Kim Robinson - Venice Drowned

I remember Kim Stanley Robinson as one of the best writers in quite an impressive group of students I taught at the Clarion science fiction writing workshop in the mid-seventies. He was not the one who dismantled the ceiling, though, nor the one who carried around a small bale of marijuana and a glazed expression, nor the one who supposedly had shacked up with one of the instructors, nor the one who liberated the fire hose… unfortunately for me, Stan was just a pleasant, hardworking guy who was mainly thereto write, and write well. Which makes it difficult to do a racy introduction for him. Doubly difficult because he pleads modesty and will only reveal the following information:

1.He did his Ph.D. thesis on the novels of Philip K. Dick (whether in the department of English, theology, philosophy, or pharmacy, he does not say).

2. He teaches at the University of California at Davis.

3. His first novel, The Wild Shore, came out from Ace in 1984.

"Venice Drowned" is a nearly flawless exemplar of a kin of writing that can only be done in science fiction. I don’t know if it has a name — in academic jargon I suppose it would be something like "refractive mimesis" — but it’s that creepy kind of double-vision writing where an imagined world, similar to ours but different in some dramatic particular, is described with such painstaking authority that it becomes absolutely real, to such c extent that the world ceases to be simply background for the story; in a curious way, it becomes the story. Philip Dick was the master of this kind of invention, of course, which doesn’t detract from Stan’s achievement. Rereading it gives me goosebumps.

By the time Carlo Tafur struggled out of sleep, the baby was squalling, the teapot whistled, the smell of stove smoke filled the air. Wavelets slapped the walls of the floor below. It was just dawn. Reluctantly he untangled himself from the bedsheets and got up. He padded through the other room of his home, ignoring his wife and child, and walked out the door onto the roof.

Venice looked best at dawn, Carlo thought as he pissed into the canal. In the dim mauve light it was possible to imagine that the city was just as it always had been, that hordes of visitors would come flooding down the Grand Canal on this fine summer morning…. Of course, one had to ignore the patchwork constructions built on the roofs of the neighborhood to indulge the fancy. Around the church San Giacomo du Rialto all the buildings had even their top floors awash, and so it had been necessary to break up the tile roofs, and erect shacks on the roof beams made of materials fished up from below: wood, brick lath, stone, metal, glass. Carlo’s home was one of these shacks, made of a crazy combination of wood beams, stained glass from San Giacometta, and drain pipes beaten flat. He looked back at it and sighed. It was best to look off over the Rialto, where the red sun blazed over the bulbous domes of San Marco.

"You have to meet those Japanese today," Carlo’s wife, Luisa, said from inside.

"I know." Visitors still came to Venice, that was certain.

"And don’t go insulting them and rowing off without your pay," she went on, her voice sounding clearly out of the doorway, "like you did with those Hungarians. It really doesn’t matter what they take from under the water, you know. That’s the past. That old stuff isn’t doing anyone any good under there, anyway."

"Shut up," he said wearily. "I know."

"I have to buy stovewood and vegetables and toilet paper and socks for the baby." she said. "The Japanese are the best customers you’ve got; you’d better treat them well."

Carlo reentered the shack and walked into the bedroom to dress. Between. putting on one boot and the next he stopped to smoke a cigarette, the last one in the house. While smoking he stared at his pile of books on the floor, his library as Luisa sardonically called the collection; all books about Venice. They were tattered, dog-eared, mildewed, so warped by the damp that none of them would close properly, and each moldy page was as wavy as the Lagoon on a windy day. They were a miserable sight, and Carlo gave the closest stack a light kick with his cold boot as he returned to the other room.

"I’m off," he said, giving his baby and then Luisa a kiss. "I’ll be back late; they want to go to Torcello."

"What could they want up there?"

He shrugged. "Maybe just to see it." He ducked out the door.

Below the roof was a small square where the boats of the neighborhood were moored. Carlo slipped off the tile onto the narrow floating dock he and the neighbors had built, and crossed to his boat, a wide-beamed sailboat with a canvas deck. He stepped in, unmoored it, and rowed out of the square onto the Grand Canal.

Once on the Grand Canal he tipped the oars out of the water and let the boat drift downstream. The big canal had always been the natural course of the channel through the mudflats of the Lagoon; for a while it had been tamed, but now it was a river again, its banks made of tile rooftops and stone palaces, with hundreds of tributaries flowing into it. Men were working on roofhouses in the early-morning light; those who knew Carlo waved, hammers or rope in hand, and shouted hello. Carlo wiggled an oar perfunctorily before he was swept past. It was foolish to build so close to the Grand Canal, which now had the strength to knock the old structures down, and often did. But that was their business. In Venice they were all fools, if one thought about it.

Then he was in the Basin of San Marco, and he rowed through, the Piazetta beside the Doge’s Palace, which was still imposing at two stories high, to the Piazza. Traffic was heavy as usual. It was the only place in Venice that still had the crowds of old, and Carlo enjoyed it for that reason, though he shouted curses as loudly as anyone when gondolas streaked in front of him. He jockeyed his way to the Basilica window and rowed in.

Under the brilliant blue and gold of the domes it was noisy. Most of the water in the rooms had been covered with a floating dock. Carlo moored his boat to it, heaved his four scuba tanks on, and clambered up after them. Carrying two tanks in each hand he crossed the dock, on which the fish market was in full swing. Displayed for sale were flats of mullet, lagoon sharks, tunny, skates, and flatfish. Clams were piled in trays, their shells gleaming in the shaft of sunlight from the stained-glass east window; men and women pulled live crabs out of holes in the dock, risking fingers in the crab-jammed traps below; octopuses inked their buckets of water, sponges oozed foam; fishermen bawled out prices, and insulted the freshness of their neighbors' product.

In the middle of the fish market, Ludovico Salerno, one of Carlo’s best friends, had his stalls of scuba gear. Carlo’s two Japanese customers were there. He greeted them and handed his tanks to Salerno, who began refilling them from his machine. They conversed in quick, slangy Italian while the tanks filled. When they were done, Carlo paid him and led the Japanese back to his boat. They got in and stowed their backpacks under the canvas decking, while Carlo pulled the scuba tanks on board.

"We are ready to voyage at Torcello?" one asked, and the other smiled and repeated the question. Their names were Hamada and Taku. They had made a few jokes concerning the latter name’s similarity to Carlo’s own, but Taku was the one with less Italian, so the sallies hadn’t gone on for long. They had hired him four days before, at Salerno’s stall.

"Yes," Carlo said. He rowed out of the Piazza and up back canals past Campo San Maria Formosa, which was nearly as crowded as the Piazza. Beyond that the canals were empty, and only an occasional roof-house marred the look of flooded tranquillity.