Chapter 9 Chapter nine

The Great Khan had a map showing all the cities of the empire and neighboring countries with their houses, streets, walls, rivers, bridges, bays, and cliffs.He knew that it was impossible to get information about these places from Marco Polo's report, and they were places he was familiar with: how the three square cities of Dadu, the capital of China, are intertwined with each other, each city has four temples and four The gates of the city are opened in turn according to the seasons; how the rhinoceros on Java island sprints with a horn that can kill people when they are angry, and how people along the coast of Malabar gather pearls on the seabed.

Kublai Khan asked Marco, "When you return to the West, will you tell me the story you have already told me?" "I speak, I speak," said Marco, "but the man who listens remembers only what he expects to hear. The description I had the honor of having you listen to was a world that circulated among porters and boats the day after my return. What lies between them is another world; if one day I become a prisoner of Genoese pirates and be imprisoned with a writer of adventure novels, then I may tell it again in my later years and let him take notes, which is another world. The world. It is not the voice that speaks that determines the story, but the ear that listens."

"Sometimes I feel that your voice is coming from afar, and I am a prisoner, trapped in a vulgar situation. At that time, all forms of human society have reached the end of reincarnation, and it is hard to imagine what new things will evolve into. form. And I hear in your voice the invisible reasons that keep cities alive, by which perhaps they may rise after death." The Great Khan had a map showing the whole earth, every continent, the most distant borders, the routes of ships, the coasts, the most famous capitals, and the richest ports.He flipped through it in front of Marco Polo, trying to test his knowledge.The traveler sees a city with three coasts enclosing a long strait, a narrow bay, and a sea surrounded by land; he recognizes it as Constantinople; Between the two mountains facing each other; he also recognized Samarkand and its gardens at a glance.

As for other cities, he can only rely on the legends he heard, or guess with vague clues: for example, Granada is the mottled pearl of Islam; Lübeck is the well-organized port in the north; Thibouk soil; it is Paris that everyone brings home a loaf of bread every day.There are small colored drawings on the map showing inhabited, oddly shaped places, only palm trees peering out, an oasis hidden in the folds of the desert that could only be Nefta; castles built on quicksand and cattle Where the cattle graze on the tide-washed meadows, one only thinks of the Gulf of Saint-Michel; where the palace is not within the walls, but the city is within them, it must be Urbino.

There are cities on the map that neither Marco nor the geographers have ever visited and whose locations are unknown, but they certainly have the possible shape of a city: Cusco reflects its complete trade order on a radial pattern, verdant Mexico in the The palace of Montezuma reigns over the lake, the bulbous cupolas of Novgorod, the white roofs of Lhasa rise above the cloudy roof of the world.Marco named the places (just names anyway) and pointed out what route to take.Everyone knows how many languages ​​there are in the world, and how many times the name of a city will change: and from any place, you can reach another place through many different roads, or ride a horse, or drive, or take a boat. , or fly.

The emperor closed the map and said to Marco, "I believe you can know the city better by looking at the map than by experiencing it yourself." Polo replied: "When you travel, you will find that there is no difference between the cities: each city looks like any other city, they exchange shape, order and distance with each other, and the shapeless wind and dust invade the continent, but your map preserves it. The difference between them: the combination of different qualities, like the strokes of a name." The Great Khan has a book of maps, which concentrates the maps of all the cities: the walls built on solid foundations, the ones that have collapsed and are gradually swallowed up by the sand, and there are only holes dug by Fangzi for the time being, but they will become cities one day.

Marco Polo turned the pages; he recognized Charico, Ur, Carthage, and he pointed out the mouth of the Scamander, where the Achaean ships waited ten years until Ulysses The built wooden horse was pulled into the city gate before the soldiers who besieged the city returned to their boats.But he gave Troo the shape of Constantinople, and foresaw Mahomet's many months of siege, and, like Ulysses the cunning, steered his ships round Pyra and Grata, and departed by night. Sailing against the current of the Bosporus Strait to the Golden Horn.The amalgamation of these two cities has produced a third city, which may be called San Francisco, with long light bridges spanning Golden Gate Bay, open trams through steep streets, and a three-hundred-year-long siege. And brown races assimilated with decaying white races in a country wider than the khan's empire, which might be the capital of the Pacific in a thousand years.

The map has this quality: it reveals the face of the shapeless, unnamed city.Here's a city that looks like Amsterdam, a semicircle facing north, with concentric canals--the Dauphin's, the Emperor's, the nobles'; here's a city that looks like York, on the Moor Highlands, with walls and many lofty towers; here is another city that looks like New Amsterdam, aka New York, an oval island between two rivers, crowded with glass and steel towers, canal-like streets, each All straight, except for Broadway. The variety of shapes is innumerable: new cities will be born until each shape finds its own.When the change of shape comes to an end, the end of the city begins.The last few pages of the map are a network of shapeless cities with no beginning or end, some of which look like Los Angeles, others of Kyoto and Osaka.

Cities and the Dead 5 Laudomia, like all cities, has another city of the same name next to it: Laudomia of the dead, or cemetery.But the peculiarity of Laudomia is that it is not only twins but triplets; in short, there is a third Laudomia, the city of the unborn. Everyone knows the nature of the Twin Cities.As Laudomia of the living became more crowded and expanded, the cemetery expanded beyond the walls.The streets of the Laudomia of the dead are only big enough for the carts of the workers, and there are many windowless buildings in these streets; The same crowded, piled on top of each other.If the weather is fine in the afternoon, when the residents of the living city go to worship the dead, they will see their surnames on the tombstones: Like the city of the living, this city also hides the history of labor, anger, fantasy, and sexual desires. The difference is that everything here has become necessary, and will no longer be affected by chance, everything has been sorted out.In order to affirm itself, the Laudomia of the living must seek its own notes from the Laudomia of the dead, at the risk of finding more or less answers: why there is more than one Laudomia, why there could be The different cities that have appeared, why they did not appear, or give some incomplete, contradictory, and disappointing reasons.

It is quite right that Laudomia reserves the same large area for unborn people. Of course, the size of the space is not proportional to the number of residents, because the future population should be infinitely large. However, since it is a vacant place, The surrounding buildings are full of niches, wall holes and pits, and the unborn may be as small or large as possible, maybe as big as a mouse or a silkworm or an ant or an ant egg, and it is not sure whether they are upright or not. Lie on the protruding part of the wall, the column capital or the foot, neatly arranged or scattered, and think about the future life separately, so you might as well envision the Laudomia a hundred or a thousand years later in a marble vein, there is Countless inhabitants dressed in clothes never seen before, say, eggplant-coloured shaggy garments, or turkey-feather turbans, and you could recognize your own offspring, friends and foes, creditors and debtors, all Continue their vengeance, or marry for love and money.Living Laudomians used to ask questions in the house of the unborn: footsteps echoed hollowly under the cupola; questions were asked in silence: the living asked questions about themselves and not about the unborn Some people care about whether they can live forever, some hope that future generations will forget his evil deeds; everyone wants to know what happened next; but the wider their eyes are opened, the less they can see the continuous clues; the future of Laudomia The residents of China are like specks of dust, detached and independent from the past and the future.

The Laudomia of the Unborn does not give the living Laudomia residents a sense of security like the city of the dead: there is only panic.As a result, visitors find that they can only think in two directions, and don't know which direction contains more distress: one idea is to believe that the unborn far outnumbers the living and the living combined, and every stone on the stone Every hole has invisible crowds crowding the airways, like spectators in the stands of a stadium; and, as Laudomia multiplies with each generation, there are hundreds of airways for each airway. Each of the 40,000 unborn humans stretched their necks and opened their mouths wide to avoid suffocation.Another idea is to believe that Laudomia would at some point disappear along with its inhabitants; in other words, the inhabitants would pass on from generation to generation until a certain number was reached and terminated.At that time.Laudomia of the undead and Laudomia of the unborn are like the two hemispheres of an inverting hourglass; , is the last grain of sand that fell, waiting at the top of the sand pile. City and Sky IV Astronomers were invited to establish laws for the construction of the city of Bailinthia. They calculated the location and date according to the astrology; they drew a horizontal line and a vertical line. axis.Based on the twelve officials of the zodiac, they divided the regions on the map, so that every temple and every district was illuminated by lucky stars; Lunar eclipse in millennium.Bailinthia—they promised—would reflect the harmony of the heavens; the fate of its inhabitants would be overshadowed by the reason of nature and the blessings of the gods. Bailinthia was built strictly according to the calculations of astronomers; various peoples came and settled; the first generation born in Bailinthia spread within the walls; age. In the streets and squares of Bailinthia you will meet cripples, stumps, hunchbacks, fat men and bearded women.But the most terrible sights are invisible: there will be hoarse howls from the cellars and lofts where children with three heads or six feet are hidden. The astronomer of Bailinthia is faced with a difficult choice, whether to admit that he has miscalculated and cannot explain the celestial phenomena, or must confirm that this monster's city is a reflection of the heavenly order. The Three Connected Cities During my travels, I stopped every year through Perocopia, staying in the same room in the same hotel.Since the first time I saw it, I lifted the curtains every time to see the scenery: a pit, a bridge, a small wall, a eucalyptus tree, a cornfield, a thorn bush with blackberries, a chicken farm, The yellow peak of a mountain, a white cloud, and a blue sky in the shape of a swing.I definitely didn't see anyone the first time; in the second year, because of some movement in the leaves, I saw a flat, round face eating corn.In the second year, three people appeared on the low wall, and on the way back, I saw six people sitting side by side, with their hands on their knees, and there were some medlars in the coil. After that, I walked into the room every year Lifting the curtain reveals more faces: sixteen, including those in the pit; Count it in.They had the same features, they all seemed gentle, they were freckled, they were smiling, some had blackberry juice on their lips.Before long, I saw the whole bridge full of round-faced guys, all huddled together for lack of room to move; they were eating the kernels of corn, and then nibbling on the cobs. Thus, as the years passed, the pits disappeared from sight, and the trees and briar bushes disappeared, and they were hidden by rows of round, smiling faces chewing leaves, and you can't imagine, a small field of corn How many people can be accommodated in such a limited space, especially those who sit with their knees hugged.They must have been much more numerous than they appeared: I saw the mountain peaks obscured by a growing crowd: but the men on the bridge are now accustomed to step on other shoulders, and my eyes can no longer see so far. This year, when I lifted the curtain, the entire window was filled with faces: from one corner to the other, layer upon layer, far and near, all were still flat round faces with a slight smile, many With my hands on the shoulders of the person in front of me, I couldn't even see the sky, so I simply left the window. However, it is not easy to move around.There are twenty-six people in my room: if you try to move your feet, you will bump into the ones who are squatting on the ground.Some people sat on the half-length chest of drawers, some people took turns leaning on the bed, and I squeezed between their knees and elbows: fortunately, they were all extremely polite people: hidden city 2 In Lysa, life is unhappy.People in the street wrung their hands as they walked, cursed the crying children, leaned against the iron railing by the river, and pressed their fists to their temples.Just woke up from a nightmare in the morning, and another nightmare started immediately.In a workshop, where your fingers could be hammered or pricked with needles, or you would face the wrong numbers in the books of merchants and bankers, or the empty glasses lined up on the counter in the tavern, but in this In this kind of place, as long as you hang your head down, you can always hide your sad eyes.It's worse inside, and you don't have to go in to know it: in summer the windows echo with quarrels and broken glasses. But every quarter of an hour in Lysa the laughter of the child at the window could be heard because he saw a dog rushing to the hut to grab a piece of biscuit dropped by the mason on the trellis; The waitress shouted: "Good man, let me taste it"; The man showed off her white lace parasol at the racetrack; the officer on horseback smiled at her as he leaped for the last time; he was a happy man, but his horse was happier than he, and when he leaped over the fence he saw a partridge The partridge is flying; the happy bird has just been released from its cage by a painter; the happy painter has finished his illustration of the bird, tracing every feather of its speckled red and yellow; The city of Lysa also has an invisible line that connects one creature to another at a certain moment, then loosens, and stretches between the two moving points, drawing new shapes quickly, so no A happy city hides a happy city every second, it just doesn't know it." city ​​and sky five Andrea's construction skills are very subtle. Every street in it follows the orbit of the planets, and the design of buildings and public places also follows the order of the constellations and the position of the brightest stars: Antares, Wall Palestine, Capricornus, and Cepheid variables.The city's operational calendar also has predetermined charts, scheduling works, functions, and celebrations to correspond to the celestial aspects of the day: thus, the earth's day and the celestial night correspond to each other. The life of the city is strictly regulated, as calm as the movement of the celestial bodies, and it is inevitably out of the control of human will.If I were to praise the industriousness and delicacy of Andria's citizens, I would have to say: I can understand how you feel like part of an unchanging sky, a cog in a mechanism, and therefore try to avoid changing your city and your city. your habits.Of all the cities I know, only Andrea is suited to being still in time. They stared at each other in astonishment. "But why? Who ever said that?" So they took me to see a hanging street in a bamboo grove that had just opened recently, and to a shadow theater that had been built on the site of a dog farm (dog The field has been moved to the former quarantine station, which was closed after the last epidemic patient recovered), and a river mouth, a statue of Tellis and a ski slope have just been opened. "Didn't these new constructions disrupt the interstellar rhythm of the city?" "Our city is perfectly in tune with the sky," they replied, "no matter what happens to Andrea, there will be new scenes in the astral world." Every time Andrea changes, astronomers will see through the telescope New starburst, see the far distance in the sky turn from orange to yellow, see a nebula spread, see a spire hang down somewhere in the Milky Way, each change means that Andrea or the starry sky will change accordingly: the city and the sky Never stay the same. Concerning the character of Andria's inhabitants, two virtues deserve mention: self-confidence and prudence.They firmly believe that any reform in the city will affect the celestial phenomena, so before making any decision, they will first weigh the risks and benefits of the reform to themselves, to the city, and to each world. The Four Connected Cities You accuse me of saying that my story begins by taking you into the center of the city without mentioning the space that separates the two cities, perhaps the ocean, the rye fields, the larch forests, or the swamps.I will answer you with a story. Once, on the streets of the famous city of Cecilia, I met a shepherd driving his flock of sheep wearing copper bells along the wall. "May your stars shine brightly," he stopped and greeted me, "Can you tell me, what is the name of the city we are in at the moment?" "I wish you all the best!" I replied. "Why don't you recognize the famous city of Cecilia?" "Please don't take offense," said the man. "I'm a wandering shepherd. My sheep and I sometimes have to go through the city, but we can't tell the difference. If you ask the names of the pastures: I know them all. Under the cliff, the green slope, the shadow grass. For me Well, cities have no names: they are the places that separate one grazing land from another, and there are no leaves, and the sheep are terrified at street corners. Me and the dog will run and herd them together." "I'm the exact opposite of you," I said. "I only know the city, and I can't tell what is outside the city. In a place where no one lives, every stone and every tuft of grass looks like another stone and any other tuft of grass." Then, over the years, I got to know more cities and traveled more continents.One day I was walking between two identical rows of houses; I got lost.I asked a passerby, "May you come and go safely, can you tell me where this is?" "Cecilia, bad luck!" he replied. "We, my sheep and I, have walked these streets for many years and have not found our way..." I know him, though his beard has turned white; he is the shepherd I met long ago.A few sheep with scabies followed him, they didn't even smell bad, they were almost skin and bones.They gnaw on the waste paper in the trash can. "Impossible!" I exclaimed. "I also entered a town, but I can't remember when, and I kept walking in its streets, going deeper and deeper. But it was another town, far from Cecilia, and I How can you come to the place you said if you haven't left the city yet?" "All places are confused," said the Shepherd. "There's Cecilia everywhere. This must be the old dwarf sage grass. My sheep recognize the grass over the traffic island." hidden city 3 A fortune teller was asked about the future of Marozia, and she replied, "I see two cities: one for mice, and one for swallows." The interpretation of the prophecy is: in today's Marozia the leaden streets scurry about like rats, vying with each other for the food that happens to escape from the most vicious mouths; but a new century is about to begin, At that time, the inhabitants of Marozia will fly like swallows in the summer sky, call each other like a game, show off their skills, and use their still wings to slide down quickly to wipe out the mosquitoes in the air. "It's time for the end of the century of mice and the beginning of the century of swallows," say some staunch ones.In fact, under the gloomy and humble atmosphere like a mouse, you can already feel that more reserved people have a thought of taking off like a swallow, ready to soar into the clear sky with a flick of their tail, and draw a picture of a new realm with the tip of their wings. curve. Many years later, I returned to Marozia: for a while it was believed that the prophecy of the divining woman had been fulfilled: the old century was dead and buried, and the new century was in its heyday.The city has indeed changed, perhaps improved.But the wings I see flapping all around me are just umbrellas of suspicion with heavy eyelids drooping under them; people who believe they're flying when in fact they're just puffed up bat-like coats, and it's great to be off the ground up. Then, if you walk along the fortified walls of Marozia, at the most unexpected moment you will see a crack opening before you, revealing another city.A moment later it disappeared again.Perhaps the key is knowing what to say, what to do, in what order and rhythm; or, it is enough to have someone's gaze, answer, gesture; Other people's fun is enough: in that moment, all spaces, heights and distances will change, and the city will also change, becoming clear and transparent like a serpentine.But all this must appear to have happened by chance, not to be overemphasized, nor to think that you are performing a decisive act, remembering that at any moment the old Marozia may return and bring its stone roofs, cobwebs and mud , soldered on all heads. Was the divination woman wrong?uncertain.My opinion is that Marozia is two cities, the mouse's and the swallow's; both cities change with time, but their relationship remains the same; at the moment the latter is getting rid of the former. Connected Cities No. 5 Speaking of Sedesilia, I should first describe the entrance to the city.You must have thought that as you gradually approached the city gate, you would see a series of city walls rising from the dusty plain, and the customs officers guarding the wall were already squinting at your luggage.You are outside the city until you reach it; you pass through the arch and you find yourself in it; graphics. If you believe this, you are wrong: Saedyria is not like that.You have walked for hours without knowing whether you are already in the city or still outside.Sedesilia is a city diluted in the plain, stretching out like a shoreless lake in a swamp; dull buildings stand back to back in the barren fields, mixed with boarded fences and tin huts .From time to time, there are clusters of simple buildings on the edge of the street, tall or short, like a comb with missing teeth, making people feel close to the center of the city.But as you go on, you see only places of indeterminate nature, then a bunch of workshops and warehouses, cemeteries, playgrounds with Webster's wheels, slaughterhouses; In the alleys of small shops, I soon saw some suburbs that seemed to be suffering from leprosy. If you ask passers-by, "Where's Sedeselia?" they'll make a general gesture that might mean "right here," or "ahead," or "all around," or even "beside you." behind". "I'm looking for cities," you insist. "We come here every morning to work," one replied, while others said, "We come back to sleep at night." "But what about the cities where people live?" you ask. "It must be over there," they say, some raising their arms and pointing diagonally at a clump of shadows on the horizon, while others point to other spires behind you. "So I've gone too far?" "No, go ahead and have a look." So you go on your way, from one suburb to another, and then it's time to leave Sedesilia.You ask someone for the way out of the city, and once again you pass through the freckled suburbs; night falls; the windows light up, thicker here, thinner there. You have given up asking whether the dilapidated surroundings harbor a Sedesilia that the traveler can identify and remember, or that Sedesilia is merely a suburb of itself.What troubles you now is a more distressing question: Is there still an outside of Sedesilia?Or, no matter how far you travel out of town, do you just go from one transition zone to another and never get out? The Hidden City Part 4 Hundreds of years of repeated invasions have caused Theodora to suffer a lot; as soon as one enemy is driven out, another enemy immediately becomes stronger and threatens the residents who survived the catastrophe.After the vultures in the sky fly away, they have to deal with the snakes; the spiders disappear, and the flies multiply into the whole black; the city defeats the termites, but suffers from the woodborer.Animals that were no match for the city were extinct one by one.The inhabitants stripped off their scales and carapaces, plucked their elytra and feathers, and made Theodora a city of men, which still retains this character today. But, first of all, it has been uncertain for many years whether the final victory will belong to the last animal that challenges human sovereignty today: the rat.Each generation of rats is inexhaustible, and there will always be a certain number left to breed more powerful offspring. They are not afraid of traps or poisons.They only take a few weeks to fill Theodora's gutters.However, the murderous and capable human beings finally defeated the arrogant enemy with a fierce massacre. After the corpses were buried with their last fleas and their last germs, the animal necropolis became a closed sterile city.Man has at last re-established the order of the world which he has disrupted: no living animal doubts it any longer.The bookshelf of Theodora Library contains the works of Buffon and Linnaeus, which let people know what animals are. At least the inhabitants of Theodora believed so, and they could not imagine a forgotten animal awakening from its slumber.Another animal, which had not been seen for many years since it was expelled from the unextinct animal system, began to squirm again in the vaults of ancient books;Man-head lion, vampire bat, one-horned dragon, nine-tailed fox, bull head, horse face, human wolf and two-headed snake.Start to invade the city again. hidden city five I am not going to tell you about the unjust city of Bernice, with its meat-mincing machines adorned with three-paneled panels and ceiling wall reliefs (the scrubbers will feel even more ashamed if they poke their heads over the railings to look at the halls and porches) himself small and imprisoned).But I'll tell you about the hidden, just city of Bernice, which uses expedient materials to connect steel wires, pipes, pulleys, pistons, brick yards, etc., like climbing vines, in the dark rooms behind the shops and at the bottom of the stairs. Like plants, the gearwheels (which, once started, make a muffled rattling sound announce that a new kind of sophisticated machinery has taken control of the city).I will not describe to you how the injustice of Bernice lay in the fragrant pool of the bathhouse, weaving romantic stories with exaggerated words, and watching the round skin of the slave girl in the pool with monopolistic eyes; but I will tell you How fair people are always careful to avoid the detection and arrest of sycophants; they recognize their fellow travelers by the way they speak, paying special attention to the pronunciation of commas and parentheses; Delicious food reminiscent of the golden days of old: rice and celery soup, soybeans, mashed flower petals. Based on these materials, you can generalize the image of the future Bernice, which can help you understand the current Bernice more than any other material.But you must remember my words: In the seed of a just city lies a poisonous seed: the confidence and pride of being decent, of being more just than many who profess to be more just than just.The seed germinates in resentment, hostility, and dissatisfaction; there is a natural desire to avenge the unjust, and with this desire is the desire to take their place.Another unjust city, though somewhat different from the original one, was gradually burrowing through Bernice's double sheath of injustice and justice. I do not want you to get a distorted idea from what I have said, so I must draw your attention to the fact that this city of injustice that has sprouted secretly in the secret city of justice has one essential characteristic: The love of love will suddenly awaken one day—like opening a window in excitement—and, though not yet regular, is able to form a city again, more just than it was before it gave birth to injustice.However, if you look closely at this new embryo of justice, you will see a small spot growing, as if there is a growing tendency to try to enforce justice by unfair means, perhaps this is the embryo of a large city... These words of mine will lead you to the conclusion that Bernice is certainly a string of ephemeral, different cities, alternately alternating with each other, sometimes just and sometimes unjust.But what I want to warn is another point: all the future Bernices already exist at this moment, they are wrapped in layers, tightly packed, they cannot be separated, and they cannot cross the threshold. The Great Khan has other maps of happy lands not yet discovered but seen only in the imagination: New Atlanta, Utopia, Sun City, Ocean City, Tamoe, New Harmony, New Lanark , Icaria. Kublai Khan said to Marco: "You have been to so many places and seen so many signs, you must be able to tell me which piece of paradise the wind will blow us to." "With regard to these ports, I cannot draw a route on a map, nor can I predict the date of landing. Sometimes, all I need is a glance, an opening in an incongruous landscape, a flash in the fog, a hearing of a crowd The dialogue between two people in the novel, then, starting from there, I believe that a perfect city can be built bit by bit. If I told you that the journey I was going to take was discontinuous in space and time, sometimes loose and sometimes dense, you would not believe that I should stop pursuing this city from now on. As we talk now, maybe It is rising scattered throughout your empire; you may as well pursue it, but in the way I tell you." The Khan was already looking at other maps of cities horrified in nightmares and curses: Aynoch, Babylon, Yehulan, Butua, Brave New World. He said: "If we can only go ashore at Hell City, all our efforts will be in vain, and there it is, the shrinking eddy into which the tide draws us." But, says Polo, "the hell of the living does not necessarily exist; if there is, it is the hell in which we now live every day, and which was formed by our being brought together. We have two ways of avoiding suffering. The method, for many people, the first is easier, to accept hell and become a part of it, so that you don't have to see it. The second is somewhat risky, and you must always be on your guard against it: find people and things in hell that are not hell, Learn to recognize them, make them last, give them space."