Those who built cities moved up as each new layer was added, following the light as if they could build their way into heaven itself. Below them people worked and played, were born and died in the gloom. The people’s eyes grew large and dark and shiny.

One by one the lights flickered and went out, until the people had to carry torches through the permanent night. They bartered for slimy leaves of lettuce spread out for trade on the sidewalks and hunted the small scurrying animals that haunted the waste dumps on the end of each street. Nobody remembered planes or cars. The electricity had stopped working long ago, but nobody noticed or cared, the last television and light bulb had been broken generations before.

One night a man came up against the fence that had been there since before his grandfather’s grandfather had been born and pulled at the metal so rusted it came away in his hands. When he climbed through the hole he had made he saw a wide expanse of clean asphalt that curved gently up into the dark. He returned with friends, and then again later with more friends, and then strangers came, and many nights later a group crawled through the fence and began to follow the path, determined to find where it led. Some turned back, but the rest went on and when they finally tore another hole in the fence they found themselves in another city like their own, but different. And they bartered and they hunted, and some went back, and some stayed, and others gathered with new people and began the trip anew.

And they came upon another level, and the same thing happened. And another. And another. And fewer and fewer went back and more and more people joined them, bartering and hunting, loving and hating, dying and being born, until there were thousands of them on the road, a tribe of nomads walking towards the sun with their wide, dark, shining eyes.

Last Updated November 27, 2000.

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