The Millennium Blues

by James Gunn

  Certainly there would be famine. Already in many places in the world but particularly in northern Africa, famine had corrected population excesses—where massive relief efforts had not intervened—but only after land had been ruined by over-cultivation. Increasingly hunger would seem the normal human condition, and where people were hungry they would be driven to desperate remedies.

  Hunger rendered people susceptible to disease. Germs and viruses found easy victims among weakened bodies, and then, having fed and grown strong, swept on to healthier countries. The world should expect new plagues, perhaps as deadly as smallpox to the Amerindians or the Spanish influenza of 1919 or the Black Death of the Middle Ages that destroyed half the population of Europe. Moreover, new genetic experiments might get out of the laboratory into the general population. A stray virus of fatal dimensions impossible to calculate was long overdue.

  “As a matter of fact,” Gentry had said, “some new viruses that have become epidemic in the past decade or two may well have originated in that fashion. So when disease-control laboratories announce some miracle cure for a new disease, we might well ask whether that disease, or another, did not also originate there."

  Hunger also turned upon its neighbors. Hungry countries went to war. Wars reduced population. It used to be that such reductions were only temporary, since the basic necessity for population increase was a plentiful supply of fertile women, but contemporary wars do not spare civilians. Women would die, too. Perhaps the entire human species would die, if the scientists predicting a nuclear winter were correct.

  The blonde in the second row licked her upper lip. She had a creamy, unblemished skin, not like Angel's, which he had no delight any more in unveiling or touching and only physiological pressures that he was unable to relieve in any other way drove him to embrace. And even that release had been denied him since Angel's recent poor health. He felt sorry for her, but he also had a healthy appreciation for his own needs. Gentry had imagined himself removing the blonde's clothing piece by piece and unveiling that youthful skin.

  It was true, he had pointed out, that the world had not yet resorted to all-out nuclear war, although it had come close. But in the coming year or years of starvation and madness, wars would be fought with all the weapons at hand.

  Finally, awaiting humanity if it avoided the three fates that Malthus had predicted were the second unholy trinity: energy, pollution, and heat.

  These were the lashes with which he had finally scourged the audience into submission and temporary—he had no illusions about permanent change in the human species—agreement with his social thesis. The easy energy sources were running low, and the high-technology sources were either inadequate, like geothermal, too dangerous, like nuclear fission, or too difficult, like nuclear fusion and space mirrors.

  Energy was still available, to be sure, but the costs of availability were rising toward the criminal if not the suicidal. Pollution was rapidly rendering the biosphere unlivable, and although pollution could be controlled, the costs of control made a technological civilization possible only to the few. And heat, the ultimate pollution, could not be controlled. Civilization operated on machines that converted raw materials of one kind or another into energy; such processes produced waste heat, and waste heat accumulated, along with the carbon dioxide that was the byproduct of chemical combustion and trapped increasing amounts of the sun's heat. No way to stop it: Earth would turn increasingly hot and finally become unlivable.

  The only way to rewrite that tragic scenario, he had concluded, was to change the way people lived and thought. No longer could we afford the luxury of governments that make concern about individual welfare their central organizing principle. That was merely institutionalized selfishness. We had to change to systems that encourage people to think of themselves as members of groups, that place the welfare of all above the welfare of any smaller number.

  “And if you ask me: Am I recommending socialism?” he had said. “My answer is that of course I am. I am not the one urging this change upon you, however, but the unavoidable logic of catastrophe. We cannot afford, if we wish to survive, to continue to think ourselves as anything but the human species. We will all live—or, more likely, we will all die. We cannot survive as individuals.

  “I say that we will all die because I do not believe in the basic rationality or even the basic good will of the human species. I do not believe that people can change. I do not believe that they will change, even under the threat of imminent destruction if they do not. I would be glad to be proved wrong."

  He had finished: fifty minutes on the nose, like a well-trained academic. And the audience had approved its own evisceration. It was a simple group, in spite of its university setting, and it had responded to his oratory as uncritically as any groundlings. The faculty and students wore their hair shirts with pride and welcomed the ashes to their heads with melancholy joy.

  The blonde in the second row sat, her breathing rapid, staring at him, while her neighbors rose and headed for the aisles. When she got up at last, he moved toward that side of the platform so that their paths would converge as he descended.

  “Dr. Gentry,” a woman's voice said, and a middle-aged woman with dyed black hair and too much makeup intercepted him. Her voice was breathless. “It was such a beautiful presentation. I don't know how you managed to cover so much—"

  “Thank you—goodbye,” he said, trying to move past her as he saw the blonde entering the aisle.

  But the middle-aged woman had maneuvered her too-bony body in front of him. “I just love your books, Dr. Gentry.” Her eyelashes were long and black and unmistakably false. They fluttered against her cheeks in a sickening imitation of youthful flirtatiousness. She was reaching into her large, leather purse and pulling out—not one but two, no, three of his books to autograph.

  He looked despairingly at the back of the blonde moving smoothly up the aisle. The back looked even more appealing than the front.

  By the time he had autographed the books, a seedy-looking professor in a tweed jacket was standing behind the middle-aged woman. He was holding a pipe by the bowl and pointing the stem at him. “What about the decline in the population growth rate in China?” he demanded. “I'm a geography professor and population growth is one of my specialties."

  “It's only temporary,” Gentry said heavily, “and partly a result of drastic measures that cannot be sustained."

  “But twenty years ago, your book on the population explosion predicted that by this time we would be destroyed, and we're no closer to that than we ever were,” the geography professor said.

  “Are you in a hurry?” Gentry asked.

  “I'm a physicist,” said a tall, slender youngish man, “and you apparently are unaware of new breakthroughs in thermonuclear fusion—"

  “I've been hearing about such breakthroughs for thirty years,” Gentry said, “and we don't seem to be any closer to a practical application. It seems to me that there are fundamental obstacles.” He rocked back on his heels. He had given up on the blonde.

  “But that's what I said about—” began the geographer.

  “But in the experimental tokomak at—” the physicist said at the same time.

  “In any case,” Gentry said. “My argument is not dependent on any one element. If I grant this gentleman his slowing of the population explosion and you your fusion generators, it will only postpone the inevitable by a few years. Population growth will not stop short of catastrophe, and more energy only will mean more waste heat. And meanwhile political tensions increase and although nuclear arsenals have dwindled, more nuclear weapons have fallen into the hands of terrorists and other irresponsible and desperate groups."

  Another woman, this one a fat bleached blonde, spoke up from behind the geographer. “You convinced me, Dr. Gentry. But I wonder what you convinced me of. Are we supposed to just give up and die?"

  “My business is to make you think,” Gentry said, “not lead you by the hand. But if you had been lis
tening at the end, you would understand that the only way to salvation is by social action."

  An earnest, dark-haired young man had edged his way into the circle that now surrounded Gentry. “What kind of social action are you recommending? Revolution?"

  “If necessary,” Gentry said. The circle recoiled a few inches. These were the privileged few, and revolution would mean the end of their comfort. “It would be better if people would simply stop being selfish and agree to act for the greater good of the whole society, to reduce their standards of living to a level that this planet could sustain and that everybody could share, to reduce their numbers to a size that could coexist comfortably, and to give up notions of sovereignty and nationality. In other words, if people agreed to behave rationally."

  “But what about freedom?” the dark young man asked.

  “What about catastrophe?” Gentry responded.

  “Isn't that communism?"

  “I'm talking rational behavior. I'm not interested in labels. If you want to call communism rational, that's your choice."

  “How are we going to reduce our standard of living?” the fat blonde asked.

  “We can start in little ways. By reducing our dependence upon machines. Walking or riding a bicycle instead of starting up an automobile. Staying colder in the winter and hotter in the summer. Growing as much of our own food as we can. Eating less meat and more vegetable matter, which would be more healthful anyway. Stop using fertilizers and farm machinery. Go back to the land. Stop expecting other people to do things for us that we can do for ourselves—"

  “In other words, live like our ancestors lived,” said the geographer.

  “Exactly,” Gentry growled.

  “A lower living standard means a lower survival rate,” said the physicist. “More infant mortality. More people dying of disease."

  “Exactly."

  “If everyone is raising their own food and doing their own chores,” the dark young man said, “that might be the end of philosophy and art and poetry."

  “As in Aristotelian Athens or Shakespearean London."

  “Dr. Gentry,” an sandy-haired middle-aged man said, “we've arranged a reception in your honor, and perhaps this conversation could continue at my place."

  Gentry thought about the blonde and felt bitter. “I don't go to receptions,” he said.

  “But—” The man seemed unable to find words to fit the situation. “There are guests—"

  “That's not my problem."

  “I understood—. There was correspondence."

  “If I have to associate with the people who pay me,” Gentry said heavily, “my fee would be twice as high.” He enjoyed the look of shock on their faces, but he didn't show it. Nobody said what they meant anymore. If people spoke their minds, there would be less polite boredom, more real encounters.

  “And now,” he said, “if you will pardon me—"

  They would pardon him, he knew, as he moved through them toward the aisle. A person who spoke bluntly was always forgiven, because he said what they all wanted to say. He did what they all wanted to do. And they would dress up his calculated rudeness as rugged honesty and tell stories to their friends about their encounter with the man Diogenes was looking for.

  As he emerged from the auditorium, he heard a soft voice on his right. “Dr. Gentry,” it began, “I just wanted to tell you—"

  It was the nubile blonde. She had waited for him after all.

  He took her hand and placed it on his arm. “I want to hear everything you have to say,” he said. “But this is not a good place to talk. Come with me and we'll have a bit of dinner, a drink or two, and some good conversation."

  In a world doomed to catastrophic destruction, which could not much longer avoid the precipice, which might, indeed, already be toppling, he had gotten lucky once again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  March 8, 2000

  Elois Hays

  Elois Hays returned to the theater exactly on time. The building was dark and empty. Some places seem right without people—bedrooms and bathrooms, for instance, but others need the press of life or machinery's illusion of the vital process. Busy intersections are like that, department stores, restaurants, auditoriums, theaters.... Without people they seem oddly wrong, scenes not for murder but for horror.

  She was used to getting back before the others. An hour for lunch meant an hour and a half for everybody else. But she was never late. She didn't want to keep anyone waiting. Josh would have said that it was her professionalism, and her psychiatrist, that it was her over-punitive superego. Why couldn't it simply be the right thing to do?

  She wanted to do the right thing, and all the wrong things in her life had happened not because she willed them but because of accidents or miscalculations. She was always on time because she didn't want ever to be in the wrong; she didn't want the responsibility for things not working out; she didn't want anybody yelling at her. So even when she knew the others would not return on time, she was there.

  She wandered down the left-hand aisle toward the stage feeling around her all the ghosts of audiences past. Their quiet was the hush of enthrallment as the magic of the stage captured them, enraptured them. They listened, they were involved, they were all the great audiences rolled into one in this place where magic was commonplace.

  She had always been in love with the theater, ever since she had been a little girl. She had loved to dress up and become someone else. Her psychiatrist said that this was because she was unhappy with the person she was, but she thought it was because she was in love with magic. People didn't have to escape from something; they could escape to something. Escape could be a positive step.

  Well, maybe there was something to the thought that she truly enjoyed losing herself in a part, thinking like that person, feeling like that person, becoming that person. When she played a strong woman like Elizabeth the Queen, Medea, or Hedda Gabler, she felt strong and confident, sure of herself as she wasn't in real life. And even when she played a weak woman like Ophelia or Camille, she felt as if the world made sense and that even her weakness had a place in it.

  There is something grand about dying for love or because the world is out of joint, but there is nothing satisfying or redemptive in living without love because you are afraid to make another mistake, or failing at love because you don't know how to play the role.

  She mounted the empty stage with its few bare sets and props to suggest the lounge of the mountain inn where the four doomed characters in The North Wind had come together to strut and fret their hour before the new ice age ground them and their artifacts into drift to be puzzled over by some strange successor breed.

  She pivoted upon the dusty floor. If the audience could see how it really was, perhaps the mood so essential to the magic would be destroyed. Dirt and grime, canvas and artifice, the paint applied too thick, the lines too deep, the costumes dirty and perhaps a bit ragged, the actors smelling of garlic or alcohol, or even of unwashed bodies. But then the magic began, the stage became a wonderland, and the actors became like gods, capable of commanding tears and laughter—yes, and love.

  The opening nights were grand with all their uncertainties and fears of unremembered lines. Like dressing up for a costume ball. Everyone becoming someone else, falling into their parts, their lines coming like natural conversation, only better, not the way conversation is but the way it ought to be. And beyond the footlights, the audience falling silent before the voices from the stage, demanding attention, weaving spells.

  She remembered moments when it had happened. Surely it was worthwhile to have lived, if only for this, to have felt the power of the act and the transmutation of lead into gold. She stood upon the stage and listened to the echoes of all the great lines spoken upon its boards.

  Actors and audience, players and played-upon. Shakespeare had rung all the changes upon the resemblances of life to the stage, or the stage to life. That was what they were, weren't they? Sometimes players, sometimes played-upon, o
r always played upon with only an occasional illusion that one was a player, a manipulator rather than one manipulated, an actor rather than an audience.

  But she liked the stage best, she thought, when it was like this—bare. As in Our Town. With only the suggestion of place in the midst of the frank admission of theater. Until the words of the Stage Manager begins to weave a spell, and the actors create their illusion, and the great magic begins again. And it is like being a child once more, dressing up, dreaming marvelous dreams.

  She wandered off, stage left, looking for someone else in the gloom broken only by a stray beam of light from a distant bulb. Hearing sounds, she moved toward the dressing rooms, passing her own, coming to Susan's and finding the door barely ajar.

  The sounds were familiar but puzzlingly alien as well.

  Elois Hays had looked out the inn window through cold blue eyes that reflected the advancing glacier. “The long winter has come again,” she had said, “and it will bury everything human and decent."

  The Poet had looked up from the little table nearest the bar. “Human and decent,” he had said bitterly, “there's an oxymoron for you."

  “At least,” Teddy had said, rummaging behind the bar for the absinthe, “it will bury us first, and we won't have to worry about the rest of the world."

  Susan had been standing by the glass doors that opened onto the veranda. “Maybe the rest of you are willing to wait while that glacier grinds us into little pieces, but I think we should get out of here—travel south while there's still time."

  “There's no escape,” Elois had said. “The ice is going to cover the world."

  “Besides,” Teddy had said, “we've had a taste of the weather out there already. If we hadn't come across this place here in the foothills—"