PROLOGUE:  CURIOUS BEGINNINGS

     "What are you up to, Christina?"
     "Well, Sven, while the other kids have gone home for the holidays, and there's some peace and quiet here, I thought I'd do something that Mr. Larsson has been trying to get me to do for over a year."
     "Let's see... He wants you to imagine what Caesar would have said if he had had the courage to cross the threshold to my room.  'Alea jacta est' or 'Who threw that jacket at me?' or something like that."
     "Very funny.  No, he's been wanting me to get into history and more or less recent geological events.  The Big Freeze that began around 2100, for starters, and the events that led to the topping of the mountains, and the unexpected results on global climate that followed."
     "What a way to spend a holiday!  You're working on some boring and nutty history project. At least you're doing something, though. I wanted to go skiing, but there hasn't been enough snow here in Sweden for, oh, maybe 200 or 250 years."
     "Well, there's always the South Pole.  That seems to be about the only place where they go skiing.  But mostly, Antarctica produces lamb and mutton and milk and beef.  Or so it seems.  Not to mention the mines.
     "Anyway, this project isn't boring. I've dug out some archival electronic newspapers, I've arranged some of the headlines in order, and I've bundled them for Mr. Larsson, so he can see I've been doing something worth while.  If you're good, I'll let you rummage through them."
     "What do you mean, good?"
     "Well, no lousy jokes.  Be serious.  Imagine you'll be getting yourself ready to become a cadet in Spacefleet Academy."
     "You've got to be kidding!  No star stuff for me!  I'm going to be a lawyer, then maybe a politician.  World President, maybe.  Just think, some day you'll be able to say that you knew President Sven Svenson when he was 16."
     "OK, it'll be great to brag like that, but Mr. World President, if you don't know your world history you'll be kicked out of office and find yourself on your rear in the street up there in the capital, right in the middle of Quito!  So, if you promise to behave, I'll let you in on some of the secrets of the past."
     "All right, I'll be on my best behavior."
      Christina wasn't sure what Sven's best behavior was.  Like the other orphans in the school, the ones totally bereft of family, like her for that matter, it had taken some time, over two years in fact, for this tall 16-year-old to come to grips with his new situation in life and to learn to get along with the other kids. Sven's way of dealing with difficulty was to make a joke out of everything. Christina was much younger when her entire family was wiped out by the Militia during a family reunion back in 2509, nine years ago, when she was a little girl of seven.  She had been sullen and withdrawn for over a year, and if it had not been for Mrs. Larsson, her housemother then and now, she might have slipped into darkness. She hated the Militia with a burning passion, only slowly extinguishing it by degrees and by intervals. They had taken her family from her -- her mother, her father, her sister, her cousins and her aunts and uncles and grandparents, everyone.  She survived because she was going to the bathroom in the basement toilet!  The explosion wiped out the house, the yard, everything.  Somehow, the debris had not fallen on her.  A wall or something must have kept it off her.  The perpetrators were never caught, and it was never clear why the Militia chose the peace-loving Vasa family as its target.  What had they ever done to deserve such treatment?
     Her eyes darkened, her face grew somber.  She'd not had this kind of thought lately.  Nor had Sven ever seen this side of her.  She was a serious, studious, but cheerful and generally happy 16-year-old. Gloom and Christina were polar opposites -- the antipodes, as she liked to say.
     "What's with you?" he asked.  "All of a sudden, you're a different person."
     "Sven, I'm sorry. I don't like to get gloomy, at least not in public. But with you I know it's not really in public. It's just that the thought of the horrible day when my family was totally destroyed hit me like a hammer.  Maybe that's why I've tried to avoid thinking about the past, or looking into it."
     "Do you want to talk about it?  Or maybe we should just look at the stuff you put together for Mr. Larsson?  Or, if you can't do that now, maybe do something fun, like virtual skiing?  Oops -- sorry. Didn't mean to be flippant."
      "Actually, I'd rather not talk about that awful day now.  And I'm kind of glad you've not lost your light-hearted touch.  Let's take a look at the package."
     "A virtual package.  Virtual newspapers."
 

Capetown Times, 2 January 2110

 WORLD AUTHORITIES WORRY ABOUT UNEXPECTED FREEZE

According to scientists meeting here, the Earth might be in for a long deep freeze. While no one has yet found a cause, the Earth has been cooling down rapidly for a full decade, dropping one degree a year in average temperature after over a century of warming due to the Greenhouse Effect.

The Buenos Aires Gazette, 18 June 2199

GLACIERS ADVANCE IN EUROPE, ASIA, NORTH AMERICA AND  GREENLAND, ANTARCTICA, AND TIERRA DEL FUEGO

Glaciers will invade mainland Argentina and Chile within five years, according to scientists meeting in Buenos Aires.  The Big Chill looks like the worst ice age ever to hit Earth.  A leading authority claims that

New Dehli News, 22 August 2200

FUTURE ONE SPACE STATION BEGUN

Construction in outer space has begun on the orbiting space station called Future One.  "This will take at least 15 years," said Natalie Juillet, chief space scientist of the Earth Scientific Mission in Grenoble. Dr. Juillet refused to speculate on the exact mission of the station, saying only that it is expected to be incredibly large, the size of a small town of some 10,000 inhabitants and that it will be in permanent stationary orbit about 1500 km above Earth.
  The multidenominational Primitivist religious group has long opposed plans to erect such a station.  "God does not want human beings to live in such a place," said Deacon Ibn-Youssef.  "We will oppose

 
Le Monde, 8 November 2250

ANTIMATTER WEAPON UNVEILED; WILL DEFEND EARTH AGAINST  ALIENS, SAYS PRESIDENT

President Moineau disclosed today that Earth Scientific Mission has created a weapon intended to destroy any hostile alien invaders. The matter/antimatter device is intended to deter the apparent threat from an alien race gathering its forces near Jupiter, on the side of the planet hiding it from Earth observation posts.

     "Antimatter weapons! Alien invasion forces! Are these grown-ups talking?" Sven couldn't help acting out a little scene of invading forces and brave Earth soldiers repelling them. "Zap!"
     "Sven, be serious. Sure, it turned out to be a hoax brilliantly perpetrated by a group of bored Future One cosmonauts. But it looked real. Anyway, the antimatter gun is what was used to blast off the tops of the Himalayas at the level of the Tibetan Plateau, and later of virtually every mountain on Earth over half that altitude."
     "You want me to be serious? OK, here I am, Textbook Sven, in my flat textbook voice. 'Geologists reasoned as early as the 1990s that the Himalaya Mountain range was driving Earth's climate, preventing warm and moist air from moving north into Eastern Siberia. A century later, scientists calculated that removing the tops of the Himalayas would restore the climate of the Earth to that prevailing about the year 2000. Unfortunately, political decisions overrode purely scientific ones, and as mountain top after mountain top evaporated, each small cause brought about unforeseen and immense effects.  The Earth overheated, the ice caps melted all over the globe in less than a century, islands fell below sea level, coastal regions flooded. Much of the population fled to newly warmed areas of central Asia, North America, and Antarctica.'"
     "Bravo! You learned your lesson so well! I'm proud of you. So we'll skip a few of these newspapers, the ones that talk about that stuff.  But I think there's some info you don't have."
 

London Times, 7 June 2301

ANTIMATTER GUNS DESTROY TWO HIMALAYA PEAKS; VAST AMOUNTS OF  ENERGY RELEASED, SENT TO FUTURE ONE FOR STORAGE

The first two Himalaya peaks were destroyed in remote parts of Nepal yesterday, disappearing before the eyes of amazed onlookers.  Dr. Hélène Cruche explained that antimatter beams reacted with the matter of the mountains, causing a reaction in which both matter and antimatter were converted to an enormous amount of energy. The energy has been sent to Future One, which will become a kind of huge battery.  The same technology that has made the direction of movement of the released energy possible will be used in the future to help create the conditions necessary for life on Venus and Mars, according to Dr. Cruche.

     "Holy jalapeña! That's hot news! No, seriously, I mean it, I didn't realize that that's where the energy needed to fuel Aphrodite and Ares came from, or is coming from."
     "And that's not all.  Look at this."
 

Tokyo Sun, 7 June 2401

PRIMITIVIST MILITIA FORMED IN GREENLAND AS FIRST GALACTIC  SPACE EXPLORATION BEGINS

In a daringly public and visucapsuled Sermon in the Valley, an anonymous organizer of a militant branch of the Primitivist religious group has established a Militia, whose charge it is to destroy the scientific advances of the past several centuries. The mystery leader, calling himself The Deacon, speaking outdoors to a gathering of thousands of followers, denounced as the work of Satan the three space stations currently in operation, Aphrodite near Venus, Future One near Earth, and Ares near Mars. He also denounced the launch of the space exploration and the planned creation of an Extended Life Brigade, volunteers whose lives will be extended by about 200 years thanks to a genetic procedure developed by Dr. Stanley Narb, who has carried out the initial experiment on himself. It is not clear what actions, if any, the Militia will undertake in their opposition to Earth Government policies.

     "Well, what do you think Mr. Larsson will say when he sees this? Do you think he'll see a future Ensign Vasa in me? For that matter, do I have what it takes?  I understand that the Space Fleet demands intelligence, initiative, endurance, and strength."
      "He'll love this stuff! And, hey, you're smart, imaginative, persevering, and pretty tough. I think you can do anything you set out to do, except virtual skiing. I spied on you that day you tried it. Are you ever a loser at that!"
       "You dirty rat! I was supposed to be doing my thing in complete and absolute privacy. How did you sneak in and spy on me? I ought to bop you one!"
     "Actually, I'm quasi innocent in this. I happened to be around when -- OK, I had sneaked in to the gym, but honest, it wasn't to spy on you. I wanted to get in an extra hour of virtual skiing on the sly, but then I heard the door open. I hid as best I could, almost in the open, but you didn't see me. But I saw you break your legs five times in a row! I almost couldn't control myself -- you looked so downhearted, so beaten. You should have seen your face!"
     "You know, when you run for World President, I'm going to reveal your two-faced, cheating, lying ways. I'll..."
     A tall middle-aged woman came softly into the lounge, with a holiday cake for the kids -- "her" kids -- who had no home to go to, literally no family at all.  "My goodness, it sounds like an argument! What's going on?"
     "Oh, it's nothing, Mrs. Larsson. Chris was just showing me a surprise package of old media clips she's put together for Mr. Larsson, and we were just carrying on like idiots."
     Christina glared at him. He knew how much she hated being called Chris or or any other nickname! And now he's blabbed her secret surprise to Mrs. Larsson!  "Don't tell him about it, please!" she begged with a whiny tone of voice. "I'll let you see the package if you promise not to tell."