Air Force One, Conclusion (5)
Tennen is silent at first. Mick imagines him looking aside from his jury-rigged microphone into the dark sky beyond the aircraft’s edge. Moonlight in his white hair — his jaw tightening as he decides how much to tell the impertinent youngster. When his voice returns through the console, he speaks more slowly. "I remember flowers in the foothills," he says. "Yellow flowers in the foothills of Su-meru, and white near Ku-meru." He laughs. "The Greeks thought we named the Two Mountains thus because there was gold in one and silver in the other. Everyone knew, after all, how rich we were! But we named them for the color of their flowers. Our wealth was in our land: the Top of the World, where it was always spring or autumn — and in our ships that sailed down the curve of the world to all lesser lands. But most of all, our wealth was in the subtlety of our thought." "We sailed much more than the waves, before the end. We sailed the sky, as this vessel does, even when I was a boy. And before the end, we had begun to sail the space between the worlds, just as you Americans had begun — with our help — before you, too, were beaten down." "At least you, Mick, can still see your country," the old man says. "Mine is lost. For at the age when you were looking up at that lineman, I was looking down at my father’s sheep in the meadows of Atlantis. Very long ago, indeed." "Oh, Christ," Mick says. "Colonel, I don’t believe in, uh — sunken continents. Like, if we just look hard enough we oughta find all those pretty buildings, half tumbled down under water, right? And — the Top of the World? There’s no there up there, buddy. You gotta do better than that." "Oh," the Colonel says. "But it was at the top of the world, before you young nations turned your globes the wrong way up. And my home is sunken indeed, in a manner of speaking. But not beneath the waves. It lies under four miles of ice, which grinds the land beneath it to bedrock and leaves no charming ruins. "And if the thought of my home is too difficult for you to accept, please think of me as an Egyptian like my men. I lived long in that land, which had been one of our colonies. "However hard it may be for you to accept," Tennen says. "this is the truth. I cannot make you believe me. In so short a time, I cannot even tell you my whole story. I cannot make you listen to me. But before I let you, out of simple ignorance, put final victory into the hands of those who have enslaved your people and mine for millennia, I will at least tell my story. I will speak into a dead microphone if I must — but I will speak." Mick stubs out his smoke on the panel, in the ash-stained spot that has become customary, then holds his hand, fingers spread, in the multi-colored glow of the instruments. He moves it back and forth, watching its elongated reflection in the tall windscreen’s glass: fingers stretching up into the star-filled sky. He looks over at the co-pilot again, but this time he sees Page’s body as he last glimpsed it: skin deathly white, and a huge bloody wound in the chest. The chest heaves once, and the head jerks up, eyes open — looking at him. "Yeah!" Mick looking away instantly. "That’s fine. It doesn’t hurt to talk, right?" He looks back at the corpse, but it’s normal again: a nice ordinary mummy. He watches it for a while, then quickly checks the pilot on his left, just to make sure that he’s not doing anything un-called for. Then Tennen is speaking again, and Mick tries — or at least imagines what it would be like to try — to summon up the energy to pay attention. Unfortunately, the difference between the energy that this feat would require and the energy which he actually has available is so great that the project never goes beyond the earliest planning stages. The micro-thought-processes involved reluctantly release most of their brief claim on neuronal hardware and fade again into the background, leaving him staring out the forward windscreen again. At some point, however, Mick is no longer seeing the dark horizon and moonlit clouds. He is looking down from a field of yellow and white blossoms, like stars in the grass, toward a distant city of towers that shine in the sun. They knew that they were defeated on the day the attack came — from so unexpected a direction that for hours after the event they were unaware that anything had happened. Sunset came, and the stars appeared in an untroubled sky with no terrible event reported from any quarter of the land nor any of the far-flung colonies, scattered like jewels around the lower regions of the world. It was finally from the astronomers that the warning came, drawing the world’s attention to an unexpected quarter. Har-gil, the red planet, home of the Atlanteans’ proudest achievement: the first colony on another world — had suddenly fallen silent. And had greatly brightened. The philosophers and geomancers had warned of the possibility of terrible violence from the strange Powers that had somehow entered the world. Even so, no one could have expected this. The great projectile must have been set in motion, through arts unknown to humankind, many years before — even before the most acute geomancers had warned of the danger. It must have fallen through the trackless ocean of the Void for decades, gathering speed, nudged imperceptibly by the great planets with precision undreamt-of by the finest calculators, until, at its arrival, it flashed through the high, thin regions of the doomed colony’s skies with unanswerable speed: a rock the size of a city. The voyage to Har-gil, the Red Planet, had taken a decade to prepare, and more than a year to accomplish. The colonists had traveled in ships of the Void, their vast sails filled with sunlight. Their arrival and the creation of a colony on another world had consumed the efforts — and fulfilled the dreams — of millions. Already the first experimental farms, filled with crops, specialized for the small world’s cold climate and thin air, were yielding their initial harvest. Soon the colony would be self-sustaining — and soon thereafter the only limit to its growth would be the rate at which the great light-sails could set forth from Earth. Nine-tenths of the colonists lived at the North Polar Outpost: a town of a few hundred people and a few score huts. It was there that the weapon fell. Of the few who were out of doors that morning, none survived long enough to be killed by the actual impact. Two seconds before contact, the radiant heat of the asteroid’s passage was great enough to begin to melt the aluminum walls of the huts. At the impact center, rock incandesced to a depth of six miles below the level of the original surface. Traveling outward in all directions at four miles per second, the shockwave hurled rock into the Void like sand shaken from a carpet. Three minutes after the great impact, the crater had assumed its final shape: six miles deep at the center and fifteen hundred miles across, with a volume of more than half a million cubic miles. Even so, by far the greatest part of the impact’s energy had traveled deep below the planet’s surface, radiating outward from the point of the asteroid’s deepest penetration. Spreading outward in a shallow cone, it was still deep beneath the surface when the last few miles of the impact crater were being blasted away. For several minutes afterward, the planet’s surface was relatively quiet, while thousands of trillions of tons of debris arced hundreds of miles skyward. The exploding impact region had carried its portion of the planet’s atmosphere with it into the Void, and air rushing from surrounding regions into the gigantic vacuum created was beginning to cause gale-force winds across wide areas. But that effect, based in air, spread slowly. Most of the planet enjoyed its last minutes of peace. When at last the spreading cone of the deep shockwave again intersected the planet’s surface in a broad circle not far from the equator, more rock began exploding into space. The cataclysm that had carved out the impact crater had consumed less than ten percent of the impactor’s kinetic energy. This time, rock exploded outward in a layer four miles deep, and extending around the entire circumference of the planet. Eighteen minutes after impact, the process ended when the shockwave reached the opposite point of the globe and excavated a near-perfect echo of the original impact crater there. The total energy expended by the asteroid’s impact was five hundred thousand times greater than the sum of all humanity’s most terrible weapons combined. Three million cubic miles of rock had been ejected from the planet with such force that little of it would ever return. The planet had lost more than eighty percent of its already modest atmosphere and hydrosphere. The meager biosphere was, effectively, destroyed. The murder of a planet had been accomplished in less than twenty minutes. The murder of Atlantean civilization, by the same weapon, would require about twenty years. The philosophers understood the implications even before the astronomers confirmed their suspicions. If a similar weapon had been directed against the Earth, it might possibly have been detected in time to allow for some desperate action. The new Void-faring arts might have been used to nudge the weapon into a harmless path. But if the Philosophers had understood more deeply, or the geomancers divined more clearly, they would have seen that the weapon would never, in any case, have been aimed against the Earth. The Enemy’s goal was never to destroy the Earth’s magnificent biosphere, which such an impact could have accomplished on Earth as completely on Har-gil. The goal was to destroy Earth’s civilization — the culture that stood between the Enemy and their final objective. That goal would be more efficiently accomplished by many smaller projectiles. Unstoppably many. Much of the debris of the great impact was swept up or expelled from the solar system by the great planets. Much more fell into the Sun herself. But of the uncountable hundreds of thousands of trillions of fragments produced by the great collision, hundreds of thousands would inevitably find the Earth in the coming years. Of those, the great majority would be less than a yard across, and would do no more than to produce spectacular but harmless fireballs in Earth’s deep atmosphere. Several thousand bodies with diameters as great as ten yards would survive to impact the earth’s surface. Such projectiles, were they to strike land, would carve craters hundreds of yards across with explosions that would be heard, in populated areas, for tens of miles around. Several hundred bodies with diameters of up to one hundred yards would strike the planet. These would carry the force of the very greatest of human nuclear weapons. On land, they would flatten an area the size of a small nation and start firestorms that would consume thousands or tens of thousands of square miles of forest, pouring vast quantities of carbon dioxide and dust into the atmosphere. Of course, approximately three quarters of these bodies would fall into the Earth’s oceans. There they would do less damage: raising waves that would, on average, be only a few tens of yards high by the time they arrived at inhabited coastlines. But sometime over the two decades following the disaster, several dozen bodies with diameters as great as 1000 yards would intersect the Earth’s orbit. In total, these bodies would carry several hundred times the destructive force of all humanity’s weapons combined. In the actual event, thirty such bodies struck the oceans. The waves they raised typically traveled around the Earth’s oceans at several thousand miles per hour, breaking on the coastlines with heights between one hundred and one thousand yards. Many of these waves traveled scores or hundreds of miles inland, often in the most populous areas of the planet, killing everything in their path. Before the Floods, eight-tenths of the Earth’s population had lived within fifty miles of the ocean. Six of the largest impactors struck land. Each one sterilized an area tens of miles in diameter. Each one started firestorms in the immediate impact area as well as in widely scattered areas sometimes hundreds of miles away, where white-hot ejecta from the initial impact re-impacted the tortured land. While the waves of the ocean impacts killed their hundreds of millions, the fires of the land impacts darkened the sky for thirty years, lowering the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere for decades. Snowfall covered more land, and lasted longer each year. Cloud cover increased. The Earth’s albedo rose dramatically, reflecting more sunlight back into the Void before it could warm the surface. The climate of the Earth, already delicately balanced between glaciation and warming, tipped toward glaciation. Near the poles, the ice sheets advanced more rapidly than the few surviving scientists had believed possible. Still, there had been time to flee, and time to build. Great stone cities were made in high places. Bands of survivors created monuments of stone, both on Earth and on Har-Gil. Knowledge was stored in deep places, guarded with every device of the geomancers. Hiding themselves in their remote fastnesses, the survivors prepared to defend themselves as best they might. They knew that the storm of fire and flood was only the beginning. Soon, settling gently onto the rubble of a murdered civilization, the new Gods would come — the new Powers who had claimed this world as their own. "So you’ve been in hiding for ten thousand years," Mick says. "Fighting a guerilla war against these guys? Whoever they are?" "Yes," Tennen replies. Mick takes the battered cigarette pack from his pocket: a treasured relic of an equally lost past. Its original contents have, of course, long since disappeared. Of their more modern, hand-rolled replacements, he sees that exactly one remains. He puts the box back into his shirt pocket. "You know what the problem with that is?" he asks. "I don’t know how to break this to you," he continues when Tennen remains silent. "It’s a detail, but — you know. Details matter. The thing is — your little story here has you being like ten thousand years old, right? And me, personally, see, I’m not really expecting to get that old. In fact, I don’t really know — " he frowns as if in thought, "hardly any ten-thousand-year-olds. I mean, the cost of health insurance alone would have to kill you, right? So that’s — the part that seems kind of funny to me." Tennen is silent for a long while before replying. "There is so much you that do not know," he says at last. "Far too much for an hour’s talk. Even if we had time to say it all — for you to ask questions and for me to answer — would it not it still be far too short a time to overturn beliefs that you have held for a lifetime?" "Humor me," Mick says. "Of course!" Tennen answers quickly. "I did not mean to suggest that I would stop! I hesitate only because you have now asked for what may be the most difficult part of my story for you to accept." "Well, I don’t know," Mick says. "I think I’m doing pretty good so far with the Ten Thousand Year Old Man and the Lost Continent of Atlantis!" "You speak lightly," Tennen says, a trace of anger in his voice. "But thus far I have only told you stories of long ago, and far away. Will you still feel so amused when I tell you that my enemies have their hand on your daughter’s heart?" Mick flinches and drags his heavy eyes away from the corpse of the co-pilot. In the space of a few seconds he is fully awake. He knows that his new awareness will not last longer than a minute or two, but is determined to make use of consciousness while he possesses it. "What about my daughter?" he asks. "Yes," Tennen says. "I mention her because you care for her. But can you keep thinking of her? Can you feel keep feeling for her, when I tell you that the new masters of this world have robbed her, have murdered her, just as they have robbed and murdered billions?" "Tennen —", Mick begins. "Do you not read your Bible, Innkeeper?" the ancient man asks. "But I suppose you’ve been busy staying alive these last sixty years. Staying alive and growing old." "There is a particularly interesting story in your Bible," he continues. "It contains an odd coincidence. Do you recall it?" "And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy and seven years : and he died. And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japeth." "There is a long sequence of such anecdotes," Tennen says. "But I suppose that you do not believe them either. Otherwise you would certainly have wondered about all those very old men. Perhaps you would have even noticed that their spectacular — from your point of view — longevity came to a sudden end at exactly the time of the flood. Perhaps you would have that coincidence to be notable." "I may not be up on my Bible studies lately," Mick says, "but I’m pretty damn sure my daughter isn’t in there." "Oh, but she is," Tennen says. "For they have stolen her life, as surely as they have stolen yours and your wife’s — as they have stolen the lives of everyone you have ever met. Beside this, all other losses you have ever experienced, all other crimes that have ever been committed upon you, directly or indirectly, are as nothing. "Do you know," Tennen continues, "how easy it is to control you mayflies? You geriatric children, who barely have time to reproduce before your bodies begin to age and die? You simply have no time — no time to think, no time to notice. No time to develop your full faculties. Mick frowns at the glowing console, starting to prepare another demand, then stops himself. Tennen’s speech still seems irrelevant. But then a word comes to mind unbidden, remembered from some scrap of random reading many years in the past, from a specialty that was not his. The word is telemerase. "Also imagine a world destroyed, as I have described," Tennen says. "Imagine a world in which even the survivors — the few who lived inland — are starving. Their crops failing. But amid all that terror, the worst cataclysm that befalls them is all but indetectable. It is the tiniest of things, with few outward signs: a few hours’ fever, a few days’ weakness. Yet it is the most potent of devices: a tiny, skillfully tailored virus. It is a weapon." The ribonucleoprotein "telomerase" catalyzes telomere synthesis and replication, maintaining telomere length by offsetting its shortening during cell division. Telomeric caps of sufficient length at chromosome endings prevent chromosomal fusing during cell division, but, in humans and other mammals, are gradually depleted with repeated cellular reproduction. Rates of telomere shortening vary greatly between species. "But this was a weapon far more subtle than your scientists’ ridiculous War Flu — and far more successful. For when it passed, it left behind it a world for the taking." "Do you understand that, even with a mortality rate of ninety-eight percent, a population can be grown back in less than a century. It is no time at all. But now that century, instead of being the typical span of a man’s adolescence, encompassed five generations. At the end of which time this had become a world of perpetual children: their history already faded to vague legends. A race easily misled, and easily controlled." "Imagine," the ancient man says, "what a few thousand soldiers might do on a planet full of toddlers." When, after sufficient divisions, telomere cap lengths falls below a critical minimum, cell division typically ceases. Gradual cessation of cell division is expressed at the level of the organism as aging. Cells which fail to stop dividing after reaching minimum telomere length suffer a high and increasing probability of karyotypic DNA rearrangement, resulting in pre-cancerous tumors. As unprotected chromosome division continues, the accumulation of genetic errors typically produces non-viable cells which cease division. Very occasionally, however, random DNA rearrangement occurring during unprotected division may activate a telomerase regulation mechanism which, oddly, is of greater effectiveness than that employed before the genetic damage occurred. The resultant "immortalization" of genetically damaged cells is the source of cancerous tissue. Thus, in recent years, telomerase catalization mechanisms have come to occupy central stage in both oncology and longevity research. "If someone offered to rape or murder your daughter," Tennen continues, "you would stop at nothing to prevent it. But these — people — have stolen everything from her. Her past, her future. Centuries of her life, and whole millennia if her culture were allowed to have just the slightest medical understanding. They have stolen from her everything that she might have been. She has lost realms of experience which you literally cannot imagine. She has lost a world, without so much as knowing it. No one knows, and no one cares, because it all happened — so very long ago. "And who can step forward to protect her from this rape and this murder?" he asks. "Who will open the way back to that world, for her and a whole race like her. Will you? Or will you decide that nothing is real but the world of rusting trucks, fading radiation, and the lingering death of hope? Will you decide to see her and your wife drift back into the wilderness? To see your daughter’s descendents forget even what little your culture was allowed to achieve? Until they once again live the lives of animals, as their masters would prefer?" Tennen stops angrily, and Mick stares at the console as if entranced. "These — masters," he says at last. "If it’s true — why? Why would they want — a world full of ‘children’? What’s the point?" "Oh," Tennen’s voice smiles. "You are so much more valuable than you know, you little ones. What, you ask, could such beings possibly want with such little ones as you? In an cosmos full of limitless matter and energy, all free for the taking, what could you possibly offer? Can you think of no analogy from your culture, little one? Is it not clear, that in such a cosmos, nothing finally matters — but life?"
Copyright © 2000 Michael Goulish |