Read Online The Long Utopia by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Terry Pratchett
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hydrogen and methane as fuel.
Joshua recognized all this. A colony built out of recycled junk from the Datum, Madison West 11 was characteristic of the second great wave of migration out of the suffering Datum Earth.
The climate as ever had been the problem. By 2046, six years after the Yellowstone eruption itself and the onset of the volcano winter, things had seemed to be stabilizing, if not actually improving. People did continue to die; Joshua remembered a report that in the end Yellowstone had killed more people from lung diseases caused by the ash than had perished in the immediate aftermath of the eruption itself. But then some climatic tipping point had been reached – some had said it was the collapse of the Gulf Stream, but by then the science data-gathering itself had become too patchy to be sure – and the winter that year had been worse than ever. The rivers froze, the ports iced up, and Midwest farmland submitted to permafrost. When the big hydroelectric plants in Quebec began to fail in the freeze, the American national electricity grid collapsed, and such great cities as Boston and New York had finally to be abandoned.
Across America, people who had clung on to their homes for six years finally gave up and walked or drove out of there, either south across the Datum or stepwise into the Low Earth worlds West or East, where refugee camps had overwhelmed communities that were already struggling to cope. With time new towns had started to emerge, like this one in West 11, towns with a new character, using the scavenged remains of the old and scrambling for new solutions. Timber, plentiful on the Low Earths, was used in fuel-producing gasifiers, like the one on the tractor Joshua could see now – a fuel source that was a lot more accessible, for now, than coal or oil or nuclear. Datum museums had been emptied of nineteenth-century spinning wheels and looms and steam engines, for use as models for new kinds of industry. Electricity was got whatever way you could,such as with alternators and batteries from step-capable vehicles like that golf buggy, fixed to windmills or improvised paddle wheels in rivers. Anything resembling a web was still rare outside the larger, older stepwise cities like Valhalla, but in a town like this there would be walkie-talkies and ham radio set-ups, and maybe somebody would be laying down copper wire for a phone network.
Of course agriculture had been the key, as it had been from the day of the eruption itself – the need to feed all those displaced people. There had been a major international incident when in 2047 the US Navy had raided the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island, for its stock of seeds for heirloom crops – the more primitive, hardier strains needed less cultivation than the varieties that had dominated the vast mechanized fields of the pre-Yellowstone Datum.
But Joshua thought it was working, even if these new patchwork Low Earth towns weren’t quite like any other: neither like their Datum forebears nor even the raw colonial towns of the Long Earth, like Reboot and Hell-Knows-Where. Madison West 11 was always going to be a jumble of old and new. You didn’t drive a car; there were few vehicles on the dirt roads save for farm trucks and ambulances and cop cars and bicycles. You didn’t go online any more, but lined up to deposit your money at bank branches, like the manager was Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life . Yet these quaint 1900-type practices were studded with bits of high tech, such as solar-cell blankets fixed to thatch roofs.
And Datum America itself had not been abandoned altogether, even now. Americans had come to recognize that what they and their ancestors had made of their continent-sized country was a historic monument in itself. So the new worlds had striven to come to the rescue of the old.
Nelson, evidently tiring, had been quiet since they’d sat down here.
Joshua gave him a playful punch on the shoulder.
Joshua recognized all this. A colony built out of recycled junk from the Datum, Madison West 11 was characteristic of the second great wave of migration out of the suffering Datum Earth.
The climate as ever had been the problem. By 2046, six years after the Yellowstone eruption itself and the onset of the volcano winter, things had seemed to be stabilizing, if not actually improving. People did continue to die; Joshua remembered a report that in the end Yellowstone had killed more people from lung diseases caused by the ash than had perished in the immediate aftermath of the eruption itself. But then some climatic tipping point had been reached – some had said it was the collapse of the Gulf Stream, but by then the science data-gathering itself had become too patchy to be sure – and the winter that year had been worse than ever. The rivers froze, the ports iced up, and Midwest farmland submitted to permafrost. When the big hydroelectric plants in Quebec began to fail in the freeze, the American national electricity grid collapsed, and such great cities as Boston and New York had finally to be abandoned.
Across America, people who had clung on to their homes for six years finally gave up and walked or drove out of there, either south across the Datum or stepwise into the Low Earth worlds West or East, where refugee camps had overwhelmed communities that were already struggling to cope. With time new towns had started to emerge, like this one in West 11, towns with a new character, using the scavenged remains of the old and scrambling for new solutions. Timber, plentiful on the Low Earths, was used in fuel-producing gasifiers, like the one on the tractor Joshua could see now – a fuel source that was a lot more accessible, for now, than coal or oil or nuclear. Datum museums had been emptied of nineteenth-century spinning wheels and looms and steam engines, for use as models for new kinds of industry. Electricity was got whatever way you could,such as with alternators and batteries from step-capable vehicles like that golf buggy, fixed to windmills or improvised paddle wheels in rivers. Anything resembling a web was still rare outside the larger, older stepwise cities like Valhalla, but in a town like this there would be walkie-talkies and ham radio set-ups, and maybe somebody would be laying down copper wire for a phone network.
Of course agriculture had been the key, as it had been from the day of the eruption itself – the need to feed all those displaced people. There had been a major international incident when in 2047 the US Navy had raided the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island, for its stock of seeds for heirloom crops – the more primitive, hardier strains needed less cultivation than the varieties that had dominated the vast mechanized fields of the pre-Yellowstone Datum.
But Joshua thought it was working, even if these new patchwork Low Earth towns weren’t quite like any other: neither like their Datum forebears nor even the raw colonial towns of the Long Earth, like Reboot and Hell-Knows-Where. Madison West 11 was always going to be a jumble of old and new. You didn’t drive a car; there were few vehicles on the dirt roads save for farm trucks and ambulances and cop cars and bicycles. You didn’t go online any more, but lined up to deposit your money at bank branches, like the manager was Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life . Yet these quaint 1900-type practices were studded with bits of high tech, such as solar-cell blankets fixed to thatch roofs.
And Datum America itself had not been abandoned altogether, even now. Americans had come to recognize that what they and their ancestors had made of their continent-sized country was a historic monument in itself. So the new worlds had striven to come to the rescue of the old.
Nelson, evidently tiring, had been quiet since they’d sat down here.
Joshua gave him a playful punch on the shoulder.
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