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in the desert you can remember your name
I woke up this morning close to tears, closer to tears than I've been in a very long time. I hardly ever cry, and when I do it's never for anything *worth* tears-- just pure fretfulness, exhaustion, self-indulgent frustration. And nightmares. Even then, it's never a *reasonable* sort of nightmare; no falling, no monsters, no people dying. The recurring volcano dream can get kind of tense, but it never gets so far as *tears*. No, it's always something much more abstract than that.
Today's dream I was on Atlantis. Not necessarily sga's Atlantis; the city I was in probably borrowed as much from Timeheart and King's Mouth Plain as from there; but it was empty, and very, very old, and tall and strong and white and beautiful and so *full* of art and knowledge and memory and deep wise joy that if I had been a different sort of person, I would have cried just from *that*. Years ago an expedition had gone there from our home, and never been heard from again, and as I wandered through the white rooms full of light, every so often I would see I sign that they had been there -- a wrapper, a willow-wand, a crumpled piece of cloth -- and I would hug it to myself with a sort of bittersweet wonder, that it had not been entirely empty and alone all that time, that time did pass here, that it could be a home, and welcomed, but still Atlantis.
I was with the second expedition. We were a small group, sent to see if it was safe, if there was anything there, what had happened to the first small group, and nothing had, except that they had lived their lives out there, wrapped in light and silence: and there was nothing more to do, except to wander through the city, the high-ceilinged chambers, the friendly corridors, the wide plazas paved in white marble, to learn it and let it know me, know me enough to make me real, and come wandering back to camp every day or so to say a few quiet words to my teammates and then orbit out again through the city's heart, and nothing before me but endless quiet white corridors stretching through time and the knowledge through me that *something* will remember...
And then somebody sent word back to Earth that it was safe there, and there was amazing beyond any imagining, and more people came, more people and equipment and supplies, noisy and hungry and eager.
It didn't make any difference to me, for a while. I was used to being alone, and they knew that we would need a while to get accustomed to people again, so I simply took to wandering farther afield, and for longer. And then one day I stood in a room-- one of my favorite rooms in the city, if only for how entirely unexceptional it was, hundreds of other rooms like it around the city, high ceiling, smooth floor, broad windows overlooking a plaza -- special only because I had come back to it time after time, often enough that I knew it as well as it knew me, knew every nick in the molding, every angle of light, every view through the window -- except that this time, the view was different. Instead of a courtyard scattered with fountains and framed by soaring buildings, I saw a square of yellow rubble. Rubble and broken things, and beyond that, edifices of plain brick, row after row. They were tearing the city down to build barracks.
That's when I started wanting to cry.
It was needed, they said, with so many people and so much to do, so many useful things they were pulling out of the city, they had to build their own buildings: it was necessary. And there was so much city: what they'd had to destroy would never be missed. Dr. Jackson just shook his head sadly, and turned away. My sister was too busy talking to contractors to listen, and waved me off. Mom offered me crabcakes.
Very special, very expensive crabcakes, made from the first of the animals harvested from the newly stocked oceans, oceans that I remembered as still and serene, wreathed with pale nets and glittering sand. "Mom," I said, swallowing down anger and weeping, "You know I don't like crabcakes. I've never liked crabcakes." "I know," she said, honestly bewildered. "That's why I got them, I thought you'd be glad." We were standing in the commisary, the commisary that had once been a deep gallery, chill with stillness and patience, lit only by high slit windows under the roof that cast long bright stripes across the floor in an endless twilight. Now that floor was covered by dingy white asbestos tiles smeared with the reflection of guttering flourescent lights, echoing with squeaks and tired voices, full of boxes of things brought from Earth and things made by the reshaping of the city. I leaned against Mom's cart. Something in me cracked and rebuilt itself and I swallowed down a lump, again, feeling damp and drained. "I'm leaving," I said, the only answer I could find in myself anymore. "I'm leaving, as soon as the next ship comes in, and going even further out, as far as I can. I won't be back."
And then I woke up, not quite crying yet. It wasn't the first time I've had that dream-- oh, never the same place twice, but the feeling is the same, the story is the same. Once, I was a third-generation colonist on a green new world, taking a bike ride, for once, out beyond my home in the city of Landing, along the old rail-road tracks to the mines in the mountains. But it had changed, from the path I remembered: alongside the track they had paved a two-lane highway, and along the highway, one after another, were McMansions, baking in the sun and set on huge dead green lawns of earthgrass. The blueleaf redbark trees along the track, an endless singing forest the last time I had been out this far, were going brown from too much sunlight, and from the alien ivy climbing them. Beside the highway were sign after sign, yellow and black, putting rules down over what should have been a final free wilderness, what we'd lost on Earth and come this far to find, and now we were losing it again. I kept going, getting angrier and sadder, but not wanting to turn back, hoping I would come to where the pavement ended, until I saw one more sign: "No singing near the road," and that was the last straw, I left. That night at dinner I asked my family 'why?' and Dad replied, 'Well, that's what we've all come here for, to find a new life, to get ahead the way we couldn't on the old planet." "To make a *new* life!" I shouted, "not to remake the old one all over again!" They stared at me blankly for a second, and that's when I started making plans to leave.
It's strange, and yet fitting, perhaps, that my free-floating anxiety should manifest in the dreamworld as a phobia of terraforming, of all things. (aren't dreams supposed to use *obscure* symbolism?)
Today's dream I was on Atlantis. Not necessarily sga's Atlantis; the city I was in probably borrowed as much from Timeheart and King's Mouth Plain as from there; but it was empty, and very, very old, and tall and strong and white and beautiful and so *full* of art and knowledge and memory and deep wise joy that if I had been a different sort of person, I would have cried just from *that*. Years ago an expedition had gone there from our home, and never been heard from again, and as I wandered through the white rooms full of light, every so often I would see I sign that they had been there -- a wrapper, a willow-wand, a crumpled piece of cloth -- and I would hug it to myself with a sort of bittersweet wonder, that it had not been entirely empty and alone all that time, that time did pass here, that it could be a home, and welcomed, but still Atlantis.
I was with the second expedition. We were a small group, sent to see if it was safe, if there was anything there, what had happened to the first small group, and nothing had, except that they had lived their lives out there, wrapped in light and silence: and there was nothing more to do, except to wander through the city, the high-ceilinged chambers, the friendly corridors, the wide plazas paved in white marble, to learn it and let it know me, know me enough to make me real, and come wandering back to camp every day or so to say a few quiet words to my teammates and then orbit out again through the city's heart, and nothing before me but endless quiet white corridors stretching through time and the knowledge through me that *something* will remember...
And then somebody sent word back to Earth that it was safe there, and there was amazing beyond any imagining, and more people came, more people and equipment and supplies, noisy and hungry and eager.
It didn't make any difference to me, for a while. I was used to being alone, and they knew that we would need a while to get accustomed to people again, so I simply took to wandering farther afield, and for longer. And then one day I stood in a room-- one of my favorite rooms in the city, if only for how entirely unexceptional it was, hundreds of other rooms like it around the city, high ceiling, smooth floor, broad windows overlooking a plaza -- special only because I had come back to it time after time, often enough that I knew it as well as it knew me, knew every nick in the molding, every angle of light, every view through the window -- except that this time, the view was different. Instead of a courtyard scattered with fountains and framed by soaring buildings, I saw a square of yellow rubble. Rubble and broken things, and beyond that, edifices of plain brick, row after row. They were tearing the city down to build barracks.
That's when I started wanting to cry.
It was needed, they said, with so many people and so much to do, so many useful things they were pulling out of the city, they had to build their own buildings: it was necessary. And there was so much city: what they'd had to destroy would never be missed. Dr. Jackson just shook his head sadly, and turned away. My sister was too busy talking to contractors to listen, and waved me off. Mom offered me crabcakes.
Very special, very expensive crabcakes, made from the first of the animals harvested from the newly stocked oceans, oceans that I remembered as still and serene, wreathed with pale nets and glittering sand. "Mom," I said, swallowing down anger and weeping, "You know I don't like crabcakes. I've never liked crabcakes." "I know," she said, honestly bewildered. "That's why I got them, I thought you'd be glad." We were standing in the commisary, the commisary that had once been a deep gallery, chill with stillness and patience, lit only by high slit windows under the roof that cast long bright stripes across the floor in an endless twilight. Now that floor was covered by dingy white asbestos tiles smeared with the reflection of guttering flourescent lights, echoing with squeaks and tired voices, full of boxes of things brought from Earth and things made by the reshaping of the city. I leaned against Mom's cart. Something in me cracked and rebuilt itself and I swallowed down a lump, again, feeling damp and drained. "I'm leaving," I said, the only answer I could find in myself anymore. "I'm leaving, as soon as the next ship comes in, and going even further out, as far as I can. I won't be back."
And then I woke up, not quite crying yet. It wasn't the first time I've had that dream-- oh, never the same place twice, but the feeling is the same, the story is the same. Once, I was a third-generation colonist on a green new world, taking a bike ride, for once, out beyond my home in the city of Landing, along the old rail-road tracks to the mines in the mountains. But it had changed, from the path I remembered: alongside the track they had paved a two-lane highway, and along the highway, one after another, were McMansions, baking in the sun and set on huge dead green lawns of earthgrass. The blueleaf redbark trees along the track, an endless singing forest the last time I had been out this far, were going brown from too much sunlight, and from the alien ivy climbing them. Beside the highway were sign after sign, yellow and black, putting rules down over what should have been a final free wilderness, what we'd lost on Earth and come this far to find, and now we were losing it again. I kept going, getting angrier and sadder, but not wanting to turn back, hoping I would come to where the pavement ended, until I saw one more sign: "No singing near the road," and that was the last straw, I left. That night at dinner I asked my family 'why?' and Dad replied, 'Well, that's what we've all come here for, to find a new life, to get ahead the way we couldn't on the old planet." "To make a *new* life!" I shouted, "not to remake the old one all over again!" They stared at me blankly for a second, and that's when I started making plans to leave.
It's strange, and yet fitting, perhaps, that my free-floating anxiety should manifest in the dreamworld as a phobia of terraforming, of all things. (aren't dreams supposed to use *obscure* symbolism?)