Keen students of cryptopolitology will know of the so-called "Fast Cities", places like fluvial Ambulatia and Velocester, which currently holds the urban speed record. But the fastest city ever to have existed is Urbs Ubiquis.
It began as New Exeter, founded on America's east coast by a breakaway group of Mayflower Pilgrims in 1621. The schism between the main, Puritan colonial party and the more liberal splinter group was a bitter one, and out of shame and resentment the governor of New Plymouth later claimed that the New Exonians had never left, but died from an outbreak of scurvy in the colony's first winter.
As for the New Exonians, their anticipation at leaving England behind, compounded by their desire to get away from their fellow Pilgrims, was so strong that the city itself began to migrate towards the north-west. The movement was at first measured in inches, but the city accelerated at what appears from surviving records to have been an exponential rate. This uncanny movement exacerbated the rift between the citizens and their superstitious countrymen, but doesn't seem to have bothered the Native Americans, who were happy to trade with the "running city". Over the course of three years or so, the citizens took on food crops, livestock and fresh citizenry from their neighbours, initially the Wampanoag and later the Pequot. In 1624 New Exeter's population topped 1,000. By this time its speed was such that it could only be approached on horseback, or head-on, although the head-on approach was considered inadvisable.
The city's exact route after this time is unknown, as it sped out of Pequot territory and into America's unoccupied heartland. Many small towns today claim that their valley, or that strip where the grass just won't grow, was scorched by the city as it blazed its trail north-west, but after more than 300 years of colonisation, civil war, expansion and development it's impossible to be certain. What is known is that before it reached the foothills of the Rocky Mountains (and who knows which might have done more damage to the other?), New Exeter's speed went right off the scale, and it hurtled out of topological reality altogether.
It was after this time that the citizens renamed New Exeter "Urbs Ubiquis", as they came to understand that their city was now... everywhere. (Most recently, the younger generation have taken to calling it "Zen".) Spread so thinly, however, Urbs Ubiquis and its inhabitants are not quite as solid as they once were.
Ubiquis's towers and minarets can be seen out of the corner of your eye, in some fortuitous juxtaposition of your own city's buildings perhaps, or by some trick of the light shining off glass or metal. When you glimpse for a second a human face in the fire, or in the pattern of your wallpaper, or in the branches of the tree outside your window, you glimpse the people of Ubiquis about their daily business. It is possible to love an Ubiquinian, or to be loved by one, in the half-felt breath of a warm breeze on your neck, the half-felt caress of your clothes pressing against your ribs. It is possible to hear their voices breaking through on talk radio. It may be that Dali's "Spain", "Invisible Man" and other similar portraits were occasioned by visits from Ubiquinians.
Showing posts with label Invisible Cities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Invisible Cities. Show all posts
Friday, February 09, 2007
Muango
Three days with a parang and a native guide got me into the wild heartland of Gabon, in east central Africa. There I found ancient, jungle-clad Muango. Like Angkor-Wat and Teotihuacan, its cyclopean, millenia-old stones bear witness to a once-great civilisation of craftsmen, architects and astronomers. Unlike those other cities, Muango is populated, although its denizens have forgotten all but the legend-echoes of what their ancestors knew.
Like the Dogon people of Mali, who knew of the binary nature of Sirius long before the telescopes were invented that could prove it, the citizens of Muango – the Chimuango – have scientific knowledge woven into the fabric of their religion that was only recently uncovered by Western scientists. The name of their city is, in their language, the word for "door", and it is their belief that Muango was founded on "the door of the world" – the gateway that leads into and out of our universe.
I have seen this gateway with my own eyes, although only the outside may viewed thus. (I speak of "the outside", when I suppose I really mean to say "the inside" – the side that faces into our world. But one may go mad dwelling on such philosophical conundra.) No one, not even from among the Chimuango themselves, is permitted to cross the gateway's threshold and look within. The gateway is a box, a cube perhaps three metres on each side, hewn from stone and covered (or should I say lined?) in gold. The gold is but a veneer, however, for the plating itself is solid lead, moulded with the most astonishing bas-reliefs. Previous visitors to the city hoping to map out what lay beyond the gateway by X-ray came away frustrated, even before the Chimuango got wise to them.
The Chimuango priests say that the Creator-God made the gateway, first arranging the floor, ceiling and three walls around the vast lid that forms the fourth wall. Pulling in the box's edges towards himself, he thus formed a lip upon which the lid would rest, and this done he pushed the lid into place and sealed the world in. The box is, of course, inside-out and so it is that we are all on the inside, the twenty-seven cubic metres enclosed by the box being outside our universe.
Here is the uncanny science at the heart of Muango: not the gateway that the Chimuango guard, but their insistence that no one must look inside it. For Chimuango lore states that the Creator-God and his own world exist in many forms, and that to observe him would force him to restrict himself to one form, a transformation from divine to mundane, an act of deicide. In effect, the ancient religion of Muango anticipates quantum theory, particularly Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. In an age when man has observed the farthest corners of the universe and the innermost recesses of his own small planet, what the Chimuango protect with their black-market Kalashnikovs and their very lives is not a mere stone box, but the last unscrutinised twenty-seven cubic metres in existence.
Like the Dogon people of Mali, who knew of the binary nature of Sirius long before the telescopes were invented that could prove it, the citizens of Muango – the Chimuango – have scientific knowledge woven into the fabric of their religion that was only recently uncovered by Western scientists. The name of their city is, in their language, the word for "door", and it is their belief that Muango was founded on "the door of the world" – the gateway that leads into and out of our universe.
I have seen this gateway with my own eyes, although only the outside may viewed thus. (I speak of "the outside", when I suppose I really mean to say "the inside" – the side that faces into our world. But one may go mad dwelling on such philosophical conundra.) No one, not even from among the Chimuango themselves, is permitted to cross the gateway's threshold and look within. The gateway is a box, a cube perhaps three metres on each side, hewn from stone and covered (or should I say lined?) in gold. The gold is but a veneer, however, for the plating itself is solid lead, moulded with the most astonishing bas-reliefs. Previous visitors to the city hoping to map out what lay beyond the gateway by X-ray came away frustrated, even before the Chimuango got wise to them.
The Chimuango priests say that the Creator-God made the gateway, first arranging the floor, ceiling and three walls around the vast lid that forms the fourth wall. Pulling in the box's edges towards himself, he thus formed a lip upon which the lid would rest, and this done he pushed the lid into place and sealed the world in. The box is, of course, inside-out and so it is that we are all on the inside, the twenty-seven cubic metres enclosed by the box being outside our universe.
Here is the uncanny science at the heart of Muango: not the gateway that the Chimuango guard, but their insistence that no one must look inside it. For Chimuango lore states that the Creator-God and his own world exist in many forms, and that to observe him would force him to restrict himself to one form, a transformation from divine to mundane, an act of deicide. In effect, the ancient religion of Muango anticipates quantum theory, particularly Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. In an age when man has observed the farthest corners of the universe and the innermost recesses of his own small planet, what the Chimuango protect with their black-market Kalashnikovs and their very lives is not a mere stone box, but the last unscrutinised twenty-seven cubic metres in existence.
Cotheca
Cotheca is a city of fanatical collectors. Its citizens are united in the cause of building the ultimate Collection, an exhibition without parallel. It is their aim to preserve for posterity everything human – all human life, all human artefacts, everything made or touched by humans. They envision the world as a museum, and themselves as its curators.
The people of Cotheca are the most pacifist in the world. Since the Collection, encompassing all human life on Earth, must for completeness' sake include the Earth itself (and since no smaller territory would suffice to display all its contents), the Cothecans' ultimate ambition is, admittedly, world domination. Yet they have no intention of taking it by force – they don't want to damage any of the exhibits. And they don't want the exhibits damaging each other, either. Wars, to them, are acts of unimaginable vandalism. Injecting you with embalming fluids is nothing less than a Cothecan's duty as a curator of the Collection, but overpowering and restraining you in order to do it would be like roughing up a Ming vase.
It's therefore very easy to capture any Cothecans who leave the city (but check them carefully for syringes!), and although no tourist has ever returned from Cotheca we know quite a lot about their society. (Cothecans are very happy to discuss their ways with outsiders, hoping no doubt to recruit others to their cause.) They prize individuality highly, since it is each person's uniqueness that justifies his or her inclusion in the Collection. Identical siblings are taboo, and after the firstborn twin or triplet is delivered, the "duplicates" are discarded, unnecessary. There is no question of swapping with hypothetical rival Collections – the Cothecans will not countenance rivals, since this would threaten the Collection's own uniqueness. It is an article of faith that once completed, the human Collection will itself be collected by the curators of some vast interplanetary museum. This at least answers the question of who the Cothecans plan to display their Collection to.
Each Cothecan is expected to live a responsibly healthy life, breed the next generation of curators, perform such curating duties as they can and finally surrender their bodies for cataloguing and archiving. This generally happens in late middle age, while they are still in reasonably good condition. They have enough specimens of old age among the tourists and explorers they've collected. Violent criminals, rare as they are in Cothecan society, are subject to summary preservation and are displayed publically alongside informative descriptions of their acts. When all other specimens have been archived in the Collection, the curators will archive each other – writing up their lives on display cards, assuming dignified postures and being pumped full of embalming fluids. Finally, her work done, the last curator will write out her own card, take a last wistful look at the perfection around her, and commit an act of self-preservation.
The people of Cotheca are the most pacifist in the world. Since the Collection, encompassing all human life on Earth, must for completeness' sake include the Earth itself (and since no smaller territory would suffice to display all its contents), the Cothecans' ultimate ambition is, admittedly, world domination. Yet they have no intention of taking it by force – they don't want to damage any of the exhibits. And they don't want the exhibits damaging each other, either. Wars, to them, are acts of unimaginable vandalism. Injecting you with embalming fluids is nothing less than a Cothecan's duty as a curator of the Collection, but overpowering and restraining you in order to do it would be like roughing up a Ming vase.
It's therefore very easy to capture any Cothecans who leave the city (but check them carefully for syringes!), and although no tourist has ever returned from Cotheca we know quite a lot about their society. (Cothecans are very happy to discuss their ways with outsiders, hoping no doubt to recruit others to their cause.) They prize individuality highly, since it is each person's uniqueness that justifies his or her inclusion in the Collection. Identical siblings are taboo, and after the firstborn twin or triplet is delivered, the "duplicates" are discarded, unnecessary. There is no question of swapping with hypothetical rival Collections – the Cothecans will not countenance rivals, since this would threaten the Collection's own uniqueness. It is an article of faith that once completed, the human Collection will itself be collected by the curators of some vast interplanetary museum. This at least answers the question of who the Cothecans plan to display their Collection to.
Each Cothecan is expected to live a responsibly healthy life, breed the next generation of curators, perform such curating duties as they can and finally surrender their bodies for cataloguing and archiving. This generally happens in late middle age, while they are still in reasonably good condition. They have enough specimens of old age among the tourists and explorers they've collected. Violent criminals, rare as they are in Cothecan society, are subject to summary preservation and are displayed publically alongside informative descriptions of their acts. When all other specimens have been archived in the Collection, the curators will archive each other – writing up their lives on display cards, assuming dignified postures and being pumped full of embalming fluids. Finally, her work done, the last curator will write out her own card, take a last wistful look at the perfection around her, and commit an act of self-preservation.
Invisible Cities
Here's fun! I've stumbled across Blind Atlas, a collection of sketches of odd cities and other places. The next three posts are my bid at getting cities of my own included.
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