From the airship station they fumbled over mountains dragging heaving luggage and tools and instruments—
—Careful, dammit! Careful!
—over barely-delineated slivers of dirt that wound around peaks and darted through valleys, the geologist used to little hikes through the woods like this, the engineer more at home in the workshop with his calculating engine. Only an occasion like this could drag him from the city, from the university campus: the place I’d been looking for, the geologist had said to him, I found it. His ambrographs, taken too late in the afternoon to really look like anything but concrete ghosts, revealed only a hint of what the structure captured. His sketches of the ancient highway were a little better: hexagonal patterns of blocks spiraling outward between two concrete rails, lost for centuries but now rediscovered, ready to be salvaged, reverse-engineered; it was more beautiful to him than the flowers curling out from its edges, the trees blooming above it, this mathematical perfection set by artisans, geometers, architects, sorcerers of a forgotten age.
He had endured the eight-hour airship journey and a hike that began on a cool spring morning and dragged on through the heat of the afternoon. The party stopped on a hillside where many trees had fallen and heaved their packs down, sighing, uncorking canteens and unwrapping pies. The geologist wiped the sweat from his brow, consulted a map with one of the guides before moving on.
The rest of the journey covered more than half a league, though it was hard to tell; the path disappeared and they trudged through thick underbrush the rest of the way. The sun was still up, though, when the soft forest floor hardened beneath him; with his boot he swept away an arc of straw to uncover an ash-gray slab of concrete. Squinting, he could see something through the trees.
“Is that?”
“Right through these trees here.”
The forest ended abruptly and before them stretched a massive clearing littered with shapes, just pure shapes: the wall of hexagonal blocks keeping the slope of a mountain at bay seemed less real than it was in the ambrograph, so impossibly grand, this phalanx against the slow march of the trees slipping down the slopes, creeping on multiplying legs reaching into the earth. Whose mountain was this? Where dwelt the gods now? Parabolic hills of concrete supported smooth roads arcing through the sky, great vines winding steel railings, hanging over the crumbled edges of broken bridges, trees stubbornly forcing their way through the cracks, waves of grass growing up around fallen supports; these green impositions betrayed the gray perfection of this feat of engineering, ugly blights on an otherwise sublime landscape. It was a place the engineer dreamed of.
The geologist removed his hat, wiped his brow. “Imagine what the ancient world must have looked like. All covered in this stuff. No wonder they left.”
“It’s amazing,” the engineer said. “I can see why we must take their place. This is a world we must not abandon. It will live where it’s planetary neighbors have died. We will see to it. Now we must get to work. Take from this what we can. Do with it what we must.”
And they did, for a week a dozen men and women measuring, analyzing, testing, rebuilding, dismantling everything in sight: what does this do? Why did they build it this way? What is it made of? Can we do it better? How did they use it? How might we use it? In all of these ancient ruins, the streets that crossed the sky like aqueducts, the bridges supported by ropes of metal, the skeletal remnants of glass towers, they took what they could, applied, reconfigured, salvaged, built the future out of ruins, and wondered where the ancients went wrong. Some were uneasy, didn’t want to repeat the mistakes that doomed their species once already; some turned their hate to the ruins themselves and fetishized nature. The geologist couldn’t understand these people—no, he could, he said, he just didn’t agree—and gave in to friendly arguments over aesthetic and political concerns in the mornings, before their work began for the day.
The swath of concrete cut a shrill note through the harmony of the woods, welcome noise amid the boredom, the uniformity of nature that he would never know. Could he have ever known it? the engineer wondered. Could anyone? The woods were frighteningly alien to the people even the ancients considered ancient, the original toolmakers who first interfaced with the natural world, but now, he told himself, now the woods are ours. Wilderness mastered finally. Place of fear, where the spirits dwelt, where the rock had spirit as much as his own bones, an artery carrying the pulse of the city finally. You will never return to nature, he said; it doesn’t exist for us, best to accept it, to revel in it. The bridge that spans the gorge, the tunnel that solves the mountain, are these things not as beautiful as the gorge or the mountain themselves? This wall, these hexagonal blocks, it’s like looking at the arabesque on the temple door, I’m filled with the same feeling, he would say, I’m filled with a feeling I thought I lost. You misunderstand, the geologist would counter, the planet as organism, romantic folly, not my view. It’s not the wall I hate; it truly is a wonder. It’s what we do with it. What kind of future can we build out of these ruins? They contemplated the question through the night, and while packing their equipment on the last day of their survey, and on the long ride back to the city, but still they had only the question. And when he imagined the building, the inevitable project that would come of this research, a thousand stone-shapers swinging hammers in an orchestra of human potential, who would they swing for? Not to reshape the past, not to rebuild the world of the ancients, a scale model of their world, a world that would devour itself, just as it had thousands of years ago; no, he thought, we are this world’s caretakers, and we will to build to fulfill the promise that they couldn’t keep.