The City and the Cygnets

By Michael Bishop

"[These] stories . . . elliptically chronicle the life of [an alternative] Atlanta, Georgia, 2000-2070. Beneath a huge artificial dome that blocks out the stars, hierarchically stashed on nine subterranean levels with computer-controlled simulations of weather and seasonal change, the citizens of this grim, bureaucracy-ridden sardine tin . . . contrive not just to endure but to prevail. Through 70 years of increasing repression, various free spirts turn a living cubicle into a facsimile of a starship in deep space, experiment with multipartner 'marriages' for the elderly, or dearly earn moments of mutual benison with an unwanted cubicle-mate. . . . bearing witness to the weedlike survival of human instinct and aspiration in the most confining and programmed environment."   [from Kirkus Reviews]

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fairwood Press
• Release date: Aug 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393307037

Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop is an MC, DJ, producer, and teacher from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a founding member of the Alliance of MCs and COINS. He currently resides in Central New Jersey where he is a writer, blogger, consultant, and continues to dedicate his life to Hip Hop.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: THE QUALITY OF YEARNING by KELLY ROBSON

Prelude: THE DOMES

One: IF A FLOWER COULD ECLIPSE

Interlude: THE TESTIMONY OF LELAND TANNER

Two: OLD FOLKS AT HOME

Interlude: THE CITY TAKES CARE OF ITS OWN

Three: THE WINDOWS IN DANTE’S HELL

Interlude: VOLPLANING HEROES

Four: THE SAMURAI AND THE WILLOWS

Interlude: FIRST COUNCILOR JARBOE

Five: ALLEGIANCES

Interlude: THE CRADLE BEGINS TO ROCK

Six: AT THE DIXIE-APPLE WITH THE SHOOFLY-PIE KID

Interlude: INTRODUCTION TO OUT AND BACK AGAIN

Seven: A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE

Interlude: AFTER JALYRICA’S FALL

Eight: DEATH REHEARSALS

CHRONOLOGY

Author’s Afterword: WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS . . . AND MY BETTERS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE

CITY

AND

THE

CYGNETS

An Alternative History of the Atlanta

Urban Nucleus in the 21st Century

MICHAEL

BISHOP

KUDZU PLANET

• PRODUCTIONS •

BONNEY LAKE WA

Praise for Michael Bishop’s

THE CITY AND THE CYGNETS

"Michael Bishop’s Urban Nucleus concept was one of the great extrapolative achievements of science fiction in the 1970s. In the novel A Little Knowledge and the accompanying story cycle Catacomb Years, he gave it vivid life. Now, forty years later, he has drawn both books together in revised and re-imagined versions to provide modern readers with a single unified text of this vast vision of the near future."

—Robert Silverberg, SFWA Grand Master

"The City and the Cygnets ranks with the best of literary science fiction, on the level of Cloud Atlas or Life after Life. Set in an alternate-present and near-future dystopia, the book unfolds in a series of dark, detailed, sometimes tragic but often charming life stories. The stories are readable in themselves, and they build to a triumphant denoument merging science, politics, and philosophy in a way few writers can achieve. A Bishop book to savor."

—Louise Marley, author of The Terrorists of Irustan

"The City and the Cygnets introduces itself as a vision of an alternative America. But like all the best science fiction, this extraordinary chronicle of a domed Atlanta whose residents retreat to their respective corners like weary boxers, shielded within their regional bubble, is, of course, a vision of our own time and place—a vision all the more remarkable for having appeared, in its original form, almost forty years ago. And like all the best science fiction writers, Michael Bishop understands that what’s important is not the domes, but the people who have to live in them. He tells us their stories in exquisitely crafted prose and with profound insight, compassion, and wisdom. Michael Bishop is one of our very best writers, and Fairwood Press has performed an invaluable service by reminding us, with these beautiful revised editions of his work, that he always has been. If you’ve never read Bishop’s work before, I envy you what you’re about to experience.

—F. Brett Cox, author of The End of All Our Exploring: Stories

"Bishop has blended, smoothed, sensitively enhanced and reconfigured all the original Urban Nucleus material from A Little Knowledge and Catacomb Years into one glorious canvas. The City and the Cygnets makes available some of that Young Turk Bishop’s finest writing, in a volume comparable to Disch’s 334 and Ed Bryant’s Cinnabar, allied works from that period, all of which have admirably withstood the passing of time."

—Paul Di Filippo, author of The Big Get-Even

THE CITY AND THE CYGNETS

An Alternative History of the Atlanta

Urban Nucleus in the 21st Century

A Fairwood Press/Kudzu Planet Productions Book

August 2019

Copyright © 2019 by Michael Bishop

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Edition

Fairwood Press

21528 104th Street Court East

Bonney Lake, WA 98391

www.fairwoodpress.com

Cover images © 2019 Amit Dutta

Cover and book design by Patrick Swenson

Kudzu Planet Productions

an imprint of Fairwood Press

ISBN13: 978-1-933846-78-1

Fairwood/Kudzu Planet Productions Trade Edition: August 2019

Printed in the United States of America

Electronic Version by Baen Books

www.baen.com

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & DEDICATIONS

If a Flower Could Eclipse, from Worlds of If (Winter 1970) edited by Ejler Jakobsson; Old Folks at Home, from Universe 8 (May 1978), ed. by Terry Carr; The Windows in Dante’s Hell, from Orbit 12 (Jul 1973), ed. by Damon Knight; The Samurai and the Willows, from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Feb 1976), ed. by Edward L. Ferman; Allegiances, from Galaxy (Feb 1975), ed. by James Baen; At the Dixie-Apple with the Shoofly-Pie Kid, from Cosmos (Nov 1977), ed. by David Hartwell.

Prelude: the Domes, Interlude: The Testimony of Leland Tanner, Interlude: The City Takes Care of Its Own, Interlude: Volplaning Heroes, Interlude: First Counselor Jarboe, Interlude: The Cradle Begins to Rock, Interlude: After Jalyrica’s Fall, and Death Rehearsals, all first appeared, in different formats, in Catacomb Years © 1979 by Michael Bishop (New York: Berkley/G.P. Putnam’s Sons; Jan 1979), ed. by David Hartwell.

A Little Knowledge, ed. by David Hartwell, consisting of a prologue and sections titled Genesis, Psalms, and Revelation," is © 1977, by Michael Bishop (New York: Berkley/ G.P. Putnam’s Sons; May 1977). The stories, the prelude, interludes, and the Chronology from A Little Knowledge in this omnibus volume have all been extensively revised by the author and embody his preferred texts of each constituent unit.

The excerpt from Dickey’s Kudzu at the beginning of Allegiances, is copyright ©1963 by James Dickey, reprinted from Poems 1957-1967 by permission of Wesleyan University Press; Kudzu first appeared in The New Yorker.

This remade alternative history, The City and the Cygnets, is for

David Zindell,

a once-and-future friend from the early 1980s

until this unimaginable day.

*

The original dedication to A Little Knowledge reads—

This book is for the grandparents of my children: Nora Hobeika Bishop and Lee Otis Bishop. Minnie Ellis Whitaker and John Gregory Whitaker. Maxine Elaine Willis and Charles Willis. With much love, always.

(My children are luckier than most.)

*

The original dedication to Catacomb Years reads—

Do you like science fiction?

No, my husband writes it.

Jeri, this book is for you. . . .

We have no ideology. We have no theology. We dance.

—perhaps apocryphal remark of a Shinto Priest

Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of

supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of

human consciousness and experience. . . . They provide

evidence only of the brain’s power to create them.

—Oliver Sacks, Seeing God in the Third Millennium

Voices are either hallucinations or deceits of the physical world.

Joan of Arc may have had a tooth tuned in to a pulsar.

—Julian Cawthon

Introduction:

THE QUALITY OF YEARNING

by

KELLY ROBSON

The City and the Cygnets brings together Michael Bishop’s complete UrNu cycle—a novel, and seven stories of varying length—into a complete, far-reaching volume. In this future history, the United States has contracted into independent city states isolated from one another, and from the world, by domes. The Atlanta Urban Nucleus is a conservative theocracy governed by a comically warped form of muscular Christianity, Ortho-Urbanism. The social and racial hierarchy is enforced by the church, which uses police-state tactics to quell revolt. And into this tense world-in-a-dome crucible comes the ultimate disrupter—aliens.

And into my hands comes this many-hundreds-page book. A new Michael Bishop novel, new to me, and likely new to you. I call myself blessed.

I’ve been a fan of Michael Bishop for most of my adult life. In 2013, when my wife Alyx and I moved across the continent from Vancouver to Toronto and had to cull our massive book collection, we left not one Michael Bishop book behind. They are permanent residents of the bookshelf reserved for our most treasured volumes. The novels and stories that mean the most to me—Brittle Innings, Count Geiger’s Blues, Cri de Coeur, Simply Indispensable, and I, Iscariot among them—are always on my mind.

The writers we love most in our youth are not always the ones we wish to be buried with. Over the years, our tastes change, our needs change, and their work changes too. Not all writers can sustain decades of excellence. But Mike can. Mike has. Mike does.

God, I wish I could write like him. I’m constantly stunned by his extraordinarily dexterous five-fingered command of language, his surprising vocabulary, his humor and playfulness, his burning intelligence, and, most of all, his compassion. He is the one writer who has most influenced my own work—to the point where, in a fit of enthusiasm while being interviewed by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe for the Coode Street Podcast, I claimed Mike as my mentor. I quickly had to backtrack and explain.

You see, Mike’s work is so good. I’ve read so much of it over the years, my favorites multiple times. Brittle Innings has been my yearly re-read for more than two decades, against all odds because I don’t like baseball and usually don’t have time for books barely graced by female characters. So yes, if you cut open my brain, you will see Mike’s sentences written there. He is my mentor sine corpore—without body. I’m using Latin here to make it sound grand and non-creepy. But all it really means is I like his work. A lot.

Every place in the world deserves its own future histories, imagined by the people who live there. Few places get them. We’ve seen plenty of future New Yorks, Los Angeleses, Toykos, and Londons. These cities have had so many stories told about them—past, present, and future—that their imaginary versions create their own gravity, bringing immigrants and visitors from around the world. How many come because of the stories they’ve heard about the cities? Most: I would even say, all.

But these international metropolises are not the only places worth telling stories about.

The future Atlanta of The City and the Cygnets is a bomb waiting to go off. Its inciting incident, identified specifically in the chronology, is the 1973 assassination of Alberta Williams King, mother of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was (horrifyingly) shot by a young black man who claimed anti-Christian motivation. From this moment, The City and the Cygnets extends one hundred years into the future, in an Atlanta within a disarticulated United States where domed cities exist as monuments to privilege, and tombs for all those trapped within.

This is prescient. Though written at a time when most other science-fiction writers were obsessed with urban decay, Michael Bishop imagined the large cities of the USA as what they have become—expensive, overpopulated places where have-nots live in vertical poverty. Ours are towers; in an Urban Nucleus (or UrNu), these places are catacombs.

We begin with the fateful meeting of Fiona Bitler and Emory Nett-linger, two people who will ignite the fuse that brings down the Atlanta Urban Nucleus. Emory is a child. Fiona is his teacher. He is white. She is black. He is the son of the man who assassinated her civil-rights-activist preacher husband. Their relationship, born in violence and bigotry, will bring change to an alternative Atlanta in desperate need of it.

Fiona and Emory’s relationship is observed by Leland Tanner, a psychologist and human-development researcher. He goes on to conduct a gerontological study that allows senior citizen Zoe Breedlove to escape her family’s crowded subterranean boxflat by entering the Phoenix septigomoklan, a seven-person marriage. This social experiment is successful. Idyllic, even, except that the elderly participants begin inevitably to die of old age. The gerontological study is cancelled; the septigomoklanners are split up. But all is not lost.

Zoe and her spouse Parthena Cawthon are the last surviving Phoenixes. Parethena’s granddaughter Georgia is a member of the glissador corps, the pantherine darlings of the hive, flashy, athletic couriers who embody speed and fearlessness. Their foils are the hoisterjacks, masked terrorists who roam the hive threatening people, sometimes killing them, and mocking death by climbing the dome’s interior skin.

The glissadors provide essential services by moving goods and information around the city, while the hoisterjacks are simply violent criminals. But the hoisterjacks provide an important service too: they keep people afraid. An autocratic government like Atlanta’s Ortho-Urbanist theocracy needs its citizens to be afraid. Without fear, it cannot keep its grip on power. Because the glissadors exude youth, freedom, joy, and movement, they are beaten down, arrested, disappeared, and finally gassed to death en masse to quell a trumped-up revolt.

Here again, Michael Bishop is prescient. This is happening in the USA right here, right now, in 2019. Masked and armed riot cops confront peaceful protests demanding racial justice, while cordons of police protect the free-speech rights of white supremacists bearing actual Nazi iconography. It is enough to make me weep.

All this and we haven’t even gotten to the aliens yet.

Georgia Cawthon’s son Julian—the closest this multi-character epic gets to a main character—is orphaned in the faked glissador revolt. And as the police-state fist closes hard over Atlanta, Fiona Bitler and Emory Nettlinger return, quite literally from out of the wilderness, and bring aliens to Atlanta. This is possible because while the USA hunkered under its domes, turning its people into close-packed hermits, other nations and nation-cooperatives have gone to the stars.

These are aliens unlike any others in fiction. They’re passive, contemplative, reclusive. It’s impossible to connect with them, even when the government trots them out as part of a grocery-store bread-and-circus event. But their very existence throws open possibilities for the Atlanta UrNu, its greedy government, and a people starving for their future.

Hungriest of all is Julian Cawthon. Julian brings together all of the threads—the aliens, Leland Tanner and his geriatric septigomoklan experiment, his great-grandmother Georgia Cawthon, and a raft of other characters too numerous to mention here. All with their own vivid lives and fates, their own back stories, their own philosophical and psychological outlooks. The one thing they all share is a marrow-deep sense of yearning. This yearning is a common thread in Michael Bishop’s work. It is no common hunger. It is a yearning for connection, not with any single person but with everyone and everything—as well as for meaning, understanding, justice, and peace. Especially, it’s a yearning for connection with the godhead: John Donne’s plea to the deity to batter my heart.

I connect with this emotional posture on a molecular level. And no book is so satisfying to me as one that colors beyond the edges of this very common, very human, even Shakespearean (think Hamlet) but hard-to-grasp state. It’s there in Mike’s story Simply Indispensable, where the alien Joe Way offers humanity a key role in maintaining the coherence of the universe (an offer we reject because of our perverse inability to build consensus). It’s there in Brittle Innings, where World War Two-era baseball player Henry Clerval and his diminutive roomie Danny Boles yearn to join The Show—not simply a mark of fame and athletic prowess but of acceptance for their shared monstrousness. It’s there in Count Geiger’s Blues, where grumpy Übermensch-wannabe Xavier Thaxton gets his ultimate wish, even as true heroism remains just beyond his grasp.

And it’s here, every page soaked in yearning.

This is why writers write. Not because we know and understand things, but because we desperately want to know and understand. It’s the contradictions that fuel us, the sometimes ridiculous perversity of humanity, and our collective insistence on turning every which way but toward the light. Why do we do the things we do? Sometimes you have to drip 200,000 words onto the page in blood to begin to find out.

This is why I read and re-read Michael Bishop and will never put down his books. At my age, I like to think I know a few things about people. Mike knows more. But both of us know just enough to be bewildered. Humans aren’t simple, even—or especially—when they claim to be. This is not a simple book. But it’s a profoundly satisfying one. Satisfying in the answers it gives, and in the questions it asks that will never, ever be resolved.

* * *

Kelly Robson is an award-winning short fiction writer whose work has appeared in major science-fiction markets such as Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Uncanny Magazine. Her work, often translated worldwide, has appeared in many year’s-best volumes. She regularly contributes to Clarkesworld’s Another Word column. Her time-travel adventure Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach debuted in 2018 to high critical praise and was short-listed for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon awards. In 2018, her story A Human Stain won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. She has also been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the World Fantasy Award.

Growing up in the Canadian Rockies’ foothills, Kelly competed in rodeos and gymkhanas, and was crowned princess of the Hinton Big Horn Rodeo. From 2008 to 2012, she wrote the wine-and-spirits column for Chatelaine, Canada’s largest women’s magazine. After twenty-two years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica, now make their home in downtown Toronto.

Prelude:

THE DOMES

Shortly after the end of the twentieth century, history branched in a way that would have struck its human captives—had they possessed the power to view their counterparts in the divergent branch—as curious and unforeseeable. But they had no such power. Like most of us, they believed their lives linear and single, the results of a host of successive past choices that were now past recall. The captives of one branch had no awareness of those in the other, who truly mirrored them in the only aspect of their divergent lives that even in their alternative realities they shared: the splendid crazy-quilt robes of their humanity.

This narrative, then, is a history of the aforementioned other branch and its otherwise inaccessible human captives.

In 2004, the American Republic ceased to exist. For more than twenty years the nation had stumbled on a drunkard’s walk toward collapse. The Jeremiahs who foresaw the end harped on different strings, often plucking out monotones that drowned in the full orchestral resonance to which, sadly, their adherents remained deaf.

The threat, argued these one-note prophets, was (choose one, and only one) Communism, fiscal irresponsibility, military unpreparedness, technological disaster, unyielding partisanship, or spiritual decay. If the people failed to (choose one, and only one) reassert the values of the nation’s founders, restore the credibility of the dollar, restock the nation’s war-making arsenals, reject the allure of machines and computers, return to Nature, elevate country over party, or rededicate their souls to Christ, the United States of America would fly apart like an ill-made wheel.

As it happened (along the divergent branch of history that this book chronicles), the Republic collapsed not so much because things fell apart as because the center could not hold. The central government, under an unremitting barrage of regional priorities and narrow local solutions, ceded its place to an amalgam of virtually autonomous city-states, or Urban Nuclei, that separated from the heartland, so that the USA became the twenty-five poleis of the North American Urban Federation.

The symbols of this new social order were the immense, computer-designed domes capping the cities. Linked by seldom-used transit-tunnels, these Urban Nuclei rose like giant geodesic mushrooms from the cluttered neon and aluminum wilderness of the nation. The country had so leveled its landscapes that the forests of New England and the deserts of the Southwest were mere local variations on an inescapable suburban theme. It took a decade for the cities to erect their hemispherical shells, with resources that the plundered countryside yielded grudgingly. It also took so many lost human virtues—cooperation, ingenuity, perseverance—that few of the people under the domes realized what stifling secular infernos they were creating for themselves and their descendants.

Or why they were doing it.

The why arose from the irrational popular notion that the ultimate urban ecology must exist beneath a bubble or a dome. A science-fiction cliché for decades, this notion proved, if only in retrospect, an embarrassment to those who had adopted it without examining the preconceptions on which it was based. Indeed, it eventually proved such an embarrassment that in order to deny the sources of their chagrin, they invented reasons for staying as they were and resisted returning to the light. As a result, many Urban Nuclei inhabitants believed they lived in domes to protect themselves from the polluted air and pathogenic sunlight of the World Outside. This belief was in error, but for most it served.

For those demanding less facile explanations, several other theories arose. One stipulates that the domes had gone up because the materials and methods for building them had come to hand; that, in other words, the ability to engineer something not only presupposes but ensures that feat. Another theory posits the notion that the domes were the cities’ means of declaring economic and cultural independence from the rest of the nation, a divorce made possible by climate control, rooftop and hothouse cultivation, tank farming, and the creation of many kinds of chemical foodstuffs. (In truth, trade between the countryside and the cities continued unabated, albeit conducted in secret via fortified urban receiving points—as if for an Urban Nucleus to admit any degree of dependency was shameful.) A third theory embodies the bizarre but useful concept of Preemptive Isolation, the implication that the North American Urban Federation was concertedly resisting foreign attempts to entangle it in an unworkable Government of the West. The originators of this derogatory term were the leaders of New Free Europe.

Meanwhile, having engaged in a long nonnuclear war along a common frontier, Russia and China had neutralized each other as threats, making a confederation of domed cities in North America a viable alternative to union. In turn, the efforts of New Free Europe to annex the U.S. as one of its western polities had led to the local conclusion that the domes were not an option but a necessity: they represented an architectural barrier to the spores of foolish optimism and utopian meddlesomeness wafting westward across the Atlantic.

Finally, a few discerning Americans believed that the impulse behind the domes was not much different from that behind the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids. They were monuments to privilege, and tombs for all those trapped within. They were unparalleled feats of engineering, prodigious works of art, and unutterably loony memorials to human folly. They seemed, once they had arisen, as abiding and indestructible as the Earth. Like Everest and Annapurna, forever and always they were there.

Atlanta followed New York, Miami, and Los Angeles in raising a dome. During its construction, Atlanta’s leaders accepted under its girder-etched honeycombing half a million people from the surrounding countryside. This was the First Evacuation Lottery, an allegedly random computer selection of Georgia’s rural inhabitants. Surprisingly, most of those selected chose to obey their summons—perhaps because they were delighted to have won a lottery or half-panicked by realizing that someone had deemed an evacuation from the countryside crucial to their preservation.

Over half a decade, three more Evacuation Lotteries—each larger than the last—emptied the fields and town squares of the state and swelled Atlanta’s population to the bursting point. By the time the dome had been completed, the city housed most of its citizenry in topside tenements, dilapidated hotels and motor inns, and boxflats along the eerie concourses of its nine excavated understrata. Catacomb years, Atlanta’s residents called them, and, a few years into the twenty-first century, they seemed to extend before their denizens forever.

During the Catacomb Era, you could go crazy without ever realizing the depth of your madness. The apparently sane and the sadly deranged were often indistinguishable. You lived from day to day in the buried hope that your old age would deliver you to the dignity of death under a clear blue or star-spackled sky. Meanwhile, you sought to shape fragile human alliances against the terms of your imprisonment.

One:

IF A FLOWER COULD ECLIPSE

1 / My favorite color is black

It was white. That struck me most forcibly about the classroom when I first saw it. The walls gleamed like naked porcelain. The light fixtures glistened as if with an icing of frost. The floor tiles gleamed as clean and hard as ivory. Further, the white classroom was beautifully equipped. From the observation window—actually a two-way mirror, but we termed it otherwise—I saw drawing tables, easels, glass display cases, sliding chalk boards, and a small soundproofed projection unit in its hard white casing. In a way, the children in the room seemed mere extensions of the equipment.

Still observing, I spoke: Do you show many films?

Ms Bitler turned toward me in the darkness of the observation room. She had the slender facial profile of an African princess and skin of a dark chocolate. She wore two tiny pearls in the long lobes of her ears. When she replied, her voice had the acidic whine of a turning drill bit: "Sometimes, Dr Greer. We sometimes show films on hygiene. She spoke resentfully. Her last word had a particular edge. From where did this resentment flow? And films on the life sciences, she added: films geared to their individual IQs and suggestive of the modern predicament."

Very good, I said. I’d say you have that down pat.

The children sat at the long tables working—with crayons and finger paints, with plastic T-squares and drafting pencils. A few shaped delicate white flowers from tissue paper, and elongated stems from wire and florist’s tape. A few were making mobiles from cardboard and tinfoil. One mobile hung in the center of the room, a silver mock-up of the atom, slowly turning.

Which one is Emory? I abruptly asked.

Again, her drill-bit voice: I expect you can pick him out if you look.

Annoyed, I turned to rebuke her.

But Ms Bitler was staring fixedly through the two-way mirror, her chin jutting out like the cowcatcher on an old locomotive. The analogy was strange, but she carried her pride like a cowcatcher, an instrument with which to scoop up obstacles and push them away. Her lips were trembling slightly. But despite my pejorative images, she didn’t look ridiculous. She looked strong.

I turned back to the window. OK, Ms Bitler. I expect it’s that one.

The boy looked like a diminutive monk. He had cloistered himself away from the others at the only single-seating table in the room, a desk with a slanted top in the farthest corner. Leaning arthritically forward, he perched atop a white enamel stool and pressed a crayon against a sheet of paper, almost as if copying a manuscript.

Is he as creative as the others?

Isn’t that for you to determine? She still had not looked at me.

Well, then, Ms Bitler, let’s go in.

We emerged from the observation room’s darkness into the enameled clarity of the classroom. A few children looked up, but Ms Bitler rotated her wrist and set them working again. The classroom had an antiseptic smell, and Emory seemed an immensely long way off, humpbacked and isolated. He continued his tedious copying movements, and even from across the white, out-of-time room, I had the feeling he was pressing his crayon mercilessly downward, his face grimacing, the tight blue veins in his forehead ticking in concentration. I could guess that much. Ms Bitler had said virtually nothing about him. But if he had not posed a small tunneling menace to classroom order, and to himself, I would not have been there. All I knew was his name.

Emory. Emory Coleman.

Now I stood in the midst of that encompassing whiteness staring at Emory’s back, the other children mere blurred pockets of color. If only Ms Bitler would blur away to an indistinguishable hue, leaving me to deal with the boy. She must have sensed my desire, for she stopped between two tables and let me proceed alone. Over the rustling of paper and the children’s hushed voices, my footsteps on the tiles were deafening. But Emory did not look up.

Locked away in its hard white casing, the projection unit at my back, I believed that in approaching the boy, I was walking through the beam of the machine’s lamps—as if my journey demanded the consecration of light. All of it could be explained, however. Ms Bitler had put me on edge, and I was projecting on this boy the flame of anxiety that she had lit in me.

At length, I reached Emory. I pulled up an unattended stool and peered over his shoulder. He still had not seen me. All else in the room itself was far away, drowned in a sea of stabbing light. I put my glasses on. Images immediately resolved, but Emory had detected the movement and looked back at me.

This is my corner. Who said you could come in?

Would you like to see my passport? I have papers.

They won’t suffice, he said, surprisingly. Then the corner of his mouth sagged, in chagrin or disappointment, and he corrected himself: They aint any good.

No? I’m surprised anyone would stake out claims in a big, wide room like this.

It’s not so big.

Don’t you have a buddy in this group?

"I don’t have any friends here. Now, he was correcting my use of a patronizing colloquialism. I don’t choose to have any."

That’s a straightforward example of antisocial behavior. Did you know that?

His eyes became two lozenges of intense brown, which went opaque as he turned back to his drawing. He pressed his crayon against the paper so fiercely that it snapped between his fingers. I moved my stool beside his desk. Blue veins ticked on his forehead, and flakes of crayon wax lay scattered on his desktop like tiny pieces of shrapnel. His knuckles had gone white with the vehemence of his anger. Whoa, I murmured, and he threw the broken crayon on the floor. C’mon, Emory: Your teacher’s going to think me an absolute incompetent. He studied me warily, shuffled all his sketches into a pile, and dumped them into the cargo hold beneath the desk’s lift-top lid. I placed my hand on the desk. Can’t I see them?

Unaccountably, he said, Sure. His face softened and he reached into his desk, withdrew the sketches, and handed them to me. I shuffled through them, reflecting on a few but making no comments about either their craftsmanship or their unorthodox subject matter. The most obvious detail of his work was that he’d executed every sketch in black: black octopi, black starships with black bodies spilling from ruptured bulkheads, black children standing in showers of black fire, black eels and scorpions, black madonnas and burnt-out planets, witches with black capes, and weirdly lovely black flowers. One sketch struck me as morbidly poignant.

I held it up. Would you explain this one?

No.

How about telling me the title?

He paused long enough to make it clear that the idea appealed to him and that he was creating his title extemporaneously.

"Two Entities Exhumed."

How apt.

It was, I suppose. But the sketch embodied a compassion that the boy’s awkward title did not really suggest. Two figures of uncertain age, sex, and race lay sprawled in faintly smoldering rubble, mere sockets for eyes, mouths blackened and agape. But the hand of one figure had reached out to touch the hand of the other so that, the desolation of the scene aside, an odd infusion of life appeared to be taking place.

My favorite color’s black, Emory said. His eyes were the color of brandy. His close-cropped hair was blond.

You realize that may be an affectation?

No, sir, he said. It’s an assertion.

Oh, really? About what?

He lifted his desktop and withdrew a tissue-paper flower, which he extended to me semi-skeptically. It was black, like those in the drawings—an aggressive parody of all the pale tissue-paper flowers the other children had made or were making. The tissue was so imbued with black stain that it seemed evil. I took the flower, half expecting a snake to strike from its ebony heart.

Emory, this sort of thing carried too far becomes self-conscious.

He grabbed the flower away, held it deftly in thin fingers and studied its corolla, the separate petals in its center. (Was he looking for my snake?)

What is it? A black rose? A black carnation?

He looked me full in the face. If a flower could eclipse, it would look like this.

Especially a sunflower?

Nobody ever sees the sun, Emory said.

"I’ve never heard of a flower eclipsing. You’re not using eclipse with its scientific meaning, are you?"

No. He placed the flower inside the desk again and took Two Entities Exhumed away from me. My last question had set a small black wall between us. The barrier was almost touchable. That’s the assertion, he said. Now go away.

You believe in blackness?

Sometimes there aint anything else.

Do you believe in Ms Bitler?

Emory laid his head on the desk, the blue veins in his temple electrically pulsing. I patted him high on his back, turned my stool to its original position, and faced about. The classroom regained focus, the whiteness of its walls, ceiling, floor, and equipment an ironic contrast to what I had just discovered. But for one slippery moment I thought I had grasped the gist of the boy’s final statement. Emory stayed in his corner. I returned to Ms Bitler past the well-behaved prodigies who manifested their gifts in a reasonable, socially acceptable manner.

Ms Bitler and I retreated to the observation chamber and stared through the two-way glass like visitors at an aquarium, together but never touching. Well, she said. I continued to regard the children. From that vantage, Emory was just one of the group. In the world of concrete, vitrifoam, and reinforced steel to which we all belonged, these children still believed in flowers, madonnas, and joyously wriggling eels. Inside the tight clean boxflats to which they returned after school, they still contrived horror stories about witches and ogres, still made up romances and fairy tales. With his insistence on black, even Emory was a romantic. But outside—above the huge bubble encysting Atlanta, beyond the architectural miracle housing us—a nightmare menaced all our dreams. We had forgotten the precise nature of that nightmare and its beginnings. We knew only the clean but finite world of the dome. Within that world, I still believed in the children, the starships that would transport us into the freedom of the void.

I turned. Don’t say ‘Well’ again, Ms Bitler. I heard you the first time. What will you have the children do this afternoon?

She faced me haughtily. Integral calculus. Then a session of kinetic relations, dramas that the children extemporize. Then a break.

And after that?

A film, she said defiantly. On hygiene.

Great. These children possess quantitative intelligences in the genius range, and we’re showing them movies about their non-existent pubes.

I don’t formulate policy or curriculum, Dr Greer. I simply do my job. She stood before me with awesome dignity, a white-frocked tribeswoman aloof from her wizened children. One dark hand fingered the single pearl on the pendant at her throat.

I backpedaled. Ms Bitler, forgive me.

And maybe you should know something else: Emory Coleman, the little boy who loves the color black. He’s our projectionist. He runs the films.

Thank you. I’ll return this afternoon—in time for the film.

I left Ms Bitler and the Van-Ed classroom. The outer corridor was hung with a series of abstract, geometric paintings, which nonetheless suggested starscapes. At last the corridor ended, and I took a lift-tube up to the heart of the education complex. I spent the next two hours at a private carrel in the library. I took notes and eShots of computer graphics. Our preoccupation with light becomes more and more intense as we learn the impenetrability of the dark.

2 / Two Biographies

Some of the things I tell you now, I can’t fully explain. We live in shells, inside architectural blisters, bound in cocoons of personal isolation, so I must tell this story as it happened. Little of it appears in the report I filed with the Vanguard Education Program, in whose computer banks, you see, logic and good order prevail.

No one intruded upon my work.

In the quiet I took advantage of my access to Van-Ed information. The media spec, a purse-lipped man with pale jowls, helped me find e-biographies of Ms Bitler and Master Coleman. Then he wandered off into the antiseptic stacks, losing himself amid CDs, DVDs, and immaculately bound old books. I heard his voice a time or two, distilled from afar, and knew that other people haunted this facility too.

No one intruded. I called up Fiona Bitler’s biography. I already knew that she was tall, black, aristocratic in bearing, and disinclined to let herself be patronized or bullied. But her biography told me things that could aid me in fathoming the mystery of Emory Coleman. At thirty-four, Ms Bitler possessed a doctorate in applied psychology from the University’s urban extension (which now comprised the whole University), but no one addressed her by the title she had earned because she refused to allow it. This fact made me consider her in a different light.

I read more, and, with maddening slowness, I began to learn about Fiona Bitler’s heart. Born in a stagnant backwater hamlet, she came into the geodesic cocoon of Atlanta with her parents during the third Evacuation Lottery. At six months, she had been alive only because of the random impartiality of the computers sifting the names of Georgia’s remaining rural inhabitants. Her father had been Amos Foe, and when the Foes arrived in Atlanta, authorities boarded them in a walk-up flat in an unrenovated ghetto building and gave her father custodial duties in a clearing house for organic foods, a stopgap position. The family did not thrive, but it did exist.

At the age of four, Fiona began to read. Amos Foe found her one evening on her knees on cold peeling linoleum, hunched over an open spread of newsprint, deciphering the letters by a legerdemain that neither parent could comprehend. Amos Foe and his wife had had only the barest rudiments of education, but their four-year-old daughter was sitting in the drafty half-darkness reading a newspaper.

The next day Amos took her to the educational complex.

He waited six hours in a carpeted anteroom but finally spoke with a tall lean man in a technician’s smock. This man, after talking with Fiona a few minutes, then made her father return to the anteroom. The interview lasted half an hour. The technician let Fiona read from a thick book with a stippled black binding, all the while watching the way she touched the words and magically deciphered them, saying each aloud tentatively. Then he returned Fiona to Amos.

The Foes received new accommodations. White rooms inside a white building that from the street looked monolithic. Their neighbors were black. But the Foes found themselves in a unique predicament. They did not conform to the patrician ethos of their neighbors’ blackness. Throttled by aloof white administrators and unfriendly blacks, the family turned inward. Fiona grew up in her books. At sixteen, she secured the nomination of one of her Van-Ed tutors, and the urban extension admitted her into its psychology programs. With Amos’s wary permission, she lived away from home, taking a room in the facility’s sexually and racially integrated dormitory-terraces. Eight floors up, sealed away in an interior section of the complex, she pursued her studies. The walls remained white, but the people had changed. Upon emerging from her books and obtaining her first degree, Fiona Foe married Carlo Bitler.

I recognized the man’s name. But I had never associated Carlo Bitler’s name with marriage, and now I had real trouble associating it with that deeply proud but somewhat resigned woman Fiona Bitler, whom I saw among the children as at once demanding and gentle, energetic and mildly haggard. She worked within the streamlined inefficiency of the System, but without especially liking it. She was not much like her husband, whom I knew by reputation.

Though this line of narrative may seem momentarily tangential, Carlo Bitler is important. He has a great deal to do with the story of Emory Coleman, as well as with his wife’s. Therefore, fix in your mind the vision and voice of Fiona Foe Bitler that you may understand the contrast that her husband provides. As quickly as possible, I will detail the points of his life that connect most significantly with his wife’s.

Before his marriage, Carlo Bitler had graduated from the urban extension with degrees in both theology and political science. A combination of the spiritual ideals and the crass realities, he often said. He was neither a black man nor a white man, but his soul gravitated to that which was dark and primordial in his makeup. He was wide-nostriled and narrow-lipped, his flesh the color of coffee, his eyes buoying within their irises small flecks of golden light like shattered coins. Unlike Fiona Foe, he had never experienced the stale self-negating existence of the ghetto, whose buildings were roach-infested anachronisms, but which unofficially received sanction and so still stood. Carlo Bitler damned the authorities for craftily yanking their caps over their eyes, for ignoring that which needed change.

He felt the inconsistencies. In a closed world purportedly cleansed of its inner pollutions, all the residual hates gnawed at his gut. But he fought these off, looked up, and realized that no help would reach to him from without. So he made noises that he hoped would send groundswells through the concrete, and tremors through every dome-supporting girder in Atlanta. He raised his voice. He preached from the pulpits of back-alley churches. Over the gray heads of beaten-down laborers, he shouted the necessary one- and two-syllable words. The city buried these people. He wanted them to come out of their rat holes. Always, Fiona watched from the backmost pews of the urine-stained sanctuaries to which his rudely formulated purpose had led him. She watched him out of an uncomprehending love that simply endured. She now held a teaching position; she would not question her husband’s calling. Finally, the electric glow that suffused Carlo Bitler as he reached out with tortured hands to his auditors became a physical adjunct to his person: he generated the charisma that brought to him the young.

As Fiona watched, others in our dome took note. Something was happening. Here was a man who should not be practicing such demagoguery, these others said. After all, didn’t he have full rights of citizenship, full protection under the Federal Urban Charter? Unlike his wife, unlike eighty percent of the middle-aged blacks who now found air and subsistence under the dome, he had never been an integer in an Evacuation Lottery. He held the franchise of any urban-born person. That he should be making these noises was a ludicrous affront to the city that sheltered him.

The pressures were of two kinds. Carlo Bitler had one such pressure inside him, and he released it in those innumerable harangues that returned him to Fiona drained and sallow. The other pressure was that which grew in proletarian whites. They remembered just enough history to envision domed Atlanta as a racial battleground. Those who felt so threatened had no outlet but invective through which to vent their bemusement and anger. For a time, the city ignored both factions.

Here, I stopped reading and stalked out of my study cage. I walked to a lift-tube. The book stacks through which I strode reeked of disinfectant. Somewhere the purse-lipped media spec was mumbling heedlessly. I rode a clear, clean lift-tube upward until an amber light clicked on in the glass carapace above my head. Then I was alone on the uppermost rampart of the Ed-complex. Instead of sky, only a colossal honeycombing of steel and opaque Plexiglas still challenged my belief. How had we accomplished this and why? We are inside a walnut, I thought. Who in our walnut is king of infinite space? On that high parapet, I mulled the remainder of what I had just learned, afresh or anew, about Carol Bitler:

He demanded and received the opportunity to address a combined session of the Urban Council and the Conclave of Ward Representatives. His clamor had bought the time but it didn’t buy much. They gave him twenty minutes on a slow Monday, between two sessions of a debate on fund allocations. Bitler’s remarks would provide an interlude, as if he were either jester or magician. From the rear of the chamber, he threaded his way to the platform, where he stood beside the podium to survey the slack-jawed legislators, black and white. He began. He rocked and leaned to define his own limits in space. In spite of the air-conditioning, the assembly chamber smelled of sweat. He said that, next time around, he would run for ward representative, so that he would not have to threaten in order to be heard. He railed at the legislators for worrying about chipped and irrelevant statues while ignoring the crumbling edifices in which black people slept.

We are entombed! Every sick whelp among us. Yet this assembly aspires to bury us even deeper. Our surface buildings stink. They crawl with vermin. Yet you propose to replace them with still deeper ghettos. For several decades, the exigencies of history have spared you this confrontation. And now you are burying us— He stopped, for a tiny red circle had appeared on the right side of his forehead. The report of the pistol sounded like a single amplified cough. He tried to complete his sentence. . . . burying us in light . . . The circle on Bitler’s forehead sent out crimson runners. It let them drop across his eyes. Soon the wash of blood obliterated his features so that his face was no more than a scarlet Greek mask. One arm still reaching toward the assembly members, he slumped in a heap beside the podium: death by assassination.

End of Carlo Bitler’s story, as it ties into Fiona’s.

Of course, there was an untidy aftermath, but that hardly concerns me. In the five years since her husband’s death, Fiona Bitler has sewn her life together, shunning the role of a martyr’s widow. She teaches children and does so within the cold white system her husband railed against. No longer involved in socio-political activity, the site hosting her biography declares. Authoritatively.

I looked down at the city. Moving air touched my garments. Beneath the dome, I could see the old Regency complex with its central tower and smoky blue turret, but also the blinding lofty cylinders of new structures. A dull, all-pervasive luminosity seemed to hang in the air like dust. But there was no dust, only light. We no longer fret the medieval terrors of the dark, I thought. Then I rode the lift-tube down.

When I returned to my carrel, the media spec rose diffidently from my seat. What was he doing here? You’ve had a message, Dr Greer.

From whom?

Ms Bitler. She told me to tell you you’re going to miss this week’s instruction in hygiene. Her scheduled activities wait for no one.

No. I don’t imagine they do.

Will you need this carrel any longer, sir?

I suppose not.

A woman, he said. A film on hygiene.

I smiled at him in irritated puzzlement and left. His empty whistling followed me.

3 / The Witch of Tooth Decay

I wrote that some of what I must tell you is beyond my power to explain. Let me reiterate. Occasionally people try to live so strenuously by the processes of logic that they become irrational. So don’t expect explanations of me. I refuse to add to the inanities into which you will rationalize yourselves. Darknesses of all sorts exist, and sometimes we had best simply accept them. They exist. Meanwhile, we carry the gnarled rudeness of our souls like shillelaghs, either stumping around or bludgeoning aside those things that annoy or confuse us.

It was nearly three when I stumped into the Van-Ed observation room. Through the two-way mirror, I saw Ms Bitler standing to one side of the classroom. Tables and chairs had been shoved against the walls. Engaged in kinetic relations, the children held forth on the ivory parquetry that they had cleared to enact a conflict of some kind. Two groups stood facing one another. Chins jutted forward bellicosely. Hands fisted and unfisted. There seemed to be, for all the jutting chins and clenched fists, an unwritten law that no one touched anyone else during these cathartic little dramas. Whether any such provision really existed, the children all obeyed it. I turned a dial beside the window. The voices of the children came lucidly through several small circular speakers.

They were arguing about the time when the geodesic domes of the twenty-five Urban Nuclei must eventually suffer demolition, releasing us to the sun. The two sides made no concessions, reached no compromises. My own charge, young Emory Coleman, belonged to neither group. He sat on the table supporting the antique projection unit, one lank white arm draped over its casing, his gaze resolutely on the floor.

The argument among the other children went on: We should destroy the domes as soon as we can. We must keep them even after the conditions that prompted them no longer exist. The domes proclaim humankind’s stupidity. No, they demonstrate all that we can do through close cooperation. And on it went.

Emory looked up at the two groups in forensic confrontation. His pale hairless legs, ending in a pair of dark blue moccasins, swung back and forth. Why don’t you all shut up? he said. You’ve gone over your allotted time. We ought to be watching our movie. He dropped the metal canister from which he’d already removed the reel of film and let it clatter on the floor.

Every head turned toward him as he threaded the flimsy old celluloid through the projector’s sprockets. The hard white casing sat on a rack beneath the table. He’d taken it off almost without our seeing, as easily as he might doff a beanie. Now he was standing, working efficiently at his sole gratifying duty.

The other children stared blankly for an instant, but Ms Bitler nodded a stringent approval and they moved their chairs into position for the film. Then Ms Bitler dialed the lighting down, turning the classroom into a glossy crypt.

Into this gleaming