Sunday, 15 September 2019

Cities At Night


"Magnificence spread below the mountain, city like a galaxy of million-hued stars, bridges a-soar over shimmering waters toward heights where homes gleamed beyond counting. Wind boomed, full of sea. It was too cold to stand in for long. While they did, her hand sought his. When they took shelter in the car, soon she leaned against him and he put an arm about her shoulder; and at last, gently, once, they kissed."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART TWO, 1988 A. D., p. 99.

Lights seen, wind heard, sea smelled, cold felt, bodily sensations.

They parked in the hills, with the Eastbay cities like a galaxy of stars below them, San Francisco an island universe across darkness. She sighed and leaned against him. He wondered, dimly alarmed, why he had come here. 
-copied from 2 here.

A less sensorial experience.

Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly are above San Francisco in 1988. Wanda is about to start Time Patrol training.

Robert Kintyre and Margery Towne are above Berkeley in about 1960. A common friend has just been murdered.

The two couples are across the Bay decades apart in different genres but possibly in the same timeline.

It is night here in Lancaster near Morecambe Bay.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I recalled this bit about Archopolis from Chapter IV of A STONE IN HEAVEN, detailing how Miriam Abrams was affected by her apparently first sight of the Imperial capital: "Thus she found herself more alone, more daunted among a million people and a thousand towers, than ever in a wildwood or the barrenness of a moon. Maybe those numbers, million, thousand, were wrong. It felt as if she could see that many from the groundside terminal, but she was dazed. She did know that they went on beyond sight, multiplied over and over around the curve of the planet. Archopolois was merely a nexus: no matter if the globe had blue oceans and green open spaces--some huge, being property of nobility--it was a single single city." The description continued in the next paragraph: "She collected her modest baggage, hailed a cab, blurted her destination to the autopilot, and fled. In nightmare beauty, the city gleamed, surged, droned around her."

And that word, "gleamed," made me think Miriam Abrams happened to arrive in Archopolis when it was night. I can easily imagine how the vastly sprawling and multicolored lights of the city could help make her feel dazed and intimidated by the "nightmare beauty" of the Imperial City.

Ad astra! Sean