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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Leaving Lost Atlantis
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Dear Jean,
I’ve tried not to be bitter. I haven’t always been successful. But I held my tongue when you told me, in front of our daughters, that I was a failure and a fuck-up. I gritted my teeth and bore your insults when you berated our sex life at my work in front of my coworkers. I bit through my lip when you told me you’d fallen in love with someone else (and you took pains to tell me it was the first time you’d felt anything like love in a very long time). So it’s with some pleasure, but only a modicum of bitterness that I’m writing to tell you you were wrong: I found Atlantis. I know I’ve been missing for a while, and I’m sure you’re pissed as hell. I wanted to write sooner, but I couldn’t. And I feel bad about missing my support payments. If you want, you can claim the life insurance policy I had through the school and my pension, too- just tell your lawyer I faced “imminent peril” and did not return; I never got around to taking your name off them- to be honest, I didn’t have anyone else I’d have wanted the money to go to. But it’s not like you ever needed your share of my pittance from the university; your new “love” has more money than I’ll ever see. Taking me to court for support, and for custody, after the divorce was settled- that was spite, and I don’t understand it, frankly. You left me- what was there left to be spiteful over? I don’t want to be followed, but I’ll say it was in one of those old books I was chasing. I lost the eBay auctions to collectors, but it turns out most true collectors are happy to let an expert give his opinions on occult artifacts. Information from those pinged off things I’d already read, and I pieced things together and, well, I figured out where the island had been. Now I don’t know what made me do it. I’d had other leads before that came to nothing, and I mean I still had money left on the grant from the university, I could have rented one of those new unmanned submersibles, really put on the Ritz, but somehow I knew that I couldn’t let the school know where I was, or what I was doing. So I emptied my savings and chartered one of those little one-man subs. It was cramped, and smelled like rotten fish inside it, but it got me under the sea. The whole way down, in that stinking sub I thought it stank because it leaked, and had probably killed its last inhabitants- that not only was I not going to find Atlantis, but I was going to drown like a fool. I was doing my best to steel myself against impending failure, when I saw them: pillars on the sea floor. The first few looked just like the ones at Stonehenge- obviously man-made, but otherwise sort of innocuous- too perfect to be naturally occurring, but showing no purposeful placement. But as I drew closer, I could see they were covered in hieroglyphic markings, sort of a simplified Cyrillic alphabet. The letters glowed blue, and there was a bright flash, and suddenly the pillar was covered in English characters, and they swirled together into a large message that read, “Hello. Please disembark at left.” I guided the sub to a small empty space that seemed designed for accepting small vessels- the underwater equivalent of a port. Via radio, the ship’s crew were adamant that I not leave the little sub, but I told them it was designed for this sort of thing. I adjusted the gauges inside the sub, so the pressure slowly came down until it equalized with the water around us, then the sub began to fill with water. In the meantime, I readied and checked my equipment. It was going to be a strenuous dive, nearly 600 feet down, but nothing I hadn’t been through before (of course, the last time I’d dived down to that depth I’d suffered from severe nitrogen narcosis and couldn’t remember anything that happened- though that’s far from atypical). My sub was at the bottom of a low hill maybe ten meters tall- a good sign, I though, since pressure lessens going up rather than down. But I swam over the top of the hill, only to be confronted by a deep depression in the ocean floor. I could see the same bluish glow as the pillars had given off, but not much more despite the lamp in my hand. I continued down. The depth gauge at my wrist read nearly 200 meters, but still I swum down. I began to panic; I hadn’t calculated a dive this deep, and soon my breathing gas mix might become a liability; then a calm hit me, and I knew it would be all right. I was meant to find this place- it all was happening for a reason (I realize now this was just nitrogen narcosis, and its accompanying euphoria). At 260 meters, or about 850 feet, I felt something brush my leg. Then something struck me in the shoulder, or rather bumped into me at speed. I spun around, trying to get my bearings, but the light barely penetrated the water. I could make out a humanoid arm or leg swimming past, but at such a rate and speed there had to be dozens of them around me. Suddenly, inside my head I heard a voice say, “Do not fight. We will not harm you.” Of course, this was completely contradicted by the throbbing pain in my head that accompanied the message, so intense that I peed myself and passed out. I awoke with holes beneath my jaw, and lungs full of salt water. I wanted to struggle, but I’d been strapped to a table, and I think I was also sedated, because even when I moved, my muscles responded only weakly. Raw panic gripped me, and I fought to keep myself from throwing up when of their own accord my lungs pushed the water up, then sucked another “breathe” in, all through the new slits in my neck. I was suddenly aware that there were two people in the room. One of them was a woman, and looked every bit like a woman on the surface, aside from the fact that her hair splayed in a halo from her face, playing gently in the ocean currents. She smiled, and said, “Welcome to Atlantis,” though this time her voice in my head was gentler. “You should not have tried to swim to us. You nearly died, and we were already on the way to get you.” She was an ambassador of sorts. She told me that when the sub’s parent vessel couldn’t raise me on the radio, they’d remotely recalled the sub and left. I found that she could hear thoughts I wanted her to (though I had to work a little to restrain certain thoughts- I accidentally told her she was cute). I still haven’t learned enough about them to know if it’s a naturally evolved telepathy or some kind of technology they haven’t explained to me yet, but it seems both passive and intelligent; they don’t have to concentrate, and at the same time they only broadcast what they want to have known. But the reason I’ve been missing, and the reason I couldn’t write, is Atlantis has rules about contact with the outside world. They let me in, but I couldn’t leave, couldn’t write. I had to appeal directly to their ruler to have an exception made. But after pouring through their histories, I can understand their shyness. The legend according to Plato is that Atlantis unsuccessfully attacked Athens, and then sank into the sea. The truth is different. The Atlanteans were thousands of years beyond Athens; they were working on rocketry, for God’s sake. But they were also a peaceful city-state; in Latin over the city gate is the inscription, “The just do no harm.” It was the Athenians who sought conquest, despite their disadvantage. Rather than be party to a slaughter (and likely, due to their wealth, many slaughters yet to come), the Atlanteans decided to hide their island nation in the single place it would impossible for war to find it: beneath the sea. Their technology even then was decades beyond us now; I’ve looked at schematics for gigantic machinery that I can scarcely fathom, but suffice to say they accomplished the impossible. Of course, the Athenians were the “victors” according to history, so they wrote the books, and Atlantis became the defeated aggressor. I suspect that Plato, like Galileo after him, ran afoul of the ruling class of his day, and rather than a premature ending decided to slightly alter the wording of his philosophical treatise, without altering its meaning. That history has lost its original context is unfortunate, but such a thing rarely survives the trials of time. Atlantis always hoped a day might come when mankind would soften enough for them to return to the surface. It really pains these people to have science that could virtually end hunger and disease, but be unable to share it because our species would just find a way to engineer it to be better still at murder. By their count we’re nearly as backward today as the Athenians were thousands of years ago. Their philosopher-king in the Platonic (or perhaps it was Socratic) mold is largely an executive- imposing the will of the people, rather than his own edicts. Their republic is far more directed, and is focused around weekly community meetings where direct votes are tallied. I mean, it’s honest to God democracy- no oligarchy of any kind. They’ve harnessed thermal vents for electricity that provides for all of their power, and the architecture is, there aren’t words, really. The city is capped by a rocky-looking dome that keeps the city hidden from anyone who might look to scan it from the surface, but built into its crags are these giant, vibrant buildings that claw and scrape at the “skyline” in an architectural style that feels like its influenced by Egypt, only if ancient Egypt were the dominant culture in the 24th century. Beneath the dome everything is lit by a brilliant blue glow. It’s all so beautiful, so perfect. I remember college, and we spent nights staring up at the stars, talking about how wonderful seeing those ancient, fabled societies would be. I only ever wanted to share them with you; and when our marriage started to have trouble, I just buckled down, because I thought if anything could fix us, if anything could give us back that fire we had, it was sharing something like this. But we can’t. Because you left me. And married someone else. Because of that, you’ll never see Atlantis. Our daughters will never see Atlantis. If you have any heart left, you won’t tell them what they’re missing. I’m only telling you because that girl I loved in college, I wanted her to know that it was real, that us and it and our dream, all of it, was possible, just waiting to be touched. I know we haven’t been the best of friends lately, but we were once, and I hope you can start dreaming again; it would be the saddest thing in the world to me if you couldn’t. But don’t for an instant worry about me. It might all sound lonely, being the only surface man in a strange land. But I’ve met someone, too. Her name is Mera, and she’s beautiful; you’d probably say she’s too young for me (and might not be wrong about that). We’ll be married next month. She’s already pregnant, too; beautiful twin boys, healthy as clams. And I know I always told you your breasts were a nice size, perfect for my hands, and that they wouldn’t sag after you breastfed our children (though somehow they still did a little), but hers are larger, and firmer, and underwater, they’ll never sag. That might come off as bitter, and perhaps it is a little, but I only mean to say I’m happy. I wanted to be happy with you, but I’m happy without you anyway. And I do hope you find happiness without me. - Peter Jean, I’ve been through every friend and associate in your ex-husband’s address book; even the higher-ups at his university think he’s vanished without a trace. I don’t like taking money from people who get no benefit off it. You want me to keep chasing geese it’s your dime, but he’s out of the state, likely out of US jurisdiction. I’d also raise the specter that this letter ain’t what it says; it’s him saying goodbye, on account of he’s leaving the world behind- hell, you’re a grown up girl, offing himself. You don’t pay me for advice, so this is on the house: let it go. Chasing bad blood gets you nothing but more of the same. Maurie P.S. Figured you’d want his letter back; maybe your girls will want it someday. |
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