Hope of Earth (81 page)

And Queen Boudica, in
Chapter 12
, spelled as our research indicates is authentic. I had read about her decades ago, but was reminded of it by an ad for silver coins dating from that period. So I did what I love: I got into the actual guts of it, and learned what had actually happened. The supposedly civilized Romans acted with stunning barbarism, publicly stripping and flogging the queen and raping her young daughters. Exactly how young is not known, but they could have been children. Rome was lucky not to have lost Britain as a result of that caper. But if there was anything the Romans could do well, it was fight battles; they had discipline like none seen before. So they kept Britain. But what was I to do with Wildflower, the queen’s younger daughter? She disappeared, nameless, in history, after her awful experience. So I rescued her, and she became a worthy continuing character following in the steps of the Ice Man’s daughter. I hadn’t seen that coming.

Chapter 13
was a surprise. I wanted to explore the matter of the word “slave” deriving from “Slav.” It turned out to be an uncertain connection, and difficult to illustrate Actively. But my researcher discovered the Kingdom of Samo, unlisted in most references, and since my lead character for that chapter was Sam, I couldn’t resist. So once again the novel went in a different direction, and perhaps not a consequential one. Yet I wonder:
could
there have been a Sam? It is also tempting to conjecture that the word “avarice,” meaning extreme greed, derives from “Avar,” the people who raided Europe for its booty. Of course the Avars were only doing what every conqueror does, including especially the Europeans when they invaded the rest of the world. Reputation sometimes depends on whose ox is gored.

Then the Mongols. I have been fascinated with them since college. In fact, since high school, when I discovered Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” and was entranced. Conventional history largely ignores them, except when they threatened Europe, but they were a major factor in Asian history. They were the ultimate conservatives: they solved the crime and welfare problems the old-fashioned way, by slaughtering anyone who was into mischief or who would not or could not work. It was said that after the Mongol conquest, a beautiful virgin could travel alone with a bag of gold from Asia to Europe without being molested. That may have been an exaggeration, but suggests the way of it. Those in the path of the Mongols learned fear in a hurry, or they died. But I, being of liberal bent, would not have cared to live in that society. I study it from afar. I remembered an episode from a book I read in 1970, of a prince who just couldn’t hold on to his territory, until about the third or fourth time after Tamerlane rescued him, he turned suddenly competent. What could account for that? In that quarter-century curiosity of mine was the genesis of a 32,000 word novella, wherein Wildflower finally gets her man. I found that the later Mongols were just as shifty and treacherous as anyone else in history. So was there an aphrodisiac herb of the type Sahara described? That is doubtful. My earlier researches in the Arabian Nights tales acquainted me with the rich folklore of the Moslem region, and the hyperbole used. For example, there was the fabulous “bhang,” a sleep-inducing narcotic, a strong dose of which was said to be such that if an elephant merely sniffed it, the creature would sleep from year to year. In that spirit I conjecture a love potion whose potency would be mainly in the belief folk had of its nature.

Meanwhile there was the Great Chinese Wall. I sent Alan into that research, expecting to have a setting around 221
B.C
. He returned with a verdict similar to that on the Sphinx: no can do. There was no such unified wall. What? But all of history says—but all of history was wrong. Again. It did not impede the Mongol conquest of China, because it wasn’t there. Most of that wall was built in the Ming dynasty, in the sixteenth century,
after
the Mongols had been expelled from China, the setting for my
Chapter 16
. There is not now, and never was, a unified three thousand mile long stone wall. Only disconnected local walls, most of which were of packed earth rather than stone. So I learned what did not entirely please me, and now you know it too. Is it true that the Chinese Wall is the only man-made artifact that shows from space? No—because it isn’t there, and if it were there, it would be too thin to be seen from such a distance. Another illusion of history bites the dust.

Chapter 17
derives from a cute little melody I heard on the radio that started a chain of thought: Suppose there is a meeting of enemies, the men just about ready to fight, the women afraid the truce will come apart before it starts, with great mutual harm. Then a child brings a scribbled bit of music, and the musician plays it, and the women start dancing and hauling the men in, and instead of battle there is harmony after all. Because of that new little dance, the minuet. I remembered the minuet from the time I was hauled in to see a first-grade presentation in which my daughter Cheryl participated. You know the type; you have to watch and applaud so as to support your child and the school, no matter how amateurish the production is. But when my daughter’s class performed, it was the minuet, in period costume, and I was entranced; it was the most darling thing I had seen in years, and Cheryl was just perfect. Those stately, mannered steps and turns—my boredom was transformed to wonder and delight. So, close to twenty years later, I told Alan, “Find me that setting.” We had too much of Europe, and not enough of the New World, in this volume, so he looked in America—and couldn’t find it. America of those days was rough frontier country; there were no fancy balls with costumed women, and certainly not with armed men present. So we had to go back to Europe, to the court of King Louis XIV, one of those foppish settings I have avoided all my life. And lo, Louis turned out to be much more interesting than I had thought, and a master of the dance and great supporter of the arts. Later in life he was to become spoiled by power, but this was his beginning, and he was a remarkably apt and appealing figure. So I couldn’t have my original notion, again, but found one perhaps as worthy. So what was the cute little tune that had set me off? It turned out to be from the movie
The Piano,
a creature of quite a different nature.

Chapter 18
, about the Maginot Line of France, had a similarly devious derivation. In the 1980s I asked my literary agent of the time, Kirby McCauley, what genres were hot, and he said High Fantasy and World War II. Well, my fantasy might better be called low, and why should I want to mess with World War II? After all, I was there, and my family barely got out of Europe in time, after my father was arrested without cause by the fascist government of Spain at the time Hitler met with Franco; Poland and France had fallen, and England was seemingly next. We came across on the last regular passenger boat, the
Excalibur,
on the same trip that the one-time king of England, Edward VIII, took, in 1940, and I had my sixth birthday on that ship, with a cake made of sawdust because supplies were short. What interest did I have in World War II? Right; the question brought the answer, and in due course I wrote my World War II novel
Volt
But one of the things” I had planned to explore therein got squeezed out, by processes similar to those described here, so I had no section featuring the Maginot Line. So I decided to show it here. Which put me right back into France. Again.

For
Chapter 19
I had in mind the Solar Stirling engine, one of a number of intriguing developments in the arena of sustainable power. I first read of the original Stirling engine in
Scientific American
decades ago, and was never quite able to figure out how it worked, but I saw the potential in its external combustion. When I learned of the solar variant, I went after it. The material I got related to Sunpower Inc., a small company designing and producing such engines. It turned out to be mind-bendingly complicated to grasp in detail. I read the book
The Next Great Thing,
which was interesting in its coverage of Sunpower’s desperate efforts to make the engine work, but not very clear on technical detail. My son in law John read it and contacted Sunpower and got more material. Researcher Alan read it and consulted with John, and discussed it with me. But when I presented it in the novel, I had to simplify so drastically for clarity that most of that research was wasted. This is the nature of research novels; some of the best material has to be left out. But the Solar Stirling engine exists, and may indeed be a significant aspect of the future. Of course my planned community uses proven old technology like the hydraulic ram too, and is getting into the useful plants hemp and kenaf, which truly do represent two of the world’s best hopes for the future production of useful fibers. The existing timber and pulp industries managed to suppress such alternatives in the past, but as the trees run out and the need becomes more pressing, significant changes will occur. For the setting I chose a type of planned community that intrigued my elder daughter Penny and me as we listened to a tape of Pete Seeger’s song “The Garden.” For the sponsoring religion I used the Quakers, because I was raised as a Quaker and profoundly respect its principles, though I elected not to join that religion as an adult. Quakers tend to be good businessmen and socially conscious citizens, and many are concentrated in the state of Pennsylvania, so well could be associated with a project of this type. This is not the first time I have had reference to the former Quaker use of “thee;” it occurs in my unpublished World War II novel
Volk
and a variant is in my ADEPT fantasy series of novels.

The cloud harvesting shown in
Chapter 20
is already being done today, in the area described; it solved the water problems of local villages in the Andes.

So there was a good deal of misadventure, or at least changed direction, in the course of the writing of this novel, and much of it did not go at all the way I had anticipated. But that’s the thing about writing, especially historical fiction: the author can indeed not have it all his own way. Perhaps that is the way it should be. The settings and the characters should have some say in their presentation.

I didn’t have that kind of problem in the early chapters, because there there is no recorded history to align with; the social aspect is mine to invent. And while I find the whole of history interesting, my greatest interest is in the early aspects. I saw the significance of the lockable knees in a public service TV program, and locked on to it immediately: such a seemingly small thing, with such a significant effect. To be able to stride without fatiguing the legs—a subtle but crucial change that enabled human beings to travel erect longer with less energy, and less heating, than other hominids. Scavenging for bone marrow was in the same program, and similarly critical; it gave mankind a good food source where for most creatures there was nothing, because they lacked the ability to crack open the bones. Provided he could not only get there, but get it away from other animals: encouragement to develop effective weapons.

But for me, the most important change was how mankind handled heat. I was satisfied that human beings lost much of their body fur during an aquatic phase, as shown in the two prior novels, but Alan dug up two obscure articles that showed another theory. None of the books seemed to have it, which is odd, because it is the most compelling argument I have seen in this particular arena. Lose the fur, dissipate the heat that your burgeoning brain generates—and suddenly mankind is the naked ape. Forget the Aquatic hypothesis; this makes sense on the open plain, where mankind was striding. It all fits together. Alan also found evidence that there are a number of (small) holes in the human skull that allow veinous blood to pass between the brain and the skin. Normally it flows from the brain to the skin, but when the body is under heat stress, it reverses, and the cooler blood of the skin flows to the brain. The fossil record shows that the number of these channels has increased steadily as the brain expanded.

Then the triple ploy, which is my own conjecture, based on research that showed me scattered parts of it. Sex, love, attachment, used in sequence to capture and hold a man who would rather be sowing his oats far more broadly. The change of the female breasts to become not merely to feed the baby, but to make her continuously appealing to the man. Thus the foundation of monogamy, because now it was possible for a single woman to satisfy the continual passion of a single man; and better for him to stay close to her than to wander too far afield, because otherwise she could breed at any time with someone else. In battle of the sexes, the man became larger and stronger and possessed of more physical ambition, but the woman became the major ongoing object of his desire. The downside was that this led also to prostitution and rape, because the woman could not readily turn off her sex appeal. But overall, it seems likely that even today a woman would rather live without a man, were she otherwise provided for, than a man without a woman. She has what he wants. Even the most intelligent, independent, or least scrupulous men still fall for the triple ploy.

There is also my answer to the reason for mankind’s burgeoning brain, the largest known in the animal kingdom, relative to body size. He had already established his niche in the world, and was no longer in danger of extinction because of starvation or prédation by panthers. It seems likely that the development of vocabulary and language was the engine that powered that expansion—but why was it necessary? That monstrous brain was a phenomenally expensive burden, forcing significant changes in all the rest of his body and life; why balance such a delicate albatross on the top of his precariously erect body? Because mankind’s main competition now was either his own kind, or a near relative. He was in a mental arms race, and he who was slightly stupid lost out. This race continued until modern man developed linguistic tools as potent in their fashion as locked knees and hand weapons had been in theirs: syntax and high-velocity speech. These enabled modern man to accomplish more, verbally, with less actual brain, than
Homo erectus
could manage. That translated into better planning and organization, superior tools and weapons, and coordinated drives to achieve long-range objectives. Neither
Homo
erectus
nor his offshoot Neandertal man could compete. But though the modern brain is not the largest ever, it remains a giant compared to that of any other creature.