Chapter 10

Delivering the Goods

A weight of responsibility. Incipient fear, peaking rapidly then brushed aside…

“If this wasn’t all a dream, of course.”

Wilbur ignored me, looking thoughtful. “The future could be yours to make or break, but it seems a little late to worry about it now, given how much you’ve learnt already. I’d say the ball’s pretty much in your stadium.”

“Court,” I corrected.

Wilbur’s face wilted with confusion. “What have you caught?”

I trusted my expression to be sufficient reply.

As if understanding, Wilbur backtracked. “The other possibility, though, also well represented in the literature, is that events can follow only one path—that however you use your knowledge, it will only ensure that the past forty years proceed as they have, as they necessarily must. That’s if you can return to your own time.” He shook his head suddenly and vigorously, as if trying to snap himself out of a reverie. “Assuming you are from the past… Perhaps I’ll ask Toby to add a DNA test for Saturday. Better than fingerprints. But until then, at least, I shall continue to assume that you are Ernest suffering from amnesia.”

“And a change of fingerprints.”

“Please keep that to yourself.”

“What?!”

“No point confusing people without definitive proof.”

“Toby knows. That I’m not Ernest at least.”

“He knows that’s what you think. But he’s not convinced.”

“Despite his tests!? And you want me to keep the one bit of corroborating evidence to myself! Why?”

“Ern— Steven. If you are correct, it raises more questions than it answers. How did you travel forty years from the past? How do you return? Where’s Ernest?”

“Where’s Wally?” I muttered angrily, annoyed at his request for secrecy. “What’s the capital of Gibraltar?”

“It would be best,” he continued, “to have definitive proof before others are hit with these puzzles. No point going off half-cocked and getting it wrong.”

“I’m not wrong. I know.”

“Just wait for the tests. Trust me.”

I was not at all sure I did trust Wilbur, but a knock from the front door effectively ended our debate.

I expected Wilbur to take charge, but after a few moments of stony silence, he curtly gestured with his head in the direction of the door.

I sighed, trudged to the door, and opened it to find a stunningly attractive young woman, in her late teens, on the verge of knocking again. Almost a caricature of feminine beauty, her high cheekbones, long straight dark hair, large piercing blue eyes, moderate straight nose and generous lips were undermined by her chewing of gum and her shapeless clothes: frayed paint-strewn coveralls over a matching T-shirt. Beside her: a small quasi-supermarket trolley housing a cardboard box full of groceries.

“Hi Ernie,” she said merrily. “Delivery time!” She raised the front wheels of the trolley over the doorstep and pushed it inside. On the verge of being run over, I hastily stepped out of her way. Apparently, she was familiar with my house, because she made straight for the kitchen, pausing momentarily to ask, “What happened?”

I followed her gaze to my still bare foot and its dark bruise. “Had an argument with a car door,” I suggested, not interested in explaining.

“Looks like you lost… Hi Wilbur. How’s the project going?”

Wilbur smiled. “Stalled for the moment, Laura. I’m surprised to see you. I thought you started holidays this week.” Was Wilbur trying to catch this woman’s attention? Not only did he seem to stand straighter than usual, but his face was more expressive—especially his eyes. He moved towards her, stretching out his arms as if to help, then awkwardly halted the motion as she lifted the box of groceries effortlessly onto the kitchen bench.

“No, next week,” she said.

“Where are you off to, again?” said Wilbur, casually yet self-consciously moving closer towards her.

“Up north. Rail most of the way, then we’ll probably hire a dirigible—always wanted to see the tropics from the air.”

“Sounds good,” said Wilbur, with one of the most clichéd expressions of fascinated attention I’d ever seen.

“It’ll tide me over until my world trip,” she said.

“Have you decided when you’ll take that?”

“Probably soon as I finish studying—I think. Can’t wait. Six months, every continent, I’ll never want to come back.”

“You will, I’m sure,” said Wilbur.

“Ernie didn’t,” she said, turning to me. “That’s what you told me when you got back.”

I must have looked nonplussed again because, before I could reply, Wilbur made apologies for me. “You’ll have to forgive Ernest, Laura. He’s developed a fairly thorough case of amnesia.”

Sudden compassion, mixed with confused mischief. Glancing at my bruised foot, she said, “The car hit you in the head too, did it?”

“No,” I said gruffly.

“Then how did you lose your memory?”

“Can’t remember,” I grumbled.

“We’re not sure yet,” said Wilbur.

“Remember me?” she said.

I shook my head. “Actually I’m not really Ernest, my name is Steven. And we’ve never met.” Perhaps Wilbur wanted me to keep the hard evidence to myself for the time being, but he’d said nothing about keeping my supposedly false memories secret as well.

He gave me a sharp look, but held his tongue.

Laura, on the other hand, took my revelation in her stride. “Uh-huh. You sure look like Ernie. And sound like him. Though I’ve never seen you in need of a shave.” Too quickly for me to reply, she changed the subject. “Any meatboxes?” she said, opening a cupboard. “Or other returnables?”

“Any what?” I said.

She opened a cupboard and, from it, extracted three empty items: a cardboard box, an egg carton, and a sturdy, compartmentalised, plastic container. She then placed all three items in her trolley, and shut the cupboard.

“I better shove off,” she said, pushing the trolley toward the front door. “Don’t forget to confirm the order, Ernie. Think I got it right.”

Wilbur and I followed her to the door, watched her push the trolley behind a van parked in the driveway, pick it up and place it inside, close the door, and move to the driver’s seat. She talked in bursts the whole time. “Better finish my rounds. Before the ice blocks melt. Still got another fifty deliveries. Be lucky to finish on time. Hope you get your memory back soon. See you next week. Nope—forgot—your amnesia must be catching—see you when I get back from holidays.”

The van, not as smoothly contoured nor as low to the ground as other cars I’d seen, moved off all but silently.

“Ice blocks!?” I said to Wilbur as we headed back to the kitchen.

“To keep meat and other perishables fresh.” His usual taciturn response. Now that Laura was gone, so was his smile (and his drooling).

“But ice blocks? Why not a refrigerated van?”

“Why not an atom-splitter to slice bread? Or a Lear jet to go shopping? Because it’s way over the top. Unnecessary. Wasteful of energy. The ice blocks may seem low-tech, but they’re efficient and inexpensive.”

I idly thumbed through the items Laura had left. “Like the van I suppose? It’s different to other cars.”

“It’s designed for its purpose,” said Wilbur. “Intra-city haulage. A bit less aerodynamic. And slower—eighty k, its limit.”

I shifted my attention from the groceries to Wilbur. Seated near the kitchen bench, watching me like a hawk, his expression was unreadable. “What about inter-city?” I said. “Long trips?”

“They’re not that common. Most consumption, logically enough, occurs close to sites of production. But of course you can’t grow pineapples in this climate, only in the tropical north, so some long hauls can’t be avoided. For those, there’s rail, shipping, and bigger, faster, trucks.”

“What powers them all? Has Peak Oil hit yet?”

“Long ago. Most transport is now powered by electricity in one form or another, either directly like urban rail, or indirectly via batteries, such as for most cars—although a few, especially the larger or longer-haul vehicles, use hydrogen fuel cells where practical, otherwise petrol.”

“So all the petrol hasn’t gone?”

“No but it’s certainly diminished. And not much used for transport—instead mostly to make products harder to find large-scale substitutes for, like plastics, fertilizers, and by-products like kerosene.”

“And what’s used to make all the electricity? Not fossil fuels, I suppose—that would be out of keeping in this future. Although I can’t remember seeing a single solar panel or wind turbine since I’ve been here.”

“You wouldn’t. But there is plenty of solar and wind energy in use—in appropriate locations. Wind turbines are too noisy to have much place in urban design, so they, like solar farms and thermal plants, have been set up in strategic rural locations. Mind you, there’s still plenty of solar technology all over the city—you just wouldn’t notice it.”

“Why not? How could it be hidden?”

“It isn’t hidden, it’s in plain view.” He eyed me carefully, as if still disbelieving me. “Solar paint.”

I barely avoided another parrot impersonation—instead, I returned his questioning gaze in kind. I had heard of attempts to incorporate some sort of solar energy cell into paint that could cover any surface, and it had even been suggested it would not need direct sunlight to function, merely any form of light. But it was in the early experimental stages. “So,” I finally said, “solar paint covers all the buildings, does it?”

“And cars and other transport—to keep their batteries charged, usually without any further fuss.”

I must have looked even more bewildered than normal, because Wilbur’s suspicious gaze vanished. He went on at some length, including an explanation of why cars always had dark colours—to enhance absorption of light so as to increase their solar paint’s efficiency. Whereas houses, with larger surface areas, had no similar requirement for dark colours, yet still usually managed to produce more energy than they used. That was possible even in my time, without solar paint, but apparently it had now become the norm, aided by improved house design, and greater energy efficiency.

Yet geothermal energy not solar paint was now Australia’s primary power source. Apparently, much of the country looked as if it had been deliberately built to generate geothermal energy, with vast areas of hot rocks, most of them with their own groundwater ready to be evaporated by the heat into closed-cycle, high pressure steam that ultimately turned the turbines that produced the electricity.

There were also lesser contributions from large-scale solar, wind, tidal, and wave energy, with the spasmodic sources backed up by batteries, salt, compressed air, and various other storage systems to ensure a constant supply of baseload energy. We were more blessed than many other countries, but others were pursuing different mixes of the same, and occasionally other, approaches.

Combined with fewer but more long-lived and cleaner cars, vastly more durable batteries, widespread use of bicycles, less time spent working and hence commuting, reduced transporting of goods due to more local production and distribution, and greater use of teleconferencing and other travel alternatives, the result was, aside from greater self-sufficiency, a reduction in energy requirements—allegedly—to less than a tenth of their peak of three decades before.

“So no doubt all this fixed global warming as well?” I inquired sarcastically, when Wilbur’s explanation ended.

“Oh no. The climate is still warming—if barely. And that’s despite a negative global carbon footprint.”

I struggled with this. “You mean carbon isn’t to blame?”

“It certainly contributes, and its reduced output will eventually have a benefit, once the system’s lag-time of a few decades passes. But the predictions of your time were based on overestimates of climate sensitivity and feedbacks, and underestimates of natural cycles. Fortunately, the worst fears have not come to pass and the world, for the most part, has found ways to adapt.”

I still couldn’t accept it. “You mean, the consensus was wrong!?”

“A consensus is no guarantee of truth or understanding. Scientists are only human: like everyone else, they sometimes make mistakes. That’s why the history of science is littered with ideas that were once popular but later proved untenable: phlogiston, N-rays, curative lobotomies, a steady-state universe, multiple universes. Likewise in reverse: much established science was treated as nonsense for decades before it was accepted. Continental drift, for example. Bacteria as the cause of stomach ulcers. Like much else, science progresses with many an occasional step backwards or sideways as it gradually moves forward.”

“You’re telling me all that fuss and bother, all the debate and politicking about carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes, it all turned out to be so much hot air?!”

“Aptly, yes.”

I should perhaps have been less surprised. Most politicians seem to specialise in wasting time and energy on the wrong causes, all the while huffing and puffing enough to power their own fleet of hot air balloons. “Speaking of hot air, did I hear Laura right earlier? Did she say she was going to hire a dirigible?”

“Yes. Sky-snails are very popular.”

“You mean like the Hindenburg? Elongated balloons full of hydrogen, ready to explode as soon as someone fails to notice the no smoking sign?”

“More or less, except they use helium rather than hydrogen, since helium is inert. Non-flammable, and safe as hoses.”

“Houses,” I corrected.

Wilbur momentarily furrowed his brows, clearly baffled. “More like hotels than houses.”

I shook my head but ignored his misunderstanding. “Surely, people prefer planes?”

“If they’re in a hurry. Otherwise, zeppelins can be used more or less like planes, except without such extreme energy use. Much less costly to produce and maintain too. Of course, planes are still used, though only more or less when necessary.”

“That sounds draconian.”

“It isn’t, really. The world trip Laura was talking about will be largely on planes. She’s entitled to it, as part of her birth right—as is anyone in most developed nations. But she can take it only once, at least without it costing her an upper and lower limb. More practically and fairly, if she wants to travel again after her world trip, she can do so by sea or rail or other less costly modes. The point is, it’s much harder for anyone to hop on a plane on a sudden whim, or to jet set regularly—instead they have to treat air travel for what it truly is, a costly resource-intensive privilege that needs to be used sparingly and responsibly.”

“It still sounds draconian.”

“You ignore the advantages of such an arrangement. Most holiday spots are no longer congested. Airports don’t have to continually expand and multiply, indeed most have shrunk. And friendships don’t have to endure as many holiday vids.”

I smiled, thinking of the ones I’d suffered. My smile seemed to please Wilbur out of all proportion, his face lighting up as if just told he’d won a lottery. “Even so,” I said, unconvinced, “if planes are a luxury, surely so are plenty of other things. What about delivery trucks—like the one Laura used?”

“On the contrary, they save much energy and expense compared to everyone doing their own shopping.”

“Some people do their own shopping. I saw them yesterday.”

“Yes, most still prefer to shop themselves, some of the time. But many prefer their regular requirements to be delivered periodically. Saves a repetitive chore. I take that option, as do you.”

“You mean,” I said without expression, “as does Ernest.”

He nodded slowly, but his previous sudden pleasure had now faded into something more ambiguous.

“It all sounds like green heaven,” I muttered, returning my attention to the groceries. “So how come it feels like hell to me?”

“You’re a stranger in a strange land,” said Wilbur, distractedly, staring through me. With a blink, he snapped back into focus, and spoke with more surety. “Once your memories return, I’m sure you’ll appreciate it as much as you ever did.”

I restrained myself from pointing out the obvious flaw in his argument, settling instead for giving him a dirty look. Then, attending to the dull but necessary domestic task of unpacking the groceries, I took the box’s topmost item, a carton of eggs, and put it in the refrigerator.

“I suggest you check the order as you put it away,” said Wilbur. “However considerable her charms, Laura is not always the most reliable packer.”

I rummaged through the box looking for an invoice, without success. “Check it against what? Where’s the paperwork?”

Wilbur smiled, though it struck me as forced, as did the words that followed. “These false memories of yours are thorough all right.” He moved to the study and returned with the computer’s cardboard-thin screen in hand. “The ‘paperwork’ is on here of course. And on your Babel—but this is easier to use.” He pressed the top corners of the screen to the wall nearest the groceries, and it remained there, safely fixed in place. Then he took me step by step through a very simple process which found the order Ernest had placed the previous week, and which allowed me to mark (by tapping screen checkboxes) what I’d received, or hadn’t. I was surprised to discover the order was from several different ‘providers’: butcher, grocer, greengrocer, and stationery store.

“Which one does Laura work for?” I asked, checking off the items as I unpacked.

“All of them. They’re more or less adjacent.” To my surprise, Wilbur didn’t lend a hand unpacking; he just sat and watched me closely.

“Where we ate yesterday?” I asked.

“No. A larger sales centre near the hub of Chord, about ten minutes away by car. It has the main food outlets for the city, and many other shops. It serves those not close enough to buy directly from producers.”

As I worked my way through the delivery, I noticed several cuts of red and white meat in a sturdy plastic container just like the empty one Laura had taken—a so-called meatbox, presumably. With a faint hope that the conspiracy was about to be unmasked, and, I suspect, wearing a leery grin, I held the container aloft. “I thought Ernest was a vegetarian.”

“He is,” said Wilbur, eyes fixed on me, “but he likes to entertain, and some of his friends don’t much care for his vegetarian dishes.”

I nodded without conviction, unsurprised that Wilbur had such a ready answer. It would have been too easy if he hadn’t. I placed the meatbox in the freezer, where it fitted neatly on top of another, almost empty one. Pointing at it, I said, “Recyclable, no doubt?”

“Of course—but more to the point, reusable.”

I continued to unpack, noticing that many items came without packaging, while the rest were minimally wrapped, often in paper, only occasionally in sturdy plastic similar to the meatboxes. I was hardly surprised, given everything else I’d seen.

“Little to recycle here,” I said.

“Which is in everyone’s interest.”

“Not producers, surely? Wouldn’t it raise their costs? Wouldn’t it often be cheaper to use materials that couldn’t be recycled?”

“Sometimes, from the narrow perspective of a single producer. But not from a more inclusive viewpoint. As far as a city or region or nation is concerned, the less time involved in producing and disposing of packaging—and in avoiding, or else recovering from, the often toxic side-effects of both processes—the lower the price, and the shorter the working week.”

I nodded as if sagely, then my eye was caught by a cylindrical plastic shampoo bottle. I took it from the box and studied it. To my surprise, the top was able to be screwed off. “What on earth is the point of this? Surely you pour the contents from here.” I pointed at the usual dispenser tab in the centre of the top.

“Yes, of course,” said Wilbur. “But the top is detachable to make it easier to refill the bottle.”

“To refill?!”

“Of course. Like meatboxes. Or toothpaste containers. Or a horde of other things.”

As it happened, there was a tube of toothpaste in the order, so I picked it up and immediately noticed that its head could also be unscrewed. I was confident this was also the case in the real world (who takes enough notice of such minor details to be really sure?) but I’d never heard of them being re-filled. Certainly, Yvette would have ensured it was done if available. It suddenly occurred to me that she should have been having this dream, not me. She’d have been overawed.

“Is this plastic recyclable?” I said, holding both the toothpaste and shampoo for Wilbur to see. “I don’t see a code anywhere.”

“All plastic is recyclable.”

I wasn’t sure how that made codes redundant, but I wasn’t going to inquire. Wilbur’s cool reactions to my questions were increasingly making me feel slow and uncivilised.

I returned to checking the order. Most items looked familiar in substance but not always in appearance. Notably, there was rarely anything that could be called a brand name. The items with packaging had manufacturer names listed in small print, accompanied by content specifications for food and most other items, but that was all.

“Is this pirate toilet paper?” I asked, holding up a brown-paper-wrapped set of four rolls.

Looking at me with a sceptical expression, Wilbur seemed lost for a reply. Temporarily, at least. “It’s from the regional manufacturer. Pirates could use it if they wanted. If there were any pirates.”

“No, no,” I said, unsure if he was making another of his would-be jokes. “Pirate, as in bootleg. Illegal. There’s no brand name so…”

“Of course there’s no brand name. There’s no brand. All toilet paper in Chord and the region is made by Hillbeach’s one manufacturer of it. Their name and address is on the wrapping.”

“In small print!”

“What need is there for anything more obvious? Should the senses be assaulted, as they were decades ago, with glaring announcements of the fact?”

“One toilet paper manufacturer? To serve how many people?”

“About two million.”

“In my day, there must have been ten or more toilet paper brands on the shelves.”

“All pretty much as effective for their specific purpose as any other, no doubt.”

“Maybe so, but—”

“So you only really needed one brand.”

“Some people prefer softer paper than others.”

“Which is why the local manufacturer makes three different types. But there’s no need for twenty different manufacturers.”

“What if your single manufacturer makes shoddy toilet paper? You’re stuck then. In more ways than one.”

“That old chestnut! Of course, quality could vary—one city could have great toilet paper but lousy shirts, and the next city, the opposite. But information about manufacturing techniques is freely shared, so poor quality production never persists. At worst, people reorganise so that, where possible, the best producers churn out more to cover areas served poorly by others, who find different duties to perform, usually more successfully.”

I did not have a comeback but even if I did, I wouldn’t have bothered. While Wilbur was speaking, I noticed something on the computer screen which I could not believe had eluded me for so long. “What’s going on here? Nearly all of these items have no prices! The food at least—all of them are zero! Except the mangos, which are really expensive.”

“Yes, well, mangos are something of a luxury round here. They can’t be grown this far south, and involve a lot of resources to have transported here.”

“You’ve missed the point,” I said, edgily. “The rest of the food is free!”