New Atlantis (5 page)

Down another street, about the level of the first-floor
windows, came a flickering drift of hundreds of motes of silver. With a single
motion all turned toward the cross street, and glittered off into the dark blue
shadows.

There were shadows, now.

We looked up, up from the flight of silver fish, up from
the streets where the jade-green currents flowed and the blue shadows fell. We
moved and looked up, yearning, to the high towers of our city. They stood, the
fallen towers. They glowed in the ever-brightening radiance, not blue or
blue-green, up there, but gold. Far above them lay a vast, circular, trembling
brightness: the sun’s light on the surface of the sea.

We are here. When we break through the bright circle into
life, the water will break and stream white down the white sides of the towers,
and run down the steep streets back into the sea. The water will glitter in
dark hair, on the eyelids of dark eyes, and dry to a thin white film of salt.

We are here.

Whose voice? Who called to us?

~

He was with me for twelve days. On January 28th the ’crats
came from the Bureau of Health, Education and Welfare and said that since he
was receiving Unemployment Compensation while suffering from an untreated
illness, the government must look after him and restore him to health, because
health is the inalienable right of the citizens of a democracy. He refused to
sign the consent forms, so the chief health officer signed them. He refused to
get up, so two of the policemen pulled him up off the bed. He started to try to
fight them. The chief health officer pulled his gun and said that if he
continued to struggle he would shoot him for resisting welfare, and arrest me
for conspiracy to defraud the government. The man who was holding my arms
behind my back said they could always arrest me for unreported pregnancy with
intent to form a nuclear family. At that Simon stopped trying to get free. It
was really all he was trying to do, not to fight them, just to get his arms
free. He looked at me, and they took him out.

He is in the federal hospital in Salem. I have not been able
to find out whether he is in the regular hospital or the mental wards.

It was on the radio again yesterday, about the rising land
masses in the South Atlantic and the Western Pacific. At Max’s the other night
I saw a TV special explaining about geophysical stresses and subsidence and
faults. The U.S. Geodetic Service is doing a lot of advertising around town,
the most common one is a big billboard that says IT’S NOT OUR FAULT! with a
picture of a beaver pointing to a schematic map that shows how even if Oregon
has a major earthquake and subsidence as California did last month, it will not
affect Portland, or only the western suburbs perhaps. The news also said that
they plan to halt the tidal waves in Florida by dropping nuclear bombs where
Miami was. Then they will reattach Florida to the mainland with landfill. They
are already advertising real estate for housing developments on the landfill.
The president is staying at the Mile High White House in Aspen, Colorado. I don’t
think it will do him much good. Houseboats down on the Willamette are selling
for $500,000. There are no trains or buses running south from Portland, because
all the highways were badly damaged by the tremors and landslides last week, so
I will have to see if I can get to Salem on foot. I still have the rucksack I
bought for the Mount Hood Wilderness Week. I got some dry lima beans and
raisins with my Federal Fair Share Super Value Green Stamp minimal ration book
for February — it took the whole book — and Phil Drum made me a tiny camp stove
powered with the solar cell. I didn’t want to take the Primus, it’s too bulky,
and I did want to be able to carry the viola. Max gave me a half pint of
brandy. When the brandy is gone I expect I will stuff this notebook into the
bottle and put the cap on tight and leave it on a hillside somewhere between
here and Salem. I like to think of it being lifted up little by little by the
water, and rocking, and going out to the dark sea.

~

Where are you?

We are here. Where have you gone?

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The New Atlantis

Ursula K. Le Guin

Book View Café Publishing Cooperative Edition November 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-342-3
Copyright © 1975 Ursula K. Le Guin

First published:
The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction,
edited by Robert Silverberg. Hawthorne Books, 1975.

Cover illustration by Dominic Sinclair, Dreamstime.com

Cover design by Leah Cutter, http://www.KnottedRoadPress.com/

Production team:
Proofreader: Vonda N. McIntyre

v20131111vnm

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Ursula K. Le Guin
is a founding member of Book View Café.

She has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls, and Finding My Elegy, New and Selected Poems. Small Beer Press published her two-volume story collection, The Real and the Unreal, in 2013.

She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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