Guide to Lower Heaven 1: The City of Heaven
Found excerpt, from author’s first draft notes for “The Academocracy in Heaven”
The glass-faced pyramids were the first thing your eyes found approaching the island-bound city of Heaven, the House of Innovation, the multi-cultural cauldron and crucible, caldera of culture and commerce, the jewel of the southern Valley. With the sun at its zenith, the steep triangles shone malevolently bright enough to burn your passing eye. Fortunately the cubic multitude of buildings beneath the retina singeing spires of the Colleges unfurled in much more muted colors, echoing out in radial, block-edged rings that terraced down from the tooth-like hill at the island’s center. On the boat ride in you noted this blossoming pattern repeating in micro wherever one of the late-built Colleges intervened in the original grid laid out by the Founders.
Traveling inland from the ragged lining of slums along the island, you walked through these layers, and saw how the slums engulfed and interspersed between the factories and offices, which had a tendency to lie adjacent to markets and business corridors, which lay always convenient to the richest neighborhoods at the island’s pleural center. Looking back the way you came you’d see it was at all compass points encapsulated by the foamy teal of the lake, bulging around Heaven like a snake around an egg, and beyond that wrapped in endless, emerald jungle.
In year 244 Heaven’s concrete skin crawls with innovation, landlords, ticking clocks, traffic jams, and something else, an unknown bittersweet taste. Picking through the metro’s masses on your full day’s trek, to watch the solar magelights sputter on, district by district, you wonder what all the strange looks were about, why all the hurrying. Drink in hand you ponder this city, the streets dancing busier even now as the sun is set, full of dreams, lacking sleep.
But a distraction prevents any deeper thought; an Aeromobile is crashing; over the lake. The flames from the wing emblazoned the twilit horizon as it plummeted. Until the bang it was just part of the landscape, one of hundreds of lights creeping cross the water, sky, and land, proceeding as intended, until it was a flipping drop of fire, to hiss plunging into the water. But that’s only logical, you think—those aircraft don’t crash gradually, that was the problem, you don’t get a warning before these things went down.
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