Copyright 2017 J.D. ALT

All Rights Reserved

Cover Design by J.D. ALT

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons (with the exception of named historical figures) living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

1.

Station Eccles—May, 2028

The portal is a horizontal-bar livestock gate secured with a chain and padlock. To access it, one must first descend into and climb out of a narrow, rock-strewn arroyo. The entry vehicle is a white, Tacoma, long-bed Star-Gazer. Going in, the transition is seamless and, seemingly, instantaneous: The Station Eccles is a large rectangular module, 700 meters by 500 meters, in geo-stationary Earth position at an altitude of 6,000 feet. It is organized structurally as a topological patchwork of mini-ecosystem experiments, linked with a network of footpaths and two-tracks—a testing ground for prototype building components, water-management, energy and food-growing systems for the new Alpha Matrix colony evolving about 10 kilometers distant. The cockpit and crew-quarters for the station are on a small, central, plateau facing south. One does not sense its geo-stationary flight until well after nightfall. Then, sitting on the navigation veranda, the relentless roll of the Eccles through the black, star-flung vertigo of the galaxy is a joy to feel. I know, because I’m the captain.

I speak in these strange terms for a reason: Ever since the US/SpaceX “Man on Mars” mission (MOM) was announced—and became such an overwhelming national obsession—I have begun to think of our work here, on Earth, as a parallel mission. I have argued (obviously with some limited success) that before we colonize Mars we ought to make a more serious, organized, and dedicated effort to rescue our mission to colonize Earth—for that, in fact, is the mission we have been undertaking for these many centuries of human civilization, is it not? (And, I might add, with disastrous results.) But while we are beginning, finally, to make rational progress, MOM—which is scheduled to send its first manned mission of colonizers to the Red Planet in three weeks—continues to overshadow everything we are accomplishing. More to the point, the promise of the asteroidal mining operations continues to obsess the selfish gene even though the rationale behind it was debunked six years ago. For these reasons I feel compelled, now, to write this account of Saint Eccles—to try to frame events of the last decade in a more rational perspective.

2.

A Walk in the Forest

Everything I want to explain began, really, twelve years ago with the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. I remember vividly the day of that election. Maggie and I, after voting early in the morning, drove to Saint Michaels on the Chesapeake Bay’s Miles River and checked into The Inn at Perry Cabin. We walked into town and had lunch. All the restaurants and bars had TVs going with CNN tracking exit polls and speculating endlessly on just how badly Donald Trump was going to lose. No one was talking about Hillary Clinton winning—only about Trump losing in a landslide. After an afternoon of reading, a nap, and glass of wine, we ate dinner at Perry Cabin, then wandered into the bar to watch the election results with fifteen or twenty other patrons. In virtually every state, Trump was leading. But CNN’s John King, who had the magic map-screen that he waved his hand at to scroll and enlarge and pull up tallies, continually pointed out that the early results were all from rural counties. The big numbers would be coming later from the urban voting districts, where the blacks and Latinos and working women and professional liberals were expected to overwhelming repudiate Donald Trump. Along about my third glass of wine, John King was beginning to sound worried. Trump was still in the lead, notching up state after state—and the progressive urban districts remaining to be counted were growing fewer and fewer. Maggie and I went up to bed before the election was called. As we walked up the stairs absorbed in our thoughts, I made one comment: “Mags,” I said, “I think we have a big problem.”

While Maggie drifted off to sleep, I kept my reading light on for an hour or so. The book I was absorbing at the time was The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. It painted a detailed explanation of the fact that trees—and, I suppose plants in general, though he focused exclusively on trees—are not the solitary, passive entities we suppose them to be, but are organized (just as we are) into families, and communities—even nations, if you will, which is what a forest would be. What we see above ground is simply the sun-seeking, food producing organ of something far more extensive and complex below ground. Trees sense and communicate and exchange nutrients with each other through their root systems—which Wohlleben likened to a living brain which certainly was, in some real sense, conscious and purposeful. Parent trees nurture off-spring trees, whose sun-organs struggle to grow in the shade of the adult canopy. Neighboring trees signal each other about beetle invasions, and send up into their inner bark and leaves toxins to ward off the intruders. A tree that discovers a cache of water in the soil does its best to share the find with its community. And all of these communications and actions are facilitated by uncountable colonies of mycorrhizal bacterium and fungi living on the intertwining mesh of the tree roots, feeding them nutrients from the soil in exchange for a share of the sugar the trees manufacture from the sun, carrying the tree-messages from root to root, and guarding against underground invasion by predators.

Before I turned off the light that night of the election, I re-read a section of the book that described what happens when a big storm comes along and topples a large swath of the forest all at once. Intuitively, I could feel this was exactly what was happening that night in the “forest” of the United States. A great complex of old-growth political and social orthodoxy was being blown down in a storm of unexpected power and destruction. In the morning, Donald Trump was going to be President-elect of the United States of America, and what had been a towering and over-spreading tree-canopy of the middle forest was going to lie shattered on the forest floor.

And that, of course, is exactly what happened. The next morning, where the forest canopy of the three-decade old “global democrats” (as we later came to remember them) had mightily stood, there was now simply open sky and sunshine. The great under-class of the American democracy, feeling abandoned and ignored, seeing their prospects diminished, watching their children fall into unsupportable debt for educations that provided them with no employment, having lost the value of their homes but not the burden of their variable-rate mortgages, seeing local businesses that had issued paychecks for multiple generations dissolve into global conglomerates, leaving behind abandoned workplaces and empty storage lots—this massive surge of struggle and disappointment had risen up during the night and knocked down the forest in the desperate hope, obviously, that something better would now take root.

I knew, from my re-reading the night before, the next question was going to be: What is going to start growing now in that newly blown-clear open space? Things were going to start competing for all of that suddenly available sunlight. At the time, the last thing I could ever have imagined taking root would be an almost obsessive national fascination with the colonization of Mars. That, I understand—even now in retrospect—requires a bit of explanation. In a nutshell, however, what happened was this: Republicans had taken control of America with the promise they would bring back jobs to the working class. When that stubbornly failed to materialize, they simply promised, instead, to make them rich.