I REMEMBER TRAVELING TO NANA AND PEPAW’S FARM when I was very young. Only much later I learned what it was that they did. She and Pepaw were ergarian farmers, harvesting wind and thermal energy for the city of New York, who apparently generously recompensed such farmers for their harvest. At my tender age, they simply had very interesting machinery, many horses, and drove tractors. As we traveled one particular visit, Mom was busy going through flash cards of addition and subtraction with me, and making sure my restraint was in place for the bumping and jostling we occasionally had skidding across the countryside in our 12-meter four-in-hand coachhome. It certainly is odd that after so many, many years, this sort of detail remains so clear in my memory. What I can say is that I can recall this very curious detail of that vessel because it was the most talked-about feature of the vehicle by far, for anyone hearing about it when my Dad spoke of our travels. ‘Our whole family can live completely self-sustained in 12 meters of luxury. Even in the kilnderness!’ he would brag when we stayed at stagehouses. Or when we would stop to dinner. Or when we harnessed up before a trip, and disengaged after one. It was a large vessel, and was spoken about largely.
To be honest, anything at all that had to do with numbers would be his favorite topics, especially when those numbers were in the extremes of what people think to be normal. In reflection, I don’t ever recall seeing another coachhome as large as ours in any travels. I also saw very few in four-in-hand configuration. When we occasionally had encountered such a vessel, those were generally coupled to plain crafted, generic horses with dull tin coats and steel heatpipe ribbing. Comparatively, our bronze horses with “radiabsorbant” black pipes – and lots of them, Dad would boast – they simply gave you the feel of raw power. Feed reins of uncommon thickness tethered them to our nitre tanks from their hindquarters.
I became fond of our horses. I think we all did actually, we gave them names. The front pair were more brass colored and had black fringes on the shoulder plates, rump plates, and solid black shanks all the way down to the hoof. That is, except the left one, which had his right front hoof replaced after an accident when we moved to New York last year. I named her Lightfoot, because, well, she had one light foot which was not painted. Next to her was Smitty. My brother named him and I couldn’t guess what it means if anything at all. Behind Smitty was Jesse, and finally James was to her left. Those two were a heavier build, armored mostly in titanium. I could tell them apart by the thicker cooling piping in James’ mane.
Many travelers would swap out their horses at stagehouses, tethering up to some generic plugs. Our family was different, and it was one of those differences that you just accept when you’re a child. We owned our horses and never swapped them out. Nothing stabled at the stagehouses seemed capable of hauling our coachhome even if we tied six together – which my Dad ensured us we could do because he had modified our couplings to accommodate such if the need for more power came up. Our horses were also different. They were not new, sleek, “efficient” horses; I had the sense – and in later years assumed on myself an affinity to the sense – that the raw power of these older model horses was superior in all regards to the newer builds. None of their remote management and power-limiting “advancements” got in the way of just doing the business of pulling your vessel.
If I go on so long about the manner in which we got from hither to tither, it is for good reason. It was a home. It was a transport. It created my early memories, and I did so love traveling with my family in this way. I was alone among my friends however, in seeing this as perfectly normal. Most children go on about their static lives, growing up in one city and knowing intimately only one neighborhood. They mostly consider our adventurous moving about as a trouble. Some even speak of it as a violation of natural laws to have no singular set of streets and businesses and houses and neighbors in your memories. But I likewise thought their lives to be constrained and colorless. When I entered a new school I wrote the rude remarks off as jealousy, though my mom and dad never made such a criticism. We were not snobby in any way that I can tell, but we were blessed to be sure. I think back now and I recall that no one else we came across at all seemed to have such a luxurious invention, allowing the exploration of any regions we wished on a whim, turning the very Earth into a living, fully immersive picture book such as what my friends at school could only imagine through flipping the smudged pages of photographs and documentary in a second-hand geography book.
As I had mentioned the journey was many hours long. I recall so well this particular trip we made for the manner in which it seems to come to the fore so very often whenever my life becomes troubled over the harsh world in which we live. I could not have thought at that time that anything particularly special was to come of it, but truly it was a life-changing journey for our entire family. Nor could I ever have realized how valuable that trip, with the small talk and discussions we transacted in in our familial fashion, would turn out to be when I grew up.
It happened when dad was assigned to a new airship in the Caribbean skies and as always we chose to move our home ourselves instead of carting everything up into an airship, as many Guard families do when they transfer. The desert was endless and mostly flat enough that we easily glided over the terrain. We needed to stay as low as possible to make good time, because the temperatures sometimes dropped below 800º in the hills. Dad said our horses’ turbines could stall at those low temperatures pulling so much weight. Trips like that would require the addition of two more horses, and that would cost quite a bit more for both the engines and in the nitre they would consume on our long trip. So we wound around the hills a bit, and this trip was sufficient time to endure a significant amount of father-son quality time. In Dad’s world, quality time usually means a science lesson.
“Look at that, kids!” said Dad, pointing excitedly out the window. “It’s a dust devil!”
“Ooooh! Cool!” responded my brother, craning his neck.
“Can I see it?” said I, from my seat into which I was lodged, strapped, and embedded like the naval of a sitting fat man.
“All right.” Mom said. She unfastened my prison methodically. She lifted me to the eisenglass and I peered through the pale amber haze at the face of a low precipice, where a crook turned the run of the ledge briefly toward us, and then bent away again to resume it’s parallel path, only a bit closer to our route. In that elbow I saw orange and brown dust dancing rhythmically in a twisting dervish. The dancer was so energetic and excited in its revolutions I thought it must have been the happiest dirt in the world. I saw the elbow of the ledge lacked the striations that ran the length of the face everywhere else, like a stage had been set for the performance. It was dancing in a smooth polished divet in the ground, which I assumed was what kept it from escaping it’s small platform no matter how ambitious it was in its turns. “Isn’t that strange?” she inquired, kissing my cheek as she held me up and seemed to breathe a savory parcel of my youth, to store away as if it were a dear letter for use in reminiscing one day long off in her golden years.
“It’s the ‘Desert Sculptor’” informed my dad factually. “This dust devil was discovered 50 years ago and has never stopped spinning! That ledge has trapped the wind current, and the sand erosion is polishing the face of it like sandpaper.” He was driving and had eyes where they belonged, but a sense that he was nonetheless dispassionate about my mother’s worries and will remained lingering.
“Why does it keep going?” asked my brother.
“Because the wind keeps going. The wind never stops out here. There has never been a calm day like we see inside the city.”
“How come?”
“Climatologists haven’t answered that just yet. We need to invent some way to explore the upper regions of the atmosphere, where we will probably learn what causes this heat and weather down here.” answered our father. “Did you know there was once a time we could just walk around outside without suits? Almost a quarter of the planet was cool and fresh air that we didn’t even need suits to walk around in.”
I struggled to imagine such a place, and my best visualization conjured up some immense dome with walls and ceilings beyond our vision, holding out the kilnair. “How big was that city?” asked I.
“It wasn’t a city, you silly!” laughed my brother. “They never stop talking about it in the Almanack. It’s like, an entire chapter or something about the cold weather. They thought 100º was hot!”
“It said this would happen if the earth were not tilted in the orbit.” Mother suggested, timidly.
“What?” I exclaimed in disbelief.
“Oh, no Chase, he’s right. It was not inside a city.” Dad was so wrapped up in his lesson he didn’t even hear mom’s remark and ignored her completely.
“But how did they keep the kilnair out?”
“Kids, this world did not always have kilnair. We started out very hot, when the earth was formed. It got cooler over time, and at many times even got completely frozen. When water falls through frozen air, it makes something called snow, and the whole planet got covered in white frozen snow.”
“Page 74. We know all about the old climate,” mother stated distantly. She sat to the table and began dutifully writing family cards. “I have to notify everyone of our new address.” My brother and dad just carried on oblivious to her, and I sensed a sadness.
“Did everything die that time too?” asked my brother.
“No, there were many animals who just grew long hair and learned to live in the new environment.”
“But there is no energy when it’s cold. We can’t run engines inside the cities because everything runs on kilnair. How did people live without any energy in the whole world?” asked my brother.
“Well, believe it or not, you can run engines in cold air exactly the same as we run them in kilnair. But the times we are talking about were before people had any cities. All they needed was food, and a place to keep warm. We called them cave men.”
At this point I was getting quite confused, so I just sipped my cup and let my brother’s brain do all the work.
“You can’t run a steam engine in cold air! Everyone knows that!” my brother objected.
“Well the engine really just needs two different temperatures to work. Today, we have hot kilnair providing energy for steam, but the engine won’t work unless we add cold to what’s called the ‘condensate’ well. The cold shrinks the steam, pulling new steam through the engine. So, if I wanted to run that engine inside the city, I already have the cold side. I would need to just heat up the outside boiler tubes. It would run just fine!”
My brother was getting exasperated as his world of scientific knowledge began to implode. “But how can you ‘make’ heat on the outside? Even if you could do it, all the heat would blow away!”
Dad noticed this was getting to him, and calmly explained the disconnect. “Everything you have said is very true, son, what I mean is, that we would have to change our engines to work in cold air. They would still work the same way, but we need to turn them inside-out. Put the boiler tubes on the inside of the engine, and the cold air outside will remove the heat. If you burn something, you can heat the boiler tubes and it all works.
“Burning needs oxygen!” my brother objected again.
“Yes, and just like the air inside the cities today, the air outside had oxygen naturally in it.”
“You mean they didn’t need to make oxygen? Ever?” said my brother, now almost frantic.
“I want to invent something that makes cold air” said I, finally giving up on comprehending this inside-out world without energy.
“You better invent something that fills the whole planet with oxygen while your there!” added my brother sarcastically.
“I know you do, and we all do. The Almanack doesn’t talk about the oxygen because it was normal to them. As you know from school all our oxygen is contained in carbon dioxide. Just like in our cities, plants used to reverse that naturally. For the whole planet! Now, energy works sort of like that. If you make cold air, that means you are taking heat away with something. But then you’re in a pickle! You have to put the heat somewhere! It can’t just snap out of existence. Nothing really does.”
“Except with nitre?” asked my brother, again reinforcing his school science lessons.
Our dad had a way to defuse our frustrations when deep and difficult topics came before the family, as what was before us now. It was a paradox that a man so apparently successful in such a serious vocation could keep such a good humor about him, but it was among the most enviable parts of his character. “Mmmm…” My father paused, scrunching up his face in comical ponderance. This would hold, with eyes searching this way and that, until he would arrive at some explanation of a very complicated process, in terms which we could absorb. For our age, this was so bemusing. We failed to constrain our laughter. A finger finally shot up profoundly, “When you let nitre out of a container what it is doing is using that heat to make new chemicals – oxygen, nitrogen,” then adding victoriously, “and water!”
“Oh!” said my brother. He eventually realized that he did not, in fact, understand, and added, “But the heat is gone. That’s the point, right?”
“I know the heat is technically gone, but it has actually been turned into something else.” Explained Dad energetically, “The heat has sort of mashed the atoms together to make these new molecules.” He was now mashing imaginary atoms together in his hands, “The energy that used to be heat, is now holding the water, or oxygen, or nitrogen together in their new forms.”
“But it isn’t heat anymore?” my brother inquired.
“It can be turned back into heat. Molecules are like heat batteries that turn the heat energy into a sort of glue. That is the single most important chemistry principle for our survival on earth! Nitre takes heat away from the steam, turning it into this… molecule glue, and the cool steam turns back into water. Water goes back out to get more heat from the kilnair and turns back into steam for turbines.” He pointed out the window at Jesse, “See Jesse’s black rib pipes? There’s cool water running through them right now as he pulls us! It’s being boiled by the kilnair for his turbine.” Realizing he got off topic, as usual, he added emphatically, “But! With the right conditions, they can be unglued and the glue turns back into heat again. We came up with a big word in Greek for things like that; we call them ‘Ex – Oh – Ther – Mic’.”
“X! O! Termee!” I exclaimed.
“That works!” my Dad said with a shrug.
“I want to make cold air by putting heat into batteries, and bring back dinosaurs and oceans!” said I.
“And what would you like to find in an ocean?” inquired my Dad.
We knew we could all trust our wildest imaginations with him implicitly. I belted out the first and most fascinating thing my mind could consider, with vigor: “Whales!”
“Yes!” laughed my father, “The largest mammals to ever live! You see, that is the secret to restoring our Earth, if God wishes it to be restored for us! But the possibility that He has something even better in mind should always keep us looking forward to the future.”
After a length, I could tell my brother was digesting this all deeply. He eventually located the root of the problem which occupied his mind.
“But oxygen is an element, not a molecule, my teacher told me.”
“Oh, yes, they are exactly right! But the oxygen released from nitre is not alone. No, you see, two of them stick together to make what we call O-2. That means it is actually two oxygen atoms. So it’s a molecule. And an element. Make sense?”
“Aaaah! Cool!” said my brother.
“Cool indeed. Until it goes ‘exo-THERM-ic,’ at least!”
We all laughed at his silly play on words. We always did, it seemed. It may be safe to say that whenever we engaged our Dad in any questions about our world, we needed to keep on our toes about the words we chose if we wanted to avoid giggling or rolling our eyes in humorous delight. In fact any words with which we formed our question, comment, or exclamation; if a homophone or homonym were employed we were sure to be replied to with some double- or triple entendre relying on a definition of it which we did not intend. His conversations were like an intricate mind bender, but to our amazement that incorrectly interpreted word would still accurately and correctly answer our question or address our concern. The ease with which he dispatched our confusuions and concerns through unorthodox use of vocabulary and syntax made me wonder sometimes if a choice of words in our discourse ever really matters. He was masterful in expressing concepts regardless of the props or language left at his disposal. Truthfully, our Dad was never more serious or more grand about anything at all in life, than he was about joking at the seriousness of life’s grandeur.
About this time, Mom had finished addressing cards and had put together some sandwiches for our lunch. For all the intellect and showmanship of my father, he never seemed to sense as we did, that mother was intimidated by it. Our family seemed to be in a subtle but ominous race for who may be the better parent. The one using her diligent provision of bare necessities and family upkeep to outpace the other’s upstaging wealth of knowledge and unconcerned joie de vivre. A sense arose that the love parents offer to their children obey the same laws of thermodynamics that bound our energy-hungry physical world in some zero sum game. This was becoming fast in my perceptions, carrying forward as I grew in years through friendships and dating, to be the normal management of close and intimate relationships.
“Come to the table Christian, I made ham and cheese sandwiches, with pickles” said our mother. She carefully cut half a sandwich up into bits for me, and brought one plate up to the cockpit for Dad.
“Thank you, Honey,” he said. “Do you know what time your mother and father expect us today?”
“No, I told you that I didn’t hear back from them before we left,” she said.
“Well, I only have a couple days to stay before we have to head on out to our new duty station. We have to get settled in, and I will need to get trained up on my new ship. So these memories we are making for the kids this trip are very important. Try to get some rest, the next beacon should be 45 minutes away. Their farm is only 10 minutes from that, I’ll wake you when we reach the beacon.”
My Dad was good at hiding his feelings about the new job, but I could tell he was not quite himself. He tried very hard to put us all at ease. That was the behavior which brought the concern to our attention. My friends at school had been saying there has been talk of a lot of piracy around Haiti lately, including kidnapping children. My dad has been driving a desk for as long as I have been alive and all he does now is teach new guardsmen maintenance and operation. He said going back to an airship will be easy, but I know Mom has been very worried about it. She was worried about both his safety, which is to say, his ability to provide for our lifestyle if something horrible should happen to him; and for those same reasons she was worried about what we should do when he retires from service after this duty. I had no idea what may be in store for us in Santa Rosa, and could not have ever imagined the course my own life was about to take in those storied Caribbean skies. I was just looking forward to fresh apple pie, riding in Pepaw’s combine harvester, and a coolingplace hearth that doesn’t smell like ammonia.
Science Fiction
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