Edward M. Lerner introduces us to a tale that at once is reminiscent of the stark ever winter world of the Yukon in Jack London’s White Fang or the bitter cold existence of Jeremiah Johnston in the film, starring Robert Redford, that bares his namesake.
In Paradise Regained, Jan/Feb 2017 issue of Analog Magazine, we are ushered into a world trapped in cold and snow. A post-frontier future plight of a lone weary soul battling against time, elements and death to do as all living things do: survive. Paradise may be have entered our lexicon as a mythical place where wayward souls gravitate towards after their physical bodies have expired. Or it could be a saviour-oasis or archetypal Shambala where people seek both shelter and answers. But here, it is in the sanctity, warmth and protection afforded by a grounded spacecraft known simply as Ship.
A sole human takes up his father’s mantle when he passes and begins to live there and somehow help it. All because of a promise he had made. This leftover remnant of spacefaring ingenuity has, by the passing of ages, has had its full purpose forgotten. The history of humans who had come to this planet generations ago are recorded in a fading ship’s log or diary, yet the irony is that the human population that has managed to live off the land have lost the finer arts of speech and writing. Much is lost in translation. The ship, once a possible scouting craft launched from Big Ship, has become downgraded to bare usefulness; providing an essential ‘man-around-the-fire’ tool on which the man and his father had become attached. The main character, after covering his father’s body in stones until Winter breaks, begins reading what he can of the diary and learning all he can from Ship. There is a sense of time running out. Ship is eating the last of its Helium 3 and the man must help, but from what he can figure out, hundreds of years ago, Firsters – his space-faring colonial ancestors – came to this planet, ironically named ‘Paradise’ and became stranded there. Retroviruses were created that changed the human natural biology so that they could survive in the environment and eat the food and through this they devolved from social creatures to territorial ones.
What entails is the man’s struggle to understand and assist Ship in completing its pre-programmed mission. Although he is far from his home world of Earth, his story continues a thread of living human history that reflects the nature of changing societies of pre-civilisation. Countless cultures had thrived and vanished for many millennia. Widely spoken languages died. In much the same way, the people on Paradise lost their knowledge and grasp of technology and capability of explaining it and so quickly reduced over a few generations to scattered hunter-gathers and subsistence farmers. But there is a way to return to the way things were. The future of the human race only lies in one man’s ability to reacquire the intellect that has for centuries separated him from the beasts.
By J.K.A. Short
