heavy hiking
boots, with the weight of forty-pound backpacks and a multitude of additional supplies
hanging from our belts. All three of us lurched, and the anthropologist fell to one knee,
while the psychologist patiently waited for us to recover. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was
the least startling reentry I could manage.”
The surveyor cursed, and glared at her. She had a temper that must have been
deemed an asset. The anthropologist, as was her way, got to her feet, uncomplaining.
And I, as was my way, was too busy observing to take this rude awakening personally.
For example, I noticed the cruelty of the almost imperceptible smile on the
psychologist’s lips as she watched us struggle to adjust, the anthropologist still
floundering and apologizing for floundering. Later I realized I might have misread her
expression; it might have been pained or self-pitying.
 We were on a dirt trail strewn with pebbles, dead leaves, and pine needles
damp to the touch. Velvet ants and tiny emerald beetles crawled over them. The tall
pines, with their scaly ridges of bark, rose on both sides, and the shadows of flying birds
conjured lines between them. The air was so fresh it buffeted the lungs and we strained
to breathe for a few seconds, mostly from surprise. Then, after marking our location
with a piece of red cloth tied to a tree, we began to walk forward, into the unknown. If
the psychologist somehow became incapacitated and could not lead us across at the
end of our mission, we had been told to return to await “extraction.” No one ever
explained what form “extraction” might take, but the implication was that our superiors
could observe the extraction point from afar, even though it was inside the border.
We had been told not to look back upon arrival, but I snuck a glance anyway,
while the psychologist’s attention was elsewhere. I don’t know quite what I saw. It was
hazy, indistinct, and already far behind us—perhaps a gate, perhaps a trick of the eye.
Just a sudden impression of a fizzing block of light, fast fading.
***
The reasons I had volunteered were very separate from my qualifications for the
expedition. I believe I qualified because I specialized in transitional environments, and
this particular location transitioned several times, meaning that it was home to a
complexity of ecosystems. In few other places could you still find habitat where, within
the space of walking only six or seven miles, you went from forest to swamp to salt
marsh to beach. In Area X, I had been told, I would find marine life that had adjusted to
the brackish freshwater and which at low tide swam far up the natural canals formed by
the reeds, sharing the same environment with otters and deer. If you walked along the
beach, riddled through with the holes of fiddler crabs, you would sometimes look out to
see one of the giant reptiles, for they, too, had adapted to their habitat.
I understood why no one lived in Area X now, that it was pristine because of
that reason, but I kept un-remembering it. I had decided instead to make believe that it
was simply a protected wildlife refuge, and we were hikers who happened to be
scientists. This made sense on another level: We did not know what had happened here,
what was still happening here, and any preformed theories would affect my analysis of
the evidence as we encountered it. Besides, for my part it hardly mattered what lies I
told myself because my existence back in the world had become at least as empty as
Area X. With nothing left to anchor me, I needed to be here. As for the others, I don’t
know what they told themselves, and I didn’t want to know, but I believe they all at least
pretended to some level of curiosity. Curiosity could be a powerful distraction.
That night we talked about the tower, although the other three insisted on
calling it a tunnel. The responsibility for the thrust of our investigations resided with
each individual, the psychologist’s authority describing a wider circle around these
decisions. Part of the current rationale for sending the expeditions lay in giving each
member some autonomy to decide, which helped to increase “the possibility of
significant variation.”
66
This vague protocol existed in the context of our separate skill sets. For
example, although we had all received basic weapons and survival training, the surveyor
had far more medical and firearms experience than the rest of us. The anthropologist
had once been an architect; indeed, she had years ago survived a fire in a building she
had designed, the only really personal thing I had found out about her. As for the
psychologist, we knew the least about her, but I think we all believed she came from
some kind of management background.
The discussion of the tower was, in a way, our first opportunity to test the limits
of disagreement and of compromise.
“I don’t think we should focus on the tunnel,” the anthropologist said. “We
should explore farther first, and we should come back to it with whatever data we gather
from our other investigations— including of the lighthouse.”
How predictable, and yet perhaps prescient, for the anthropologist to try to
substitute a safer, more comfortable option. Although the idea of mapping seemed
perfunctory or repetitive to me, I could not deny the existence of the tower, of which
there was no suggestion on any map.
Then the surveyor spoke. “In this case I feel that we should rule out the tunnel
as something invasive or threatening. Before we explore farther. It’s like an enemy at
our backs otherwise, if we press forward.” She had come to us from the military, and I
could see already the value of that experience. I had thought a surveyor would always
side with the idea of further exploration, so this opinion carried weight.
“I’m impatient to explore the habitats here,” I said. “But in a sense, given that
it is not noted on any map, the ‘tunnel’ … or tower … seems important. It is either a
deliberate exclusion from our maps and thus known … and that is a message of sorts …
or it is something new that wasn’t here when the last expedition arrived.”
The surveyor gave me a look of thanks for the support, but my position had
nothing to do with helping her. Something about the idea of a tower that headed
straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with
structure. I could not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the
inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a
sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown.
The psychologist nodded, appeared to consider these opinions, and asked,
“Does anyone yet have even an inkling of a sensation of wanting to leave?” It was a
legitimate question, but jarring nonetheless.
All three of us shook our heads.
“What about you?” the surveyor asked the psychologist. “What is your
opinion?”
The psychologist grinned, which seemed odd. But she must have known any
one of us might have been tasked with observing her own reactions to stimuli. Perhaps
the idea that a surveyor, an expert in the surface of things, might have been chosen,
rather than a biologist or anthropologist, amused her.
“I must admit to feeling a great deal of unease at the moment. But I am unsure
whether it is because of the effect of the overall environment or the presence of the
tunnel. Personally, I would like to rule out the tunnel.”
 Tower.
“Three to one, then,” the anthropologist said, clearly relieved that the decision
had been made for her.
The surveyor just shrugged.
Perhaps I’d been wrong about curiosity. The surveyor didn’t seem curious
about anything.
“Bored?” I asked.
“Eager to get on with it,” she said, to the group, as if I’d asked the question for
all of us.
We were in the communal tent for our talk. It had become dark by then and
there came soon after the strange mournful call in the night that we knew must have
natural causes but created a little shiver regardless. As if that was the signal to disband,
we went back to our own quarters to be alone with our thoughts. I lay awake in my tent
for a while trying to turn the tower into a tunnel, or even a shaft, but with no success.
Instead, my mind kept returning to a question: What lies hidden at its base?
***
During our hike from the border to the base camp near the coast, we had experienced
almost nothing out of the ordinary. The birds sang as they should; the deer took flight,
their white tails exclamation points against the green and brown of the underbrush; the
raccoons, bowlegged, swayed about their business, ignoring us. As a group, we felt
almost giddy, I think, to be free after so many confining months of training and
preparation. While we were in that corridor, in that transitional space, nothing could
touch us. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we
reached our destination.
The day before we arrived at the camp, this mood was briefly shattered by the
appearance of an enormous wild boar some distance ahead of us on the trail. It was so
far from us that even with our binoculars we could barely identify it at first. But despite
poor eyesight, wild pigs have prodigious powers of smell, and it began charging us from
one hundred yards away. Thundering down the trail toward us … yet we still had time
to think about what we might do, had drawn our long knives, and in the surveyor ’s case
her assault rifle. Bullets would probably stop a seven-hundred-pound pig, or perhaps
not. We did not feel confident taking our attention from the boar to untie the container
of handguns from our gear and open its triple locks.
There was no time for the psychologist to prepare any hypnotic suggestion
designed to keep us focused and in control; in fact, all she could offer was “Don’t get
close to it! Don’t let it touch you!” while the boar continued to charge. The
anthropologist was giggling a bit out of nervousness and the absurdity of experiencing
an emergency situation that was taking so long to develop. Only the surveyor had taken
direct action: She had dropped to one knee to get a better shot; our orders included the
helpful directive to “kill only if you are under threat of being killed.”
I was continuing to watch through the binoculars, and as the boar came closer,
its face became stranger and stranger. Its features were somehow contorted, as if the
67
beast was dealing with an extreme of inner torment. Nothing about its muzzle or broad,
long face looked at all extraordinary, and yet I had the startling impression of some
presence in the way its gaze seemed turned inward and its head willfully pulled to the
left as if there were an invisible bridle. A kind of electricity sparked in its eyes that I could
not credit as real. I thought instead it must be a by-product of my now slightly shaky
hand on the binoculars.
Whatever was consuming the boar also soon consumed its desire to charge. It
veered abruptly leftward, with what I can only describe as a great cry of anguish, into
the underbrush. By the time we reached that spot, the boar was gone, leaving behind a
thoroughly thrashed trail.
For several hours, my thoughts turned inward toward explanations for what I
had seen: parasites and other hitchhikers of a neurological nature. I was searching for
entirely rational biological theories. Then, after a time, the boar faded into the backdrop
like all else that we had passed on our way from the border, and I was staring into the
future again.
***
The morning after we discovered the tower we rose early, ate our breakfast, and doused
our fire. There was a crisp chill to the air common for the season. The surveyor broke
open the weapons stash and gave us each a handgun. She herself continued to hold on
to the assault rifle; it had the added benefit of a flashlight under the barrel. We had not
expected to have to open that particular container so soon, and although none of us
protested, I felt a new tension between us. We knew that members of the second
expedition to Area X had committed suicide by gunshot and members of the third had
shot each other. Not until several subsequent expeditions had suffered zero casualties
had our superiors issued firearms again. We were the twelfth expedition.
So we returned to the tower, all four of us. Sunlight came down dappled
through the moss and leaves, created archipelagos of light on the flat surface of the
entrance. It remained unremarkable, inert, in no way ominous … and yet it took an act
of will to stand there, staring at the entry point. I noticed the anthropologist checking
her black box, was relieved to see it did not display a glowing red light. If it had, we would
have had to abort our exploration, move on to other things. I did not want that, despite
the touch of fear.
“How deep do you think it goes down?” the anthropologist asked.
“Remember that we are to put our faith in your measurements,” the
psychologist answered, with a slight frown. “The measurements do not lie. This
structure is 61.4 feet in diameter. It is raised 7.9 inches from the ground. The stairwell
appears to have been positioned at or close to due north, which may tell us something
about its creation, eventually. It is made of stone and coquina, not of metal or of bricks.
These are facts. That it wasn’t on the maps means only that a storm may have uncovered
the entrance.”
I found the psychologist’s faith in measurements and her rationalization for the
tower ’s absence from maps oddly … endearing? Perhaps she meant merely to reassure
us, but I would like to believe she was trying to reassure herself. Her position, to lead
and possibly to know more than us, must have been difficult and lonely.
“I hope it’s only about six feet deep so we can continue mapping,” the surveyor
said, trying to be lighthearted, but then she, and we, all recognized the term “six feet
under” ghosting through her syntax and a silence settled over us.
“I want you to know that I cannot stop thinking of it as a tower,” I confessed. “I
can’t see it as a tunnel.” It seemed important to make the distinction before our descent,
even if it influenced their evaluation of my mental state. I saw a tower, plunging into the
ground. The thought that we stood at its summit made me a little dizzy.
All three stared at me then, as if I were the strange cry at dusk, and after a
moment the psychologist said, grudgingly, “If that helps make you more comfortable,
then I don’t see the harm.”
A silence came over us again, there under the canopy of trees. A beetle spiraled
up toward the branches, trailing dust motes. I think we all realized that only now had we
truly entered Area X.
“I’ll go first and see what’s down there,” the surveyor said, finally, and we were
happy to defer to her.
The initial stairwell curved steeply downward and the steps were narrow, so
the surveyor would have to back her way into the tower. We used sticks to clear the
spiderwebs as she lowered herself into position on the stairwell. She teetered there,
weapon slung across her back, looking up at us. She had tied her hair back and it made
the lines of her face seem tight and drawn. Was this the moment when we were
supposed to stop her? To come up with some other plan? If so, none of us had the nerve.
With a strange smirk, almost as if judging us, the surveyor descended until we
could only see her face framed in the gloom below, and then not even that. She left an
empty space that was shocking to me, as if the reverse had actually happened: as if a
face had suddenly floated into view out of the darkness. I gasped, which drew a stare
from the psychologist. The anthropologist was too busy staring down into the stairwell
to notice any of it.
“Is everything okay?” the psychologist called out to the surveyor. Everything
had been fine just a second before. Why would anything be different now?
The surveyor made a sharp grunt in answer, as if agreeing with me. For a few
moments more, we could still hear the surveyor struggling on those short steps. Then
came silence, and then another movement, at a different rhythm, which for a terrifying
moment seemed like it might come from a second source.
But then the surveyor called up to us. “Clear to this level!” This level. Something
within me thrilled to the fact that my vision of a tower was not yet disproven.
That was the signal for me to descend with the anthropologist, while the
psychologist stood watch.
“Time to go,” the psychologist said, as perfunctorily as if we were in school and
a class was letting out.
An emotion that I could not quite identify surged through me, and for a
moment I saw dark spots in my field of vision. I followed the anthropologist so eagerly
down through the remains of webs and the embalmed husks of insects into the cool
68
brackishness of that place that I almost tripped her. My last view of the world above:
the psychologist peering down at me with a slight frown, and behind her the trees, the
blue of the sky almost blinding against the darkness of the sides of the stairwell.
Below, shadows spread across the walls. The temperature dropped and sound
became muffled, the soft steps absorbing our tread. Approximately twenty feet beneath
the surface, the structure opened out into a lower level. The ceiling was about eight feet
high, which meant a good twelve feet of stone lay above us. The flashlight of the
surveyor ’s assault rifle illuminated the space, but she was faced away from us, surveying
the walls, which were an off-white and devoid of any adornment. A few cracks indicated
either the passage of time or some sudden stressor. The level appeared to be the same
circumference as the exposed top, which again supported the idea of a single solid
structure buried in the earth.
“It goes farther,” the surveyor said, and pointed with her rifle to the far corner,
directly opposite the opening where we had come out onto that level. A rounded
archway stood there, and a darkness that suggested downward steps. A tower, which
made this level not so much a floor as a landing or part of the turret. She started to walk
toward the archway while I was still engrossed in examining the walls with my flashlight.
Their very blankness mesmerized me. I tried to imagine the builder of this place but
could not.
I thought again of the silhouette of the lighthouse, as I had seen it during the
late afternoon of our first day at base camp. We assumed that the structure in question
was a lighthouse because the map showed a lighthouse at that location and because
everyone immediately recognized what a lighthouse should look like. In fact, the
surveyor and anthropologist had both expressed a kind of relief when they had seen the
lighthouse. Its appearance on both the map and in reality reassured them, anchored
them. Being familiar with its function further reassured them.
With the tower, we knew none of these things. We could not intuit its full
outline. We had no sense of its purpose. And now that we had begun to descend into it,
the tower still failed to reveal any hint of these things. The psychologist might recite the
measurements of the “top” of the tower, but those numbers meant nothing, had no
wider context. Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.
“There is a regularity to the circle, seen from the inside walls, that suggests
precision in the creation of the building,” the anthropologist said. The building. Already
she had begun to abandon the idea of it being a tunnel.
All of my thoughts came spilling out of my mouth, some final discharge from
the state that had overtaken me above. “But what is its purpose? And is it believable
that it would not be on the maps? Could one of the prior expeditions have built it and
hidden it?” I asked all of this and more, not expecting an answer. Even though no threat
had revealed itself, it seemed important to eliminate any possible moment of silence.
As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might
appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful. Had I expressed this
anxiety to the psychologist, she would have been worried, I know. But I was more
attuned to solitude than any of us, and I would have characterized that place in that
moment of our exploration as watchful.
 A gasp from the surveyor cut me off in mid-question, no doubt much to the
anthropologist’s relief.
“Look!” the surveyor said, training her flashlight down into the archway. We
hurried over and stared past her, adding our own illumination.
A stairway did indeed lead down, this time at a gentle curve with much broader
steps, but still made of the same materials. At about shoulder height, perhaps five feet
high, clinging to the inner wall of the tower, I saw what I first took to be dimly sparkling
green vines progressing down into the darkness. I had a sudden absurd memory of the
floral wallpaper treatment that had lined the bathroom of my house when I had shared
it with my husband. Then, as I stared, the “vines” resolved further, and I saw that they
were words, in cursive, the letters raised about six inches off the wall.
“Hold the light,” I said, and pushed past them down the first few steps. Blood
was rushing through my head again, a roaring confusion in my ears. It was an act of
supreme control to walk those few paces. I couldn’t tell you what impulse drove me,
except that I was the biologist and this looked oddly organic. If the linguist had been
there, perhaps I would have deferred to her.
“Don’t touch it, whatever it is,” the anthropologist warned.
I nodded, but I was too enthralled with the discovery. If I’d had the impulse to
touch the words on the wall, I would not have been able to stop myself.
As I came close, did it surprise me that I could understand the language the
words were written in? Yes. Did it fill me with a kind of elation and dread intertwined?
Yes. I tried to suppress the thousand new questions rising up inside of me. In as calm a
voice as I could manage, aware of the importance of that moment, I read from the
beginning, aloud: “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner
I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…”
Then the darkness took it.
“Words? Words?” the anthropologist said.
Yes, words.
“What are they made of?” the surveyor asked. Did they need to be made of
anything?
The illumination cast on the continuing sentence quavered and shook. Where
lies the strangling fruit became bathed in shadow and in light, as if a battle raged for its
meaning.
“Give me a moment. I need to get closer.” Did I? Yes, I needed to get closer.
What are they made of?
I hadn’t even thought of this, though I should have; I was still trying to parse
the lingual meaning, had not transitioned to the idea of taking a physical sample. But
what relief at the question! Because it helped me fight the compulsion to keep reading,
to descend into the greater darkness and keep descending until I had read all there was
to read. Already those initial phrases were infiltrating my mind in unexpected ways,
finding fertile ground.
So I stepped closer, peered at Where lies the strangling fruit. I saw that the
letters, connected by their cursive script, were made from what would have looked to
the layperson like rich green fernlike moss but in fact was probably a type of fungi or
69
other eukaryotic organism. The curling filaments were all packed very close together
and rising out from the wall. A loamy smell came from the words along with an
underlying hint of rotting honey. This miniature forest swayed, almost imperceptibly,
like sea grass in a gentle ocean current.
Other things existed in this miniature ecosystem. Half-hidden by the green
filaments, most of these creatures were translucent and shaped like tiny hands
embedded by the base of the palm. Golden nodules capped the fingers on these
“hands.” I leaned in closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival
training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be
read.
I was unlucky—or was I lucky? Triggered by a disturbance in the flow of air, a
nodule in the W chose that moment to burst open and a tiny spray of golden spores
spewed out. I pulled back, but I thought I had felt something enter my nose, experienced
a pinprick of escalation in the smell of rotting honey.
Unnerved, I stepped back even farther, borrowing some of the surveyor ’s best
curses, but only in my head. My natural instinct was always for concealment. Already I
was imagining the psychologist’s reaction to my contamination, if revealed to the group.
“Some sort of fungi,” I said finally, taking a deep breath so I could control my
voice. “The letters are made from fruiting bodies.” Who knew if it were actually true? It
was just the closest thing to an answer.
My voice must have seemed calmer than my actual thoughts because there was
no hesitation in their response. No hint in their tone of having seen the spores erupt into
my face. I had been so close. The spores had been so tiny, so insignificant. I shall bring
forth the seeds of the dead.
“Words? Made of fungi?” the surveyor said, stupidly echoing me.
“There is no recorded human language that uses this method of writing,” the
anthropologist said.
“Is there any animal that communicates in this way?”
I had to laugh. “No, there is no animal that communicates in this way.” Or, if
there were, I could not recall its name, and never did later, either.
“Are you joking? This is a joke, right?” the surveyor said. She looked poised to
come down and prove me wrong, but didn’t move from her position.
“Fruiting bodies,” I replied, almost as if in a trance. “Forming words.”
A calm had settled over me. A competing sensation, as if I couldn’t breathe, or
didn’t want to, was clearly psychological not physiological. I had noticed no physical
changes, and on some level it didn’t matter. I knew it was unlikely we had an antidote
to something so unknown waiting back at the camp.
More than anything, the information I was trying to process immobilized me.
The words were composed of symbiotic fruiting bodies from a species unknown to me.
Second, the dusting of spores on the words meant that the farther down into the tower
we explored, the more the air would be full of potential contaminants. Was there any
reason to relay this information to the others when it would only alarm them? No, I
decided, perhaps selfishly. It was more important to make sure they were not directly
exposed until we could come back with the proper equipment. Any other evaluation
depended on environmental and biological factors about which I was increasingly
convinced I had inadequate data.
I came back up the stairs to the landing. The surveyor and the anthropologist
looked expectant, as if I could tell them more. The anthropologist in particular was on
edge; her gaze couldn’t alight on any one thing but kept moving and moving. Perhaps I
could have fabricated information that would have stopped that incessant search. But
what could I tell them about the words on the wall except that they were either
impossible or insane, or both? I would have preferred the words be written in an
unknown language; this would have presented less of a mystery for us to solve, in a way.
“We should go back up,” I said. It was not that I recommended this as the best
course of action but because I wanted to limit their exposure to the spores until I could
see what long-term effects they might have on me. I also knew if I stayed there much
longer I might experience a compulsion to go back down the stairs to continue reading
the words, and they would have to physically restrain me, and I did not know what I
would do then.
There was no argument from the other two. But as we climbed back up, I had
a moment of vertigo despite being in such an enclosed space, a kind of panic for a
moment, in which the walls suddenly had a fleshy aspect to them, as if we traveled inside
of the gullet of a beast.
***
When we told the psychologist what we had seen, when I recited some of the words,
she seemed at first frozen in an oddly attentive way. Then she decided to descend to
view the words. I struggled with whether I should warn her against this action. Finally I
said, “Only observe from the top of the stairs. We don’t know whether there are toxins.
When we come back, we should wear breathing masks.” These, at least, we had
inherited from the last expedition, in a sealed container.
“Paralysis is not a cogent analysis?” she said to me with a pointed stare. I felt a
kind of itchiness come over me, but I said nothing, did nothing. The others did not even
seem to realize she had spoken. It was only later that I realized the psychologist had
tried to bind me with a hypnotic suggestion meant for me and me alone.
My reaction apparently fell within the range of acceptable responses, for she
descended while we waited anxiously above. What would we do if she did not return?
A sense of ownership swept over me. I was agitated by the idea that she might
experience the same need to read further and would act upon it. Even though I didn’t
know what the words meant, I wanted them to mean something so that I might more
swiftly remove doubt, bring reason back into all of my equations. Such thoughts
distracted me from thinking about the effects of the spores on my system.
Thankfully the other two had no desire to talk as we waited, and after just
fifteen minutes the psychologist awkwardly pushed her way up out of the stairwell and
into the light, blinking as her vision adjusted.
70
“Interesting,” she said in a flat tone as she loomed over us, wiping the cobwebs
from her clothing. “I have never seen anything like that before.” She seemed as if she
might continue, but then decided against it.
What she had already said verged on the moronic; apparently I was not alone
in that assessment.
“Interesting?” the anthropologist said. “No one has ever seen anything like that
in the entire history of the world. No one. Ever. And you call it interesting?” She seemed
close to working herself into a bout of hysteria. While the surveyor just stared at both
of them as if they were the alien organisms.
“Do you need me to calm you?” the psychologist asked. There was a steely tone
to her words that made the anthropologist mumble something noncommittal and stare
at the ground.
I stepped into the silence with my own suggestion: “We need time to think
about this. We need time to decide what to do next.” I meant, of course, that I needed
time to see if the spores I had inhaled would affect me in a way significant enough to
confess to what had happened.
“There may not be enough time in the world for that,” the surveyor said. Of all
of us, I think she had best grasped the implications of what we had seen: that we might
now be living in a kind of nightmare. But the psychologist ignored her and sided with
me. “We do need time. We should spend the rest of our day doing what we were sent
here to do.”
So we returned to camp for lunch and then focused on “ordinary things” while
I kept monitoring my body for any changes. Did I feel too cold now, or too hot? Was that
ache in my knee from an old injury suffered in the field, or something new? I even
checked the black box monitor, but it remained inert. Nothing radical had yet changed
in me, and as we took our samples and readings in the general vicinity of the camp—as
if to stray too far would be to come under the tower ’s control—I gradually relaxed and
told myself that the spores had had no effect … even though I knew that the incubation
period for some species could be months or years. I suppose I thought merely that for
the next few days at least I might be safe.
The surveyor concentrated on adding detail and nuance to the maps our
superiors had given us. The anthropologist went off to examine the remains of some
cabins a quarter mile away. The psychologist stayed in her tent, writing in her journal.
Perhaps she was reporting on how she was surrounded by idiots, or just setting out
every moment of our morning discoveries.
For my part, I spent an hour observing a tiny red-and-green tree frog on the
back of a broad, thick leaf and another hour following the path of an iridescent black
damselfly that should not have been found at sea level. The rest of the time, I spent up
a pine tree, binoculars focused on the coast and the lighthouse. I liked climbing. I also
liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so
fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the
modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had
always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.
 The richness of Area X’s biosphere was reflected in the wealth of birdlife, from
warblers and flickers to cormorants and black ibis. I could also see a bit into the salt
marshes, and my attention there was rewarded by a minute-long glimpse of a pair of
otters. At one point, they glanced up and I had a strange sensation that they could see
me watching them. It was a feeling I often had when out in the wilderness: that things
were not quite what they seemed, and I had to fight against the sensation because it
could overwhelm my scientific objectivity. There was also something else, moving
ponderously through the reeds, but it was closer to the lighthouse and in deep cover. I
could not tell what it was, and after a while its disturbance of the vegetation ceased and
I lost track of it entirely. I imagined it might be another wild pig, as they could be good
swimmers and were just as omnivorous in their choice of habitats as in their diets.
On the whole, by dusk this strategy of busying ourselves in our tasks had
worked to calm our nerves. The tension lifted somewhat, and we even joked a little bit
at dinner. “I wish I knew what you were thinking,” the anthropologist confessed to me,
and I replied, “No, you don’t,” which was met with a laughter that surprised me. I didn’t
want their voices in my head, their ideas of me, nor their own stories or problems. Why
would they want mine?
But I did not mind that a sense of camaraderie had begun to take hold, even if
it would prove shortlived. The psychologist allowed us each a couple of beers from the
store of alcohol, which loosened us up to the point that I even clumsily expressed the
idea that we might maintain some sort of contact once we had completed our mission.
I had stopped checking myself for physiological or psychological reactions to the spores
by then, and found that the surveyor and I got along better than I had expected. I still
didn’t like the anthropologist very much, but mostly in the context of the mission, not
anything she had said to me. I felt that, once in the field, much as some athletes were
good in practice and not during the game, she had exhibited a lack of mental toughness
thus far. Although just volunteering for such a mission meant something.
When the nightly cry from the marshes came a little after nightfall, while we
sat around our fire, we at first called back to it in a drunken show of bravado. The beast
in the marshes now seemed like an old friend compared to the tower. We were
confident that eventually we would photograph it, document its behavior, tag it, and
assign it a place in the taxonomy of living things. It would become known in a way we
feared the tower would not. But we stopped calling back when the intensity of its moans
heightened in a way that suggested anger, as if it knew we were mocking it. Nervous
laughter all around, then, and the psychologist took that as her cue to ready us for the
next day.
“Tomorrow we will go back to the tunnel. We will go deeper, taking certain
precautions—wearing breathing masks, as suggested. We will record the writing on the
walls and get a sense of how old it is, I hope. Also, perhaps a sense of how deep the
tunnel descends. In the afternoon, we’ll return to our general investigations of the area.
We’ll repeat this schedule every day until we think we know enough about the tunnel
and how it fits into Area X.”
71
Tower, not tunnel. She could have been talking about investigating an
abandoned shopping center, for all of the emphasis she put on it … and yet something
about her tone seemed rehearsed.
Then she abruptly stood and said three words: “Consolidation of authority.”
Immediately the surveyor and the anthropologist beside me went slack, their
eyes unfocused. I was shocked, but I mimicked them, hoping that the psychologist had
not noticed the lag. I felt no compulsion whatsoever, but clearly we had been
preprogrammed to enter a hypnotic state in response to those words, uttered by the
psychologist.
Her demeanor more assertive than just a moment before, the psychologist said,
“You will retain a memory of having discussed several options with regard to the tunnel.
You will find that you ultimately agreed with me about the best course of action, and
that you felt quite confident about this course of action. You will experience a sensation
of calm whenever you think about this decision, and you will remain calm once back
inside the tunnel, although you will react to any stimuli as per your training. You will not
take undue risks.
“You will continue to see a structure that is made of coquina and stone. You will
trust your colleagues completely and feel a continued sense of fellowship with them.
When you emerge from the structure, any time you see a bird in flight it will trigger a
strong feeling that you are doing the right thing, that you are in the right place. When I
snap my fingers, you will have no memory of this conversation, but will follow my
directives. You will feel very tired and you will want to retire to your tents to get a good
night’s sleep before tomorrow’s activities. You will not dream. You will not have
nightmares.”
I stared straight ahead as she said these words, and when she snapped her
fingers I took my cue from the actions of the other two. I don’t believe the psychologist
suspected anything, and I retired to my tent just as the others retired to their tents.
Now I had new data to process, along with the tower. We knew that the
psychologist’s role was to provide balance and calm in a situation that might become
stressful, and that part of this role included hypnotic suggestion. I could not blame her
for performing that role. But to see it laid out so nakedly troubled me. It is one thing to
think you might be receiving hypnotic suggestion and quite another to experience it as
an observer. What level of control could she exert over us? What did she mean by saying
that we would continue to think of the tower as made of coquina and stone?
Most important, however, I now could guess at one way in which the spores
had affected me: They had made me immune to the psychologist’s hypnotic suggestions.
They had made me into a kind of conspirator against her. Even if her purposes were
benign, I felt a wave of anxiety whenever I thought of confessing that I was resistant to
hypnosis—especially since it meant any underlying conditioning hidden in our training
also was affecting me less and less.
I now hid not one but two secrets, and that meant I was steadily, irrevocably,
becoming estranged from the expedition and its purpose.
***
Estrangement, in all of its many forms, was nothing new for these missions. I understood
this from having been given an opportunity along with the others to view videotape of
the reentry interviews with the members of the eleventh expedition. Once those
individuals had been identified as having returned to their former lives, they were
quarantined and questioned about their experiences. Reasonably enough, in most cases
family members had called the authorities, finding their loved one’s return uncanny or
frightening. Any papers found on these returnees had been confiscated by our superiors
for examination and study. This information, too, we were allowed to see.
The interviews were fairly short, and in them all eight expedition members told
the same story. They had experienced no unusual phenomenon while in Area X, taken
no unusual readings, and reported no unusual internal conflicts. But after a period of
time, each one of them had had the intense desire to return home and had set out to
do so. None of them could explain how they had managed to come back across the
border, or why they had gone straight home instead of first reporting to their superiors.
One by one they had simply abandoned the expedition, left their journals behind, and
drifted home. Somehow.
Throughout these interviews, their expressions were friendly and their gazes
direct. If their words seemed a little flat, then this went with the kind of general calm,
the almost dreamlike demeanor each had returned with—even the compact, wiry man
who had served as that expedition’s military expert, a person who’d had a mercurial and
energetic personality. In terms of their affect, I could not tell any of the eight apart. I had
the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their
interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space.
As for the papers, they proved to be sketches of landscapes within Area X or
brief descriptions. Some were cartoons of animals or caricatures of fellow expedition
members. All of them had, at some point, drawn the lighthouse or written about it.
Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning
in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the
beholder.
At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous
faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not
mean being dead.

72
 6. ALTERNATIVE (HI)STORIES

73
19. PHILIP K. DICK – THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962) (excerpts)
1 thirty-eight years old, and he could remember the prewar days, the other times. Franklin
For a week Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail. But the valuable
shipment from the Rocky Mountain States had not arrived. As he opened up his store
on Friday morning and saw only letters on the floor by the mail slot he thought, I'm going
to have an angry customer.
Pouring himself a cup of instant tea from the five-cent wall dispenser he got a broom
and began to sweep; soon he had the front of American Artistic Handcrafts Inc. ready
for the day, all spick and span with the cash register full of change, a fresh vase of
marigolds, and the radio playing background music. Outdoors along the sidewalk
businessmen hurried toward their offices along Montgomery Street. Far off, a cable car
passed; Childan halted to watch it with pleasure. Women in their long colorful silk
dresses ... he watched them, too. Then the phone rang. He turned to answer it.
"Yes," a familiar voice said to his answer. Childan's heart sank. "This is Mr. Tagomi. Did
my Civil War recruiting poster arrive yet, sir? Please recall; you promised it sometime
last week." The fussy, brisk voice, barely polite, barely keeping the code. "Did I not give
you a deposit, sir, Mr. Childan, with that stipulation? This is to be a gift, you see. I
explained that. A client."
"Extensive inquiries," Childan began, "which I've had made at my own expense, Mr.
Tagomi, sir, regarding the promised parcel, which you realize originates outside of this
region and is therefore-"
But Tagomi broke in, "Then it has not arrived."
"No, Mr. Tagomi, sir."
An icy pause.
"I can wait no furthermore," Tagomi said.
"No sir." Childan gazed morosely through the store window at the warm bright day and
the San Francisco office buildings.
"A substitute, then. Your recommendation, Mr. Chil-dan ?" Tagomi deliberately
mispronounced the name; insult within the code that made Childan's ears burn. Place
pulled, the dreadful mortification of their situation. Robert Childan's aspirations and
fears and torments rose up and exposed themselves, swamped him, stopping his
tongue. He stammered, his hand sticky on the phone. The air of his store smelled of
themarigolds; the music played on, but he felt as if he were falling into some distant sea.
74
"Well ..." he managed to mutter. "Butter churn. Icecream maker circa 1900." His mind
refused to think. Just when you forgot about it; just when you fool yourself. He was
D. Roosevelt and the World's Fair; the former better world. "Could I bring various
desirable items out to your business location?" he mumbled.
An appointment was made for two o'clock. Have to shut store, he knew as he hung up
the phone. No choice. Have to keep goodwill of such customers; business depends on
them.
Standing shakily, he became aware that someone-a couple-had entered the store.
Young man and girl, both handsome, well-dressed. Ideal. He calmed himself and moved
professionally, easily, in their direction, smiling. They were bending to scrutinize a
counter display, had picked up a lovely ashtray. Married, he guessed. Live out in City of
the Winding Mists, the new exclusive apartments on Skyline overlooking Belmont.
"Hello," he said, and felt better. They smiled at him without any superiority, only
kindness. His displays-which really were the best of their kind on the Coast-had awed
them a little; he saw that and was grateful. They understood.
"Really excellent pieces, sir," the young man said.
Childan bowed spontaneously.
Their eyes, warm not only with human bond but with the shared enjoyment of the art
objects he sold, their mutual tastes and satisfactions, remained fixed on him; they were
thanking him for having things like these for them to see, pick up and examine, handle
perhaps without even buying. Yes, he thought, they know what sort of store they are in;
this is not tourist trash, not redwood plaques reading MUIR WOODS, MARIN
COUNTY, PSA , or funny signs or girly rings or postcards or views of the Bridge. The
girl's eyes especially, large, dark. How easily, Childan thought, I could fall in love with a
girl like this. How tragic my life, then; as if it weren't bad enough already. The stylish
black hair, lacquered nails, pierced ears for the long dangling brass handmade earrings.
"Your earrings," he murmured. "Purchased here, perhaps?"
"No," she said. "At home."
Childan nodded. No contemporary American art; only the past could be represented
here, in a store such as his. "You are here for long?" he asked. "To our San Francisco?"
"I'm stationed here indefinitely," the man said. "With Standard of Living for Unfortunate
Areas Planning Commission of Inquiry." Pride showed on his face. Not the military. Not
one of the gum-chewing boorish draftees with their greedy peasant faces, wandering up
Market Street, gaping at the bawdy shows, the sex movies, the shooting galleries, the
cheap nightclubs with photos of middle-aged blondes holding their nipples between
their wrinkled fingers and leering... the honkytonk jazz slums that made up most of the
flat part of San Francisco, rickety tin and board shacks that had sprung up from the ruins
even before the last bomb fell. No-this man was of the elite. Cultured, educated, even
more so than Mr. Tagomi, who was after all a high official with the ranking Trade
Mission on the Pacific Coast. Tagomi was an old man. His attitudes had formed in the
War Cabinet days.
"Had you wished American traditional ethnic art objects as a gift?" Childan asked. "Or
to decorate perhaps a new apartment for your stay here?" If the latter... his heart picked
up.
"An accurate guess," the girl said. "We are starting to decorate. A bit undecided. Do you
think you could inform us?"
"I could arrange to arrive at your apartment, yes," Childan said. "Bringing several hand
cases, I can suggest in context, at your leisure. This, of course, is our speciality." He
dropped his eyes so as to conceal his hope. There might be thousands of dollars
involved. "I am getting in a New England table, maple, all wood-legged, no nails.
Immense beauty and worth. And a mirror from the time of the 1812 War. And also the
aboriginal art: a group of vegetable-dyed goat-hair rugs."
"I myself," the man said, "prefer the art of the cities."
"Yes," Childan said eagerly. "Listen, sir. I have a mural from WPA post-office period,
original, done on board, four sections, depicting Horace Greeley. Priceless collector's
item."
"Ah," the man said, his dark eyes flashing.
"And a Victrola cabinet of 1920 made into a liquor cabinet."
"Ah."
"And, sir, listen: framed signed picture of Jean Harlow ."
The man goggled at him.
"Shall we make arrangements?" Childan said, seizing this correct psychological instant.
From his inner coat pocket he brought his pen, notebook. "I shall take your name and
address, sir and lady."
75
Afterward, as the couple strolled from his store, Childan stood, hands behind his back,
watching the street. Joy. If all business days were like this... but it was more than
business, the success of his store. It was a chance to meet a young Japanese couple
socially, on a basis of acceptance of him as a man rather than him as a yank or, at best,
a tradesman who sold art objects. Yes, these new young people, of the rising generation,
who did not remember the days before the war or even the war itself-they were the
hope of the world. Place difference did not have the significance for them.
It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and
governing, but people.
And yet he trembled with fear, imagining himself knocking at their door. He examined
his notes. The Kasouras. Being admitted, no doubt offered tea. Would he do the right
thing? Know the proper act and utterance at each moment? Or would he disgrace
himself, like an animal, by some dismal faux pas?
The girl's name was Betty. Such understanding in her face, he thought. The gentle,
sympathetic eyes. Surely, even in the short time in the store, she had glimpsed his hopes
and defeats.
His hopes- he felt suddenly dizzy. What aspirations bordering on the insane if not the
suicidal did he have? But it was known, relations between Japanese and yanks , although
generally it was between a Japanese man and yank woman. This... he quailed at the
idea. And she was married. He whipped his mind away from the pageant of his
involuntary thoughts and began busily opening the morning's mail.
His hands, he discovered, were still shaking. And then he recalled his two o'clock
appointment with Mr. Tagomi; at that, his hands ceased shaking and his nervousness
became determination. I've got to come up with something acceptable, he said to
himself. Where? How? What? A phone call. Sources. Business ability. Scrape up a fully
restored 1929 Ford including fabric top (black). Grand slam to keep patronage forever.
Crated original mint trimotor airmail plane discovered in barn in Alabama, etc. Produce
mummified head of Mr. B. Bill, including flowing white hair; sensational American
artifact. Make my reputation in top connoisseur circles throughout Pacific, not excluding
Home Islands.
To inspire himself, he lit up a marijuana cigarette, excellent Land-O-Smiles brand.
In his room on Hayes Street, Frank Frink lay in bed wondering how to get up. Sun
glared past the blind onto the heap of clothes that had fallen to the floor. His glasses,
too. Would he step on them? Try to get to bathroom by other route, he thought. Crawl
or roll. His head ached but he did not feel sad. Never look back, he decided. Time? The
clock on the dresser. Eleven-thirty! Good grief. But still he lay.
I'm fired, he thought.
Yesterday he had done wrong at the factory. Spouted the wrong kind of talk to Mr.
Wyndam-Matson, who had a dished-in face with Socrates-type nose, diamond ring, gold
fly zipper. In other words, a power. A throne. Frink's thoughts wandered groggily.
Yes, he thought, and now they'll blacklist me; my skill is no use-I have no trade. Fifteen
years' experience. Gone.
And now he would have to appear at the Laborers' Justification Commission for a
revision of his work category. Since he had never been able to make out Wyndam-
Matson's relationship to the pinocs -the puppet white government at Sacramento-he
could not fathom his ex-employer's power to sway the real authorities, the Japanese.
The LJC was pinoc run. He would be facing four or five middle-aged plump white faces,
on the order of Wyndam-Matson's. If he failed to get justification there, he would make
his way to one of the Import-Export Trade Missions which operated out of Tokyo, and
which had offices throughout California, Oregon, Washington, and the parts of Nevada
included in the Pacific States of America. But if he failed successfully to plead there...
Plans roamed his mind as he lay in bed gazing up at the ancient light fixture in the
ceiling. He could for instance slip across into the Rocky Mountain States. But it was
loosely banded to the PSA, and might extradite him. What about the South? His body
recoiled. Ugh. Not that. As a white man he would have plenty of place, in fact more than
he had here in the PSA. But... he did not want that kind of place.
And, worse, the South had a cat's cradle of ties, economic, ideological, and god knew
what, with the Reich. And Frank Frink was a Jew.
His original name was Frank Fink. He had been born on the East Coast, in New York,
and in 1941 he had been drafted into the Army of the United States of America, right
after the collapse of Russia. After the Japs had taken Hawaii he had been sent to the
West Coast. When the war ended, there he was, on the Japanese side of the settlement
line. And here he was today, fifteen years later.
In 1947, on Capitulation Day, he had more or less gone berserk. Hating the Japs as he
did, he had vowed revenge; he had buried his Service weapons ten feet underground, in
a basement, well-wrapped and oiled, for the day he and his buddies a rose. However,
time was the great healer, a fact he had not taken into account. When he thought of the
idea now, the great blood bath, the purging of the pinocs and their masters, he felt as if
were reviewing one of those stained yearbooks from his high school days, coming upon
an account of his boyhood aspirations. Frank "Goldfish" Fink is going to be a
paleontologist and vows to marry Norma Prout. Norma Prout was the class schones
Mädchen , and he really had vowed to marry her. That was all so goddam long ago, like
listening to Fred Allen or seeing a W. C. Fields movie. Since 1947 he had probably seen
76
or talked to six hundred thousand Japanese, and the desire to do violence to any or all
of them had simply never materialized, after the first few months. It just was not
relevant any more.
But wait. There was one, a Mr. Omuro, who had bought control of a great area of rental
property in downtown San Francisco, and who for a time had been Frank's landlord.
There was a bad apple, he thought. A shark who had never made repairs, had partitioned
rooms smaller and smaller, raised rents... Omuro had gouged the poor, especially the
nearly destitute jobless ex-servicemen during the depression years of the early 'fifties.
However, it had been one of the Japanese trade missions which had cut off Omuro's
head for his profiteering. And nowadays such a violation of the harsh, rigid, but just
Japanese civil law was unheard of. It was a credit to the incorruptibility of the Jap
occupation officials, especially those who had come in after the War Cabinet had fallen.
Recalling the rugged, stoic honesty of the Trade Missions, Frink felt reassured. Even
Wyndam-Matson would be waved off like a noisy fly. W-M Corporation owner or not.
At least, so he hoped. I guess I really have faith in this Co-Prosperity Pacific Alliance
stuff, he said to himself. Strange. Looking back to the early days... it had seemed such
an obvious fake, then. Empty propaganda. But now...
He rose from the bed and unsteadily made his way to the bathroom. While he washed
and shaved, he listened to the midday news on the radio.
"Let us not deride this effort," the radio was saying as he momentarily shut off the hot
water.
No, we won't, Frink thought bitterly. He knew which particular effort the radio had in
mind. Yet, there was after all something humorous about it, the picture of stolid, grumpy
Germans walking around on Mars, on the red sand where no humans had ever stepped
before. Lathering his jowls, Frink began a chanting satire to himself. Gott, Herr
Kreisleiter. Ist dies vielleicht der Ort wo man das Konzentrationslager bilden kann? Das
Wetter ist so schon. Heiss, aben doch schon...
The radio said: "Co-Prosperity Civilization must pause and consider whether in our
quest to provide a balanced equity of mutual duties and responsibilities coupled with
remunerations..." Typical jargon from the ruling hierarchy, Frink noted. "...we have not
failed to perceive the future arena in which the affairs of man will be acted out, be they
Nordic, Japanese, Negroid..." On and on it went.
As he dressed, he mulled with pleasure his satire. The weather is schon, so schon. But
there is nothing to breathe...
However, it was a fact; the Pacific had done nothing toward colonization of the planets.
It was involved-bogged down, rather-in South America. While the Germans were busy
bustling enormous robot construction systems across space, the Japs were still burning
off the jungles in the interior of Brazil, erecting eight-floor clay apartment houses for ex-
headhunters. By the time the Japs got their first spaceship off the ground the Germans
would have the entire solar system sewed up tight. Back in the quaint old history-book
days, the Germans had missed out while the rest of Europe put the final touches on their
colonial empires. However, Frink reflected, they were not going to be last this time; they
had learned.
And then he thought about Africa, and the Nazi experiment there. And his blood stopped
in his veins, hesitated, at last went on.
That huge empty ruin.
The radio said: "...we must consider with pride however our emphasis on the
fundamental physical needs of peoples of all place, their subspiritual aspirations which
must be..."
Frink shut the radio off. Then, calmer, he turned it back on.
Christ on the crapper, he thought. Africa. For the ghosts of dead tribes. Wiped out to
make a land of-what? Who knew? Maybe even the master architects in Berlin did not
know. Bunch of automatons, building and toiling away. Building? Grinding down. Ogres
out of a paleontology exhibit, at their task of making a cup from an enemy's skull, the
whole family industriously scooping out the contents-the raw brains- first, to eat. Then
useful utensils of men's leg bones. Thrifty, to think not only of eating the people you did
not like, but eating them out of their own skull. The first technicians! Prehistoric man in
a sterile white lab coat in some Berlin university lab, experimenting with uses to which
other people's skull, skin, ears, fat could be put to. Ja, Herr Doktor. A new use for the big
toe; see, one can adapt the joint for a quick-acting cigarette lighter mechanism. Now, if
only Herr Krupp can produce it in quantity...
It horrified him, this thought: the ancient gigantic cannibal near-man flourishing now,
ruling the world once more. We spent a million years escaping him, Frink thought, and
now he's back. And not merely as the adversary... but as the master.
"...we can deplore," the radio, the voice of the little yellow-bellies from Tokyo was
saying. God, Frink thought; and we called them monkeys, these civilized bandy-legged
shrimps who would no more set up gas ovens than they would melt their wives into
sealing wax. "...and we have deplored often in the past the dreadful waste of humans in
this fanatical striving which sets the broader mass of men wholly outside the legal
community." They, the Japs, were so strong on law. "...To quote a Western saint familiar
to all: 'What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his
soul?' " The radio paused. Frink, tying his tie, also paused. It was the morning ablution.
77
I have to make my pact with them here, he realized. Black-listed or not; it'd be death for
me if I left Japanese-controlled land and showed up in the South or in Europe-anywhere
in the Reich.
I'll have to come to terms with old Wyndam-Matson.
Seated on his bed, a cup of lukewarm tea beside him, Frink got down his copy of the I
Ching . From their leather tube he took the forty-nine yarrow stalks. He considered, until
he had his thoughts properly controlled and his questions worked out.
Aloud he said, "How should I approach Wyndam-Matson in order to come to decent
terms with him?" He wrote the question down on the tablet, then began whipping the
yarrow stalks from hand to hand until he had the first line, the beginning. An eight. Half
the sixty-four hexagrams eliminated already. He divided the stalks and obtained the
second line. Soon, being so expert, he had all six lines; the hexagram lay before him, and
he did not need to identify it by the chart. He could recognize it as Hexagram Fifteen.
Ch'ien. Modesty. Ah. The low will be raised up, the high brought down, powerful
families humbled; he did not have to refer to the text-he knew it by heart. A good omen.
The oracle was giving him favorable council.
And yet he was a bit disappointed. There was something fatuous about Hexagram
Fifteen. Too goody-goody. Naturally he should be modest. Perhaps there was an idea in
it, however. After all, he had no power over old W-M. He could not compel him to take
him back. All he could do was adopt the point of view of Hexagram Fifteen; this was
that sort of moment, when one had to petition, to hope, to await with faith. Heaven in
its time would raise him up to his old job or perhaps even to something better.
He had no lines to read, no nines or sixes; it was static. So he was through. It did not
move into a second hexagram.
A new question, then. Setting himself, he said aloud, "Will I ever see Juliana again?"
That was his wife. Or rather his ex-wife. Juliana had divorced him a year ago, and he
had not seen her in months; in fact he did not even know where she lived. Evidently she
had left San Francisco. Perhaps even the PSA. Either their mutual friends had not heard
from her or they were not telling him.
Busily he maneuvered the yarrow stalks, his eyes fixed on the tallies. How many times
he had asked about Juliana, one question or another? Here came the hexagram, brought
forth by the passive chance workings of the vegetable stalks. Random, and yet rooted in
the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and
particles in the universe. The necessary hexagram picturing in its pattern of broken and
unbroken lines the situation . He, Juliana, the factory on Gough Street, the Trade
Missions that ruled, the exploration of the planets, the billion chemical heaps in Africa
that were now not even corpses, the aspirations of the thousands around him in the same moment consulting the oracle. And were they all getting as gloomy advice as he?
shanty warrens of San Francisco, the mad creatures in Berlin with their calm faces and Was the tenor of the Moment as adverse for them as it was for him? […]
manic plans-all connected in this moment of casting the yarrow stalks to select the exact
wisdom appropriate in a book begun in the thirtieth century B.C. A book created by the
sages of China over a period of five thousand years, winnowed, perfected, that superb
cosmology-and science-codified before Europe had even learned to do long division.

The hexagram. His heart dropped. Forty-four. Kou. Coming to Meet. Its sobering
judgment. The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden. Again he had
gotten it in connection with Juliana.

Oy vey , he thought, settling back. So she was wrong for me; I know that. I didn't ask
that. Why does the oracle have to remind me? A bad fate for me, to have met her and
been in love-be in love-with her.

Juliana-the best-looking woman he had ever married. Soot-black eyebrows and hair;
trace amounts of Spanish blood distributed as pure color, even to her lips. Her rubbery,
soundless walk; she had worn saddle shoes left over from high school. In fact all her
clothes had a dilapidated quality and the definite suggestion of being old and often
washed. He and she had been so broke so long that despite her looks she had had to
wear a cotton sweater, cloth zippered jacket, brown tweed skirt and bobby socks, and
she hated him and it because it made her look, she had said, like a woman who played
tenis or (even worse) collected mushrooms in the woods.

But above and beyond everything else, he had originally been drawn by her screwball
expression; for no reason, Juliana greeted strangers with a portentous, nudnik, Mona
Lisa smile that hung them up between responses, whether to say hello or not. And she
was so attractive that more often than not they did say hello, whereupon Juliana glided
by. At first he had thought it was just plain bad eyesight, but finally he had decided that
it revealed a deep-dyed otherwise concealed stupidity at her core. And so finally her
borderline flicker of greeting to strangers had annoyed him, as had her plantlike, silent,
I'm-on-a-mysterious-errand way of coming and going. But even then, toward the end,
when they had been fighting so much, he still never saw her as anything but a direct,
literal invention of God's, dropped into his life for reasons he would never know. And on
that account-a sort of religious intuition or faith about her-he could not get over having
lost her.

She seemed so close right now... as if he still had her. That spirit, still busy in his life,
padding through his room in search of-whatever it was Juliana sought. And in his mind
whenever he took up the volumes of the oracle.

Seated on his bed, surrounded by lonely disorder, preparing to go out and begin his day,
Frank Frink wondered who else in the vast complicated city of San Francisco was at this

78
20. JOANNA RUSS – ”WHEN IT CHANGED” (1972)
Katy drives like a maniac; we must have been doing over 120 kilometers per hour on
those turns. She’s good, though, extremely good, and I’ve seen her take the whole car
apart and put it together again in a day. My birthplace on Whileaway was largely given
to farm machinery and I refuse to wrestle with a five-gear shift at unholy speeds, not
having been brought up to it, but even on those turns in the middle of the night, on a
country road as bad as only our district can make them, Katy’s driving didn’t scare me.
The funny thing about my wife, though: she will not handle guns. She has even
gone hiking in the forests above the forty-eighth parallel without firearms, for days at a
time. And that does scare me.
Katy and I have three children between us, one of hers and two of mine. Yuriko,
my eldest, was asleep in the back seat, dreaming twelve-year-old dreams of love and
war: running away to sea, hunting in the North, dreams of strangely beautiful people in
strangely beautiful places, all the wonderful guff you think up when you’re turning
twelve and the glands start going. Some day soon, like all of them, she will disappear for
weeks on end to come back grimy and proud, having knifed her first cougar or shot her
first bear, dragging some abominably dangerous dead beastie behind her, which I will
never forgive for what it might have done to my daughter. Yuriko says Katy’s driving puts
her to sleep.
For someone who has fought three duels, I am afraid of far, far too much. I’m
getting old. I told this to my wife.
“You’re thirty-four,” she said. Laconic to the point of silence, that one. She
flipped the lights on, on the dash—three kilometers to go and the road getting worse all
the time. Far out in the country. Electric-green trees rushed into our headlights and
around the car. I reached down next to me where we bolt the carrier panel to the door
and eased my rifle into my lap. Yuriko stirred in the back. My height but Katy’s eyes,
Katy’s face. The car engine is so quiet, Katy says, that you can hear breathing in the back
seat. Yuki had been alone in the car when the message came, enthusiastically decoding
her dot-dashes (silly to mount a wide frequency transceiver near an I.C. engine, but most
of Whileaway is on steam). She had thrown herself out of the car, my gangly and gaudy
offspring, shouting at the top of her lungs, so of course she had had to come along.
We’ve been intellectually prepared for this ever since the Colony was founded, ever
since it was abandoned, but this is different. This is awful.
“Men!” Yuki had screamed, leaping over the car door. “They’ve come back! Real
Earth men!”
***
We met them in the kitchen of the farmhouse near the place where they had landed;
the windows were open, the night air very mild. We had passed all sorts of
transportation when we parked outside—steam tractors, trucks, an I.C. flatbed, even a
bicycle. Lydia, the district biologist, had come out of her Northern taciturnity long
79
enough to take blood and urine samples and was sitting in a corner of the kitchen
shaking her head in astonishment over the results; she even forced herself (very big,
very fair, very shy, always painfully blushing) to dig up the old language manuals—
though I can talk the old tongues in my sleep. And do. Lydia is uneasy with us; we’re
Southerners and too flamboyant. I counted twenty people in that kitchen, all the brains
of North Continent. Phyllis Spet, I think, had come in by glider. Yuki was the only child
there.
Then I saw the four of them.
They are bigger than we are. They are bigger and broader. Two were taller than
I, and I am extremely tall, one meter eighty centimeters in my bare feet. They are
obviously of our species but off, indescribably off, and as my eyes could not and still
cannot quite comprehend the lines of those alien bodies, I could not, then, bring myself
to touch them, though the one who spoke Russian—what voices they have—wanted to
“shake hands,” a custom from the past, I imagine. I can only say they were apes with
human faces. He seemed to mean well, but I found myself shuddering back almost the
length of the kitchen—and then I laughed apologetically—and then to set a good
example (interstellar amity, I thought) did “shake hands” finally. A hard, hard hand. They
are heavy as draft horses. Blurred, deep voices. Yuriko had sneaked in between the
adults and was gazing at the men with her mouth open.
He turned his head—those words have not been in our language for six hundred
years—and said, in bad Russian:
“Who’s that?”
“My daughter,” I said, and added (with that irrational attention to good
manners we sometimes employ in moments of insanity), “My daughter, Yuriko Janetson.
We use the patronymic. You would say matronymic.”
He laughed, involuntarily. Yuki exclaimed, “I thought they would be good
looking!” greatly disappointed at this reception of herself. Phyllis Helgason Spet, whom
someday I shall kill, gave me across the room a cold, level, venomous look, as if to say:
Watch what you say. You know what I can do. It’s true that I have little formal status,
but Madam President will get herself in serious trouble with both me and her own staff
if she continues to consider industrial espionage good clean fun. Wars and rumors of
wars, as it says in one of our ancestors’ books. I translated Yuki’s words into the man’s
dog-Russian, once our lingua franca, and the man laughed again.
“Where are all your people?” he said conversationally.
I translated again and watched the faces around the room; Lydia embarrassed
(as usual), Spet narrowing her eyes with some damned scheme, Katy very pale.
“This is Whileaway,” I said.
He continued to look unenlightened.
“Whileaway,” I said. “Do you remember? Do you have records? There was a
plague on Whileaway,”
He looked moderately interested. Heads turned in the back of the room, and I
caught a glimpse of the local professions-parliament delegate; by morning every town
meeting, every district caucus, would be in full session.
“Plague?” he said. “That’s most unfortunate.”
 “Yes,” I said. “Most unfortunate. We lost half our population in one
generation.”
He looked properly impressed.
“Whileaway was lucky,” I said. “We had a big initial gene pool, we had been
chosen for extreme intelligence, we had a high technology and a large remaining
population in which every adult was two-or-three experts in one. The soil is good. The
climate is blessedly easy. There are thirty millions of us now. Things are beginning to
snowball in industry—do you understand?— give us seventy years and we’ll have more
than one real city, more than a few industrial centers, full-time professions, full-time
radio operators, full-time machinists, give us seventy years and not everyone will have
to spend threequarters of a lifetime on the farm.” And I tried to explain how hard it is
when artists can practice full-time only in old age, when there are so few, so very few
who can be free, like Katy and myself. I tried also to outline our government, the two
houses, the one by professions and the geographic one; I told him the district caucuses
handled problems too big for the individual towns. And that population control was not
a political issue, not yet, though give us time and it would be. This was a delicate point
in our history; give us time. There was no need to sacrifice the quality of life for an insane
rush into industrialization. Let us go our own pace. Give us time.
“Where are all the people?” said that monomaniac.
I realized then that he did not mean people, he meant men, and he was giving
the word the meaning it had not had on Whileaway for six centuries.
“They died,” I said. “Thirty generations ago.”
I thought we had poleaxed him. He caught his breath. He made as if to get out
of the chair he was sitting in; he put his hand to his chest; he looked around at us with
the strangest blend of awe and sentimental tenderness. Then he said, solemnly and
earnestly:
“A great tragedy.”
I waited, not quite understanding.
“Yes,” he said, catching his breath again with the queer smile, that adult-to-
child smile that tells you something is being hidden and will be presently produced with
cries of encouragement and joy, “a great tragedy. But it’s over.” And again he looked
around at all of us with the strangest deference. As if we were invalids.
“You’ve adapted amazingly,” he said.
“To what?” I said. He looked embarrassed. He looked inane. Finally he said,
“Where I come from, the women don’t dress so plainly.”
“Like you?” I said. “Like a bride?” for the men were wearing silver from head to
foot. I had never seen anything so gaudy. He made as if to answer and then apparently
thought better of it; he laughed at me again. With an odd exhilaration—as if we were
something childish and something wonderful, as if he were doing us an enormous
favor—he took one shaky breath and said, “Well, we’re here.”
I looked at Spet, Spet looked at Lydia, Lydia looked at Amalia, who is the head
of the local town meeting, Amalia looked at I don’t know whom. My throat was raw. I
cannot stand local beer, which the farmers swill as if their stomachs had iridium linings,
but I took it anyway, from Amalia (it was her bicycle we had seen outside as we parked),
80
and swallowed it all. This was going to take a long time. I said, “Yes, here you are,” and
smiled (feeling like a fool), and wondered seriously if male-Earth-people’s minds worked
so very differently from female-Earth-people’s minds, but that couldn’t be so or the race
would have died out long ago. The radio network had got the news around planet by
now and we had another Russian speaker, flown in from Varna; I decided to cut out
when the man passed around pictures of his wife, who looked like the priestess of some
arcane cult. He proposed to question Yuki, so I barreled her into a back room in spite of
her furious protests, and went out on the front porch. As I left, Lydia was explaining the
difference between parthenogenesis (which is so easy that anyone can practice it) and
what we do, which is the merging of ova. That is why Katy’s baby looks like me. Lydia
went on to the Ansky Process and Katy Ansky, our one full-polymath genius and the
great-great I don’t know how many times greatgrandmother of my own Katharina.
A dot-dash transmitter in one of the outbuildings chattered faintly to itself—
operators flirting and passing jokes down the line.
There was a man on the porch. The other tall man. I watched him for a few
minutes—I can move very quietly when I want to and when I allowed him to see me, he
stopped talking into the little machine hung around his neck. Then he said calmly, in
excellent Russian, “Did you know that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth?”
“You’re the real one,” I said, “aren’t you? The other one’s for show.” It was a
great relief to get things cleared up. He nodded affably.
“As a people, we are not very bright,” he said. “There’s been too much genetic
damage in the last few centuries. Radiation. Drugs. We can use Whileaway’s genes,
Janet.” Strangers do not call strangers by the first name.
“You can have cells enough to drown in,” I said. “Breed your own.”
He smiled. “That’s not the way we want to do it.” Behind him I saw Katy come
into the square of light that was the screened-in door. He went on, low and urbane, not
mocking me, I think, but with the self-confidence of someone who has always had
money and strength to spare, who doesn’t know what it is to be second-class or
provincial. Which is very odd, because the day before, I would have said that was an
exact description of me.
“I’m talking to you, Janet,” he said, “because I suspect you have more popular
influence than anyone else here. You know as well as I do that parthenogenetic culture
has all sorts of inherent defects, and we do not—if we can help it—mean to use you for
anything of the sort. Pardon me; I should not have said ‘use.’ But surely you can see that
this kind of society is unnatural.”
“Humanity is unnatural,” said Katy. She had my rifle under her left arm. The top
of that silky head does not quite come up to my collarbone, but she is as tough as steel;
he began to move, again with that queer smiling deference (which his fellow had showed
to me but he had not), and the gun slid into Katy’s grip as if she had shot with it all her
life.
“I agree,” said the man. “Humanity is unnatural. I should know. I have metal in
my teeth and metal pins here.” He touched his shoulder. “Seals are harem animals,” he
added, “and so are men; apes are promiscuous and so are men; doves are monogamous
and so are men; there are even celibate men and homosexual men. There are
homosexual cows, I believe. But Whileaway is still missing something.” He gave a dry
chuckle. I will give him the credit of believing that it had something to do with nerves.
“I miss nothing,” said Katy, “except that life isn’t endless.”
“You are—?” said the man, nodding from me to her.
“Wives,” said Katy. “We’re married.” Again the dry chuckle.
“A good economic arrangement,” he said, “for working and taking care of the
children. And as good an arrangement as any for randomizing heredity, if your
reproduction is made to follow the same pattern. But think, Katharina Michaelason, if
there isn’t something better that you might secure for your daughters. I believe in
instincts, even in Man, and I can’t think that the two of you—a machinist, are you? and
I gather you are some sort of chief of police—don’t feel somehow what even you must
miss. You know it intellectually, of course. There is only half a species here. Men must
come back to Whileaway.”
Katy said nothing.
“I should think, Katharina Michaelason,” said the man gently, “that you, of all
people, would benefit most from such a change,” and he walked past Katy’s rifle into
the square of light coming from the door. I think it was then that he noticed my scar,
which really does not show unless the light is from the side: a fine line that runs from
temple to chin. Most people don’t even know about it.
“Where did you get that?” he said, and I answered with an involuntary grin. “In
my last duel.” We stood there bristling at each other for several seconds (this is absurd
but true) until he went inside and shut the screen door behind him. Katy said in a brittle
voice, “You damned fool, don’t you know when we’ve been insulted?” and swung up
the rifle to shoot him through the screen, but I got to her before she could fire and
knocked the rifle out of aim; it burned a hole through the porch floor. Katy was shaking.
She kept whispering over and over, “That’s why I never touched it, because I knew I’d
kill someone. I knew I’d kill someone.” The first man—the one I’d spoken with first—was
still talking inside the house, something about the grand movement to recolonize and
rediscover all the Earth had lost. He stressed the advantages to Whileaway: trade,
exchange of ideas, education. He, too, said that sexual equality had been reestablished
on Earth.
***
Katy was right, of course; we should have burned them down where they stood. Men
are coming to Whileaway. When one culture has the big guns and the other has none,
there is a certain predictability about the outcome. Maybe men would have come
eventually in any case. I like to think that a hundred years from now my great-
grandchildren could have stood them off or fought them to a standstill, but even that’s
no odds; I will remember all my life those four people I first met who were muscled like
bulls and who made me—if only for a moment—feel small. A neurotic reaction, Katy
says. I remember everything that happened that night; I remember Yuki’s excitement in
the car, I remember Katy’s sobbing when we got home as if her heart would break, I
remember her lovemaking, a little peremptory as always, but wonderfully soothing and
81
comforting. I remember prowling restlessly around the house after Katy fell asleep with
one bare arm hung into a patch of light from the hall. The muscles of her forearms are
like metal bars from all that driving and testing of her machines. Sometimes I dream
about Katy’s arms. I remember wandering into the nursery and picking up my wife’s
baby, dozing for a while with the poignant, amazing warmth of an infant in my lap, and
finally returning to the kitchen to find Yuriko fixing herself a late snack. My daughter
eats like a Great Dane.
“Yuki,” I said, “do you think you could fall in love with a man?” and she whooped
derisively. “With a ten-foot toad!” said my tactful child.
But men are coming to Whileaway. Lately I sit up nights and worry about the
men who will come to this planet, about my two daughters and Betta Katharinason,
about what will happen to Katy, to me, to my life. Our ancestors’ journals are one long
cry of pain and I suppose I ought to be glad now, but one can’t throw away six centuries,
or even (as I have lately discovered) thirty-four years. Sometimes I laugh at the question
those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask, looking at the
lot of us, hicks in overalls, farmers in canvas pants and plain shirts: Which of you plays
the role of the man? As if we had to produce a carbon copy of their mistakes! I doubt
very much that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. I do not like to think of
myself mocked, of Katy deferred to as if she were weak, of Yuki made to feel
unimportant or silly, of my other children cheated of their full humanity or turned into
strangers. And I’m afraid that my own achievements will dwindle from what they were—
or what I thought they were—to the not-very-interesting curiosa of the human race, the
oddities you read about in the back of the book, things to laugh at sometimes because
they are so exotic, quaint but not impressive, charming but not useful. I find this more
painful than I can say. You will agree that for a woman who has fought three duels, all
of them kills, indulging in such fears is ludicrous. But what’s around the corner now is a
duel so big that I don’t think I have the guts for it; in Faust’s words: Verweile doch, du
bist so schön! Keep it as it is. Don’t change.
Sometimes at night I remember the original name of this planet, changed by
the first generation of our ancestors, those curious women for whom, I suppose, the
real name was too painful a reminder after the men died. I find it amusing, in a grim
way, to see it all so completely turned around. This, too, shall pass. All good things must
come to an end.
Take my life but don’t take away the meaning of my life.
For-A-While.
21. BERNARDINE EVARISTO – BLONDE ROOTS (2009) (excerpts)
Book One
OH LORD, TAKE ME HOME
So while my boss, Bwana, and his family are out clinking rum-and- Coke glasses and
shaking their wobbly backsides at fancy parties down the road, I’ve been assigned duties
in his office to sort through his ledgers. I used to hope that the celebration of
Voodoomass would be the one day off in the year for us slaves—but oh no, it’s business
as usual.
Outside the window the palm trees that line the avenues are decorated with
gold and silver streamers. They are tall, sleek, snooty with the deportment of those who
grow up balancing the precious milk of coconuts on their heads; dangling from their
glossy green fronds are flickering oil lamps sitting in red-painted cassava gourds.
The cobblestone pavement has been swept smooth of yesterday’s sandstorm,
and the hawkers selling takeaways have been sent packing.
Frogs and crickets provide a drunken nighttime chorus while cameldrawn
carriages deliver stoosh party guests to our neighboring compounds. The men wear
flamboyant kaftans and their glamorously fat women try to outdo one another with
peacock-print headscarves tied up into the most extravagant girlie bows.
All the houses are freshly whitewashed, with stained-glass windows depicting
the gods: Oshan, Shangira, Yemonja. Stone sphinxes guard porches, and stationed by
doorways are torch lamps on tall marble plinths— their flames are slippery blue fingers
grasping out at the sticky nighttime air.
From the upper rooms of the houses blast the hectic electronic beats of the
young, and from downstairs comes the mellow music of the marimba, amid the laughter
and bantering of people who have every reason to celebrate this season of goodwill,
because they are free men and free women in the heart of the most expensive piece of
real estate in the known world: Mayfah.
CHIEF KAGA KONATA KATAMBA I is the Bwana in question. He made his fortune
in the import-export game, the notorious transatlantic slave run, before settling down
to life in polite society as an absentee sugar baron, part-time husband, freelance father,
retired decent human being and, it goes without saying, sacked soul.
My boss is also a full-time anti-abolitionist, publishing his pro-slavery rants in
his mouthpiece, The Flame—a pamphlet distributed far and wide— as a freebie.
In spite of myself, I’d just begun to flick through the latest god-awful issue,
feeling my stomach constrict and my throat tighten, when a hand shoved a folded note
through the open office window and vanished before I could see who it was attached
to.
I opened the note, read the magic words and felt my head suddenly drowning.
Waves crashed and thundered inside my skull.
82
I let out the most almighty, silent howl.
Then I passed out.
How long for, I’ve no idea, maybe a few minutes, but when I came to I was
slumped in my seat, my head dropped forward, the note still in my hand.
I read it again through a film of water.
It was real and it was true—I was being given the chance to escape.
Oh Lord.
After so many years on the waiting list, the thing I most desired was in the palm
of my hand. Yet it was all too quick. I sat there frozen. A thousand what ifs ran through
my mind. In returning my life to its rightful owner— me—I would also be putting my life
at stake. If I wasn’t careful or lucky, I’d end up at the local whipping post or chopping
block.
Then my survival instincts kicked in.
My head cleared.
I was back again.
I ripped the note to shreds.
I stood up and looked at the wooden mask of Bwana’ s face on the wall.
And I gave it the right, royal one-finger salute.
THE NOTE TOLD ME THAT the Underground Railroad was operating again after
service had been suspended owing to derailment. It was often the case when energy
couldn’t’ t be filched from the city’ power station or the train broke down due to the
overload of escaping slaves wanting to cadge a safe ride out of the city, to begin the long
journey back to the Motherland.
I hoped I could trust the message because the Resistance was often infiltrated
by sleepers who eventually went operational to betray whole rebel cells.
Deep down I knew that the slave traders were never going to give up their cash
cow. It was, after all, one of the most lucrative international businesses ever, involving
the large-scale transport of whytes, shipped in our millions from the continent of Europa
to the West Japanese Islands, so called because when the “great” explorer and
adventurer Chinua Chikwuemeka was trying to find a new route to Asia, he mistook
those islands for the legendary isles of Japan, and the name stuck.
So here I am in the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa (UK or GA for short),
which is part of the continent of Aphrika. The mainland lies just over the Ambossan
Channel. It’s also known as the Sunny Continent, of course, on account of it being so
flaming hot here.
Great Ambossa is actually a very small island with a growing population to feed,
and so it stretches its greedy little fingers all over the globe, stealing countries and
stealing people.
Me included. I’m one of the Stolen Ones.
That’s why I’m here.
The note gave me only one hour to get to the disused Paddinto Station and
directions on how to find the manhole hidden behind some bushes through which I
could slip down into the subway. There I would be met by a member of the Resistance
who would lead me through its dank subterranean tunnels. That was the promise,
anyway, and if it wasn’t the practice, I’d be done for.
But I am a firm believer in hope. I am still alive, after all.
The city of Londolo’s Tube trains had officially stopped burrowing many years
ago when the tunnels started collapsing under the weight of the buildings above them.
The city returned to the slower but more reliable modes of transport: carriages, horses,
carts, camels, elephants, stagecoaches and, for the really nutty fitness fanatics,
velocipedes. The only vehicle we slaves owned was called Shanks’ Pony.
But here’s the thing: at some point, a bright spark in the Resistance had a
brainwave and the disused subway was put to use, enabling many to make their way out
of the heavily guarded city of Londolo as far as the docks, where they began the long,
hazardous trip back to Europa.
For the first time since I had been taken away, I could seriously consider that I
might be returning home. Was it possible? I still had such vivid memories of my parents,
my three sisters, our little flint cottage on the estate, and my beloved cocker spaniel,
Rory. My family were probably all dead now, if they had survived the raids by the Border
Lander men who had been my first captors.
The Ambossans called us tribes, but we were many nations, each with our own
language and funny old customs, like the Border Landers, whose men wore tartan skirts
with no knickers underneath.
The Ambossans also called Europa the Gray Continent, on account of the skies
always being overcast.
But oh, how I longed for those cloudy gray skies.
How I longed for the incessant drizzle and harsh wind slapping my ears.
How I longed for my snug winter woollies and sturdy wooden clogs.
How I longed for Mam’s warm dripping sandwiches and thick pumpkin broth.
How I longed for the fire crackling in the hearth and our family singsong around
it.
How I longed for the far northern district from whence I was taken.
How I longed for England.
How I longed for home.
I AM PROUD TO DECLARE that I come from a long line of cabbage farmers.
My people were honest peasants who worked the land and never turned to
theft even when it snowed in summer or rained all winter so that the crops miscarried
in their pods and turned to mulch.
We weren’t landowners, oh no, we were serfs, the bottom link in the
agricultural food chain, although no actual chains clinked on the ground when we
walked around. Nor were we property, exactly, but our roots went deep into the soil
because when the land changed hands through death, marriage or even war, so did we,
and so tied we remained, for generation upon generation.
The deal was that we were leased some fields by our master, Lord Perceval
Montague (Percy, behind his back), the umpteenth eldest son in the family to whom my
83
family had an umbilical bond. In return all male serfs were conscripted to be foot soldiers
in his battles, and believe you me it was a lawless society back then. It was pretty wild
in the far north in those days. If someone wanted to raid your land or steal your flock,
they did it through brute force, unless you were able to meet fire with gun-powder, or
rally a private army to defend yourself, even if it was just a motley crew of shambolic
farmhands.
So we worked our patch of land, as well as Percy’s.
Whatever we harvested, we had to give half to him.
He was supposed to offer poor relief, but rarely did.
We were charged for extras such as taking his cart to go to market or using his
grain mill or bread oven, which, if we had poor harvests, meant a debt carried over on
our annual accounts for several years.
Montague Manor was an imposing pile of granite, tomblike slabs framed
against skies that shuddered beneath the chain mail of the north’s daily bout of rain.
It proved an irresistible attraction to us kids, yet I was the only one of my sisters
with enough derring-do to risk succumbing to the lure of the big house.
Once, when everyone was at the annual summer fayre on the estate, my sisters
peeping through some bushes as cowardly witnesses, I sneaked in through the manor’s
heavy wooden door into the cavernous Grand Hall. I tried to tiptoe, but my clogs echoed
around the high ceiling.
The walls were hung with tapestries of fair maidens stroking the horns of
unicorns, reindeer antlers spread out like the branches of trees, and a massive bear’s
head with salivating gnashers was stuck up directly opposite the front door. Its wet,
limpid eyes followed my every move.
When I heard moans coming from deep underneath the ground, I panicked,
about-turned and charged out, bumping into a stuffed wolf by the front door, which
looked ready to lurch and take a bite. The moans must have come from Percy’s s
legendary dungeons where he imprisoned poachers and captives from the Border
skirmishes. Eventually they’d be packed off for the long trek through the forests to the
next ship docked on the coast bound for the New World—or so we’d heard.
To us peasants, the New World was a distant land far across the seas about
which we knew nothing, except that no one wanted to go there, because those that did
never came back.
Home was Apple Tree Cottage on the edge of the estate. A hotchpotch of
timber beams and earth-packed walls. It was infested with rustling insects. Indeed the
whole house was alive with vermin-from the wasps nesting in the straw-thatched roof
to the body-hopping fleas for whom our blood was the elixir of life. A front door opened
onto a tiny parlor with an earthen floor and a peat fire. Two sleeping spaces were
separated by heavy green woolen drapes either side of the corridor that served as the
kitchen. We couldn’t afford window glass because of the tax, and so with the shutters
closed it was always winter inside.
Madge, Sharon, Alice and I shared a straw mattress. We slept under a
multicolored quilt made out of cast-offs stitched by two great-aunts who’d died before
we were born. I bagsyed the middle, kept warm by my sisters during those freezing
northeasterly nights.
Then there was Rory the dog, who was always bounding around knocking things
over even though he wasn’t “a puppy no more,” as Mam’d shout. Her foot would send
him on an impromptu long jump from which he’d land with a squeal, legs comically
splayed flat.
Our Pa and our Mam were Mr. Jack and Eliza Scagglethorpe.
Pa’s muscles clung to him in hard sinews because there was little fat to shelter
his bones. He had a bushy scrag-end of a beard that he “couldn’t be arsed” to trim, and
his cheeks were blistered from where the bitter winds had rubbed them raw. He had the
stoop of a thin tree blown forward by a gale, because he’d been planting and digging up
cabbages since he was a tiny kid.
Pa’s hair was the dark ginger of the folk from the Border Lands. It fell to his
shoulders in spirals beneath the wide-brimmed farmer’ s hat he always wore when
outdoors.
Before I was old enough to know better, he’d roll up his smock, instruct me to
put a finger to the throbbing pulse of the veins on his arms and tell me centipedes lived
inside them. I’d run away shrieking with him chasing me, both of us knocking over stools,
pails and my sisters in the process.
Pa was passionate about his cabbages, said they had to be treated lovingly, like
children. What didn’t I know about flaming cabbages! January King was “crispy and full
of flavor,” the Autumn Queen was dark green and the Savoy King was “a tough little
bugger.” What didn’t I know about the Cabbage Wars of old, when the Scagglethorpes
had fought victoriously for the Montagues against the Paldergraves?
I hated eating cabbage in those BS (Before Slavery) days.
What I’d give for one now.
PA NEVER ONCE COMPLAINED about not having a son, but we all knew what
was on his mind, because sometimes when he looked at us, his disappointment was
undisguised.
Who was going to carry on the Scagglethorpe cabbage farming tradition?
He’d always shake it off, though.
“Go on,” he’d urge us girls. “Tell me I have one wish.”
“What wish?”
“Don’t be so stupid. Tell me I have a wish. That you can grant me.”
“But we don’t have special powers; we’re not fairy god-mothers.”
“It’s a game, you silly lot. Give me one wish or I’ll throw a cabbage at your thick
skulls.”
“All right then, Pa, you have one wish.”
“Well, now, let’s see. What would I want? Oh, I know what I’d wish for,” he’d
say, scratching his chin like the thought was just coming to him.
“To see my girls in those crinolines with expensive whalebones that those ladies
up there wear, pretty paste on your cheeks, pearls around your swanlike necks; to see
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you swirling around at dances with kindly gentlemen on your arms, winning smiles on
your lips and glass slippers on your feet.”
“Oooh, don’t be so soppy,” I’d say, before going to fetch the looking glass to
see if my neck really was “swanlike.”
That night I dreamed of a lacy yellow crinoline with puffed-up sleeves. My gown
was so exquisite, my glass slippers so dainty, that when I ran across the meadows, hair
flowing in the wind, everyone gasped at how elegant I’d turned out.
Then I ruined it by getting bunions because the slippers were too tight and one
of them cracked and the glass cut into my foot, waking me up with the pain of it.
PA WOULD RISE BEFORE DAYLIGHT had kicked nighttime into touch. He’d
return after dark, when he’d be mardy until he’d eaten.
He liked a tankard of ale (only ever admitted the one) of a Friday night after
dinner when he’d go to Johnny Johnson’s barn over at None-Go-By Farm for a “wee
session” with “the lads”—all old men pushing forty. He’d come home reeking of the
barley and herbs in his ale, singing a bawdy song, which we could hear from fields off,
then catching his breath as he leaned against the opened door frame blasting cold air
into our parlor, ranting on about how “the working man will have his day,” before
staggering inside in his manure-caked boots and collapsing into his chair, legs sprawled
open, head thrown back so that his bristly Adam’s apple stuck out and quivered.
“How are the lads?” Mam would say out loud once he was snoring, not looking
up from her knitting needles, which clacked like warring swords.
I’ll never forget the first time it was my turn to take Pa hot bread and dripping
for lunch.
The clouds had sunk so low from the heavens I couldn’t find him for ages, until
there he was, looming out of the fog, one hand rested on his pitchfork, looking for all
the world like a scarecrow, and I suddenly saw how all the backbreaking work had
drained him.
He was singing, but not one of his usual smutty songs that made us girls giggle
and our mam scowl. Instead he sounded like one of the choir boys at church whose
voices hadn’t become coarse and mud-filled and angry from years of breaking up icy
ground with shovels, slopping out donkey shit or chopping wood for hours in freezing
winter dressed in rough sackcloth, with their bare feet shod only in clogs.
It was the voice of the boy inside the man. The child inside my father.
His heart was full of yearning, for something he’d lost or wanted to have.
My heart crumbled like stale bread.
Are you going to Scarborough Fayre?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme,
Remember me to one who lives there,
She once was a true love of mine.
On my tenth birthday it was my turn to go out onto the fields blindfolded to
pull up the first cabbage of the season. Aged ten you’d already survived the pox, the
sweat and just about every other disease that spirited children away early, so it was
likely you might grow to adulthood. If the cabbage came up with a lot of earth attached,
it meant you’d be rich; if not then you’d be poor.
That spring dawn we all trekked across the damp grass and past trees beginning
to unfurl the tiny lavender-colored petals of blossom.
I’d already decided on my career path. I was going to become one of those rare
silk-trading women, like that young Margaret Roper from the village at Duddingley who
went off on the back of a cart and came back in her own carriage. Like her I’d be
apprenticed for seven years; then I’d run my own business. First I had to persuade Pa to
persuade Percy to let me go. I knew Pa would scoff at the idea of one of his silly
daughters becoming a proper businesswoman.
It didn’t put me off.
The debt would take many years to pay off but eventually I’d be rich enough to
settle it myself.
I had it all sorted.
As you do, when you’re ten.
The cabbage came up with a huge clump of sod attached.
I did a cartwheel, singing out, “Wey, hey, hey, the cat and fiddle and the cow
jumped over the moon.”
Oh, so it really sodding worked then, didn’t it?
MEMORIES WOULD NOT GET ME to the station on time.
I flew out of Bwana’s office like a leopard on kola nuts and rushed across the
compound, the largest in the city. Across the freshly sprinkled, squeaky-green lawn, past
the rockery studded with cacti, past the widehipped, big-mama palms of the pineapple
grove, past the orange and pink slides and roundabouts of the adventure playground,
past the saccharine scent of the mangosteen, pawpaw and vanilla trees, past the open-
air swimming pool with mosquitoes buzzing over its stagnant surface, past the camel
paddocks, and behind all that, finally, to the secreted slave quarters, which had been
considerately built next to the sewage dump and pigs’ pen.
There I entered the tiny hut I shared with my roommates: Yomisi and Sitembile.
Yomisi was in her thirties, like me. Only she’d been born Gertraude Shultz on a
wheat farm in Bavaria. Aged eighteen she was kidnapped by slave catchers as she made
her way back from church one chilly Sunday morning, foolishly taking the shortcut across
the graveyard. She eventually ended up in Londolo, sleeping side by side with yours
truly. It was an unlikely bonding: I was the optimist, she the pessimist. I clutched my
return ticket to my chest, always dreaming of escape; she’d ripped hers to shreds the
very first time she was gang-raped by her three kidnappers shortly after capture.
She’d been hell-bent on revenge ever since.
Yomisi was Bwana’s cook. Steel-thin, green-eyed, heavy-lidded, she was forced
to wear an iron muzzle in the kitchen to prevent her eating on the job. It encaged her
face in metal bands that clamped a perforated plate over her mouth. A lock secured this
contraption at the back.
Her lips cracked. Her mouth dehydrated. Her tongue swelled. Her gums bled.
85
Even when the muzzle was removed at night she spoke through gritted teeth.
Sometimes Bwana vomited the night away or one of his children ran a fever.
The runs were commonplace. Bwana’s regular hallucinations bordered on insanity, and
the entire family frequently broke out in rashes so unbearable they could be seen
clawing off layers of skin in a communal frenzy.
All fingers pointed to the juju of Bwana’ s business enemies, none at the
passive, sticklike cook.
Crushed glass.
Rotten meat disguised by strong herbs and spices.
Fungi.
Plants she would not name.
It was the only thing that gave her pleasure.
My second roommate was the cheery young Sitembile, who was in her early
twenties. She liked to remind us lesser mortals that she was born Princess Olivia de
Champfleur-Saxe-Coburg-Grimaldi-Bourbon-Orleans- Hapsburg in a palace in the
ancient land of Monaco. Taken hostage in a war with the French, she was sold into
captivity when her father, the king, wouldn’t pay for the release of a girl child when he
already had five sons in line to inherit the crown.
Sitembile held the honored position of household toilet cleaner, emptying
approximately fifty toilet pots each morning, before spending the rest of the day
scooping out the bog holes and hosing them down with lime disinfectant to deter bugs
and flies.
When time allowed, and it rarely did, she sat on our stoop, chattering away,
embarking on a conversation in her head, letting the listener in halfway through and
then being surprised when we complained we didn’ t have a clue what she was going on
about.
She’d sit there twisting her hair into pigtails mixed with clay, rubbing ocher into
her skin to darken its pigment in the hope that she might be spotted by one of Bwana’ s
nicer, younger, more handsome business associates and be whisked away to a new life
as a favored mistress. With substantial curves either side of a naturally tiny waist, it was
just possible.
Yomisi tried to dampen Sitembile’s enthusiasm with her oft-declared dictum
that dreams and disappointment were inseparable bedfellows.
I helped rub ocher into Sitembile’s smooth, undamaged back, countering that
dreams kept our spirits buoyant.
We three women had slipped into one another’s lives and found a way to be
together.
Now I was slipping out.
Without saying a word.