Page 84 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Wind God’s Last Altar

These rituals are performed on the metal stairs leading to the access
hatch of the wind turbine. That portal is sealed, still protected by a
long-dead touch pad designed to transmit an encrypted code to a
lock inside the tower. But the door is never touched: it is
considered sacred and taboo. To get a message to the wind god, its
high priests bang on the hollow metal tower with rocks. They hope
the slight reverberations will travel up almost 300 feet and get their
unhelpful deity’s attention.”
“Well, there you have it, folks: a post-apocalyptic scenario
reduced to one small place on the planet. What could happen next?
Could the underground wiring be uncovered by shifting sands and a
shaman or two electrocuted? The nacelle of this last functioning
turbine suddenly fall off, its 150-foot blades either wreaking havoc
among the faithful or punching a hole in the earth directly over a
previously unknown source of water, in either case a clear response
of the wind god to human entreaties? Or the thing just stop
working like the others, becoming as mute as Stonehenge or the
moai on Easter Island? There has to a protagonist, to bear witness
or be a victim or beneficiary of whatever the outcome is. I haven’t
decided on that, either. How would you handle it, fellow
Daemons?”
“Every religion seeks a natural stability supporting its secular
authority,” said Cyril Kornfleck. “I should think a newly-minted
hierarchy of hierophants, particularly following the greatest
demonstration of natural instability in human history, would be
conditioned by those fraught circumstances to attempt a tighter
control on people’s lives than one might find in today’s multi-
cultural secular society. Astronomy originated, according to a fairly
reasonable archaeological and anthropological theory, as a means of
giving the rulers a heads-up on eclipses, traditionally an ill-omen
among the scientifically-ignorant. The witchdoctors in this
microcosm might have an edge in meteorological prediction: by
knowing which way the wind goes, they would able to use banging
on the tower as leading to the wind god’s response. Such secrets—
nephelognostic, seasonal and intuitive—gained through reading the
subtle signs of change in their part of the world, would give them

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