by Lory Kaufman
“Look at them. They look so happy,” Shamira said.
“The nano bits have already balanced the Signora’s brain,” Medeea told them.
The younger Hansum had his arm around Guilietta, looking like he never wanted to let her go.
“I thought we were done,” the older Hansum sighed, watching them. He looked back at his comrades. “I’m in this all the way. But are you sure you want to . . .” Shamira looked right at Hansum, her green eyes showing over the veil. They glistened more happily than Hansum had remembered seeing them since Kingsley’s death.
“I’m all in too,” Shamira assured him. “I have no regrets.” She put a hand to the node on her neck and tapped it. “My temporal protection is off.”
“And you two?” Hansum asked Lincoln and Medeea. “Once they go through the vortex . . .”
Lincoln looked at Medeea. It was a joint decision.
“Sweet heart?” Lincoln asked.
“This way, we get to do it all over again,” she answered, “and with all our good friends, including Guilietta.” They kissed.
“Thank you. Thank you all,” Elder Hansum said, and he reached in his tunic and took off the necklace with his own temporal protector, dropping it to the ground. “Friends,” he called out to the others. “It’s time to go.”
“Time to go to Heaven, kind angel?” the Signora asked.
The older Hansum smiled. “You could say that, dear woman. You truly could.”
“Oh Agistino,” the Signora said, taking her husband’s arm. “Together,” and the Master smiled and crossed himself.
“Friends, be not afraid of what you are about to see,” Elder Hansum said. “It is but a doorway to another place. Sideways . . .”
And there, before them on the walkway, a vortex formed. But, instead of being vertical, it was horizontal, so they could all walk through it. A wind gusted and sucked in leaves and vapor from the clouds. The Signora smiled broadly, gripping Agistino with one arm, her bonnet with the other.
“The stairway to Heaven,” she chimed.
Guilietta was staring, almost trembling, at the sight of the whirlwind. The older Hansum watched the light of it dance off her radiant features. Looking at her, he was almost frozen with awe, a softness in his eyes that bespoke a century of devotion.
“I’d almost forgotten . . .” the old Hansum began to say.
“Forgotten what, elder?” young Hansum asked.
“So beautiful. So . . .” Then he shook his head. “Please, enter now the Sands of Time.”
“Come, my darling,” Hansum said to Guilietta, gently pulling her by the hand. She held back, her lips slightly parted and worry in her eyes.
“It’s safe. I wouldn’t do anything to harm you,” the older Hansum said, smiling.
As Guilietta passed him, she stopped.
“Signor, your eyes, they’re so much like . . .” The old man leaned forward and whispered in Guilietta’s ear.
“Hush. Tell me in fifty years. Now hurry.”
“Aren’t you leading the way?” the young Hansum asked.
“No, you go ahead. I’ll be staying here for now. But first, let me look one more time upon the faces of my youth. The faces of all youth. Youth and courage. Youth and possibilities. Youth in a world where all is conceivable,” and the older Hansum stepped back. “Farewell. Take care of each other.”
The older Hansum watched his younger self step forward, smiling encouragement to Guilietta. As they stepped into the whirling vortex, one of Guilietta’s hands was holding the younger Hansum’s, the other was touching her belly, where the baby lay. The older Hansum beamed and was now truly content. The della Cappas followed into the vortex, walking happily to their own new futures, to the old Hansum’s soon-to-be-extinguished past. But he didn’t care.
“The meaning of life is to give your life meaning,” the old man said to himself. “This I have done,” and he smiled. Hansum turned to Lincoln, Shamira and Medeea. “Good bye old friends. I guess we’ll see each other on the other side of tomorrow.”
The old Lincoln and Medeea stood in an embrace, both smiling at Hansum, and then they locked eyes with each other, making the other the last thing they would see. Shamira stood with her hands clutched in front of her, a smile of joy and awe on her face. With the roar of the vortex in his ears, Hansum’s skin flushed with excitement and expectation, content in his submission to a successful sacrifice.
As the young Hansum’s foot started to step out of the other side of the time portal, the elderly Hansum began to laugh with anticipation and felt his emotions peaking — his final emotions. He raised his hand to his cheek, in a gesture of awe, but as the two parts of his body came together, they passed through each other, as if vapor. Through fading eyes, he saw his younger self almost into the future. And as they became more solid there, he felt himself passing into nothingness, into a never-was-ness.
“Love has won,” he whispered, “Love has . . .”
Coda
As countless generations of humans into the future watched this new scene play out on their Mists of Times Chronicles, it was like Hansum’s parents’ home was in a little snow globe setting. For thousands of years, what became known as The Tragical Tale of Romero and Guilietta, became one of the most watched History Camp stories. And at the end of it, Hansum always walked into his family’s home with the beautiful young woman on his arm, presenting her to his parents.
“Mother, Father, Charlene, this is Guilietta. She is my wife,” he said, his voice echoing in the cosmos.
Men and women, forward through the ages, watched as the two young people wed again in the 24th-century. It was not an elopement this time. Hansum’s parents were present, as well as Guilietta’s. Bringing the Signora and Master della Cappa forward in time, curing the Signora of her mental illness and giving them places in the future, seemed to work out. The History Camp Time Travel Council ruled it didn’t change the time in between, so no harm was done. And Agistino was a huge help at the 14th-century Verona History Camp.
“Congratulations Guilietta,” the sixteen-year-old Shamira said, as she embraced Guilietta at the crowded wedding reception. A proud Hansum of eighteen looked on, standing next to the fifteen-year-old best man, Lincoln.
“Thank you, sister,” Guilietta replied, smiling radiantly.
“Oh, it’s hard to hug you now,” Shamira laughed, stepping back. “Can I touch?”
“Per favore, please,” Guil answered. Shamira put her hand on Guilietta’s beautiful large belly.
“It’s harder than I thought. Oh, it kicked,” and everyone laughed.
“How are you enjoying your art history courses, Sham?” Hansum asked, and a wicked smile came to Shamira’s lips.
“Oh, it’s been . . . very gratifying,” she said waving someone over. Guilietta looked up as a shadow fell across them. “This is someone I met in class. He’s a sculptor and from the 26th-century.” A large hand extended to Guilietta and then Hansum. The other went tenderly onto Shamira’s shoulder.
“Hello. I’m Kingsley.”
“Ah, there you are, Lincoln,”
Arimus called.
“I’ve found you at last.”
“Oh darn, and I’ve been trying to hide from you, Arimus,” Lincoln kidded. “You’re the guy who put us through all that torture.”
“A student often calls the lessons of life a trial,
But as you grow, there’ll be no denial.
Those same struggles are what makes one interesting.”
“Arimus, did you find out who that Elder Yu was?” Hansum asked.
“No, not yet. It still remains a mystery.
I went back to retrieve you at the Arena
and you were already gone . . . history.”
“Strange. So strange,” Hansum said. “Whoever he was,” Hansum said looking to his Guilietta, “we have a lot to thank him for.”
“Si, God bless Elder Yu,” Guilietta said. “He seemed like a man of love. His eyes reminded me of yours, husban
d. Everything reminds me of you.”
“The same here, Guilietta. I guess that’s what love really is,” and they kissed.
“Oh, there they go again,” Lincoln complained. “You won’t find me falling like that. Never. Ever. Okay, now that you found me, Arimus, what else ya got to make me even more interesting than this adventure already has?”
“Oh yes, of course, my young mind-delver,”
and Arimus reached into his robes and took out
a tiny glass tear vessel.
“Lincoln, please give your greetings to Medeea.”
“Oh, zippy,” Lincoln said, smiling at the bottle in his hand. “And yet another big adventure is about to begin.”
-the end-
BONUS FEATURE
BACK STORY of the futuristic world
you’ll find in The Verona Trilogy
by Lory Kaufman
Thank you for reading The Verona Trilogy. I truly hope you enjoyed it.
Most futuristic novels don’t give you the back story of their civilizations. They just plop the reader into the middle of the characters’ lives and start the story rolling. The writer lets readers infer much of how the civilization works from what happens around the characters. I do pretty much the same thing. After all, it’s the characters and the story that is important, and the quality of its telling. But behind the scenes, writers of future fiction have to work out a general history for their world to rationalize why things are the way they are. But, I thought, why not share the backstory? Some readers might find it interesting. That’s what follows here.
The Verona Trilogy takes place in three time periods; the 24th and 31st-centuries, when the characters are in the future, and 14th-century Verona, Italy, when they are in the past.
While writing the first book of the trilogy, The Lens and the Looker, I spent months researching 14th-century Verona, and even went to modern Verona, spending days taking in the many sights. What a difference that made to my vision of the tale’s telling. Many of the buildings, streets and churches have been maintained much as they were in the past, so I felt I was wandering in and seeing the same things my characters did. I wanted details to be as realistic as they could and, for me, it’s the details in the research that feed and inspire my writer’s imagination.
Writing about the future also took lots of research, contemplation and then creative speculation. The research had to do with subjects that are very dear to me; ecology, green politics, population studies and futurism in general. All through my contemplation and speculation, I had one mantra: what hard decisions did my characters’ ancestors have to make to ensure the existence of human civilization for another ten thousand years? This would inform me what the world my characters inhabited looked like.
Because of space constraints, I am only including the Back Story of my future worlds.
It is my hope that, after reading what follows, you may wish to reread the series. If you do, you may see many more layers to the story.
Cheers,
Lory Kaufman,
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
January 2013
Population:
The Lens and the Looker starts in 2347, the 24th-century A.C.E. (After the Common Era). At that time, I have the population of the Earth at 300,000,000, or 300 million. Let’s compare that with the population of humans alive as of this writing, November 2012. The population of “Spaceship Earth” has exceeded 7,000,000,000. That’s seven billion or seven-thousand million, depending on what side of the Atlantic “pond” you’re on.
I work into my fictional tale that the future population of 300 million is not just a number that happened by accident. It was a deliberate figure chosen by a planetary Council of Elders. Before I explain how I came to decide on that number, I think a short preamble comparing the population in my story to the actual number of humans in our present world could be interesting and informative. After all, there’s a big difference in those quantities, and if you are anything like me, it’s hard to conceive of and compare numbers that high. All I see is a heck of a lot of zeros and I think it’s really important that we feel these numbers in our guts.
First, let’s compare by just writing them out.
Three-hundred million, or 300,000,000
then
Seven billion, or 7,000,000,000
This doesn’t really illuminate the difference in size for me.
How about doing it as a percentage?
300 million is only about 4.5% of 7 billion. That means, for every 100 people alive today, only 4 or 5 people are alive in the History Camp world of 2347. Still not making very much of an impression?
How about drawing a mental picture this way . . .
If you take a package of common computer paper and agree that the thickness of one page is equal to one person, then stack up 300 million sheets, that pile of paper would be 100,000 feet high or over 18.9 miles. (30,400 metres or 30.4 km). Wow, that’s high, you say. (I’m calculating an average computer paper at about 250 pages per inch or almost 1,000 sheets per 100 cm)
But what about the population of today, the planet we all live on, right now? If you piled one piece of paper on top of another for every human alive now, the pile you would get would be over 2,300,000 feet or an amazing 550 miles high. (701,040 meters or over 700 KM) The space shuttles orbited at less than half that altitude. Getting the picture?
Here’s another thought that stretches my mind, not only with population numbers but also regarding time. Until as little as 10,000 years ago it is estimated that the natural population for humans planet-wide was only 1,000,000, when we lived as hunter gatherers. That’s only one million. That puny paper stack would only be 333 feet high (101.5 meters), about the height of a 30 storey building. The space shuttle was higher than that standing on its launch pad. Ten millennium ago was also the time when humans invented rudimentary farming, and that’s when populations started to grow.
Why 300,000,000 was chosen as a sustainable
population number:
As mentioned above, I envisioned a planetary Council of Elders determining a target number of humans that could be sustained by the ecosystem of the planet for an indefinite number of millenia. I had them choose 300,000,000. I envisaged this happening in the last years of the 21st-century, with them choosing the early 24th-century as the target time for reaching the much lowered population goal. This is the time when the first book in the series, The Lens and the Looker, starts.
The impetus for the drastic lowering in numbers of people lay in the many cataclysmic events I envisioned happening in the latter half of the 21st-century; the rising of the oceans, droughts that starved millions, bacterial infections that wiped out billions and wars that caused diasporas of whole populations. Refugees, like hordes of locusts, limped from continent to continent, consuming, killing and dying. Wow, this short description brings to mind many of the great dystopian novels written since the early decades of the 20th-century, such as Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This is all after World War One when there were initial glimpses of the possibility of world domination by one ideology or another. Then, after the first atomic bombs were dropped at the end of World War Two, visionaries started writing cautionary tales about humans now possessing the ability to really destroy the planet. Dystopian literature was born!
However, in the world that I created for The Verona Trilogy, I have the humans of the 24th-century already past these hard times and successfully rebuilding the world. I figured there’s already enough dystopian literature out there. I’m calling my genre “post-dystopian.” You see, this time, humans have retained enough knowledge and wisdom to not to repeat the mistakes of the past. There was no burning of the libraries of Alexandria, the world didn’t fall into religious fundamentalism or create a fascist state. No. In this world humans rose from the ashes and prospered. Why and how this happens is described under several of the heading
s that follow, but let me mention a few of the “norms” that I have imbedded in the psyches of my characters, even when they’re spoiled kids.
1) It was recognized that for humans to survive, we must allow other species to thrive. It became a common currency of thought that there is a complex underpinning to nature, a balanced and complex web of life, in which millions of various life forms and processes support and sustain each other. For this multitude of other species to survive, humans must share planetary resources. To share planetary resources, our numbers must be lowered. The people of the future I’ve imagined recognize that the world their ancestors (us) lived in was literally a house of cards, one where, if too many cards were removed, the whole structure would collapse.
2) It was accepted that humankind had outstripped its biology, that is, nature could no longer keep population numbers in check. For millions of years, before we developed agriculture and medicine, a very high reproduction rate was needed for any species to survive. As I mentioned earlier, it is estimated that, as little as 10,000 years ago, there were only about 1,000,000 homo sapiens on the planet. That’s when humans invented agricultural skills. Because of this, and because of other unique, adaptive qualities of our human brain, infant mortality rate steadily decreased and the average human lifespan increased. Within the blink of a galactic eye, ten-thousand years, the population of our specie’s shot up to where it is as of this writing, over seven billion. That’s where my imagination fast-forwards to sometime in the late 21st-century when humans finally collectively decide that, since nature can no longer control population size, if we want to survive, it will be our responsibility to control it ourselves.
3) Besides agriculture and medicine, it was recognized that every invention humans created allowed its population to grow. I include in the definition of “invention,” not just technology, but also human organizations: governments, businesses, corporations, economic systems, traditional and non-traditional families, etc. It became another ingrained concept that, throughout history, and to ill effect, both technology and societal systems were progressively tweaked by the people in power to concentrate control over resources and the way people thought into fewer and fewer hands.