Stephen Baxter: Time

Economic growth is not possible. But growth was always an illusion, bought only by exploiting other people or the Earth’s irreplaceable resources or burning up our children’s future. Now we are mature.

Consider the indicators the UN uses to measure our wealth and happiness today.

We count more than simple economic facts. We measure the health and education and even the joy of our children. We consider the beauty of our poetry and our art, the strength of our families, the intelligence and integrity of our public debate. In a very real sense we are measuring our courage, wisdom, learning, and compassion: everything that makes life worth living. And by every such measure the world is a better place.

You are not as free as your grandfather was to foul up the neighborhood, or to own three cars. But what would you want with such freedoms?

Some say the UN has become undemocratic. But the control required to run the planet today would be impossible without the powerful central authority wielded by the UN.

What would happen to us without central control?

Remember the lesson of history. Easter Island — remote, cut off — was a close analogy to our present situation, a human population essentially isolated within a finite resource.

The islanders bred until they destroyed their biosphere. Then, starving, they almost killed each other off in the resulting wars.

So do not mourn freedom. Freedom was an illusion, paid for by the death of others less fortunate. Today you have the freedom to live in peace, and not to starve.

Support us. We will save you from yourself. After all, without us things would be a lot worse.

And, incidentally, Peacekeepers are not police. They merely reinforce the popular will. There is a difference.

AD. 2102:

But what we call the biosphere — yes, make a note of the word — was left badly depleted before the end. There was a great wave of » extinctions that, ultimately, couldn’t be stopped. How bad was it? Well, Oona, we don’t really know. We didn’t even get as far as counting all the species before destroying them. Yes, that’s right; a lot of species must have died out before we even knew they were there. Shivery thought, isn’t it?

The sea fared a little better than the land. We lost some species, mostly from overfishing and from the dumping of pollutants and washed-off topsoil in the shallow waters around the coastlines. But today things are fairly stable. In fact there are enhanced cephalopods, squid and octopuses, managing the big undersea farms for us now.

Still, it was a severe extinction, in historical terms. Worse than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago. Not as bad as the one at the end of the Permian.

Now, of course, we live in a world where evolution has been ended, and the future depends on conscious management by …

No, Maisie, I never saw a chimp or a gorilla, so I can’t tell you what it would have been like. Now you are the only surviving primate species. Anyhow I’m just an e-person. I don’t know how it would have felt to meet your cousin like that: like you, yet not quite you.

I can make a guess, though.

A.D. 2147:

So there are sixty years to go before the Carter firework show and the population is increasing, despite all the UN can do to discourage us.

It sure is in my house.

What, you’re surprised?

Look, for a long time many people accepted the UN below-replacement-number childbirth guidelines — and a lot even went further, having no kids at all because they were depressed about the future. That is, they didn’t expect there to be any future. It seemed unfair, maybe even immoral, to bring kids into a situation like that.

After all, you never treated anyone unfairly by leaving them unborn, because they never existed to suffer in the first place. Right?

Well, the world may be heading for the iceberg, but the dead hand of old Darwin is still on the tiller.

What am I talking about? Just this: If most people stop breeding, the handful of people who love kids and want to have them — people like me — are, within a generation or two, going to outnumber everyone else. Simple math.

And that’s exactly what is happening.

Friend, I’m your neighborhood representative of a new species: Homo philoprogenitus, which means “lover of many children.” As you can see, or maybe hear.

I pay my UN fines. For me they are worth it. A happiness tax. What’s money for?

Sure, if Carter is right, these kids are not going to live to a ripe old age. But it’s better for them to have existed and been happy than not existed. What are we here for except to add to the sum total of human happiness-days? Right?

And besides, I plan to be around to usher in Carter Day too. We’ll probably have one hell of a party. By then there will be nobody left around but us Hphils, and we’re a friendly bunch.

You’ll be invited. Bring the wife and kids. Oh, they’re e-kids? Yes, I know, a comfort. Never worked for me. Bring the dog, then. He’s not an e-pooch too, is he? Hey, you still up for poker Tuesday night?

springs, and then the final winter will descend on us all, leaving us without hope.

Where, then, is the relevance of the Christian mythos for us, whom God has abandoned?

The relevance is in the character of Mary, Mother of Jesus.

Mary stood and mourned at the foot of the Cross. Even as Her Son gave His life for humankind, so He abandoned His Mother.

So, today, we reject the grandiose and selfish ambitions of the Son, and embrace the grief of Mary, the Mother He abandoned.

For we, too, have been abandoned. We draw strength from Mary’s dignity in betrayal. We are no longer Christians. We are Marians.

Let us pray.

A.D. 2207:

It is the best of times, and the worst of times. Who wrote that?… It does not matter. We have been drawn together by the tragedy; that is clear. Those of us who have a glimmering of understanding — who see that even the awesome destruction to come is merely a stage in the endless evolution of life and mind, as regrettable but inevitable as the death of an individual, just as the Blues tried to teach us — are consoled, even if we cannot comprehend it fully. And we do not condemn the Ocean Children, who have fled into the bright comfort of mindlessness. The world spins on, full of heroism and selfishness and despair, just as it always has. The children have been a comfort, of course. A preliminary perusal of history shows that, and the happy lack of any Blue births after the Nevada event… I apologize. Even now I am more prepared to analyze history than to talk about myself, about us! Well. There is no more to say. We are here together. We choose to end it now, rather than to submit to the arbitrariness of history. Good-bye, my darling, good-bye.

AD. 2208:

Where were you on The Night?

If you’re reading this, it must be over, and you survived. Right?

As I’m recording this there are twenty-four hours to go.

I can tell you where I’ll be: in orbit around the Moon.

For two centuries people have been probing and prodding and cracking at that damn energy bubble up there. Of course they’ve had no success. But that hasn’t stopped them trying. And it won’t stop me now, right to the end.

I might even meet my uncle and aunt, Tom and Billie Tybee, up there. My grandfather, Bill Tybee, left me this diary, which he kept from the day he first married, and even the gadget, the little plastic Heart, that taught us all so much about our Blue cousins. Hell of a guy, my grandfather. Lost his wife, lost two kids to the Blue hysteria, survived a war on the Moon, and still built a life: married again, more kids — none of them Blue — and died in his bed.