Revelation

Prologue

At the mention of memoirs, the Minister threatens me with everything from Section Two to the Chinese water torture. Naturally, since all I want is a quiet life, I back down. To his credit, he tries not to smirk. 'You can't stop me writing a novel, though.' The Minister turns puce but then he's known to be heavy on the port.

So here it is. Of course it's only a story, and if pressed I will deny that it ever happened. And deny it I have done, consistently, in all my conversations with those people with polite voices and calculating eyes.

To me, as a polar ice man, there's nothing odd about a tale of fire which starts in an Arctic blizzard. The planet is an interconnected whole; I measure the burning of rainforests in the thinning of the pack ice I walk on, and of fossil fuels in the desperate hunger of the ten-footers which raid our camps. The Arctic, in turn, is biding her time, quietly stoking up her revenge… but I digress.

The key to unlocking the secret of the diaries was Archie. My old friend Archie was the fatal miscalculation of the puppet masters. They had correctly assumed that I wouldn't understand the material I was handling, that I lacked the arcane knowledge which was the key to the secret. But if this particular puppet cut its strings, if I didn't do what my manipulators expected me to do, well, I give the credit to Archie.

We went back to the Creation, Archie and I. As boys we'd wandered around Glasgow's Castlemilk district in the days when it was run by real hard men, not the sham jessies you see now. Young buccaneers in search of trouble, which we often found. And if that seems an unlikely start to a couple of academic careers, I could tell you some juicy tales about quite a few distinguished Glaswegians. In fact our current Scottish Prime Minister… but there I go, wandering again.

Then there were the ladies, and then I went to Aberdeen and we drifted our separate ways until we met by chance years later at a Royal Society dinner in London. Archie the buccaneer was now a respected nuclear physicist, renowned for his work on superstring theory. I was into Arctic climate, looking for signs of trouble ahead. New Age monks, we had disdained commerce, despised the worldly, and devoted our lives instead to the search for greater truths.

As to how this unworldly pair reacted when wealth beyond calculation came within our reach, well — that's part of the story.

The rest of it has to do with blowing the planet to hell.