Severian, Storyteller Jean Wulf Lictor's Sword describes his descent on the rock:
The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless, like all dead things, as if it were a time that was open after the fall of the mountain. Fossil bones protruded from the surface in places, bones of powerful animals and people. The forest also established there its dead, stumps and limbs, which time has turned to stone ...
Deeper than these, lay the buildings and mechanisms of humanity. (And maybe there are other races ...) I saw ... non-ferrous metals, so curious that I could not be sure whether their figures were intended as works of art or as parts for strange machines ....
This is a direct blow by the author when applying to the idea of a layer of culture - a layer of physical evidence, material , abandoned by all civilizations that have ever covered the area in question. Gene Wolfe writes about a very distant future, when the Sun itself is outdated and dies, and the history of the Earth is much closer to its end than to its beginning. When you think about how many people are created material of all kinds that already exist on the surface of the world, and when you think that history can go on for millions of years, you realize that we are most likely accumulating something big. (The shorter story causing such an accumulation is Clark Ashton Smith “Planet of the Dead.”)
The related point is Jack Vance's laughing The eyes of the superworld This, like the story of Wolfe, is only the more so established at the Extreme Old Age of the Earth. Drinkers in a tavern argue about the legality of the doctrine that Funambulous Evangels holds, which
".... stipulate that for each square of the earth two and one quarter million people died and laid their dust, therefore creating a wet and omnipresent robe of lich mold, on which this blasphemy to walk ... The total amount is almost one mile compacted cadaveric dust covering the surface of the earth, which is clearly false. "
The critic continues to explain that if the doctrine were true, the coast would be aligned with the cliffs of the corpse-dust a mile away. The cheerful fanatic replicates that "the humidity exhaled and expelled by countless people of the past," "pushed the ocean to the exact equivalent, so that neither edge nor abyss could be seen."
The bottom line of the Funambulous Evangel doctrine is that its adherents must, out of respect for the dead, "walk up, along roads and edges, and when we have to travel, we use specially blessed shoes."
The idea of the cultural layer takes on a more serious cultural (in the usual use of the word) form on the “Alpha-Ralph” boulevard by Kordweiner Smith. I think that if I had to choose one fairy tale by Kordweiner Smith as my best story, that would be so. Science fiction is not becoming more haunting than this. And again we are in the distant future, although thousands, and not millions of years ahead; far enough in any case for a great sense of the past, which will be transmitted by the author. The elegant paradox of this story is that the more those distant future people try to recover their lost past, the more they make us feel the immensity of the distance between our time and their heads.
Virginia and I bought the first French newspaper, which appeared after the most ancient world had fallen. We found joy in the news, even in advertisements. Some parts of the culture are difficult to reconstruct. It was hard to talk about products, of which only the names were preserved, but the homunculi and machines, working tirelessly at Downeep-downdeep, kept the surface of the world filled with enough new products to fill everyone's heart with hope. We knew that all this was a conviction, and yet it was not. We knew that when diseases killed a statically correct number of people, they would go out; when the level of accidents rose too high, he will stop, not knowing why. We knew that everything above us, Instrumentality looked ....
People of this era, known as the “Re-discovery of man,” warn of authenticity, crave for risk. They and their ancestors were expelled for thousands of years in a gradually significant culture of material well-being and spiritual vacuum. Now they want to feel that they live real lives, as the ancients used to do, as in our time. Studying the question of in what sense he can and in what sense cannot be, come back, Kordweiner Smith evokes magnificence, contrasts and severity of a huge period of history, and makes us feel that we ourselves are beginning to be born - pioneers of the era, seriously , but started with a great time road.
The project Ooranye, which is currently underway, is designed to convey a sense of the cultural layer of the world, whose civilization is 1.2 million years. Even this period of time has not been explored in a layer that covers a large percentage of the surface of its immunity, but with respect to historical memories, the culture layer is undoubtedly thick; gaps in the desert sound with memories of victories and catastrophes. Twenty-five great cities with discs on the stem date from a very early age, which were built in the brilliant era of Phosphorus more than a million years ago. Monorail system is somewhat later, but still ancient - it dates from the era of zinc. The sequence of the era itself is a kind of mental artifact, since age follows age, named after the successful elements on the periodic table, as part of the mental furniture of the Uranians. History-heritage accumulates with the affairs of great adventurers and rulers, and human civilization in general, always threatened and outnumbered by other forces, may be gradually approaching a more solid support.
