I shaded the interior light with my hands and peered out of the window, we were jammed in with many other vehicles only a centimetre away from us, also moving at this breakneck pace. I could see people in the other cars chatting away and obviously relaxed and oblivious to the incredible speed at which they were travelling. The lights in the roof above the road were just a vague blur; we must have been approaching 480kph.
I sat back and tried to relax, the Professor was sitting very calmly opposite me which, I suppose, made me feel safe enough to ask a difficult question.
‘Professor, it seems to me that there are more women than men in London, is that because most of the men remain in their homes with their families, or is there an imbalance in the population?’
‘That is a very perceptive observation,’ said the Professor after a moment’s thought. ‘You are correct, there are many more women than men in the general population. The ratio is about five to one, this has been a deliberate policy for the past 100 years or so.’
‘Blimey, it’s all a bit Malthusian isn’t it, what do you do with the male babies, leave them on a mountain ledge to be devoured by eagles?’
This time the pause was longer. The Professor gently touched the side of her illuminated headgear.
‘I now understand the reference,’ she said with a nice smile. ‘That’s very amusing but the answer is no. We perfected what you might know as family planning many years ago so male babies are simply not born in any significant numbers. It was generally considered beneficial to the whole population to keep the numbers of men to a minimum. This was an agreement worked out with the support of the vast majority of the male population too.’
‘I see, but can I ask why? I mean, I can’t help wondering why men are so awful, why we need to be bred out of existence?’
‘There’s certainly nothing of the sort happening, not at the moment.’
‘Not at the moment?’ I suddenly remembered the thing Pete had mentioned, the women who hated men. ‘You mean you might change your mind! Is this the Weaving thing, the Weaving women?’
‘Oh, the Weavers. Yes, they very much wish to eliminate men from the earth, I admit they are a powerful lobby but at present in London anyway, they don’t have any real standing.’
‘Can you explain about them though?’
‘Just relax, Gavin, you can find out everything you need to know about such topics if you relax.’
That really didn’t answer my question, my mind was full of suspicion, what did she mean relax? Why couldn’t she just tell me, why did everything have to be so damned mysterious? I sat back and tried to relax.
Immediately the information flooded in, it was like revision, I could distinctly remember being on the bus going to school when I was in the sixth form, heading for an exam and running through information in my mind, like strings of facts emerging from somewhere in among my neural networks. Weaver women were named as such because of their adherence to the teachings of a group of women who came to prominence in 2073. They belonged to a scientific research group based in Africa, India, Asia and Australia. Five Myrmecologists came up with Weaver theory, I thought about Myrmecologists as I didn’t know what they did, then I knew they studied ants. These women studied Weaver ants in particular. Weaver ants are so called because they make hanging nests out of carefully woven leaves, they live in colonies of many hundreds of thousands and are the most socially advanced living creatures on the earth besides Homo sapiens. They are also entirely female except for the rare occasions when they need to breed in which case the slightly smaller ‘minor’ ants allow a few of the babies to become male. The nursing ants can define the gender of infant ants with chemicals.
Although I was receiving this knowledge in a torrent I couldn’t take it all in and interpret it. I knew there were more Weaver ants on the planet than human beings and they had survived for millions of years, dominating the area they inhabit and using some other insects as cattle. The Weaver women started a movement which rapidly gained popularity, encouraged women to start working together, outside the political, social and cultural structures imposed upon them by men. They wanted to move towards a more just and gentle society that didn’t rely on men for its continuation. They were clearly very successful.
Within two generations the number of men in Africa, Asia, India and Australia had dropped to an all-time low, ratios of fifteen to one in favour of women were not uncommon by the turn of the twenty-third century.
I finally managed to utter something to the Professor. ‘That’s kind of terrifying,’ I said.
‘Indeed, it has been a major challenge,’ she replied. ‘I would suggest that in London most women revere the men they know. What the Weaver women have proven beyond doubt though is that men as they were, as you were, had a very negative effect on the world and women in general. We have seen a massive drop in crime and violence in the last one hundred and fifty years. We don’t have wars, we don’t have violent behaviour on our streets, we don’t have domestic violence, child abuse and we don’t have rape.’
I sat in silence. What she had just told me was such a damning indictment of my gender that I could come up with no response. I wanted a reason to contradict this ridiculous notion, that everything wrong with the world I had come from was men’s fault, however, what I had seen in London indicated that I was dwelling in a very large, very sophisticated, complex and vibrant, but very peaceful city. I’d knocked about a bit before I left my own time, I’d been in strange cities where people had warned me about certain ‘no go areas.’ In all my conversations with Pete, Nkoyo and Ralph no one had mentioned areas that were ‘a bit unsafe at night’ or anything of the sort.
‘So, out of all the men who live in London now, there are no murderers or rapists? Surely you have the odd nutter who goes crazy and commits a crime?’
‘I would guess there are two reasons why this doesn’t happen, and you are staying in one of them. There certainly are very severely mentally ill people who, without due care and understanding could be a danger to themselves or others, there is also another very important reason however.’
‘Which is?’
‘That the vast majority of boys are raised by their fathers, when a boy has a solid, reliable and loving father in his early life we have observed that he grows up to be a solid, reliable adult who is far less likely to resort to violence to resolve problems. Can you excuse me for one moment?’
I shrugged, that was not merely food for thought; that was a bulk food delivery truck for thought. I stared out of the window for a moment watching the lights flash past at epilepsy-inducing intensity. I heard the Professor mutter something and turned to face her. She had her eyes shut and was saying something under her breath, I couldn’t make it out, I was wondering if she was praying. Maybe these cars were not quite as safe as I’d assumed.
She opened her eyes and looked at me. ‘I beg your pardon, I was just talking to Nkoyo, she was asking about you.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘Can you talk to people through your kidonge too?’
The Professor smiled. I liked her, she had a far gentler demeanour than many of the other women I’d met.
‘No, I was using the phone,’ she said pointing to a small pad on the side of her seat. I glanced down at my seat, there was a pad there but it was blank.
‘Think of someone you’ve met,’ said the Professor.
I thought of Pete, his picture immediately appeared on the little pad, I sat upright, startled by the response speed.
‘If you want to talk to him you can, unless he’s busy. Is there a little blue square beneath his picture?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Then he’s busy, and we are at our destination.’
As soon as she’d said that I felt the car slow down, veer off to the left and rise up a slight incline. I really had to push my head back as we slowed. I could
n’t describe the deceleration as actually violent, but it was close enough to violent to be alarming. The car stopped and the doors opened immediately. The Professor stood up, adjusted her rather bizarre headgear and left the vehicle.
I followed her out and of course there was another surprise. I should have started to get used to them but it still made me stop and stare. A crowd of maybe thirty people stood in a large semicircle in front of me. They all looked like teenagers, they were all smiling and they were all looking at me.
‘Welcome to the London Museum of Human History, Gavin,’ said a young woman. ‘We are very excited to meet you.’
11
Museum of our Past
The story of the previous two hundred years as seen from the perspective of the Squares of London in 2211 was completely at odds with the story I’d learned in Gardenia, or what led up to Gardenia.
The tales I read of the brutal regimes that had come and gone, the economic and social collapse that had taken place in the Gardenian past seemed to be completely lacking in London.
Now, instead of reading a beautifully made book in a beautiful quiet room in a barn conversion, I was casually strolling through two hundred years of human history in the company of a load of students and a professor with a weird hat.
‘Do you recognise that?’ asked one of the young people as we entered the massive building. It was hard not to. Harrods department store was directly in front of me. I don’t mean a picture of Harrods; I mean the actual building.
Harrods department store was dwarfed by the colossal structure surrounding it; the whole Harrods building resembled nothing more than a dolls house in a playroom. The London Museum of Human History was, as I was about to learn, a very large place. Not only was the structure beyond the scale of anything I’d seen back in my day or even in the Gardenian world, it was incredibly busy. The teeming crowds who were wandering around the massive halls reminded me of exhibitions I’d unwillingly visited with Beth; events like Grand Designs Live and the Ideal Home show at the NEC. But this museum was on a scale that made Grand Designs Live look like a Tuesday afternoon amateur watercolour exhibition in Chipping Norton library.
‘Is that the actual original Harrods?’ I asked the attentive little crowd around me.
‘Yes, it was reconstructed about a hundred years ago,’ said another of the students, a young woman. ‘It was retrieved from the seabed and rebuilt here, does it look anything like the original?’
‘Abso-fucking-lutely,’ I said. I noticed this term meant nothing to them so I tried another response. ‘It looks exactly the same as it did in my day.’
The little gaggle of faces nodded at me and smiled. They all looked South East Asian to me; no blonde, or even light brown, hair on display.
We wandered along a slightly raised walkway to the side of the Harrods building and another rather iconic building came into view.
‘That is St Paul’s Cathedral,’ said the young woman beside me. The way she enunciated the words made it clear that none of them was familiar to her.
‘Oh God help me,’ I gasped as my eyes fell on the vision of St Paul’s Cathedral looking pristine and spectacular but somehow rather small.
I stood holding the handrail on the walkway as I scanned the incredible vision before me, St Paul’s Cathedral next to Tower Bridge. Behind it, the Houses of Parliament, to one side, bizarrely, the MI6 building made iconic by the later James Bond movies and behind that, 30 St Mary Axe, better known as the Gherkin. All these buildings were now exhibits in a museum, all of them dwarfed by the fabulous structure that housed them.
‘It must be an odd experience for you, seeing all these buildings, do you recognise them?’ asked the Professor who was now standing beside me.
‘Yes, I do, I know all of them. How did this happen?’
‘It happened a long time ago, as the sea levels rose and the city expanded and spread out, about a hundred and fifty years back, some of the more enterprising women of the time managed to arrange to have the buildings dismantled and reconstructed here.’
‘But, why? It’s insane! Such a colossal undertaking, it must have taken years and cost a fortune.’
‘It certainly took many months, of course most of the process was automated,’ explained the Professor. ‘We now grow buildings rather than construct them from parts as many of these old structures were made, but we think it’s important that present and future generations understand the ingenuity and inventiveness of previous times. I know you had museums back in 2011.’
‘Yeah, but blimey…’ was really all I could say. I noticed that much animated discussion was taking place among the students behind me. I turned to them to try and work out if I was the cause of the slightly hushed conflict.
The young woman at the front, physically diminutive but clearly a leader among the group smiled at me with a slightly pained expression.
‘We have no wish to upset you but we noticed when you saw the old buildings you made a cry for help from a deity.’
It took me a moment to untangle what she was saying, then I realised.
‘Did I?’ I asked.
The massed ranks of students staring at me with serious expressions nodded in affirmation.
‘Oh, wait, you mean when I said “God help me”?’ I know I was smiling as I spoke, somehow I knew what they were thinking and I found it amusing.
‘You think I was actually saying it because I believe in a God or something?’
More nods.
‘Well, it was a very common expression back when some of those buildings were standing in their original position. People who didn’t believe in God or go to church or think of themselves in any way religious would say things like “Oh my God” or “For God’s Sake” or “Jesus Christ!” as expressions, I often say them to stop myself using swear words.’
There was a general sigh of relief from the crowd, I’d noticed a couple of them had started to move away before I spoke, they had turned back to hear what I had to say on the topic.
‘There were still loads of people who believed in religion, God and all that stuff back in the twenty-first century, but not all of us. I never did.’
I noticed many of the students look to the Professor for confirmation. She adjusted her bizarre headgear and explained. ‘Gavin has been thoroughly tested, he does not appear to be damaged by his exposure to religious illness,’ she said. ‘It’s a great lesson for all of us to understand that even as far back as 2011 the illness was in decline.’
‘You see it as an illness?’ I asked. ‘That’s a bit harsh isn’t it?’
‘It is now classified as a treatable mental condition, it’s not fatal but it’s clearly not a good state for any individual,’ said the Professor, explaining it as if it was bloody obvious.
Surrounded as I was by the incredible visions of my old home world in a museum, I didn’t want to get into a discussion on religion and philosophy. ‘Let’s move on,’ I pleaded. ‘Without the help of any God.’
We moved along the walkway, behind me I could sense a lot of restrained chatter was going on as the students discussed the topics just aired.
I, on the other hand, was fascinated by the exhibits in the museum; as we moved along, I saw that Harrods was only a façade, the interior of the building was missing, what was behind it was a series of exhibition spaces filled with things from the early part of the twentieth century.
Over in one corner of the space was a massive steel construction, an oil rig. Not a model of an oilrig, I’m talking the real thing, hundreds of meters high just sitting in the corner like a discarded lawn mower.
‘Holy shit, look at that,’ I said. I think I may have said this many times during my visit.
‘Did you engineer things like that?’ asked one of the students.
‘What, oil rigs? No, not me, I k
new people who did, the fossil fuel industries employed loads of engineers like me but I was more involved with mineral extraction. Quarries, mines, stuff like that.’
‘Like that,’ said one of the students who pointed behind me. I turned and saw a Hitachi ex8000 hydraulic shovel; when I left 2011 these big eight-hundred-tonne babies were still on the drawing board. This massive caterpillar tracked earthmover was clearly well used and a bit knackered looking.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said. ‘Yes, I recognise that.’
‘You might see some other things you’re familiar with,’ said one of the male students I was standing near. ‘Do you recognise the Ford Angular mechanical vehicle?’
I looked in the direction the young chap was pointing, there on a plinth was a light blue car. I had indeed seen it before, funny looking little thing.
‘I think it was actually called the Ford Anglia,’ I said, correcting his description. ‘I had an Auntie who drove one of those but they were already old-fashioned when I was born.’
‘It looks so cute,’ said the young man. ‘Is it really true you had to make it go yourself, it didn’t know how to move.’
I nodded. ‘Yep, that’s right, you had to learn to drive, you had to pass a test, an exam to make sure you were a good driver.’
‘It all sounds so dangerous,’ said the small young woman. ‘Surely people made mistakes and the machines caused injury and damage.’
‘All the time,’ I said. ‘It was really dangerous, many thousands of people were killed and injured every year, if you were sensible or even just vaguely intelligent, you knew you were taking a big risk when you got behind the wheel.’
‘What do you mean, got behind the wheel?’ asked the young man.
‘I mean,’ I had to think for a moment. ‘I mean you sat in the seat behind the wheel inside the machine, then you took control of the machine using the pedals with your feet and a wheel with your hands.’
I mimed the position you took when controlling the steering wheel and for some reason this made them laugh.
News from the Squares Page 13
