The Time Surgeons
Chapter 27 The Long Night

The war was bad. As nuclear fires blossomed over once mighty cities, and too frequently eliminated leaders of states and nations, entire countries fell into anarchy fed by power loss, water loss, hunger and panic.

The paradox of modern civilization was that for all its power and sophistication it was fragile. Enormous cities were fed by food and resources drawn to their bosoms by gossamer webs of transport and communication; the regions that fed them in turn supported by the combined brains and energies of the millions in those cities, whose bounty fed back to them over those same threads.

And most people were peaceful. They were not gunmen expecting to live by their fighting skills, but people who worked, and raised their children; protected from the few who would prey upon them by a small number of police.

The police didn’t have a chance. In some places, they became or joined the new warlords. In others, they held to their duty and died.

Not all cities were hit by the mushroom clouds, but too many were, and the countryside was invaded by hordes of the hungry, who rolled over the farmlands leaving destruction in their wake. The surviving cities lost their support, or too much of it, and fell in their own ways.

It was not enough to destroy civilization. The world fragmented from nation states into city states, many often retaining a loose political alliance. But the radioactive fallout spread in plumes across the country and around the world; more people died, more animals died, more plants died, in a vicious circle spiraling down to the world’s doom.

But there were remnants, many poor and dying but some, by a combination of luck, location and grit, remaining strong. Much knowledge was retained, even in some places a degree of political freedom. So the world could have recovered from its tragedy. Perhaps in only a few hundred years. It would not have rivalled the past world in numbers, not yet: but may have approached it in technology.

But fate was not finished with mankind yet. The long dance between warmth and ice, so slow that mankind had barely noticed it in the frenetic pace of their own quick generations, turned to ice.

By inches, then at an accelerating pace, the remaining beacons of civilization began to flicker and die, and the ice marched on, oblivious to their fate.

The last remnants of civilization fell, and humanity descended into its long, cold night.

No matter how softly one treads, the faint, chaotic ripples of causality cannot be denied. However careful Ron was to fulfil the entreaty from the future with minimum disturbance, still subtle changes to the timelines of men and chance flowed outwards from his actions. Most of the ripples died in the war. The few that remained continued to fade in its deadly aftermath, until finally the last filament was cut, as if by some quantum Fate wielding her scissors on the threads of time.

And so darkness fell. But somewhere, buried against time and warded against fate, the knowledge of the Ancients slept, waiting.