Page 56 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Aquifer Virginalis

change. Air? Well, it’s already almost unbreathable in many places; if
remediation technology disappears and every dirty fuel available is
burned in ignorant desperation, then we will be one Krakatoa-event
away from widespread asphyxiation. Finally, water. That is the
subject of my first story in the series.”
“It’s no mystery what has already happened not just to the world’s
oceans, but to its sources of freshwater. Acid rain may decrease in
future once industrial production is halted—that is a pre-Setback
story I will cover in the fire and earth stories—but that is only one
of the lingering sources of groundwater pollution creating a severe
problem for the greatly reduced human population. Most of them
in the Northern Hemisphere have migrated north, along with other
flora and fauna able to survive the rigors of dislocation. Vast
quantities of weapons remain available, of course—arms large and
small—as well as ammunition, all overproduced in the last years of
easy manufacture and distribution. Following the breakdown of
social institution, brute force will become the dominant organizing
principle of both roving and stationary bands of desperate people
looking for potable water. I also presume every large reservoir has
been depleted by drought or their dams burst by torrential flows of
glacial meltwater.”
“That is the physical background. Psychologically and culturally,
humanity is in transition from the shock of the Setback’s early
decades to the establishment of a new subsistence economy and
semi-tribal network of polities. The settlements will depend on
defensible and reliable sources of freshwater near arable land, as less
and less of the terrestrial surface remains habitable. This
resemblance to earlier stages of our history—real and imaginary—
does not, as I said, necessarily reflect a lack of imagination on the
part of the writer: it is the literary shorthand, as it were, of frontier
towns and medieval fiefdoms enabling me to focus on a short-
story’s key components of plot and character rather than fleshing
out an unfamiliar set of circumstances and relationships.”
“So I will zero in on one of these stockaded villages. I will call it
Starkerville, after the strongman and his family running it. It sits on
a confined aquifer over which the Starkers have built a well. This

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