Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [88]
On his left the city spread and sprawled beneath him, its silver and golden lights strewn in Marco Polo Bay like ducats and doubloons from a burst treasure chest. It moved him, even if he had no tears anymore. Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man’s stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back.
New Venice, of course, he had loved. It was the quintessence of what Mankind was about, when he summed it up: the single-mindedness of surviving at any cost, even if it meant eating up the rotting corpses of your friends, and a certain sense of the grandiloquent gesture and gratuitous ornament. But he knew the New Venetian scene by heart, and lately he had seen too much of the wings. There were no regrets to have. The heydays, he was sure, were over. He had lived like a New Venetian, quite to the full, and he would die like one: frozen to the bone, his shape deep in the snow, like another footprint toward no earthly pole. Soon the city disappeared from his sight, preventing the seductive winks of light that could have brought him back, and now, on his left, he could divine, more than he could see, the frozen ocean, a greyish rough expanse of chaotic nothing, like an immense crumpled sheet of paper imperfectly flattened out.
The way the Air Architecture worked was beyond his comprehension. But he could clearly make out the barrier of turbulent yellow-tinted flames—the Fire Maidens, as they were called—that surrounded the city at wide intervals, and the kind of hazy airwall that they built. It made him think of the sword of flames Mougrabin had talked about. Leaving Eden of one’s own accord, as he was doing now, certainly showed, he thought, some strength of character.
Maybe that was what had happened to Mankind. That original sin story was an embarrassed cover-up. Man had simply walked out, bored or angry at being ordered around. Or he’d lost any interest in God as soon as he had the girl to fool around with. He had abducted her, starting a long tradition of romantic elopement. God had first thought good riddance, but had soon missed his favourite pet. Animals were less fun to play with. Eventually God grew tired of promenading alone in the evening breeze, and for the first time, like an ill-loved, ill-loving father, He learned the pangs of regret and bitterness. He closed the Garden and let it rot like an old fairground park. An angel still kept the rusty gates, just to make it desirable again. By and by, time passed and the Ice had covered everything. When men came back to the pole, even those who remembered Eden and thought it could well have been there did not recognize it. But they still had the Adamic streak and had taken pleasure in renaming everything, beast and plant and crag. What a brilliant theology, chuckled Gabriel, reassured to see that the effects of alcohol had not quite worn off and would carry him, lightheaded, a little further on.
The Air Architecture area was forbidden because the concentrated methane fumes it emanated were notoriously poisonous, but Brentford had once told him of a small opening in a fence near a power plant where someone (let us say a Navy Cadet from the Belknap Base looking for a short cut while on a more or less authorized leave) could go through with minimal fuss. Gabriel found it easy enough, indeed, to crawl through the fence that surrounded the brick building (no light coming now through the strange curlicues of its cast-iron windows) and run, holding his breath, to the other side of the site, to the gate beyond the derrick, and then onward to his death.
As soon as he had left the plant behind and drawn close to the edge of the cliff, Gabriel felt the difference. New Venice was nothing close to hot or even