Page 83 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Wind God’s Last Altar

Brad Razeberry squinted at the remains of his rice pudding, as if
the right words with which to begin his presentation were stuck
somewhere on the surface of that inchoate but self-adhering
structure.
“Now, I have an idea, but its elements are definitely unoriginal,”
he began slowly. “So please don’t criticize it on those grounds. It
has to have a twist at the end—maybe an unexpected revelation.
But maybe not: the alternative is the inexorable inevitability of a
fated destiny, also a common theme in our genre. And the least
original thing here is the disintegration of a depopulated society
bereft of all the means of survival we now take for granted. So, an
author has license in these scenarios to invoke as much atavism and
environmental degradation as necessary to advance the plot. In my
story, a small band of human survivors, hurled back to the
popularly-accepted stereotypical Stone Age culture and technology,
has found a niche in which they can survive as hunter-gatherers,
relatively secure from other marauding groups and the harshest
conditions. They live near a high mountain plateau, where their
forebears found a mysterious grove of tall metallic trees: an old
wind farm, long disused, its towers slowly toppling as their rusting
bases can no longer support the tonnage above against the howling
winds that sporadically blow through the area. Of course, the future
primitives don’t know the devices’ purpose, have no idea of electric
power and cannot understand how humans could have built these
mammoth structures.”
“You can guess at their explanation: an extinct race of giants put
the towers on Earth anow haves a means for communicating with
and divining the intentions of the wind god. That omnipotent deity
lives in the sky, the source of inexplicable and unpredictable
meteorological forces. The dilapidated condition of these altars is
taken as a sign by these people of the withdrawal of heavenly
favor—their lives are blighted, after all. So they pray and make
offerings at the one pylon with blades that still turn in a stiff breeze.
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