Hope of Earth (82 page)

And art, that enabled mankind to form larger and thus more powerful groups without as much internal dissent. If there is anything that defines mankind, aside from his intelligence, it is art. No other creature we know of even cares about it. Every human culture has its art, and many past cultures have left dramatic artistic monuments.

So the things that I hope made an impression in this volume are locked knees, bone marrow scavenging, the brain/heat/fur-loss/clothing connection, the triple ploy, the arms race, and the art/numbers connection. Thereafter it’s mostly history, wherein the nuances of the creature’s vast potentials are constantly played out. I hope you have found that worthwhile too.

And where is this history leading? To disaster, as I see it. Mankind’s burgeoning brain enabled him to conquer the world, and his continuing interest in reproduction enabled him to overpopulate it. Panthers may have limited his population in the early days, but they have long since been nullified. No natural limit seems to exist. Now it seems that only mankind can limit mankind’s population, and that isn’t happening. Except—one of the seemingly conquered predators is returning. Disease. It is taking the place of the panthers. Through history it was always formidable. The plagues of Athens and other cities, and the bubonic plague, are only samples of an ongoing and deadly threat. There is also war, wherein the human creature’s most formidable enemy is other human beings. Over the millennia various ways have been tried to protect communities from attack by other communities, without perfect success. Isolation and defense did not save the Ice Man’s village from destruction, and might not have saved the community of Dreams, but for a special circumstance. Massive linear walls and defenses saved neither the Chinese nor the French. As long as there are too many people for the available resources, neither isolation nor defense lines can suffice. Mankind’s refusal to take reasonable precautions, to discipline itself, is leading to an infinitely more brutal discipline by nature, and by mankind itself.

Because GEODYSSEY is a series, I try to have characters from prior novels appear in later novels, though each book has its own primary cast. Did you recognize them? Bub from
Shame of Man
raped Flo in
Chapter 1
. This time Blaze from
Isle of Woman
appeared in
Chapter 4
. Ember appeared in
Chapter 5
, with her husband Scorch and baby Crystal. I try to show such prior characters at the age they were in the historical time of the particular setting, but this can be tricky, because Blaze and Ember aged four years per chapter, while Hugh and Anne from
Shame of Man
aged only one year per chapter. Thus Blaze and Ember aged about seventy years in the course of human history, while Hugh and Anne aged only about twenty years. Sam, Flo, and the other siblings of
Hope of Earth
aged only about six months between chapters, or about a decade in the full novel. Thus when the characters of different novels interact, they do so at different ages. Blaze was ten in
Chapter 4
, while Ember, who paralleled him, was fourteen in
Chapter 5
. This is especially tricky in the case of Mina, the foundling who turns out to be Flo’s lost baby; she aligns with this novel here, and ages at a different rate in the prior one. As I tried to clarify in the Introduction, the people are not really the same, nor are they strictly the descendants of those in earlier chapters; they are essentially similar types that appear throughout all human history. At any rate, Crockson, who is mentioned in
Chapter 9
and appears in
Chapter 10
, is from
Woman,
and Ittai as already mentioned is from
Man,
while Kettle is from
Woman.
Guillaume, Jacques’s commanding officer in
Chapter 18
, is the French version of Bill (William) from
Man,
the intelligent one, whose son Bille will later meet and love Mina. “Bil” actually first appeared in
Chapter 3
, along with his band leader Joe, also from
Man.
He appears again in
Chapter 19
, with his wife Fay and daughter Faience. Min appears again in
Chapter 20
, as Minne, with a problem of age because of the different time lines. But because all the characters live their full lives in each of their settings, Min can be nine years old in this novel though she was closer to fourteen at this time in the prior novel. Bub also appears again. How can he be a leader of raiders here, when he had other roles in the prior novel? Because these characters are actually representations of types, appearing all over the world all through human history, doing different things in different situations. The real unity in the series is its background: the phenomenally rich course of human experience.

So will the real human history lead to cannibalism, as in
Woman,
or in exhaustion of resources, as in
Man,
or in disease, as in
Earth?
I fear that if it does not, it still will be supremely unpleasant. If we don’t take warning and do something to change course very soon. I hope we do. Our knowledge and intelligence and plain common sense should enable us to avoid destruction and become the true hope of Earth—if we choose to apply them.