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24: London Redux
We returned on the same Temporale spur to London of 2608, a week after our departure. We had no regrets about our illusion-shattering journey, but we were in despair at not seeming closer to having a way to help the Martians of our era. Our home world was beginning to fail, and doom could come in mere decades.
We had seriously depleted the money Tatnall had given us in the form of gold coins, which we were selling to an antiquarian dealer in New Portobello for a robust sum in the currency of World Credits. Emerging from that shop for the last time, empty of 1890s gold pound denominations, we had among us WC 22,000, which sounds like a lot, but it would be enough to house, feed, and transport a family of three for about a week.
"We are marooned," Sindi said dismally as she stirred her tea. We sat in a high café overlooking the Thames just upstream from the drowned Houses of Parliament.
With world sea levels still up about 100 feet, but below their all-time crest of 128 feet in 2245, a sheet of water some 60 feet deep covered large sections of the City and Greater London. At some point during the breakdown of civilization from the mid-2000s to the mid-2100s, a rump government of the British Isles managed to salvage a few national treasures in the hope of using them to restore the monarchy and return things to their long-lost equilibrium. Using techniques that were remarkably effective, considering the brute force and massive weights involved, they tunneled a few yards a day under several cathedral buildings to pour huge boats of concrete. For St. Paul's in particular, they removed the crypts underneath to a new structure of plain concrete, some 600 feet above sea level in the New City. The outer portico and steps were demolished and removed to clear the plaza for what came next. The basilica itself then had an enormous concrete footing, and its plaza was bounded within a heavily steel-reinforced hull of poured concrete some 30 feet thick and 200 feet high. The entire building floated, albeit sluggishly, and rose to the crest of the eventual flood tide (200 feet), where the structure was then affixed using massive girders and cross-ties. It is now part of the floor-base of the New City.
Our mood mirrored the melancholy of those high, empty Gothic windows through which we could occasionally see a school of fish enter the gloomy halls of long-ago debate. We watched dolphins play under the stub of the great tower in which Big Ben once sat (this giant bell now tolls the hours from a place near the new St. Paul's in the New City), and its booming tones can be heard shuddering through the abandoned Tube lines deep down.
I observed: "At least, since the recent warming started again in 2500, London is a brighter, sunnier place."
"Oh," Trini said, "remember the cold and snow in H. G. Wells' London!"
Sindi added: "And the dreary rainy gray industrial cities of later on!"
At present, the New City (Greater London) covers several square miles on several platform levels stacked about 100 feet apart. Most of the world's coastal cities are like that. You'll find the most squalor and violent crime on the lowest decks versus increasing wealth and white-collar criminality the higher you venture. The stacks system of the new coastal cities has inadvertently turned out to be an ingenious sorting box of humanity.
We fell silent as we sipped our tea and admired the tall, slender fan palms leaning out into the clear blue sky from the edges of the New City, beyond Westminster Tower. Flocks of white seabirds circled over water cawing and seeking a kill. Far out at sea, a high wall of cumulus clouds signaled a tropical storm moving this way. It was easy to imagine how the area must have looked in the warm period after the most recent great ice ages, when Britain was joined to Europe by a hand bridge, and hippos wallowed in the Thames Estuary—easy to imagine, impossible to reconstruct, since hippos had become extinct in the early 2000s, soon followed by the majority of other large animal species from tigers and lions to elephants and rhinos. Somewhere, in the eras of time joined by the Temporale, someone is building a great zoo, and one day, if we ever save our beloved Mars, I may journey there to see for myself the various species of Ice Age and Holocene animals all restored in their natural habitats. What destructive fools we humans have been, not to lift a finger while those magnificent creatures were allowed to dwindle away...
I was jolted from my reverie by the sounds of shouting. In the small café, several waiters and customers were leaning toward a window overlooking a faux cobblestone square surrounded by derivative, pubby looking structures that attempted to recapture Georgian and Victorian quaintness. There we saw that a crowd had gathered around several men going at it near the stone lion fountain.
"My Gods," I said.
Trini and Sindi both shrugged. "What? It's just a few fools having a fist fight."
"Yes, but look." I pointed outside to a man in the crowd—the spectacled Flash, who had ridden with me in the zeppelin on the way to King City on Mars. "I have seen that guy before—in our era, on Mars, on Olympus. He must have been shadowing me."
Instantly, the women's faces lit up and we darted outside. Here was a connection with our mission! We encircled the man, confronted him, and in his eyes we read immediate recognition and surrender. He was a prim little man of about 65, wearing clothing appropriate to London of 2608. He wore those twinkling, square rimless glasses, a black Homburg (as closely as I can approximate between the styles of then and the styles of when we first landed on Earth in the 1890s), a tan raincloak over a drab, business-like gray tunic, and black trousers over soft gray boots. He carried a cane slung over one arm, and a brown leather briefcase in the other hand. Instead of a necktie, he wore an electronic harness of fine wires with a ceramic bolo-clasp on whose flat surface was his picture along with some symbols.
"So," he said. "Now everything is changed."
In the square, a robust young blond man in purple tunic and black trousers was acquitting himself admirably. Though his left eye was swollen, and blood poured from his nose and mouth, he was just finishing drubbing the last of his three attackers.
One of these men was just getting up and about to attack the blond man from the rear. "Excuse me," said Flash. "For our sake, it is important that we help that agent." We stood back in surprise as the mild little man's persona changed to a kind of steely determination. He strode forward in a few quick steps while setting down his briefcase and holding up the cane in both hands. The cane now became a hard, whip-like instrument of hand to hand combat. It took just two or three sharp swipes left and right to send all three attackers scurrying for their lives.
"Thanks!" said the burly blond man. He accepted tissues handed to him by onlookers and wiped off the blood. He walked stiffly to the lion fountain and completed the job of washing himself. Meanwhile, two constables in all-white jumpsuits, helmets, and huge gloves came running. They were armed, and a surveillance pod drifted in the air after them. "Is everyone all right here?" they asked.
"Oh yeah, we're fine," said the blond man. He wore a bolo badge like Flash's.
Flash had a way of blending into a crowd. He had already done that. He stood between us again with his cane and briefcase as if he'd done nothing.
As the constables dispersed the onlookers, the blond man came to join us. "Thanks, whoever you are," he told Flash.
"My pleasure," Flash said. Addressing all of us, he said: "Look, I think it's time for a meeting of the minds. Why don't we all take a stroll in the park and I'll see if we can't get your cares and concerns sorted out."
We fell in with him as he walked briskly along the rampart over looking the Thames about 100 feet below us. "I am [an indecipherable, electronic sound, a cross between a whistle, a whine, and a warble, chirped from his mouth], but you may call me simply Professor Taylor."
"You are an android, then?" said the blond man.
Trini, Sindi, and I looked at each other in surprise.
"Yes," Taylor said. "I am a first-class humanoid. Let's wait until we pass through the park and get to my office. Then we'll clear up a lot of things."
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