New York City
May. 13th, 2013 12:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aaaaaaaagh_skySo. New York.
Ellen's been to a living DC, with Mr. Mills. That was- that was interesting. To her way of thinking, that was recon- seeing what the Capital had been once, or what a Capital had been once, anyway. It wasn't so much a vacation as a week-long act of research, like watching a vid that happened to be really, really immersive.
New York is something else.
She has nothing to compare Steve's New York to. She's read about it, sure- in the history texts. In some of the novels they had in the Vault. But-
Well.
Somewhere out there in her world, she knows, there is a New York. And that New York is dead. Maybe- probably- there are people living there now, carving out lives in the ruins. Maybe not. Steve's New York is a city of islands strung together by bridges and tunnels and ferries, with a scrap of it stuck to the mainland like an afterthought. An island city is- she can't wrap her mind around the idea of such a thing existing in her world, try though she might. The War would have destroyed the city's coastlines, snapped the bridges, collapsed the tunnels, sunk the ferries. If there are islands where New York ought to be, they're going to be shadows of their former selves. Smaller, eaten by the ocean and the rivers; sicker, from the poisons in the waters and the invisible fires of two hundred years of irradiated silt. If there is a New York in her world at all, any more, it is a broken thing that has snapped away from all its history.
There are towers in Steve's New York a hundred stories tall, all steel and concrete and windows shining day or night. There are little squat buildings by the sides of streets where people sell printed matter of every kind, the published word running as easily through their hands as a fistful of sand- there are boxes where anyone with a few coins can come away with something whole and entire to read. Some of it's in languages Ellen can't make the slightest sense of; some of it... some of it Ellen didn't even recognize as language at first. There are alphabets here she's never seen. She's not sure anyone living in the Capital has, unless maybe it's one of the older Scribes.
There are places in Steve's New York- one is next to the Coney Island place he loves so much- where they keep sea animals simply so that people can look at them and learn about them. Where people go out of their way to pull food out of the ocean to feed these creatures and keep them happy. Other places, in Prospect Park in his beloved Brooklyn and Central Park in his Manhattan and another in the Bronx, where there is more green than even Oasis had, and none of it is used for the growing of food or the burial of the dead- only for people to visit, or for showing animals from far away to people who would never see them otherwise. There are airfields here, and other places where things fly; all up and down the west side of Manhattan Island are little places where craft that look like Vertibirds' tiny wingless cousins take off and land as if flying were nothing at all. In Queens there's a place where the airfield has buildings hard by the water; Steve pointed out one of the aeroplanes there, with something like rails where other planes had wheels, and said that they were seaplanes that landed on the waves.
In Queens there are places where the trains are very like the wrecked cars she's seen in the Metro tunnels, and yet unlike. The trains run underground, some places, but in Queens they mostly run above the ground, on elevated roads nothing else can travel. They do that in Brooklyn, too- the train that ran to Coney Island was one of those trains. They're crowded things, and they smell, but they're colorful and living and full of signs for services for things she never knew existed. Doctors whose only goal in life is to improve people's skin, buildings where people put their possessions because they have too many to put in their homes, people to argue points of law and taxation, services that bring food to your door- so many things...
In Steve's New York there are cemeteries, too. She's seen them. They walked past Green-Wood Cemetery on the way to Prospect Park. What she saw of it wasn't much, as it was a big place and he didn't much want to visit, but it was broad and green and beautiful, and full of memorial stones and little buildings. That ... she hadn't expected that. Yes, she's seen cemeteries in living worlds before. Mr. Mills took her to Arlington. But that was Arlington, the one place she knows of in the Capital that's still being used in her day as it was in his time, as the final rest of soldiers. And even for all that, Arlington in her world and in her time is not like this. For a burial at Arlington, the corpse is borne there, and interred, and marked for perhaps a year. By then the marker falls away and the only memorial that remains is in the Scrolls and the undying flame at the Citadel. Elsewhere in the Wasteland there are no Scrolls, only the living to remember, but either way no one makes a permanent marker, because there are no resources to spare for the sake of the dead. Arlington is green because the soil is fed with every one of the Brotherhood's fallen, not because of particular care, and its stones are there because the Brotherhood does not need to disturb the past, not because they added any.
But this is a living New York, the one that Steve took her to visit. And it's a New York where there is enough of everything that they can afford to mark the resting-places of the dead, forever. Where they can spare water for the ground that covers the dead, simply to please the eye of the living, and stone as a mark of respect for those who will never see it again. This place is alive enough to treat its dead with as much care as it treats its living, maybe more.
And this is the first she's seen of it.
Mr. Mills' DC was a thing Ellen knew she could never have. The Capital is a shattered war zone, a fossil of an earlier time, a corpse. His DC was alive when he took her there, but she knew that when she went home she'd be going back to where people were making their homes among the bones of what had been. Visiting his DC was like watching a vid- a bright, shining vid that surrounded you on all sides and that you could touch, but just a vid. She's never seen her world's New York, and she intellectually knows it's as snapped off from its past as the Capital is from DC-that-was; but the first she's seen of the city is this, three islands and a mainland scrap and eight and a half million people and glass and water and power and light.
Steve's world isn't hers. His New York won't fall the way hers did, two hundred years ago. But it's the only New York she's ever seen and in her head it's alive like nothing else she's ever seen, and when she goes home, she knows it will be dead. At most, it'll be a skeleton playing host to scrabbling squabbling tribes among the ruins.
She needs to go home, there's work to be done, but knowing that she's going from a place and a time where that city is eight and a half million lives and all the glory and joy and pain they could muster, to a place and a time where it's cinders and girders and blasted shadows.... feels rather like-
( ** WARNING: This will commit ALL WARHEADS to target and lock this station! **)
Like setting her own hand to the button.
Ellen's been to a living DC, with Mr. Mills. That was- that was interesting. To her way of thinking, that was recon- seeing what the Capital had been once, or what a Capital had been once, anyway. It wasn't so much a vacation as a week-long act of research, like watching a vid that happened to be really, really immersive.
New York is something else.
She has nothing to compare Steve's New York to. She's read about it, sure- in the history texts. In some of the novels they had in the Vault. But-
Well.
Somewhere out there in her world, she knows, there is a New York. And that New York is dead. Maybe- probably- there are people living there now, carving out lives in the ruins. Maybe not. Steve's New York is a city of islands strung together by bridges and tunnels and ferries, with a scrap of it stuck to the mainland like an afterthought. An island city is- she can't wrap her mind around the idea of such a thing existing in her world, try though she might. The War would have destroyed the city's coastlines, snapped the bridges, collapsed the tunnels, sunk the ferries. If there are islands where New York ought to be, they're going to be shadows of their former selves. Smaller, eaten by the ocean and the rivers; sicker, from the poisons in the waters and the invisible fires of two hundred years of irradiated silt. If there is a New York in her world at all, any more, it is a broken thing that has snapped away from all its history.
There are towers in Steve's New York a hundred stories tall, all steel and concrete and windows shining day or night. There are little squat buildings by the sides of streets where people sell printed matter of every kind, the published word running as easily through their hands as a fistful of sand- there are boxes where anyone with a few coins can come away with something whole and entire to read. Some of it's in languages Ellen can't make the slightest sense of; some of it... some of it Ellen didn't even recognize as language at first. There are alphabets here she's never seen. She's not sure anyone living in the Capital has, unless maybe it's one of the older Scribes.
There are places in Steve's New York- one is next to the Coney Island place he loves so much- where they keep sea animals simply so that people can look at them and learn about them. Where people go out of their way to pull food out of the ocean to feed these creatures and keep them happy. Other places, in Prospect Park in his beloved Brooklyn and Central Park in his Manhattan and another in the Bronx, where there is more green than even Oasis had, and none of it is used for the growing of food or the burial of the dead- only for people to visit, or for showing animals from far away to people who would never see them otherwise. There are airfields here, and other places where things fly; all up and down the west side of Manhattan Island are little places where craft that look like Vertibirds' tiny wingless cousins take off and land as if flying were nothing at all. In Queens there's a place where the airfield has buildings hard by the water; Steve pointed out one of the aeroplanes there, with something like rails where other planes had wheels, and said that they were seaplanes that landed on the waves.
In Queens there are places where the trains are very like the wrecked cars she's seen in the Metro tunnels, and yet unlike. The trains run underground, some places, but in Queens they mostly run above the ground, on elevated roads nothing else can travel. They do that in Brooklyn, too- the train that ran to Coney Island was one of those trains. They're crowded things, and they smell, but they're colorful and living and full of signs for services for things she never knew existed. Doctors whose only goal in life is to improve people's skin, buildings where people put their possessions because they have too many to put in their homes, people to argue points of law and taxation, services that bring food to your door- so many things...
In Steve's New York there are cemeteries, too. She's seen them. They walked past Green-Wood Cemetery on the way to Prospect Park. What she saw of it wasn't much, as it was a big place and he didn't much want to visit, but it was broad and green and beautiful, and full of memorial stones and little buildings. That ... she hadn't expected that. Yes, she's seen cemeteries in living worlds before. Mr. Mills took her to Arlington. But that was Arlington, the one place she knows of in the Capital that's still being used in her day as it was in his time, as the final rest of soldiers. And even for all that, Arlington in her world and in her time is not like this. For a burial at Arlington, the corpse is borne there, and interred, and marked for perhaps a year. By then the marker falls away and the only memorial that remains is in the Scrolls and the undying flame at the Citadel. Elsewhere in the Wasteland there are no Scrolls, only the living to remember, but either way no one makes a permanent marker, because there are no resources to spare for the sake of the dead. Arlington is green because the soil is fed with every one of the Brotherhood's fallen, not because of particular care, and its stones are there because the Brotherhood does not need to disturb the past, not because they added any.
But this is a living New York, the one that Steve took her to visit. And it's a New York where there is enough of everything that they can afford to mark the resting-places of the dead, forever. Where they can spare water for the ground that covers the dead, simply to please the eye of the living, and stone as a mark of respect for those who will never see it again. This place is alive enough to treat its dead with as much care as it treats its living, maybe more.
And this is the first she's seen of it.
Mr. Mills' DC was a thing Ellen knew she could never have. The Capital is a shattered war zone, a fossil of an earlier time, a corpse. His DC was alive when he took her there, but she knew that when she went home she'd be going back to where people were making their homes among the bones of what had been. Visiting his DC was like watching a vid- a bright, shining vid that surrounded you on all sides and that you could touch, but just a vid. She's never seen her world's New York, and she intellectually knows it's as snapped off from its past as the Capital is from DC-that-was; but the first she's seen of the city is this, three islands and a mainland scrap and eight and a half million people and glass and water and power and light.
Steve's world isn't hers. His New York won't fall the way hers did, two hundred years ago. But it's the only New York she's ever seen and in her head it's alive like nothing else she's ever seen, and when she goes home, she knows it will be dead. At most, it'll be a skeleton playing host to scrabbling squabbling tribes among the ruins.
She needs to go home, there's work to be done, but knowing that she's going from a place and a time where that city is eight and a half million lives and all the glory and joy and pain they could muster, to a place and a time where it's cinders and girders and blasted shadows.... feels rather like-
( ** WARNING: This will commit ALL WARHEADS to target and lock this station! **)
Like setting her own hand to the button.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-13 07:52 pm (UTC)