Aerospace III : The Inuit Cycle
Other Thoughts
Gordon Best
Chapter 1 : Building Permit
If Nunavut were a country, it would rank 17th in land area at 1,877,787km squared. Not to be confused with Nunavik, which is east of us. Sudan is 16th at 1,886,068km squared. It took us a while to get up to speed on the building program that started in Nunavik (Ungava).
I am Carla Wilson leader or mayor of Kugluktuk, a western village on the north shore of mainland Nunavut. Just think of Great Slave Lake as a finger pointing north to our town on the arctic sea. I was 22 when the pressure started heading our way. People were asking their leadership, why they had no programs like Nunavik. I was asking too.
I wanted Kugluktuk to grow in population and the people to have a safe place to live. Uncle Jack helped us build the road through the ridge and construct the pad for our first dome. He blasted that famous hole that was the stage for subsequent events.
But something must have been screwy in Iqaluit. It will become a Movie. 'Screwy in Iqaluit.' That is our capital. Did they call in the army?
We were building without a work permit. Do you call in the army? We had thousands of people with nowhere to go. Would they tossed us out when winter was coming?
Then I got the phone call from Suqi in Ungava. She told me about the prophecy. She told me what Namid, their seer, had said.
"There will be a war. A confrontation at your door. This will be used to attack us all. Fighters and bombers. We need to take the fight to them." said Suqi.
"But why us and why now?" I asked.
Suqi said, "It has been brewing for 600 years. They have always wanted to blow us off the map. These domes are a great target. I have already spread the news about the government's decision."
"Then what do we do?"
Suqi said, "It is already in motion. Watch the news."
It was the following week that several army freight planes (C-5M Super Galaxy) landed at our newly upgraded airport. They took control and unloaded many personnel carriers and some light tanks. Everyone was armed. We got the news and uncle Jack moved his equipment across the road at the gap. He had a row of storage sheds on both sides of the road. And only he knew that they were full of explosives.
We don't know what happened next. But Fred warned them not to fire.
Well! All hell broke loose. My uncle is a very peaceful man. But he must have seen himself as a man at the crossroads.
My guess is that some of the soldiers fired. Men scattered and more bullets flew. The bullets found their way into the explosives and a huge wave of fire, blew through the troops. Of the 450 soldiers only 22 survived. We only found small pieces of uncle Jack.
It was the spark that lit a fuse of pent up frustration. We used the media. We had our own satellites. Soon we had 10 wheelships in orbit documenting every move and passing on the information to us.
It was easy to see that the airbases across Canada were ramping up for something.
But many of the maintenance people on the airbases were native. Of the dozen bases across Canada in use, we had people ready to make the sacrifice. They would no longer be able to live in or near these bases.
The signal was given by Suqi and her people, 19th August, a wednesday morning. Small charges, looking like dice, were placed in the exhaust vents of most of the fighters in the country. Transport planes and helicopters were similarly treated. Then a signal was sent effectively closing down the Canadian air forces.
Two hours later the same thing happened in the US. The border region. But this included missile silos. Because the US would attack, if Canadian forces were attacked, native people carried out commands, coming from a native network. The planes sat quiet on the tarmac. There was a strange quiet on all the media.
Then we sent out a message. It was me speaking about uncle Jack. About my love for him and how he was sitting blocking the army, who were about to make 4000 people homeless. Anyone would have done the same.
Then my brother Henry spoke. He talked of how it is so easy to wipe out us seven million natives of the north. Now that we are prosperous and don't need the white man anymore. They planned on bombing us into space. We took steps to stop that, and we are sorry that fifty people died.
I said, "If any move is made to harm our people, then we have other plans. We wait for your offers of peace."
And many other messages were sent through the electronic equipment in the wheelships. Our spacecraft made no effort to hide.
That was when the uprisings started. It had nothing to do with us. Other minorities had their own gripes.
First in the US, Blacks and Mexicans united to tear down the institutions that had enslaved them. No city governments were able to function. Police in uniform were open season. Police stations and jails were emptied and destroyed. It was all carefully carried out, as if it had been long planned. Public utilities were taken over and guarded.
Army bases were full of people going berserk, with their machine guns and rifles. They were killing their own. Cities were becoming bunkered regions with opposing sides. People fled to summer houses. Or just out to smaller towns. They were disarmed at roadblocks and/or turned back.
Native reservations were now actively building foundations, for domes, because they were becoming overwhelmed with returning native peoples.
I am aware that we never got any attack on our domes. If it had been tried, I am sure we would have been protected with weapons up on the wheelships. But they never used them.
It is forgotten that more than half the peoples off-world, are of native background. We are talking many millions mostly on Mars. I am saying that they must have used something, because the missile silos throughout the world went silent. They never functioned reliably again.
It does not mean that things were now easy for us. We could no longer show our faces in the cities or even the towns to the south. So we had to stop dealing with Gimli. Now our tech equipment and parts come indirectly from Fairbanks and Lab City. Much of the airship tech comes through Iceland and Greenland.
The Gimli companies saw the writing on the wall. They realized where their business was coming from and they moved their whole operation to Carcross, Yukon. The dome business moved first and then the airship company.
People were choosing sides and no one wanted to be white. Cities soon refused to elect white people or people who spoke for the white side. Whites were now the new minority group. All this, because of a building permit.
Chapter 2 : Life
So life went on. We stayed to ourselves and found happiness in a growing mixed inuit and native community. We have always had white people with us, but no one who choses to stay are thought of that way. It was just the bureaucrats that were forced out of town.
I met my husband at a dance in town. He is a pilot and was sent from Iqaluit to work here at our new airport. Tom was here when the army planes landed. He got out and hid, watching the goings on, until he heard the explosion. Then he and his fellow airport people boarded the freighters and overpowered the crews.
He said he was very close to killing them. They all were rounded up and led to our pitiful jail. Then the pilots flew the planes north, all but one. To a hiding spot on one of the islands. When the injured men were returned to the remaining freighter, the captured crews were let go to fly south.
* * *
We were ashamed at just how far behind we were in the building of our community numbers. North Russia was well ahead of us. Our leaders had sat on their hands and stole the government money from our towns. And now we had no money at all coming from the south.
But then we got a message. 'Build them and they will come.' Not that we build the domes for ourselves, but build the roads south and build domes with the natives. Move south into Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Build a line of domes from east to west like a wall. Build a hundred domes of the longest type and form a wall with four kilometre gaps between.
I started to work it out. The wheelships were going to watch over us, but we had to dedicate the next ten years to building this wall. Then we could build our own domes. Other communities will foot the bill, but we must work hard summer and winter.
From Fort Severn to Lake Athabasca we drew a line in the woods and built roads south to clear swaths of forest as I described. Our location close to the 58 latitude line. Then we extended the line on into Alberta.
They told us to just keep building. At some point there were 5000 of us working full out. Airships buzzing and the sound of power drills.
It was not a useless wall to shut people out, but a wall to house people in. Anyone who came north. Anyone who came was helping. We built a fortress of people. Tom and I settled in to the first dome and we moved on as the line of domes got longer.
All of our friends are from this time. Ranks of natives and inuit working side by side. Wheelships overhead watching over us. We ate fresh moose and caribou every night. Strong protein to keep us going. We had an army of people growing crops. Where none had been grown before. We had schools of the highest standard for our children and in the end it resulted in 3000km of domes. Or 300 domes in all.
That was the first line.
About the 59th parallel north we did the same or the new generation did it. A second wall. While they were building, we were up on the north shore ( Arctic shore) building another wall of domes.
Around, and this is rough, on the 66th parallel north, we built from Repulse Bay to the Alaskan border. Then we moved south to the 65th parallel. And the next generation built a fourth line.
1200 domes. And that was just us. And they came. Millions of people came from the rest of Canada, US, the South Americans, China and India. They came and invested in us. We did charge them an entrance fee. The non-native paid. And we were living off the riches of the Moon and Mars.
When we had a presence of 30 million people we confronted Canada. A country that we demanded acceptance from. And we formed a new country. Crazy white people. We stated our numbers. It is the same population as the rest of Canada. We had absorbed 10 million of their people into our ranks.
Guess what? They still rejected us. So Great Shield was born. We just use 'Shield' for short. From the 58th parallel north we claimed it all.
We built the best airports and railways. Highways and a steady route of airships plying the air, east and west.
Alaska had been busy as was Ungava and Labrador. Ungava claimed everything north of the 55th parallel. There really was nothing that Quebec could do about it.
In the present day, we see 500 domes in Alaska, 400 in Inuvialuit (Northwest Territories), 1200 in Nunavut, 600 in Nunavik (Ungava), 200 in Nunatsiavut (Labrador). And we have now joined with Greenland. Three nations as one.
Shield, Alaska and Greenland are now the Federated North Pole. We will wait for Iceland, Saamiland, Yupikland to join us. Iceland has 32 million and the numbers are rapidly growing in Saamiland and Yupikland.
Chapter 3 : Fort Conger
It was our job as a successful people to retake the north. We still worried about the chinese and the east indians were also sniffing around. Fort Conger is an old military research base, but has not been used in 260 years. We however were sure to get people to settle here. Then we will move south and west on Ellesmere Island. Now that the warming is upon us. Five domes for Ellesmere then on to Baffin.
We are working closely with Greenland and Nunavik, who feel close to this countryside. Half of our settlers will be Greenlanders and we are glad to have them. They are great defenders of the north and good cousins. We wanted to put dozens of domes on all the islands but we need people willing to move there.
What we got were people from the Moon settlements. They came and got off on the fresh air and open spaces. The first year they spent in rehab and then you could not stop their industry. After the Moon, everything was easy for them in the north. They sang and danced strange jigs and boy could they work. The happiest people I have ever met. Was it their plan all along. To resettle Earth. All the difficult spots? Now that the warming is here, we will see.
The islands quickly fill with a thousand domes. Hundreds of thousands of Greenlanders and Moon people. They got along well. I visited the domes of Ellesmere Island. The first five and saw the comradery. I felt the lightness in the air. A joy that was only hinted at further south. We did not appreciate the paradise we were living in. These people did.
Greenland has a shuttle port in their highlands. It is the main port for all the peoples coming back to Earth. The Moon people are in rehab there, then released to move to the islands.
This is when we put a call out to Mars. It was with the blessing of Mars that we made the presentation from Fort Conger with lots of footage of the history of the place and the present dozen domes on the island. We showed the two dozen major islands of Nunavut and told them we needed people to settle them. We wanted to build a thousand domes and wanted indigenous people to come and help. We wanted a strong nation and most of the Mars settlers had native blood. We told them of our 30 million people, but we needed to double that to become a force for peace in the world.
We did not speak as the white man, out of the side of our mouth. We need the peace of Mars. They had formed a united group of colonies, after some conflict, but never war. Now could they come and supply that knowledge to Shield.
They would come. Millions of the young would reach Greenland for rehab, and recover much more quickly to be neighbours in our country and islands. They were adjusting from 0.4Gs and not 0.18Gs (Moon gravity). Within a generation, we had 55 million and the respect of all nations. Canada cowered at our demands of them. The US had no central authority to speak with.
Then the earthquakes started. I, Carla Wilson was afraid. Not near us but down in the Mississippi, about a year later the caldera that was Yellowstone blew.
It is suspected that some military group planted charges, which stirred the great volcano. But I believe a more natural reasons like rising sea levels and shifting continental plates.
It turned out that living in a dome was also the best protection from volcanic ash and nuclear winter. The cities across the world fell one by one. People kept moving north to join us. We started building further south.
As the agriculture collapsed in America it was only us (in Canada), who were growing satisfying crops. Our trees were suffering and the animals were dying. We corralled as many as we could and kept them in giant covered shelters.
So we built domes but slowly, as the weather dampened everything down. The turbulent air and the violent seas. It was never the cold that bothered us. The best places to be were up on our northern islands. Every other day, we sent people up on the structures to sweep the surface of ash. That ash will become a part of our new soils.
Now the thorium reactors are in full use, because there is so little sunlight and we need to power the lighting systems 16 hours a day. The winds will stop for days at a time (no turbine electricity) and then the winds rage for a week.
We knew millions were dying in towns and cities, but only those who were in domes survived well. We could only help those who came to us. It surprised us just how well other countries had vilified us to the point that, so many people did not think to trust us. We were hated but our doors are open.
Many were blaming us, as the cause of the volcano. It took attention away from their failure. It must have been two billion that died. I was not happy to be alive and see it happen. Then the wars started. There were a lot of weapons about. Then it was another two billion died in the wars. But not around here.
Much of China was a wasteland. India was attacked by volcanoes in Indonesia. Maybe a 100 million survived.
All the icefields were black with soot. So when the winter was over the icecaps melted as never before. Many of the rivers of India dried to a trickle.
We had suffered as well and there were people with lung ailments. But we did alright. We build lines of domes to the US border. We took control and welcomed the survivors into our homes. This did not always turn out well, but people were not in their right minds.
We were not against building, using traditional methods. But in the north it is not suitable and why it took so long for people to realize this?...
Chapter 4 : Farming
When the prairies were again in good enough shape to farm, we took a new approach. We lived without grains. We only grew a token amount in the domes. So looking out at the vast fields waiting for our attention, we started by planting bushes and trees. We set aside a continuous band of prairie to natural grasses. East to west, Ontario to the Rockies. Now wildlife had a southern corridor.
Using the Ontario example, who had for the most part survived, we planted any kind of nut or fruit tree that would grow. There was no incentive to grow grain. There was no rush to go back to the old ways. If there were problems in our approach, we could change direction.
Bands of forest were planted east to west. A band that was about two kilometre wide, sometimes four. Then an open field of a couple of kilometres on the north and south side. Forest planted from north to south. Much the same.
Our goal was to bring back the mild weather and the rains. Through wind breaks and a strong forest canopy, the desert will change to a paradise. As much as possible. Allow the insects and wildlife to flourish. Then we took each square field and did everything we could to bring the soil back to life. This would take us 20 years and I am getting old and we are only half finished. Thank you Monsanto, for shaking us up to the evils of greed.
I like to walk in the wild fields and smell the flowers and the earth. I look over to the vast forests growing all the food we really need. We have not gone back to grain. Mono-culture at its worst. But we grow some crops for fodder and composting. We grow beans and lentils. We have a limited number of dairy cattle, but encourage wild caribou and deer which we hunt in the late fall.
At the time of this writing, Canada has a population higher than the US. But we leave them to solve their own problems. And they have many. They are still killing each other in great numbers and we don't want to draw attention to our success.
Socialists are we? Community protects its own. Biology shows animals co-operate, more than compete.
We take in the people, that are smart enough to make it to our door. Guns are removed and destroyed. Many of the black people have made it here. Most of them want to stay and build this country. Good luck to them.