(Dark) Magic Highway U.S.A.

More personal disclosure time: the sort of thing I wrote about on Monday most definitely leads to me taking a jaundiced view of what I'm writing about today.

Back in 2007, a colorful piece of Disney futurism called Magic Highway U.S.A. made its way across the internet. First broadcast in 1958 as part of the Disneyland series, it looked forward from a time where the Interstate Highway System was just beginning to transform the way Americans travelled to a perfect retrofuture where the roads were wide, journeys swift and the automobile king.

A good way to gain insight to a specific point in history is to look at its futurism, its science fiction. Nineteenth-century Britain's preoccupation with a rival European power found expression in invasion literature such as 1871's The Battle of Dorking, and a century later Japan's seemingly invincible economy saw science-fictional works predicated around the United States eclipsed by the Rising Sun.

In the 1950s, everything was swell, so long as you weren't black, a woman, an atheist, a communist, a beatnik, or any kind of minority, and were American. The Second World War was over and America was stronger than ever, ready and able to spread freedom, democracy, and Mom's apple pie to every part of the world, thanks to the twin fists of Prosperity and Science. Magic Highway U.S.A. reflects that postwar optimism and forecasts a world in which great highways "link together all nations, and help create a better understanding among the peoples of the world... and a better way of life for the future."

In this Magic Highway U.S.A. reflects the boundless, triumphal optimism of a country that had not yet learned to fear the Soviet nuclear threat, and had not been humbled by Vietnam. The highways would be laid down, the people would be free to drive where they pleased, and everything would be awesome.

Another truth about science fiction is that one can learn nearly as much from what isn't said as what is. Take a look at it yourself, if you haven't; I've found it here on YouTube, but there's no telling if this is authorized by Disney, and so I offer no guarantees as to whether this video is actually live as you read this. If so, you're missing out - but I do have a couple of stills from the movie below, as well.



Magic Highway U.S.A. stresses scale. Bigness! The highways themselves are massive, the network is massive, and the machines that build it are massive, from mobile bridgebuilders to the monstrous roadbuilder, which devours the land with a toothy maw and lays down road like some tremendous steel behemoth. It's suggested with such casual flippancy that I somehow doubt there was much in the way of an environmental impact assessment before it rumbled through. What we don't see are the prefabricated suburbs being flown in from roaring factories, slung below a fleet of carrier helicopters each with blades the breadth of a football stadium, but that would hardly be out of place in Magic Highway U.S.A.'s vision of the future.

"In one sweep, a giant roadbuilder changes rough ground into a wide, finished highway."

The film's vision of a country "[decentralized]... into vast urban areas" is a simple extension of the suburban impulse which was, in 1958, still in its infancy. Our perspective changes from a tightly-packed labyrinth of buildings without a scrap of ground or grass visible, to a few stands of towers that stretch toward the horizon, linked together by wide roads almost free of traffic and standing largely separate from one another.

They tried that once in North York, by the by, with a new model suburb based around tall residential towers isolated from each other by wide-open areas. Today it's called Jane and Finch and has some of the highest crime and poverty rates in the city. I'm not saying that correlation equals causation here, but for me it's hardly a stellar advertisement for the concept.

These "urban areas" look far less like cities than they do farmers' fields that yielded a bumper crop of skyscrapers. The only allowance for pedestrian travel we're shown is in a shopping center, where "moving sidewalks make window shopping effortless," and "escalator ramps carry office workers from level to level."

At no point in Magic Highway U.S.A. is anything non-mechanical ever depicted as moving. Motor cars and moving sidewalks are the arteries of this world of statues. Nor does it acknowledge that anyone gets around by any method other than a car; obviously, the General Motors streetcar conspiracy was only the beginning in this future. Even freight trains have been replaced by "truck trains," which "combine railroad volume with highway flexibility."

Environmental consequences? What environmental consequences? For that matter, what environment? The use of cantilevered skyways above the sort of desert where Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner dueled is framed as preserving "the beauty and grandeur of mountain travel," not the beauty and grandeur of nature itself. While I'll admit that highway networks do go a long way to bind together peoples and countries, they're hardly the unalloyed good that Magic Highway U.S.A. represents - at the least, with present methods, they encourage negative impacts such as carbon pollution. In this future, they certainly don't have a problem with building highways straight through equatorial rain forests.

To be fair, Magic Highway U.S.A. doesn't assume that the internal combustion engine will reign supreme forever, and this is one point where I wish it had hit the mark. It posits automobiles switching first to jets, then to nuclear power, and finally "the sun-powered electro-suspension car, which needs no wheels."

Yes, of course! All we have to do in order to have Hover-Boards is to make sure they're solar-powered! Mattel's only got six years; they'd better get cracking!

"These spectacular conceptions will lead to new dimensions for the American highway." And, one would hope, perfectly reliable cars...

At the time it was made, Magic Highway U.S.A. was earnestly showing a world that was supposed to be pleasant and full of promise, a utopia that we could all look forward to. Fifty-one years later, it looks to me more like a roadmap to social breakdown. Not only does its world of the future encourage sprawl and dependency, it practically makes them mandatory. It is so married to the concept of the personal automobile that there is no allowance at all for their absence. In this world of the future, people would probably think they were better off dead than have their driver's license revoked. Personally, I can only be thankful that the techno-utopian excesses of Magic Highway U.S.A. did not come true.

The most outlandish prediction, though? "America will one day be criss-crossed by a network of super-speed transcontinental motorways." Oh, the things they believed back then...

just because I'm behind the curve doesn't mean I don't care

PDP #53: Engineering Test

Today's was a photo of opportunity, taken while I was delving into the little-attested history of Long Branch for my recent post on the subject. Based on what I can figure, this is an Orion International Orion VII Next Generation transit bus, fresh from the manufacturing plant in Mississauga and being put through its paces before being sent south to Oriskany for final finishing and delivery to some lucky transit agency. I see buses like this every day in TTC colors; I just never thought they could be so purple.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

More than a Busy Highway

Personal disclosure time: I've absolutely no motive to be charitable about anything the City of Barrie does, because I was made to live in that sprawling suburban labyrinth for nearly thirteen years of my life. I'm thankful that university allowed me to escape, and I never want to live there again. It seems, however, that the Barrie government wants to bring itself ever closer to me anyway, like a zombie cut in half dragging itself across the rocks.

What's happened is simple, understandable as a mere extension of previous policy, and to my mind still indefensible. The province of Ontario has given the go-ahead for the city of Barrie to annex yet more chunks of Innisfil, a town to the south that seems to exist solely to provide Barrie with something to annex, where it will proceed to build a number of new transit-oriented developments linked to downtown and Barrie South GO station by quick, speedy, reliable light rail vehicles.

Hah. Got you, didn't I? What they're really going to do is the same thing Barrie has always done - they're going to drop down some more ill-designed residential subdivisions in virgin land and call it a day. This is nothing new for them. Back when I lived there, I thought I knew the place like the back of my hand. I can't say the same now, as half of the city that exists now wasn't even built in 2001.

That is if you can call an agglomeration of meandering suburban roads, inexpertly stapled to a downtown core more appropriate for a community of 30,000 than 130,000, a "city."

Personally I find this move distressing - in this day and age, suburbs are the last things we should be investing in, when the rewards of densification and new urbanism have the potential to reinvent our way of life in a positive manner - but not unexpected. What really gets me is the way the Toronto Star, where I became aware of this, frames the issue.

"Drive up 400 could get worse," the headline reads. "Highway 400, notorious for its bumper-to-bumper traffic, could get a lot more crowded," says the first line of the story. It's telling that the Star chooses to focus purely on the traffic consequences of this planning decision. Not the social impacts, not the environmental costs, but the fact that drivers on the 400 will have to spend more time on it than before because of more people using it. (God forbid they take the GO train - public transit's for the plebes, I suppose.)

The greatest problem with this is that the consequences will be invisible. All we'll have is more endless rows of houses where once were farmers' fields. Because, really, we don't need agricultural land - we can always buy food from other countries! The concept of food security is just so gauche, isn't it?

PDP #52: Parading the Colours

As I said previously, yesterday I was at the D-Day ceremony in Nathan Phillips Square, and it was well-attended; though I doubt there'd have been the same kind of turnout in places like Barrie or Peterborough. After a half-hour preshow that began as soon as the clock in Old City Hall stopped striking twelve - the sort of precision so rare it's always extremely welcome when it appears - the ceremony began with the colour parties marching around the square.

The parade was led by the Toronto Fire Services Pipes & Drums. I'd forgotten how much I appreciate bagpipes.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

The Glorious Sixth of June

I'll be leaving shortly to attend Toronto's D-Day ceremony at Nathan Phillips Square. As this is the 65th anniversary, and because people tend to like big round numbers, I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say it'll probably be well-attended. As far as big round numbers go, too, this may well be the last gasp for many of the remaining veterans - not even a lot of eighteen-year-olds are still going strong sixty-five years later.

When that day comes, I have to wonder what it'll look like, because I may have had a preview. Five years ago, on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, I attended the ceremony held at the small but powerful Peterborough war memorial. Aside from a scattering of small children and the cadets in uniform, my small group of friends and I seemed to be the only people there under the age of thirty-five.



Is this the future? An ever-smaller crowd of men and women with silver hair to acknowledge the past? How long will it be before people begin seriously suggesting that D-Day and the Second World War as a whole are no longer relevant to the modern world, and how long before other people start listening to them?

As the last veterans die, is D-Day and its lessons doomed to slide into forgotten history, into irrelevance? We've lost, I think, too much already. We can't let even that remembrance slip away. Otherwise, as I've written before, it strips the significance and meaning away from what they did; if, one day, it comes to no one (or only a very few) caring about what happened on D-Day, and all the other days of decision during all of the other wars, they lose the principles they fought for.

PDP #51: Phoque corporatif

Here's a bonus picture taken for yesterday's post that didn't make the grade - the official seal of the Corporation of the Village of Long Branch, the organization that ran the community from 1930 to 1967. I found this one on a flagpole between Long Branch Loop and Browns Line.

The only thing it may be missing is a smiley face on the sun.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

HisT.O.ry: Long Branch, Sea Breezes

Every once in a while, between the past and future, Acts of Minor Treason takes time to look backward at some of Toronto's history - preferably the parts of it that haven't been bulldozed already.

There's a tree-lined street in Long Branch¹ named Muskoka Avenue. In some respects it's a far cry from the real Muskoka, that northern land of buzzing insects, tranquil lakes and cottages to which Hollywood stars retreat, but it's appropriate in its own way. Though it's only 13.8 kilometers from downtown Toronto as the crow flies², at the end of the 19th century Long Branch was Toronto's own Muskoka-on-the-Lake. In the land now enclosed by Lake Shore Boulevard, Etobicoke Creek and the Lake Ontario shoreline, members of Toronto's wealthy elite maintained cottages where they could get away from it all.

Houses in Long Branch along the shore of Lake Ontario

If the average Torontonian is aware of Long Branch today, it's probably because of the 501 Queen streetcar, half of the westbound runs of which are signed for the Long Branch Loop - it's not exactly the kind of place where sensational things that interest CityNews tend to happen. It's an "old stock" community in southwest Etobicoke, with New Toronto to the east and Mississauga to the west. Long Branch was once a municipality in its own right, incorporated in 1930 as the Village of Long Branch, and was the last of present-day Toronto's constituent communities to be formed. It was one of the thirteen municipalities that came together in 1954 to form the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, and thirteen years later its independent existence came to an end, when it was amalgamated with Etobicoke. With a 2006 population of 9,610 Long Branch retains a small-town feel, and it represents a relatively affluent corner of the city with a plurality of households pulling in more than $100,000 a year.

This isn't much of a surprise, considering its background.

In the nineteenth century, Toronto was a densely-packed city - it had to be. Before the advent of the automobile, streetcar lines represented the only accessible and effective mode of transit for the average person, and the economics of streetcar lines then, as now, required a large population in a small area. Beyond the city limits, density fell off dramatically. As late as 1883, the Long Branch area was farmland, connected to Toronto only by the then-unpaved Lakeshore Highway.

Then, as now, not everyone was satisfied with the grinding hubbub that was almost inescapable in boisterous, industrial Hogtown, and given this dissatisfaction a man named Thomas Wilkie saw his opportunity. In the mid-1880s he laid down Sea Breeze Park, a cottage community anchored around two hundred and nineteen individual lots south of modern Lake Shore Boulevard, with the first cottage sold in 1886.

The Hotel Long Branch, built in 1887, was the centerpiece of Mr. Wilkie's waterfront paradise. In an effort to attract the rich to its doorstep it boasted, in addition to a prime view of the lake, amenities such as electricity and telephone connections to Toronto for the low, low price of $15 per week. Unfortunately, the Bank of Canada's inflation calculator only goes back to 1914, when $15 was the equivalent of $284.75 in 2009 dollars. Still, it's fair to say that it was most likely a pretty penny.

The same could be said for the Hotel Long Branch itself, which managed to avoid the death-by-bulldozer fate of the majority of Toronto's historical landmarks by burning to the ground in 1954.

4 Long Branch Avenue, pictured above, dates from 1896, when Long Branch was still a vacation spot for the wealthy

While transit service to Long Branch began as early as 1895, with the Toronto and Mimico Electric Railway and Light Company running service west from Queen and Roncesvalles, the kind of people who would buy cottages among its trees were hardly the kind who'd rub shoulders with the hoi polloi on a common streetcar.³ Prior to the T&M's rails, the majority of traffic was carried to Long Branch via the Grand Trunk Railway, which maintained a station there, as well as a small fleet of lake steamers which connected Long Branch with a wharf at the foot of Yonge Street.

The extension of streetcar service to Long Branch allowed it to transform from a wealthy vacation spot to a true community. In December 1928, the TTC began running streetcars from Long Branch Loop direct to downtown Toronto, a route maintained to the present by 501 Queen and 508 Lake Shore cars.

Long Branch Loop, the western terminus of the Toronto streetcar system, has seen eighty-one years of uninterrupted service

Changing patterns of settlement in the mid-20th century led to a shift in Long Branch. What had once been a seaside resort community had become a dynamic village, with its population increasing from 5,172 in 1941 to nearly 9,000 ten years later, though it did not experience the same explosive growth as suburbs such as Leaside or North York.⁴ Nevertheless, many of the original cottages were replaced by modest, inexpensive postwar construction.

War had its own impact on Long Branch aside from patterns of construction, the impact of the men and women who never came home. During the First World War, new pilots were trained there. The Long Branch Cenotaph stands today at the intersection of Long Branch Avenue and Park Boulevard, erected in 1933 by Branch 101 of the Canadian Legion in memory of those who fought and died in the First World War and, later, the Second World War and the Korean War.

The Long Branch Cenotaph - "In Memoriam"

One of Long Branch's greatest challenges blew in from the south on the night of October 15, 1954, when the Dominion Weather Office forecast "rain tonight" for Toronto. What arrived was Hurricane Hazel⁵, one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit Canada in the twentieth century. Though Long Branch was not hit as hard as other communities in and around Toronto, raging floodwaters in Etobicoke Creek flooded three streets, killed at least seven people, and damaged or destroyed almost two hundred properties. Many of these, particularly along Island Road and Forty-Third Street in western Long Branch, were demolished in the interest of public health and were replaced by open parkland.

Today, Island Road connects Lake Shore Boulevard with a parking lot in Marie Curtis Park, named for the last reeve of the Village of Long Branch, on the Mississauga side of Etobicoke Creek. Forty-Third Street, at least the part of it south of Lake Shore Boulevard, no longer exists.

Today, Long Branch is a quiet, peaceful community, one of many throughout the city. Like the rest of the city, it's a far cry from the fortress of British blood it would have been in the 1880s, and Polish, Chinese, and Russian are the home languages of a good chunk of Long Branch's modern population.

Today, you can't see Toronto from Long Branch, and it's still the sort of place you can go to get away from it all.

LOCATION: Southwestern Etobicoke, between Twenty-Third Street to the east, Etobicoke Creek to the west, and the railway lands to the north.

HOW TO GET THERE: Every second 501 Queen streetcar rolling westbound is signed 501 LONG BRANCH, bound for the Long Branch Loop. During weekday rush hours it's supplemented by 508 Lake Shore cars running west from King and Church Streets. Alternatively, the 110 Islington South and 123 Shorncliffe buses connect Long Branch Loop with Islington station and Kipling station, respectively.

¹ The Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names tells me that it was named in honor of "the famous Long Island resort," the existence of which I can find no evidence. This may instead be a reference to Long Branch, New Jersey, which was a beach resort as far back as the eighteenth century.

² If you want to be pedantic, this is the straight-line distance between the foot of Yonge Street and the intersection of Lake Shore Boulevard West and Long Branch Avenue.

³ In much the same way as you wouldn't likely find Conrad Black on the subway - that is, if he wasn't in prison.

⁴ North York likes to pretend it's not a suburb anymore, but I FOR ONE CAN SEE THROUGH ITS CUNNING DISGUISE

⁵ Which, strangely enough, did not involve the future mayor of Mississauga demolishing a single thing with her bare hands.

_________________________
SOURCES

Brown, Ron. Toronto's Lost Villages. Toronto: Polar Bear Press, 1997.

Lemon, James. Toronto Since 1918: An Illustrated History. Toronto: National Museums of Canada, 1985.

Harder, Kelsie B. ed. Illustrated Dictionary of Place Names: United States and Canada. New York City: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1976.

Mackay, Claire and Johnny Wales. The Toronto Story. Toronto: Annick Press Ltd., 1990.

Needham, Richard J. Boom Town Metro. Toronto: Toronto Daily Star, 1964.

Previous HisT.O.ry

• The Lion of the Way
  
• Old Otter Loop

presently I notice some degree of disagreement between what I found in my sources and what is on Wikipedia. also, "A Plurality of Households" might make a good name for a rock band

PDP #50: Sheppard East

The thing I've always found odd, and slightly disturbing, about North York is how swiftly the transition is between the built-up downtown around Yonge Street and the sprawling suburbia that seems to comprise nine-tenths of that city. On Sheppard Avenue East, there are a few glass-and-steel corporate headquarters such as the ones pictured below, none of them towering and yet not out of place in a downtown either. East of them, though, you enter the residential domains of Willowdale, and after five minutes' walk from Yonge you might as well be in Mississauga.

It's even more stark along Sheppard Avenue West - once you're past Beecroft, from the lay of the land downtown North York might as well be a million kilometers away.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

Common Words #5: The Worlds Machine

In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that a lot of the stuff I wrote in my younger days is not so horrible that I would rather burn it than share it with the world. Maybe I've got some clue about what I'm doing after all.

This story, such as it is, dates from June 2001 and was actually written as an assignment for my Writer's Craft course in the last year of high school. My intention in it was to closely emulate the style used by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine, down to most of the story being one of the characters actually narrating - I wonder how much ink went into printing all of Wells' extra apostrophes back in the day. After rereading it now, I think I pulled it off a lot better than, say, an attempt I made to emulate Heinlein's style in the same course, which I thankfully no longer have because that was one of the ones I would rather burn than share with the world.

Give this one a chance, sez I. As with previous entries in the Common Words series, this is being released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

*****
The Worlds Machine
by Andrew Barton
*****

The Worlds Traveller - as I will refer to him to protect his identity - was relating a perplexing tale to us. His grey eyes flashed, as if they were portals to the sum total of all the knowledge that any man could know, and he spoke with a sense of youth and vigor that had only days previously all but disappeared from his being. Computers of every make and model filled every nook and cranny in the room, their hums combining to form a mechanical symphony. The Traveller himself nearly danced from keyboard to keyboard, not even missing a beat while speaking as he did so.

"I understand that you may not believe my findings," said the Traveller, "as they, admittedly, lack a firm grounding in the realm of physics. Nevertheless, let me put a question to you good sirs; what is physics except a struggle to understand the realm of creation without knowing the entire sum of its parts? No, as much as it may be authoritative, much of science today is comparable to a child attempting to resolve the rituals of proper society."

"You can't shove all accepted wisdom aside simply because you don't think it reflects reality," said Watt, a smart-looking man with wire-rimmed glasses and hands that looked naked when not holding briefcases. "Even if there are some areas in which current knowledge isn't up to par, you can't say you've found a way to ignore the lot as if it doesn't make any difference."

"Ah, but I never said anything of the sort!" said the Traveller, smiling with glee like a child free of responsibility. "There remain many holes in what science can explain about the world. For these past four years, it's been my singular goal to exploit that. Mr. Steffel," he said, fixing his attention upon the jeans-clad man, "what can you tell me about potentiality?"

"That any particular event has a particular chance of occurring?" the man concluded, after a few minutes of prodding and explanation on the part of the Worlds Traveller.

"Yes, along those lines, indeed," said the Traveller. "At any point in time, as the river of futurity continues its eternal flow, any event is, theoretically, possible. Even though the past is immutable in the traditional sense, even the tiniest action can have an unpredictable effect on how the future unfolds. If one of you were to spontaneously depart this residence, you may well have set a chain of events into motion that culminates with the fall of an empire. Or by not doing so, you may trigger the same effect, or an entirely different one. The point is, the future is inherently chaotic, and the smallest change in the past could transform our present day into something wholly unrecognizable."

"You yourself admitted that the past is immutable," said Abrams, a man who seemed to be happy only when pointing out the shortcomings of another. "And then you launch into an explanation of what may happen if the past is changed! Do you even know yourself what you are talking about, man?"

"Of course, to be sure," said the Worlds Traveller. "Think for a moment. Knowing that we have indeed been endowed with freedom of choice, there is any number of possible actions any of you could take at this moment that would doubtlessly influence the future. It is not a specious assumption to suggest that as long as humankind has been able to think, it has had the gift of free will. You may claim that you are insignificant in the scope of history, and I would be inclined to agree; out of the unnumbered billions that have walked this Earth, only the tiniest handful have risen to find a place in our history books. Nevertheless, every person in that tiniest handful had just the same capacity for freedom of choice as you men do here and now."

"So what you're saying is that the great men of history could easily have made choices other than those that memory recalls," suggested Steffel.

"Precisely! My friends, there is nothing in existence which would force a soul to choose the very same option each time it is presented. No, it is far more likely that the exact reverse is true, and that a soul will choose every option if it is presented! In fact, it has been rumored that whenever a choice is faced by any fraction of the universe, it selects both - from one universe springs two, where both possibilities have come to pass!"

"But you cannot be saying that the universe freely splits itself in a manner akin to the lowliest bacteria," said Watt. "Surely..."

"That is exactly what I'm saying! Gentlemen, somewhere beyond these walls, beyond the stars, beyond the very walls of space itself, I am giving this exact lecture, saying these exact words, except that other me is wearing white socks instead of brown. Adrift in that sea of possibilities are worlds where America has never existed, Christianity fell in the face of Islam and communism presides over the world. Somewhere, in some other world, anything that you can possibly imagine not only could happen, but has happened."

"I assume you have some proof for such a forthright statement?" asked Abrams. "From where I sit, all I can see is the wild tale of someone who is shut up in a laboratory for far longer than is good for the body or mind."

"Yes, I admit, well... take this as you like most to take it. If you are of the opinion, as am I, that what I am about to tell you is real and has actually happened, I welcome your support in the matter. Conversely, you can also take this as a fiction, a tale that I have brewed to illustrate the complexity and chaos of what would, on the surface, seem to be an ordinary and simple life."

The Worlds Traveller leaned back in a cushioned chair and twirled a pencil between his fingers. "My friends, I have seen vistas which no person born under this sky has ever witnessed. I have been an explorer in an alien world. I have a devised a means to travel through the dimensions - not to futurity, but to alternity."

#

"It is a feat of unflagging tenacity for an object to penetrate the aether that seperates the dimensions, and it was for that purpose I have invested so much of my life in building the vehicle with which I might pierce those walls. It is a triumph of engineering, a marvel of mechanics that looks as out of place even among the most advanced contrivances of our time as a flintlock musket would in the days of Babylonia. Yet it is the centerpiece to the whole affair. Without it, I could not hope to even dream about such a quest as I have undertaken.

"Once I had seen to it that the house would not be disturbed for some time, and made the proper arrangements should I not return from this journey beyond space, I set into the confines of my laboratory. The Worlds Machine, as I had come to call it, stood in the precise center of the room, its polished finish standing out against the fraying paint and dust-covered shelves which I had not found time to rectify. It looked much the same as it had since its outer skin had gone on, but on that day it felt... different. There was a certain electricity in the air, as if it knew its day had dawned and was ready to do the task for which it had been designed.

"Once I had turned on the engine and the Machine began to hum and purr, I deposited a handful of items I deemed important in the space behind the couch from which I would operate the controls. Against what was in essence a small cargo bay, built in the event that I came upon an artifact which I could not abandon but be unable to carry otherwise, the supplies I had brought seemed pathetically small. There was a Kodak there as well, with fifty rolls of film to its name, as was a video camera and tape recorder for further proof of whatever I might find.

"I made one look - hopefully not the last I would ever make - around the laboratory which had been my room for so long before I ducked into the machine. As I did so, I noticed that the holster I wore inside my jacket was empty. Cursing myself for my potentially fatal lack of foresight, I ducked out for a brief moment to retrieve my favored pistol from its lockbox. Though I sincerely hoped that the need to use it would not present itself, it would be an extraordinary stupidity to invest so much effort only to arrive in a situation where the lack of an effective weapon would spell inescapable doom.

"The door made a reassuring sound as it sealed behind me. The Worlds Machine was now a fully self-contained craft, with my air being drawn from its own storage tanks rather than from the atmosphere surrounding me. It was a sensible precaution, built on the premise that I might find myself in a world where the atmosphere had become poisonous in some way or had disappeared entirely. I made sure that the hatches were all sealed fast before I truly began this fantastic voyage.

"Even to my own eye, the controls of the Machine are remarkably simple, when taking into account the duties they must perform. Foremost among them was a panel of numbers, thirteen columns of zeroes followed by a single, lonely 1. That 1 marked this world, my home. If I was to return to it, it would not do to make it something difficult to remember. The Machine itself was controlled with a simple lever, which I would push forward to ascend the order of worlds, and reverse in order to descend them. It was with that lever that I would embark on my greatest journey.

"I began to exert pressure on the lever, but only the smallest I could manage at first. At once I noticed that the laboratory gained a misty, hazy perspective, as if I was viewing it through a bank of fog. Nonsense, I thought! I realized that it must be a result of what allows the machine to punch through to the next world, feeling quite rewarded in my vindication. With more courage making itself available, I pressed further on the lever, watching the lab shimmer and vanish before my eyes, taking those first steps into alternity."

#

"I will not preclude to bore you with the details of the first few worlds I encountered now; if you so wish to hear of them, speak to me directly at some later time. This story is truly about the seventh world on which I found myself, the seventh iteration of our familiar Earth on which the Worlds Machine found solid ground. I had wondered what might happen if the machine happened to come to occupy the same space as an object that had taken root where my laboratory was, but dismissed it as an acceptable risk. It was not until later I discovered that the machine would not materialize in alternity if it intersected anything at all physical.

"After the Machine shimmered into existence and the fog around me melted away, I gaped through the window-slits at the world in which I had arrived. There was no trace of my laboratory anywhere, which was not a thoroughly unexpected situation. What was unexpected, though, was that there was no trace of any construction other than my laboratory. Where it once stood, and for as far around as I could see through my own eyes and the Machine's cameras, there was naught but forest. I had been fortunate that the machine had materialized in a clearing, where there had stood nothing that could impede my arrival.

"My heart raced as my mind took stock of the possibilities. Why, perhaps this was a world where mankind had never managed to walk upon two legs and realize that he could think. Imagine the libraries upon libraries of information that could be gleaned from a planet that had never seen human contact! Pocketing the extra film, I threw the Kodak's carry strap over my neck, and did the same with that attached to the video camera. The gun was still there, and I felt no pressing need to remove it. Even if humanity did not exist on this world, it was a sure conclusion that at least some form of predator would.

"I cannot remember just how long I spent eagerly combing over the flora that bloomed in the clearing around the Machine. I took photos of several, as many photos as I could take, knowing full well that I would have more than enough pecuniary backing to recoup my losses once this knowledge was disseminated beyond my brain. I catalogued a full dozen flowering plants which I had never seen, creations that were elegant and alluring but simultaneously alien, in an odd fashion. I collected sample bags that I had carried in the Machine and placed each specimen of plant within one. They were to be my proof of this journey. It was then that I first felt a strange sensation impinging upon my consciousness.

"As I explain it, I realize that the thing I felt in my mind on that other world is not something which I can explain to you. As far as I know, words do not exist in our vocabulary that may describe it. Nevertheless, it was unmistakably there in the back of my mind, a visitating thing which I could not rightly explain. On a hunch, I resolved to set further out from the Worlds Machine, in an effort to locate the source of this strange sensation. I walked for several minutes, and as I did so it became only more pronounced, ascending to an alien symphony that played across my brain. I was perplexed and fascinated by it. I tried desperately to explain it to myself, but had no more success than I would have attempting to explain it to you.

"At long last, I saw her. Off in the distance, between the trees and leaves and flowers, I could distinctly see a woman's face. As I drew closer, I realized that she was the source of this reverbration in my mind. I wondered how such a thing was possible as I gazed at her. As I did so, she diverted her gaze from what had been the previous object of her attention and smiled at me, as if she had known that I was already there. She walked out of the forest ten or twenty feet ahead of where I stood on the path, and that is where I got my first glimpse of her.

"This woman was built like a horse -- or, more appropriately, a centaur. Her face was as familiar as any you might see along these streets, as was everything above her waist, but that was the extent of this lady's ability ot pass for a human. Below that she was built like Pegasus, four legs divided by a massive pair of feathered wings, the color of a dark blue metal. The legs themselves were wholly human in their design as well. I stood shocked at this unexpected wanderer, my mind empty of thoughts. She extended a hand in my direction.

"I regret, friends, that I cannot relate what transpired immediately after that, for the simple reason that I had fainted."

*****

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*****

Previously on Common Words:

• "Tranquil Fragments"
  
• "The Software Market on Rainier"
  
• "Sixty-Ton Payload"
  
• "To the Gallows"

this series is fondly dedicated to Mark Helprin, everyone's favorite copyright maximalist

PDP #49: The Primeval Bright

It's incredible, really, how minor adjustments to the camera lens can affect how a photograph turns out. This was taken in an indoor, open-at-both-ends bus bay at Warden station in Scarborough, and how the camera saw it is not the way I did. Where the portal in the photo is flooded with light, to the eye it was just an ordinary, blue-sky day.

I stood waiting with camera at the ready for what felt like ten minutes just so I could get this shot, as the bus emerged from the stark whiteness. I like that it turned out well enough that its rollsign is readable.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.