The Surface
It’s only fairly recently that our people found out about the rest of the world. The first they knew was when they started experimenting with radio – and discovered that the ether was full of other people’s communications. At first nobody realized that that was what all the noise was. I won’t bore you with the details of how it was deciphered, anyway the fact is I don’t really know much beyond the simple stuff about code-breaking that they teach you when you’re little.
Then folks began to wonder why the other people weren’t picking up our radio and responding to us – that was when they began to realize how big the world is. They were only picking up inter-territory transmissions, and intra-territory transmissions are just too weak to pick up at great distances. Eventually they built a transmitter powerful enough to be heard. They were amazed at how powerful it had to be, and worked out roughly how far away the other territories are. They weren’t wildly wrong: the world is only about five times as big as they guessed. This was far less of a surprise than some of the other things the other people have taught us. At first some of them were just plain unbelievable.
In some places, there are forests. Forests are like agriculture halls stuffed full of plants, except that the plants are much bigger and tougher, and there are no walls or roofs or lights, and they go on for miles and miles and miles. Up there on the surface! Probably very interesting places, but certainly very dangerous. No-one lives there, because the forests stop you putting up solar collectors and wind-farms. Just as the coast puts a stop to our territory’s expansion in that direction, so some of the other territories are hemmed in by forests.
I’ve seen video pictures of forests: they’re fantastic.
In some places, there are rivers. That’s lots of water, flowing on the surface. Well, we sort of have rivers in our area – when it rains. But in our area, as soon as the rain stops and all the water’s run away, that’s it. Maybe you didn’t know about rain anyway – rain is water falling onto the surface from above, and without it there wouldn’t be any water in the ground for us! But proper rivers flow most of the time, or even some of them maybe all the time. I’m not sure why – maybe in those places it rains all the time, or maybe the rain gets stored up somehow and released into the rivers slowly. I don’t know.
The territories that have rivers are lucky, because they can dam the rivers, and make electricity using them. They call that hydroelectricity, and they say it’s better than solar collectors and wind farms. Although there are big rivers in some of the forests, it’s impossible to dam them for hydroelectricity because the forest just pulls the dams to bits too quickly – the people in one territory have tried, several times.
No-one here used to know that the world is round, and spinning! My Dad says that was pretty hard to believe; but of course I’ve always known, so it seems natural to me.
It was our people who invented railways, and none of the other territories have them. One other place is thinking about trying to make some. Recently, some people from there came in a big boat, and took some of our engineers back to their place to help them.
Boats are amazing. My Mum took me onto the surface to go and look at it. It was about an hour’s walk, on the surface, from the end of North Line to the coast. It’s hard going with the breathing apparatus and carrying your own water; but it was worth it. There was quite a crowd sight-seeing, but I was the only little one, and one of the foreigners spotted me and invited me and my Mum to go onto the boat. We didn’t have enough air and water for the extra time, but the foreigner promised to top it up for us so we went. We had to clamber into a little boat that bounced up and down on the water, because the big boat couldn’t come very close to the coast. The little boat was open-topped, so we had to keep our gear on until we got to the big boat. Inside the big boat it was pretty much like home, except that it’s always moving a bit, rocking and swaying about. They say you can’t feel the difference when it starts to move, but I think that’s just because it’s always moving. But then, once a train gets going you don’t realize how fast that’s going, either.
Boats are ever so slow compared with trains. To the place it came from, it’s only about ten times as far as it is from the end of North Line to the end of South East; but they say it takes four weeks! Making a boat is a lot of work, too, and they have to carry air, water and food for all the occupants for weeks, so they’re very big and expensive to run. There’s only three of the seven territories that can be reached by boat so far. Three of the others don’t have a coast at all, and the other one is too far away. No-one has mapped the coasts even half as far as that; it’s not even certain that the sea goes all the way, there could be a land barrier in between.
My Dad says it’s funny to talk about land being a barrier. When he was a boy the sea was the edge of the world. In the other directions you can keep on tunneling further and further as far as you like, but if you start going under the sea you just get water pouring in unless you spend far too much trying to keep it out. In some places they’ve done it, where the rock is less porous, but in most places it’s just not worth it. We don’t normally go much below the natural water table even on land, and under the sea the water’s salty and no use anyway.
But tunneling takes years to get anywhere. Boats may be slow compared to trains, but at least they can go somewhere where no-one’s ever dug any tunnels.
One of the most fantastic things that oldies are still finding it hard to come to terms with is the idea that once upon a time people used to live out in the open, on the surface, without breathing apparatus. In some parts of the world you didn’t even need to carry your own water: good clean water was lying about on the surface for the taking! People in one of the territories have folk-tales they claim are from those times, but no-one believed it until some folks in one of the other territories found some remains of old structures on the surface, and managed to work out something about how people lived in the old days. They reckon that if it was possible to explore the surface a bit, there might be quite a lot up there waiting to be investigated. But they think that mostly the surface has been worn away or mangled by forests since then.
It’s hard to imagine the surface getting worn away, really. They say that rainfall and rivers can move the soil pretty quickly in some parts of the world, but why doesn’t that just wear it down to bare rock? Experiments show that rock can decompose into soil, but it takes an awful long time. There’s even an idea that the forests used to cover more of the world than they do now, and it was them that turned the rocks into soil. According to the people in one of the territories, in some places you can find remains of forest buried in the ground; they even reckon that the patterns you sometimes find in stone are the remains of ancient forests. How they’re supposed to get into the stone is beyond me.
The other thing is that, of the stone patterns I’ve seen, more look like bones than like any plants I’ve ever seen – even in videos of forests. But some of the ‘bones’ are too big for animal bones, and they aren’t like human bones. Some people even think that once upon a time there might have been animals as big as people, or possibly even bigger.
Comparing the history of the different territories is interesting. Three of the territories have been in radio contact for a very long time, but even they have written histories going back much further still. The history of each territory goes back a different distance into the past. One of them goes back over a thousand years, compared to our three hundred.
One interesting conclusion they’re beginning to come to is that long before any of them started keeping written histories, we all came from the same place, and that there weren’t separate territories at all. Apart from the fact that we’re all human and pretty much alike – a few superficial details excepted – whichever territory we come from, all our writing is fairly similar, even if the languages are quite different. Some people who’ve studied it carefully reckon that even the languages have more in common than you’d expect by chance.
Another part of the argument is that although each territory has its own distinctive technology, most of that has developed within the territory’s period of recorded history, and that the ancient core technology is the same in all territories. We all make solar collectors and wind farms in basically the same way. We all make air systems and agricultural lighting in much the same way.
Of course, there may be more territories waiting to be discovered – they just haven’t invented radio yet, or they are still in the listening stage. The territories with boats, including us before long maybe, might get into contact with territories with a coast without them developing radio, but it would be easy to miss them anyway. There’s not much to see of our territory from the coast, just a few wind farms in the distance; and apparently the boats tend to stay a fair way away from the coast most of the time because there they’re at less risk of being bashed into rocks by the movement of the water. The sea is shallow near the edges, but it gets very deep further out.
People in one territory have invented a way of getting about above the surface, that they say could get over any possible land barriers. They call it flying, but it’s not much like real flight. They use fixed wings, rather than flapping ones like a bat’s or an insect’s, and propel themselves with a rocket, carrying two chemicals that react violently together and running what amounts to a continuous controlled explosion in a chamber at the rear of the vehicle, pushing it forward. The wings are shaped so as to hold the weight of the craft on the pressure of air under them. Sounds pretty dodgy, but apparently it works. It can go nearly as fast as a train, and even has more acceleration. It uses a phenomenal amount of energy though, and so far they’ve only managed to get a few kilometres. Only an optimist would extrapolate from that to going thousands of kilometres!
Controlling a flying machine is apparently quite tricky. They say it’s not too bad if the ground’s reasonably level where you take off and land, and you don’t go up too high. They’ve sent animals and instruments up in rockets that they sent straight up, but they’ve not managed to get them back to the ground safely.
In the territory that made the rockets, the sky’s permanently cloudy, so they didn’t even know about the Sun and Moon and stars until they got in touch with other territories. They must have found that hard to get to grips with! They don’t have a coast, either, so none of them has ever been to another territory or seen the sky.
A few brave souls here are trying to develop some kind of agriculture on the surface. They flatten areas and make walls out of slabs of consolidated soil to prevent rainwater running off so the ground retains enough moisture for things to grow. Things are indeed growing, but the ordinary farmers laugh at the enormous expenditure of effort for so little return.
Anyone would think I was an expert on the sky, and rain and things. My Mum and Dad are a bit barmy about The Surface, you see.