DRMacIver's Notebook
Stable state
Stable state
Sometimes people come to us from the City.
It’s not common, but it’s not rare either. Most years we see one, maybe two, people stagger out of the door that opens in the shining silver wall.
Usually we take them in. If the harvest is good and we have food to spare, we will, but if they come to us in lean winter months when we have nothing to spare, their mere presence takes food from the mouths of others who need it. Better that they return to their City than that one of us go.
And we do go. The sick and the dying go to the City. When the harvest has been poor and the winter months draw in, the elderly often go. Some people go simply because they are curious, or because they do not fit in at home.
Of those who do go in, some promise to return. They never do. Some of the visitors tell us that once they came from the village, but if so they did so long before anyone now alive can remember.
Not everyone goes to the City eventually. Many choose to die rather than go into the City. Some despite what the visitors from the City tell us of it, some because of the same.
Because if you ask a visitor what the City is like, they all say more or less the same thing.
The first thing they tell you is that it is heaven. There is no want for any material thing - endless food of endless variety, warm homes all year round, no need to toil each day in the field - and endless delights and diversions, from parties and idle games to intellectual pursuits and competitions of skill. There are millions of people in City, and you can always find the perfect ones to spend your time with. Whatever your desire, it can be fulfilled in the City. It is heaven.
The second thing they tell you, if you press and ask them why then they left to come to the village, where our lives are defined by want and toil to survive, is that something is missing in Heaven.
The haunted looks on their faces at the second are almost as disturbing at the look of bliss on their faces at the first.
The City is a place of wonders, there is no doubt. Many of the visitors bring us gifts. Some of them we reject, and ask are returned to the City - delights and diversions that beckon us with the promise of more - but some are of a more practical sort. We still use the water purifier that was given to us a generation back, and the village’s oven is powered by a source of endless heat provided to us by the City. Many of our knives and other tools are City-made, and of far superior quality than we can buy from the travelling merchants. Living near to the City gives us many things.
But it also takes many things from us.
We mourn for those who go to the City, perhaps more so than those who die, because we know they are still in there, and we wonder what their lives are like in there.
The visitors who come to us tell us of the delights of the City and how many wonders there are in there and how blissful they found it, but if you ask them if they were happy there, they go quiet.
People who come from the City rarely stay. Sometimes it’s the first winter that does it, sometimes the second, but more often they leave in the height of summer. They rarely say much about why other than that they miss the City, but I can only imagine that they look a life of toil and simple pleasures and decide that, whatever was missing from heaven, at least it was still heaven.
I long ago decided that I would not go into the City, but sometimes when I pause in my work, I find myself looking upwards, staring at the shining walls, and wondering what heaven is like.