If the past does not exist, is it necessary to invent it?
Eleanor Arnason
“Do you ever wonder,” I said to Aurelian after we finished the Great Sow, “what the point of all this is?”
Aurelian, who exactly fitted his golden name—his hair was pale yellow and his eyes were a shade of brown so light it seemed almost yellow—shook his head.
“I envy you your certitude or stupidity or whatever it is,” I said.
We were standing high on Peak 32, looking across the valley at Peak 33, where the Sow was, a pictograph cut with lasers in the rock of a mountainside we’d scraped clean and sheared flat. There was a wind blowing, cold and wet, and grey clouds were moving quickly across the sky. The enormous sow lay on her side, her gross bulk covering an entire mountainside, while her piglets sucked on her rows of tits.
“Skipped your pill, didn’t you?” Aurelian said.
I nodded and pulled up the collar of my jacket. It was cold up there above the treeline, with nothing around to break the wind. I’d known for several days I was going into a depression, but I couldn’t make myself take one of the little blue pills out of their bottle and pop it into my mouth. The doctors told me it was all chemical, my ups and downs, a cyclical imbalance of something or other in my brain. All I had to do was take the blue pills when I was down and the orange pills when I was up, and I’d be as sane and happy as the next person, who was probably popping pills too.
“What’s so difficult about taking a pill?” Aurelian asked me. “You must be crazy or something to make a problem out of that.”
That remark, of course, was to reassure me: there was nothing really wrong with being crazy, nothing we couldn’t joke about. I said, “Uh-huh. Come on, let’s go somewhere warm.”
We went back to the helicopter and Aurelian flew us out of there, over the grey mountains and down over the green plain. The sky had cleared in the west, so we could see the sun setting. Its color at sunset was darker than Sol’s, an almost purple red; its red light glinted on the rivers and rice paddies below us. I lit a cigar. Aurelian said, “Do you have to?”
“Okay,” I said, and put the cigar out. In a normal state, I’d have been angry with him, but I have only one emotion when I’m going down, a kind of numb despair. Ahead of us was the first thing we had done on this planet, the Ring of Heaven. We had cut a circle in the plain and run the Maison River into it, bringing the river in and out through long tunnels so that all you could see from above was the ring of water, encircling a smooth, green lawn with a huge standing-stone at its center. I could remember how excited I had been the first time I saw it after it was done. Aurelian and I had gone up in a helicopter with a couple of bottles of rice wine and someone to fly the chopper while we got drunk: a Meshniri, since they got sick not drunk on our booze and we knew he/she wouldn’t drink even if we got drunk enough to try passing the bottle. Now the Ring bored me. A cheap trick, I thought as we passed over it.
Ville-Maison was a little way beyond it, spread out on both sides of the Maison River, a few of its lights already on. The city was two grids at a thirty-degree angle to each other. The great bow curve of the river separated them, and they were joined by the five bridges. The sun had set and the city’s colors had all turned to grey, but I could imagine them: the dark reddish-brown of the river, the pale grey of the streets and buildings and the bright summer green of the trees and the lawns. Not bad, not bad, I thought, and it had been done more or less by accident, the basic plan laid out by a couple of engineers in the settlement days and modified by almost everyone since then. I looked at Aurelian, who was busy talking to the control tower. An engineer, a stupid engineer. I got the ideas and he figured out how to make them work. If I were not around, he would probably do as good a job as the guys who had laid out Ville-Maison. So what was the point of having me around?
The runway lights were on, and we dropped slowly into the center of a circle of white light. When he had landed, Aurelian said, “Look, you go home and take a pill.”
“Maybe.” I retrieved the cigar from the ashtray, figuring I would light it as soon as I got out of the helicopter.
Aurelian turned to look at me. “If you were diabetic, you’d take insulin, wouldn’t you?”
“In my present mood, maybe not.”
“Listen, every time we do a job, you get more and more manic, till finally you’re kiting so high you’re barely in sight. Then, as soon as we’re done, you come crashing down. And you’re not easy to get along with either up or down, so I wish you’d take the pills.”
“Okay,” I said, and climbed out of the helicopter. It was pretty cold even on the plain, but that was normal. They had had to develop a new kind of rice to grow here, because the regular kinds couldn’t take the cold. I walked across the wet grass into the terminal and out again, just in time to catch the bus downtown. I still had the cigar, unlit because they won’t let you smoke cigars on any kind of public transport. We ought to organize, I thought, looking out at the wet streets, the dark trees moving in the wind, the houses set back behind little gardens, light shining out their windows. Cigar smokers, arise.
I went to the office instead of home. There was nothing at home except the pills. I lived alone in a one-room apartment, its windows looking out at the windows of another house. All I had there was a bed and bookcases full of books, and more books that I had to stack on the floor or put in the kitchen cabinets, because there was no more room in the bookcases. I didn’t do much there except sleep. Even my reading I did elsewhere, usually at one of the cafes you found on every other sidewalk like cafes in Paris; but here they were glassed in for protection against the cold and wet, and the windows were opened only on bright days in summer. I liked them best in winter. I’d sit by a window and drink hot tea, looking out through the rain-streaked glass at people with umbrellas hurrying down the street. If the spectacle of other people getting wet began to bore me, I could read or order something to eat. I always ate out. I didn’t even own any kitchenware.
Our office had two rooms, one for me and one for Aurelian, and the windows opened out on a canal lined with trees. It was dark enough out there so that I could see the pale, glimmering lights that were ghost moths flying among the trees. I opened the window in my office and smelled the weedy canal smell, then sat in the dark to watch the ghost moths and smoke my cigar. When I had finished the cigar, I turned on the lights and looked around. I had three big blowups that covered most of three walls: aerial photos of Stonehenge and a five- or six-level interchange somewhere in North America and bomb craters in Vietnam, almost a century old and still visible. They didn’t know, the guys who dropped the bombs, that they were creating an enduring work of art. Under the grass or whatever was growing there, you could still see the faint lines that had been the boundaries of rice paddies. Scattered across the uneven grid the paddies made were deep pocks left by the bombs. It’s all art, if you get high enough. Remember that Italian pilot—you won’t unless you’ve read a lot of history books—who dropped bombs on the Ethiopians and saw the explosions as red roses blooming below him? But that, as they say, was long ago and in another country and all those people are dead.
On my drawing board was a sketch of the next project: the Serpent. It was going to be a mound like the ones built by the North American Indians: a wide, low, grass-covered ridge that began with a series of hummocks—the rattle—and went spiraling out till finally it straightened and ran due north for two or three hundred meters, and ended in a diamond-shaped hill that was the snake’s head. I didn’t like the way the sketch was coming along, so I fiddled with it for a while, wrecked it and tore it up. Forget that, I thought, and turned off the lights. It must have been raining, though the only sign of it I could see was a mistiness around the street light across the canal. The ghost moths were gone, all except one that gleamed, then vanished, then gleamed again in the dark beneath a tree.
We had been brought out here, Aurelian and I, because they had found out—years ago when we first began to settle other planets—that people were so used to living surrounded by their own artifacts, living on top of the debris of millennia, that a bare planet made them uneasy. They felt exposed and vulnerable, somehow, without mounds, dolmens, Roman roads, arrowheads in the earth that turned up when they plowed. So we came and made a past for them. Your friendly neighborhood history-makers. Give us a month and we’ll make you a century. They could have got the result they wanted by dropping bombs all over a new planet. The craters would have marked the land sufficiently, said “This is ours” to all comers.
There was a Meshniri bar down the street, and I needed a drink. I closed up the office and went downstairs. As I had suspected, it was raining, a light drizzle that was barely more than a mist. Somebody had their windows open and a recording on: a Chinese opera. Almost all the planet’s settlers were East Asians, Chinese mostly. The climate was too cold for the Indochinese, the Thais, or the Indonesians. I walked to the corner where the bar was, orange light shining out its tiny windows, orange being the color of Meshnir’s sun. Their sun was visible from this planet, a dim star in the Dragon constellation. People told me it had a definite orange tinge. But I’ve never been able to see the colors of stars; they all look white to me.
Inside, the air was hot and full of the sweet smell of Meshniri bodies. The jukebox was playing old-time Meshniri music, which used a lot of percussion instruments made out of wood. This particular piece had a lot of rattling and clicking in it, along with the clear sound of a wooden drum. The jukebox screen was blank, since the Meshniri didn’t combine pictures with their music. But the screen had not been disconnected. A grey-white flickering light filled it. It was bright enough to be irritating, and I didn’t know how the Meshniri could stand it. The Meshniri looked at me, not really wanting me there, but too polite to tell me to get out. I went to the bar and asked the bartender for ansit. He/she poured me a glass. For some reason we can drink Meshniri booze, though they can’t drink our stuff. I sipped a little. At first you taste the sweetness. It’s as sweet as a liqueur. Then it starts burning. You feel as if you’ve just stuffed your mouth full of hot peppers. You choke and gasp and drink the water chaser and then try another sip. The Chinese from Szechwan, where they cook with hot pepper, love the stuff. It was a Szechwanese who first got me drinking ansit and going to Meshniri bars, getting used to the Meshniri watching me—wishing I would go and leave them in peace.
I sat down at a table. The jukebox was playing a modern piece, an electric flute from Earth replacing a Meshniri wooden flute. If I hadn’t been there, they would probably have danced, all of them in a row, their long, thin arms and legs moving slowly and stiffly. I sipped more ansit, listening to the sound of the wooden pipe-gongs. They loved wood and trees, the Meshniri. They sculpted trees the way the Japanese did, but the trees they bent and pruned were enormous. They had whole gardens full of sculptured trees, all centuries old. The sculptors must have been very patient and very determined; I envied them those qualities. I didn’t have the discipline to bend a branch and wait for the tree to learn to grow that way. If I were working with trees, I would probably have Aurelian bulldoze them all down and put in plastic substitutes whose branches went the way I wanted.
I drank slowly, which is the only way to drink ansit, and went through four or five glasses of water. I felt myself sliding deeper into depression, sitting in the dim room, surrounded by the black-brown shiny bodies of the Meshniri, their sweet smell so thick I thought I could taste it. Soon, I knew, the floor beneath me would collapse, and I’d be falling through black space for hours or days. I had to get out before that happened, get back to my place and take a pill. I left my drink unfinished, got up and walked out, looking straight ahead so I couldn’t see the Meshniri watching me. Their eyes were large and so pale they seemed colorless.
Outside it was still raining, a fine, misty rain. Burrowing beetles were everywhere, driven out of their burrows by the water. They scurried across the sidewalk, their black, scaly bodies glittering in the light from the street lights. I had to watch my feet to avoid stepping on one. They crunched underfoot the way really big roaches did. Sometimes when I went down, something funny happened to my vision: things seemed to recede and get very distinct, both at the same time. Those beetles on the sidewalk were a long, long way below me, but I saw them so clearly I could almost count the scales on their backs.
I hurried, thinking my apartment was only four or five blocks away; I’d be there in a few minutes; all I had to do was take a pill and hold on an hour or so till it took effect.
The rain started coming down hard. The beetles scurried for shelter, and I ran the rest of the way home, up the front steps and in the front door. Ms. Li opened her apartment door and looked out when I came slamming in. I could hear her 3D: the evening news giving the body count for a border skirmish somewhere light-years away.
“Oh. It’s you,” she said.
Right, I thought, going up the stairs. It was me. The mad genius was home. But where were the flowers, the red carpet, the band? The hall upstairs was bare except for a piece of silk embroidered with flowers and birds, framed and glassed, hung by Ms. Li. It had come with her all the way from China, and it was hideous. I could smell marijuana smoke coming from the room across from mine, where a girl lived who, Ms. Li had told me, worked as a systems analyst for the Statistical Center. I would come up the stairs sometimes and hear her hurrying to get inside before I appeared; or open my door and see her door open then shut again, when she realized I was coming out. As careful as she had been, I had seen her a couple of times. She was a perfectly ordinary-looking girl, from North China probably, since she was tall and very fair-skinned.
My phone was going meep-meep-meep. I unlocked my door, got inside, turned on the phone and said, “History Unlimited. If you don’t like your old past, let us build you a new one.”
“Just checking,” Aurelian said. “You weren’t home earlier.”
“I was out drinking. I’m going to take my medicine, so you can stop worrying.”
“Why don’t you take it right now and come back and tell me you’ve done it?”
“Okay.” I went and took a pill. When I got back to the phone, I said, “Your good deed is now done. The ghosts of dead Boy Scouts can rest easy.”
“I’ll see you at the office. Okay?”
“Uh-huh,” I said and turned the phone off. I got out my last bottle of rice wine and took a big swallow to get the metallic taste of the pill out of my mouth. I had only one picture in my apartment: a blown-up aerial photo of Manhattan, the spiky towers thrusting up like trees in a forest, blurred by the thick pollution haze. What an amazing artifact, I thought, looking at it. The photo had been taken from so high up, all you could see was the towers. The people who scurried like beetles between them were invisible. I opened a window and sat on the ledge, wine bottle in my hand. The rain had become a downpour. I swallowed more wine, watching the rain come down, shining like silver where the street lights lit it, filling the gutters, swirling down the drains. All I had to do was wait an hour till the pill went to work, and then I’d be fine.