The Times of Sand
A David Sands Competition story By Claire Milano
An entry in The Sands of Time Writing Competition
The Times of Sand by Claire Milano
“If only we had a time-travel machine.”
It was early in the meeting for this to be expressed. Usually it was in the after-presentation roundtable, or even in the pub at the end of the day.
Looking at the slide, Isabel squinted at the image of a 17th century page of scribbles. There were inkblots, tears in the page and what looked like a water – or maybe wine? – stain running down the middle of the page.
“What is it measuring? Temperature? What are the units?”
“Celsius?” someone suggested.
“Wasn’t born yet”, came a reply.
Less than a dozen paleoclimatologists ¾ “historical data scientists”, or “weather data recovery agents”, or “climate reconstruction specialists”, depending on who they were trying to persuade to give them funding ¾ were sitting in a small room in the community library. This was the latest in a series of meetings that had been going on for decades, the participants for the most part well known to each other, though there were sometimes one or two bemused people who wandered in. Today there were two people sitting towards the back. Although they were actually dressed in smart casual, even chic, clothes, they somehow gave the impression of wearing trench coats and trilbys.
“If we could go back in time, we could tell them how important it will be to the future to take these observations properly,” Piotr said in a grumbling tone.
“We could take them proper instruments”, chimed in Isabel.
“And the metric system” added Elspeth.
There was a collective sigh around the room. The two strangers at the back of the room glanced at each other.
“We’d better wrap up soon,” Isabel eventually broke the glum silence. “We have this room reserved on a waiver basis, so we need to clear out before those who can afford to rent this space come in. The Society for the Enhancement of Colour in Reed-Based Textiles will be here in ten.”
“How do they have the funding to book the room with actual money?” demanded Matteo. The two strangers glanced at each other again, this time with a tinge of disappointment.
“Not worth it”, muttered the man under his breath. “This bunch is hopeless. They can’t even scrape together enough to rent a room.”
“Patience”, said his companion. “Anyway, we have orders.”
The group started to shut down their laptops, gather their papers, turn off the equipment, and bicker gently about where to go for supper and/or drinks, and in which order of importance. As they slowly straggled out the door and into the blustery evening, they returned wistfully to the theme of time travel. The woman raised her eyebrows with a “See, I told you so” smirk.
Once the group were ensconced in a dim, mid-level, caters-to-everything restaurant and bar down the street, they continued with their ever-expanding wish list of time travel demands as the average blood-alcohol level increased.
“Why were people dying of heat strokes in Essex in the middle of the Little Ice Age”?
“We could see whether it was really was a super El Niño which caused the Late Bronze Age collapse.”
“What about the North American megadroughts?”
“Hey, listen, we don’t even need to go ourselves. Forget about training ¾ we could just send automatic recording instruments back!”
This struck everyone to silence for a minute as they collectively pondered the idea. Then, as if they weren’t already discussing the impossible, Isabel asked that question so vexing to all scientists:
“But how would we get the data?”
The not-trench-coat couple had discretely followed them in and sat down at the neighbouring table. With an inward sigh at having to engage with these lunatics, the man leaned forward, summoned up a smile and saying, “Please forgive me for intruding, but I was at your conference earlier today.”
The group stared at him, blinking slowly. They could collectively decipher the worst 18th century handwriting from ink and wine smeared parchment, identify at a glance the most obscure weather instrument, reciting the specifications, inventor and even, sometimes, what it was meant to measure, and read thousands of years of climate from an ice core, but (while fiercely dedicated to them) occasionally had trouble recognizing their own offspring. Isabel, one of the more socially adept of the group, smiled unsuspiciously and exclaimed ,
“How lovely!”
“My colleague and I” ¾ he gestured towards the woman sitting next to him ¾ “were quite fascinated by your work.”
He winced as the group collectively brightened and showed all the signs of being willing to explain, for several hours if need be, the difficulties in establishing the exact demarcation point between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. His colleague smoothly broke in with,
“I think your drinks are arriving. Do you mind if we join you?”
The next round of drinks were not, in fact, arriving, but in their excitement at having strangers express interest in their work, this went unnoticed. Mustering all their training in friendly interrogation to keep the conversation going even slightly in their preferred direction, the pair managed to extract most of the information needed for their report.
The following morning, while the scientists regrouped in their fee-waived library meeting room, Anna and Oliver were in consultation with their superior officer.
“They’re scientists, ma’am. And historians.”
“How is that possible? Please tell me the scientist part has outweighed the historian.”
“They’re weather scientists, ma’am. Historical weather scientists. Although I gather that if the weather lasts long enough, it eventually turns into climate. They call themselves either paleoclimatologists.”
There was a short, grim silence. Two of weirdest, most obsessive and frankly, nerdiest pursuits known to civilisation, history and weather, had, without anyone realizing, blended together.
“How was this allowed to happen? This travesty should have been stopped! Although we do desperately need them on board. We’ve lost too much already. Can they be trained? Conscripted?”
“Many of them do have ties to their governmental meteorological agencies, and we’ve pulled their records on their respective countries’ Official Secrets Acts. There are one or two who are more independent. It’s such a small group, though. They will notice if three quarters of the colleagues go missing.”
“Conscript them all, then. I’ll get the paperwork and you can go collect them from this library after lunch.”
“Ma’am.” Anna and Oliver saluted and left the office.
Later that afternoon, a gaggle of bewildered scientists were brought into a non-descript room in a non-descript building in a non-descript part of town.
“I demand to know who you are, what we’re doing here and what authority you have”, demanded Elspeth belligerently.
“Madam, you know by what authority, we’ve been over this several times”, said Anna wearily. It had been a long ride, though not necessarily in geographical terms. “As servants of the Crown who have signed the Official Secrets Acts of your respective countries, you are bound to provide all needful service to the Crown.” Oddly yet conveniently, they were all from countries who shared the same head of State, and thus a shared secret service. There had been multiple variants of this conversation in the hour since she and Oliver had shown up at the start of the conference’s “health” break, consisting of tea, coffee, biscuits, muffins, and a few sad, ignored apples. The subsequent lack of sugar and caffeine on the part of the scientists may have been contributing to an aura of hostility emanating from the group. Then again, they were the definition of oddball. Hostility to authority was their default position.
“I don’t know anything”, wailed Matteo. “I’m just a post-doc”.
“We know”, Anna replied soothingly. “We’ll explain everything we can, once we get you settled.” Several variations of this conversation had also been repeated over the past hour.
“And for heaven’s sake, someone get some caffeine and grub”, muttered Oliver. “We should have packed their snacks as well”.
“I’ll remind you that we paid for those with our meeting dues, which included tea break refreshments”, said Piotr with dignity, also not for the first time.
“And I don’t have any money to pay for lunch,” Matteo continued to wail. “I’m just a post-doc. Those snacks were my only hope of eating today.”
Eventually, the experienced professionals managed to herd the scientists into a newer, better lit and more comfortable conference room than the one they just left, where a formidable woman waited. Lured in by the aroma of coffee and the sight of baked goods heaped on the table, the group were sufficiently distracted for a temporary silence to fall.
“No doubt you’re wondering why you’ve been conscript-”, began the formidable woman started, but altered her words at the sight of Anna frantically shaking her head. “What your special talents and knowledge are that require us to avail ourselves of your services”, she smoothly altered her somewhat brusque beginning.
“Well, we don’t know who you are, do we, so we can’t possibly know how you are to avail yourself of our services”, replied Yann somewhat snarkily, though the caffeine and sugar were starting to have a mellowing effect.
“Let me begin by going back to a statement made in your discussion yesterday afternoon. And six months ago during your online meeting. And two years before that. Several, if not most of you, have referred to the desirability of time travel to aid in your research. I am here to tell you we need you to help us with time travel.”
A gawping silence fell.
“Is this some kind of joke? Are we being filmed? More than usual, I mean?”
“No ma’am, it’s not a joke. If I may continue?” Assent for the formidable woman to continue was indicated.
“I do not need to remind you that you have all signed the Official Secrets Acts, and that no, we are not being filmed. In fact, the entirely of this conversation is strictly confidential.” She looked around severely.
“Time travel does exist.”
Pandemonium erupted.
“What?”
“How?”
“But, but, but…that violates the second law of thermodynamics…”
The formidable woman, known on this occasion by the name of Sofia, held up her hand. “Please. We realize this is a great shock. More is to come. For the moment, I can say that it is not fully understood, and what we do understand is highly classified. We do not know how many other people or organizations are aware of it. But this brings me to the reason we need you.
“The details of how we know this are currently classified. Field operatives have put /did put / are putting / themselves at great risk to obtain this information. They have discovered something is interfering with the desertification of the Sahara ten thousand years ago.”
“But… that’s the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution. Without the desertification of Africa…” began Yann.
“There would be no concentration of hunter-gatherers in the Nile Valley or the Fertile Crescent” finished Elspeth.
“No settled farming communities in the Levant or Africa” agreed Piotr.
“No city-states or civilisations developing in Africa or the Middle East,” stammered Isabel.
“And then no world as we currently know it”, added Matteo, horrified.
The scientists sat in stunned silence. Sofia smiled grimly. “I see you all grasp the critical importance of this disturbance.”
At this, discussion broke out again. “But the Hypsithermal was due to orbital dynamics, after the last great Ice Age. How could this change?”
“The desertification of the Saraha is caused by the fundamental circulation cells, driven by the Sun. The energies involved are immense. How could something interfere with processes on the size of the solar system?”
“That’s what we need you to find out,” said Sofia. “We need to know why the Saharan desertification isn’t happening, and how to restart it. We need to bring back the Time of Sands.”
Over the next few days, plans were made, discussed, discarded and then fished out of bin as no better ideas came up. Terms like “speleotherms”, “delta O eighteen”, “tree ring isotopes”, and “geological flood markers” flew through the air. Technical details were discussed, dreamed up, and dreams were then crushed as Anna and Oliver gave them the hard facts of time-travel.
“Anything electronic tends to get fried” cautioned Oliver.
“You mean we need to go analogue?” cried Matteo, aghast.
“I’ll have to have a poke around my attic,” murmured Elspeth. “I think I have some thermographs in a box somewhere…”
“What about batteries or a generator?” asked Piotr. “We’ll need some kind of automatic recording device. We’re talking about years, decades of data accumulation, not just a few days.”
“We can transmit data back through time, though?” asked Isabel.
“I’m afraid not,” replied Anna. “Space, yes. Time no. The signal attenuates too much.”
“You mean”, said Yann, “We’re going to have to go back in time…ourselves? In person?”
A silence fell.
“I’m afraid so,” said Sofia at last.
Their training began. Exercise, runs, strength training, and enforced time without electronics. Museums were scoured for instruments. Teams were formed, schedules devised for the mass collection of data. Families were informed that their distinguished relatives had been honoured to be selected to go on a special research assignment to Mars.
“Mars? Are you insane? No-one’s been to Mars!” said Elspeth. “Why not Pluto?” asked Piotr sarcastically. “Not enough images for the AI,” replied Oliver seriously. Piotr gave it up. Finally, the day of departure dawned.
The process was complex, not to say tortuous. “It’s like a combination of an airport check-in with a budget airline and a NASA countdown,” grumbled Yann. “Oh? I never knew you went on a spaceflight with NASA,” exclaimed Isobel. “I was using my imagination”, replied Yann with dignity. “Although maybe now I won’t have to.”
Team 1, consisting of Isabel, Piotr, and Oliver, were to take observations four times a year, on the equinoxes and solstices. Team 2, Elspeth, Yann, Mateo and Anna, would take observations for two weeks every ten years. They were scheduled to meet up every hundred years.
10,000 years ago
The savannah-like landscape entranced them. Team 1 despite their tight deadlines, looked around in wonder. Even Piotr, grumbling cynic that he was, couldn’t help being struck silent at the lazy rivers winding their way down from the mountains. The mountains themselves were clear and crisp on the southern horizon. Herds were dotted across the landscape, half-hidden among the tall grass.
“Are those giraffes?”
“Next to the hippos near that lake?”
“No, left of the elephants.”
“This is incredible!”
“Be careful not to be seen by anything sentient,” cautioned Anna. “We don’t want to send those rhinos down a different evolutionary path by feeding them peanuts.”
They soon found a routine, setting up, taking measurements, packing up again and moving forward in time. As they slowly moved forward in time, both teams noticed a change. At first it became sunnier and drier, leading to gradual drying up of the rivers, then the lakes. Trees gave way to grass, grass gave way to dust and sand. But then this reversed, with the skies becoming cloudier, and strangely dingey. The dried-up rivers and lakes turned into swamps and marshes. Even on clear days there was a murkiness to the air.
“Volcanoes?” wondered Yann.
“No known eruptions from the ice core records for a hundred years either side of today,” replied Elspeth.
“Forest fires?” suggested Matteo.
“Could be,” agreed Elspeth. “Mind you, they’d have to be big. And far away — it’s too damp for much to burn here.”
The two teams kept on their separate paths for another hundred years, until on their next rendezvous, they all noticed an even odder tinge coming from the southern mountains.
“We should stay together in one group until we figure out what that is,” Anna said decisively. She had learned decisiveness was crucial to head off counterproposals, hypotheticals, and general off-topic wittering. She was happy. This crew didn’t mind her attitude.
Everyone wanted to be on the team checking out the strange column of fire and smoke seen on the distant mountain tops. Actually, everyone wanted to get out of the boring, tedious work of checking through their enormous stacks of data. Tedious work that had to be done, with limited electronics, before it could be analyzed to find out what was going wrong. Although trekking across the now somewhat sad landscape was also appealing after months of jumps and routine and never getting to wander off and explore.
“Enough” said Oliver, tired of their bickering. “I’m taking one person from my team with me. That person will be Isabel. She has both the expertise and the fitness” - here he stared at those who had been skipping their fitness routines. Piotr and Yann looked away.
“Fine” grumbled Elspeth. “Although I’m tough as old boots, you know”.
“Oh, we know”, muttered Piotr.
“You take care of her.” Elspeth fixed Oliver with a gimlet eye. “That’s my job,” he replied. “Yours, on the other hand, is to sort through the data so we can figure out what’s happening, and, possibly, if you can manage, why.”
Oliver and Isabel’s packs were prepared with lightning speed. They donned their high-tech, low-vis camo gear.
“Remember it will be hard for us, as well as any contemporaries, to see each other”, said Oliver. “Don’t go wandering off.”
Isobel gave him a look, then jammed on her camo cap so he couldn’t tell she was rolling her eyes. “Yes, boss”.
“That’s the ticket”, Oliver replied cheerfully.
Isobel found a low-tech, highly visible, soaking wet weed on the side of the swamp and flicked it at him. “Oops.”
They set off across the low plain separating them from the smoking mountain. Although they had each worked in forbidding environments before, and were getting used to the prehistoric time, the contently smoking mountain and grey, drizzling skies were not encouraging. “Looks like something out Mordor,” commented Oliver.
They estimated the mountains to be three days’ walk away. On the second day, glints of what appeared to be metal could be seen from time to time on the mountainsides. “I thought metallurgy didn’t get started for another few thousand years” said Oliver uneasily. “As far as we know”, replied Isobel. “We could be wrong.”
“Or time could be changing.”
“Try not to think about it” Isobel said urgently. “We’re not quite sure yet how quantum entanglement, the observer effect and conscious interaction work, but reality could depend on how we think about it. If you think too much about time changing while we’re in the process of investigating time changes, well, we have no idea what the consequences could be.”
Oliver thought this over. “This is making my head hurt”.
“Good”, said Isabel. “Stop thinking. Try to not think about elephants instead.”
“What?”
“The more you try to not think about elephants, the more you can only think about elephants.”
“I think we should stop talking now.”
On the third day, as they started up the mountain, the smoke became thicker. It smelled like sulphur. They coughed, their eyes ran, and their heads hurt. Isobel thought she was hallucinating when she saw the first smokestack. “You’re right, it is like Mordor,” she pointed it out to Oliver. “Stay here,” he ordered as he went to check it out. “Who on earth would travel back in time to randomly pollute a mountain?”
“It’s not there to pollute the mountain.” Isobel ignored his order as she peered around him. “That sulphur is being shot up into the upper atmosphere, where it blocks out the sunlight and forms sulphuric acid. There seems to be some ash or dust mixed in. That helps cloud formation, making it cloudier and rainier. This is what’s causing the miserable weather. It’s like hundreds of volcanoes going off at once, all the time. We have our answer to what’s changing the climate.”
“But not why.” Oliver reached the small but powerful smokestack and examined the metal pipe with sulphur and ash shooting out like a geyser. “What’s this?”
They both stared at the small, clear logo of a well-known, giant tech company stamped on the side. “I was going to ask who would be stupid enough to stamp their logo on a nefarious project, but I guess that’s a superfluous question.”
“This is a big operation. And these people are excellent at surveillance. I don’t like this. We should report back.”
“Well now, I can’t let you do that,” said a new voice. “You’re right, we do have excellent surveillance. We build a backdoor into all our products, including government issue camo gear.”
They whirled around. “How did you know we were here?” gasped Isobel. “And what is all this, anyway?”
A tall man with thick dark hair stood on a rocky ledge behind them. “This, my friends, will lead to the new future. Only by shaping the past can we shape the future. And do you know what the worst calamity to befall mankind was?”
“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell us,” muttered Oliver beneath his breath.
“Agriculture! Agriculture led to civilisation, and with civilisation we stopped being free! To reach our true human potential, we need to avoid the agriculture and civilisation trap!”
“That is … insane,” said Oliver.
“I don’t like that word. I prefer visionary. Just think of all the problems we have in the present. Our present. Pollution, climate change, overpopulation, diabetes, obesity, too much screen time. By changing the climate of the Sahara we’ll stop the rise of agriculture and prevent civilisation ever arising!”
“So you’re stopping pollution and climate change in the future by polluting and changing the climate of the past?” asked Isobel incredulously.
“Precisely” the man beamed. “Now you’ll appreciate that I can’t let you spoil my plans. I think I’ll have to escort you back to the present and keep you in one of our safe locations.”
He started to move towards them but suddenly stopped as he looked around. “Who are you all?”
At the main site, Anna’s ears were starting to bleed from the terms being hurtled around her. Standard deviations, p-values, and Gumbel distributions battled against autocorrelations, type two error, and occasionally, words she understood as actually related to weather. She spent most of her time surveying the surroundings, and keeping a careful eye on the route Oliver and Isobel had taken.
On the second afternoon, Yann came to stand beside her. “Taking a break from the numbers?” she asked.
“My head is full of them, but we’ve seen some trends and come up with some ideas. The atmosphere seems to be getting significantly more polluted over time.”
“Polluted? How can it be polluted? There’s no industry. There isn’t even any agriculture.”
“The only clue we have so far are those,” Yann pointed to the smoking mountains. “What’s bothering you? You keep staring at the same spot.”
“There’s a strange shimmering not far from the mountain. It looks like – I’m not sure. Almost as if reality is thinning in that spot. Can you see it?”
Yann stared. “I think so? I’m not sure what reality thinning looks like.”
Elspeth and Piotr came up beside them, Matteo following behind.
“Whatever it is, it’s not good” Piotr declared.
“It looks like two things at the same time,” said Matteo.
“It spells trouble,” Anna agreed. “I think we should retrieve Oliver and Isobel and report back. We’ll pack up and take the land carts. They won’t go fast, but they have emergency batteries. Remember to use the camo mode and to wear your camo suits.”
They slowly chugged over the landscape, instruments rattling and people hanging over the edges. The smell of sulphur became more pervasive. “The volcanic effect. We were right,” said Elspeth. “But it’s not natural,” said Piotr. “Someone is doing this deliberately.”
“Are you sure?” asked Anna sharply. “That changes the situation.”
“The Monte Carlo limit test indicates a 99.995 probability that null hypothesis is invalidated”, reported Matteo.
“In English?”
“Yes.”
Anna rapidly made some different type of calculations. “This is not a quick or cheap operation. Someone with enormous resources and patience is behind this. They’re likely to have high-calibre protective units. Weapons? Hmmm…” She stared off into the distance.
“Ok, I think we’ll take this low tech, as we probably can’t hope to counter what they have available. Plus we really don’t want to injure someone in a different time. We have no idea what that would do to the fabric of time, and reality is already thinning. Here’s the plan…”
Reaching the mountain the next day, they slowly crept up the mountain path, keeping surprisingly quiet. Matteo, Yann and Elspeth crept up one side of the path, Anna and Piotr on the other. They heard the words “Well now, I can’t let you do that,” and sped up as stealthily as they could. They saw a strange man talking to the camo-blurred shapes of Isobel and Oliver. Anna passed a thick rope to Piotr, who reached over to pass it to Elspeth, over to Yann and last of all to Mateo. They encircled the man raving about civilisation and agriculture, Isobel and Oliver keeping him distracted. By the time he noticed them, they were close enough to gently wind him in the rope.
“Protocol five?” Anna asked Oliver. “Protocol five”, he confirmed. “Did you bring the equipment?”
“Of course I did,” she replied huffily.
“Then let’s go back and make our guest Sofia’s problem.”
“And shut down these smokestacks!” Elspeth, Piotr, Yann, Isobel and Matteo started to confer on the optimal protocol for returning the Sahara to the Times of Sand.
About Claire Milano:
I'm slightly dyslexic, so when I saw the title of the competition, I first read it as "The Time of Sands", and the idea for this story came into being. I'm a scientist, although not in the precise area (space or time) covered by this story. I live in Canada with my family and dog.
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