Schemes of the Unknown Unknown Ch. 12

Whatever else Earth might be—and it was a candidate for many honours—in the thirty-eighth century what it principally happened to be was mostly just a tourist resort. It was the same wherever Paul and Beatrice travelled on the planet: everything they saw was labelled and displayed for the benefit of tourists. The visitors to Earth might also be archaeologists, palaeontologists, musicians or climatologists, but they were mostly just tourists. Tourism was Earth's principal source of income and everything on the planet was preserved and packaged to serve that purpose.

This observation was nowhere more valid than in London, England: the city Paul and Beatrice were now visiting. The metropolis had a peculiar significance in Earth history from the age of Chaucer to the Twentieth Century. It was the capital city of a kingdom in which the industrial revolution began. It had once been the hub of the planet's most extensive empire, the capital of a nation of disproportionate cultural influence (even into the Twenty-First Century) and the land from which Paul could trace his earliest known ancestors.

Paul's ancestry could also be traced to Armenia, France, Australia, Canada and South Africa, but the branch of his family tree to which Paul was most emotionally attached came from London and villages in what had once been the English countryside.

It seemed that every building, every road, every courtyard and every item of street furniture in London was marked with a plaque that explained its historical significance. The plaques were sometimes constructed from blue metal but most were displayed on a plasma screen that even diamond couldn't cut. They might celebrate a house where Charles Dickens once worked; the site of a theatre in which Shakespeare's plays were performed in the sixteenth century; a recording studio where the Beatles recorded; or the site of a gruesome twenty-fifth century murder.

London was an eccentrically diverse city. One cobbled street might more properly belong to the age of Samuel Johnson. Another would be lined with quaint twentieth century bus stops and shop windows that displayed everything from umbrellas to antique computer games on small metal disks. In amidst this miscellany were theatres, museums, art galleries and holographic multimedia shows.

London could best be described as an enormous amusement park and there were countless people to be amused by it. The million people who lived in the city represented just a fraction of the city's peak population in the twenty-third century. Most of the people currently in London, however, were visitors like Paul and Beatrice. Some were here for professional reasons and these were the lucky ones most likely to be authorised to land on the planet's surface. Archaeologists, biologists, geologists, historians of every kind, and other researchers were here in great abundance. Paul's discipline however would never have been sufficient justification for him to be so honoured. There was no need for someone whose expertise was in antique databases to actually be permitted on the planet's surface. The bits and bytes of data he analysed were exactly the same on Godwin as they were on Earth.

Besides the privileges granted to diplomats and business executives, the primary qualification that granted a person the privilege to walk on Earth's surface was a generous financial contribution to the planet's substantial conservation costs. Paul and Beatrice were constantly reminded that it was thanks to the generosity of people like him (well, not Paul specifically) that Earth wasn't now just dead and lifeless.

It was alarming how precarious the survival of Earth had been. Every age of human innovation was associated with yet another spasm of global vandalism that threatened the extinction of humankind and most other life as well. The age of steam and steel marked the first era in which the planet was at critical risk. The ages of oil and electricity, of silicon and satellite dishes, of robotics and nuclear fusion: each fresh phase of human history was associated with a fresh set of environmental risk from which humanity just about survived only by the good fortune of scientific progress rather than prudence or effective conservation.

Most of those who lived on Earth were employed in the tourist industry. By virtue of being amongst the top twenty destinations on the planet, London had one of the largest city populations on Earth. And the British Isles was one of the planet's most densely inhabited tourist destinations. The actual current distribution of population was very misleading. There were huge cities in China, India, Brazil and North America that had once housed tens of millions of people, but were now of such little interest to tourists that their current population only numbered in the thousands. In some cities, only memorable now because of the economic origins of their growth, a single person might live in a tall building surrounded by thousands of empty skyscrapers.

Beatrice and Paul were shambolic tourists. Paul had always wanted to visit London, but he'd never been so enamoured with the prospect of visiting Ipswich, Toulouse, Krasnoyarsk, Chicago and the Namibian Desert, all of which found themselves on his haphazard itinerary. The couple travelled to some unlikely destinations as a result of Paul's chaotic scheduling and his ignorance concerning travel arrangements on a planet where flying was strictly rationed, most travel was by electric car or train, and where the number of tourists permitted at any one time at any one place was strictly rationed. Any form of travel that consumed a disproportionate amount of the world's resources was very rarely permitted. And most means of travel were as much museum pieces as the destinations.

Paul was very poor at estimating the distance and journey time to his destination. After the couple had enjoyed a relaxing but not especially productive week in the South Pacific Ocean, the time it took to sail by ship across the ocean and travel by train across Siberia was rather longer than the single afternoon that Paul naively allocated. The reconstructed luxury liner, Lusitania, must have represented the pinnacle of progress in the early Twentieth Century, but even the most luxurious suite was too cramped and poorly fitted (not to mention badly air-conditioned) for Paul's taste. And he didn't enjoy at all his traumatic experience of sea-sickness. Who would have imagined that such relatively small up and down motion could have such a nauseous effect? Beatrice, naturally, gave no impression of being out of sorts at all.

It was very odd to be on a planet that existed more in the past than it did in the present. Any part of Earth's history with historical or scientific significance was preserved or newly reconstructed. Almost all the planet was either national park or museum. Beatrice pointed out that much the same was also happening on the Moon. There was a natural desire to preserve the past. However, as more and more past events and artefacts were now considered worth preserving, they had steadily accumulated to the extent that they squeezed out the last few remaining things that had no historical significance at all.

Although London had a relatively low permanent population, it was in fact one of the most crowded spots on the planet. This privilege was shared with only a handful of other great cities such as Rome, Paris, Istanbul, Beijing and New York. There was congestion from Charing Cross, along Whitehall and towards Westminster where tourists from Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and other planetary orbits crowded together to view the many famous sights they'd always wanted to see.

"Let's go somewhere quieter," suggested Paul who had only ever seen crowds like this before on the Moon.

Beatrice agreed and the couple set off down the escalators at Westminster, which were perfect mid-twenty first century facsimiles, caught an underground train that resembled one from a century or two later, and used the iconic underground map to navigate to the outer suburb of Richmond-upon-Thames. This was still very busy but thankfully rather less crowded than central London.

Beatrice and Paul ambled along to Richmond Park which appeared to be the most famous landmark in this quaint suburb. Paul looked warily towards the sky as he recalled the rain that had fallen earlier that day. Although the weather forecasts indicated only a low likelihood of further precipitation, Paul was in constant dread of this peculiar meteorological phenomenon. How could anyone ever be fond of rain? He'd already endured one English downpour and now understood why people on Earth owned waterproofs and carried umbrellas. Rain was cold. It was persistent. It made you very wet indeed. If you ran to shelter and you were unfortunate, you might have to wait for several hours until you could gingerly emerge and hope that you weren't going to get soaked by the next downpour.

English wildlife, even in Richmond Park, was very elusive and, when you caught a glimpse of it, singularly unspectacular. Only an ornithologist could enthuse about sparrows, thrushes and blackbirds. There were none of the rather more interesting but quite dangerous animals that roamed Africa or India. So, after not very long and not having seen even one of the park's famous herd of red deer, Beatrice and Paul left the park in the extraordinarily early dusk. This was late autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and the days were now tiresomely short.

This was another characteristic of Earth that Paul had difficulty understanding and didn't enjoy. Weather was one thing. Seasons were another. And he came to appreciate that a change of season didn't just entail a change in the weather. There was also a difference in the number of daylight hours. No wonder humanity had fled Earth for the outer planets and if not so much the stars then the Kuiper Belt.

Beatrice and Paul wandered into a pub. This was a peculiar North European phenomenon mostly centred on the British Isles. Paul had come to rather like these ubiquitous institutions which were so often full of plaques and memorabilia to commemorate the famous people who'd visited them in the past. Paul wasn't at all sure who 'Mick Jagger' was but he sat on a chair that had once accommodated the backside of this singer of an ancient folk music called 'rock'. Beatrice chose to sit in a chair that had once graced the bottom of another mostly forgotten singer called 'Madonna'. They were served by a robot that pulled them measurements from a quaint hand pump of a not especially cold alcoholic beverage that was measured in archaic units called 'pints'.

Earth was in many ways more foreign to Paul than anywhere else he'd ever been, but it was also the most familiar. He was privileged to have seen the actual monuments that were famous throughout the Solar System such as the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Venetian canals and the London Eye.

As he sat in the pub with Beatrice and supped the strangely bitter but still intoxicating 'ale', Paul recalled his occasional encounters with the old man in Nudeworld. He'd not had another encounter with him now he was much closer to the Sun, although he'd quite recently chosen to revisit Nudeworld. Yes, he did succumb to Blanche's entreaties that he should have sex with her. No, she didn't appear to have changed one iota in the many months since he'd last visited Nudeworld nor did she recognise that this was probably the longest separation his virtual lover and he had experienced in the many years of their relationship.

Nudeworld was no longer what it once seemed to be. This was partly because his long journey to Earth and the accompanying months of marriage now made the virtual world seem trivial and inconsequential. Partly it was because the frequent attempts to terminate Paul's life had made real life appear dramatically more exciting than a relatively humdrum virtual world in which he had a bizarrely ordinary relationship with Blanche. Nevertheless, Paul still couldn't resist Nudeworld's magnetic pull. He wondered whether he would ever again meet the strange non-nude stranger whose appearance conflicted so much with what he expected in a virtual reality that after all only existed to address a specific rather niche fantasy. The old man's comments in their brief conversations niggled Paul. What was he supposed to have gleaned from them? Was it supposed to provide him with guidance for his imminent and epochal voyage to beyond the Heliopause and probably even the Oort Cloud?

There was another more mundane cause for Paul's recent venture back to virtual space and that was because he had more time to do so. Paul and Beatrice travelled from hotel to hotel across the globe but every destination soon came to seem much the same, even if they stayed only a few days. Seven days of tourism a week wearied Paul and he welcomed the opportunity to rest. Beatrice was happy to oblige. She told him that she didn't mind being a solitary tourist. As long that is, she said as she gave her husband an affectionate kiss on the lips, he didn't mind being left alone in the hotel room by himself. "Not at all, not at all," said Paul who, in any case, was generally someone who preferred just his own company.

So, for almost as much time as they spent together, Paul would rest in the luxury of a hotel room that might once have been a chamber in the home of a Duke, Prince, Emir or other potentate in Earth history. They were now long dead, along with their titles, but they'd left their homes as monuments that outlasted in almost every case even the nations over which they'd ruled. At the moment, for instance, Paul and Beatrice were staying in a mansion called Buckingham Palace not far from Westminster where several generations of British monarchs had once lived. It was a peculiar experience to have slept in a bedroom where a monarch had once lived and upon whose empire the Sun never set. However as Paul came from a region of space where the Sun was fairly incidental this didn't impress him quite as much as it perhaps ought to have done.

"Our security guards are over there," said Paul, tipping the rim of his glass towards the other side of the pub.

Beatrice nodded but she didn't bother to turn her head in their direction. "After all those assassination attempts you should be pleased that there are people watching over us," she said.

"I guess so, but I still think it's creepy."

He scrutinised the pair of guards who were discreet as always but nonetheless were never less than ten metres away from the couple wherever they happened to be. One of the guards, Grace, was a woman who'd chosen a muscular body for herself that might well attract some men but didn't really appeal to Paul. And anyway he was married to Beatrice as he so often had to pinch himself to believe. Grace was an Earth citizen from South Pacific City who could actually trace her ancestry to one of the many scattered volcanic islands in the ocean, although Paul wasn't sure whether it was one of those that had been submerged by the rising ocean-level in the twenty-second century.

The other guide was a man. Or at any rate just over half a man. He'd been a Martian soldier in the planet's interminable war. Although he'd been told, Paul couldn't remember which side of the conflict Jorgen had fought on. The war had done the ex-soldier no favours. His fighting career had ended badly and he was now almost half machine. In fact he was actually a kind of cyborg. The right half of his face was mostly plastic and metal and housed a right eye with ocular facilities far beyond that of ordinary people. He no longer had a need for binoculars or even night-vision glasses. What was left of his arms and legs was reinforced by the same plastic/metal mix that made him stronger, faster and more formidable than most other security guards. It was a mystery to Paul just how much of Jorgen's body was biological and how much synthetic, but it wasn't a mystery he cared enough to resolve.

In truth, just looking at Jorgen made Paul feel decidedly uncomfortable.

"It's not his fault he looks like that," said Beatrice, who was especially sympathetic.

"I know. I know," said Paul. "How did he get that way?"

"I don't know," said Beatrice. "Does it matter? There are a lot of ways to get wounded in battle, if not actually killed. That's what happens in warfare."

"I really don't understand it at all," said Paul in all honesty. No conflict on Godwin could possibly stir up sufficient disagreement for one set of people to wish harm on another set.

Paul looked back at Grace and Jorgen who, unlike most couples in the pub, barely said a word to each other and were careful not to appear to be watching their wards with undue attention. He was confident that whatever they were drinking was almost certainly not alcoholic. What a dull life his guards had to lead.

Paul was slightly drunk when the couple finally left the pub, although Beatrice was as sober as she'd have been if she'd not drunk a single drop. And perhaps she hadn't. Paul didn't really keep count. Typically, as soon as they were outside it was raining again as well as being dark and cold. And also typically, neither Paul nor Beatrice had an umbrella.

"Should we ask Grace or Jorgen for one?" asked Paul.

"I don't think our guards would appreciate it if we made it too obvious that they were following us everywhere," said Beatrice. "I know they're meant to, but itissupposed to be discreet and we were asked not to let it bother us."

"Well, itdoesbother me," said Paul. "And Iwouldlike the use of an umbrella."

"Just a minute," said Beatrice, who slipped back into the pub while Paul stood outside under the shelter of the porch. She came back within rather less of a minute holding a big black umbrella that could easily shelter both of them.

"We don't have far to walk to the underground station," said Beatrice. "Just over the bridge and past the shops..."

"That's still plenty of time for my feet to get wet," Paul complained as he ruefully contemplated the puddles at his feet.

"Don't worry," said Beatrice who kissed her husband reassuringly on the lips. "I'll dry your feet later..."

And do a lot more, thought Paul as his penis stiffened already at the prospect of lovemaking on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. The only thing that might put him off the prospect was the presence of all those paintings of short-legged orange dogs on the wall. They were a strange lot, the British Royal Family. No wonder they didn't last long after the fall of the British Empire.