Chapter 12: Earth - 3752 C.E.

Whatever else Earth might be—and it was a candidate for many honours—in the thirty-eighth century what it principally happened to be was mostly just a tourist resort. It was the same wherever Paul and Beatrice travelled on the planet: everything they saw was labelled and displayed for the benefit of tourists. The visitors to Earth might also be archaeologists, palaeontologists, musicians or climatologists, but they were mostly just tourists. Tourism was Earth's principal source of income and everything on the planet was preserved and packaged to serve that purpose.

This observation was nowhere more valid than in London, England: the city Paul and Beatrice were now visiting. The metropolis had a peculiar significance in Earth history from the age of Chaucer to the Twentieth Century. It was the capital city of a kingdom in which the industrial revolution began. It had once been the hub of the planet's most extensive empire, the capital of a nation of disproportionate cultural influence (even into the Twenty-First Century) and the land from which Paul could trace his earliest known ancestors.

Paul's ancestry could also be traced to Armenia, France, Australia, Canada and South Africa, but the branch of his family tree to which Paul was most emotionally attached came from London and villages in what had once been the English countryside.

It seemed that every building, every road, every courtyard and every item of street furniture in London was marked with a plaque that explained its historical significance. The plaques were sometimes constructed from blue metal but most were displayed on a plasma screen that even diamond couldn't cut. They might celebrate a house where Charles Dickens once worked; the site of a theatre in which Shakespeare's plays were performed in the sixteenth century; a recording studio where the Beatles recorded; or the site of a gruesome twenty-fifth century murder.

London was an eccentrically diverse city. One cobbled street might more properly belong to the age of Samuel Johnson. Another would be lined with quaint twentieth century bus stops and shop windows that displayed everything from umbrellas to antique computer games on small metal disks. In amidst this miscellany were theatres, museums, art galleries and holographic multimedia shows.

London could best be described as an enormous amusement park and there were countless people to be amused by it. The million people who lived in the city represented just a fraction of the city's peak population in the twenty-third century. Most of the people currently in London, however, were visitors like Paul and Beatrice. Some were here for professional reasons and these were the lucky ones most likely to be authorised to land on the planet's surface. Archaeologists, biologists, geologists, historians of every kind, and other researchers were here in great abundance. Paul's discipline however would never have been sufficient justification for him to be so honoured. There was no need for someone whose expertise was in antique databases to actually be permitted on the planet's surface. The bits and bytes of data he analysed were exactly the same on Godwin as they were on Earth.

Besides the privileges granted to diplomats and business executives, the primary qualification that granted a person the privilege to walk on Earth's surface was a generous financial contribution to the planet's substantial conservation costs. Paul and Beatrice were constantly reminded that it was thanks to the generosity of people like him (well, not Paul specifically) that Earth wasn't now just dead and lifeless.

It was alarming how precarious the survival of Earth had been. Every age of human innovation was associated with yet another spasm of global vandalism that threatened the extinction of humankind and most other life as well. The age of steam and steel marked the first era in which the planet was at critical risk. The ages of oil and electricity, of silicon and satellite dishes, of robotics and nuclear fusion: each fresh phase of human history was associated with a fresh set of environmental risk from which humanity just about survived only by the good fortune of scientific progress rather than prudence or effective conservation.

Most of those who lived on Earth were employed in the tourist industry. By virtue of being amongst the top twenty destinations on the planet, London had one of the largest city populations on Earth. And the British Isles was one of the planet's most densely inhabited tourist destinations. The actual current distribution of population was very misleading. There were huge cities in China, India, Brazil and North America that had once housed tens of millions of people, but were now of such little interest to tourists that their current population only numbered in the thousands. In some cities, only memorable now because of the economic origins of their growth, a single person might live in a tall building surrounded by thousands of empty skyscrapers.

Beatrice and Paul were shambolic tourists. Paul had always wanted to visit London, but he'd never been so enamoured with the prospect of visiting Ipswich, Toulouse, Krasnoyarsk, Chicago and the Namibian Desert, all of which found themselves on his haphazard itinerary. The couple travelled to some unlikely destinations as a result of Paul's chaotic scheduling and his ignorance concerning travel arrangements on a planet where flying was strictly rationed, most travel was by electric car or train, and where the number of tourists permitted at any one time at any one place was strictly rationed. Any form of travel that consumed a disproportionate amount of the world's resources was very rarely permitted. And most means of travel were as much museum pieces as the destinations.

Paul was very poor at estimating the distance and journey time to his destination. After the couple had enjoyed a relaxing but not especially productive week in the South Pacific Ocean, the time it took to sail by ship across the ocean and travel by train across Siberia was rather longer than the single afternoon that Paul naively allocated. The reconstructed luxury liner, Lusitania, must have represented the pinnacle of progress in the early Twentieth Century, but even the most luxurious suite was too cramped and poorly fitted (not to mention badly air-conditioned) for Paul's taste. And he didn't enjoy at all his traumatic experience of sea-sickness. Who would have imagined that such relatively small up and down motion could have such a nauseous effect? Beatrice, naturally, gave no impression of being out of sorts at all.

It was very odd to be on a planet that existed more in the past than it did in the present. Any part of Earth's history with historical or scientific significance was preserved or newly reconstructed. Almost all the planet was either national park or museum. Beatrice pointed out that much the same was also happening on the Moon. There was a natural desire to preserve the past. However, as more and more past events and artefacts were now considered worth preserving, they had steadily accumulated to the extent that they squeezed out the last few remaining things that had no historical significance at all.

Although London had a relatively low permanent population, it was in fact one of the most crowded spots on the planet. This privilege was shared with only a handful of other great cities such as Rome, Paris, Istanbul, Beijing and New York. There was congestion from Charing Cross, along Whitehall and towards Westminster where tourists from Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and other planetary orbits crowded together to view the many famous sights they'd always wanted to see.

"Let's go somewhere quieter," suggested Paul who had only ever seen crowds like this before on the Moon.

Beatrice agreed and the couple set off down the escalators at Westminster, which were perfect mid-twenty first century facsimiles, caught an underground train that resembled one from a century or two later, and used the iconic underground map to navigate to the outer suburb of Richmond-upon-Thames. This was still very busy but thankfully rather less crowded than central London.

Beatrice and Paul ambled along to Richmond Park which appeared to be the most famous landmark in this quaint suburb. Paul looked warily towards the sky as he recalled the rain that had fallen earlier that day. Although the weather forecasts indicated only a low likelihood of further precipitation, Paul was in constant dread of this peculiar meteorological phenomenon. How could anyone ever be fond of rain? He'd already endured one English downpour and now understood why people on Earth owned waterproofs and carried umbrellas. Rain was cold. It was persistent. It made you very wet indeed. If you ran to shelter and you were unfortunate, you might have to wait for several hours until you could gingerly emerge and hope that you weren't going to get soaked by the next downpour.

English wildlife, even in Richmond Park, was very elusive and, when you caught a glimpse of it, singularly unspectacular. Only an ornithologist could enthuse about sparrows, thrushes and blackbirds. There were none of the rather more interesting but quite dangerous animals that roamed Africa or India. So, after not very long and not having seen even one of the park's famous herd of red deer, Beatrice and Paul left the park in the extraordinarily early dusk. This was late autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and the days were now tiresomely short.