In the middle on a low, knocked-together dais, was Teddy, in dirty Swill rig, enacting what seemed to be a dance. In a while I saw that he was in fact miming a play, taking all the parts, switching from character to character with a twist of the features, a defining gesture, a change of deportment. He told, without words, a tale of a Sweet electrician being superannuated down to the towers and there looking after the internal power lines, vetting the outdated trivs and – this was the most emphatic section – teaching children to be electricians. Not the teenagers – his impersonation of a ratbag teenager drawing graffiti brought the crowd to laughter and a few teenagers to spitting fury they dared not express in violence – whom he portrayed as feckless, unteachable and already lost, like their parents (that roused some muttering), but the very young, the seven-and eight-year-olds, girls as well as boys. He did a hilariously crude sketch of Grandma blundering around the flat when the lights fused, then standing by in puzzled wonder when seven-year-old Junior did a running repair with an improvised fuse wire. Then he gave them a quick reprise of the electrician teaching young kids.
It was tremendously impressive and the crowd applauded. And so they damned well should have – he was brilliant. He was more than brilliant; I can recognize flowering genius when I see it and a pared-down, unfussy technique that has been rehearsed to perfection and drives every point home. When, afterward, he melted into the crowd they clotted in groups, discussing what he had told them.
So that is what my policeman brother is actually good for. Like myself he has a talent. But his is admired. Too late, of course. Everything is always too late. Nothing can save this crumbling planet except elimination of three-quarters of its people.
And we know that can happen.
February 25, 2059
It’s a sad, mad world. Teddy and Carol have resigned from PI and gone to live with the Kovacs tribe in Twenty-three. He means to spend the rest of his life in mimed propaganda. Is he just stage-struck or is an achievement possible?
July 13, 2059
The meeting room has become a kindergarten for a dozen smelly Swill brats being taught to do things with their hands while a gaggle of ci-devant tradesmen get them interested in making things work. The tradesmen, having no teaching expertise, aren’t very good at it but the kids seem to enjoy it. At least it keeps them off the streets. Mum is teaching some to read and write; they’re not so keen on that but they might be when they discover story books. (The Ma’am has a lot of these. Must remind Billy.)
Billy wants me to teach arithmetic but I won’t do it. I don’t understand arithmetic. I can switch the light on but I don’t understand electricity; I can manipulate figures but I don’t understand them. And I’m sick of figures.
Contact with Swill depresses me. I am condemned to life here but I don’t have to join in it.
November 4, 2059
They have roped me in at last. Not as a teacher; I will not stand for Swill clustered about me, Billy and his fallen technicians have collected some technical manuals which they don’t know how to reduce to simple tools of instruction. It’s quite easy to simplify them. I once saw a military Small Arms Manual, designed for the teaching of nitwits, and I can see that it has an ideal instructor’s layout. You can learn from it without an instructor. That’s the model I will use. It will occupy the endless days.
So I am doing something ‘useful.’ Maria, who had, as she put it, ‘given me away,’ seems to think this makes me respectable again. As though I care.
February 11, 2060
Word processors! Seven of them! Old models, prone to breakdown, but here. In a million years Billy could never have brought off that haul. When I asked who provided the stuff, he said, ‘Arthur Derrick,’ uncomfortably, aware of stirring unwelcome memories. (I clutched his ankles and wept over his feet. That I was fifteen and stupid, another person, does not ease the shame.) Why Derrick? Is he another frustrated, do-gooding, bleeding heart? Hard to imagine. Perhaps a political spy disguised as Santa Claus, lulling the Trojans with gifts? Billy thinks it isn’t important, so long as the loot rolls in. He says Derrick likes Nick’s ideas. Perhaps pigs grow wings and the world really is flat.
August 23, 2060
Derrick was here today. Actually here. So was a huge consignment of paper, literally millions of sheets. And cases of books, basic technical stuff in the main. He saw me but did not speak. He looks older and has had the sense to let his hair grow but still resembles a waiting crocodile. He contemplated a working classroom for ten minutes in reptilian silence before he said to Billy, ‘I was intrigued by Nick’s New Men because I didn’t know what he meant.’ Billy told him, ‘Neither did Nick, then.’ I still don’t know.
August 24, 2060
I asked what he meant by New Men. He said they are people who do what they can instead of sitting on their arses waiting for time to roll over them. Smart bastard. So that’s why all these dreary books have to be extracted, boiled down and turned into learning texts for duplication in thousands. Stuff like farming, cloth-making, hygiene – much more ambitious than the simple home-tradesman manuals of last year. ‘A legacy for the dark years coming,’ says Billy, who is a sucker for a catch-phrase.
March 4, 2061
Mum is not well, losing weight and not retaining food. The meds seem puzzled.
March 13, 2061
Catching ’em young seems to bring results. Those ten-year-olds can make processors do anything but sing and dance. Even Derrick, on his occasional visits, cracks open a narrow slit of approval. Today I cracked a bit more than that, his silence. We passed each other in the hallway and on impulse I jeered at his departing back, ‘Why bother? Your arse is safe from the rising damp.’ Without turning, he said, ‘Yes, that’s why.’ What is he after? Forgiveness of sins?
Mum no better. She is thin. We begin to hear tales of other women in similar case. Why only women?
March 17, 2061
Mum will die. She knows it and speaks of it calmly. Billy pretends he is not distraught; the meds don’t pretend to be anything else. It seems there are dozens of cases, all women. Another experiment? Derrick doesn’t know. Or says he doesn’t. But he looks like a man pursued.
March 20, 2061
Mum is dead of this anorexic wasting. So are others. I sat with her last night while her consciousness came and went. Once she said, very forcefully, ‘I’ve had a good life, Francis. So full.’ Full, I thought, of what would have been avoided in a saner world. Or is it a matter of knowing what you want, irrespective of the nature of the world? I thought once that I knew what I wanted. Billy came in later, but by then she was rambling about the past, about summertime and the glistening sea.
THE AUTUMN PEOPLE
3
Andra to Lenna
. . . So, after three years and a dozen attempts, I realize that this play is unwritable. I have given it up. After a year of wrestling with a psychiatrist to find a satisfactory central source for Billy’s inconsistencies, after switching my attention to Teddy and taking endless lessons in the techniques of mime (which will, at least, be professionally useful), after trying to refocus the whole period through the eyes of Derrick, I have given it up.
Your novel is not at fault. I should have seen from the beginning that these people struggled in the nets of local culture and their own personalities; they did not represent the collapsing world. It might be impossible, I feel, to create a group that could represent it.
It is too easy to fall into the trap of seeing history in terms of human movement, as though all else is ancillary, as though we make history. It is history that makes us. The Greenhouse years should have shown that plainly; the Long Winter will render it inescapable. The Greenhouse years made a shortish downward curve in human fortunes; the Long Winter may make a longer but, because we are better prepared, shallower dip.
Or, are these no more than necessary experiences in the life of the species, not peaks and depths at all, but interruptions comparable to the rainstorms and frosts we learn to deal with by changing
our clothes for the duration of discomfort? In the enormous stretch of history to come the Greenhouse years will rate as little more than an unseasonably hot day . . .
She filed the letter among the documents which would, on her death, become part of the university archive, along with the academic reviews which disapproved of attempts to reduce history to flashes of insight through narrow tower windows.
But, she thought, the novel gained me some recognition in the larger world outside the campus and since I, unlike history, am not here forever, that is an acceptable pleasure. The little human glimpses do help, if only in confirming our confidence in steadfast courage.
Postscript
Nobody can foretell the future. In a world of disparate aims, philosophies and physical conditions the possible permutations are endless; few guesses aimed beyond a decade from today are likely to be correct, even by accident. So, this novel cannot be regarded as prophetic; it is not offered as a dire warning. Its purpose is simply to highlight a number of possibilities that deserve urgent thought if some of them are not to come to pass in one form or another.
1. Population. This is a present problem in many areas and may soon be a problem in all areas, with special emphasis on those with little arable land. Demographic forecasts suggest a slowing of the birthrate, but that prediction is based on assessment of possible/probable future trends which are not really amenable to assessment. It is possible that the planet’s population will double within three to four decades.
2. Food. How shall we feed a planet with twice its present population? We know that it is possible in terms of food production, yet already about half the population is underfed and much of it actually starved. Why?
3. Employment. Long-range predictions of the results of automation are cautious and conservative and limited to a very few years. The factors that cannot be assessed are managerial greed, stresses of competition and the ability of rising Third World technologies to undercut a productivity geared to profit instead of usefulness.
4. Finance. In this novel I have placed the collapse of the money system in the fifth decade of the new century. Some thinkers have suggested the second decade as crucial. The reason? Lack of markets caused by unemployment beyond previous nightmares of recession, bankrupt governments and the collapse of the Third World market for shoddy.
None of these things need happen. All of them can if we ignore the warnings of Sir Macfarlane Burnett that we ‘must plan for five years ahead and twenty years and a hundred years.’ No country in the present world is likely to do this because no government can, by the nature of its provenance, plan beyond its own tenure. All governments busy themselves with preserving and continuing their own power. They do little else. There are no votes in projects twenty years in the future, let alone a hundred.
Two other major matters must be considered by today’s futurologist:
1. Nuclear war. My opinion, for what it may be worth, is that this is an unlikely occurrence. Those capable of it know the cost: nobody left to loot the losers. Fanaticism cannot be discounted as a possible, demented impulse but there we can only take refuge in optimism.
2. The Greenhouse effect. It is unlikely that we will have definite information on the extent of this before the turn of this century. It could be a comparatively mild matter of gently changing climates (but not therefore to be ignored) or it could be a global disaster, striking with great suddenness.
We can be sure only that enormous changes will take place in the next two or three generations, all of them caused by ourselves, and that we will not be ready for them. How can we be? We talk of leaving a better world to our children but in fact do little more than rub along with day-today problems and hope that the longer-range catastrophes will never happen.
Sooner or later some of them will.
The Sea and Summer is about the possible cost of complacency.
Sleep well.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was assisted by a writer’s fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s arts funding and advisory body.
George Turner was born in Melbourne in 1916. Prior to his career in SF, he was a critic and an established mainstream writer, winning the prestigious Miles Franklin Award for The Cupboard Under the Stairs. He came to science fiction late in life – he was in his 60’s when his first SF novel, Beloved Son was published. Beloved Son won the Ditmar Award – one of nine Ditmars Turner accumulated – but he is perhaps best known for his stunning novel of climate change run amok, The Sea and Summer, winner of the 1988 Arthur C. Clarke Award. He was named as a guest of honour for the 1999 World Science Fiction Convention, Aussiecon Three, but died before the event.
Also by George Turner
NOVELS
Beloved Son (1978)
Vaneglory (1981)
Yesterday’s Men (1983)
The Sea and Summer (1987)
Brain Child (1991)
The Destiny Makers (1993)
Genetic Soldier (1994)
Down There in Darkness (1999)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
A Pursuit of Miracles (1990)
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