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21: The World in 2600
The world in which we stood was a marvel all its own. After disastrous warming, melting, and rising sea levels in the first two centuries of the millennium, a 200-year mini-ice age similar to the Little Ice age (1400s-1800s) had followed. This was nothing really new, except the extreme extent of the flooding and the storms. Large segments of southeastern North America, for example, had turned into islands amid shallow seas. The flora and fauna of the seas had changed as salinity decreased because virtually all the glaciers and ice caps had melted. Disease and disaster reduced the human population to half a billion. More recently, since about 2500 the world has been gaining in mean monthly atmospheric temperatures again.
Among the survivors of those hard centuries, it almost seemed as if a golden age had arrived. Like the people of our Mars, the people of Earth in this time knew they must stick together and make their world work. Most of the large mammals they had come down from the Ice Ages with had vanished. The largest land animal was now the black bear or the horse. The largest sea creatures were smaller whales and sharks. No major rain forests remained by 2300, though the taiga and tundra of northeastern Siberia and Canada had thawed and dried out enough to sprout new generations of evolving tree species.
Humans were far wiser about burning things that contaminated the atmosphere. The age of the automobile was gone, and now city streets had vanished, replaced by overhead tramways. These tramways were slightly inclined and worked by means of gravity. People took mass transit for granted. You entered a station and sat in a tram which, when it began to move, dropped with a comfortable speed for a few feet to get momentum going, and then coasted to the next station—all for free, based on gravity. At the next station, a rudimentary hydraulic system slowly raised the vehicle five or six feet for the next leg of the journey. It was far less stressful to the environment than pushing some behemoth train under continuous and wasteful power on a flat surface or up and down slopes. Air and orbital travel likewise was revolutionized.
Just as a new paradise seemed to be developing—the Faraos arrive around 2300. They ruled from 2300 to 2900 and then vanished after a violent and bloody human uprising, leaving an Earth depopulated and in ruins. There was also a war among the aliens. A Great Pulse during the war has wiped out all digital information, burned or flooded paper, melted plastic, and otherwise destroyed all records. Mankind reverts almost to mesolithic times. Just a few million humans are left alive from the billions who once lived on Earth and started to populate the solar system. Mars was on her own. With the near total loss of historical records, the Martians invent their own universe complete with Popesses and other cultural anchors. It seems to clear now.
With much of the world in 2600 CC still flooded, the survivors chose to build over the old cities rather than move further uphill. Consequently, great hives of concrete emerged. The higher up you lived and worked in these layer cakes, the greater your status. There were four major classes, with the aliens inhabiting black floating fortresses above the cities. First Class were those who lived near the clouds in sun-drenched, glass-domed cities that mimicked the old American midwest with its quaint cultures and slow lifestyles. Second Class were the educated class, the knowledge, memory, language, and similar grayworkers. Third Class were the technicians, whose education was far less theoretical and more practical. The Untouchables, as some have called them, are the unfortunates who live on the ground level under the shadows of the great hives. There is much crime and despair among the Untouchables, as well as a bacteria-like proliferation of strange cults and religions including vampires and cannibals. Because of the dreadful genetic manipulations of the 21st Century, there are people living in the ground shadows whose very humanity is questioned by those who jealously guard their positions in the upper decks.
There are, however, great marvels beyond the cities with their silently sliding gravity trains.
To travel to Mars, we journeyed to the Orbital Transfer Station above the Equator, and from there to the L5 LaGrange Point, where there is an ancient Temporale transfer station powerful enough to propel a ship the size of a 20th Century ocean liner to Mars in a matter of hours without disturbing the cocktail olive in your martini, if that's what you drink.
To reach orbit, we traveled by gravity train from London to Spain and then to Morocco and down to Equatorial Africa. Here was a marvelous space port that stretched as far as the eye could see in the steamy tropical sun. Several huge shapes were in various stages of rising or falling. Each of them was a balloon shaped like a cube three miles to a side. We counted ten in constant motion. To travel into space, you didn't want to sit atop a rocket and have to blast your way through millions of tons of air resistance which burned most of the fuel on board. Instead, you rode one of these inflated cities up to about 33 miles, where the atmosphere is very thin. As you ride up, you can see 3-di holo movies or go shopping or check into a hotel and catch up on your sleep. Under each Lifter, as the balloons are called, is the equivalent of a downtown. That's for passenger hops. For cargo transport, each Lifter has a complex of warehouses underneath. The lifter carries one or more orbital liners capable of taking 400 hundred people or 30 tons of cargo into space. Once the liners have streaked away, liners full of people and cargo drop down from space into the hangars (or hangers) underneath, and the heavily burdened Lifter becomes a Dropper as it falls under carefully controlled conditions to earth. We amused ourselves during the four hour ascent by watching replays of a 3-D holographic performance of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and by sight-seeing along the observation decks.
The flight into orbit also has an interesting gravitational twist. To gain momentum quickly, the sharply angled rocket plane actually drops at first, then straightens with hydrogen-powered afterburners blazing, and ascends through the thin upper atmosphere until it is weightless in black, orbital space.
We were told, although we did not see it on this trip, that several of the world's continental mountain ranges have mass drivers, where ships are propelled along nuclear-generated electromagnetic tubes under very negative atmospheric pressure, until they pop out of the low-vac tunnel several miles up and then roar into space atop clean hydrogen-burning rockets.
One other marvel we noted was the method of long-distance air flight. Mankind had abandoned the sooty, filthy practice of pushing a huge aircraft along using a constant burn of kerosene based fuel. Instead, you rode aloft on a Lifter to an altitude of about 20 miles with still fairly rich air. There, you boarded a sheet-glider (slung under another Lifter). The glider had several square miles of surface area with solar panels atop and lifting gas in its skin, and this thing would basically drop for thousands of miles, slowly, silently, gliding like a shadow over the oceans and clouds and continents until it alighted on a runway. Inside, you could shop or sleep or party or read a book or go jogging. You never felt you were anywhere but on solid ground, although you were miles in the sky. Once emptied, the plane glided back to 20 miles up slung under a Lifter. These Lifters, however, were tethered using flexible ceramic cables of incredible strength.
The Faraos, whom hardly anyone ever saw, approved of this and added design specifications of their own to make it even more efficient. They were more interested in the Temporale transfer station. Apparently, eons ago, the solar system had been a major hub in the galaxy-wide transfer system of a much more advanced race of aliens than the ones who were now Earth's colonial rulers. We humans had the misfortune of growing up in much-coveted real estate.
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Wells and Tatnall left on their own journey, taking the time machine with them. Trini, Sindi, and I were fascinated by the fact that travel on earth, and to the planets, was now no longer by propulsion ships (rockets, what have you) but by the Temporale itself. That meant we could take a trip to Mars in a matter of hours, and that was too much for us to resist.
We actually almost had an argument about it, Trini, Sindi, and I. It was great that we had managed to learn so much, to travel so far, and now stood on the verge of returning to Mars at the godpod time. No matter how rational and skeptical we were in our varying degrees, every instinct of our intensive upbringing rebelled against the idea of witnessing what our Scriptures and Directions seemed to say was the creation of our world. There was another thing too. Were we wasting time we didn’t have? We needed to resolve the matter of the Popess' key and the huge unknown installation under the Holy City. Was a trip to Mars the right thing at this moment?
While none of us had the indecency to seem skeptical or cynical, Sindy did sound gravely sarcastic as she said: "We are on Earth, and we have seen the time before any human had gone to Mars, so the world certainly was not created when the Temple says it was."
I added: "It's always possible there has been some misunderstanding..."
Trini said regretfully: "Certainly, that's obvious, isn't it? Is it possible that the Temple has erred over time and lost the true original message?"
Sindy and I both stared at her. Could Trini, the most rational of all, now be back-pedaling because the truth was too much to handle? That the entire religion to which we had given ourselves was based on false premises?
"Trini," Sindi said ironically, "we know NASA was a civilian organization for putting people into space—not a divine institution landing godpods."
"It doesn't mean our values have been wrong," I pleaded. "We may have some facts wrong because we were cut off from the mother civilization and our ancestors did the best they could with what they had."
Trini cocked her head to one side and made a chilling face I shall never forget. She said, so intensely that her head seemed to rock slightly on the foundation of her neck, and her eyes glittered: "What if that is also true here on Earth? We've already gotten a sense of this ancient train system that apparently cuts through time and space as if millions of years and millions of miles were nothing. We watched Wells and Tatnall and their people observing religious rites that are hauntingly like our own. There is even a Pope in Rome, wherever that is."
We had all had similar thoughts in the backs of our minds. Trini just verbalized it for all of us. Once again, we held hands, standing in a circle high up on the transfer deck of the huge London Transfer, and spoke prayers rededicating our lives and our souls to the service of Mars the Divine.
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