New Atlantis (4 page)

I asked him to explain what the sun tap would mean to the masses,
with me as a representative mass. He explained that it means we can tap solar
energy for power, using a device that’s easier to build than a jar battery. The
efficiency and storage capacity are such that about ten minutes of sunlight
will power an apartment complex like ours, heat and lights and elevators and
all, for twenty-four hours; and no pollution, particulate, thermal, or
radioactive. “There isn’t any danger of using up the sun?” I asked. He took it
soberly — it was a stupid
question, but after all not so long ago people thought there wasn’t any danger
of using up the earth — and said no, because we wouldn’t be pulling out energy,
as we did when we mined and lumbered and split atoms, but just using the energy
that comes to us anyhow: as the plants, the trees and grass and rosebushes,
always have done. “You could call it Flower Power,” he said. He was high, high
up on the mountain, ski-jumping in the sunlight.

“The State owns us,” he said, “because the corporative State
has a monopoly on power sources, and there’s not enough power to go around. But
now, anybody could build a generator on their roof that would furnish enough
power to light a city.”

I looked out the window at the dark city.

“We could completely decentralize industry and agriculture.
Technology could serve life instead of serving capital. We could each run our
own life. Power is power! . . . The State is a machine. We could unplug the machine,
now. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. But that’s true only
when there’s a price on power. When groups can keep the power to themselves;
when they can use physical power-to in order to exert spiritual power-over;
when might makes right. But if power is free? If everybody is equally mighty?
Then everybody’s got to find a better way
of showing that he’s right . . .”

“That’s what Mr. Nobel thought when he invented dynamite,” I
said. “Peace on earth.”

He slid down the sunlit slope a couple of thousand feet and
stopped beside me in a spray of snow, smiling. “Skull at the banquet,” he said,
“finger writing on the wall. Be still! Look, don’t you see the sun shining on
the Pentagon, all the roofs are off, the sun shines at last into the corridors
of power . . . And they shrivel up, they wither away. The green grass grows through
the carpets of the Oval Room, the Hot Line is disconnected for nonpayment
of the bill. The first thing we’ll do is build an electrified fence outside the
electrified fence around the White House. The inner one prevents unauthorized
persons from getting in. The outer one will prevent authorized persons from
getting out . . .”

Of course he was bitter. Not many people come out of prison
sweet.

But it was cruel, to be shown this great hope, and to know that
there was no hope for it. He did know that. He knew it right along. He knew
that there was no mountain, that he was skiing on the wind.

~

The tiny lights of the lantern-creatures died out one by
one, sank away. The distant lonely voices were silent. The cold, slow currents
flowed, vacant, only shaken from time to time by a shifting in the abyss.

It was dark again, and no voice spoke. All dark, dumb,
cold.

Then the sun rose.

It was not like the dawns we had begun to remember: the
change, manifold and subtle, in the smell and touch of the air; the hush that,
instead of sleeping, wakes, holds still, and waits; the appearance of objects,
looking gray, vague, and new, as if just created — distant mountains against
the eastern sky, one’s own hands, the hoary grass full of dew and shadow, the
fold in the edge of a curtain hanging by the window — and then, before one is
quite sure that one is indeed seeing again, that the light has returned, that
day is breaking, the first, abrupt, sweet stammer of a waking bird. And after
that the chorus, voice by voice: This is my nest, this is my tree, this is my egg,
this is my day, this is my life, here I am, here I am, hurray for me! I’m here!
— No, it wasn’t like that at all, this dawn. It was completely silent, and it
was blue.

In the dawns that we had begun to remember, one did not
become aware of the light itself, but of the separate objects touched by the
light, the things, the world. They were there, visible again, as if visibility
were their own property, not a gift from the rising sun,

In this dawn, there was nothing but the light itself.
Indeed there was not even light, we would have said, but only color: blue.

There was no compass bearing to it. It was not brighter
in the east. There was no east or west. There was only up and down, below and
above. Below was dark. The blue light came from above. Brightness fell.
Beneath, where the shaking thunder had stilled, the brightness died away
through violet into blindness.

We, rising, watched light fall.

In a way it was more like an ethereal snowfall than like
a sunrise. The light seemed to be in discrete particles, infinitesimal flecks,
slowly descending, faint, fainter than flecks of fine snow on a dark night, and
tinier; but blue. A soft, penetrating blue tending to the violet, the color of
the shadows in an iceberg, the color of a streak of sky between gray clouds on
a winter afternoon before snow: faint in intensity but vivid in hue: the color
of the remote, the color of the cold, the color farthest from the sun.

~

On Saturday night they held a scientific congress in our
room. Clara and Max came, of course, and the
engineer Phil Drum and three others who had worked on the sun tap. Phil Drum
was very pleased with himself because he had actually built one of the things,
a solar cell, and brought it along. I don’t think it had occurred to either Max
or Simon to build one. Once they knew it could be done they were satisfied and
wanted to get on with something else. But Phil unwrapped his baby with a lot of
flourish, and people made remarks like, “Mr. Watson, will you come here a
minute,” and “Hey, Wilbur, you’re off the ground!” and “I say, nasty mould you’ve
got there, Alec, why don’t you throw it out?” and “Ugh, ugh, burns, burns, wow,
ow,” the latter from Max, who does look a little pre-Mousterian. Phil explained
that he had exposed the cell for one minute at four in the afternoon up in
Washington Park during a light rain. The lights were back on on the West Side
since Thursday, so we could test it without being conspicuous.

We turned off the lights, after Phil had wired the
table-lamp cord to the cell. He turned on the lamp switch. The bulb came on,
about twice as bright as before, at its full forty watts — city power of course
was never full strength. We all looked at it. It was a dime-store table lamp
with a metallized gold base and a white plasticloth shade.

“Brighter than a thousand suns,” Simon murmured from the
bed.

“Could it be,” said Clara Edmonds, “that we physicists have
known sin — and have come out the other side?”

“It really wouldn’t be any good at all for making bombs
with,” Max said dreamily.

“Bombs,” Phil Drum said with scorn. “Bombs are obsolete. Don’t
you realize that we could move a mountain with this kind of power? I mean pick
up Mount Hood, move it, and set it down. We could thaw Antarctica, we could
freeze the Congo. We could sink a continent. Give me a fulcrum and I’ll move
the world. Well, Archimedes, you’ve got your fulcrum. The sun.”

“Christ,” Simon said, “the radio, Belle!”

The bathroom door was shut and I had put cotton over the
bug, but he was right; if they were going to go ahead at this rate there had
better be some added static. And though I liked watching their faces in the
clear light of the lamp — they all had good, interesting faces, well worn, like
the handles of wooden tools or the rocks in a running stream — I did not much
want to listen to them talk tonight. Not because I wasn’t a scientist, that
made no difference. And not because I disagreed or disapproved or disbelieved
anything they said. Only because it grieved me terribly, their talking. Because
they couldn’t rejoice aloud over a job done and a discovery made, but had to
hide there and whisper about it. Because they couldn’t go out into the sun.

I went into the bathroom with my viola and sat on the toilet
lid and did a long set of sautillé exercises. Then I tried to work at the Forrest
trio, but it was too assertive. I played the solo part from
Harold in Italy,
which is beautiful, but it wasn’t
quite the right mood either. They were still going strong in the other room. I
began to improvise.

After a few minutes in E-minor the light over the shaving
mirror began to flicker and dim; then it died. Another outage, The table lamp
in the other room did not go out, being connected with the sun, not with the
twenty-three atomic fission plants that power the Greater Portland Area. Within
two seconds somebody had switched it off, too, so that we shouldn’t be the only
window in the West Hills left alight; and I could hear them rooting for candles
and rattling matches. I went on improvising in the dark. Without light, when
you couldn’t see all the hard shiny surfaces of things, the sound seemed softer
and less muddled. I went on, and it began to shape up. All the laws of
harmonics sang together when the bow came down. The strings of the viola were
the cords of my own voice, tightened by sorrow, tuned to the pitch of joy. The
melody created itself out of air and energy, it raised up the valleys, and the
mountains and hills were made low, and the crooked straight, and the rough
places plain. And the music went out to the dark sea and sang in the darkness,
over the abyss.

When I came out they were all sitting there and none of them was
talking. Max had been crying. I could see little candle flames in the tears
around his eyes. Simon lay flat on the bed in the shadows, his eyes closed,
Phil Drum sat hunched over, holding the solar cell in his hands.

I loosened the pegs, put the bow and the viola in the case,
and cleared my throat. It was embarrassing. I finally said, I’m sorry.”

One of the women spoke: Rose Abramski, a private student of
Simon’s, a big shy woman who could hardly speak at all unless it was in
mathematical symbols. “I saw it,” she said. “I saw it. I saw the white towers,
and the water streaming down their sides, and running back down to the sea. And
the sunlight shining in the streets, after ten thousand years of darkness.”

“I heard them,” Simon said, very low, from the shadow. “I
heard their voices.”

“Oh, Christ! Stop it!” Max cried out, and got up and went
blundering out into the unlit hall, without his coat. We heard him running down
the stairs.

“Phil,” said Simon, lying there, “could we raise up the
white towers, with our lever and our fulcrum?”

After a long silence Phil Drum answered, “We have the power
to do it.”

“What else do we need?” Simon said. “What else do we need,
besides power?”

Nobody answered him.

~

The blue changed. It became brighter, lighter, and at the
same time thicker: impure. The ethereal luminosity of blue-violet turned to
turquoise, intense and opaque. Still we could not have said that everything was
now turquoise-colored, for there were still no things. There was nothing,
except the color of turquoise.

The change continued. The opacity became veined and
thinned. The dense, solid color began to appear translucent, transparent. Then
it seemed as if we were in the heart of a sacred jade, or the brilliant crystal
of a sapphire or an emerald.

As at the inner structure of a crystal, there was no
motion. But there was something, now, to see. It was as if we saw the
motionless, elegant inward structure of the molecules of a precious stone.
Planes and angles appeared about us, shadowless and clear in that even,
glowing, blue-green light.

These were the walls and towers of the city, the streets,
the windows, the gates.

We knew them, but we did not recognize them. We did not
dare to recognize them. It had been so long. And it was so strange. We had used
to dream, when we lived in this city. We had lain down, nights, in the rooms
behind the windows, and slept, and dreamed. We had all dreamed of the ocean, of
the deep sea. Were we not dreaming now?

Sometimes the thunder and tremor deep below us rolled
again, but it was faint now, far away; as far away as our memory of the thunder
and the tremor and the fire and the towers falling, long ago. Neither the sound
nor the memory frightened us. We knew them.

The sapphire light brightened overhead to green, almost
green-gold. We looked up. The tops of the highest towers were hard to see,
glowing in the radiance of light. The streets and doorways were darker, more clearly
defined.

In one of those long, jewel-dark streets something was
moving — something not composed of planes and angles, but of curves and arcs.
We all turned to look at it, slowly, wondering as we did so at the slow ease of
our own motion, our freedom. Sinuous, with a beautiful flowing, gathering,
rolling movement, now rapid and now tentative, the thing drifted across the
street from a blank garden wall to the recess of a door. There, in the dark
blue shadow, it was hard to see for a while. We watched. A pale blue curve
appeared at the top of the doorway. A second followed, and a third. The moving
thing clung or hovered there, above the door, like a swaying knot of silvery
cords or a boneless hand, one arched finger pointing carelessly to something
above the lintel of the door, something like itself, but motionless — a
carving. A carving in jade light. A carving in stone.

Delicately and easily the long curving tentacle followed
the curves of the carved figure, the eight petal-limbs, the round eyes. Did it
recognize its image?

The living one swung suddenly, gathered its curves in a
loose knot, and darted away down the street, swift and sinuous. Behind it a
faint cloud of darker blue hung for a minute and dispersed, revealing again the
carved figure above the door: the sea-flower, the cuttlefish, quick,
great-eyed, graceful, evasive, the cherished sign, carved on a thousand walls,
worked into the design of cornices, pavements, handles, lids of jewel boxes,
canopies, tapestries, tabletops, gateways.