I'm going to take a short break from physics to post a chapter from my book which I finished yesterday. It's off to a reader for comments, then back to me for one last read through.
There is a footnote which I cannot explain since it doesn't appear in the original. The Duex ex Machina of this book (one of them at least) is the return of a spaceship sent to explore nearby planets for a place to live. So the news today makes that part a little more plausable.
Somewhere, in an earlier post for a week or two ago, you'll find the first chapter. When you're writing, it's a good idea if every chapter tells a story. It's 78,000 words and I expect based on historical records it will be just over 80,000 words when I finish editing (much shorter than Sprials, btw but interestingly prior books on spirals have been longer and shorter and the next summary book so far is looking to come in at under 25,000 words.
book 3 Starts this way: Chapter 1
Present Day Earth, 1000 years after the great collapse
Dewayne Johnson woke up with the twilight
of dawn shivering slightly. He is too
thirsty to take time to coax the fire back to life. He has a sip from the precious small store of
water and a cold breakfast of dried meat just to have something to chew. He is a modern man, but he carries a spear
and wears a loin cloth. The small bag he
carries has little room or weight as befits someone who must carry all of his
possessions on his back.
He is cold, despite the coming heat that
he knows is coming with sun, so after the quick meal, he is running through the
suburbs of a crumbling city.
Grass and trees, large and small bushes grow
through the road. There should be small
ponds and streams this time of year, but they are all dried up.[p1]
Even when the streams have water, they are little more than rivulets in
what used to be concrete gutters. It is the
dry season in a multiyear drought. In
these conditions, when they can be found, rivers are streams, streams are
stagnant ponds. The small ponds are
cracked, dried up mud. Dewayne’s dark
skin doesn’t burn easily in the sun, but he has been thirsty, constantly
searching for water this hunt. He
wonders if he will be able to find enough water to survive the trip back to the
village where he started.
The day started cool, but the sun is quickly
rising in a cloudless sky and the heat will soon be terrific and
unrelenting. Even in his prime,
accustomed as he is to these conditions, Dewayne is uncertain if he will make
it back to civilization if he doesn’t find water.
He steps carefully because even this far
out from the city center there are slivers of glass and rusted metal that would
easily cut through his moccasins. The potential death that could follow
would be long and painful, dying of thirst or hunger unable to walk or perhaps
the longer death from an infection.
There
are periodic deep rumbling sounds resulting from deteriorating structures, as
window, shingles, roofs, walls or even entire buildings fall. What used
to pass as roads in the city are clogged with debris which have merged into
hills. Large and small bushes and trees
sprout from these debris-hills, making them beautiful but treacherous in their instability.
He is hunting this morning, but later he
may be running from something. There were few large animals after the collapse,
but they eventually came back from the woods to occupy the cities, abandoned to
plague, war, depopulation and the general failure of power, information, social
order and industry. It is hard to say
which blow came down harder so long after the collapse.
For a time, the cities were full of
marauders, but they eventually moved out and became civilized again. It happened after they ran out of victims,
when the food supplies and weapons ran out and when the deteriorating condition
of the buildings made them too dangerous.
Dewayne was an outsider from an early age,
uncomfortable in the new city states, and their outlying communities, the so-called
“Collectives” which buffered the cities from each other. The city-states were hard on people with
their rationing and regulated life styles and their clinging by their
fingernails to the trappings of civilization and the ancient technologies and weapons
they hoped would protect them from each other.
Dewayne was also a conflicted man. He was educated, but he turned his back on
civilization because it was too restrictive.
The need for society of others dragged him back to the collective, but
his inability to conform dragged him away again. During the current drought, which has been
around for so many years he has lost track, food was rationed. Hunger and a nervous unrest drove him from
the Collective where he was raised, always at the mercy of the administrators,
tolerated only so long as he could produce what they considered sufficient and
fed if the excess was sufficient to include him. If he brought food back, more often than not,
his absence and these trips outside of the collective were tolerated.
On rare occasion, Dewayne ran into similar
spirits from other collectives. On even
more rare occasions he came across an individual who had escaped completely,
but they rarely survived for long alone and it was impossible to form a
confederation without coming under the protection or threat of a city-state.
He came here for the wilderness, but at
times, even the dead city seemed to close in on him. It was
as if the ghosts of the past were here, waiting for him to make some mistake
that would allow them to hold him here against his will and forever.
If he was successful, he would sell whatever
game he brought back, for when the crops failed in the Collective, people
starved, not only in the Collective; but also in the outlying communities that
depended on the city for protection and ultimately the cities themselves.
Dewayne lived in the more independent communities
surrounding the City, but he did not like the forced agrarian labor. It offended him that someone of his
intellectual skills was considered too untrained and too untrainable for the
skilled positions in the cities. Despite
his wide range of technical knowledge, Dewayne had mastered nothing. He had taken to hunting and trading which
failed to satisfy either his aspirations nor his need to be alone.
Technical weapons were outlawed to prevent
insurrection, but spears worked well enough for defense.
Traps were the only effective method of
hunting. It took less than a week to
find game trails and lay the traps out before he came back around to see
whether he would be successful or not.
He carried a machete, beat out of the rusting steel of the buildings
around him for close work and a similar homemade knife for butchering. Today, he as he circled the city he would run
out of water. If he didn’t find more
water, tomorrow he would have to turn back and see whether he could make it
back or not.
The Collectives were worse for the
poorest, but even the rich, the city dwellers, the governors and the director
himself faced the chance of plague, malaria, dysentery and the like, diseases known
and unknown, manmade and acts of god. The
poisons from the last of the wars killed directly and over time. The world had been at war with the remainder
of the human population for some time.
For all the fear they inspired, if it
didn’t rain, the ruling class died like everyone else.
The sun cracked the eastern sky behind
him. The crumbling buildings of the
abandoned city before him cast long shadows away from him. He looked back at the rising sun, welcoming
the light and feeling the rising warmth.
As he turned back, Dewayne saw a shooting
star in the still dark part of the sky but it doesn’t disappear. It grows brighter with each moment. He gawks. He has seen many shooting stars,
there are no city lights to dim the night sky except within the city itself. There is something different about this
one. It casts an unnatural light and
seems to drift towards the city. He is
tempted to run, but hesitates. If it is
one of the ancient missiles, running would do not good. Where
would he run to, and why?
He wondered if anyone else would see
it. He is quite a distance from the last
outpost of civilization. He follows the
trajectory. He realizes that it is a
trajectory. His heart beats faster. There is a sonic boom and he crouches down in
reaction dropping the spear and covering his ears. A sympathetic building in response to the
shockwave gives way and falls with a thundering roll, it lasts for a long
time. Maybe it is 2 buildings or 3. Dewayne cannot see the collapse through the
intervening woods but he notices the star is dropping in the direction of the
city.
It isn’t a missile, he thinks, it is
slowing down. It is a spaceship. He has never actually seen one, but he is certain
this is what a spaceship would look like, how it would act.
He has seen satellites crash before, but
this is not a satellite. There is a
thruster slowing its descent, the source of the strange light. The engines seem to stutter, then a parachute
deploys. It could still be a missile,
some missiles used parachutes, but why would anyone attack an empty city?
Where is it going, he wonders? Will it crash? He does a quick catalog. The most likely landing site in that
direction is the ancient airport. A
spaceship would land at an airport, wouldn’t it?
The airport is on the far side of the city,
its runways filled with thorny bushes; but that would not be visible from space. If he goes to the airport, and expects to
make it today, he must travel through several miles of overgrown city, there
will be wild dogs, maybe hogs, even a bear or big cat. Worse still, there is falling debris and the
sharp objects which litter what used to be streets, now clogged with traps and
pitfalls. It is not safe. In the suburbs, the collapsed buildings are
low, there is not so much glass or sharp, rusted metal. He wants to go back to the Collective first
and get help, but even if he ran the whole way it would take a full day to get
there. By then… What? What
would happen by then?
He makes up his mind and starts an
unhurried jog towards the city in the direction of the airport. He’s done this before, but never alone.
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