CONTRAILS VANISHED FROM THE SKY

SYLLABUS

     The above may be a dreaded, exciting or memorable word depending on a scholar's status or age, but although it is not the hook for which a writer toils mightily to interest a reader, your author offers it as a quick alternative to the content of a six-hundred-page tome that most of us can imagine in ten minutes.  The collapse of a civilization is a familiar topic on bookshelves the world over, but the following act is always more interesting.  What's to be done with the pieces left of our world is at hand in this novella, with no glorious escape atop a billionaire's toy.  We are stuck here, let's enjoy it.

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      Two millennia had passed since the cataclysm, but the old prejudices had only abated slightly and slowly.  Though the image of an Ancient's face was still dreadful to behold, features once despised were gaining some acceptance.  A short, heavily built fellow could find a job shoveling fish on a boat so long as he kept his red mane cropped tight.  To polish their bien-pensant credentials and honor their guests, society matrons favored slight, pale-skin maids in pastel veils to serve mocha in mahogany bowls rimmed with gold.  The tone contrasts were lovely, though the presence of quasi-enslaved Ancients was disquieting, but the maids knew their place.

     To the Shaman's heirs such tidbits were heresy, vile affronts to the Mother who might just repeat her malediction.  On Her children perhaps.

     In learned circles there was still no agreement on the causes of the cataclysm, although the Institute's archives offered plenty of documentation for its sequence.

     In the last years of the ever more threatening global heating, the predicted release of methane from permafrost in the northern reaches of the Russian federation had steadily increased to general indifference until the gas began to burn.  Until then it had been just another set of fake news to bolster the argument of the climate change enthusiasts, those socialist maniacs who would have invented anything to destroy the great engines of progress that drove universal growth and enrichment.  Why, the weather changed all the time anyhow and constitutional amendments granting liberty in the pursuit of happiness for all had become widespread in the world's wealthy democracies.  This was music to the ears of the autocratic tycoons who ruled most of them and had brought forth social security systems financed by their beneficiaries with their ownership of stocks and bonds.  Most everyone was getting wealthier in their dotage and accumulating toys, the favorite being the guns one surely needed to protect riches from the riffraff.  Life was good and so what if a few neighborhoods in coastal cities, their downtown even, flooded on New Moon tides.  Nearly universal wealth made it easy enough to pack up and move to higher ground.

     More than the few inches of sea level rise, the fires in Siberia caught the attention of the news media.  The summer blazes and their toll in life and property in the desiccated forests of the middle latitudes had made for great imagery and advertising revenue, but the ignition of the methane and its feeding cycle on the permafrost's organic soils was something else altogether. Immense conflagrations covered hundreds of thousand acres, year around.  Great optics.  The heat drew winds from the lands to its south, the smoke rose into the Far North where jet streams brought it back over the populated areas of the middle latitudes.  You could see its haze, sample its stench in New York City in the winter's coldest days.  When the methane ignition cycle began its devastation in the Nunavut Territories of Northern Canada, the media finally saw fit to report on climate change and its stunning consequences day in and day out.

     It was a great opportunity for the tycoons, a chance to raise the flags, proclaim unity in the face of the emergency, mobilize their militias to protect the population against its greatest enemy, not the warming of the planet, but their fellow man, the migrants whose heartbreaking stories had pretty much disappeared from the news.  Call it misery fatigue.  Tune it out, change the channel, there goes the counting of eyeballs and the advertising revenues.  But when the concrete and steel serpentines of the border walls appeared on the screens sneaking across the world's most beautiful wildernesses like modern revivals of the Great Wall of China, when the automated laser pulse weapons began to pick off the intruders at the shores, the ratings rose sky high.  Why didn't those fools heed the orders of the drones?  Yeah, go back where you came from, swim back to Africa... At long last, government was taking care of the problem.

     Just when the media grew uncomfortable with the massacres of innocents that brought a slight sense of guilt to their viewers, mother nature came to the rescue with a doozy, tens of thousands of deaths without human agency to blame.  In the Philippines, within an easy afternoon drive from Manila, the infamous Mount Pinatubo blew its top and induced a series of earthquakes while blanketing the area in deadly ash clouds of very fine particles.  Its gray, rolling clouds smothering the landscape and extinguishing sunlight were such a gift as background to breathless newscasters that another catastrophe at Lake Kivu in the faraway African continent would have gone unnoticed weren't for its shores' two million residents.  For unknown reason the concentrations of nearly frozen methane at the lake's 1500 feet depths that were exploited for energy production began to surface and ignite.  From the news standpoint, the casualties were significant enough, but the visuals were stale.  Gigantic methane blazes, just like Siberia, but without the black smoke of the burning tundra.

     Meanwhile the everlasting conflicts of the Middle East came to a peak of madness.  Someone bombed an oil tanker, someone responded with a volley of tactical nuclear weapons.  The predictable escalation destroyed the Mediterranean's optic cables making communications between warring parties impossible and expanding in a succession of disastrous failures in one nation after another.  Be it for credit cards or social network chitchat or commerce and industry, the net fell silent.

     Terrifying events indeed, but how could they possibly have prompted an abrupt reversal of the warming of the planet and ushered the ice age that brought worldwide chaos to an apocalyptic conclusion?

     Betula and Liriodendron did not partake in the debate.  They were laureates of the Institute's Department of Botany, their eyes were on the future.  Their mission would be to trace the return of their namesakes to the northern wastes, now that the ice sheet was beginning its retreat.

     That, and whatever else they might find worthy of the Institute's fancy.

NEXT, CHAPTER ONE: TESTIMONIES FROM THE ARCHIVES