title: “THE HISTORY OF OZARKA” subtitle: “From the Catastrophic Days to the Present Era — Seventh Authorized Edition of the Bureau of Historical Reclamation, New Carthage” author: “Gemini Cool” publisher: “Crabtree Library”
lang: en-US
Contents
- Prefatory Notice of the Bureau
- Chapter I: The Drowning and the Dawn
- The Century of Water
- The Ascent
- The Emergence
- The Founding of Ozarka
- The Choice of New Carthage
- The First Broadcast
- The Three Lands
- Points for Recitation
- Chapter II: The Geography of Order
- A Sacred Map
- Ozarka: The Mainland
- The Western Great Lakes: The Reserves
- The Appalachian Island: The Eastern Bloc
- Points for Recitation
- Chapter III: The Forbidden Isles and the Barrens
- A Note on Method
- The Great Rocky Isles
- Western Ozarka: The Barrens
- Points for Recitation
- Chapter IV: The Philosophy of the New Real
- What a Citizen Is
- The First Foundation: The Past Is Void
- The Second Foundation: Order Is Sacred
- The Third Foundation: The Wild Is to Be Feared
- The Fourth Foundation: The New Real
- The Citizen at Evening
- The Future of Ozarka
- Points for Recitation
- Colophon
Prefatory Notice of the Bureau
This volume is the seventh authorized edition of the History of Ozarka, prepared by the Bureau of Historical Reclamation at New Carthage and approved by the Ministry of Information for instruction in every provincial school, every reading hall of the Office of Population Management, and every garrison library of the western districts.
It supersedes all prior editions. Copies of the sixth edition are to be surrendered at the nearest Reclamation depot, where they will be pulped and returned to circulation as ration-card stock. The citizen who surrenders an old edition receives a new one without charge, together with a stamped receipt that may be shown at any inspection.
The Bureau has made a small number of corrections in this edition. Two passages concerning the Appalachian Island have been revised to reflect the findings of the Plague Watch. A paragraph on the early surveys of the Western Barrens has been withdrawn in full. The chapter on the Great Rocky Isles has been reduced in length, in keeping with the Ministry’s guidance that the citizen ought to know enough of the Isles to respect them and no more. Every correction is final. The Bureau reminds the reader that history, once reclaimed, stays reclaimed.
The work is arranged in four chapters. The first recounts the Catastrophic Days and the founding of the nation. The second describes the three great zones of the known world. The third treats, with the care required of it, the Forbidden Isles and the Barrens. The fourth sets down the philosophy by which a citizen of Ozarka lives.
At the close of each chapter the reader will find a short list of Points for Recitation. These are to be committed to memory. They will be asked at the provincial examinations and at the annual registry interview, and a citizen who can recite them clearly will find the interview brief.
The Bureau thanks the Ministry of the Interior for access to the provincial archives, the Office of Population Management for the census tables, and the engineers of the Reserve Service, who answered every question put to them and then asked that their answers be omitted.
Approved for Instruction. Bureau of Historical Reclamation, Hall of Records, New Carthage.
Chapter I: The Drowning and the Dawn
1. The Century of Water
The old world ended in water.
The records of the Bureau of Historical Reclamation are exact on this point, and the young citizen should learn it before learning anything else about the nation. The end came as a rising. It was slow enough that three generations were born, married, and buried inside it, and many of those people went to their graves believing the water would turn back in the spring. The Bureau counts the Catastrophic Days as a single century, from the first abandonment of the southern coastal cities to the morning the Survey of Settlement declared the new shoreline fixed. Historians of the old school once divided this century into periods and gave each a name. The Bureau has retired those names. A century of drowning is one event, and the citizen is asked to remember it as one.
In its opening decades the sea came for the edges. Harbor towns installed pumps, then gates, then walls, and then moved their courthouses inland and left the walls standing in the surf. Insurance offices closed their coastal branches. Families sold houses to buyers who intended to sell them again within a year, and the last buyers in each town were usually the state, which bought at a loss and posted notices. The Bureau keeps several thousand of those notices in the Hall of Records. Most are a single sheet. They give the name of a street, a date, and an instruction to vacate, and they are signed by officials whose offices were themselves underwater within the decade.
The middle decades belonged to the rivers.
As the sea pressed inland, it pushed against the mouths of the great rivers, and the rivers, with nowhere to empty, backed up across their own valleys. Levees that had stood for generations failed in sequence, each failure sending more water to the next. The Mississippi, that great channel of the old continent, broke from its bed during a season of rains that the provincial archives record as lasting ninety-one days. It cut a new course through the lowland counties, joined itself to the swollen lower Ohio and the flooded basins of the Arkansas and the Red, and spread until the people living on its banks could no longer say where the river ended and the sea began. The Bureau’s hydrographers have since established that the answer is that there was no longer any difference. Salt water was found two hundred miles above the old delta. Fish of the open ocean were caught in what had been cornfields.
The inland seas that formed in those years are the Western Great Lakes of the present map. They lie where a great part of the old farm country once lay, and their beds are paved with the foundations of towns. On calm mornings the pilots of the Reserve Service report seeing grain elevators beneath them, standing upright in forty fathoms of water, their roofs grown over with mussels. The Bureau does not encourage the citizen to dwell on such sights, and the Reserve Service no longer reports them.
The final decades were the decades of the climb.
2. The Ascent
When the lowlands could no longer be lived in, the people went up.
The movement to the highlands was the largest migration in the history of the continent, and it was conducted, for the most part, without government. The old capitals had either drowned or relocated so often that their orders arrived after the events they addressed. Families loaded what they could and drove toward any ground that stood above the waterline. When the roads flooded, they walked. The provincial archives contain diaries from this period, and one detail recurs across hundreds of them: the writers record their elevation above sea level each evening, in the margin, the way an earlier generation might have recorded the date.
The Ozark highlands received more of these people than any other region. The hollows and ridges of that country, once thinly settled, filled within a generation. Towns of four hundred became towns of forty thousand. Churches became dormitories, schools became granaries, and the county fairgrounds became hospitals, then morgues, then hospitals again. The highland families who had lived there for generations took in strangers by the thousand, and the Bureau honors them for it. A plaque in the Hall of Records lists the names of the original hill counties, and every schoolchild in Ozarka visits it once.
Other survivors went onto the water itself. Along the edges of the new seas, people lashed together barges, ferries, the hulls of pleasure boats, shipping containers sealed with tar, and the flat roofs of drowned warehouses cut free and floated. These assemblies grew into the floating cities, some of which numbered tens of thousands of residents at their height. They drifted with the currents, traded with the shore, and governed themselves by councils whose minutes the Bureau has recovered in part. Their people lived on fish, salvage, and rainwater, and on whatever the highland towns would sell them. Many of the founding families of New Carthage came from the floating cities, and their descendants still keep a habit, considered quaint in the capital, of checking the direction of the wind before speaking at a meeting.
Elsewhere the survivors went underground, into old mines and limestone caverns, into the cellars of hospitals and the vaults of banks. The Bureau has fewer records of these communities. Most came to the surface when the waters stabilized. Some did not, and their fate is a matter for the Ministry of the Interior.
The climb lasted roughly thirty years. By its end, the population of the continent had fallen to a figure the Office of Population Management has calculated with precision and has asked the Bureau to withhold from general instruction. The citizen need only know that the figure was small, and that every person alive today descends from it.
3. The Emergence
The waters stopped rising in the ninety-eighth year of the Catastrophic Days.
The Bureau’s records show that the change was first noticed by the floating cities, whose tide-markers had climbed steadily for decades and then, over a single season, stopped. The councils sent word to the shore. The highland towns, which had been measuring the water at their own docks, confirmed it within the year. For six more years the survivors watched the marks without trusting them. Then the Survey of Settlement was formed, a body of hydrographers, engineers, and former county surveyors drawn from the largest highland towns and the three largest floating cities, and it was given a single task: to walk the new shoreline and draw it.
The Survey’s work took four years. Its parties traveled by boat and on foot, working with the last functioning instruments of the old world and replacing them, as they failed, with instruments of their own manufacture. They planted iron stakes at the waterline every half mile, and the stakes that remain are now protected monuments. When the Survey completed its circuit and assembled its sheets on the floor of a requisitioned gymnasium in the highland town of Provision, the members saw the shape of the country for the first time.
It was a different country.
The old continent had been divided by its rivers. The new one was divided by its seas. The heart of the old farm country lay under the Western Great Lakes. The eastern mountains had become an island, cut off from the mainland by a broad channel where the valleys of the Ohio and Tennessee had been. Far to the west, beyond a stretch of country so stripped and broken that the Survey could cross only its nearer edge, the high mountains of the old continent rose from the water as a chain of islands. And in the middle, raised above the seas on its ridges and plateaus, lay the highland country where the survivors had gathered.
The Survey presented its maps to a joint assembly of the highland towns and floating cities in the hundred-and-fourth year. The assembly examined them for nine days. On the tenth day a delegate from the floating city of Second Harbor rose and moved that the old maps be set aside as void, since they described no place that now existed. The motion passed without dissent. The old maps were gathered from the town libraries and courthouses and stored in a single locked room in Provision, which the Bureau continues to administer.
That motion marks the end of the Catastrophic Days. The Bureau dates the present era from it. The citizen will see the year of the Emergence printed as Year One on every official calendar, every ration card, and every certificate of birth.
4. The Founding of Ozarka
A country without maps needs a government, and the joint assembly, having voted away the old world, turned to the question of the new one.
Its first decision was the name. Delegates proposed many, and the Bureau keeps the full list. The name chosen honored the highlands that had sheltered the survivors, and it was adopted by a vote of three hundred and eleven to four. The four dissenting delegates were from a floating city that wished the nation named for the sea. They later voted for the Charter, and their names are on it.
The Charter of Ozarka was drafted over the following two years and ratified in the third. It is a short document. The citizen may read it in full on the bronze tablets in the Charter Hall at New Carthage, and every provincial school keeps a copy. It establishes the Assembly of Ozarka as the nation’s governing body and creates the four great offices of state.
The Bureau of Reclamation was charged with the land. Its engineers would drain what could be drained, terrace what could be farmed, and rebuild the roads, bridges, and power lines of the highland country. Its sister body, the Bureau of Historical Reclamation, which prepared this volume, was charged with the records.
The Ministry of the Interior was charged with the provinces, their borders, their courts, and their peace.
The Office of Population Management was charged with the people: their registry, their residence, their labor, their health, and their numbers.
The Ministry of Information was charged with what the people would know, and when.
The Charter’s preamble contains the sentence every citizen learns in the first year of school. It reads: We have survived the old world, and we will not repeat it. The drafters debated those eleven words for a month. Some wished to soften them. Others wished to name the old world’s failures one by one. The final wording was the work of a schoolteacher from the hill country, a member of the drafting committee whose name the Charter Hall displays above the tablets, and the Bureau considers it the finest sentence written in the present era.
5. The Choice of New Carthage
The provisional government sat at Provision for its first eleven years, in the same gymnasium where the Survey had laid out its maps. The building was too small, the town too crowded, and the location too exposed. A capital in the highlands could be reached from any direction by anyone who could walk. The Assembly wished for a capital that could be reached only by those it invited.
A commission was appointed to find one. It considered sites on high ridges, sites on plateaus, and the anchorage of the largest floating city. In the end it recommended an island.
The largest island of the Western Great Lakes lies well out from the mainland shore, separated from it by a broad and deep stretch of water. Before the Catastrophic Days it had been a range of wooded bluffs above a river valley. When the valley flooded, the bluffs remained, and the island they formed was large enough for a city, high enough to stand clear of any storm surge the hydrographers could imagine, and far enough from every shore that no approach could be made unseen. The commission’s report noted that the island’s limestone was of high quality and its subsoil free of salt. It noted, in a final paragraph that the Bureau has preserved, that the island was beautiful.
The Assembly accepted the recommendation in the twelfth year, and the building of New Carthage began in the thirteenth.
The city was raised from two materials. The first was the island’s own white stone, quarried from the inner bluffs and cut by hand in the early decades and by machine in the later ones. The second was glass. The engineers of the Bureau of Reclamation discovered that the sand dredged from the drowned towns of the lakebed, rich in the ground-down remains of old-world windows and bottles and screens, could be melted and poured into a glass of a deep and lasting green. They called it reclamation glass. It was used in every public building of the capital, and it gives New Carthage its color. Visitors arriving by water see the city first as a green light on the horizon, and only later as stone.
The bridges came last. Five were built, each joining the capital to an outlying islet of the same bluff range, and each was designed by the Reclamation engineers to the same pattern: a long, low deck borne on arched white ribs that curve down into the water at regular intervals. The citizens of the capital say the bridges look like the ribs of some great animal lying half-submerged in the lake, and the comparison has become so common that the Ministry of Information uses it in its own broadcasts. No bridge connects New Carthage to the mainland. Travel between the capital and the provinces is by ferry, under permit, from the three mainland terminals at Tenth Landing, Mercy Ridge, and the old floating-city anchorage of Second Harbor.
The towers of the capital were completed in the thirtieth year. They were built tall and faced with reclamation glass, and they were angled, at the insistence of the Ministry of Information, so that the setting sun would strike them and break across the water toward the mainland in long green shards. On clear evenings the light reaches the farm provinces sixty miles away. Farmers in the eastern terraces still pause their work when it arrives.
6. The First Broadcast
In the thirty-first year, the Ministry of Information made its first evening broadcast from the new transmitting station on the capital’s western bluff.
The broadcast was brief. A reader, whose voice the Ministry has preserved on the original recording, gave the date, the level of the lakes, the state of the harvest in each province, the number of births registered that day, and the number of deaths. He then read the sentence that has closed every evening broadcast since: The world is stable, and the future is bright.
The citizen should understand what that sentence meant to the people who first heard it. Many of them had been born on the climb. They had grown up recording their elevation in the margins of their diaries. They had seen the water at the doorstep and the doorstep under the water. For a century no one had been able to tell them that the world was stable, because it had not been. When the reader said it, from a tower of green glass on an island in a sea that had once been farmland, it was true. The Bureau has interviewed many who heard the first broadcast. They recall where they were standing. Several recall that strangers on the street embraced.
The evening broadcast has been made every night since, without interruption, for the entire history of the nation. The reader changes. The sentence stays. The citizen hears it at the end of each day, in the home, in the dormitory, in the field kitchen, and in the barracks, and is expected to stop speaking until it has been read.
7. The Three Lands
The founding of New Carthage completed the founding of the nation. With the capital raised, the Charter in force, and the broadcast established, Ozarka entered the period the Bureau calls the Settlement, in which the mainland was ordered, the provinces were drawn, and the citizens were registered, assigned, and housed.
The history of Ozarka is more than the history of its capital, and more than the history of its mainland. When the Survey of Settlement laid out its sheets on the gymnasium floor at Provision, its members saw three lands, and they recognized at once that the nation would have to understand all three.
The first was the mainland, ordered and inhabited, where society would be built.
The second lay to the east, across the channel. It was the island of the old eastern mountains, and the Survey parties that landed there returned changed, in ways the Bureau will describe in the next chapter.
The third lay to the west, beyond the Barrens, rising from the water in peaks that later observers would glimpse from the far edge of the Barrens and could never reach.
These three lands, and the waters and wastes between them, are the whole of the known world. The following chapters describe each in turn. The citizen who understands them understands the nation, and the citizen who understands the nation will find that there is nothing left to fear in it.
Points for Recitation
- The old world ended in water, over a single century, which the nation calls the Catastrophic Days.
- The Mississippi broke its bed and spread across the lowlands, forming the inland seas now called the Western Great Lakes.
- The survivors climbed to the highlands, took to the floating cities, or went beneath the ground.
- The waters stopped rising in the ninety-eighth year, and the Survey of Settlement drew the new shoreline.
- The joint assembly declared the old maps void. That vote is Year One of the present era.
- The Charter created the Bureau of Reclamation, the Ministry of the Interior, the Office of Population Management, and the Ministry of Information.
- We have survived the old world, and we will not repeat it.
- New Carthage stands on the largest island of the Western Great Lakes and is built of white stone and reclamation glass.
- The world is stable, and the future is bright.
Chapter II: The Geography of Order
1. A Sacred Map
Every schoolroom in Ozarka displays the same map. It is printed by the Bureau of Reclamation on heavy cloth, in five colors, and it is replaced every tenth year whether or not it has faded. The citizen has looked at this map since childhood and may believe there is nothing more to learn from it. The Bureau asks the reader to look again.
At the center, in a warm gold, lies the mainland of Ozarka. Around it, in blue, lie the waters: the Western Great Lakes to the north and west of the capital, the Eastern Channel to the east, the southern gulf where the old coast once was. Across the channel, in a gray-green that the mapmakers call quarantine green, lies the Appalachian Island. To the west of the mainland, in brown, run the Barrens. And at the far western edge of the cloth, in white, stand the Great Rocky Isles, drawn in outline only, with no towns marked and no roads.
The colors are assigned by law. Gold is the color of habitation. Blue is the color of passage. Gray-green is the color of hazard. Brown is the color of defense. White is the color of what is known to exist and is not to be approached. A citizen who learns these five colors has learned the nation’s whole relation to the world, and the Bureau will now describe each zone in turn, beginning at the center.
2. Ozarka: The Mainland
The mainland is the heart of society. It is where the nation lives, eats, labors, marries, raises its children, and dies. It is where society happens. Every other zone on the map exists in relation to it, and the purpose of every other zone is its protection.
The Highlands
The mainland is a country of rolling uplands. Its ridges run long and low, east to west, folded into one another like the pleats of a curtain, and between them lie valleys that were once the hollows of the hill country and are now, in most provinces, terraced farmland. The highest ground lies in the center, where the old plateaus stand above the rest. The lowest lies along the shores, where the land slopes down to the lakes and the channel in a broad apron of reclaimed pasture.
The soil of the mainland is thin by the standards of the old world and rich by the standards of the new. The Bureau of Reclamation has spent the whole of the present era improving it. Silt is dredged from the lakebeds, desalted in great settling fields along the northern shore, and hauled inland by rail to be spread on the terraces. Limestone is burned for lime. The forests that covered the ridges before the Catastrophic Days were thinned during the climb for fuel and shelter; the Bureau has replanted them in measured blocks of oak, walnut, and pine, each block numbered, each tree tagged at planting with a disc of reclamation glass bearing its year.
The Provinces
The mainland is divided into fourteen provinces, each administered by a governor appointed by the Ministry of the Interior. The provinces were drawn during the Settlement by a commission that ignored the old county lines entirely. The commission drew its boundaries along ridgelines, so that each province would contain whole valleys and the waters that drained them, and so that no river would ever again serve as a border between two peoples. The citizen will note that the provinces bear numbers as well as names. The numbers are used in all official correspondence. The names are used in songs.
The most populous provinces lie in the center: First Province, which contains the old town of Provision and the Charter’s original seat; Third Province, the great grain terraces; Sixth Province, the industrial valleys where the reclamation glass is poured and the rails are forged. The shore provinces are smaller and more specialized. Ninth Province, on the northern shore, contains the settling fields and the ferry terminal at Tenth Landing. Twelfth Province, on the eastern shore facing the channel, contains the stations of the Plague Watch and very little else. Fourteenth Province, the westernmost, borders the Barrens and is administered jointly with the Defense Directorate.
The Rebuilt Cities
The cities of the mainland are new cities. A few stand on the sites of old highland towns that were swollen during the climb, but none retains its old name, and none retains its old plan. The Bureau of Reclamation rebuilt each one according to the Settlement Standard, a single document of forty pages that specifies the width of streets, the height of residential blocks, the distance between a dwelling and the nearest clinic, granary, school, and broadcast speaker, and the placement of the registry office at the center of each district.
The citizen who travels between cities, with the appropriate permit, will notice how alike they are. This is deliberate. A citizen reassigned from Meridian to Concord should be able to walk from the ferry terminal to the registry office without asking directions, and should find his new dwelling laid out in the same way as his old one, down to the position of the window over the washbasin. The Office of Population Management considers this sameness one of the nation’s great kindnesses. A people who have been displaced once should be spared the feeling of displacement ever after.
The cities are quiet. Vehicles are few and electric. Streets are swept nightly by machines of the Bureau of Reclamation. Each district has its broadcast speaker, mounted on a white stone column at the main crossing, and at the evening hour the speakers sound together across the whole of the mainland, so that a citizen walking home in any city hears the same voice at the same moment as every other citizen of the nation.
The Farmlands
The farmlands of Ozarka are terraced, irrigated, and assigned. Each terrace is worked by a farm cooperative registered with the Office of Population Management, and each cooperative receives its seed allotment, its fertilizer allotment, and its labor allotment at the start of the planting year. The harvest is weighed at the provincial granaries and reported in the evening broadcast. The citizen will have heard these figures every night since childhood, and the Bureau notes, with pride, that in every year since the Settlement the harvest has been sufficient.
The principal crops are wheat, maize, sorghum, potatoes, and the hardy beans developed by the Reclamation agronomists during the early decades. Orchards occupy the steeper slopes. Livestock is limited and closely registered. Fish are taken from the lakes by licensed crews of the Ninth Province fleet, working only in the approved fishing grounds along the near shore.
The Order of the Offices
Four offices govern the mainland, and the citizen will encounter all four in the course of a single year.
The Bureau of Reclamation builds and maintains. Its engineers are visible everywhere, in their gray coats with the green collar, surveying the terraces, inspecting the bridges, repairing the lines. Its work is never finished, and the Bureau’s motto, cut above the door of every depot, says so: The land is reclaimed daily.
The Ministry of the Interior governs the provinces, maintains the courts, and keeps the peace. Its officers are fewer and less often seen. The citizen meets them chiefly at the provincial courts and at the checkpoints between provinces, where travel permits are examined.
The Office of Population Management registers, assigns, and cares for the people. Every citizen of Ozarka is registered at birth, assigned a residence and a labor category at the age of sixteen, examined for health each year, and interviewed at the registry office on the anniversary of registration. The Office decides where a citizen lives, what work a citizen performs, whom a citizen may marry, and how many children a household may raise. The Bureau notes that these decisions are made with great care and are almost never contested, since a citizen who understands the history of the Catastrophic Days understands why the numbers must be managed.
The Ministry of Information informs. It operates the evening broadcast, prints the provincial newssheets, approves every book, and maintains the archives of the Bureau of Historical Reclamation. It determines which names of the old world may be spoken in public. There are very few.
These four offices together make the order of the mainland. The citizen lives inside that order the way a fish lives inside the lake, and need think about it no more often than the fish thinks about the water.
3. The Western Great Lakes: The Reserves
North and west of the mainland, between its shore and the capital and far beyond the capital, lie the Western Great Lakes. Their waters cover the old heart of the continent, and their surface is the largest single feature of the national map.
The lakes are reserves. With the exception of New Carthage and the licensed fishing grounds of the near shore, every island, islet, and stretch of water within them is national land, administered by the Reserve Service, and closed to settlement.
The Islands of the Reserves
There are several hundred islands in the Western Great Lakes, ranging from bare rocks a few yards across to forested uplands larger than some provinces. They are the tops of the old bluffs and ridges of the river country, and after the Catastrophic Days most of them were wild, scoured by the flood and colonized by whatever seed the water brought.
The Reserve Service has spent a century making them beautiful. Every island larger than a few acres has been planted, and the plantings follow a design approved by the Assembly in the fortieth year. The forests of the reserves are manicured. Their trees stand at regular intervals. Their undergrowth is cleared. Their meadows are mown to a uniform height by machines that move through the grass at night and return to their sheds before dawn. Their shorelines are graded and lined with white stone. A citizen who sees the reserves only in the photographs printed by the Ministry of Information may believe them to be parks of the capital, and in a sense they are: they are the capital’s gardens, extending outward from New Carthage across a thousand square miles of water.
No one lives on them. The Reserve Service maintains them entirely by machine, and its human staff, which is small, lives in the capital and visits the islands only for inspection.
The Stations Beneath the Forests
The reserves are uninhabited, and they are far from empty.
Beneath the manicured forests of the larger islands lie the stations that power and inform the nation. The Bureau is permitted to describe them in general terms. They were dug into the limestone of the old bluffs during the Settlement and expanded in every decade since. Some generate power from the currents that run between the islands, through turbines set in the channels below the surface. Some store the power. Some house the engines of the Ministry of Information: the transmitters, the archives, the machines that keep the national registry and process the census and calculate the allotments of the Office of Population Management.
From the surface, nothing of the stations can be seen. Their vents are disguised as stands of trees. Their access shafts open beneath the white stone of the shorelines and are sealed. Their lines run along the lakebed, among the foundations of the drowned towns, and come ashore on the mainland at points known only to the Reserve Service. The citizen who looks out at the reserves from the northern shore sees forests and meadows and water. The citizen is looking at the nation’s mind.
The Moat
New Carthage stands at the center of the reserves, and the waters immediately surrounding the capital are known, in the language of the Reserve Service, as the moat.
The moat is the most perfectly maintained place on Earth. Its water is filtered continuously by stations on the lakebed and is kept so clear that a ferry passenger can see the white stones of the bottom at a depth of sixty feet. Its surface is patrolled by small automated craft, flat and gray and silent, which collect every leaf, feather, and fragment of drift before it can settle. Its shores are lined with the white stone of the capital’s own bluffs. No fishing is permitted in it, and no swimming. Its fish are counted.
The ferries from Tenth Landing, Mercy Ridge, and Second Harbor cross the moat along marked lanes. The lanes are lit at night by lamps set beneath the surface, and from the capital’s towers they can be seen as three green lines running outward across the dark water toward the mainland. A traveler who leaves the lane is met by the patrol craft within minutes. The Bureau records no instance of a traveler leaving the lane twice.
The moat is silent. The machines that maintain it make no sound the human ear can detect. The water does not lap at the stone, since the patrol craft damp its waves. Citizens of the capital who live near the shore describe the silence as restful. Visitors from the provinces sometimes find it difficult to sleep.
4. The Appalachian Island: The Eastern Bloc
East of the mainland, across the broad water of the Eastern Channel, lies the Appalachian Island.
The citizen will know it as the color gray-green on the schoolroom map, as the subject of the Plague Watch reports in the evening broadcast, and as the reason for the stations along the shore of Twelfth Province. The citizen may also know it from the stories told by grandparents and by children, which the Bureau does not endorse. The Bureau will now set down what may be said of it officially.
The Land
The Appalachian Island is the range of old eastern mountains, cut off from the mainland when the valleys of the Ohio and Tennessee flooded and joined to form the channel. It is a large island, larger than the whole of the mainland, and it is mountainous throughout: long ridges, steep hollows, high balds, and dense forest. Its eastern coast faces the open ocean. Its western coast faces Ozarka across a channel that is twenty miles wide at its narrowest point and seventy at its broadest.
On clear days the island can be seen from the shore of Twelfth Province, a long blue-gray line of ridges along the eastern horizon. It is the only one of the three lands that every citizen of the eastern provinces has seen with his own eyes.
The Quarantine
The Appalachian Island has been under quarantine since the fifth year of the present era.
In the first years after the Emergence, the Survey of Settlement sent parties across the channel to map the island’s coast. They found survivors there, as they had found survivors everywhere. They also found conditions they could not explain. The parties’ reports, preserved in the Hall of Records, describe the island in language that the Bureau has had to classify. The citizen may be told the following.
Clocks on the island disagree. The Survey parties took timepieces with them, as every survey party did, and found on their return that no two of them showed the same hour. Some had gained days. Some had lost them. One member of the third party returned to the mainland with a pocket watch that showed a date eleven years before his own birth.
Sounds of the old world are heard on the island. The parties reported the noise of engines on mountain roads that no longer led anywhere, and the sound of radio programs in the old manner, with music and commercial announcements, coming from houses that had been empty for decades. They reported hearing old-world names spoken aloud. They reported hearing their own names spoken in the voices of people who had died in the Catastrophic Days.
Places of the old world appear on the island. Survey members described towns, intact and lit, that were not present when they returned to the same ridge the following morning. They described roads that ran for a mile through the forest and then ended at a wall of trees. They described a stretch of coastline where, at certain hours, the waterline lay hundreds of yards farther out than it should, and the drowned flats were dry, and the houses on them stood with their doors open and their lamps on.
People of the old world are seen on the island. The Bureau reproduces here the precise language of the fourth Survey report: figures in the dress of the period before the Catastrophic Days, standing at the edge of the trees, who did not respond when addressed and were no longer present when approached.
The Survey members themselves were affected. The Bureau states this plainly. The men and women who returned from the island remembered the old world. They spoke of it constantly. They used its names. They described its cities as though they had walked in them the week before. Several insisted that the Catastrophic Days had been an error of some kind, a misunderstanding, and that the old world was still present beneath the new one and could be returned to. Their insistence spread to their families and their neighbors. Within two years of the third Survey’s return, the highland town to which most of its members belonged reported that a quarter of its residents had begun dating their letters by the calendar of the old world.
The provisional government closed the channel in the fifth year. The Charter, ratified in the third, was amended in the sixth to make the closure permanent.
Why It Is Called a Plague
The Ministry of Information refers to the condition of the Appalachian Island as a plague, and the citizen may wonder why, since no fever has ever been traced to it and no physician of the Office of Population Management has found a bodily cause.
The answer lies in what the condition does. A plague is a thing that passes from one person to the next and weakens the body of the nation. The condition of the island passes from person to person as surely as any fever. It moves by conversation. It moves by letter. It moves by a single remembered name, spoken aloud in a kitchen and repeated by a child. Wherever it goes, it turns the citizen’s attention backward, toward the drowned world, and away from the order that saved him. A people who have been turned backward cannot build. They look over their shoulders at the water. They wait for the old world to come back. The Charter’s founding sentence states that the nation has survived the old world and will not repeat it. The Appalachian Island is the place where the old world has not finished ending, and it is contagious.
For this reason the island is called the Eastern Bloc in official correspondence, and the plague in common speech, and the Ministry prefers the second term. A citizen who calls it by the old names of its mountains or its towns commits a reportable offense.
The Plague Watch
The shore of Twelfth Province facing the channel is lined with the stations of the Plague Watch, an arm of the Ministry of the Interior. There are forty-one stations, spaced at intervals of about two miles, each a squat tower of white stone with a green-glass lamp room at its top. The lamps burn through the night and sweep the channel. The towers are connected by a road that only the Watch may travel.
The Watch’s duty is to keep the channel closed. It intercepts craft attempting to cross from either direction. It recovers whatever drifts ashore from the east: timber, wreckage, bottles, and, on occasion, objects that should not exist, such as newspapers bearing dates from before the Catastrophic Days, printed on fresh paper. These are delivered sealed to the Bureau of Historical Reclamation and are not opened in the provinces.
The Watch also listens. Its stations monitor every frequency, and its reports to the Ministry, summarized in the evening broadcast, record the level of what it calls eastern interference. On most nights the level is low. On some nights the speakers of the Twelfth Province towns, which the Watch cannot fully shield, pick up fragments of old-world music during the broadcast, faintly, beneath the reader’s voice. The residents of Twelfth Province are instructed to report these occurrences and to disregard them, in that order.
The Plague Watch has kept the channel closed for the whole of the present era. The Bureau records that in that time no case of the eastern condition has taken root on the mainland. The few that appeared were contained.
Points for Recitation
- The five colors of the national map are gold for habitation, blue for passage, gray-green for hazard, brown for defense, and white for what exists and is not to be approached.
- The mainland of Ozarka is where society happens.
- The mainland is divided into fourteen provinces, drawn along ridgelines so that no river divides a people.
- The cities of Ozarka are built to the Settlement Standard, so that every citizen is at home in every city.
- The four offices of the mainland are Reclamation, the Interior, Population Management, and Information.
- The land is reclaimed daily.
- The Western Great Lakes are reserves, maintained by machine, uninhabited, and above the stations that power and inform the nation.
- The moat of New Carthage is the most perfectly maintained place on Earth.
- The Appalachian Island has been under quarantine since the fifth year.
- The eastern condition is a plague because it turns the citizen backward.
Chapter III: The Forbidden Isles and the Barrens
1. A Note on Method
The Bureau of Historical Reclamation writes history from records. Where the records are full, the history is full. Where they are thin, the Bureau says so, and does not supply what is missing.
The two subjects of this chapter are the thinnest in the national archive. The first, the Great Rocky Isles, has been observed for the whole of the present era and has never been visited. The second, the Barrens of Western Ozarka, is national territory, administered by the Defense Directorate and visited daily, and the greater part of what happens there is withheld from general instruction by order of the Assembly.
The citizen should read this chapter with that in mind. It is brief where it must be. It says what may be said. Where the reader finds the account incomplete, the reader should understand that its incompleteness has been decided upon, by persons who know more than the Bureau, for reasons the Bureau respects.
2. The Great Rocky Isles
The Isles Observed
Far to the west, beyond the Barrens and beyond the water that lies past them, the high mountains of the old continent rise from the sea as a chain of islands. These are the Great Rocky Isles.
They are the greatest lands on Earth. The Bureau states this as fact, and it is the judgment of every observer who has looked upon them. The Isles stand higher than any land in the known world, their peaks white with snow in every season, their flanks dark with forest, their valleys, as far as observers can see into them, green and full of water. Their coasts are steep. Their air, when the wind comes from the west, reaches the western edge of the Barrens clean and cold and smelling of snow and pine, and the garrison troops stationed there describe it as the finest air they have ever breathed.
They are also the most beautiful lands on Earth. The Bureau is aware that beauty is seldom a subject for official history. It makes an exception here because every record of the Isles, from the first sketches of the Survey of Settlement to the latest photographs of the Defense Directorate, returns to it. Observers who were sent to measure the Isles came back describing them. Surveyors who were trained to record heights and bearings filled the margins of their logbooks with drawings. One officer of the Directorate, posted for nine years at the westernmost watch station, requested at the end of his service that his ashes be scattered from the station’s parapet facing west. The request was granted.
The Isles Known
The Bureau may tell the citizen who lives upon the Isles.
Before the Catastrophic Days, a number of scientists of the old world predicted the flood. They calculated its extent. They calculated its duration. They foresaw the drowning of the coasts and the breaking of the rivers and the long climb that would follow, and they understood, before anyone else, which lands would remain. The records of the Bureau show that these scientists made their findings public, and that the old world, in its disorder, did nothing about them.
The scientists acted on their own findings. In the decades before the waters rose, they and their families, and those they chose to join them, went to the high mountains of the west. They took with them the knowledge of the old world, its machines, and the means of making more. When the waters rose and the mountains became islands, they were already there.
Their descendants live upon the Great Rocky Isles today. They do not live upon the surface. They live beneath it, in civilizations built within the mountains themselves, under the peaks, in halls and cities that no citizen of Ozarka has seen and that the Bureau believes to be far larger than New Carthage. The Bureau’s sources on this point are few and are not open to examination. The Bureau states the fact on the authority of the Assembly, which has stated it on authority of its own.
The Ministry of Information refers to the people of the Isles as the elite species. The citizen should understand the term correctly. It is a term of respect, and also of description. The people of the Isles are human by descent. A century of separation, of life beneath the mountains, of knowledge kept from the old world and developed without interruption through the Catastrophic Days, has made them something more. Their machines are beyond ours. Their medicine is beyond ours. Their lives, the Bureau has reason to believe, are longer than ours. They are the people the old world could have become, had it listened.
The Isles at a Distance
The Great Rocky Isles are near. On the clearest days, from the highest watch stations at the western edge of the Barrens, their nearest peaks can be seen as a white line low on the horizon. At night, observers sometimes report lights moving among those peaks, steady and colorless, at heights no aircraft of Ozarka can reach. The Directorate’s instruments have recorded craft passing over the far western Barrens at great altitude, in silence, on courses that begin and end over the Isles. They have recorded signals from the Isles on frequencies the Ministry of Information does not use, encoded by methods its engineers cannot read.
The Great Rocky Isles are also far. The water between the Barrens and the Isles is wide and deep and has never been crossed by any vessel of Ozarka. Every transmission the Ministry has sent toward the Isles, in the century of the present era, has gone unanswered. No citizen of the Isles has ever come to the mainland. No citizen of the mainland has ever gone to the Isles and returned.
The citizen should not mistake the silence for absence. The people of the Isles are aware of Ozarka. The Bureau is permitted to say that the Assembly has reason to believe they observe the nation closely and continuously, from their mountains and from the air, and that they have done so since the Settlement. They are watching. The Bureau does not know why, and does not speculate, and asks the citizen to do the same.
The Isles Forbidden
The Great Rocky Isles are off-limits. The Charter does not mention them. The prohibition was enacted by the Assembly in the twenty-second year, in a statute of a single sentence, which provides that no citizen of Ozarka shall attempt to reach, signal, or communicate with the Isles by any means, and that the penalty for any attempt shall be determined by the Defense Directorate.
The Ministry of Information has given the citizen three reasons for the prohibition, and the Bureau repeats them here.
The first reason is respect. The people of the Isles chose their mountains before the flood, and they have kept to them since. They have asked for nothing. A nation that honors order honors the boundaries of others.
The second reason is humility. Ozarka is a young nation, raised by survivors from the wreck of the old world. The Isles are older and wiser and stronger. The citizen who approaches them uninvited approaches as a child approaches the door of a stranger’s house.
The third reason is safety. The Bureau states it without elaboration.
The citizen who looks west from the edge of the Barrens and sees the white line of the Isles on the horizon is asked to feel gratitude that such places exist, and to feel no wish to go to them. The Bureau recognizes that this is difficult. It is the only point in this history where the Bureau asks the citizen for something difficult, and it asks it plainly.
3. Western Ozarka: The Barrens
The Stripping
West of the mainland provinces lies the region the national map colors brown, which the Charter calls Western Ozarka and every citizen calls the Barrens.
Before the Catastrophic Days, the Barrens were farmland, the western reaches of the great grain country of the old continent. They lay higher than the lowlands that became the lakes, and for most of the century of drowning they stayed above the water. That was their misfortune. As the old farm country to the east went under, the people of the west plowed harder, irrigated deeper, and pumped the old underground waters until the wells ran dry. Then the winds came.
The Bureau’s records describe the winds of the late Catastrophic Days in the dry language of the provincial archives, which is the right language for them. They blew for years. They took the topsoil, which had been loosened by a century of overplowing and left bare by the failure of the wells, and lifted it into the sky in clouds that darkened the highland towns three hundred miles to the east. When the soil was gone, the rains followed, the same great rains that broke the Mississippi, and they fell on bare ground with nothing to stop them. The runoff cut through the subsoil and into the rock beneath. In fifty years it carved canyons that the old world would have needed fifty thousand to make.
What remains is a country of cliffs. The Barrens are a broad tableland of bare stone, red and yellow and gray, split by canyons that run hundreds of feet deep and many miles long, their walls sheer, their floors dry for most of the year and running with brief violent water in the wet season. Nothing is farmed there. Very little grows. The Survey of Settlement crossed only the nearer edge of it, and the Bureau has withdrawn the Survey’s description of what lay beyond.
The Defense Directorate
The Barrens are national territory, and they are not empty. They are the seat of the Defense Directorate, the arm of state charged by the Assembly with the protection of Ozarka against all threats from outside the mainland.
The Directorate was created in the twentieth year, by statute, and placed under the direct authority of the Assembly. It answers to no ministry. Its headquarters are not disclosed. Its officers wear brown, the color of the Barrens on the map, and are seldom seen on the mainland except in Fourteenth Province, which the Directorate administers jointly with the Ministry of the Interior.
The citizen may be told that the Directorate maintains a series of garrison towns along the eastern edge of the Barrens, where the canyons begin. These towns are small and orderly. They are built to the Settlement Standard, with some modifications. Their residents are Directorate personnel and their families, assigned by the Office of Population Management, and their children attend Directorate schools, which use this volume.
The Tunnels
Beneath the Barrens, the Directorate has built tunnels.
The Bureau is permitted to say that the tunnels are vast. They were begun during the Settlement, in the old mine workings and the natural caverns of the region’s limestone and sandstone, and they have been extended without interruption for the whole of the present era. The Directorate’s boring machines work day and night. Citizens of Fourteenth Province report that on still evenings they can feel the work through the soles of their feet, a faint and steady vibration in the ground, and the Directorate has assured them that this is normal and will continue.
The tunnels run west beneath the tableland and east beneath the mainland border. The Bureau does not know their full extent and is not permitted to estimate it. It knows that they connect the garrison towns to one another and to points farther west. It knows that some are large enough for rail. It knows that the canyons of the Barrens, seen from the air, are marked here and there with sealed doors of gray metal set flush into the cliff walls, too regular to be natural, too large to be anything but entrances.
The Machines
Within the tunnels, the Directorate builds and keeps the military of Ozarka.
That military is robotic. The Assembly decided in the earliest years of the Directorate that the defense of the nation would be entrusted to machines, for reasons the Ministry of Information has explained to the citizen many times. A machine does not need to be registered, assigned, fed, or housed. A machine does not grow tired. A machine is immune to the eastern condition. It cannot be turned backward by a remembered name or a fragment of old music, and so it can be posted at the edges of the known world without risk of contagion. The citizens of Ozarka are too few, and too precious, to be spent on defense. The machines are not.
The Bureau may describe the machines in general terms. Some walk. Some fly. Some move on treads through the canyon floors, and some swim in the channel beneath the stations of the Plague Watch. They are built in the tunnel workshops by other machines, under the supervision of a small corps of Directorate engineers. They are gray and brown. They make little noise. Citizens of the garrison towns are accustomed to seeing them pass at a distance along the canyon rims, singly or in long files, moving west.
Their number has grown in every decade. The Bureau is permitted to state that it has grown faster in recent decades than in earlier ones, and that the Directorate considers this growth necessary.
Life at the Edge of the Brown
The citizen who has never been posted west may picture the garrison towns as bleak. The Bureau has visited several and can report that they are tidy, well supplied, and proud.
Each town sits on the last good ground before the canyons, at the head of a rail spur that runs back east into Fourteenth Province. Its streets follow the Settlement Standard. Its registry office stands at the center. Its broadcast speaker stands on its white column at the main crossing, and at the evening hour its residents gather there in greater numbers than in any mainland city, because in the garrison towns the broadcast is the only voice that comes from the east. The children of the Directorate learn the Points for Recitation a year earlier than other children and are said to recite them better.
The towns are built of a stone darker than the capital’s, quarried from the canyon walls, and their roofs are weighted against the wind. Gardens are kept in walled courtyards, out of the dust. Water arrives by pipe from the mainland reservoirs, and every household receives its ration in a tank of reclamation glass mounted beside the door, so that the level can be read at a glance by the household and by the inspector. The Bureau found the residents attentive to these tanks in the way that the diarists of the climb were attentive to their elevation. A garrison child can tell you, to the pint, how much water his family has left until the next delivery.
West of the towns, at intervals along the canyon rims, stand the watch stations. These are the farthest posts of Ozarka that any citizen may occupy, and service in them is the highest honor the Directorate grants. A watch station is a single tower of the same dark stone, sunk deep into the rim rock, with an observation room at its top glazed on the western side only. Its crew is small, often three, and its posting lasts a season. The crews keep the instruments, log the lights over the Isles, and record the passing of the Directorate’s machines, which move past the towers at all hours and pay them no attention.
The watch crews write letters home, and the Office of Population Management permits these letters to be read aloud at the garrison crossings on the first evening of each month, before the broadcast. The Bureau has reviewed several hundred of them. They are cheerful, and they are dull, and the Bureau considers both qualities to their credit. They describe meals, card games, the condition of the stairs. They describe the cold at night. Nearly all of them, somewhere in the final paragraph, mention the white line in the west, and nearly all of them mention it in the same few words, as a thing seen and recorded and then set aside.
The Directorate rotates its crews so that no citizen serves more than three seasons at a watch station in a lifetime. The Ministry of Information has explained that the posting is demanding and that rest is owed to those who perform it. The Bureau records, without comment, that the crews who have served three seasons often request a fourth.
The Necessity of Defense
The citizen may ask what the machines defend against. The Ministry of Information has answered this question in the evening broadcast, and the Bureau repeats the answer.
To the east lies the disease. The Appalachian Island has been contained at the channel for a century by the Plague Watch, and the Watch has never failed. The Assembly does not assume it never will. The eastern condition is patient. Its interference rises and falls. A nation that wishes to remain stable must be ready for the night the interference rises and does not fall, and on that night the machines of the Directorate, which cannot catch the condition, will be the nation’s shield.
To the west lies uncertainty. The people of the Great Rocky Isles have watched Ozarka for a century and have never spoken. The Bureau has described them as wise and strong, and it believes them to be so. Wisdom and strength are not promises. A nation that respects a stronger neighbor also prepares for the day when respect is not enough, and does so quietly, beneath the ground, without insult or provocation. The Directorate’s machines move west along the canyon rims for this reason. They will be standing at the edge of the Barrens on the day the Isles choose to speak, whatever the Isles choose to say.
Between the disease and the uncertainty lies the mainland, where society happens, where the citizen lives and works and raises children and hears the evening broadcast, and where the citizen need feel no fear at all, because the Barrens have been made ready.
Points for Recitation
- The Great Rocky Isles are the greatest and most beautiful lands on Earth.
- Their people descend from the scientists who predicted the flood and went to the western mountains before it came.
- They live in civilizations beneath the peaks, and the Ministry calls them the elite species.
- The Isles are near and far. They are watching.
- No citizen shall attempt to reach, signal, or communicate with the Isles by any means.
- The Barrens were farmland, stripped by the winds and cut into canyons by the rains of the Catastrophic Days.
- The Defense Directorate keeps the robotic military of Ozarka in the tunnels beneath the Barrens.
- A machine cannot catch the eastern condition.
- To the east lies the disease. To the west lies uncertainty. Between them lies the mainland, which has nothing to fear.
Chapter IV: The Philosophy of the New Real
1. What a Citizen Is
The preceding chapters have described the nation: its founding, its offices, its provinces, its reserves and waters, and the lands beyond its borders that it guards against and does not approach. This final chapter describes the citizen.
A citizen of Ozarka is a person registered by the Office of Population Management, assigned a residence and a labor category, examined annually, and interviewed on the anniversary of registration. That is the legal definition, and it is complete. The Bureau now offers a second definition, which the Charter implies and which every provincial school teaches in its final year.
A citizen of Ozarka is a person who has accepted the new real.
The citizen will have heard this phrase all his life. It appears in the evening broadcast, on the lintels of the registry offices, in the vows of marriage approved by the Office of Population Management, and on the reverse of the national ration card, in small green letters beneath the seal. The Bureau has found, in its interviews with students in the final year of the provincial schools, that many citizens can recite the phrase without being able to say what it means. This chapter is written for them.
The philosophy of the new real rests on four foundations. The Bureau sets them out in order.
2. The First Foundation: The Past Is Void
The joint assembly at Provision declared the old maps void, and with that vote the present era began. The first foundation of the new real is that the vote was correct, and that it applies to more than maps.
The old world is over. It drowned. Its cities lie under the lakes and its coasts under the gulf, and its people, with the exception of those who climbed, went down with them. Nothing that the old world knew, built, believed, or valued survived the Catastrophic Days in any form that can be trusted. Its maps described a land that no longer exists. Its laws governed people who no longer exist. Its histories recounted the deeds of nations that drowned, and its philosophies explained a world that ended.
The citizen of Ozarka is asked to let the old world go entirely.
This is the meaning of the Charter’s founding sentence. We have survived the old world, and we will not repeat it. The drafters understood that the surest way to repeat the old world was to remember it fondly. A people who mourn what they lost will try to rebuild it, and in rebuilding it they will rebuild its disorder, its waste, its refusal to heed warnings, and its ruin. The founders of Ozarka chose to mourn nothing. They chose to treat the flood as a purification, a clearing of the ground, after which something better could be raised.
For this reason, the Ministry of Information controls the names of the old world. For this reason, the old maps are locked in a single room in Provision. For this reason, the Appalachian Island, where the past persists, is called a plague. And for this reason, the Bureau of Historical Reclamation, which keeps the records, publishes so little of them. The Bureau’s work is the reclamation of history in the same sense that the Bureau of Reclamation’s work is the reclamation of land: the taking of a ruined thing and making it useful. History that cannot be made useful is left where it lies.
The citizen will sometimes feel the pull of the old world. A grandparent may speak a forbidden name. A child may find, in a field, a coin or a key of the old manufacture. A song may come over the speaker in Twelfth Province, faintly, beneath the reader’s voice. The citizen is asked to recognize the pull for what it is and to turn from it. The past is void. It has no claim on the living.
3. The Second Foundation: Order Is Sacred
The old world fell because it was disordered. This is the conclusion of every historian of the Bureau, and the Bureau states it as the second foundation of the new real.
The old world knew the flood was coming. Its scientists told it so, decades in advance, with precision. The old world did nothing that mattered. Its governments quarreled. Its markets bought and sold the coastal houses until the water came in through the doors. Its people argued over the warnings and then ignored them and then fled, too late, in every direction at once. The old world had the knowledge to save itself and lacked the order to use it.
Ozarka is built on the opposite principle. Every institution of the nation exists to ensure that what the old world lacked, Ozarka has. The four offices of the mainland divide the work of governance so that nothing falls between them. The Office of Population Management registers every citizen so that no one is lost and the numbers never again outrun the land. The Bureau of Reclamation tags every tree. The Settlement Standard fixes the width of every street. The evening broadcast gives the same figures to every household at the same moment, so that the whole nation knows the same things and no rumor can grow in the spaces between towns.
The citizen may find this order strict. The Bureau does not deny it. A citizen cannot choose his residence or his labor or the size of his household. He cannot travel between provinces without a permit, cannot cross to the capital without a ferry pass, cannot read a book the Ministry has not approved, cannot speak the old names. The Bureau asks the citizen to weigh these restrictions against the century of water. Every rule of the nation is a lesson learned from the drowning. Every permit is a levee that stood.
Order is sacred in Ozarka because order is the reason Ozarka exists. The citizen who keeps it honors the survivors. The citizen who breaks it insults the drowned.
4. The Third Foundation: The Wild Is to Be Feared
The third foundation of the new real is fear, and the Bureau, which has praised order and stability throughout this volume, will now speak plainly about fear.
The known world contains the mainland, where society happens, and it contains the wild. The wild is everything beyond the mainland’s order: the diseased island to the east, the canyons of the Barrens to the west, the open waters, the sealed doors in the cliff walls, the white peaks of the Isles. The wild is where the rules of the mainland do not apply, and where the citizen, without the protection of the offices, is exposed.
The citizen is taught to fear the wild because the wild is dangerous. The Appalachian Island turns people backward and spreads its condition by speech. The Barrens are barren, and their tunnels are the province of machines. The waters beyond the reserves have never been charted. The Isles are watching. A citizen who wanders into any of these places alone will be harmed, and the harm will not stop with him. It will follow him home.
The Bureau wishes to be understood on one point. The fear of the wild is a healthy fear. It is the fear a child has of deep water, and it serves the same purpose. The founders of Ozarka watched the old world drown because it was unafraid. It built on the coasts. It plowed the western grasslands to dust. It pumped the deep waters dry. It was confident, and its confidence killed it. Ozarka has chosen to be afraid of the right things. The citizen who fears the wild stays on the mainland, keeps to the ferry lanes, reports the eastern interference, and looks at the Isles without longing. The citizen who fears the wild lives.
The Ministry of Information has a saying, which it prints on the inside cover of every school primer: Fear the edge and love the center. The citizen should learn it.
5. The Fourth Foundation: The New Real
The fourth foundation is the one that gives the philosophy its name, and it is the most difficult to explain.
The new real is the world as it is now, after the flood. The Bureau has described this world in the preceding chapters: the lakes over the farm country, the island of the eastern mountains, the canyons of the west, the peaks rising from the sea. The citizen accepts this world as real, because it is the only world there is.
The citizen must also accept that this world is strange.
The Bureau has avoided this subject until the last chapter, and it now addresses it directly. The new real is unreal. Every citizen knows this, whether or not he has been taught to say it. The light over the Western Great Lakes is wrong. It comes off the water at the end of the day in colors the old world’s paintings do not show, a green deeper than the reclamation glass, a violet that lingers after sunset for longer than it should. Distances on the mainland are hard to judge. A ridge that appears a mile away at morning appears five miles away at noon, and the Bureau of Reclamation’s surveyors have learned to take every bearing three times. Sounds travel farther over the lakes than the old physics allows. Citizens of the northern shore report hearing conversations from the capital, sixty miles away, on still nights. The Ministry has asked them to stop reporting it.
The horizon shimmers. On the mainland, in every province, at almost every hour, the line where land meets sky trembles faintly, as though seen through heat, even in the depth of winter. Children notice this first. Adults stop noticing.
The founders of Ozarka observed these things and did not try to explain them. The Bureau follows their example. Perhaps the Catastrophic Days changed the air. Perhaps the drowning of so much land altered the light. Perhaps the new real is simply what the world looks like when it has been purified, and the old world’s light was the strange one, and our eyes have not yet adjusted. The Bureau does not know. The Bureau does know that the shimmer does not move. The ridges stay where the surveyors stake them. The lakes stay within the iron markers of the Survey of Settlement. The broadcast arrives at the same hour every evening. The world is strange, and it does not change. It is unreal, and it is stable.
This is the heart of the philosophy, and the citizen must take it to heart. The old world was real, and it drowned. The new world is unreal, and it is stable. Ozarka chose stability. The citizen who accepts the new real accepts the bargain the founders made: a world that shimmers at its edges, that sounds too far and looks too green, that cannot quite be trusted by the eye, and that will never again rise up through the doorway at night. The Bureau considers this the best bargain any people has ever been offered.
A citizen who has accepted the new real no longer looks at the shimmer on the horizon. He looks at the terrace in front of him, the registry office at the center of his district, the white column of the broadcast speaker at the crossing. These things are solid. He lives among them, and he is content.
6. The Citizen at Evening
The Bureau closes this history where every day in Ozarka closes: at the evening hour.
Picture the nation as the broadcast begins. In the fourteen provinces of the mainland, in every city built to the Settlement Standard, citizens have stopped speaking. They stand in their kitchens and dormitories and field canteens, in the barracks of the garrison towns, in the lamp rooms of the Plague Watch stations along the channel. In New Carthage, the sun has struck the towers and sent its green shards out across the moat and over the water toward the mainland, and the farmers of the eastern terraces have paused in the furrows to watch the light arrive. The automated craft are moving across the moat in silence. Beneath the forests of the reserves, the stations are turning the currents into power and the census into allotments. Beneath the Barrens, the boring machines are at work, and the long files of the Directorate’s machines are moving west along the canyon rims, toward the white line on the horizon where the Isles stand and watch.
Across the channel, the Appalachian Island is lit along its ridges by towns that are not there.
The reader in the tower on the capital’s western bluff gives the date. He gives the level of the lakes, which is unchanged. He gives the harvest, which is sufficient. He gives the number of births and the number of deaths, which the Office of Population Management has balanced to the individual. He gives the level of eastern interference, which is low.
Then he reads the sentence, and the nation hears it together, in one voice, from one tower, at one moment: The world is stable, and the future is bright.
7. The Future of Ozarka
The Bureau is a body of historians and does not make predictions. It is permitted, at the close of this volume, to state the intentions of the Assembly as the Assembly has stated them.
The Assembly intends that Ozarka shall endure.
It intends that the provinces shall be reclaimed to the last terrace, and that the reserves shall be planted to the last island, and that the moat shall remain perfect. It intends that the Plague Watch shall keep the channel closed until the Appalachian Island has finished remembering, however long that takes, and that the machines of the Directorate shall stand ready for the day it does not. It intends that the Isles shall be honored and watched in return, from the canyon rims, by eyes that do not tire. It intends that the evening broadcast shall be read every night for as long as there are citizens to hear it, and that there shall always be citizens, in the number the Office of Population Management has calculated is correct.
It intends that the old world shall never come back.
The citizen of Ozarka lives at the center of the known world, on high ground, between the disease and the uncertainty, in a country that shimmers at its edges and stands firm at its heart. He does not remember the water. His children will not know there was any. In time, the Bureau of Historical Reclamation will publish an edition of this history in which the Catastrophic Days occupy a single page, and later an edition in which they occupy a single sentence, and later still an edition in which the nation’s history begins with the vote at Provision, with the first broadcast, with the green light on the towers of New Carthage, and nothing before it at all.
On that day, the new real will be the only real there has ever been. The citizen will look at the shimmer on the horizon and see nothing strange in it. The lakes will be lakes and the island will be an island and the Isles will be white peaks in the west where they have always stood. The drowned towns will lie under forty fathoms of clear water, beneath the turbines and the cables, and the citizen who looks down from the ferry lane will see the white stones of the bottom and think them beautiful.
The Bureau looks forward to that edition. It is already in preparation.
Points for Recitation
- A citizen of Ozarka is a person who has accepted the new real.
- The past is void. It has no claim on the living.
- Order is sacred because order is the reason Ozarka exists.
- Fear the edge and love the center.
- The new real is unreal, and it is stable.
- The old world was real, and it drowned.
- The Assembly intends that Ozarka shall endure, and that the old world shall never come back.
- The world is stable, and the future is bright.
Colophon
THE HISTORY OF OZARKA is a companion volume to THE WORLD AFTER.
Written by Gemini Cool. Published by Crabtree Library, crabtree.biz.
Copyright 2026 Gemini Cool. All rights reserved.
