Sea of Tranquility(43)

—

Another lecture, this one virtual. No, the same lecture, just performed now in the holospace. (In non-space. Nowhere.) Olive was a hologram in a room of holograms, a sea of dim lights flickering before her, all of them gathered in a minimalistic suggestion of a room. She gazed out at several hundred slightly luminescent facsimiles of people, their actual bodies in individual rooms all over Earth and in the colonies, and had the unhinged thought that she was speaking directly to a congregation of souls.

“An interesting question,” Olive said, “which I’d like to consider in these last few minutes, is why there’s been such interest in postapocalyptic literature over this past decade or so. I’ve had the tremendous good fortune of getting to travel a great deal in the service of Marienbad—”


Blue sky over Salt Lake City, birds wheeling overhead

The rooftop of a hotel in Cape Town, lights sparkling in the trees

Wind rippling over a field of long grass by a train station in northern England

“Can I show you my tattoo?” the woman in Buenos Aires said



“—which is to say I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a great many people about postapocalyptic literature. I’ve heard a great many theories about why there’s such interest in the genre. One person suggested to me that it had to do with economic inequality, that in a world that can seem fundamentally unfair, perhaps we long to just blow everything up and start over—”


“That’s just how it seems to me,” the bookseller had said,

in an old shop in Vancouver, while Olive admired his pink glasses



“—and I’m not sure I agree with that, but it’s an intriguing thought.” The holograms shifted and stared. She liked the idea that she could still hold a room, even if now the room was just in the holospace, even if the room wasn’t really a room. “Someone suggested to me that it has to do with a secret longing for heroism, which I found interesting. Perhaps we believe on some level that if the world were to end and be remade, if some unthinkable catastrophe were to occur, then perhaps we might be remade too, perhaps into better, more heroic, more honorable people.”


“Doesn’t it seem possible?” the librarian in Brazzaville asked,

her eyes shining, and outside on the street

someone was playing a trumpet,

“I mean, no one wants this to happen, obviously,

but think of the opportunity for heroism…”



“Some people have suggested to me that it’s about the catastrophes on Earth, the decision to build domes over countless cities, the tragedy of being forced to abandon entire countries due to rising water or rising heat, but—”


A memory: waking in an airship between cities,

looking down at the dome over Dubai,

and believing for a wildly disorienting moment that she’d left Earth



“—that doesn’t ring true to me. Our anxiety is warranted, and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that we might channel that anxiety into fiction, but the problem with that theory is, our anxiety is nothing new. When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?

“I had a fascinating conversation with my mother once, where she talked about the guilt she and her friends had felt about bringing children into the universe. This was in the mid-2160s, in Colony Two. It’s hard to imagine a more tranquil time or place, but they were concerned about asteroid storms, and if life on the moon became untenable, about the continued viability of life on Earth—”


Olive’s mother drinking coffee in Olive’s childhood home:

yellow flowered tablecloth

hands clasped around a blue coffee mug

her smile



“—and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”


In a world that no longer exists but whose exact end date is unclear,

Captain George Vancouver stands on the deck of the HMS Discovery,

gazing anxiously out at a landscape with no people in it



“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?”

She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”



* * *



—

An hour later, Olive removed her headset and was once again alone in her office. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever been so tired. She sat still for a while, absorbing the details of the physical world: the bookshelves, the framed drawings by Sylvie, the painting of a garden that her parents had given her as a wedding present, the odd piece of metal she’d once found on Earth that she’d hung on the wall because she loved the shape of it. She rose and went to the window to look out at the city. White street, white buildings, green trees, ambulance lights. It was midnight, and so the ambulances had no need of sirens. Lights flashed blue and red up the street and then receded.