9. Future Reminiscence
One does not simply... well... one just can not fit all of modernity, the result of a few thousand years of human evolution and technical progress, into the holds of a small yacht. I suppose even the largest bulk carrier would not have been enough. Therefore, I had to be very, very selective and deliberate on my upcoming one way trip to the Sunset lands. I had a few darkly humorous thoughts about the way that for those remaining, such a journey would have looked like death (and don't get me started on the meaning of the idiom "go West" in English). At any rate, straightforward two-way travel was unheard of since the Second Age (and even then, not everyone had the privilege of trying to sail to the hallowed occident and remaining in one piece), and later, it became impossible for all but a handful of very special cases (Istari, you know who you are).
Knowing that I would be leaving for good, I spent a good two months painstakingly selecting what items I would keep. First and foremost, of course, came the musical instruments, but they dragged with them a whole bunch of inevitable "auxiliary" items - cables, amps, recording devices, even cases and stands. I had already described the issue of powering them - it made my mind boggle for quite a while, but I believed it solved for the immediate future. I could not resist taking along a laptop and even a decent digital camera with a set of lenses, but the electronics were also of the most compact variety. In a sense, it was like preparing for a space flight - amusingly enough, one of my regrets over my stay in Middle-Earth was the fact that I've never been in space; at my richest, I might have afforded a ride aboard the Soyuz as a "cosmic tourist", but trying this would have attracted far more attention to me than I could've allowed.
Anyone up to building a cosmodrome in Aman? Thought so.
The second major issue was the books. I had a nagging suspicion that the electronic devices would not get me very far in Aman (thus far, I've been proven wrong, but better be safe than sorry), so while I digitized everything I could, storing bundles of tightly wrapped SSDs and dongles all over the yacht and on my person, I still took a few dozen printed tomes along. Engineering, lore, languages - and, of course, the music. I just could not do without some of that wisdom. Who knows, maybe even Valinor might benefit from it; since I had no inkling about its present state - societal, technological, even what kind of government I might be finding - I was trying to be ready for anything, from regression to something resembling ancient Greece to a hyper-advanced world where the devices I'd be carrying might look like a stone axe in the Gulf war.
Regardless, the items I had on my boat were actually the majority of my possessions. Always on the move - if not outright on the run - I was never the one to burden myself with too many items, for whichever reason (first, it was squalor, then, the necessity to remain hidden, later, the constant danger; the end result was the same). Unlike many (most?) people, I never found any kind of allure in real estate, either, knowing that more often than not, liquidating it would be a hassle and a time-sink - and, most importantly, buying and selling it was leaving too much of a paper trail (that is, unless and until some new kind of invader would conveniently liquidate it for you using a flaming torch or a rocket mortar). In the end, my assets were boiled down to the yacht and its contents, which included (well hidden) a number of bars of gold and platinum as a "financial cushion"; the rest, right before my departure, was sold and the money all funneled to charity. I even had to get rid of some of the tools - why drag a hammer across the sea when you can make or buy one at the destination; surely Aman couldn't have become THAT backwards for this to become an issue, I thought? Same with the clothes: I kept but a token amount, knowing that I'd have to blend in once I arrived in Valinor, anyway, but denim and Hawaii shirts would not be helpful in that regard.
Such was my line of thought as I was looking at a pile of items scattered across my room in Elrond's estate (which appeared to be deliberately built in the image of Imladris of old, and I found that endearing). My new life has begun.
And life turned out way more interesting... in an unpredictable sort of way... when I reported to my designated new workplace for the "public services" that I've been appointed to. To put it very mildly, it was not what I would have expected to find - not just for myself, but also in the whole of Aman. At the same time, my new predicament was an answer to a question that has been nagging me for a while - ever since I got the permission to return, and the possibility of dwelling in Valinor again became more than a distant, abstract possibility.
The issue was manifold, but I was hesitant to dump all of my questions upon Elrond at once, despite my curiosity. Having witnessed the development of infrastructure on Old Earth as the humans moved from caves and dugouts to villages, then to towns, and finally to cities, I was getting used to the attendant amenities... and very interested in how those who returned to Aman - or never left it in the first place - would be solving the same problems.
You see, we elves are not the ethereal beings some might believe us to be (especially in the time after the first contact). We eat and drink - and that leaves us with... the unfortunate implications dictated by our biological nature, the burden of the hröa. That our metabolism is far more efficient, which has a part to play in our lifespan, does not change the basics. We are not exempt from the economic and societal norms, either; that and the physical laws - conservation of matter, momentum and energy (not sure which would appear more imperative to the average reader!) Any activity - domestic, let alone economic - is bound to leave a certain amount of refuse, it's only the percentage proportion that changes depending on efficiency, but it can never truly become zero. As my homecoming seemed all but inevitable, I became curious as to how the issue was handled in the Undying Lands, especially with its drastically increased population, and...
"...You've got to be kidding me", I exhaled as I heard the explanation of my duties. The whole enterprise hit me as being simple and brilliant, at least for the level of technology that was extant in Aman. I also remembered vaguely that Old Earth has attempted something like that - but with the Valar being there, it took on a whole new dimension.
It really did appear that the denizens of Valinor have taken a leaf out of Middle-Earth's book - that, or convergent evolution and progress came into play. I was surprised to find central plumbing in Elrond's estate, both inbound and outbound; the former appeared pretty straightforward but the latter made me curious. As it turned out, the explosive growth of the population at the end of the First Age made the kings of the three peoples - or, more precisely, their artificers and economy managers - think more of the amenities, and Yavanna, sensing the necessity, came to their aid. While it was up to the builders to erect the infrastructure - and, as I quickly learned, retrofitting the most ancient habitation, like Tirion's oldest parts, was not a task for the faint-hearted - the ultimate treatment was left to the miracles of nature... even though these wonders took a little bit of a helping hand to come together.
One of Yavanna's gifts was a kind of tough, rapidly growing plant that appeared to work like a natural biofilter to treat the effluent in vast fields outside each city. There was probably some other measure of processing, like bacteria, in use, but even that word was not really known around, so I decided to leave it at that. I certainly would refrain from abusing the hospitality of the Lady of the Green Earth and trying to pry more information from her. With the Valar's powers being what they are - inscrutable not only to my mind, shaped (volens nolens...) by the millenia spent among the humans in a world that lost all of its magic of yore, but even, more often than not, to those who never left Aman - no one was sure. The more important thing was that it apparently worked - and the apparent lack of heavy industries probably helped with keeping everything, ah, "closer to nature". But that was where I and the other apparent delinquents came in: after a while, the purifying plants had to be mowed down and processed into feed-stuff. And that required strong hands capable of holding a scythe. At least until someone would invent a combine harvester, that is.
I knew that sounded absurd. Your usual, run-of-the-mill paradise (and again, doesn't moving to Aman sound, at first, like afterlife?) should not have issues with wastewater management or trash, for Eru's sake, nor punishments by public works, nor any petty offenders that might be sentenced to corrections of this kind. But then again, it would not have things like the Oath, the Kinslaying or the mass rebellions, either.
Speaking of trash... Thankfully, the magnitude of the issue with solid waste in Aman was not nearly as grave as that of Earth which has been, of late, literally drowning in derelict polystyrene cups, PET bottles and all other manner of polymers - being a pre-mass production society does have its perks, after all. But Yavanna has come up with something to help with solving the problem, too - namely, a couple interesting breeds of beetles and worms that would attack the garbage and eventually process it into what passed pretty well for soil, fit even for Kementári's own gardens. What wouldn't humans have given to have these on hand to help them with their issues! I just prayed silently to Ilúvatar that these creatures would not, one day, go off the hinges en masse and discover that other organic matter, including living one, might also have certain nutritional value. About the last thing Valinor might need was a re-enactment of a B-movie about killer insects and annelids; giant spiders before the First Age were really enough.
And there I was, mowing down meaty, unsavory looking plant stems for a few hours at a time, three days each week, as a measure of "public service" to those I had left behind in Aman. Someone might have found it a downright humiliating assignment - for its sheer mindlessness as much as for it being physically taxing. Me, I would not discount and deride it outright: for one thing, cutting down green-fodder is much better than doing the same thing to people. Besides, it left the head wonderfully vacant - apart from necessitating a token degree of attention to avoid slashing my own boot (and parts of my anatomy, too) with the scythe blade. More than that: being who I am, I found the predicament both enlightening, beneficial for the body and even useful as a source of new musical ideas that were coming to me when I was getting into the nigh-robotic groove of swinging my implement or examining the plant-beds (there was a faint hint of smell lingering there, I had to admit, but most of the time I was wearing a protective mask, and the amenities block on the premises had a shower stall, so I did not pay it a great deal of attention, knowing that it was easy to get rid of).
Thinking of the flows of matter and energy intrinsic to the process was fascinating in itself. And when I was taking a break one sweltering afternoon, reclining in the shade and sipping water to rehydrate, all the while thinking of what I'd just half witnessed, half extrapolated in my brain, I felt the cool, tingling - and musically tinged - goosebumps on my skin, as if my body has become a synthesizer's keyboard, and someone was tentatively pressing keys to pick notes for a melody that had coalesced in their mind. That someone, evidently, was the same old me. Oh yes... that was the job for the synthesizer this time. I unpacked it with my other belongings, of course, checked it for being in working order (it was) - and mostly left it in the corner of my room, covering it with a piece of cloth to keep out dust. When I had the time, the inclination - and the strength - to practice, I was mostly doing it with a guitar, and the ivories were left untended. It's been this way for a couple of months now, and it was really the time to change that. My thoughts skipped back to Earth and the great guru of the instrument, a wise old Greek man, who taught me a lot about it a couple decades ago. He had once composed a record called "Soil Festivities", inspired by the natural elements, life's processes... and I was thinking of something along those lines, too.
Well, it was time to get back to work, and so I did - after making sure the tune I had envisioned was memorized well. I did not hate this job at all: I had done far worse while in Middle-Earth, really. And if the Valar (or the detractors of my person that were bound to exist in Valinor) thought that I, a former prince of the house of Finwë, would have found menial physical labor for the common good of everyone in the Ñoldor realm degrading, and suffered due to the whole idea of it (in addition to the undoubted physical exertions), they were wrong. I was not sure what they were trying to achieve, but this... "punishment"... was doing about as much to intimidate, humiliate or besmirch me as the formal divestment of the title or the prohibition of carrying a sword - that is, about zilch. Really, I was no longer a child of the pseudo-Feudal age when these things would have mattered - but I was not going to enlighten the Powers, let alone anyone else, about my opinion of this... lest they found another, and this time truly undignified thing to task me with.
Author's remark: the Greek master of the synthesizer mentioned above is, of course, Vangelis. If Maglor was sticking around on Earth during the late 20th century and early into the 21st, as a musician, they were bound to cross paths somehow. :-)
Note: the chapter name is from a song by Borknagar (from Epic album, 2004)
