Chapter 12 - Enlightenment

In the salon the following day Miranda and George have finished their light lunch of sandwiches and fruit.  Georgie is again playing with his toy city.  He is using some new computerised thing for his cars that Charles and Alexandra have been teaching him to program.

Remembering Paton's Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon, in the lower level of the historical National Gallery of Scotland, this morning had brought back fond memories of Edinburgh.   With a profound sense of loss, Miranda had begun to catalogue in her mind the many other places she loves around the world that are gone from her forever. 

She remembers the memorial to Walter Scott in Princes St and the statues of those great Enlightenment figures Hume and Adam Smith in the Royal Mile. 

Sitting on the Floor beside Georgie she moves two little plastic figures into his main street, joining in his game and talking in the voice of a child driving a play car:

"Brrrr - skreech - plonk!"

George regards her as if she is a big child.  He is past making such noises - mostly.

Miranda is not daunted.

"Remember our story yesterday?"

"The time when people started to examine popular stories and put aside those that could not be tested was called the Enlightenment," she says as she places one statue, Hume, and then the other, Smith, in what has become her fantasy world too.

"After the Enlightenment, natural philosophers, as scientists were called, could no longer conclude that a god or some other un-testable imaginative creation, like a ghost or a gremlin, was responsible for a natural event and still expect to be taken seriously," she muses, half to herself.

"You know what Uncle Charles is fond of saying:  Those who will not reason are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves?"

Of course, she is carrying on from the lesson from yesterday.  But now George stops playing and looks at her seriously as if he is considering the merits of her argument.

Yes, of course he's heard Uncle Charles say this.  He loves his young uncle who plays fun boy's games with him; and sister Alexandra.  They babysit with him almost every afternoon and help him with his city.   But he hasn't really understood what Charles means when he says it.

"Well," continues Miranda, "Charles is quoting his hero, Lord Byron, who was one of many important thinkers of the time - like these two men," she says, pointing to the two plastic figures she's plonked into his city: "Hume, the greatest British philosopher of the period, and Adam Smith, the father of modern Economics."

"There were lots of other Enlightenment thinkers in France and what later became Germany and in Russia and some other European countries, together with the Founding Fathers of the United States like Jefferson and Ben Franklin and several early leaders in Australia.  As you get older you will learn more about them."

"It was the ideas of the Enlightenment that led humanity into the modern world."

"After the Enlightenment true knowledge about the world began to accumulate, faster and faster as one real, 'sensible', fact build upon another.  And people found that sticking to just this 'sensible' knowledge, that could be tested by experiment, gave them amazing new understanding about the world and new abilities to build, make and do, lots of things, never made or done before." 

"All of a sudden, in just two centuries, two long lifetimes, science taught us about germs and viruses; and engineering allowed motors to begin to replace slavery and serfdom and domestic service; and allowed people to talk to each other and fly around the world. It became so powerful that it helped people to grow more food, fight death and disease and live longer."  

"And invent plastic for toys," responds George enthusiastically, smiling. It's a sort of joke.

"And plastic for toys," Miranda confirmed. "And guess what, the real world of physics and chemistry and biology turned out to be much more interesting and unexpected than any story that people had been able to imagine in the olden times.  You'll find out more about space-time and quantum mechanics and the chemistry of life as you get bigger."

The thought of becoming a big boy makes him serious.

"Gran" he says, "why do you and Grandpa Bertram have to die after Angela's party?"

"Let's look at our picture book again and I'll tell you", she says.

"Science and engineering is a tool and like any tool it can be misused. Like to make weapons to kill people.

"In this case it was used to make humans the dominant species on the planet."

'Too complicated,' she thinks. 'Try again'.

"With science and technology people lived longer, deaths decreased and food became more plentiful. So the population of the World doubled and then doubled again; and again; and then again."

"Soon there were just too many people and we had to reduce our numbers.  That's why we have the International Ten-Two Protocol; and our deathday this Friday."

Reminded of her deathday George throws himself at her, embracing her with all his might.

After a while he gives voice to something that's been worrying him.

"Alex told me not everyone has a deathday when they get old.  Why do you have to die on Friday Gran?" he asks, as if he has discovered a miscarriage of justice.

"What a big and clever boy you are!  Let's look at our first drawing from this morning again."

Miranda takes up the drawing book and rearranges him on the seat beside her.

"People, up here, wandered around for about 60,000 years and there were only a few hundred thousand children in different parts of the world. We'll draw a long line like this, 60."

She draws a long line, almost right across the page and writes 60 at the end.

"Then during the next bit with farms and villages and castles the number of people grew and people spread to more places so that there were probably 200 million in the whole world.  This period lasted for another 6,000 years. We'll add this little bit, 6." 

She adds another tenth and writes 6.

"During this time there were diseases and wars and famines and plagues and just when the number of people grew something would happen to shrink them back again. So, the numbers of children sometimes doubled but then got smaller again. 

But with the help of science and engineering after just 60 years, this tiny, teeny little dot at the end, there were seven times more children than there had ever been, at any time since the world began."

She adds a tiny dot for less than the twentieth century. 

"Very soon most of the planet had been converted to producing food, clothes, houses, vehicles and other things, like Videowalls, for more and more and more people. But like the mould on the orange that Gran threw away this morning, this huge human population was destroying the planet. And unless people did something to change things, there would be over twenty times more people, than there had been during all this period before, in another lifetime."

"It couldn't go on for much longer."

George is sitting beside her, cuddling in.  Has he realised that she will soon be gone?  She is overwhelmed with love for him and there is a lump in her throat as she continues:

"When Gran was your age the people who prefer to believe made-up stories had convinced everyone that there was nothing to worry about.  Some thought that the gods would look after us, others that the scientist's story was just made up too.  But then the yearly rains called the Monsoon, that helped feed over a quarter of the people on Earth stopped coming.  At the same time the main food growing areas in North America and Argentina suffered ten years of drought."

"What's a drought?" Gran.

"That's like when Gran forgets to water her pots on the balcony and the plants die. But in a drought, all the plants in the countryside die then the animals that eat them die too.  Then the people who eat the plants and the animals die as well."

"Soon people started trying to go into neighbouring counties and the food wars started. Governments collapsed and men with guns took over."

"Imagine filling your bucket with sand at the beach and then you fill another, then another and you go on all day 'til you have 500 buckets of sand in a heap. The number of grains of sand in the heap is still less than two and a half billion, the number of children who starved to death or died of thirst or from related violence and disease."

"So, after the collapse, the countries that remained viable got together and decided that we had to limit all mommies and daddies to having just two children, before the world reached ten billion people again. In this way we might prevent billions more innocent children dying, when humans reached plague proportions again.  And we could do something about poverty; ignorance and overcrowding as well." 

"The agreement was that the Protocol would apply to everyone equally, no matter which Continent they live in."   

"Mommies and daddies could still choose to have more children but then we had to promise that as soon as our third child grew up to be an adult we would die."

"I wanted another baby and was happy to agree, and so were a lot of other people.  So that eventually the population will return to a sustainable two billion and you and lots of children like you, as well as your grandchildren's grandchildren will have a future." 

"That's why it's called 'Ten-Two'."

"Of course, some people will tell you that it's because the human race was at ten-to-midnight, when all our systems would collapse.  After that a managed return to sustainability would become impossible for a very long time."

Of course, thinks Miranda, George is still far too little to understand everything she has said.  But she has kept him engaged, as she had when reading him to sleep with Alice in Wonderland. And as Alice thought, at the end of the very first chapter: "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?"

She has found telling the story therapeutic and a pleasant way to spend some of her final hours.  And George will have the drawings she has made with him today, and this last lesson, to remember her by.  But her sense of profound loss rose as he cuddled her now.

She is amazed when he suddenly asks, with big tears in his eyes:  "But why do you have to die Gran?  What if Auntie Angela was killed instead?" 

How long has he been considering this?  Is he contemplating murdering Angela? 

"It makes no difference" she answers.  

"Once I signed the Ten-Two contract I accepted that I must be sacrificed this Friday no matter what, unless I died earlier.   The moment Auntie Angela was born, my death was sealed and it made no difference what happened to her.  And I'm not doing this because I wanted Angela alone but to have three children.  I'm doing it for Mummy too." 

George puts aside his homicidal thoughts and gives her another giant cuddle, for Mummy too!