The Time Surgeons

The world would have survived a nuclear war at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis two decades earlier. There were fewer, less sophisticated missiles then, with much less ability to bombard one continent from another within mere minutes. Mankind would have been bloodied badly, but recovery would have taken mere decades, or at worst centuries.

This time it was not so fortunate. Too many cities were destroyed, too much infrastructure lost, too much radiation released, too much death unleashed. Some tried to hold on to the treasures of the past: in regions held grimly by the remnants of armies or civil authorities, in isolated communities hoping the weather the storm devouring the world, or in hidden retreats. Most fell before the year was out.

Again, dust and soot blocked the sun, cooling the earth: only worse this time. Again, armed forces once sworn to serve and protect turned to rule and pillage, competing with other armed groups driven by desperation: only worse.

Still the world held on by its grim fingernails, and with luck it might have recovered.

It was not lucky.

In eons past the Earth had been warm, ruled by vast forests inhabited by giant amphibians and insects. Over millions of years both the continents and the climate shifted. By the time the ancestors of humanity were looking at the world with the first glimmers of understanding, the world had entered a period of instability.

For untold millennia, the world danced uncertainly between warmth and ice. For long stretches it enjoyed relatively warm periods in which the great ice sheets were banished to the poles, and most of the globe was bathed in sunlight, warmth and life. These alternated with other long stretches of bitter cold, where sheets of ice miles thick marched toward the equator, gripping most of the world in an embrace of deathly cold. And for hundreds of thousands of years as the ice came and went, the ancestors of humanity continued to eke out their existence with tools of wood, bone and stone.

When the last of the great ice ages ended the survivors of the human race were ready, having at last achieved a level of sentience and skill, perhaps a gift from the ice itself, that primed them to take over the entire world. And take it over they did. The entire history of the race, from agriculture to metals to science to space to the war that destroyed them, took place in the mere eleven millennia of warmth since the final retreat of the ice sheets.

Yet the Earth remained uncertain. The climate was subject to many factors: the Earth’s orbit and inclination and the activity of the Sun. Life also had its say. Many thought that the Earth was peculiarly lucky, orbiting in a narrow ‘Goldilocks Zone’ where the Sun was not too close to bake it and not so far it would freeze. Yet in the absence of certain heat-absorbing gases such as carbon dioxide, the Earth would have been a snowball; too much and it would have become an oven. Life had removed much of these gases from the atmosphere into its own bodies and remains, but also released some. Colder and warmer periods still came and went.

People had only just begun to understand what caused the great ice ages. They had learned that small changes in the amount of the Sun’s heat reaching Earth could tip it from one state to another; and that once started the ice sheets would not easily surrender their rule. Their blinding white reflected sunlight too well, banishing the sun’s warming rays back into space.

And the world had entered a cooling trend. Scientists had not been sure whether the trend was real: it is hard to see a small signal in the presence of larger fluctuations that are poorly understood. But underneath it all, it was as if the Earth wanted to cool. Yet it struggled in its desire, for the gases released by humans as they dug up then burned enormous quantities of fuels, fuels that had held the Earth’s carbon locked up for eons, had spread like a thickening gossamer blanket over the globe.

Had mankind not fallen, it would have been only a few years before they started worrying that their own activities would cause the opposite problem. They would begin to fear that the carbon dioxide produced by their mighty industries would add to the warming blanket of the atmosphere until the Earth became too hot for them: that in escaping the ice of a natural progression, the human race must suffer in a heat of their own creation. Instead of ice they would die by fire.

But their mighty industries were now ashes. And worse, literal ashes: the dust thrown up by the explosions and burning of the cities dimmed the sun. The Earth had already been overdue for its next ice age, but perhaps mankind’s warming effects would have prevented it. And since its birth the Sun had been growing slowly hotter: maybe that would have made the difference even without humanity’s burning of fossil fuels. But it had been on a knife-edge. Mankind hadn’t known it and even if they had, they were now powerless to stop it.

And so the Earth began to cool.

Winter was a little longer. Snow and ice covered a little more area, then stayed, their bright white reflecting the Sun’s energy away into the darkness of space. The world cooled a little more. As the air became drier and the vast pumping of carbon dioxide and other gases had all but ceased, a little more heat could escape through Earth’s thinning blanket. Slowly, but at an accelerating rate, the summers got cooler, the winters got colder, and the grip of the ice expanded.

By the time the immediate effects of the war were over it was too late. Crops failed. People starved. The survivors faced famine on top of the rest. And famine led to war, as if there had not already been enough war. Still people struggled: to hold on to whatever remnants of their glory they could; to fight off those who would destroy them; just to live.

And meanwhile the ice continued to grow, seeking to restore its dominion over vast reaches of the planet, like it had millennia ago before the first birth of civilization.

Those parts of the Earth not covered by ice were colder and less productive. It was the final straw. Populations crashed. As had happened so many times before in humanity’s distant past, bands of warriors and invaders swept the lands, driven away from their own land by seasons too poor to support them, or towards the mythical lure of fabulous wealth elsewhere.

What remained of civilization finally reached its fatal tipping point. For years it had held on in shrinking beacons of hope, slowly sliding toward the abyss. Now the abyss claimed it, and what was left of the human race fell into barbarism; from barbarism, into chaos; and from chaos, into a world lit only by fire.

For millennia the world was held in the grip of the ice, and mankind lived much as it had in the previous ice ages: as small groups living off the land as best they could. Then slowly it began to warm again. Life became easier; populations grew; slowly people were able to reinvent agriculture, and small towns grew, linked by networks of trade and kin.

Much had been lost of the ways of the Ancients. In many places nothing was left except mysterious rubble; in places, lakes of glass where few dared to venture, for they were cursed. In other places the remains of their cities still stood, tall dark towers, crumbling with age, but still reaching pathetically toward the stars their owners had once dared to attempt. The Ancients had left few clues; but there were some, and slowly their descendants began to learn.

On the continent once known as North America such knowledge was highly prized, and slowly the towns organized themselves around Farmers and Hunters as the majority, Artisans who were fewer but possessed special and prized skills, Defenders as elite fighters, and over all of them the Sages. The Sages were the wisest of men and women: those with the vision to see and understand.

If one were to compare the developing land with forgotten times past, what it was most like were the city states of ancient Greece. However these people had a different history, that brought with it an almost racial memory of the perils of war. They had a different mix of technology. Most of all there were fewer physical barriers to separate peoples, and consequently stronger ties of trade and kin. So the scattered city states were more cohesive than those of past times and stronger for it. They grew naturally into a confederacy, and while remaining fiercely loyal to their own cities they were also loyal to the whole, which became known as the Concord.

Civilization has always had to contend with barbarians, and this one was no exception. Sometimes the barbarians broke upon the shores of the Concord and swept away what they could, leaving death and destruction, but not so much that it caused more than local pain, soon smoothed back like the sands. Other times the invaders were stronger, and the Defenders from nearby regions joined together and struck back, driving them away and more often than not pursuing them to their deaths. By such means the Concord, rarely interested in its own wars of conquest, widened its range, members and power.

Sometimes, it faced greater dangers.