Floating Worlds
Authors: Cecelia Holland,Cecelia Holland
For my sisters,
Deborah and Jennifer,
minds like music,
hearts of glass
“These people were giants,” Tony said. He waved up at the towering ruin before them. “They built on such a scale, their ideas were so absolute and universal—”
Paula said, “They were Fascists.”
“You can’t have everything.”
She scuffed her feet over the pavement, two thousand years old, seamed with moss. She had never been good at history. Down the wide, straight street, a man in a white hat leaned back to take a snapshot of the ruins. Paula went down the steps and turned to look up at the building. On the frieze above the doors stone masks hung, labeled. She tried to make out the lettering. BRA—
“Haven’t you ever been here before?” Tony said. He came up behind her, his hands in his pants pockets.
“Once. When I was little. My mother brought me. We had ice creams afterward.” Why was everything so large? She shaded her eyes to see the letters. MANTE. She would have to look it up.
“What was it used for?”
“A museum. A library. Something like that.”
She looked around them. Both sides of the street were lined with ruins. Opposite, a wall still stood upright, the windows worn soft and round with age.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s arrogant.”
“You’re very provincial.”
She grunted at him. They went along the street. Her footsteps rang noisily after her off the ruined walls. The pavement was hard and her legs hurt. Other people strolled around, their heads tilted back.
On the street corner a woman sat painting at an easel. Tony went straight toward her. Paula ambled after him. Opposite the museum, green vines swallowed the last remaining wall of another building. The yellow tongues of sweet Mary reached out to the light. She veered across the pavement and picked one flower and sucked it for the trace of honey. She would have an ice cream on the way home. Voices here traveled far, perhaps the stone carried them; she could hear people talking in the next street. She went up beside Tony.
He stood next to the painter, his face pursed. Amused, she watched him put his head this way and that to see the picture from different angles. He was really a critic, not a writer at all; he knew every pose.
“The lighting presents an interesting problem,” he said.
The woman wiggled her brush in a muddy cup of water. “The domelight changes from day to day. Almost from hour to hour.”
Paula looked straight up overhead. The light was diffuse. It fell in pale sheets through the height of the dome, here blue and there definitely more yellow. It was hard to realize that the ocean covered them. Tony was discussing Art with the painter. He sounded knowledgeable but Paula did not understand anything he said. She went across the street. From here she could see through the broken walls to the next row of ruins, and through them to the next, all huge, the biggest buildings she had ever seen. The people who had built this city had dominated the Earth for three centuries, by money, by force, and by guile; they had colonized Mars, reached as far as Uranus, cracked atoms and made whole cities out of polymer, and Manhattan had been the heart of that empire.
“You know a lot about art,” the woman said to Tony. “Do you paint?”
He smiled at her. “I’m a writer. My name’s Tony Andrea.”
“Oh, really.” They shook hands. She had read his first book. Paula circled behind them to look at the water color. She did not like it. Cramped onto the square paper, the buildings looked small, like broken boxes. She put her hands in her jacket pockets, raising her eyes back to the ruins.
“Are you a writer too?” the painter said.
Paula shook her head. “I’m—”
“We haven’t figured out yet what Paula is,” Tony said.
They walked off down the street. A thick tarry slab of the concrete had buckled up the pavement in the middle. The street ran off straight to the shining wall of the dome in the distance, bordered on either side by raised strips of poured stone. Paula stepped up onto the border.
“Why is this part higher than the other?”
Tony walked along the lower level, beside her. She could see the balding crown of his head. Maybe when he was asleep she would draw an ivy wreath on it. He said, “They drove their cars on this part, and the people on foot walked up where you are. Out of the way, see?”
“They drove their cars on the ground?” No wonder the street was so broad. “Were they horse-drawn?”
“They were a little more advanced than that, kitch.”
Ahead of them the angle of the light changed. They were coming to the wall of the dome. A jagged shell of a building rose up from the street, hundreds of feet high, catching the light. She put her hand up between her eyes and the dome. “It’s glass.” The domelight shone green as leaves along the edges of the walls. “That’s a dumb thing to make a building out of.”
Tony laughed. He swung her off the border and down to the street beside him. “You really are a narrow-minded little materialist.”
“Did they live here? In glass buildings?” Some fable moved elusively at the edge of her memory.
“No. They lived somewhere else and came in here during the day.”
“Now tell me the truth.”
“I’m sorry, kitch, that is the truth.”
She stood looking up at the glass. Maybe in those days glass had been more common than it was now. Waves of stain crossed it, traces of dry dust like tracks from the time when the ruins had been under water.
“Atlantis.”
“That’s a different place entirely,” Tony said. “That’s in Aegea.”
They went on to the port. The covered boat waited in the brackish water of the dock, empty. Paula went down between the benches to the back, next to the steering box. Tony sat down beside her.
“The doctor says he won’t do the operation unless you sign a paper saying you know I can get you pregnant.”
“What?”
“I know it’s ridiculous, but he’s an old bastard, he says he’s tired of naturalizing the men and then six months later sucking out the women.”
Paula leaned on the wall of the steering box, looking in at the controls. “It’s not up to him.” The long handle coming from the floor was probably the brake. She was surprised that having a baby would be so complicated. The boat rocked; people crowded on board.
“Are you having dinner with me tonight?” she asked.
“I have to work,” Tony said. “I’ve been with you all day.”
He was writing a metaphysical novel, of which she had already read three drafts. He was endlessly inventive without being especially creative, which made his books easy to read. He told her how he was changing Chapter Three, where the hero murdered his wife. She wondered if he had made up the doctor’s demand. Maybe he did not want a baby after all. The painter was maneuvering her easel through the door into the boat. Behind her the boatman came in and pulled up the ramp. He got into the steering box beside Paula.
“Hang on, we may bump going through the locks.”
The deck shuddered under Paula’s feet. She heard the rumble of an engine. She turned to the window. The rubberized walls of the lock closed around the boat and slipped with a wet slick plop past the window. The interior lights came on, making everything white. The boat rose straight up. Outside the window the ocean was lit dark green from the dome wall they were passing. So close to New York, the sea was filthy. Flakes of garbage floated around the window. There was supposed to be an ancient dump here someplace, still leaking after hundreds of years. Tony was talking to the boatman about nautical design. The water outside the boat filled slowly with sunshine. She pressed her cheek against the clammy plastic of the window. Half a mile below, the Manhattan dome glowed like a moon in the ocean.
The boat surfaced. They flew across the choppy open water. Paula sat back. The other passengers talked in low voices. Tony sat absently licking the hairs of his mustache into his mouth and biting them off. Ahead, the southern end of the New York dome reflected the late sunlight back across the water in a coppery trail. In the western sky, rank with pollution, swirling with smoke, three images of the sun sank toward the horizon. Half the sky was brilliant ruddy orange. The boat yawed in the wind off the seacoast. They sank into the water again. The boatman steered them through the underwater lock and up to the surface of the terminal pond.
Tony helped her down the ramp, steering her by one hand on her arm. They went into the terminal building and took the crowded vertical car to the roof bus stop. Dark was falling. The winking white light of an air bus was coming above the trees. Tony stood beside her, rocking back and forth on his heels.
“Write something down I can show my doctor, so he can take the plug out.”
“I think you ought to go to a doctor who minds his own.”
The bus settled down onto the roof. She went up the steps beside the driver. She hadn’t paid for a bus ride in days; she put a dollar into the box. Tony came after her, crowding her in. The bus was full, all the side benches taken. She went down the aisle to the back.
“Do you like the name Jennie?” Tony asked.
“I like Jennifer better.”
“Jennifer Mendoza sounds terrible.”
She looked up at him, drawn by his earnestness. His eyes were blue, unexpected against his chocolate dark skin. Their baby would not have blue eyes.
“Andrea is a girl’s name.” It was a fad to name babies for their fathers.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said.
The bus slowed and settled down on a rooftop, and the lights blinked on and off. “Hobold Building,” the driver called. “Change for crosstown. Next stop the university.”
“What if it’s a boy?” Paula said.
Tony shrugged. “I have no preference in boys’ names.”
The bus flew off in a giddy curve. She clutched the railing to keep from falling. Out the window, beyond the fat woman on the bench, the blue night domelight shone on the surface of the lake. The bus crossed a hilly stretch of trees and lowered again. She slid between Tony and a row of knees toward the back door.
She got off the bus near the turret of the Biochemistry Building. There was an arrow-shaped sign pasted to it:
Celestial Mechanics Conference
. She went across the campus. Most of the university was underground. On the silo of the Technology Building was another arrow-shaped sign. She liked the phrase, “celestial mechanics.” Maybe she would name the baby that. She went through the park. It was dark under the trees and she stayed in the open. An owl hooted. She stopped and waited but heard nothing more.
The top three stories of her building were above ground. She went in the front door, past the crowds of bicycles, and up to the third floor. In the circular middle room of the commune a small knot of people already waited at the big table for the dinner rice. She stopped at the videone for her messages. There were no messages. She went to her room, in the back hall, threw her bag on the unmade bed, and went next door and knocked.
“Who’s there?”
She opened the door and went into a tiny, crowded room. An Chu was standing at her drawing table sketching. Paula took off her jacket, dropped it on the bed, and stretched herself out on top of it and the other woman’s stacked clean sheets and towels.
“We went to Manhattan. Have you ever been there? The undersea dome.”
An Chu’s beaked Aztec nose was an inch from the paper. “I can’t stand being under water. The job list is there on the bed.”
Like Paula, An Chu was out of work. Paula sat up. She piled the clean laundry up into a single stack against the wall and found the long sheet of paper advertising jobs. Outside in the hall, someone called, “The rice is out.” An Chu took the bowl and went to get their dinner. Paula toed off her shoes. She got up to see the long sleeveless dress An Chu had been drawing. The walls of the little room were papered with sketches of clothes. An Chu brought the nutty fragrance of rice into the room.
“Here’s one,” Paula said, sitting down on the bed again. “Swamper for an all-night bar. Prefer non-drinker.”
An Chu located her cutting board and a knife and began to chop vegetables. “You drink.” A piece of celery sailed into Paula’s lap and she ate it.
“I could quit. What’s a bramante?”
“I think it’s a place in Lisbon.”
“I think it’s a man. I’m glad I can’t type.” Rows and rows of uninteresting jobs required typing. She watched An Chu pile up the green and orange vegetables at the side of the chopping block. An Chu’s skin was golden, her lips full, her long eyes like jet. She swept the vegetables into the pot, where they sizzled.
“I have to get up early tomorrow,” Paula said. “Make sure I wake up, will you?”
“Why?”
“For the oral exam. For the Committee.”
“Oh, lord. You aren’t still doing that?”
“It’s a job. They pay better than anything else except the Martians.”
“If you ask me,” An Chu said, stirring the vegetables, “there’s no difference between the Committee and the Martians. They’re all a power train.”
Paula folded the job sheet and stuck it into a crack in the wall. She sat down on the floor, ready to eat. An Chu was right about the Committee. A worldwide company, it negotiated contracts and ran diplomatic errands for the rest of the Middle Planets. She had applied out of curiosity, and the tests had become a kind of joke; they asked for some training in interplanetary law, which she did not have, and gave aptitude tests in mathematics and science, which she knew she had flunked. It was amusing to answer tongue-in-cheek to all their solemn stupid questions. The other woman spooned up rice and vegetables into a bowl, and Paula reached for it, hungry.
The Committee for the Revolution had its New York office in a gulley between the campus and the lake. The building was one story, with three or four air cars parked on the roof. When Paula got there, the waiting room was already full of people. She crossed through the crowd, conscious of the stares, and read down the schedule on the bulletin board. Her name was third on the list for the oral exam. She could not leave to get her breakfast as she had planned. There was no place to sit. She stood by the wall next to the desk.
She had seen most of the other people at the written examinations. Nearly all were younger than she was by five or six years. They bent over their notebooks studying, or stared into space, book plugs in their ears. They took it all terribly seriously. The room was warm. She could smell her own body. She wondered why she was scheduled so early. Her stomach fluttered. It was easy to be facetious and irreverent to a piece of paper.