The Aftermath

by Samuel C. Florman

  "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!" Sarah quoted Wordsworth to describe our days and nights at sea. My new love, the English major, was much given to literary quotations. "I'll try to keep it under control," she said sheepishly, by way of apology. The fact was, I adored every word she spoke.

  We spent some of our mornings on shore, taking preplanned tours of Africa's southeastern coast: Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and finally South Africa. But the itinerary that had seemed so appealing when I read about it in a brochure paled in comparison to what Sarah and I were discovering in each other. I'm afraid that I didn't learn as much as I might have about the interesting places we visited; my heart and mind just weren't into it. Instead, I experienced ten days of pure happiness, and then...

  ——————

  After the cataclysm, as the sky first glowed red, then darkened, as the outside air grew lung-searingly hot and then bitter cold, and as we became gradually aware of what had happened in the world, our group spent hours together talking, sometimes lapsing into long silences, and privately—although we did not at first speak of it— praying. Sarah, Mary, Herb, and I, traveling with our parents— and Mary and Herb with younger sisters—had been spared the ultimate pain of losing those closest to us. Roxy, although she wept bitter tears for the human race, acted as if she never had a family of her own, and rebuffed any of us who approached her on the subject. Tom had suffered the greatest loss of all—parents, a large and close group of siblings, and lots of nieces and nephews. He reacted with a bleak stoicism that saddened us all. Mary tried to ease his sorrow with religious consolation, but he gently dismissed her efforts.

  At one point, Roxy impulsively suggested that we resume our line-dancing classes. We knew that she meant well, but we didn't have the heart for it. There is a popular image of mobs, amid the ultimate calamity, engaged in orgies of drink, dance, and sex. Supposedly this happened during the plagues of the Middle Ages, and it has been envisioned in speculative stories and science fiction books. That's not the way it was with us. An extra beer, yeah, why not? But we had no spirit for wild partying. None.

  Yet, while we gave up our dancing—although we vowed to return to it one day—we still needed to talk. And one of the things we talked about was the miracle of our coming together, finding each other, and being spared together. We marveled at the phenomenon of our dancing and falling in love at the very moment that the universe was hurling the most awful devastation at our planet.

  After the ship sank, and we found ourselves castaways on a desolate beach, physical needs took priority over philosophical debate. We were busy all day, helping with the basic work of establishing a camp. Yet in the evenings we six managed to find each other and huddled together on the sand, wrapped in blankets, looking like refugees in some disaster zone—which is what we were.

  I remember in particular one discussion we had soon after coming ashore. The expeditionary force had left that morning, headed inland, and there was widespread worry about what they were likely to discover. Nevertheless, when the six of us got to talking, our spirits took wing. With the natural optimism of youth (as my father would say), we felt intuitively that we would survive. What we viewed with fascination and alarm was the reality of being cast back, technologically, more than six millennia.

  I recalled having studied, as part of my undergraduate course work, the crafts of the Iroquois Indians of New York State, and being fascinated by the ways in which they coped with life in the Stone Age. The earliest Dutch explorers found the Iroquois manufacturing nets, twine, and rope from elm, cedar, and basswood barks; weaving baskets, mats, moccasins, belts, and burden straps from vegetable fibers and animal hair; tanning deerskins and decorating them with hair and shells; fashioning clay vessels and clay pipes; carving wooden ladles, spoons, dishes, and ceremonial masks. These so-called primitive people built impressive longhouses, manufactured excellent canoes and paddles, bows and arrows, snow-shoes, lacrosse sticks, spears, tomahawks, and war clubs. They used antlers to make knife handles, digging blades, awls, combs, needles, and fish hooks. They manufactured hoes by sharpening the shoulder blade of a deer or the shell of a tortoise and fastening it to a stick. They fashioned stone mortars for pounding corn, grinding mineral paint, and for pulverizing roots and barks for medicine.

  The Iroquois, of course, were just one tribal group among the myriad whose prehistoric handicrafts have been uncovered and studied by archaeologists. Even the most sophisticated engineer cannot fail to be dazzled by the evidence of technical genius exhibited in natural history museums in every corner of the world. It is bewitching to stare at the objects in display cases and to think of living like these early peoples lived, without factories and power plants, without bulldozers and jet planes—creative and ingenious, yet dwelling in harmony with nature.

  "Perhaps," I mused, "just perhaps, this is the way we ought to go."

  "We may have no choice," Herb said, "depending on what the expeditionary force finds—or doesn't find."

  "It sounds good to me," Roxy said. "A new beginning. A new world. A chance to develop our own Garden of Eden."

  "Oh, come on," Tom said. "Don't tell me you'll be happy to live your life without indoor plumbing, television, and air conditioning?"

  "To say nothing of Mozart and Shakespeare," murmured Sarah.

  Roxy smiled sadly, shrugged, and remained silent.

  "I can tell you one thing," Tom persisted. "The six hundred engineers in our group are not going to settle for some kind of primitive paradise. What we want is technological progress, plenty of it and the sooner the better."

  "Easy does it," Herb said. "Whatever we decide to do, it's going to take time. I know you feel a sense of urgency, Tom, but remember, we have no place else to go." He winked at Roxy.

  "Also," I said, "you can't think just in terms of yourself and a few like-minded Western techies. There are many different people around here with ideas of their own. Engineers are not a majority, even among the passengers. And there is considerable variety even among the engineers. Our tour group contains, by design—I know because I saw how my father and his committee put it together— a large number of young people, a balance between the sexes, a certain amount of ethnic diversity, and a twenty percent representation from foreign countries, that is, from outside the United States. Asians are particularly well represented, being leaders in the engineering profession in the United States as well as in their native lands. The ship's company also comprises many under-thirty folks, and features a striking assortment of different types. Captain Nordstrom and his officers are mostly Scandinavian. The seamen are mostly Asian. The rest are from just about everywhere.

  "As for the inhabitants of this area where we landed—assuming some have survived—they are certainly mixed: not only South African blacks and whites; but, from what I have learned, a surprisingly large number of Indians and Pakistanis, more than ten percent of the local inhabitants. The population of this world of the future is likely to be diverse with a capital D—and they may not all share your high-tech views, Mr. Tom Swift."

  "Is that a coincidence?" Sarah asked. "A multiplicity of races and cultures. A gene pool of amazing variety. I wonder..."

  I looked at Sarah, who smiled and shifted closer to me.

  As our debate ran its course, and the evening light dimmed along the beach, I found myself surreptitiously beginning to think about my own personal future. And almost instantly I decided that I wanted to marry Sarah. In the world that had existed until just a few days earlier; I would have carefully considered how to proceed. I was very much in love, yes, but there would have been so many practical considerations—schooling to be completed, career to be considered, Sarah in Pennsylvania, me in Georgia—plus the lack of pressure to marry, indeed the very opposite force at work, the pressure to remain single until later. Now there would be no "later" in the conventional sense. Education, career, homemaking, all were compressed into something that must be embarked upon immediately.
In that previous life, at twenty-five years of age, I was just a kid. Now I was a mature member of the tribe, already past the time when I should have been starting a family.

  And there was another factor that I suddenly found frightening. In that other existence, if through some terrible turn of events, Sarah should have been lost to me, I would eventually have gotten over it—would I?—and found somebody else, somewhere, out of the millions of suitable young women in the world. Here there was a limited number of young women, and the potential loss seemed vastly greater. How can I say that the woman I loved seemed more precious in a world suddenly become smaller? I will not say it; but I admit that the thought occurred to me.

  Also, marriage in this coming society, the shape of which I could hardly envisage, loomed larger than marriage in the world we had left. Here, a partnership in survival entailed working together as part of an extended family, finding food and shelter, averting ever-impending hazards, striving to make a new world. I understood, as I never did before, the concept of marrying for the sake of carrying on the blood line, saving the farm—or the homestead, or the kingdom. I found myself thinking of Sarah as a mother, a breeder of a new race.

  Sarah. What a name for this moment! Sarah, wife of Abraham, mother of Isaac. God vowed that she would become a "mother of nations." What was I doing, thinking so much lately about the Bible? I guess it couldn't be helped, what with fire and flood and the destruction of the world. Anyhow, putting it all together, I knew that I needed Sarah by my side. As I saw her looking at me, I could tell that she felt the same way.

  The idea, unspoken, was spontaneously in the air. We all became silent. Sarah and I smiled at each other, as did Tom and Mary, as did Herb and Roxy. In an enchanted moment, it became apparent that each of the three couples had made a life commitment.

  "Marriages are made in heaven," I said later to Sarah, "and that's doubly true for us, brought together by a comet." I then observed that I was picking up her habit of quoting the classics. "I guess that's Shakespeare," I added, feeling smug.

  "Close," Sarah answered. "It's John Lyly, a contemporary of Shakespeare's." Then, suddenly pulling me to her, she said, "And the full quote is: 'Marriages are made in heaven—and consummated on earth.' "

  —————

  In the long run, of course, even the most icily analytical engineer— my father to the nth power—could not deal with this disaster in the lucid form of logic. When the Focus Group met, we might start with reasoned debate, but would eventually resort to poetry and emotion—and silent reflection. There is no way in which we can rationalize what has happened and try to compare it with anything else. The world destroyed. We didn't really absorb it that first day, or come to grips with it. How could we? How can we even now? But there it was, and here it is.

  As the immediate threat lessened, and we found ourselves on this shore, warm and dry and with food to eat, tense vigilance among the survivors gave way to elemental relief, then quickly turned to something else among most people, something difficult to define—I can only call it shock. The destruction of the world is different from the loss of a loved one, unlike even widespread calamities such as earthquakes or wartime massacres. Everyone gone. Everything gone. Impossible to grasp. Carried beyond fear, grief, and anger to shock, we came inevitably to feel awe in the biblical sense, dread of the immense, powerful, and ultimately unfathomable universe.

  I've said that I would leave the serious philosophizing to others, yet here I am talking again about awe and the Bible. Actually, my primary feeling—my primal feeling—was the joy of being alive, of having survived. I've read about the guilt experienced by survivors—soldiers in battle or people in concentration camps—individuals who were astonished to find that, when grief for others seemed called for, they were overwhelmed by relief at their own deliverance. I felt some such guilt, but not as much as I suppose I should have. I was pleased that my father was spared, and achingly sad that my friends back home were gone. But I could not subdue the exhilaration I felt because of the elemental fact of my own survival.

  Of course, there was one major difference between the passengers and the crew, unspoken but momentous. Most of the passengers were together with their immediate families, husbands with wives and parents with children. Most of the crew came alone. Many of them are young, single, and adventurous, but not all. There was mourning aplenty, mostly private and subdued.

  To give the full picture, I must also mention the suicides. At least, we all assume that's what they were. Shortly after the full scope of the Event was known, while we were still at sea, three members of the crew disappeared, presumably overboard. Each of the three had expressed to friends their agonizing grief over having lost loved ones—and they explicitly announced their intention of putting an end to their own unendurable lives. There was no official announcement of these losses, but the news did get around. When the people and supplies from the ship reached the shore, and the captain announced that all on board were accounted for, he too was making the assumption that was universally shared.

  Awe, grief, shock, wonder—all such feelings inevitably gave way to the immediate pressures of simply getting through each day. Most of the survivors—young and old, passengers and crew, workers and academics, leaders and humble laborers—found an effective remedy for melancholy in hard work. They turned the precariousness of our situation to advantage as an aid to personal healing.

  4

  After a five-day trek up flood-scoured hills, the expeditionary force reached Ulundi, or rather the place that had been Ulundi before the coming of fire and flood.

  Deck Officer Gustafsson, speaking with Captain Nordstrom in his daily radio call, reported that the first people he had encountered were a group of Zulu youngsters kicking a soccer ball around on a muddy field. This tranquil scene, come upon suddenly after their journey through appalling wasteland, brought several members of the party to the verge of tears. A rugged master at arms dropped to his knees in a prayer of thanksgiving.

  The children greeted the strangers with smiles and took them to one of the few buildings that remained standing amid charred ruins. There, Gustafsson reported, he was received graciously by a group of men who were conducting a meeting. This turned out to be the Ulundi Indaba, an ad hoc administrative organization, comparable to the Queen of Africa survivors' newly formed Governing Council.

  About half the people present were Zulus, several dressed strikingly in tribal ceremonial regalia. Some of them were officials of the now defunct provincial government. Others were tribal elders. Apparently, both the Zulu king and the paramount chief had perished in the disaster; but other leaders, acknowledged through traditional blood lines, had stepped forward. There were also several representatives of the other tribal groups who dominated the national government through the African National Congress Party. As far as Gustafsson could tell, then and later, political rivalries, as well as tribal antagonisms, were set aside by the holocaust.

  In the Indaba, the white population was represented by such political leaders as had survived, along with several executives of local businesses. The Indian and Pakistani communities also had a few delegates. Rounding out the company were a number of officials from the army and police, which forces, Gustafsson noted, were racially integrated.

  Simon Kambule, a forty-year-old Zulu politician, welcomed Gustafsson and his crew into an outbuilding that had survived the disaster, partly wrecked but usable. There were benches and tables enough to seat the Indaba members and visitors. It was noontime, and the roof, even with a few holes in it, provided welcome relief from the sun.

  "Welcome, gentlemen," Kambule said, speaking English with a singsong British-African accent. "We are so happy that there are others who have survived this terrible event. We wish to offer you every possible means of support, and we hope and expect that you will share with us in equal measure whatever resources you may have brought with you. Let us exchange 'vital statistics,' if you will: names, numbers, facts about ourselves. If I ma
y, I will start off the discussion and call upon my countrymen to fill in details as I go. Then we will ask you to provide us with similar information about yourselves."

  As he spoke, the charismatic African gestured elegantly, looking directly in turn at each of the newcomers. Meanwhile, water and fruit appeared—bananas, mangoes, and pineapple—brought by local women. The visitors eagerly partook of the refreshing fare.

  Kambule began his narrative account with a recollection of Christmas Eve. Without warning, shortly before midnight on December 25, the inferno had descended upon Ulundi and its environs. At first the strange glow in the night was far off in the distance, but within minutes, fire swept across the landscape and entered the city. From Kambule's description, Gustafsson perceived that although Ulundi was well within the "safety zone" as defined by Jane Warner's calculations, it had nevertheless suffered terrible damage. While spared the lethal rain-down from the sky, the city had been attacked by wind-driven forest fires from outside the zone.

  Suddenly, violently, the streets became rivers of flame, the buildings instant pyres. Most of the people were in their beds and never knew what happened. In many places the fire darted in jets, as if shot from flamethrowers, enveloping some individuals, leaving others untouched. Small firestorms swirled about like tornadoes, sucking up the oxygen in certain locations, leaving it unaffected in others. Never, it seemed, had death been more capricious. People staggered about, stunned and in anguish. However, unlike most of the earth's surface, where the slaughter was total, there was in and about Ulundi a remnant, a population of survivors.