EARTH. 2040:

World areas expected to be submerged when Greenland and

Antarctic ice sheets fully melt.

Large portions of Estonia, Denmark, eastern Britain, northern

Germany, and northern Poland.

The Netherlands.

Western Siberia (the Occidental Plain) east of the Urals,

linking the Black Sea to the Caspian and Azov seas, nearly to

the Arctic.

Lowlands of Libya, Iraq.

The Hindustan and Indus Valleys in India.

Portions of northeastern China.

Southwestern New Guinea and a large bight extending into

the Eastern Australian Desert.

The Lower Amazon and La Plata valleys, the Yucatan Peninsula.

Large portions of the states of Georgia, North Carolina,

and South Carolina.

Florida, Louisiana. . . .

"The prime attraction of Earth is the author's unfailing

resourcefulness in extrapolating a post-greenhouse effect

future that is plausible, dismaying, and amazing in equal

parts. . . . Erin's prose ranges from regular to high octane

... his characters have vivid intellectual lives." --Entertainment Weekly "It is indeed a book that anyone interested in the survival

of our terrifying species should read."--Interzone

EARTH, 2040:

Archaic or obsolete activities or occupations:

1. flint knapping, entrail reading, arrow fletching . . .

smithing, barrel making, art appraising . . . clock making,

reindeer herding, dentistry, handwriting . . . game-show host,

channeler, UFOlogist . . . drug smuggler, golf course manager,

confidential banker . . . sunbathing, drinking tap-

water . . .

New service professions:

1. household toxin inspector, prenuptial genetic counselor,

meme adjustment specialist . . . indoor microecologist,

biotect, prenatal tutor, cerebrochemical balance advisor . . .

Net-SIC consultant, voxpop arbitrageur, ferret designer, insurance life-style adjuster . . .

World human population figures:

1982: 4.3 billion

1988: 5.1 billion

2030: 10.3 billion

"A major effort conceived with great imagination and

written with Brin's usual panache." --Locus

"Fully dimensional and engaging characters with plausible

motivations . . . Brin's exciting prose style will

probably make this a Hugo nominee, and will certainly

keep readers turning pages." --Publishers Weekly

Bantam Spectra Books by David Brin

EARTH

HEART OF THE COMET

(with Gregory Benford)

THE POSTMAN

THE PRACTICE EFFECT

THE RIVER OF TIME

STARTIDE RISING

S U N D I V E R

THE UPLIFT WAR

EARTH

DAVID BRIN

BANTAM BOOKS

NEW YORK  TORONTO  LONDON  SYDNEY  AUCKLAND

EARTH A Hunttim SpfCtrti Hook

Ktsntam hardcover edition/)unr J990 Bantam Hack edition/lime 1991

SPECTRA and the portrayal of ci boxed 's tire trademarks of Htintam Hooks.

a el/vision ofHiintam Douhleday /)elf I'uhlishiny, Croup. Inc.

At! rights reserved.

Copyright Š 1990 by Davit! Hrin

Cover tirt copyright Š 1991 hy Dennis Duvidson

Library of C.onKress Cata lay. C.tiril Number 904

No part of this book mny hi: reproduced or transmitted

in tinv form or hy tiny nif<inn. electronic or mcc hi inicul.

incliuliny, photocopyiny,. rcconlin^. or hy tiny information

storay.f and rctrii'vcif system, without pcrniis.-iion in writing, from thf pi ih/is her

For inforimition {lihircss: Huntcmi Hooks

If you purchased this book without a caver you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed"

to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has

received any payment for this "stripped book."

/.S7W 055329024'-X

I'tihlishcii simultaneously in the Uniteil Stales <nui Ctinathi

Kantian Hooks tire publisheif hy Hfinttins Hooks, a division of Huntum Don hiedav Dell Puhlisbmy. Croup. Inc Its trademark, consi^tiny. of the words 'fifiniiun Hooks" und the portrayal of 11 rooster, is Registered in (/..'>. f^ileni and Trademark Office and in other countries Marea Re^is trada Hunttiin Hooks. 666 Fifth Avenue. New York. New York 10103

ItlNliniN III) UN11U1 S! AH-' 01 AMmil A

OPM 0 9 K 7 (S S 4 3

TO OUR COMMON MOTHER

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

As writers go, I suppose I'm known as a bit of an

optimist, so it seems only natural that this novel

projects a future where there's a little more wisdom

than folly . . . maybe a bit more hope than despair.

In fact, it's about the most encouraging tomorrow

I can imagine right now.

What a sobering thought.

EARTH

PART I

PLANET

First came a supernova, dazzling the universe in brief,

spendthrift glory before ebbing into twisty, multispectral

clouds of new-forged atoms. Swirling eddies spiraled until

one of them igniteda newborn star.

The virgin sun wore whirling skirts of dust and

electricity. Gas and rocks and bits of this and that fell

into those pleats, gathering in dim lumps . . .

planets . . .

One tiny worldlet circled at a middle distance. It

had a modest set of properties:

massbarely enough to draw in a passing asteroid or

two;

moonsone, the remnant of a savage collision, but

big enough to tug deep tides;

spinto set winds churning through a fuming

atmosphere;

densitya brew that mixed and separated, producing

an unpromising surface slag;

temperatureheat was the planet's only voice, a

weak one, swamped by the blaring sun. Anyway, what

can a planet tell the universe, in a reedy cry of infrared?

2 DAVIDBRIN

"This exists," it repeated, over and over. "This is a

condensed stone, radiating at about three hundred

degrees^ insignificant on the scale of stars.

"This speck, a mote, exists. "

A simple statement to an indifferent cosmosthe

signature of a rocky world, tainted by salty, smoke-blown

puddles.

But then something new stirred in those puddles. It

was a trivialitya mere discoloration here and there. But

from that moment the voice changed. Subtly, shifting in

timbre, still faint and indistinct, it nevertheless seemed

now to say,

"I ... am . . ."

An angry deity glowered at Alex. Slanting sunshine cast

C shadows across the incised cheeks and outthrust tongue

0 of Great To, Maori god of war.

R A dyspeptic idol, Alex thought, contemplating the

E carved figure. I'd feel the same if I were stuck up there,

decorating, a billionaire's office wall.

It occurred to Alex that Great Tu's wooden nose resembled

the gnomon of a sundial. Its shadow kept time, creeping

to the measured ticking of a twentieth century

grandfather clock in the corner. The silhouette stretched

slowly, amorously, toward a sparkling amethyst geode--yet

another of George Huttori's many geological treasures. Alex

made a wager with himself, that the shadow wouldn't reach

its goal before the sinking sun was cut off by the western

hills.

And at this rate, neither would George Button. Where

the devil is the man? Why did he agree to this meeting, if

he didn 'I plan on bloody showing up?

Alex checked his watch again, even though he knew

the time. He caught himself nervously tapping one shoe

against the nearby table leg, and stopped doing it.

What have Jen and Stan always told you? "Try to learn

patience, Alex. "

It wasn't his best-known virtue. But then, he'd learned

a lot the last few months. Remarkable how it focused your

mind, when you guarded a secret that might mean the end

of the world.

He glanced toward his friend and former mentor, Stan

Coldman, who had set up this appointment with the chairman

of Tangoparu Ltd. Apparently unperturbed by his employer's

tardiness, the slender, aging theoretician was

immersed in the latest issue of Physical Review.

No hope for distraction there. Alex sighed and let his

eyes rove George Hutton's office one more time, hoping to

get a measure of the man.

Of course the conference table was equipped with the

4 DAVIDBRIN

best and latest plaques, for accessing the World Data Net.

One entire wall was taken up by an active-events screen, a

montage of real-time views from random locations across the

Earth--zeppelins cruising above Wuhan . . . sunrise in a

North African village . . . the urban lights of any city in

the world.

Original holographic sculptures of mythical beasts

shimmered by the entrance to the suite, but nearest the desk

were Hutton's dearest treasures, minerals and ores collected

over a lifetime grubbing through the planet's crust--including

a huge blood zircon, glittering on a pedestal just below

the Maori war mask. It struck Alex that both objects were

products of fiery crucibles--one mineral, the other social.

Each denoted resilience under pressure. Perhaps this said

something about George Hutton's personality, as well.

But then, perhaps it meant nothing at all. Alex had

never been a great judge of people. Witness the events of the

last year.

With a sudden click and hum, the hallway doors parted

and a tall, brown man appeared, breathing hard and coated

with perspiration.

"Ah! You made yourselves at home. Good. Sorry to

keep you waiting, Stan. Dr. Lustig. Excuse me, will you? I'll

only be a moment." He peeled a sweaty jersey off broad

shoulders, striding past a window overlooking the sailboats

of Auckland harbor.

George Button, I presume. Alex thought as he lowered

his outstretched hand and sat back down. Not much for

formality. That's just as well, I suppose.

From the open door to the lavatory, Button shouted.

"Our game had delay after delay for injuries! Minor stuff,

fortunately. But I'm sure you understand, I couldn't let the

Tangoparu team down when I was needed. Not during the

finals against Nippon Electric!"

Normally, it might seem odd for a businessman in his

fifties to neglect appointments for a rugby game. But the

dusky giant toweling himself off in the loo seemed completely

unselfconscious, aglow with victory. Alex glanced at

his former teacher, who now worked for Button here in

New Zealand. Stan only shrugged, as if to say billionaires

made their own rules.

Button emerged wearing a dressing gown and drying his

hair with a terry-cloth towel. "Can I offer you anything, Dr.

Lustig? How about you, Stan?"

"Nothing, thank you," Alex said. Less reticent, Stan

accepted a Clenfiddich and spring water. Then Button settled

into a plush swivel chair, stretching his long legs beside

the kauri-wood table.

Whatever happens, Alex knew, this is where the trail ends. This is my last hope.

The Maori engineer-businessman regarded him with

piercing brown eyes. "I'm told you want to discuss the Iquitos

incident, Dr. Lustig. And the miniature black hole you

let slip out of your hands there. Frankly, I thought you'd be

sick of that embarrassment by now. What did some press

hacks call it then? A possible China Syndrome2."

Stan cut in. "A few sensationalists set off a five-minute

panic on the World Net, until the scientific community

showed everybody that tiny singularities like Alex's dissipate

harmlessly. They're too small to last long by themselves."

Button raised one dark eyebrow. "Is that so, Dr. Lustig?"

Alex had faced that question so many times since Iquitos.

By now he had countless stock answers--from five-second

sound bites for the vid cameras to ten-minute lullabies

for Senate investigators ... all the way to hours of abstruse

mathematics to soothe his fellow physicists. He really

ought to be used to it by now. Still the question burned, as

it had the first time.

"Talk to me, Lustig, " the reporter, Pedro Manella, had

demanded on that ashen afternoon in Peru, as they watched

rioting students set Alex's work site ablaze. "Tell me that

thing you made isn't about to eat its way to China. "

Lying had become so reflexive since then, it took some

effort to break the habit today. "Um, what did Stan tell

you?" he asked George Button, whose broad features still

glistened under a thin gloss of perspiration.

"Only that you claim to have a secret. Something

you've kept from reporters, tribunals . . . even the security

agencies of a dozen nations. In this day and age, that's impressive by itself.

"But we Maori people of New Zealand have a saying,"

he went on. "A man who can fool chiefs, and even gods,

must still face the monsters he himself created.

6 DAVIDBRIN

"Have you created a monster, Dr. Lustig?"

The question direct. Alex realized why Button reminded

him of Pedro Manella on that humid evening in

Peru, as tear gas wafted down those debris-strewn streets and

canals. Both big men had voices like Hollywood deities.

Both were used to getting answers.

Manella had pursued Alex onto the creaking hotel balcony

to get a good view of the burning power plant. The

reporter panned his camera as the main containment building

collapsed amid clouds of powdery cement. Cheering students

provided a vivid scene for Manella to feed live to his

viewers on the Net.

"When the mob cut the power cables, Lustig, " the persistent

journalist asked while shooting, "that let your black

hole out of its magnetic cage. It fell into the Earth then,

no? So what happens now? Will it emerge again, blazing

and incinerating some hapless place halfway around the

world?

"What did you make here, Lustig? A beast that will

devour us all?"

Even then, Alex recognized the hidden message between

the words. The renowned investigator hadn't been

seeking truth; he wanted reassurance.

"No, of course I didn't," Alex remembered telling

Manella on that day, and everyone else since then. Now he

let go of the lie with relief.

"Yes, Mr. Button. I think I made the very Devil itself."

Stan Coldman's head jerked up. Until this moment,

Alex hadn't even confided in his old mentor. Sorry. Stan, he

thought.

Silence stretched as Button stared at him. "You're saying

... the singularity didn't dissipate like the experts

said? That it might still be down there, absorbing matter

from the Earth's core?"

Alex understood the man's incredulity. Human minds

weren't meant to picture something that was smaller than

an atom, and yet weighed megatons. Something narrow

enough to fall through the densest rock, yet bound to circle

the planet's center in a spiraling pavane of gravity. Something

ineffably but insatiably hungry, and which grew ever

hungrier the more it ate ...

(ust thinking about it put in sudden doubt the very

notions of up and down. It challenged faith in the ground

below your feet. Alex tried to explain.

"The generals showed me their power plant ... offered

me a blank check to construct its core. So I took their

word they'd be getting permission soon. Any day now, they

kept telling me." Alex shrugged at his former gullibility. An

old story, if a bitter one.

"Like everybody else, I was sure the Standard Physical

Model was correct--that no black hole lighter than the

Earth itself could possibly be stable. Especially one as tiny as

we made at Iquitos. It was supposed to evaporate at a controlled

rate, after all. Its heat would power three provinces.

Most of my colleagues think such facilities will be cleared

for use within a decade.

"But the generals wanted to jump the moratorium--"

"Idiots," Button interrupted, shaking his head. "They

actually imagined they could keep a thing like that secret?

These days?"

For the first time since Alex's bombshell, Stan Goldman

put in a comment. "Well, George, they must have thought

the plant well isolated in the Amazon."

Button snorted dubiously, and in retrospect Alex

agreed. The idea was harebrained. He'd been naive to accept

the generals' assurances of a calm working environment,

which proved as untrustworthy as the standard models of

physics.

"In fact," Coldman went on. "It took a leak from a

secrets registration service to set that Manella character on

Alex's trail. If not for that, Alex might still be tending the

singularity, safe inside its containment field. Isn't that right, Alex?"

Good old Stan. Alex thought affectionately. Still making excuses for his favorite student, just as he used to back in Cambridge.

"No, it's not. You see, before the riot, I was already

preparing to sabotage the plant myself."

While this seemed to surprise Coldman, George Button

only tilted his head slightly. "You had discovered something

unusual about your black hole."

Alex nodded. "Before 2020, nobody imagined such

things could be made in the laboratory at all. When it was

found you could actually fold space inside a box and make a

singularity . . . that shock should have taught us humility.

8 DAVIDBRIN

But success made us smug, instead. Soon we thought we

understood the damned things. But there are ... subtleties

we never imagined."

He spread his hands. "I first grew suspicious because

things were going too bloody well! The power plant was

extremely efficient, you see. We didn't have to feed in much

matter to keep it from dissipating. The generals were delighted

of course. But I started thinking . . . might I have

accidentally created a new type of hole in space? One that's

stable? Able to grow by devouring mere rock?"

Stan gaped. Alex, too, had been numbed by that first

realization, then agonized for weeks before deciding to take

matters into his own hands, to defy his employers and

defang the tiny, voracious beast he'd helped create.

But Pedro Manella arrived first, amid a flurry of accusations,

and suddenly it was too late. Alex's world collapsed

around him before he could act, or even find out for certain

what he'd made.

"So it is a monster ... a taniwha," George Button

breathed. The Maori word sounded fearsome. The big man

drummed his fingers on the table. "Let's see if I've got this

right. We have a purported stable black hole, that you think

may orbit thousands of miles below our feet, possibly growing

unstoppably even as we speak. Correct? I suppose you

want my help finding what you so carelessly misplaced?"

Alex was nearly as impressed with Hutton's quickness

as he was irked by his attitude. He suppressed a hot response.

"I guess you could put it that way," he answered,

levelly.

"So. Would it be too much to ask how you'd go about

looking for such an elusive fiend? It's a little hard to go

digging around down there in the Earth's core."

Button obviously thought he was being ironic. But

Alex gave him a straightforward answer. "Your company already

makes most of the equipment I'd need . . . like those

superconducting gravity scanners you use for mineral

surveys." Alex started reaching for his valise. "I've written

down modifications--"

Button raised a hand. All trace of sardonicism was gone

from his eyes. "I'll take your word for now. It will be expensive, of course? No matter. If we find nothing, I'll take the

cost out of your pakeha hide. I'll skin you and sell the pale

thing in a tourist shop. Agreed?"

Alex swallowed, unable to believe it could be so simple.

"Agreed. And if we do find it?"

Lines furrowed Hutton's brow. "Why . . . then I'd be

honor bound to take your pelt anyway, tohunga. For creating

such a devil to consume our Earth, I should ..."

The big man stopped suddenly. He stood up, shaking

his head. At the window, Button stared down at the city of

Auckland, its evening lights beginning to spread like powdered

gemstones across the hills. Beyond the metropolis lay

forested slopes slanting to Manukau Bay. Twilight-stained

clouds were moving in from the Tasman Sea, heavy with

fresh rain.

The scene reminded Alex of a time in childhood, when

his grandmother had taken him to Wales to watch the turning

of the autumn leaves. Then, as now, it had struck him

just how temporary everything seemed . . . the foliage, the

drifting clouds, the patient mountains . . . the world.

"You know," George Button said slowly, still contemplating

the peaceful view outside, "back when the American

and Russian empires used to face each other at the brink of

nuclear war, this was where people in the Northern Hemisphere

dreamed about fleeing to. Were you aware of that,

Lustig? Every time there was a crisis, airlines suddenly

overbooked with "vacation" trips to New Zealand. People

must have thought this the ideal spot to ride out a holocaust.

"And that didn't change with the Rio Treaties, did it?

Big War went away, but then came the cancer plague, greenhouse

heat, spreading deserts . . . and lots of little wars of

course, over an oasis here, a river there.

"All the time though, we Kiwis still felt lucky. Our rains didn't abandon us. Our fisheries didn't die.

"Now all those illusions are gone. There's no safe place

any longer."

The big man turned to look at Alex, and despite his

words there was no loathing in the tycoon-engineer's eyes.

Nor even bleakness. Only what Alex took to be a heavy

resignation.

"I wish I could hate you, Lustig, but you've obviously

subcontracted that job quite ably yourself. And so you deprive

me even of revenge."

"I'm sorry," Alex apologized sincerely.

Button nodded. He closed his eyes and took a deep

breath.

"All right then, let's get to work. If Tane, father of the

Maori, could go into the bowels of the Earth to battle monsters,

who are we then to refuse?"

D For more than two decades, we at The Mother have maintained

our famed list of Natural Tranquility Reserves--rare

places on Earth where one might sit for hours and hear no

sounds but those of wilderness.

Our thirty million worldwide subscribers have led in vigilantly

protecting these reserves. All it takes is a single thoughtless

act, by air traffic planners for instance, to convert a precious

sanctuary into yet another noisy, noisome place, ruined by the

raucous clamor of humanity.

Unfortunately, even so-called "conservation-oriented" officials

still seem obsessed by archaic, TwenCen views of preservation.

They think it's enough to save a few patches of forest

here and there from development, from chemical leaks or acid

rain. Even when they succeed, however, they celebrate by

opening hiking trails and encouraging ever higher quotas of

sightseers, who predictably leave litter, trample root systems,

cause erosion, and worst of all jabber at the top of their lungs in gushing excitement over "being one with nature."

It's surprising the few animals left can find each other amid

the bedlam, to breed.

Excluding Greenland and Antarctica, seventy-nine Tranquility

Reserves were reported in our last roundup. We're now sad

to report that two failed this year's test. At this rate, soon there will be no terrestrial silence zones left at all.

And our Oceania correspondents report matters growing

worse there, as well. Too many landlubbers seem to be heading

off the standard shipping lanes--vacationers who seek out nature's serenity, but in so doing bring to silent places the plague

of their own voices.

(And then there is that catastrophe the Sea State, perhaps

better left unmentioned here, lest we despair entirely!)

Even the southern Indian Ocean, Earth's last frontier of solitude, trembles under the cacophony of our cursed ten billions

and their machines. Frankly, it wouldn't surprise this writer if Gaia eventually had enough, if she awoke from her fitful slumber EARTH 11

and answered our noise with a shaking such as this tired planet

has never known.

--From the March 2038 edition of The Mother. I D Net access Pl-63-

AA1888667767.]

There are many ways to propagate. (Such a lovely

H word!) This late in her long life, Jen Wolling figured she

0 knew just about all of them.

L Especially where the term applied to biology--to all

0 the varied means Life used to foil its great enemy. Time.

S So many were those ways, Jen sometimes puzzled why

P everyone fussed so over the traditional one, sex.

H True, sex had its points. It helped ensure variability

E in a species--a gambler's game, mixing one's own genes

R with another's, betting that beneficial serendipities will

E outweigh the inevitable errors. In fact, sex had served

most higher life forms well enough and long enough, to

become reinforced with many pleasurable neural and hormonal

responses.

In other days Jen had plumbed those pathways in vivo

and with gusto. She had also mapped those same roads more

precisely, in charts of pristine yet still passionate mathematics.

Hers had been the earliest computer models to show

theoretical bases for feeling, logical rationales for ecstasy,

even theorems for the mysterious art of motherhood.

Two husbands, three children, eight grandchildren, and

one Nobel Prize later, Jen knew motherhood from every angle,

even though its fierce hormonal flows were now only

memories. Ah, well. There were other types of propagation.

Other ways even an old woman might leave an imprint upon

history.

"No, Baby!" she chided, pulling a bright red apple away

from the bars dividing the spacious lab in two. A gray tentacle

waved between the steel rods, snatching at the fruit.

"No! Not till you ask for it politely."

From her desk nearby, a young black woman sighed.

"Jen, will you stop teasing the poor creature?" Pauline Cockerel

shook her head. "You know Baby won't understand unless

you accompany words with signs."

"Nonsense. She comprehends perfectly. Observe."

The animal let out a squeaky trumpet of frustration.

12 DAVIDBRIN

Acquiescing, it rolled back its trunk to wind the tip round a

mat of shaggy fur, hanging low over its eyes.

"That's a good girl," Jen said, tossing the apple. Baby

caught it deftly and crunched happily.

"Pure operant conditioning," the younger woman

sniffed. "Hasn't anything to do with intelligence or cognition."

"Cognition isn't everything," Jen replied. "Politeness,

for instance, needs to be ingrained at deeper levels. It's a

good thing I came down here. She's getting spoiled rotten."

"Hmph. If you ask me, you're just rationalizing another

bout of PNS."

"PNS?"

"Post-Nobel syndrome," Pauline explained.

"Still?" Jen sniffed. "After all these years?"

"Why not? Who said anyone recovers?"

"You make it sound like a disease."

"It is. Look at the history of science. Most prizewinners

turn into either stodgy defenders of the status quo--like

Hayes and Kalumba--or iconoclasts like you, who insist on

throwing stones at sacred cows--"

"Mixed metaphor," Jen pointed out.

"--and carping about details, and generally making nuisances

of themselves."

"Have I been making a nuisance of myself?" Jen asked

innocently.

Pauline cast her eyes heavenward. "You mean besides

coming here randomly, unannounced, and meddling in

Baby's training?"

"Yeah. Besides that."

With a sigh Pauline plucked one data plaque from a

jumble of the wide, wafer-thin reading devices. This one was

dialed to the latest issue of Nature ... a page in the letters

section.

"Oh, that," Jen observed. She had come here to the

hermetic, air-conditioned pyramid of London Ark, in order

to escape the flood of telephone and Net calls piling up at

her own lab. Inevitably, one would be from the director of

St. Thomas's, inviting her to a pleasant lunch overlooking

the river, where he'd once again hint that an emeritus professor

in her nineties really ought to spend more time in the

country, watching ultraviolet rays turn the rhododendrons

funny shades of purple, instead of gallivanting around the

EARTH 13

globe poking her nose into other researchers' business and

making statements about issues that were none of her concern.

Had anybody else spoken as she had, at last week's

World Ozone Conference in Patagonia, they would have returned

home to more than mere letters and phone calls. In

today's political climate, the gentlest outcome might have

been forced retirement. Cood-bye lab in the city. Cood-bye

generous consultancies and travel allotments.

That little Swedish medal certainly did have its compensations.

To become a laureate was a little like being

transformed into that famous nine-hundred-pound gorilla--

the one who slept anywhere it wanted to. Glimpsing her

own tiny, wiry reflection in the laboratory window, Jen

found the metaphor delicious.

"I only pointed out what any fool should see," she explained.

"That spending billions to blow artificial ozone into

the stratosphere isn't going to solve anything. Now that

greedy idiots have stopped spewing chlorine compounds

into the air, the situation will correct itself soon."

"Soon?" Pauline was incredulous. "Decades is soon

enough to restore the ozone layer? Tell that to the farmers,

who have to fit their livestock with eye covers."

"Shouldn't eat meat anyway," Jen grumbled.

"Then tell all the humans who'll get skin lesions because

1. ."

"The U.N. supplies hats and sunglasses to everyone.

Besides, a few pence worth of cream clears away precancerous--"

"What about wild animals then? Savannah baboons

were doing fine, their habitat declared safe just ten years

ago. Now so many are going blind, they have to be collected

into the arks after all. How do you think we'll cope with

that here?" Pauline gestured into the vast atrium of London

Ark, with its tier upon tier of enclosed, artificial habitats.

The huge edifice of hanging gardens and meticulously regulated

environments was a far cry from its origins in the old

Regent's Park Zoo. And it was only one out of almost a

hundred such structures, scattered all over the world.

"You'll cope the way you have all along," Jen answered.

"By stretching facilities, putting in extra hours, making

do--"

"For now! But what about tomorrow? The next catastro-

14 DAVIDBRIN

phe? Jen, I can't believe I'm hearing this. You led the fight

for the arks, from the beginning!"

"So? Am I a traitor then, if I say that part of the job has

succeeded? Why, in some places we've even made additions

to the gene pool, like Baby here." She nodded toward the

furry pachyderm inside the big cage. "You should have faith

in your own work, Pauline. Habitat restoration will come off

the drawing boards someday. Most of these species should

be back outside in only a few centuries--"

"Centuries!"

"Yes, surely. What's a few hundred years, compared to

the age of this planet?"

Pauline sniffed dubiously. But Jen cut in, putting on a

touch of Cockney accent for good measure. "Cor, why d'ye

take it all so bloody personally, dearie-o? Step back a minute.

What's the worst that can happen?"

"We could lose every unprotected terrestrial species

massing over ten kilos!" the young woman replied fiercely.

"Yes? For good measure, let's throw in the contents of

these arks--the protected species--and every human being.

All ten billion of us. That'd be some holocaust, to be sure.

"But how much difference would it make to the Earth, Pauline? Say, ten million years from now? Not much, I'll wager. The old girl will wait us out. She's done it before."

Pauline's mouth was slack, her expression stunned. For

a moment Jen wondered if she'd really gone over the top,

this time.

Her young friend blinked. Then a suspicious smile

spread. "You are awful! For a minute there I actually started

taking you seriously."

Jen grinned. "Now . . . you know me better than

that."

"I know you're an unrepentant curmudgeon! You live

to get a rise out of people, and someday your contrary habits

will be your undoing."

"Hmph. Just how do you think I've remained interested

in life this long? Finding ways to keep amused . . . that's

my secret of longevity."

Pauline tossed the reading plaque back onto the cluttered

desk. "Is that why you're going to South Africa next

month? Because it'll outrage everybody on both sides?"

"The Ndebele want me to look over their arks from a

macrobiological perspective. Whatever their politics and

EARTH 15

race problems, they are still vital members of the Salvation

Project."

"But--"

Jen clapped her hands. "Enough of that. It has nothing

to do with our little project in stirpiculture, right here. Mammut amencanum. Let's have a look at Baby's file, shall we? I may be retired, but I'll bet I can still recommend a

better neural factor gradient than the one you're using."

"You're on! It's in the next room. I'll be right back."

With a youthful grace that Jen watched lovingly, Pau-

line hurried out of the lab, leaving Jen to ponder alone the

mysterious ways of ambiguity in language.

It was, indeed, a bad habit, this toying with people. But

as the years flickered by it grew easier. They all forgave so, almost as if they expected it ... demanded it of her. And because she tested everybody, taking contrary positions

without prejudice, fewer and fewer people seemed to believe

she meant anything she said at all!

Perhaps, Jen admitted honestly, that would be the

world's long-term revenge on her. To attribute everything

she said to jest. That would be some fate for the so-called

"mother of the modern Gaian paradigm."

Jen stroked Baby's trunk, scratching the bulging forehead

where induced neoteny had given the elephant-mam-

moth hybrid an enlarged cortex. Baby's brow-fur was long

and oily, and gave off a pungent, tangy, yet somehow pleasant

odor. The worldwide network of genetic arks had

a surfeit of pachyderms, even this new breed--"Mammontelephas"--with half its genes salvaged from a 20,000year-

old cadaver exposed by the retreating Canadian tundra. So

many of them bred true, in fact, that there were some to

spare for experiments in extended childhood in mammals.

Under strict supervision by the science tribunals and animal

rights committees, of course.

Certainly the creature seemed happy enough. "How

about it, Baby?" Jen murmured. "Are you glad to be smarter

than the average elephant? Or would you rather be out on

the plains, rolling in mud, uprooting trees, complaining

about ticks, and getting pregnant before you're ten?"

The pink-tipped trunk curled around her hand. She

stroked it, tenderly. "You're awfully important to yourself,

aren't you? And you are part of the whole.

"But do you really matter. Baby? Do I?"

16 DAVIDBRIN

Actually, she had meant every word she said to Pauline

--about how even mass extinctions would be essentially

meaningless in the long run. A lifetime spent building the

theoretical foundations of biology had convinced her of

that. The homeostasis of the planet--of Gaia--was powerful

enough to survive even great cataclysms.

Many times, sudden waves of death had wiped out species,

genuses, even entire orders. Dinosaurs were only the

most glamorous victims of one episode. And yet, across each

murderous chasm, plants kept removing carbon dioxide

from the air. Animals and volcanoes continued putting it

back again, give or take a few percentage points.

Even the so-called greenhouse effect that had everyone

worried--melting icecaps, spreading deserts, and driving

millions before the rising seas--even that catastrophic outcome

of human excess would never rival the great inundations

following the Permian age.

Jen very much approved of the way everyone marched

and spoke out and wrote letters these days, passing laws and

designing technologies to "save the Earth" from twentieth-

century errors. After all, only silly creatures fouled their

own nests, and humanity couldn't afford much more silliness.

Still, she took her own, admittedly eccentric view,

based on a personal, quirky, never-spoken identification

with the living world.

Out in the atrium, a low rumble echoed off the walls of

the glass cavern. She recognized the deep, purring growl of a

tiger, her totem animal according to a shaman she'd spent

one summer with, before the last century ended. He had

said hers was "the spirit of a great mother cat ..."

What nonsense. But oh, what a handsome fellow he

had been! She recalled his aroma of herbs and wood smoke

and male musk, even though it was hard right now to pin

down his name.

No matter. He was gone. Someday, despite all the efforts

of people like Pauline, tigers might be gone, too.

But some things endured. Jen smiled as she stroked

Baby's trunk.

// we humans annihilate ourselves, mammalian genes

are rich enough to replace us with another, maybe wiser

race within a few million years. Perhaps descendants of

coyotes or raccoons, creatures too adaptable ever to need

EARTH 17

refuge in arks. Too tough to be wiped out by any calamity

the likes of us create.

Oh, Baby's delicate species might not outlast us. but

Norway rats surely will. I wonder what kind of planetary

custodians their descendants would make.

Baby whimpered softly. The elephant-mammoth hybrid

watched her with soft eyes that seemed troubled, as if the

creature somehow sensed Jen's disturbing train of thought.

Jen laughed and patted the rough gray flesh. "Oh, Baby.

Grandma doesn't mean half the things she says ... or

thinks! I just do it to amuse myself.

"Don't worry. I won't let bad things happen. I'll always

be watching over you.

"I'll be here. Always."

18 DAVIDBRIN

D World Net News: Channel 265/General Inter-

est/Level 9+ (transcript)

"Three million citizens of [Image of tear-streaked brown the Republic of Bangladesh ^ces staring in numb dismay at watched their farms and vil- the bloated bodies of animals lages wash away as early and canted drowned ruins of monsoons burst their band- farmhouses-' built levees, turning remnants of the crippled state

into a realm of swampy

shoals covered by the rising

Bay of Bengal. . . ."

[D Viewer option: For details on cited storm, voice-link STORM 23 now.]

"These are the die-hards. [Image of a pregnant woman who have refused all prior wuh tour crying children, push- offers of resettlement. Now. '"S her frightened husband to- though, they face a bitter ward ^"-skinned medics. Zoom I ." rc ,l ' *.<;; on one doctors hammer and choice. If they accept full ,^ ^^ ^ ^

refugee status, fining their nurse's Canadian maple leaf. brethren in Siberian or Aus- Members of the screening team tralian New Lands, it will wear kindly smiles. Too ner- also mean taking all the vous to show resentment, the conditions attached, par- young Bengali signs a clipboard ticularly that they must and passes under the tent flap.] swear population restriction oaths. ..."

(0 To read out specific oaths, voice-link REFUGE 43.]

[D For specific medical procedures, voice-link VASECT 7.]

"Having reached the limits [View of barges, rafts, salvaged

of their endurance, many ships of all shapes and sizes,

have agreed to the host na- clustered under pelting rain.

tions' terms. Still, it's ex- CTUde dredges probe skeletons

, -n i of a former village, hauling up

pected some will refuse ^er, furniture: odds and

even this last chance and g^s to use or sell for scrap. elect instead the harsh but Other, quicker boats are seen unregulated life as citizens pursuing schools of silvery of Sea State, whose crude anchovies through newly inun- rafts already sail the fens dated shoals.] and shallows where formerly stretched great mte (D Real-time image 2376539.365x- .,..,' - " 2370.398, DISPAR XVII satellite. estates. . . . $1.45/minute.]

[D For general background, link SEASTATE 1.]

P For data on specific flotilla, link SEA BANGLA 5.]

"Already, spokesmen for [Diplomats in marble halls, fil- Sea State are asserting sov- ing papers.] ereignty over the new fish- [Surveyors mapping ocean ex- ing grounds, by right of P^ses.J

reclamation. ..." [q Time-delayed images

APW72150/09, Associated Press

[D Ref. UN document 2038 6683]

43589.5768/UNORRS 87623ba.]

"As expected, the Republic [View of a brown-skinned of Bangladesh has issued a youth in a greasy bandanna, protest through its U.N. g^Ping a '"sty railing, staring delegation. Though, with toward an uncertain future.]

their capital now underwater,

the remonstrations begin

to sound like those of a

tragic ghost. ..."

To Stan Coldman it was a revelation, watching Alex

M Lustig hurry from work site to work site under the

E vaulted, rocky ceiling. You never can tell about some- S one till you see him in a crisis, he mused.

0 Take Alex's familiar gangling stoop. It no longer

S appeared lazy or lethargic down here, half a kilometer

P underground. Rather, the lad seemed to lean forward for

H leverage as he moved, pushing a slow-moving tractor

E here, a recalcitrant drill bit there, or simply urging the

R workers on. Air resistance might have been the only

E thing slowing him down.

Stan wasn't the only one watching his former student,

now transformed into a lanky, brown-haired storm of catalysis.

Sometimes the other men and women laboring in this

deep gallery glanced after him, eyes drawn by such intensity.

One group had trouble connecting data lines for the big

analyzer. Lustig was there instantly, kneeling on the caked,

ancient guano floor, improvising a solution. Another team,

delayed by a burned-out power supply, got a new part from

Alex in minutes--he simply ripped it out of the elevator.

"I guess Mr. Button will notice when no one comes up

for dinner," Stan overheard one tech say with a shrug.

"Maybe he'll use a rope to lower us a replacement part."

"Naw," another replied. "George will lower dinner itself.

Unless Dr. Lustig plugs us all with intravenous drips so

we don't even have to stop to eat."

The remarks were made in good humor. They can tell

this isn't /ust another rush job, but something truly urgent. Still, Stan was glad necessity forced him to stay by his computer. Or else--age and former status notwithstanding

--Alex would have drafted him by now to help string cables

across the limestone walls.

Moment by moment, a laboratory was taking shape below

the mountainous spine of New Zealand's North Island.

It was still only the three of them--Stan, George, and

Alex--who knew about the lost singularity, the Iquitos

black hole that might now be devouring the planet's interior.

The techs had been told they were seeking a "gravitational

anomaly" far deeper than any prior scan for trace ores

or hidden methane had ever looked. But most of them knew

a cover story when they heard one. The leading rumor--

-L--------1

exchanged with fleeting smiles--was that the boss had

found a map to the subterranean Lost World of Verne and

Burroughs and TwenCen B-movies.

They'll have to be told soon, Stan thought. Alex and I

can't handle the scans all by ourselves. Probing for an object

smaller than a molecule, through millions of cubic kilometers

of stressed minerals and liquid metal, would be like

chasing a hurtling needle through countless fields of haystacks.

As if they'd be able to do anything about it if they did

find the taniwha down there. Even Stan, who understood

most of Alex's new equations, could bring himself to believe

the terrifying results for only a few seconds at a time.

/ have four grandchildren, a garden, bright students

with all their creative lives ahead of them, a woman who

has made me whole by sharing my life for decades. . . .

There are books I've saved for reading "later. " Sunsets. My

paintings. Tenure . . .

Such wealth, modest in monetary terms, nonetheless

made George Hutton's billions seem like no big difference in

comparison. It was hard, yet poignant, to be forced at this

late date to take inventory and realize that.

I am a rich man. I don't want to lose the Earth.

Stan's satchel computer chimed, interrupting his morbid

turn of thought. In a small volume above the open briefcase,

an image took shape--of a gleaming cylinder whose

surface sheen wasn't quite metallic, nor plastic, nor ceramic.

Rather, it glistened slickly, like a liquid held fast in some

tubular constraint of force.

That took long enough, he thought irritably, checking

the figures. Good. The main antenna can be built using

today's technology. Nothing complicated, just simple

microconstructors. Programming the little buggers, though

1. that's going to be a headache. Can't afford any lattice

faults, or the gravity waves it radiates will scatter all over

the place.

For longer than he could remember, Stan had heard excited

predictions about how nanomachines would transform

the world, create wealth out of garbage, build new cities,

and save civilization from the dire prospect of ever-dwindling

resources. They would also scour your arteries, restore

brain tissue to youthful vigor, and mayhaps even cure bad

breath. In reality, their uses were limited. The microscopic

22 DAVIDBRIN

robots were energy gluttons, and they required utterly well-

ordered environments to work in. Even to lay down a uniform

crystalline antenna, molecule by molecule in a nutrient-chemical

bath, would require attention in advance to

every detail.

Carefully, he used Alex's equations to adjust the design,

teasing the cylinder into just the right shape to send

delicate probes of radiation downward through those fiery

circles of hell below, in search of an elusive monster. It was

blissfully distracting work.

When the explosion struck, the initial wall of sound

almost knocked Stan off his stool. Booming echoes reverberated

down the rocky galleries. A scream followed, and a hissing

roar.

Men and women dropped tools, rushing to a bend in

the cave where they stared in apparent horror. Alex Lustig

plowed past the throng toward the commotion. Stan stood

up, blinking. "What . . . ?" But none of the running techs

stopped to answer his question.

"Get a ladder!" someone cried.

"There's no time!" another shouted.

Negotiating a maze of pipes and wires cluttering the

floor, Stan finally managed to nudge past a rank of gawkers

and see what had happened. It looked at first as if a steam

line had broken, jetting hot vapor across a wall festooned

with gridlike latticework. But the wind that suddenly hit

him wasn't searing. It knocked him back with a blast of

bitter cold.

Is it fust the liquid nitrogen? Stan worried, bending

into the frigid gale. Or did the helium line break as well? The first would be a setback. The latter might mean catastrophe.

He managed to join a crowd of techs sheltering behind one of the chemosynthesis vats. Clutching flapping work coats, the others stared toward the tangle of scaffolding,

where a broken pipe now spewed cutting cold. Meters beyond

that impassable barrier, two figures huddled on a teetering

catwalk. The shivering workers were isolated, with no

visible way to escape or to reach the cutoff valve atop the

towering cryogenics tanks.

Someone pointed higher, near the arched ceiling, and

Stan gasped. There, dangling from a cluster of stalactites,

hung Alex! He had one arm draped through a gap between

^------T

EARTH 23

two of the hanging rock-forms, just above where they fused.

It looked like an awfully precarious perch.

"How'd he get up there7"

Stan had to repeat the question over the roar of frigid,

pressurized gas. A woman in a brown smock pointed to

where a metal ladder lay crystallized and shattered amid the

jetting frost. "He was trying to get past the jet to the cutoff

valve . . . but the ladder buckled! Now he's trapped!"

From his perilous position, the young physicist gestured

and shouted. One of the techs, a full-blooded Maori from

George Hutton's own iwi, started scrambling for pieces of

hardware. Soon he was whirling a heavy object at the end of

a cable, sending it flying on an upward arc. Alex missed the

tool itself, but caught the cable round his left arm. Bits of

crumbling limestone rained from his shaky roost as he used

his teeth and one hand to reel in a drill with a rock-bolt bit

already in place.

How can he find the leverage to . . .

Amazed, Stan watched Alex throw his legs around the

half-column. Hugging the stalactite, he applied the drill to

the strongest section, just above his head. The hanging rock

shuddered. Cracks appeared, crisscrossing the pillar at Alex's

midriff. If he fell, he would carom off some toppled scaffolding

straight into the supercold jet.

Stan withheld breathing as Alex drove the bit, tested it,

and quickly passed a loop of cable through the grommet,

giving it his weight just as the greater part of the stalactite

gave way, falling to strike the debris below with a crashing

noise. The crowd shouted. Dangling in midair, Alex struggled

for a better grip while everyone below saw what the

tumbling stone had done to his inner thighs. Bleeding runnels

dripped through the remnants of his tattered trousers,

joining rivulets of sweat as he strained to tie a loop knot.

Encountering the roaring gas, the bloody droplets exploded

into sprays of reddish snow.

Stan breathed again when Alex slipped his shoulders

through the loop and let the cable take his weight. Still

gasping, the young man turned and shouted over the noise.

"Slack! . . . Pump!"

Two of the techs holding the cable looked puzzled.

Stan almost rushed over to explain, but the Maori engineer

caught on. Gesturing to the others, he began letting out

more cord and then pulled most of it back just before Alex's

24 DAVIDBRIN

feet neared the icy jet. The process repeated, letting out

rope, pulling it back. It was a simple exercise in harmonic

resonance, as with a child's swing, only here the plumb was

a man. And he wouldn't be landing in any sandbox.

Alex's arc grew as the tether lengthened. With each

pass he came nearer the supercold shroud of liquefied air, a

blizzard of sparkling snowflakes whirling in his wake. He

called down to those manning the straining cable. "Fourth

swing . . . release!"

Then on the next pass--"Three!"

Then--"Two!"

Each time his voice sounded more hoarse. Stan nearly

cried out as he saw the arc develop. They were going to

release too soon! Before he could do anything though, the

men let go with a shout. Alex sailed just over the jet, past

the two stranded survivors, to collide with the tangled

gridwork atop the centermost cryo tank. Immediately he

scrambled for purchase on the iced surface. The woman

next to Stan grabbed his arm and hissed sharply as Alex

began a fatal slide . . .

1. and stopped just in time, with one arm thrown

around a groaning pipe.

A sharp crackling noise made Stan jump back as one of

the nearby chem-synthesis tanks crinkled, folding inward

from the cold. Fiber-thin control lines flailed like wounded

snakes until they met the helium jet, at which point they

instantly shattered into glassy shards.

"They've cut the flow topside," someone reported.

Stan wondered, was the helium partial pressure already

high enough to affect sound transmission? Or was the fellow's

voice squeaky out of fear?

"But there's too much already in those tanks," another

said. "If he can't stop it, we'll lose half the hardware in the

cavern. It'll set us back weeks!"

There are three lives at stake, too, Stan thought. But

then, people had their own priorities. Hands took his sleeve

again . . . this time several senior engineers were organizing

an orderly evacuation. Stan shook his head, refusing to

go, and no one insisted. He kept vigil as Alex worked his

way toward the cutoff valve, hauling himself hand over

hand. The pipes were left discolored. Patches of frozen skin,

mixed with blood, Stan realized with a queasy feeling.

Centimeter by centimeter Alex neared the collapsed

EARTH 25

catwalk. One wall staple remained in place, imbedded in

limestone. Barely able to see, Alex had to hunt for it, his

foot repeatedly missing the perch.

"Left, Alex!" Stan screamed. "Now up!"

His mouth open wide, exhaling a dragon's spume of

crystallized fog, Alex found the ledge and swung his weight

onto it. Without pausing, he used it to hurl himself at the

valve.

After all his struggles getting there, turning the handle

was anticlimactically easy. At least that part of the cryo system was built well. The wailing shriek tapered off, along

with the icy pressure. Stan staggered forward.

Past him sped rescue teams with ladders and stretchers.

It took moments to pull down the two injured workers and

hustle them away. But Alex would not be carried. He came

down on his own, gingerly. Huddled in blankets, arms

locked by those guiding him, he looked to Stan like some

legendary Yeti, his bloodless face pale and sparkling under a

crystal frosting. He made his escorts stop near Stan, and

managed a few words through chattering teeth.

"M-my fault. Rushing things-s . . ." The words

drowned in shivering.

Stan took his young friend's shoulder. "Don't be an ass;

you were grand. Don't worry, Alex. George and I will have

everything fixed by the time you get back."

The young physicist gave a jerky nod. Stan watched the

medics bear him away.

Well. he thought, wondering at what the span of a few

minutes had revealed. Had this side of Alex Lustig been

there all along, hidden within? Or would it come to any man

called upon by destiny, as that poor boy obviously was, to

wrestle demons over the fate of the world?

D Long ago, even before animals appeared on dry land, plants

developed a chemical, lignin, that enabled them to grow long

stems, to tower tall above their competitors. It was one of those breakthroughs that changed things forever.

But what happens after a tree dies? Its proteins, cellulose,

and carbohydrates can be recycled, but only if the lignin is first dealt with. Only then can the forest reclaim the stuff of life from death.

26 DAVIDBRIN

One answer to this dilemma was discovered and exploited

by ants. One hundred trillion ants, secreting formic acid, help

prevent a buildup which might otherwise choke the world beneath

a layer of impervious, unrotting wood. They do this for

their own benefit of course, without thought of what good it does the Whole. And yet, the Whole is groomed, cleaned, renewed.

Was it accidental that ants evolved this way, to find this

niche and save the world?

Of course it was. As were the countless other accidental

miracles which together make this wonder work. I tell you, some

accidents are stronger, wiser than any design. And if saying that makes me a heretic, let it be so.

-^Jen Wolling, from The Earth Mother Blues, Globe Books, 2032. I D hyper access code 7-tEAT-687-56-1237-65p.]

Pleiades dipped its nose, and Teresa Tikhana welcomed

E back the stars. Hello, Orion. Hello, Seven Sisters, she

X silently greeted her friends. Did you miss me?

0 As yet, few constellations graced the shuttle's for-

S ward windows, and those glittered wanly next to the

P dazzling Earth, with its white, pinwheel storms and brilH

liant vistas of brown and blue. Sinuous rivers and

E fractal, corrugated mountain ranges--even the smokeR

stack trails of freighters crossing sunburned seas--all

E added up to an ever-changing panorama as Pleiades rotated

out of launch orientation.

Of course it was beautiful--only down there could humans

live without utter dependence on temperamental machinery.

Earth was home, the oasis; that went without

saying.

Still, Teresa found the planet's nearby glare irksome.

Here in low orbit, its dayside brilliance covered half the sky,

drowning all but the brightest stars.

Vernier rockets throbbed, adjusting the ship's rotation.

Valves and circuits closed with twitters and low chuckles, a

music of smooth operation. Still, she scanned--checking,

always checking.

One plasma screen showed their ground track, a few

hundred kilometers from Labrador, heading east by southeast.

NASA press flacks loved ground path indicators, but

the things were next to useless for serious navigation. InEARTH 27

stead, Teresa watched the horizon's tapered scimitar move

aside to show more stars.

And hello. Mama Bear, she thought. Good to see your

tail pointing where I expected.

"There's of' Polaris," Mark Randall drawled to her

right. "Calculating P and Q fix now." Teresa's copilot compared

two sets of figures. "Star tracker fix matches global

positioning system to five digits, in all nine degrees of freedom.

Satisfied, Terry?"

"Sarcasm suits you. Mark." She scanned the figures for

herself. "Just don't get into the habit of calling me Terry.

Ask Simon Bailie, sometime, why he came home from that

peeper-run wearing a sling."

Mark smiled thoughtfully. "He claims it was 'cause he

got fresh with you on the Carter Station elevator."

"Wishful thinking," she laughed. "Simon's got delusions

of adequacy."

For good measure, Teresa compared satellite and star

tracker data against the ship's inertial guidance system.

Three independent means of verifying location, momentum,

and orientation. Of course they all agreed. Her compulsive

checking had become notorious, a sort of trademark among

her peers. But even as a little girl she had felt this need--one

more reason to become a pilot, then astronaut--to learn

more ways to know exactly where she was.

"Boys can tell where north is," other children used to

tell her with the assurance of passed-down wisdom. "What

girls understand is people!"

To most sexist traditions, Teresa had been impervious.

But that one seemed to promise explanations--for instance,

for her persistent creepy feeling that all maps were somehow

wrong. Then, in training, they surprised her with the news

that her orientation sense was far above average.

"Hyperkinesthetic acuity," the doctors diagnosed, which

translated into measurable grace in everything she did.

Only that wasn't how it felt. If this was superiority,

Teresa wondered how other people made it from bedroom to

bath without getting lost! In dreams she still sometimes felt

as if the world was on the verge of shifting capriciously,

without warning. There had been times when those feelings

made her wonder about her sanity.

But then everyone has quirks, even--especially--astronauts.

Hers must be harmless, or else would the NASA

28 DAVIDBRIN

psych people have ever let her fly left seat on an American

spacecraft?

Thinking of childhood lessons, Teresa wished at least

the other part of the old myth were true. If only being female

automatically lent you insight into people. But if it

were so, how could things ever have gone so sour in her

marriage?

The event sequencer beeped. "Okay," she sighed.

"We're on schedule, oriented for rendezvous burn. Prime

the QMS."

"Aye aye, Mem Bwana." Mark Randall flicked switches.

"Orbital maneuvering system primed. Pressures nominal.

Burn in one hundred ninety seconds. I'll tell the passengers."

A year ago the drivers' union had won a concession.

Nonmembers would henceforth ride below, on middeck.

Since this trip carried no NASA mission specialists, only

military intelligence officers, she and Mark were alone up

here on the flight deck, undistracted by nursemaid chores.

Still, there were minimal courtesies. Over the intercom,

Mark's low drawl conveyed the blithe confidence of a stereotypical airline pilot.

"Gentlemen, by the fact that your eyeballs have

stopped shiftin' in their sockets, you'll realize we've finished

rotating. Now we're preparin' for rendezvous burn,

which will occur in just under two and a half minutes.

1. ."

While Mark rambled, Teresa scanned overhead, checking

that fuel cell number two wasn't about to act up again.

Station rendezvous always made her nervous. All the more

so when she was flying a model-one shuttle. The noises Pleiades made--its creaking aluminum bones, the swish of coolant in old-style heat-transfer lines, the squidgy sound of

hydraulic fluid swiveling pitted thrusters--these were like

the sighs of a one-time champion who still competed, but

only because the powers-that-be found that less expensive

than replacing her.

Newer shuttles were simpler, designed for narrower

purposes. Teresa figured Pleiades was perhaps the most complex

machine ever made. And the way things were going,

nothing like it would ever be built again.

A glitter over near Sagittarius caught her eye. Teresa

identified it without having to check: the old international

EARTH 29

Mars mission--scavenged for components, and the remnants

parked in high orbit when that last bold venture had been

canceled, back when she was still in grade school. The new

rule for harder times was simple--space had to pay for itself

with near-term rewards. No pie in the sky. No investment in

maybes. Not when starvation remained an all too likely

prospect for such a large portion of humanity.

". . . checked our trajectory three different ways,

folks, and Captain Tikhana has declared that all's well.

Physics has not broken down ..."

Overlaid across the constellations were multicolored

graphics displaying the vessel's orbital parameters. Also in

the forward window, Teresa saw her own reflection. A

smudge had taken residence on her cheek, near where a curl

of dark brown hair escaped her launch cap . . . probably a

grease speck from adjusting a passenger's seat before launch.

Rubbing just smeared it out, however, overaccentuating her

strong cheekbones.

Great. Just the thing to make Jason think I'm losing

sleep over him. Teresa didn't need any more aggravation,

not when she was about to see her husband for the first time

in two months.

In contrast, Mark Randall's reflection looked boyish,

carefree. His pale face--demarcated from the white of his

spacesuit by the anodized helmet ring--showed none of the

radiation stigmata that now scarred Jason's cheeks . . . the

so-called "Rio tan," acquired working outside through the

sleeting hell of the South Atlantic magnetic anomaly. That

escapade, a year ago, had won Jason both a promotion and a

month's hospitalization for anticancer treatments. It was

also about when troubles in their marriage had surfaced.

Teresa resented Mark's smooth complexion. It should

have been a confirmed bachelor like him who volunteered to

go out and save the peepers' beloved spy-eye, instead of Ja-

son I'm-married-but-what-the-heck Stempell.

It also should have been some bachelor who signed up

to work cheek by jowl with that blonde temptress June Morgan.

But once again, guess who raised his hand?

Easy, gill. Don't get your blood up. The objective is

reconciliation, not confrontation.

Mark was still regaling the Air Force men below. "...

remind me to tell you how one time she an' her old man

smuggled a homemade sextant on a mission. Now any other

30 DAVIDBRIN

married couple might've chosen something more useful,

such as . . ."

With her right hand, Teresa made a gesture whose

meaning had changed little since the days of Crazy Horse.

Spacer sign-talk for cut the crap.

"Um, but I guess we'll save that story for another day.

Please remain strapped in as we make our last burn before

station rendezvous." Randall switched off the intercom.

"Sorry, boss. Cot a little carried away there."

Teresa knew he was unrepentant. Anyway, that episode

with the sextant wasn't much compared to the tall tales told

about some astronauts. None of that mattered. What was

important was that you lived, the ship lived, the mission got

done, and you were asked to fly again.

"Bum in five seconds," she said, counting down. ". . .

three, two, one ..."

A deep-throated growl filled the cabin as hypergolic motors

ignited, adding to their forward velocity. Since they

were at orbital apogee, this meant Pleiades' perigee would

rise. Ironically, that in turn would slow them down, allowing

their destination, the space station, to catch up from

behind them.

The station's beacons showed on radar as a neat row of

blips strung along a slender string, pointing Earthward. The

lowermost dot was their target, Nearpoint, where they'd offload

cargo and passengers.

Next came the cluster of pinpoints standing for the

Central Complex, twenty kilometers farther out, where scientific

and development work took place in free-fall conditions.

The final, topmost blip represented a cluster of

facilities tethered even higher--the Farpoint research lab,

where Jason worked. They had agreed to meet at the halfway

lounge, if offloading went well at her end and if his

experiments let him get away.

They had a lot to talk about.

All motors shut off as a sequencer by her knee shone

zero. The faint pressure on her backrest departed again.

What replaced it wasn't "zero-g." After all, there was plenty

of gravity, pervading space all around them. Teresa preferred

the classic term "free fall." An orbit, after all, is just a plummet that keeps missing.

Unfortunately, even benign falling isn't always fun. Teresa

had never suffered spacesickness, but by now half the

EARTH 31

passengers were probably feeling queasy. Hell, even peepers

were people.

"Commence yaw and roll maneuver," she said, as a formality.

The computers were managing fine so far. Thrusters

in the shuttle's nose and tail--smaller than the QMS brutes

--gave pulsing kicks to set the horizon turning in a complex,

two-axis rotation. They fired again to stabilize on a

new direction.

"That's my baby," Mark said softly to the ship. "You

may be gettin' on in years, but you're still my favorite."

Many astronauts romanticized the last Columbia-class shuttle. Before boarding they would pat the seven stars painted by the shuttle's entry hatch. And, while it went

unspoken, some clearly thought beneficent ghosts rode Pleiades, protecting her every flight.

Maybe they were right. Pleiades had so far escaped the

scrapyard fate of Discovery and Endeavor, or the embarrassing

end that had befallen old Atlantis.

Privately, though, Teresa thought it a pity the old crate

hadn't been replaced long ago--not by another prissy model-

three job, either, but by something newer, better. Pleiades wasn't a true spaceship, after all. Only a bus. A local, at that.

And despite all the so-called romance of her profession,

Teresa knew she was little more than a bus driver.

"Maneuver completed. Switching to hook-rendezvous program."

"Yo," Teresa acknowledged. She toggled the Ku band

downlink. "MCC Colorado Springs, this is Pleiades. We've

finished siphoning external tank residuals to recovery cells

and jettisoned the ET. Circularization completed. Request

update for approach to Ere--" Teresa stopped, recalling she

was talking to Air Force. "--for approach to Reagan Station."

The controller's tinny voice filled her earphones.

"Roger, Pleiades. Target range check, ninety-one kilometers . . .

mark."

"Yes?" Randall interrupted with a weak smirk. It was a

stale joke, which, fortunately, control didn't hear.

"Doppler twenty-one meters per second . . . mark. Tangential v,

five point two mps . . . mark."

Teresa did a quick scan. "Verified, control. We agree."

32 DAVIDBRIN

"An' thar she blows," said Mark, peering through the

overhead window. "Erehwon, right on schedule."

"Ixnay, Mark. Open mike."

Randall hand signed so-what indifference.

"Roger, Pleiades," said the voice from Colorado Springs.

"Switching you over to Reagan Station control. MCC out."

"Reagan, shmeagan," Mark muttered when the line was

clear. "Call it peeper heaven."

Teresa pretended not to hear. On the panel by her right

knee she punched the proc button, then tapped 319 exec.

"Rendezvous and retrieval program activated," she said.

Between their consoles there appeared a holographic

image of Pleiades itself--a squat dart, black on the bottom

and white on top, her gaping cargo bay radiators exposed to

the cooling darkness of space. Filling the greater part of the

bay was a closed canister of powder blue. The peepers' precious

spy-stuff. Colonel Glenn Spivey's treasure. And

heaven help anyone who laid even a smudge on its wrapper.

Behind the cargo several white spheres held tons of

supercold propellants, recovered from the towering external

tank after it had fueled the shuttle through liftoff. Dumping

the two-million-liter tank into the Indian Ocean had been

their preoccupation early in orbital insertion--a routine

waste that used to outrage Teresa, but that she no longer

even thought about anymore. At least they were rescuing

the residuals these days. All that leftover hydrogen and oxygen

had countless uses in space.

While Mark talked to Erehwon control, Teresa caused

the snare mechanism to rise from the rim of the cargo bay.

The stubby arm--sturdier than the remote manipulator

used for deploying cargos--extended a telescoping tip ending

in an open hook.

"Erehwon confirms telemetry," Mark told her. "Approach

nominal."

"We've got a few minutes then. I'll go look in on the

passengers."

"Yeah, do that." Of course Mark knew she had another

reason for getting up. But this time he judiciously kept silent.

Unbuckling, then swiveling to use the seat back as a

springboard, Teresa cast off toward the rear of the flight

deck. Before automation, a mission specialist used to watch

over the cargo from there. Now only a window remained.

EARTH 33

Through it she surveyed the peepers' package, and beyond, the cryocanisters. If the coming hook-snatch maneuver worked, they'd save half the hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide

back there, as well--another valuable bonus to offload.

Otherwise, most of the reserve would be used up

matching orbits.

She brought her head near the chill window to peer at

the snare arm, rising from the starboard platform. It was

locked, just as the computer said. Just checking, Teresa

thought, unrepentant of her need to verify in person.

She twisted and dove through a circular opening in the

"floor." Five Air Force officers in blue launch suits looked

up as she swam into the spacious cabin known as middeck.

Two of the passengers looked sick, averting their eyes as

Teresa floated by. At least there were no windows here, so

they were spared the added misery of horizon disorientation.

A third of all first-timers had to adapt several days

before their fluttering stomachs allowed them to appreciate

scenery, anyway.

"That was a smooth launch, Captain," the elder sickly

one enunciated carefully. He wore two drug-release patches

behind one ear, but still looked pretty shaky. Teresa knew

the man from other flights, and he'd been ill on those too.

Must be pretty damned irreplaceable if they keep sending

him up. As Mark Randall colorfully put it, guys like this

never had to prove they had guts.

"Thank you," she replied. "We aim to please. I just wanted to see how you all were doing and to say we'll be meeting the Nearpoint snare in about twenty minutes. Station

personnel will need an hour to offload cargo and salvaged

residuals. Then it'll be your turn to ride the elevator

to Central."

"That's if you manage to hook the snare, Ms. Tikhana.

What if you miss?"

This time it was the man seated forward on the left, a

stocky fellow with eyes shaded by heavy brows, and bright

colonel's eagles on one shoulder. White sideburns offset his

roughened skin--a patchy complexion that came from repeated

treatments to slough off precancerous layers. Unlike

Ra Boys or other groundside fetishists, Glenn Spivey hadn't

acquired his blotchy pigmentation on a beach. He had won

the dubious badge of honor the same way Jason had--high

over Uruguay, protected by just the fabric of his suit as he

34 DAVIDBRIN

fought to save a top-secret experiment. But then, what were

a dozen or so rads to a patriot?

They obviously hadn't mattered to Jason. Or so her husband

had implied from his recovery bed after his own encounter

with the South Atlantic radiation zone.

"Hey look, hon. This doesn't change our plans. There are sperm

banks. Or when you 're ready, we can make some other arrangement.

Some of our friends must have some damn high quality . . . Hey,

babe, now what's the matter'"'

The infuriating density of the man! As if that had been

foremost on her mind while he lay in a hospital with tubes

in his arms! Later, the subject of children did contribute to

the widening gulf between them. But at the time her only

thought was, "Idiot, you might have died!"

With professional coolness, Teresa answered Colonel

Spivey. "What if the station can't hook Pleiades midpass? In

that case we'll do another burn to match orbits the old-

fashioned way. That'll take time though. And there'll be no

residual propellant to offload after docking."

"Time and hydrazine." Spivey pursed his lips. "Valuable

commodities, Ms. Tikhana. Good luck."

Twice since she had come down here, the colonel had

glanced at his watch--as if nature's laws could be hurried

like junior officers, with a severe look. Teresa tried to be

understanding, since it did take all kinds. If it weren't for

vigilant, paranoid spy-types like Spivey, always poking and

peeping to see to it the provisions of the Rio Treaties were

kept, would peace have lasted as long as it had? Ever since

the Helvetian War?

"Safety first, Colonel. You wouldn't want to see us

wrapped in twenty kilometers of Spectra-fiber tether material,

would you?"

One of the younger peepers shivered. But Spivey met

her eyes in shared understanding. They each had priorities.

It was far more important they respect than like each other.

Back at her console, she watched the bottom portion of the

station come into view--a cluster of bulbous tanks and

plumbing hanging from a silvery line. Far above, other station

components glittered like jewels strung far apart on a

very long necklace. Most distant, and invisible except by

radar, lay Farpoint Cluster, where Jason worked on things

she still knew next to nothing about.

EARTH 35

They were passing over the Alps now, a battered, crumpled

range, whose bomb craters were only now emerging

from winter's coating of snow. It was an awesome juxtaposition,

showing what both natural and man-made forces could

do, when angry.

But Teresa had no time for sightseeing. Her attention

focused on Nearpoint--hanging like a pendulum bob, closest

to the Earth.

Just below the fluid-pumping station hung a boom that

flexed and stretched as its operator played out line like a

fisherman, casting for the big one.

Teresa's eyes roamed over her instruments, the station,

the stars, absorbing them all. Moments like this made all the

hard work worthwhile. Every part of her felt unified, from

the hands lightly flexing Pleiades' vernier controls to the

twin hemispheres of her brain. Engineer and dancer were

one.

For the present all anxieties, all worries, vanished. Of

the countless jobs one could have, on or off the world, this

one gave her what she needed most.

"We're coming in," she whispered.

Teresa knew exactly where she was.

D

"Once upon a time, the great hero Rangi-rua lost his beautiful

Hine-marama. She died, and her spirit went to Rarohenga, the

land of the dead.

"Rangi-rua was beset with grief. Inconsolable, he declared

that he would follow his wife into the underworld and fetch her

back again to Ao-marama, the world of light.

"With Kaeo, his ever-faithful companion, Rangi-rua came to

the swirling waters guarding the entrance to Rarohenga. There,

he and Kaeo dove into the mouth of hell, down where the heartbeat of Manata sends shivers through the earth. Against this

power they swam and swam until, at last, they reached the other

bank, where the spirit of Rangi-rua's lovely wife awaited him.

"Now, to be fair it must be said that Rangi-rua and Kaeo

may not have been the only mortals to accomplish this feat. For

the pakeha tell a similar story of one called Orpheus, who did the very same thing for the sake of his lover--and it is said he even managed the crossing on his own.

"But Rangi-rua outdid Orpheus in the most important thing.

36 D A V I D B R I N

For when Rangi-rua emerged again into the light of father sun,

both his friend and his lover were at his side.

"But Orpheus failed because, like all pakeha, he just

couldn't keep his mind on one thing at a time."

Sitting in front of his holographic display--sole illumiC

nation in the deserted lab--Alex recalled George Hut0

ton's performance at the celebration, earlier in the

R evening, reciting Maori legends to the tired but happy

E engineers by firelight. Especially appropriate had been

the tale of Rangi-rua's, speaking as it did of fresh hope,

snatched from the very gates of hell.

Laccr, ihuugli, Alex found himself drawn back to the

underground laboratory. All the machinery, so busy earlier

in the day, now lay dark and dormant save under this pool

of light, which spilled long shadows onto the nearby limestone

walls.

Rangi's legend had touched Alex, all right. It might apply

to his present state of mind.

Don't look back. Pay attention to what's in front of

you.

Right now what lay before him was a depiction of the

planet, in cutaway view. A globe sliced like an apple, revealing

peel and pulp, stem and core.

And seeds, Alex thought, completing the metaphor.

The eye couldn't make out Earth's slight deviations

from a sphere. Mountain ranges and ocean trenches--exaggerated

on commercial globes--were mere dewy ripples on

this true-scale representation. So thin was the film of water

and air compared to the vast interior.

Inside that membrane, concentric shells of brown and red and pink denoted countless subterranean temperatures and compositions. With a word, or by touching the hole's controls, Alex. could zoom through mantle and core, following rocky striations and myriad charted rivers of magma.

Okay, George, he thought. Here's a pakeha allegory for

you. We'll start by cutting a hole straight through the

Earth.

From the surface of the globe, he caused a narrow line

to stah inward, through the colored layers. Drill a tunnel,

straight as a laser, with mirror-smooth walls. Cover both

ends and drop a ball inside.

EARTH 37

It was an exercise known to generations of physics students,

illustrating certain points about gravity and momentum.

But Alex played the scenario in earnest.

Assuming that inertia] and gravitational mass balance,

as they tend to do, anything dropped at Earth's surface

accelerates nine point eight meters per second, each

second.

His fingers stroked knobs, releasing a blue dot from the

outer rim. It fell slowly at first, even with the time rate

magnified. A millimeter here stood for an awful lot of territory

in the real world.

But after the ball falls a good distance, acceleration

has changed.

In 1687, Isaac Newton took several score pages to prove

what smug sophomores now demonstrated on a single sheet

--ah, but Newton did it first!--that only the spherical portion

"below" a falling object continues to apply net gravity,

until acceleration stops altogether as the ball hurtles

through the center at a whizzing ten kilometers per second.

It can't fall any farther than that. Now it's streaking upward.

(Answer a riddle--where is it you can continue in a

straight line, yet change directions at the same time?)

Now more and more mass accumulates "below" the

rising ball. Gravity clings, draining kinetic energy. Speed

slackens till at last--neglecting friction, coriolis effects,

and a thousand other things--our ball lightly bumps the

door at the other end.

Then it falls again, hurtling once more past sluggish.

plasti-crystal mantle layers, past the molten dynamo of the

core, plummeting then climbing till finally it arrives

"home" once more, where it began.

Numbers and charts floated near the giant globe, telling

Alex the round trip would take a little over eighty minutes.

Not quite the schoolboy perfect answer, but then schoolboys

don't have to compensate for a real planet's varying

density.

Next came the neat trick. The same would be true of a

tunnel cut through the Earth at any angle! Say, forty-five

degrees. Or one drilled from Los Angeles to New York,

barely skimming the magma. Each round trip took about

eighty minutes--the period of a pendulum with the same

span as the Earth.

38 DAVIDBRIN

EARTH 39

It's also the period of a circular orbit, skimming, just

above the clouds.

Alex soon had the cutaway pulsing with blue dots, each

falling at a different angle, swiftly along the longer paths,

slowly along shorter ones. Besides straight lines there were

also ellipses, and many-petaled flower trajectories. Still, to a

regular rhythm, they all recombined at the same point on

the surface, labeled peru.

Of course, things change when you include Earth's rotation

1. and the pseudo-friction of a hot object pushing

against material around it . . .

Alex was procrastinating. These simulations were from

his first days in New Zealand. There were better ones.

His hands hesitated. The palms were still blotchy from

skin grafts after that helium explosion debacle. Ironically,

they hadn't trembled half as much, then, as after today's

astonishing news.

Alex wiped away all the whirling dots and called another

orbit from memory cache. This figure--traced in

bright purple--was smaller than the others--a truncated ellipse subtly twisted from Euclidean perfection by irregulari-

40 DAVIDBRIN

ties in the densely-packed core. It didn't approach Peru

anymore.

This was no theoretical simulation. When their first

gravity scans had shown the thing's awful shadow, horror

had mixed with terrible pride.

It didn't evaporate immediately, he had realized. / was

right about that.

It was awful news. And yet, who in his position

wouldn't feel heady emotions, seeing his own handiwork

still throbbing, thousands of miles below the fragile crust?

It lived. He had found his monster.

But then it surprised him yet again.

After Pedro Manella's headlines had made him the world's

latest celebrated bad-boy, it naturally came as a relief when

the World Court dismissed all charges on a technicality of

the Anti-Secrecy Laws. Alex was seen as the dupe of unscrupulous

generals, more fool than villain.

It might have been better had they jailed and reviled

him. Then, at least, people in authority might have listened

to him. As it was, his peers dismissed his topological arguments

as "bizarre, overly complex inventions." Worse, special

interest groups on the World Data Net made him a

gossip centerpiece overnight.

"... classic symptoms of guilt abstraction, used by the subject to disguise early childhood traumas . . ." one correspondent from

Peking had written. Another in Djakarta commented, "Lustig's

absurd hints that Hawking's dissipation model might be wrong

mesh perfectly with the shame and humiliation he must have felt after Iquitos . . ."

Alex wished his Net clipping service were less efficient,

sparing him all the amateur psychoanalyses. Still, he had

made himself read them because of something his grandmother

once told him.

A hallmark of sanity, Alex, is the courage to face even

unpleasant points of view.

How ironic then. Here he was, vindicated in a way he

could never have imagined. He now had proof positive that

the standard model of micro black holes was flawed . . .

that he had been on the right path with his own theories.

Right and wrong, in the best combination of ways.

Then why can't I leave this cave? he wondered. Why

do I feel it isn 'I over yet?

EARTH 41

"Hey, you stupid pakeha bastard!" A booming voice

ricocheted off the limestone walls. "Lustig! You promised to

get drunk with us tonight! Tama meamea, is this any way to

celebrate?"

Alex had the misfortune to be looking up when George Button switched on the lights. His world, formerly confined to the dim pool of the holo tank, suddenly expanded to fill

the cavern-lab Hutton's wealth had carved under the ancient

rock.

Alex's blinking eyes focused first on the thumper, a

shining rod two meters in diameter and more than ten long,

caged to a universal bearing in a bowl excavation larger than

some lunar craters. It resembled the work of some mad telescope

maker who had neglected to make his instrument hollow,

Grafting it, instead, of perfect, superconducting crystal.

The gleaming cylinder pointed a few degrees off vertical,

just as they had left it after that final bracketing run.

Banks of instruments surrounded the gravity antenna, along

with ankle-deep layers of paper, shredded by the ecstatic

technicians when the good news had finally been confirmed.

Beyond the thumper, a flight of steps led upward to

where George Button stood, waving a bottle and grinning.

"You disappoint me, fellow," the broad-shouldered billionaire

said, sauntering downstairs unevenly. "I planned getting

you so pissed you'd spend the night with my cousin's poaka of a daughter."

Alex smiled. If that was what George wanted him to do,

he was bound to comply. Without Hutton's influence he'd

never have been able to sneak into New Zealand incognito.

There'd have been no long hard search through the awesome

complexity of the Earth's interior, improvising and inventing

new technologies to hunt a minuscule monster.

Worst of all, Alex might have gone to his grave never knowing

what his creation was up to down below--if it was quietly

dissipating or, perhaps, proceeding at a leisurely pace to

devour the world.

At first, sighting it several days ago on a graviscan display

had seemed to confirm their worst fears. The nightmare,

reified.

Then, to everyone's relief and astonishment, hard data

seemed to point another way. Apparently the thing was dying

1. evaporating more mass and energy into the Earth's

interior than it sucked in through its narrow event horizon.

42 DAVIDBRIN

True, it was thinning much more slowly than the obsolete

standard models predicted. But in a few months, nevertheless,

it would be no more!

/ really should celebrate with the others, Alex

thought. / should put aside my last suspicions, crawl into

any bottle George offers me, and find out what a poaka is.

Alex tried to stand, but found he couldn't move. His

eyes were drawn back to the purple dot, circling the innermost

colored layer.

He felt a large presence nearby. George.

"What is it, friend? You haven't found an error, have

you? It is ..."

Alex caught Hutton's sudden concern, "Oh, it's dissipating

all right. And now . . ." He paused. "Now I think

I know why. Here, take a look."

With a word he banished the model of the Earth, replacing

it with a schematic drawn in lambent blue. Reddish sparkles

flashed at the rim of the object now centered in the

tank. They swept toward a central point like beads caught in

water, swirling down a drain.

"This is what I thought I was making, back when His

Excellency persuaded me to build a singularity for the Iquitos

plant. A standard Kerr-Prestwich black hole."

Button took a stool next to Alex and watched with

those deceptive brown eyes. One might guess he was a simple

laborer, not one of Australasia's wealthiest men.

The image in the tank looked like a rubber sheet that

had been stretched taut and heated, and then had a small,

heavy weight dropped onto it. The resulting funnel had finite

width and depth in the display, but both men knew

that the real thing--the hole in space it represented--had

no bottom at all. The reddish dots represented bits of matter

drawn in by gravitational tides, caught in a swirling disk.

The disk brightened as more matter fell, until a ring of fierce

brightness burned near the funnel's lip. Below this came a

sudden cutoff within which only pitch blackness reigned.

Nothing escapes from inside a black hole's event horizon.

At least, there's no direct escape.

Alex glanced at George. "Cosmologists say many singularities

like this must have been created when the universe

began. If so, only the biggest survive today. Smaller ones

evaporated long ago, as predicted in the 1970s by Stephen

Hawking. A simple singularity--even with charge and rotaEARTH 43

44 DAVIDBRIN

tion--has to be extremely heavy to be stable ... to pull in

matter faster than it's lost by vacuum emission."

He pointed to the outskirts of the depression, where

bright white pinpoints flashed independently of the hot ring

of accreting material.

"Some distance out, the tight stress-energy of infolding

gravity causes spontaneous pair production . . . ripping

particle-antiparticle twins--an electron and a positron, for

instance--out of the vacuum itself. It isn't exactly getting

something from nothing, since each little genesis costs the

singularity some field energy. And that's debited to its

mass."

The sparkles formed a halo of brilliance--creation in

the raw.

"Generally, one newborn particle falls inward and the

other escapes, resulting in a steady weight loss. A tiny hole

like this one can't pull in new matter fast enough to make

up the difference. To prevent dissipation you have to feed

it."

"As you did with your ion gun, in Peru."

"Right. It cost a lot of power to make the singularity in

the first place, even using my special cavitron recipe. It took

even more to keep the thing levitated and fed. But the accretion

disk gave off incredible heat." Alex felt briefly wistful.

"Even the prototype was cheaper, more efficient than hydro

power."

"But then you started having doubts," George

prompted.

EARTH 45

"Yeah. The system was too efficient, you see. It didn't

need much feeding at all. So I toyed with some crazy notions

1. and came up with this."

A new schematic replaced the funnel. Now it was as if a

heavy loop of wire had sunk into the rubber sheet. Still

unfathomably deep, the depression now circled on itself.

Again, reddish bits of matter swept into the cavity,

heating as they fell. And again, sparkles told of vacuum pair

production--the singularity repaying mass into space.

"This is something people talked about even back in

TwenCen," Alex said. "It's a cosmic string."

"I've heard of them." George's dark features showed

fascination. "They're like black holes. Also supposed to be

left over from that explosion you pakeha say started every-

thing--the Big Bang."

"Uh-huh. They aren't truly funnel-things drawn in circles,

of course. There's a limit to how well you can represent

1. ." Alex sighed. "It's hard to describe this without

math."

"I know math," George grumbled.

"Mm, yes. Excuse me, George, but the tensors you use,

searching for deep methane, wouldn't help a lot with this."

"Maybe I understand more'n you think, white boy."

Hutton's dialect seemed to thicken for a moment. "Like I

can see what your cosmic string's got that black holes don't.

Holes got no dimensions deep inside. But strings have

length."

George Button kept doing this--play-acting the "distracted

businessman," or "ignorant native boy," then coming

back at you when your guard was down. Alex accepted

the rebuke.

"Good enough. Only strings, just like black holes, are

unstable. They dissipate too, in a colorful way."

At a spoken word, a new display formed.

The rubber sheet was gone. Now they watched a loop in

space, glowing red from infalling matter, and white from a

halo-fringe of new particles, showering into space. Inflow

and outgo.

"Now I'll set the simulation in motion, stretching time

a hundred-million-fold."

The loop began undulating, turning, whirling.

"One early prediction was that strings would vibrate

46 DAVIDBRIN

incredibly fast, influenced by gravitational or magnetic

..."

Two sides collided in a flash, and suddenly a pair of

smaller loops replaced the single large one. They throbbed

even faster than before.

"Some astronomers claim to see signs of gigantic cosmic

strings in deep space. Perhaps strings even triggered the formation of galaxies, long ago. If so, the giant ones survived

because their loops cross only every few billion years.

Smaller, quicker strings cut themselves to bits ..."

As he spoke, both little loops made lopsided figure

eights and broke into four tinier ones, vibrating madly. Each

of these soon divided again. And so on. As they multiplied,

their size diminished and brightness grew--bound for annihilation.

"So," George surmised. "Small ones still aren't dangerous."

Alex nodded. "A simple, chaotic string like this

couldn't explain the power curves at Iquitos. So I went back

to the original cavitron equations, fiddled around with

Jones-Witten theory a bit, and came up with something

new.

"This is what I thought I'd made, just before Pedro

Manella set off his damned riot."

The tiny loops had disappeared in a blare of brilliance.

Alex uttered a brief command, and a new object appeared.

"I call this a tuned string."

Again, a lambent loop pulsed in space, surrounded by

white sparks of particle creation. Only this time the string

didn't twist and gyre chaotically. Regular patterns rippled

round its rim. Each time an indentation seemed about to

touch another portion, the rhythm yanked it back again.

The loop hung on, safe from self-destruction. Meanwhile,

matter continued flowing in from all sides.

Visibly, it grew.

"Your monster. I remember from when you first arrived.

I may be drunk, Lustig, but not so I'd forget this terrible taniwha."

Watching the undulations, Alex felt the same mixed

rapture and loathing as when he'd first realized such things

were possible . . . when he first suspected he had made

something this biblically terrible, and beautiful.

"It creates its own self-repulsion," he said softly, "exEARTH 47

plotting second- and third-order gravities. We should have

suspected, since cosmic strings are superconducting--"

George Button interrupted, slapping a meaty hand onto

Alex's shoulder. "That's fine. But today we proved you didn 'I make such a thing. We sent waves into the Earth, and echoes show the thing's dissipating. It's dying. Your string

was out of tune!"

Alex said nothing. George looked at him. "I don't like

your silence. Reassure me again. The damned thing is for

sure dying, right?"

Alex spread his hands. "Bloody hell, George. After all

my mistakes, I'd only trust experimental evidence, and you

saw the results today." He gestured toward the mighty

thumper. "It's your equipment. You tell me."

"It's dying." George said, flat out. Confident.

"Yes, it's dying. Thank heaven."

For another minute the two men sat silently.

"Then what's your problem?" Button finally asked.

"What's eating you?"

Alex frowned. He thumbed a control, and once again a

cutaway view of the Earth took shape. Again, the dot representing his Iquitos singularity traced lazy precessions among

veins of superheated metal and viscous, molten rock.

"It's the damn thing's orbit." Equations filed by. Complex

graphs loomed and receded.

"What about its orbit?" George seemed transfixed, still

holding the bottle in one hand, swaying slightly as the dot

rose and fell, rose and fell.

Alex shook his head. "I've allowed for every density

variation on your seismic maps. I've accounted for every

field source that could influence its trajectory. And still

there's this deviation."

"Deviation?" Alex sensed Button turn to look at him

again.

"Another influence is diverting it. I think I've got a

rough idea of the mass involved. . . ."

The bigger man swung Alex around bodily. The Maori's

right hand gripped his shoulder. All signs of intoxication

were gone from Hutton's face as he bent to meet Alex's eyes.

"What are you telling me? Explain!"

"I think . . ." Alex couldn't help it. As if drawn physically,

he turned to look back at the image in the tank.

"I think something else is down there."

48 DAVIDBRIN

In the ensuing silence, they could hear the drip-drip of

mineral-rich water, somewhere deeper in the cave. The

rhythm seemed much steadier than Alex's heartbeat. George Button looked at the whiskey bottle. With a sigh, he put it down. "I'll get my men."

As his footsteps receded, Alex felt the weight of the

mountain around him once more, all alone.

D In ages past, men and women kept foretelling the end of the

world. Calamity seemed never farther than the next earthquake

or failed harvest. And each dire happening, from tempest to

barbarian invasion, was explained as wrathful punishment from

heaven.

Eventually, humanity began accepting more of the credit, or

blame, for impending Armageddon. Between the world wars, for

instance, novelists prophesied annihilation by poison gas. Later

it was assumed we'd blow ourselves to hell with nuclear weapons.

Horrible new diseases and other biological scourges terrified

populations during the Helvetian struggle. And of course,

our burgeoning human population fostered countless dread

specters of mass starvation.

Apocalypses, apparently, are subject to fashion like everything

else. What terrifies one generation can seem obsolete and

trivial to the next. Take our modern attitude toward war. Most

anthropologists now think this activity was based originally on theft and rape--perhaps rewarding enterprises for some caveman or Viking, but no longer either sexy or profitable in the context of nuclear holocaust! Today, we look back on large-

scale warfare as an essentially silly enterprise.

As for starvation, we surely have seen some appalling local

episodes. Half the world's cropland has been lost, and more is

threatened. Still, the "great die-back" everyone talks about always seems to lie a decade or so in the future, perpetually deferred.

Innovations like self-fertilizing rice and super-mantises

help us scrape by each near-catastrophe just in the nick of time.

Likewise, due to changing life-styles, few today can bear the

thought of eating the flesh of a fellow mammal. Putting moral or

health reasons aside, this shift in habits has freed millions of tons of grain, which once went into inefficient production of red meat.

Has the Apocalypse vanished, then? Certainly not. It's no

longer the hoary Four Horsemen of our ancestors that threaten

EARTH 49

us, but new dangers, far worse in the long run. The byproducts

of human shortsightedness and greed.

Other generations perceived a plethora of swords hanging

over their heads. But generally what they feared were shadows,

for neither they nor their gods could actually end the world. Fate might reap an individual, or a family, or even a whole nation, but not the entire world. Not then.

We, in the mid-twenty-first century, are the first to look up at

a sword we ourselves have forged, and know, with absolute

certainty, it is real. . . .

--From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books, edition 4.7

(2035). I D hyper access code 1-(TRAN-777-97-9945-29A.]

"All right, babe. The first elevator heading down will be crammed E with cargo, but Clenn Spivey put in a word, so I should be able to X hitch a ride on the next one. I may even be in Central before you."

0 Teresa shook her head, amazed. "Spivey arranged

S it? Are we talking about the same Colonel Spivey?"

P Her husband's face beamed from the telecom

H screen. "Maybe you don't know Clenn as I do. Underneath that

E beryllium exterior, there's a heart of pure--"

R "--of pure titanium. Yeah, I know that one." TeE

resa laughed, glad to share even a weak, tension-melting

joke.

So faT, so good, she thought. Right now it felt great just

looking at him, knowing he was a mere forty kilometers

away, and soon would be much closer. Jason, too, sounded

eager to give this a try.

Someone had once told Teresa it was too bad about her

husband's smile, which sometimes transformed his intelligent

features into those of an awkward puppy dog. But Teresa

found his grin endearing. Jason might be insensitive at

times--even a jerk--but she was sure he never lied to her.

Some faces just weren't built to carry off a lie.

"By the way, I watched you snag that hook, first pass. Did you

take over from the computer again? No machine pilots that smoothly."

Teresa knew she was blushing. "It looked like the program

was stuttering^ so I ..."

"Thought so! Now I'll have to brag insufferably at mess. It'll be your fault if I lose all my friends up here."

The capture maneuver was actually simpler than it

50 DAVIDBRIN

looked. Pleiades now hung suspended below the space station,

from a cable stretched taut by gravitational tides.

When it was time to go, they'd simply release the hook and

the shuttle would resume its original ellipse, returning to

mother Earth having saved many tons of precious fuel.

"Well, I reckon it's cause I'm paht Texan," she drawled,

though she was the first in all her lineage ever to see the

Lone Star State. "Ergo mah facility with the lasso."

"It also explains why her eyes are brown," Mark Ran-

dall inserted from nearby.

Jason's image glanced toward Teresa's copilot. "I don't

dare comment on that, so I'll pretend I didn't hear it." Then, back to Teresa, "See you soon, Rip. I'll reserve a room for us at the Hilton."

"I'll settle for a broom closet," she answered, and hang

it if Randall took the wrong meaning. Some people just

couldn't imagine that a husband and wife, meeting for the

first time in months, might want above all else to make contact,

to talk quietly and preserve something neither of them

wanted to lose.

"I'll see what I can arrange. Stempell out."

After securing the hook, their first task had been to offload

tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Likewise the extra orbital

maneuvering propellants Teresa's careful piloting had

saved. Every kilo of raw material in orbit was valuable, and

the station offloading crew went through the procedures

with meticulous care.

The holo display showed Pleiades suspended, nose upward,

just below the bottom portion of the station--

Nearpoint--the section closest to Earth. It was a maze of

pipes and industrial gear hanging by slender, silvery threads

many miles into the planet's gravity well. Teresa watched

nervously as three station operators in spacesuits finished

draining the aft tanks. Only when the hoses were detached at last did she release a knot of tension. Explosive, corrosive liquids, flowing only meters from her heat shielding, always

made her edgy.

"Crew chief requests permission to commence cargo offloading,"

Mark told Teresa.

"Granted."

From the maze above, a giant, articulated manipulator

arm approached Pleiades' cargo bay. A spacesuited figure

EARTH 51

waved from the bay, guiding the arm gingerly toward the

mysterious Air Force package.

Colonel Clenn Spivey observed from the window overlooking

the bay. "Easy does it. Come on, you bastards, it's

not made of rubber! If you ding it--"

Fortunately, the crew outside couldn't hear his backseat

driving. And Teresa didn't mind. After all, he was charged

with equipment worth several hundred million dollars.

Some anxious muttering at this point was understandable.

So why do I detest the man so much? she wondered.

For months Spivey had been working closely with her

husband on some unspoken project. Perhaps it was her dislike

of being excluded, or that nasty word "secrecy." Or

perhaps the resentment came simply from seeing the colonel

take up so much of Jason's attention, at a time when she was

already jealous of others.

"Others" . . . meaning that June Morgan woman, of

course. Teresa allowed herself a brief remise of resentment. Just don't let it cause an argument, she reminded herself. Not this time. Not up here.

She turned away from Spivey and scanned the status

boards again--attitude, tether strain, gravity gradient--all

appeared nominal.

In addition to the hook-snatch docking trick, tethered

complexes like this one offered many other advantages over

old-style "Tinkertoy" space stations. Long, metalized tethers

could draw power directly from the Earth's magnetic

field, or let you torque against those fields to maneuver

without fuel. Also, by yet another quirk of Kepler's laws,

both tips of the bola-like structure experienced faint artificial gravity--about a hundredth of a g--helpful for living

quarters and handling liquids.

Teresa appreciated anything that helped make space

work. Still, she used remote instruments to examine the

braided cables. Superstrong in tension, they were vulnerable

to being worn away by microscopic space debris, even meteoroids.

Statistical reassurances were less calming than simply

checking for herself, so she scanned until she was sure

the fibers weren't on the verge of unraveling.

Overhearing Spivey, clucking like a nervous hen as his

cargo cleared the bay, Teresa smiled. I guess maybe we're

not that different in some ways.

The Russians and Chinese had similar facilities in orbit,

52 DAVIOBRIN

as did Nihon and the Euros. But the other dozen or so space-

capable nations had abandoned their military outposts as

costs rose and the skies came increasingly under civil control.

Rumor had it Spivey's folk were trying to cram in as

much clandestine work as possible before "secrecy" became

as outmoded up here as below.

The crane operator loaded the Colonel's cargo into an

old shuttle tank--now the station freight elevator--and sent

it climbing toward the weight-free complex, twenty klicks

above.

"Request permission to prepare the airlock for transit,

Captain." Spivey was already halfway down the companionway

to middeck, impatient to join his mysterious machine.

"Mark will help just as soon as the tunnel is pressurized,

Colonel."

One spacesuited astronaut examined the transparent

transitway connecting Pleiades' airlock to Nearpoint. He

waved through the rear window, signing "all secure."

"I'll see to Spivey," Mark said, and started to unstrap.

"Fine." But Teresa found herself watching the spaceman

outside. He had remained in the bay after finishing,

and she was curious why.

Climbing atop one of the tanks at the aft end, the station

crewman secured his line to the uppermost insulated

sphere . . . then went completely motionless, arms half

outstretched before him in the limp, relaxed posture known

as the "spacer's crouch."

Teresa quashed her momentary concern. Of course. I

get it.

A little ahead of schedule for once, the fellow was seizing

a chance that came all too rarely. He was watching the

Earth roll by.

The planet filled half the sky, stretching toward distant,

hazy horizons. Directly below paraded a vastly bright panorama

that never repeated itself, highlighted topographies

that were ever-familiar and yet always startling. At the moment,

their orbital track was approaching Spain from the

west. Teresa knew because, as always, she had checked their

location and heading only moments before. Sure enough,

soon the nubby Rock of Gibraltar have into view.

Great pressure waves strained against the Pillars of Her-

cules, as they had ever since that day, tens of thousands of

years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean had broken through the

EARTH 53

neck of land connecting Europe and Africa, pouring into the

grassy basin that was to become the Mediterranean. Eventually,

a new balance had been struck between sea and ocean,

but ever since then it had remained an equilibrium of tension.

Where the great waterfall once surged, now diurnal

tides interacted in complex patterns of cancelation and reinforcement, focused and reflected by the funnel between

Iberia and Morocco. From on high, standing waves seemed

to thread the waters for hundreds of kilometers, yet those

watery peaks and troughs were actually quite shallow and

had been discovered only after cameras took to space.

To Teresa, the patterns proved beautifully, once again,

nature's love affair with mathematics. And not only the sea

displayed wave motion. She also liked looking down on towering

stratocumulus and wind-shredded cirrus clouds. From

space the atmosphere seemed so thin--too slender a film to

rely all their lives upon. And yet, from here one also sensed

that layer's great power.

Others knew it too. Teresa's sharp eyes picked out sparkling

glints which were aircraft--jets and the more common,

whalelike zeppelins. Forewarned by weather reports on

the Net, they were turning to escape a storm brewing west

of Lisbon.

Mark Randall called from the middeck tunnel. "The

impatient so-and-so's already got the inner door open! I better

take over before he causes a union grievance."

"You do that," she answered quietly. Mark could handle

the passengers. She agreed with the cargo handler, out in

the bay. For a rare instant no duties clamored. Teresa let

herself share the epiphanic moment, feeling her breath, her

heartbeat, and the turning of the world.

My Cod, it's beautiful. . . .

So it was that she was watching directly, not through Pleiades' myriad instrumentalities, when the color of the sea changed--subtly, swiftly. Pulsations throbbed those very

storm clouds as she blinked in amazement.

Then the Earth seemed suddenly to bow out at her. It

was a queer sensation. Teresa felt no acceleration. Yet somehow

she knew they were moving, rapidly and non-inertially,

in defiance of natural law.

It did occur to her this might be some form of spacesickness--or

maybe she was having a stroke. But neither consid-

54 DAVIDBRIN

eration slowed the reflex that sent her hand stabbing down

upon the emergency alarm. With the same fluid motion,

Teresa seized her space helmet. In that time-stretched second,

as she spun around to take command of her ship again,

Teresa caught one indelible glimpse of the crewman in the

cargo bay, who had turned, mouth open in a startled, silent

cry of warning.

Back in training, other candidates used to complain about

the emergency drills, which seemed designed to wear down,

even break the hothouse types who had made it that far.

Whenever trainees felt they had procedures down pat, or

that they knew the drill for any contingency, some

smartaleck in a white coat inevitably thought up ways to

make the next practice run even nastier. The chief of simulations hired engineers with sadistic imaginations.

But Teresa never cursed the tiger teams, not even when

they threw their worst at her. She used to see the drills as a

never-ending exercise in skill. Perhaps that was why she

didn't quail or flinch now, as a storm of noise assailed her.

The master alarm barely preceded the first peal from the

shuttle's backup gyroscope. As she was shutting that down,

the characteristic buzzer of the number one hydraulics line

started chattering. Station Control wasn't far behind.

"Cotcha Pleiades, we're onto it. ... It looks like ... no ..."

Voices shouted in the background. Meanwhile, Pleia-

des' accelerometers began singing their unique, groaning

melody.

Teresa protested--We can't be accelerating! But her inner

sense said differently. Logic would have her shut off the

sensors--which were obviously giving false readings. Instead

she switched on the shuttle's main recorder.

Amber lights blazed. She acted quickly to close a critical

QMS pressurization line. Then, as if she didn't already

have enough troubles, Teresa's peripheral vision started

blurring! She could still see down a tunnel. But the zone

narrowed even as she shouted--"No. Dumpit, no!"

Colors rippled across the cabin, turning the cockpit's

planned intricacy into a schizophrenic's fingerpainting. Teresa

shook her head sharply, hoping to drive out the new

affliction. "Control, Pleiades. Am experiencing--"

"Terry!" A shout from behind her. "I'm coming. Hold

on . . ."

EARTH 55

"Pleiades, Control. We're . . . having trouble--"

A shrill squeal interrupted over the open link from Er-

ehwon; it made her wince in dread recognition.

"Mark, check the boom!" Teresa cried over her shoulder

as she peered through a narrowing isthmus at the computer

panel by her right knee. The thing was so obsolete it

couldn't even take voice commands reliably. So more by

rote than sight she flipped a toggle over to manual override.

"Pleiades, we're going blind--"

"Same here!" she snapped. "I've got acceleration too,

just like you. Tell me something I don't know!"

The voice fought through gathering static. "We're also

getting anomalous increase in tether tension . . ."

Teresa felt a chill. "Mark! I said check the boom!"

"I'm trying!" He shouted from the ceiling port. "It

1. looks fine, Terry. The boom's okay--"

". . . extremely high anomalous electric currents in the

tether . . ."

Two amber blurs switched over to red. "Put your helmet

on and get ready to jettison the transitway," Teresa told

her copilot as more alarms whistled melodies she had never

before heard outside a simulator. Teresa felt rather than saw

Mark slip into his seat as she pushed aside a switch guard

and punched the red button beneath. Instantly they heard a

distant crump as explosive charges tore away the plastic tunnel

recently attached to their airlock.

"Transitway jettisoned," Mark confirmed. "Terry, what

the hell's going--"

"Get ready to blow the boom itself," she told him. By

touch, Teresa punched buttons on the digital autopilot, engaging

the shuttle's smaller reaction-control motors. "DAP

on manual. RCS engaged. When we break off, we'll hang for

a minute before dropping. But I think--"

Teresa paused suddenly as one of the red smudges

turned amber. "--I think--"

Another switched from crimson to yellow-gold. And another.

Then an amber light went green.

As quickly as it had arrived, the frightening rainbow

began melting away! She blinked twice, three times. Starting

in the middle, the visual blurriness evaporated. Acuity returned

as warning lights and musical alarms subsided one by

one.

"Pleiades ..." Station Control sounded breathless.

56 DAVIDBRIN

Buzzers were shutting down over there, as well. "Pleiades, we

seem to be returning--"

"Same here," she interrupted. "But what about the

tether tension!"

"Pleiades, tether tension ... is slackening." Control's tone

was relieved. "Must have been transient, whatever the hell it was.

There may be some backlash though ..."

Mark and Teresa looked at each other. She felt

stretched, pummeled, abused. Was it really over? As more

amber lights winked out, they inventoried damage. Miraculously,

Pleiades seemed unharmed.

Except, of course, for the million-dollar transit tube

she'd just jettisoned. The passengers weren't going to appreciate being ferried like so many beachballs, in personal survival

enclosures. But their resentment couldn't match that

of the bean-counters in Washington, if no justification were

at hand.

"Jeez. What if we'd gone ahead and blown the boom?"

Mark muttered. "Better put that squib on safety, Terry." He

nodded toward the primed trigger, flashing dangerously between

their seats.

"Hold on a sec." Teresa's eyes roved the cockpit, seeking

1. anything. Any clue to the mysterious episode. She

tapped her throat mike. "Control, Pleiades. Confirm your

estimate that backlash will be minimal. We don't want to

face--"

That was when her gaze lighted on the inertial guidance

display, showing where in space their ring laser gyroscope

thought they were. She read it like a newspaper headline.

The numbers were bizarre and rapidly changing in ways Teresa

didn't like at all!

Eye flicks took in the corresponding readouts of the star

tracker and satellite navigation systems. They were in total

conflict, and none of them agreed with what the seat of her

pants was telling her. '

"Control! I'm disengaging, under emergency protocols."

"Wait Pleiades'. There's no need. You may increase our backlash!"

"I'll take that chance. Meanwhile, better check your

own inertial units. Have you got a gravitometer?"

"Affirmative. But what . . . ?"

"Check it! Pleiades out."

Then, to Mark, "You blow the boom, I'll handle the

DAP. jettison on count of three. One!"

Randall had his hands on the panel, still he remonstrated.

"You sure? We'll catch hell . . ."

"Two!" She gripped the control stick.

"Terry--"

Intuition tickled. She felt it--whatever it was--re-

turning with a vengeance.

"Blow it, Mark!"

Before she even felt the vibration of the charges, Teresa

activated her vernier jets in translational mode, doing as any

good pilot would in a crisis--guiding her ship away from

anything more substantial than a thought or a cloud.

"What the hell is going on up here? Have you both lost

your minds?"

A sharp voice from behind them. Without turning she

snapped, "Colonel Spivey, strap in and shut up!"

Her harried, professional tone worked better than any

curse or threat. Spivey might be obnoxious, but he was no

fool. She sensed his quick departure and swept him from her

mind as reaction jets wrestled the orbiter's reluctant mass

slowly away from the station's tangle of cranes and storage

tanks. On the back of Teresa's neck all the tiny hairs shivered.

"Pleiades, you're right. The phenomenon is periodic. Anomalous

tension is returning. Gravitometer's gone crazy . . . tides of unprecedented--"

A second voice interrupted, cutting off the controller. "Pleiades, this is Station Commander Perez. Prepare to receive emergency telemetry."

"Affirmative." Teresa swallowed, knowing what this

meant. She felt Mark lean past her to make sure the ship's

datasuck boxes were operating at top speed. In that mode

they recorded every nuance for one purpose only, so endangered

spacers could obey rule number one of their

trade . . .

Let the next guy know what killed you.

The station commander was dumping his operational

status into Pleiades in real time--a dire measure for the

chief of a secret military station. That made Teresa all the

more anxious to get away fast.

She ignored navigational aids, checking orientation by

instinct and estimate. Teresa groaned on realizing that two

58 DAVIDBRIN

main thrusters were aimed at Nearpoint's cryo tanks, risking

a titanic explosion if she fired them. That left only tiny

verniers to nudge the heavy shuttle. She switched to a roll

maneuver, cursing the slowness of the turn.

"Oh, shit! Mark, is that guy still in the cargo bay?"

The creepy nausea was returning, she could tell as she

fought the sluggish spacecraft. Nearby, Mark laughed suddenly

and a bit shrilly. "He's still there. Helmet pressed to

the window. Guy's mad, Terry."

"Stop calling me Terry!" she snapped, turning to get a

fix on Nearpoint again. If the tanks were clear now . . .

Teresa stared. They weren't there anymore!

Nothing was there. Tanks, habitats, cranes . . . everything

was gone!

Alarms resumed their blared warnings. With her instruments

turning amber and red again, Teresa decided Erehwon

was none of her business now. She punched buttons labeled

x-translational and high, then squeezed the stick to trigger

a full-throated hypergolic roar, sending Pleiades where she

figured the station and tether weren 'I.

Mark called out pressures and flow rates. Teresa

counted seconds as the blurriness encroached again. "Move,

you dumpit bitch. Move!" She cursed the massive, awkward

orbiter.

"I found the station." Mark announced. "Jesus. Look at

that."

Through a narrowing tunnel Teresa glanced at the radar

screen. She gasped. The bottom assembly was more than five

kilometers below them and receding fast. The tether had

stretched suddenly, like a child's rubber toy. "Damn!" she

heard Mark Randall cry. Then Teresa had difficulty hearing

or seeing anything at all.

This time the squidgy feeling went from her eyes

straight back through her central sinus. The blaring of new

alarms mixed with strange noises originating within her own

skull. One alert crooned the dour song of a cooling system

gone berserk. Unable to see which portion, Teresa flicked

switches by touch, disabling all the exchange loops. She had

Mark close down the fuel cells as well. If the situation

didn't improve before they ran out of battery juice, it

wouldn't matter anyway.

"All three APUs are inoperable!" Mark shouted

through a roar of crazy noise.

EARTH 59

"Forget 'em. Leave 'em turned off."

"AH of them?"

"I said all! The bug's in the hydraulic lines, not the

APUs. All long fluid lines are affected."

"How do we close the cargo bay doors without hydraulics?"

he protested through rising static that nearly drowned

his words. "We won't . . . able to ... during reentry!"

"Leave that to me," she shouted back. "Close all lines

except rear hypergolics, and pray they hold!"

Teresa thought she heard his acknowledgment, and a

clicking that might have been those switches being closed.

Or it could have been just another weird sensory distortion.

Without hydraulics they couldn't gimbal the main maneuvering

rockets. She'd have to make do with RCS jets,

flying blind in a chiarascuro of distortion and shadow. By

touch Teresa disengaged the autopilot completely. She fired

the small jets in matched pairs, relying on vibration alone to

verify a response. It was true seat-of-the-pants flying, with

no way to confirm she was moving Pleiades farther from

that dangerously overstretched tether, or perhaps right toward

it. ...

Sound became smell. Roiling images scratched her skin.

Amid cacophonous static Teresa thought she actually heard Jason, calling her name. But the voice blew away in the noisome gale before she could tell whether it was real or

phantom--one of countless chimeras clamoring from all

sides.

For all she knew, she was permanently blind. But that

didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the battle to save

her ship.

Vision finally did clear, at last, with the same astonishing

speed as it had been lost. A narrow tunnel snapped into

focus, expanding rapidly till only the periphery sparkled

with those eerie shades. Screaming alarms began shutting

down.

The transition left her stunned, staring unbelievingly at

the once-familiar cabin. The chronometer said less than ten

minutes had passed. It felt like hours.

"Um," she commented with a dry throat. Once again, Pleiades had the nerve to start acting as if nothing had happened.

Red lights turned amber; amber became green. Teresa

herself wasn't about to recover so quickly, for sure.

60 DAVIDBRIN

Mark sneezed with terrific force. "Where--where's Er-

ehwon? Where's the tether?" A few minutes thrust couldn't

have taken them far. But the approach and rendezvous display

showed nothing at all. Teresa switched to a higher

scale.

Nothing. The station was nowhere.

Mark whispered. "What happened to it?"

Teresa changed radar settings, expanding scale again

and ordering a full-spectrum doppler scan. This time, at last,

a scattering of blips appeared. Her mouth suddenly tasted

ashen.

"There's . . . pieces of it."

A cluster of large objects had entered much higher orbit,

rising rapidly as Pleiades receded in her own ellipse. One

transmitted an emergency beacon, identifying it as part of

the station's central complex.

"We better do a circularization burn," Mark said, "to

have a chance of rescuing anybody."

Teresa blinked once more. / should've thought of that.

"Check . . . check all the tank and line pressures

first," she said, still staring at the mess that had been the

core of Reagan Station. Something had rent the tethers . . .

and all the spars connecting the modules, for good measure.

That force might return anytime, but they owed it to their

fellow spacers to try to save those left alive.

"Pressures look fine," Mark reported. "Give me a minute

to compute a burn. It'll be messy."

"That's okay. We'll use up our reserves. Kennedy and

Kourou are probably already scrambling launchers--" She

stopped, ears perked to a strange tapping sound. Another

symptom? But no, it came from behind her. She swiveled

angrily. If that damned Spivey had come back . . .

A face in the rear window made Teresa gasp, then she

sighed. It was only their inadvertent hitchhiker, the space-

suited crewman, his helmet still pressed against the perspex

screen.

"Hmph," she commented. "Our guest doesn't look as

pissed off as before." In fact, the expression behind the

steamed-up faceplate beamed unalloyed gratitude. "He must

have seen Nearpoint come apart. By now it may already be

in the atmos ..."

She stopped suddenly. "Jason!"

"What?" Mark looked up from the computer.

EARTH 61

"Where's the upper tip? Where's Farpoint!"

Teresa scrabbled at the radar display, readjusting to its

highest scale on autofrequency scan--taking in the blackness

far from Earth just in time to catch a large blip that

streaked past the outer edge of the screen.

"Sweet Caia . . . look at the doppler!" Randall stared.

"It's moving at . . . at . . ." He didn't finish. Teresa could

read the screen as well as he.

The glowing letters lingered, even after the fleeting blip

departed. They burned in the display and in their hearts.

Jason, Teresa thought, unable to comprehend or cope

with what she'd seen. Her voice caught, and when she finally

spoke, it was simply to say, "Six . . . thousand kilometers

1. per second."

It was impossible of course. Teresa shook her head in

numb, unreasoning disbelief that Jason would have, could

have, done this to her!

"Kakashkiya," she sighed.

"He's leaving me ... at two percent of the goddamn

speed of light . . ."

D It was Ate, first-born daughter of Zeus, who used the golden

apple to tempt three vain goddesses, setting the stage for tragedy.

Moreover, it was Ate who made Paris fall for Helen, and

Agamemnon for Breises. Ate filled the Trojans' hearts with a love of horses, whose streaming manes laid grace upon the plains of

Ilium. To Ulysses she gave a passion for new things.

For these and other innovations, Ate became known as

Mother of Infatuation. For these she was also called Sower of

Discord.

Did she realize her invention would eventually lead to

Hecuba's anguish atop the broken walls of Troy? Some say she

spread dissension only at her father's bidding . . . that Zeus

himself connived to bring about that dreadful war ". . . so its

load of death might free the groaning land from the weight of so

many men."

Still, when he saw the bloody outcome, Zeus mourned.

Gods who had supported Troy joined those backing Hellas, and

all agreed to lay the blame on Ate.

Banished to Earth, she brought along her invention, and its

effects would prove as far-reaching as that earlier boon--the gift 62 DAVIDBRIN

of Prometheus. Indeed, what could Reason ever accomplish for

mankind by itself, without Passion to drive it on?

Infatuation spread, for well and ill. Life, once simple, became

vivid, challenging, confusing. Hearts raced. Veins sang

with recklessness. Wild gambles paid off fantastically, or tumbled into memorable fiascos.

There came to Earth a thing called "love."

Infatuation forever changed the world. That is why some

came to call it the "Meadow of Ate."

The last tremors had ended, but it still took several min-

C utes for the technicians to crawl out from under their

0 desks. Through cascading hazes of limestone dust they

R peered about, making sure the quake was really over.

E Some cast awed glances toward the nexus console,

where Alex Lustig had remained throughout the unexpected

temblors.

One unspoken thought circulated among them--that

any bloke who could make the Earth rattle was surely one to

reckon with.

Inside, Alex wasn't quite as calm as he seemed. In

truth, exhaustion and sheer astonishment were what had

kept him at his station while others dove for cover, far more

than bravado or showy courage. This sudden power to cause

earthquakes was a completely unexpected side effect of their

project, and of trivial importance next to the news he now

saw before him.

Unfortunately, they had found exactly what they were

looking for.

The cutaway hologram told the story. Where only one

purple dot had been depicted before--looping a deeply buried

orbit about the planet's center--now a second object

could be seen circling even lower still. What had been only

dire suspicion was now reified and horrible.

"It's down there, all right," George Button's chief

physicist reported, lifting his hard hat to smooth back sparse

white hair. Stan Goldman's hands trembled. "We'll need

data from other listening posts to pin it down precisely."

"Can you estimate its mass?" Button asked. The Maori

tycoon sat on the other side of the console, wearing a scowl

that would have made the warriors of Te Heuheu proud.

EARTH 63

During the quakes he, too, had spurned shelter. But the

techs only expected that of him.

Coldman pored over his screen. "Looks like just under

a trillion tons. That's several orders heavier than Alex's . . .

than the first one. Than Alpha."

"And its other dimensions?"

"Too small to measure on linear scales. It's another singularity, all right."

George turned to Alex. "Why didn't we detect this

other thing before?"

"It seems there are more ways to modulate gravity

waves than anyone imagined." Alex motioned with his

hands. "To pick any one object out of the chaos below, we

have to calculate and match narrow bandwidths and impedances.

Our earlier searches were tuned to find Alpha, and

picked up Beta only by inference."

"You mean--" Ceorge gestured at the tank-- "there

may be more of the things down there?"

Alex blinked. He hadn't thought that far ahead. "Give

me a minute."

Speaking softly into a microphone, he pulled subroutines

from his utility library, creating charts and simulations

near the hologram. "No," he said at last. "If there were

more they'd affect the others' orbits. It's just those two. And

my . . . and singularity Alpha is decaying rapidly."

Ceorge grunted. "What about the big one? I take it that damn thing is growing?"

Alex nodded, reluctant to speak. As a physicist he was

supposed to accept the primacy of objective reality. Yet there

remained a superstitious suspicion in his heart, that dark

potentialities become real only after you have spoken them

aloud.

"Seems to be," he said, with difficulty.

"I agree," added Stan.

Button paced through the still-drifting dust, in front of

the gleaming gravity-wave generator. "If it's growing, we

know several things." He held up one finger. "First, Beta

can't be terribly old, or it would have consumed the Earth

long ago, neh?"

"It could be a natural singularity left over from the Big

Bang, which hit Earth only recently," Stan suggested.

"Weak, very weak. Wouldn't an interstellar object be

moving at hyperbolic speeds?" Button shook his head. "It

64 DAVIDBRIN

might pass through a planet on a fluke, but then it'd just fly

off into space again, barely slowed at all."

Alex nodded, accepting the point.

"Also," Button went on, "it stretches credulity that

such an object would happen to arrive just now, when we

have the technology to detect it. Besides, you yourself said

small singularities are unstable--be they holes or strings or

whatever--unless they're specially tuned to sustain themselves!"

"You're saying someone else has . . . ?"

"Obviously! Come on, Lustig. Do you think you're the

only bright guy on the planet? Face it, you've been scooped.

Preceded! Someone beat you to it, by inventing a better cavi-

tron perhaps, or using something different.

"Probably something different, more sophisticated,

since this taniwha is worse than your pathetic thing, your

Alpha!" George spread a grin absent of mirth. "Accept it,

Alex boy. Someone out there whipped you at your own

game . . . somebody better at playing mad scientist."

Alex didn't know what to say. He watched the big

man's expression turn thoughtful.

"Or maybe it's not just a lone madman this time. I wonder.

1. Governments and ruling cliques are good at coming

up with ways to destroy the world. Maybe one was

developing some sort of doomsday device? An ultimate deterrent?

Maybe, like you, they released it by mistake."

"Then why keep it secret?"

"To prevent retribution, of course. Or to gain time

while they plot an escape to Mars?"

Alex shook his head. "I can't speculate about any of

that. All I can do is--"

"No." George stabbed a finger at him. "Let me tell you

what you can do. First off, you can get busy confirming this

data. And then, after that ..."

The fire seemed to drain out of Button's eyes. His

shoulders slumped. "After that you can tell me how much

time I have left with my children, before that thing down

there swallows up the ground beneath our feet."

The frightened techs shifted nervously. Stan Coldman

watched his own hands. Alex, however, felt a different sense

of loss. He wished he too could react in such a way--with

anger, defiance, despair.

Why do I feel so little? Why am I so numb?

EARTH 65

Was it because he'd been living with this possibility so

much longer than George?

Or is George right? Am I miffed that someone else obviously

did a bigger, better job of monster making than I

ever could7

Whoever it had been, they were certainly no more competent

at keeping monsters caged. Small satisfaction there.

"Before we do more gravity probes," Stan Coldman

said. "Hadn't we better find out why that last scan set off

seismic tremors? I've never heard of anything like it before."

George laughed. "Tremors? You want quakes? Just wait

till Beta's grown to critical size and starts swallowing up the

Earth's core. Chunks of mantle will collapse inward . . .

then you'll see earthquakes!"

Swiveling in disgust, Button strode off toward the stairs

to climb back to Ao-marama--to the world of light. For some

time after he departed, nobody did or said much. The staff

desultorily cleaned up. Once, Stan Coldman seemed about

to speak, then closed his mouth and shook his head.

A nervous engineer approached Alex, holding a message

plaque. "Um, speaking of earthquakes, I thought you'd better

see this." He slid the sheet onto the console between

Stan and Alex. On its face rippled the bold letters of a standard World Net tech-level press release:

TEMBLORS, LEVEL 3 THROUGH 5.2, HAVE HIT SPAIN, MOROCCO,

BALAERICS. CASUALTIES LOW. SWARM FOLLOWED

UNUSUAL PATTERN IN SPACE, TIME, AND PHASE DOMAINS.

INITIAL ONSET----

"Hm, what does this have to do with . . . ?" Then Alex

noticed--the Spanish quakes had struck at exactly the same

time as the jolts here in New Zealand! Turning to the

whole-Earth cutaway, he made some comparisons, and whistled.

As nearly as the eyeball had it, the two swarms had

taken place one hundred and eighty degrees apart--on exactly

opposite sides of the globe.

In other words, a straight line, connecting New Zealand

and Spain, passed almost exactly through the planet's core.

He watched the new singularity, the one called Beta,

follow a low, lazy trajectory, never climbing far from the

inmost zone where density and pressure were highest, where

its nourishment was richest.

66 DAVIDBRIN

It does more than grow, Alex realized, amazed the universe

could awe him yet again. It does one hell of a lot more

than grow.

"Stan--" he began.

"You've noticed too? Puzzling, isn't it?"

"Mm. Let's find out what it means."

So they were immersed in arcane mathematics, barely

even aware of the world outside, when someone turned a

dial to amplify the breathless voices of news reporters,

describing a disaster in space.

PART II

PLANET

A modest fire burns longer. So it is, also, with stars.

The brightest rush through lives of spendthrift

extravagance to finally explode in terminal fits of self-

expression, briefly outshining whole galaxies.

Meanwhile, humbler, quieter suns patiently tend their

business, aging slowly, gracefully.

Ironically, it takes both types to make a proper

potion. For without the grand immoderation of

supernovas there would be no ingredientsno oxygen,

carbon, silicon, or iron. And yet the steady yellow suns

are also neededto bake the concoction slowly, gently,

or the recipe will spoil.

Take a solar mix of elements. Condense small lumps

and accrete them to a midsized globe. Set it just the

right distance from the flame and rotate gently. The

crust should bubble and then simmer for the first few

million years.

Rinse out excess hydrogen under a wash of sunlight.

Pound with comets for one eon, or until a film of

liquid forms.

Keep rotating under an even heat for several billion

years.

Then wait. . . .

68 DAVIDBRIN

D For consideration by the 112 million members of the Worldwide

Long Range Solutions Special Interest Discussion Group

[0 SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546], we the steering committee

commend this little gem one of our members [D Jane P.

Gloumer QrT JN 233-54-2203 aa] found in a late TwenCen novel.

She calls it the "Offut-Lyon Plan." Here's Ms. Gloumer to describe the notion:

"Our problem isn't too many people, per se. It's that we have

too many right now. We're using up resources at a furious rate,

just when the last of Earth's surplus might be used to create true, permanent wellsprings of prosperity. Projects such as reforestation, or orbital solar power, or [D list of other suggestions hyper-

appendixed, with appropriate references] aren't making any progress because our slender margin must be spent just feeding

and housing so many people.

"Oh, surely, the rate of population growth has slackened. In

a century, total numbers may actually taper off. But too late to

save us, I'm afraid.

"Now some insensitive members of this very SIQ have suggested

this could be solved by letting half the people die. A grim

Malthusian solution, and damn stupid in my opinion. Those five

billions wouldn't just go quietly for the common good! They'd go

down kicking, taking everybody else with them!

"Anyway, do billions really need to die, in order to save the

world? What if those billions could be persuaded to leave term- poran'/y?

"Recent work at the University of Beijing shows we're only

a decade away from perfecting cryosuspension . . . the safe

freezing of human beings, like those with terminal diseases, for

reliable resuscitation at a later time. Now at first that sounds like just another techno-calamity--plugging another of the drain

holes and letting the tub fill still higher with people. But that's just small thinking. There's a way this breakthrough could actually

prove to be our salvation.

"Here's the deal. Let anyone who wants to sign up be suspended

until the twenty-fourth century. The U.N. guarantees their

savings will accumulate at I % above inflation or the best government bond rate, whichever is higher. Volunteers are assured

wealth when they come out the other end.

EARTH 69

"In return, they agree to get out of the way, giving the rest of

us the elbow room we need. With only half the population to

feed, we problem solvers could roll up our sleeves and use the

remaining surplus to fix things up.

"Of course, there are a few bugs to work out, such as the

logistics of safely freezing five billion people, but that's what SIG

discussion groups like this one are for--coming up with ideas

and solving problems!"

Indeed. Jane's provocative suggestion left us breathless. We expect more than a million responses to this one, so please, try to

be original, or wait until the second wave to see if your point has already been stated by someone else. For conciseness, the first

round will be limited to simple eight-gig voice-text, with just one subreference layer. No animation or holography, please. Now

let's start with our senior members in China . . .

It was truly "mad dogs and Englishmen" weather. Claire

L wore her goggles, of course, and was slathered with skin

I cream. Nevertheless, Logan Eng wondered if he really

T oughtn't get his daughter out of this blistering sun-

H shine.

0 Not that, to all appearances, anything could possiS

biy harm that creature up ahead, with the form of a girl

P but moving along the striated rock face like a mountain

H goat. It never occurred to Logan that Claire might fall,

E for instance, here on a mere class-four slope. His red-

R headed offspring strode ahead as if she were crossing a

E lawn, rather than a forty-degree grade, and disappeared

around the next bend in the canyon wall with a final flash of

bronzed legs.

Logan puffed, reluctantly admitting to himself why

he'd been about to call her back. / can't keep up with her

anymore. It was inevitable, I guess.

Realizing this, he smiled. Envy is an unworthy emotion

to feel toward your own child.

Anyway, right now he was occupied with greater spans

of time than a mere generation. Logan teetered on the edge

of the period called "Carboniferous." Like some ambitious

phylum, aspiring to evolve, he sought a path to rise just a

few more meters, into the Permian.

That landmark, which had seemed so stark from far

70 DAVIDBRIN

away--a distinct border between two horizontal stripes of

pale stone--became deceptive and indistinct up this close.

Reality was like that. Never textbook crisp, but gritty,

rough-edged. It took physical contact, breathing chalky sediments or tracing with your fingertips the outline of some

paleozoic brachiopod, to truly feel the eons imbedded in a

place like this.

Logan knew by touch the nature of this rock. He could

estimate its strength and permeability to seeping water--a

skill learned over years perfecting his craft. Also, as an amateur, he had studied its origins in prehistoric days.

The Carboniferous period actually came rather late in

the planet's history. Part of the "age of amphibians," it

spanned a hundred million years before the giants known as

dinosaurs arrived. Wonderful beasts used to thrive near

where he now trod. But it was mostly upon ocean bottoms

that life's epic was written, by countless microorganisms

raining down as gentle sediment year after year, eon after

eon, a process already three billion years old when these clay

chapters were lain.

Of course Logan knew volcanic mountains, too. Only

last week he'd been scrambling over vast igneous flows in

eastern Washington state, charting some of the new underground

streams awakened by the shifting rains. Still, mere

pumice and tuff were never as fascinating as where the land

had once quite literally been alive. In his work he'd walked

across ages--from the Precambrian, when Earth's highest

denizens were mats of algae, to the nearly recent Pliocene,

where Logan always watched out for traces of more immediate

forebears, who might by then already have been walking

on two legs and starting to wonder what the hell was going

on. He regularly returned from such expeditions with boxes

of fossils rescued from the bulldozers, to give away to local

schools. Though of course Claire always got first choice for

her collection.

"Daddy!"

He was negotiating a particularly tricky bend when his

daughter's call tore him from his drifting thoughts. A misstep

cost him his footing, and Logan felt a sudden, teetering

vertigo. He gasped, throwing himself against the sloping

wall, spreading his weight over the largest possible area. The

sudden pounding of his heart matched the sound of pebbles

raining into the ravine below.

EARTH 71

It was an instinctive reaction. An overreaction, as there

were plenty of footholds and ledges. But he'd let his mind

wander, and that was stupid. Now he'd pay with bruises,

and dust from head to toe.

"What--" He spat grit and raised his voice. "What is it,

Claire?"

From above and somewhere ahead he heard her voice.

"I think I found it!"

Logan reset his footing and pushed away. Standing upright

required that his ankles bend sharply as his climbing

shoes pressed for traction. But beginning scramblers learned

to do that on their first outing. Now that he was paying

attention again, Logan felt steady and controlled.

Just so long as you do pay attention, he reminded himself.

"Found what?" he called in her general direction.

"Daddy!" came exasperated tones, echoing faintly

down narrow sidechannels. "I think I found the boundary!"

Logan smiled. As a child, Claire never used to call him

"Daddy." It had been an affront to her dignity. But now that

the state of Oregon had issued her a self-reliance card, she

seemed to like using the word--as if a small degree of

residual, calculated childishness was her privilege as an

emerging adult.

"I'm coming, Ceode!" He patted his clothes, waving

away drifts of dust. "I'll be right there!"

The badlands stretched all around Logan. Sculpted by

wind and rain and flash floods, they no doubt looked much

as they had when first seen by whites, or by any people at

all. Humans had lived in North America for only ten or

twenty thousand years, tops. And though the weather had

changed during that time--mostly growing dryer and hotter

--it had been even longer since any appreciable greenery

found a purchase on these sere slopes.

Still, there was beauty here: beige and cream and cinnamon

beauty, textured like hard layers of some great, petrified

pastry that had been kneaded hard below and then

exposed by rough scourings of wind and rain. Logan loved

these rocky deserts. Elsewhere, Earth wore its carpet of life

as a softening mask. But here one could touch the planet's

tactile reality--mother Caia without her makeup on.

His job often took him to places like this ... to map

out schemes for managing precious water. It was a role much

72 DAVIDBRIN

like the "wildcatters" of twentieth-century lore, who used

to scramble far and wide in search of petroleum, until each

of the six hundred major sedimentary basins had been

probed, palpated, steamed, and sucked dry.

Logan liked to think his goals were more mature, his

task more benign and well thought out than that. Still he

sometimes wondered. Might future generations look back

on him and his world-spanning fraternity the way

teledramas now depicted oilmen? As shortsighted fools,

even rapists?

His ex-wife, Claire's mother, had decided about that

long ago. After his involvement in the project to cover over

the lower Colorado River--saving millions of acre-feet of water

from evaporation and creating the world's longest green-

house--she had rewarded him by throwing him out of the

house.

Logan understood Daisy's feelings . . . her obsessions,

actually. But what was I to do? We can't save the world

without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

All over the planet there were problems crying out for

solutions, not tomorrow, but right now. Nations and cities

wanted water shifted, pumped and diked. As the seas rose

and rains migrated unpredictably, so did his labors, as governments strove desperately to adapt. Great changes were at

work, in the air and land and oceans. They were the sort of

global transformations one read of in the very rocks themselves

1. such as when one long epoch of geological stability

would come suddenly and violently to an end, leaving

everything forever recast.

And yet . . . Logan inhaled the scent of sage and juniper.

Nothing had altered this country within man's memory.

Not even the greenhouse effect. He rejoiced in places

like this, where no one would ever ask for his services.

Places invulnerable to any works he could imagine.

A red-tailed hawk patrolled the next mesa, cruising a

thermal air current that made the intervening gullied slope

swim before his eyes. He touched a control near the left

strap of his goggles and the bird steadied in view, smart optics

enabling him to share its hunt, vicariously. There was a

gleam in the raptor's yellow iris as it scanned the sparse

cover, seeking prey that might be sheltered there.

EARTH 73

The bird passed out of sight. Logan readjusted the goggles

and resumed climbing.

Soon he encountered tricky territory. Shards of stone

had broken from an undermined outcrop, leaving a treacherous

scree in his path. Logan's nostrils flared as he stepped off

carefully, arms outstretched for balance. Then he hopped

again, a little quicker.

This kind of ground was ideal, of course. Not particularly

dangerous--he and Claire carried tracking beepers anyway,

and Forest Service 'copters were less than thirty

minutes away--but enough so to be thrilling. Logan leaped

from boulder to tottering boulder. It lent an added spice of

adrenaline to the exhilaration of just being out here in the

open, far from the teeming cities or his growling bulldozers,

without a care in the world beyond the crucial decision of

where he was going to plant his feet next.

At last he landed, surefooted and elated, on another

patch of easy slant--no more vertical than horizontal. Logan

paused again to catch his breath.

He and Claire had seen many other hikers on their way

here, of course. You needed reservations years in advance to

get a camping permit. Ironically though, right now the two

of them were completely alone in this particular area. While

tourists thronged the easy nature trails and aficionados went

for hard ascents, intermediate terrain like this often went

unvisited for days at a stretch.

Squinting to blur vision a bit, Logan could almost smear

out signs of recent human passage . . . those eroded spots

where footprints had worn the stone in ways wind or water

never could, or bits of paper or foil too small to qualify for

antilitter fines. It was so quiet--no drone of aircraft engines

at the moment, no voices--that one might even imagine one

was treading ground no other person had explored in all of

time.

It was a pleasant fantasy.

Logan scanned for his daughter, his goggles adapting to

the changing glare. Now where has she gotten to?

A giggle made him start. "I'm right above you,

dummy!"

Sure enough, there she was. Not five meters uphill,

perched on a fifty-degree slope. She must have lain in wait,

quiet and unmoving, for at least ten minutes as he approached.

74 DAVIDBRIN

"I never should have let Kala M'Lenko teach you stalking,"

he muttered.

She tossed her hair, red tinged from the sun. Her skin

was copper colored too, saying to hell with the palefaced

fashion of the day. Where a normal sixteen-year-old would

have worn the latest style in sun hats, she sported a sweatband

visor and streaks of white onc-ex cream.

"But you said a girl today oughta have survival skills."

"Thems, you have in plenty. Too plenty, maybe," Lo-

gan answered in pidgin Simglish. But he grinned. "Let's see

what you found."

Actually, he was pleased with her attitude. As she led

him up a path too narrow for footprints, Logan found himself

recalling a time some years ago when he had challenged

her to "find a rock" in Kansas.

They had been visiting his parents, before the divorce,

but long after the Big Drought had forced plains farmers to

switch from their beloved corn to sorghum and amaranth.

Claire loved the Eng spread, even though the agricooperative

it was a part of scarcely resembled the Ma and Pa farms still

vivid in story books. At least it was more real than the lavish

estate where Daisy had grown up, where Claire hated visiting

because her aristo cousins so often cast her in the role of

their amusing hick relation, who didn't even know enough

to care that she was poor.

"If you can find a rock, I'll give you ten dollars, " he

had told his daughter on that day, thinking it a simple way

to keep her amused during the sluggish stretch until dinnertime.

And while the inducement had been mere pocket

change, she nevertheless scampered off into the harvested

fields, searching through stubble while he lazed in a hammock,

catching up on his journals.

It didn't take Claire long to realize plowed fields

weren't good places to find stones. So she moved to the

verges, where windbreak trees swayed in a bone-dry sirocco. During all that lazy afternoon she kept running back to her father with bits of treasure to show him . . . bottle caps

and machine parts, for instance. Or ancient aluminum soft-

drink pull-rings, still shiny after seventy years. And all sorts

of other detritus from two and a half centuries' ceaseless

cultivation. They had fun puzzling over these trophies, and

Logan would have been happy with just that. But, typically,

Claire never forgot the original challenge.

EARTH 75

She brought him hard clumps that proved, under a magnifying

glass, to be only hardened dirt. She retrieved agglomerates

of clay and chunks of broken cement. Every sample

turned into a revelation, a glimpse into the past. Each time

she would hurry off again, only to return a few minutes

later, breathless with the next sample to be dissected.

Finally, when Logan's mother called them in for supper,

he broke the news to Claire. "There are no stones in Kansas,

" he had said. "Or at least not in this part of the state.

Even after all the terrible erosion, there's still hardly anywhere you can find bedrock. It's all a great plain built up

over thousands of years, out of dust and tiny bits blown

down from the Rockies.

"There's fust no natural way for a stone to get here,

honey."

For an instant he had wondered if he'd taken a father's

license too far, teasing the child that way. But his daughter

only looked at him and then pronounced, "Well, it was fun

anyway. I guess I learned a lot."

At the time Logan wondered at how easily she had accepted

defeat. It was only three days later, as they prepared

to depart for home, that she said to him, "Hold out your

hand. " and placed in his palm a heavy, oblong shape, crusty,

with a blackened, seared quality to it. Logan remembered

blinking in surprise, hefting the stone. He took out his magnifier and then borrowed his father's hammer to chip a corner.

No doubt about it. Claire had found a meteorite.

"There is a way for a stone to get here, isn't there'" she had said. Silently, Logan pulled out coins and paid up.

Now, on this Wyoming slope, a much bigger Claire patted

the slanting cliff where a sudden change in color could

be seen, from mocha to a sort of toffee cream. She pointed to

faint outlines, naming fossil creatures whose skeletons were

set in stone when this had been the bottom of a great sea,

millions of centuries ago. Logan's own trip into memory was

relatively minor in comparison, a mere eight years. But eight years which had changed that precocious little girl.

She won't have to be picky to choose a man, he

thought. She'll scare off all but the few who can keep up

with her.

"... and none of them appear above this line. They

76 DAVIDBRIN

all died out right here!" She stroked the line again. "This

has to be the Permian-Triassic boundary."

He nodded. "Fair enough. Shall I take your picture next

to it?"

Claire protested. "But we have to take a scraping! I

want to take home--"

"Scraping second. Photo first. Humor Papa."

Claire let out an exasperated sigh. But then, he

thought, It's a dad's fob to make light of things. To be hard

to impress.

He touched the controls at the rims of his goggles.

"Now smile," he said.

"Oh all right. But wait a minute!"

She grabbed a flat electrobrush from her back pocket,

flicked the switch to charge it, and began swiping at her

tangled locks. Finally, she swept off her own goggles and

ignored the ferocious sun to smile for the camera.

Logan grinned. In many ways, Claire was still quite sixteen.

It had been a good day. But returning to camp, dusty and

with the grit of ages between his teeth, Logan looked forward

to a quiet evening meal and collapsing in his sleeping

bag. His pack, containing the full five kilos of rock samples

allowed by Claire's collector's permit, he dropped with relief

by the licensed fire ring.

Studiously, Logan pretended not to see the flashing

light atop his tiny camp-transceiver. Until he touched the

play button, he could still plead ignorance--claim he'd been

out of reach somewhere on the mountain. Dammit. The

others in his consulting firm had been told, forcefully. He

wasn't to be disturbed except in an emergency!

Washing his face with a cloth dipped in a crevice

streamlet, Logan tried to be cynical. They probably want me

back "urgently" to clear somebody's drain spout. Returning

to the tent, he tossed the wash cloth over the little

red beacon.

But he couldn't dismiss it that easily. His imagination

betrayed him. While Claire rattled the cooking pot Logan

kept envisioning scenes of moving water. As they ate quietly

in the gathering dusk, he found himself--like some character

out of a Joseph Conrad tale--picturing inundations, delEARTH 77

uges, liquid calamities breaking through man's flimsy

barriers, setting all works, great and small, in peril.

It was incongruous, here in a parched land where one's

very pores gasped, where moisture was assessed in precious

droplets. But he had little control over the train of images

thrown up by his forboding unconscious. He pictured levees

bursting, rivers shifting . . . the Mississippi finally spilling

over the worn out dikes confining it, tearing through unprotected bayous to the sea.

Surrendering at last, he flung aside the tent flap and

entered to read the damned message. He remained inside for

some time.

Emerging at last, Logan saw that Claire had already

packed away the utensils and was dismantling her own

small shelter under the early stars. He blinked, wondering

how she knew.

"Where's the trouble?" she asked, as she rolled the soft

fabric tent into a tight ball.

"Uh . . . Spain. There were some strange earthquakes.

A couple of dams may be in danger."

She looked up, excitement in her eyes. "Can I come? It

won't interrupt my schoolwork. I can study by hyper."

Once again, Logan wondered what fine thing he must

have done to deserve a kid like this. "Maybe next time.

This'll be just a quick dash. Probably they just want reassurance, so I'll hold their hands a while and then hurry back."

"But Daddy . . ."

"Meanwhile, you've got to spend a lot of time on the

Net, catching up, or that college in Oregon could revoke

your remote status. Do you want to have to go back to high

school? At home in Louisiana? In person?"

Claire shivered. "High school. Ugh. All right. Next

time, then. So get your gear; I'll take care of your tent. If we

hurry we can make it to Drop Point by eight and catch the

last zep into Butte."

She grinned. "Hey. It'll be fun. I've never done a three

point five traverse in the dark before. Maybe it'll even be

scary."

D

A dust wafts through the hills and valleys of Iceland.

The people of the island nation sweep it from their porches.

78 DAVIDBRIN

They wipe it from their windows. And they try not to scowl when

tourists exclaim, pointing in delight at the red and orange twilight glow cast by suspended topsoil, scattering the setting sun.

Stalwart Northmen originally settled the land, whose rough

democracy lasted longer than any other. For most of twelve centuries their descendants disproved the lie that says liberty must

always be lost to aristocrats or demagogues.

It was a noble and distinguished heritage. And yet, the founders' principal legacy to their descendants was not that freedom, but the dust.

Whose fault was it? Would it be fair to blame ninth century

settlers, who knew nothing of science or ecological management?

In the press of daily life, with a family to feed, what man of

such times could have foreseen that his beloved sheep were

gradually destroying the very land he planned leaving to his children?

Deterioration was so gradual that it went unnoticed, except

in the inevitable tales of oldsters, who could be counted on

to claim the hillsides had been much greener in their day.

Was there ever a time when grandparents didn't speak so?

It took a breakthrough ... a new way of thinking ... for

a much later generation to step back at last and see what had

happened year after year, century after century, to the denuded

land ... a slow but steady rape by degrees.

But by then it appeared already too late.

A dust drifts through the hills and valleys of Iceland. The people of the island nation do more than simply sweep it from their

porches. They show it to their children and tell them it is life floating in ghostlike hazes down the mountain slopes. It is their land.

Families adopt an acre here, a hectare there. Some have

been tending the same patch since early in the twentieth century, devoting weekends to watering and shoring up some

stretch of heath or gorse or scrub pine.

Pilots on commuter flights routinely open their windows and

toss grass seeds over the rocky landscape, in hopes a few will

find purchase.

Towns and cities reclaim the produce of their toilets, collecting sewage as if it were a precious resource. As it is. For after

treatment, the soil of the night goes straight to the barren slopes, to succor surviving trees against the bitter wind.

EARTH 79

A dust colors the clouds above the seas of Iceland.

At the island's southern fringe, a cluster of new volcanoes

spills fresh lava into the sea, sending steam spirals curling upward.

Tourists gawp at the spectacle and speak in envy of the

Icelanders' "growing" land. But when natives look to the sky,

they see a haze of diminishment that could not be replaced by

anything as simple or vulgar as mere magma.

A dusty wind blows away the hills of Iceland. At sea, a few

plankton benefit, temporarily, from the unexpected nurturance.

Then, as they are wont to do, they die and their carcasses rain

as sediment upon the patient ocean bottom. In time the layers

will creep underground, to melt and glow and eventually burst

forth again, to bring another island to life.

Short-term calamities are nothing to the master recycling

system. In the end, it reuses even dust.

Nelson Crayson had arrived in the Ndebele canton of

B Kuwenezi with two changes of clothes, a satchel of

I stolen Whatifs, and an inflated sense of his own impor-

0 tance. All were gone by the time, nine months later, he

S gathered his tools by the Level Fourteen Ape-iary and

P stepped through the hissing airlock into a bitter-bright,

H air-conditioned savannah. By then, of course, it was far

E too late to regret the reckless way he'd spent the profits

R from his smuggled software. Too late to seek another

E career path.

By then, Nelson felt irrevocably committed to shoveling

baboon shit for a living.

It was not a highly regarded occupation. In fact, the

keepers would have assigned robots the job, if not for the

monkeys' annoying habit of nibbling plastic. As yet, robots

lacked the kind of survival instincts Nelson had been born

with--courtesy of a million years of frightened ancestors.

At least, each of those ancestors had survived long

enough to beget another in the chain leading to him. In his

former life Nelson had never given much thought to that.

But of late he'd grown to appreciate the accomplishment,

especially as his employers reassigned him from habitat to

habitat--catering to one wild and unpredictable species after

another.

Most of his first months had been spent in the sprawl80 DAVIDBRIN

ing main ark--Kuwenezi Canton's chief contribution to the

World Salvation Project, where scientists and volunteers recreated entire ecosystems under multi-tiered, vaulting

domes, where gazelles and wildebeest ran across miniature

ranges that looked and felt almost real. Nelson's first task

had been to carry fodder to the ungulates and report when

any looked sick. To his surprise, it wasn't all that hard. In

fact, boredom made him ask for a more demanding job. And

so they named him dung inspector.

Great. I had to open my mouth. If I ever make it home

to Canada, you can bet I'll tell them what kind of hospitality

you can expect in South Africa, these days.

It was apparently no different here in ark four--a

tapered wedge of steel and reinforced glass two miles from

Kuwenezi's main tower, sitting atop the canton's long-abandoned

gold mine. Ark four was the gene-crafters' lab, where

new types were sought that might endure the sleeting ultraviolet

outside or adapt to the creeping deserts and shifting

rains.

Nelson had nursed a fantasy that his reassignment here

was a promotion. But then the director had handed him the

familiar electroprod and sampler, and sent him to face more

baboons.

/ hate baboonsI I can feel them lookin' at me. It's like

I can tell what they're thinking.

Nelson did not like what he imagined going on in the

minds of baboons.

These monkeys were different at least. He could tell

soon after pushing into sight of a copse of grey-green acacia

trees, their leaves drooping in the dusty heat. Clustered beneath those gnarled limbs were about forty creatures, darker

than the tawny beasts he had known in the main ark, and

noticeably larger, too. They moved lazily, as sensible creatures

would under the noon sun--even moderated by the

expanse of reinforced glass overhead. Only idiotic humans

like Dr. B'Keli insisted on work in conditions like these.

Procrastinating, Nelson looked the troop over. Perhaps

they weren't completely natural baboons at all. Nelson had

heard rumors about some experiments . . .

His nostrils flared as fickle air currents wafted his way.

They sure smelled like baboons. And when he shuffled

through the sharp savannah grass toward them, Nelson soon

knew that any genetic differences had to be minor. They

EARTH 81

still moved about on four feet, tails flicking, stopping to pry

open nuts or groom each other or snarl and cuff their neighbors,

jockeying for status and dominance within the stepped

hierarchy of the troop.

Oh, they're baboons, all right.

As soon as he came in sight, the troop rearranged itself,

with strong young males taking posts at the periphery. Grizzled,

powerful elders rose up on haunches to watch him

nonchalantly.

Nelson knew these creatures lived mostly as vegetarians.

He also knew they ate meat whenever they could. Until

the collapse of the planetary ozone layer and the accompanying

weather changes, baboons had been among the most

formidable wild species in Africa. It had amazed Nelson

when he first overheard, a month ago, one scientist commenting

that mankind had evolved alongside such adversaries.

I'll never call a caveman stupid again, he vowed as one

of the creatures lazily bared impressive fangs at him. Paranoid,

yes. Cavemen must've been real paranoid. But paranoia

ain't so dumb.

At least the troop appeared calm and well fed. But that

was deceptive. Back in the main ark Nelson had come to

compare life in a baboon troop with an ongoing--often violent--soap opera without words.

He saw one senior male rock on his haunches, watching

a pregnant female seek tasty grubs under nearby rocks.

Rhythmically smacking his lips, the patriarch pulled in his

chin and flattened his ears, exposing white eyelid patches.

The female responded by ambling over to sit by him, facing

away. Methodically, he began picking through her fur, removing

dirt, bits of dead skin, and the occasional parasite.

Another female approached and began nudging the expectant

mother to move over and share the male's attention.

The screeching fit that ensued was brief and inconsequential

as such things went. In a minute the two had been cuffed

into silence and all three monkeys turned away, minding

their own business again.

Nelson's job was to sample monkey droppings for a routine microflora survey--whatever that was. As he approached, he recalled what Dr. B'Keli had told him after his

first, unpleasant encounter with baboons.

82 DAVIDBRIN

"Don't ever look them in the eye. That was exactly the wrong

thing to do! The dominant males will take it as a direct challenge."

"Fine," Nelson had answered, wincing as the nurse sutured

two narrow bites on his posterior. "Now you tell me!"

But of course, it really had all been in the introductory

tapes he was supposed to have watched, back when his

funds first ran out and he found himself willing to take a

job, any job. Those painful bites reinforced the then startling

revelation that tape learning might actually have practical

value, after all.

Tutored by experience, he now kept the electroprod

ready, but pointed away in a nonthreatening manner. With

his other hand. Nelson pushed the sticklike dung sampler

into a brown mass half hidden in the grass. Buzzing flies rose

indignantly.

/ don't like Dr. B'Keli. For one thing, despite his "authentic"

sounding name, the biologist's caramel features

were suspiciously pale. He even had light-colored eyes.

Of course whites could legally work in all but two of

the Federation's cantons. And nobody else, from the director

on down, seemed to care that a blanke held high position

among the Ndebele. Still, Nelson nursed resentment over

the subtle discrimination his settler parents used to suffer

from whites, back in the Yukon new town of his birth, and

had imagined the tables would be turned here, where blacks

ruled and even U.N. rights inspectors were held at bay.

Now he knew how naive he'd been, expecting these

people to welcome him like a long-lost brother. In fact,

Kuwenezi was a lot like those boom town suburbs of White

Horse. Both seethed with ambition and indolence, with rising

and falling hopes . . . and with authority figures insisting

on hard work if you wanted to eat.

Hard work had turned his parents' filthy refugee camp

into bustling, prosperous Little Nigeria--commercial center

for the new farming districts scattered across the thawing

tundra. Little Nigeria's immigrant merchants and shopkeepers

turned their backs on Africa. They sang "Oh, Canada"

and cheered the Voyageurs on the teli. His folks worked

dawn to dusk, sent money to his sister at that Vancouver

college, and politely pretended not to hear when some

drunkard patronizingly "welcomed" them to a frontier that

belonged as much to them as to any beer-swilling Canuck

land speculator.

EARTH 83

Well, I didn't forget. And I won't.

The sampler finished digesting its bit of dung and signaled.

Nelson shook loose the brown remnant. After the

initial sensation of his arrival the baboons had settled down

again. Calm prevailed. Momentarily, at least.

Strange, how over the last few weeks he had grown so

much more confident in his ability to "read" the moods of

his animal charges. Behaviors that had been opaque to him

before were now clear, such as their never-ending struggle

over hierarchy. The word was used repeatedly in those

dreary indoctrination tapes, but it had taken personal contact

to start seeing all the ladders of power running through

baboon society.

The males' struggles for dominance were noisy, garish

affairs. Their bushy manes inflated to make them seem twice

their size. That, plus snarling displays of teeth, usually caused one or the other to back down. Still, over in the main ark Nelson had witnessed one male savannah baboon spilling

a rival's entrails across the gray earth. The red-muzzled

victor screamed elation across the waving grasses.

It had taken a bit longer to realize that females, too,

battled over hierarchy . . . seldom as extravagantly as the

males, and involving not so much simple breeding rights as

food and status. Still, their rancor could be longer lasting,

more resolute.

The troop's dominant male stared at him, a huge brute

massing at least thirty-five kilos. Scars along the creature's

grizzled flanks sketched testimony of former battles. Wherever

he moved, others quickly got out of his way. The patriarch's

expression was serene.

Now there's a bloke who gets respect.

Nelson couldn't help thinking of his own triumphs and

more frequent failures back in White Horse, where the flash

of a knife sometimes decided a boy's claim to the "tribal

pinnacle"--or even his life. Girls, too, had their ways of

cutting each other down. Then there were all the power

pyramids of school and town, of work and society. Hierarchies. They all had that in common.

Moreover, not one of those hierarchies had appeared to

want or value him. It was an uncomfortable insight, and

Nelson hated the baboons all the more for making it so

clear.

Nelson's sweaty grip on the electroprod tightened as a

84 DAVIDBRIN

pair of young adults, maybe twenty kilos each, settled down

a few meters away to pick through each others' fur. One

adolescent turned and yawned at him, gaping wide enough

to swallow Nelson's leg up to his calf. Nelson edged away

some distance before resuming with another pile of turds.

"/ think I might like to work with animals," he had

told them when he first arrived at Kuwenezi, his one-way air

ticket used up and his supply of bootlegged Whatifs spread

across the placement officer's desk.

Shortly before making the fateful decision to come

here, Nelson had seen a documentary about the canton's

scientists--Africans fighting to save Africa. It was a romantic

image. So when asked what work he'd like to do as a new

citizen, the first thing to come to mind had been the Ark

Project. "Of course I'll want to invest my money first. I

may prefer to work part-time, y'know. "

The placement officer had glanced down at the software

capsules Nelson had pirated from the White Horse office of

the CBC. "Your contribution suffices for provisional admission,

" he had said. "And I think we can find you suitable

work."

Nelson grimaced at the recollection. "Right. Shoveling

monkey shit. That's real suitable." But his money was gone

now, lavished on instant new friends who proved stylishly

fickle when the juice ran out. And back in Canada the CBC

had sworn out a local warrant for his arrest.

The sampler beeped. Nelson wiped its tip and glanced

back at the two young males. They had been joined by a

small female carrying a baby. As he moved on in search of

more dung, they followed him.

Nelson kept them in sight while he probed the next

pile. The young female looked fidgety. She kept glancing

back at the troop. After a couple of minutes, she approached

one of the males and held out her baby to him.

After six months in the arks, Nelson had a pretty good

idea what the young mother was trying to do. Adult baboons

were often fascinated by babies. Top-rank females, tough mamas Nelson called them, used this to their advantage, letting others help care for their infants, as if granting

their inferiors a special favor.

Other females feared uninvited attention to their offspring.

Sometimes the one taking the baby never gave it

EARTH 85

back again. So a low-status mother sometimes tried to recruit

protectors.

Still, this was the first time Nelson had ever seen the

attempt so direct. The infant cooed appealingly at the big

male, and its mother made grooming gestures. But the male

only inspected the baby idly and then turned away to

scratch after insects in the soil.

Nelson blinked, suddenly experiencing one of those unexpected,

unwanted moments of vivid recollection. It was a

memory of one Saturday night two years ago, and a girl he

had met at the New Lagos Club.

The first part of that encounter had been perfection.

She seemed to dial in on him from across the room, and

when they danced her moves were as smooth as a rapitrans

rail and just as electric. Then there were her eyes. In them

he was so sure he read a promise of enthusiasm for whoever

won her. They left early. Escorting her home to her tiny

coldwater flat. Nelson had felt alive with anticipation.

Meeting her elderly aunt in the kitchen hadn't been

promising, but the girl simply sent the old woman off to

bed. He remembered reaching for her then. But she held

him off and said, "I'll be right back. "

While waiting, he heard soft noises from the next room.

The rustle of fabric heightened his sense of expectation. But

when she emerged again, she was still fully dressed, and in

her arms she held a two-year-old child.

"Isn't he cute?" she said, as the infant rubbed his eyes

and looked up from Nelson's lap. "Everyone says he's the

best-behaved little boy in White Horse. "

Nelson had shelved his sexual hopes at once. His memory

was vague about what followed, but he recalled a long,

embarrassed silence, punctuated by fumbling words as he

maneuvered the child off his lap and worked his way toward

the door. But one image he recalled later with utter clarity--

it was that last, unnerving, patient expression on the young

woman's face before he turned and fled.

Nelson realized later she'd been worse than crazy.

She'd had a plan. And for some reason he came away from

that episode feeling he was the one who had failed.

The little mother baboon turned to look directly at him

and Nelson shivered at a strange moment of deja vu. Summoning

B'Keli's injunction against direct eye contact, he

found much to do, searching for more piles to check.

86 DAVIDBRIN

The expanse of superhard glass overhead might keep

out the ultraviolet, but it hardly eased the savannah heat.

Artificial mimicry of the greenhouse effect made it stifling,

in spite of the blowing fans. As he had been doing for a few

weeks now, Nelson took humidity and temperature readings

from his belt monitor and noted the direction of the desultory

breeze. Slowly, he was coming to recognize the way

even a man-made environment had its "seasons," its "natural"

responses to unnatural controls.

His sampling path soon took him toward the edge of the

habitat where slanted panes met the rim wall. Trays of

cables circuited the habitat two meters high. Through the

transparent barrier he could see the dun hillsides and sunburnt

wheat fields of a land once called Rhodesia, then Zimbabwe,

and several other names before finally becoming

Ndebele Canton of the Federation of Southern Africa.

It wasn't like any "Africa" Nelson had seen while growing

up, lying prone in front of the B-movie channel. No

elephants. No rhinos. Certainly no Tarzan here. At least

he'd had enough sense not to flee Canada for his parents'

lamented homeland. Everyone knew what had become of

Nigeria. The rains that had abandoned this land now

drenched the Bight of Africa, engulfing abandoned cities

there.

Deserts or drowning. Africa just could not get a break.

Closer in view were the sealed chambers below this one,

a series of glistening ziggurat terraces leading step by step

toward the dusty ground, each sheltering a different habitat,

a different midget ecosphere rescued from the ruined continent.

The coterie of curious baboons in his trail had grown by

the time Nelson came closest to the glassy wall. They went

about their business--eating, grooming, scuffling--but all

the time watching him with a nonchalant fascination that

drew them in his wake. Each time he finished sampling a

pile of feces, several monkeys would poke at the disturbed

mass, perhaps curious what he found so attractive about ordinary

turds.

Why are they following me? he wondered, perplexed

by the monkeys' behavior, so unlike that of their cousins in

the main ark. Once, the alpha male stared directly at Nelson,

who was careful not to accept the implied challenge.

EARTH 87

Nervously, he realized the entire troop now lay between

him and the corridor airlock.

The little mother and her baby remained his closest

adherents. Nelson noticed her anxiety grow as five larger

females approached, several of them clearly high-status matriarchs, whose sleek infants rode their backs like lords. One

of the newcomers handed her baby to a helper and then

began sidling toward the solitary mother.

The young one screeched defiance, clutching her infant

close and backing away. Her eyes darted left and right, but

none of the creatures nearby seemed more than vaguely interested

in her plight. Certainly none of the big, lazy males

offered any succor.

Nelson felt a twinge of sympathy. But what could he

do? Rather than watch, he turned and hurried several meters

to another set of droppings. He wiped his brow on his shirtsleeve and put his back to the blazing sun. In the muggy

heat daydreams transported him back to his own room in

the cool northlands, with his own bed, his own teli, his own

little fridge stuffed with icy Labatts, and his mother's pungent

Yoruba cooking wafting upstairs from the kitchen. The

reverie was pleasant beyond all expectation, but it shattered

in an instant when he felt a sudden sharp tug on his pants

leg. /

Nelson swiveled, holding the stun-prod in both shaking

hands. Then he exhaled an oath. It was only the little female

again--now wide-eyed and sweat-damp, wearing a grimace

of fear. Still, she did not back away when he shook the

rod at her. Rather, she edged forward, trembling and awkward

on two feet, clasping her infant with one paw while in

the other she held forth something small and brown.

Nelson broke into nervous laughter. "Great! That's all I

need. She's offering me shit!"

Flies buzzed as she shuffled another step, extending her

piquant gift.

"C'wan, beat it, eh? I got enough to sample. And it's

supposed t'be undisturbed shit, get it?"

She seemed to understand at least part of it. The rejection

part. With some retained dignity she spilled the feces

onto the dry earth and wiped her paw on grass stems, all the

time watching him.

The other monkeys had backed away when he shouted.

Now they returned to their affairs as if nothing had hap88 DAVIDBRIN

pened. At first glance, one might guess they were content, foraging and lazing in the warm afternoon. But Nelson could sense undercurrents of tension. The patriarch's nostrils

flared as he sniffed, then resumed grooming one of his

underlings.

This is one troop of insane monkeys, all right. Nelson

wondered if there were still openings hauling hay to giraffes.

With a resigned sigh he moved on, calculating how many

more piles of crap he had to cover before at last he could get

out of here, shower, and go nurse a beer or two--or four.

Screams suddenly erupted behind him, shrill peals of

panic and fury. Nelson turned, his nerves finally tipped over

into anger. "Now I've had enough ..."

The words choked off as a small maelstrom of dark

brown landed in his arms. Flailing for balance, he nearly fell

over as a screeching creature clawed at his dungarees,

scratching his shoulders and arms. Nelson staggered backward

swearing, trying to protect his face and throw the

baboon off. But the creature only scrambled around behind

his shoulders, enclosing his neck in a fierce constriction.

Nelson wheezed. "Damn stupid crazy . . ." Then, just

as suddenly, he forgot all about the small monkey on his

back. He gaped at the entire troop, now arrayed in a half

circle around him.

Moments ticked by, punctuated by the pounding of his

heart. Most of the dark animals merely watched, as if this

were great entertainment. The lead male licked himself lazily.

But facing Nelson directly now were five large, grimacing

beasts who appeared to have something much more active

in mind. They paced back and forth, turning and

barking at him, tails flicking expressively.

The troop's dominant females, he knew quickly. But

why were they angry with him? The matriarchs' band

moved forward. Nelson did not like the gleam he saw in

their eyes.

"Stay . . . stay back," he gasped, and brandished the

stunner-prod. At least he thought it was the prod, until a

second glance showed it to be the sampler. Where had the

damned prod gone!

He saw it at last several meters away. The biggest male

was pressing his broad, multicolored snout against the white

plastic, sniffing it. Cursing, he realized he must have

dropped his only weapon in that initial moment of panic.

Nelson had more immediate problems than recovering

Kuwenezi Ark property. Less savagely intimidating than

adult males, the females nonetheless growled impressively.

Their teeth shone saliva-bright, and he knew why even leopards

and hyenas did not dare attack baboons in a group.

It wasn't hard to figure who it was cowering on his

back, pressing her infant between them. In desperation, the

little mother had apparently decided to enlist his "protection"

whether he offered it or not. He stepped sideways, in

the direction of the exit, speaking soothingly to the angry

females. "Now . . . take it easy, eh? Peace an' love . . .

uh, nature is harmony, right?"

They didn't seem particularly interested in reason, nor

in slogans borrowed from the Earth Mother movement.

They spread to cut him off.

/ heard they can be pretty mean in their fights between

females . . . I even saw one kill the baby of another.

But this is ridiculous! Don't they care I'm a man?

We feed them. We made this place, to save them!

He realized with a sinking sensation that only one of

these monkeys had any respect for him. And that shivering

creature hac( turned to him only because nobody more important

gave a damn.

Nelson looked around. One of the outer airlocks was just thirty meters away, opening onto the roof of the habitat below. He had no sun hat or goggles, but could easily stand

the harsh daylight long enough to dash to another entrance.

He began sidestepping that way slowly, maintaining a soothing

monologue. "That's right . . . I'll just be going', then

... no need for trouble, eh?"

He was halfway to his destination when the following

monkeys seemed to grasp his intent. In a blur, two of them

moved quickly to cut off that escape. Together, the pair of

irate females blocking his path didn't even equal his mass,

but their tough hides looked all but impervious while Nelson's

own skin, already throbbing and bleeding from his little

passenger's unintended damage, seemed tender and

useless against those savage, glistening canines.

Both airlocks were out, then. A utilities tray circuited

the wall at about man height--the only conceivable refuge

in sight. Nelson dropped the sampler and ran for it.

90 DAVIDBRIN

Their angry screeches amplified off the reflecting glass.

His pursuers' rapid footfalls paced the pounding of his heart

as Nelson poured everything he had into reaching the wall.

The sound of snapping jaws triggered a jolt of adrenaline. He

took two final strides and leaped for the conduit tray, his

fingers tearing for a hold on the slippery metal mesh. Fangs

snagged his pants and laid a bloody runnel along his right

calf as he swung his legs up at the last moment.

As soon as he was wrapped around the tray, his little

passenger scrambled over him to clamber onto the cluster of

pipes and cables. One foot squashed his nose as she hoisted

her infant onto a nearby stanchion, but Nelson was too exhausted

to do more than just hang there while the creatures

below leaped and snapped at him some more, missing his

rear end by inches. Inside, he had left only enough energy to

curse himself for an idiot.

They gave me a chance! he realized. The matriarchs

had waited after the young female leaped on him, to see

what he'd do. He could have rejected her then--could have

pried her loose and put her down.

Hell, all I'd have had to do was sit down . . . she'd

have had to run for it.

Of course, the conclusion was inevitable anyway. The

little monkey didn't have a chance. But at least it wouldn't

have involved him. Now Nelson understood the other baboons'

anger. He'd violated his own neutrality. He had

taken sides.

When he finally caught his breath, he wriggled and

puffed his way atop the narrow platform. Seated a meter

away, his unwelcome charge licked her baby and watched

him. When he moved to sit up, she backed off a bit to give

him room.

"You," he panted, pointing at her, "are a lot of trouble."

To his surprise she turned her back on him in a motion

he recognized. She was asking him to groom her!

"Fat chance o' that," he muttered.

Morosely, he looked around. The troop seemed content

simply to observe for a while. The big male examining Nelson's

stunner hadn't found the trigger--worse luck--but he had dragged it halfway to the acacia grove before losing interest and abandoning it. Now the nearest exit was much

closer than his weapon.

The cabal of high-status females sat calmly on their

haunches, looking up at him. One by one they left briefly to

check on their own infants--in "day care" with lower-status

monkeys--then quickly rejoined the impromptu posse-

lynch mob.

Nelson turned and pounded the thick pane of barrier

glass behind him in frustration. A low hum was the only

response . . . that and bruised knuckles. The Bangkok

crystal sheeting was incredibly tough. He didn't even contemplate trying to break it.

Beyond lay lower terraces of the ark tower, each sheltered

beneath still more tightly-sealed glass. Nelson could

make out forest growth within the ecosystem just below this

one. In addition to preserving a patch of jungle, it provided

part of the passive atmosphere regeneration that made ark

four all but self-sufficient.

Movement caught his eye. Along the treetops below he

saw people walking through the forest canopy, along a catwalk

skyway. Nelson squinted, and recognized both the

dark face of the ark director and the coffee features of Dr.

B'Keli. They were showing off the new artificial ecosphere to

a white woman, small and frail and quite elderly. From their

expressions, they seemed eager to make a good impression.

She nodded, and at one point reached out to pluck a leaf and

rub it between her hands.

"Hey! Up here! Look up here!" Nelson beat the glass--

an effort that seemed required given his circumstances,

though he had no real hope of being heard.

Sure enough, the group strolled on, oblivious to the

drama unfolding over their heads.

Damn them! Damn the arks. Damn the Salvation Project

1. and damn me for ever getting myself into this

mess!

At that moment Nelson loathed everybody he could

think of--from twentieth-century humanity, who had

wrecked Earth's delicate balance, to the voters and bureaucrats

of the twenty-first, who spent fortunes trying to save

what was left, to his caveman ancestors, who had been stupid

enough to grow big, useless brains that everybody was

always trying to cram with book learning, when what a guy really needed were claws, and big teeth, and skin as tough as old leather!

He remembered the leader of the Bantus, a "youth

92 DAVIDBRIN

club" he had tried to join back in White Horse. It wasn't

supposed to be run like an old-style urban gang, but that was

how it turned out anyway. For months Nelson had come

home from an endless series of "initiations," each time more

bruised than the last--until it finally dawned on him that

he fust wasn 'I wanted . . . that his only use to them was

as an outlet for their "organized group activity"--the tribe

strengthening its internal bonding by beating up on someone

else.

He glanced across the prairie at the top male baboon, so

serene and in charge, yawning complacently and ferociously.

Nelson hated the patriarch and envied him.

// / had a hide like that .../// had fangs . . .

His attention was drawn back by the shaking of his unsteady

platform. Nelson turned to see that the little female

was hopping up and down, grimacing, tugging at his sleeve.

"Stop that!" he cried. "This thing isn't built to take that

kind of . . ." Then he looked beyond and saw what had her

so upset.

Her foes must have found one of the access ladders. Or

maybe they had boosted each other, forming a multimonkey

pyramid. However they managed it, three of the largest were

now picking their way along the cable tray, heading in this

direction.

"Oh hell," he sighed. The young mother backed against

him. Her infant's dark eyes were wide with fear.

Nelson glanced down at the ground, and saw with surprise

that the way was clear below! As he watched, the head

male and his followers cleared a path, cuffing other baboons

aside. The alpha male looked up at Nelson then, and tilted

his head.

With uncanny insight, Nelson suddenly understood.

He had only to jump, and he could run all the way to the

airlock unmolested before the crazy females caught up with

him!

Perhaps. But he'd never make it encumbered. He exchanged

a look with the bull. That, it seemed, was part of

the bargain. He was not to interfere in the natural working

out of their social order. Nelson nodded, comprehending.

He waited till the small female next to him was fully engaged,

all her attention given to answering the threatening

grimaces of her stalkers. At that moment Nelson slipped

over the edge.

EARTH 93

It was a bad landing. He came to his feet gasping at a

sharp twinge in his ankle. Hurriedly, though, he hopped

away several meters before pausing to glance back.

Nobody was following him. In fact, the troop mostly

faced the other way, watching the drama reach its climax on

the ledge overhead. The bull appeared to have dismissed

him completely now that he was leaving the scene.

Burdened by her infant, though, the small mother

could not follow him. She stared after him instead, blinking

with a mute disappointment he could read only too well.

Then she had no time for anything but immediate concerns;

with her infant on her back, she turned to bare her teeth at

her assailants.

Nelson backed away another two steps toward the

safety of the exit, now beckoning only twenty or so meters

away. Still, he couldn't tear his eyes away. He was captivated

by the small baboon's stand, grimacing final defiance

at her foes, holding them back with brave lunges. It was an

effort she could not keep up for long.

From experience, he knew the other females did not

seek her death, only the baby's. It was a bit of savagery he

had not questioned until today. Now though, for the very

first time, Nelson wondered . . . why.

It was so cruel. So awful. It reminded him of human nastiness.'And yet, in all the time he had been here, he had never asked the experts about this or any other matter. It

had been as if ... as if to do so would be to admit too

openly the ignorance he had nurtured for so long. His frail,

rigid facade of cynicism could not bear curiosity. Once he

started asking questions, where would it stop?

Nelson felt a pressure building in his head. It couldn't

be restrained. ...

"Why?" he demanded aloud, and felt his voice catch at

the sound.

Protecting her child, the mother backed away awkwardly,

shrieking at her enemies.

"Why's it like this!" he asked, to no one present save

himself.

Barely aware of what he was doing, Nelson found himself

limping forward. He felt eyes track him as he held up

his arms.

"Hey, you!" he called. "I'm back. Come on

down ..."

94 DAVIDBRIN

He had no need to repeat himself. The mother monkey

grabbed her baby and launched herself from the doomed

redoubt, landing in his arms as a taut bundle of scrawny

brown fur, clawing for purchase on his already bleeding

shoulders. Nelson hurriedly stepped away, fully resigned

that now there was no way he'd reach the airlock in time.

Sure enough, when he glanced back a crowd of angry baboons

were catching up fast. The original pursuers had now

been joined by several more irate monkeys, at least two of

them large, pink-faced males, all dashing his way, screaming.

Nelson did not bother trying to run any further. He

turned and scanned the ground for anything--anything at

all--until his gaze fell upon a white rod.

His dung sampler.

Sighing that it wasn't even the inadequate shock-prod,

Nelson snatched it up, carrying the motion through just in

time to catch a leaping baboon in the snout. The creature

screamed and tumbled whimpering away.

The females scattered, dispersing on all sides. Dark eyes

peered at him through the tall grass.

Panting, blinking in surprise, Nelson wondered. Was

that it? Hey, maybe all it takes is the right bluff!

Then he saw why the females had given up so easily.

They were moving aside to make room for a new force.

Rumbling with a low rage, the patriarch and his entourage

arrived. Nine big males, their manes fully inflated, ambled

with patient assuredness toward him and his

frightened, weary charge. Their pace might be confident, but

flecks of saliva dripped from their curled lips. Nelson read

their eyes, and knew them for killers.

And yet, in that same suspended moment, Nelson had

time to feel something he had never before imagined ... a

strange, crystal calm. As if this was all somehow familiar. As

if he had been in this place, in this very predicament, many

times before.

We were all like this, once, he realized, feeling the

weight of his makeshift cudgel. White, black, yellow . . .

men, women . . . our ancestors all shared this, long ago ...

Back when Africa was new . . .

Human beings had changed the world, for well and ill.

Would their efforts now save what was left? Nelson couldn't

begin to guess.

EARTH 95

All he knew for sure was that for the first time he cared.

Nelson and the little mother shared communion in a

moment's eye contact. Leaving her baby clinging to his

shoulder, she slipped down to stand beside his left knee,

guarding his flank.

The pack slowed and circled. The bull shook his head,

as if reading something different in Nelson's stance, in his

eyes. But Nelson suddenly knew the creature saw only part

of it.

We humans almost wrecked the whole world. Humans

may yet save it . . .

You don't mess with guys who can do shit like that.

"Okay, it's nine against two," he said, hefting his rude

club, smacking its reassuring weight in the palm of his left

hand.

"That sounds about right."

When at last they charged, Nelson was ready for them.

D Running Census: Net datura request [D ArBQP

9782534782]

U.S. Population Over Age 65

Year Percent

\

1900 4.0%

1980 11.3%

2038 20.4%

Voting Clout of U.S. Citizen Age Groups

Citizen Age Group Percent Who Vote Political

"Clout

Factor"

18-25 19% 5

26-35 43% 23

36-52 62% 39

53-65 78% 44

66-99 93% 71

96 DAVIDBRIN

National Comparisons

Nation Citizenry Seniors' Voting Clout

Over 65

Japan 26.1 % 87

U.S.A. 20.4% 71

Han China 20.2% 79

Russian S.F.S.R. 19.1% 81

Yakutsk S.S.R. 12.1%* 37

Yukon Province, 11.7%* 31

Canada

Sea State 10.0% 19

Republic of 6.2%* 12

Patagonia

'Biased by effects of immigration.

"Interactive and remote voting outlawed; polling allowed in person only, at voting stations.

The rattling truck stank to high heaven.

L It wasn't just the fumes from its gasoline engine--

I Logan Eng was used to riding high-priority construction

T equipment. Fragrant, high-octane aromatics were as fall miliar as the grit of countless deserts or the metal tang 0 of grease and drilling mud. Even the sweat fetor pervadS

ing the cracked upholstery spoke pungently of honor-

P able work.

H But in addition to all that, Logan's driver was a toE

bacco addict. Worse, he didn't take his nicotine in pills

R or spray. No, Enrique Vasquez actually smoked paper-

E wrapped bundles of shredded weed, inhaling the sooty

vapors with deep sighs of satisfaction.

Logan eyed in unwilling fascination the glowing ember

that seemed ever about to fall off the tip of Enrique's cigarette.

So far in this lurching ride across rugged Basque countryside,

that mesmerizing bit of ash hadn't yet set off

flaming catastrophe. But he could not help picturing it landing

amid the floorboards, there igniting a great ball of exploding

petrol fumes.

Of course Logan knew better. (With his forebrain!)

Only a generation ago, over a billion cigarettes had been

consumed each year. And back in TwenCen, the rate had

reached staggering trillions. If the things were as unsafe as

they looked, not a forest or city would be left standing.

"You will want to stay for our National Day celebrations!"

Enrique bellowed to be heard over the engine and

rattling springs. The hand holding the cigarette draped the

open window casing, leaving the other to handle both steering

and shifting. The complaining gearbox set Logan's teeth

on edge in sympathy.

"I wish I could!" he shouted back. "But my job in Iberia's

finished tomorrow. I'm due back in Louisiana--"

"Too bad! It would you make happy. Glorious fireworks

we'll see! Everyone drunk gets. Then the young men,

fun with the bulls have!"

The Basque were the oldest people in Europe, and

proud of their heritage. Some said their language came from

the Neolithic hunters who first claimed this land from the

retreating ice. In a Bilbao museum, Logan had seen replicas

of tiny boats Basque sailors used long ago, to hunt whales

98 DAVIDBRIN

out on the rude Atlantic. They must be very brave or suicidal, he thought, then and now.

Logan gasped as his guide swerved, sending plumes of

dust and gravel billowing toward an onrushing lumber

hauler. The drivers exchanged obscene gestures with a vehemence

that seemed quite sociable, in its macho way. Enrique

shouted parting insults as the pickup roared along the rocky

verge of a hundred-meter drop. Logan swallowed hard.

They sped past tumbled stones that must once have

been some ancient wall or boundary. Conifer forests blurred

where hardscrabble farms and pastures once covered these

slopes. Here and there, commercial quick-pine gave way to

newer stands of cedar and oak, planted in grudging compliance

with the Balanced Reforestation Treaty, though their

slower growth would profit only future generations.

Enrique grinned at him, all traces of indignation already

forgotten. "So. Have they, the dams' safety, determined

yet?"

Logan managed to parse the strange version of Simglish

they taught here. He nodded.

"I spent a week in Badajoz, going over every datum

within two hundred klicks of the quake epicenter. Those

dams will last a long while yet."

Enrique grunted. "In Castile they are good engineers.

Not like down in Granada, where the land they are letting

go to hell." He spat out the window.

Logan refrained comment. Never get involved in interregional

prejudices was a principal rule. Anyway, nobody

could stop the climate from changing, since the Sahara had

vaulted the Straits to begin southern Europe's desertification.

Blame it on the greenhouse effect, Logan thought. Or

the shifting Gulf Stream. Hell, blame it on gnomes. Let the

scientists figure out causes. What matters to me is how

much we can save.

Logan closed his eyes and tried to sleep. After all, if

Enrique sent the truck over a cliff, watching it happen

wouldn't change it. Anyway, if he'd had ambitions to live

forever he'd never have become a field engineer. He hardly

noticed the rhythmic jouncing of his skull against the metal

door frame--a relatively trivial irritant. Dozing, he found

himself recalling how Daisy--his former wife and Claire's

mother--used to approve of his professional plans.

EARTH 99

You'll fight the system from within, she had told him

when they were students and in love. Meanwhile, I'll battle

it from the outside.

The plan had sounded bold and perfect then. Neither of

them had figured on the way people change ... he by

learning compromise, she by growing more adamant with

each passing year.

Maybe she only married me to get at her family. It

wasn't the first time the thought had occurred to Logan. At

Tulane, she had said he was the only boy who seemed completely

unimpressed with her money and name--which was

true enough. After all, financiers just own things, while a

skilled person with a job he loves has much, much more.

How strange then, years later, for Daisy to accuse him

of being a "tool of rich-pig land rapists." All that time it had

been in his head that he was keeping his side of their bargain,

forsaking lucrative deals in favor of confronting incompetence

in the field, compelling governments and egotistic

planners with grandiose schemes to look more than a decade

ahead, to work with nature instead of always against her.

Yes, he also had been motivated by a joy of craft and the

pleasure of solving real, palpable puzzles. Was that a betrayal?

Can't a man have several loves at once--a wife, a

child, and the world?

For Daisy, apparently, there could be only one. The

world. And on her terms.

The truck passed out of the forest, zooming along dusty

headlands. Sunlight reconnoitered the edges of Logan's sunglasses as his thoughts drifted randomly. The zigzag speckles

under his eyelids reminded him at one point of waves on a

seismograph.

Queer waves, the professor from the University of C6r-

doba had called them, ecstatically describing the recent

surge of bizarre earthquakes. At first Logan's interest had

been solely to estimate possible hidden damage to large

structures such as dams. But as he looked over the frequency

spectrum of the tremors he saw one strangeness more peculiar

than all the others.

Sharp peaks at wavelengths of 59, 470, 3,750, and

30,000 meters.

Octaves, Logan realized at the time. Eightfold harmonics.

I wonder what that could possibly mean?

Then there was the mystery of one drilling tower that

100 D A V I D B R I N

had vanished. Water miners, digging an exploratory well

when the quakes struck, had run scurrying for shelter, some

of them stumbling from vision blurred to the point of blindness.

When it was over, and at last they could see again, it

was only to stare blankly at the place where the rig had

stood. There lay only a hole, as if some giant had come along

and uprooted everything!

Including its tower, the entire drill string had just

reached a length of 470 meters.

Of course, it could be a coincidence. But even so, what

on Earth could convert quake energy into . . .

"Senor." The driver interrupted Logan's lazy musing.

Enrique nudged him with an elbow and Logan cracked one

eyelid. "Hm?"

"Senor, you can the bay oversee now."

Logan sat up, rubbing his eyes . . . then inhaled

sharply. Instantly all thought of quakes and harmonic mysteries

vanished. He gripped the door frame, looking across a

sea that was the same color as Daisy McClennon's eyes.

For all her craziness, her obsessiveness, the single-mindedness

that eventually drove him from their home--his former

wife's eyes were still the ideal by which Logan measured

all beauties. Amid the noisy student demonstrations where

they first met, she had thought it was shared ideological

fervor that made him ignore her money and look directly at

her instead. But in truth, it had been those eyes.

Transfixed, he didn't even look for the tidal power station

that was their destination. He had room right then for

just the sea. It was enough to fill his soul.

The poor, tortured transmission screamed as Enrique

downshifted and sent the rattling truck careening toward

the aquamarine waters of the Bay of Biscay.

D

Along the banks of the Yenisey River, immigrants lay out their

new farms and villages. It is a long, hard process, but they have seen starvation and the ruin of their homelands--covered by

rising waters or blowing sands. They look across endless waves

of rippling steppe grass and vow to adapt, to do whatever it

takes to survive.

Relocation officials tell them--No, you may not use that valley

over there; it is reserved for the reindeer.

EARTH 101

No, you may no? tap the river at that spot; flow rates must be

maintained for proper oxygenation.

You must choose one of these proven designs for your

houses. You'll be glad you did when the arctic winter comes,

and you wish the walls were thicker still.

Staring at vast reaches of perspiring tundra, swatting persistent gnats and mosquitoes, the newcomers find it hard to

imagine this sweltering place blowing neck-deep in snow.

Shivering at the thought, they nod earnestly and try to remember

everything they are told. Grateful to be here at all, they thank

their Russian and Yakut hosts, and promise to be good citizens.

The tall, well-fed Soviets smile. That is well, they say. Work

hard. Be kind to the land. Restrict your birth rate as you have

promised. Send your children to school. Before, you were

Kurds, Bengalis, Brazilians. Now you are people of the North.

Adapt to it, and it will treat you well.

The refugees nod. And thinking of all those left behind them,

waiting to come to the land of opportunity, they vow once more

to do well.

"Watching, all the time watching . . . goggle-eye

C geeks. Soon as I get out, I'm gonna Patagonia, buy it?

R That's where the youth growth is. More ripe fruit like

U us, Cuzz. And not so many barrel spoilers . . . rotten

S old apples that sit an' stink and stare atcha . . ."

T Remi agreed with Crat's assessment as the three of

them strode side by side down a gravel path through the

park./Roland also expressed approval, nudging Crat's shoulder.

"That's staccato code, boy-oh."

What brought on Crat's sudden outburst was the sight

of yet another babushka, glaring at them from a bench under

one of the force-grown shade trees as Remi and Roland

and Crat scrambled up a grassy bank from the culvert where

they'd been smoking. The very moment they came into

view, the old woman laid her wire-knitting aside and fixed

them with the bug-eyed, opaque gape of her True-Vu lenses

--staring as if they were freaks or aliens out of some space-

fic vid, instead of three perfectly normal guys, just hanging

around, doing nobody any harm.

"My, my!" Remi whined sarcastically. "Is it my breath?

Maybe she smells . . . tobacco^"

"No joke, bloke," Roland replied. "Some of those new

102 D A V I D B R I N

goggles've got sniffer sensors on 'em. I hear the geek lobby in

Indianapolis wants to put even home-grown on the restrict

list."

"No shit? Tobacco? Even? Roll over, Raleigh! I just

gotta move outta this state."

"Settlers ho, Remi?"

"Settlers ho."

The stare got worse as they approached. Remi couldn't

see the babushka's eyes, of course. Her True-Vu's burnished

lenses didn't really have to be aimed directly at them to get a

good record. Still, she jutted out her chin and faced them

square on, aggressively making the point that their likenesses,

every move they made, were being transmitted to her

home unit, blocks from here, in real time.

Why do they have to do that? To Remi it felt like a

provocation. Certainly no one could mistake her tightlipped

expression as friendly.

Remi and his pals had promised their local tribes supervisor not to lose their tempers with "senior citizens on self-

appointed neighborhood watch." Remi did try, really. It's

/ust another geek. Ignore her.

But there were so gor-sucking many geeks! According to

the Net census, one in five Americans were over 65 now.

And it felt far worse in Bloomington--as if oldsters were a

ruling majority, staking out every shady spot with their electronic sun hats and goggle-scanners, watching from porches-,

watching from benches, watching from lawn chairs . . .

It was Crat whose reserve broke as they approached that

baleful inspection. Suddenly he capered. "Hey, granny!"

Crat bowed with a courtly flourish. "Why don't you record

this!" Roland giggled as Crat swept off his straw cowboy hat

to display a garish scalp tattoo.

Merriment redoubled when she actually reacted! A sudden

moue of surprise and revulsion replaced that glassy

stare. She rocked back and turned away.

"Astonishing!" Roland cried, mimicking their least favorite

teen-behaviors teacher at J. D. Quayle High School.

He continued in a snooty, midwestern drawl. "It should be

noted that this small urban band's totemistic innovation

achieved its desired effect . . . which was? Anybody?"

"Shock value!" all three of them shouted in unison,

clapping hands, celebrating a minor victory over their natural

enemy.

EARTH 103

Used to be, you could break a babushka's stare with an

obscene gesture or show of muscular bluster--both protected

forms of self-expression. But the biddies and codgers

were getting harder to shake. Any time nowadays you actually

made one of them yank back that awful, silent scrutiny

was a triumph worth savoring.

"Freon!" Crat cursed, "fust onc& I'd like to catch some

goggle geek alone, with fritzed sensors and no come-go record.

Then I'd teach 'em it's not polite to stare."

Crat emphasized his point with a fist, smacking his

palm. Today, since it was cloudy, he had forsaken his normal

Stetson for a plaid baseball cap, still acceptable attire for

a Settler. His sunglasses, like Remi's, were thin, wire framed,

and strictly for eye protection. Nothing electronic about

them. They were a statement, repudiating the rudeness of

geriatric America.

"Some people just got too much free time," Roland

commented as the three of them sauntered near the babushka,

barely skimming outside the twenty-centimeter

limit that would violate her "personal space." Some oldsters

were gearing up with sonar, even radar, to catch the most

innocent infraction. They went out of their way to tempt

you, creating slow-moving bottlenecks across sidewalks

whenever they saw young people hurrying to get somewhere.

They hogged escalators, acting as if they hoped you'd

bump them, giving them any excuse to squeeze that police-

band beeper, or raise the hue and cry, or file a long list of

nuisance charges.

These days, in Indiana, juries were composed mostly of

TwenCen grads anyway. Fellow retirement geeks who

seemed to think youth itself a crime. So naturally, a guy had

to accept the endless dares, skirting the edge whenever challenged.

"Cranny could be doin' something useful," Crat paused

to snarl, bending to really scrape the zone. "She could be

gardening or collectin' litter. But no! She's gotta stare!"

Remi worried Crat might spit again. Even a miss would

be a four-hundred-dollar fifth offense, and despite Cranny's

averted gaze those sensors were still active.

Fortunately, Crat let Remi and Roland drag him out of

sight into the formal hedge garden. Then he leaped, fist

raised, and shouted, "Yow, tomodachis!" pumped by nicotine

and a sweet, if minor, victory. "Patagonia, yeah!" Crat

104 D A V I D B R I N

gushed. "Would that be dumpit great? Kits like us run it all

there."

"Not like here, in the land o' the old and the home of

the grave," agreed Remi.

"Huh, say it! Why, I hear it's better'n even Alaska, or

Tasmania."

"Better for Settlers!" Roland and Remi chanted in unison.

"And the music? Fuego-fire's the only beat that Yakuti

Bongo-Cream can't meet."

Remi didn't care much about that. He liked the idea of

emigrating for other reasons.

"Naw, cuzz. Patagonia's only the first step. It's a staging

area, see? When they open up Antarctica, settlers from

Patagonia'11 have the jump. Just a hop across the water." He

sighed. "We'll have new tribes, real tribes when the ice

melts enough. Set it up our way. Real freedom. Real people."

Roland glanced at him sidelong. Months ago they had

qualified as a youth gang, which meant mandatory tribal

behaviors classes. That was okay, but Remi's friends sometimes

worried he might actually be listening to what the

profs were saying. And sometimes he did have to fight that

temptation . . . the temptation to be interested.

No matter. It was a good afternoon to be with pals,

drooping out in the park. It was well past the sweltering heat

of midday--when those without air-conditioning sought

shade in the hedge garden for their siestas--so right now

people were scarce in this section of the garden. Just a couple

of seedy ragman types, slumped and snoring under the

fragrant oleanders. Whether they were dozers or dazers,

Remi couldn't tell from here. As if the difference mattered.

"Real privacy, maybe," Roland agreed. "You just make

sure that's in the constitution, Rem, if they nom you to

write it."

Remi nodded vigorously. "Dumpit A-okay! Privacy! No

gor-suckers watchin' your every move. Why, I hear back in

TwenCen . . . aw, shit."

Sure enough, bored with just talking, Crat had gone

over the top again. With no one in sight from this hedge-

lined gravel path, he started drum-hopping down a line of

multicolored trash bins, rattling their plastic sides with a

stick, leaping up to dance on their flexing rims.

EARTH 105

"Sweet perspiration . . . Sweat inspiration ..."

Crat chanted, skipping to the latest jingle by Phereo-Moan.

"Sniff in' it stiffens it . . . " Roland countertimed,

catching the excitement. He clapped, keeping time.

Remi winced, expecting one of the bins to collapse at

any moment. "Crat!" he called.

"Damn what, damn who?" His friend crooned from on

high, dance-walking the green container, shaking its contents

of grass cuttings and mulch organics.

"U-bieak it--U-buy it," Remi reminded.

Crat gave a mock shiver of fear. "Look around, droogie.

No civic-minded geepers, boy-chik. And cops need warrants."

He hopped across to the blue bin for metals, making

cans and other junk rattle.

True, no goggle-faces were in sight. And the police were

limited in ways that didn't apply to citizens ... or else

even the aphids on the nearby bushes could be transmitting

this misdemeanor to Crat's local youth officer, in real time.

"An aroma for home-a, and a reek for the street ..."

Remi tried to relax. Anyway, what harm was Crat doing?

Just having a little fun, was all. Still, he reached his

limit when Crat started kicking wrappers and cellu-mags out

of the paper-recycle bin. Misdemeanor fines were almost

badges of honor, but mandatory-correction felonies were another

matter!

Remi hurried to pick up the litter. "Get him down,

Rollie," he called over his shoulder as he chased a flapping

page of newsprint.

"Aw petrol! Lemme 'lone!" Crat bitched as Roland

grabbed him around the knees and hauled him out of the

last container. "You two aren't sports. You just--"

The complaint cut short suddenly, as if choked off.

Picking up the last shred of paper, Remi heard rhythmic

clapping from the path ahead. He looked up and saw they

were no longer alone.

Bleeding sores, he cursed inwardly. All we needed were

Ra Boys.

Six of them slouched by the curving hedge, not five

meters away, grinning and watching this tableau--Remi

clutching his flapping load of paper, and Roland holding

Crat high like some really homely ballerina.

Remi groaned. This could be really bad.

Each Ra Boy wore from a thick chain round his neck the

106 DAVIDBRIN

gleaming symbol of his cult--a sun-sigil with bright metal

rays as sharp as needles. Those overlay open-mesh shirts exposing darkly tanned torsos. The youths wore no head coverings

at all, of course, which would "insult Ra by blocking

the fierce love of his rays." Their rough, patchy complexions

showed where anti-one creams had sloughed precancerous

lesions. Sunglasses were their only allowance for the sleeting

ultraviolet, though Remi had heard of fanatics who preferred

going slowly blind to even that concession.

One thing the Ra Boys had in common with Remi and

his friends. Except for wristwatches, they strode stylishly

and proudly unencumbered by electronic gimcrackery . . .

spurning the kilos of tech-crutches everyone over twenty-

five seemed to love carrying around. What man, after all,

relied on crap like that?

Alas, Remi didn't need Tribal Studies I to tell him that

was as far as teen solidarity went in the year 2038.

"Such a lovely song and dance," the tallest Ra Boy said

with a simper. "Are we rehearsing for a new amateur show

to put on the Net? Do please tell us so we can tune in.

Where will it be playing? On Gong channel four thousand

and three?"

Roland dropped Crat so hurriedly, the Ra Boys broke up

again. As for Remi, he was torn between a dread of felonies

and the burning shame of being caught picking up litter like

a citizen. To walk just three steps and put it in the bin

would cost him too much in pride, so he crumpled the mass

and stuffed it in his pocket--as if he^ had plans for the garbage, later.

Another one joined the leader, sauntering forward.

"Naw, what we have here . . . see . . . are some neofem

girlie-girls . . . dressed up as Settlers. Only we caught them

being girlie when . . . when they thought no one was looking!"

This Ra Boy seemed short of breath and a bit droopy

eyed. Remi knew he was a dozer when he lifted an inhaler

and took a long hit of pure oxygen from a hip flask.

"Hmm," the tall one nodded, considering the proposition.

"Only problem with that hypothesis is, why would

anyone want to dress up like a gor-sucking Settler in the first

place?"

Remi saw Roland seize the growling Crat, holding him

back. Clearly the Ra Boys would love to have a little physi-

EARTH 107

cal humor with them. And just as clearly, Crat didn't give a

damn about the odds.

But even though no geeps were watching now, dozens

must have recorded both parties converging on this spot

1. chronicles they'd happily zap-fax to police investigating

a brawl after the fact.

Not that fighting was strictly illegal. Some gangs with

good lawyer programs had found loopholes and tricks. Ra

Boys, in particular, were brutal with sarcasm . . . pushing a

guy so hard he'd lose his temper and accept a nighttime

battle rendezvous or some suicidal dare, just to prove he

wasn't a sissy.

The tall one swept off his sunglasses and sighed. He

minced several delicate steps and simpered. "Perhaps they

are Gaians, dressing up as Settlers in order to portray yet

another endangered species. Ooh. I really must watch their

show!" His comrades giggled at the foppish act. Remi worried

how much longer Roland could restrain Crat.

"Funny," he retaliated in desperation. "I wouldn't figure

you could even see a holo show, with eyes like those."

The tall one sniffed. Accepting Remi's weak gambit, he

replied in Posh Speech. "And what, sweet child of Mother

Dirt, do you imagine is wrong with my eyes?"

"You mean besides mutant ugliness? Well it's obvious

you're going blind, oh thou noonday mad dog."

Sarcasm gave way to direct retort. "The Sun's rays are

to be appreciated, Earthworm. Momma's pet. Even at risk."

"I wasn't talking about UV damage to your retinas, dear

Mr. Squint. I refer to the traditional penalty for self-abuse."

Paydirt! The Ra Boy flushed. Roland and Crat laughed

uproariously, perhaps a little hysterically. "Got him, Rem!"

Roland whispered. "Go!"

From the scowls on the Ra Boys' patchy faces, Remi

wondered if this was wise. Several of them were fingering

their chains, with the gleaming, sharp-rayed amulets. If one

or more had tempers like Crat's . . .

The lead Ra Boy stepped closer. "That a slur on my

stamina, oh physical lover of fresh mud?"

Remi shrugged, it was too late to do anything but go

with it. "Fresh mud or fecund fern, they're all out of reach

to one like you, whose only wet licks come from his own

sweaty palm."

More appreciative laughter from Roland and Crat

108 D A V I D B R I N

hardly made up for the lead Ra Boy's seething wrath, turning

him several shades darker. / didn 'I know I'd strike such

a nerve with that one, Remi thought. Apparently this guy

had a lousy sex life. Some victories aren 'I worth the price.

"So you're the manly man, Joe Settler?" Ra Boy

sneered. "You must be Mister Testo. An Ag-back with a

stacked stock, and whoremones for all Indiana."

Here it comes. Remi foresaw no way to avoid exchanging

Net codes with this character, which in turn would lead

to a meeting in some dark place, with no neighborhood

watch busybodies to interfere.

With a small part of his mind, Remi realized the encounter

had built up momentum almost exactly along the

positive feedback curve described in class by Professor Jame-

son . . . bluster and dare and counterbluff, reinforced by a

desperate need to impress one's own gang ... all leading

step by step to the inevitable showdown. It would be an

interesting observation--if that knowledge had let Remi prevent

anything, but it hadn't. As it was, he wished he'd never

even learned any of that shit.

He shrugged, accepting the Ra worshipper's gambit.

"Well, I'm already man-ugly enough, I don't have to pray for

more from a great big gasball in the sky. I admit, though,

your prayers sure look like they've been--"

Remi realized, mid-insult, that both groups were turning

toward a sound--a new set of interlopers had entered

the hedge garden. He turned. Along the path at least a dozen

figures in cowled white gowns approached, slim and graceful.

Their pendants, unlike the Ra Boys', were patterned in

the womblike Orb of the Mother.

"NorA ChuCa," one of the Ra Boys said in disgust.

Still, Remi noticed the guys in both gangs stood up

straighter, taking up masculine poses they must have

thought subtle, rather than pretentious. Feminine laughter

cut off as the newcomers suddenly noticed the male gathering

ahead of them. But their rapid pace along the path

scarcely tapered. The North American Church of Caia

hardly ever slowed for anybody.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen," several girls in the front

rank said, almost simultaneously. Even shaded by their

cowls, Remi recognized several of them from the halls of

Quayle High. "Can we interest you in donating to the Trillion

Trees Campaign?" one of the dedicants asked, coming

EARTH 109

face to face with Remi. And he had to blink past a moment's

fluster--she was heartbreakingly beautiful.

In her palm she held out brightly colored leaflet chips

for any of the boys who would take one. There was an outburst

of derisive laughter from the other side of the trail.

These were surely young, naive Caians if they thought to

hit up Ra Boys for reforestation money!

Settlers, on the other hand, weren't as ideologically incompatible.

More importantly, it struck Remi that this offered

a possible out.

"Why yes, sisters!" he effused. "You can interest us. I

was just saying to my Settler friends here that tree planting

will have to be our very first priority when we get to Patago-

nia. Soon as it's warmed up down there. Yup, planting

trees ..."

Crat was still exchanging glares with the craziest looking

Ra Boy. Grabbing his arm, Remi helped Roland tow him

amidst the gliding tide of white-garbed girls. All the way,

Remi asked enthusiastic questions about current Caian projects,

ignoring the taunts and jeers that followed them from

the harsh-faced young sun worshippers. The Ra Boys could

say whatever they wanted. On the scale of coups in tribal

warfare, scoring with girls beat winning an insult match,

hands down. Not that actual scoring was likely here.

Hardcore Gaian women tended to be hard to impress. This

one, for example.

". . . don't you see that hardwood reforestation in

Amazonia is far more important than planting conifers

down in Tierra del Fuego or Antarctica? Those are new ecologies,

still delicate and poorly understood. You Settlers are

much too impatient. Why, by the time those new areas are

well understood and ready for humans to move in, the main battle, to save the Earth, could be lost!"

"I see your point," Remi agreed. Anxious to make good

their getaway, he and Roland nodded attentively until the

Ra Boys were out of sight. Then Remi kept on smiling and

nodding because of the speaker's heart-shaped face and

beautiful complexion. Also, he liked what he could make

out of her figure under the gown. At one point he made a

show of depositing the trash from his pocket in a brown

recycle bin, giving the impression that litter gathering was

his routine habit, and winning a brief approving pause in her

lecture.

110 D A V I D B R I N

When they passed a row of hooded cancer plague survivors

in wheelchairs, he slipped some dollar coins into their

donation cups, getting another smile in reward.

Encouraged, he wound up accepting a pile of chip brochures,

until at last she began running low on breath as they

passed near the superconducting rails of the cross-park rapi-

trans line. Then came a really lucky moment. A newly arriving

train spilled youngsters in school uniforms onto the

path, shouting and dashing about. The cascade of children

broke apart the tight-knit squadron of Gaians. Remi and the

young woman of his dreams were caught in the whirling

eddies and pushed to one side under one of the rapitrans

pillars. They looked at each other, and shared laughter. Her

smile seemed much warmer when she was off her planet-

saving pitch.

But Remi knew it would only be a moment. In seconds,

the others would reclaim her. So, as casually as he could, he

told her he would like to see her personally and asked for

her net code to arrange a date.

She, in turn, met his gaze with soulful brown eyes and

asked him sweetly to show his vasectomy certificate.

"Honestly," she said with apparent sincerity. "I just

couldn't be interested in a man so egotistical he insists, in a

world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately

needed. If you haven't done the right thing, can you point

to some great accomplishment or virtue, to justify clinging

to ... ?"

Her words trailed off in perplexity, addressing his back

as Remi seized his friends' arms and rapidly departed.

"I'd show her somethin' more important than genes!"

Crat snarled when he heard the story. Roland was only

slightly more forgiving. "Too damn much theory crammed

into that pretty little head. Imagine, invading a guy's privacy

like that! Tell you one thing, that's one bird who'd be

happier, and a whole lot quieter as a farm wife."

"Right!" Crat agreed. "Farm wife's got what life's about.

There's plenty room in Patagonia for lots of kids. Overpop's

just propa-crap--"

"Oh, shut up!" Remi snapped. His face still burned

with shame, made worse by the fact that the girl obviously

hadn't even known what she was doing. "You think I care

what a bleeding NorA ChuCa thinks? They only teach 'em

how to be--whatV

EARTH 111

Roland was holding his wristwatch in front of Remi's

face, tapping its tiny screen. Lights rippled and the machine

sang a warning tone.

Remi blinked. They were being scanned again, and it

wasn't just someone's True-Vu this time, but real eavesdropping.

"Some tokomak's got a big ear on us," Roland reported

irritably.

It was just one thing after another! Remi felt like a

caged tiger. Hell, even tigers had more privacy nowadays, in

the wildlife survival arks, than a young guy ever got here in

Bloomington. The park used to be a place where you could

get away, but not anymore!

He looked around quickly, searching for the voyeur.

Over to the south citizens of many ages were busy tending

high-yield vegetables in narrow strip gardens, leased by the

city to those without convenient rooftops. Bean pole detectors

watched for poachers, but those devices couldn't have

set off Roland's alarm.

Nor could the children, running about in visors and

sun-goggles, playing tag or beamy. Or the ragged men in

their twenties and thirties, over by the reflecting pond,

draped in saffron sheets, pretending to be meditating, but

fooling no one as they used biofeedback techniques to supply

their bottomless, self-stimulated addiction . . . dazing

out on endorphin chemicals released by their own brains.

There were other teens around too . . . though none

wore gang colors. The silent, boring majority then, who neither

slip-shaded nor dazed--students dressed for fashion or

conformity, with little on their minds--some even carrying

pathetic banners for tonight's B-ball contest between the

Fighting Golfers and the Letterman High Hecklers.

Then he saw the geek--a codger this time--leaning

against one of the slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector, looking directly at the three of them. And sure

enough, amid the bushy gray curls spilling under his white

sun hat, Remi saw a thin wire, leading from an earpiece to a

vest made of some sonomagnetic fabric.

Wheeling almost in step, the boys reacted to this new

provocation by striding straight toward the geezer. As they

neared, Remi made out the ribbons of a Helvetian War veteran

on his chest, with radiation and pathogen clusters. Shit, he thought. Veterans are the worst. It would be hard winning any points over this one.

112 D A V I D B R I N

Then Remi realized the coot wasn't even wearing goggles!

Of course he could still be transmitting, using smaller

sensors, but it broke the expected image, especially when

the gremper removed even his sunglasses as they approached,

and actually smiled!

"Hello, boys," he said, amiably. "I guess you caught me

snooping. Owe you an apology."

Out of habit, Crat squeezed the fellow's personal zone,

even swaying over a bit as he flashed his scalp tattoo. But the

geek didn't respond in the usual manner, by flourishing his

police beeper. Rather, he laughed aloud. "Beautiful!

Y'know, I once had a messmate ... a Russkie commando

he was. Died in the drop on Liechtenstein, I think. He had a

tattoo like that one, only it was on his butt! Could make it

dance, too."

Remi grabbed Crat's arm when the idiot seemed about

to spit. "You know using a big ear's illegal without wearing a

sign, tellin' people you've got one. We could cite you, man."

The oldster nodded. "Fair enough. I violated your privacy,

and will accept in situ judgment if you wish."

Remi and his friends looked at each other. Geriatrics--

especially those who had suffered in the war--hardly ever

used the word "privacy" except as an epithet, when accusing

someone of hiding foul schemes. Certainly Remi had

never heard of a codger willing to settle a dispute as gang

members would, man to man, away from the all-intrusive

eye of the Net.

"Shit no, gremper! We got you--"

"Crat!" Roland snapped. He glanced at Remi, and Remi

nodded back. "All right," he agreed. "Over by that tree. You

pitch, we'll swing."

That brought another smile. "I used that expression

when I was your age. Haven't heard it since. Did you know

slang phrases often come and go in cycles?"

Still chatting amiably about the vagaries of language

fashion since his day, the geep led them toward their designated

open-air courtroom, leaving a puzzled Remi trailing

behind, suddenly struck by the unasked-for exercise of visualizing this wrinkled, ancient remnant as a youth, once as

brimming as they were now with hormones and anger.

Logically, Remi supposed it might be possible. Perhaps a

few grempers even remembered what it had been like, with

some vague nostalgia. But it couldn't have been as bad to be

EARTH 113

young back then, he thought bitterly. There was stuff for

guys like me to do. Old farts didn't control everything.

Hell, at least you had a war to fight!

After the Helvetian holocaust, the frightened international

community finally acted to prevent any more big

ones, putting muscle into the inspection treaties. But that

didn't seem like much of a solution to Remi. The world was

going straight to hell anyway, no detours. So why not do it

in a way that was at least honorable and interesting?

Do not go gentle into that good night . . . Poetry

class was just about the only one Remi really liked. Yeah.

Back in TwenCen there were some guys who had it right.

From a grassy step they could look out over much of

downtown Bloomington, a skyline still dominated by preserved

TwenCen towers, though several of the more recent,

slablike 'topias canted like ski slopes to the north. From

somewhere beyond the park boundaries could be heard the

ubiquitous sound of jackhammers as the city waged its endless,

unwinnable war against decay, renovating crumbling

sidewalks and sewer pipes originally designed to last a hundred

years . . . back more than a century ago, when a hundred

years must have sounded like forever. Bloomington

looked and felt seedy, like almost any town, anywhere.

"I like listening to people, watching people," the codger

explained as he sat cross-legged before them, displaying a

surprising limberness.

"So what?" Roland shrugged. "All you geeks listen and

watch. All the time."

The old man shook his head. "No, they stare and record.

That's different. They were raised in a narcissistic age,

thinking they'd live forever. Now they compensate for their

failing bodies by waging a war of intimidation against youth.

"Oh, it started as a way to fight street crime--retired

people staking out the streets with video cameras and crude

beepers. And the seniors' posse really worked, to the point

where perps couldn't steal anything or hurt anybody in public

anymore without getting caught on tape.

"But after the crime rate plummeted, did that stop the

paranoia?" He shook his gray head. "You see, it's all relative. That's how human psych works. Nowadays seniors--

you call us geeks--imagine threats where there aren't any

anymore. It's become a tradition, see. They're so busy warn114 D A V I D B R I N

ing off potential trouble, challenging threats before they materialize, they almost dare young men like you--"

Roland interrupted. "Hey, gremper. We get all this in

Tribes. What's your point?"

The old man shrugged. "Maybe pretending there's still

a need for neighborhood watch makes them feel useful.

There's a saying I heard . . . geeks find their own uses for

technology."

"I wish nobody ever invented all this tech shit," Remi

muttered.

The war veteran shook his head. "The world would be

dead, dead now, my young friend, if it weren't for tech stuff.

Want to go back to the farm? Send ten billion people back to

subsistence farming? Feeding the world's a job for trained

experts now, boy. You'd only screw things up worse than

they already are.

"Tech eventually solved the worst problems of cities,

too: violence and boredom. It helps people have a million

zillion low-impact hobbies--"

"Yeah, and helps 'em spy on each other, too! That's one

of the biggest hobbies, isn't it? Gossip and snooping!"

The old man shrugged. "You might not complain so

much if you'd lived through the alternative. Anyway, I

wasn't trying to catch you fellows in some infraction. I was just listening. I like listening to people. I like you guys."

Crat and Roland laughed out loud at the absurdity of

the remark. But Remi felt a queer chill. The geezer really

seemed to mean it.

Of course Professor Jameson kept saying it was wrong to

overgeneralize. ". . . because you are gang members, that will

color your views of everything. Young males do that when engaged in us-versus-them group bonding. They have to stereotype their enemies, dehumanize them. The problem's really bad here in this part of the city, where the young-old conflict has deteriorated ..."

Everybody hated Jameson, all the girlie gangs and dudie

gangs--staying in his class only because a pass was required

for any hope of earning a self-reliance card ... as if half

the kids were ever going to qualify. Shit.

"I like you because I remember the way it was for me,"

gremper went on, unperturbed. "I remember when I felt I

could bend steel, topple empires, screw harems, burn cities

1. ."He closed his wrinkled eyelids for a moment, and when he reopened them, Remi felt a sudden thrill tickle his EARTH 115

spine. The old guy seemed to be looking faraway into space

and time.

"I did burn cities, y'know," he told them in a low, very

distant voice. And Remi somehow knew he had to be remembering

things far more vivid than anything to be found

in his own paltry store of recollections. Suddenly, he felt

awash in envy.

"But then, each generation's got to have a cause, right?"

the oldster continued, shaking free of reminiscence. "Ours

was ending secrecy. It's why we fought the bankers and the

bureaucrats and mobsters, and all the damned socialists to

bring everything out into the open, once and for all, to stop

all the underhanded dealing and giga-cheating.

"Only now our solution's causing other problems.

That's the way things go with revolutions. When I overheard

you guys dreaming aloud of privacy--like it was something

holy--Jesus, that took me back. Reminded me of my

own dad! People used to talk that way back at the end of

TwenCen, till my generation saw through the scam--"

"Privacy's no scam!" Roland snapped. "It's simple human

dignity!"

"Yeah!" Crat added. "You got no right to follow guys'

every move ..."

But the old man lifted one hand placatingly. "Hey, I

agree! At least partly. What I'm trying to say is, I think my

generation went too far. We overthrew the evils of secrecy--

of numbered bank accounts and insider deals--but now you

guys are rejecting our excesses, replacing them with some of

your own.

"Seriously though, what would you boys do if you had

your way? You can't just ban True-Vu and other tech-stuff.

You can't rebottle the genie. The world had a choice. Let

governments control surveillance tech . . . and therefore

give a snooping monopoly to the rich and powerful ... or

let everybody have it. Let everyone snoop everyone else,

including snooping the government! I mean it, fellows. That

was the choice. There just weren't any other options."

"Come on," Roland said.

"All right, tell me. Would you go back to the illusion of

so-called privacy laws, which only gave the rich and powerful

a monopoly on secrecy?"

Crat glowered. "Maybe. At least when they had a ...

116 D A V I D B R I N

monopoly, they weren't so dumpit rude! People could at

least pretend they were being left alone."

Remi nodded, impressed with Crat's brief eloquence.

"There's something to that. Who was it said life's just an

illusion, anyway?"

The gremper smiled and answered dryly. "Only every

transcendental philosopher in history."

Remi lifted his shoulders. "Oh, yeah, him. It was on the

tip of my tongue."

The old man burst out laughing and slapped Remi on

the knee. In an odd way, Remi felt warmed by the gesture,

as if it didn't matter that they disagreed in countless ways or

that a gap of half a century yawned between them.

"Damn," the gremper said. "I wish I could take you

back to those days. The guys in my outfit . . . the guys

would've liked you. We could've shown you some times."

To his amazement, Remi believed him. After a momentary

pause, he asked, "Tell us ... tell us about the guys."

The three of them deliberated later, some distance from the

tree, as dusk shadows began stretching across the park. Of

course the old man left his big-ear unplugged while they

passed judgment. He looked up when they returned to squat

before him.

"We decided on a penalty for the way you invaded our

privacy," Roland said, speaking for all.

"I'll accept your justice, sirs," he said, inclining his

head.

Even Crat grinned as Roland passed sentence. "You

gotta come back here again next week, same time, and tell

us more about the war."

The old man nodded--in acceptance and obvious pleasure.

"My name is Joseph," he said, holding out his hand.

"And I'll be here."

Over the next few weeks he kept his promise. Joseph told

them tales they had never imagined, even after watching a

thousand hypervideos. About climbing the steep flanks of

the Pennine Alps, for instance, and then the Bernese Oberland--slogging through gas and bugs and radioactive mud.

He described digging out booby traps nearly every meter of

the way, and prying out the bankers' mercenaries every ten

or so. And he told them of his comrades, dying beside him,

EARTH 117

choking in their own sputum as they coughed their lungs

out, still begging to be allowed to press on though, to help

bring the Last War to an end.

He told them about the fall of Berne and the last gasp of

the Gnomes, whose threat to "take the world down" with

them turned out to be backed by three hundred cobalt-thorium

bombs . . . which were defused only when Swiss

draftees finally turned their rifles on their own officers and

emerged from their shattered warrens, hands high over their

heads, into a new day.

As spring headed toward summer, Joseph commiserated

over the futility of high school, even under a "new education

plan" that forced on students lots of supposedly "practical"

information, but never did a guy any good anyway. He

held them transfixed talking about the way girls used to be,

back before they were taught all that modern crap about

psychology and "sexual choice criteria."

"Boy crazy, that's what they were, my young

tomodachis. No girlie wanted to be caught for even a minute

without a boyfriend. It was where they got their sense of

worth, see? Their alpha to omega. They'd do anything for

you, believe most anything you said, so long as you promised

you loved 'em."

Remi suspected Joseph was exaggerating. But that didn't

matter. Even if it was all a load of bull semen, it was great bull semen. For the first time in his life, he contemplated the prospect of getting older--actually living beyond twenty-

five--with anything but a vague sense of horror. The idea of

someday being like Joseph didn't seem so bad ... as long

as it took a long time happening, and providing he got to do

as much as Joseph had along the way.

It was the profession of soldiering that fascinated To-

land. Its camaradarie and traditions. Crat loved hearing

about faraway places and escape from the tight strictures of

urban life.

But as for Remi, he felt he was getting something more

1. the beginnings of a trust in time.

Joseph was a great source of practical advice, too--subtle

verbal put-downs nobody here in Indiana had heard in

years, but which would burrow like smart bombs dropped

among the gang's foes, only to blow up minutes, even hours,

later with devastating effect. One day they met the same

group of Ra Boys in the park and left them all scratching

118 D A V I D B R I N

their heads in confusion, reluctant even to think of tackling

Settlers anytime soon.

Roland talked about joining the Guard, maybe trying

for one of the peacekeeping units.

Remi began tapping history texts from the Net.

Even Crat seemed to grow more reflective, as if every

time he was about to lose his temper, he'd stop and think

what Joseph would say.

No one worried overmuch when Joseph failed to show

up one Saturday. On the second unexplained absence

though, Remi and the others grew concerned. At home, sitting

at his desk comp, Remi wrote a quick ferret program

and sent it into the Net.

The ferret returned two seconds later with the old

man's obituary.

The mulching ceremony was peaceful. A few detached-looking

adult grandchildren showed up, looking eager to be elsewhere.

If they had been the sort to cry, Remi, Roland, and

Crat would have been the only ones shedding tears.

Still, he had been old. "If any man's led a full life, it

was me," Joseph once said. And Remi believed him.

/ only hope I do half as well, he thought.

So it came as a shot from the sky when Remi answered

the message light on his home comp one evening, and found

logged there a terse note from Roland.

OUR NAMES LISTED IN PROGRAM GUIDE FOR A NET

SHOW . . .

"Right!" Remi laughed. The law said whenever anyone was

depicted, anywhere in the Net, it had to go into the listings.

That made each weekly worldwide directory bigger than all

the world's libraries before 1910.

"Probably some Quayle High senior's doing a Net version

of the yearbook ..."

But his laughter trailed off as he read the rest.

IT'S ON A REMINISCENCE DATABASE FOR WAR VETS.

AND GUESS WHO'S LISTED AS AUTHOR . . .

Remi read the name and felt cold.

Now, don't jump to conclusions, he told himself. He

FR1;EARTH 119

might've just mentioned us . . . a nice note about getting to know three young guys before he died.

But his heart raced as he sought the correct Net address,

sifting through layer after layer, from general to specific to

superspecified, until at last he arrived at the file, dated less

than a month ago.

THE REMEMBRANCES OF IOSEPH MOVERS: EPILOGUE: MY

LAST WEEKS----ENCOUNTERS WITH THREE CONFUSED

YOUNG MEN.

This was followed by full sight and sound, plus narration,

beginning on that afternoon when they had met and held

impromptu court where an elm tree shaded them from the

glaring sky.

Perhaps someone neutral would have called the account

compassionate, friendly. Someone neutral might even have

described Joseph's commentary as warm and loving.

But Remi wasn't neutral. He watched, horrified, as his

image, Roland's, and Crat's were depicted in turn, talking

about private things, things spoken as if to a confessor, but

picked up anyway by some hidden, hi-fidelity camera.

He listened, numbed, as Joseph's editorial voice described

the youths who shared his final weeks.

"... had I the heart to tell them they were never going to Patago-

nia or Antarctica? That the New Lands are reserved for refugees from catastrophe nations? And even so there isn't enough thawed tundra to go around?

"These poor boys dream of emigrating to some promised land, but

Indiana is their destiny, now and tomorrow ..."

/ knew that, Remi thought, bitterly. But did you have

to tell the world I was dumb enough to have a dream?

Dumpit, Joseph! Did you have to bare it all to everybody?

A neutral party might have reassured Remi. The old

man hadn't told very many people. It was in the nature of

the Net, that vast ocean of information, that most published

missives were read by only one or two others besides the

author himself. Maybe one percent were accessed by a hundred

or more. And fewer than one piece in ten thousand

ever had enough viewers, worldwide, to fill even a good size

meeting hall.

Perhaps all that had gone through Joseph's mind when

he made this last testament . . . that it would be seen by

120 D A V I D B R I N

only a few old men like himself and never come to his

young friends' attention. Perhaps he never understood how

far ferret-tech had come, or that others, who had grown up

with the system, might use the directories better than he.

Remi knew it wasn't very likely Joseph's memoirs

would work their way up, through good reviews and word of

mouth, to best-seller status. But that hardly mattered. It could happen. For all the old man knew, Remi's nonchalant ramblings and dreams could be sifted by a million voyeurs or

more!

"Why, Joseph?" he asked, hoarsely. "Why?"

Then another face came on screen. Delicate features

framed in white. It was a voice Remi had managed to purge

from memory, until now.

"I'm sorry, but I just couldn't be interested in a man so egotistical as to insist, in a world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately needed. If you haven't done the right thing, can you point to some great accomplishment or virtue . . . ?"

Remi screamed as he threw the unit through his bedroom

window.

Strangely, Roland and Crat didn't seem to grasp what he was

so upset about. Perhaps, for all their stylish talk, they didn't

really understand privacy. Not really.

They worried, though, over his listlessness and learned

not to speak of Joseph when each of them received small

royalty checks in their accounts, for their parts in what was

fast becoming a small-time social-documentary classic. They

spent their shares on their diverging interests, while Remi

took his out in cash and gave it to the next NorAChuCa he

met ... for the Trillion Trees.

And so there came a day when he encountered, once

again, a small band of Ra Boys in the park, this time without

his friends, without any company but his loneliness.

This time the odds mattered not at all. He tore them

up, top to bottom, using sarcasm like a slug rifle, assaulting

them as he might have taken on Gnome mercenaries, had he

been born in a time when there was honorable work for

brave men to do and an evil that could be grappled with.

To the Ra Boys' amazement it was he who demanded to

exchange net codes. It was he who challenged them to a

rendezvous.

By the time Remi actually met them later, in the darkEARTH 121

ness behind the monorail tracks, however, they'd done their

own net research, and understood.

Understanding made their greeting solemn, respectful.

Their champion exchanged bows with Remi across the

makeshift arena, and even held back for a while, letting his

clumsy opponent draw honorable blood before it was time at

last to end it. Then, dutifully, one tribesman to another, he

gave Remi what he desired most in the world.

For weeks afterward, then, the Ra Boys spoke his name

in honor under the Sun.

The Sun, they said, was where at last he had settled.

The Sun was the final home of warriors.

D

Living species adapt when individuals stumble onto new ways of

doing things and pass on those new ways to their descendants.

This is generally a slow process. Sometimes, however, a species

accidentally opens a door to a whole new mode of existence,

and then it flourishes, pushes aside its competition, and

brings on many changes.

Sometimes those changes benefit more than just itself.

In the beginning, the Earth's atmosphere contained copious

amounts of nitrogen, but not in a form living things could easily turn to protein. Soon however, an early bacterium hit on the right combination of chemical tricks--enabling it to "fix" nitrogen

straight from the air. The advantage was profound, and that

bacterium's descendants proliferated. But other species profited

too. Some plants grew tiny knobs on their roots, to shelter and

succor the inventive microbes, and in return they received the

boon of natural fertilizer.

In a similar way, once upon a time, the ancestor of all grasses fell upon a way to cover soil like a carpet, with tough, fibrous leaves that soak up nearly every ray of sunlight. Other

plants were driven back by an onslaught of grasses, some even

to extinction. But for certain animals--those making the right

counter-adaptations--the advent of grass opened opportunities.

Ungulates, with multiple stomachs and the knack of chewing

cud, could graze on the tough stems and so spread onto uplands

and plains formerly barren of much animal life.

So, too, when flowering plants arrived some ferns had to

retire, but the victors shared their new prosperity with all the

crawling, flying, creeping things that came to feed on nectar and 122 D A V I D B R I N

pollinate them. Into newborn niches spread a multitude of novel

forms . . . insects, birds, mammals . . .

Of course, sometimes a species' invention only benefited

itself. Goats developed an ability to eat almost anything, right

down to the roots. Goats proliferated. Deserts spread behind

them.

Then another creature appeared, one whose originality was

unprecedented. Its numbers grew. And in its wake some other

types did flourish. The common cat and dog. The rat. Starlings and pigeons. And the cockroach. Meanwhile, opportunity grew sparse for those less able to share the vast new niches--huge

expanses of plowed fields and mowed lawns, streets and parking

lots . . .

The coming of the grasses had left its mark indelibly on the

history of the world.

So would the Age of Asphalt and Concrete.

Jen Wolling found the Ndebele Rites of Caia charming.

H The canton's Kuwenezi Science Collective pulled out

0 all the stops, sparing nothing to put on a show of their

L piety. To watch the lavish torchlight celebration under

0 a midnight moon, one might imagine they were com-

S memorating Earth Day itself, and not just a going-away

P party for one old woman they had known barely a fortH

night.

E Dancers in traditional costumes capered and

R whirled before the dignitaries' dais, stamping bare feet

E on the beaten ground to the tempo of pounding drums.

Feathered anklets flapped like agitated captive birds. Spears

thudded on shields as men in bright loincloths leaped in

apparent defiance of gravity. Women in colorful dashikis

waved bound sheaves of wheat, specially grown in

hothouses for this out-of-season observance.

Jen appreciated the dancers' lithe beauty, taut and powerful

as any stallion's. Perspiration flew in droplets or

smeared to coat their dark brown bodies in a gleaming, athletic

sheen. Their rhythm and power were mighty, exultory,

and marvelously sexual, which brought a smile to Jen's lips.

Although tonight's purpose was to venerate a gentle metaphoric

goddess, the choreography had been co-opted from

much older rites having to do with fertility and violence.

"It's far, far better than in the days of neocolonialism,"

EARTH 123

the tall ark director said to her. Sitting cross-legged to her

left, he had to lean close to be heard over the percussive

cadence. "Back then, the Ndebele and other tribes maintained

troupes of professional dancers to pander to tourists.

But these young men and women practice in their spare time

simply for the love of it. Few outsiders ever get to see this

now."

Jen admired the way the torchlight glistened on Director

Mugabe's brow, his tight-coiled hair. "I'm honored," she

said, crossing her arms over her heart and giving a shallow

bow. He grinned and returned the gesture. Side by side, they

watched rows of young "warriors" take terrific risks, exchanging

whirling spears to the delight of clapping women

and children.

Venerable and ancient this dance might be, but there

was no correlation here with the primitive. Jen had just

spent two weeks consulting with Kuwenezi's experts, learning

all about Ndebele Canton's plans for new animal breeds

better able to endure the challenging and ever-changing environment of southern Africa. They, in turn, had listened

attentively to her own ideas about macroecological management.

After all, Jen had virtually invented the field.

By now of course, it had accumulated all the trappings

of a maturing technology, with enough details to leave a

solitary dreamer-theoretician like her far behind. Specific

analyses she left to younger, quicker minds these days.

Still, she occasionally managed to surprise them all. If

Jen ever ceased being able to shock people, it would be time

to give up this body's brief manifestation and feed her meager

store of phosphorus back into the Mother's great mulch

pile.

She recalled the expression on that fellow B'Keli's face

when, during her third and final lecture, she had begun talking

about . . . specially designed mammalian chimeras

1. incorporating camels' kidneys . . . birds' lungs . . .

bear marrow . . . chimps' tendon linkages . . . Even Director

Mugabe, who claimed to have read everything she'd

written, was staring glassy-eyed by the end of her talk. Her

conclusion about . . . the rough love of viruses . . . seemed to have been too much even for him.

When the house lights had come on, she was greeted

with stunned silence from the packed crowd of brown faces.

There was, at first, only one questioner--a very young man

124 D A V I D B R I N

whose northern, Yoruba features stood out amid the crowd

of Southern Bantu. The boy's arms and face were bandaged,

but he showed no outward sign of pain. All through the talk

he had sat quietly in the front row, gently stroking a small

baboon and her infant. When Jen called on him, he lowered

his hand and spoke with a completely stunning Canadian

accent, of all things.

"Doctor . . . are you sayin' that--that people might someday be

as strong as chimpanzees? Or be able to sleep through winter, like bears?"

Jen noticed indulgent smiles among the audience when

the boy spoke, though Mugabe's expression was one of

mixed relief and angst. Anxiety that such an untutored

member of their community had been the only one to offer

the courtesy of a question. Relief that someone had done so

in time.

"Yes. Exactly," she had replied. "We have the entire human

genome fully catalogued. And many other higher mammals. Why not

use that knowledge to improve ourselves?

"Now I want to make clear I'm talking about genetic improvement

here, and there are limits to how far one can go in that direction. We're already by far the most plastic of animals, the most adaptable to environmental influences. The real core of any self-improvement campaign

must remain in the areas of education and child-rearing and the new psychology, to bring up a generation of saner, more decent people.

"But there really are constraints on that process, laid down by the capabilities and limitations of our bodies and brains. And where did those capabilities and limitations come from? Our past, of course. A haphazard sequence of genetic experiments by trial and error, slowly accumulating favorable mutations generation by generation. Death was the means of our advancement . . . the deaths of millions of our ancestors.

Or, to be more precise, those who failed to become our ancestors.

"Those who did survive to breed passed on new traits, which gradually accumulated into the suite of attributes now at our disposal--our upright stance, our better-than-average vision, our wonderfully dexterous hands. Our bloated brains.

"As for what the latter has done to our skull size, ask any woman who's given birth ..."

At that point the audience had laughed. Jen noticed

some of the tension seeping away.

"Other species have meanwhile collected their own, similar catalogues of adaptations. Many of them at least as wonderful as those we're EARTH 125

so arrogantly proud of. But here's the sad part. With one exception--

the inefficient interspecies gene transfer performed by viruses--no animal species can ever profit from another's hard-won lessons. Until

now, each has been in it alone, fending for itself, hoarding what it's acquired, learning from no one else.

"What I am proposing is to change all that, once and for all. Hell, we're already doing it! Look at the century-old effort to blend characteristics among plants, to transfer, say, pest resistance from one hardy wild species into another that is a food crop. Take just one such product--

legu-corn, which fixes its own nitrogen. How many productive farmlands and aquifers has it saved by eliminating the need for artificial

fertilizer? How many people has it saved from starvation?

"Or take another program--to save those species of birds who cannot bear excess ultraviolet by inserting eagle codons, so their descendants'

eyes will be as impervious as those of hawks or falcons. The

happy accidental discovery of one family can now be shared with others.

"Or take our experiments at London Ark, where we're remaking a

vanished species by slowly building a woolly mammoth genome within an elephant matrix. Someday, a species which has been extinct for thousands of years will walk again,"

A woman in the third row raised her hand. "But isn't that

exactly what the radical Caians object to? They call it bastardization of species ..."

Jen remembered laughing at that point. "I am not a favorite

of the radicals."

Quite a few in the audience had smiled then. The

Ndebele shared her contempt for the taunts, even threats, of

those who proclaimed themselves guardians of modern morality.

No doubt the original idea behind her invitation to

come here had been prestige. Southern Africa suffered partial

isolation from the world's ever-tightening web of

commerce and communication, largely because the commonwealth

still practiced racial and economic policies long

abandoned elsewhere. No doubt they were surprised when a

Nobel laureate actually accepted. This visit would cause Jen

problems when she returned home.

It was worth it though. She'd seen promise here. Cut off

as they were, these archaic racialist-socialists were looking at

familiar problems in unique ways. Often cockeyed wrong ways, but intriguing nonetheless. They had a great advan-

126 D A V I D B R I N

tage in not caring what the rest of the world thought. In that

way, they were much like Jen herself.

"What matters to me is the whole," she had replied. "And the

whole depends upon diversity. The radicals are right about that. Diversity is the key.

"But it need not be the same diversity as existed before mankind.

Indeed, it cannot be the same. We are in a time of changes. Species will pass away and others take their place, as has happened before. An ecosystem frozen in stone can only become a fossil.

"We must become smart enough to minimize the damage, and then

foster a new diversity, one able to endure in a strange new world."

Of all those in the audience, some had looked confused

or resentful. Others nodded in agreement. But one, the boy

in the front row, had stared at her as if struck dumb. At the

time she had wondered what she'd said that had affected

him so.

Jen was jerked back to the present as Director Mugabe

spoke her name over the rhythm of the beating drums. She

blinked, momentarily disoriented, while hands gently took

both her elbows, helping her to stand. Smiling women in

bright costumes urged her forward. Their white, perfect

teeth shone in the flickering torchlight.

Jen sighed, realizing. As the oldest woman present, and

guest of honor, she couldn't refuse officiating at the sacrifice

1. not without insulting her hosts. So she went through

the motions--bowing to the Orb of the Mother, accepting

the bound wheat, pouring the pure water.

So many people had taken to this sect, movement, Zeitgeist . . . call it what you will. It was an amorphous thing, without center or official dogma. Only a few of those

paying homage to the Mother did so thinking it a religion

per se.

Indeed many older faiths had taken the simple, effective

measure of co-opting Caian rituals into their own. Catholics

altered celebrations of the Virgin, so that Mary now

took a much more vigorous personal interest in planetary

welfare than she had in the days of Chartres or Nantes.

And yet, ]en knew many for whom this was more than

a mere statement or movement. More than just a way of

expressing reverence for a danger-stricken world. There were

radicals for whom Caia worship was a church militant. They

saw a return of the old goddess of prehistory, at last ready to

end her banishment by brutal male deities--by Zeus and

EARTH 127

Shiva and Jehovah and the warlike spirits once idolized by

the Ndebele. To Gaian radicals there were no "moderate"

approaches to saving Earth. Technology and the "evil male

principle" were foes to be cast down.

Evil male principle, my shriveled ass. Males have their

uses.

For some reason Jen thought of her grandson, whose

obsessions in the twin worlds of abstraction and engineering

were stereotypical of what radicals called "penis science." It

was some time since she had last heard from the boy. She

wondered what Alex was up to.

Probably something terribly silly, and utterly earthshaking

if I know him.

Soon came the final act of the evening. The Cleansing.

Jen smiled and touched one by one the offerings brought

before her by adults and children, each presenting a wicker

basket containing broken bits of mundane archaeology.

Scraps of tin ... broken spark plugs . . . shreds of

adamant, insoluble plastic. . . . One basket was nearly

filled with ancient aluminum beer cans, still shiny thirty

years after they had been outlawed everywhere on Earth.

Each collection was the work of one member of this community,

performed in his or her spare time over many months.

Each basket contained the yield given up by one square

meter of soil, painstakingly and lovingly sifted till no trace

of human manufacture was detectible, as deep as the individual's

time, strength, and piety allowed. In this way, each

person incrementally returned a small bit of the planet to its

natural state.

Only what was natural? Certainly not the land's contours,

which had been eroded and moved wholesale by human

enterprise.

Not the aquifers, whose percolating waters would never

be quite the same, even where antidumping was enforced

and where inspectors granted the precious label "pure and

untainted." That only meant the content of heavy metals

and complex petro-organics was too sparse to affect one human's

health over a normal lifespan. It certainly didn't mean

"natural."

Especially, the word didn't apply to that complicated

living thing known as topsoil! Winnowed of countless native

species, filled with invaders brought inadvertently or on

purpose from other continents--from earthworms to rotifers

128 D A V I D B R I N

to tiny fungi and bacteria--the loam in some places thrived

and elsewhere it died, giving up its dusty substance to the

winds. Microscopic victories and defeats and stalemates

were being waged in every hectare all over the globe, and

nowhere could a purist say the result was "natural" at all.

Jen glanced over her left shoulder to see Kuwenezi's

lambent towers. The main ark was dim, but its great glass-

crystal face reflected a rippling sister to the moon. Within

those artificial habitats dozed plants and animals rescued

from a hundred spoiled ecosystems. To the radicals, such

arks were glorified prisons--mere sops to humanity's troubled

conscience, so that nature's slaughter could go on.

To Jen, though, the great arcologies weren't jails, but

nurseries.

Change can't be prevented, only guided.

The radicals were right about one thing, of course.

What finally emerged from those glass towers, someday,

wouldn't be the same as what had gone in. Jen's public state-

ments--that she did not find that in itself tragic--ensured

continued hate mail, even death threats, from followers of a

sect she herself had helped found.

So be it.

Death is just another change. And when the Mother

needs my phosphorus, I'll give it up gladly.

The local denomination, of course, held that Caia's true

complexion must be that of pure, fecund earth, and yet they

seemed not to care about the paleness of her skin. As Jen

lifted her arms, they carried their offerings to outsized recycling bins, waiting under the stars. When the last contribution

tumbled inside, a shout of celebration rose,

commemorating the salvation of several thousand square

meters.

This ceremony had delightful idiosyncracies, but it was

essentially similar to others she'd officiated at, from Australia to Smolensk. In all those places, people had taken it for

granted that she was an appropriate surrogate--a stand-in for

Caia herself.

Only a surrogate ... Jen smiled, offering her benediction

and forgiving their error. The drums resumed, and

dancers rejoined their exertions. But for a moment Jen

watched the torchlight play across the faces and the glass

towers beyond.

Modern folk. you pay homage to the Mother as a "parEARTH 129

able. " And I am but a stand-in, tonight, for an abstract

idea.

Well, we shall see about that, my children. We shall

see.

She had planted seeds during her visit. Some would germinate,

perhaps even flower into action.

The young man in the bandages appeared again. She

saw him seated across the arena, his baboon companions

resting against his knees. He nodded back as she smiled at

him, and Jen had a sudden, clear recollection of his final

question, yesterday afternoon in the lecture hall.

"You talk about a lot of possibilities Doctor Wolling . . ." he

had said. "Maybe we could do some of those things ... or even all o' them, eh?

"But won't we also have to give up somethin' in return? They say

there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. So what'll it cost us. Doctor?"

Jen remembered thinking, What a bright boy. He understood

that nothing was ever easy, which her own grandson

never seemed to grasp, no matter how often the world

smacked poor Alex in the head.

No, Jen thought. Humanity may have to give up more

than a little, if the Earth is to be saved. We may, in the end,

find the old gods were right after all. That nothing worthwhile

comes without a sacrifice.

Jen smiled at the boy, at all of them. She opened her

arms, blessing the dancers, the audience, the animals in the

arks, and the ravaged countryside.

That sacrifice, my children, may turn out to be ourselves.

PART III

PLANET

The newborn world liquefied under pummeling asteroid

impacts. Heavy elements sank, generating still more heat,

and a dowry of radioactive atoms kept the planet's

interior warm even after the surface cooled and hardened.

Eventually, the inmost core crystallized under

intense pressure, but the next layer remained a swirling

metal fluid, a vast electric dynamo. Higher still

congealed a mantle of semisolid mineralssuperdense

pyroxenes and olivines and lighter melts that squeezed

up crustal cracks to spill forth from blazing volcanoes.

Heat drove the circulating convection cells, jostled

the plates, drove the fields. Heat built continents and

made the Earth throb.

Heat also kept some water molten at the surface.

Preorganic vapors sloshed in solution, under lightning

and fierce sunbeams. . . .

The process started taking on a life of its own.

132 D A V I D B R I N

D

A range of minor mountains divides the city of Los Angeles.

During the city's carefree youth, great battalions of trucks

streamed toward the little valleys between those hills, brimming

with kilotons of urban garbage.

Coffee grounds and melon rinds, cereal boxes and disposable

trays . . .

In those profligate times every purchased commodity

seemed to come inside its own weight of packing material. The average family generated enough waste each year to fill home and garage combined.

Newspapers, magazines, and throwaway advertisements

1. .

Even earlier, during the fight against Germany and Japan,

Los Angeles mandated limited recycling to help the war effort.

Citizens separated metals for curbside pickup. Bound paper

was returned to pulp mills; even cooking grease was saved for

munitions. Those few who weren't glad to help still complied, to

avoid stiff fines.

Milk cartons and paper towels . . . and never-used,

slightly dented goods, discarded at the factory . . .

After the war, people found themselves released from decades

of privation into a sudden age of plenty. With the crisis

over, recycling seemed irksome. A mayoral candidate ran on a

one-issue promise, to revoke the inconvenient law. He won by a

landslide.

Peanut hulls, fast-food bags, and fakeaway pizza

boxes . . .

The hills dividing L.A. had been formed as the Earth's Pacific

Plate ground alongside the North American Plate. As the

two huge, rocky masses pressed and scraped, a coastal range

squeezed out at the interface, like toothpaste from a tube. The

Santa Monica Mountains and Hollywood Hills were mere offshoots

from that steady accumulation, but they helped shape the

great city that eventually surrounded them.

Boxes from frozen dinners, boxes from new stereos and

computers, boxes from supermarket produce sections, boxes,

boxes, boxes . . .

Between the hills once lay little valleys of oak and meadow,

where mule deer grazed and condors soared--ideal out-of-view

spots for landfills. The regiments of trucks came and went, day

EARTH 133

in and day out. Hardly anyone noticed until quite late that all

suitable and legal crevices would be topped off within a single

generation. By century's end flat plains stretched between onetime peaks, eerily lit at night by tiki torches burning methane gas

--generated underground by the decaying garbage.

Beer and soft-drink cans, ketchup bottles and disposable

diapers . . . engine oil, transmission fluid, and electroplating

residue . . . chipped ceramic knickknacks and worn-out furniture

1. .

Harder times came. New generations arrived with new sensibilities and less carefree attitudes. Pickup fees were enacted

and expensive processes found to stanch the flow ... to cut

the flood of trash in half, then to a tenth, then still more.

And yet that left the question of what was to be done with

the plateaus between the hills. Plateaus of waste?

Plastic bottles and plastic bags, plastic spoons and plastic

forks . . .

Some suggested building there to help relieve the stifling

overcrowding--though of course there would be the occasional

explosion, and a house or two could be expected to disappear

into a sudden mire from time to time.

The family pet, sealed in a bag . . . hospital waste . . .

construction debris . . .

Some suggested leaving the sites exactly as they were, so

future archaeologists could find a wealth of detail from the prodigal middens of TwenCen California. With an even longer view,

paleontologists speculated what the deposits might look like in a few million years, after grinding plates compressed them into

layers of sedimentary stone.

Tires and cars, broken stereos and obsolete computers,

missing rent money and misplaced diamond rings . . .

It might have been predictable, and yet few saw the answer

coming. In a later day of harder times, of short resources and

mandatory recycling, it was inevitable that those landfills should draw the eyes of innovators, looking for ways to get rich.

Iron, aluminum, silica . . . nickel, copper, zinc . . . methane,

ammonia, phosphates . . . silver, gold, platinum . . .

Claims were filed, mining plans presented and analyzed.

Refining methods were perfected and approved. Excavation began

between the ancient hills.

Into a past generation's waste, their desperate grandchildren

dug for treasure.

The garbage rush was on.

So now Teresa was a hero, and a recent widow. No comE

bination was more appealing to the masses ... or to

X NASA press flacks, whose attentions she welcomed like

0 an invasion of nibbling rodents. Fame was a pile of

S dumpit she could live without.

P Fortunately, operational people had her for several

H weeks after the Erehwon disaster. Teams of engineers

E spent from dawn to dusk coaxing every bit of useful

R description from her memory, until each night she

E would fall into bed and a deep, exhausted, dreamless

slumber. Some outsiders got wind of the intense debriefing

and railed for her sake against "gestapo grilling tactics"--

until Teresa herself emerged one day to tell all the well-

meaning do-gooders to go fuck off.

Not in so many words, of course. Their intentions were

fine. Under normal circumstances it would be cruel to scrutinize

a recent survivor so. But Teresa wasn't normal. She

was an astronaut. A pilot astronaut. And if some all-knowing

physician prescribed for her right now, the slip might say

--"Surround her with competent people. Keep her busy,

useful. That will do more good than a thousand floral gifts

or ten million sympathy-grams."

Certainly she'd been traumatized. That was why she

also cooperated with the NASA psychers, letting them guide

her through all the stages of catharsis and healing. She wept.

She railed against fate and wept again. Though each step in

grieving was accomplished efficiently, that didn't mean she

felt it any less than a normal person. She just felt it all

faster. Teresa didn't have time to be normal.

Finally, the technical types had finished sifting her

story to the last detail. Other questioners took over then--

center chiefs, agency directors, congressional committees.

Masters of policy.

Sitting next to Mark at hearing after hearing, Teresa felt

waves of ennui as she listened to the same praise, the same

lofty sentiments. Oh, not every public servant was posing.

Most were intelligent, hardworking people, after their own

fashion. But theirs was a realm as alien to her as the bottom

of the sea. She was sworn to protect this system, but that

didn't make sitting through it any easier.

"They talk and talk . . . but they never ask any of the

real questions!" she muttered to Mark, sotto voce.

EARTH 135

"Just keep smiling," he whispered back. "It's what

we're paid for, now."

Teresa sighed. Anyone in NASA who refused her turn

in the public relations barrel was a slacker who did real

harm. But why did your smile-burden multiply whenever

you did something particularly well? Was that any way to

repay initiative? If there were justice, it'd be Colonel Glenn

Spivey and the other peepers forced to sit through this, and

she'd get the reward she wanted most.

To get back to work.

To help find out what had killed forty people. Including

her husband.

Instead, Spivey was probably in the thick of things,

helping design a new station, while she had to endure media

attention any Hollywood star would swoon for.

As weeks passed, she began suspecting there was more

to this than just an awkward overlap of two cultures. They

kept urging her to do chat shows and go on lecture circuits.

Or, if either she or Mark wanted to take off on a two-month

vacation on St. Croix, that would be all right, too.

Tempted by a chance to graduate from astronaut to

superstar, Mark succumbed. But not Teresa. She was adamant.

And finally she asserted her right to go home.

A domestic service had come by regularly to water the

plants. Still, the Clear Lake condo felt cryptlike when she

walked through the front door. She went from window to

window, letting in the listless, heavy-sweet smells of Texas

springtime. Even traffic noise was preferable to the silence.

NASA had forwarded her important messages, providing

secretaries to handle fan mail and bills. So she was denied

even the solace of busywork during those awkward first

hours. Her autosec flashed the queue of her clipping program

... a backlog of fifteen thousand headlines culled

from news services and Net-zines in every time zone. She

flushed everything having to do with the accident, and the

tally dropped below a hundred. Those she might scan later,

to catch up with what was happening in the world.

Teresa wandered room to room, not exactly avoiding

thoughts of Jason, but neither did she go straight to the

photo album, shelved between the bound-paper encyclopedia

and her husband's collection of rare comic books. She

didn't need photographs or holo-pages in order to replay mo136 D A V I D B R I N

ments from her marriage. They were all in her head--the

good and not so good--available on ready recall.

All too ready . . .

She slipped two hours of Vivaldi into the sheet-reader

and went out to the patio with a glass of orange juice.

(Someone had read her file and left two liters of the real

thing in her cooler, fresh squeezed from Oregon oranges.)

Beyond the polarized UV screen, Teresa looked out on

the swaying elms sheltering several blocks of low apartment

buildings, ending abruptly at the white dikes NASA had

erected against the rising Gulf of Mexico. The tracks of a

new rapitrans line ran atop the levee. Trains swept past on

faintly humming superconducting rails.

A bluebird landed on the balcony and chirped at her,

drawing a brief smile. When she was little, bluebirds had

been threatened all over North America by competition

from starlings and other invaders brought to the continent

by prior, careless generations of humans. Worried devotees

of native fauna built thousands of shelters to help them

survive, but still it seemed touch and go for the longest

time.

Now, like the elms, bluebirds were resurgent. Just as no

one could have predicted which plants or animals would

suffer most from the depleted ozone and dryer climate, nobody

seemed to have imagined some might actually benefit.

But apparently, in a few cases, it was so.

On the downside, Teresa remembered one awful autumn

when she and Jason came home almost daily to find

pathetic creatures dying on the lawn. Or worse, hopping

about in panic because they could no longer see.

Blind robins. Some threshold had been reached, and

within weeks they were all dead. Since then Teresa sometimes

wondered--had the extinction been universal? Or was

the die-off just a local "adjustment," restricted to south

Texas? A few words to her autosecretary would send a ferret

program forth to fetch the truth in milliseconds. But then,

what good would knowing do? The Net was such a vast sea

of information, sipping from it sometimes felt like trying to

slake your thirst from a fire hose.

Besides, she often found the Net tedious. So many people

saw it as a great soapbox from which to preach recipes for

planetary salvation.

Solutions. Everybody's got solutions.

138 D A V I D B R I N

One group wanted to draft the entire space program

into an effort to suspend ozone generators in the stratosphere.

A preposterous idea, but at least it was bold and

assertive, unlike the panacea offered by those calling for the

abandonment of technology altogether, and a return to

"simpler ways." As if simpler ways could feed ten billion

people.

As if simpler ways hadn't also done harm. Astronauts

suffered few illusions about the so-called "benign pastoral

life-style," having seen from space the deserts spread by earlier civilizations--Sumerians, Chinese, Berbers, Amerinds--

armed with little more than sheep, fire, and primitive agriculture.

Teresa had her own ideas about solutions. There were

more riches on the moon and asteroids than all the bean

counters in all the capitals of the world could add up in

their combined lifetimes. Lots of astronauts shared the

dream of using space to cure Earth's ills.

She and Jason had. They had met in training, and at

first it had seemed some magical dating service must have

intervened on their behalf. It went beyond obvious things,

like their shared profession.

No. I fust never met anyone who could make me laugh

so.

Their consensus had extended to shopping among the

pattern-marriage styles currently in vogue. After long discussion, they finally selected a motif drawn up by a consultant

recommended by some other couples they knew. And it

seemed to work. Jealousy never loomed as a question between

them.

Until late last year, that is.

Until that Morgan woman appeared.

Teresa knew she was being unfair. She might as well

blame Glenn Spivey. It was also about when Jason started

working for that awful man that their troubles began.

Or she could lay the blame on ...

"Dumpit!" She cursed. All this introspection brought a

tightness to her )aw. She'd hoped absolute openness--giving

the shrinks everything inside of her--would get her through

all these "grief phases" quickly. But personal matters were

so completely unlike the physical world. They followed no

reliable patterns, no predictabilities. Despite recent optimistic pronouncements about new models of the mind, there

EARTH 139

hadn't yet been a Newton of psychology, an Einstein of

emotions. Perhaps there never would be.

Teresa felt a constriction in her chest as tears began to

flow again. "Damn . . . damn . . ."

Her hands trembled. The glass slipped from her fingers

and fell to the carpet, where it bounced undamaged, but

juice sprayed over her white pants. "Oh, cryo-bilge . . ."

The telephone rang. Teresa shouted on impulse, before

the NASA secretaries could intervene.

"I'll take it!" Of course she ought to let her temporary

staff screen all calls. But she needed action, movement,

something!

As soon as she'd wiped her eyes and stepped inside,

however, Teresa knew she'd made a mistake. The broad,

florid features of Pedro Manella loomed over her from the

phone-wall. Worse, she must have left the unit on auto-send

before departing on that last mission. The reporter had already

seen her.

"Captain Tikhana . . ." He smiled, larger than life.

"I'm sorry. I'm not giving interviews from my home. If

you contact the NASA--"

He cut in. "I'm not seeking an interview, Ms. Tikhana.

This concerns another matter I think you'll find important.

I can't discuss it by telephone--"

Teresa knew Manella from press conferences. She disliked

his aggressive style. His moustache, too. "Why not?"

she broke in. "Why can't you tell me now?"

Manella obviously expected the question. "Well, you

see, it has to do with matters conjoining onto your own

concerns, where they overlap my own ..."

He went on that way, sentence after sentence. Teresa

blinked. At first she thought he was speaking one of those

low-efficiency dialects civilians often used, bureaucratese, or social science babble ... as impoverished of content as they were rich in syllables. But then she realized the man

was jabbering the real thing--bona ride gibberish--phrases

and sentences that were semantic nonsense!

She was about to utter an abrupt disconnect when she

noticed him fiddling with his tie in a certain way. Then

Manella scratched an ear, wiped his sweaty lip on a sleeve,

wrung his hands fust so . . .

The uninitiated would probably attribute it all to his

Latin background--expressiveness in gestures as well as

140 D A V I D B R I N

words--but what Teresa saw instead were crude but clear

approximations of spacer hand talk.

1. open mike, she read. watch your words . . .

CEASS RED URGENCY . . . CURIOSITY . . .

It was all so incongruous, Teresa nearly laughed out

loud. What stopped her was the look in his eyes. They

weren't the eyes of a babbler.

He knows something, she realized. Then--He knows

something about Erehwon!

Manella was implying her phone line might be tapped.

Furthermore, he was clearly making assumptions about the level of observation. Trained surveillance agents would find his sign language ruse ludicrously transparent. But the charade

would probably fool most context-sensitive monitoring

devices or agency flacks drafted to listen to the predictably

boring conversations of a bus driver like herself. It would

also get by any random eavesdropping hacker from the Net.

"All right." She waved a hand to stop him in mid-

sentence. "I've heard enough, Mr. Manella, and I'm not interested.

You'll have to go through channels like everybody

else. Now, goodbye."

The display went blank just as he seemed about to remonstrate.

He was a good actor, too. For it was only in those

brown eyes that she saw confirmation of her own hand

signs. Signs by which she had answered: maybe . . . i'ee re

SPOND SOON . . .

She would think about it. But why does Manella imagine

I'd be monitored in the first place? And what is it he

wants to tell me?

It had to be about Erehwon . . . about the calamity.

Her heart rate climbed.

At which point she'd had quite enough of this emotional

rebellion by her body. She sat cross-legged on the

carpet, closed her eyes, and sought the calm-triggers taught

to her in high school--laying cooling blankets over her

thoughts, using biofeedback to drain away the tension.

Whatever was happening, whatever Manella had to say, no

good would come of letting ancient fight-flight reactions

sweep her away. Cavemen might not have had much use for

patience, but it was a pure survival trait in the world of their

descendants.

Inhaling deeply, she turned away from the travails of

consciousness. Vivaldi joined the chirping bluebirds in an

unnoticed background as she sought the center, wherein she

always knew when and where she was.

This time though, she couldn't quite be sure that it--

the center--was still there anymore at all.

D

After he succeeded in separating Sky-Father from Earth-Mother,

giving their offspring room at last to stand and breathe, the forest god, Tane, looked about and saw that something else was lacking.

Only creatures of ira atua--the spirit way--moved upon the

land. But what could spirit entities ever be without ira tangata, mortal beings, to know them? Nothing.

So Tane attempted to bring mortal life to the world. But of all

the female spirits with whom he mated, only one possessed ira

tangata. She was Hine-titama, Dawn Maid. Daughter and wife of

Tane, she became mother of all mortal beings.

Later, after the world had been given life, Hine-titama turned

away from the surface, journeying deep into the realms below.

There she became Hine-nui-te-po, Great Lady of Darkness, who

waits to tend and comfort the dead after their journey down

Whanui a Tane, the broad road.

There she waits for you, and for you too. Our first mortal

ancestor, she sleeps below waiting for us all.

On his way back to Auckland after two days at the

C Tarawera Ceothermal Works, Alex found himself en0

snared in tourist traffic at Rotorua. Buses and minivans

R threaded the resort's narrow ways, hauling Australian

E families on holiday, gushing Sinhalese newlyweds, se-

rene-looking Inuit investors, and Han--the inevitable swell

of black-haired Han--nudging and whispering in close-

packed mobs that overflowed the pavements and lawns,

thronging and enveloping anything that might by any

stretch be quaint or "native."

Most shops bore signs in International Ideogramatic

Chinese, as well as English, Maori, and Simglish. And why

not? The Han were only the latest wave of nouveau moyen

to suddenly discover tourism. And if they engulfed all the

beaches and scenic spots within four thousand kilometers of

Beijing, they also paid well for their hard-earned leisure.

Yet more Chinese piled off flywheel buses just ahead of

142 D A V I D B R I N

Alex's little car, wearing garish sunhats and True-Vu goggles

that simultaneously protected the eyes and recorded for posterity every kitsch purchase from friendly concessionaires

touting "genuine" New Zealand native woodcraft.

Well, it's their turn, Alex thought, nursing patience. And it surely does beat war.

Kiwi autumn was still warm and breezy, so he had the

side window down. The smell of hydrogen sulfide from the

geysers was pungent, but not too noticeable after all his time

working underground with George Hutton's people. Waiting

for traffic to clear, Alex watched another silvery cruise

zeppelin broach a tree-lined pass and settle toward the busy

aerodrome at the edge of town. Even from here he made out

the crowds crammed into steerage, faces pressed against windows

to peer down at Rotorua's steamy volcanic pools.

A decade or two hence it might be the new bourgeois of

Burma or Morocco who packed the great junket liners, taking

advantage of cheap zep travel to swarm abroad in search

of armloads of cheap souvenirs and canned memories. By

then of course, the Han would have grown used to it all.

They'd be sophisticated individual travelers, like the Japanese

and Malays and Turks, who avoided frantic mobs and

snickered at the gaucheries of first-generation tourists.

That was the curious nature of the "mixed miracle."

For as the world's nations scrimped and bickered over dwindling

resources, sometimes scrapping violently over river

rights and shifting rains, its masses meanwhile enjoyed a

rising tide of onetime luxuries--made necessary by that demon

Expectation.

--Pure water cost nearly as much as your monthly rent.

At the same time, for pocket change you could buy disks

containing a thousand reference books or a hundred hours

of music.

--Petrol was rationed on a need-only basis and bicycles

choked the world's cities. Yet resorts within one day's zep

flight were in reach to even humble wage earners.

--Literacy rates climbed every year, and those with full-

reliance cards could self-prescribe any known drug. But in

most states you could go to jail for throwing away a soda

bottle.

To Alex the irony was that nobody seemed to find any

of it amazing. Change had this way of sneaking up on you,

one day at a time.

EARTH 143

"Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool.

Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is fust stupid. "

That was how his grandmother had put it, once. And

she ought to know. Everyone praised Jen Wolling for her

brilliant foresight. But one day she had shown him her

scorecard from the World Predictions Registry. After twenty-

five years of filing prognostications with the group, her success rating was a mere sixteen percent! And that was better

than three times the WPR average.

"People tend to get dramatic when they talk about the future.

When I was young, there were optimists who foresaw personal spacecraft and immortality in the twenty-first century . . . while pessimists looked at the same trends and foretold collapse into worldwide

famine and war.

"Both forecasts are still being made, Alex, with the deadlines always pushed back one decade, then another and another. Meanwhile,

people muddle through. Some things get better, some a lot worse.

Strangely enough, 'the future' never does seem to arrive. "

Of course Jen didn't know everything. She had never

suspected, for instance, that tomorrow could come abruptly,

decisively, in the shape of a microscopic, titanically heavy

fold of twisted space. . . .

Alex maneuvered slowly past a crowd that had spilled

into the street, watching dancers perform a haka on the

marae platform of an imposing Maori meeting house. Sloping

beams of extravagantly carved red wood overhung the

courtyard where bare-chested men stuck out their tongues

and shouted, stamping in unison and flexing tattooed thighs

and arms to intimidate the delighted tourists.

George Button had taken Alex to see the real thing a

while back, at the wedding of his niece. It was quite a show,

the haka. Evidence of a rich cultural heritage that lived on.

For a while, at least . . .

Alex shook his head. It's not my fault there won't be

any more hakas--or Maori--in a few years' time. I'm not

responsible for the thing, swallowing the Earth from

within.

Alex hadn't made that monster--the singularity they

called Beta. He'd only discovered it.

Still, in ancient Egypt they used to kill the messenger.

He would have no such easy out. He might not have

been the one to set Beta on its course, but he had made the

144 D A V I D B R I N

evaporating Iquitos singularity, Alpha. To George Button

and the others, that made him responsible by proxy--no

matter how much they liked him personally--until Beta's

real makers were found.

Alex recalled the image that had begun unblurring in

the holo tank as they probed the monster's involute topology.

It was horrible, voracious, and beautiful to behold. Undeniably

there was a genius somewhere . . . someone a

whole lot better than Alex at his own game. The realization

was humbling, and a bit frightening.

Immersed in his own thoughts, he had been driving the

little Tangoparu company car on mental autopilot, threading

past one bottleneck after another. Just when it seemed

traffic would open up again, red brake lights forced him to

stop hard. Shouts and horns blared somewhere up ahead.

Alex leaned out the window to get a better look. Emergency

strobes flashed. A bobbing magnus-effect ambulance

hovered near one of the massive, blocky tourist hotels,

where budget-conscious travelers rented tiny, slotlike units

by the cubic meter. The vehicle's spherical gas bag rotated

slowly around a horizontal pivot, using small momentum

shifts to maneuver delicately near white-suited emergency

workers. Alex had no view of the injured, but stains on the

clothes of shocked bystanders told of some bloody episode

that must have gone down only moments ago.

The crowds suddenly parted and more police have into

view, wrestling along a figure swaddled in restraint netting,

who howled and writhed, wild-eyed, with face and clothes

flecked in blood and spittle. A green gas cannister at his belt

showed him to be a dozer--one of those unfortunates more

affected by excess carbon dioxide than other people. In

most, such borderline susceptibilities caused little more

than sleepiness or headaches. But sometimes a wild mania

resulted, made far worse by the close press of crowding human

flesh.

Apparently, supplemental oxygen hadn't helped this

fellow ... or the poor victims of his murderous fit. Alex

had never seen a mucker up close like this before, but on

occasion he had witnessed the effects from a distance.

"You don't get anything, but what something else gets taken

away . . ." He distantly recalled ]e.n saying that last time he

visited her office in London, as they stood together at the

window watching the daily bicycle jam turn into a riot on

EARTH 145

Westminster Bridge. "True-Vu tech put a stop to purposeful street crime," she had said. "So today most killings are outrages of pure environmental overload. Promise me, Alex, you'll never be one of

those down there . . . the honestly employed."

Horribly fascinated, they had observed in silence as the

commuter brawl spread onto Brunner Quay, then eastward

toward the Arts Center. Recalling that episode, Alex suddenly

saw this one take an unexpected turn. The officers

hauling the wild-eyed mucker, distracted by frantic relatives

at their sleeves, let their grip loosen for just a moment. Even

then, a normal man might not have been able to tear free.

But in a burst of hysterical strength the maniac yanked loose

and ran. Ululating incoherently, he knocked down bystanders

and then hurtled through the traffic jam--directly toward

Alex's car!

The mucker's arms were pinned. He can't get far, Alex

thought. Somebody will stop him.

Only no one did. Nobody sensible messed with a

mucker, bound or unbound.

Deciding at the last moment, Alex kicked his door

open. The madman's eyes seemed to clarify in that brief

instant, replacing rage with an almost lucid, plaintive ex-

pression--as if to ask Alex, What did I ever do to you? Then

he collided with the door, caroming a few meters before

tumbling to the street. Somehow Alex felt guilty--as if he'd

just beaten up a helpless bloke instead of possibly saving

lives. That didn't stop him, though, from leaping out and

throwing himself atop the kicking, squalling man--now

suddenly awash with incongruous tears as he cursed in some

inland dialect of Han. With no better way to restrain him,

Alex simply sat on him till help arrived.

The whole episode--from breakaway to the moment officers

applied the spray sedatives they should have used in

the first place--took little more than a minute. When the

trussed-up mucker looked back at him through a crowd of

snapping True-Vu lenses, Alex had a momentary feeling that

he understood the fellow ... far better, perhaps, than he

did the gawking tourists around him. There was something

desperately fearful and yet longing in those eyes. A look

reminding Alex of what he sometimes saw in a mirror's momentary,

sidelong glance.

It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all

146 D A V I D B R I N

create monsters in our minds. The only important difference

may be which of us let our monsters become real.

After wading through congratulatory backpats to his

car, Alex looked down and saw for the first time that his

clothes were smeared with blood. He sighed. Why does everything

happen to me? I thought academics were supposed

to lead boring lives.

Oh, what I wouldn 'I give for some good old-fashioned

British boredom about now. . . .

No sooner was he seated than the driver behind him

blew his horn. So much for the rewards of heroism. Edging

around a final tourist bus he saw open lanes ahead at last.

Carefully Alex fed the engine hydrogen, spun up the little

car's flywheel, and gradually built up speed. Soon the northern

reaches of the Mamaku range sped by as he left Rotorua

behind and set off across the central plateau.

This highway shared the chief attribute of Kiwi roads--

a stubborn resistance to straight lines. Driving entailed carefully swooping round hairpin bends and steep crags, intermittently

staring over precipices into gaping, cottony

nothingness.

It was easy to see how New Zealand had got its Maori

name--Ao Tearoa--Land of the Long White Cloud. Mist-

shrouded peaks resembled recumbent giants swathed in fog.

The slumbering volcanoes' green slopes supported rich forests,

meadows, and over twenty million sheep. The latter

were kept mostly for their wool nowadays, though he knew George Button and many other natives ate red meat from time to time and saw nothing wrong with it.

In this land of steam geysers and rumbling mountains,

one never drove far without encountering another of Hut-

ton's little geothermal power stations, each squatting on a

taproot drilled near a vein of magma. Mapping such underground

sources had made George wealthy. The network of

sensors left over from that effort now helped Alex's team

define what was happening in the Earth's core.

Not that anyone expected the scans to offer hope. How,

after all, do you get rid of an unwanted guest weighing a

million million tons? A monster ensconced safely in a lair

four thousand kilometers deep? You surely don't do it the

way the Maori used to placate taniwha . . . demons . . .

by plucking a hair and dropping it into dark waters.

Still, George wanted the work continued, to learn how

EARTH 147

much time was left, and who was responsible. Alex had

wrung one promise from George, in case they ever did find

the culprit. He wanted an hour with the fellow . . . one

hour to talk physics before George wreaked vengeance on

the negligent genius with his own hands.

Thinking about the poor man he had encountered so

roughly back in Rotorua--remembering the sad yet bloody

look in the mucker's eyes--Alex wondered if any of them

really had a right to judge.

He had always liked to think he had a passing education in

fields outside his own. Alex had known, for instance, that

even the greatest mountains and canyons were mere ripples

and pores on the planet's huge bulk. Earth's crust--its ba-

salts and granites and sedimentary rocks--made up only a

hundredth of its volume and half a percent of its total mass.

But he used to picture a vast interior of superdense,

superhot melt, and left it at that. So much for geology.

Only when you truly study a subject do you find out

how little you knew all along.

Why, just two months ago Alex had never heard of

Andrija Mohorovici6!

In 1909 the Yugoslav scientist had used instruments to

analyze vibration waves from a Croatian earthquake. Comparing

results from several stations, Mohorovicic discovered

he could, like bats or whales, detect objects by their reflected

sound alone. On another occasion he found a thin

layer that would later bear his name. But in 1909 what he

heard were echoes of the Earth's very core.

As instruments improved, seismic echolocation showed

other abrupt boundaries, along with fault lines, oil fields,

and mineral deposits. By century's end, millions were being

spent on high-tech listening as desperate multinationals

sought ever-deeper veins, to keep the glory days going just a

little longer.

A picture took shape, of a dynamic world in ceaseless

change. And while most geologists went on studying the

outer crust, some curious men and women cast their nets

much deeper, beyond and below any Conceivable economic

reward.

Such "useless" knowledge often makes men rich--witness

George Hutton's billions. Whereas Alex's own "practi-

148 D A V I D B R I N

cal" project, financed by money-hungry generals, had

turned unprofitable to a rare and spectacular degree.

It fust goes to show ... he thought. You never can

tell what surprises life has in store for you.

Even as Alex admitted his ignorance of geophysics, it

was his own expertise that Hutton's techs called upon as

they struggled to improve their tools. The gravity antennas

employed superconducting wave generators like those in a

cavitron--the still-unlicensed machine he'd used in Iquitos.

So he was able to suggest shortcuts saving months of development.

It was fun exchanging ideas with others . . . building

something new and exciting, out of sight of the suspicious

bureaucrats of the scientific tribunals. Unfortunately, each

time they laughed together, or they celebrated overcoming

some obstacle, someone inevitably stopped short and turned

away, remembering what it was all about and how futile

their work was likely to be in the long run. Alex doubted

that even his great-grandparents' generation, during the awful

nuclear brinksmanship of the cold war, had ever felt so

helpless or hopeless.

But we have to keep trying.

He switched on the radio, looking for some distracting

music. But the first station he found carried only news bulletins, in Simplified English.

"We now tell you more news about the tragedy of Reagan Station.

Two weeks ago, the American space station exploded. The ambassador to the United Nations, from Russia, accuses that the United States of North America was testing weapons on Reagan Station. The Russian

ambassador does say that he has no proof. But he also does say that this is the most likely explanation ..."

Most likely explanation indeed, Alex thought. It just

goes to show . . . you never can tell.

D In olden times, to be "sane" meant you behaved in ways

both sanctioned by and normal to the society you lived in.

In the last century some people--especially creative people

--rebelled against this imposition, this having to be "average."

Eager to preserve their differences, some even went to the opposite extreme, embracing a romantic notion that creativity and

suffering are inseparable, that a thinker or doer must be outra-

EARTH 149

geous, even crazy, in order to be great. Like so many other

myths about the human mind, this one lingered for a long time,

doing great harm.

' At last, however, we have begun to see that true sanity has

nothing at all to do with norms or averages. This redefinition

emerged only when some got around to asking the simplest of

questions.

"What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of

mental illness?"

The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack--

flexibility--to be able to change your opinion or course of

action, if shown clear evidence you were wrong.

satiability--the ability to feel satisfaction if you actually get what you said you wanted, and to transfer your strivings to other goals.

extrapolation--an ability to realistically assess the possible

consequences of your actions and to empathize, or guess how

another person might think or feel.

This answer crosses all boundaries of culture, age, and language.

When a person is adaptable and satiable, capable of

realistic planning and empathizing with his fellow beings, those

problems that remain turn out to be mostly physiochemical or

behavioral. What is more, this definition allows a broad range of deviations from the norm--the very sorts of eccentricities suppressed under older worldviews.

So far so good. This is, indeed, an improvement.

But where, I must ask, does ambition fit under this sweeping

categorization? When all is said and done, we remain mammals.

Rules can be laid down to keep the game fair. But nothing will

ever entirely eliminate that will, within each of us, to win.

--From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books, edition 4.7 (2035) I D hyper access code 1-(TRAN-777-97-9945-29A.]

"... the most likely explanation. Come now, Captain

E Tikhana. Surely you aren't taken in by that silly cover

X story they're spreading? That America was conducting

0 secret weapons tests aboard Erehwon?"

S Teresa shrugged, wondering again why she had let

P Pedro Manella set up this luncheon meeting in the first

H place. "Why not?" she responded. "The space secretary

E denies it. The President denies it. But you press people

R keep printing it."

E "Exactly!" Manella spread his hands expansively.

"The government's charade is working perfectly. It's a venerable tactic. Keep loudly denying something you didn't do, so nobody will look for what you really did!"

Teresa stared as he twirled a forkful of linguini and

made a blithe insouciance of taking it under the portal of his

moustache. Fighting a nascent headache, she pressed the

pressure points above her eyes. The plastic table top rocked

under her elbows, setting plates and glasses quivering.

"Exactly-what-are-you-talking-about?" she said irritably,

speaking the words individually. "If you don't start

making sense soon, I'm going to switch languages. Maybe

you can make yourself understood in Simglish."

The reporter gave her a look of distaste. Known to be

fluent in nine tongues, he clearly had no love for the experimental bastard son of English and Esperanto.

"All right, Ms. Tikhana. Let me spell it out for you. I

think your husband's team on the space station's Farpoint

platform was experimenting with captive black holes."

She blinked, then broke out laughing. "I knew it. You are crazy."

"Am I?" Manella wiped his moustache and leaned toward

her. "Consider. Although cavitronics research is allowed

in a few places, in only one location have

investigators been licensed to go all the way--to create full-

scale singularities. And then only in orbit around the

moon."

"So?"

"So imagine some government decided to do an end run

around the international team. What if they wanted to experiment

on singularities of their own, in secret, to get a

technological head start before the moratorium ends?"

"But the risks of getting caught--"

"Are substantial, yes. But those repercussions would be

EARTH 151

lessened by keeping all experiments at high altitude until

everyone is sure microholes are safe and the tribunals start

issuing licenses. Look what happened to that poor imbecile

Alex Lustig, when he got caught jumping the gun right on

the Earth's surface."

Teresa shook her head. "You're implying the United

States was engaged in secret, illegal research in space," she

said coolly.

Manella's smile was patronizing, infuriating. Teresa

steeled herself to ignore everything but content.

"I'm suggesting," he replied. "That your husband

might have been involved in such a program, and never

bothered telling you about it."

"I've heard enough." Teresa crumpled her napkin and

threw it on the table. She stood, but then stopped as she saw

the reporter pull out several glossy photographs and lay

them between the place settings. Teresa's fingertips traced

the outline of Jason's face.

"Where was this taken?"

"At a conference on gravity physics last year, in Snowbird.

See? You can read his name tag. Of course he wasn't in

uniform at the time ..."

"Do you carry a secret camera in your bow tie?"

"In my moustache," he said, with such a straight face

that Teresa almost believed him. "This was back when I was

hunting for clues to Alex Lustig's whereabouts, before I

broke the story on his own particular--"

Teresa flipped the last picture aside. "Nobody trusts

photographs anymore, as proof of anything at all."

"True enough," Manella conceded. "They could be

faked. But it was a public conference. Call the organizers. He

used his own name."

Teresa paused. "So? Among other things, Jason was

studying anomalies in the Earth's gravitational field. They're

important to orbital mechanics and navigation." Because of

that aspect, Teresa had done more than a little reading on

the subject herself.

Manella commented with his shoulders. "The Earth's

field is twenty orders of magnitude less intense than the sort

of gravity they talk about at conferences on the theory of

black holes."

Teresa slumped into her seat again. "You're crazy," she

152 D A V I D B R I N

repeated. But this time her voice didn't carry as much conviction.

"Come now, Captain. You're an adult. Do not sink to

abuse. Or at least keep the abuse relevant. Call me overzealous.

Or pushy. Or even pudgy. But don't say I'm crazy when

you know I might be right."

Teresa wanted to look anywhere but into the man's

dark, piercing eyes. "Why can't you just leave it alone! Even

if everything you suspect were true, they paid for it with

their lives. The only ones they harmed were themselves."

"And the taxpayers, Ms. Tikhana. I'm surprised you

forget them. And perhaps your space program. What will

happen to it during the lengthy investigations?"

Teresa winced, but said nothing.

"Besides, even if they only harmed themselves, does

that excuse their bosses for violating basic principles of international law? True, most physicists agree cavitrons can't

make anything truly dangerous. But until that's verified by a

science tribunal, the technology is still quarantined. You

know the reasons for the New Technologies Treaty as well

as I do."

Teresa felt like spitting. "The treaty's a millstone, dragging

us back--" But Manella disagreed, interrupting.

"It's our salvation! You, of all people, should know

what harm was done before its enactment. Care to try stepping

outside right now without protection? Our grandparents

could do so safely, even on a day like today."

She glanced through the coated panes of the restaurant.

It was bright out, not a cloud in the sky. Many strollers were

enjoying an afternoon on the Mall. But everyone, without

exception, wore sun hats and protective glasses.

Teresa knew the UV danger was often overstated. Even a few days' sunbathing on a beach wouldn't appreciably shorten the average person's lifespan. The ozone layer

wasn't that badly depleted yet. Still, she got Manella's

point. Human shortsightedness had shredded that protective

veil, just as it accelerated the spreading deserts and rising

seas.

"You Americans astonish me," he went on. "You

dragged the rest of us, kicking and screaming, into environmental awareness. You and the Scandinavians chivvied and

coerced until the treaties were signed . . . possibly in time

to save something of this planet.

EARTH 153

"But then, once the laws and tribunals were in place,

you became the loudest complainers! Hollering like frustrated

children about restraints on your right to do whatever

you please!"

Teresa didn't say anything, but answered silently. We

never expected all the damned bureaucracy.

Her personal grudge was the tribunals' slowness in releasing

new rocket designs--studying, then restudying

whether this propellant or that one would produce noxious

or greenhouse gases. Closing the barn door too late on one

problem and closing opportunity's door at the same time.

"The world is too small," Manella went on. "Our frail,

frugal prosperity teeters on a precipice. Why do you think I

devote myself to hunting down little would-be Fausts like

Alex Lustig?"

She looked up. "For the headlines?"

Manella lifted his wine glass. "Touche. But my point

remains. Captain Tikhana. Something went on aboard that

station. Let's put aside illegality and talk about secrecy. Secrecy meant it wasn't subject to scrutiny and criticism.

That's how calamities like Chernobyl and Lamberton and

Tsushima happen. It's also why--to be horribly blunt--your

husband is right now hurtling at relativistic velocities toward

Sagittarius."

Teresa felt the blood drain out of her face. She had a

sudden memory . . . not of Jason, but of the slippery way

Colonel Clenn Spivey had managed to avoid testifying.

Spivey had to know more, much more than he was telling.

Oh, Manella was smart all right. Right down to knowing

when his point was made . . . when it was best to stop

talking while his victim squirmed for some way out of his

infernal trap of logic.

Despairingly, Teresa saw no escape. She had to make a

choice between two equally unpalatable avenues.

She could go to the inspector general with this. By federal

and treaty law she'd be protected from retribution. Her

rank and pay and safety would be secure.

But there was no way the 1C could protect the most

precious thing left to her--her flight status. Any way it

went, "they" would find an excuse not to let her back into

space again.

The other choice Manella was clearly, implicitly offering.

She subvocalized the half obscenity ... a conspiracy.

154 D A V I D B R I N

Something scratched at the window. She looked outside

to see a creature scrabbling against the smooth surface of the

glass--a large insect, bizarre and startling until she remembered.

A cicada. Yes, the Net had stories about them.

The city had braced for the reemergence of the seven-

teen-year cicadas, which from time beyond memory had

flooded one summer every generation with noisy, ratcheting

insect life, swarming through the trees and keeping everybody

awake until they at last mated, laid their eggs, and

died. A nuisance, but one whose recurrence was so rare and

well timed that Washington regularly made an event of it,

with special studies in the schools and humorous reports on

the zines.

Only this year something had gone wrong.

Perhaps it was the water, or maybe something let into

the soil. No one knew why yet . . . only that when a few,

straggling cicadas finally did emerge from their seventeen

winters underground, they were warped, sickly things, mutated

and dying. It brought back memories of the cancer

plague, or the Calthingite babies of twenty years ago, and led

to dire conjectures about when something like it would next

happen to people again.

Teresa watched the pitiful, horrible little insect crawl

away amid the shrubbery ... a victim, one of so many

without names.

"What is it you want of me?" she asked the reporter in

a whisper.

Somehow, she had expected him to smile. She was glad, even grateful, that he was sensitive enough not to exult openly. With a sincerity that might even be genuine, Pedro

Manella touched her hand.

"You must help me. Help me find out what is going

on."

D The World Predictions Registry is proud to present our

twenty-fifth annual Prognostication Awards, for accomplishments

in the fields of trend analysis, meteorology, economic forecasting, and whistle blowing. In addition this year, for the first time in a decade, there will be a new category.

For some time a debate has raged in our portion of the Net

EARTH 155

over the purpose of the registry. Are we here simply to collate

the projections of various experts, so that over time those with

the best accuracy scores may "win" in some way? Or should

our objective be something more far-reaching?

It can be argued that there's nothing more fascinating and

attractive to human beings than the notion of predicting a successful path through the pitfalls and opportunities that lie ahead.

Entertainment Net-zines are filled with the prophecies of

psychics, soothsayers, astrologers, and stock market analysts,

all part of a vast market catering to this basic human dream.

Why not--some of our members have asked--expand the

registry to record all those visions as well, and score them as we do the more academic models? At the very least we'd provide a

service by debunking charlatans. But also there's the possibility, even if most offer no more than sensationalism and fancy, that

just a few of these would-be seers could be making bona ride

hits.

What if some crank--without knowing how or why--stum-

bled onto a rude but promising trick or knack, one offering him

or her a narrow window onto the obstacle course ahead? These

days, with the world in the condition it's in, can we afford to

ignore any possibility?

For this reason, on our silver anniversary, we're establishing

the new category of "random prophecy." It will require a

database store larger than all other categories combined. Also,

as in the department for whistle blowing, we'll be accepting

anonymous predictions under codenames to protect those fearful

for their reputations.

So send them in, you would-be Johns and Nostrodami . . .

only please, try not to be quite as obscure as the originals. As in the other sections, part of your score will be based on the explicitness and testability of your projections.

And now for honorable mentions in the category of trends

analysis . . .

--World Predictions Registry. [D AyR 2437239.726 IntPredReg.

6.21.038:21:01.]

Once, when he was very young, Alex's gran took him

C out of school to witness a life ark being launched.

0 Nearly thirty years later, the memory of that morning

R still brought back feelings of childlike wonder.

E For one thing, in those days an adult might think

nothing of sending a big, black, gasoline-powered taxi to

Croydon to pick up a small boy and then take him all the

way back to where St. Thomas's Hospital squatly overlooked

long queues of cargo barges filing down the Thames

past Parliament. After politely thanking the cabbie, young

Alex had taken the long way to the hospital entrance, so he

could dawdle near the water watching the boats. Set free

temporarily from uniforms and schoolyard bullying, he savored

a little time alone with the river before turning at last

to go inside.

As expected, Jen was still busy, running back and forth

from her research lab to the clinic, giving both sets of assistants revised instructions that only served to introduce still

more chaos. Alex waited contentedly, perched on a lab stool

while patients from all over Greater London were tested and

prodded and rayed to find out what was wrong with them.

Back then, while still involved in practical medicine, Jen

used to complain she was always being sent the cases no one

else could diagnose. As if she'd have had it any other way.

Laboratory science interested Alex, but biology seemed

so murky, so undisciplined and subjective. Watching them

test victims of a dozen different modern urban maladies,

brought on by pollution, tension or overcrowding, he wondered

how the workers were able to conclude anything at

all.

One of the techs fortunately came to his rescue with a

pad of paper and soon Alex was immersed, doodling with

maths. On that day--he recalled vividly in later years--it

had been the marvelous, intricate, and exacting world of

matrices that had him enthralled.

At last Jen called to him as she removed her lab coat.

Short, but deceptively strong, she took his hand as they left

the hospital and rented two cycles from a hire/drop bubble

near the elevated bikeway.

Alex had hoped they'd take a cab. He complained about

the weather and distance, but Jen insisted a little mist never

hurt anyone, and he could use the exercise.

In those days bicycles weren't yet lords of London's

EARTH 157

streets, and Alex had to endure a harrowing blur of horns

and shouting voices. Keeping up with Jen seemed a matter of

grim survival until at last the green swards of Regent's Park

opened up around them in a welcome haven of calm.

Black banners hung limply as they dropped off the bikes

at a canal-side kiosk, below green and blue Earthwatch placards.

Demonstrators stood nearby with ash-smeared brows,

protesting both the ark program and the recent events that

had made it necessary. One damp-haired speaker addressed

tourists and visitors with an intensity that blazed in Alex's

memory ever afterward.

"Our world, our mother, has many parts. Each--like the organs in

our bodies, like our very cells--participates in a synergistic whole. Each is a component in the delicate balance of cycle and recycle which has kept this world for so long an oasis of life in the dead emptiness of space.

"What happens when you or I lose a piece of ourselves? A finger? A lung? Do we expect to function the same afterward? Will the whole ever work as well again? How, then, can we be so blithe at the dismembering of our world? Our mother?

"Gaia's cells, her organs, are the species that share her surface!

"Here, today, hypocrites will tell you they're saving species. But how? By amputating what's left and storing it in a jar? You might as well cut out a drunkard's liver and preserve it in a machine. For what purpose?

Who is saved? Certainly not the patient!"

Alex watched the speaker while his grandmother

bought tickets. Most of the fellow's words left him perplexed

on that day. Still, he recalled being fascinated. The

orator's passion was unusual. Those who held forth on Sun-

days at Speakers' Corner seemed pallid and overwry in comparison.

One passage in particular he recollected with utter clarity.

The fellow stretched his hands out at passersby, as if

pleading for their souls.

"... humans brought intelligence, sentience, self-awareness to

the world, it cannot be denied. And that, by itself, was good. For how else could Caia learn to know herself without a brain? That was our purpose--to furnish that organ--to serve that function for our living Earth.

"But what have we done?"

The demonstrator wiped at the ash stains above each

eye, runny from the intermittent drizzle. "What kind of brain

slays the body of which it is a part? What kind of thinking organ kills 158 D A V I D B R I N

the other organs of its whole? Are we Caia's brain? Or are we a cancer!

One she'd be far better off without?"

For a moment, the speaker caught Alex's eye and

seemed to be addressing him especially. Staring back, Alex

felt his grandmother take his hand and pull him away, past

metal detectors and sniffer machines into the relative tranquility of the grounds inside.

On that day nobody seemed much interested in the

bears or seals. The African section held few tourists, since

that continent had been declared stabilized a few years before.

Most people thought the great die-back there was over.

For a time, at least.

Passing the Amazona section, Alex wanted to stop and

see the golden lion tamarins, their large enclosure outlined

in bright blue. There were quite a few other blue-rimmed

areas there. Guards, both human and robot, focused on anyone

who approached those specially marked exhibits too

closely.

The yellow-maned tamarins looked at Alex dispiritedly,

meeting his eyes as he passed. To him it seemed they too

were aware of what today's activity was about.

Crowds were already dispersing in the newly expanded

section of the zoo devoted to creatures from the Indian subcontinent.

He and Jen were too late for the official ceremony,

naturally. Gran had never been on time for anything

as long as he'd known her.

Still, it didn't really matter. The mass of visitors wasn't

here to listen to speeches but to bear witness and know that

history had marked yet another milestone. Jen told him

they were "doing penance," which he figured must mean

she was a Gaian, too.

It wasn't until many years later that he came to realize

millions thought of her as the Gaian.

While they queued, the sun came out. Vapor rose from

the pavement. Jen gave him a tenner to run off for an ice

lollie, and he made it back just in time to join her at the

place where the new border was being laid.

Half the exhibits in this section were already lined in

blue. Guards now patrolled what had only a month ago been

standard zoo enclosures, but which were now reclassified as

something else entirely. This was before the hermetically

sealed arks of later days, back when the demarcation was

still mostly symbolic.

EARTH 159

Of course the extra animals, the refugees, hadn't arrived

yet. They were still in quarantine while zoos all over the

world debated who would take which of the creatures recently

yanked out of the collapsing Indian park system.

Over the months ahead, the exiles would arrive singly and

in pairs, never again to see their wild homes.

Painters had just finished outlining the blackbuck compound.

The deerlike animals flicked their ears, oblivious to

their changed status. But in the next arena a tigress seemed

to understand. She paced her enlarged quarters, tail swishing,

repeatedly scanning the onlookers with fierce yellow

eyes before quickly turning away again, making low rumbling

sounds. Jen watched the beast, transfixed, a strange,

distant expression on her face, as if she were looking far into

the past . . . or to a future dimly perceived.

Alex pointed a finger at the great cat. Although he

knew he was supposed to feel sorry for it, the tiger seemed

so huge and alarming, it gave him a ritual feeling of security

to cock his thumb and aim.

"Bang, bang," he mouthed silently.

A new plaque glittered in the sunshine.

LIFE-ARK REFUGEE NUMBER 5,345

ROYAL BENGAL TIGER

NOW EXTINCT IN THE WILD.

MAY WE EARN THEIR FORGIVENESS THROUGH THESE ARKS

AND SOMEDAY GIVE THEM BACK AGAIN THEIR HOMES.

"I've looked into the gene pool figures," fen had said,

though not to him. She stared at the beautiful, scary, wild

thing beyond the moat and spoke to herself. "I'm afraid

we're probably going to lose this line."

She shook her head. "Oh, they'll store germ plasm. And

maybe someday, long after the last one has died ..."

Her voice just faded then, and she looked away.

At the time Alex had only a vague notion what it was

all about, what the ark program was for, or why the agencies

involved had at last given up the fight to save the Indian

forests. All he knew was that Jen was sad. He took his grandmother's hand and held it quietly until at last she sighed

and turned to go.

160 D A V I D B R I N

Those feelings lingered with him even long after he

went away to university and entered physics. Everyone is

either part of the problem or part of the solution, he had

learned from her. Alex grew up determined to make a difference,

a big difference.

And so he sought ways to produce cheap energy. Ways

that would require no more digging or tearing or poisoning

of land. Ways to give billions the electricity and hydrogen

they insisted on having, but without cutting any more forests.

Without adding poisons to the air.

Well, Alex reminded himself for the latest time. / may

have failed at that. I may have been useless. But at least

I'm not the one who killed the Earth. Someone else did

that.

It was a strange, ineffective solace.

No, another part of him agreed. But the ones who did it

--whatever team or government or individual manufactured

Beta--they, too, might have begun with the purest of

motives.

Their mistake might just as easily have been my own.

Alex remembered the tigress, her savage, reproachful

eyes. The slow, remorseless pacing.

The hunger . . .

Now he pursued a far deadlier monster. But for some

reason the image of the great cat would not leave him.

He remembered the blackbucks, gathered in their pen

all facing the same way, seeking security and serenity in

numbers, in doing everything alike. Tigers weren't like that.

They had to be housed separately. Except under rare circumstances, they could not occupy the same space. That made

them harder to maintain.

There were analogies in physics . . . the blackbucks

were like those particles called bosons, which all sorted together.

But fermions were loners like tigers. . . .

Alex shook his head. What a bizarre line of contemplation!

Why was he thinking about this right now?

Well, there was that postcard from Jen . . .

Not really a postcard--more a snapshot, sent to one of

his secret mail drops in the Net. It showed his grandmother,

apparently as spry as ever, posing with several black men

and women and what looked like a tame rhinoceros--if such

a thing were possible. Transmission marks showed it had

EARTH 161

been sent from the pariah Confederacy of Southern Africa.

So ]en was making waves, still.

It runs in the family, he thought, smiling ironically.

He jerked slightly as someone nudged him on the

shoulder. Looking up, he saw George Button standing over

him.

"All right, Lustig, I'm here. Stan tells me you wanted to

show me something before we begin the next test run. He

says you've added to your bestiary."

Alex jerked, still remembering the life ark. "I beg your

pardon?"

"You know . . . black holes, microscopic cosmic

strings, tuned strings ..." George rubbed his hands in

mock anticipation. "So, what have you come up with this

time?"

"Well, I've been wrong before ..."

"And you may be again. So? Each time you goof, it's

brilliant! Come on, then. Show me the final loop, or lasso, or

lariat, or . . ."

He trailed off, eyes widening at what Alex manifested

in the holo tank. "Bozhe moi," George sighed. An expression

Alex knew was definitely not Maori.

"I call it a knot singularity," he replied. "An apt name,

don't you think?"

The blue thing did resemble a knot of sorts--a Cordian

monstrosity with the same relationship to a boy scout's

clove hitch as a spaceship had to a firecracker. The writhing

orb was in ceaseless motion--loops popping out of the surface

and quickly receding again--making Alex think of a

ball of angry worms. All around the rippling sphere was

emitted a shining light.

"I--I suppose that thing is made of ... strings?" George asked, then swallowed.

Alex nodded. "Good guess. And before you ask, yes,

they're touching each other without reconnecting and dissipating.

Think of a neutron, George. Neutrons can't exist

for long outside an atom. But contained inside, say, a helium

nucleus, they can last nearly forever."

George nodded soberly. He pointed. "Look at that!"

The loops popping out of the roiling mass mostly

throbbed and flailed quickly before being drawn back in.

162 D A V I D B R I N

Now though, a string extended farther out than usual and

managed to cross over on itself beyond the knot.

In a flash it burned loose and floated away from the

greater body. Released from the whole, the liberated loop

soon twisted round itself again. With another flash of reconnection there were two small ones in its place. Then four.

Soon, the rebel string had vanished in a rush of division and

self-destruction.

As they watched, another loop cut itself off in the same

way, drifting off to die. Then another. "I think I see," George said. "This thing, too, is doomed to destroy itself, like the micro black hole and the micro string."

"Correct," Alex said. "Just as a black hole is a gravitational

singularity in zero macrodimensions, and a cosmic

string is a singularity in one, a knot is a discontinuity in

space-time that can twist in three, four ... I haven't calculated how many directions it can be tied in. I can't even

dream what the cosmological effects might be, if any truly

big ones were made back at the beginning of the universe.

"What all three singularities have in common is this. It

doesn't pay to be small. A small knot is just as unstable as a

microstring or a microhole. It dissipates--in this case by

emitting little string loops which tear themselves apart in a

blaze of energy."

"So," George said. "This is what you now think you

made in your cavitron, in Peru?"

"Yes, it is." Alex shook his head, still unable to really

believe it himself. And yet no other model so accurately

explained the power readings back at Iquitos. None so well

predicted the mass and trajectory they had observed during

the last week. It still astonished Alex he could have constructed such a thing without knowing it was even theoretically

possible. But there it was.

Silence between the two men remained unbroken for

moments.

"So now you have a model that works," George said at

last. "First you thought you had dropped a black hole into

the Earth, then a tuned string. Now you call it a knot . . .

and yet it still is harmless, dissipating."

Button turned back to look at Alex again. "That still

doesn't help you explain Beta, does it? You still have no idea

why the other monster is stable, self-contained, able to grow

and feed at the Earth's core, do you?"

EARTH 163

Alex shook his head. "Oh, it's a knot all right. Some kind of knot singularity. But exactly what type . . . that's what we try to start finding out today."

"Hmm," Button looked across the underground chamber,

past the waiting technicians to the gleaming new

thumper, freshly built to specifications Alex and Stan

Coldman had developed, now tuned and ready to send probing

beams of gravity downward, inward.

"I'm concerned about those earthquakes," George said.

"So am I."

"But there's no way to avoid taking risks, is there, hm?

All right, Lustig. Co on, give the order. Let's see what the

thing has to say, face to face."

Alex waved to Stan Coldman, stationed by the thumper

itself, who rolled his eyes in a swift prayer and then threw

the master timing switch. Naturally, nobody in the chamber

actually heard the sound of coherent gravitons, fired downward

from the superconducting antenna. Still, they could imagine.

Alex wondered if the others, too, were listening for an

echo, and fearing just what would be heard.

D Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546], random sampling of today's bulletin board queries. [D Abstracts only. Speak number

or press index symbol for expanded versions.]

(54,891) "Why, after all these years, haven't they figured

out how to separate valuable elements from seawater?

It must be a conspiracy by the mining

companies! Any comments out there? Or suggested

references I can look up?"

(54,892) "Ever since I was little, back in TwenCen, I kept

hearing about fusion power--how it'd provide

cheap, clean, limitless energy someday. They

said it was 'only' twenty years or so from being

practical, but that was sixty years ago! Can

someone index-ref some teach-vids on the subject,

so a lay person like me can find out where

they're at today?"

164 D A V I D B R I N

(54,893) "I hear in Burma and Royal Quebec they're letting

convicted killers choose execution by disassembly,

so their organs can go on living in other

people. One fellow's still 87% alive, they recycled

him so well! Can anyone help me trace

the origins of this concept? Where does execution

leave off and a kind of immortality for felons

begin?"

(54,894) "How about fighting the greenhouse effect by

sending lots of dust into the atmosphere, to

block sunlight like those volcanoes did during

the chill snap of '09? I recently found a swarm of

references to something called nuclear winter they were all worried about back during TwenCen. It might have been scary when there

were all those bombs lying around, but right now

I think we could use some winter around here!

Anyone interested in starting a subforum about

this?"

(54,895) "Why jiltz poor wire-heads whose only tort is

self-perving? Sure they're vice lice, but where's

the fraction in evolution in action? I say let 'em

unbreed themselves, and stop forcing therapy

drugs on the pleasure-centered!"

(54,896) "My company blood test shows a 35% higher

than average genetic presensitivity to cell-muting

by trace chlorine. The boss says, stop using

public swimming pools or lose my supra-insurance.

Can she use a company test to tell me

what to do on my free time? Any public domain

law programs on the subject?"

(54,897) "Say, does anyone else out there feel he or

she's missing something^ I mean, I can't pin it

down exactly, but ... do you feel something's

going on, but nobody's telling you what it is? I

don't know. I just can't shake this feeling something's

happening . . ."

The Bay of Biscay glowed with the same radiant, sap-

L phire hues Logan remembered in Daisy McClennon's

I eyes. He fell for those delicate shades again as he travT

eled swiftly southward aboard a Tide Power Corporation

H minizeppelin. The beauty of the waters was chaste, se0

rene, pure, but all that would change once Eric Sauvel's

S engineers had their way.

P Sauvel sat next to him, behind the zep's pilot, gesH

turing to encompass the brilliant seascape. "Our silt stir-

E rers are already scattered across eight hundred square

R kilometers, where bottom sediments are richest," he

E told Logan, raising his voice slightly above the softly

hissing motors.

"You'll provide power directly from the Santa Paula barrage?"

"Correct. The tidal generators at Santa Paula will feed

the stirrers via superconducting cables. Of course any excess

will go to the European grid."

Sauvel was a tall, handsome man in his early thirties, a

graduate of Ecole Polytechnique and chief designer of this

daring double venture. He hadn't welcomed Logan's first

visit a few weeks ago, but changed his mind when the American

suggested improvements for the main generator footings.

He kept pressing to have Logan back for a follow-up. It

would be a lucrative consultancy, and the partners back in

New Orleans had insisted Logan accept.

At least this trip was more comfortable than that hair-

raising truck ride from Bilbao had been. That first time,

Logan had only seen the tidal barrage itself--a chain of unfinished barriers stretching across a notch in the Basque seaboard.

Since then he'd learned a lot more about this bold

type of hydraulic engineering.

All along this coastline the Atlantic tides reached great

intensity, driven by wind and gravity and tunneled by the

convergence of France and Spain. Other facilities already

drew gigawatts of power from water flooding into the Iberian

bight twice a day, without adding a single gram of carbon to

the atmosphere or spilling an ounce of poison upon the

land. The energy came, ultimately, from an all but inexhaustible

supply--the orbital momentum of the Earth-Moon

system. On paper it was an environmentalist's dream--the

ultimate renewable resource.

166 D A V I D B R I N

But try telling that to those demonstrators, back in

Bordeaux.

This morning he had toured the facility already in place

across the former mudflats of the Bassin d'Arcachon, near

where the rivers Caronne and Dordogne flowed past some of

the best wine country in the world. The Arcachon Tidal

Power Barrage now supplied clean energy to much of southwestern

France. It had also been bombed three times in the

last year alone, once by a kamikaze pilot pedaling a handmade

ornithopter.

Demonstrators paced the facility's entrance as they had

for fourteen years, waving banners and the womb-shaped

Orb of the Mother. It seemed that even a pollution-free

power plant--one drawing energy from the moon's placid

orbit--was bound to have its enemies these days. The

protestors mourned former wetlands, which some had seen

as useless mud flats, but which had also fed and sheltered

numberless seabirds before being turned into a dammed-up

plain of surging, turbid saltwater.

Then there was the other half of Eric Sauvel's project,

about which still more controversy churned. "How much

sediment will you raise with your offshore impellers?" Lo-

gan asked the project manager.

"Only a few tons per day. Actually, it's amazing how

little sea bottom muck has to be lifted, if it's well dissolved.

One thousand impellers should turn over enough nutrients

to imitate the fertilizing effect of the Humboldt Current, off

Chile. And it will be much more reliable of course. We

won't be subject to climatic disruptions, such as El Nino.

"Preliminary tests indicate we'll create a phytoplankton

bloom covering half the bay. Photosynthesis will ... is the

correct expression skyrocket'1."

Logan nodded. Sauvel went on. "Zooplankton will eat

the phytoplankton. Fish and squid will consume zooplankton.

Then, nearer to the shore, we plan to establish a large

kelp forest, along with an otter colony to protect it from

hungry sea urchins ..."

It all sounded too good to be true. Soon, yields from the

Bay of Biscay might rival the anchovy fisheries of the eastern

Pacific. Right now, in comparison, the bright waters below

were as barren as the gleaming sands of Oklahoma.

That, certainly, was how Sauvel must see the bay today,

as a vast, wet desert, a waste, but one pregnant with poten-

EARTH 167

tial. Simply by lifting sea floor sediments to nourish the

bottom of the food chain--drifting, microscopic algae and

diatoms--the rest of life's pyramid would be made to flourish.

Dry deserts can bloom if you provide water. Wet ones

need little more than suspended dirt, I suppose.

Only we learned, didn 'I we, how awful the effects can

be on land, if irrigation is mishandled. I wonder what the

price will be here, if we 'we forgotten something this time?

A lover of deserts, and yet their implacable foe, Logan

knew stark beauty was often found in emptiness, while life,

burgeoning life, could sometimes bring with it a kind of ugly

mundanity.

So the tradeoffs--a bird marsh exchanged for a dead but

valuable energy source ... a lifeless but beautiful bay bartered

for a fecund sea jungle that could feed millions . . .

He wished there were a better way.

Well, we could institute worldwide compulsory eugenics,

as some radicals propose--one child per couple, and

any male convicted of any act of violence to be

vasectomized. That'd work all right . . . though few effects

on population or behavior would be seen for decades.

Or we could ration water even more strictly. Cut energy

use to 200 watts per person . . . though that would

also stop the worldwide information renaissance in its

tracks.

We might ground all the dirigible liners, end the tourism

boom, and settle down to regional isolationism again.

That would save energy, all right . . . and almost certainly

finish the growing internationalism that's staved off

war.

Or we could force draconian recycling, down to the

last snippet of paper or tin foil. We could reduce caloric

intake by 25 percent, protein by 40 percent . . .

Logan thought of his daughter and threw out all brief

temptation to side with the radicals. He and Daisy had

responsibly stopped at one child, but of late Logan was less

sure about even that restriction. A person like Claire would

cure many more of the world's ills than she created by living

in it.

In the end, it came down to utter basics.

Nobody's cutting my child's protein intake. Not while

168 D A V I D B R I N

I'm alive to prevent it. Whatever Daisy says about the futility

of "solving" problems, I'm going to keep on trying.

That meant helping Sauvel, even if this pristine ocean-

desert had to be overwhelmed by clouds of silt and algae and

noisome, teeming fish.

The glare of sunlight off the water must have been

stronger than he realized. Logan's eyes felt funny. A spectral,

crystal shine seemed to transform the air. He blinked in

a sudden daze, staring across a sea made even more mesmerizing

than any mere iris shade. It loomed toward him, seizing

him like a lover, with a paralyzing captivation of the

heart.

Shivers coursed his back. Logan wondered if a microbe

might feel this way, looking with sudden awe into a truly

giant soul.

All at once he knew that the sensations weren't subjective

after all! The minizep shook. Tearing his gaze from the

hypnotic sea, Logan saw the pilot rub her eyes and slap her

earphones. Eric Sauvel shouted to her in French. When she

answered, Sauvel's face grew ashen.

"Someone has sabotaged the site," he told Logan loudly

to be heard over the noise. "There's been an explosion."

"What? Was anybody hurt?"

"No major casualties, apparently. But they wrecked one

of the anchor pylons."

The weird effects were ebbing even as Sauvel spoke.

Logan blinked. "How bad is it?"

The engineer shrugged, an expressive gesture. "I do not

know. Everyone appears to have been affected in some way.

Even I sensed something just a moment ago--perhaps sub-

sonics from the blast."

Sauvel leaned to his left and peered. "We're coming

into sight now."

At first it was hard to see that anything had happened at all.

There were no plumes of smoke. No sirens wailed across the

sloping shelf overlooking Santa Paula inlet. On both banks

the half-finished energy storage facilities looked much as Lo-

gan remembered them.

The fjordlike cove began as a wide gap in the coastline

that narrowed as it penetrated inland. Crossing it at a chosen

point lay rows of monoliths, like gray military bunkers, each

linked to the next by a flexible dam. Twice daily, tides

EARTH 169

would drive up the natural funnel and over those barriers,

pushing turbines in the process. Then, as moon and sun

drew the water away again, it would pay another toll. Back

and forth, ebb and flow, the system needed no steady stream

of coal or oil or uranium, nor would it spill forth noxious

waste. Spare parts would be the only ongoing cost, and electricity its sole output.

Logan scanned the pylons and generator housings. One

or two of his suggestions had already been put into effect, he

saw. Apparently, the modifications had worked. But as yet

he saw no signs of damage.

"Over there!" Sauvel pointed to one end of the barrage

chain. Emergency vehicles flashed strobe lights, while

magnus floaters and police helicopters scoured the surrounding

hillsides. Their pilot answered repeated demands for

identification.

Logan sought telltale signs of violence but spotted no

blackened, twisted wreckage, no sooty debris. When Sauvel

gasped, he shook his head. "I don't see ..."

He followed Sauvel's pointing arm and stared. A new

tower had been erected on the shore, reaching like a construction crane fifty meters high. Its nose drooped, heavy

with some cargo.

Only as they neared did Logan notice that the spire was

strewn with green, stringy stuff--seaweed, he realized, and

from the sagging tip there dangled a man! The "tower" was

no tower at all, but an important piece of the tidal barrage

1. the shoreline anchor boom. A horizontal structure. At

least it was supposed to be horizontal. Designed to withstand

fierce Atlantic storms, it had lain flat in the water,

until . . .

"The devil's work!" Sauvel cursed. Some force had contrived

to stand the boom on end like a child's toy. Watching

rescue vehicles close in to save the dangling diver, they verified by radio that there were no other injuries. Emergency

crews could be heard complaining, there was no trace to be

found of the purported bomb!

Logan felt a growing suspicion they'd never find any.

He didn't laugh. That would be impolite to his hosts,

whose work had been set back days, perhaps weeks. But he

did allow a grim smile, the sort a cautious man wears on

encountering the truly surprising. He felt as he had a few

weeks ago, when examining those strange Spanish earthquakes--and the case of the mysterious, disappearing drilling rig. Logan made a mental note to tap the world

seismological database as soon as they reached shore. Maybe

there was a connection this time, as well.

Something new had entered the world all right. Of that

much, he now felt certain.

D

A great reservoir lay under the North American prairie. The

Ogallala aquifer spread beneath a dozen states--a vast hidden

lake of pure, sweet water that had trickled into crevices of stone through the coming and going of three ice ages.

To the farmers who had first discovered the Ogallala it must

have seemed a gift from Providence. Even in those days, the sun

used to parch Oklahoma and Kansas, and the rains were fickle.

But wells drilled only a little way down tapped a life source as

clear and chaste as crystal. Soon circles of irrigation turned

bone-dry grassland into the world's richest granary.

Day by day, year after year, the Ogallala must have seemed

as inexhaustible as the forests of the Amazon. Even when it

became widely known that it was being drawn down several feet

each year, while recharging only inches, the farmers didn't

change their plans to drill new wells, or to install faster pumps. In abstract, to be sure, they knew it could not last. But abstractions don't pay the bank. They don't see you through this year's harvest.

The Ogallala was a commons without a protector, bound

for tragedy.

So the American Midwest was fated to suffer through another of the many little water wars that crackled across the early part of the century. Still, although bitterness ran high, the casualty figures were lower than from the rioting in La Plata, or the

Nile catastrophe. That was probably because, by the time the

battle over the Ogallala aquifer was fully joined, there remained little but damp pores, here and there, for anyone to fight over.

Dust settled over brown, circular patches where bounty had

briefly grown, coating rusting irrigation rigs and the windows of empty homes.

Following close behind the dust, there blew in sand.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star . . . E Despite some trepidation, Teresa schooled herself X to stay calm during her first trip back into space. She

0 checked frequently, but her beacons didn't wobble. The

S continents hadn't shifted perceptibly. Her old friends,

P the stars, lay arrayed as she remembered them. SprinH

kled road signs, offering unwinking promises of a conE

stancy she had always relied upon.

R How I wonder what you are . . . E "Liars," she accused them. For their promise had proven false once already. Who, after going through what

she had, could ever be certain those constellations might not

choose to go liquid again, melting and flowing and becoming

one with the chaos within her?

"What was that, Mother? Did you say something?"

Teresa realized she'd spoken aloud to an open mike.

She glanced outside, where distant, spacesuit-clad figures

crawled over a latticework of girders and fibrous pylons.

They were too far away to make out individual faces.

"Uh, sorry," she said. "I was just . . ."

A second voice cut in. "She's just cluckin' to make sure her

chicks are okay. Right, Mommy?"

That voice she knew. Traditional it might be, for a work

party on EVA to call the watch pilot "Papa." Or in her case,

"Mother." But only Mark Randall had the nerve to call her

"Mommy" over an open channel.

"Can it, Randall." Colonel Glenn Spivey this time, stepping

in to curtail idle chatter. "Is anything the matter, Captain

Tikhana?"

"Um . . . no, Colonel."

"Very well, then. Thank you for continuing to monitor us, quietly."

Teresa punched her thigh. Damn the man! Spivey's version

of politeness would spoil fresh-picked apples. She

twisted her cheek-mike away so the next stray word

wouldn't draw that awful man's attention.

I'm not myself, she knew. Extraneous talk on open

channel just wasn't her style. But then, neither were espionage

or treason.

She glanced toward her left knee. The tiny recorder

she'd placed there was tucked well out of sight, tapping the

shuttle's main computer via a fiber barely thick enough to

see. It had been almost too easy. The instruments required

172 D A V I D B R I N

were already aboard Pleiades. It was just a matter of modifying

their settings slightly, so narrow windows of data could

be snooped by her little data store.

It helped that this was a construction mission. For hours

at a stretch, she would be left alone while Randall and

Spivey and the others were outside, supervising the robots

that were erecting Erehwon II. Defense wanted the new edifice

put in place quickly, which involved using those undamaged

portions of Reagan Station, plus parts cobbled from

spares and rushed up on heavy boosters.

That was an advantage of "national security" as a priority.

The calamity wouldn't be allowed to paralyze all space

activity, as happened after the Challenger disaster or that

horrible Lamberton fiasco. On the other hand, other programs

were being stripped for this. Civilian space was going

to suffer for a long time to come.

Out in the blackness, Teresa watched figures systematically

dismantle a giant cargo lifter--opening the great rocket

like an unfolding flower. Space Jacks, like butchers in an

oldtime abattoir, bragged they could find a use for "everything

but the squeal." It was a far cry from back when

NASA had first tried to assemble an entire working space

station, unbelievably, out of nothing but tiny capsules and

gridwork, every bit hauled to orbit inside shuttles.

Unhappy over the hurried pace, this construction squad

had unanimously chosen her to be Mother, to watch over

them from Pleiades' control deck. Management dared not

buck the drivers' and spinners' unions when it came to crew

safety, so Teresa had escaped the talk-show circuit, after all.

The irony was, for the first time in her career she found

herself preoccupied in other ways. She did her job, of

course. Because the other 'nauts were counting on her, she

meticulously took telemetry readings, making doubly sure

her "chicks" were all right. Still, Teresa kept turning around

to glance through the rear window at the Earth. It wasn't the

planet's beauty that distracted her, but a nervous sense of

expectation.

The NASA psychologist had warned there were always

difficulties, first time up again after a trouble mission. But

that wasn't it. Teresa knew it was important to get back in

the saddle. She had confidence in her skills.

No, her gaze kept drifting Earthward because that was

where she'd seen the first symptoms. Those weird optical

EARTH 173

effects the psychers had largely dismissed as stress hallucinations, but which had given her an instant's warning last

t'me.

Stop being so nervous, she told herself. If Manella's

right, it can't happen again. He thinks Erehwon was torn

apart when some stupid malf released a micro black hole

up at Farpoint lab. Whatever Frankenstein device they

were playing with must have blown its energy all at once.

By that reasoning it was a single exploding singularity

that had, by some unknown means, carried the first men--

or what was left of them--to the stars.

For the fortieth time, she tried to figure out how they

might have done it. How could anybody build and conceal a black hole, for heaven's sake--even a micro black hole--in space without word getting out? The smallest hole with a

temperature low enough to be contained would need the

mass of a midget mountain. You don't go hauling that kind

of material into low earth orbit without someone noticing.

No, the thing would have been built by cavitronics--that

new science of quantum absurdities, of forces nobody had

even heard of forty years ago, which let foolish men create

space-warped sinkholes out of the raw stuff of vacuum itself.

Cavitronics. In spite of reading popular accounts, Teresa

knew next to nothing about the field. Who did?

Well, Jason, apparently. She had thought him incapable

of ever lying to her. Which showed just how little she knew

about people after all.

What amazed Teresa most was that Spivey and his coconspirators

could actually hide such a massive thing up

here, in Earth's crowded exosphere. True, Farpoint had been

isolated. Getting there required two consecutive twenty-kilometer elevator rides.

Still, how does one hide a gigaton object in Low Earth

Orbit? Even compressed to a pinpoint, its presence would

have perturbed the trajectory of the whole complex. She'd

have been able to tell every time she piloted a mission to

Erehwon, from subtle differences in her readings. No.

Manella had to be wrong!

Then she remembered how those DOD men in powder

blue uniforms had sequestered the recordings, as soon as Pleiades returned from that horribly extended mission. Teresa had assumed it was for accident analysis. But somehow

the data never were made public.

174 D A V I D B R I N

She mentally catalogued ways a pilot could really tell

the mass of the upper tip, assuming all shuttles docked far

below. The list was shockingly small.

What j/ . . . she pondered. What if, each trip to Er-

ehwon, the shuttle's operating parameters were adjusted,

its inertial guidance units altered beforehand?

It wouldn't take much, she decided. Worse than dishonest,

it would be horribly unprincipled to lie to a pilot about

her navigation systems, to purposely make them give false

readings.

But it could be done. After all, she'd only see what she

expected to see.

The thought was appalling. This wasn't the sort of

thing one took to the union steward!

Over the next hour Teresa answered calls from the work

party, computed some corrections for them, and shepherded

one woman and her robot back on course from a five-degree

deviation. She double-checked the modification and

watched till the astronaut and her cargo were back on station.

Meanwhile though, her head churned with arguments

both for and against the scenario.

"They simply couldn't have gotten away with it!" she

cried out at one point.

"Beg pardon, Mama?"

It was Mark again, calling from the site where he was

unreeling great spools of ultra-strong spectra fiber.

"Pleiades here. Um, never mind."

"I distinctly heard you say--"

"I'm--practicing for the Space Day talent show. We're

doing Hound of the Baskervilles."

"Cheery play. Remind me to lose my ticket."

Teresa sighed. At least Spivey hadn't cut in. He must

have been preoccupied.

"They couldn't have gotten away with it," she muttered

again after turning her mike completely off. "Even if

they could have finagled Pleiades to give false readings

..."

She stopped, suddenly too paranoid to continue aloud.

Even if they could fool Pleiades, and me. into ignoring

gigatons of excess mass, they couldn't have disguised it

from the real observers . . . the other space powers! They

all keep watch on every U.S. satellite, as we watch every EARTH 175

one else up here. They would have spotted any anomaly as

big as Manella talks about.

Teresa felt relieved . . . and silly for not having

thought of this sooner. Manella's story was absurd. Spivey

couldn't have hidden a singularity on Farpoint. Not unless

1. .

Teresa felt a sudden resurgent chill. Not unless all the

space powers were in on it.

Pieces fell into place. Such as the bland, perfunctory

way the Russians had accused America of weapons testing,

then let the matter drop. Or the gentlemen's agreement

about not making orbital parameters public beyond three

significant figures.

"Everyone is cheating on the treaty!" she whispered, in

awe.

Now she understood why Manella was so insistent on

acquiring her help. There might be more of the damned

things up here! Half the stations between LEO and the

moon might contain singularities, for all she knew! The data

in her little recorder might be the key to tracking them

down.

The enormity of her situation was dawning on her.

Much as she resented the science tribunals for blocking

some space technologies, Teresa nevertheless wondered

what the world might have been like by now without them.

Probably a ruin. Did she then dare help cause a scandal that

could bring the entire system crashing down?

After all, she thought, it's not as if Spivey's people

ignored the ban completely. They put their beast out here,

where . . .

Again she slammed her thigh.

1. where it killed friends, her husband . . . and put

the space program back years!

Teresa's eyes filmed. Her balled fist struck over and over

until the hurt turned into a dull, throbbing numbness. "Bastards!"

she repeated. "You gor-sucking bastards."

So it was with grief-welled eyes that Teresa didn't even

notice sudden waves of color sweep the cabin, briefly clothing

what had been gray in hues of spectral effervescence,

then quickly fading again.

Outside, among the growing girders and tethers, one or

two of the workers blinked as those ripples momentarily

affected peripheral vision. But they were trained to concen-

176 D A V I D B R I N

trate on their jobs and so scarcely noticed as the phenomena

came and swiftly passed away again.

By Teresa's knee, however, the little box quietly and

impartially recorded, taking in everything the shuttle's instruments fed it.

PART IV

PLANET

The planet had orbited its sun only a thousand million

times before it acquired several highly unusual traits, far

out of equilibrium.

For one thing,, none of its sister worlds possessed any

free oxygen. But somehow this one had acquired an

envelope rich in that searing gas. That alone showed

something odd was going on, for without constant

replenishment, oxygen must quickly burn away.

And the planet's temperature was unusually stable.

Occasionally ice sheets did spread, and then retreated

under glaring sunshine. But with each swing, something

caused heat to build up or leak away again in

compensation, leaving the rolling seas intact.

Those seas . . . liquid water covering two thirds of

the globe ... no other world circling the sun shared

that peculiar attribute. Then there was the planet's pH

balanceoffset dramatically from the normal acidic

toward a rare alkaline state.

The list went on. So far from equilibrium in so

many ways, and yet so stable, so constant. These were

strange and unlikely properties.

They were also traits of physiology.

178 D A V I D B R I N

D For all you farmers out there scratchin' in the dry heat, tryin'

to get your sorghum planted before the soil blows away, here

are a few little har-hars from bygone days. After all, if you can't laugh at your troubles, you're just lettin' em get the upper hand.

"Yesterday I accidentally dropped my best chain

down one of the cracks in my yard. This morning I

went to see if I could fish it out, but by golly, I could

still hear if rattling on its way down!"

Found that one in a book of jokes told by sod flippers here in the Midwest a hundred years ago, during the first Dust Bowl. (And

yes, there was a first one. Had to be, didn't there?) These gems

were collected by the Federal Writers Project back in the 1930s

1. their version of Net Memory, I guess. Here's some more

from the same collection:

"I had a three-inch rain last week . . . one drop every

three inches."

"It was so dry over in Waco County, I saw two trees

fighting over a dog."

"It's so dry in my parts, Baptists are sprinkling converts,

and Methodists are wipin' 'em with a damp

cloth."

As I sit here in the studio, spinning the old two-way dial, I see some of you have carried your holos out to the fields with you. I'll try to talk loud so you can find your set later under the dust!

Well, okay, maybe that one wasn't so good. Here's two from

the book I guess must be even worse.

"My hay crop is so bad, I have to buy a bale just to

prime the rake."

' 'This year I plan to throw a hog in the corn trailer and

pick directly to him. Figure I shouldn't even have to

change hogs till noon."

Anybody out there understand those last two? I have free tickets

to the next Skywriters concert in Chi-town for the first ten of you EARTH 179

to shout back good explanations. Meanwhile, let's have some

zip-zep from the Skywriters themselves. Here's "Tethered to a

Rain Cloud."

Roland fingered the rifle's plastic stock as his squad

C leaped off the truck and lined up behind Corporal Wu.

R He had a serious case of dry mouth, and his ears still

U rang from the alert bell that had yanked them out of

S exhausted slumber only an hour before.

T Who would've imagined being called out on a real

raid? This certainly broke the routine of basic training--

running about pointlessly, standing rigid while sergeants

shouted abuse at you, screaming back obedient answers,

then running some more until you dropped. Of course the

pre-induction tapes had explained the purpose of all that.

"... Recruits must go through intense stress in order to break

civilian response sets and prepare behavioral templates for military imprinting.

Their rights are not surrendered, only voluntarily suspended

in order to foster discipline, coordination, hygeine, and other salutary skills . . ."

Only volunteers who understood and signed waivers

were allowed to join the peacekeeping forces, so he'd known

what to expect. What had surprised Roland was getting accepted

in the first place, despite mediocre school grades.

Maybe the peacekeepers' aptitude tests weren't infallible after

all. Or perhaps they revealed something about Roland

that had never emerged back in Indiana.

It can't be intelligence, that's for sure. And I'm no

leader. Never wanted to be.

In his spare moments (all three of them since arriving

here in Taiwan for training) Roland had pondered the question

and finally decided it was none of his damn business

after all. So long as the officers knew what they were doing,

that was enough for him.

This calling out of raw recruits for a night mission

didn't fill him with confidence though.

What use would greenies like us be in a combat operation? Won't we just get in the way?

His squad double-timed alongside a towering, aromatic

ornamental hedge, toward the sound of helicopters and the

painful brilliance of searchlights. Perspiration loosened his

grip on the stock, forcing him to hold his weapon tighter.

180 D A V I D B R I N

His heartbeat quickened as they neared the scene of action.

And yet, Roland felt certain he wasn't scared to die.

No, he was afraid of screwing up.

"Takka says it's eco-nuts!" the recruit running beside

him whispered, panting. Roland didn't answer. In the last

hour he'd completely had it with scuttlebutt.

Neo-Caian radicals might have blown up a dam, someone

said.

No, it was an unlicensed gene lab or maybe an unregistered

national bomb--hidden in violation of the Rio

Pact. . . .

Hell, none of the rumored emergencies seemed to justify

calling in peach-fuzz recruits. It must be real bad trouble.

Or else something he didn't understand yet.

Roland watched the jouncing backpack of Corporal Wu.

The compact Chinese noncom carried twice the weight any

of them did, yet he obviously held himself back for the

sluggish recruits. Roland found himself wishing Wu would

pass out the ammo now. What if they were ambushed?

What if . . . ?

You don't know anything yet, box-head. Better pray

they don't pass out ammo. Half those mama's boys runnin'

behind you don't know their rifles from their assholes.

In fairness, Roland figured they probably felt exactly

the same way about him.

The squad hustled round the hedge onto a gravel driveway,

puffing uphill toward the glaring lanterns. Officers

milled about, poring over clipboards and casting long shadows

across a close-cropped lawn that had been ripped and

scraped by copters and magnus zeps. A grand mansion stood

farther upslope, dominating the richly landscaped grounds.

Silhouettes hastened past brightly lit windows.

Roland saw no foxholes. No signs of enemy fire. So,

maybe ammo wouldn't be needed after all.

Corporal Wu brought the squad to a disorderly halt as

the massive, gruff figure of Sergeant Kleinerman appeared

out of nowhere.

"Have the weenies stack weapons over by the flower

bed," Kleinerman told Wu in flat-toned Standard Military

English. "Wipe their noses, then take them around back.

UNEPA has work for 'em that's simple enough for infants to

handle."

Any recruit who took that kind of talk personally was a

EARTH 181

fool. Roland just took advantage of the pause to catch his

breath. "No weapons," Takka groused as they stacked their

rifles amid trampled marigolds. "What we supposed to use,

our hands?"

Roland shrugged. The casual postures of the officers

told him this was no terrorist site. "Prob'ly," he guessed.

"Them and our backs."

"This way, weenies," Wu said, with no malice and only

a little carefully tailored contempt. "Come on. It's time to

save the world again."

Through the bright windows Roland glimpsed rich men,

rich women, dressed in shimmering fabrics. Nearly all

looked like Han-Formosans. For the first time since arriving

at Camp Perez de Cuellar, Roland really felt he was in Tai-

wan, almost China, thousands of miles from Indiana.

Servants still carried trays of refreshments, their darker

Bengali or Tamil complexions contrasting with the pale

Taiwanese. Unlike the agitated party guests, the attendants

seemed undisturbed to have in their midst all these soldiers

and green-clad marshals from UNEPA. In fact, Roland saw

one waiter smile when she thought no one was looking, and

help herself to a glass of champagne.

UNEPA . . . Roland thought on spying the green uniforms.

That means eco-crimes.

Wu hustled the squad past where some real soldiers

stood guard in blurry combat camouflage, their eyes hooded

by multisensor goggles which seemed to dart and flash as

their pulse-rifles glittered darkly. The guards dismissed the

recruits with barely a flicker of attention, which irked To-

land far worse than the insults of Wu and Kleinerman.

I'll make them notice me, he vowed. Though he knew

better than to expect it soon. You didn't get to be like those

guys overnight.

Behind the mansion a ramp dropped steeply into the

earth. Smoke rose from a blasted steel door that now lay

curled and twisted to one side. A woman marshal met them

by the opening. Even darker than her chocolate skin was the

cast of her features--as if they were carved from basalt.

"This way," she said tersely and led them down the ramp--

a trip of more than fifty meters--into a reinforced concrete

bunker. When they reached the bottom, however, it wasn't

at all what Roland had expected--some squat armored slab.

182 D A V I D B R I N

Instead, he found himself in a place straight out of the Ara-

bian Nights.

The recruits gasped. "Shee-it!" Takka commented concisely,

showing how well he'd picked up the essentials of

Military English. Kanakoa, the Hawaiian, expressed amazement

even more eloquently. "Welcome to the elephant's

graveyard, Tarzan."

Roland only stared. Tiny, multicolored spotlights illuminated

the arched chamber, subtly emphasizing the shine

of ivory and fur and crystal. From wall to wall, the spoils of

five continents were piled high. More illicit wealth than To-

land had ever seen. More than he could ever have imagined.

From racks in all directions hung spotted leopard pelts,

shimmering beaver skins, white winter fox stoles. And

shoes! Endless stacks of them, made from dead reptiles, obviously, though Roland couldn't begin to conceive which

species had given its all for which pair.

"Hey, Senterius." Takka nudged him in the ribs and

Roland looked down where the Japanese recruit pointed.

Near his left foot lay a luxurious white carpet . . . the

splayed form of a flayed polar bear whose snarling expression

looked really angry. Roland jerked away from those

glittering teeth, backing up until something pointy and hard

rammed his spine. He whirled, only to goggle in amazement

at a stack of elephant tusks, each bearing a golden tip guard.

"Gaia!" he breathed.

"You said it," Kanakoa commented. "Boy, I'll bet Her

Holy Nibs is completely pissed off over this."

Roland wished he hadn't spoken the Earth Mother's

name aloud. Hers wasn't a soldierly faith, after all. But

Kanakoa and Takka seemed as stunned as he was. "What is

all this?" Takka asked, waving at the heaped stacks of animal

remains. "Who in the world would want these things?"

Roland shrugged. "Used to be, rich folks liked to wear

gnomish crap like this."

Takka sneered. "I knew that. But why now? It is not

just illegal. It's . . . it's--"

"Sick? Is that what you were going to say, Private?"

They turned to see the UNEPA marshal standing close

by, looking past them at the piled ivory. She couldn't be

over forty years old, but right now the tendons in her neck

were taut as bowstrings and she looked quite ancient.

EARTH 183

"Come with me, I want to show you soldiers something."

They followed her past cases filled with pinned, iridescent

butterflies, with gorilla-hand ashtrays and stools made

from elephants' feet, with petrified wood and glittering coral

no doubt stolen from nature preserves ... all the way to

the back wall of the artificial cave, where two truly immense

tusks formed a standing arch. Tiger skins draped a shrine of

sorts--a case Grafted in dark hardwood and glass, containing

dozens of earthenware jars.

Roland saw veins pulse on the backs of her hands. The

recruits fell mute, awed by such hatred as she radiated now.

Nothing down here impressed them half as much.

Roland found the courage to ask, "What's in the jars,

ma'am?"

Watching her face, he realized what an effort it took for

her to speak right now, and found himself wondering if he'd

ever be able to exert such mastery over his own body.

"Rhinoceros . . . horn," she said hoarsely. "Powdered

narwhal tusk . . . whale semen . . ."

Roland nodded. He'd heard of such things. Ancient legends

held they could prolong life, or heighten sexual prowess,

or drive women into writhing heat. And neither

morality nor law nor scientific disproof deterred some men

from chasing hope.

"So much. There must be a hundred kilos in there!"

Takka commented. But he stepped back when the UNEPA

official whirled to glare at him, her expression one of bleak

despair.

"You don't understand," she whispered. "I hoped we'd

find so much more."

Roland soon discovered just what use recruits were on a

mission like this.

Sure enough, he thought, resigned that he had only

begun plumbing the depths of exhaustion the peacekeeping

forces had in store for him. Hauling sixty-kilo tusks up the

steep ramp, he and Private Schmidt knew they were important

pieces in a well-tuned, highly efficient, rapid-deployment

force whose worldwide duties stretched from pole to

pole. Their part was less glamorous than the on-site inspectors

prowling Siberia and Sinkiang and Wyoming, enforcing

arms-control pacts. Or the brave few keeping angry militias

184 D A V I D B R I N

in Brazil and Argentina from each other's throats. Or even

the officers tagging and inventorying tonight's booty. But

after all, as Corporal Wu told them repeatedly, they also

serve who only grunt and sweat.

Roland tried not to show any discomfort working with

Schmidt. After all, the tall, skinny alpine boy hadn't even

been born yet when the Helvetian War laid waste to much

of Central Europe, and anyway you couldn't exactly choose

your background. Roland made an effort to accept him as a

native of "West Austria" and forget the past.

One thing, Schmidt sure spoke English well. Better, in

fact, than most of Roland's old gang back in Bloomington.

"Where are they hauling this stuff?" his partner asked the

pilot of one of the minizeps as they took a two-minute

breather outside.

"They've got warehouses all over the world," the Swedish

noncom said. "If I told you about them, you wouldn't

believe me."

"Try us," Roland prompted.

The flier's blue eyes seemed to look far away. "Take

what you found in that tomb and multiply it a thousand-

fold."

"Shee-it," Schmidt sighed. "But . . ."

"Oh, some of this stuff here won't go into storage. The

ivory, for instance. They'll implant label isotopes so each

piece is chemically unique, then they'll sell it. The zoo arks

harvest elephant tusks nowadays anyway, as do the African

parks, so the beasts won't tear up trees or attract poachers.

That policy came too late to save this fellow." He patted the

tusk beside him. "Alas."

"But what about the other stuff? The furs. The shoes.

All that powdered horn shit?"

The pilot shrugged. "Can't sell it. That'd just legitimize

wearing or using the stuff. Create demand, you see.

"Can't destroy it, either. Could you burn billions worth

of beautiful things? Sometimes they take school groups

through the warehouses, to show kids what real evil is. But

mostly it all just sits there, piling up higher and higher."

The pilot looked left and right. "I do have a theory,

though. I think I know the real reason for the warehouses."

"Yes?" Roland and Schmidt leaned forward, ready to

accept his confidence.

EARTH 185

The pilot spoke behind a shielding hand. "Aliens. They're going to sell it all to aliens from outer space."

Roland groaned. Schmidt spat on the ground in disgust.

Of course real soldiers were going to treat them this way.

But it was embarrassing to have been sucked in so openly.

"You think I'm kidding?" the pilot asked.

"No, we think you're crazy."

That brought a wry grin. "Likely enough, boy. But

think about it! It's only a matter of time till we're contacted,

no? They've been searching the sky for a hundred years

now. And we've been filling space with our radio and TV

and Data Net noise all that time. Sooner or later a starship has to stop by. It only makes sense, no?"

Roland decided the only safe reply was a silent stare. He

watched the noncom warily.

"So I figure it's like this. That starship is very likely to

be a trading, vessel . . . out on a long, long cruise, like

those clipper ships of olden times. They'll stop here and

want to buy stuff, but not just any stuff. It will have to be

light, portable, beautiful, and totally unique to Earth. Otherwise, why bother?"

"But this stuff's dumpit contraband!" Roland said,

pointing to the goods stacked in the cargo bay.

"Hey! You two! Break's over!" It was Corporal Wu, calling

from the ramp. He jerked his thumb then swiveled and

strode back into the catacomb. Roland and his partner stood

up.

"But that's the beauty of it!" the pilot continued, as if

he hadn't heard. "You see, the CITES rules make all these

things illegal so there won't be any economic market for

killing endangered species.

"But fobbing it all off on alien traders won't create a

market! It's a one-stop deal, you see? They come once, then

they are gone again, forever. We empty the warehouses and

spend the profits buying up land for new game preserves."

He spread his hands as if to ask what could be more reasonable.

Schmidt spat again, muttering a curse in SchweitzerDeutsch.

"Come on Senterius, let's go." Roland followed

quickly, glancing only once over his shoulder at the grinning

pilot, wondering if the guy was crazy, brilliant, or simply

a terrific sculptor of bullshit.

Probably all three, he figured at last, and double-timed

186 D A V I D B R I N

the rest of the way. After all, fairy tales were fairy tales,

while Corporal Wu was palpable reality.

As he worked, Ro]and rec^JJfd the days not so ]ong ago when he and his pals Remi and Crat used to sit in the park listening to old Joseph tell them about the awful battles of

the Helvetian War. The war that finally did end war.

Each of them had reacted differently to Joseph's eventual

betrayal--Remi by turning tragically cynical, and Crat

by declaring void anything spoken by anyone over thirty. To

Roland, however, what lasted were the veteran's tales of

combat--of comrades fighting shoulder to shoulder, hauling

each other through mountain passes clogged with germ-

laden, radioactive mud, struggling together to overcome a

wily, desperate foe. . . .

Of course he didn't actually wish for a real war to fight.

Not a big one on the vast, impersonal scale the old vet described.

He knew battle sounded a lot more attractive far

away, in stories, than it would seem in person.

Still, was this to be the way of it from now on? Hauling

off contraband seized from CITES violators? Manning tedious

observer posts separating surly, bickering nations too

poor and tired to fight anyway? Checking the bilges of rusting

freighters for hidden caches of flight capital?

Oh, there were real warriors in the peacekeeping forces.

Takka and some of the others might get to join the elite

units quelling fierce little water wars like the one going on

now in Ghana. But as an American he'd have little chance of

joining any of the active units. The Guarantor Powers were

still too big, too powerful. No little country would stand for

Russian or American or Chinese troops stationed on their

soil.

Well, at least I can learn how to be a warrior. I'll be

trained, ready, in case the world ever needs me.

So he worked doggedly, doing as he was told. Hauling

and lifting, lifting and hauling, Roland also tried to listen to

the UNEPA officials, especially the dark woman. Had she

really wished they had found more of the grisly contraband?

". . . thought we'd traced the Pretoria poaching ring

all the way here," she said at one point as he passed by laden

with aromatic lion skins. "I thought we'd finally tracked

down the main depot. But there's so little white rhino powder,

or--"

EARTH 187

"Could Chang have already sold the rest?" one of the

others asked.

She shook her head. "Chang's a hoarder. He sells only

to maintain operating capital."

"Well, we'll find out when we finally catch him, the

slippery eel."

Roland was still awed by the UNEPA woman, and a bit

jealous. What was it like, he wondered, to care about something

so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow

more alive than he was.

According to the recruitment tapes, training was supposed

to give him strong feelings of his own. Over months of

exhaustion and discipline, he'd come to see his squadmates

as family. Closer than that. They would learn almost to read

each other's thoughts, to depend on each other utterly. If

necessary, to die for one another.

That was how it was supposed to work. Glancing at

Takka and Schmidt and the other strangers in his squad,

Roland wondered how the sergeants and instructors could

accomplish such a thing. Frankly, it sounded awfully unlikely.

But hell. guys like Kleinerman and Wu have been soldiering

for five thousand years or so. I guess they know

what they're doing.

How ironic, then, that they finally made a science of it

at the very end, just as the profession was trying to phase

itself out of existence forever. From the looks given them by

the UNEPA marshals, that day could come none too soon.

Necessity allied the two groups in the cause of saving the

planet. But clearly the eco-officers would rather do without

the military altogether.

Just be patient, Roland thought as he worked. We're

doing the best we can as fast as we can.

He and another recruit disassembled the shrine at the

back of the cavernous treasure room, carefully unwinding

snakeskin ropes binding the two huge archway tusks. They

were lowering one of the ivory trophies to the floor when

Roland's nostrils flared at a familiar smell. He stopped and

sniffed.

"Come on," the Russian private groused in thickly accented

Standard. "Now other one."

"Do you smell something?" Roland asked.

188 D A V I D B R I N

The other youth laughed. "I smell dead animals! What

you think? It stink worse here than Tashkent brothels!"

But Roland shook his head. "That's not it." He turned

left, following the scent.

Naturally, soldiers weren't allowed tobacco, which

would sap their wind and stamina. But he'd been quite a

smoker back in Indiana, puffing homegrown with Remi and

Crat--as many as eight or ten hand-rolled cigs a week. Could

a noncom or UNEPA be sneaking weed behind a corner? It

had better not be a recruit, or there'd be latrine duty for the

entire squad!

But no, there weren't any hiding places nearby. So

where was it coming from?

Corporal Wu's whistle blew, signaling another short

break. "Hey, Yank," the Russian said. "Don't be a pizdyuk. Come on."

Roland waved him to silence. He pushed aside one of

the tiger skins, still sniffing, and then crouched where he

had first picked up the scent. It was strongest near the floor

beside the glass case--now emptied of its brown jars of macabre

powder. His fingers touched a warm breeze.

"Hey, give me a hand," he asked, bracing a shoulder

against the wood. But the other recruit flipped two fingers as

he walked away, muttering. "' Amerikanskee kakanee zassixa ..."

Roland checked his footing and strained. The heavy

case rocked a bit before settling again.

This can't be right. The guy who owned this place

wouldn't want to sweat. He'd never sweat.

Roland felt along the carved basework, working his way

around to the back before finding what he sought--a spring-

loaded catch. "Aha!" he said. With a click the entire case

slid forward to jam against one of the huge, toppled tusks.

Roland peered down steep stairs with a hint of light at the

bottom.

He had to squeeze through the narrow opening. The

tobacco smell grew stronger as he descended quietly, carefully.

Stooping under a low stone lintel, he entered a chamber

hewn from naked rock. Roland straightened and pursed

his lips in a silent whistle.

While this hiding place lacked the first one's air of elegant

decadence, it did conceal the devil's own treasure . . .

shelves stacked high with jars and small, bulging, plastic

EARTH 189

bags. "Hot damn," he said, fingering one of the bags. Gritty

white powder sifted under a gilt-numbered label adorned

with images of unicorns and dragons, though Roland knew

the real donor must have been some poor, dumb, mostly

blind rhino in southern Africa, or another equally unprepossessing beast.

"The freaking jackpot," he said to himself. It was definitely

time to report this. But as he turned to head back

upstairs, a voice suddenly stopped him.

"Do not move, soldier-fellow. Hands up or I will shoot

you dead."

Roland rotated slowly and saw what he'd missed in his

first, cursory scan of the room. At about waist level, near a

smoldering ashtray in the corner of the left wall, some of the

shelving had swung aside to reveal a narrow tunnel. From

this opening a middle-aged man with Chinese features

aimed a machine pistol at him.

"Do you doubt I can hit you from here?" the man asked

levelly. "Is that why you don't raise your hands as I command?

I assure you, I'm an expert shooter. I've killed lions,

tigers, at close range. Do you doubt it?"

"No. I believe you."

"Then comply! Or I will shoot!"

Roland felt sure the fellow meant it. But it seemed this

was time for one of those inconvenient waves of obstinacy

his friends used to chide him for, which used to get him into

such trouble back home.

"You shoot, and they'll hear you upstairs."

The man in the tunnel considered this. "Perhaps. On

the other hand, if you were to attack me, or flee or call for

help, the threat would be immediate and I would have to

kill you at once."

Roland shrugged. "I ain't going' nowhere."

"So. A standoff, then. All right, soldier. You may keep

your hands down, as I see you're unarmed. But step back to

that wall, or I will consider you dangerous and act accordingly!"

Roland did as he was told, watching for an opportunity.

But the man crawled out of the tunnel and stood up without

wavering his aim once. "My name is Chang," he said as he

wiped his brow with a silk handkerchief.

"So I heard. You been a busy guy, Mr. Chang."

Brown eyes squinted in amusement. "That I have, sol190 D A V I D B R I N

dier boy. What I've done and seen, you could not imagine.

Even in these days of snoops and busybodies, I've kept

secrets. Secrets deeper than even the Helvetian Gnomes

had."

No doubt this was meant to impress Roland. It did. But

he'd be damned if he'd give the bastard any satisfaction. "So

what do we do now?"

Chang seemed to inspect him. "Now it's customary for

me to bribe you. You must know I can offer you wealth and

power. This tunnel bears a floater trolley on silent rails. If

you help me take away my treasure, it could begin a long,

profitable relationship."

Roland felt the piercing intensity of the man's scrutiny.

After a moment's thought, he shrugged. "Sure, why not?"

Now it was Chang's turn to pause. Then he giggled.

"Ah! I do enjoy encountering wit. Obviously you know I

am lying, that I'd kill you once we reached the other end.

And I, in turn, can tell you have more urgent goals than

money. Is it honor you seek, perhaps?"

Again, Roland shrugged. He wouldn't have put it quite

that way.

"So, again we have a standoff. Hence my second proposition.

You help me load my trolley, at gunpoint. I will then

depart and let you live."

This time Roland's pause was calculated only to delay.

"How do I know . . ."

"No questions! Obviously I can't turn my back on you.

Agree or die now. Begin with the bags on the shelf by your

shoulder, or I'll shoot and be gone before others can come!"

Roland slowly turned and picked up two of the bags,

one in each hand.

The "trolley" did indeed float a few millimeters above a

pair of gleaming rails, stretching off into interminable darkness.

Roland had no doubt it was meant for swift escape, or

that Chang would be long gone by the time UNEPA traced

the other end. The guy seemed to have thought of everything.

He tried to carry as little as he could each trip. Chang lit

a cigarette and fumed, watching him like a cat as Roland

leaned over the tiny passenger's pallet to lay his loads in the

trolley's capacious cargo hamper.

Roland's experience with babushkas and grempers back

in Indiana helped, for he seemed to know by instinct how to

EARTH 191

just brush the inside edge of provocation. Once, he fumbled

one of the clay jars. It hit hard and trickled powder onto the

tunnel floor, crackling where bits struck the silvery rails.

Chang hissed and the knuckles of his hand whitened on the

pistol grip. Still, Roland figured the geep wouldn't shoot

him just yet. He'd do it at the last moment, probably when

the trolley was ready to go.

"Hurry up!" the Han millionaire spat. "You move like

an American!"

That gave Roland an excuse to turn and grin at the

man. "How'd you guess?" he asked, slowing things another

few seconds, stretching Chang's patience before grabbing

two more jars and resuming work.

Chang kept glancing up the stairs, obviously listening

1. but never letting his attention waver long enough to

give Roland any foolish notions. You should've reported the

secret passage the minute you found it, Roland thought,

cursing inwardly. Unfortunately, the opening was behind

the display case, and who knew when it would be discovered?

Too late for Private Roland Senterius, probably.

The look in Chang's calculating eyes made Roland reconsider

the scenario. He knows that I know I'll have to jump him, just before the end.

What's more. he knows that I know that he knows.

That meant Chang would shoot him before the last moment,

to prevent that desperate lunge. But how soon before?

Not too soon, or the smuggler would have to depart

with a half-empty trolley, abandoning the rest of his hoard

forever. Clearly, Chang's profound greed was the one thing

keeping Roland alive. Still, he'd have to do it before the

cargo hamper was topped off ... before Roland's adrenaline

was pumping for the maximum, all-or-nothing effort.

Five loads to go, Roland thought while fitting more jars

snugly into place under Chang's watchful eye. Will he do it

at three? Or two7

He was delivering the next load, beginning to screw up

his courage, when a noise echoed down the steep stair shaft,

preempting all plans.

"Senterius! It's Kanakoa. And Schmidt. What the hell

you doing down here?"

Roland froze. Chang edged against the wall near the

steps, watching him. There came the scrape of footsteps on

stone.

192 D A V I D B R I N

Dumpit, Roland cursed. He was bent over the trolley in

an awkward position, much too far away to attack Chang

with any chance of success. In addition, his hands were

laden with bags. If only he were carrying jars, that could be

thrown . . .

"Senterius? What are you doing, asshole? Smoking?

Kleinerman'll roast all of us if they catch you!"

Roland suddenly realized why Chang was watching him

so intently. Chang's following my eyes!

Roland's gaze could not help widening when one

booted foot appeared on the topmost visible step. Chang was

using him to gauge where the other recruits were, to tell

when the moment was just right for killing all three of

them! In holding onto seconds of life, Roland knew suddenly,

horribly, he was murdering Kanakoa and Schmidt.

Still, even knowing that, he remained statuelike. In

Chang's eyes he saw understanding and the glitter of contemptuous victory. How did he know? Roland railed inside. How did he know I was a coward?

The admission belied every one of his dreams. It betrayed

what Roland had thought were his reasons for living.

The realization seared so hot it tore through his rigor and

burst forth in a sudden scream.

"Cover!" he cried, and threw himself onto the pallet,

slamming home the trolley's single lever. Almost simultaneously

a series of rapid bangs rattled the narrow chamber and

Roland's leg erupted in sudden agony. Then there was blackness

and the swift whistle of wind as the little car sped into

a gloom darker than any he had ever known.

Seconds ticked while he battled fiery pain. Clenching

his jaw to keep from moaning, Roland desperately hauled

back on the lever, bringing the trolley to a jerky halt in the

middle of the arrow-straight shaft. Waves of dizziness almost

overwhelmed him as he rolled over onto his back and

clutched his thigh, feeling a sickening, sticky wetness there.

One thing for certain, he couldn't afford the luxury of

fainting here. Funny--he'd been taught all that biofeedback

stuff in school, and drilled in it again here in training. But

right now he just couldn't spare the time to use any of those

techniques, not even to stop the pain!

"There are two types of simple thigh wounds," memorized

words droned as he wrestled the belt from his waist. "One, a

straight puncture of muscle fiber, is quite manageable. Treat it

EARTH 193

quickly and move on. Your comrade should be able to offer covering fire, even if he can no longer move.

"The other kind is much more dangerous ..."

Roland fought shivers as he looped the belt above the

wound. He had no idea which type it was. If Chang had hit

the femoral artery, this makeshift tourniquet wasn't going to

do much good.

He grunted and yanked hard, cinching the belt as tight

as he could, and then slumped back in reaction and exhaustion.

You did it! He told himself. You beat the bastard!

Roland tried to feel elated. Even if he was now bleeding

to death, he'd certainly won more minutes than Chang had

intended giving him. More important still, Chang was

brought down! In stealing the smuggling lord's only means

of escape, Roland had ensured his capture!

Then why do I feel so rotten?

In fantasy Roland had often visualized being wounded,

even dying in battle. Always though, he had imagined

there'd be some solace, if only a soldier's final condolence of

victory.

So why did he feel so dirty now? So ashamed?

He was alive now because he'd done the unexpected.

Chang had been looking for heroism or cowardice--a berserk

attack or animal rigor. But in that moment of impulse

Roland had remembered the words of the old vet in Bloom-

ington. "A fool who wants to live will do anything his captor tells him. He'll stand perfectly still just to win a few more heartbeats. Or he may burst into a useless charge.

"That's when, sometimes, it takes the most guts to retreat in good order, to fight another day."

Yeah, Joseph, sure. Roland thought. Tell me about it.

As his heart rate eased and the panting subsided, he

now heard what sounded like moans coming down the tunnel.

Kanakoa or Schmidt, or both. Wounded. Perhaps dying.

What good would I have done by staying? Instead of a

leg wound, he'd have gone down with several bullets in the

heart or face, and Chang would have gotten away.

True enough, but that didn't seem to help. Nor did

reminding himself that neither of those guys back there

were really his friends, anyway.

"Soldier boy!" The shout echoed down the narrow passage.

"Bring the trolley back or I'll shoot you now!"

194 D A V I D B R I N

"Fat chance," Roland muttered. And even Chang's

voice carried little conviction. Straight as the tunnel was,

and even allowing for ricochets, the odds of hitting him

were low even for an expert. Anyway, what good was a

threat, when to comply meant certain death?

It wasn't repeated. For all the millionaire knew Roland

was already at the other end.

"Why did I stop?" Roland asked aloud, softly. At the

terminus he might find a telephone to call an ambulance,

instead of lying here possibly bleeding to death.

A wave of agony throbbed up his leg. "And I thought I

was so smart, not becomin' a dazer."

If he'd ever slipped over that line--using biofeedback to

trip-off on self-stimulated endorphins--he'd certainly have a

skill appropriate for here and now! What would have been

self-abuse in Indiana would be right-on first aid at a time like

this.

But then again, if he'd ever been a dazer, he wouldn't

even be here right now. The corps didn't accept addicts.

Suddenly the cavern erupted in thunder, shaking the

very walls. Roland covered his ears, recognizing pulse-rifle

fire. No doubt about it, the real soldiers had arrived at last.

The gunshots ended almost immediately. Could it be

over already? he wondered.

But no. As the ringing echoes subsided, he heard voices.

One of them Chang's.

". . . if you throw down grenades. So if you want your

wounded soldiers to live, negotiate with me!"

So Chang claimed two captives. Roland realized gloomily

that both Schmidt and Kanakoa must have been caught,

despite his shouted warning.

Or maybe not! After all, would Chang admit to having

let one recruit escape down the tunnel? Perhaps he only had

one of the others and used the plural form as a ploy. Roland

clung to that hope.

It took a while for someone in authority to begin negotiations.

The officer's voice was too muffled for Roland to

make out, but he could hear Chang's side of the exchange.

"Not good enough! Prison would be the same as death

for me! I accept nothing more rigorous than house arrest on

my Pingtung estate. . . .

"Yes, naturally I will turn state's evidence. I owe my

EARTH 195

associates nothing. But I must have the deal sealed by a

magistrate, at once!"

Again, the officials' words were indistinct. Roland

caught tones of prevarication.

"Stop delaying! The alternative is death for these

young soldiers!" Chang shouted back.

"Yes, yes, of course they can have medical attention

1. after I get my plea bargain! Properly sealed! Meanwhile,

any sign of a stun or concussion grenade and I shoot

them in the head, then myself!"

Roland could tell the marshals were weakening, probably

under pressure from the peacekeeper CO. Dammit! he

thought. The good guys' victory would be compromised.

Worse, Chang surely had means at his estate for another

escape, even from state detention.

Don't give in, he mentally urged the officers, though he

felt pangs thinking of Kanakoa, or even Schmidt, lying there

dying. I/you plea bargain, the bastard'll fust start all over

again.

But Chang's next shout carried tones of satisfaction.

"That's better! I can accept that. You better hurry with the

document though. These men do not look well."

Roland cursed. "No!"

He rolled over and reached into the cargo hamper, tossing

bags and jars onto the tracks ahead. They split and shattered.

Narwhal tusks and rhino horns coated the tracks in

powdered form, obstructing further travel in that direction.

Then Roland fought fresh waves of nausea to writhe around

on the narrow trolley, facing the direction he had come.

He'd worried he might have to manipulate the lever

with his feet. But there was a duplicate at the other end. A

red tag prevented the switch from being pushed past a certain

point. This Roland tore out, ripping one of his fingers in

the process.

"Yes, I am willing to have my house arrest fully monitored

by cameras at all times . . ."

"I'm sure you are, carni-man," Roland muttered. "But

you don't fool me."

He slammed the lever home and the trolley glided forward.

What began as a gentle breeze soon was a hurricane as

power flowed from the humming rails.

You forget, Chang, that your estate is still on Mother

196 D A V I D B R I N

Earth. And my guess is that Mom's had fust about enough

of you by now . . .

The light ahead ballooned in a rapidly expanding circle

of brilliance. Roland felt solenoids try to throw the lever

back, but he strained, holding it in place. In an instant of

telescoped time, he saw a figure turn in the light, stare down

the shaft, raise his weapon . . .

"Caia!" Roland screamed, a battle cry chosen at the last

second from some unknown recess of faith as he hurtled like

a missile into space.

It was a mess the UNEPA team came down to inspect, after

peacekeeping personnel pronounced it safe, and once the

wounded boy had been rushed off to hospital. They were

still taking pictures of the two remaining bodies when the

green-clad Ecology Department officials came down the

steep stairs at last to see what had happened.

"Well, here's your missing cache, Elena," one of them

said, picking carefully through the white and gray powders

scattered across the floor. Three walls of shelves were intact,

but a fourth had collapsed over two quiet forms, sprawled

atop each other in the corner. There, the snowdrifts had

been stained crimson.

"Damn," the UNEPA man continued, shaking his head.

"A lot of poor beasts died for one geek's fetish."

Elena looked down at her enemy of all these years.

Chang's mouth gaped open--crammed full of powder that

trailed off to the limp hand of the young recruit she had

spoken to early in the evening. Even dying, riddled with

bullets, this soldier apparently had a sense of symmetry, of

poetry.

A peacekeeping forces noncom sat near the boy,

smoothing a lock of ruffled hair. The corporal looked up at

Elena. "Senterius was a lousy shot. Never showed any promise

at all with weapons. I guess he improvised though. He

graduated."

Elena turned away, disgusted by the maudlin, adolescent sentiment. Warriors, she thought. The world is finally growing up though. Someday soon we'll be rid of them at last.

Still, why was it she all of a sudden felt as if she had

walked into a temple? Or that the spirits of all the martyred

EARTH 197

creatures were holding silent, reverent watch right now,

along with the mourning corporal?

It was another woman's low voice Elena seemed to hear

then, so briefly it was all too easy to dismiss as an echo or a

momentary figment of exhaustion. Still, she briefly closed her eyes and swayed.

"There will be an end to war, " the voice seemed to say, with

gentle patience.

"But there will always be a need for heroes. "

D

After the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea, millions of

years passed while the Indian landmass wandered northward

away from Africa, creeping across the primordial ocean in solitary splendor. Then, once upon an eon, India collided head on,

into the belly of Asia.

Great crustal blocks buckled from the slow-motion force of

that impact, gradually, inexorably piling mountains higher and

higher until a huge plateau towered through the atmosphere,

creating a vast wall that diverted air to the north and trapped the southern winds in a pocket.

During each winter the land beneath this pocket cooled,

lowering air pressure, drawing moisture-laden clouds onto the

foothills to pour down monsoon rains. Each summer the countryside warmed again, raising pressures, driving the clouds back to

sea.

This regular cycle of wet and dry seasons made routine the

bounty of the great alluvial plains below the mountains, fertilized by the plateau's silty runoff. When human beings arrived to clear the forests and plant crops, they found a land of untold fecundity, where they could build, and create culture, and have babies,

and make war, and have more babies, and make love, and

have more babies still . . .

Came then a time--only an eyeblink as the ages mark it--

when the pattern changed. Gone were the great forests that had

cooled the valleys with the transpired breath of ten billion trees.

Instead, the soot of cook fires and industry rose into the sky like a hundred million daily sacrifices to individual, shortsighted

gods.

Not only in India, but all around the world, temperatures

steadily climbed.

As always with such changes, the sea resisted, and so the

198 D A V I D B R I, N

first grand effects were seen onshore. The chill of winter vanished like a memory, and summer's ridge of high pressure remained

in place year-round over a hardpan that had once

welcomed fertile farms.

In fact, it rained now more than ever. Only now the monsoons

stayed where they were born ... at sea.

The trick to reading, Nelson Crayson decided, was slipping

into the rhythm of the words, but not letting that

get in the way of listening. Nelson concentrated on the

sentences zigzagging across the page.

0

s

p

H

Although many struggled to keep their faith in

a static, unchanging universe, it was already

apparent to the best minds preceding Darwin

that Earth's creatures had changed over

time. . . .

The worst thing about studying, Nelson had decided, was books. Especially this old-fashioned kind, with motionless letters the color of squashed ants splayed across musty paper.

Still, this dusty volume contained Kuwenezi's sole copy

of this essay. So he had to stick with it.

Evolutionists themselves argued over how species changed. Darwin's and Wallace's "natural selection"--in which diversity within a species provides

grist for the grinding mill of nature--had to

pass ten thousand tests before it triumphed conclusively

over Lamarck's competing theory of "inheritance

of acquired traits."

But even then arguments raged over essential

details. For instance, what was the basic unit of

evolution?

For years many thought it was species that

adapted. But evidence later supported the "selfish

gene" model--that individuals act in ways that promote

success for their descendants, caring little

for the species as a whole. Examples of individual

success prevailing over species viability include

peacocks' tails and moose antlers . . .

EARTH 199

Nelson thought he understood the basic issue here. A good

example was how people often did what was good for themselves,

even if it hurt their family, friends, or society.

But what do peacocks' tails have to do with it?

Nelson sat beneath overhanging bougainvillaeas.

Nearby, the gentle flow of water was punctuated by the

sound of splashing fish. The air carried thick aromas, but

Nelson tried to ignore all those deceptively natural sensoria

for the archaic paper reading device in his hands.

If only it were a modern document, with a smart index

and hyper links stretching all through the world data net. It

was terribly frustrating having to flip back and forth between

the pages and crude, flat illustrations that never even

moved! Nor were there animated arrows or zoom-ins. It

completely lacked a tap for sound.

Most baffling of all was the problem of new words. Yes,

it was his own damn fault he had neglected his education

until so late in life. But still, in a normal text you'd only

have to touch an unfamiliar word and the definition would

pop up just below. Not here though. The paper simply lay

there, inert and uncooperative.

When he'd complained about this, earlier, Dr. B'Keli

only handed him another of these flat books, something

called a "dictionary," whose arcane use eluded him entirely.

How did students back in TwenCen ever learn anything at all? he wondered.

Darwin spoke of two types of "struggle" in the wild

--conflict between individuals for reproductive success,

and the struggle of each individual against

the implacable forces of nature, such as cold,

thirst, darkness, and exposure.

Good, Nelson thought. This is what I was looking for.

Influenced by the dour logic of Malthus, Darwin believed

the first of these struggles was dominant.

Much of the "generosity" we see in nature is actually

quid pro quo--or "you scratch my back and I'll

scratch yours." Altruism is generally tied to the

success of one's genes.

Still, even Darwin admitted that sometimes cooperation

seems to transcend immediate needs.

200 D A V I D B R I N

Examples do exist where working together for the

common good appears to outweigh any zero-sum

game of "I win, you lose."

The book suddenly jolted as a brown paw slapped it. A long

snout, filled with gleaming teeth, thrust into view. Feral

brown eyes glittered into his.

"Oh, not now, Shig," Nelson complained. "Can't you

see I'm studyin'?"

But the infant baboon craved attention. It reached out

and squeaked appealingly. Nelson sighed and gave in,

though his arms were still tender with freshly healed scar

tissue.

"What do you have there, eh?" He pried open the little

monkey's paw. Something reddish and half gnawed rolled

out--a piece of fruit purloined from a forbidden source.

"Aw, come on, Shig. Don't I feed you more'n enough?"

Of course this was night shift and no one else was

around to witness the minor theft. He dug a small depression

in the soft loam and buried the evidence. With all recycling

factors above par, one pilfered fruit probably

wouldn't trigger catastrophe.

A broad expanse of tinted crystal panes separated this

portion of the biosphere from the star-sprinkled night. More

than mere practicality had gone into creating this enclosed

miracle of biological management. The tracks and runners,

the sprinklers and sprayers, were so tastefully hidden one

might think this an arboretum or greenhouse rather than a

high-tech sewage plant.

Settling Shig in his left arm, Nelson tried to resume

where he'd left off.

This latter view of evolution--that it includes a

place for kindness and cooperation--certainly is

an attractive one. Don't all our moral codes stress

that helping one another is the ultimate good?

We're taught as babes that virtue goes beyond

mere self-interest. . . .

Affronted at being ignored, Shig dealt with the insult by

turning and sitting on the open book, then looking about

innocently.

"Oh, yeah?" Nelson said, and retaliated by tickling the

EARTH 201

infant, whose jaws gaped in a silent laughter as he writhed

and finally escaped by toppling onto the soft grass.

Then, switching states quickly, the little baboon suddenly

crouched warily, sniffing the brookside foliage and listening.

Shig's gaze swept the pebbly banks of the nearby

stream and the maze of dripping vines crisscrossing overhead.

Then, suddenly, a larger baboon emerged from the

rustling plantain beds and Shig let out a squeak of pleasure.

Nell sniffed left and right before climbing down and

sauntering toward her offspring, tail high. Sleek and well

fed, she hardly resembled the scraggly outcast Nelson had

rescued from ark four's savannah biosphere. Nelson

couldn't help comparing her transformation to his own. We 'we come a long way from sampling shit for a living, he thought.

While in the hospital he at first had worried what the

scientists would do to him for leaving six male baboons battered

and whimpering beneath the dusty acacia trees. Self-

defense or no, Nelson had visions of dismissal, deportation,

and a year's corrective therapy back in a Yukon rehab camp.

But apparently the Ndebele regarded his exploit in ways

he hadn't imagined. Director Mugabe, especially, spoke of

the episode having "a salutary effect on the baboons' relationship with their caretakers ..."

If by that he meant the troop would henceforth treat

humans more respectfully, Nelson supposed the director

had a point. Beyond that though, the people of Kuwenezi

claimed to appreciate the "warrior's virtues" he'd displayed.

Hence the battery of placement exams that followed his release

from care, and his astonishing assignment here, with

the prestigious title of Waste Management Specialise 2.

"Of course the pay's still shitty," he reminded himself.

Nevertheless, the skills he learned here were in high demand

and would guarantee his prospects if he did well.

Modern cities dealt with sewage biologically these days,

imitating nature's own methods. The flow from tens of millions

of toilets coursed through settling and aerating paddies

the size of large farms. One stretch might be a riot of bulrushes and aloe, bred to remove heavy metals. Next, a scum

of specially designed algae would convert ammonia and

methane into animal fodder. Finally, most urban treatment

plants ended in snail ponds, with fish to eat the snails, and

both harvested to sell on the open market.

202 D A V I D B R I N

The water that emerged was generally as pure as any

mountain stream. Purer, given the state of most streams

these days. It was to this craft at recycling water that most

now credited the survival of modern cities. Without it, the

least consequence nearly everywhere would have been war.

The problem with bio-treatment, though, was that it

took acres and acres. A life ark had no room for that. The

refuge ecospheres had to be self-contained, and self-supporting, or weary taxpayers might someday forget their pledge to fund these living time capsules, preserving genetic treasures

for another, more fortunate age.

So Director Mugabe had decreed that this system must

be "folded." What might have covered hectares now fit into

the area of a large auditorium.

Diluted sewage first seeped between the sandwiched

glassy layers overhead, encountering special algae and sunlight.

After aeration, the green slurry then sprayed over suspended

trays of vegetation. Dripping slowly down the

hanging roots, filtered water at last fell to the streamlet below, where duckweed completed the process, helped by several

species of fish that thrived here, even though they were

now extinct in the wild.

Shig climbed onto his mother's back and Nell carried

her infant over to the miniature river to splash at the shallows

playfully. Naturally the recycling plant was deserted at

this hour. At first nervous about handling a shift all by himself, Nelson soon found the task strangely easy, as if the

complex interplay of details--adjusting flows and checking

growth rates--seemed natural, even obvious somehow.

Mugabe and B'Keli said he possessed a "knack," whatever

that meant. The whole thing had Nelson terribly puzzled, if

also pleased.

Back in school he hadn't given much thought to what

the teachers said--about how vegetation took in carbon dioxide,

nitrates, and water, and used sunlight to turn those

ingredients into oxygen, carbohydrates, and protein. In essence,

plants converted animals' waste products into the

very things animals needed for living, and vice versa. Those

lessons had been part of his curriculum since preschool, including all the ways man's industry had thrown the system

out of balance.

Still, he was pretty sure nobody had ever told him

about benzene or hydrogen cyanide or ammonia, or all the

EARTH 203

other bizarre chemicals given off in trace amounts by creatures

like himself. Chemicals which--if not for all sorts of

hardworking bacteria--would have choked the atmosphere

and killed everybody off long before humans ever fooled

around with fire.

"Were you aware of the importance of wool moths and hair beetles?"

Dr. B'Keli had asked when Nelson first started showing

an interest. "If it weren't for those specialized eaters of fur and hair, we mammals would have covered the land with a layer of sheddings

more than two meters thick by now. Think of that, next time you

spread mothballs to save your favorite sweater!"

Nelson shook his head, certain he was being had. / might be a changed person, but I still don't like Dr. B 'Keli.

Still, it had gotten him thinking. What made the system

of cycle and recycle work so well for millions of years?

For every waste product it seemed there was some species

out there willing to consume it. Every plant or animal depended

on others and was depended on by others still.

Even more amazing, the interdependence was usually a

matter of eating one other! As individuals, each creature

tried hard to avoid becoming anyone else's meal. And yet, it

was all this eating and being eaten, this preying and being

preyed upon, that made the great balancing act work!

Months ago, he would never have allowed himself the

presumed weakness of curiosity. Now it consumed him. The

pattern of symmetry had been going on for three billion

years, and he wanted to know everything about it.

How? How did it all come about?

That visiting professor some weeks back, the old

woman from England, had called the process "homeostasis"

1. the tendency of some special systems to stay in balance

for a long time, even if they're rocked by temporary setbacks.

Nelson mouthed the word.

"Homeostasis ..."

It had a sensual sound to it. He picked up the book

again and found his place.

Nearly every culture has laws to shelter family,

tribe, and nation from the impulses of individuals.

In recent times we've extended these codes of

protection to include those without family, the

weak, even the alien, and agonize that we don't

202 D A V I D B R I N

The water that emerged was generally as pure as any

mountain stream. Purer, given the state of most streams

these days. It was to this craft at recycling water that most

now credited the survival of modern cities. Without it, the

least consequence nearly everywhere would have been war.

The problem with bio-treatment, though, was that it

took acres and acres. A life ark had no room for that. The

refuge ecospheres had to be self-contained, and sef-supporting, or weary taxpayers might someday forget their pledge to fund these living time capsules, preserving genetic treasures

for another, more fortunate age.

So Director Mugabe had decreed that this system must

be "folded." What might have covered hectares now fit into

the area of a large auditorium.

Diluted sewage first seeped between the sandwiched

glassy layers overhead, encountering special algae and sunlight.

After aeration, the green slurry then sprayed over suspended

trays of vegetation. Dripping slowly down the

hanging roots, filtered water at last fell to the streamlet below, where duckweed completed the process, helped by several

species of fish that thrived here, even though they were

now extinct in the wild.

Shig climbed onto his mother's back and Nell carried

her infant over to the miniature river to splash at the shallows

playfully. Naturally the recycling plant was deserted at

this hour. At first nervous about handling a shift all by himself, Nelson soon found the task strangely easy, as if the

complex interplay of details--adjusting flows and checking

growth rates--seemed natural, even obvious somehow.

Mugabe and B'Keli said he possessed a "knack," whatever

that meant. The whole thing had Nelson terribly puzzled, if

also pleased.

Back in school he hadn't given much thought to what

the teachers said--about how vegetation took in carbon dioxide,

nitrates, and water, and used sunlight to turn those

ingredients into oxygen, carbohydrates, and protein. In essence,

plants converted animals' waste products into the

very things animals needed for living, and vice versa. Those

lessons had been part of his curriculum since preschool, including all the ways man's industry had thrown the system

out of balance.

Still, he was pretty sure nobody had ever told him

about benzene or hydrogen cyanide or ammonia, or all the

EARTH 203

other bizarre chemicals given off in trace amounts by creatures

like himself. Chemicals which--if not for all sorts of

hardworking bacteria--would have choked the atmosphere

and killed everybody off long before humans ever fooled

around with fire.

"Were you aware of the importance of wool moths and hair beetles?"

Dr. B'Keli had asked when Nelson first started showing

an interest. "If it weren't for those specialized eaters of fur and hair, we mammals would have covered the land with a layer of sheddings

more than two meters thick by now. Think of that, next time you

spread mothballs to save your favorite sweater!"

Nelson shook his head, certain he was being had. / might be a changed person, but I still don't like Dr. B 'Kelt.

Still, it had gotten him thinking. What made the system

of cycle and recycle work so well for millions of years?

For every waste product it seemed there was some species

out there willing to consume it. Every plant or animal depended

on others and was depended on by others still.

Even more amazing, the interdependence was usually a

matter of eating one other! As individuals, each creature

tried hard to avoid becoming anyone else's meal. And yet, it

was all this eating and being eaten, this preying and being

preyed upon, that made the great balancing act work!

Months ago, he would never have allowed himself the

presumed weakness of curiosity. Now it consumed him. The

pattern of symmetry had been going on for three billion

years, and he wanted to know everything about it.

How? How did it all come about?

That visiting professor some weeks back, the old

woman from England, had called the process "homeostasis"

1. the tendency of some special systems to stay in balance

for a long time, even if they're rocked by temporary setbacks.

Nelson mouthed the word.

"Homeostasis . . ."

It had a sensual sound to it. He picked up the book

again and found his place.

Nearly every culture has laws to shelter family,

tribe, and nation from the impulses of individuals.

In recent times we've extended these codes of

protection to include those without family, the

weak, even the alien, and agonize that we don't

204 D A V I D B R I N

live up to these standards perfectly. A kind of cultural

quasi-citizenship has even been granted

some of our former food animals--whales, dolphins,

and many other creatures with whom it's

possible now to feel a sense of kinship.

Arguing endlessly over ways and means, most

of us still agree on a basic premise, an ideal. If

asked to envision paradise, we would indeed have

the lion lie down with the lamb, and all people,

great and small, would treat each other with kindness.

But it's important to remember these are our morals, based on our background as particularly social mammals. Creatures who need a nurturing

tribe--who are helpless and lost without a clan.

What if intelligence and technology had been

discovered by some other species, say crocodiles?

Or otters? Would they share our ideas of fundamental

morality? Even among humans, despite our talk about caring for others, all too often it's "look out for number one."

Still, I'd like to suggest here that the drift from

egotism toward cooperation is an inevitable one. It

derives from basic patterns that have guided the

evolution of life on Earth for three and a half billion

years and continue to shape and transform our

world.

Yes, Nelson thought. She's the only one I've found

who talks about the real stuff. I don't understand half of

what she says, but it's here. This is where I start.

He stroked the scratchy paper pages, and for the first

time thought he understood why some oldtimers still preferred

such volumes to modern books. The words were here,

now and always, not whispering ghosts of electronic wisdom,

sage but fleeting like moonbeams. What the volume

lacked in subtlety, it made up for in solidity.

Like me, maybe?

Nelson laughed.

"Right! Dream on, eh?"

He returned to the text. When the monkeys returned

from their bath, they found him deeply immersed in an adventure

they could not begin to follow. This time, however,

they merely sat and watched, letting him do this strange

human thing in peace.

D

For half a century the city of West Berlin was something of an

ecological island.

Its isolation wasn't total of course. Water seeping underground

ignored political boundaries, as did the rain and pollution

from Communist factories just beyond the wall. Except for one

frightening episode, just after the Second World War, food and

consumer goods flowed from the Federal Republic by rail and

road and air.

Still, in many ways the city was an oasis less than ten miles

by twenty, whose several million shut-ins interacted hardly at all with the territory surrounding them.

With no place to send their waste, Berliners of those days

had to pioneer recycling. Refuse was strictly separated for curbside pickup. Even sidewalks were made of stone tiles so they

could be stacked during street repairs and then reused.

Despite the city's flashy night life and reputation for irreverence, West Berlin had more park area per capita than New York

or Paris. Gardeners grew more of their own food than other

urbanites. One proud mayor proclaimed that, should humanity

ever send a generation ship to the stars, it ought to be crewed

by West Berliners.

A mayor of Bonn promptly suggested that would be a very

good idea.

Berliners dismissed his sarcasm as churlish, and went on

living.

"You did not make Pele as angry this time, you well-

C endowed pakeha tohunga."

0 The old priestess reached over to pat Alex's knee.

R With a reedy voice she went on complimenting him.

E "You must be learning better foreplay! Keep it up. That,

surely, is the way to win Pele's favor."

Alex's face reddened. He looked to George Button, sitting

on a woven mat nearby. "Now what's she talking

about?"

The big Maori glanced across the fire pit at Meriana

Kapur, who grinned as she stirred the coals with an iron

206 D A V I D B R I N

poker. Quiescent flames licked higher and the tattoos on her

lips and chin seemed to flicker and dance. The crone appeared

ageless.

"Auntie's referring to the fact that there were fewer and

milder quakes after the recent scans. That must mean the

Earth goddess found your, er, probings . . . more acceptable

this time."

George said it with a straight face. Or almost straight.

The ambiguity was just enough to make Alex suppress an

impulse to laugh out loud.

"I thought Pele was a Hawaiian spirit, not Maori."

George shrugged. "The Pacific's cosmopolitan today.

Hawaiian priests consult ours in matters of body magic,

while we defer when it comes to volcanoes and planetary

animism."

"Is that where you studied geophysics, then?" Alex

smirked. "In a shaman's hut, beside a lava flow?"

He was surprised when George nodded earnestly, without

taking offense. "There, and MIT, yes." Button went on

to explain. "Naturally, Western science is paramount. It's

the central body of knowledge, and the old gods long ago

admitted that. Nevertheless, my ventures wouldn't have got

backing from my family and mi and clan, had I not also

apprenticed for a time with Pele's priests, at the feet of Kilauea."

Alex sighed. He shouldn't be surprised. Like California

fifty years ago, contemporary New Zealand had gradually

transformed its longstanding tradition of tolerance into a

positive fetish for eccentricity. Of course George's people

saw nothing inconsistent in mixing old and new ideas to suit

their eclectic style. And if that occasionally made staid outsiders blink in wonder, so much the better.

Alex refused to give George the satisfaction. He

shrugged and turned to regard the priestess once again.

Here under the hand-carved beams of the centuries-old

meeting house, he had only to squint to imagine himself

transported in time. Even her tattoos looked genuine . . .

unlike those the entertainers at Rotorua put on and took off

as easily as hair or skin color. Still, it was doubtful many

ancient Maori women, even priestesses, reached Auntie's

age with all their own teeth still in place, as hers were,

gleaming straight and white from a life of hygiene and regular

professional care.

EARTH 207

Alex realized she was waiting for a reply, and so he

nodded slightly. "Thank you, Auntie. I'm glad the goddess

found my attentions . . . pleasing."

George planted a hand on his shoulder. "Of course Pele

liked them. Didn't the Earth move for you?"

Alex shrugged the hand aside. George had insisted they

come here tonight, implying it was important. Meanwhile

Alex chafed for the lab and his computer. One more simulation

might break the logjam. Maybe if he kept at it, kept

trying . . .

"You pursue a great taniwha that has burrowed into

Our Mother," the priestess said. "You seek to grasp its nature.

You fear it will devour Our Mother and ourselves."

He nodded. A colorful appraisal, but it summed things

up rather well. Their most recent gravitational tomography

scans had lit up Earth's interior with a startling clarity that

struck George's technicians dumb, sketching the planet's

deep layers in fine, prickled, searing complexity that defied

all previous geophysical models.

The search had revealed both "taniwhas," the two singularities

slowly orbiting near the planet's heart. Both the

shriveled, evaporating remnant of his own Alpha and the

ominous, massive spectre of Beta had shown up as tiny, perfect

sparkles within the maelstrom. Everything he'd surmised

about the larger beast had been confirmed in those

scans. The cosmic knot was growing, all right. And the more

closely he examined its convoluted world-sheets, its torturous

topology of warped space-time, the more beautiful it

grew in its implacable deadliness.

Unfortunately, he was no closer to answering any of the

really basic questions, such as when and where the thing

had originated. Or how it was that probing for it triggered

earthquakes at the surface, thousands of miles away.

Hell, he couldn't even figure out the thing's orbit! Prior

to these recent scans he'd been so sure he had Beta's dynamics

worked out--the way gravity and pseudo-friction and

centrifugal forces balanced in its slow whirl about the inner

core. But its trajectory had shifted after the first scan. Some

additional factor must have nudged it. But what?

Auntie Kapur tapped a steady beat on a miniature ceremonial

drum--which some called a zzxjoanw--while making

fatidic statements about amorous goddesses and other

superstitious nonsense.

208 D A V I D B R I N

". . . You reach deep within Pele's hidden places,

touching Her secrets. She would not permit this of just any

man. You are honored, nephew."

Gaia worship took many forms, and this Pele-venerating

version seemed harmless enough. He'd even heard Jen speak

favorably of Auntie's cult, once. Under other circumstances

he might have found all this very interesting, instead of a

damned nuisance.

"Have no fear," she went on. "You will tame this beast

you pursue. You will keep it from harming Our Mother."

She paused, looking at him expectantly. Alex tried to

think of something to say.

"I am an unworthy man," he answered, modestly.

But the old woman surprised him with a quick, reproachful

glare. "It's not for you to judge your worthiness!

You serve, as a man's seed serves the woman who chooses

him. Even the taniwha serves. You would do well, boy, to

consider the lesson of the tiny kiwi bird and her enormous

egg."

Alex stared. The suggestion seemed so bizarre--and the

tension of the last few weeks had him wound up so tight--

that he couldn't contain himself any longer. He guffawed.

Auntie Kapur tilted her head. "You are amused by my

metaphors?"

"I . . ." He held up one hand placatingly.

"Would you prefer I used other terms? That I ask you to

contemplate the relationship between 'zygotes' and 'gametes'?

Would you understand better if I spoke to you of

dissipative structures? Or the way, even amid catastrophe,

life creates order out of chaos?"

Alex was unable to react except by blinking. While she

stirred the coals again, George whispered, "Auntie has a biophysics degree from the University of Otago. Don't make

assumptions, Lustig."

Trapped--by a movie cliche! Alex had known this was

a modern person sitting across from him. And yet her pose--

what Stan Goldman would call her "schtick"--had drawn

him in.

"You . . . you're saying the singularity won't harm

the Earth? That it might instead trigger some ..."

Auntie reached over the coals and rapped him sharply

on the back of his hand. "I say nothing! It's not my job to

tell you, a 'genius,' what to think--you, who have many

EARTH 209

times my brains and whose prowess impresses even Our

Mother. Those are silly endowments but they serve their

purposes.

"No, I only pose you questions, at a time when you're

obviously concentrating much too closely on your problem.

You show every sign of being ensnared by those very brains

of yours--of being cornered by your postulates! To nudge

you off balance then, I offer you the wisdom of sperm and

egg.

"Heed my words or not. Do as you will. I have confused

you and that is enough. Your unconscious will do the rest."

She concluded rattling the drum, then put it aside and

dismissed both men with a brusque wave. "I forbid further

work until you've rested and distracted yourselves. You are

commanded to get drunk tonight. Now go."

The priestess watched the fire pit silently as they stood

up. Alex grabbed his shoes and followed George out of the

meeting house, into a starry night. Ten feet down the path,

however, the two men stopped, looked at each other, and

simultaneously broke into fits of laughter. Alex nearly doubled

over, his sides hurting as he desperately tried to catch

his breath. George slapped him roughly on the back. "Come

on," the big Maori said. "Let's get a beer. Or ten."

Alex grinned, wiping his eyes. "I ... I'll join you in

an hour or so, George. Honestly. I only have to check one

simulation and . . . what's the matter?"

Suddenly frowning, George shook his head. "Not tonight.

You heard what Auntie said. Rest and distraction."

For the third time that evening, Alex gaped. "You can't

take that crazy old bat seriously!"

George smiled sheepishly, but also nodded. "She is a bit

of a ham. But where her authority applies, I obey. We get

drunk tonight, white fellow. You and I, now. Whether you

cooperate or not."

Alex had a sudden vision of this massive billionaire

holding his head under a beer tap, while he sputtered and

fought helplessly. The image was startlingly credible. Another

believer, he sighed inwardly. They were everywhere.

"Well ... I wouldn't want to flout tradition. . . ."

"Good." George slapped Alex on the back once more,

almost knocking him over. "And between rounds I'll tell

you how I once substituted for the great Makahuna, back in

'20, when the All Blacks smashed Australia."

210 D A V I D B R I N

Oh, no. Rugby stones. That's all I need. Still, Alex felt a strange relief. He'd been commanded to seek oblivion, and by no less than a spokeswoman for Caia

herself. On such authority--despite his agnosticism--he

supposed he could let himself forget for just one night.

Alex had been in pubs all over the world, from the faded

elegance of the White Hart, in Bloomsbury, to rickety, firetrap

shanties in Angolan boom towns. There had been that

kitschy Russian tourist bistro, near the launch site at Kapus-

tin Yar, where dilute, vitamin-enriched vodka was served in

pastel squeeze tubes to background strains of moon muzak

1. very tacky. He'd even been to the bar of the Hotel

Imperial, in Shanghai, just before the Great Big War Against

Tobacco finally breached that mist-shrouded last bastion of

smoking, driving grumbling addicts into back alleys to nurse

their dying habit.

In comparison, the Kai-Keri was as homey and familiar

as the Washington, his own local back in Belsize Park. The

bitter brown ale was much the same. True, the crowd

around the dart board stood closer than in a typical British

pub, and Alex had gotten lost during his last two trips to the

loo. But he attributed that to the coriolis effect. After all,

everything was upside down here in kiwi land.

One thing you wouldn't see in Britain was this easy

fraternizing of the races. From full-blooded Maoris to

palefaced, blond pakehas and every shade in between, nobody

seemed to notice differences that still occasionally

caused riots back home.

Oh, they had names for every pigmentation and nationality,

including postage stamp island states Alex had never

even heard of. The New Zealand Herald just that morning

had run an outraged expose about promotion discrimination

against Fijian guest-workers in an Auckland factory. It had

sounded unfair, all right . . . and also incredibly picayune

compared with the injustices and bigotries still being perpetrated almost everywhere else, all over the world.

Actually, Alex figured Kiwis fretted over such small-

scale imperfections so they wouldn't feel left out. Harmony

was all very good in theory, but in practice it sometimes

seemed a bit embarrassing.

Soon after arriving in New Zealand, he had asked Stan

Goldman just how far the attitude stretched. How would

EARTH 211

Stan feel, for instance, if his daughter came home one night

and said she wanted to marry a Maori boy?

Alex's former mentor had stared back in surprise.

"But Alex, that's exactly what she did!"

Soon he also met George's family, and the wives and

husbands and kids of several Tangoparu engineers. They

had all made him feel welcome. None seemed to blame him

for the deadly thing that was growing in the Earth's core.

And you're not responsible. It's not your monster.

Again, the reminder helped, a little.

"Drink, Lustig. You've fallen behind Stan and me."

George Button was accustomed to getting his way. Dutifully,

Alex took a breath and lifted the tapered glass of

warm brew. He closed his eyes, swallowed, and put it down

again, empty.

When he reopened them, however, the pint had magically

resurrected! Was this divine intervention? Or defiance

of entropy? The detached portion of Alex's mind knew

someone must have poured another round, presumably from

a pitcher that even now existed somewhere outside his diminishing field of vision. Still, it was fun to consider alternatives.

A negentropic time-reversal had certain arguments in

its favor.

With yet another of his unraveling faculties, Alex listened

to Stan Coldman's recollections from dimly remembered

days at the end of the last century.

"I was thinkin' about becoming a biologist in the late

nineties," his former research advisor said. "That's where all

the excitement was then. Biologists think of those days the

way we physicists look back on the early nineteen-hundreds,

when Planck an' Schrodinger were inventing the

quantum, and old Albert himself nailed the speed o' light to

the bleeding reference frame . . . when the basis for a

whole science was laid down.

"What a time that must have been! A century's engineering

came out of what those lucky bastards discovered.

But by my time it was all lookin' pretty dumpit boring for

physics."

"C'mon, Stan," George Button protested. "The late

nineties, boring? For physics? Wasn't that when Adler and

Hurt completed grand unification? Combinin' all the forces

of nature into one big megillah? You can't tell me you

weren't excited then'."

212 D A V I D 8 R I N

Stan brought one spotted hand to his smooth dome,

using a paper serviette to dab away spots of perspiration.

"Oh, surely. The unification equations were brilliant, elegant.

They called it a "theory of everything" . . . TOE for

short.

"But by then field theory was mostly a spectator sport.

It took almost mutant brilliance to participate . . . like you

have to be eight feet tall to play pro basketball these days.

What's more, you started hearing talk about closing the

books on physics. There were profs who said 'all the important

questions have been answered.' "

"That's why you thought about leaving the field?" George inquired.

Stan shook his head. "Naw. What really had me depressed

was that we'd run out of modalities."

Alex had been pinching his numb cheeks, in search of

any feeling. He turned to peer at Stan. "Modalities?"

"Basic ways and means. Chinks in nature's wall. The

lever and the fulcrum. The wheel an' the wedge. Fire an'

nuclear fission.

"Those weren't just intellectual curiosities, Alex. They

started out as useless abstractions, sure. But, well, do you

remember how Michael Faraday answered, when a member

of Parliament asked him what use would ever come of his

crazy 'electricity' thing?"

George Button nodded. "I heard about that! Didn't Faraday

ask, um . . . what use was a newborn baby?"

"That's one version," Alex agreed, commanding his

head to mimic the approximate trajectory of a nod. "Another

story has him answering--'I don't know, sir. But I'll

wagell, er . . . wager someday you'll tax it!'" Alex

laughed. "Always liked that story."

"Yeah," Stan agreed. "And Faraday was right, wasn't

he? Look at the difference electricity made! Physics became

the leading science, not just because it dealt in fundamentals

but also 'cause it opened doors--modalities--offering us

powers we once reckoned belonged to gods!"

Alex closed his eyes. Momentarily it seemed he was

back in the meeting house, with Auntie Kapur slyly referring

to the ways of heavenly beings.

"Grand unification depressed you because it wasn't practical'1." George asked unbelievingly.

"Exactly!" Stan stabbed a finger toward the big geo-

EARTH 213

physicist. "So Hurt described how the electroweak force

unifies with chromodynamics and gravitation. So what? To

ever do anything with the knowledge, we'd need the temperatures

and pressures of the Big Bang!"

Stan made a sour look. "Pfeh! Can you see why I almost

switched to quantum biology? That was where new theories

might make a difference, lead to new products, and change

people's lives."

Button regarded his old friend with clear disappointment.

"And I always thought you math types were in it for

the beauty. Turns out you're as much a gadget junky as I

am." He waved to a passing barmaid, ordering another

round.

Coldman shrugged. "Beauty and practicality aren't always

inconsistent. Look at Einstein's formulas for absorption

and emission of radiation. What elegance! Such simplicity!

He had no idea he was predicting lasers. But the potential's

right there in the equations. ..."

Alex felt the words wash over him. They were like

swarming creatures. He had a strange fantasy the things

were seeking places within him to lay their young. Normally,

he had little use for the popular multimind models of

consciousness. But right now the normal, comforting illusion

of personal unity seemed to have been dissolved by the

solvent, alcohol. He felt he wasn't singular, but many.

One self watched in bemusement while a dark pint

reappeared before him, again, as if by magic. Another sub-

persona struggled to follow the thread of Stan's rambling

reminiscence.

But then, behind his tightening brow, yet more selves

wrestled over something still submerged. Benumbed by fatigue

and alcohol, logic had been squelched and other, more

chaotic forces seemed to romp unfettered. Ninety-nine to

one the results would be just the sort that sounded great

during a party and like gibberish the morning after.

". . . when, out of nowhere, the cavitron appeared!

Imagine my delight," Stan went on, spreading his gnarled

hands. "All of a sudden we found there was, after all, a way

to gain access to the heart of the new physics!"

The elderly theoretician made a fist, as if grasping

tightly some long-sought quarry. "One year the field seemed

sterile, sexless, doomed to mathematical masturbation or

worse--perpetual, pristine theoretical splendor. The next

214 D A V I D B R I N

moment--boom! We had in our hands the power to make

singularities! To move and shape space itself!"

Stan appeared to have temporarily forgotten the tragic

consequences of that discovery. Even so, Alex took sustenance

from his friend's enthusiasm. He recalled his own

feelings on hearing the news--that the team at Livermore

had actually converted raw vacuum into concentrated space-

time. The possibilities seemed endless. What he himself had

envisioned was cheap, endless energy for a shaky, impoverished

world.

"Oh, there remained limitations," Stan went on. "But

the chink was there. The new lever and fulcrum. Perhaps a

new wheel! I felt as Charles Townes must have, the day he

bounced light back and forth through the lattice in that

pumped-up ruby crystal, causing it to . . ."

Alex's chair teetered backward as he stood suddenly.

He steadied himself with his fingertips against the tabletop.

Then, staring straight ahead, he stumbled awkwardly

through the crowd, weaving toward the door.

"Alex?" George called after him. "Alex!"

A stand of Norfolk pine, twenty meters from the rural pub,

drew him like flotsam from a roaring stream. In that eddy

the air was fresh and the chatty hubbub no longer sought to

overwhelm him. Here Alex had only the rustle of boughs to

contend with, a gentle answer to the wind.

"What is it?" George Button asked when he caught up

a minute later. "Lustig, what's the matter?"

Alex's mind spun. He swiveled precariously, torn between

trying to follow all the threads at once and grabbing

tightly onto just a few before they all blew away.

He blurted, "A laser, George. It's a laser!"

Button bent to meet Alex's eye. It wasn't easy, both

men wavered so.

"What are you talking about? What's a laser?"

Alex made a broad motion with his hands. "Stan mentioned

Einstein's abs--absorption and emission parameters.

But remember? There were two 'B' parameters--one for

spontaneous emission and one for stimulated emission from

an excited state."

"Speaking of an excited state," George commented. But

Alex hurried on.

"George, George!" He spread his arms to keep balance.

EARTH 215

"In a laser, you first create an--an inverted energy state in

an excited medium . . . get all the outer electrons in a crystal

hopping, right? The other thing you do is you place the

crystal inside a resonator. A resonator tuned so only one

particular wave can pass back and forth across the crystal

1. ."

"Yeah. You use two mirrors, facing each other at opposite

ends. But--"

"Right. Position the mirrors just so, and only one wave

will reach a standing state, bouncing to and fro a thousand,

million, jillion times. Only one frequency makes it, one polarization, one orientation. That one wave goes back and

forth, back and forth at the speed of light--causing stimulated

emission from all the excited atoms it passes, sucking

their excited energy into one single--"

"Alex--"

"--into a single coherent beam ... all the component

waves reinforcing ... all propagating in parallel like

marching soldiers. The sum is far greater than the individual

parts."

"But--"

Alex grabbed George's lapels. "Don't you see? We fed a

single waveform into such a medium a few weeks back, and

again two days ago. Each time, something emerged. Waves of

energy far greater than what we put in!

"Think about it! The Earth's interior is a hot soup of

excited states, like the plasma in a neon tube or a flashed

ruby crystal. Given the right conditions, it took what we fed

it and magnified the output. It acted as an amplifier!"

"The Earth itself?" George frowned, now seriously puzzled.

"An amplifier7. In what way?"

Then he read something in Alex's face. "Earthquakes.

You mean the earthquakes! But . . . but we never saw any

such thing in our old resource scans. Echoes, yes. We got

echoes and used them for mapping. But never any amplification

effect."

Alex nodded. "Because you never had a resonator before!

Think of the mirrors in a laser, George. They're what

create the conditions for amplification of one waveform, one

orientation, into a coherent beam.

"Only, we're dealing in gravity waves. And not just any

gravity waves, but waves specifically tuned to reflect

from--"

216 D A V I D B R I N

"From a singularity," George whispered. "Beta!"

He stepped back, wide-eyed. "Are you saying the taniwha ..."

"Yes! It acted as part of a gravity wave resonator. With

the amplifying medium consisting of the Earth's core itself!"

"Alex." George waved a hand in front of his face. "This

is getting crazy."

"Of course the effect ought to be muddy with only one

mirror, and we had only Beta to bounce off of. The second

series of tests conformed to that sort of a model."

Alex stopped and pondered. "But what about that first

scan, weeks ago? That time our probe set off narrow, powerfully

denned quake swarms. That output beam was so intense!

Focused enough to rip apart a space station . . ."

"A space station?" George sounded aghast. "You don't

mean we caused the American station to . . ."

Alex nodded. "Didn't I tell you that? Tragic thing. Awful

luck it just happened through a beam so narrow."

"Alex . . ." George shook his head. But the flow of

words was too intense.

"I understand why the amplification was muddy the

second time--just what you'd expect from a one-mirror resonator.

But that first time ..." Alex slammed his fist into

his palm. "There must have been two reflectors."

"Maybe your Alpha, the Iquitos black hole . . ."

"No. Wrong placement and frequency. I ..." Alex

blinked. "Of course. I have it."

He turned to face George.

"The other singularity must have been aboard the space

station itself. It's the only possible explanation. Their being

directly in line with the beam wasn't coincidental. The station

hole resonated with Beta and caused the alignment. It

fits."

"Alex . . ."

"Let's see, that would mean the outer assembly of the

station would be carried off at a pseudo-acceleration

of . . ."

He paused and looked up through a gap in the branches

at the stars overhead. His voice hushed in awe. "Those poor

bastards. What a way to go."

George Button blinked, trying to keep up. "Are you

saying the Americans had an unlicensed ..."

EARTH 217

Again, however, Alex's momentum carried him. "We'll

need a name, of course. How about 'gravity amplification by

stimulated emission of radiation'? Might as well stay with

traditional nomenclature." He turned to look at George.

"Well? Do you like it? Shall we call it a 'graser'? Or would

'gazer' sound better. Yes, 'gazer,' I think."

Alex's eyes glittered. Pain dwelled there, mixed equally

with a startled joy of discovery. "How does it feel, George,

to have helped unleash the most powerful 'modality' ever

known?"

The two men looked at each other for a stretched moment

of time, as if each were suddenly acutely aware of the

pregnant relevance of sound. The silence was broken only

when Stan Coldman called from the door of the pub.

"Alex? George? Where are you fellows? You're taking a

long time relieving yourselves. Are you too drunk to find

your zippers? Or have you found something else out there

that's interesting?"

"We're over here!" George Button called, and then

looked back at Alex, who was staring at the stars again, talking

to himself. In a somewhat lower voice, George added,

"And yes, Stan, it appears we've found something interesting

after all."

218 D A V I D B R I N

PART V

PLANET

In the new world's earliest days, there was no one to

speak ill of carbon dioxide, or methane, or even hydrogen

cyanide. Under lightning and harsh sunlight those

chemicals merged to stain the young ocean with amino

acids, purines, adenylates . . . a "primeval soup" which

then reacted still further, building complex, twisting

polymers.

Mere random fusings would have taken a trillion

years to come up with anything as complex as a

bacterium. But something else was involved beyond just

haphazard chemistry. Selection. Some molecules were

stable, while others broke apart easily. The sturdy ones

accumulated, filling the seas. These became letters in a

new alphabet.

They, too, reacted to form still larger clusters, a few

of which survived and accrued . . . the first genetic

words. And so on. What would otherwise have taken a

trillion years was accomplished in a relative instant.

Sentences bounced against each other, mostly forming

nonsense paragraphs. But a few had staying power.

Before the last meteorite storm was over or the final

roaring supervolcano finally subsided, there appeared

within the ocean a chemical tour de force, surrounded by

a lipid-protein coat. An entity that consumed and

220 D A V I D B R I N

excreted, that made true copies of itself. One whose

daughters wrought victories, suffered defeats, and

multiplied.

Out of alphabet soup there suddenly was told a story.

A simple tale as yet. Primitive and predictable. But

still, a raw talent could be read there.

The author began to improvise.

EARTH 221

D Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest

Group [D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546] Steering

Committee Report.

For weeks now there's been a marathon debate going on over in

subgroup six (techno-cures), category nine, forum five, concerning the relative merits of nano-constructors versus Von Neumann

machines as possible sources of wealth to replace our

tired planet's exhausted mines and wells.

The word "exhausted" applies as well to the weary moderators

of this tag-team endurance round. Finally the forum chair

said, "Enough already! Don't any of you people have jobs?

Families?"

We agree. It's all very well to talk about how these two

technologies might someday "generate enough wealth to make

even TwenCen America look like a Cro-Magnon tribe." But one

of the purposes of this SIG is to take ideas beyond mere speculation and offer the world feasible plans!

So let's call a pause on this one, people. Get some sleep.

Say hello to your children. Come back when you can show a

workable design for a truly sophisticated machine that can make

copies of itself--whether grazing on lunar soils or swimming in a nutrient bath. Then the rest of us will happily supply the carping criticism you'll need to make it work.

In sharp contrast, the soc-sci freaks in group two have had

some very witty forums about the current fad of applying tribal

psychology to urban populations. At one point over half a million Net users were tapping in, taking our SIG, once more, all the

way up to commercial-grade use levels! Digest-summaries of

those forums are already available, and we commend group

two's organizers for running such a lively, productive debate.

They were still pumping out Houston from last week's

E hurricane when she got into town. Teresa found it mar-

X velous how the city had been transformed by the calam0 ity.

S Avenues of inundated shops rippled mysteriously

P just below floodline, their engulfed wares glimmering

H like sunken treasure. The towering glass office blocks

E were startling vistas of blue and white and aquamarine,

R reflecting the summer sky above and bright-flecked wa-

E ters below.

222 D A V I D B R I N

Limp in the humidity, rows of canted trees marked the

drowned borderlines of street and sidewalk. Their stained

trunks testified to even higher inundations in the past. Under

fluffy clouds pushed by a torpid breeze, Houston struck

Teresa like some hypermodernist's depiction of Venice, before

that lamented city's final submergence. A wonderful

assortment of boats, canoes, kayaks, and even gondolas negotiated side streets, while makeshift water taxis plowed the

boulevards, ferrying commuters from their residential

arcologies to the shimmering office towers. With typical

Texan obstinacy, nearly half the population had refused

evacuation this time. In fact, Teresa reckoned some actually

reveled living among the craggy cliffs of this manmade archipelago.

From the upper deck of the bus she saw the sun escape a

cloud, setting the surrounding glazed monoliths ablaze.

Most of the other passengers instantly and unconsciously

turned away, adjusting broad-brimmed hats and polarized

glasses to hide from the harsh rays. The only exceptions

were a trio of Ra Boys in sleeveless mesh shirts and gaudy

earrings, who faced the bright heat with relish, soaking in it

worshipfully.

Teresa took a middle path when the sun emerged. She

didn't react at all. It was, after all,, only a stable class C star, well-behaved and a safe distance removed. Certainly, it was

less dangerous down here than up in orbit.

Oh, she took all the proper precautions--she wore a hat

and mild yellow glasses. But thereafter she simply dismissed

the threat from her mind. The danger of skin cancer was

small if you stayed alert and caught it early. Certainly the

odds compared favorably with those of dying in a helizep

accident.

That wasn't why she'd avoided taking a heli today,

skipping that direct route from Clear Lake, where the NASA

dikes had withstood Hurricane Abdul's fury. Teresa had

used a roundabout route today mostly to make sure she

wasn't being followed. It also provided an opportunity to

collect her thoughts before stepping from frying pan to fire.

Anyway, how many more chances would she have to

experience this wonder of American conceit, this spectacle

that was Houston Defiant? Either the city moguls would

eventually succeed in their grand, expensive plan--to secure

the dikes, divert the water table, and stabilize everything on

EARTH 223

massive pylons--or the entire metropolis would soon join

Calveston under the Gulf of Mexico, along with large

patches of Louisiana and poor Florida. Either way, this scene

would be one to tell her grandchildren about--assuming

grandchildren, of course.

Teresa cut off a regretful twinge as thoughts of lason

almost surfaced. She concentrated on the sights instead as

they passed a perseverant shopkeeper peddling his soaked

fashions from pontoons under a sign that read, "preshrunk, guaranteed salt resistant." Nearby, a cafe owner had set up tables, chairs, and umbrellas atop the roof of one of their

bus's stranded, wheeled cousins and was doing a brisk business.

Their driver delicately maneuvered past this enterprise

and the cluster of parked kayaks and dinghies surrounding

it, then negotiated one of the shallow reefs of abandoned

bicycles before regaining momentum on Lyndon Johnson

Avenue.

"They ought to keep it this way," Teresa commented

softly, to no one in particular. "It's charming."

"Amen to that, sister."

With a momentary jerk of surprise, Teresa glanced toward

the Ra Boys and saw what she had not noticed before,

that one of them wore a quasi-legal big ear amplifier. He

returned her evaluation speculatively, touching the rims of

his sunglasses, making them briefly go transparent so she

could catch his leer.

"Water makes the old town sexy," he said, sauntering

closer; "Don'tcha think? I love the way the sunlight

bounces off of everything."

Teresa decided not to point out the minor irregularity,

that he wore no sign advertising his eavesdropping device.

Only in her innermost thoughts . . . and her lumpy left

pocket . . . did she have anything to hide.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" she answered, giving

him a measured look he could take as neither insult nor

invitation. It didn't work. He sauntered forward, planted

one foot on the seat next to her, leaned forward, and rubbed

the close-cropped fuzz covering his cranium.

"Water serves the sun, don't ya know? We're supposed to let it come on come on come. It's just one of His ways o'

lovin', see? Coverin' Earth like a strong man covers a

woman, gently, irresistibly . . . wetly."

Fresh patches of pink skin showed where over-the-

224 D A V I D B R I N

counter creams had recently cleared away precancerous areas.

In fact, Ra Boys weren't many more times as likely to

develop the really deep, unbeatable melanoma tumors than

other people. But their blotchy complexions heightened the

image they desired--of dangerous fellows without respect

for life. Young studs with nothing to lose.

Teresa felt the other passengers tense. Several made a

point of turning toward the young toughs, aiming their

True-Vus at them like vigilant, crime-fighting heroes of an

earlier era. To these the boys offered desultory, almost obligatory gestures of self-expression. Most of the riders just

turned away, withdrawing behind shadow and opaque

lenses.

Teresa thought both reactions a bit sad. I hear it's even

worse in some cities up north. They're nothing but teenagers,

for heaven's sake. Why can't people fust relax?

She herself found the Ra Boys less frightening than pathetic.

She'd heard of the fad, of course, and seen young

men dressed this way at a few parties Jason had taken her to

before his last mission. But this was her first encounter with

sun worshippers in daylight, which separated nighttime

poseurs from the real thing.

"Nice metaphors," she commented. "Are you sure you

didn't go to school?"

Already flushed from the heat, the bare-shouldered

youth actually darkened several shades as his two friends

laughed aloud. Teresa had no wish to make him angry. Dismembering a citizen--even in self defense--wouldn't help

her now-precarious position with the agency. Placatingly,

she held up one hand.

"Let's go over them, shall we? Now you seem to be

implying the rise in sea level was caused by your sun deity.

But everyone knows the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets

are melting because of the Greenhouse Effect--"

"Yeah, yeah," the Ra Boy interrupted. "But the greenhouse

gases keep in heat that originates with the sun."

"Those gases were man-made, were they not?"

He smiled smugly. "Carbon dioxide and nitrous oxides

from cars and TwenCen factories, sure. But where'd it all

come from originally? Oil! Gas! Coal! All buried and

hoarded by Her Nibs long ago, cached away under her skin

like blubber. But all the energy in the oil an' coal--the rea-

EARTH 225

son our grempers dug and drilled into Old Caia in the first

place--that came from the sun!"

He bent closer. "Now, though, we're no longer enslaved

to Her precious hoard of stolen fossil fat-fuel. It's all gone up in smoke, wonderful smoke. Bye-bye." He aimed a kiss at

the clouds. "And there's nowhere else to turn anymore but

to the source itself!"

Ra worshippers were backers of solar energy, of course,

while the more numerous Caians pushed wind power and

conservation instead. As a spacer, Teresa ironically found

her sympathies coinciding with the group whose appearance

and style were the more repulsive. Probably all she had to do

was let these fellows know she was an astronaut and all

threat and bluster would evaporate. Honestly, though, she

liked them better this way--loud, boisterous, reeking of testosterone and overcompensation--than she would as fawning

admirers.

"This city ain't gonna last long anyway," the Ra Boy

continued, waving at the great towers, up to their steel ankles

in Gulf waters. "They can build their levees, drive

piles, try to patch the holes. But sooner or later, it's all going'

the way of Miami."

"Fecund jungle's gonna spread--" one of the others

crooned through a gauzy, full-backup mouth synthesizer.

Presumably it was a line from a popular song, though she

didn't recognize it.

The growling motors changed pitch as the bus approached

another stop. Meanwhile, the leader leaned even

closer to Teresa. "Yessiree, blistery! The Old Lady's gonna

brim with life again. There'll be lions roaming Saskatchewan.

Flamingoes flocking Greenland! And all 'cause of Ra's

rough lovin'."

Poor fellow, Teresa thought. She saw through his pose

of macho heliolatry. Probably he was a pussycat, and the

only danger he presented came from his desperate anxiety

not to let that show.

The Ra Boy frowned as he seemed to detect something

in her smile. Trying harder to set her aback, he bared his

teeth in a raffish grin. "Rough, wet loving. It's what women

like. No less Big Mama Caia. No?"

Across the aisle, a woman wearing an Orb of the Mother

pendant glared sourly at the Ra Boy. He noticed, turned, and

226 D A V I D B R I N

lolled his tongue at her, causing her fashionably fair skin to

flush. Not wearing True-Vus, she quickly looked away.

He stood up, turning to sweep in the other passengers.

"Ra melts the glaciers! He woos her with his heat. He melts

her frigid infundibulum with warm waters. He ..."

The Ra Boy stammered to a halt. Blinking, he swept

aside his dark glasses and looked left and right, seeking Teresa.

He spotted her at last, standing on the jerry-rigged

third-floor landing of the Gibraltar Building. As the

waterbus pulled away again, raising salty spumes in its wake,

she blew a kiss toward the sun worshipper and his comrades.

They were still staring back at her, with their masked eyes

and patchy pink skins, as the boat driver accelerated to catch

a yellow at First Street, barely making it across before the

light changed.

"So long, harmless," she said after the dwindling Ra

Boy. Then she nodded to the doorman as he bowed and

ushered her inside.

She had one stop to make before her meeting. A walk-in

branch of a reputable bank offered an opportunity to unload

her burden.

Usually a cash transaction would cause raised eyebrows,

but in this case it was customary. The smiling attendant

took her crisp fifties and led her to an anonymity booth,

where Teresa promptly sealed herself in. She took a slim

sensor from one pocket and plugged it into a jack in the side

of her wallet, which then served as a portable console while

she scanned every corner of the booth for leaks. Of course

there were none. Satisfied, she sat down and disconnected

the sensor. As she was doing that, however, her hand accidentally stroked the worn nub of the wallet's personal holo

dial, causing a familiar image to project into space above the

countertop.

Her father's eyes crinkled with smile lines and he

looked so proud of her as he silently mouthed words she had

long ago memorized. Words of support. Words that had

meant so much to her so often since he first spoke them

... on every occasion since when she found herself bucking

the odds.

Only none of those other crises was ever nearly as dire

as the business she'd gotten herself into now. For that reason

EARTH 227

she held her hand back from touching the sound control or even replaying his well-remembered encouragement in her mind.

She was too afraid to test it. What if the words wouldn't

work this time? Might such a failure ruin the talisman forever,

then? Uncertainty seemed preferable to finding, out

that this last touchstone in her life had lost its potency, that

even her father's calm confidence could offer no security

against a world that could melt away any time it chose.

"I'm sorry, Papa," she said quietly, poignantly. Teresa

wanted to reach out and touch his gray-flecked beard. But

instead she turned off his image and firmly turned her attention

to the task at hand. From her pocket she drew one of

two data spools, inserting it into a slot in the counter. Picking a code word from the name of a college roommate's pet

cat, she created a personal cache and fed in the contents of

the spool. When the cylinder was empty and erased, she

breathed a little easier.

She was still embarked on a dangerous enterprise that

might cost her her job, or even lead to jail. But at least now

she wouldn't become a pariah for the modern sin of keeping

secrets. She'd just registered her story--from the Erehwon

disaster to her recent, surreptitious orbital data collection

for Pedro Manella. If any of it ever did come to trial, now

she'd be able to show with this dated cache that she had

acted in good faith. The Rio Treaties did allow one to withhold

information temporarily--or try to--so long as careful

records were maintained. That exception had been left in

order to satisfy the needs of private commerce. The treaties'

drafters--radical veterans of the Helvetian War--probably

never imagined that "temporary" might be interpreted to be

as long as twenty years or that the registering of diaries like

hers would become an industry in itself.

Teresa sealed the file, swallowing the key in her mind.

Such was her faith in the system that she simply left the

empty spool lying there on the countertop.

"I wish you hadn't done that."

"Done what, Pedro?"

"You know what I mean. What you did when you got

back to Earth."

Manella regarded her like a disapproving father. Fortu-

228 D A V I D B R I N

nately, Teresa's own dad had been patient and understanding--and

thin. In other words, nothing like Pedro Manella.

"All I did was refuse to shake hands with Colonel

Spivey. You'd think I'd have slapped him across the face or

shot him."

Looking down at the blue lagoons of Houston, the

portly newsman shook his head. "In front of net-zine cameras?

You might as well have done exactly that. What's the

public to think when a shuttle pilot steps out of her spacecraft, accepts the thanks of all the other astronauts, but then

pointedly turns away and spits when the mission supervisor

steps up for his turn?"

"I did not spit!" she protested.

"Well it sure looked that way."

Teresa felt warm under the collar. "What do you want

from me? I'd just verified--at least to my satisfaction--that

the bastard must have had a black hole on Erehwon. He

recruited my husband into an illegal conspiracy that caused

his death! Did you expect me to kiss him?"

Manella sighed. "It would have been preferable. As it is,

you may have jeopardized our operation."

Teresa folded her arms and looked away. "I wasn't followed

here. And I got you your data. You asked nothing else

of me." She felt put-upon and resentful. As soon as she had

arrived, and Manella's assistants scurried off with her second

spool, Pedro had launched into this Dutch uncle lecture.

"Hmph," he commented. "You didn't actually say anything

to Spivey, did you?"

"Nothing printable or relevant. Unless you count commentary

on his ancestry."

Manella's scowl lifted slightly. Much as he disapproved

of her actions, he clearly would have liked to have been

there. "Then I suggest you let people assume the obvious--

that you and Spivey had been having an affair--"

"What?" Teresa gasped.

"--and that your anger was the result of a lovers'--"

"Dumpit!"

"--of a lovers' tiff. Spivey may suspect you're on to his

activities, but he'll not be able to prove anything."

Teresa's jaw clenched. The unpalatability of Manella's

suggestion was matched only by its inherent logic. "I'm

swearing off men forever," she said, biting out the words.

Infuriatingly, Manella answered only with a raised eye-

EARTH 229

brow, economically conveying his certainty she was lying. "Come on," he replied. "The others are waiting."

A chart projection hung over the far end of the conference

room. It wasn't holographic, merely a high-definition, two-

dimensional schematic of the multilayered Earth. A nest of

simple, concentric circles.

Innermost, extending from the center about a fifth of

the way outward, was a brown zone labeled solid inner core

----CRYSTALLINE IRON + NICKEL . . . 0-1227 KILOMETERS.

Next came a reddish shell, about twice as thick. liquid

OUTER CORE----IRON + OXYGEN + SULFUR . . . 1227-3486 KILOMETERS, the caption read.

The beige stratum beyond that took up nearly the rest

of the planet. mantle, the legend stated. oxides of silicon,

ALUMINUM, AND MAGNESIUM (ECLOCITES AND PERIDOTITES IN PER-

OVSK1TE FORM) . . . 3486-6350 KILOMETERS.

All three great zones featured subdivisions marked by

dashed lines, tentative and vague lower down, with captions

terminating in question marks. At the outermost fringe Teresa

discerned a set of thin tiers labeled, asthenosi'here, lith-

OSPHERE, OCEANIC CRUST, CONTINENTAL CRUST, HYDROSPHERE

(ocean), atmosphere, macnetosi'here. Outlining that final

zone, curving arrows rose from near the south pole, to reen-

ter in Earth's far northern regions.

The speaker at the front of the room was a trim blonde

woman who pointed to those arching field lines.

"We were especially interested in the intense high-energy

region astronauts call the 'South Atlantic devil,' a magnetic

dip that drifts westward about a third of a degree per

year. These days it hovers over the Andes . . ."

Using a laser pointer, she traced the high, diffuse fields

that were her specialty. The woman obviously knew a thing

or two about space-borne instrumentation.

She ought to, Teresa thought.

As a consultant transferred to Houston two years ago,

June Morgan had become friends with several members of

the astronaut corps, including Teresa and her husband. In

fact, Teresa had been glad, at first, when June was assigned

to work with Jason on a recent Project Earthwatch survey.

Now, of course, Teresa knew her husband had been using

that assignment to cover other work for Colonel Spivey.

230 D A V I D B R I N

That hadn't kept him from getting to know June better,

though. A whole lot better.

When Manella had brought Teresa in to introduce to

everybody, June barely met her eyes. Officially, there was no

grudge between them. But they both knew things had gone

farther than any modern marriage contract could excuse.

The one Teresa had signed with Jason made allowances for

long separations and the planetbound spouse's inevitable

need for company. Their arrangement was no "open marriage"

stupidity, of course. It set strict limits on the duration

and style of any outside liaison and specified a long list of

precautions to be taken.

The agreement had sounded fine four years ago. In theory.

But dammit, Jason's affair with this woman had violated

the spirit, if not the letter, of their pact!

Perhaps it had been Teresa's fault for following her curiosity,

for checking who Jason had seen while she was away

on a long-duration test flight. She had been shocked to learn

that it was a NASA person ... a scientist no less! A

groupie, even a bimbo, would have been okay. No threat

there. But an intelligent woman? A woman so very much

like herself?

She recalled the feeling of menace that had flooded her

then, creating a horrible tightness in her chest and a blindness

in her eyes. For hours she had walked familiar neighborhoods

completely lost, in a cold panic because she had

absolutely no idea where she was or in what direction she

was heading.

"You want me to give her up?" Jason had asked when she

finally confronted him. "Well, of course I'll give her up, if you want me to."

His infuriating shrug had driven her crazy. He'd managed

to make it sound as if she were the one being irrational,

choosing this particular case to get jealous about all of a

sudden. Perhaps illogically, she didn't find his blithe willingness to go along with her wishes calming, for underneath

his acquiescence she fantasized a regret she could not verify

in any way.

His sojourns aloft were generally longer than hers. She

had spent many more long days alone on Earth between

missions, surrounded all the time by overtures. She'd seldom

availed herself of those dubious comforts, whatever the

freedoms allowed by their contract. That he'd been less reti-

EARTH 231

cent when he was home alone hadn't bothered her till then.

Men were, after all, inherently weasels.

She'd tried to remain civilized about it, but in the end

Teresa let him go to space that last time with barely an acknowledgment of his farewell. For weeks their telemetered

messages were terse and formal.

Then came that fatal day. As she was docking her shuttle,

unloading her cargo and preparing to send Spivey's

peepers across the transitway, Teresa had been emotionally

girding herself to make peace with Jason. To begin anew.

// only--

Teresa pushed away memory. It probably wouldn't have

worked out. What marriage lasted these days, anyway? All

men are pigs. She missed him terribly.

One glance told Teresa she wasn't alone in mourning.

Meeting June Morgan's eyes in that brief moment, she knew

the other woman's pain was akin to her own. Damn him. He

wasn 'the ever supposed to fling with anyone he liked. Especially someone like me! Someone who might compete for

his love.

That instant's communication seemed to cause the

blonde scientist to stumble briefly in her address. But she

quickly recovered.

". .. so for ... for most of the twentieth century,

Earth's total magnetic field weakened at an ... average

rate of four hundredths of a percent per year. And the decline

has steepened recently. That, combined with a greater

than expected drop in the Earth's ozone layer, leads to a

growing suspicion we may be about to experience a rare

event--a complete geomagnetic reversal."

The man across from Teresa raised his hand. "I'm sorry,

Dr. Morgan. I'm just a poor mineralogist. Could you explain

what you mean by that?"

June caused the display to zoom in upon a long, jagged,

S-shaped range of undersea mountains, threading the middle

of the sinuous Atlantic Ocean. "This is one of the great oceanic spreading centers, where older crust is pushed aside to make room for new basalt welling up from the mantle. As

each fresh intrusion cools and hardens, the rock embeds a

frozen record of Earth's magnetism at the time. By studying

samples along these ridges, we find the field has a habit of

suddenly flipping its state . . . from northward to southward,

or vice versa. The change can be quite rapid. Then,

232 D A V I D B R I N

after a long period of stability, it flips back the other way

again.

"Way back during the Cretaceous, one stable period

lasted almost forty million years. But in recent times these

flip-flops have taken to occurring much more rapidly--every three hundred thousand years or so." June put up a slide showing a history of peaks and valleys crowding ever closer

together, ending with a slightly wider patch near the right-

hand edge. "Our latest stable interval has exceeded the recent

average."

"In other words," Pedro Manella suggested, "we're

overdue for another flip."

She nodded. "We still lack a good explanation of how

geomagnetism is generated, down where the core meets the

mantle. Some even think sea level has something to do with

it, though according to the Parker model . . ." June stopped

and smiled. "The short answer? Yes, we do seem overdue."

"What might be the consequences, if it flipped today?"

Another woman at the table asked.

"Again, we're not sure. It would certainly impair many

navigational instruments--"

Teresa's nostrils flared. She'd known this. Yet hearing it

said aloud felt like a direct challenge.

"--and it might eliminate some protection from solar

proton storms. Space facilities would need shielding or have

to be abandoned altogether."

"And?" Manella prompted.

Isn 'the that enough? Teresa thought, horrified.

The speaker sighed. "And it might wreck what's left of

the ozone layer."

A murmur of consternation spread among those assembled.

Pedro Manella loudly cleared his throat to get their

attention. "Ladies, gentlemen! This is serious of course.

Still, it's only background to our purpose here today." He

turned to regard June. "Doctor Morgan, let's get to the

point. How might your geomagnetic data help us track down

any illegal black hole singularities on or near the Earth?"

"Mmm, yes. Well it's occurred to me there've been

some recent anomalies, such as this new drift in the South

Pacific ..."

Teresa listened attentively. Still, she couldn't help wondering. Why did Manella insist I come here today' I could have sent my data by courier.

EARTH 233

Not that she had anything better to do. Perhaps Pedro

wanted her to tell the others about the subjective sensations

she'd experienced during the catastrophe, or to recite the

story of Erehwon's destruction one more time.

No matter. Teresa was used to being a team player. Even

in a quasi-illegal band like this one, most of whose members

she didn't even know.

Damn it, she thought. / fust want to know what's going

on.

For now that meant cooperating with Manella, and even

June Morgan, putting aside personal feelings and helping

any way she could.

D Like most other religious special interest groups on the Net,

we in the Friends of St. Francis Assembly [D SIG.Rel.disc. 12-

RsyPD 634399889.058] have been discussing the Pope's latest

encyclical, Et in Terra pax et sapientia, which sanctions veneration of the Holy Mother as special protector of the Earth and its

species. Some say this stands alongside his predecessor's acceptance of the population oath as a breakthrough concession

to common sense and the new worldview.

Not all take this attitude, however. Consider the manifesto

published yesterday on the Return to the Robe Channel

[D SIG.Rel.disc. 12-RsyPD 987623089.098] criticizing His

Holiness for ". . . succumbing to both creeping Gaianism and

secular humanism, both incompatible with Judeo-Christian her-

meneutics . . ."

I just had a voice-text exchange with the Monsignor Nassan

Bruhuni [D pers.addr. WaQ 237.69.6272-36 aadw], leading author

of the manifesto, during an open question session. Here's a

replay of that exchange.

Query by T.M.: "Monsignor, according to the Bible, what was

the very first injunction laid by the Lord upon our first ancestor?"

Reply by Msgr. Bruhuni: "By first ancestor I assume you mean

Adam. Do you refer to the charge to be fruitful and multiply?"

T.M.: "That's the first command mentioned, in Genesis 1. But

Genesis 1 is clearly just a summary of the more detailed story in Genesis 2. Anyway, to 'multiply' can't have been first chronologically.

That could only happen after Eve appeared, after sex was

234 D A V I D B R I N

discovered through sin, and after mankind lost immortality of the flesh!"

Msgr. B.: "I see your point. In that case, I'd say the command

not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. It was by breaking that

injunction that Adam fell."

T.M.: "But that's still only a negative commandment . . . 'Don't

do that.' Wasn't there something else? Something Adam was

asked actively to do?

"Consider. Every heavenly intervention mentioned in the Bible,

from Genesis onward, can be seen as a palliative measure,

to help mend a fallen race of obdurate sinners. But what of the

original mission for which we were made? Have we no clue what

our purpose was to have been if we hadn't sinned at all? Why

we were created in the first place?"

Msgr. B.: "Our purpose was to glorify the Lord."

T.M.: "As a good Catholic, I agree. But how was Adam to glorify?

By singing praises? The heavenly hosts were already doing

that, and even a parrot can make unctuous noises. No, the evidence is right there in Genesis. Adam was told to do something

very specific, something before the fall, before Eve, before even being told not to eat the fruit!"

Msgr. B.: "Let me scan and refresh my ... Ah. I think I see

what you refer to. The paragraph in which the Lord has Adam

name all the beasts. Is that it? But that's a minor thing. Nobody considers it important."

T.M.: "Not important? The very first request by the Creator of His creation? The only request that has nothing to do with the repair work of mortality or rescue from sin? Would such a thing have

been mentioned so prominently if the Lord were merely idly curious?"

Msgr. B.: "Please, I see others queued for questions. Your point

is?"

T.M.: "Only this--our original purpose clearly was to glorify God by going forth, comprehending, and naming the Creator's

works. Therefore, aren't zoologists, crawling through the jungle, struggling to name endangered species before they go extinct,

doing holy labor?

"Or take even those camera-bearing probes we have sent

to other planets. . . . What is the first thing we do when awe-

inspiring vistas of some faraway moon are transmitted back by

our little robot envoys? Why, we reverently name the craters,

valleys, and other strange beasts discovered out there.

"So you see it's impossible for the end of days to come, as

EARTH 235

your group predicts, till we succeed in our mission or utterly fail.

Either we'll complete the preservation and description of this

Earth and go forth to name everything else in God's universe, or

we'll prove ourselves unworthy by spoiling what we started with

--this, our first garden. Either way, the verdict's not in yet!"

Msgr. B.: "I ... really don't know how to answer this. Not in

real time. At minimum you've drawn an intriguing sophistry to

delight your fellow Franciscans. And those neo-Gaian Jesuits, if

they haven't thought of it already.

"Perhaps you'll allow me time to send out my own ferrets

and contemplate? I'll get back to you next week, same time,

same access code."

So that's where we left it. Meanwhile, any of you on this SIG are welcome to comment. I'll answer any useful remarks or suggestions.

After all, if there's anything I seem to have on my hands

these days, it's free time.

--Brother Takuei Minamoto [D UsD 623.56.2343 -alf.e.]

It was a laser.

C He still couldn't get used to the idea. A gravity

0 laser. Imagine that.

R / wonder where the power comes from.

E "Mr. Sullivan? May I freshen your drink, sir?"

The flight attendant's smile was professional. Her features

and coloration clearly Malay. "Yes, thank you," he

replied as she bent to pour, her delicate aroma causing him

to inhale deeply. "That's a lovely scent. Is it Lhasa Spring?"

"Why . . . yes sir. You are perceptive."

She met his eyes, and for an instant her smile seemed

just that much more than perfunctory. It was a well-measured

look that fell short of provocative, but also seemed to

promise a litle more than mere professionalism during the

long flight ahead.

Alex felt content as she moved on to serve the next

passenger. It was nice flirting amiably with an exotic beauty,

without the slightest temptation to ruin it by trying

for too much. The last few months had left his libido in a

state of suspension, which had the pleasant side effect of

allowing him the freedom to appreciate a young woman's

smile, the fine, well-trained grace of her movements, with-

236 D A V I D B R I N

out flashing hormones or unwarranted hopes getting in the

way.

It had been different during his first year of graduate

school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore

instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the

late-blooming quandaries of maturity, he had parsed the elements

of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation,

separating and solving the variables one by one until

the problem--if not generally solved--did appear to have

tractable special solutions.

The mapping wasn't exact, of course. According to Jen,

biological systems never translated exactly onto mathematical

models, anyway. Still, at the time he acquired certain

practical skills, which garnered him a reputation among his

classmates and friends.

Then, curiosity sated, his interests changed trajectory.

Companionship and compatibility became desiderata more

important than sex, and he even aspired for joy. But these

proved more elusive. Seduction, it seemed, contained fewer

variables and relied less on fate than did true love.

Disappointment never banished hope exactly, but he

was persuaded to shelve aspiration for a while and return to

science. Only at Iquitos did hope suffer truly mortal

wounds. Compared to that loss, sex was a mere incidental

casualty.

/ know what Jen would tell me, he thought. We

moderns think sex can be unlinked from reproduction. But

the two are connected, deep down.

Alex knew most of the time he was in denial about the

coming end of the world. He had to be, in order to do his

work. In such a state he could even enjoy studying Beta, the

elegant, deadly monster in the Earth's core.

But denial can only rearrange pain, like a child re-sorting

unloved vegetables on his plate, hoping a less noticeable

pattern will deceive parental authority. Alex knew where

he'd quarantined his bitter outrage. It still affected the part

of him most intimately tied to life and the propagation of

life.

Alex imagined how his^ grandmother might comment

on all this.

"Self-awareness is fine, Alex. It helps make us interesting beasts, instead of just another band of crazy apes.

EARTH 237

"But when you get right down to it, self-awareness is probably

overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn't need it in order to be successful, or even smart."

Thinking about Jen made Alex smile. Perhaps, after the

hard work of the months ahead was done, there'd be time to

go home and visit her before the world ended.

Stan Coldman had been left in charge in New Zealand, continuing

to track Beta while Alex went to California on a

mission to beg, wheedle, and cajole ten years' raw data from

the biggest observatory in the world. This was a mission he

had to take on himself, for it required calling in many old

favors.

From a small building on the UC Berkeley campus, his

old friend Heinz Reichle ran three thousand neutrino detectors

dispersed all over the globe. The planet was almost

transparent to those ghostly particles, which penetrated rock

like X rays streaming through soft cheese, so Reichle could

use the entire worldwide instrument round the clock to

track nuclear reactions in the sun and stars. For his part

though, Alex hoped the disks full of data in his luggage

would show a thing or two about the Earth's interior as well,

perhaps helping the Tangoparu team track the awful Beta

singularity to its source.

Alex still wanted to meet the person or persons responsible--almost as badly as George Button did.

I'd like to know how they were able to create such a

complex, twisted knot of space. They can't have used anything

as simple as a Witten mapping,. Why. even renormal-

ization would have taken--

The airplane's public address system came to life, interrupting

his thoughts. From the seat back in front of him

projected the smiling, confident visage of their captain, informing everyone that the Hawaiian Islands were coming

into view.

Alex shaded his window against internal reflections and

gazed down past layers of stratospheric clouds to a necklace

of dark jewels standing out from the glittering sea. Back in

the days of turbojets, this would have been a refueling stop.

But modern hypersonic aircraft--even restricted by the

ozone laws--just streaked on by.

He had seen Hawaii much closer than this anyway, so it

wasn't the chain itself but the surrounding waters that slid-

238 D A V I D B R I N

denly interested him. From this height he saw patterns of

tide and color--resonant standing waves and subtly shaded

shoals of plankton luminance--outlining each bead in the

nearly linear necklace of islands. Polarized sunglasses, especially, brought out a richness of detail.

Once, Aiex would have looked on this phenomenon

with pleasure but little understanding. Time spent with

George Hutton's geologists had corrected that. The islands

weren't static entities anymore, but epic, rocky testimonials

to change. From the big island westward, beyond the thousand-meter cliffs of Molokai, all the way past lowly Midway,

a chain of extinct volcanoes continued arrow straight for

thousands of miles before zigging abruptly north toward the

Aleutians. That bent path to the arctic circle was also a trip

back in time, from the towering, ten thousand cubic mile

basalt heap of Mauna Loa, past weathered, craggy elder isles

like Kauai, to ancient coral atolls and eventually prehistoric,

truncated seamounts long conquered by the persistent

waves.

On the big island, two memorable volcanoes still

spumed. But most activity had already shifted still further

east, where the newest sibling was being born--an embryonic,

as yet unemerged isle already named Loihi.

Most of the planet's volcanoes smoldered where the

edges of great crustal plates met gratingly, or rode up over

each other--as along this great ocean's famous Ring of Fire.

But Hawaii's trail of ancient calderas lay smack in the middle

of one of the biggest plates, not at its rim. The Hawaiian

Islands had their origins in a completely different process.

They were the dashed scars left as the Central Pacific Plate

cruised slowly above the geological equivalent of a blowtorch,

a fierce, narrow tube of magma melting through anything

passing over it.

George Button had likened it to pushing thick aluminum

foil slowly over an intermittent arc welder. Part of

George's wealth had come from tapping power from such

hot spots in the mantle.

Oh, yes. Hawaii certainly testified that there was energy

down there.

But you can't generate a. laser . . . or a gazer . . .

from just any lump of hot matter. You need excited material

in an inverted state. . . .

There it was again--his thoughts kept drawing back to

EARTH 239

the problem, just as the taniwha kept pulling in atoms as it

orbited round and round the Earth's core.

At first he'd been certain the amplified gravity waves

originated from Beta itself. After all, what bizarre energy

levels might lay within the roiling, folded world-sheets of a

cosmic knot? In fact, on that night in New Zealand when

Alex experienced his moment of drunken inspiration, he

had also felt a wave of desperate hope. What if the knot

itself was being stimulated to emit gravity radiation? Could

Beta be forced somehow to give up energy faster than it

could suck atoms from the core?

Alas, scans showed the beast hadn't lost any weight at

all, despite the titanic, Earth-rattling power released in the

gazer beam. The only apparent effect on Beta had been to

shift its orbit slightly, making it harder than ever to trace its history.

And so Alex still had no idea where the energy came

from. Add another gnawing, frustrating mystery to the list.

It was one thing to know he and everyone else were doomed to be destroyed. But to die ignorant? Not even having looked on the face of his destroyer? It was not acceptable.

"Mr. Sullivan? Pardon me, sir."

Alex blinked. By now Hawaii was long gone from sight.

He turned away from the blue Pacific to meet the almond

eyes of the beautiful ASEAN Air flight attendant.

"Yes? What is it?"

"Sir, you've received a message."

From her palm he took a gleaming data sliver. Alex

thanked her. Unfolding his comp-screen, he slipped the chip

inside and keyed access. Instantly, a holo of George Button

frowned at him, sternly, under bushy eyebrows. A short row

of block letters appeared.

THIS )UST ARRIVED ON A NET RECEPTION BOARD IN AUCK-

EAND, UNDER YOUR REAL NAME, MARKED URGENT.

THOUGHT YOU'D BETTER SEE IT RIGHT QUICK----GEORGE.

Alex blinked. Only a few people on the planet knew he'd

gone to New Zealand, and those obligingly used his cover

name. Hesitantly, he touched the screen and instantly a flat-

image photograph appeared in front of him, rather smudgy

and amateurish looking. It showed a crowd of people--tourists,

apparently--looking admiringly at a disheveled,

240 D A V I D B R I N

youngish man, lanky and a little underweight. The center of

attention was holding another man to the ground--a wild-

eyed fellow with flecks of froth at the corners of his mouth.

/ should have expected this, Alex thought with a sigh.

Tourists loved using their True-Vu goggles. There must have

been many records of his minor "heroics" in Rotorua. Apparently

a few had made it onto the net.

He looked at his own image and saw a fellow who

didn't really want to be where he was, or doing what he was

doing.

/ should not have interfered. Now look what's happened.

He touched the screen again to see the rest of the message,

and suddenly a new visage loomed out at him--one he

knew all too well.

Talk about looking, on the face of your destroyer . . .

It was Pedro Manella, dressed in a brown suit that

matched his pantry-brush mustache. The portly reporter

grinned a frozen, knowing grin. Alex read the text below

and groaned.

ALEX LUSTIC, I KNOW YOU'RE IN NEW ZEALAND SOMEWHERE.

FROM THERE GENERAL DELIVERY WILL GET THIS TO

YOU.

ARRANGE A MEETING WITHIN TWO DAYS, OR THE EN.

TIRE WORLD WILL BE HUNTING FOR YOU, NOT I ALONE.

--MANELLA

That man was as tenacious as a remora, as persistent as any

taniwha. Alex sighed.

Still, he wondered if it really mattered anymore. In a

way, he looked forward to watching Pedro Manella's face

when he told the man the news.

It was an unworthy anticipation. A grown man

shouldn't covet revenge.

Ah, he thought, but we are legion. I contain multitudes.

And some of the people making up "me" aren't

grown-ups at all.

D Each of the allies had its own reasons for entering the bloody

conflict now variously known as the "Helvetian War," the "Se-

EARTH 241

crecy War," and the "Last-We-Hope"--perhaps the most bizarre

and furious armed struggle of all time.

A leading factor in the industrial north was the laundering of

profits for drug merchants and tax cheaters. Overburdened with

TwenCen debt, citizens of America and Pan-Europe demanded

those groups at least pay their fair share, and resented the banking gnomes for sheltering criminals' ill-gotten gains.

International banking secrecy was even more hated in the

developing world. Those nations' awesome debts were aggravated

by "capital flight," whereby leading citizens had for generations smuggled mountains of cash to safe havens overseas.

Whether honestly earned or looted from national treasuries, this

lost capital undermined frail economies, making it even harder

for those left behind to pay their bills. Nations like Venezuela, Zaire and the Philippines tried to recover billions removed by

former ruling elites, to no avail. Eventually, a consortium of restored democracies stopped railing at their ex-dictators and instead

turned their are on the banking havens themselves.

Still, neither taxpayer outrage up north nor cash starvation

in the south would have been enough to drive the world to such

a desperate, unlikely confrontation were it not for two added

factors--a change in morality and the burgeoning Information

Age.

Those were the days of the great arms talks, when mutual,

on-site inspection was seen as the only possible way to ensure

de-escalation. As each round of weapons reductions raised the

verification ante, the international corps of inspectors became

sacrosanct. Words like "secrecy" and "concealment" began

taking on their modern, obscene connotations.

To increasing numbers of "blackjacks"--or children of century

twenty-one--the mere idea of secrecy implied scheming

dishonesty. "What're you hiding, zygote?" went the now corny

phrase. But in those days it conveyed the angry, revolutionary

spirit of the times.

That wrath soon turned against the one remaining power

center in whom secrecy was paramount and unrepentant. By the

time the members of the Brazzaville Consortium gathered to

write their final ultimatum, they were no longer in a mood for

compromise. Belated conciliatory words, broadcast from Berne

and Nassau and Vaduz, were too little and far too late to stifle the new battle cry: . . . Open the books. All of them. Now!

Would the allies have gone ahead, suspecting what death

and horror awaited them?

242 D A V I D B R I N

Knowing what we do now, about what lay buried under the

Glarus Alps, most agree their only mistake was not declaring

war sooner. In any event, by the second year of fighting, mercy

was hardly on anybody's agenda anymore. Only vengeful modern

Catos could be heard, crying from the rooftops of the

world--

Helvetia delenda est!

By then it was to the death.

--From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books, edition 4.7

(2035). [d hyper access code 1-ITRAN-777-97-9945-29A.]

Pedro insisted they change vehicles three times during

E their roundabout journey from the Auckland aero-

X drome. At one point he bought them both new clothes,

0 straight off the rack in a tourist clip joint in Rotorua.

S Changing at the store, they abandoned their former at-

P tire on the off chance someone might have planted a

H tracking device on them.

E Teresa went along with these measures stoically,

R absurd and melodramatic as they seemed. Without ap-

E propriate experience or instincts to guide her, she could

only hope Manella knew what he was doing.

Strangely, the Aztlan reporter appeared to grow calmer,

the closer they neared the arranged rendezvous. He drove

the final kilometers of winding forest highway with a peaceful

smile, humming atonal compositions of dubious lineage.

Teresa's contribution was to work away silently at her

cuticles and rub a hole in the thin carpet with her right foot

each time Pedro tortured the little rental car's transmission

or took a curve too fast. It didn't help that they still drove

on the left in this country, putting the passenger in a position

she normally associated with having control. She had

never found it easy letting someone else drive--even lason.

She was close to snatching the wheel out of Pedro's hands

by the time bright signs began appearing along the side of

the road.

WAITOMO CAVES. (LIST AHEAD.

COME SEE THE WONDER OF THE WAIKATO.

EARTH 243

One of the billboards depicted a family of happy spelunkers,

helmet lamps glowing as they pointed at astonishing sights

just offstage.

"We've entered their security perimeter, by now,"

Manella said. To seem more relaxed, he'd have to close his

eyes and go to sleep.

"You think so?" Teresa knew he didn't mean the tourist

concessionaires. She frowned at the blur of conifers rushing

past her window. Manella glanced at her and smiled. "Don't

fret. Lustig isn't a violent type."

"How do you explain what happened in Iquitos then?"

"Well, I admit he is ... highly accident prone."

When Teresa laughed bitterly, Pedro shrugged. "That

doesn't release him from responsibility. Au contraire. Unlucky

people should exercise special caution, lest their bad

luck come to harm others. In Lustig's case--"

"His message hinted he knew something about the destruction

of Erehwon. Maybe he caused it! He might be

working with Spivey, for all we know."

Manella sighed. "A chance we'll have to take. And now

we're here."

Signs pointed left to public parking. Pedro swooped

down, around, and into a slot with a display of panache

Teresa could have lived without. She emerged to a syncopation

of crackling vertebrae, feeling more respect than ever

for the pioneers of Vostok, Mercury, and Gemini, who first

ventured into space crammed into canisters approximately

the same size of the tiny car.

She and her companion crossed the highway to the

ticket booth, paid for two admissions, and joined other tourists

passing under one of the ubiquitous carved archways

that seemed a New Zealand trademark. Teresa glanced at

those gathering for the two o'clock tour, a sparse assortment

of winter travelers that included hand-holding Asian newly-

weds, retirees with Australian accents, and local children in

quaint woolen school uniforms. For all she knew, any of

them might be agents for the mysterious organization they'd

tracked to this place.

The meeting had been set up with delicacy and circumlocution,

each side taking precautions against a possible

double cross. It all struck Teresa as anachronistic, and hopelessly adolescent.

Unfortunately, adolescents ran the world. Big, irrespon-

244 D A V I 0 B R I N

sible adolescents like Jason or this Lustig fellow, whose dossier read like the biography of a high-tech Peter Pan. Even

worse were serious, bloody-minded types like Colonel

Spivey, whose games of national security were played with

real multitudes serving as pawns. She recalled how intensely

the man had worked during the recent space mission. Spivey

was driven, all right. Sometimes that could be a good thing.

It could also make some people dangerous.

"You're sure these people will keep their word?" she

whispered to Manella.

He looked back with amusement. "Of course I'm not

sure! Lustig may be nonviolent, but what do we know about

his backers?" Again, he shrugged. "We'll find out soon

enough."

Ask a foolish question . . . Teresa thought.

Their tour guide arrived at last, a dark-haired, dark-

skinned young man with broad shoulders and a pleasant

smile. The guide cheerfully beckoned them to follow him

along a wooden walk that hugged the steep hillside, and

soon had them traversing along mist-shrouded waterfalls.

Teresa kept close to Manella at the end of the queue.

She caught herself glancing backward to see if anyone

was sneaking up behind them, and made herself stop doing

it.

The vegetation changed as they passed under a rain forest

canopy. Exotic birds flitted under moist foliage that

looked so healthy you might never imagine how many other

places like this were withering elsewhere on the planet.

Here even the smells seemed to convey strength, diversity.

This jungle felt as if it were a long way from dying. Inhaling

felt like taking a tonic. That calmed her a bit. She took deep

breaths.

They turned a corner and suddenly the cave entrance

yawned ahead of them. The gap in the mountainside was

appropriately dark, foreboding. Steps proceeded downward

between slippery metal banisters, with bare bulbs spaced at

intervals apparently calculated to maximize eerie shadows,

to thrill visitors with an illusion of creaking decrepitude and

mystery.

Teresa listened idly as the guide recited something having

to do with great birds, cousins of the legendary moa,

who used to get trapped in caves like these during prehis-

EARTH 245

toric times, leaving their bones to be discovered by astonished

explorers many centuries later.

As they descended, he used a beam to point out features

of the grottoes, carved over thousands of years by patient

underground streams, then embellished with fluted limestone

apses by centuries of slow seepage. In places the ceiling

gave way to shafts and chimneys that towered out of

sight or dropped into total blackness, lined with soda-straw

draperies and crystalline, branchlike helicites. Curling galleries curved out of view, hinting at an interminable maze

that would surely swallow anyone foolish enough to leave

the wooden walkway.

It was, indeed, quite beautiful. Still, Teresa felt little

true surprise or awe. It was all too familiar from prior exposure on TV or in net-zines. She nodded familiarly at stalactites

and stalagmites, acquaintances already encountered in

the past by proxy. Rather than eerie or strange, they were

neighbors she had learned a lot about over the years, long

before ever meeting them in person.

The good side of the world media village was the sense

it gave ten billion that each of them had at least some small

connection with the whole. The bad side was that no one

ever encountered anything, anymore, that was completely

new.

Perhaps that was why I became an astronaut, in hopes

of someday seeing some special place before the cameras

got there.

If so, lots of luck. The vast mountain ranges of the

moon were still unclimbed. And at present rate, they probably

never would be. Likewise the steep canyons, ice sheets,

and red vistas of Mars.

Teresa scanned craggy terraces, shaped over millennia

by the slow drip-dripping of carbonate-rich water. No doubt

she and Pedro were already being watched by Alex Lustig's

mysterious organization. Their instructions had been to

keep to the rear. If Pedro knew anything more, he hadn't

told her.

"Now we'll be going down another set of stairs," their

guide announced. "Hold onto the rail because the lights

grow dimmer, to let our eyes adapt for the Grand Cave."

The visitors' voices grew hushed as they descended

plank steps, put there to protect the limestone floor from

the erosive rub of countless feet. Once, Teresa caught a

246 D A V I D B R I N

white flash of teeth as Manella turned to grin at her. She

ignored him, pretending not to see.

Soon it was hardly pretense. Colliding with Pedro's

broad back was her first warning the descent had ended.

Whispers diminished to an occasional giggle as people

bumped awkwardly. A cough. A faint, familiar hiss as someone

in the crowd took oxygen from a hip flask, followed by a

mumbled apology.

Listening carefully, Teresa made out rhythmic thumping

sounds and a faint splash. The tour leader spoke from

somewhere to her left. "We'll divide the group now and

continue by water. Each boat will have a guide, standing in

the prow, who will pull you along by hauling on ropes arrayed

along the ceiling."

As her eyes adapted, Teresa soon made out smudges

here and there--the edge of the dock and several small vessels

moored alongside, with a man's or woman's silhouette

at the bow. She even thought she could trace a webbery of

cables draped across the rock overhead.

"Interesting mode of transport," Pedro commented as

they watched the first boat depart. More tourists were

helped into the next one and the queue moved forward.

"As each boat rounds the bend ahead," the chief guide

continued. "You'll leave behind the last illumination. Your

pilot will be operating by memory and touch alone. But

don't worry, we only lose one or two boatloads a year."

A poor joke, but it touched off nervous titters.

"A few more turns and you'll arrive at the main grotto,

where our famous worms will perform their unique show for

you--the centerpiece of Waitomo Caves. Then, by another

route, you'll be returned here to the landing. We hope you

enjoy your visit to the wonder of the Waikato."

Some wonder. So far Teresa hadn't seen anything particularly

impressive. Much bigger caves were regularly featured

on the National Geographic net-zine.

The tourists just ahead of them boarded a boat. There

was room remaining at the back, but their guide held out a

hand to stop Manella. "You, sir, look just a bit heavy to add

here. I'll take you two in the last one myself."

As Pedro sniffed indignantly, the guide helped them

into the final boat. Then he moved to the bow and cast off.

The dim remaining light disappeared behind them as he

EARTH 247

pulled the ceiling-spanning ropes hand over hand and they passed around a bend into pitch darkness.

Teresa tried using biofeedback to speed her adaptation

to the dark and found it disconcerting how little training

helped. You couldn't amplify what doesn't exist.

By now there were no signs of the other boats. They

might have drifted over a cliff, for all Teresa knew. Or perhaps

some stealthy monster waited just ahead, plucking

each group silently and swiftly from their stygian barges.

The waters were chill to her fingertips when she

dragged them alongside. They also seemed to have a faint

oily quality. Bringing a few drops to her lips, she tasted minerals.

It wasn't unpleasant though. The underground river

was slow but clear and fresh. It tasted timeless.

"Some years the water rises too high to let boats pass,"

the guide told them in a soft voice. "And during droughts

they can be stranded."

"Are there eyeless fish, down here?" Teresa asked.

The native's low, disembodied laughter seemed to

dance along the sculpted rocks. "Of course! What sort of buried river would this be without such? They live on seeds, pollen, and insect larvae carried down here from kj waho,

the outside world. Some of those larvae survive to become

flies, which in turn feed ..."

Teresa grabbed the gunnels quickly as she sensed something

massive approach from the left--moments before their

boat grated against rock, tipping slightly. "Just a second,"

the voice told them. "I have to step out to guide us around

this column. Hold on."

She traced the faint scrape of a boot on a sandy bank.

Without any sight at all, not even the dark eclipse of

Manella in front of her, she sensed only vague movement as

their vessel scoured along a limestone verge and then

emerged round a corner into a starry night.

Teresa gasped. Stars? Sudden disorientation left her staring

at the brilliant vault overhead, amazed.

But it was early afternoon when we arrived.

How . . . ?

Automatically, she sought her friends, the familiar constellations, and recognized none of them. Everything had

changed! It was as if she'd passed through some science fictional device, to a world in some distant galaxy. The swirl of

248 D A V I D B R I N

stellar clusters arced overhead in vast, regal, and totally alien splendor.

Teresa blinked, suffering from acuity of senses. Hearing

told her she was underground. Her internal gyroscope said

she was less than two kilometers from the car. And yet the

clinquant stars screamed of open sky. She shook her head.

Wrong. Wrong. Readjust. Don't make assumptions!

All this happened in a narrow instant, the time it took

for her to notice that every one of these "stars" shone the

same exact shade of bright green. In half a second Teresa

settled the sensory clash, seeing how this artful hoax was

perpetrated.

The boat rocked as a figure occulted the false constellations,

stepping back into the bow. The guide's silhouette

eclipsed bright pinpoints as he hauled away at a line of

blackness overhead. "Our cave worms make their homes

along the roof," his voice echoed softly. "They produce a

phosphorescence that lures newly hatched flies and other

insects whose eggs and larvae were swept here from the outside

world-. The bright spots lead those insects not outside,

not back into Te Ao-marama, but onto sticky snares."

Something was wrong. Teresa sat forward. She whispered.

"Pedro, his voice . . ."

With uncanny accuracy, Manella grabbed her hand and

squeezed for silence. Teresa tensed briefly, then forced herself

to relax. This must be part of the plan. With effort she

sat back and made the best of the situation. There was nothing

else to do, anyway.

Now she felt sheepish for even momentarily mistaking

the lights overhead for stars. Their slow passage let her estimate parallax . . . ranging from one and a half to three meters

above them. She' could, in fact, follow the rough

contours of the ceiling now. Anyway, there was no twinkle

from atmospheric distortion. Some of the "stars" were, in

fact, large oblong shapes.

Still . . . She blinked, and suddenly rationalization

departed once more. For another thrilling moment Teresa

purposely enjoyed the illusion again, looking out on an alien

sky, on the fringes of some strange spiral arm with fields of

verdant suns--the mysterious night glitter of a faraway frontier.

Their guide's shadow was the black outline of a nebula.

The nebula moved. So, she suddenly noticed, did a regular,

EARTH 249

straight boundary. A rectangular blackness, free of green,

passed over them as if demarking a gate. Soon Teresa heard a

low rumble of motors and sensed a barrier roll behind them.

The emerald starscape vanished.

"Now, if you'll please cover your eyes," the shadow

said. She felt Manella move to comply, but only shaded

hers. To close them completely would demand too much

trust.

A sharp glow suddenly grew ahead of them. Perhaps it

was only a dim lamp, but the glare felt intense enough to

hurt her dark-adapted retinas. It quickly drove out all remaining trace of the worm phosphors. Teresa bade them

farewell regretfully.

The boat bumped once more and stopped. "Come this

way please," the voice told them. She felt a touch on her

arm and Teresa let herself be led, blinking, out of the swaying

craft. Her eyes tearing somewhat from the brightness,

she had to squint past rays of diffraction to see who had

replaced their original guide. It was a brown-haired man,

lightly freckled, who clearly owned no Polynesian ancestry

at all. Right now he regarded Pedro with an expression she

couldn't read, but obviously carrying strong emotion.

"Hello, Manella," he said, apparently making an effort

to be polite.

It was Teresa's first chance to scrutinize Alex Lustig in

person. In photographs he had appeared distant, distracted,

and some of that quality was present. But now she thought

she perceived something else as well, possibly the expression

of one who has sought strangeness, and found much more

than he had ever bargained for.

Pedro used a kerchief to wipe his eyes. "Hello yourself,

Lustig. Thanks for seeing us. Now, I hope you have a good

explanation for what you've been up to?"

Here they were deep underground, out of contact with

any of their own people or, in fact, any legal authority--and

sure enough, old Pedro was slipping right back into the role

of paternal authority figure.

"As you wish." Alex Lustig nodded, apparently un-

fazed. "If you two will follow me, I'll tell you everything.

But I warn you, it will be hard to believe."

Of course Pedro wouldn't let someone else get the last

word in, even with a line like that.

250 D A V I D B R I N

"From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely

preposterous and utterly calamitous."

An hour later Teresa wondered why she only felt anesthetized,

when she really ought to loathe the man. Even if he

hadn't made the monster eating away at the Earth's heart, he

was still the one who had brought this thing to her attention.

Then there was his role in triggering the burst of coherent

gravity waves that drove Jason and nine others on their

one-way journey to the stars. That, too, should be reason

enough to despise Alex Lustig. And yet the only emotions

she felt capable of right now were more immediate ones

1. such as the wry pleasure of seeing Pedro Manella for

the first time at a loss for words.

The big man sat across from Lustig, hands folded on a

table of dark wood, his notepad completely forgotten. Pe-

dro's eyes kept flicking to a large holographic cutaway of the

Earth, more vivid and detailed than anything their group

had been able to construct back in Houston. Delicately

traced minutiae cast orange, yellow, and reddish shades

across one side of Manella's face, lending false gay overtones

to his bleak expression.

There were only the three of them here in a sparsely

furnished underground chamber. After providing his guests

with refreshments, Lustig had launched into his briefing

without assistance, though twice he had lifted a headset to

consult someone outside. Naturally, the man had help. Despite

his "solitary wizard" reputation, there was no way he

could have figured all this out by himself.

The possibility of a hoax occurred to Teresa several

times, but she recognized that as wishful thinking. Lustig's

calm thoroughness bespoke credibility, however insane or

horrible his conclusions.

". . . so it was only this week, by combining gravity

scans with neutrino observations, that we were able to pin down at last where the energy is coming from . . . the elevated state powering the gazer effect. It's at the base of the

mantle, where the geomagnetic field draws on currents in

the outer core ..."

Technically, the story wasn't hard to follow. While

searching for his Iquitos black hole, Lustig and his associates

had stumbled across a much more dangerous singularity al-

EARTH 251

ready present at the center of the Earth. They tried using

tuned gravity waves to trace that one's trajectory and history,

but that touched off internal reflections, amplifying

gravitons much as photons are between the mirrors of a laser.

In this case the "gazer mirrors" consisted of the mysterious

Beta itself plus the experimental black hole onboard

station Erehwon. What blasted forth was a great wave of

warped space-time, spearing in the general direction of

Spica.

Lustig was a good teacher. He kept his math to low-level

matrices and used figures to graphically lay out this tale of

catastrophe. It sounded all too plausible--and she wouldn't

have believed a single word if she hadn't witnessed so much

firsthand. The sudden, horrible stretching and contraction

of Erehwon's tether, for instance. Or the relativistic departure

of the Farpoint lab. Or those colors.

What had Teresa becalmed in an emotional dead zone

was the realization that all her concerns were over. What

point was there in worrying about internal politics at NASA,

or her next flight itinerary, or her failed marriage, if the

whole world was coming to an end soon?

The mystery singularity--Lustig's "cosmic knot"--

must have started small. But Beta had grown till now it teetered

near a critical threshold. She read the accretion rate off

a side screen. Clearly the thing was poised for a voracious

binge that could have only one conclusion.

One conclusion ... So far he had spared them an explicit

simulation of what would happen when matter began

flowing into Beta's maw in megatons per second. Teresa figured

it would start with shock waves disrupting the planet's

deep, ancient convection patterns. Earthquakes would roll

and volcanoes spume as great seams opened in the crust.

Then, undermined from within, the outer layers would collapse.

Ironically, little would happen to things in orbit, like

the moon or satellites. Earth's total mass below would stay

the same, only converted into a far more compact form. If

she happened to be on a mission at the time, she'd get to

watch the whole show . . . until the singularity revealed

its bare glory and seared her spacecraft out of existence in a

blast of gamma radiation.

Teresa shook herself. This was no time for a funk. Later,

252 D A V I D B R I N

at home, she could climb under the covers, curl in a ball,

and hope to die.

". . . that one of our problems was finding the inverted

energy distribution that's being tapped by the gazer beam.

Where does all the power come from?" The Englishman ran

a hand through his hair. "Then it all made sense! The

Earth's magnetic dynamo is the source. Specifically, discrete

superconducting domains where--"

Teresa started, sitting upright. "What did you say?"

Alex Lustig regarded her with pale blue eyes. "Captain

Tikhana? I was referring to current loops, where the lower

mantle meets the liquid core--"

She interrupted again. "You spoke of superconductivity.

Down there? We still have trouble cooling rapid transit

lines on a summer day, but you say there are superconducting

areas thousands of miles below, where temperatures

reach thousands of degrees?"

The British physicist nodded. "Don't forget, pressures

at the base of the mantle exceed ten thousand newtons per

square centimeter. And then there's a delightful coincidence

one of my colleagues noticed only recently. The bottommost

mineral state, before mantle gives way to metallic core,

seems to consist of various oxides pressed into a perovskite

structure--"

"Per . . . ovskite?"

"A particularly dense oxide arrangement that forms

readily under pressure."

"I still don't get it," she said, frowning.

He spread his hands. "Relatives of these same perov-

skites happen to be among the best industrial superconductors!

This coincidence led us to consider a weird notion

1. that there are places, thousands of kilometers below

us, where electric current flows completely free of resistance."

The very idea made Teresa close her eyes. Once upon a

time, superconductivity had been associated only with utter

cold, near absolute zero. Only in recent decades had "room

temperature" superconductors joined a few other breakthroughs

to help salvage the hard-pressed world economy.

Now she envisioned loops -and titanic circuits, flowing in

perfect, resistance-free fire. It was a startling notion. "These

superconducting domains . . . they're the excited zones

you tap with the gravity resonator?"

EARTH 253

"We think so. Energy levels drop each time, but are

quickly pumped up again by convection."

Silence held. When Manella spoke again, he shook his

head. "So many wonderful discoveries ... all made under

the shadow of an angel of death. Okay, Lustig, you've had

your fun. Now tell us what we need to know."

"Know for what?"

Pedro pounded the tabletop. "For revenge! Who released

this thing? And when? Where do we find them?"

From the other man's countenance, Teresa guessed this

wasn't the first time he had heard that request. "I don't

know the answer yet," he replied. "It's hard to trace its

trajectory back, taking into account friction and accretion

and inhomogeneities in the core . . ."

"You can't even begin to guess?"

The physicist shrugged. "By my calculations the thing

shouldn't even exist."

"Of course it shouldn't exist! But somebody made it,

obviously. You said you understood the basic principles."

"Oh, I do . . . or thought I did. But I'm having trouble

seeing how anyone could make such a large knot with any

energy source available on Earth today."

"Wasn't it smaller when it fell?"

"Surely. But remember, practical cavitronics is only

about eight years old. When I extrapolate that far back from

Beta's present size and growth rate, it's still too bloody

heavy. No structure on Earth could have supported it."

Manella glowered. "Obviously you've made some mistake."

Teresa saw something flash briefly in Alex Lustig's eyes

--an anger that quenched as quickly as it came. With surprising

mildness, he nodded. "Obviously. Perhaps it is eating

faster than my theory predicts. This isn't an area anyone

has much experience in."

At that moment Teresa felt the weight of the cave

around her, as if all the tons overhead were pressing on her

chest. Partly to overcome faintness, she spoke the critical

question.

"How . . ." She swallowed. "How much time do we

have?"

He blew a sigh. "Actually, that part's fairly easy. However

rapidly it grew in the past, the asymptotic threshold

remains the same. If it continues sucking in matter, faster

254 D A V I D B R I N

and faster ... I'd say we have about two years until major

earthquakes begin. Another year before volcanic activity

chokes the atmosphere.

"Then of course, things accelerate rapidly as the singularity's

growth feeds on itself. Ninety-five percent of the

Earth won't be swallowed till the last hour. Ninety percent

in the final minute or so."

Teresa and Pedro shared a bleak look. "My Cod," she

said.

"That, of course, is what will happen if it continues

along the path now marked out for it." Alex Lustig spread

his hands again. "I don't know about you lot. But personally,

I'd rather not leave the thing to do its job unmolested."

Teresa turned and stared at the physicist. He glanced

back with raised eyebrows.

"Do you mean . . . ?" she began, and was unable to

speak.

He answered with a shrug. "Surely you don't imagine I

agreed to meet with you two just to satisfy my arch nemesis

and his craving for headlines, do you? We'll need your help,

if we're to stand a chance of getting rid of the damned

thing."

Manella panted. "You . . . have a way?"

"A way, yes, though it doesn't offer very good odds.

And it's going to take more resources than I or my friends

have at hand."

He looked back and forth between his two stunned visitors.

"Oh now, don't take it like that. Look at it this way,

Pedro. If we pull this off, you and my friend George can

spend many fine years, forever if necessary, arguing how to

find and punish the brainy bastards responsible for this

thing."

His expression then turned darker and he looked down.

"That is, if this works."

PART VI

PLANET

World Ocean rolled, stroked by driving winds and tugged

by barren Sister Moon.

For millions of years, twin tidal humps of churning

water swept round and round, meeting little resistance

but the sea floor itself. Only here and there did some

lone, steaming volcano thrust high enough to reach open

sky, daring to split the driving waves.

Eventually more islands sweated out, then more

still. As the crust heaved and shifted, many of those

mafic barges collided and merged until newborn

continents towered over the waters. Onto those sere

platforms ceaseless rains fell, nurturing nothing.

Only sheltered below the waves did life wage its

continuing struggle to improve or die. One-celled

creatures divided prodigiously, without planning or

intent, experimenting with new ways of living.

One lucky family line chanced onto the trick of

using sunlight to split water and make carbohydrates.

That green patrimony took off, filling half the world's

niches.

The day's length altered imperceptibly as Earth

exchanged momentum with her moon. Eon by eon, the

seas grew saltier and then stabilized. The sun brightened,

also gradually. Sometimes the rolling waters changed color

256 D A V I D B R I N

as some innovative microbe gained a sudden temporary

advantage, burgeoned, outstripped its food supply, and

died back again.

Then one tiny organism consumed another, but

failed to devour its prey. Instead, the two coexisted and a

deal was struck. An accidental sharing of responsibilities.

A symbiosis.

One from many, and metazoa--multicellular life--

was born.

That innovation, cooperation, changed everything.

EARTH 257

D Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest

Group I D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546] Special

notice to our members.

See this morning's major news release by the Los Alamos

Peace Laboratory [D Alert K12-AP-9.23.38:11:00 S.pr56765.0] for

the latest test results from their solenoidal fusion test reactor.

They report achieving a confinement-temperature product more

than five times better than before, with almost none of those

pesky stray neutrons that caused the Princeton disaster of 2021.

This may be it! After so many false leads over so many

years. According to LAPL's chief of engineering, ". . . clean,

efficient, and virtually limitless fusion power may now be only

twenty or twenty-five years away. . . ."

Those wanting technical details or to see the raw data

from yesterday's experiment, just press I D Tech.PD-l 23642399

4234.0975 aq], or voice-link "solenoid-fusion five" now.

Claire Eng slogged through a pond of mucky water,

H hauling one end of a nylon net, concentrating hard to

Y keep her footing on the plastic pool liner. She couldn't

D afford to make one wrong move in this slimy soup.

R Not if I don't want to spend two hours washing

0 gunk out of my hair, she thought.

S Just beyond the net and its row of floating buoys, a

P throng of panicky fish protested being herded into this

H corner of the pond. Their splashing sent ripples lapping

E too close to the tops of her waders. The fish--and the

R odorous green gunk they lived in--were ready for har-

E vest. Unfortunately, both smelled awfully ripe, too.

Claire spat greasy, rank droplets. "Come on. Tony!" she

complained to the dark-haired boy at the other end of the

net. "I still have homework to do, and Daisy's sure to be a

gor-suck pain about chores."

Tony finished tying his end to a stainless steel grommet

and hauled himself out of the pond. On the concrete bank,

under a row of potted, overhanging mulberry trees, he used

a hose to rinse off his waders before shucking them. "Be

258 D A V I D B R I N

right with you, Claire," he called cheerfully. "Just hold

tight another minute!"

Claire tried to be patient, but her hat and sunglasses

had come askew while helping drive hordes of hapless fish

toward their doom. Now she had to face the relentless Louisiana

sun unprotected. The afternoon was muggy, fly smitten,

and she almost wished she'd had an excuse not to help

her friend harvest this month's tilapia crop. But, of course,

she couldn't let Tony down. Not with the Mexican

megafarms cutting prices these days, driving small-time fish

ranchers to the edge.

Angling her head away from the glare, she looked out

across the endless flat expanse of Iberville Parish, dotted

with cedar groves, rice paddies, and square dark patches of

gene-designed quick-cane. And countless fish ponds--chains

of low watery ovals, mulberry rimmed and glistening--the

cool, efficient protein factories that let chefs in Baton Rouge

and New Orleans maintain a spicy culinary tradition long

after the Gulf coast fisheries had gone away.

In the distance, she made out a straight, tree-lined hummock,

stretching north to south--the East Atchafalaya Basin

Protection Levee, one of so many mammoth earthworks

thrown up by the Army Corps of Engineers over more than a

century, to forever stave off the meeting of two great waters.

Endless miles of dikes and channels and monumental spillways

lined the Mississippi River, the Gulf, and nearly every

flow path conceived in the corp's computerized contingency

plans. Tagging along with her father, and later in her own

right, Claire had walked nearly every meter of the vast project.

From Logan she had inherited a fascination for hydraulic

engineering and an abiding contempt for the sort of techno-

arrogance that spoke words like "forever."

"Idiots," she muttered. Now the corps was offering

Congress a new plan, one "guaranteed" to keep the Mississippi

from doing what it was absolutely bound to do eventually--shift

its banks and find a new way to the sea. Logan's

private estimates suggested the new levees would keep Old

Man River out of the Atchafalaya Valley for another three

decades, maximum. Claire considered her father an optimist.

"Ten more years, tops,'^ she said in a low voice.

She'd miss this land when it all disappeared ... its

criss-crossing little bayous and streams. The dead-still, humid

air, thick with tangy Cajun cooking that bit right back

EARTH 259

when you put it in your mouth. And the old grempers and

gremmers, sitting on benches, telling lies about days when

there were still patches of mangrove swamp in these parts,

thick with deer and 'gators and even "critters" never catalogued

by science.

Claire narrowed her eyes and briefly saw the same flat

parish roiling under hectare after kilohectare of foamy

brown water, a mighty river hauling a continent's silt down

this shortcut to the sea--along with every farm and house

and living soul in its path.

But Daisy won't move. Hell, nobody listens to me, and

I'm tired of being called "Cassandra" by all my friends.

In a matter of months she'd be gone from here anyway.

Maybe people would pay better attention after she won a

reputation elsewhere. After making a name for herself . . .

"Here, hand me the end."

She gave a start as Tony tapped her shoulder from the

concrete bank. Straining, she dragged the line nearer. It took

both of them, hauling together, to pull it taut and tie it off.

"Thanks, Claire," Tony said. "Here, let me help you

out."

To her astonishment, he didn't wait for her to slosh

over to the ladder. Tony grabbed her shoulder straps and

hauled her onto the apron by strength alone. Dripping, she

sat there while he hosed off her waders, grinning.

Showoff. she thought. Still, she couldn't help being impressed.

At seventeen Tony was in full growth, changing

every day and proud of it. She remembered when he had

first surged past her in height, only a short time ago, and she

had felt a passing, irrational wave of envy toward her childhood

friend. Even in a world leveled for women by technology,

there were times when sheer size and power still had

their advantages.

Testosterone has its drawbacks, too, Claire reminded

herself as she hung rhe rubber overalls to dry. Her remote-

school in Oregon included a curriculum about the many

reasons why women could count their blessings that they

weren't male, after all. Still, lately she'd been surprised to

catch Tony gazing at her with looks of bashful admiration.

Surprising, that is, till she realized.

Oh. It's sex.

Or something nicer, actually, but closely related. Anyway,

whatever it was, Claire wasn't ready to deal with it

260 D A V I D B R I N

right now. Since puberty she had avoided girls her own age,

because of their precocious, single-minded, one-topic focus.

At fourteen and fifteen, boys seemed more interested in doing

things--in projects on the World Net or neat stuff in the

real world. Now though, inevitably, her male friends were

catching up and starting to go goofy too.

"I've got to stay for the harvester truck," Tony told her,

looking down. "Want to wait with me? We could head over

to White Castle, after. Maybe join Judy and Paul ..."

Judy and Paul were a long-standing couple. To hang out

with them in public would make a statement, turning Claire

and Tony into "Tony-and-Claire." She wasn't sure she

wanted to become half of such a four-legged creature, quite

yet. Far safer the amorphous throngs of teenagers who gathered

at the dry-skating rink, or the Holo-Sim Club. . . .

"I'm sorry, Tony. I really have to go. Daisy--"

"Yeah, I know." He cut her off quickly, making a show

of nonchalance. "You gotta deal with Daisy, poor kid. Well,

good luck. Let me know if you can get away later."

She. clambered down slippery steps to the duckboard

walkway. "Yeah, I'll buzz. Or maybe tomorrow we'll go out

with the team after your lacrosse game."

"Yeah." He brightened, shouting after her. "Just watch.

We'll turn those guys into holey swiss cheese, full of rads

and rems!"

Claire waved one last time and then turned to hurry

home under the shadow of towering canebrakes, across tiny

bridges where retirees idled with fishing poles, smiling at her

with lazy familiarity, and finally past the long-abandoned

refinery, now stripped of everything but crumbling, worthless

concrete.

Why does being a teenager make you so impatient? she

pondered as she neared Six Oaks, her mother's tiny autarchy

on the bayou. Claire knew she couldn't put Tony off much

longer without hurting him. The profiler at school says I'm

just a gradual type. No cause for worry if I'm slower than

other kids, or more cautious.

But what if the tests missed something? What if

there's something wrong with me?

Abstractly, Claire knew these were typical thoughts for

her age. Every adolescent wonders if he or she's the vanguard

of the latest wave of mutants, made unhuman by

some rare, fundamental flaw. Each quirk or idiosyncrasy gets

EARTH 261

magnified out of all proportion. A zit is the first stage of

leprosy. A rebuff means banishment to the Sahara.

Knowing all that helped a little . . . though only a little.

/ fust hope that when I'm finally ready. Tony or someone

like him will be ready for me.

She turned away from the refinery towers--slowly decomposing

into gravelly sediment--without even seeing

them, and took one last turn between an aisle of willows to

hurry the rest of the way home.

Many houses in the area had columns and porticos more

reminiscent of old movies than real history, but the effect

was particularly anachronistic at Six Oaks. At first squint

you might think you were looking at a miniature version of

Tara, but satellite dishes and a forest of bristling antennas

quickly dispelled any sense of antebellum charm. And while

other families maintained rooftop photocells and supplementary

water heaters, few kept enough to dispense entirely

with the parish power grid.

After all, though, this was Daisy McClennon's "island,"

where self-sufficiency meant more than a trendy fad

or even good citizenship, but had over the years become a

militant faith. And Claire was fast turning into an apostate.

Unlike the neighbors, chez McClennon had no account

with any of the local food-testing services. Why bother,

when you grew amaranth and pejibaye palm fruit and

marama beans and lentils in your own little horticultural

paradise ... a glassed-in wonder of nutritional productivity

that Claire's mother had designed herself? It had been

purchased with inherited money, but of late Daisy seemed

to expect Claire to maintain it single-handedly.

Not much longer though. Daisy. Six months more and

I'm gone.

Probably, her mother would barely notice when she

left. Daisy'd just hire on some oath-pledged refugee, or one

of those Han or Nihonese college kids who kept passing

through these days, taking a year off working their way

around the world from zep passage to zep passage in the

latest Asian fad. If so. Daisy was due for a surprise. No modern, self-indulgent Nihonese kid would work as hard as

Daisy expected for just room and board and electric.

"Aw, hell," Claire sighed on catching sight of the wind

262 D A V I D B R I N

generator. Speaking of electric, those limp vanes meant current

would be rationed again. And guess who had top priority

around here?

Claire made her rounds with rapid efficiency, starting at

the methane pit, where she checked fluid levels in the crap

digester. It was supposed to be "zero maintenance," but that

guarantee was by now a bitter joke. I'll bet my rich cousins

never have to do chores, she thought with halfhearted

crankiness. Alas, even Logan agreed with her mother on one

thing: that "hard work builds character." So even if she had

been able to live with her father, it wouldn't have been that

much easier. And to be honest, she had met her relatives in

the McClennon clan. Horrible, stuck-up creatures, living off

wealth neither they nor their parents ever had a hand in

creating. None of them would be hurt by a little honest

labor, for sure.

Still, there's got to be a middle ground. Claire grunted

as she fought to clear a drip-irrigator in the main greenhouse,

blowing down one nozzle till spots swam before her

eyes. Maybe I just wish Daisy'd do her share around here.

At least the bee zapper was working. For years their

hives had been under seige by Africanized swarms, seeking

to take over as they had everywhere else in the area, ruining

all the once-profitable apiaries in the parish. Chemicals and

spray parasites did no good. But a few weeks ago Claire had

found a net reference by a fellow in Egypt, who'd discovered

that the African strain beat their wings faster than the tame

European variety. Burrowing into archaic TwenCen military

technology, he had adapted sensor-scanner designs from an

old, defunct project called "Star Wars." Now Claire and a

few thousand others were testing his design and reporting

weekly results to a network solutions SIC.

Like a glittering scarecrow, the cruciform laser system

watched over her squat hives. When she had first turned it

on, the surrounding fields had come startlingly alight with

hundreds of tiny, flaming embers. The next morning, ash

smudges were all that remained of the vicious invaders

within line of sight. But her own honeybees were untouched.

Now she looked forward to a sweet profit and her

first stingless summer.

Perfect timing, she thought ironically. Just as I'm

about to move away.

Before going inside, there was one last chore to do.

EARTH 263

Claire clambered down to the little creek behind the house,

to check on Sybil and Clyde.

The piebald gloats bleated at her. They had finished

eating all the water hyacinths within reach along that

stretch of bank, so she readjusted their tethers to bring them

near another weed-clogged area. Without such creatures, every

waterway in the South would be choked with rank tropical

opportunists by now, flourishing unstoppably for lack of

natural controls.

Some neighbors made pets of their channel-clearing

gloats, or the other type bred specially to eat kudzu vines.

Claire liked animals, but she didn't want to feel any ties

here, so she kept this relationship strictly businesslike. Anyway, what was the point in trying to maintain every tiny

canal, as if canals weren't mortal like everything else?

The Mississippi's coming anyway, she thought, looking

out toward the land she both loved and longed to leave

behind. You better get used to the idea, Atchafalaya. You 're

gonna know greatness, whether you like it or not.

After adjusting Clyde's protective goggles, Claire

brushed at his speckled coat. "What's this? Some sort of

mange?" The gloat bleated irritably as puffs of dry fur

floated from its patchy side. "All right. All right. I'll look

into it." Sighing, Claire took a sample and patted the creatures, who were soon munching exotic weeds again, contentedly.

Echoes of gunfire and rocking explosions rattled the

walls as she passed her mother's suite of rooms. Music

blared--the strains of some oldtime movie Daisy was condensing

for a Net entertainment group. Though she perpetually

proclaimed contempt for the industry, Daisy's expertise

at compressing oldtime flicks was legendary. Skillfully, she

could pack ninety tedious minutes into a crisp forty or less,

speeding the languid pace of classics like The Terminator or

Deliverance to suit the time-devouring appetites of modern

viewers.

Or, for others wanting more out of a particular film,

Daisy McClennon would expand the original . . . adding

material from film archives or even computer-generated extrapolations.

It brought in a steady income that allowed her

to contemptuously spurn the despised family trust fund.

Most of the time.

Besides, a career .working on the Net had one more ad-

264 D A V I D B R I N

vantage--the occupation lacked any obvious impact on the

real environment of the Earth.

"Tread lightly on our world's toes" went the motto of

one of Daisy's eco-freak organizations, the sort whose members

didn't take off their shoes inside their houses, but instead

removed them before going outside. That particular

group had as their totem emblem a fierce Chinese dragon,

curled and snarling, representing an angry, violated eco-

sphere fed up with swarming, pestilential humanity. The

same reptilian icon stretched above the hearth of the main

sitting room, Daisy's favorite part of the villa, but one seldom

visited anymore by Claire.

Hell, she was too damn busy maintaining the rest of it!

Claire cursed roundly when she saw that Daisy had neglected

even to empty the trash, supposedly on her own list

of chores. Not content with the normal five recycling bins,

her mother insisted this house have twelve. And three

mulch piles. Then there were the soap maker, the yoghurt

maker, the midget brewery . . .

Claire thought of a recent stylish trend among her

peers. Oh, I'd make a swell Settler. I can grow herbal medicines, make my own paper, grind ink from bark and lamp

black . . . and fix the water pump's gaskets myself, since

mother hates buying parts from Earth-raping manufacturers.

City folk, tending high-yield gardens and a few clip-

wing ducks on the roof, loved pretending that made them

rough and independent, blithely ignoring all the ways they

still counted on society's nurturing web, the tubes and ducts

that piped in clean water, power, gas . . . and carried off a

steady stream of waste. Ironically, few kids ever grew up

better qualified to homestead a new frontier than Claire.

And few had so little desire to do so.

After all, who in their right mind would want to live

that way'

Oh, reducing your impact was moral and sensible, up to

a point. Beyond which there was a lot to be said for labor-

saving devices! Claire swore her own place would have a

microwave-infrasound cooker. And an electric garbage disposal,

oh please. And maybe, just for that first year of celebration--a

licentious, never-ending gallon of store-bought

ice cream.

EARTH 265

Changing out of her sweaty work clothes in the privacy of her own room, Claire paused by a shelf of mementos brought by her father from trips all over the planet. A ten-

million-year-old spider, encased in Dominican amber, lay

next to fossils from the Afar desert and a beautiful hardwood

dolphin, carved by a Brazilian engineer Logan had met

in Belem.

Her mineral collection wasn't exactly world class. But

there was a lovely polished slab of bright green smithsonite,

alongside its cousins jadeite and entrancing malachite. More

yellowish than green, the hypnotic, translucent autainite

had come from France, and the purple erythrite from deep in

the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

None of these minerals were particularly rare, not even

the disk of glittering "star" quality quartz hanging over her

mirror--where she let down her reddish-brown hair and

checked for stray droplets from Tony's pond. Picking up the

crystal lens, she peered through it at her own image, wishing

the highlights it gave her hair might somehow translate into

the real world, where she so often envied other girls their

shining locks.

As a child, she had thought the bit of quartz magical.

But Logan had emphasized that it was a routine miracle. The

Earth contained veins and seams and whole flows of beautiful

mineral forms that took only a practiced eye to discover

and a little skill to prepare. In contrast, Claire had been

shocked when an uncle thought to please her one birthday

with a "unique" gift--a slice of fossilized tree trunk. It had

subsequently taken her weeks to investigate and discover its

origins, then anonymously donate it back to the petrified

forest it had been stolen from in the first place.

There was a difference, of course. Many common things

could be beautiful, even magical. But in a world of ten billion

people, true rarities shouldn't be owned. At least on

that point she, Logan, and Daisy all agreed.

Claire put the crystal back. Beside the mirror lay her

favorite treasures, several beautiful chert arrowheads. Not

archaeological relics, but even better. Logan had taught her

to chip them herself, during one of their too infrequent

camping trips. To be fair, Claire admitted both her parents

had taught her useful things. Only Logan's lessons always

seemed much more fun.

Under the window, nesting in her neglected model of

266 D A V I D B R I N

the Bonnet Carre Spillway, her pet mouse, Isador, twitched

his nose as Claire stopped to pet him and feed him seeds.

The wall screens of her Net unit flickered on idle,

showing new assignments from the remote-school in Oregon.

But Claire first checked for personal messages. And sure

enough, there was a blip from her father winking on her

priority screen! At a spoken command, it lit up with a bright

picture of Logan Eng standing atop a bluff overlooking a bay

of brilliant blue water. To save power, she took the message

in written form. Rows of letters shone.

I'll MICRO-BIOTA. SAW AMAZING THINGS HERE IN

SPAIN. SPELL THAT " IIH-MAZMC}"( D SEE ATTACHED FIX.)

HAVE CRAZY THEORY TO EXPLAIN THESE EVENTS.

WROTE A PAPER ABOUT IT FOR A SPEC-FACT SIC. IF I'M

RIGHT, SOMETHING MIGHTY FISHY IS GOING ON!

ATTACHED A DRAFT (D) FOR YOU TO LOOK AT, IF

YOU LIKE. A LITTLE TECHNICAL. NOTION'S PRO'BLY NONSENSE.

BUT YOU MAY FIND THE ABSTRACT AMUSING.

1. MY BEST TO DAISY. SAY I'LL COME TO DINNER AFTER

CLEARING PAPERWORK )AM AT OFFICE.

LOVE YOU, HONEY.----DADDY D

Claire smiled. He wasn't supposed to call himself "Daddy."

That was her affectation.

She touched the data appended tag and called up

Logan's speculative paper. Claire recognized the net-zine he

was submitting it to ... one where scientists could let

their hair down without risking their reputations. She had a

hunch Logan was really going to set off a ripe one this time.

Then she frowned. Suddenly suspicious, Claire queried

her security program.

"Dumpit!" she cursed, stamping her feet in annoyance.

Logan's blip had been snooped since reception. And it didn't

take a genius to know who the snooper was. "Dumpit,

Daisy!"

The older generation as a whole seemed to have no respect

for privacy, but this was downright insulting. As a

brilliant hacker, Daisy could have brushed aside her daughter's

simple security system and read Claire's mail without

leaving traces. That she hadn't even bothered to cover her

tracks showed either blithe indifference or straight contempt.

EARTH 267

"Only half a year and I'm gone from here," Claire told

herself, repeating it like a mantra to calm down. "Only half

a year."

She wished, oh how she wished, that at sixteen, almost

seventeen, that didn't feel like eternity.

Meanwhile, in another room not far away, all four walls

flickered with light and sound. And every glimmer found its

own reflection in Daisy McClennon's eyes.

To the left, a full-sized Davy Crockett--soot smeared

and bloodied, but undaunted--defended the Alamo in color

far more brilliant than ever imagined by the original director.

Soon, sophisticated equipment under Daisy's subtle

guidance would add a third dimension and more. For the

right price, she'd even intensify the experience with smell

and the floor-rattling concussion of Mexican cannonballs.

Her best, most pricey enhancements were so good, in

fact, they had to carry a truth-in-reality warning ... a little

pink diamond flashing in one corner, signifying "this

isn't real" to those with weak hearts or soft minds. While

many called her an artist, Daisy did holo-augmentations for

cash income, period. The other walls of her laboratory were

devoted to her really important work.

Columns of data flowed like spume over a waterfall.

Torrents--and yet mere samplings from the river, the ocean

of information that was the Net. Daisy's blue eyes skimmed

scores of readouts at once.

Here a UNEPA survey assayed remaining rain-forest resources.

Next to it rippled a project proposal by a major

mining company. And over to the right, one of her subroutines

patiently worked its way through a purloined list of

antisabotage security procedures for the West Havana Nuclear

Power Station . . . still apparently impregnable, but

Daisy had hopes.

The visible portion of the flow was only a sliver, a fragment

distilled and sent back to this nexus by her electronic

servants--her ferrets and foxes, her badgers and hounds--

data-retrieval programs euphemistically named after beasts,

some now extinct but known in earlier times for their tenacity,

hunger, and unwillingness to take "no" for an answer.

All over the world, Daisy's electronic emissaries searched

and probed at her bidding, prying loose secrets, correlating,

combining, devouring.

268 D A V I D B R I N

Daisy's cover business helped explain her prodigious

computing needs, her means. But actually, she lived and

worked for ends. Into the universe of data she sent forth

guerrillas, her personal contingents in the war against planet

rapists.

Such as Chang. It was she who had tipped UNEPA off to

the whereabouts of that awful man's grisly cache near

Taipei. News of Chang's death had come as a welcome surprise.

She'd been so sure he'd escape or at worst get a wrist

slap. Perhaps those wimps at UNEPA were getting some

guts, after all.

But now, on to other things. Daisy sat padmasama on a

silk cushion amidst a cyclone of pictures and data. Her eyes

quickly sifted what her creatures brought her ... industrial

"development" plans . . . laxity by weak, compromise-ridden

public agencies . . . betrayal by bribed,

gor-sucked officials. And worse.

Within the movement, her name was spoken in hushed

tones, with respect, awe, and a little fell dread. In another

era, Daisy might have heard the voices of angels in church

bells. Today, though, her talents truly flowered as she

plucked the schemes of builders as well as the prevarications

of moderates, even half a world away.

"So Logan thinks his idea's just amusing . . . probably

nonsense . . ." she whispered as she wove her ex-husband's

recent paper into a special database. Of course she couldn't

follow his more arcane mathematical derivations, but that

didn't matter. She had programs for that. Or human consultants

just a net call away.

". . . the station's anchor boom couldn't

have been lifted by any known explosive. For lack

of other explanations, I'm led to imagine incredibly

focused seismic waves ..."

Daisy's nostrils flared as she watched a panned view of the

hated tidal power project. Yet another example of Logan's

selling out. Of his futile, foredoomed effort to "solve" the

world's problems. In bargaining with evil, of course, he had

bartered away his souL

Still, she knew him. She knew her former love better

than he knew himself. Logan's poorest hunches were often

better than other engineers' best analyses.

EARTH 269

"It'd be just like him to latch onto something big and

not even trust his own instincts," she sighed.

Daisy stared at the broken tidal barrage. Anything that

could disrupt a big project like that interested her. There

were people she knew . . . others who also despised the

slow, reformist methods of the North American Church of

Caia. A loose network of men and women who knew how to

take action. This news of Logan's might mean some new

threat. Or perhaps an opportunity.

Daisy's eyes stroked the data flow pouring endlessly

from the Net sea. The blue eyes of a hunter, they flashed

and sought. Their patience was that of mission, and in them

dwelled the perseverance of dragons.

D

Sleep little children, you be good,

Do your chores just like you should.

Eat your food now, clean your plate,

Poor kids dream of getting what you ate.

Play square always, don't tell lies,

'Cause secret-keepers always die,

Grumbling and all alone,

Underground just like a Gnome.

Do you like money? Just you know,

Some types help while others glow.

Earth-Bonds serve us, all our days,

But Swiss gold gives off gamma rays.

"Whatever we do," Teresa Tikhana had said earlier, be-

C fore the meeting broke up. "We can't let any of the

0 space powers in on this. I'm sure now they were all in

R cahoots with Spivey's illegal research on Erehwon.

E Heaven only knows what they'd do if they got their

hands on gravity lasers and cosmic knots. "

So they decided not to publicly announce the impending

end of the world, or their bold, if unlikely, plan to fight

it. Big governments were already the prime suspects for having

created Beta, losing it, and then hiding the story to escape

responsibility. If so, the powers that be wouldn't think

270 D A V I D B R I N

twice about wiping out George Hutton's little band to keep

the foul secret a little longer.

Perhaps he and the others were leaping to wrong conclusions.

All in all, Alex did find the scenario garish and a

bit too weird. But it fit the facts as they knew them. Besides,

they simply couldn't afford to take chances.

"We'll deal with the taniwha ourselves, then," George

Button had summarized at the end of the meeting.

"It'll be hard to set up the resonators without anyone

noticing," Alex reminded everybody. But Pedro Manella

had agreed with George. "Leave that part to Button and me.

We'll provide everything you need."

The portly Aztlan reporter had seemed so relaxed, so

confident. No sign remained of the emotion he'd shown on

first hearing of the monster at the planet's heart. Even a slim

hope, it seemed, was enough to fill him with energy.

Alex felt uncomfortable putting such trust in a man

who--by his own recent reckoning--had ruined his life. Of

course it was actually thanks to those riots in Iquitos, triggered by Manella, that his own crude Alpha singularity had

fallen and he'd been forced to go looking for it. If not for the

fellow's meddling in Peru, Alex would probably have paid

no more attention to the center of the Earth than . . .

He leaned back in his swivel chair and realized he had

no adequate simile for comparison. The center of the Earth

was essentially the last place one thought of. And yet, without

it where would any of us be?

In front of Alex, the planet's many layers glowed fulgent

in the final schematic presented at the now-adjourned

meeting. This ghostly, near-spherical Earth circumscribed a

geometric figure--a tetrahedral pyramid whose tips pierced

the surface at four evenly spaced locations.

EASTER ISLAND 27° y ^0" S, 109° 24' 30" W

(RAPA NUI):

SOUTH AFRICA 27° 30'36" S, 24° 6'E

(NEAR REIVILO):

IRIAN JAYA 2° 6' 36" S, 137° 23' 24" E

(NEW GUINEA):

WEST GREENLAND ^ 33, ^ ^ 55. 41. ^ ^

(NEAR

CODHAVN):

EARTH 271

Four sites. I'd rather have had twelve. Or twenty.

He'd said as much to Stan and George and the other

geophysicists. There's no telling what will happen when

we start pushing at Beta in earnest. It's certain to drift and

tumble. That array of resonators should be a dodecahedron

or icosahedron for full coverage, not a pyramid.

But a pyramid was all they could manage.

It wasn't a matter of money. That George had in plenty,

and he was willing to spend every farthing. His political

contacts in the Polynesian Federation meant two sites would

be readily available, no questions asked. But to set up beyond

the Pacific basin, their tiny cabal would need help.

Especially if word wasn't to leak out.

Back in the last century, undercover, secret maneuver-

ings were more the rule than the exception. Nations, corporations, drug cartels, and even private individuals habitually

concealed monumental schemes. But arms inspections were

followed by tourism, as jetliners and then zeps began nosing

through swathes of sky once reserved for warcraft. Data-

links laced metropoleis to donkey-cart villages. Of the three

great centers of TwenCen secrecy, state socialism had collapsed

before Alex was even born, and finance capitalism

met its ruin soon after that, amidst the melted Alps.

In hindsight, the Helvetian tragedy probably hadn't

even been necessary, for not even the fabled gnomes could

have kept their records private much longer in a world filled

with amateur snoops--data hackers with as much free time

and computing power as ingenuity.

That left the third relict, and the strongest. The great

nation states still maintained "confidential" services--permitted the victors by the same treaty that had ended such

things for everyone else. Those agencies could have helped

the Tangoparu team set up their gravity-wave array in total

secrecy. But then, those same agencies were almost certainly

the enemy, as well.

George thinks they made Beta and are hiding their

mistake to save their own hides, even if it means eventually

dooming everyone.

Alex couldn't imagine that kind of thinking. It made

him ashamed to be a member of the same species. To hear

Teresa Tikhana describe her Colonel Spivey, though, she

272 D A V I D B R I N

might as well be talking about a creature from another

planet.

Were Spivey and his collaborators even now struggling

to find a solution as well? Perhaps that's what Teresa's husband

had been working on, out in space. If so, the government

boys never seemed to have stumbled on the gravity

laser effect. And at this point, Alex would be damned if he'd

give it to them.

Of course if we succeed the secret will come out near

the end anyway. It'll be hard to ignore a sunlike fireball

rising out of the Earth, accelerating toward deep space at

relativistic speeds.

By then, he and the others had better have prepared to

go into hiding. In addition, Alex himself would feel compelled

to take memory destroyers as soon as Beta was safely

on its way, to prevent spilling what he had learned by coincidence and accident and mental fluke. In principle, it was

only what he deserved, of course, for the sin of hubris. Still,

he'd regret losing his mental image of the knot singularity,

its intricate ten-space foldings, its awful, ignescent beauty.

That loss would haunt him, he knew. Almost, he would

rather die.

As if I'll get a choice. It's a long, shot this will work at

all.

They were taking a terrible chance. Using gravity-wave

recoil to move Beta sounded fine in theory. But some of

their initial test gazer beams for unknown reasons had interacted with matter at the planet's surface--coupling with an

earthquake fault in one case, with man-made objects in another.

It was still a mystery why this happened or what the

consequences might be once they really got started.

But what choice do we have?

Alex looked at the glowing points where the tetrahedron

met Earth's surface. Four sites where they must build

mammoth superconducting antennas without anyone finding

out. And they had so little time.

The resonators had to be evenly spaced and on dry land

--not easy to arrange on a world two thirds covered in water.

It had taken his computer two whole seconds to search

and finally find the best arrangement.

"We only have a few months," Teresa Tikhana said,

interrupting Alex in his brooding. The American astronaut

sat across the table from him in the darkened room, watch-

EARTH 273

ing the same display. They had both fallen silent after the

others left, each thinking alone.

In response, he nodded. "After that, Beta will be too

massive to budge, even with the gazer. We'd only excite

resonant states Stan thinks could make it even worse."

Teresa shivered. When she sat up, she looked around in

a way Alex had noticed before--as if she were checking her

surroundings in some manner he couldn't fathom. "You'll

be setting up the resonator on Rapa Nui, won't you?" she

asked, suddenly.

"Yes. That's the anchor point, so--"

"It's a special place, you know." Her voice was hushed.

"That's where Atlantis is."

"Um . . . Atlantis?" Perplexed, at first he thought she

must be referring to the island's eerie Neolithic history, or

the haunting monoliths to be found there. Then he remembered.

"Oh. The space shuttle that crashed long ago. Is it

still there?"

Teresa Tikhana's jaw tightened briefly. "It didn't crash.

Captain Iwasumi made a perfect emergency landing under

impossible conditions. It was the fools in charge of bringing

Atlantis home . . . they dropped her."

It must have happened when she was only a child, yet

the woman covered her eyes in pain. "She's still down there,

stripped, a shell. A monument on a pedestal. You should

visit her if you get the chance."

"I'll do that. I promise."

She looked up. Their eyes met briefly, then Teresa

sighed. "I'd better pack. Dr. Coldman and I have a plane to

catch."

"Of course." He stood up. "I . . . I'm glad you're with

us, Captain Tikhana. Your help is going to be vital." Alex

paused. "Also ... as I said. I'm so very sorry about your

husband--"

She raised a hand, cutting off another embarrassing

apology. "It was an accident. If anyone's to blame for blindness--for not picking up on what was happening ..." She

trailed off, shaking her head. "We'll drop you a coded message

when we get to Codhavn, Dr. Lustig."

"Have a safe trip, Captain." Hesitantly, he offered his

hand. After a moment, she took it. Her slim, calloused grip

betrayed a single faint tremor before she quickly let go

274 D A V I D B R I N

again. Then she turned away, departing for her quarters in

another part of the cave.

"And good luck," Alex added softly after she had gone.

"We're all going to need more than a little of that, too."

EARTH 275

D World Net News: Channel 265/General Interest/

Level 9+ (surface transcription)

"Central Amazonia. This is [Image of desert. Scrub bush

Nigel Landsbury reporting and cracked clay. Heat waves

in real time for the BBC. rise from the hardpan all the

I've come here to this deso- w^ to a ^V horizon- A re-

, , , porter s voice carries over the

late land to cover a scene ^ ^ ^kimg burning.]

both tragic and historic, as

Brazilian national forces [a For raw footage voice-link

pursue Tupo rebels to their "AMAZONIA One" now.]

last redoubts.

"Here an armed detachment [Camera pans, and viewer slid-

of FLS fighters was caught dm^ sees smoke rising from

an hour ago, /ust short of burning vehicles surrounded by

the edge of the Chico strewn bodies. Military helicop-

, in, . ; p , . ters shred the plumes as uni-

Mendes National Salvation ^^ ^^ ^^ p^

' arK prodding prisoners with hands

on their heads.]

[D For background reports, link

"FLS REBELS" or "CHICO MEM- OES PARK."]

"The campesinos who died [Still panning, camera takes in

or were captured here today the reporter himself, tan clothes

could not have hidden for whipped by a relentless dry

long in their rain-forest ref- wind, Just to his left- star-

mi. 7. i tlingly, there appears the sharp

uge. The sensor technology ^ g ^ ^ ^^pp ^ ^

[D link "SENSOR-TEK"] that ^den transformation from

cuts short so many would- caked clay to tight-packed, slen-

be guerrilla movements der, swaying trees.]

nowadays would be no less

effective under the canopy.

Their cause was lost as soon

as it turned violent, with

the massacre of the last

Quich'hara Indian village.

two weeks ago."

276 D A V I D B R I N

"But there is a further, uiti- [Closeup on the reporter's face,

mate irony . . . that this awash with memory of trag- forest the rebels wanted to ^V-^

claim for their impover- p g^ ^ ^

ished families . . . their 6309467/q/3509.]

paradise for escape from the [D Rebuttal: NorAChuGa 2038- strict regimen of the 421/Pres. Isl.]

crowded urban poor . . . is

doomed anyway. Yesterday,

the Brazilian government

admitted the failure of the

"preservation islands" ap-

proach to saving Amazonia,

recognizing at last that you

cannot save a patch, here

and there, of a whole

ecosystem."

"Contracts have already [Closeup of the forest edge

been signed to harvest the yellowed leaves crumble

dying hardwoods of Chico to dust in a human hwd-^

Mendes Park, removal of ^ ^^. ^ ^ p^

the large animals to life 9867984/i/567.]

arks, and cryosuspension of [D Contract: Life Ark 62 LeSs

as many insect and plant 2393808/K/78.]

seed types as can be cata-

logued in time. This sys-

tematic approach, tested

last year with some small

success in Manaus Prov-

ince, has never before been

tried on such a vast scale.

Experts doubt more than

five percent of the remain-

ing species can be registered

before harvesters must com-

plete their work. "

EARTH 277

"Still, what is to be done? [Cut back to the resigned fea- How can you keep alive a tures of the reporter.]

rain forest where there is no

rain?"

[D Link WEATHERNET ALPHA-

YEAR SUMMARY 2037--2956a*.]

"Transpiration, evaporation, [Camera returns to the scene of

humidity renewal . . . sci- burning. One dusty corpse,

ence can give names to all arms outstretched toward the

the reasons why the preser- supposed refuge of the forest,

1. , , , r -i j can be seen clutching a single

vation islands plan failed. ^ ^ j

Some blame the worldwide

warming. Whatever the rea- [d Real-time image NorSat 12.

son, however, it is we who $l.l2/minute.]

must live with what remains.

And it is the poor

who in the end are caught

in the middle. "

"This is Nigel Landsbury [Reporter looks upward, and

1. reporting from Ama- the camera follows his gaze to a

zonia " s^ ^un wltn floating dust.]

[D Reporter bio: N.LANDSBURY-

BBC3. Credibility ratings: AaAb-2

Viewer's Union (2038). AaBb-4,

World Watchers Ltd. (2038).]

Stan Coldman watched Auntie Kapur stir the fire with a

M crooked stick. A mist of ash lifted in its wake, and the

E coals brightened briefly to compete with the old worn-

S an's blue-flickering computer display. Beyond those

0 twin pools of light, the ocher columns of the meeting

S house melted into moist shadows of a New Zealand

P mountain forest. Auntie preferred this setting for their

H final meeting before everyone dispersed to Earth's four

E corners. Beginning such a covert enterprise in darkness

R seemed appropriate to their dim chances.

E "Rapa Nui will be easiest," the priestess told Stan

and George. The glinting sparks set her chin tattoo designs

in eerie motion. "My sisters there will provide every facility,

and the Chilean authorities will be no problem."

"That's good," Stan said. He rubbed his eyes, blaming

exhaustion and bits of drifting ash for the stinging. It was

long past his normal bedtime--as if anything were "normal"

anymore. But at least Ellen would be waiting up for him,

and he hoped to salvage something of their last night together.

"That island's the anchor point," he went on. "Site one

has to be there, with no allowance for error."

"Then it's agreed, that's where Alex must go," George

Button said.

Stan nodded. "Of course. Alex should get the safest

site, and the one where the most delicate control is needed,

since only he truly understands that thing down there."

"Do not count on Rapa Nui being safe." Meriana Kapur

regarded Stan severely. "It is an island of awful power. A

place of death and horrible old gods. I agree Lustig must be

the one to go there, to that focal point. But not because it is

safe."

Auntie had a way of making statements one could not

answer. Stan glanced at George and saw his friend nod reverently.

As a pakeha kiwi--a white New Zealander, and one

who hadn't even been born here--Stan felt it wiser simply

to defer to the Maori when they spoke of such things.

"Very well. We still have to finalize the teams to go set

up the other three resonators."

EARTH 279

George Button spoke gruffly. "I've decided I'll handle

Irian Java myself."

Stan turned and blinked at him. "But we need you to

coordinate everything. Our equipment ..."

The billionaire waved one hand. "All can be accomplished

by hyper, using company codes and colloquial

Taupo speech. But some things have to be done in person. I

must be there to arrange matters with certain friends among

the Papuans."

"Do you have a specific site in mind?"

George smiled. "The perfect site. I discovered it during

a resource survey ten years ago ... a series of deep caves

even greater than the Mulu caverns, in Borneo."

"But I never heard. How did you keep them secret? And

why?"

"How is easy, my friend." George put one finger to his

lips. "Besides me, only chief engineer Raini knows about it,

and she swore me an oath. It didn't qualify as a "mineral

resource," per se, so we simply neglected mentioning it to

the Papuan government."

"But it is a resource! Caves like the Mulu generate income

from tourism ..."

Stan stopped, suddenly aware of the irony. No more

than a kilometer away were the grottoes of Waitomo, wonders

of nature now reduced to yet another brief stop in the

travel itineraries of millions, its ancient floors trampled, its

limestone seeps forever altered by rivulets of vapor condensed

from myriad human exhalations, its glow-worm constellations

demoted from silent, awesome mysteries to a few

more frames in the next tourist's automatic camera.

"That's why enough for me," George answered. "Another

reason I want to take this task is to see the Irian caves

once again. If there's time near the end, you too must join

me there, my old friend. You've never seen their like. We'll

drink a toast to Earth, down where no stone has ever felt the

brush of human voices."

The look in George's eye told more than his words. But

Stan shook his head. "If it gets that close and we know

we've lost, I'll take Ellen to Dunedin to be with the

grandkids." He shook his head. This was getting much too

morbid. "Anyway, I'll be doing a job of my own up north, at

site three. That'll be plenty vivid enough for me, staring at

all that ice."

280 D A V I D B R I N

Auntie Kapur was still studying her screen and the map

overlay Alex Lustig had prepared. "According to our Porn-

mie genius, your requirements are less severe. You can set up

your small Greenland resonator anywhere within several

hundred kilometers of the tip of our mythical pyramid. Do

you have any place in mind?"

"I have some friends working on the Hammer Dig, east

of Codhavn. Everyone knows I'm interested in the project,

so it won't be much of a surprise if I show up with a team to

do some local gravity scans. It'll be a perfect cover."

"Hmm." Auntie Kapur was clearly worried. Sites one

and two were within the Pacific Rim, in reach of her network

of sympathizers and coreligionists. There were Caians

in Greenland too, of course, but of a completely different

sect. Stan and Teresa would be pretty much on their own up

there.

"You know all this is going to make us subject to the

secrecy laws," Stan said dryly. "We could get in trouble."

The others looked at him, then burst out laughing. It

was a welcome if momentary break in the tension. Normally

a serious thing, breaking the provisions of the Rio Treaties

was at this point the least of their worries.

"That leaves Africa," George summarized when they

got back to business. And indeed, the final site would be the

toughest. Tangoparu Ltd. had never done business in the

area where they had to set up the last resonator. Their geological maps were obsolete, and to make matters worse, the

region was on the U.N.'s Stability and Human Rights Watch

List. Nobody on their team knew anyone there well enough

to rely on. Not well enough to help them set up a thumper

in absolute privacy.

"I've already started putting out feelers," Auntie Kapur

said. "With a nested hyper search I ought to find someone

trustworthy who can get us in."

"Just make sure to run your search routine by Pedro

Manella. He's in charge of net security," Stan cautioned.

"We don't want some bored hacker's ferret program arousing

attention--"

He stopped when Auntie gave him an indulgent look, as

if he were trying to teach his own mother to tie her shoes.

She's not much older than me, he thought. I'm a

grandfather and a full professor. So how does she always

manage to make me feel like a little boy, caught with a frog

in his pocket?

Maybe it's something she learned in priestess school.

while I was studying inconsequential stuff like the workings

of stars and the shape of space.

"I'll be careful," she promised, remaining vague. But in

her eyes Stan read something that seemed to say she knew

exactly what she was doing.

D

Back in the year 1990, the people of the United States of America paid three billion dollars for eighteen thousand million disposable diapers. Into these snug, absorbent, well-engineered

products went one hundred million kilograms of plastic, eight

hundred million kilograms of wood pulp, and approximately five

million babies. The babies weren't disposable, but all the rest

went straight into the trash stream.

Early designs for "disposable" diapers had included

degradable inner liners, meant to be flushed down the toilet

while the outer portion was reused. But that method was soon

abandoned as inconvenient and unpleasant. Modern parents

preferred just balling up the whole offensive mess and tossing it into the garbage. Tons of feces and urine thus bypassed urban

sewage systems and went instead by flyblown truck through city

streets to landfills, incinerators, and the new, experimental recycling plants. Along with them went hepatitis A, the Norwalk

and Rota viruses, and a hundred other air- and water- and insect-borne threats.

As the price of landfill dumping rose above $100 a ton, by

1990 it was costing Americans $350 million a year just to get rid of single-use diapers, so for every dollar spent by parents on

disposables, other taxpayers contributed more than ten cents in

hidden subsidy.

That didn't include, of course, the untold cost of the 1996

New Jersey Rota epidemic. Or the nationwide hepatitis outbreaks

of '99.

But what could be done? To busy young families, needing

two wage earners just to make ends meet, convenience was a

treasure beyond almost any price. It could make the difference

between choosing to have a child or giving up the idea altogether.

Packaging and disposal fees might have let old-fashioned

282 D A V I D B R I N

diaper services compete on even terms. But that, and other bullet-biting measures, voters succeeded in putting off for another

generation ... for another, harder century.

These, after all, were the waning years of high-flying

TwenCen. And nothing was too good for baby.

Anyway, if the bill wouldn't come due for another twenty

years or so, all the better. Baby would be a superkid, raised on

tofu and computers and quality time. So baby could pay for it all.

)en Wolling missed her postman.

H Who would have imagined it, back when she was a

0 blonde fireball tearing up turn-of-the-century biology?

L Even then she'd known the future would offer surprises,

0 but the changes that amazed her most turned out not to

S be the grand ones--those milestones noted breathlessly

P by media pundits--but little things, the gradual shifts

H people overlooked simply because they crept up on you

E bit by bit, day by day.

R - Such as the steady disappearance of postmen. Amid

E the growing worldwide data culture few had foreseen

that consequence--an end to those punctual footsteps on

the walk, to the creak of the letter box, to the friendly

"hello" rustle of paper envelopes. . . .

Without fanfare, Britain's twice-a-day deliveries went

every other day, then once weekly. Letter carrying was "deregulated"--turned over to private services, which then

charged by the minute and made a production number of

signing over a single envelope.

What Jen missed most was the routine mundanity of

mail time. It used to come as a welcome break, an excuse to

tear herself away from the flat, cramped, eye-wearying computer

screens of those days, stretching her crackling back as

she hobbled over to pick up the daily offering of multicolored

envelopes.

Most of it had been junk of course. What was Sturgeon's

first law? Ninety percent of anything is crap.

But ah, that remaining ten percent!

There were letters from dear friends (which, amidst a

month-long wrestling bout of abstract theory, often served

to remind her she had friends). And there were technical

journals to leaf through, scribble on the margins, and leave

in the corner to pile up like geologic sediments. . . .

EARTH 283

And beautiful, real-paper magazines--Natural History

and National Geographic and Country Life--their glossy

pages conveying what modern hyper versions could not, despite

high-fidelity sound and stereo projection.

Trees regularly died for human literacy in those days.

But that was one sacrifice even Jen didn't begrudge. Not

then, nor even today as she opened the curtains to spill

morning light onto library shelves stacked high with books

printed on rag paper, some even bound in burnished leather

that had once adorned the backs of proud animals.

This library could bring a small fortune from collectors

1. and the sharp opprobrium of vegetarians. But one of

the advantages of the electronic age was that you could

maintain a universe of contacts while keeping all prying

eyes out of your own home, your castle.

It also has disadvantages, she thought as she scanned

the list of bulletins awaiting her this morning. Her

autosecretary displayed a column of daunting figures. Back

when communication had still been a chore, half these correspondents would have been too lazy or thrifty to spend

the time or a stamp. But now, message blips were as easy and

cheap as talk itself. Easier, for copies could be made and

transmitted ad infinitum.

Yes, indeed. Sometimes Jen longed for her postman.

You don't miss water or air, either--not till the well

runs dry, or the oxygen partial pressure drops to twenty

percent.

She took a subvocal input device from its rack and

placed the attached sensors on her throat, jaw, and temples.

A faint glitter in the display screens meant the machine was

already tracking her eyes, noting by curvature of lens and

angle of pupil the exact spot on which she focused at any

moment.

She didn't have to speak aloud, only intend to. The

subvocal read nerve signals, letting her enter words by just

beginning to will them. It was much faster than any normal

speech input device . . . and more cantankerous as well.

Jen adjusted the sensitivity level so it wouldn't pick up each

tiny tremor--a growing problem as her once athletic body

turned wiry and inexact with age. Still, she vowed to hold

onto this rare skill as long as possible.

Tapping certain teeth made colors shift in the tanks and

screens. A yawn sent cyclones spinning within a blue ex-

284 D A V I D B R I N

panse. Sometimes, under a talented operator, a subvocal

could seem almost magical, like those "direct" brain-to-computer

links science fiction writers were always jabbering

about, but which, for simple neurological reasons, had never

become real. This was as close as anyone had come, and still

ninety percent of existing subvocals were used at most to

make pretty 3-D pictures.

How ironic then, that Jen had been taught to use hers at

age sixty-two. So much for adages about old dogs and new

tricks!

"Hypersecretary, Sri Ramanujan," she said.

Mists cleared and a face formed, darkly handsome, with

noble Hindu features. For her computer's "shell" persona

Jen could have chosen anything from cartoon alien to movie

star. But she had picked this system's unique designer as a

model. In those eyes she recognized something of the young

consultant from Nehruabad, his life-spark peering out from

the cage of his useless body.

"Good morning, Professor Wolling. During the last twenty-four

hours there have been three priority-nine world news items, two regional alerts for Britain, and four on general topics from Reuters, your chosen neutral-bias news agency. None of the alerts were in categories listed by you as critical."

Citizens had to subscribe to a minimum news-input or

lose the vote. Still, Jen was anything but a public events

junky, so her nine-or-greater threshold was set as high as

allowed. She'd scan the headlines later.

"You have received six letters and thirty five-message blips from individuals on your auto-accept list. Sixty-five more letters and one hundred and twelve blips entered your general delivery box on the Net.

"In addition, there were four hundred and thirteen references to

you, in yesterday's scientific journals. Finally, in popular media and open discussion boards, your name was brought up with level seven or greater relevance fourteen hundred and eleven times."

It was clearly another case of human profligacy--this

typical turning of a good thing into yet another excuse for

overindulgence. Like the way nations suffering from greenhouse

heat still spilled more than five billion tons of carbon

into the atmosphere each year. A prodigious yield that was

nevertheless nothing compared to the species' greatest harvest--words.

And to think, some idiots predicted that we'd some-

EARTH 285

day found our economy on information. That we'd base

money on it!

On information? The problem isn't scarcity. There's

too damned much of it!

The problem usually wasn't getting access to information.

It was to stave off drowning in it. People bought personalized

filter programs to skim a few droplets from that

sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became

the selected entertainments and special-interest zines

passed through by those tailored shells.

Here a man watches nothing but detective films from

the days of cops and robbers--a limitless supply of formula

fiction. Next door a woman hears and reads only opinions

that match her own, because other points of view are culled

by her loyal guardian software.

To avoid such staleness, ]en had hired a famous rogue

hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. "Let's see

what happens to that list," she said aloud, "when we use

threshold seven, categories one through twenty."

"And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?"

Jen felt in a good mood. "Let's go with twenty percent."

That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in

defiance of her own parameters. This way she asked

Ramanujan to unleash purposely on her a little of the chaos

his devilish virus-symbiont had once wreaked on thirteen

million Net subscribers in South Asia--jiggling their complacent

cyberworlds to show them glimpses of different realities,

different points of view.

After he was caught, being sent to that hospital-jail in

Bombay hardly mattered to Sri Ramanujan, whose own body

had been a prison since infancy. But cutting off his net privileges had been an added punishment far worse than any

death sentence.

"As you wish, Jen Wolling."

The simulated visage seemed pleased. He bowed and

disappeared, making way for unreeling sheaves of data. Colors

demarked significant passages, enhanced by her semantic-content

filter.

Her eyes focused on text which glowed with reddish

highlights. Ah, the little devil, she thought, for the program

had slipped in a cluster of hate mail.

". . . Wolling has become a loose cannon. Her recent trip to

Southern Africa proves she's lost all sense of propriety.

284 D A V I D B R I N

panse. Sometimes, under a talented operator, a subvocal

could seem almost magical, like those "direct" brain-to-computer

links science fiction writers were always jabbering

about, but which, for simple neurological reasons, had never

become real. This was as close as anyone had come, and still

ninety percent of existing subvocals were used at most to

make pretty 3-D pictures.

How ironic then, that Jen had been taught to use hers at

age sixty-two. So much for adages about old dogs and new

tricks!

"Hypersecretary, Sri Ramanujan," she said.

Mists cleared and a face formed, darkly handsome, with

noble Hindu features. For her computer's "shell" persona

Jen could have chosen anything from cartoon alien to movie

star. But she had picked this system's unique designer as a

model. In those eyes she recognized something of the young

consultant from Nehruabad, his life-spark peering out from

the cage of his useless body.

"Good morning, Professor Wolling. During the last twenty-four

hours there have been three priority-nine world news items, two regional alerts for Britain, and four on general topics from Reuters, your chosen neutral-bias news agency. None of the alerts were in categories listed by you as critical."

Citizens had to subscribe to a minimum news-input or

lose the vote. Still, Jen was anything but a public events

junky, so her nine-or-greater threshold was set as high as

allowed. She'd scan the headlines later.

"You have received six letters and thirty five-message blips from individuals on your auto-accept list. Sixty-five more letters and one hundred and twelve blips entered your general delivery box on the Net.

"In addition, there were four hundred and thirteen references to

you, in yesterday's scientific journals. Finally, in popular media and open discussion boards, your name was brought up with level seven or greater relevance fourteen hundred and eleven times."

It was clearly another case of human profligacy--this

typical turning of a good thing into yet another excuse for

overindulgence. Like the way nations suffering from greenhouse

heat still spilled more than five billion tons of carbon

into the atmosphere each .year. A prodigious yield that was

nevertheless nothing compared to the species' greatest harvest--words.

And to think, some idiots predicted that we'd some-

EARTH 285

day found our economy on information. That we 'd base

money on it!

On information? The problem isn't scarcity. There's

too damned much of it!

The problem usually wasn't getting access to information.

It was to stave off drowning in it. People bought personalized

filter programs to skim a few droplets from that

sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became

the selected entertainments and special-interest zines

passed through by those tailored shells.

Here a man watches nothing but detective films from

the days of cops and robbers--a limitless supply of formula

fiction. Next door a woman hears and reads only opinions

that match her own, because other points of view are culled

by her loyal guardian software.

To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue

hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. "Let's see

what happens to that list," she said aloud, "when we use

threshold seven, categories one through twenty."

"And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?"

Jen felt in a good mood. "Let's go with twenty percent."

That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in

defiance of her own parameters. This way she asked

Ramanujan to unleash purposely on her a little of the chaos

his devilish virus-symbiont had once wreaked on thirteen

million Net subscribers in South Asia--jiggling their complacent

cyberworlds to show them glimpses of different realities,

different points of view.

After he was caught, being sent to that hospital-jail in

Bombay hardly mattered to Sri Ramanujan, whose own body

had been a prison since infancy. But cutting off his net privileges had been an added punishment far worse than any

death sentence.

"As you wish, Jen Wolling."

The simulated visage seemed pleased. He bowed and

disappeared, making way for unreeling sheaves of data. Colors

demarked significant passages, enhanced by her semantic-content

filter.

Her eyes focused on text which glowed with reddish

highlights. Ah, the little devil, she thought, for the program

had slipped in a cluster of hate mail.

". . . Wolling has become a loose cannon. Her recent trip to

Southern Africa proves she's lost all sense of propriety.

286 D A V I D 8 R I N

"But what irks most is her recent cavalier reassessment of the essential Gaian paradigm--a scientific model she herself helped develop

so many years ago! She is becoming a senile embarrassment to biological science ..."

]en found the style familiar, and sure enough, the signature

was that of an old colleague, now a bitter opponent. She

sighed. It was strange to find herself regularly assaulted as

unscientific whenever she deviated an iota from "accepted"

principles . . . principles based upon her own earlier theories.

Well, she admitted to herself. Maybe sometimes I deviate

more than an iota. And I do enjoy causing a stir.

She flicked her tongue. Electromagnetic sensors read

her intent and swept the diatribe away without comment.

Another glowed redly in its place.

"... Wolling is an embarrassment to our cause to save Our

Mother. Isn't it enough she pays homage to the reductionist values of patriarchal western science, giving that discredited realm the devotion she properly owes Caia?

"In giving ammunition to Earth-rapists--to Zeus-Iehovah-Shiva

worshippers--she betrays Our Mother . . ."

Strange how one word could mean so many things to so

many different people. To biologists, "Caia" described a theory

of planetary ecological balance and regulated feedback

loops. But to devoted mystics it named a living goddess.

Another tongue flick, and a third tirade slid into place.

"... Evolution has always been driven by the death of species.

Take the so-called catastrophes of the Permian and Triassic and Cretaceous, when countless living types were annihilated by environmental

shocks. Now, according to Wolling and Harding, these were dangerous times for the Earth, when the so-called "Caia homeostasis" almost collapsed.

But that simply isn't true! Today's so-called ecological crisis is just another in a long series of natural . . ."

Smiling made the display shimmer. Here were representatives

of three different, unasinous points of view, each

deeply opposed to the others, and yet all attacking her! She

leafed through other crimson diatribes. Some Madrid Catholics

poured calumny on her for assisting the gene-resurrection

of mastodons. A white antisegregation society fired

fusillades at her for visiting Kuwenezi. One of the "ladybug

combines" accused her of undermining the trillion-dollar

organic pest-control industry, and so on. In most cases the

writer clearly didn't even understand her real position.

EARTH 287

Should a rare piece of vituperation actually show cleverness,

it would go into a clipping file. But none of today's hate-

grams offered anything illuminating, alas.

The technical citations were hardly any more interesting.

Most were doctoral theses referring to her old papers

1. the "classics" that had led to that damned Nobel prize.

She selected five promising ones for later study, and dumped

the rest.

Among the personal messages was one bona ride letter

from Pauline Cockerel, asking Jen to come visit London Ark.

"Baby misses you."

The young geneticist added an animated montage of the

young demi-mastodon in action. Jen laughed as Baby lifted

her trunk in a grinning trumpet of victory, while chewing a

stolen apple.

There were a few other friendly notes, from loyal colleagues

and former students. And a data packet from

Jacques, her third husband--containing a folio of his latest

paintings and an invitation to his next showing.

All of these merited replies. Jen tagged and dictated

first-draft answers, letting the syntax-checker convert her

clipped short-speech into clear paragraphs. In fact, sometimes

thoughts streamed faster than judgment. So Jen never

"mailed" letters till Tuesdays or Fridays, when she scrupulously

went over everything carefully a second time.

She glanced at the clock. Good, the chore would be

done well before morning tea. Only two letters to go.

". . . I'm real sorry to bother you. You probably don't remember

me. I sat in the front row during your talk . . ."

This writer wasn't adroit at short-speech. Or he lacked a

conciseness program to help him get to the point. Jen was

about to call up one of her standard fan mail replies when

one highlighted line broke through.

". . . at Kuwenezi. I was the guy with the little baboons . . ."

Indeed, Jen remembered! The boy's name had been

1. Nelson something-or-other. Uneducated, but bright

and earnest, he had asked the right questions when his more

sophisticated elders were still trapped in a morass of details.

". . . I've been studying hard, but I still don't understand some things about the Cayan Paradime . . ."

Jen nodded sympathetically. The word "Caian" had become

nearly as meaningless as "socialist" or "liberal" or

"conservative" were half a century ago . . . a basket full of

288 D A V I D B R I N

contradictions. She sometimes wondered what James Lovelock

and Lynn Margulis would have thought of where their

original, slim monographs had led. Or the Russian mystic,

Vernadsky, who even earlier had proposed looking at the

Earth as a living organism.

Perhaps these times were ripe for a new church militant,

as in the waning days of the Roman Empire. Maybe

great movements liked having living prophets to both idealize

and later crucify. Veneration followed by varicide seemed

the traditional pattern.

With Lovelock and Margulis and Vernadsky long gone,

the new faithful had to settle for ]en Wolling--founding

saint and heretic. At times it got so she even wished she'd

never had that epiphany, so long ago on the frosty shoulders

of Mount Snowdon, when the turning leaves had suddenly

revealed to her the jewellike mathematical clarity of the

Caia metaphor.

No regrets. ]en shook her head. / cannot regret those

equations. For they are true.

Onee, when young Alex had come to her complaining

of the awful burden, being a Nobelist's grandson, she had

told him, "Some fools think I'm smart because I found a few

tricks, to make math serve biology. But you and I know a

secret . . . that someday you'll go places where I can't.

Prize or no damned prize."

She missed her grandson and wondered what mischief

he was up to.

Jen shook herself out of a mental random walk. Bearing

down, she returned to the letter from the black teenager in

Kuwenezi.

". . . the part that confuses me most is how animals and plants

fight each other for survival. Like hunting and being hunted? Nobody 'wins' those wars, cause every soldier dies anyway, eventually? Most of the time, what looks to them like fighting isn't really fighting at all!

Cause each of them depends on the others.

"Like, a herd of deer depends on wolfs to keep deer numbers down, or else they'd overgrase and then all starve to death . . . And the wolfs' numbers are controlled by how many deer there are to eat.

"This is what they mean by homeostasis, isn't it? One kind of

animal regulates another, and it's regulated back . . ."

Jen skimmed ahead to a highlighted area.

"But what about Man? Who or what regulates us'1."

She nodded appreciatively. There were scores of good

EARTH 289

books she could refer the young man to. But he must have already accessed the standard answers and found them unsatisfying.

We are an unregulated cancer, proclaimed many eco-radi-

cals. Man must cut his numbers and standard of living by a factor of ten, or even a hundred, to save the world.

Some even suggested it would be better if the destroyer

species--Homo sapiens--died out altogether, and good riddance.

Those pursuing the "organic" metaphor suggested the

problem would be solved once humanity adjusted to its

proper role as "brain" of the planetary organism. We can learn

to regulate ourselves, pronounced the moderators of the North

American Church of Caia, as they pushed "soft" technologies

and birth control. We must learn to be smart planetary managers.

There were still other opinions.

Everything would be fine on Earth if humans just left! That

was the message of the space colonization movement, as

they promoted plans for cities and factories in the sky. Out in

space, resources are endless. We'll move out and turn the little blue planet into a park!

To Madrid Catholics and some other old-line religious

groups, The world was made for our use. The end of days will come soon. So why "regulate." when it's all temporary anyway? One unborn human fetus is worth all the whales in the sea.

A group based in California offered a unique proposal.

"Sheckleyans" they called themselves, and they agitated--

tongue in cheek, Jen imagined--for the genetic engineering

of new predators smart and agile enough to prey on human

beings. These new hunters would cull the population in a

"natural" manner, allowing the rest of the race to thrive in

smaller numbers. Vampires were a favorite candidate

predator--certainly canny and capable enough, if they could

be made--but another Sheckleyan subsect held out for

werewolves, a less snooty, less aristocratically conceited sort

of monster. Either way, romance and adventure would return,

and mankind, too, would at last be "regulated." Jen

sent the Sheckleyans an anonymous donation every year.

After all, you never could tell.

These were just some of the suggestions, both serious

and whimsical. But Jen realized the young man deserved

more than stock answers. She put his letter on the high-

290 D A V I D B R I N

priority heap--the pile of items she would go over carefully

later, in the hours before bed.

One letter to go then. The last one had arrived on auto-

accept, so the sender knew her private code. Jen scanned

with rising irritation. Someone seemed to be advertising vacation homes on the Sea of Okhotsk!

That's all I need.

But then she suddenly remembered. Vacation

homes . . .

It was a mnemonic cue. "Sri Ramanujan," she said

aloud. "I think this message may be in cipher. Please see if

we own a key to break it."

The face of the young Hindustani appeared briefly.

"Yes, (en Wolling. It uses a private code given you years ago by the Pacific Society of Hine-marama. I'll have it translated in a minute."

Ah, Jen thought. This had to be from the New Zealand

priestess, Meriana Kapur. It was ages since she'd seen the

Maori woman, whose cult took the Caia concept rather literally.

But then, so had Jen during one phase.

"Here it is, Professor."

Ramanujan vanished again, leaving a totally transformed

message in his place.

A totally innocuous message, as well. What she read

now consisted of a rambling series of disconnected reminiscences . . . some the two women had experienced together, long ago, and some clearly made up. Jen noticed that

none of the sentences were even highlighted. Her semantic-

content program couldn't find a single explicit statement to

set in bold!

But then, gradually, she smiled. Of course. This isn't

senility, it's diamond blade sharpness! There are ciphers

within ciphers. Codes within codes.

Apparently, Auntie Kapur wanted to be sure only Jen

understood this message. Certainly no busybody hacker's

automatic snooping program would sort meaning out of this,

not without the shared context of two women who had

lived a very long time.

Vagueness can be an art in itself.

Jen's smile faded when it began dawning on her how

seriously the Maori priestess took this. The precautions began

to make sense as glimmerings of meaning penetrated.

". . . I'm afraid Mama's unexpected ulcer has only one possible

cure. Repairing the hole requires drastic measures . . . but the regular EARTH 291

doctors would only interfere if they knew. (We think they originally caused the problem.) . . ."

There were more passages like that. Hints and allusions.

Was Meriana saying the world itself was in danger? A danger

worse than the big power nuclear standoff of long ago?

A passing reference was missed until her third reading.

Then Jen realized Kapur was referring to her grandson.

Alex? But what could he be involved in that could

pose such a threat to . . .

Jen gasped. Oh, that bloody boy. This time he must

really have done it!

Nobody with any sense kept confidential notes on a

computer. So from a desk drawer she took out an expensive

pad of real paper and a pencil. Carefully this time, Jen went

through her friend's letter line by line, jotting references

and probable meanings. It wasn't any form of code-breaking a machine could perform, more like the ancient Freudian art of analyzing free associations, a sleuthing through the subjective world of impressions and wild guesses. A very human

sort of puzzle, thousands of years older than the discrete

patternings of cybernetics.

Exactly what is it they want of me? Jen wondered what

she, an old woman, could do to help Auntie and Alex in a

situation as dire as this. Finally, though, it became clear.

Africa. Ndebele Canton . . . Meriana heard of my visit

there. She thinks I can help get them in. Secretly.

Jen sat back, amazed. Secretly? These days?

The idea was absurd.

She chewed her lip.

Well ... it would be a challenge, at least.

By Pauling, and Orgell . . . I'll bet I can do it.

One thing for certain, Auntie's letter demanded an immediate

response. No waiting till Friday for this one.

And that lad in Kuwenezi--Nelson Grayson. It looked

as if the young man with the pet baboons might be getting

his answers in person after all.

292 D A V I D B R I N

D Net Vol. A8230-761, 04.01.38: 11:24:12 UT; User

M12-44-6557-Bac990 STATISTICAL REQUEST

[Level: generic/colloquial]

Earth Land Surface Area (In millions of square kilometers)

1988 2038

Total 149 142

In desert, mountain, tundra 101 111

In arable land 40 29

In cultivated land 13 11

In fish farms 0.002 0.12

Census Counts (in billions of individuals)

1988 2038

Human beings 5.2 10.6

Domestic cattle 1.2 0.2

Domestic sheep 1.0 0.5

Domestic hogs 0.5 0.5

Domestic dogs and cats 0.4 0.02

 On a different continent, but only milliseconds away by

H light-cable, another woman also sailed the data sea.

Y Only while ten Wolling carefully navigated a dinghy,

D Daisy McClennon sailed a privateer's sloop, in search of

R prey.

0 On her work wall, a science fiction space epic

S stepped frame by frame through a flashy battle sequence

P her video processor inserting new special effects, mak-

H ing already grand starships even more magnificent. Mat-

E ted stars and planets grew three dimensional, and

R explosions more titanic than ever. With such magic

E Daisy breathed new life into old classics, though for a

diminishing, specialized audience.

Again, however, Daisy's attention swerved from her

cash crop of embellished movies to other scenes and truer

obsessions. The news services told of recent raids by

Bedouin rebels, attacking the International Petroleum Reser

vation. She checked the reports' accuracy by other means

and discovered that U.N. peacekeepers were understating

the amount of oil spilled from pipelines severed by the na

tionalists, but not by enough to cause a scandal, unfortu

nately. Daisy had learned from hard experience never to cry

"coverup!" unless the payoff was worthwhile.

Now here was a likely target. Blue symbols off Luzon

showed one of the floating barge-towns of the Sea State,

heading northward toward Japan. UNEPA was supposed to

make sure the nation of refugees obeyed its rules. But sure

enough, only two inspector boats showed in the vicinity.

Nowhere near enough.

I wonder what Sea State is up to, she asked herself.

Keying an oceanographic database, Daisy noted that a

large migration of spinner porpoises would intersect the

path of the flotilla in a few weeks' time. UNEPA had re

cently downgraded spinners from "threatened" to "watch"

status, which meant those with proven need were allowed to

harvest limited numbers. Sea State could always establish

proven need.

"Cotcha!" Daisy said, and sent a coded alert to an ac

tivist group in Nagasaki. When that Sea State flotilla

reached its destination, there'd be a party waiting to pounce

on the slightest infraction.

294 D A V I D B R I N

What next?

For a while she thought she had managed to trace a

twisty money trail, proving that an official in Queensland

had gor-sucked to local hotel interests. But the carni-man

was smarter than usuaL Computer taps on his accounts

failed to report any unusual purchases in real estate or minerals futures.

For this case, her background as a McClennon helped.

Before becoming a family black sheep, she had witnessed

many of the ways her cousins and uncles sheltered and

moved money without letting it show up on the net. So she

called in a few favors from fellow radicals in Australia, who

could arrange to snoop the Queensland official in person.

Sooner or later, she was going to get the guy.

A timer beeped. She was supposed to get up and do

some chores around the compound, or else Claire would

raise a fit. This work in the Net was important for world

survival, but her daughter didn't seem to care about that

1. probably wished she lived more like her spoiled cousins.

Well, there's no getting out of it, I suppose. Daisy

sighed. It probably was past time she took a turn of her own

at the cess pit. Or was it greenhouse maintenance Claire had

been after her about?

But as she rose, Daisy caught a sudden change in one of

her alert boxes, highlighting a name from her special watch

list. For years she had maintained a tiny lamprey program

attached to the home unit of the infamous Jennifer Wolling.

All that time, her little spy had sampled and assessed what

the apostate biologist was up to. Now, from London, it reported

Wolling's ciphered message.

"Hmm," Daisy pondered, sitting down again. "The

witch hardly ever tries to hide anything. What's she up to

now?"

With trivial ease, Daisy traced the memorandum to its

source. Of course. The Pacific Caians were just the sort to

conspire with Wolling. Compromisers, they worshipped an

anemic goddess who seemed willing to settle for a world

only half destroyed by man, with most of its species preserved

in glass bottles, relying on technological "solutions"

thrown together by bright idiots like Logan Eng. . . .

The cipher code was a good one. It took an hour to

crack it. And when Daisy finally read the decrypted letter,

EARTH 295

she found a second layer filled with personal references and

context-laden hints--the hardest kind of puzzle for an outsider

to untangle.

That only made it more tempting, of course. Daisy

knew about some new language programs, almost intelligent

in their own right, that might apply here. And there were

human consultants who owed her favors, too. Some of them

might pick up connections she missed.

If all else failed, she also had certain contacts among

enemy groups, as well . . . big corporations and government

agencies with fantastic resources at their command.

Among those, too, were also men and women indebted to

her for past services. Daisy had dealt with devils before,

when it suited her purposes. Sometimes honest rapists were

preferable to mealy-mouthed compromisers.

She transferred the partially deciphered letter into her

"possible clues" file, along with other anomalies like her ex-

husband's paper on the mysterious Spanish quakes.

Ignored to her left, small screens monitored all twenty

hectares of Six Oaks, the realm she and Logan had built here

on the bayou, where she practiced self-reliance and "zero

impact" far more faithfully than the pallid versions

preached by the NorAChuCas. Not just "good faith efforts,"

but independence from the mines and factories and polluting

power plants of industrial society . . . and from her

own damned, smug, aristocratic family.

One of those displays showed her daughter standing on

a stepladder next to the greenhouse, her hair tied back in a

kerchief and arms covered with putty as she scraped the

labels off newly bought sheets of glass and fitted them one

by one to replace those cracked in a recent storm.

But Daisy did not see, nor did she recall her promise.

Drawn once more to the holo screens, her blue eyes roved

the electronic sea, the data ocean, seeking the blood foes of

her world. Practicing the art of vendetta. Pursuing prey.

D No animal is as likeable as an individual, and yet so loathsome in large groups. Voracious, implacable, using up everything

in sight, this creature has been a bane to the Earth. Within

a few millennia it has stripped vast portions of the planet, turning them into barren desert.

296 D A V I D B R I N

The animal isn't Man, though humankind helped it multiply

in vast numbers. It is the goal. A boon to smalltime nomads, the

goat is an immeasurable calamity to the planet's biosphere.

Even today, it shares as much blame for the advancing sands as

global warming or ill-planned irrigation.

That is why we, the Preservation Alliance of North Africa,

have reluctantly taken action to sacrifice one species for the

good of all. It is why we come onto the Net today, via this un-

traceable routing, to announce what we have done.

Some say the preferred target of a winnowing should be

humanity itself, which has perpetrated even worse harm. That

may be so, but we admit to squeamishness about murdering the

billions of people it would take to make a difference.

Besides, the Helvetian War proved Homo sapiens to be biologically adept, highly resistant to engineered diseases. The major

powers' biocrisis teams would make matters moot within a

few weeks anyway. Only a few million would die before cures

were found, resulting in no long-term ecological change, just our own pursuit as criminals.

Nsne of these drawbacks apply to our other target species,

however. We are certain the world will retrain the remaining pastoral shepherds once their destructive herds are eliminated. And

we emphasize that our virus has been carefully tested. The disease is quite specific to goats. It should have no other effect than

to correct a horrible mistake of man and nature.

One purpose of this announcement is to appeal to workers

in biolabs. Think carefully when you're asked to seek a cure. By

your minor sabotage you may save a forest or a million hectares

of Sahel! Drop that test tube into an autoclave, and you may

save a hundred species otherwise doomed to perish before this

rapacious menace! Remember, civil disobedience is your right

under the Charter of Rio.

Another purpose is, of course, to seek public discussion.

Criticism and data on the effects of our peremptory measure

may be sent to the general and open display

board [D OpDBaql.779.-66-8258-BaB 689.] We will read your

comments regularly, and we welcome your suggestions.

Sincerely,

The Preservation Alliance of North Africa

 This time of year, Davis Strait thronged with traffic.

M Great freighters plowed the choppy waters, following

E strobing marker buoys all the way to Lancaster Sound

S and the shortcut to Asia. Solar arrays and rigid wing-

0 sails lent the sleek vessels a family resemblance to the

S clipper ships of yore, on which men once upon a time

P had risked their lives seeking this selfsame Northwest

H Passage. Now and then, the shadows of dirigibles, like

E passing clouds, darkened the sea nearby. The zeppelin

R crews, bound for Europe or Canada, leaned out to wave

E at the high-tech sailors below.

It was a far cry from when Roald Amundsen had come

this way, to spend three hard years battling toward Alaska.

Today the voyage took two weeks, and all looked peaceful

here in the realm of the midnight sun.

Of course, Stan Goldman knew, appearances can be

deceiving.

From this height he could make out a place along

Greenland's western verge where a vast, growling glacier

met the open sea. Beacons detoured commerce round a

chain of lumbering behemoths wrapped in reflective foil.

The insulated bergs resembled great, silvery, alien mother

ships, as mammoth engines pushed them south toward

thirsty lands.

Eventually, the giant island would run out of white

treasure, unbelievable as it might seem up here, where a

snowy plateau still spanned one entire horizon. In fact, it

had already retreated a long way, leaving stark, sheer fjords

cut into a serrated coast. Lichens and mosses spread like

velvet across new plains and valleys, just below this hired

zeppelin. After close to a million years, spring had come at

last to Greenland.

And yet, there is a cost. There's always a cost.

Stan had just finished reading dire news about these

northern seas. Species counts were down again. No one had

seen a bowhead whale in years. And migratory birds, the

litmus of ecological health, were laying fewer eggs.

Many blamed the old nemesis, pollution. Down below,

UNEPA and Kingdom of Denmark launches sniffed among

the great freighters ... as if any captain would dare drop

even a paper cup into this heavily policed waterway. Actu

ally though, climatic changes, rather than dumping, might

be at fault. Temperate-zone creatures could flee the spread-

298 D A V I D B R I N

ing deserts by moving north. But where could polar bears go

when their dens turned to slush?

Of course, palm trees wouldn't be growing up here any

time soon. A man immersed in those bright waters would

still be unconscious in minutes and dead from hypothermia

inside an hour. And six months from now, the sun would

vanish for another winter.

There are limits, Stan reassured himself. Mankind may

be able to mess with the climate, but we can't change the

seasons or shift Earth's axial tilt.

Almost at once, however, he reconsidered. Is even that

beyond our reach now? He pondered some implications of

Alex Lustig's equations and found himself weighing notions

unimaginable only weeks ago. / wonder if it might be possible

to . . .

Stan shook his head firmly. Such meddling had already

brought about nothing but calamity.

"Kalatdlit-Nunat."

Stan turned to his traveling companion. "I beg your

pardon?"

Teresa Tikhana lifted a small reading plaque. "Kalatdlit-

Nunat. It's what the Inuit people--the Eskimos--call

Greenland."

"The Inuit? I thought their second language was Danish."

Teresa shrugged. "Who says two languages are enough?

How does the saying go? 'A man with only one ethnicity

stands on just one leg.' . . . Come on, Stan. How many

languages do you speak?"

He shrugged. "You mean besides International English

and Physics? . . . And the Maori and Simglish and Han

they taught us in school?" He paused. "Well, I can get along

in General Nihon and French, but ..."

He laughed, seeing her point. "All right. Let's hear it

again."

Teresa coached him till he could pronounce a few indigenous

politenesses. Not that there'd be much time for idle

chitchat where they were going--a rough outpost in the

middle of a wasteland. He'd always wanted to see this tremendous

frozen island, but this mission wasn't for tourism.

Stan glanced across the aisle. The other members of

their expedition had gathered near a forward window, whispering

and pointing as the cargo ships and vacuum-packed

EARTH 299

icebergs fell behind. Stan listened now and then, to make sure the technicians kept their voices low and stayed away from taboo subjects.

"You're sure we can't use the old NATO base at

Codhavn?" Teresa asked. "It's got every facility. And the

science commune using it now is pretty free and open, I

hear."

"They're mostly atmosphere researchers, right?" Stan

asked.

"Yeah. First set up to monitor radioactive fallout from

the Alps. Now they're part of the Ozone Restoration Project,

such as it is."

"Reason enough to avoid the place, then. You'd surely

be recognized."

The woman astronaut blinked. "Oh, yeah." Self-consciously

Teresa brushed back strands of newly blonde hair,

dyed just for this journey. "I--guess I'm just not used to

this way of thinking, Stan."

In other words, she hadn't the advantage of growing up

as he had, during the paranoid twentieth, when people routinely

maintained poses for the sake of anything from ideology

to profit to love--sometimes for whole lifetimes.

"Try to remember," he urged, dropping his voice.

"We're breaking Danish territorial law, bringing you in under

a false passport. You're supposed to be on vacation in

Australia, right? Not halfway around the world, smuggling

undocumented gear into . . . Kalatdlit-Nunat."

She tried to look serious, but couldn't suppress a smile.

"All right, Stan. I'll remember."

He sighed. If their conspiracy hadn't been critically

shorthanded, he'd never have agreed to bringing Teresa

along. Her competence, charm and fascinating mind would

be welcome of course. But the risk was awfully great.

"Come on," she said, nudging his elbow. "Now you're

starting to look like Alex Lustig."

Nervously, he laughed. "That bad?"

She nodded. "I thought we 'nauts were a sober-pussed

bunch. But Lustig makes Glenn Spivey look like a yuk artist.

Even when he smiles, I feel like I'm attending a wake."

Maybe, Stan thought. But how would you look if you

had that poor boy's burdens on your back?

Stan withheld comment though. He knew Teresa, too,

was suffering from a- coping reaction. Her way of dealing

300 D A V I D B R I N

with this awful crisis was to go into denial. Certainly she'd

never let it interfere with her work, but Stan imagined she

simply let the reason for their desperate venture slip her

mind, any chance she got.

"It's poor Alex's upbringing at fault," Stan answered in

his best Old Boy accent. "English public schools do that to a

lad, don't'cha know."

Teresa laughed, and Stan was glad to hear the pure,

untroubled sound. She has enough reason for denial. Of all

the members of their cabal, she had been the first struck

personally by the lashing tail of the taniwha--the monster

in the Earth's core.

More of them would share that honor before long. Stan

thought of Ellen and the grandkids and his daughter back in

England. Faces of students and friends kept popping up at

odd moments, especially during sleep. Sometimes it felt like

going through a photo album of treasures already lost.

Stop. It's useless to maunder this way.

He sought distraction outside. The Northwest Passage

lay behind them, now. To the left, fleets of smaller boats

could be seen threading craggy offshore islets, bound for a

bustling seaport just ahead.

"Codhavn," Teresa said, reading her guidebook again.

She gestured at the piers and factories lining the bay. "And

what does the Net say is this city's principal industry?" She

inhaled deeply through her nose. "I'll give you three

guesses."

Stan didn't have to sniff the cannery aroma. Those

trawlers were returning from the rich banks offshore--where

arctic upwellings nourished clouds of silvery fish. So far

UNEPA safeguards had managed to save that vital resource

for mankind's ravenous billions, so all wasn't lost up here.

Not yet at least.

The canneries had created a boomtown, and no lack of

eager immigrants seeking their fortunes on a new frontier.

Others came simply for elbow room, to escape the close

press of neighbors back home.

It probably wasn't all that different a thousand years

ago, Stan figured. Back then, too, men chased wealth and

breathing space. And Red Erik knew /ust how to lure them

to this faraway shore. Even its name--Greenland--was an

early, inspired example of sneaky advertising.

Viking settlements had sprouted along the rocky coast.

EARTH 301

And the Scandinavians were lucky at first, arriving during a

warm spell brought on by sunspots and Earth's subtly variable

orbit.

But what astronomy gave, astronomy could take away.

By the fifteenth century, cycles had turned again. The "little

ice age"--a time of scanty summers and scarcer sunspots

--froze the rivers Seine and Thames at Christmastime, and

icebergs were seen off Spain. Ironically, Irish sailors reported

news from the struggling Greenland colony only decades

before another dawning--when Christopher Columbus and

John Cabot drew the world's attention back to strange lands

rimming the ocean sea. But by the time voyagers next set

foot on the great island, all sign of living Europeans had

vanished.

Stan found it hard to imagine history repeating itself

here. The wharves and factories all shared a thick-walled

look of determined permanence, as if defying nature to do

her worst.

And yet, Stan pondered. Other eras had their certainties,

and look at them now.

Soon the cannery town fell away as their pilot steered

up one of the broad valleys, carved over ages by endless tons

of ancient, compressed snow. Now the vales below flowed

with newborn streams. Reindeer clattered over algae-stained

rocks, spooked by the airship's shadow into skittish flight.

Up ahead lay the grand glacier itself. Here, and in Antarctica,

the ice ranges grew three kilometers thick, storing

half the fresh water on Earth. Only the fringes of that stockpile had melted so far, but when it thawed in earnest, the

world's coastlines would really start to rise.

The removal of so much weighty ice couldn't help but

affect the crust underneath. Rebound-reverberations were already

being felt far away. In Iceland, two fierce new volcanoes

sputtered. There would be more as time went on.

Especially if we don't solve the problem of gazer beams

coupling with surface matter, Stan thought. It still puzzled

him that resonant gravity waves sometimes set off tremors in

the outer crust. He hoped there'd be an answer soon, or just

trying to get rid of the taniwha might cause massive harm.

Two days to get set up . . . another three to grow our

thumper and test Manella's data-links to the other stations

1. got to figure ways to work in tandem with Alex's

group--and George's and Kenda 's . . .

302 D A V I D B R I N

He'd gone over it all so many times, and still it seemed a

wild-eyed plan--trying to shove a superheavy, microscopic

bit of folded space into a higher orbit by poking at it repeatedly with invisible rays . . . yep, it sounded pretty far-

fetched, all right.

Stan caught a metallic glint up ahead, just short of the

fast-approaching ice sheet. That must be their goal, where

the glacier's retreat had recently revealed clues to an

enigma. Where some believed an awful killing had taken

place a long time ago.

They say every spot on Earth has a story, a library of

stories to tell. If that is so, then this island specializes in

mysteries.

With rising impatience Stan watched Greenland's second

coast, its inner shore, where a new, encroaching fringe

of land lapped against a continent of ancient whiteness.

The tiny scientific outpost perched beside an icy rivulet,

near enough towering cliffs to wear their shadow each long

arctic morning. A greeting party waited by the mooring towers

as automatic snaring devices seized the zep and gently

drew it down.

Every other dirigible landing in Teresa's experience had

been at commercial aerodromes, so she found this rough-

and-ready process fascinating, and oddly similar to the no-

frills approach used in space.

The pilot certainly would have let her sit in the cockpit,

if only she identified herself. But of course that wasn't possible.

So she made do instead by leaning out the window like

a gawking tourist, bursting with questions she wasn't allowed

to ask and suggestions she dared not offer. After the

gondola settled with a bump and scrape, Teresa was the last

to get off, lingering by the control cabin listening to the crew

go through their shutdown checklist.

The Tangoparu techs had already begun offloading their

supplies when she finally debarked. Teresa started over to

lend a hand, but Stan Coldman called her to meet some

people wearing knit caps and Pendleton shirts. It was hard to

pay attention to introductions, though. She felt distracted

by the ice plateau, .towering so near it set her senses quivering.

Then there was the smell--cool, invigorating, and inexplicably

drawing. She helped her colleagues haul the gear

EARTH 30;

and inflate their solitary dome. But all the while Teresa kep

glancing toward the glacier, feeling its presence. At last

when all the heavy labor was done, she could bear it nc

longer. "Stan, I've got to go to the ice."

He nodded. "I understand. We'll erect the toilet next

I'm sorry ..."

Teresa laughed. "No, I mean really. I'll be back in ;

couple of hours. It's just something I have to do."

The elderly physicist blinked twice and then smiled

"Of course. You worked hard studying gravitonics all thi

way out here. Go ahead. We'll just be setting up the vat:

anyway. You won't be needed until tomorrow morning."

She touched his sleeve. "Thanks, Stan." Then, impul

sively, Teresa leaned over and kissed his grizzled cheek.

The Tangoparu team had set up some distance from thi

rest of the settlement, so she shunned the main path and se

off cross-country, over the gravelly moraine. Having neve

approached a primary glacier before, she had no way of judg

ing distances. There were no trees or familiar objects to

comparison; by eye alone, it might be anywhere from one t(

ten kilometers away. But her inner sensoria told Teresa shi

could make it there and back before supper. Anyway, noth

ing out here could harm her even if she miscalculated. Ii

her thermal suit she could even wait out the brief summe

night if she had to.

No, this wasn't a dangerous place--certainly not corn

pared to space.

Nevertheless, her heart leaped in her chest when

shadow swept the pebbly surface, looming from behind he

with startling speed. Teresa felt its sudden presence am

whirled in a crouch, squinting at a blurry form like a hug

ball cupped in an open fist.

She sighed, straightening and trying to pretend th

abrupt appearance hadn't scared the wits out of her. Eve]

against the afternoon sun, she recognized one of thos

Magnus effect minicranes, used all over the world for utilit

lifting and hauling. They were to helicopters what a zep wa

to a stratojet. In other words, cheap, durable, and easy to ru:

on minimal fuel. Like zeps, minicranes maintained buo>

ancy with inflated hydrogen. But this smaller machin

moved by rotating the bag itself between vertical prongs, i queer, counterintuitive effect of physics let it maneuver a^

ilely.

304 D A V I D B R I N

Shading her eyes, Teresa watched the operator lean out

of his tiny cabin. He shouted something in Danish. She

called back. "feg tale ikke dansk! Vil De tale engelsk?"

"Ah," he answered quickly. "Sorry! You must be one of

Stanley Coldman's people. I'm on my way to the dig now

and could use some ballast. Do you want a ride?"

Actually, she didn't. But Teresa found it hard to say no.

After all, it would be selfish to stay away from camp any

longer than she had to.

"How do I board?"

As the machine drew close, the whir of the spinning bag

was no longer swept away by the wind. The small control

assembly hung suspended beneath by two forks from the

central axis, and its engine gave off a hissing whine. In answer

to her question, the pilot simply leaned down and offered

his hand.

Well, she who hesitates is lost . . .

Teresa ran to meet the little airship. At the last moment,

she leaped, his grip seized her wrist and she was

hauled, gently but swiftly, inside.

"Lars Stiirup," he said as the bouncing settled down.

There was a hiss of released gas and they began rising.

"I'm Ter . . ."

She stopped and covered her gaffe by coughing, as if

from exertion. "... terribly glad to meet you, Lars. I'm

1. Emma Neale." It was the name on her borrowed passport,

lent by a Tangoparu scientist whose skills were less

needed here than Teresa's.

Blond and fair, Lars looked more Swedish than Danish.

He wore his sleeves rolled up, displaying well-developed

forearms. "Pleased to meet you, Emma, I'm sure. We don't

get many new people up here. What's your line? Paleontology?

Paleogeochemistry?"

"None of the above. I'm just here to help Stan do some

seismic scans."

"Ah." Lars nodded. "Those will be useful. Or so Dr.

Rasmussen says. She hopes they'll help us find remnants of

the meteorite."

Looking across the crushed moraine, Teresa thought

that rather optimistic. "how can anything be left, after what

this land has been through since then?"

The pilot grinned. "The thing hit pretty dumpit hard.

Buried lots of stuff good. Of course the ice scraped off hun-

EARTH 305

dreds of meters. But by using radar from space you can find

plenty of buried features that are invisible up close."

Tell me about it. Teresa had assisted in many such orbital

surveys, using microwaves to trace lost tombs in Egypt,

Mayan ruins in Mexico, and the tracks of ancient watercourses

that had last flowed back when the Sahara bloomed

and prehistoric humans hunted hippos in the lush fens of

Libya.

She was tempted to demonstrate her own knowledge,

but then, what would Emma Neale know of such things?

"That's very interesting," she said. "Please go on."

"Ah! Where to begin? To start off, it's on Greenland we

find some of the oldest rocks ever discovered--formed less

than half a billion years after the planet itself!"

Lars gestured broadly as he spoke, frequently taking his

hands from the controls to point out features of the terrain

below. Teresa found his cavalier piloting both disturbing

and somehow exciting. Of course, one could take liberties

with a slow, forgiving vehicle like this. Still, the young

man's proud confidence permeated the tiny cabin. A streak

of oil stained the calloused edge of his right hand, where in

hurried washing he mightn't notice it among the curling

hairs. He probably did all his own maintenance, something

Teresa envied since guild rules only let astronauts watch and

kibitz when their craft were serviced.

". . . so underneath we find remnants of a huge crater.

One of several that asteroids made when they struck the

Earth about sixty-five million years ago ..."

He kept glancing sideways at her, pointing here and

there across the tumbled terrain. Teresa suddenly realized,

He's preening for me! Naturally, she was used to men trying

to impress her. But this time, her reaction came out more

pleased than irritated. It was a dormant, unaccustomed feeling

that made her suddenly nervous and oddly exhilarated. /

should consider remaining a blonde, she thought idly.

The glacier loomed now--a chill mass that set her internal

compass quivering. She could sense it stretching on and

on toward the deep heart of this minicontinent, where it lay

in layers so dense the rocky crust sagged beneath it. Layers

that had been put down, snowflake by snowflake, over inconceivable time.

Now coming into view below the white cliff was the

site where machines could be seen biting into the frozen

306 D A V 1 D B R I N

ground, scientifically sifting a deep excavation for ancient

clues. Still talking and pointing things out like a tour guide,

Lars steered his craft toward the activity.

"Um . . . could I ask a favor?" Teresa interrupted the

young pilot's monologue.

"Of course. What may I do for you?"

Teresa pointed nearby. "Could you drop me off there?

Near the ice?"

Lars clearly wasn't one to let schedules interfere with

gallantry. "Anything you wish, Emma." With a sure hand

on the controls he turned his machine into the wind spilling

off the glacier, increasing spin and plowing through the stiff,

cold current. As the buffeting grew, Teresa began regretting

her request. After all, she could have walked. It would be

silly to survive so many orbital missions only to meet her

end in a wrecked utility craft, just because a young man

wanted to impress her.

"Lars . . . ," she began, then stopped herself, recalling

how bravely and silently Jason used to watch whenever she

let him sit behind her pilot's seat during a launch.

Jason ... A flux of images and feelings rose like

steamy bubbles. Diverting them, Teresa inexplicably found

herself instead picturing Alex Lustig! And especially the

gray worry forever coloring that strange man's eyes. Almost,

she let herself recall the terrible thing he hunted.

"Get ready to jump!" Lars shouted over wind as he

jockeyed the minicrane toward a sandy bank. Teresa slid the

door open and watched the ground rise. Glancing back, she

caught a look of shared adventure from the young Green-

lander. "Thanks!" she said, and leaped. Recoil sent the lifter

soaring as she braced for a hard landing.

The impact knocked the breath out of her, but it wasn't

as bad as some training exercises. She rolled to her feet only

slightly bruised and waved to show all was well. The pilot

banked his craft nimbly and gave her thumbs up. He called,

but all she could make out was, "... see you soon,

maybe!" Then he was gone, blown downwind by the icy

freshet.

Shivering suddenly, Teresa closed her collar zip and

stepped into that breeze. Soon she was scrambling over

rocky debris that must have been freshly exposed only this

very spring.

Ice. So much ice, she thought.

EARTH 307

Ice like this was a spacer's dream--to make water for

life-support or fuels for transport. There were a thousand

ways spaceflight could be made cheaper and safer and better,

if only enough ice were available out there. Earth had her

oceans. There was water in the Martian permafrost, in comets,

and in the moons of lupiter. But all those sources were

too far away, or too deep inside a gravity well, to offer hope

to a parched space program.

If only orbital surveys had found deposits at the moon's

poles, as if wishing ever made things so.

But this . . . this continent of ice.

She reached out to touch the glacier's flank. Under a

rough crust, Teresa found a thin layer much softer than expected.

Deep within, though, she knew it had to be almost

diamond hard.

At the very point where the ice stopped, she bent and

picked up a polished pebble.

Among the oldest rocks known, he said. And I'm probably

the first to touch this one. The first sentient being to

stand at this particular spot.

That was why she had been drawn here, she now real-

ized. There are no unclimbed mountains left on Earth . . .

and no plans to let anyone scale the peaks of Aristarchus

or the shield volcanoes of Tharsus.

Jungles crash to make way for houses. The world

sweats in every pore the breath and touch of humanity.

There's not a single place left where you can go and say to

a new part of the universe--"Hello, we've never met. Let

me introduce myself. I am Man. "

A new thought occurred to her.

// / were this planet, I guess 1 'd be feeling pretty damn

sick of us by now.

Teresa inhaled the bracing air flowing off the ice. In

evaporating, it gave off odors trapped inside crystal lattices

ages ago--back when there were no living beings around

with minds or speech . . . nor any concept that it can be

worth half a lifetime just to reach such a place ... to stand

where no one ever has before.

She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn't

let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be

gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and

worshipped the only way a person like her could worship--

in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky.

308 D A V I 0 B R 1 N

Q Net Commercial Data Comparison request

Uit 152383568.2763: Price contrasts in standard

1980 international dollars.

Skilled Services

(typical in each Average 2038 Price Annual Trend

category)

Cosmetic surgery $202.00 -1.0%

(complete

face-lift)

Custom-designed $113.00 -2.0%

ferret program

Full genetic $176.00 -2.5%

susceptibilities

workup

One-hour lawyer $21.00 -3.5%

consultation

One-hour home $ 76.00 +1.0%

visit,

microtoxin

surveyor

Standard Average 2038 Price Annual Trend

Material

Products

One liter $ 93.00 +2.5%

gasoline

One ream $ 52.00 +5.5%

bleached bond

paper

D-cell non- $ 47.00 +4.0%

rechargeable

battery

One pair true-vu $ 8.50 -2.0%

sensu-record

goggles, with

net access

Commentary: The effects of rising education continue dev-

EARTH 309

astating prices of once prestigious services, while resource

exhaustion keeps pushing up the cost of material goods, except

photonics and electronics, which have escaped upward

spirals because of competitive innovation. One ironic consequence is that profit margins in those fields are narrow, and

the industries now flourish principally due to the sustained

inventiveness of amateurs.

The pakeha had a saying . . . "It's only a little white

M lie."

A George Button enjoyed collecting inanities like

N that. To whites, there seemed to be as many shades of

T untruth as Eskimos had words for snow. Some lies were

L evil, of course. But then there were "half-truths" and

E "metaphors" and the sort your parents told you, "for

your own good."

As he crawled through a narrow, twisty stone passageway, George remembered one fine, lazy evening at the Quark and Swan, bearding poor Stan Coldman about such

western hypocrisies. Because it would gall his friend, who

loved novels, George particularly disparaged that mendacity

called "fiction," in which one person, a "reader," actually

pays an "author" to lie about events that never happened to

people who never even existed.

"So all your Maori fairy tales are true?" Stan had asked in hot

response.

"In their own way, yes. We non-western peoples never made this

artificial distinction between real and imagined . . . between 'objective'

and 'subjective.' We don't have to suspend disbelief in order to

hear and accept our legends . . ."

"Or to adopt six impossible worldviews before breakfast! That's

how you Maori get away with claiming your ancestors never lied. How can anyone lie when they're able to believe two contradictory things at the same time?"

"Are you accusing me of inconsistency, white fellow?"

"You? A man with fifty technical patents in geophysics, who still makes sacrifices to Pele? Never!"

Inevitably, the argument ended with them shouting,

noses half a meter apart . . . then breaking up in waves of

laughter until someone recovered enough to order the next

round.

310 D A V I D B R I N

All right, George admitted to himself as he felt for a

narrow ledge along the polished stone of an underground

streamway. It's easy to be sanctimonious about the lies of

others. But it's quite another thing when you find yourself

trapped, having to deceive or face losing all you love.

Pulling back from the rock face, he sent his helmet

beam ahead and saw that the worst was over. A few more

teetering steps and he'd be able to jump to something

vaguely like a walking path, with enough headroom to stand

instead of hunching like a gnome in a maze.

He took the traverse quickly and landed agilely, hands

spread, wide for balance. Adjusting the lamp, George peered

up a narrow, scending tube of water-smoothed limestone to

where a sharp wedge divided the twisting channel. One passage

scattered his beam among tapered, glittering columns,

where mineral-rich seeps had formed arches reminiscent of

the Caliph's Palace in C6rdoba. He hadn't noticed that gallery

on his outward journey. Now he paused to sketch the

opening in his pocket plaque.

The accepted thing to do would be to publish the map,

of course. There would be money, prestige. But the Net

wasn't ever getting this datum, he had vowed.

How do you justify a lie? George asked himself as he

carefully retraced his steps, heading back the way he'd

come.

A decade ago, on first discovering these immense

caverns beneath the mountains of New Guinea, he had chosen

to refrain from telling his clients about them. Was that

theft, to keep this marvel for himself? Perhaps. Worse than

theft though, was the lie itself.

To believe six impossible or contradictory things before

breakfast . . . Yes, Stan. And one impossible thing I

believed was that I could save this place.

He had to squeeze headfirst through the next opening,

sliding down a chute into a sparkling, miniature chapel.

Knobby calcite growths covered not only the walls but the

floor as well, catching the lamplight in dazzling crystalline

reflections. "Cave coral," it was called ... a common

enough phenomenon till humans invented spelunking, penetrating

the depths to seek Earth's hidden treasures. Now

the coral was gone from nearly every known cave on Earth,

scavenged bit by bit by souvenir hunters--each rationalizing

that just one more fragment wouldn't be missed.

EARTH 311

Passing again through the minute cathedral, George

sought the exact footprints he had made on the trip out--

tiny breaks and smudges among the glassy shards. These he

tried to step in, but there was no way to avoid adding some

slight, incremental harm this time, as well.

"The world is made of compromises," he seemed to hear Stan

Goldman say, though his friend was far away at the moment,

doing his own part amid the icy wastes of Greenland.

"You must make trade-offs, George, and live with the consequences."

"A pakeha way of looking at things . . . ," George

muttered half aloud as he exited the coral suite, wriggling

sideways through a narrow crack into another streamway.

Whispering echoes skittered around him like tiny creatures.

Among the soft reverberations he imagined Stan's reply.

"Hypocrisy, ButtonI Who do you think you're talking to, some

California tourist? Using 'pakeha' science made you a bloody billionaire!

It gave you power to do good in the world. So use it!"

One of life's joys was to have friends who gave you

reality checks . . . who would call you on your crap before

it rose so high you drowned in it. Stan Coldman was such a

friend. Together, in Wellington, their wives still had each

other for company. But now George, alas, would have to

make do imagining what Stan might say.

As he panted, squeezing his massive bulk through a

cramped stricture between sodastraw draperies, the echoes

of his breathing came back to him as a voice that wasn't

there.

"Dump the sanctimony about wishing you were really a noble

savage, Button . . . Admit you're as Western as I am."

"Never!" George grunted as he popped free, into the

final stretch of open passageway. Gasping, with hands on his

knees, he seemed to hear his friend's voice converging like a

conscience from every wall.

"What, never . . . ?"

George stood up straight at last, and grinned.

"Well . . . hardly ever." The ringing in his ears

sounded musically like laughter until it faded away. Setting

out again, he thought, There are no non-Western peoples

anymore.

Indeed, there wasn't a Maori alive whose blood didn't

flow with multicolored blends of English, Scots, Samoan,

and scores of other flavors. Nor had any living Maori grown

312 D A V I D B R I N

up without color video or the omnipresent, all-pervading

influence of the Net.

Still, I am more than just another homogenized gray

man of bland gray times' And if I'm forced by circumstances

to lie, then at least I can look on my lies as a Maori

should, as appalling things!

And to that, at last, Stan Coldman's surrogate voice

remained silent. His friend, George knew, would not disagree.

Turning a bend in the passage, he stopped and turned

off his lamp. At first the sudden blackness was so utter, his

hand was lost in front of his face. At last, however, he made

out an incredibly faint glimmer, reflecting off a rupicoline

wall ahead. That could only mean one thing, that he was

nearly back to the site.

Dialed to its lowest level, the lamp still made him blink

when it came back on. He set out again, first scrambling over

a ledge and then ducking under a hanging rock drapery to

emerge at last on a balcony overlooking the grotto where he

and the others had come to battle demons.

Unlike their comfortable, furnished caverns back in

New Zealand, only a few stark floodlights cast intimidating

shadows across this great gallery. Sleeping bags lay strewn

on piles of hay purchased from a Papuan farmer who plowed

the hillsides overhead, not suspecting what vast counties lay

beneath his hissing tractor. A portable recycling unit stood

in one corner, taking in the team's wastes and returning a

necessary if unpalatable fraction of their needs.

None of these discomforts mattered to George's veterans,

of course. So it had to be the virgin nature of these

secret caves that had everyone talking in whispers, softly,

respectfully, as if to spare the place any more violation than

necessary. George wasn't the only one to go off on solitary

reverent explorations. During the brief rest periods their

medic demanded between long stints of labor, most of the

crew now and then took off just to get away for a little

while.

There were other, larger caverns in this network--one

even bigger than Good Luck Cave, in Sarawak, dwarfing

forty sports stadia. But this one served their needs and so

had been sacrificed for the project. Several meters of sediment

had been cleared away, exposing hard rock where a

large hemispherical basin had been dug.

EARTH 313

Nearby lay the metal frame that would hold their new

thumper, and beyond that stood the tank where the crystal

cylinder itself was slowly growing, atom by atom, under the

direction of a myriad of simple, tireless nanomachines. In

two days the perfect lattice would be a finely tuned superconducting antenna, and their real work would begin.

George climbed down a series of gour pools over which

small waterfalls had once cascaded. He'd been away only

half an hour, yet his crew had already resumed work.

No need to play foreman here. It's amazing what a

strong, motivator it can be, when you have a slim chance to

save the world.

A slight, dark-featured man looked up at George from

inside the bowl-like excavation, standing on a wooden scaffold.

"So my friend, did you find your river?"

George's Papuan friend, Sepak Takraw, had enlisted to

help their shorthanded team. Enlisted under false pretenses,

for George had told him they were probing for deep methane--a

recurring grail ever sought by countries that had

once been rich in oil, but now grew used to paucity again

and hated it. Sepak's vow of confidentiality was titanium

clad, of course. Still, George couldn't justify letting any

more people know the true nature of their mission. Perhaps

later he'd get to tell Sepak. After they succeeded. Or when

they knew for sure they'd failed.

"Ah." George lifted his shoulders. "The river is no

more."

"Too bad." Sepak sighed. "Maybe the farmers took it

away."

"It's a thirsty world." George nodded. "So. How does

the foundation look?"

Sepak gestured into the bowl, where two of George's

engineers were scrutinizing the smooth wall with instruments.

"As you see, we're all but finished. Only bloody-

damn Kiwi perfectionism keeps them at it. Since Helvetians

went extinct, you lot are the worst nit-pickers around."

George smiled at the mixed compliment. However

much they bickered, both Maori and pakeha New Zea-

landers agreed that any job worth doing was worth doing

well. Tangoparu Ltd. had built its reputation on that fetish

for accuracy.

And all the more so this time. The parameters Alex

314 D A V I D B R I N

Lustig gave us will be difficult enough to meet without

human error.

"They finally tired of my impatience and chased me

away. Such impertinence. Here, help me out of this pit, will

you?"

George hoisted his small friend. Once on his feet, Sepak

laid down his tool bag and took out a small flask. It was a

mild local brew, but one notorious for playing hell with

anyone not used to it. So naturally, he offered George a

swig. George shook his head. He had taken a vow.

When next I drink, it will be to our world's salvation

1. or standing over the bloody ruin of the bastards who

wrecked her.

"Suit yourself." Sepak knocked back a swallow and

then slipped the flask into a pouch embroidered with beaded

butterfly designs. He was a full-blooded member of the Cimi

tribe, which took pride in a very special distinction. Of all

nations, clans, and peoples on Earth, only among native

Papuans were there still a few left alive who remembered

when the planet had not been a single place.

This year was the centennial of the 1938 Australian

expedition which discovered the Great Valley of central

New Guinea, isolated until then from any contact with the

outside world. The last "unknown" tribes of any size had

been found there, living as they had for countless generations--tending crops, waging war, worshipping their gods,

thinking their long notch between the mountains the sum

totality of existence.

Until the Australians arrived, that is. From that moment,

the Age of Stone was extinct. The universal Era of the

Electron soon enveloped everyone--one world, one culture,

one shared vocabulary. One shared Net.

Overhead, Sepak's great-great-uncle was among the celebrities

being interviewed for global news channels--one of

just a few who remembered when the tall white outsiders

arrived. "The last first contact," was how media referred to

the event.

Or at least, Stan Coldman might insist optimistically,

the last first contact to occur on Earth.

Sepak would talk about it at the least excuse. Clearly,

he saw no distinction between Maori and pakeha, dismissing

all non-Papuans as "whites," in the generic sense. In

the odd, reverse pecking order of modern ethnicity-chic,

EARTH 315

there was no higher status than to have a great-grandfather

who had once chipped his own tools from native stone.

Who, in pure, primitive innocence used to reverently and

with relish consume the flesh of his neighbors.

Sepak looked along one of the galleries, where polished

stone ripples fell away toward shrouded mysteries. "So. No

more river. Too bad. What good is a glorious cave without a

stream to make it laugh and sing? What's become of the

thing that carved this mighty place? Such a mundane end,

to be sucked away to irrigation wells."

"There are signs the river flowed only a few decades

ago." From his pocket, George unfolded a handkerchief.

Sepak peered at a few glinting slivers. "What are they?"

"Fish bones."

The Papuan sighed. Whatever sightless species had once

lived atop this tiny ecosphere's food chain, a few wan skeletons

were its only legacy.

George knew that millions above ground would share

his sense of loss if they were told. These days, it might even

lead to calls for action. Although the uniqueness of this

particular line was forever gone, perhaps some other species,

locked away in some preserve or life ark, might prosper here

if only the water returned. But George would keep his secret,

only wondering what these parched channels might

have been like when a chuckling, lightless miracle coursed

their hidden beds.

Again, he thought he knew what Stan Coldman might

say.

"Hey, all right. We make mistakes. But who told us, back when we

started digging and mining and irrigating, that it would come to this?

No one. We had to find out for ourselves, the hard way.

"So where were those damned UFOs and charioted gods and

prophets when we really needed them? No one gave us a guidebook for managing a planet. We're writing it ourselves now, from hard experience."

Concealing a sad smile, George also knew how he'd reply.

/ mourn the moa, whom my own ancestors drove into

extinction. I mourn the herons and whales, slaughtered by

the pakeha. / mourn you too, little fishes.

When all of this was done, he would fill glasses for his

friends, and drink to each lost species. And then, if there

316 D A V I D B R I N

was enough beer left in the world, he'd also toast those yet

to die.

"Come on, Sepak," George said, folding away his handkerchief.

"You can help me adjust the crane assembly. It has

to be perfect when we lift the cylinder out of its bath."

"Precision, precision." Sepak sighed. Notwithstanding

his engineering degree from the University of Port Moresby

--and skin no darker than George's--he muttered, "You

honkies put too much faith in your precious machines.

They'll steal your souls, trust me. We Gimi know about this.

Why just the other day my grandfather was telling

me . . ."

Content to receive a healthy dose of his own medicine,

George listened politely while they worked together--suffering

in ironic role reversal the very same sort of guilt trip

he'd inflicted on countless others since he first learned how.

Stan would just love this, George thought, and listened

humbly while Sepak turned the tables on him, milking the

overflowing teat of Western shame for all it was worth.

D

1. And so She stopped first at the planet Venus to see if that might be the place. But when She sipped the atmosphere, She

exclaimed, "Oh no! This is much too hot!"

Then She went to Mars, and once more cried out. "Here it's

much too thin and cold!"

At last, however, She came to Earth, and when She tasted

the sweet air She sang in delight. "Ah, now this one is just

right!"

It wasn't much, as sculptures go. Especially on an island

C renowned for its monuments. A small pyramid of stone,

0 that was all--jutting from a sandy slope, where sparse

R grasses swayed to restless ocean breezes. A black-winged

E Chilean kestrel took off with a screeching cry as Alex

climbed the low hill to get a better look at a three-sided nub

of polished granite. At first sight, it was something of a disappointment.

Come on, Lustig. Get with the spirit. It's only the tip

of something much, much bigger. Imagine it doesn 'the end

EARTH 317

just below ground, but keeps slanting down. down, ever

downward . . .

He knew how those edges were aimed, probably far better

than the original artist who had put the sculpture here,

seven decades ago.

Imagine the Earth surrounds a solid pyramid, with

four faces and four vertices, whose tips just pierce the surface . . .

He pictured a vast, stony tetrahedron--like one of the

magic geometric forms Johannes Kepler used to think kept

planets well ordered in the sky. Before Alex stood not a

modest, unassuming monument, but one apex of the largest

sculpture in the world. One containing the greater part of

the world.

Similar carvings had been placed in Greenland, New

Guinea, and South Africa, in one of the only arrangements

that let each vertex emerge on dry land. For reasons similar

to the artist's, Alex had chosen the same four sites to place

his secret resonators. It was more than mere happenstance,

therefore, that had brought him here to Rapa Nui.

Standing over the stone pinnacle, Alex turned slowly,

hands in his pockets, taking in the treeless, rocky plain.

Westward a few kilometers jutted the cliffs of Rano Kao, one

of the island's three large, dormant volcanoes, overlooking a

sea of frothy whitecaps. Not counting trivial islets, the wind

riven by that jagged prominence arrived after crossing eight

thousand miles of unimpeded ocean.

How strange to think on such scales, when all my

training is to contemplate the infinitely small.

Standing here, he knew with utter precision where the

other Tangoparu teams were dispersed around the globe.

Probably none of them would encounter their local portions

of the Whole Earth Sculpture. Sites two and four were offset

from the actual monuments by several hundred kilometers.

But this was the hub. Few islands were so small compared

with the vast ocean surrounding them. Alex could not

have missed this apex had he tried.

Some say pyramids are symbols of luck, he pondered.

But I'd still prefer a dodecahedron.

Rapa Nui had been chosen as headquarters for other

reasons, not least of which was security. Here the Pacific

Society of Hine-marama had more influence than the "national"

authorities in faraway Chile. Under the society's

318 D A V I D B R I N

umbrella they could bring in a large crew, sparing Alex the

need to supervise construction, leaving him time to wrestle

the cloud of numbers and images in his head.

Those images followed him everywhere, even walking

along the cinder cone of an ancient volcano or contemplating

strange monuments on an isle of monuments.

Just north of Rano Kao, for instance, near Rapa Nui's

solitary town and landing strip, squatted a white shape that

had once been a proud bird of space. Now guano streaked

and forlorn, the shuttle A tiantis perched permanently on a

rusted platform for visitors to gawk at and birds to use in

other ways. Keeping his promise to Captain Tikhana, Alex

had paid his respects to the stripped hulk, once a multi-

billion-dollar vessel of aspiration, but now just another

Easter Island obelisk. The sensations engendered had been

forlorn.

Like the first time he had seen the native statues this

place was famous for. There had been that same woebegone

feeling.

1. ; as if this were a place hopes came to die.

Alex turned southward. There, by the tiny, crashing

bay of Vaihu, stood a row of seven towering carvings, called

moai, pouting under heavy basalt brows. Several bore cylindrical

topknots made of reddish scoria. They faced inland,

seamed with cement where latter-day restorers had pieced

them together from broken fragments. The glowering sentinels

did not seem grateful. Rather, they radiated grim, obdurate

resentment.

Before departing for the Arctic, Stan Coldman had

given Alex a slim book about Easter Island, with old-style

paper pages. "You're going to one of the saddest, most fascinating places on Earth," the elderly physicist had told him.

"In fact, it has a lot in common with Greenland, where I'm

headed."

Alex couldn't imagine two places less alike--one a continent

in its own right, covered with ice, the other a fly-

speck, broiling and nearly waterless amidst the open ocean.

But Stan explained. "Both were experiments in what it

might be like to plant a .colony on another world--tiny settlements, isolated, without trade or any outside support,

forced to live by their wits and meager local resources for

generation after generation."

EARTH 319

Stan concluded grimly. "In neither case, I'm afraid, did

humanity do very well."

Indeed, from what Alex later read, Stan had understated

the case. Hollywood images of Polynesian paradises

ignored the boom-and-bust cycles of overpopulation that hit

every archipelago with desperate regularity--cycles resolved

by one means chiefly--the bloody culling of the adult male

population. Nor did movies refer to that other holocaust--

the slaughter of native species--not just by people, but by

the pigs and rats and dogs the colonists brought with them.

The Polynesians weren't particularly blameworthy. Humans

had a long history of making messes wherever they

went. But Alex recalled his grandmother once explaining

the importance of scale. The smaller, more isolated the

ecosystem, the quicker any damage became fatal. And there

were few places on Earth as small, isolated, or fatal as Rapa

Nui.

Within a few generations of humanity's arrival, around

800 ad, not a tree was left standing. Without wood for boats,

the settlers then had to abandon the sea, along with all possibility of escape or trade. What remained was native rock,

from which they cut rude homes . . . and these desolate

icons.

Overpopulation and boredom left open only the one

option--endless war. One brief century after the great statues

had been raised, nearly every one had been smashed in

tribal forays and reprisals. By the time Europeans arrived--to

arrogantly rename the place after a Christian holiday--the

natives of Rapa Nui had nearly annihilated each other.

As if we moderns do much better. It only takes a bit

more power, and greater numbers, to accomplish what the

Easter Islanders never could . . . to foul something as big,

as the ocean itself.

Earlier, he had strolled the island's one narrow beach,

up at Anakena, where Hotu Matu'a long ago first landed

with his band of hopeful settlers. And what Alex at first

thought was white sand turned out to be bits of shredded

styrofoam, ground from "peanuts" and other packing material

spilled thousands of miles away. The stuff had been

outlawed when he was still in university. Yet it still washed

ashore everywhere. Scraggly sea birds poked through the detritus.

They might not be dying, but they certainly didn't

look well, either.

320 D A V I D B R I N

Jen, he thought, wishing his grandmother were here to

talk to. / need you to tell me it's not already too late. I need

to hear there's enough left to be worth saving.

The .glowering statues stared inland, seeming to share

Alex's gloomy premonitions.

Oh, the new gravity resonator worked all right. In its

first test runs it had picked out Beta's familiar glitter in

brighter detail than ever. Echoes bracketed the massive,

complex singularity within twenty meters inside Earth's

fiery bowels.

So far, so good. But in those reverberations Alex had

also seen how fast the taniwha was growing.

Damn, we have hardly any time at all.

He looked beyond the dour stone figures, and in his

imagination he suddenly pictured Ragnarok. Steam billowed

as the sea was rent by sudden gouts of flame, leaving behind

a measureless, bottomless hole.

Then, back into the unplugged depths, the despoiled

ocean poured.

"Here's the news," June Morgan told him when he returned

to the prefab hall the technicians had built not far from

Vaihu. It felt like a small sports arena set upon a flat expanse

of naked bedrock. Under the opaque roof they had erected

their computers and the master resonator ... a gleaming

cylinder newly born from its vat of purified chemicals and

now anchored to swiveled bearings. Alex said, "just give me

a summary, will you, June?"

Though she wasn't part of the original cabal, June had

proven invaluable, along with several of Pedro Manella's

"new people." Her expertise on magnetism came in particularly

handy as they traced the fields lacing Earth's core, seeking

those weird zones of superconducting current discovered

only weeks ago.

Also, June was a demon for organization. As the hurried

days passed, Alex came to rely on her more and more.

"Site two reports they'll have full readiness in just a

few hours," the blonde woman said, confirming that George

Hutton's group in New Guinea was on schedule. "Greenland

team says they'll be-in operation by tomorrow afternoon."

"Good." Alex had known Goldman and Tikhana

would come through. "What about Africa?"

EARTH 321

She lifted her eyes. "They were supposed to report in

again two hours ago but . . ." She shrugged. With their

program so delicately balanced, failure at even one location

would be disastrous. And the African team was in territory

completely out of their control. Still, it was amazing Jen had

managed getting them into Kuwenezi at all.

"Don't worry about it. My grandmother's never been

on time for an appointment in her life. Still, she somehow

always comes through. We won't need site four for a while

yet.

"As for us, however, the time's come," he concluded,

raising his voice. "So let's get busy."

He sat at a nearby station, showing the familiar holographic

display of a cutaway Earth, with side projections

for every factor he could possibly want to follow. Their earlier

probes had set off all types of vibrations below--gravitational,

sonic, electrical. Likening the planet to a complex,

untempered bell seemed more appropriate each time they

tapped it. At the world's surface, all this "ringing" sometimes

manifested in trembling movements--a resonant coupling

Alex was just beginning to sort out. At worst, if they

weren't careful they might release pent-up faulting strains,

already on the verge of bursting.

"Hmm," he pondered, looking at the latest output.

"Looks like the tremors weren't so bad this time, even

though we increased power. Maybe we're getting the hang of

this."

New maps indicated many zones below where raw

power waited to be tapped, as soon as their network was

complete. It's a whole world down there, Alex thought.

And we've only just begun exploring it.

Now the border between liquid core and mantle was

shown in such detail, it appeared like the surface of an alien

planet. There were corrugations which looked startlingly

like mountains, and rippling expanses that vaguely resembled

seas. Shadow continents mimicked thousands of kilometers

below the familiar ones. Far under Africa, for

instance, an intrusion of nickel-iron bobbed like an echo of

the granite frigate floating far above.

There was "weather," too--plumes of plasti-crystalline

convection circulating in slow-motion currents. Occasionally,

unpredictably, these streamways flickered into that

322 D A V I D B R I N

astonishing, newly discovered state, and electricity flowed in

perfect strokes of lightning.

It even "rained." Long after most of Earth's iron and

nickel had separated from the rocky minerals, settling into

the deep core, metal droplets still coalesced and migrated

downward, pelting the boundary with molten mists, drizzles,

even downpours.

/ shouldn't be surprised. Convection and change of

state would have to operate down there, too. Still, it all

seemed eerie and suggested bizarre notions. Might there be

"life" on those shadow masses? Life to which the plastic,

tortured perovskites of the mantle made up an "atmosphere"?

To whom the overhead scum of granite and basalt

was as diaphanous and chill as high cirrus clouds were to

him?

"Ten minutes." June Morgan gripped her clipboard

plaque nervously. And Alex noticed others glancing his way

with similar looks. Still, in his own heart he sensed only icy

calm. A grim, composed tranquility. They had studied the

monster", and now teratology was finished. It was time to go

after the thing, in its very lair.

"I'd better get ready then. Thanks, June."

He reached for his subvocal, fitting the multistranded

device over his head and neck. As he adjusted the settings,

he recalled what Teresa Tikhana had said to him back in the

Waitomo Caves, just before they parted.

". . . It's a long way to the next oasis, Dr. Lustig. You know that, don't you? Someday we may find other worlds and perhaps do better with them. But without the Earth behind us, at our backs, we'll never ever get that second chance ..."

To which Alex mentally added, // we lose this battle,

we won't deserve another chance.

He showed none of this, however. For the sake of those

watching him, he grinned instead and spoke with a soft,

affected burr.

"All right, lads, lassies. Shall we invite our wee devil

out to dance?"

They laughed nervously.

Swiveling in its gimbaled supports, the resonator turned

with accuracy finer than any human eye could follow. It

aimed.

And they began.

PART VII

PLANET

A tug of war began, between sea and sky and land.

In the ocean, life was carnivorous and simple, a

pyramid founded on the very simplest forms, the

phytoplankton, which teemed in great colored tides

wherever sunlight met raw materials. Of the elements

they needed to grow and flourish, hydrogen and oxygen

could be taken from the water, and carbon from the air.

But calcium and silicon and phosphorus and nitrates

1. these had to be acquired elsewhere.

Some you got by eating your neighbor. But sooner or

later, everything suspended in the sea must drop out of

the cycle to join the ever-growing sediments below. Cold

upwelling currents replenished part of the loss, dragging

nutrients back up from the muddy bottoms. But most of

the deficit was made up at the mouths of rivers, draining

rain-drenched continents. Silt and minerals, the raw

fertilizer of life, dripped into the sea like glucose from an

intravenous tap.

On land, it took a long time for life to gain a

foothold. And for a very long time there were just frail

films of cyanobacteria and fungi, lacing the bare rock

surfaces with filaments and tiny fibers. These first soils

kept moisture in contact with stone longer, so

324 D A V I D B R I N

weathering hastened. The flow of calcium and other

elements to the sea increased.

Plankton are efficient when well fed. And so, after

the breakup of Condwanaland, when many great rivers

fed shallows teeming with green life, carbon was sucked

from the air as never before. The atmosphere grew

transparent.

At that time the sun was less warm. And so,

deprived of its greenhouse shield, the air also cooled. Ice

sheets spread, covering more and more of the Earth until,

from north and south, glaciers nearly met at the equator.

This was no mere perturbation. No mere "ice age. "

Reflecting sunlight into space, the icy surface stayed

frozen. Sea levels dropped. Evaporation decreased because

of the chill. There was less rain.

But less rain meant less weathering of continental

rocks . . . less mineral runoff. The plankton began to

suffer and grew less efficient at taking carbon out of the

air. Eventually, the removal rate fell below

replenishment by volcanoes and respiration. The

pendulum began to swing the other way.

In other words, the greenhouse grew back. Naturally.

Within a few tens of millions of years the crisis was

over. Rivers flowed and warm seas lapped the shorelines

again. Life resumed its march--if anything, stimulated by

the close call.

A tug of war . . . or a feedback loop . . . either

way it succeeded. What matter that each cycle took

epochs, saw countless little deaths and untold tragedies?

Over the long term, it worked.

But nowhere was it written, in water or in stone,

that it absolutely had to next time.

EARTH 325

D Dear Net-Mail User I D EweR-635-78-2267-3 aSp]:

Your mailbox has just been rifled by EmilyPost, an autonomous

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by an anonymous group of net subscribers in western

Alaska. [D ref: sequestered confession 592864 -2376298.98634, deposited with Bank Leumi 10/23/36:20:34:21. Expiration-disclosure 10

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Of course you enjoy free speech. But EmilyPost has been

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Post with other options you'll soon find out about. . . .

When the tiny settlement had first been established on

L the salty verge of the Gulf of Mexico, tall ships wearing

I high-top wings of white sailcloth had to ride the tidal

T flow through a measureless, reedy delta in order to

H reach it. Negotiating the shifting channels took a good

0 pilot. Still, the new trading post lay within easy reach of

S piping seabirds. Sailors at anchor could hear breakers

P boom against sand bars.

H The port was meant to be a point of contact be-

E tween three worlds--freshwater, saltwater, and the con-

R tinental ocean of prairie rumored to stretch beyond the

E western hills. The village thrived in this role and became

a town. The town, a metropolis. Time crawled by, as

inexorable as the river.

Once a city has grown great and venerable, it takes on

its own justification. Centuries passed. Eventually, the original raison d'etre for New Orleans hardly mattered anymore.

A living thing, it fought to survive.

Logan E'ng strolled a levee watching barges glide past sunken

abandoned docks. Once, this had been the second-busiest

port in North America, but today cargo ships passed on by,

toward the big tube-reloading stations at Memphis, for example.

This muggy evening, the main redolence was of

mint-scented pine oils, added by the city to cover other, less

pleasant aromas. Environment Department launches sniffed

each barge suspiciously. But according to Logan's ex-wife, it

wasn't bilge dumping that gave the river that greasy brown

pungency, but the town's own creaking sewers.

Of course, Daisy McClennon never lacked for causes.

As student protestors, long ago, they had shared the same

battles. Those had been great days to be young and on the

side of righteousness.

But time affects relationships, as well as cities. And

Daisy, the purist, found it ever harder to accept Logan, who

had in his heart something called compromise. Their first

big fight came early on, when Alaska, Idaho, and other holdouts

finally began taxing household toxics like canned

paints and pesticides, to encourage proper disposal. Logan

had been elated, but Daisy wrinkled her nose, detecting a

sellout. "You don't know string pullers and deal makers like I do,"

she had declared. "If they gave in so easily, it was to forestall bigger EARTH 327

sanctions later. They're experts at testing the wind, then giving you moderates just enough rope. . . ."

Logan came to envy other people, whose marriages

might wither or flourish over mundane things like money or

sex or children. For their part, he and Daisy had always

earned more than they needed, even in these tight times.

And their lovemaking used to be so good that even in middle

age he still thought her the most desirable woman alive.

How absurd that little differences in politics should

come between them! Differences he, personally, found inscrutable.

He still vividly recalled that final, bitter evening, wiping

biodegradable dish soap from his hands as he tried to

catch her eyes. "Hey! I m on your side!" he had pleaded.

"No you're not!" she had screamed back. A handmade

plate shattered on the wall. "You build dams! You help irrigators ruin fertile land!"

"But we have new ways . . ."

"And every one of your new ways will just bring on more catastrophes!

I tell you, I can't live an.ym.ore with a. man who sends bulldozers tearing across the countryside . . ."

He recalled her eyes, that evening ten years ago, so icy

blue and yet so full of fire. He had wanted to hold her, to

inhale her familiar scent and beg her to reconsider. But in

the end he went out into the night ... a humid night like

this one . . . carrying suitcases and a feeling ever afterward

of exile.

Ironically, Daisy had been as good as her word. She

could tolerate him, if not his views, just so long as he didn't

live in the same house. Shared custody of Claire was handled

so easily, Logan had to wonder. Was it because Daisy

knew he was a good father? Or because the issue simply

didn't loom as large to her as the latest cause?

"People talk as if the old days of capitalist rapists ended on the beaches of Vanuatu, and with the sack of Vaduz," she had pro-

nounced just last Sunday, over a dinner of neo-Cajun blackened

soycake. "But I know better. They're still there, behind the

scenes, the profiteers and money men. Anti-secrecy laws just drove them undercover.

"All this talk of using tax policy to 'assess social costs' . . . what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them."

This from a vegetarian, who thought it murder to harm

328 D A V I D B R I N

a perennial plant! At one point during the meal, Logan's

daughter caught his eye. I just have to live with Daisy till college --Claire's look of commiseration seemed to say--You had to

be married to her!

Actually, a part of Logan perversely enjoyed these

monthly exposures to Daisy's fanaticism. Among his engineering

peers he so often took the pro-Gaian side in arguments,

it was actually refreshing to have the roles reversed

occasionally.

Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man

good to see things from a different point of view.

Take the scene from this levee. Logan found it hard to

get excited over simple sewage. It was only biomatter, after

all, headed straight for the gulf. Not something really serious,

like heavy metals in an aquifer or nitrates in a lake. The

brown stuff out there wouldn't make pleasant drinking water.

(Who drank from the Mississippi anyway?) But the

ocean could absorb one hell of a lot of fertilizer. No cities

lay downstream, so officials looked away when the Old

Dame . . . leaked. New Orleans had special problems anyway.

From atop the splattered dike, Logan spied the massive

flood barrier city fathers had built to fight aggressive tidal

surges. The price for that impressive edifice lay behind him

--a town still elegant and proud, but wracked by neglect.

Logan had toured Alexandria, Rangoon, Bangkok, and

other threatened cities, assessing similar panoramas of grandeur

and loss. Sometimes his advice had actually helped,

like at Salt Lake, where the rising inland sea now surrounded

a thriving sunken municipality. More often,

though, he came home feeling he'd been battling mud slides

with his bare hands. The death of Venice, apparently, hadn't

taught anybody anything.

Sometimes you just have to say good-bye.

Here in New Orleans, earnest men and women worked

to save their unique town. He'd recently helped the Urban

Corporation anchor seventeen downtown blocks against further

sinking into the softening ground. Tonight they were

rewarding him with a night in the old French Quarter, still

gay and full of life--though now the Dixieland strains echoed

off these riverside barricades, and barges rolled by even

with wrought-iron balconies.

At one point he just had to get away, for his ringing ears

EARTH 329

to cool off and the fiery cuisine to settle. Excusing himself,

he left to stroll the muggy, jacaranda-scented evening, stepping

aside for lovers and wandering groups of Ra Boys on the

prowl. The Big Easy had class all right. In decline, there

remained an air of seedy blaisance, and even the inevitable

bandit types believed in courtesy.

He listened to the barge horns and thought of the manatees

that had inhabited this area, back when La Salle's men

first poled their way through endless marshes, trading ax

heads for furs. The manatees were long gone, of course. And

soon . . . relatively soon ... so would New Orleans.

The dying of any city begins at its foundation. The

French had faced a huge expanse of bayous and reed beds

where the Mississippi deposited silt far into the Gulf. This

posed a problem. You want to build a town at the mouth of

a great river, but which mouth? Natural rivers have many.

They chose the most navigable one, and used a Chip-

pewa word to call it "Mississippi." But nature paid no heed

to names. Channels silted up, and the river kept bulling new

paths to the sea.

It was natural, but men found it inconvenient. So they

started dredging, saying, "This shall be the main channel,

always and forever. "

Dredged mud piled up along the banks of a trough that

pushed ever outward, carrying its load of plains dust and

mountain sediment deeper into the gulf. Not a fan but a

finger, poking mile by mile, year after year, in the general

direction of Cuba.

Meanwhile the rest of the delta began eroding.

Logan had inspected hundreds of kilometers of embankments,

thrown up in forlorn efforts to save the doomed

shore. More tall levees contained the river, whose gradient

flattened over time. Suspended silt began falling out even

north of Baton Rouge. Soon the sluggish current no longer

held back the sea. Salinity increased.

Upstream, the Mississippi fought like an anaconda,

writhing to escape. The contest was one of raw power. And

Logan knew where it would be lost.

Can you hear it calling? He asked the captive waters.

Can you hear the Atchafalaya, beckoning you?

Fortunately, Claire would move away long before the

Mississippi burst through the Old River Control Structure or

some other weak point, spilling into that peaceful plain of

330 D A V I D B R I N

cane fields and fish farms. But Daisy? She'd never budge.

Perhaps she didn't believe because the warning came from

him, and that made Logan feel vaguely guilty.

In effect, he could only pray the Corps' new barriers

were as good as they claimed. It was possible. Schools now

taught youngsters to think in terms of decades, not mere

months or years anymore. Maybe that culture had worked

its way even to Washington.

But rivers see decades, even centuries, as mere trifles.

The Mississippi rolled by. And, not for the first time,

Logan wondered if Daisy might be right after all. / try to

find solutions that work with Earth's forces. I like to think

I've learned from the mistakes of past engineers.

But didn 'the they, too. think they built for the ages?

He remembered what Shelley had written, about an ancient

pharaoh.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Now the pyramids of Giza, symbols of man's conquest of

time, were crumbling under the smoggy breath of fifty million

denizens of Cairo. The monuments of Ramses were flaking

to dust, blowing away to become thin layers in some

future geologist's dissection of the past.

Can we build nothing that lasts? Nothing worth lasting?

Logan sighed. He had been away too long. He turned

away from the patient river and took the rusted, creaking

iron stairs back into the ancient city.

A man in blue stood near the door of the restaurant, his

crewcut and patchy skin exaggerated by the rhodium flicker

of the entrance sign. At first, Logan thought the fellow was a

Ra Boy in mufti. But a second glance showed him to be too

old, and much too formidable to be a Ra Boy.

Normally, Logan would have left out the second glance,

but one does look twice when someone steps up and grabs

your elbow. Logan blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"No. It's I who must apologize. You're Logan Eng, may I

assume?"

"Uh . . . I won't serve time for keeping it mum." The

flip cliche rolled out before he could regret it, but the sal-

EARTH 331

low-faced man appeared not to notice. He let go of Logan's

arm only as they moved away from the doorway.

"My name is Glenn Spivey, colonel. United States

Aerospace Force."

The stranger held out an ID that projected a holographic

sphere ten centimeters across, emblazoned with

crusty military emblems.

"Please go ahead and use your wallet plaque to verify

my credentials, Mr. Eng."

Logan started to laugh. Partly in relief this wasn't a robbery

and partly at the incongruity. As if anyone would want

to fake such a garish thing!

"I'm sure I believe you ..."

But the other man insisted. "I really would prefer you

check, sir."

"Hey, what's this about? I have people waiting . . ."

"I know that. This shouldn't take long. We can talk

soon as you've verified my bona fides. It's for youi own pro

tection, sir."

In the stranger's eyes, Logan recognized a tenacity far

exceeding his own. Arguing was clearly futile.

"Oh, all right." He took out his wallet and aimed its

lens first at Spivey and then at the man's glowing credential.

Quickly he dialed the private security service he used for

such things and pressed his thumb to the ident-plate. In

three seconds the tiny screen flashed a terse confirmation.

All right, the fellow was who he said he was. Logan

might have preferred a robber.

"Shall we go for a walk then, Mr. Eng?" Spivey motioned

with one arm.

"I just finished walking a piece. Can we sit down? I

really only have a moment ..."

His protest trailed off as the officer showed him to a

long black car parked at the curb. One glance told Logan the

thing was made of steel throughout, and ran on high-octane

gasoline.

Astounding. Work vehicles were one thing. Out in the

field, machines needed that kind of power. But what use was

it here in a city? This told him more than he'd learned by

reading Spivey's ID.

Logan felt like a desecrator, planting his work pants on

the plush upholstery. When the door hissed shut, all sound

from the blaring, cacophonous street instantly vanished.

332 D A V I D B R I N

"This is a secure vehicle," Spivey told him, and Logan quite

believed it.

"All right, Colonel. What's all this about?"

Spivey held up one hand. "First I must tell you, Mr.

Eng, that what we're about to discuss is highly classified.

Top secret."

Logan winced. "I want my lawyer program."

The officer smiled placatingly. "I assure you it's all legal.

You must be aware certain government agencies are exempt

from the open-access provisions of the Rio Treaties."

Logan knew that. Disarmament hadn't ended all threats

to peace or national security. Nations still competed, and in

principle he accepted the need for secret services. Still, the

idea made him intensely uncomfortable.

Spivey went on. "If you wish, though, we can record

our conversation, and you may deposit a copy with a reputable

registration service. Which one do you use for business?

I'm sure you often sequester proprietary techniques for

weeks or months before applying for patents."

Logan relaxed just a bit. Sequestering a conversation, to

keep it confidential for a short time, was another matter

entirely ... so long as a legal record was kept in a safe

place. In that case, he wondered why Spivey used the word

"secret" at all.

"I deposit with Palmer Privacy, but--"

Spivey nodded. "Palmer will be satisfactory. Because

we'll be discussing matters of national safety, however, and

a possible threat to public welfare, I must ask for a ten-year sequestration, at ultimate level."

At that level, only a high court could open the record

before expiration. Logan swallowed. He felt as if he had

stepped into a bad flat-movie from the twentieth century,

one made all too realistic in Daisy McClennon's enhancement

lab. He was tempted to look around for the flashing

pink star, installed to cue viewers that this wasn't real.

"Naturally, my agency will reimburse the extra cost, if

that's a concern," Spivey added.

After a moment's hesitation, Logan nodded. "Okay."

His voice felt very dry.

Spivey took out two recording cubes, black, with tamper-proof

seals, and set them into a taper. Together, they

went through the ritual, establishing names and conditions,

time and location. At last, with both cubes winking, the

EARTH 333

colonel settled back in his seat. "Mr. Eng, we're interested in

your theories about the incident at the Biscay tidal barrage."

Logan blinked. He had been imagining things this

might be about, from person smuggling, to waste-dumping

scams, to insider trading. He traveled widely and met so

many colorful types that there was no telling how many

might be involved in the ceaseless, sometimes shady jockeying

of governments and corporations. But Spivey had surprised

him with this!

"Well, Colonel, I'd have to classify that paper more under

the heading of science fiction than theory. After all, I

published in a database for speculative ..."

"Yes, Mr. Eng. The Alternate View. Actually, you may

be surprised to learn our service keeps close tabs on that

zine, and similar ones."

"Really? It's just a forum for crackpot ideas . . ." He

read the other man's look. "Well, maybe not as crackpot as

some. Most subscribers are technical people. Let's say it's

where we can publish things that don't belong elsewhere--

certainly not the formal journals. Most of the ideas aren't to

be taken seriously."

He felt uncomfortably sure Spivey was watching his every

move, taking his measure. Logan didn't like it.

"Are you saying you think your hypotheses worthless?"

the man asked levelly.

Logan shrugged. "There are lots of notions that seem to

work on paper, or in Net simulations, but can't be justified

in the real world."

"And your notion was?" Spivey prompted.

Logan thought back to the case of the missing drill rig

in southern Spain--and the anchor boom that had been

lifted on end at the tidal power station--both without any

sign of sabotage.

"All I did was calculate how a special type of Earth

movement could have caused the strange things I saw."

"What kind of Earth movement?"

"It's . . ." Logan lifted both hands parallel. "It's like,

well, pushing a child on a swing. If you shove at the right

frequency, matching the natural pendulum rhythm, you'll

build momentum with each stroke--"

"I'm aware of how resonance works, Mr. Eng. You suggested

the Spanish anomalies were caused by a special type

of seismic resonance. Specifically, the sudden arrival of ex-

334 D A V I D B R I N

tremely narrowly focused earthquakes and corresponding

gravity variations--"

"No! I didn't say that was the cause! I merely showed

such waves would be consistent with observed events. It's

an amusing idea, that's all. I can't really say why I even

bothered with it."

The government man inclined his head slightly. "I'm

sorry I misspoke. You sound upset about it."

"A man's reputation is important. Especially in my

field. People understand play, of course. So I was careful to

make clear that's all I was doing, playing with an idea! It's

quite another thing to say, 'this is what happened.' I didn't

do that."

Spivey regarded him for a long interval. Finally, he

opened a slim briefcase and pulled out a large-format reading

plaque. "I'd appreciate it if you'd leaf through this, Mr. Eng,

and consider what you see in light of your . . . playful exercise."

Logan thought of protesting. By now his associates in

the restaurant might be worried. Or they might be incoherent

from alcohol or assume he'd gone off to bed. . . .

He took the plaque. Making certain the recording cubes

could read over his shoulder, he put his thumb on the page-

turn button and began skimming. Silence stretched in the

limo as he read. Finally, he said, "I don't believe it."

"Now you understand why I insisted you check my

credentials, Mr. Eng, so you'll know this is no hoax."

"But this episode here ..."

"You haven't seen the actual recording, yet. It's much

more vivid than numbers. Allow me." The man expertly

dialed the correct data page. "This was taken by a high-

altitude reconnaissance blimp, above our Diego Carcia Naval

Station, in the Indian Ocean."

Depicted now in front of Logan was a moonlit seascape.

Calm waters glistened under still tropical air.

Suddenly, the ocean surface flattened in eight places.

Despite the angle of view and foreshortening, Logan could

tell the dimples formed a perfect octagon.

As quick as the dips appeared, they suddenly ballooned

outward, joined now, by an outer ring of smaller bulges,

twenty in all. Scale numbers ran down the side of the

screen, and Logan whistled.

The hillocks collapsed again, much quicker than nor-

EARTH 335

mal gravity could have pulled them down. Forty-nine depressions

replaced them this time. The center eight were

now too deep for the camera to measure.

Then, suddenly, the screen erupted with light. Faster

than Logan could follow, a handful of bright streaks speared

upward, perpendicular to the ocean. They were gone in an

instant, leaving behind a diffracting pattern of circular ripples, spreading and subsiding until at last all was still once

more.

"That's the best example," Spivey commented. "It was

accompanied by seismic activity bearing some similarity to

the Spanish quakes."

"Where . . ." Logan asked hoarsely. "Where did the

water go?"

The colonel's smile was distant, enigmatic. "Just missed

the moon, by less than three diameters. Of course, by that

point it was pretty diffuse. . . . Are you all right, Mr. Eng?"

Genuine concern suddenly crossed Colonel Spivey's face as

he leaned forward. "Would you like a drink?"

Logan nodded. "Yes . . . thank you. I think I need one

very much."

For a little while, despite the car's whispering air-conditioner, he found it rather difficult to breathe.

D NetVol.A69802-11 04/06/38 14:34:12UT. User

G-654.11-7257.Aab12 AP News Alert: 7+: Key-select:

"Conservation," "animal rights," "conflict":

In the ongoing, sometimes violent confrontation between the

International Fish and Fowl Association and the animal rights

group known as No-Flesh, a surprise development today. To the

amazement of many, the Hearth Conclave of the North American

Church of Gaia has intervened in favor of the world's largest

organization of duck hunters.

According to the Most Reverend Elaine Greenspan, sister-

leader of Washington State and this month's spokesper for the

conclave:

"We have examined all the evidence and decided that in

this case neither hunting nor the consumption of animal tissue

harms Our Mother. Rather, the activities of IFFA are clearly

beneficial and meritorious."

336 D A V I D B R I N

In light of the church's long-standing abjuration of the

slaughter of warm-blooded animals, Greenspan explained:

"Our position against red meat is often misunderstood. It's

not a moral stand against carnivorality, per se. There is nothing inherently evil about eating or being eaten, for that is clearly part of Gaia's plan. Human beings evolved with meat as part of their

diet.

"Our campaign has been waged because great herds of

grazing cattle and sheep were destroying much of the Earth.

Vast quantities of needed grain were being wasted as fodder.

And finally, modified food animals such as beef steers are

abominations, robbed of the ultimate dignity of wild creatures, to have a chance to fight or flee, to struggle to survive.

"After hearing the arguments of IFFA representatives, we

find that none of these objections apply to them.

"Similarly, our broad stand against hunting was based on the scarcity of wildlife in comparison with the chief predator, humankind. But this does not hold where hunters are few,

responsible, and sportsmanly, and where the prey species is

renewable.

"Contrary to our initial expectations, we have determined

that IFFA duck hunters have been among the most ardent

supporters of conservation, spending millions to buy up and

preserve wetlands, pursuing polluters and poachers, and

regulating their own activities admirably. Any complete ban on

hunting would, we estimate, lead to catastrophic loss of

remaining migratory routes. The church therefore rules that IFFA

is beneficial to society and to Gaia, and grants its blessing."

In fact, there are precedents for this surprising action. Thirty

years ago, for instance, the church campaigned against the

selling off of many obsolete military bases, which they deemed

better preserved in that state than sold to be developed as

commercial property.

To today's announcement, however, a spokesper for No-

Flesh had only this comment:

"This takes NorA ChuGa hypocrisy to new heights. Killing is

killing and murder is murder. All animals have rights, too. Let

IFFA and their new allies beware. What they do unto others may

yet be visited on them!"

When asked if this was a threat of violence, the spokesper

declined elaboration.

 Nelson Crayson was having trouble grasping

B "cooperation" and "competition." The two words were

I denned as opposites, and yet his teacher claimed they

0 were essentially the same thing.

S Moreover, at some deep level Nelson felt he'd

P secretly suspected it all along.

H "I'm still confused, Professor," he admitted at their

E next meeting, though it cost him to say it. Each time

R Dr. Wolling granted one of these sessions, he feared she

E was finally going to give up on his slowness, his need for

palpable examples at every point of theory.

She looked pale, sitting across the table from him. That

might just be because she spent so much time with those

enigmatic strangers, performing mysterious surveys in the

abandoned gold mine below ark four. Still, Nelson worried

about her health.

Frail she might seem, but her gaze was unwavering.

"Why don't you start off where you do understand,

Nelson?"

He quashed an urge to consult his note plaque. Once,

Dr. Wolling had slapped his hand when he did that too

often. "Respect your own thoughts'" she had snapped.

"All right," he breathed. "The Caia theory says Earth

stays a good place for life because life itself keeps changing

the planet. Otherwise, it would've gone into a permanent ice

age, like Mars. Or a runaway, um, greenhouse instability

losing all its water like Venus did."

"More likely Venus than Mars, actually," she agreed.

"Earth is rather close to its sun for a water world, near the

inner edge of the habitable zone. So how did we avoid a

Venus-style trap?"

For this he had a ready answer, the standard one. "Early

algae and bacteria helped ocean chemistry take carbon

dioxide out of the atmosphere. They bound the carbon into

their skeletons, which, uh, sedimented to the sea floor. So

the atmosphere got clearer"

"More transparent to heat radiation."

"Yeah. So heat could escape, and the oceans could stay

wet even as the sun got hotter. In fact, the air temperature's

stayed roughly the same for four billion years."

"Including ice ages?"

Nelson shrugged. "Trivial fluctuations."

He liked the phrase. Liked the way it rolled off the

338 D A V I D B R I N

tongue. He had practiced it last night, hoping there'd be a

chance to use it. "Like the heating everybody's so worried

about these days. Sure it's making terrible problems, and a

big die-back may be coming . . . including maybe us. But

that's not so unusual. In a million years or so, the balance

will swing back."

Jen Wolling's nod seemed to say he was both right and

wrong. Right that the greenhouse effect of the twenty-first

century wasn't the first upward jolt in Earth's thermostat.

But perhaps wrong that this excursion was like all the

others.

Keep to the topic! He reminded himself. That was the

problem with intellectual talk. It spun out so many

sidetracks, you never got where you were going unless you

used discipline. As if "intellectual" and "discipline" were

words he had ever imagined applying to himself, only six

months ago!

"So," Dr. Wolling said, placing one hand on the other.

"Life kept changing Earth's atmosphere in just the right way

to maintain a suitable environment for itself. Was this on

purpose?"

Nelson felt briefly miffed she'd try to snare him so.

Then he realized she was only being a good teacher and

giving him an easy one. "That'd be the strong, Gaia

hypothesis," he answered. "It says the homeo . . . um,

homeostasis . . . life's balancing act ... is all part of a

plan. The religious Caian people--" Nelson chose his words

carefully out of respect for the Ndebele "--say Earth's

history proves there's a god, or goddess, who designed it all

to happen this way.

"Then there's the middle Caia hypothesis . . . where

people say the Earth behaves like a living organism. That it

has all the properties of a living creature. But they don't say

it was actually planned. If the organism has any

consciousness, it's us."

"Yes, go on," she prompted. "And what's the standard

scientific view?"

"That's the weak Caia theory. It says natural processes

just interact in a predictable way with things like oceans and

volcanoes . . . calcium^ runoff from continents and such

... so carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere

when it's cold, but when things get too hot the gas is pulled

out, letting heat escape again."

EARTH 339

"It's a process, then."

"Yeah, but one with all sorts of built-in stabilities. Not

just in temperature. Which is why so many people see a

plan."

"Indeed. But I only made you review all that because it

bears on your question. How can competition be looked at

as a close cousin to cooperation?

"Think about the Precambrian Era, Nelson, two to

three billion years ago, when green algae in the ocean began

pulling all that carbon out of the air in earnest. Tell me,

what did they pour forth in its place?"

"Oxygen," he answered quickly. "Which is

transparent ..."

She waved one hand. "Forget that for a moment. Think

about the biological effects. Remember, oxygen burns. It

was--"

"A poison.'" Nelson interrupted. "Yeah. The oJd

bacteria were Anna ..."

"Anaerobic. Yes. They couldn't deal with such a

corrosive gas, even though they were the ones putting it

there! It was a classic case of learning to live in your own

waste products."

Nelson blinked. "Then . . . then there must have

been pressure to adapt."

Dr. Wolling's smile transmitted more than just

satisfaction. The encouragement both warmed and confused

Nelson.

"Exactly," she said. "A crisis loomed for Caia. Oxygen

pollution threatened to end it all. Then some species

stumbled onto a correct biochemical solution--how to take

advantage of the new high-energy environment. Today,

nearly everything you see around you is descended from

those adaptable ones. The few surviving anaerobes are exiled

to brewery vats and sea bottoms."

Nelson nodded, eager to keep that expression in her

eyes. "So Caia went on changing and getting better--"

"--more subtle. More complicated."

His head hurt from trying so hard. "But ... it sounds

like both at the same time! It was cooperation, because the

species making the' change had to shift together. Y'know,

hunter and hunted. Eater and eaten. None of them could

have made it alone.

340 D A V I D B R I N

"But it was competition, too, 'cause each of them was

struggling only for itself!"

Dr. Wolling absently waved away a wisp of gray hair.

"All right, you see the essential paradox. We've all, at one

time or another, wondered about this strange thing--that

death seems so evil. Our basic nature is to oppose it. And

yet, without it there'd be no change, nor any life at all.

-"Darwin made the cruel efficiency of the process clear

when he showed that every species on Earth tries to have

more offspring than it needs in order to replace the prior

generation. Every one tries, in other words, to overpopulate

the world, and must be regulated by something outside

itself.

"What this universal trait means is that the lion not

only cannot lie down with the lamb ... he cannot even be

completely comfortable lying down with other lions! At

least not without always keeping one eyelid cracked."

Nelson looked at her. "I ... think I understand."

She tapped the table and sat up. "Tell you what. Let's

take an even better example. Do you know anything about

the nervous system?"

"You mean the brain and stuff?" Nelson shook his

head. How much could a guy learn in a few months? Damn!

Even using hypertexts, there was so much knowledge and so

little time.

Jen smiled. "This is simple. We'll use a holo."

She must have planned this. One muttered word and

the desk projector displayed a cutaway view of a human

cranium. Nelson recognized the outlines, of course. As early

as third grade, kids were taught about the two hemispheres

--how both sides of the brain "thought" in different ways

that somehow combined to make a single mind.

Sophistication about such matters increased as you

grew older, and sometimes not for the better, as when

teenagers put together homemade tomography-scan kits to

get real-time activity images of their own brains. Not for

greater self-awareness, but so they could learn how to "daze

out"--to release the brain's own natural opiates on demand.

That honey pot had never tempted Nelson, thank goddess.

But he'd seen what it did, to friends and almost agreed with

those who wanted to outlaw self-scanning devices.

"See the complicated blue mesh?" Dr. Wolling asked.

"Those are nerve cells, billions of them, connected so

EARTH 341

intricately that computer scientists, with all their

nanodissectors, still haven't duplicated such complexity.

Each synapse--each little nonlinear electric switch--

contributes its own tiny syncopated lightning to a whole

that's far, far greater than the sum of its parts--the towering

standing wave that composes the symphony of thought."

// only I could talk like that, he wished, and instantly

chided himself for even dreaming it. He might as well aspire

to win his own Nobel prize.

"But look closely, Nelson. The volume taken up by

nerve cells is actually small. The rest is water, lymph, and a

structure of glial cells and other insulating bodies, which

feed and support the nerves and keep them from shorting

out.

"Now, consider instead the brain of a fetus."

The image shrank to a smaller, simpler shape. Within

the bulging dome, the dazzling blue tracery was now absent.

"Instead of nerves," Jen went on, "we have millions of

primitive protocells, pretty much undifferentiated and

dividing like mad. So how is it some of these cells know to

become nerves, and others humble supporters? Is it all laid

down in some plan?"

"Well, sure there's a plan! It's in the DNA ..."

Nelson's voice trailed off as he noticed her watching him.

She had to be drawing a parallel, somehow, with the

planetary condition. But he couldn't see the connection.

There's a plan, all right. But how? Is there some little

guy inside the baby's skull who reads the DNA like a

blueprint and says, "You! Become a nerve cell! You there.'

Become a supporter!"

Or is it done in some simpler . . .

"Uh!" Nelson's head snapped up suddenly and he met

her cool gray eyes. "The protocells . . . compete with each

other . . . ?"

"To become nerve cells, yes. Excellent insight. Nelson.

Here, watch closely." Jen touched another control and

multicolored lights glowed at pinpoints along the rim of the

skull. "These are sites where neural growth factors secrete

into the mass of protocells. A different chemical from each

control point. Coding in each cell tells it what to do if it

encounters such and such a mixture of growth factors. If it

gets enough of just the right combination, it gets to be a

nerve cell. If not, it becomes a supporter."

342 D A V I D B R I N

Nelson watched, fascinated, as flows of color spread out

from each secretion site. Here red and white merged to form

a distinct pink blending. Elsewhere a blue stimulant

overlapped a green one and formed complex swirls, like

stirred paint.

"Also," Dr. Wolling went on, "the cells secrete

chemicals of their own, to suppress their neighbors, a lot

like the quiet chemical warfare waged by plants ..."

Nelson grabbed his own set of controls and zoomed in

for a closer look. He saw cells writhe and jostle, striving to

soak where the colors shone brightest. Different chemical

combinations seemed to trigger different behaviors . . .

here a frenzy of growth leading to tight bundles of

successful nerves. Over there, a sparser network with only a

few winners, whose long, spindly appendages resembled

spiders' legs.

"It's like ... as if the different mixes make different

environments, eh? Like how different amounts of sunshine

and water make a desert here, a jungle there? Like . . .

ecological niches?"

"Very good. And we know what happens when one

niche is damaged or fails. Inevitably it affects the whole,

even far away. But go on. How do the cells deal with the

different demands of the different environments?"

"They adapt, I guess. So it's . . ." Nelson turned to

face his teacher. "It's survival of the fittest, isn't it?"

"Never did like that expression." But she nodded.

"You're right again. Only here, the 'food' they compete for

isn't really food. It's a brew of substances needed for further

development. If a cell gets too little it dies, in a manner of

speaking. As an astrocyte or other support cell, it lives on.

But as a potential nerve cell, it is no more."

"Amazing," Nelson muttered. "Then, the arrangement

of nerves in our brain, it comes about because of those

scattered little glands, all giving out different chemicals?"

"Not just scattered, Nelson. Well placed. Later I'll show

you how just one small difference in the amount of

testosterone boys get before birth can make crucial changes.

Of course, after birth learning takes over, fully as important

as anything that came before. But yes . . . this part really is

amazing."

Dr. Wolling shut off the display. Nelson rubbed his

eyes.

EARTH 343

"Evolution and competition go on inside us," he said in

awe.

She smiled. "You really arc a bright young fellow. I

can't tell you how many of my students fail to make that

leap. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense to

use inside us the same techniques that helped perfect life on

the planet as a whole."

"Then our bodies are just like . . ."

She stopped him. "That's enough for now. More than

enough. Go feed your pets. Get some exercise. I slipped

some readings into your plaque. Co over them by next time.

And don't be late."

Still blinking, his mind awhirl, Nelson stood up to go.

It wasn't until much later that he seemed to recollect her

standing on her toes to kiss his cheek before he left. But by

then he was sure he must have imagined it.

As his duties expanded, taking him from the regulated pools

and fountains of the recycling dome to the rain forest

habitat to the enclosed plain where elands stretched their

legs under reinforced crystal panes, the two baboons

accompanied Nelson like courtiers escorting a prince. Or

more likely, apprentices attending their wizard. For

wherever Nelson strode, magical things happened.

/ speak a word, and light streams forth, he thought as

he made his nightly rounds. Another, and water rises for

animals to drink.

Voice-sensitive computers made it possible, of course.

But even sophisticated systems weren't good enough to

manage a place like this. Not without human expertise.

Or where that ain't available, let blind guesswork

substitute, eh?

Nelson's reaction to his spate of promotions had been

pleasure mixed with irritation.

After all, I don't really know anything!

True, he seemed able to tell when certain animals were

about to get sick, or when something needed fixing in the air

or water. He had a knack for setting overhead filters so the

grass grew properly, but guesswork was all it was. He had

talents never imagined back in the crowded Yukon, but

talent was a poor substitute for knowing what you were

doing!

So Nelson went about his duties a troubled wizard,

344 D A V I D B R I N

pointing at ducts and commanding them to open, sending

squat robots off on errands, rubbing and tasting leaves . . .

worrying all along that he hadn't earned this gift. It was like

a big joke perpetrated by some capricious fairy godmother.

Not knowing where it came from made it seem revokable at

any time.

In his reading he encountered another phrase--"idiot

savant"--and felt a burning shame, suspecting it referred to

him.

A human being knows what he's doin'. Otherwise,

what's the point in being human?

So he waFked his rounds nodding, listening to the

button player in his left ear. Every spare moment, Nelson

studied. And the more he learned, the more painfully aware

he grew of his ignorance.

Shig and Nell helped. He'd point at a piece of fruit, and

they would scurry to bring back the sample. What genetic

magic had made them so quick to understand? he wondered.

Or maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm part monkey.

This evening both baboons were subdued as he led

them on rounds with unusual intensity. In his head,

Nelson's thoughts roiled.

With images of high school . . . the sports teams and

the gangs . . . cooperation and competition.

Images of his parents, hard at work side by side, striving

for long hours to make their business thrive . . .

competition and cooperation.

Images of cells and bodies, species and planets.

Cooperation and competition. Are they really the

same? How can they be?

To some, the conflict seemed inherent. Take

economics. The white immigrant, Dr. B'Keli, had given

Nelson texts praising enterprise capitalism, in which striving for individual success delivered efficient goods and services.

"The invisible hand" was the phrase coined long ago by a

Scotsman, Adam Smith.

In contrast, some still promoted the visible hand of

socialism. In Southern Africa, cosmopolitans like B'Keli

were rare. More often, Nelson heard derision of the

"soullessness" of money-based economies, and speeches

extolling paternalistic equ'ality.

The debate sounded eerily like the one raging in

biology, over the supposed sentience of Caia. "The blind

EARTH 345

watchmaker" was how some agnostics referred to the

putative designer of the world. To them, creation required

no conscious intervention. It was a process, with

competition the essential element.

Religious Caians retorted furiously that their goddess

was far from blind or indifferent. They spoke of a world in

which too many things meshed too well to have come about

by any means but teamwork.

Again and again, the same dichotomy. The conflict of

opposites. But what if they're two sides of the same coin?

He hoped some of Dr. Wolling's, references would offer

answers. Usually, though, the readings only left him with

more questions. Endless questions.

At last he closed the final reinforced airtight door and

led Shig and Nell home, leaving behind all the animals he

half envied for their lack of complex cares. They didn't

know they were locked inside a fragile rescue craft, aground

and anchored to the soil of an ailing, perhaps dying,

continent. They didn't know of the other arks in this flotilla

of salvation, scattered across the Earth like grails, holding in

trust what could never be replaced.

They didn't have to try to understand the why of

anything, and certainly not the how.

Those worries, Nelson knew, were reserved for the

captain and crew. They were the special concerns of those

who must stand watch.

D . . . Although a body's cells all carry the same inheritance,

they aren't identical. Specialists do their separate jobs, each

crucial to the whole. If this weren't so, if all cells were the same, you would have just an undifferentiated blob.

On the other hand, whenever a small group of cells strives,

unrestricted, for its own supremacy, you get another familiar

catastrophe, known as cancer.

What does any of this have to do with social theory?

Nations are often likened to living bodies. And so, oldtime

state socialism may be said to have turned many a body politic

into lazy, unproductive blobs. Likewise, inherited wealth and

aristocracy were egoistic cancers that ate the hearts out of

countless other great nations.

To carry the analogy further--what these two pervasive and

346 D A V I D B R I N

ruinous social diseases had in common was that each could flourish only when a commonwealth's immune system was weakened. In this case we refer to the free flow of information.

Light is the scourge of error, and so both aristocracy and blob-

socialism thrived on secrecy. Each fought to maintain it at all

costs.

But the ideal living structure, whether creature or

ecosystem, is self-regulating. It must breathe. Blood and

accurate data must course through all corners, or it can never

thrive.

So it is, especially, in the complex interactions among

human beings.

--From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books, edition 4.7

(2035). [D hyper access code 1-tTRAN-777-97-9945-29A.]

Jen watched the glistening pyramid of ark four rise to

H meet the stars. Or at least that was the effect as the

0 open-cage elevator dropped below the dry ground and

L began its rickety descent.

0 Illuminated by the car's bare bulb, the walls of the

S lift shaft were fascinating to watch. Layer after layer of

P nitid, lustrous rock drifted past--probably sediments

H from ancient seas or lake beds or whatever. Stories of

E the fall and rise of species and orders and entire phyla

R ought to be revealed in this trip backward through time.

E But Jen was selectively myopic, unable to read any of

the writings on this wall.

Of course, the days were long gone when any scientist,

even a theoretician, could do it all alone. Jen had a

reputation as an iconoclast. As a shit disturber. But every

one of her papers, every analysis, had been based on

mountains of data carefully collected and refined by

hundreds, thousands of field workers, long before she ever

got her hands on it.

/ have always relied on the competence of strangers.

She, who had built a theoretical framework for

understanding Earth's history, had to depend on others,

first, to find and lay out the details. Only then could she

find patterns in the raw data.

It was ironic, then. Here she was, the one some called

the living founder of modern Caianism--a movement that

EARTH 347

had already gone through countless phases of heresy,

reformation and counter-reformation. And yet she was

illiterate with the Mother's own diary right in front of her,

written in palpable stone.

Ironic, yes. Jen appreciated paradoxes. Like taking on a

new student when everything might prove futile and

pointless within a few short months, anyway.

As pointless as my life . . . as pointless as

everybody's life, if some way isn 'the found to get rid of Alex 's monster.

Of course it was unfair to name it so. In a sense, her

grandson was humanity's champion, leading their small

fellowship to battle the demon. Still, a part of Jen seethed at

the boy. It was an irrational corner which couldn't help

associating him with that awful thing down there, eating

away at the Earth's heart.

Each of us is many, she recalled. Within every human,

a cacophony of voices rages. Despite all the new

techniques of cerebrochemical balancing, and sanity

seeding, those inner selves will persist in thinking unfair

thoughts from time to time, and make us utter things we

later regret. It may not be nice, but it's human.

What was it Emerson had said? "A foolish consistency

is the hobgoblin of little minds." One might say she had

lived by that adage. Watching the rock wall glide past, Jen

determined she really must send Alex a note of

encouragement. Even a few words could mean a lot to him

in this time of struggle. It irritated her that she only seemed

to think of it when she was away from her computer,

plaque, or telephone.

Then there's security, she thought, knowing full well

she was rationalizing.

Dr. Kenda, head of the Tangoparu team here in

Kuwenezi, really was fanatical about preventing leaks. Jen

had been asked not even to hint to the Ndebele about their

true mission here. She could only tell their hosts that the

task was vitally important to the Mother. Fortunately, that

had been enough so far.

But will it suffice later, when the Earth starts shaking?

Kenda had demanded maps of the entire mine complex.

There was disturbing talk of emergency plans and escape

scenarios, of dike barriers and aquifer pressures. Jen felt

348 D A V I D B R I N

uneasy, hating to think Ndebele hospitality might be repaid

with betrayal.

One thing at a time, she told herself. What mattered

now was that they were on line, adding their machine's

throbbing power to whatever skein of forces Alex had

devised to snare the beast below, the singularity.

Lost in her thoughts, she hardly noticed as the air grew

warmer. Dank, fetid odors rose from deeper down, where

decades of seepage had filled the unpumped mine's lower

sections. The lift stopped short of those realms, fortunately.

Jen pushed open the rattling gate and set off down a tunnel

lit by a string of tiny bulbs.

Here and in other similar mines, the old white oligarchy

had skimmed the wealth from one of the richest countries in

the world. Properly invested, the veins of gold and coal and

diamonds might have provided for future generations, white

and nonwhite, long after the minerals ran out. Most of the

present black cantons did not blame the old oligarchs for

racism, per se. After all, they practiced tribal separation

themselves. What made them seethe was something much

simpler. Theft. And the frittering away of a vast treasure by

those too blind to see.

Today, the thieves' blameless descendants were bitter

refugees in faraway lands, and the victims' equally blameless

progeny had inherited a terrible anger.

Condensation glistened. Jen's footsteps echoed down

the side corridors like lifeless, skittering hauntings. At last

the light ahead brightened as she neared the open cavern

chosen by Kenda's team. There, under a vaulted ceiling, lay

the equipment they had brought from New Zealand. And in

the center loomed a gleaming cylinder, anchored in bedrock.

The dour Japanese physicist glared sourly as she arrived.

Clearly, he chafed at the condition she had imposed, in

return for her help in acquiring this site . . . that she be

notified before every run and be present as a witness.

"What was the damage, last scan?" she asked.

Kenda shrugged. "A few tremors southeast of the

Hawaiian Islands. Nothing to speak of. Hardly any

comments on the Net."

Of course she had^no way to check after him. Not

without sending out her own search programs, which would

inevitably leave a trail. So she relied on open news channels,

which seemed to have hardly noticed the chain of minor

EARTH 349

disturbances circuiting the globe. Eventually, someone was

sure to spy a pattern, of course. Hawaii, for instance, was at

the antipodes from this site. All one had to do was draw a

line from there, roughly through the Earth's center . . .

1. through the devil thing down there . . .

Jen shivered. She was no invalid at mathematical

modeling. But just two pages into one of Alex's papers she'd

gotten utterly lost in a maze of gauzy unrealities that left

her head spinning. She still couldn't bring up an image of

their enemy. Vanishingly small, titanically heavy, infinitely

involute--it was the essence of deadliness. And from

childhood, Jen had always feared most those dangers

without faces.

"Five minutes, Dr. Wolling," one of the technicians

said, looking up from his station. "Can I get you a cup of

coffee?" His friendly smile was a marked contrast to Kenda's

sour attitude.

"Thank you, Jimmy. No, I think I'd better go get ready

now." He shrugged and rejoined the others, staring into

video and holo displays, their hands gripping controller

knobs or slipped into waldo gloves. Jen walked past them all

to the corner unit she'd been assigned, where she was

grudgingly allowed to tap in her subvocal. She donned the

device and let holographic displays surround her.

She coughed, yawned, cleared her throat, swallowed--

setting off waves of color as the unit tried to compensate for

all the involuntary motions. With her own computer back

home, the clearing process was quick and automatic. Here,

deprived of all the custom design that made her terminal a

virtual alter ego, she had to do it fresh each time.

Mists dissolved into blankness. Jen dialed the unit's

sensitivity upward . . .

... and a Tiger flashed out at her,

roared, and then quickly receded into the

h;icksroillld . . -

sparkles d;lsh(:d and t'oppcd . . .

1. coruscating words with images . . .

Even the tiniest signal to her jaw or larynx might be

interpreted as a command. Keeping one hand on the

sensitivity knob, she concentrated to erase mistakes the

machine kept interpreting as nascent words.

350 D A V I D B R I N

Few people used subvocals, for the same reason few ever

became street jugglers. Not many could operate the delicate

systems without tipping into chaos. Any normal mind kept

intruding with apparent irrelevancies, many ascending to

the level of muttered or almost-spoken words the outer

consciousness hardly noticed, but which the device

manifested visibly and in sound.

Tunes that pop into your head . . . stray associations

you generally ignore . . . memories that wink in and out

1. impulses to action . . . often rising to tickle the

larynx, the tongue, stopping just short of sound . . .

As she thought each of those words, lines of text

appeared on the right, as if a stenographer were taking

dictation from her subvocalized thoughts. Meanwhile, at

the left-hand periphery, an extrapolation subroutine Grafted

little simulations. A tiny man with a violin. A face that

smiled and closed one eye ... It was well this device only

read the outermost, superficial nervous activity, associated

with the speech centers.

When invented, the subvocal had been hailed as a boon

to pilots--until high-performance jets began plowing into

the ground. We experience ten thousand impulses for every

one we allow to become action. Accelerating the choice

and decision process did more than speed reaction time. It

also shortcut judgment.

Even as a computer input device, it was too sensitive for

most people. Few wanted extra speed if it also meant the

slightest subsurface reaction could become embarrassingly

real, in amplified speech or writing.

// they ever really developed a true brain-to-computer

interface, the chaos would be even worse.

]en had two advantages over normal people, though.

One was a lower-than-average fear of embarrassment. And

second was her internal image of her own mind.

Modern evidence notwithstanding, most people didn't

really believe their personalities comprised many subselves.

Dealing with stray thoughts was to them a matter of control,

and not, as Jen saw it, negotiation.

/ also have the advantage of age. Fewer rash impulses.

Imagine giving a machine like this to young, libidinous,

hormone-drenched male pilots! Of all the silly things to

do.

Having thought that, she had a sudden memory of

EARTH 351

Thomas, on that summer day when he took her aloft in his experimental midget-zeppelin, back when such things were rare and so romantic. Her golden hair had whipped in his

eyes as he held her close, high over Yorkshire. He had been

so young, and so very male . . .

The unit couldn't interpret any detail in her vivid

recollection, thank heavens! But the sensitivity was ?et so

high, multicolored flashes filled the display, in rhythm to

her emotions. Again, a candy-striped feline poked its nose

around a corner and mewed.

Back into your lair, tiger, she commanded her totem

beast. The creature snarled and slunk back out of sight. The

colors also cleared away as Jen consciously acknowledged all

the extraneous impulses, quelling their irrelevant clamor.

A clock ticked down. At the one-minute mark there

appeared in front of her an image of the Earth's interior--a

complex, many-layered globe.

This wasn't one of her own, ideogenous constructs, but

a direct feed from Kenda's panel. Deep inside the core, a

stylized purple curve showed the orbit of their enemy. Beta.

Already that trajectory showed marginal deviations,

disturbed by earlier proddings from the four Tangoparu

resonators.

Outside that envelope lay a region of blue strands

where channels of softened mantle flickered with sudden,

superconducting electricity--the temporary concentrations

of extra energy Kenda's team needed for the coming push.

She listened as the techs maintained a running commentary.

They would wait till Beta's orbit brought it behind a likely

looking thread, then set off the "gazer"--Alex's bizarre,

incredible invention--releasing coherent gravitational waves

and giving their foe another tiny nudge.

Jen felt a surge of adrenaline. Whatever the outcome,

this was memorable. She hoped she'd live long enough to be

proud of all this someday.

Hell, there's a part of me that doesn't care about the

pride. It just wants to live longer, period.

There is, within me. a bit that wants to live forever.

It was a conceit that demanded a reply. And so, from

some recess of imagination, something caused the subvocal

to display a string of gilt words, right in front of her.

352 D A V I D B R I N

... If that is what you want, my

daughter, that is what you shall have.

For did I not promise you exactly that,

long, long ago?

]en laughed. In a low voice she answered. "Yes you did,

Mother. You promised. I remember it well." She shook her

head, marveling at the texture of her own imagination, even

after all these years. "Oh, I am a pip. I am."

Concentrating carefully, (en ignored further input from

her goddess or any other extraneous corner of her mind. She

focused instead upon the planned procedure and paid

attention to the Earth.

D

To the Efe people, the advancing jungle was just another invader

to adapt to. Legends told of many others, even long before the

Tall People came and went away again.

To Kau, leader of his small band of pygmies, the forest was

more real, more immediate, than that other world had been--

back when he used to wear shirts woven in faraway factories

and carried a carbine as a "scout" for something called "the

Army of Zaire." One thing for certain, the Tall People had been

easier to please than any jungle. You could play to their greed or superstition or vanity, and get all sorts of things the jungle

provided grudgingly, if at all.

The women, like his wife, Ulokbi, used to work in the

gardens of the Lesse people for a share of the crop. In those

days, Kau and his brothers hunted as they pleased, taking paper

money for many of their kills, flattering themselves they were

woodsmen as skilled as their grandfathers had been, before the

hills were laced with wires and pipelines and logging roads.

Now the Lesse were gone. Gone too were the gardens,

roads, carbines, and armies. In their place had come rain and

more rain . . . and jungle such as even Kau's father's

grandfather had never seen. Now Kau tried to remember and

teach his grandsons skills he himself once thought quaint.

It was all very strange. Without the old district clinic, many

children now died. And yet, Efe numbers were on the rise. Kau

could not account for it. But then, one did not try as hard

anymore, to account for things.

Now a new invader was seen clambering through the trees.

EARTH 353

Chimpanzees, spreading from what had been their last

redoubts, were also increasing, returning to reclaim their ancient range.

"Are they good to eat, grandfather?" His eldest grandson

asked one day, when their path crossed under that of a small

ape band, foraging in the canopy overhead. Kau thought back,

remembering meat he'd tasted in his youth. It hadn't been all

that bad.

But then he recalled, also, when the Efe used to squat at the

back of a Lesse village clearing while movies were shown

against a tattered screen. One had been a disturbing tale, all

about apes that had talked and yet were misunderstood and

abused in one of the Tall People's crazy cities. He remembered

being sad--thinking of them as his brothers.

"No," Kau told his grandson, improvising as he went along.

"They have almost-people spirits. We'll eat them only if we're starving. Never before."

One day, not long after, he awoke to find a mound of fruit

piled high beside his hut. Kau contemplated no connection

between the two events. He did not have to.

Teresa rose toward consciousness and for a fey moment

E felt as if she were in two places at once.

X With the deceitful certainty of dreams, she lay

0 lazily, contentedly, beside Jason's warmth. She heard

S her husband's breath and felt his man-sized bulk nearby

P --its weight and strength--which only a little while ago

H she had welcomed upon her, creating a continuum of

E he, she, and the world.

R At the same time, another part of her knew that

E Jason's nearness was ersatz, based on a close but oh so

different reality.

There's no urgency, a third voice urged, pleading

compromise. No duty calls. Hold onto the illusion a little longer.

So she tried to go on pretending. After all, can't

believing sometimes make dreams come true?

No, it can't. Besides, you're awake now.

And anyway, she went on, just to be mean. Jason's on a

one-way trip to some far star.

Without opening her eyes, she remembered where she

was now. The ice told her. Even kilometers away, the

Greenland glacier made her senses dip, tugged at her

354 D A V I U b M I IM

equilibrium, set her teetering. Just as the sloping mattress

seemed to draw her toward the weight beside her.

He doesn't twitch much, she thought about the man

sleeping only a foot away, his mass pushing a well into the

foam rubber pad. Jason used to give those sudden, tiny

jerks . . . like a dog dreaming he's chasing rabbits.

A woman has to get used to a lot when she marries, and

so (ason's nighttime movements had caused some

sleeplessness back at the beginning. But that wasn't half as

bad as when he would suddenly, for no apparent reason,

stop breathing! The rhythm of his soft snores would cease

and she'd snap wide awake in alarm.

It took the base surgeon and a dozen scholarly

references to convince her that mild, intermittent apnea in

adult males was nothing by itself to worry about. In time

she grew accustomed to all of it. To the twitches, the snores,

the sudden pauses. In fact, what had been irritating became

familiar, comforting, normal.

But fust when you get used to someone, fust when

you've reached the point where there's nowhere else in the

world you feel safer. When you feel all is well. That's

when it all gets ripped away from you again. Damned

world.

Tears offered one benefit. They washed away the

scratchy, "rusty drawer" effect of opening your eyes from

sleep. The liquid blur blinked away and the cabin swam into

focus--an insulated prefab with ribs of cured, undressed

pine. The furniture was spare and economical--a small

bureau, chairs, and a table bearing two used candles, two

glasses, and an empty wine bottle. An open closet held

exactly six changes of clothes, including an impressive arctic

suit that wouldn't need much alteration to work on Mars.

If anyone ever got to Mars.

Pervading the room were odors, from the candles, from

machinery . . . and others Teresa admitted feeling

ambivalent about. Powerful ambivalence.

Hers for instance. Her own sweat. Her shampoo. All

mingled with the overpowering aroma of a man.

"Good morning, Emma."

She turned her head on the pillow and saw his pale blue

eyes looking into hers. He's been watching me, she realized.

He was so still. I thought he was asleep.

EARTH 355

"Mmmp," she said, rubbing her eyes to wipe away any

trace of tears. "C'mornin'. What time is it?"

Lars glanced over her head. "Plenty early, yes. Did you

sleep well?"

"Fine. Fine." She pushed her pillow back against the

headboard and sat up, keeping the sheet above her breasts.

They still throbbed pleasantly from his attentive study

hours earlier. So intent had he been, so assiduous, one might

have thought he intended memorizing them and every other

contour of her body.

It had felt good. Had been good. A woman needs

appreciation, worship, from time to time. There had been a

dozen good reasons to say yes to this. He was a nice man.

Their quick-scan blood tests had checked out okay. It had

been far too long. And Teresa knew she didn't talk in her

sleep.

Teresa lived by checklists. They were modern mantras

to peace of mind. By any logical checklist, she should feel

okay about this. Still, there remained an unreasoning part of

her which adamantly sought excuses to feel guilty.

"I ... have packing to do," she said.

"It's only six. I wish you'd stay a while. I will cook

breakfast. I melted glacier ice already for coffee." In Japan,

they paid fifty thousand yen a kilo for the best ten-

thousand-year-old blue ice. Here, of course, one didn't have

to pay freight or refrigeration charges or even a resource-

depletion tax. Ancient ice lay right outside the front door,

in gigatons.

"I have one more survey scan to help with this morning

1. and the zep picks me up at fifteen hundred . . ."

"Emma, I almost have the feeling you want to get away

from me."

She'd been avoiding his eyes. Now she looked up again

quickly. Ah, she thought. No fair smiling at me like that!

Lars was everything the teenager inside her could hope

to swoon for. Built for power and endurance, he

nevertheless was gentle and tactile with those calloused

hands. His face was a regular delight: rugged and yet

retaining a touch of innocence about the eyes. It pleased

Teresa such a young, handsome fellow showed so much

enthusiasm for her. It was good for the morale. Cood for her

self-esteem.

Hell, last night was much better than good. If ever one

356 D A V I D B R I N

night's solitary consummation can be called "good." And

clearly one night was all this could ever be.

She reached up and caressed his cheek, thrilling to the

prickly touch of his morning stubble. For the moment,

reality was nice enough. When his hand stroked gently up

her side, settling eventually over one breast, she exhaled a

sigh that was ninety-five percent pleasure. The rest could go

to hell.

"No, Lars. I don't feel I have to get away from you."

As he bent to whisper in her ear, Teresa knew yet

another way to feel good about this. "Emma," he

murmured, speaking the name on her passport, the woman

she was during this brief interlude.

As Emma then, she clung to him and again sighed.

Stan Coldman escorted her to the aerodrome when it was

time for her to leave. The small cargo zeppelin was already

moored, its transparent flanks turned toward the sun to

focus every available watt onto its internal photocells.

Together they walked the long way across the open

moraine, he immersed in his own thoughts and she in hers.

"Here, take a look at this," Stan said at one point, leading

her a few meters to the left. "Do you see that?"

"See what?" He was pointing at a jumble of stones.

"Yesterday those were in a stack. I put them there.

Today it's toppled."

Teresa nodded. "Quakes." In her valise she carried data

on the recent increase in local, low-level Earth tremors,

gathered with the finest instruments. "Why the poor man's

seismograph, Stan?"

The elderly physicist smiled. "Never put all your

confidence in sophisticated gadgets, my dear. It's as bad as

trusting faith alone, or math, or your own senses."

Actually, Teresa's nickname in the Bus Driver's Guild

was "Show Me" Tikhana. She nodded in agreement. "I'll

try to remember that."

"Good. The Lord gave us eyes and imagination, faith

and reason, enthusiasm and obstinacy. Each has its place."

He kicked one of the fallen rocks. "I'm afraid it won't be

long before a lot more people suspect something's going on."

So far only a few obscure sources on the Net were

commenting on the pickup in worldwide seismic activity.

But she knew what incident had Stan particularly worried.

EARTH 357

"Have they found that plane yet?" she asked. "The one in

Antarctica?"

He shook his head. "They're assuming it crashed. But

there's not a peep from the flight transponder. And you

heard the report of that ozone scientist, who claimed seeing

something flash into the sky? The location corresponds with

the plane's last known position . . . and the emergence

point of one of our recent beams.

"I'm afraid we've probably inflicted our first

casualties."

Teresa forgave Stan his oversight. Or maybe he was

right to leave out those killed on Erehwon. That debacle had

been a true accident, after all. This time though, despite all

their precautions, they were directly to blame. Everyone in

the cabal knew this venture would cost even more lives

before it was over.

For a few minutes they walked in silence. Teresa

thought about cracks in the ice, fractures in the ground,

peals of thunder in the sky.

She also thought about how good it felt to breathe the

crisp air. To feel the breeze off the glacier on her skin. To be

alive.

"I wish I could go with you," Stan said as they neared

the bobbing zeppelin. "I'd give anything to talk to Alex and

Ceorge and find out what's going on in the big picture. Our

images of the interior are poor with this slave resonator. The

master must be giving Alex such a view of the beast."

Teresa realized he must envy Lustig the chance to map

their enemy's anatomy, too small to measure except in units

familiar to atoms, denser than a neutron star. "I'll have him

send you a portrait with the next courier. You can keep it by

your bedside, along with Ellen and the grandkids."

Her gentle teasing made him grin. "You do that."

Standing near the gangway, he offered his hand. She

threw her arms around him instead. I'll also tell Ellen she's

a lucky old girl.

Lifting her eyes over his shoulder, she saw a much taller

man at the edge of the field, standing near a big, round lifter-

crane. His hands are probably already stained with oil, she

thought, recalling how, even after Lars had washed, his skin

had given off the piquant, exciting tang of engines. They

had said their good-byes . . . she with a promise of a future

message or visit he probably knew to be a lie. And so he

358 D A V I D B R I N

simply lifted his hand and shared with her a soft smile of no

regrets.

NASA thought she was still at a seclusion resort in

Australia. It wouldn't do to have a random Net inventory

show her flitting about on the other side of the globe. But at

any moment there were millions drifting across the sky in

everything from cruise liners to economy "cattle cars" to

tramp freighters like this one. That was why the trip back to

New Zealand would include several lighter-than-air legs,

linking points where she could sneak long passages on

Tangoparu Ltd. turboprops. Settling near a window to

observe the crew cast off, Teresa resigned herself to a long

time alone with her thoughts.

Two men watched her go. One waving from the

docking site and the other farther off, standing next to an

open cowling. But as the airship leaped in a rush of released

buoyancy, Teresa's gaze lifted beyond the airstrip, beyond

the dome where Stan's crew conspired to chivvy a monster,

beyond the stony pit where sleuths sought clues to ancient

cataclysms. She skimmed breathlessly over the great ice

sheet, but even its mass could not hold her. Teresa felt a

lifting in her heart. The soft, happy thrumming of the little

zep's engines seemed to resonate with the tempo of her

pulse.

It was no unaccustomed thing, this affair she had with

flight. And yet each time felt as if she'd fallen in love again.

It was a romance separate from all earthly ardors, more

steadfast, yet unjealous of any other passion.

It's not speed that matters, she thought. It's the-^t.

It's breaking the bonds.

Far beyond the unsetting sun, she felt the pull of

faraway planets and longed to follow even there.

It's/lying . . . , she thought.

So Teresa crossed her arms and settled in to make the

best of a long voyage round the world.

D

Elvis roams the open interstates in a big white cadillac.

It has to be him. How else to explain what so many flywheel-

bus and commuter-zep riders claim to have seen . . . that

EARTH 359

plume of dust trailing like rocket exhaust behind something too

fast and glittery to be tracked with the naked eye?

Squint and you might glimpse him behind the wheel,

steering with one wrist while fiddling the radio dial, then reaching for that never-ending, always frosty can of beer. "Thank you,

honey," he tells the blonde next to him as he steps on the

accelerator.

The roar of V-8 power, the gasoline smell of freedom, the

rush of clean wind blowing back his hair . . . Elvis hoots and

lifts one arm to wave at all true Americans who still believe in

him.

Certain chatty Net-zines are rife with blurry pictures of him.

Snooty tech types claim the photos are fakes, but that doesn't

bother the faithful who collect grand old TwenCen automobiles

and polish them, saving up for that once-a-year spin down the

highway, meeting at the nearest Graceland Shrine for a day of

chrome and music and speed and glory.

Along the way, they stop at ghostly abandoned gas stations

and check for signs that he's been by. Some claim to have

found pumps freshly used, reading empty but still somehow

reeking of high octane. Others point to black, bold, fresh tire

tracks, or claim his music can be heard in the coyotes' midnight

serenade.

Elvis roams the open interstates in a big white cadillac. How else to explain the traces some have found, sparkling like fairy dust

across the fading yellow lines?

A pollen of happier days ... the glitter of rhinestones.

Across eight thousand miles of open ocean, the autumn

C gale had plenty of time to accelerate, to pick up power

0 and momentum. So did the waves and tides. Over that

R great stretch, each grew accustomed to mastery. When

E they met the island's stiff resistance, therefore, they

protested in fists of spume that climbed the steep shelf then

clenched and shook in rage.

Alex stood at the window of his hut, listening to the

storm. Even indoors, he felt each boom with his fingertips.

Each breaker set the glass panes vibrating. Rain bursts

assaulted the roof in sudden, pelting furies, rattling it like a

360 D A V I D B R I N

war drum before receding just as quickly again, driven by

the wind to drench some other place.

Out beyond the bluffs, over the sea, luminous backlit

clouds advanced on parade, parting now and then to let the

moon spread a brief, pearly sheen across the turbid waters.

A lonely color, he thought. No wonder they say

moonlight is for lovers. It makes you want someone to

cling to.

Alex was remembering. Remembering when weather

like this had been his friend.

As a student he used to walk the fens and dikes of

Norfolk, traveling all the way from Cambridge at the rumor

of a squall. They were seldom as powerful as this gale, of

course. Easter Island lay unsheltered in the middle of a vast

ocean, after all. Still the North Sea used to put on some

impressive shows.

The locals must have thought him daft to go out in his

wellies and slicker, striding into stiff gusts and cloudbursts.

But that hardly mattered. Nothing in the world felt as vivid

or as potent as a tempest. That year, facing the torture of

exams, he had felt a real need for vividness, for potency.

Others craved sunny days, punting on the Cam, but to Alex

the sky's power seemed to offer something even better--an

anodyne to the ethereal ghostliness of his mathematics and

to those uncertain adolescent qualms.

Once, while walking in keraunophilic splendor through

a thunderstorm, he had actually experienced a sudden

insight into mysteries of transactional quantum mechanics,

an intuition that had led to his first important paper.

Another time he shouted into the rain, demanding it

explain to him why Ingrid . . . yes, that had been her

name . . . why Ingrid had dropped him for another boy.

Generally, the thunder answered only irrelevancies. But

perhaps it had been the shouting itself that provided a

cleansing generally unavailable to Englishmen indoors.

Whatever. He usually came away drenched, drained,

restored.

Now, though, the fens and farms of Norfolk were

drowned. The dikes had surrendered to the sea at last and

those problems that once had vexed Alex now seemed trivial

in retrospect. What wouldn't he give to have them back, in

exchange for today's?

EARTH 361

From the darkness behind him there came a rustle.

"Alex? Can't you sleep?"

Momentary moonlight filled a trapezoid-shaped portion

of the small room as he turned around. June Morgan lay half

within that canted illumination, propped on one elbow,

watching him from bed. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to

wake you."

Her smile was warm, if tired. June's blonde hair was

tousled and flattened on one side. "I reached out," she said.

"You weren't there."

Alex inhaled deeply. "I'm going to the lab for a little

while. I'll be back soon."

"Oh, Alex," she sighed and got out of bed, wrapping

the sheet around herself. She crossed the narrow floor and

reached up to brush at his wild hair. "If you keep this up

you'll kill yourself. You've got to get more rest."

She had a pleasant smell--a feature more important to

Alex than it was to most men. Still, there are some women

whose aroma hits me like . . . ah, never mind.

It was no reflection on June, whom he liked a lot.

Probably, it was just a matter of mysterious

complementarity--of the right interlocking pheromones.

Lucy and Ingrid had smelled like goddesses to him, he

recalled . . . similarities between two otherwise completely

different lovers, known more than a decade apart. // only

one complementarity carried with it all the others, he

thought wistfully. Then all we'd have to do is go around

sniffing each other behind the ear, to find the perfect mate.

"I'm all right, really. Much more relaxed." He threw

his shoulders back, stretching. "You'd do professionally, as a

masseuse."

Her eyes seemed to twinkle. "I have. Someday I'll show

you my license."

"I quite believe you. And . . . thanks for being so

patient."

She looked up at him. Since it seemed expected of him,

and because he knew he really ought to want to, Alex took

her into his arms and kissed her. All the while though, he

chided himself.

She deserves better. Much better than you can give her

now.

Of course she had her own memories and pain. As he

362 D A V I D B R I N

held her, Alex wondered if maybe she felt the same way

toward him as he did toward her. More grateful than in love.

Sometimes it was enough just to have someone to hold.

Alex said hello to the techs on duty when he arrived. They,

in turn, waved and greeted their tohunga, their pakeha- pommie expert on weird monsters and cthonic exorcism.

Several of them crawled over scaffolding surrounding the

gleaming gravity wave resonator, giving it required servicing.

Their unit's next run wouldn't be for several hours yet, so

nearly everyone else was taking advantage of the lull to

catch up on sleep.

Those of us who can.

He sat down at his own station, touching panels and

bringing displays to light. The subvocal he left on its stand.

Lately he'd been having trouble controlling the

hypersensitive device. It picked up too many random,

useless surface thoughts which insistently manifested in his

clenching jaw muscles and a recurring tightness in his

throat.

All right, he thought, grimly. What's the latest death

toll?

Alex dialed the special database he'd set up to track

their guilt. Instantly, the far left display unrolled a list of "accidents" reported in the media, whose time and location coincided with one of their emergent beams ... a ripped

zeppelin ... a minor tidal wave ... a missing aircraft

... a mile-long freshwater tanker with its rear end shorn

off.

Surely some of these would have happened without

our intervention.

Yes, surely. Mishaps occurred all the time, especially at

sea. This epoch's ocean sediment consisted of a rain of

manmade junk, sunken vessels, and myriad other debris.

But looking at the list, Alex knew some would never

join the growing layer on the sea bottom. Some, in all probability, were no longer on Earth at all.

He thought of Teresa Tikhana, the first person he knew

who had lost someone to this strange war. She had forgiven

him, even now helped-carry the burden. After all, what were

a few lives against ten billion?

But what if we fail? Those men and women will have

been robbed of precious months. Months to spend with

EARTH 363

their families, with lovers, with summer skies or rain.

Robbed of their good-byes.

It was about to get worse, too, because the project had

been going exceptionally well. Until yesterday, each of the

four resonators had acted independently. Almost every gazer

beam had emerged along a line nearly straight through the

Earth's core. And opposite each of their four sites lay only

open ocean.

But now they had the right parameters. Beta, their

taniwha, had pulsed and throbbed with every scan. Each

time it mirrored amplified gravitons, it also experienced a

kick. Those kicks were starting to add up. Soon, if luck held,

the trough of its orbit would rise out of Earth's crystalline

inner core.

And so the tricky part began--coordinated scans from

two or more stations at once. That would be arduous to

arrange in secrecy, but Alex wasn't daunted by that, only by

the inevitability of doing even more harm. From now on, the

beam would emerge in a different location every time, and

he'd face hard choices.

Should he scrub one run because a beam might graze a

suburb? There were so many vast suburbs. What if it

happened at a crucial stage, when a beam deferred might

mean losing control of their monster for an. otbit, or ten.

... or perhaps forever?

Anyway, only a fraction of the beams interacted with

the surface world at all. Most passed through silently,

invisibly. Alex was only starting to piece together clues as to

why some did so while others coupled so dramatically with

seismic faults, seawater, or even man-made objects.

Unfortunately, they couldn't delay to figure it all out before

continuing. They had to go on.

The holo showed Earth's inmost regions. The pink core

still enclosed two pinpoints, but his Iquitos singularity had

nearly evaporated. Another day and it would be invisible.

The other object, though, was heavier than ever.

Ponderously, Beta rose, hovered, and fell again. To Alex it

appeared to throb angrily.

Each day, seemingly, he got coded queries from George

Button asking about the monster singularity's origin. Pedro

Manella, running interference for the project in Washington

--routing their communications through the most secure

channels he could find--added his own insistent questions.

364 D A V I D B R I N

Who had created the thing? When and where did the idiots

let it fall? Was there evidence that could be shown to the

World Court?

Next week Alex would have to answer in person. It was

frustrating to have learned so much and still be unable to

give a conclusion. But something was queer about Beta's life

history, that was certain.

It's got to be fundamental. The thing can't be less

than ten years old. And yet it has to be, or no one could

have made it!

Above the liquid outer core, the lower mantle glowed

many shades of green, tracing ten thousand details of hot,

slowly convecting, plasti-crystalline minerals. Some currents

looked patient and smooth, like trade winds, while others

were spiked cyclones, spearing toward the distant surface.

Dotted lines tracked intense magnetic and electric fields

--June Morgan's contribution to the model. Most currents

flowed slow and uniform, like heat eddies. But there were

also faint traceries of lambent blue--slender, snaking

threads that flickered even as he watched in real time--the

superconducting domains they had only just discovered.

Fragile and ephemeral, they were the energy source used to

drive the gazer.

Have they changed? Alex wondered. Every time he

looked, the pattern of interlaced strands seemed different,

captivating.

A tone startled him, but the watch officer only glanced

over from his own console, reassuringly. "New Guinea's

about to fire in tandem with Africa, tohunga. Don't worry.

We're off line ourselves for another four hours."

Alex nodded. "Uh, good." Internally he sighed. June is

right. I'm running myself straight into the ground.

He was grateful she stayed with him, despite his

moodiness and hesitant libido. Theirs was a wartime

comradeship of course, to be lived moment by moment,

without playing "push me, pull you" over intangibles like

permanence or commitment. People tend to worry less

about such things when the world itself seems a makeshift,

temporary place. One was grateful for what one got.

Among other things, June had at least given him back

his sexuality.

Or maybe it's the gazer, Alex wondered. For all the

machine's potential destructiveness, he still felt a thrill

EARTH 365

whenever it suddenly cast beams of titanic power. No one

had ever created anything so mighty. Those brief rays were

powerful enough to be detected a galaxy away . . .

provided someone looked in the right direction, at the right

moment, tuned to an exact frequency.

He touched a key and saw the computer had finished

reworking his design for the next-generation resonator--this

one a sphere only a little over a meter across. Spiderweb

domain traceries laced an otherwise flawless crystalline

structure. Even in simulation it was beautiful, though

probably they'd never have time to use it.

He entered a few slight modifications and put the file

away again. Alex yawned. Perhaps he might sleep now.

Still he lingered a few minutes to watch the next pulse-

run. Seconds ticked down. Beta's image passed beneath a

channel of pulsing blue. Suddenly, as Alex watched, yellow

lines lanced inward--George Hutton's New Guinea

resonator casting its triggering beam inward simultaneously

with the one in Southern Africa. The lines met deep within

the core, right on target.

Beta throbbed. Blue threads pulsed. And from the

combination something flickered like a fluorescent tube

coming to life. Suddenly a beam, white and brilliant,

speared outward at a new angle, through all the layered

shells and into space beyond.

Alex read the impulse generated, compared the recoil

coefficients with those calculated in advance and saw they

matched within twenty percent. Only then did he check for

point of exit, and blinked.

North America. Right in the middle of a populated

continent. He sighed. Well, it had to begin sometime,

somewhere.

He wasn't masochistic enough to sit and wait for

damage reports. There'd be guilt enough for later. Right now

his duty was to rest. At least he wouldn't be alone. And June

didn't seem to mind if he occasionally moaned in his sleep.

Halfway back to his hut, however, negotiating a slippery,

narrow path through the wet, waving grass, Alex was caught

suddenly in a glare of lightning.

The flash didn't startle him entirely, since bursts of rain

still rolled like traffic across the plateau and the air tingled

with the scent of long. Nevertheless he jumped, for the

366 D A V I D B R I N

sudden light brought figures out of the gloom--stark, tall

shapes whose shadows seemed to reach like grasping fingers

toward him. During that first stroke, and the black seconds

that followed, Alex felt abruptly cornered. His heart raced.

The next burst only reinforced that impression of

encirclement, but cut off too soon to show what or who was

really there. Or, indeed, if anything was there at all.

Only with the third stroke did he make out what

company of things stalked the dim slope. Alex exhaled

through nostrils flared by pumped adrenaline. Lord. I must

be keyed up, to jump half out of my knickers at the sight of

those things.

It was only the statues, of course . . . more of the eerie

monoliths constructed long ago by the native folk of Rapa

Nui, in their pessimistic, manic isolation.

They saw the end coming, he thought, looking down

the file of awful figures. But they were dead wrong about

the reasons why. They assumed only gods had the power

to wreak such havoc on their world, but people caused the

devastation here.

Alex felt compassion for the ancient Pasquans--but a

superior sort nevertheless. In blaming gods, they had

conveniently diverted censure from the real culprit. The

designer of weapons. The feller of trees. The destroyer. Man

himself.

More rain pelted him, finding entrance under his hat

and collar to send chill rivulets down his spine. Still he

watched the nearest of the great statues, pursuing a

reluctant thought. Lightning flashed again, exposing stark

patterns of white and black underneath those brooding

brows. The pouting lips pursed in sullen disapproval.

For more than a hundred years we've known better. No

outside power can approach human destructiveness. So we

managed not to fry ourselves in nuclear war7 We only

traded in that damoclean sword for others even worse . . .

Something was wrong, here. Alex felt a familiar nagging

sensation--like the tension just before a headache--that

often warned him when he was on a false trail. He could

sense the brooding stares of the ancient basalt figures. Of

course it was the night and the storm, encouraging

superstitious musings--arid yet still, it felt as if they were

trying to tell him something.

Our ancestors used to see all disasters originating

EARTH 367

outside themselves, he thought. But we know better. Now

we know humanity's the culprit. We assume . . .

Alex grabbed at the idea before it could get away.

Lightning struck again, this time so close the pealing

thunder shook his body.

1. we assume . . .

He knew it was only static electricity, crackling and

pounding around him. The atmosphere's equilibration of

charge, that was all. And yet, for the first time Alex listened

1. really listened as his ancestors must have, when they

too used to stand as he did now, under a growling sky.

The next crackling stroke shook the air and bellowed at

him.

1. Don't assume!

Alex gasped, stumbling backward, staggered by a

sudden thought more dazzling and frightening than

anything he'd ever known. All at once the great statues

made horrifying sense to him. And within the thunder, he

now heard the angry voices of jealous gods.

D World areas expected to be submerged when Greenland and

Antarctic ice sheets fully melt. [D Net Vol. A-69802-111, 04/11 /

38: 14:34:12 UT Slat-projection request.]

Large portions of Estonia, Denmark, eastern Britain, northern

Germany, and northern Poland.

The Netherlands.

Western Siberia (the Occidental Plain) east of the Urals,

linking the Black Sea to the Caspian and Azov seas, nearly to

the Arctic.

Lowlands of Libya, Iraq.

The Hindustan and Indus valleys in India.

Portions of northeastern China.

Southwestern New Guinea and a large bight extending into

the Eastern Australian Desert.

The Lower Amazon and La Plata valleys, the Yucatan

Peninsula. Large portions of the states of Georgia, North

Carolina, and South Carolina.

Florida. Louisiana . . .

 Logan ignored the insistent beeping of his wrist-pager.

L Whoever was calling, they'd have to wait till his hands

I stopped shaking. Besides, it was easy to dismiss one tiny

T sound in this cacophony of disaster.

H Sirens blared as emergency vehicles braved the

0 dark, solitary road leading down to where catastrophe

S had struck only a short while ago. Behind Logan, the

P pilot of his commandeered helicopter kept its blades

H spinning as he argued by radio with the Sweetwater

E County Sheriff's Department, urging the SWAT team

R commander to be less trigger happy and a little more

E cooperative with a federal investigating team.

". . . Look! Don't give me all that dumpit load about state and

local jurisdictions having priority. That don't hold canned shit in a gor-

sucked case like this! You see any sign of any burfing terrorists? Do we look like a bunch of fucking greeners?"

Logan ignored the racket. He stared at the panorama

below, lit by the searchlights of sheriff 'copters already on

the scene.

What was left of the Flaming Gorge Dam gleamed like

jumbled, broken white teeth below the darker sheen of

native canyon rock. Part of the glitter came from roaring

water, still spilling over the remains. Most of the great

reservoir had already departed downstream toward the

Green River Valley. Breathless net reporters told of a swath

of devastation, stretching from Wyoming through a corner

of Utah, into northwestern Colorado and finally back to

Utah again.

But then, Flaming Gorge lay near the intersection of

three states, so that was a bit misleading. In fact, the only

town evacuated was Jensen, several score miles downstream.

And by then, most of the flood's force had been spent

ravaging the unpopulated canyons of Dinosaur National

Monument.

Unpopulated . . . if you don't count scores of

missing or panicked campers. Nor a hapless paleontologist

or two.

Logan refused to think about the hurt done those

exquisite, fossil-yard badlands. One disaster at a time. He

stared at the ruined dam, wondering how such total

demolition was accomplished.

It could have been done more economically. Why blow

EARTH 369

a dam into smithereens when a good crack would serve as

well?

Besides, why would any eco-guerrilla want to smash the

Flaming Gorge Dam? No one left alive remembered the

arroyo that had been drowned under the man-made lake.

Anyway, even Neo-Caian radicals recalled the debacle when

someone had wrecked the huge Glen Canyon Dam. The

resulting mess had been a caution to all sides and restored

the world's beauty not one iota.

This didn't feel like a Greener action, anyway. Within

an hour's drive there were scores of more likely targets . . .

places where Logan's colleagues were busy altering the land

for better or worse. Projects hotly debated in the pub-crit

media, not a boring, stolid structure like this stodgy old

dam.

No, this has to be our demon again.

Footsteps scuffed the loose gravel to Logan's right. It

was Joe Redpath, the assistant assigned him only hours ago

for this mission. The tall Amerindian wore twin braids . . .

a fashion statement recently adopted on many university

campuses as chic and declarative. . . though here Logan

figured both hairstyle and attitude were genuine.

"Found some eyewitnesses, Eng," Redpath announced

tersely. "Be here in a minute."

"Good. Any word when we'll get satellite scans of the

explosion itself?"

The other man nodded. "Half an hour, they say."

"That long?" Logan felt a surge of resentment.

Redpath shrugged. "Spivey has lots of teams. You didn't

think you and me were his top boys, did you? Hell, we're

backups for the backups, man."

Logan looked squarely at the part-time federal agent. A

number of retorts crossed his mind--including telling

Redpath where Spivey could take his priorities.

But no. Something was happening in the world. And if

Logan wasn't privy to secret knowledge at the top, at least

his investigator's warrant took him where events were

breaking . . . where he might help solve the puzzle and do

some good.

"What do you think of that?" he said, pointing toward

the shattered dam.

Redpath watched Logan for another second before

370 D A V I D B R I N

turning to survey the scene. "Don't see how they did it." He

shrugged. "Shape's all wrong."

"What shape?"

Redpath gestured with his hands. "Shape of the

explosion. Dams don't break that way. No matter where you

plant the charges."

Logan wondered how Redpath knew. By investigating

other cases? Or, perhaps, from practical experience on the

other side? To some among society's brightest, cooperation

with authority was strictly a conditional matter, in each

instance judged by sharply individualized standards. He

could well imagine Redpath swinging one way on one

occasion and quite another when it suited him.

"I agree. There's a big piece missing."

The local agent inhaled deeply, his eyes roving the

tumbled remains. He exhaled and shrugged indifferently.

"Carried downstream. We'll find the chunks in the

morning."

Logan admired the man's veil. His shield of

inscrutability. In this situation, however, it didn't work at

all. He knows damn well the missing, chunks aren't

downstream! He just doesn't want to admit he's as

appalled as I am.

Their pilot finally gave up arguing with the sheriffs and

shut down his whining engine, a sudden, welcome lessening

of the din. Far better to wait for clearances from Washington,

anyway, than be shot down by trigger-happy provincials.

More footsteps approached. A woman in a National

Parks uniform, whom Redpath had deputized only an hour

ago, entered the light with a middle-aged man in tow. Two

teenagers rushed ahead to point at the blasted dam, making

awed sounds.

"We . . . were farther up the reservoir," the father

explained when asked. He was dressed in fishing gear. Hand-

tied flies dangled from his vest, along with a photo-ID

camping permit.

"We'd come ashore and were setting up to cook . . .

That's when it all happened." He covered his eyes. "Those

poor night fishermen. They were caught in the flood."

This fellow wasn't going to be much use. Shock, Logan

diagnosed, and wondered'why the ranger had even brought

him here. "What was the first thing you saw?" he asked,

trying to be gentle.

EARTH 371

The man blinked. "We lost the boat. You don't think

they'll charge us, do you? I mean, we ought to get a refund

for the whole trip . . ."

A tug at Logan's elbow made him turn. "It started with

a noise, mister."

One of the teenagers, his hair cut short, Ra Boy style,

gestured toward the muddy lake bed below. "It was this low

hum. Y'know? Like the water sort of sang1."

His sister nodded. A little younger but nearly as tall,

she wore a Church of Caia gown at complete odds with her

sibling's sun-worshipper attire. Logan could only imagine

the ideological climate in their household.

"It was beautiful but awfully sad," she said. "I thought

at first maybe it was the fish in the lake, you know,

moaning1. Because certain people were killing and eating

them?"

The boy groaned, sending her a disgusted look. "The

fish were put there so people could come and--"

"How long did the sound last?" Logan interrupted.

Both youths shrugged, nearly identically. The boy said,

"How could we know? After what happened next, our

subjective memory's sure to be screwed up."

The things they're teaching kids, these days, Logan

thought. For all the schools' emphasis on practical

psychology, kids still seemed to pick and choose what they

wanted to absorb, in this case, apparently, a convenient and

plausible excuse for imprecision.

"What did happen next?"

The boy started to speak, but his sister jabbed his ribs.

"Things got all blurry for a second or two," she said

hurriedly. "With funny colors--"

"Like we were going down this laser suspensor tunnel

ride, see?" the boy blurted out. "You know, like at--"

"Then there was this light. It was so bright we had to

turn and look. It was down in the south . . . over here at

the dam--"

"We don't know it was here at the dam! We just have

the evidence of our eyes to go by, and we were still getting

over the colors ..."

The girl ignored her irate sibling. "There were these

lines, of light? They went up, into the sky . . . sort of like

this?" She propped her elbow on one hand and gestured at

an angle toward the noctilucent clouds.

372 D A V I D B R I N

Logan looked to her brother for confirmation. "Did you

see lines also?"

He nodded. "Except they didn't go up like she said. She

thinks everything comes out of the Earth. Naw. The lines

came down! I think--" he edged closer, conspiratorially "--

I think it's aliens, mister. Invaders. Using big solar-powered

mirrors ..."

His sister whacked him on the shoulder. "You should

talk about the evidence of our own eyes! Of all the

stupid . . ."

Logan held up both hands. "Thank you both very

much. Right now, though, I think your dad needs your help

more than I do. Why don't you just give the ranger your

access codes, and we'll get in touch later if we need any

more information."

They nodded earnestly. Basically good kids, Logan

thought. He also felt more grateful than ever for the

undeserved gift of his own sensible daughter. He could

hardly remember the last time Claire's voice had taken on

that shrill, whining tone, capable of shattering glass or any

adult's peace of mind at twenty paces.

"It opened up!"

Logan turned around. The kids' father was pointing

with a shaking hand toward a starry gap in the clouds. "The

sky opened up like . . . like my folks used to tell me it

would on the day."

"On what day, sir?"

The man looked squarely at Logan, a queer shining in

his eyes. "The day of ... reckoning. They used to say the

heavens would open up, and terrible judgment would be

delivered."

He gestured at his offspring. "I used to scoff, like these

two with their pagan gods. But lately, it's seemed to me as

if ... as if ..." He trailed off, glassy eyed. The two

teenagers stared, their sibling conflicts instantly abandoned.

At that moment they looked almost like twins.

"Daddy?" the girl said, and reached for him.

"Stay away from me!" He pushed her aside. Striding to

the edge of the bluff, the man shrugged out of his fishing

jacket and threw it to the ground. Then he fell to his knees,

looking across the ravaged waste.

Tentatively, perhaps fearing another rejection, first the

girl and then her brother followed, standing on each side of

EARTH 373

their father at the brink of the overlook. But this time, instead of pushing them away, he flung his arms around their knees and clasped them tightly. Above the wailing

sirens, the growling helicopters and the still noisy crash of

ebbing floodwaters, Logan clearly heard the man sob.

Hesitantly at first, the girl stroked her father's thinning

hair. Then she looked across and took her brother's hand.

Logan found the breath tight within his chest. And

suddenly he realized why.

What if the guy is right?

Perhaps not precisely. Not about the exact cause of the

disturbing omen. The boy's "aliens" were as likely as any

mumbledy-jumble from the Book of Revelations.

Still, until this moment it hadn't quite occurred to

Logan just what might be at stake. Hour by hour, reports

poured in through Colonel Spivey's new database, ranging

from the picayune to the catastrophic. From towering

chimeras glimpsed at sea to strange tremors and dust devils

out in empty deserts. To the sudden disappearance of a great

dam. Each day it got steadily stranger.

This may be serious, Logan thought, and felt intensely

the late northern chill.

D Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest

Group I D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546].

To the astonishment of many, we've so far avoided the great die-

back people keep talking about. New crops plus better

management and a shift away from many greedy habits have

helped us feed our ten billions. Barely. Most of the time.

Solutions often breed other calamities though. So it was that

pundits, seeing this trend, predicted a population runaway

toward twenty billion or more, until our numbers finally did bring us to the oft-predicted Precipice of Malthus.

But look. The wave is cresting. After fifty years of struggle,

birth rates now appear finally under control, and UNPMA now

predicts we'll top out at thirteen billion around the year 2060.

Then, slowly, it should taper off a bit. That peak may just be low enough to let us squeak by.

Will it have been modern birth control that brought us up

just short of the edge? (If, in fact, we don't topple over it yet.) 374 D A V I D B R I N

Or was it something else? A new study [D Stat.Sur.

2037.582392.286-wELt] indicates human effort may deserve less

credit than we smugly believe.

While vast amounts have been spent getting half the world's

women to hold their births to one or at most two, nearly as much

money now pours into research and medical aid to help the

other half carry even one pregnancy to term. Causes have been

proposed for this pandemic of infertility . . . such as women

deferring child-bearing until late in life or effects inherited from the sex-crazed eighties, the cancer plagues, or drug-happy

2010s. But new research shows that pollution may have played

a principal role. Chemical mutagens in the air and water,

causing early spontaneous abortions, now appear to lead all

other forms of contraception in the industrialized world.

To some Gaian sects, of course, this just validates their

worldview, that for every immoderation there is an inevitable

counter, some negative feedback to restore a balance. In this

case, it isn't we the living who are dying, as Malthus predicted.

(At least not in vast numbers.) Rather, equilibrium is being

restored by the stressed environment itself, culling the unborn.

It's a cruel, unpleasant notion. But then, anyone who's been

alive and aware for any part of the last fifty years is by now used to unpleasant notions . . .

Daisy had been snooping again.

H "Dumpit!" Claire pounded the arm of her chair.

Y This time, her mother had gone too far. She'd installed

D a watchdog program right outside Claire's own mailbox!

R "Did she actually think I wouldn't notice something

0 like that?"

S Probably. So many parents were members of the

P "reality disabled" when it came to having a clear mental

H image of their children. Perhaps Daisy still considered

E Claire a child when it came to the demanding, grownup

R world of the Net.

E "I'll show you," Claire muttered as she tapped out

code of her own. Oh, she knew she'd never be able to tackle

Daisy one-on-one. But it just might be possible to take

advantage of her mothers preconceived notions.

Vivisector was an object program she'd borrowed from

Tony just the other day ... a tasty little routine going the

rounds among young hackers that disassembled other

EARTH 375

programs and put them back together again without leaving a trace--even while those programs were running. Carefully, Claire sicked Vivisector on her mother's watchdog. Soon its

guts were laid out across her inspection screen.

'"ye-, -)'|ka -a. theI i.'rj-uci'ji'ri'i." Cw;^ Wi ^'si'^Ti'eii ih'e 'rrfrrt; surrogate to pluck anything piped to Claire from Logan Eng.

"He's not your husband anymore. Mother. Can't you

leave the poor codder alone?"

Carefully, Claire excised a core gene from the

watchdog, to use as a template. Then she dialed her father's

Net access code and performed a hybridization test on the

protocols controlling access to his private cache. Sure

enough, there was a match. Some lines throbbed redly near

the heart of Logan's own security system. Claire tsked.

"Very lazy, Mother. Using close genetic cousins to

perform similar tasks? In related databases? I'm disappointed

in you."

She wasn't, really. Claire actually felt relieved.

Comparing codons from two infiltrators was a technique she

knew and understood. No doubt Daisy could have made the

trick moot had she tried. And although it showed benign

contempt, her mother was capable of worse emotions--like

wrath. You didn't want to tangle with Daisy when she was

in the latter state. Not at all.

The red lines throbbed. Claire considered going ahead

and excising the retrocode. Or writing a warning to her

father.

But then, what would be the point? At best Daisy

would wind up paying a fine. Then she'd just pay attention

to doing the job right.

"Why is she suddenly so interested in Logan's work,

anyway?" Claire wondered. Of course her mother

disapproved of Logan's career. But there were so many

engineers out there who were far worse ... far less

sensitive to environmental concerns. Until now Daisy had

seemed tacitly amenable to leaving her ex-husband alone

and going after bigger game.

Claire bit her lip. There was one way to find out what

was going on without triggering Daisy's alarms. That was to

have her mother's infiltrator send duplicates of whatever it

stole to her, as well as to Daisy.

No. She shook her head. / won't do that. I'll wait till

Logan's back in town and tell him in person.

376 D A V I D B R I N

Unfortunately, her father was hopping across the

continent, sending her little blips from all the sites his new

employer sent him to. His messages implied something was

up, certainly, and Claire's curiosity was piqued-

But /77 respect his privacy, she determined. I'm not

Daisy.

With that resolve, she carefully worded a simple

message to her father, saying she missed him, and adding a

final line: "Mirror-mirror, Daddy. Don't take any funny-

looking apples."

It was a bit of shared context code, from back when she

used to liken her mother to Snow White's wicked queen,

complete with all-seeing, all-knowing magic mirror.

/ just hope Lagan gets the meaning. It's pretty thin.

Carefully, Claire exited that portion of the Net, leaving

all her mother's agents in place. That done, she went back to

reading her own mail.

"I'll, CLAIRE!"

Tony Calvallo's bright, cheerful face popped out of one

message blip, less than an hour old. Had she been wearing

her wrist-comp while out repairing the mulch bin, she'd

have been able to take his call in person.

"THERE'S A 1'ARTY AT PAUL'S TONIGHT. YOU KNOW HE'S BY THE

NORTH MAIN LEVEE, SO WE COULD STROLL OVER THERE ALONG THE

WAY AND LOOK FOR SUBSIDENCE CRACKS."

He grinned and winked.

Claire had to smile. Tony was getting better at this . . .

keeping up a gentle pressure while remaining all the time

light and easy, letting her ultimately control the pace. As for

tonight's pretext, it had been a long time since she'd

inspected the levees over in Paul's part of the valley. Tony

was showing more imagination and insight all the time.

Claire bit her lip--enjoying the pressure on sensitive

nerve endings. A couple of times lately, she had let Tony

kiss her and had been surprised both by his eager roughness

and by how much she liked it.

Maybe I'm only a little slower than other girls, instead

of plain retarded, as I thought.

Her mother's generation, of course, had been precocious

and downright crazy, starting sex on average around age

eleven--an appalling notion she figured explained a lot

about the present state of the world.

EARTH 377

Still, there might be such a thing as moving too

slowly. . . .

All right, let's see what happens. Anyway, I can

always insist on actually looking for cracks in the levee.

With a smile, she punched Tony's number. Predictably,

he answered before the second ring.

At the same moment, Daisy McClennon watched rivers of

data stream down the walls of her private chamber, each

reflecting another view of the world.

One screen panned the recent Wyoming dam collapse

1. pictures laxly stored by her ex-husband where she

could easily get at them. Taking into account other case

studies in his file, this series of "coincidences" had gone

well beyond happenstance into the realm of enemy action.

She'd already tapped her usual sources and come up

with, at best, rumors and vague hints. One of the rich

expatriate banking co-ops in Ulan Bator seemed to have an

intense interest in these events. So did a Canadian old-

money clan in Quebec. Then there were the government

Spock agencies--one of whom Logan was clearly working

for. They were hard to crack, and risky, too. For one thing,

some of their best hackers were about her equal. Daisy

preferred sniffing round the edges till she knew enough to

warrant a full assault.

One possible hint turned in a nearby holo tank--a

pictorial globe of the Earth, sliced in half, with lines drawn

through the cutaway. The anonymous tip had found its way

into her box this morning--no doubt from someone in her

web of worldwide contacts. At first it made little sense.

Then she saw how each line was pinned, at one end, on the

location of one of the "anomalies" in Logan's file. Each line

then passed through the center of the Earth to arrive inside

one of four broad ovals at the antipodes.

What could that mean? So far nothing much had

occurred to her. Daisy was about to discard the hint as

spurious when she saw one of the ovals centered on

Southern Africa.

/ wonder. Jen Wolfing seemed to be involved in

something she thought serious, even dangerous. Then she

up and left for Southern Africa again. Could there be a

connection?

There was another link, now that she thought about it.

378 D A V I D B R I N

Wolling's collaborators were based in New Zealand. Wasn't that where some of the earliest quakes had been centered?

Daisy poked away at the puzzle, sending her electronic

servant beasts to seek and fetch new pieces. Brazenly, she

rifled the files of several companies owned by a cousin she

hadn't seen in years, but who owed her more favors than an

aristocratic prig like him would ever want to be reminded of.

One of his companies handled data transfers from

Australasia. . . .

Slowly, pieces fell into place. They're using a

communication nexus in Washington. A very good one, in

fact. Wouldn't have caught on if it weren't for that little

glitch there . . . happened just this morning. What luck.

Meanwhile, ignored for the moment, the last wall of

her workroom shone with her latest video-enhancement

handiwork ... a bootleg, colorized, 3-D version of The

Maltese Falcon, with extra scenes extrapolated for a set of

Chicago collectors who were apparently unhappy that some

works were protected in primitive form by the National

Treasures Act.

Miles Archer smiled, then took two bullets in the belly,

as he had so many times for about a hundred years. Only

this time his groans were in digital quad, and the blood that

seeped three-dimensionally round his fingers was vivid,

spectrally certified to be exactly the correct shade of arterial

red.

D Net Vol. A69802-554, 04/20/38: 04:14:52 UT User

T106-ll-7657-Aab Historical Reenactments

Special Interest Group. Key: "Authenticity"

Brussels--Belgian Historical Society authorities called in the

police this morning, to help disperse thirty thousand

disappointed history buffs dressed in Napoleonic military

uniforms. Some of them had traveled from as far as Taipei to

participate in this year's reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo, only to be turned away. Many angrily waved valid registration

forms, claiming they already had official membership in the

annual pageant.

This reporter asked BHS Director Emile Tousand: Why were

EARTH 379

so many accepted, only to be turned back at the battleground

itself?

"Out of three hundred and fifty thousand applicants, only

one hundred and ninety-three thousand qualified with authentic,

handmade kits--from muskets to uniform buttons. Of this

number, we predicted a no-show rate over thirty percent,

especially after this year's increase in coach-class zep tickets."

When asked to explain the discrepancy, Tousand

explained.

"// appears we are suffering for our success. Except for

Gettysburg and Borodino, ours is the best-respected battle

recreation. Many a hobbyist is eager to play a simple foot

soldier, even if only to have a radio-controlled blood capsule

explode on him the first day."

Then why were so many sent away?

"Our passion is accuracy. How, I beg you, could we have

that with more ersatz soldiers than were at the main battle itself?

The idea's absurd!

"Besides, environmental groups routinely agitate against

us. Unless we keep the trampling and noise below a certain

level, musket era reenactments may go the way of those ill-fated

attempts to recreate Kursk and El Alamein, back in the teens."

Would that be such a bad thing? Can we afford to have

thousands of men marching about, playing war, when that

scourge nearly destroyed us only a generation ago?

"is it a coincidence that as more men join clubs to 'play

war,' there has been less and less of the real thing? I can tell you that our boys come to have fun. They get fresh air and exercise,

unlike so many whose passive hobbies have turned them info

mere net junkies, or even dazers. And there are very few injuries or fatalities."

But don't war games encourage a romantic fascination with

the real thing?

"Any sane man knows the difference between falling

dramatically before the cameras, because his blood cartridge

has been set off, and what it must have been like for real soldiers ... to actually feel musket balls tearing through your guts,

shattering your bones. None of our members fails to weep when

staring across the terrible finale--the tableau of the Old Guard, lying in bloody heaps upon their last redoubt. No man who has

gazed on it in person could ever long to experience the real

thing.

"Fascination, yes. There will always be fascination. But that

380 D A V I D B R I N

only increases our appreciation of how far we've come. For all

our problems today, I doubt anyone who studies what life was

like in bygone times would sanely trade places with any

ancestor, peasant or soldier, general or king."

The moon shone on the horizon, setting in an unusual

I direction. Almost due south.

0 Of course at that moment all land headings were

N approximately southward. Such was the trickery of

0 crossing over the north pole. Or near it.

S Drifting alongside the tiny model-three shuttle

P Intrepid, Mark Randall turned from the moon to look

H down upon the estuary of the arctic River Oh, artery of

E the new Soviet grainlands. The steppe stretched across a

R flat expanse below him, an infinity of dun and green.

E Mark spoke a single word of command.

"Magnify."

In response, a portion of his faceplate instantly

displayed an amplified image. The Oh delta leaped toward

him in fine, amplified detail.

"Prepare record sheet six," he continued, as a reticle

scale overlaid the ribbon of muddy blue, weaving across a

vast, thawing tundra plain. Sensors tracked every movement

of his pupils, so Mark could roll the scene as fast as he could

look. "Zero in on position twelve point two by three point

seven . . . expand eightfold."

Smoothly, the main telescope in Intrepid's observation

bay turned microscopically on magnetic gimbals, focusing

on the specified coordinates. Or at least the inertial tracker

said they were the right coordinates. But Mark's experience

working with Teresa Tikhana had rubbed off, especially

after the Erehwon disaster, so he double-checked by satellite

references and two distinct landmarks--the Scharansky

Power Station and the Cargil Corporation grain silos,

bracketing the river from opposite shores. "Commence

recording," he said.

Between those two landmarks, the waters showed

severe agitation--surface ripples and stirred-up bottom mud

--each symptom detected in another optical or infrared or

polarization band. A flotilla of vessels nosed about the

disturbed area. Mark wondered what had churned the River

Oh so. It must be important for Intrepid's orders to be

EARTH 381

changed so abruptly, extending this simple peeper run far beyond normal.

I'm going to talk to the guild about this, Mark

thought. Polar assignments pile up too many rods. They

shouldn 'the be prolonged without extra shielding, or bonus

pay. Or at least a damn good reason ...

It got especially inconvenient when a model-three

shuttle was involved. The HOTOL technology was a pilot's

dream during takeoffand landing, but a bizarre, unexpected,

and uncorrectable vibration mode meant the crew had to

step "outside" during high-resolution camera work, in order

not to ruin the pictures with their slightest movements. The

flaw would be fixed in the next generation of vehicles . . .

in maybe twenty years or so.

He spoke again, commanding the telescope to zero in

even closer on the activity below. Now he clearly made out

machinery on the dredges, and men standing at the

gunwales of squat barges, peering into the river. Mark even

saw black figures in the water. Probably divers, since as yet

the burgeoning Oh was still too chilly to support other life

forms so large. Lab-enhanced photos would, of course, make

out even manufacturers' labels on the divers' masks.

Green telltales showed the recording was going well.

This kind of precision wasn't possible with surveillance

satellites, and manned space stations didn't operate this high

in latitude, so Intrepid was the only platform available.

Mark hoped it was worth it.

Anyway, so much for the rewards of fame and good

works. After Erehwon and his tour for NASA on the lecture

circuit, it had been good to be promoted to left seat on a

shuttle. Still, of late he'd begun wondering if maybe Teresa

weren't right to be so suspicious, after all. Something

smelled funny about the way he'd been glad-handed and

diverted from asking questions about what Spivey and his

crew had learned about the disaster.

Apparently that was who he was working for now,

anyway . . . Clenn Spivey. The peeper had a large and

growing group under him. Quite a few of Mark's friends had

been swept into the colonel's growing web of subordinates

and investigative teams. But what were they investigating?

When Mark asked, old comrades looked away embarrassed,

muttering phrases like national security or even--it's

secret.

382 D A V I D B R I N

"Bloody hell," Mark muttered. Fortunately, his suit

computer was narrow minded, and didn't try to interpret it

as an instruction. After hard experience, the astronaut corps

went for literal-minded equipment that was difficult to

confuse, if less "imaginative" than what civilians used.

Something moved at the corner of Mark's field of view.

He shut down the helmet projection and turned. The

spacesuited figure approaching wasn't hard to identify, since

his copilot was the only other person within at least a

hundred kilometers. Drifting alongside, Ben Brigham

touched two fingers of his gloved right hand to a point along

the inside of his left sleeve. This was followed by two quick

chopping motions, a hand turn, and an elbow flick.

The sun was behind Mark, shining into Ben's face,

turning his helmet screen opaque and shiny. But Mark

didn't need to see Ben's expression to read his meaning.

Big, chiefs hope to catch coyote in the act, his partner

had said in sign talk, descended not from the speech of the

deaf, but from the ancient Indian trade language of the

American plains.

Mark laughed. He left the comm channel turned off

and used his own hands to reply. Chiefs will be

disappointed . . . Lightning never strikes twice in same

place . . .

Although space sign talk formally excluded any gesture

that might be hidden by a vacuum suit, Ben answered with a

simple shrug. Clearly they'd been sent to observe the latest

site of the "disturbances" . . . weird phenomena that were

growing ever creepier since Erehwon was blown to kingdom

come.

Still, are we really needed here? Mark wondered. By

treaty, NATO and U.N. and USAF officers were probably

already prowling the disaster site below in person, even

cruising by in observation zeps. The only way [ntrepid's

orbital examination would add appreciably to what on-site

inspectors learned would be for the shuttle's instruments to

catch a gremlin in the very act. So far routine satellite scans

had captured a few bizarre events on film, at extreme angle,

but never yet with a full battery of peeper gear. . . .

Mark's thoughts arrested as he blinked. He shook his

head and then cursed.

"Oh, shit. Intercom on. Ben, do you feel--"

EARTH 383

"Right, Mark. Tingling in my toes. Speckles around the edge of

my visual field. Is it like when you and Rip, on Pleiades--?"

"Affirmative." He shook his head again, vigorously,

though he knew that wouldn't knock away the gathering

cobwebs. "It's different in some ways, but basically ... oh

hell." Mark couldn't explain, and besides, there wasn't time

for chatter. He spoke another code word to start their suits

transmitting full physiological data to ship recorders. "Full

view, main scope," he ordered then. "Secondary cameras--

independent targeting of transient phenomena."

The picture of the river loomed forth again. Now,

though, the scene was no longer efficient and businesslike.

Men scurried about the barges like angry ants, some of them

diving off craft that bobbed and shook in the suddenly

choppy water.

Tiny windows appeared on Mark's faceplate,

surrounding the main scene as Intrepid's, secondary

telescopes began zooming in under independent control.

Half the scenes were too blurry to make out as Mark's

eyesight grew steadily worse. Bright pinpoints swarmed

inward like irritating insects.

"What do we do?" Ben's voice sounded scared. Mark, who

had been through this before, didn't blame him.

"Make sure of your tether," he told his copilot. "And

memorize the way back to the cabin. We may have to return

blind. Otherwise . . ." He swallowed. "There's nothing we

can do but ride it out."

At least the ship is probably safe. There aren't other

structures around, like Teresa had to deal with. And a

model-three shuttle is too small to worry about tides.

Mark had himself convinced, almost.

The outer half of his visual field was gone, though it

kept fluctuating moment by moment. Through the

remaining tunnel, Mark watched a drama unfold far below,

where the Oh jounced and writhed as if someone were

poking it with invisible rods. Flow deformed the hills and

depressions nearly as quickly as they formed. Still, the

undulations seemed to take clear geometric patterns.

Then, within a circular area, the Oh simply

disappeared!

It was only pure luck none of the study vessels were

inside the radius when it happened. As it was, the boats had

a rugged ride as the columnar hole rapidly filled in.

384 D A V I D B R I N

"Where . . . where'd the water go?" Ben asked.

Joining the growing ringing in Mark's ears came the

blare of a camera alert. One of the secondary pictures

suddenly ballooned outward, rimmed in red. For a moment

Mark couldn't make out what had the computer so excited.

It looked like another view of the river valley, but at much

lower magnification, or from higher altitude.

But this image appeared warped somehow. Then he

realized it wasn't unfocused. He was looking down at the Oh

through a lens. The lens was a glob of water, which had

suddenly manifested in midair at an altitude of ... he

squinted to read the lidar numbers . . . twenty-six

kilometers!

Mark breathed the sweaty incense of his own dread.

Something tiny and black squiggled inside the murky liquid

blob that paused, suspended high above the planet. But

before he could order the telescope to magnify, the entire

watery mass was gone again! In its wake lay only a rainbow

fringe of vapor, melting into the speckles at his eyes'

periphery.

"What the ... ?"

"It's back!" Ben cried. "Fifty-two klicks high! Here . . ." and

he rattled off some code. Another scene, from another

instrument, popped into view.

Now the ground looked twice as far below. The Oh was

a thin ribbon. And the portion of stolen river had reappeared

at double the altitude. Mark had time to blink in

astonishment. The black object within looked like . . .

The spherule vanished again. "Mark," Ben gasped. "I just

calculated the doubling rate. It's next appearance could be--lesus!"

Mark felt his copilot's hand grab the fabric of his suit

and shake it. "There!" Ben's voice crackled over the intruding

roar of static. An outstretched arm and hand entered Mark's

narrow field of view and he followed the trembling gesture

out to black space.

There, in the direction of Scorpio, an object had

appeared. He didn't have to command amplification. Even as

telescopes slewed to aim at the interloper Mark cleared all

displays with one whispered word and stared in direct light

at the oblate spheroid that had paused nearby, shimmering

in the undiminished sunlight.

What strange force might have hurled a portion of the

Oh out here--momentarily, magically co-orbital with

EARTH 385

Intrepid--Mark couldn't begin to imagine. It violated every

law he knew. Small flickerings told of bits being thrown free

of the central mass. But in its center there floated a large

object--

--a woman. A diver, wearing a black wetsuit and scuba

gear, with twin tanks that Mark bemusedly figured ought to

last her another couple of hours, depending on how much

she'd already used.

Mark had left only a narrow tunnel of vision, but it was

enough. Through the diver's face mask he caught the

woman's strange expression--one of rapt fulfillment mixed

with abject terror. She began to make a sign with her hands.

"We've got to help her!" he heard Ben shout over the roar

of static, preparing to launch himself toward the castaway.

Realization came instantly, but too late. "No, Ben!"

Mark cried out. "Crab something. Anything!" Mark

fumbled and found a stanchion by the cargo bay door. This

he now gripped for all his life.

"Hold tight!" he screamed.

At that moment his helmet seemed to fill with a terrible

song, and the world exploded with colors he had never

known.

When it was all over, quivering from sore muscles and

wrenched joints, Mark gingerly reeled in his copilot's

frayed, torn tether. He searched for Ben everywhere. Radar,

lidar, telemetry . . . but no instrument could find a trace.

Of the hapless Russian diver, also, there was no sign.

Perhaps they have each other for company, wherever

they're going, he thought at one point. It was a strange

solace.

He did detect other things nearby . . . objects that

command insisted he pick up for study. These were bits of

flotsam ... a mud-filled vodka bottle ... a piece of weed

... a fish or two.

Then, preparing to head home, he went through the

retro protocols several times, double-checking until

Command accused him of stalling.

"Can it!" he told them sharply. "I'm just making sure I

know exactly where I am and where I'm going."

As the pyrotechnics of reentry erupted around the

cockpit windows, Mark later realized he'd spoken exactly as

386 D A V I D B R I N

Teresa Tikhana would have. To the mission controllers, he

must have sounded just like her.

"HdJ, Rip," he muttered, apologizing to her in

absentia. "I never knew how you felt about that, till now. I

promise, I won't ever make fun of you again."

Even much later, when he was once more on the steady

ground, Mark walked cautiously toward the crowd of

anxious, waiting officials with a cautious gait, as if the

tarmac weren't quite as certain a platform as the others

believed. And even when he began answering their fevered

questions, Mark kept glancing at the horizon, at the sun and

sky, as if to check and check again his bearings.

D Although claiming they have now completely resolved the

technical errors that led to the tragedy of 2029, the governments of Korea and Japan nevertheless today delayed reopening the

Fukuoka-Pusan Tunnel. No explanation was given, although it's

known .a recent spate of unusual seismic activity has caused

concern. The temblors do not fit the commission's computer

models, and no opening will take place until these discrepancies

are explained.

In regional social news, 26-year-old Yukiko Saito, heiress to the Taira family fortune, announced her betrothal to Clive Blenheim,

Earl of Hampshire, whose noble, if impoverished line stretches

back to well before the Norman Conquest.

The most recent planetological survey indicates that the islands

of Japan contain approximately ten percent of all the world's

volcanoes.

How much difference could a month make? The last

E time Teresa had sat at this table, deep inside the secret

X warrens of Waitomo, her personal world had only

0 recently crashed in on her. Now her grief was stabilized.

S She could look back at her passionate interlude in

P Greenland as part of a widow's recovery, and begin

H thinking about other things than Jason.

E Of course, last time she had also been numb from a

R completely different shock--learning about Earth's dire

E jeopardy. That fact hadn't changed.

But at least we 're doing something about it now. Futile

or not, their efforts were good for the spirit.

George Button was just finishing his overall status

report. Their limited success so far was visible in the large-

scale display where their foe could now be seen swinging

about on an elongated orbit, rising briefly out of the

crystalline inner sphere into the second layer--the outer

core of liquid metal. No longer a complacent eater, squatting

undisturbed amid a banquet of high-density matter, the

purple dot now seemed to throb angrily.

Teresa approved. We're coming after you, beast. We 'we

begun defending ourselves.

That was the good news. Give or take a few panicky

moments, all four resonators had commenced firing

sequences of tandem pulses to convert the planet's own

stored energy into beams of coherent gravity, recoiling

against Beta and gradually shoving it outward toward--

Toward what? We still haven't figured out what to do

with the damned thing. Push until its growing orbit takes

it out of the Earth, I suppose. But then what? Let a

decaying singularity, blazing at a million degrees, keep

whizzing round and round, entering and leaving, entering

and leaving till it dissipates at last in a huge burst of

gamma rays?

Teresa shrugged. As if by then the choice will still be

in our hands. That was one reason the mood at the table was

somber.

Another cause was visible on the outermost shell of the

planetary model ... a pattern of lights signifying where

gazer beams had emerged at land or sea.

Actually, most of the beams pulsed at modes and

wavelengths interacting not at all with surface objects.

Often, the only effect was a local wind shift or eddies in an

388 D A V I D B R I N

ocean current. Still, from a quarter of the sites came rumors

of strange colors or thunderclaps in a clear blue sky. Hearsay

about water spouts or disappearing clouds. Accounts of

dams destroyed, of circular swirls cut in wheat fields, of

aircraft vanishing without a trace.

Teresa glanced over at Alex Lustig. He had already told

of his efforts to avoid population centers, and she didn't

doubt his sincerity. Still, something had changed in the man

since she had seen him last. By now, in all honesty, she had

expected to find him a wreck. Tossed by guilt as he had been

when they first met, Teresa figured him due for a nervous

breakdown when the toll of innocent victims began to rise.

Oddly, he now seemed at peace listening patiently to

each speaker as the meeting progressed, exhibiting none of

the nervous gestures she recalled. His expression appeared

almost serene.

Maybe it isn't so odd at that, Teresa thought. Beyond

the pool of light cast by the display, she saw June Morgan

move over behind Lustig and start massaging his shoulders.

Teresa's nostrils flared. They deserve each other, she

thought, and then frowned, wondering what she meant by

that.

"We've tried to avoid predictable patterns," George

Button was saying. "So it would be hard to track down our

resonators' locations. No doubt several major nations and

alliances and multinationals already suspect the

disturbances are of human origin. In fact, we're counting on

a suspicious reaction. So long as they're blaming each other,

they'll not go looking for a private group."

"Isn't that dangerous?" Teresa asked. "What if

someone panics? Especially one of the deterrence powers? It

doesn't take much effort to break the treaty seals on a

squadron of cruise missiles, you know. Just hammers and

some simple software."

Pedro Manella leaned into the light. "That's under

control, Captain. First, the seismic occurrences are taking

place impartially, worldwide. The only organized pattern

anyone will notice is that the disturbances statistically avoid

major population centers^

"Second--I've taken care to deposit sequestered

announcements with a secret registration service, triggered

for net release the instant any power goes to yellow alert."

EARTH 389

Alex shook his head. "I thought we weren't going to

trust any of the services."

Manella shrugged. "After your own unpleasant

experience, Lustig, I don't blame you for feeling that way.

But there's no chance of premature release this time.

Anyway, the announcement only gives enough hints to get

some trigger-happy crisis team to slow down and consult

their geologists."

George Button touched a control, dimming the globe

display and bringing up the room lights. Alex squeezed June

Morgan's hand and she returned to her seat. Teresa looked

away, feeling at once voyeuristic and resentful. She's a

collector, Teresa thought. How can a woman who once

wanted Jason also be attracted to a man like Lustig7

She suppressed an urge to turn around and look at him

again, this time in frank curiosity.

"Besides," George Button added. "There's a limit to

how long we can keep this secret anyway. Sooner or later

someone's going to track us down."

"Don't be so sure," Pedro countered. "Our weakest link

is the Net, but I have some very bright people working for

me in Washington. By keeping traffic to a minimum and

using tricks like your Maori mountain-iwi dialect, we could

mask our short blips for as long as six months, even a year."

"Hmph." George sounded doubtful and Teresa agreed.

Manella's optimism seemed farfetched. There were too

many bored hackers out there with free time and kilobit

parallel correlators, looking for any excuse to stir up a

sensation. Frankly, she wasn't at all sure whether she'd be

greeted by her tame NASA flunkies when she got back to

Houston or by a pack of security boys, wearing total-record

goggles and slapping her with inquiry warrants.

Even so, she looked forward to the trip, riding a

stratoliner again under her own name. I've had it with zeps

and aliases for a while.

"Don't you think the secret will come out when Beta

finally emerges through the surface?" George asked. "We

won't be hiding from just ferrets then. The whole pack of

hounds will be baying for blood."

"Conceded. But by then we'll have our report ready to

present to the World Court, won't we, Alex?"

Lustig looked up, as if his thoughts had been far away.

"Um. Sorry, Pedro?"

390 D A V I D B R I N

Manella leaned toward him. "We've been after you

about this for months! Second only to getting rid of Beta is

our need to find out who made the cursed thing. It's not just

revenge--though making an example of the bastards will be

nice. I'm talking about saving our own skins!"

Teresa blinked. "What do you mean?"

Manella groaned as if he were the only one in the room

able to see the obvious. "I mean that, after all the havoc

we've set off, and are going to set off in the future, do you

think people will simply take our word we just found the

awful thing down there?

"Hell no! Here we are, led by the one man ever caught

building an illegal black hole on Earth. Who do you think

they'll blame for Beta? Especially if the real villains are

powerful men, eager to divert responsibility."

Teresa swallowed. "Oh."

All the illegal things they had done--including

maintaining secrets and harming innocents--all those she

was willing to stand to bar for. The salvation of Earth was

powerful justification, after all. But it hadn't occurred to her

that that very defense might be denied them . . . that their

group might actually be blamed for causing Beta in the first

place!

"Shit," she said, in a low voice. Now she understood

how Alex Lustig must have felt when he seemed so bitter,

last time. Which made it even harder to comprehend the

man's tranquil expression right now.

"I hadn't thought of that either," June Morgan said,

looking at her as if she'd read her mind. Teresa found herself

recalling their friendship, back before things started getting

so damned messy. The flux of contrary emotions made her

quickly turn away to avoid June's eyes.

Manella concluded. "Beyond all thought of revenge, we

need the real culprits to hand over to the mob in our stead.

So I ask again, Lustig. Who are they?"

On the tabletop Alex's hands lay folded. "We've

learned a lot lately," he said in a low voice. "Though I do

wish Stan Coldman were here to help. Yes, surely he's

needed in Greenland. But what I'm trying to say is, despite

many handicaps, I think we've made progress.

"For instance, with June's assistance, we've now got a

much better idea how matters must have been when the

singularity first fell through the most intense regions of

EARTH 391

magnetism, which must have trapped the thing for some

time before chaotic interactions finally let its apo-axis

decay."

"Chaos? You mean you can't ever tell . . . ?"

"Forgive me. I was imprecise. The word 'chaos' in this

sense doesn't mean randomness. The solution isn't perfect,

but it can be worked out."

Manella leaned forward again. "So you've traced its

orbit back? To the fools who let it go?"

Teresa sat up, feeling chilled. A strange light seemed to

shine in Alex Lustig's eyes.

"It's not easy," he began. "Even a tiny, weighty object

like Beta must have suffered deflections. Besides magnetic

fields, there were inhomogeneities in the crust and

mantle--"

Manella would have none of it. "Lustig, I know that

look on your face. You've got something. Tell us! Where and

when did it fall? How close can you pinpoint it?"

The British physicist shrugged. "Within approximately

two thousand kilometers in point of entry--"

Manella moaned, disappointed.

"--and within nine years, plus or minus, for date of

initial impact."

"Years!" Pedro stood up. He slapped the tabletop.

"Nine years ago, nobody on Earth was capable of building

singularities! Cavitronics was still a harmless theory. Lustig,

your results are worse than useless. You're saying that while

we're still likely to be destroyed, there's no way to track and

punish the guilty ones!"

For the first time, Tere&a saw Alex smile o^nly, a look

both empathic and feral, as if he had actually been looking

forward to this. "You're right on one count, but wrong on

two," he told Manella. "Can't blame you, really. I made the

same faulty assumptions myself.

"You see I, too, figured Beta had to have entered the

Earth sometime since cavitronics became a practical science.

Only after tracing Beta's rate of growth and correcting for

some hairy internal topologies did I realize it just has to be a

lot older than we'd thought. In fact, those error bars I

mentioned are pretty damn good.

"The date of entry was probably 1908. The region,

Siberia."

Teresa brought a hand to her breast. "Tunguska!"

392 D A V I D B R I N

George Button looked at her. "Do you mean . . . ?"

he prompted. But Teresa had to swallow before finding her

voice again. "It was the greatest airburst explosion in

recorded history--even including that electromagnetic pulse

thing the Helvetians set off. Barometers picked up pressure

waves all the way round the world."

Everyone watched her. Teresa spread her hands. "Trees

were flattened for hundreds of kilometers. But nobody ever

found a crater, so it wasn't a regular meteorite. Theorists

have suggested a fluffy comet, exploding in the atmosphere,

or a bit of intergalactic antimatter, or . . ."

"Or a micro black hole." Alex nodded. "Only now we

know it wasn't simply a black hole, but a far more complex

construct. A singularity so complex and elegant, it couldn't

be an accident of nature." He turned to face the others.

"You see our problem. Our models say the thing has to come

from a time before mankind possessed the ability to build

such things ... if we could do so even now."

This time both Teresa and Pedro were speechless,

staring. George Button asked, "Are you absolutely certain

no natural process could have made it?"

"Ninety-nine percent, George. But even if nature did

stumble onto just the right topology, it's absurd to imagine

such an object just happening to arrive when it did."

"What do you mean?"

Alex closed his eyes briefly. "Look. Why would

something so rare and terrible just happen to strike the

planet at the very time we're around to notice? Earth has

been here four and one half billion years, but humans only a

quarter million or so. And for less than two centuries have

we been capable of noticing anything at all but the bitter

end. That coincidence stretches all credulity! As my

grandmother might say--it's ridiculous to claim an impartial

universe is performing a drama solely for our benefit."

He paused.

"The answer, of course, is that the universe isn't

impartial at all. The singularity arrived when we're here

because we're here."

Silence stretched. Alex shook his head. "I don't blame

you for missing the point. I, too, was trapped by my modern,

Western-masochistic conceit. I assumed only humans were

clever or vicious enough to destroy on such a scale. It took a

EARTH 393

reminder from the past to show me what a stupid

presumption that is, after all.

"Oh, I can give you the date and point of entry now. I

can even tell you something about the thing's makers. But

don't ask me how to take vengeance on them, Pedro. I

suspect that's far beyond our capabilities at present."

Some of the others looked at each other in confusion.

But Teresa felt queasy. She fought the effects, breathing

deeply. No physical crisis could affect her as this series of

abstract revelations had.

"Somebody wants to destroy us," she surmised. "It's

... a weapon.''

"Oh yes," Alex said, turning to meet her eyes. "It is

that, Captain Tikhana. A slow but omnipotent weapon. And

the coincidence of timing is easily enough explained. The

thing arrived only a decade or two after the first human

experiments with radio.

"Actually, the idea's rather old in science fiction, a

horror tale of paranoia that's chillingly logical when you

work it out. Somebody out there got into space ahead of us

and doesn't want company. So it--or they--fashioned an

efficient way to eliminate the threat."

"Threat?" Manella shook his head. "What threat?

Hertz and Marconi make a few dots and dashes, and that's a

threat to beings who can make a thing like this?" He pointed

to one of the flat screens, where Alex's latest depiction of

the cosmic knot writhed and wriggled in malefic, intricate

splendor.

"Oh yes, certainly those dots and dashes represented a

threat. Given that some lot out there doesn't want

competition, it would make sense to eliminate potential

rivals like us as early and simply as possible, before we

develop into something harder to deal with."

He gestured upward, as if the rocky ceiling were

invisible and the sky were all around them. "Consider the

constraints such paranoid creatures have to work under,

poor things. It may have taken years for our first signals to

propagate to their nearest listening post. At that point they

must fabricate a smart bomb to seek and destroy the source.

"But recall how difficult it is to send anything through

interstellar space. If you want to dispatch it anywhere near

the speed of light, it had better be small! My guess is they

sent a miniature cavitron generator, one just barely adequate

394 D A V I D B R I N

to make the smallest, lightest singularity that could do the

job.

"Of course, if you start with a small singularity it'll

require quite some time absorbing mass inside the target

planet before it can really take off. In this case, about a

hundred and thirty years. But that should be adequate,

usually."

"It almost wasn't, in our case," Teresa said, bitterly. "If

we'd invested more in space, we'd have had colonists on

Mars by now. Maybe the beginnings of cities on asteroids or

the moon. We could have evacuated some of the life

arks . . ."

"Oh, you're right," Alex agreed. "My guess is we're

unusually bright, as neophyte races go. Probably most others

experience longer intervals between discovering radio and

inventing spaceflight. After all, the Chinese almost did

something with electricity a couple of times, Babylon and

the Romans."

Pedro Manella looked down at his hands. "Smart, but

not smart enough. So even if we eliminate this horrible

thing the nightmare may not be over?"

Alex shrugged. "I suppose not. We and our

descendants, should we live to have any, are at best in for a

rough time ahead. As a Yank might put it--" and his voice

dropped to a drawl "--the galaxy we're livin' in appears t'be

a mighty tough neighborhood."

Manella's face reddened. "You're taking this awfully

well to be joking about it, Lustig. Has the news driven you

over the edge? Or are you saving up for yet another surprise?

Maybe another deus ex machina to pull out of your hat, like

last time?"

Teresa suddenly realized that was, indeed, what she was

holding her breath for! He's done it before . . . turned

despair around with fresh hope. Maybe this time, too'

Seeing Alex smile, she felt a surge. But then he shook

his head and simply said, "No. I have no new tricks."

"Then why are you grinning like an idiot, Lustig!"

Manella roared.

Alex stood up. And though he continued smiling, his

hands clenched to a slow beat. "Don't you understand?

Can't you see what this means?" He turned left and right,

staring at each person in turn, getting back only blank looks.

EARTH 395

In frustration, he shouted. "It means we're not guilty. We

haven't destroyed ourselves and our world!"

He pressed both hands on the table, leaning forward

intensely. "You all saw what shape I was in, before. I was

destroyed by this. Oh, sure, we might succeed in ejecting

Beta--I give it a one in four chance now, the best odds yet.

"But what would be the point? If we produce the sort of

men who'd drop something like that into the world, and not

even care enough to go looking for it again? Would we

deserve to go on?

"You all kept telling me, 'Don't take it so personally,

Alex.' You said, 'It's not your fault, Alex. Your singularity

was harmless, not an all-devouring monster like Beta. You're

our champion against this thing!'

"Champion?" His laughter was acrid. "Couldn't any of

you see how that really made me feel?"

Every other person stared. The physicist's reserve had

cracked, and underneath now lay exposed someone more

human than the Alex Lustig that Teresa had seen before

this. A man, she realized, who had stepped deeper into the

borderlands of endurance than most ever dream of.

"I had to identify with the makers of that thing!" He

went on. "So long as I knew them to be my fellow humans, I

had to take responsibility. Couldn't any of you see that?"

He had started out grinning, but now Alex shivered.

June Morgan started to rise, but then suppressed the move.

Teresa understood and agreed. She, too, felt an urge to do

something for him, and knew the only way to help was to

listen till he stopped.

Listen humbly, for she knew with sudden conviction

that he was right.

"I . . ." Alex had to inhale to catch his breath. "I'm

smiling, Pedro, because I was ashamed to be human, and

now I'm not anymore. Mere death can't take that from me

now. Nothing can.

"Isn't . . . isn't that enough for anyone to smile

about?"

It was George Button who reached him first--who

drew his shaking friend into his massive arms. Then, all at

once, the rest of them were there as well. And none of their

396 D A V I D B R I N

former jealousies or conflicts seemed to matter anymore.

They embraced each other and for a time shared the horror

of their newly known danger . . . along with the solace of

their restored hope.

PART VIII

PLANET KILLER

Space was the fabric of its existence.

A skein of superdense yarn--knitted and purled in

ten dimensions--it was unravelable. A deep well--sunk

into a microscopic point--it was unfathomable. Blacker

than blackness, it emitted nothing, yet the tortured

space around it blazed hotter than the cores of suns.

It had been born within a machine, one that had

traveled far to reach this modest basin, pressed into the

rippling universe-sheet by a lesser star. On arrival, the

apparatus set to work Grafting the assassin's tight weave

out of pure nothingness. Then, in its final death throes,

the factory slowed its progeny onto a gentle circular

path, skating among the star's retinue of tiny planets.

For two revolutions, the assassin lost mass. There

were atoms in space to feed its small but hungry maw,

but nowhere near enough to make up for its losses . . .

loops of superdense brightness that kept popping out to

self-destruct in brilliant bursts of gamma rays. If this

went on, it would evaporate entirely before doing its job.

But then it entered a shallow dip of gravity--a brief

touch of acceleration--and it collided with something

solid! The assassin celebrated with a blast of radiation.

Thereafter, its orbit kept dipping, again and again, into

high-density realms.

398 D A V I D B R I N

Atoms fell athwart its narrow mouth--little wider

than an atom itself. There were still very few real

collisions, but where at first it dined on picograms, soon

it gobbled micrograms, then milligrams. No meal

satisfied it.

Grams became kilograms . . .

It had not been programed to know the passage of

years, nor that the feast would have to end someday,

when the planet was consumed in one last, voracious

gobble. Then it would sit alone again in space, and for a

time the solar system would have two suns . . . while

the essence that had once been Earth blew away in

coruscating photons.

Of all this it neither knew nor cared. For the

present, atoms kept pouring in. If a complex, fulgent

knot in space can be called happy, then that was its

condition.

After all, what else was there in the universe, but

matter to eat, light to excrete, and vacuum7 And what

were they? Just subtly different kinds of folded space.

Space was the fabric of its existence.

Without fuss or intent, it grew.

EARTH 399

D Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest

Group I D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546]. Space

Colonization Subgroup. Open discussion board.

Okay, so imagine we get past the next few rough decades and

finally do what we should have back in TwenCen, Say we mine

asteroids for platinum, discover the secrets of true nanotechnol-

ogy, and set Von Neumann "sheep" grazing on the moon to

produce boundless wealth. To listen to some of the rest of you,

all our problems would then be over. The next step, star travel,

and colonization of the galaxy, would be trivial.

But hold on! Even assuming we solve how to maintain long-

lasting ecologies in space and get so wealthy the costs of star-

flight aren't crippling, you've still got the problem of time.

I mean, most hypothetical designs show likely starships

creeping along at no more than ten percent of the speed of light, a whole lot slower than those sci-fi cruisers we see zipping on

three-vee. At such speeds it may take five, ten generations to

reach a good colony site. Meanwhile, passengers will have to

maintain villages and farms and cranky, claustrophobic

grandkids, all inside their hollowed-out, spinning worldlets.

What kind of social engineering will that take? Do you know

how to design a closed society that'd last so long without flying apart? Oh, I think it can be done. But don't pretend it'll be simple!

Nor will be solving the dilemma of gene pool isolation. In the

arks and zoos right now, a lot of rescued species are dying off

even though the microecologies are right, simply because too

few individuals were included in the original mix. For a healthy

gene pool you need diversity, variety, heterozygosity.

One thing's clear, no starship will make it carrying only one

racial group. What'll be needed, frankly, are mongrels . . .

people who've bred back and forth with just about everybody

and seem to enjoy it. You know . . . like Californians.

Besides, it's as if they've been preparing themselves for it

all along. Heck, picture if aliens ever landed in California. Instead of running away or even inquiring about the secrets of the universe, Californians would probably ask the BEMs if they had any new cuisine!

Fast approaching the scene of carnage, a detachment of

C the Swiss navy arrived in the nick of time. Sweeping

R over the ocean's morning horizon, the proud flotilla un-

U furled bright battle ensigns, fired warning shots, and

S sent the raiders into rout at flank speed.

T Rescued! The crews of rusty fishing barges cheered

as their saviors have into sight, the bright sun at their backs.

Only moments before, all had seemed lost. Now disaster had

turned to victory!

Nevertheless, Crat barely took notice. Amid the throng

of filthy, sweat-grimed deck hands, climbing the rigging and

waving their bandannas, he was too busy vomiting over the

side to spend much effort cheering. Fortunately, there

wasn't much left in his stomach to void into waters already

ripe with bloody offal. His fit tapered into a diminishing

rhythm of gagging heaves.

"Here, fils," someone said nearby. "Take this rag.

Clean yourself."

The voice was thickly accented. But then, nearly everyone

aboard this corroded excuse for a barge spoke Standard

English gooky, if at all. Crabbing at a blur, Crat was dimly

surprised to find the cloth relatively clean. Cleaner than

anything he'd seen since coming aboard the Congo, some

weeks ago. He wiped his chin and then tried to lift his head,

wondering miserably who had bothered taking an interest in

him.

"No. Do not thank me. Here. Let me gift you something

for the nausea."

The speaker was white haired and wrinkled from the

sun. And despite his age, it was clear that his wiry, sun-

browned arms were stronger than Crat's own soft, city-bred

pair. The good Samaritan grabbed the back of Crat's head

adamantly and lifted a vapor-spritzer. "Are you ready?

Coot! Breathe in, now."

Crat inhaled. Tailored molecules soaked through his

mucous membranes, rushing to receptors in his brain. The

overwhelming dizziness evaporated like fog under the subtropical

sun.

He wiped his eyes and then handed back the kerchief

without a word.

"You're a silent one, neh? Or is it because you're

choked up over our triumph?" The old man pointed where

the green raiders' rear guard could still be seen, fleeing west-

EARTH 401

ward in their ultrafast boats. Of course nothing owned by

Sea State could hope to catch them.

"Triumph," Crat said, repeating the word blankly.

"Yes, of course. Driven off by the one force they fear

most. Helvetia Rediviva. The fiercest warriors in all the

world."

Crat shaded his eyes against the still-early sun, wondering

vaguely where his hat had gone to. By the captain's orders,

everybody aboard Congo had to wear one to protect against the sleeting ultraviolet ... as if the average life span on a Sea State fishing boat encouraged much worry

about latent skin cancers.

The first thing Crat saw as he turned around was the

listing hull of Dacca . . . the fleet's cannery barge and the

green raiders' main target. Deck hands dashed to and fro,

washing down gear that had been sprayed with caustic enzymes.

Others cast lines to smaller vessels nearby, as pumps

fought to empty water from Dacca's flooding bilges.

The greeners hadn't had any intention of sinking her,

just rendering her useless. Still, raiders often overestimated

the seaworthiness of ships flying the albatross flag. Crat was

too inexperienced to guess if Dacca'", crew could save the

ship. And damned if he'd ask.

Near the factory ship, a UNEPA observer craft loitered,

blue and shiny like something from an alien world--which

in a sense it was. The dumpit U.N. hadn't done a gor-suck-

ing thing to stop the greeners. But should Dacca drown--or

spill more than a few quarts of engine oil saving herself--

UNEPA would be all over Sea State with eco-fines.

"There," the oldster said helpfully, nudging Crat's

shoulder and pointing. "Now you can get a good look at our

rescuers. Over toward Japan."

Is that what those islands are? The mountainous forms

were low to the northeast, like clouds. Crat wondered how

anyone could tell the difference.

He saw a squadron of low-slung vessels approaching

swiftly from that direction, so clean and trim, he naturally

at first assumed they had nothing to do with Sea State.

Smaller craft spread out, prowling for greener submarines,

while in the center a sleek, impressive ship of war

drew near. The nozzles of its powerful cannon gleamed like

polished silver. Bulging high-pressure tanks held its ammunition--various chemical agents that it began spraying over

402 D A V I D B R I N

poor Dacca to neutralize the greeners' enzymes. Although

neither dousing was supposed to affect flesh, the new bath

caused Dacca's crew to laugh and caper, luxuriating as if it

were a Fragonard perfume.

"Ah!" the old man said. "Just as I thought. It is Pike-

man. A proud vessel! They say she never needs to fight, so

fearsome is her name."

Crat glanced sideways, suddenly suspicious. This fellow's

eyes glittered with more than mere gratitude at being

saved from greener sabotage. There was unmistakable pride

in his bearing. From that, and the thick but educated accent,

Crat guessed he was no mere refugee from poverty, nor a

foolish would-be adventurer like himself. No, he must have

joined the nation of the dispossessed because his birthplace

was still officially under occupation by all the world's powers--a country whose very name had been confiscated.

Crat remembered seeing that look in the eyes of another

veteran, back in Bloomington--one of the victors in the

Helvetian campaign. How strange, then, to spot it next in

one who had lost everything.

Shit. That must've been some dumpit war.

The old man confirmed Crat's suspicions. "See how

even at this low estate they must treat us with respect?" he

asked, then added in a low voice. "By damn, they had better!"

The rescuing flotilla efficiently dispatched units to repair Dacca, while Pikeman turned into the wind to launch a tethered guard zeppelin. On closer inspection, Crat saw that

the vessel wasn't new at all. Its flanks were patched, like

every other ship in Sea State's worldwide armada. And yet

the refurbishments blended in, somehow looking like intentional

improvements on the original design.

Watching the cruiser's flag flapping in the wind, Crat

blinked suddenly in surprise. For a brief instant the great

bird at the banner's center, instead of flying amid stylized

ocean waves, had seemed to soar out of a blocky cloud, set

in a bloody field. He squinted. Had it been an illusion,

brought on by his constant hunger?

No! There! The colors glittered again! The Sea State

emblem must have been modified, he realized. Stitched in

amid the blue water and green sky were holographic threads,

flashing to the eye only long enough to catch a brief but

indelible image.

Once again, for just a second, the albatross flapped sublimely

through a square white cross, centered on a background

of deep crimson.

Naturally, during the melee the dolphins had escaped. Even

before the Helvetian detachment arrived to drive them off,

the green raiders had managed to tear the giant fishing web

surrounding the school. Crat groaned when he saw the damage.

His hands were already cracked from trying to please a

slave-driving apprentice net maker, tying simple knots over

and over, then retying half of them when his lord and master

found some fault undetectable to any human eye.

The calamity went beyond damaged nets, of course. It

could mean they'd go hungry again tonight, if the raiders'

enzymes had reached the catch already in Dacca's hold.

And yet, in a lingering corner, Crat felt strangely glad the

little creatures had got away.

Oh, sure. Back in Indiana he'd been a carni-man, a real

meat eater. Often he'd save up to devour a rare hamburger in

public, just to disgust any NorA dumpit ChuCas who happened

to pass by. Anyway, today's prey wasn't one of the

brainy or rare dolphin types on the protected lists, or else

UNEPA would have interfered faster and a lot more lethally

than any green raiders.

Still, even dumb little spinner porpoises looked too

much like Tuesday Tursiops, the bottle-nosed hero of Sat-

vid kiddie shows. They cried so plaintively when they were

hauled aboard, thrashing, flailing their tails . . . Crat's

gorge was already rising by the time cawing birds arrived to

bicker and feed on factory ship offal.

Then, suddenly, had come the greeners--among them

probably former countrymen of Crat's. He recalled seeing

well-fed pale faces, jaws set in grim determination as they

harassed Sea State's harvesters to the very limits of international law and then some. To Crat, the lurching fear and

confusion of the brief battle had only been the final straw.

"Are you feeling better now, filsV

Crat looked up from his makeshift seat, one of the

coiled foredeck anchor chains. Squinting, he saw it was the

geep again--the old Helvetian--come around to check up

on him for whatever reason. Crat answered with a silent

shrug.

"My name is Schultheiss. Peter Schultheiss," the fellow

404 D A V I D B R I N

said as he sat on a jute hawser. "Here you go. I brought you

some portable shade."

Crat turned the gift, a straw hat, over in his hands.

Weeks ago he would have spurned it as something from a

kindergarten class. Now he recognized a good piece of utilitarian craftsmanship. "Mm," he answered with a slight nod

and put it on. The shade was welcome.

"No gratitude required," Schultheiss assured. "Sea

State cannot afford eye surgery for all its young men. Nor

can we count on U.N. dumpit charity."

For the first time, Crat smiled slightly. The one thing he

liked about this disappointing adventure was the way both

old and young cursed and suffered alike. Only here at sea, a

young man's strength counted for as much as any grandpa's

store of experience.

Just wait 'n see, he thought. When I get used to all

this, I'll be tougher 'n anybody.

That wouldn't be anytime soon, though. First week out,

he'd foolishly accepted a dare to wrestle a very small Bantu

sailor wearing a speckled bandanna. The speed of his humiliation

brought home how useless years of judo lessons were

in the real world. There were no rubber mats here, no

coaches to blow time out. The jeers and pain that followed

him to his hammock proved this dream was going to take

some time coming true.

Crat remembered Quayle High and that lousy tribal

studies class he and Remi and Roland had to take. Hardly

anything spoken by the teacher stuck in memory, except

one bit--what old fathead Jameson had said one day about

chiefs.

"These were clansmen who won high status, respect, the best

food, wives. Nearly every natural human society has had such a special place for its high achievers . . . even modern tribes like your teen gangs. The major difference between cultures has not been whether, but how chiefs were chosen, and by what criteria.

"Today, neither physical power nor even maleness is a principal

criterion in Western society. But wit and quickness still make

points ..."

Crat remembered how Remi and Roland had grinned at

each other, and for an instant he had hated his friends with

a searing passion. Then, surprisingly, the prof also let drop a

few words that seemed just for him.

"Of course even today there are some societies in which the old

EARTH 405

macho virtues hold. Where strength and utter boldness still appear to matter. ..."

Each of them had taken to the Settler style for different

reasons. Remi, for romance and the promise of a new order.

Roland, for the honor of comradeship and shared danger in a

cause. For Crat, though, the motive had been simpler. He

just wanted to be a chief.

And so, a month ago, he had bought a one-way ticket

and begun what he was sure would be his great adventure.

Some fuckin' adventure.

"I think maybe the admiral will give up these fishing

grounds now," Schultheiss commented as he looked up toward

the bridge. Congo's officers could be glimpsed, pacing,

arguing with the other captains by the flicker of a holo display.

Soon they heard the bosuns shouting--all hands to the

nets in five minutes, for hauling and stowing. Crat sighed for

his throbbing muscles. "D'you think we'll be going' to

town?" he asked.

It was his longest speech yet. Schultheiss seemed impressed.

"That is likely. I hear one of our floating cities is

heading this way, north from Formosa."

"Soon as we dock," Crat said suddenly, "I'm gonna

transfer."

Schultheiss raised an eyebrow. "All Sea State fleets are

the same, my friend . . . except the Helvetian units, of

course. And I doubt you'd--"

Crat interrupted. "I'm through fishin'. I'm thinkin' of

going' to the dredges."

The old man grunted. "Dangerous work, fils. Diving

into drowned cities, tying ropes to furniture and jagged bits

of rusty metal, dismantling sunken office buildings in

Miami--"

"No." Crat shook his head. "Deep dredging. You know.

The kind that pays! Diving after . . . noodles."

He knew he hadn't pronounced it right. Schultheiss

looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded vigorously.

"Ah! Do you mean nodules'1. Manganese nodules? My

young friend, you are even braver than I thought!"

From that brief look of respect Crat derived some satisfaction.

But then the old man smiled indulgently. He patted

Crat's shoulder. "And Sea State needs such heroes to take

wealth from the deep, so we can take our place among the

^ 406 DAVIDBRIN

nations. If you would be such a man, I'm proud to know

you."

He doesn't believe me, Crat realized. Once, that would

have sent him into a sputtering rage. But he had changed

... if only because nowadays he was generally too tired for

anger. Crat shrugged instead. Maybe I don't believe it myself.

The main winch was out again, of course. That meant Con section of the great seine net would have to be hauled aboard by hand.

Now Crat remembered where he'd seen the old Helvetian

before. Peter Schultheiss was a member of the engineering

team that kept the old tub and her sister vessels, Jutland

and Hindustan, sailing despite age and decrepitude. Right

now Schultheiss was immersed headfirst in a tangle of black

gears, reaching out for tools provided by quick, attentive

assistants.

Nearby, the forward wing-sail towered like a tapered

chimney. No longer angled into the wind to provide trim, it

had been feathered and would remain so unless old Peter

succeeded. Apparently it wasn't /ust the winch this time,

but the entire foredeck power chain that depended on the

fellow's miracle work.

Now that's a skill, Crat admitted, watching Schultheiss

during a brief pause in the hauling. You don't learn that

kind of stuff on the gor-sucking Data Net.

"Again!" the portside bosun shouted. The barrel-

chested Afrikaaner had long ago tanned as dark as any man

on his watch. "Ready on the count, ver-dumpit! One-and,

two-and, three-and . . . heave!"

Crat groaned as he pulled with the others, marching

slowly amidships, dragging the sopping line and its string of

float buoys over the side. Scampering net makers busied

themselves caring for the damaged seine as fast as it came

aboard. It was a well-practiced cadence, one with a long tradition on the high seas.

When next they paused to walk forward again--Crat

massaging his throbbing left arm--he sniffed left and right,

perplexed by a sour, sooty odor. The sharp sweat tang of

unbathed men, which ha3 nearly overwhelmed him weeks

ago, now was mere background to other smells, drifting in

on the breeze.

EARTH 407

At last he found the source over on the horizon, a

twisted funnel far beyond the Sea State picket boats, rising

to stain the shredded, striated clouds. Crat nudged one of

his neighbors, an unsmiling refugee from flooded Libya.

"What's that?" he asked.

The wiry fellow readjusted his bandanna as he peered.

"Incinerator ship, I think. No allowed go upwind anybody

1. UNEPA rule, y'know? But we not anybody. So upwind

us jus' fine okay." He spat on the deck for effect, then again

onto his hands as the bosun ordered them to take up the

hawser for another round.

dancing at the smokey plume, Crat knew what Remi

would have said. "Hey, you got priorities, I got priorities. All the world's got priorities." Getting rid of land-stored toxic wastes

rated higher to most than worrying about one more carbon

source. Protecting onshore water supplies outweighed a few

trace molecules escaping the incinerators' searing flames, especially when those molecules wouldn't waft over populated

areas.

Hey, Crat thought as he heaved in time with the others.

Ain't I population7 Soon, however, he hadn't a thought to

spare except on doing his job ... on keeping jibes about

clumsy dumb-ass Yankees to a minimum, and keeping the

others from trampling him.

Because Crat was concentrating so hard, he never noticed

the captain come out on deck to test the brush of the

wind, his brow furrowed in concern. Poor as it was. Sea State

owed its very existence to computers and to other nations'

weather satellites. Regular forecasts meant life or death, enabling rusty fleets and floating towns to seek safety well in

advance of approaching storms.

Still, weather models could not predict the smaller vagaries . . .

mists and pinprick squalls, microbursts and sudden

shifts in the wind. While Crat strained on the line,

wearily aware they were still only half done, the captain's

eyes narrowed, noticing subtle cues. He turned to call his

comm officer.

While his back was turned a pocket cyclone of clear air

turbulence descended on the little fleet. The micropressure

zone gave few warnings. Two hundred meters to the east, it

flattened the sea to a brief, glassy perfection. Men's ears

popped aboard the Dacca, and blond seamen on the Pike-

408 D A V I D B R I N

man's starboard quarter briefly had to turn away, blinking

from a needle spray of salt foam.

The zone's tangent happened to brush against Congo

then, sending the wind gauge whining. Gusts struck the

feathered wing-sail, catching the vertical airfoil and slewing

it sharply. The brakeman, who had been picking his teeth,

leapt for his lever too late as the sail swung hard into the

gang of straining laborers, knocking several down and cutting

the taut cable like a slanting knife.

Tension released in a snapping jolt, hurling sailors over

the railing amid a tangle of fibrous webbing. One moment

Crat was leaning back, struggling to do his job despite his

aching blisters. The next instant, he was flying through the

air! His quivering muscles spasmed at the sudden recoil, and

yet for a moment it seemed almost pleasant to soar bemus-

ediy above the water like a gull. His forebrain, always the

last to know, took some time to fathom why all the other

men were screaming. Then he hit the sea.

Abruptly, all the shrill tones were deadened. Low-

pitched sounds seemed to resonate from all directions . . .

the thrashing of struggling creatures, the glub of air from

panicked, convulsing lungs, the pings and moans of Congo's

joints as she slowly aged toward oblivion. A destination that

loomed much more rapidly for Crat himself, apparently. His

legs and arms were caught in the writhing net, and while the

float buoys were gradually asserting themselves, that

wouldn't help men who were snared like him, only a meter

below.

Strange, he pondered. He'd always had dreams about

water . . . one reason why, when all other emigration

states had spurned his applications, he finally decided to go

to sea. Still, until now the possibility of drowning had never

occurred to him. Wasn't it supposed to be a good way to go,

anyway? So long as you didn't let panic ruin it? fudging

from the sounds the others were making, they were going to

have the experience thoroughly spoilt for them.

Something about the quality of the sound felt terribly

familiar. Maybe he was remembering the womb. . . .

Sluggishly, with a glacial slowness, he started working

on escape. Not that he had any illusions. It was just something

to do. Guess I'll be'seein' you guys soon, after all, he

told Remi and Roland silently.

His left arm was free by the time one of the thrashing

EARTH 409

forms nearby went limp and still. He didn't spare the time or

energy to look then. Nor even when a gray figure flicked by,

beyond the other side of the net. But as he worked calmly,

methodically, on the complex task of freeing his other arm,

a face suddenly appeared, right in front of him. A large eye

blinked.

No . . . winked at him. The eye was set above a long,

narrow grin featuring white, pointy teeth. The bottle jaw

and high, curved forehead turned to aim at him, and Crat

abruptly felt his inner ears go crazy in a crackling of penetrating static. With a start, he realized the thing was scanning

him . . . inspecting him with its own sophisticated

sonar. Checking out this curiosity of a man caught in a net

designed to snare creatures of the sea.

This dolphin was much larger than the little spinners

the fleet had been killing only hours ago. It must be one of

the big, brainy breeds. Certainly it looked amused by this

satiric turnabout.

Damn, Crat cursed inwardly as his right arm came free

at last. No dumpit privacy anywhere. Not even when I'm

dying.

Accompanying that resentment came a dissolving of the

peaceful, time-stretched resignation. With a crash, his will

to live suddenly returned. Panic threatened as his diaphragm

clenched, causing a few bubbles to escape. He must have

been underwater only a minute or two, but abruptly his

lungs were in agony.

Ironically, it was the dolphin--the fact of having an

audience--that made Crat hold on. Damn if he'd give it the

same show as the others! Now that his mind was working

again--such as it was--Crat began recalling important

things.

Like the fact that he had a knife! Sheathed at his ankle,

it was one of the few items ship rules wouldn't let you hock.

Bending, grabbing, unfolding, Crat came up with the gleaming

blade and started sawing at the strands clasping his legs.

Funny thing about the way water carried sound--it

seemed to amplify his heartbeat, returning multiple echoes

from all sides. Counterpoint seemed to come from the spectator,

his dolphin voyeur . . . though Crat avoided looking

at the creature as he worked.

One leg free! Crat dodged a loop of netting sent his way

by the rolling currents--and in the process almost lost the

410 D A V I D B R I N

knife. Clutching it convulsively, he also squeezed out more

stale, precious air.

His fingers were numb sausages as he resumed sawing.

The sea began filling with speckles as each second passed.

Infinite schools of blobby purple fishes encroached across

his failing vision, heralding unconsciousness. They began to

blur and the feeling spread throughout his limbs as his body

began quaking. Any second now it would overcome his will

with a spasmodic drive to inhale.

The last coil parted! Crat tried to launch himself toward

the surface, but all his remaining strength had to go into not

breathing.

An assist from a surprising quarter saved him ... a

push from below that sent him soaring upward, breaching

the surface with a shuddering gasp. Somehow, he

floundered over a cluster of float buoys, keeping his mouth

barely above water as he sucked sweet air. I'm alive, he realized in amazement. I'm alive.

The roaring in his ears masked the clamor of men

watching from the Congo, only now beginning to rush to

the rescue. Dimly, Crat knew that even those now bravely

diving into the water would never be able to cross the jumbled

net in time to reach some still-thrashing forms nearby.

As soon as his arms and legs would move again, Crat

blearily turned to the nearest struggling survivor, a stricken

sailor only a couple of meters away, churning the water feebly,

desperately. The fellow was thoroughly trapped, his

head bobbing intermittently just at the surface. As Crat

neared, he spewed and coughed and managed to catch a thin

whistle of breath before being dragged under again.

Belatedly, Crat realized his knife was gone for good,

probably even now tumbling down to Davy Jones's lost and

found. So he did the only thing he could. Gathering a cluster

of float buoys under one arm, he stretched across the

intervening tangle to grab the dying man's hair, hauling him

up for a sobbing gasp of air. Each following breath came as a

shrill whistle then . . . until the poor sod's eyes cleared

enough of threatening coma to fill instead with hysteria.

Good thing the victim's arms were still caught then, or in

panic he'd have clawed Crat into the trap as well.

Crat's own breathing came in shuddering sobs as he

kicked in reserves he never knew he had before. Just keeping

his own head above the lapping water was hard enough. He

EARTH 411

also had to tune out the fading splashes of other dying men

nearby. / can't help 'em. Really can't. . . . Cot my hands

full.

Nearby, Crat felt another form approach to look at him.

That dolphin again. / wish someone 'd shoot the

damned . . .

Then he recalled that shove to the seat of his pants.

The push that had saved his life.

His mind was too slow, too blurry to think of anything

much beyond that. Certainly he formed no clear idea to

thank the one responsible. But that eye seemed to sense

something--his realization perhaps. Again it winked at him.

Then the dolphin lifted its head, chattered quickly, and vanished.

Crat was still blinking at strange, unexpected thoughts

when rescuers arrived at last to relieve him of his burden

and haul his exhausted carcass out of the blood-warm sea.

D

A new type of pollution was first noticed way back in the nine-

teen-seventies. Given the priorities of those times, it didn't get as much attention as, say, tainted rivers or the choking stench over major cities. Nevertheless, a vocal opposition began to rise up in protest.

Trees. In certain places frees were decried as the latest

symbols of human greed and villainy against nature.

"Oh, certainly trees are good things in general," those

voices proclaimed. "Each makes up a miniature ecosystem,

sheltering and supporting a myriad of living things. Their roots

hold down and aerate topsoil. They draw carbon from the air

and give back sweet oxygen. From their breathing leaves transpires moisture, so one patch of forest passes on to the next

each rainstorm's bounty."

Food, pulp, beauty, diversity . . . there was no counting

the array of treasures lost in those tropical lands where hardwood forests fell daily in the hundreds, thousands of acres. And

yet, take North America in 1990, where there actually were more

trees than had stood a century before--many planted by law to

replace ancient "harvested" stands of oak and beech and redwood.

Or take Britain, where meadows once cropped close by

herds of grazing sheep were now planted--under generous tax

incentives--with hectare after hectare of specially bred pine.

412 D A V I D B R I N

Trash forests, they were called by some. Endless stands of

uniformity, stretching in geometric lattice rows as far as the eye could see. Absolutely uniform, they had been gene spliced for

quick growth. And grow they did.

"But these forests are dead zones," said the complainers.

"A floor covered with only pine needles or bitter eucalyptus

leaves shelters few deer, feeds few otters, hears the songs of

hardly any birds."

Even much later, as the Great Campaign for the Trillion

Trees got under way--losing in some places, but elsewhere

helping hold fast against the spreading deserts--many new forests were still silent places. An emptiness seemed to whisper,

echoing among the still branches.

It's not the same, said this troubled quiet. Some things,

once gone, cannot be easily restored.

The most pleasant thing about the new routine was that

M it finally gave Stan Coldman a chance to take some time

E off and go argue with old friends.

S The next several Gazer runs would be ordinary.

0 The program was on schedule, slowly nudging Beta,

S beat by beat, into its higher orbit. At last Stan felt hf

P could leave his assistant in charge of the resonator an'

H take an hour or so off to relax.

E In fact, it was really part of his job--helping main-

R tain their cover. After all, wouldn't their hosts get suspi-

E cious if he didn't stay in character? The paleontologists

at the Hammer site would find it odd if old Stan Coldman

didn't come by on occasion to talk and kibitz. So it was with

a relatively clear conscience that he made for the nearby

encampment to partake of some beer and friendly conversation.

All in the line of duty of course.

"We ought to have an answer in a few years," said Wyn

Nielsen, the tall, blond director of the dig and an old friend

of many years. "We'll know when the Han finally launch

that big interferometer of theirs. Until then talk is pointless."

They had been disputing whether any nearby stellar

systems might have Earthlike planets, and the elderly but

still athletic Dane kept to his pragmatic, hard-nosed reputation.

"If you have the means to experiment, do it! If not,

EARTH 413

then wait till experiments are possible. Theory by itself is

only masturbation."

The small club erupted in laughter. Still, Wyn was no

spoilsport. And as everyone else seemed to want to speculate,

he merely grumbled good-naturedly and went along.

"We'll see about that Han interferometer," said a

woman geologist named Corshkov, whom Stan had met off

and on at conferences for decades. "The Chinese have been

talking about it forever. Why can't we answer the question

with facilities in orbit right now?"

Stan shrugged. "The Euro-Russian and American

telescopes are quite old by now, Elena. Yes, they've detected

planets around nearby stars, but only giants like Jupiter and

Saturn. Little rocky worlds like Earth are harder to find . . .

like picking out the reflected glint of a needle next to a

burning haystack, I should think."

"But don't most astrophysical models predict that sun-

like stars will have planets?"

This time it was a younger Dane, Teresa's husky friend

Lars. The fellow might look like an overbuilt mechanic or an

American football hero, but he obviously read a lot.

"Yes and no," Stan replied. "C-type stars like our sun

must shed angular momentum in their infancy, and since

ours gave nearly all its spin momentum to her retinue of

planets, most astronomers think other stars that rotate like

the sun must have planets too.

"Furthermore, astronomers think early protostars give

off fierce particle winds, which drive away volatile elements.

That's why there's so much hydrogen in the outer solar system,

while Mercury and Venus, sitting close in, have been

stripped of theirs."

"But Earth came out just right," Wyn nodded. "In the

middle of a zone where water can stay liquid, right?"

"The Goldilocks effect." Stan nodded. "Life could

never have started, or kept going for long, without lots of

water.

"But as for Earth being 'in the middle' of the solar system's

life zone, well, astronomers have argued over that for

more than a century. Some used to think that if our world

was only five percent closer to the sun we would have fallen

into the Venus trap . . . heat death by runaway greenhouse

warming. And if we'd been just five percent farther. Earth's

seas would have frozen forever."

414 D A V I D B R I N

"So? What's the modern estimate?"

"Currently? The best models show our sun's life zone is

probably very broad indeed, stretching from just under one

astronomical unit all the way out past three or more."

Someone whistled. Elena Corshkov closed her eyes momentarily.

"Wait a minute. That extends past Mars! So why

isn't Mars a living world?"

"Good question. There's evidence Mars once did have

liquid water, carving great canyons we have yet to visit,

alas." To that there was a general murmur of agreement.

Several raised their glasses to opportunities lost. "Perhaps

there were even seas there for a while, where early life-forms

made a brave start before all the water froze into the sands.

The problem with old man Mars wasn't that he spun too far

from the sun. The real difficulty was that the Romans

named their war god after a pygmy. A midget world,

too small to hold onto the necessary greenhouse gases. Too

small to keep those famous shield volcanoes smoking. Too

small, by half, for life."

"Hmm," Lars commented. "Too bad for Mars. But if C

stars have broad life zones, there ought to be many other

worlds out there where conditions were right . . . with

oceans where lightning could begin the first steps. Evolution

would have worked in those places, too. So where--?"

"So where the dickens is everybody!" Wyn Nielsen interjected,

slapping the table.

So we return to the age-old question, Stan thought.

Enrico Fermi had also asked it a hundred years ago. Where is

everybody, indeed?

In a galaxy of half a trillion stars, there ought to be

many, many worlds like Earth. Surely some must have developed

life, even civilization, long ago.

On paper at least, star travel seems possible. So why,

during all the time Earth was "prime real estate, " with no

indigenous owners higher than bacteria or fish, was it

never colonized by some earlier spacefaring race?

The amount of verbiage that had been spent on the

subject--even excluding flying-saucer drivel--only expanded

after the establishment of the World Data Net. And

still there was no satisfactory answer.

"There are lots of theories why Earth was never settled

by outsiders," he replied. "Some have to do with natural

EARTH 415

calamities, like you lot are investigating here. After all, if

giant meteorites wiped out the dinosaurs, similar catastrophes

may have trounced other would-be space travelers. We

ourselves may be wrecked by some stray encounter before

we reach a level sufficient to--"

Stan's voice caught suddenly. It was as if he'd been

struck between the eyes, twice.

For a blessed time he had managed to banish all thought

of the taniwha. So the sudden contextual reminder came

like a blow. But the thing that really had him stopped in his

tracks was a new thought, one that had swarmed into consciousness following the words--We ourselves may be

wrecked by some encounter. . . .

He coughed to cover his discomfiture, and someone

slapped him on the back. While he took a drink of warm

beer, waving concerned helpers away, he thought, Could

our monster have come from outside? Could it not be man-

made?

He didn't need to make a mental note to look into the

idea later. This was one that would stick with him. // only

I'd been able to break free and go to the meeting in

Waitomo! Somehow, he must find a way to transmit this

thought to Alex!

But now was not the time to lose his train of thought.

There were appearances to maintain. Where was I . . . ?

Oh yes.

Clearing his throat, he resumed.

"My . . . own favorite explanation for the absence of

extraterrestrials--or their apparent absence anyway--has to

do with the very thing we were talking about before, the life

zones around C stars like our sun. Astronomers now envision

a very broad zone outward from our position, where a

Caia-type homeostasis could be set up by life. The farther

out you go the less sunlight you have, of course. But then,

according to the Wolling model, more carbon would remain

in the atmosphere to keep a heat balance. Voila.

"But note, there's very little habitable zone left inward

from our orbit. Earth revolves very close to the sun for a

water planet. In our case, life had to purge nearly every bit

of carbon from the atmosphere to let enough heat escape as

the sun's temperature rose. And in a couple of hundred million

years even that won't suffice. As old Sol gets hotter, the

416 D A V I D B R I N

inner boundary will cross our orbit and we'll be cooked,

slowly, but quite literally.

"In other words, we only have a hundred million years

or so to come up with a plan."

They laughed, a little nervously.

"So what's your theory?" Nielsen asked.

Stan was wondering how to get the center of attention

away from himself, so he could find an excuse to sneak

away. But he'd have to do it smoothly, naturally. He spread

his hands. "It's really simple. You see, I think Earth must be

relatively hot and dry, as water worlds go. Oh, it may not

seem that way, with seventy percent of the surface covered

by ocean. But that just means that normal life-zone planets

must be even wetter!

"One consequence would be less continental land area

to weather under rain."

"Ah, I see," a Turkish geochemist said. "Less weathering

means less fertilizer to feed life in those seas. Which in

turn means slower evolution?"

One of the paleontologists spoke from the fringes of the

group. "And the life-forms would have less oxygen to drive

fast metabolisms like ours."

Stan nodded. "And of course, with less land area,

there'd be less chance of evolving these." He held up ten

wriggling fingers.

"Huh!" Elena Corshkov commented, shaking her head.

Several arguments erupted at the periphery as the scientists

disputed amiably. Nielsen was tapping away at the

miniplaque on his lap, probably looking for refutations.

Good, Stan thought. These were bright people, and he

liked watching them toss ideas about like volleyballs. Too

bad he had to keep his most pressing scientific quandaries

secret from them. To know such things as he did, and withhold

them from his peers ... it felt shameful to Stan.

"Aha," Nielsen said. "I just found an interesting paper

on continental weathering that supports what Stan says.

Here. I'll pipe it to the rest of you."

People drew plaques and readers from their pockets and

unfolded them to receive the document, drawn from some

corner of the net by Nielsen's quick-and-dirty ferret program.

Distracted from his recent desire to leave, Stan too

began reaching for his wallet display.

EARTH 417

At that moment, though, his watch gave a tiny, throbbing

jolt to his left wrist, just sharp enough to get his attention--the rhythm urgent.

While the chatter of excited discussion swelled again,

Stan excused himself as if heading for the men's room.

Along the way he popped a micro-pickup from the watch

and put it in his ear.

"Speak," he said to the luminous dial.

"Stan." It was the tinny voice of Mohotunga Bailie, his

assistant, and it carried overtones of fear. "Get back. Right

quick." That was all. The carrier tone cut off abruptly.

Stan felt a chill, mixed thoroughly with sudden pangs

of guilt. The taniwha--has it gone out of control? Oh Lord,

I sbouldn 'the have left them alone!

But even as he thought it, he knew in his heart that

Beta couldn't have gotten away so suddenly. The physics

just weren't there for such a happenstance . . . not from

the stable configurations of just an hour ago!

Then it must be one of the beams. This time we must

have hit a city. How many died? Oh Cod, can you forgive

us? Can anyone?

With pale, shaking hands he plunged outside where the

pearly arctic twilight stretched around two thirds of the horizon.

The aurora borealis made flickering, ionized curtains

above the Greenland ice sheet. Stan half stumbled, half ran

to his little four-wheeled scooter and kicked the starter,

sending its balloon tires whining across the glittering moraine,

spewing gravel behind it.

All the way back to the Tangoparu shelter, his mind

was filled with dire imaginings of what could have put those

dread tones in his stolid assistant's voice. Then he crossed a

hillock and the dome itself came into view, along with the

big, olive-drab helicopter, parked just beyond. Stan's heart

did another flip-flop.

It wasn't a problem with Beta after all, he realized suddenly.

At least not directly. This was quite another type of

calamity.

NATO, he realized, recognizing the uniforms of the

armed men patrolling the shelter's perimeter. Lord love a

duck . . . I never thought I'd see those colors again. I'd

forgotten they were still in business.

He knew only one reason the big armed aircraft would

418 D A V I D B R I N

have come all this way at such a time of night, bringing

soldiers to the door of his laboratory. And it surely wasn't a

social call.

They've found us, he realized, knowing he had only

seconds to decide what to do.

D Plano-Forbes: 2.5 billion

World Watch: 6.0 billion

Rocks-Runyon: 10.0 billion

These estimates of the Earth's maximum sustainable human

population were all made before 1990,.as the world's attention

began shifting from ideologies and nationalism toward

matters of ecological survival. The three appraisals at first

sight seem utterly at odds. Yet all were based on the same

raw data.

In fact, their differences lie primarily in how each defined

the word "sustainable."

To Piano and Forbes, it meant a system lasting at least

as long as ancient China had--several thousand years--that

would provide all human children with education, basic amenities, and per capita energy use equal to half the consumption

of circa 1980 Americans. A sustainable human

population would use carbon-based fuels only as fast as

vegetation recycled them and would set aside enough wilderness

to preserve the natural genome.

These criteria proved impossible to maintain for long periods

at population levels exceeding 2.5 billion.*

World Watch used looser constraints for their estimate.

For instance, while "American" consumption levels were still

seen as spendthrift, the authors did not call for rationing fossil fuels. Food was their critical concern, and although they

failed to foresee many important negative and positive trends

(e.g., greenhouse desertification vs. self-fertilizing maize)

their major difference with Plano-Forbes arose from projecting

"sustainability" only a hundred years or so at a

stretch.

The Rocks-Runyon model has proven the most accurate

one, in the simple sense that it correctly predicted we could

(with difficulty) feed ten billion by the year 2040. It also clearly EARTH 419

asks the least for the human future. Bare survival was its

criterion--muddling through, with little worry spared for even

a hundred years, let alone thousands of years, down the

road.

And indeed, there are those who argue we shouldn't be

concerned so far ahead. After all, science progresses. Perhaps

those generations will invent new solutions to make the

problems we leave them seem academic.

Perhaps our descendants will be able to take care of themselves.

'These figures are challenged by groups promoting space colonization, who project that lunar and asteroidal resources, with limitless solar power, would permit Plano-Forbes life-styles for ten to twenty billion humans, sustainable for all foreseeable time. Their favorite analogy is Co-

lumbus's discovery of the New World. The flaw in such schemes,

however, is the initial investment needed before wealth from space can bring prosperity down to Earth. Governments and peoples, already living hand to mouth, will hardly put so much into projects whose bounty might profit their grandchildren, but not themselves.

--From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books, edition 4.7

(2035). [D hyper access code 1-tTRAN-777-97-9945-29A.]

There was only one entrance to the deep cave complex.

M When armed men in blue helmets rained from the sky

A on jet-assisted parafoils, they had to hunt and thrash

N through the jungle for a time before they found that

T hidden opening. Then, silently, they began repelling

L down the shadowy chimney.

E Sepak Takraw awakened to the sound of blaring

alarms and at first thought it was only another Gazer run

1. whatever those were. The Kiwis working for George

Button had remained closemouthed about the essential purpose

of the gravity scans, though clearly they had to do with

the Earth's deepest interior. Whatever the Tangoparu techs

were doing here in New Guinea, they sure took their work

godawfully seriously--as if the world would end if they

made one bleeding mistake!

Sepak had finally moved his sleeping roll up to a cleft in

a narrow, extinct watercourse, because of the noise they

420 D A V I D B R I N

made each time their big resonator thing fired up, sending

bells and whoops echoing through the deep galleries. This

time, however, when he stumbled toward the lighted chamber

rubbing his eyes, he suddenly stopped and stared down

at a scene of utter chaos. Had the New Zealanders finally

done it this time, with all their noise? Invoked To, the Maori

god of war?

They were dashing about like addled bowerbirds, and

the bright cylindrical resonator swung wildly within its

gimbaled cage as armed men swarmed into the hall. Sepak

slipped into the shadows and kept very still. George bloody

Button. What've you got me into! The government can't

be this upset over us keeping a few caves secret for a

while I

Anyway, these weren't regular police. Half the soldiers

clearly weren't even native Papuans! Sepak mouthed a silent

whistle as commandos rushed past the dazed technicians to

secure the area. No, these weren't locals, nor even U.N.

peacekeepers. By damn, they were real troops . . . ASEAN

Marines!

Anyone who did the necessary ferreting knew Earth

still bristled with sovereign military might. Perhaps even

several percent of what used to exist in the bad old days.

And even more weaponry lay "in reserve," in treaty-sealed

warehouses. Alliances still trained, still maintained a balance

of power that was very real, for all its generations of

stability. Only, on a planet aswarm with real-time cameras

and volatile public opinion, those states and blocs generally

took pains to use their martial forces gingerly.

So Sepak knew this wasn't just a raid over some infraction

of the secrecy laws. As the marines briskly rounded up

the kiwi engineers, he searched in vain for emblems of the

U.N. or other international agencies. He peered for the de

rigueur Net-zine reporters.

Nothing. No reporters. No U.N. observers.

It really is national, then, he realized. Which meant

more was involved here than just the government of Papua-

New Guinea. A whole lot more.

And these guys don't want leaks any more than

George Button did.

Sepak melted even farther back into the darkness.

By all the holy cargo of John Broom . . . George,

what have you got me into?

D Archaic or obsolete activities or occupations:

1. flint knapping, entrail reading, arrow fletching

1. smithing, barrel making, art appraising . . .

clock making, reindeer, herding, dentistry, handwriting

1. game-show host, channeler, UFOIogist . . .

drug smuggler, golf course manager, confidential

banker . . . sunbathing, drinking tapwater . . .

New service professions:

1. household toxin inspector, prenuptial genetic

counselor, meme adjustment specialist . . . indoor

microecologist, biotect, prenatal tutor, cerebrochemi-

cal balance advisor . . . Net-SIG consultant, voxpop

arbitrageur, ferret designer, insurance lifestyle adjuster ...

World human population figures :

1982: 4.3 billion

1988: 5.1 billion

2030: 10.3 billion

Teresa began her journey home as she had arrived, in

E the company of Pedro Manella. For probably the last

X time, she stepped into a little boat to be conveyed

0 through the Cave of Glowing Worms--their living con-

S stellations still shimmering in a subterranean mimicry

P of night. Then she and Pedro took advantage of the

H darkness to slip behind a flock of whispering tourists,

E treading well-worn guide paths past phosphorescent

R signs lettered in a dozen languages. Finally, they

E emerged on the flanks of a forested mountain, in New

Zealand.

It's like we only first entered for the first time an hour

ago, Teresa thought, coaxing an illusion. Nothing in the

422 D A V I D B R I N

intervening weeks has been real. I made it all up--Beta, the

trip to Greenland, the gravity laser . . .

As Pedro stepped ahead of her down the tree-lined path,

his shadow moved aside at one point to let glaring afternoon

brightness fall upon her face. Teresa fumbled for her sun-

glasses.

Just a fantasy, that's all it's been, she continued wishing, including all that stuff about interstellar enemies sending monsters to devour our world.

It was a good effort, but Teresa had to sigh. She lacked

enough talent at self-deception to make it work.

While you 're at it, might as well go whole hog and

pretend you're nineteen again, with all life's adventures

still ahead of you--first flight, first love, that illusion of

immortality.

Southern autumn was ebbing fast, chilling toward winter.

A breeze rimed her hair--now again her own shade of

brown, but longer than at any time since she'd been a teenager.

It felt at once sensuous, feminine, and startling each

time it brushed against her neck.

Distracted, she suddenly collided with Manella's massive

back. "Hey!" Teresa complained, rubbing her nose.

Pedro turned, glancing at his watch, an agitated expression

on his face. "You go on to the car," he said. "I forgot

something. See you in a nano."

"Sure. Just remember I have a plane to catch at fourteen

hundred. We--" Her voice trailed off as he hurried uphill,

disappearing round a right-hand fork in the path. Strange.

she thought. Didn't we come down the left branch?

Maybe Pedro had to visit the gents' before the long

drive. Teresa resumed walking downhill again, one hand

lightly on the guide rail overlooking steep forest slopes.

Rain-damp ferns brushed in the wind. The tourist group had

gone ahead and were probably spilling into the parking lot

to seek their buses or rented runabouts. Perhaps the traffic

jam would have cleared by the time Pedro caught up.

Teresa's bags were already in the car. In them lay a

packet of doctored photos, depicting her at an Australian

hermitage-resort for the past month. They should get by any

cursory inspection. And, she'd gone over her cover story

umpteen times. Soon, at the Auckland airport transit

lounge, she would change places with the woman who'd

been taking that holiday in her name. After the switch, at

EARTH 423

last, she'd be Teresa Tikhana once again. No reason for

NASA ever to think she hadn't done what they'd asked--

taken that long-delayed recuperative holiday.

A new swarm of tourists loomed ahead, a big, intimidating

group of determined sightseers climbing rapidly, staring

about with their total-record goggles, holding tightly onto

their shoulder bags. The tour guide shouted, describing the

wonders of these mountains--their hidden rivers and secret

byways. Teresa stepped aside to let the throng by. Several of

the men looked her up and down as they passed, the sort of

cursory, appreciative regard she was used to. Still, though

the odds of being recognized were infinitesimal, Teresa

turned away. Why take chances?

/ wonder what's keeping Pedro? She chewed on a fingernail

as she looked across the rain forest. Why do I feel

something's wrong?

If she were in a cockpit right now, there'd be instruments

to check, a wealth of information. Here, she had only

her senses. Even her data plaque had been packed in the

luggage below.

Glancing behind her, she realized something was distinctly

odd about the tour group passing by. They're sure in

a hurry to see the caves. Is their bus behind schedule, or

what?

Every one of them carried pastel shoulder bags to match

their bright tourist gear. Four out of five were men, and

there were no children at all. Are they with some sort of

convention, maybe?

She almost stopped one to ask, but held back. Something

seemed all too familiar about these characters, as she

watched them recede upslope. Their movements were too

purposeful for people on holiday. Under their goggles, their

jaws had been set in a way that made Teresa think of--

She gasped. "Peepers! Oh . . . burfit!"

Helplessly she realized what her inattentiveness might

cost. Without her plaque, she had only her slim wallet to

use in an attempt to warn those below ground. Teresa took it

from her hip pocket and flipped it open--only to find it

wouldn't transmit! The tiny transceiver was jammed.

There was a telephone though, in the gift shop by the

park entrance. Teresa backed downhill till the last "tourist"

vanished round a bend, then she turned to run--

424 D A V I D B R I N

--and crashed into several more men taking up the rear.

One of them seized her wrist in a ninety-kilo grip.

"Well. Captain Tikhana. Hello! But I heard you were in

Queensland. My goodness. What brings you to New Zealand

so unexpectedly?"

The man holding her arm actually sounded anything

but surprised to meet her here. Despite Clenn Spivey's

scarred complexion, his smile seemed almost genuine,

empty of any malice. Next to Spivey, making useless any

thought of struggle, stood a big black man and an Asian.

Despite the ethnic diversity, they all seemed cast from the

same mold, with the piercing eyes of trained spies.

A fourth man, standing behind the others, seemed out

of place in this tableau. His features, too, were vaguely oriental.

But his stance shouted civilian. And not a very happy

one, either.

"You!" Teresa told the peeper colonel, cleverly.

"I hope you weren't planning on leaving so soon, Captain?"

Spivey replied, apparently bent on using one old

movie cliche after another. "I wish you'd stay. Things are

just about to get interesting."

". . . warn you, Ceorge! The place is swarming with soldiers! They've already taken the thumper and my crew. You and Alex and the others better clear out . . ."

A hand reached past George Button to turn off the

sound. The holo unit went on visually depicting an elderly

man in a heavy parka, obviously worried but now speaking

only mime into a portable transmitter. Behind Stan

Coldman loomed a titanic, icy palisade.

"I'm afraid the warning wouldn't have done much

good, even if it had come earlier," Colonel Spivey told Hut-

ton and the assembled conspirators. "We snooped all your

files, of course, before running this kind of operation. Can't

afford to be sloppy, you know."

Teresa sat in her old chair, across from Alex Lustig and

two seats from the exit, now guarded by Spivey's ANZAC

commandoes. This time, the underground meeting room

was packed with everyone, even the cook. Everyone except

Pedro Manella, that is.

How did he know^She wondered. How does Pedro always

seem to know?

She was feeling numb of course. Another few hours and

EARTH 425

she'd have been on her way to Houston, back to her comfortable

apartment and her loyal NASA publicity flack.

Now though?

Now I'm cooked. Teresa's thoughts were scattered like

leaves. It was only natural, of course, when you contemplated

a future in federal prison.

She glanced across the table at Alex and felt ashamed.

Certainly he wasn't worried foremost about saving his own

neck. This event would have effects on more than just one

life. All right, then. We're all cooked. There was little solace

in the reminder.

"How long ago?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Button?" Spivey asked.

George levered his heavy body to sit up at the head of

the table. "How long ago did you snoop our records, Colonel?"

Teresa noticed he didn't ask how Spivey's team had

broken the Tangoparu security screen. Obviously the great

power alliances possessed better infotech than even the best

Net hackers. With the deep pockets of governments, and

many of the old loyalties to call upon, they could stay two,

three, even four years ahead of individual users. So Spivey's

next admission took her a bit by surprise.

"You know, it's funny about that," the colonel answered

openly. "We looked for you guys a long time. Too

long. You had someone running awfully good interference

for you, Button. We pierced your caches just three days ago,

and then only thanks to some anonymous tips and help

from civilian consultants like Mr. Eng here."

Spivey nodded toward the vaguely oriental-looking man

Teresa had seen on the trail, who blinked nervously when

his name was mentioned. Obviously he was no peeper.

One of the Tangoparu technicians stood up to loudly

protest the illegality of this invasion. Pulling a cube from his

jacket, Spivey interrupted. "I have a document here, signed

by the chiefs of NATO, ASEAN, and ANZAC, as well as the

New Zealand national security authority, declaring this an

ultimate emergency under the security sections of all three

pacts and the Rio Treaty. What you people have been up to

justifies that label, wouldn't you say? If anything in human

history does, a black hole eating up the Earth surely qualifies

as an 'emergency.'

"And yet you kept it to yourselves! Hiding it from the

426 D A V I D B R I N

press, from the net, and from sovereign, elected governments.

So please spare me your righteous indignation."

In the holo tank, Stan Goldman's silent image turned

away as he saw someone approaching. Sighing in silent resignation, he reached for a switch and the image cut off

abruptly. In its place the familiar cutaway globe rotated

again--the Earth, depicted as a multilayered ball of Neapolitan

ice cream.

Ah, if only it were true. An ice cream planet. What a

wonderful world it would be.

Forcing aside giddiness, Teresa mentally added--Good

luck, Stan. God bless you.

"Until only a little while ago we thought you people

were the ones who made the damned monster!" June Morgan

shouted at Spivey. "You and your secret cavitron laboratories

in orbit and your cozy great power agreements. We felt

we had to keep our work hidden or you'd interfere to save

your own asses!"

"An interesting, perhaps even plausible, defense,"

Spivey acknowledged. "But now you know it wasn't we

nasty government brutes who manufactured the . . ."He

paused.

"The Beta singularity," Alex Lustig prompted, his first

comment of the afternoon.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome," Alex nodded enigmatically.

"Yes, well. A few days ago you folks seem to have decided

the monster was sent this way instead by angry

aliens." He shrugged. "I'm not yet convinced by that colorful

scenario. But be that as it may, once you believed that,

and knew we weren't Beta's makers, wasn't it your duty

then to tell us? After all, aren't we supposed to be the experts

at dealing with external aggressors? We're the ones

with the resources and organizational skills to take your

shoestring operation and--"

"We were arguing about just that when you and your

men burst in," George said abruptly. "In hindsight, maybe I

was wrong to hold out for continued secrecy."

"Because now it will remain secret." Spivey nodded.

"You're right in your implication, Mr. Button. The alliances

I represent see great danger in this situation--danger going

far beyond the immediate matter of getting rid of Beta. The

last century's proven how dangerous new technologies can

EARTH 427

be when they're misused. But once it's widely known that

something's possible, there's never a second chance to stuff

the genie back into its bottle. Do you doubt it'll be different

when people hear about gravity lasers7"

He looked around the room. "Be honest now, would

any of you like to see Imperial Han or the East Asia Copros-

perity Sphere, learn how to make these knot singularity

things? Or Sea State, for heavens' sake?"

"There are science tribunals," June Morgan suggested.

"And on-site inspection teams. . . ."

"Yes." Spivey nodded. "A combination that'll work

fine, so long as manufacturing such things requires large industrial facilities. But hadn't we better make sure of that,

first? That these things can be controlled by the peacekeeping

agencies? After all, Dr. Lustig's already shown you can

use very small cavitrons to make impressive singularities."

"Not that impressive," Alex cut in, showing his first

sign of irritation as he gestured toward a whirling representation of Beta.

"No?" Spivey turned to face him. "With all due respect

for your admitted brilliance, Professor, you're also notorious

for truly major screwups. Can you be so sure you're right

about that? Can you absolutely guarantee that ]oe Private

Citizen won't be able to make planet killers someday, in his

basement, any time he's angry at the world?"

Alex frowned, keeping his mouth shut. Suddenly Teresa

thought of her conversations with Stan Coldman, about

the mystery of a universe apparently all but empty of intelligent life. Putting aside Lustig's theory about alien her-

serkers, there was yet another chilling possibility.

Maybe it is trivia] to make world-wrecking black

holes. Maybe it's inevitable, and the reason we've never

seen extraterrestrial civilizations is simple . . . because

every one reaches this stage, creates unstoppable singularities,

and gets sucked down the throat of its own, self-made

demon.

But no. She knew from the look in Alex Lustig's eyes.

He's not wrong about this. Beta's beyond our ability to

duplicate, now and for a long time to come. Bizarre as it

sounds, the thing was sent here.

"Hmph." George Button grunted. The Maori geophysi-

cist clearly saw little point in arguing over things already

428 D A V I D B R I N

beyond his control. "Mind if I consult my database, Colonel?"

Spivey waved nonchalantly. "By all means."

George picked up a hush-mike and spoke into it, watching

streams of data flow across his desk screen. After a minute

he looked up. "You have our stations in Greenland and

New Guinea. But the other sites--" He paused.

Spivey looked to his left. "Tell them please, Logan."

The civilian consultant shrugged. He spoke with a soft

but startlingly incongruous Cajun accent. "My computer

model of recent Earth, um . . . tremors, indicates the third

site has to be on Easter Island. The last one's inside a fifty-

kilometer circle in the northern part of the Federation of

Southern Africa."

George shrugged. "Just checking. Anyway, I see here all

is normal at those two. No troops. No cops. You haven't got

them, Colonel."

"Nor are we likely to." Spivey folded his arms, looking

quite relaxed. "None of the alliances I represent have any

jurisdiction in those territories.

"Oh, we could sabotage your sites I suppose. But if you people are right--if you're not all deluded or crazy--then Earth needs those resonators. So I imagine zapping them

would be a little self-defeating, wouldn't W'

That actually won a weak chuckle from a few of those

gathered at the table. He continued with an ingratiating

smile. "Anyway, our objective isn't to slam you all into jail.

Indeed, formal gravamens have been prepared against only

one person in this room, and even in that case we might find

some room to maneuver."

Teresa felt all eyes turn briefly toward her. Everyone

knew who Spivey meant. The list of likely counts against

her was depressing to contemplate--misappropriation of

government property, perjurious nondisclosure, dereliction

of duty, . . . treason. She looked down at her hands.

"No," Colonel Spivey continued with a smile. "We're

not here to be your enemies, but to negotiate with you. To

see if we can agree on a common program. And first on the

agenda, by all means, is how to continue the work you've

begun, putting every resource into saving the world."

Everything the man said seemed so-o-o reasonable. Teresa

found it infuriating, frustrating ... all the way down to

EARTH 429

realizing her own role in Spivey's game. While others dove

right into the subsequent freewheeling discussion, she just

sat there, resigned to a pawn's mute, helpless role.

Clearly, with the New Zealand authorities committed

to their alliance, extradition proceedings would be straightforward.

Spivey could lock her up and throw away the key.

Worse, she'd never fly again. No leak to the Net, no public

outcry, not even legal gambits by the best live or software

lawyers would ever get her back into space again.

The others were in jeopardy too, even though their

cases weren't quite as clear-cut. Teresa watched George Hut-

ton's mental wheels spin. With canny shrewdness, the Kiwi

entrepreneur poked away at Spivey's cage, testing its walls.

Prosecutions would mean disclosure, wouldn't they?

No one knew how deeply Spivey's aversion to publicity really

went. Did he seek to keep the secret for months? Years

even? Or just long enough to give his side a head start?

The Tangoparu cabal had cards to play, as well. Such as

their expertise, which no one else could duplicate in time.

George emphasized the point, though it was a weak bluff

and everyone knew it. Could they go on strike, refusing to

use those skills, when the entire world was at stake?

Spivey countered by taking a lofty tone, making a

strong case for teamwork. He dropped hints the criminal

cases might be dropped. And within hours of an agreement,

the times of short supplies and sleepless nights would end.

Fresh manpower would arrive, fresh teams of experts to

work round the clock, relieving the tired technicians, helping

them guide Beta's orbit slowly outward while making

sure the worst tectonic shocks missed populated areas.

Teresa realized Button and Lustig were trapped. The

benefits were too great, the alternatives too hard. All that

remained were the details.

Of course, no one was asking her what she thought. But

in fairness, she probably looked as if she couldn't care less

right now.

"We're particularly interested in this coherent gravity

amplification effect of yours, Dr. Lustig." The speaker was

one of Spivey's aides, a black man dressed for tourism, but

with the bearing of a professional soldier and the vocabulary

of a physicist. "Surely the implications of the gazer haven't

escaped you?" he said.

"Its implications as a weapon? Oh, they occurred to

430 D A V I D B R I N

me." Alex nodded suspiciously. "How could they not? Want

to destroy your enemies with earthquakes? Blast their cities

into marmite . . . ?"

The officer looked pained. "That isn't what I meant, sir.

Other means of triggering quakes have been studied before.

You'd be surprised how many there are. All were discarded

as worthless bludgeons, lacking precision or predictability--

useless in the present geopolitical arena."

"And please note," Colonel Spivey interjected. "It's the

very fact that we kept those techniques under wraps, completely

secret, that let us discard those awful weapons and at

the same time keep them out of the wrong hands. Secrecy

isn't always obscene."

The black officer nodded and went on. "No, Professor

Lustig, I'm not talking about liquefying the ground under

the Forbidden City or anything like that. I was thinking

instead about the gazer beam itself, propagating outward

through space.

"Consider your claim that Beta must have been built by

alien beings . . . aliens who apparently mean us harm . . .

have you given no thought to how the gazer might be

aimed? At targets coming into the solar system?" He leaned

forward. "I can't help but wonder if our extraterrestrial foes

haven't badly underestimated us, by inadvertently giving us

the very means we need to defend ourselves."

Alex blinked. A faint smile spread as he sat up

straighter. "A defensive weapon . . . using the beam

against Beta's builders. Yes." He nodded. "I see your point."

"By damn, you're right!" George Button slammed the

table. Dawning enthusiasm glinted in his eyes. "Wouldn't

that be justice? To turn their own taniwha against them?"

"Um. Wouldn't that mean leaving the, uh, Beta singularity

down there . . . inside the Earth?" Logan Eng

pointed out hesitantly. ". . . to continue serving as a mirror

for the gravity laser?" He motioned with two hands. "Otherwise,

no coherent beam."

"Oh. Right." George looked crestfallen. "Can't have

that."

"Are you certain?" the military physicist asked. "You

say Beta's orbit even now carries it briefly up to regions

where the rock density's so low it loses mass. All right, then,

what if it were set on just the right trajectory . . . remain-

EARTH 431

ing inside the Earth, but balanced to neither grow nor

shrink?"

George looked at Alex. "Is that possible?"

While Alex pondered the question, consulting mental

resources Teresa could not imagine, June Morgan commented,

"It would save us all that worry about how to deal

with a million-degree flaming ball when it's finally ejected

from the Earth. What do you think, Teresa?" the blonde

woman turned and asked her, for some reason.

Teresa pushed her chair back. "I'm feeling very tired,"

she told Clenn Spivey as she stood up. "I think I'll go lie

down for a while." The colonel looked at her for a moment

and then nodded for a guard to accompany her. Teresa

glanced back from the doorway to see Alex Lustig tracing

mathematics in a holo tank, surrounded by excited scientists

from both camps. She si.gh.ed. aad turned aw&y.

The guard was an ANZAC commando from Perth, a

gung-ho Aussie patriot who was nonetheless solicitous and

rather sweet. When she asked if it was possible to have some

food sent down, he said he would try.

Her bags were in her old room . . . retrieved from the

car and no doubt inspected for good measure. She collapsed

onto the same cot she'd awakened in that morning and

mumbled a command to put the lights out. Curled up in a

ball, clutching a blanket to her breast, Teresa did not feel

"home" in any way at all.

In fitful slumber she dreamt the death of stars.

Her old friends. Her guideposts. One by one they flickered

out, each with a cry of anguish and despair. Every sigh

she echoed in her pillow with a moan.

Something was killing them. Killing the stars.

Poor Jason, she thought in the strange, mixed illogic of

sleep. By the time he reaches Spica it'll be gone. Nothing,

but black, empty holes. And he so enjoys the light.

Dreams move on. Now she looked out through the bars

of a dungeon, across a dark, glassy-smooth sea, barren of

reflections. As she watched, the water acquired a faint luminance ...

a pearly glow that suffused not from above but

within. The radiance grew as steam rose; then roiling bubbles

burst from a mounting bulge.

The sun rose out of the ocean.

Not the horizon--but the ocean itself. Too brilliant to

432 D A V I D B R I N

see, it cast fierce light through her outstretched hand, tracing

the contours of her bones. The blazing orb speared upward

on a column of superheated vapor. In its wake,

mammoth waves rolled across the once-placid sea.

Those water mountains were higher than her prison

and heading her way. Yet she didn't care. Even half blinded,

she could trace the fireball's trajectory and knew with dreadful

certainty. It isn 'the going away after all. It's coming back.

Coming back to stay.

Perhaps it was that dreaded thought that stirred her

from the nightmare. Or maybe the creepy feeling that someone

was treading softly toward her, across the floor of her

tiny quarters. Teresa's eyes snapped open, though she was

still snared by sleep catalepsy and by her mother's reassuring

words.

"Shhh . . . you only imagined it. There are no monsters. There's

never anybody there."

A foot collided with the dinner tray, left by the kindly

commando. Teresa heard a sharp intake of breath. Momma,

Teresa thought, as her heart raced and her right hand

formed a fist, you had no idea what you were talking about.

"Shhh," somebody said, not a meter away. "Don't

speak."

She stared at two white blobs ... a pair of eyes, presumably.

Teresa swallowed and tried not to let adrenaline

rule her. "Wh . . . who is it?"

A hand settled gently, briefly over her mouth, hushing

her without force. "It's Alex Lustig. . . . Do you want to

get out of here?"

Why is it, she wondered, that your eyes never completely

dark-adapt while you sleep? Only now, staring into

the dimness, did she begin making out the man's features.

"But . . . how?"

He smiled. A Cheshire Cat smile. "George slipped me a

map. He's staying with the others. Going to try cooperating

with Spivey. You and I, though . . . we've got to leave."

"Why you?" She asked hoarsely. "You were in pig

heaven, last I looked."

He shrugged. "I'll explain later, if we make it. Right

now there's a coffee break going^on, and we've maybe fifteen

minutes till I'm missed. You coming?"

Teresa answered with action, flinging off the covers and

reaching for her shoes.

EARTH 433

The Australian was no longer on watch by her door. Instead,

a tall, powerful Maori, with permanent-looking cheek tattoos

and battle ribbons on his uniform, stood with his back

against the opposite wall, his mouth half open in a pleasant

leer. At first Teresa wondered if the Kiwi soldier had been

won over to their side. Then she saw his glassy look, like a

dazer, high on a self-induced enkephalin rush. Only, a dazer

wouldn't be a commando. Somehow, Lustig must have

drugged him.

"Choline inhibitors. He won't remember a thing," Alex

explained. He led her down silent, rock-walled corridors.

Each time they approached a door, he referred to a small box

before giving the okay to proceed. At last they arrived at the

secret quay, where two small boats bobbed in the still, cool

waters of Waitomo's underground lake.

"Won't the exits be watched?" she asked. It wouldn't

require human guards--just tiny drones, about the size of a

housefly.

"This area was swept a few minutes ago. Anyway, nobody

but George knows the route we'll be taking."

Teresa wasn't sure she liked the sound of that. But

there wasn't much choice. She climbed into the lead boat

and cast off as Alex began hauling at the network of ropes

lacing the ceiling overhead. As they neared the big doors,

the dock lights shut off, plunging them into darkness. The

gates rolled aside with a low rumble. Alex grunted, feeling

his way from one guide cable to the next. She heard him

softly counting, perhaps reciting a mnemonic.

"Are you sure you know what you're--"

He cut her off. "If you want to go back, you know the

way."

Teresa shut up. Anyway, soon they were under the false

constellations again--those parodies of starlight used by

phosphorescent worms to lure their hapless prey. Each vista

pretended to show unexplored clusters, galaxies ... a

promise of infinity.

Perhaps all our modern astronomy is wrong, she pondered,

gazing across the ersatz starfields. Maybe the "real"

constellations are just like those green dots. No more than

lures to bait the unwary.

She shook her head as the ceiling slid slowly past, carrying

with it whole implied universes. That was the problem

434 D A V 1 D B R I N

with nightmares, they clung to you, affecting your mood for

hours afterwards. Teresa couldn't afford that now. Nor even

settling into "passenger" mode. Action was the proper antidote.

She whispered. "Can I help?"

The boat glided smoothly through the water. "Not yet

..." Alex panted as he groped for something up ahead,

almost tipping them over in the process. Teresa gripped the

rocking sides. "Ah. Here it is. George's special rope. From

here we leave the main cave."

Their craft made a sharp turn, scraping by towers of

inky blackness and then embarking under new, unfamiliar

skyscapes. A little while later Alex spoke again, now short of

breath. "All right. If you take my hand, I'll help you stand

1. carefully! Let me guide you to the cable. . . . Cot it?

Now that there aren't other ropes about to confuse you, I

could use some assistance. Put an elbow on my shoulder to

feel my rhythm. Keep to an easy pace at first. Let me know

the instant you feel any motion sickness."

Teresa forbore telling him her entire life had been a

battle with vertigo. "Lay on, Macduff," she whispered with

an effort at cheerfulness.

"And damn'd be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!' "

he finished the quotation. "We're off."

Trying to stand in a swaying boat while dragging on a

cable overhead in total darkness--it wasn't exactly the easiest

thing Teresa had ever attempted. She almost fell over the

first few times. But leaning against him made it easier. They

could brace each other on four legs. Soon they were breathing

in the same cadence, gliding across the smooth pond

with hardly a sound and only the green sprinkle overhead to

give the cave walls outlines.

Soon those walls were closing in again, she could tell.

The darkness and silence seemed to accentuate her other

senses, and she was acutely aware of every faint drip of condensation, every aroma rising from her clothes and his.

The boat bumped once, twice, and then went aground

on a rocky bank. "Okay," he said. "Carefully, crouch down

and help me feel for the bag of supplies."

Letting go of the rope, they came closer than ever to

tipping over. Teresa gasped, clutching him. Together they

fell in a heap of arms and legs, gasping--and also laughing

with released tension. As they tried to untangle, he grunted.

"Ow! Your knee is on my . . . ah, thank you." His voice

EARTH 435

shifted to falsetto. "Thank you very much." They laughed

again, in tearful relief.

"Is this what you were looking for?" she asked, as one

hand came upon a nylon bag. She pushed it toward him.

"Yeah," he said. "Now where's the zipper? Don't answer

that! Here it is."

There was something bizarre and really rather funny

about all this fumbling in the dark. It made your hands feel

thick and uncoordinated, as if smothered in mittens. Still,

altogether, this beat languishing in a tiny room, feeling sorry

for yourself.

"Here, take these," he said, apparently trying to hand

her something. But in reaching out she wound up jabbing

him in the throat. He made exaggerated choking sounds and

she giggled nervously. "Oh, stop. Here, let's do it this way,"

she suggested, and ran her fingers from his neck down to his

right shoulder. She felt his left hand move to cover hers.

Together they followed his sleeve down to his other hand.

Funny, she thought along the way. / had this image of

him as being soft, mushy. But he's solid. Are all Cambridge

dons built like this?

With both hands he pressed into hers an object--a pair

of goggles. But he didn't let go quite yet.

"We had to get you out," he told her in a more serious

tone. "We couldn't let Spivey take you off to jail."

Teresa felt a lump, knowing she had underestimated

her friends.

"He'd have used your jeopardy as one more threat, to

coerce George and the others," Alex finished. "And we decided

we just couldn't allow that."

Teresa pulled her hand away. Of course. That's completely

right. Have to stay practical about this.

"So you're dropping me off now and going back?" she

asked as she adjusted the elastic headband.

"Of course not. First off, we haven't got you out yet.

And anyway, I'm not staying to be Colonel Spivey's tool!"

"But . . . but without you the gazer . . ."

"Oh, they'll manage without me, I suppose. If all they

want to do is keep the damn thing down there--" He paused

and caught his breath. "But I'm not bowing out completely.

There's method to this madness, Captain Tikhana."

"Teresa . . . please."

436 D A V I D B R I N

There was another pause. "All right. Teresa. Um, got

yours adjusted yet?"

"Just a sec." She pulled the strap and toggled the switch

by one lens. Suddenly it was as if someone had turned the

lights on.

Unlike mere passive infrared goggles, which would have

detected very little down here, these monitored whichever

way her eyes turned and sent a tiny illuminating beam in

just that direction, for just as long as she was looking that

way. The only exception was where they detected another

set of goggles. To prevent blinding another user, the optics

were programmed never to shine directly at each other, so

when Teresa looked around for the first time, she made out

limestone walls, the inky waterline, the boat--but Alex Lus-

tig's face remained hidden inside an oval of darkness.

"Couldn't have used them before because Spivey had

spy sensors--"

Teresa waved aside his explanation. It made sense.

"Now where?" she asked.

He pointed downward, and she understood why even

the peeper colonel's little robot watchers wouldn't be able to

follow them. "Okay," she said. And together they sorted

equipment from the nylon bag.

Claustrophobia was the least of her worries as they kicked

along a deep, twisting tube, carried by the current of an

underground stream. Nor did the bitter cold bother her

much--though Teresa kept an eye on the tiny clock

readout, calculating the time before hypothermia would become

a problem.

Alex's flippers churned the water in front of her, creating

sparkling flecks in her goggles' beam. Spectrum conversion

always made things look eerie, but here the effect was

otherworldly, other-dimensional. The taper of his legs

seemed to stretch endless meters, kilometers ahead of her,

like this surging hypogean torrent.

The river held their lives now and they were helpless to

turn back if George Hutton's map proved wrong or if they

took some fatal wrong turn. She imagined they might, as in

some old movie, be swept downward ever deeper into the Earth's twisting bowels, to some Land That Time Forgot. In fact, though, washing ashore on a misty underground dinosaur

refuge was less unsettling to contemplate than some

EARTH 437

likelier possibilities . . . like meeting their end pinned to a

porous wall, the freshet plunging past them through crevices

too small for human flesh to pass.

Was Alex planning to lead her all the way to the river's

outlet, somewhere on the Tasman Sea? If so, the timing

would be tight. Their air capsules weren't rated for more

than a couple of hours.

Perhaps it was the coolness, but Teresa's thoughts soon

calmed. She found herself wondering at the sculpted shapes

of the sweeping, curving tube ... at the way different

hardnesses of. stone overlapped in smooth relief and how

patient eddies had carved cavities into the ancient mountain,

laying bare fine patterns, delicate to the eye.

Those eddies were dangerous. Even with gloves and

knee pads it was hard to ward off every sudden invisible

surge, every buffet and blow. Teresa felt certain there were

daredevils among the world's bored, well-fed majority who

would pay George Button handsomely for this experience,

without ever understanding where they were or what they

were seeing.

At one point the river opened into a large chamber with

an air pocket. They met at the surface, spitting out their

mouthpieces as they treaded water.

"Amazing!" she gasped. And the black oval covering

his face seemed to nod in agreement. "Yes, it's unbelievable."

"Where to from here?"

"I ... think we take the way to the left," he answered

after a pause.

Teresa churned her legs, rotating. Yes, the river split

here, dividing into two unequal paths. Alex was referring to

the narrower, swifter-running branch. "You're sure?"

In answer, he held out the miniplaque that hung from a

cord around his neck. "Did you see any other large chambers

on the way here? Did I miss one?" She peered at the

sketch. A computer graphics device could reproduce only

what it was given, and George Hutton's drawing had apparently

been scrawled in a hurry. "I ... I'd have to say

you're right. Left it is."

They reset their goggles and mouthpieces and kicked

off toward the left-hand opening, and an ominous roaring.

Teresa was intensely aware of the annotation Button had

inscribed at this point on the map, in red letters.

438 D A V I D 8 R I N

Be careful here! the inscription had said.

Only a few meters into the new stretch, Teresa realized

just how friendly the last one had been. No time or energy

could be spared for sightseeing or philosophizing now.

Curves loomed suddenly out of the froth ahead, confusing

her smart goggles. Confusing her. Even with the help of slip-

streaming--the natural tendency to ride the current's center

--it took every ounce of effort just to keep the writhing

stone intestine from crushing her!

It can't be much farther, she figured, remembering her

brief glimpse at the sketch, unsure whether she was calculating

or simply praying. The last pool has to be fust ahead.

No sooner did she think that though, than suddenly

she was caught in a tangle with Alex Lustig's legs. With the

river plowing into them from behind, the collision was a

series of buffets that made her head ring, knocking dazzling

spots before her eyes. The goggles only made things worse

by dimming suddenly in response to her pupils' shocked

dilation.

A sharp scrape on one leg made Teresa aware of jagged

stones, too fresh and rugged to have lain in the smoothing

flow for long. A rockfall must have partly blocked the

stretch of river. She writhed to one side barely in time to

avoid being impaled on one jutting monolith, then had to

grab Alex's leg as the current swept her toward another

jagged jumble just ahead!

Clutching his ankle, Teresa hadn't time to wonder how

he had stopped so suddenly. She held on tightly with both

arms. Her flippered feet bumped the barricade and instinctively

she kicked at it.

Miraculously, it gave way! Glancing quickly downstream,

Teresa saw the current sweep away what remained

of the precarious barrier. All it had taken was one extra

nudge and the impediment was gone. What luck!

She almost let go to continue the journey. But then she

paused. How is he holding on? a voice insisted. And why

doesn 'the he let go now that the way is clear?

Something else had to be wrong. Involuntary shivers

were coursing down the man's legs. He's in trouble, she

realized.

Fighting the current, worming her arms forward one at a

time, Teresa climbed up his legs inch by awful inch, seizing

EARTH 439

at last a solid grip on his belt. She lifted her head to see what Alex was doing.

My Cod! Bubbles escaped Teresa's mouth as she tried

not to cry out. The goggles prevented her from looking

within the circle of darkness framing the man's face. But she

didn't need any look in his eye to know panic and despair.

With growing feebleness, Alex clawed at a thong that

gouged deeply into his neck, releasing thin trails of blood

every time the current let up a bit. That same current almost

dragged Teresa's goggles off as she shifted to try to see

around the black circle, to whatever had him trapped.

It was the map plaque. Somehow it had jammed into a

crevice left by the cave slide! It was what had stopped them

both from crashing among the razor-sharp rocks just seconds

ago. Now wedged in place by Alex's struggles, it also anchored

the noose that was strangling the life out of him.

There was no time for thought. Teresa's knife was at

her ankle, while Lustig's was convenient at his thigh. It

would have to be his then. But to take it meant she'd have

to let go with one arm! And Teresa knew she couldn't hold

on ... unless.

She took three deep breaths, spat out her mouthpiece

and bit down hard on his belt, fastening her teeth as hard as

she could. Gripping tight with her left arm, she released the

right and fought to bring it to the knife. The river buffeted

them like flags. But in spite of the pain, her jaw and shoulder

remained in their sockets as her right hand fumbled

with the sheath snap and at last brought out the gleaming

blade.

Teresa squeezed both arms around him again and wriggled

the pungent belt out of her mouth. Now came the hard

part--holding her breath while worming her way up Alex's

body, centimeter by centimeter. His shirt was in tatters of

course, and blood streamers stained the chill water as she

noted with one dim corner of her mind that the man's chest

was even hairier than Jason's. . . . And that, of all things,

he had an erection!

Now? Males are so bizarre.

Then she recalled the old wives' tale--that men sometimes

grow tumescent when they are close to death. Teresa

hurried.

Her arms were close to giving out and her lungs were

burning by the time she wrapped her legs around his thighs,

440 D A V I D B R I N

held tight with one arm, and reached upstream with the

knife. She tried not to stab him in the face or throat as the

fickle, trickster river tore and twisted at her grip with sudden

surges, forcing her hand this way and that.

He had to be alive and conscious still. Or was it just a

reflex that caused Alex to run a hand along her outstretched

arm, nudging her aim? All at once, through the metal blade,

she felt the taut, bowstring tension of the thong, thrumming

a bass tone of death.

Now! Bear down, bitch. Do it!

With a force of will Teresa drove strength into her arm.

The thong resisted . . . then parted with a sharp twang

that reverberated off the narrow walls.

Suddenly they were tumbling downstream, bouncing

against the floor and ceiling. Teresa had to choose between

protecting her goggles from the tearing slipstream and cramming

the breather tube back into her mouth. She chose

breath over sight and grabbed the aerator, quenching her

agonized lungs even as the high-tech optics were torn off her

head, turning everything black.

The wild ride ended just a few chaotic moments later.

Abruptly, the bottom seemed to drop out as she flew into

what felt like open air! The former low, thrumming growl

now crested to a clear, crashing roar. Gravity took her, and

the plum-met lasted a measureless time . . . ending at last

in a splash at the foot of a noisy waterfall.

The pool was deep and cold and utterly black. Teresa

struggled toward what she devoutly hoped would be the

surface. When her head finally broached again, she treaded

water, spat out her mouthpiece, and drank in the sweetness

of unbottled air. Up was up again, and down was down. For

a moment it didn't matter that nothing--not even the green

glimmer of worms--illuminated her existence. Other people,

after all, had gone blind and lived. But no one had ever

managed very long without air.

"Alex!" she shouted suddenly, before even thinking of

him consciously. He might be knocked out somewhere in

this inky lake, drifting away silently, unconscious . . . and

she without sight to look for him!

She swam away from the falls until the clatter and

spume faded enough to let her hear herself think. "Alex!"

she called again. Oh Cod, if she was alone down here. If he

EARTH 441

died because she passed within inches, just missing him

without even knowing it . . . ?

Was that a sound? She whirled. Had someone coughed?

It sounded like coughing. She kicked a turn, seeking the

source.

"Uh . . . over . . ." More coughing interrupted the

faint, croaking voice. "Over . . . here!"

She thrashed the water in frustration. "I lost my goggles,

dammit."

The current seemed to be drawing them closer, at least.

Next time his voice was clearer. "Ah . . . that must

be . . ." He coughed one last time. ". . . must be why I

can see your face now. You look terrible, by the way."

He sounded nearby. Alex kept talking to guide her. "Co

left a bit ... um . . . and thank you ... for saving my

life. Yes, that's it. Gets shallow about there . . . left a bit

more."

Teresa felt sandy bottom beneath her feet and sighed as

she dragged her heavy, shivering body out of the clinging black wetness. "Here, this way," she heard him say, and a hand grabbed her arm. She clutched it tightly and sobbed

suddenly with emotion she hadn't been aware of till that

moment. Now that all the furious action had stopped, a

sudden wave of lygophobia washed over her and she shivered

at the intimidating darkness.

"It's all right. We're safe for the time being." He guided

her to sit down beside him and put his arms around her to

share warmth. "You're an impressive individual, Captain

1. um, Teresa."

"My friends . . . ," she said, catching her breath as

she clutched him tightly. "Sometimes, my friends call me

1. Rip."

She knew he was smiling, though she couldn't even see

the hand that brushed her stringy, sopping hair out of her

eyes. "Well," he said from very close. "Thanks again, Rip."

And he held her till the shivering stopped.

Some time later, Teresa borrowed his goggles to look around.

The Hadean lake stretched farther to the left and right than

the tiny beam could reach, and the ceiling might as well

have been limitless. Only echoes confirmed they were underground--and her fey sense, which told her countless me-

442 D A V I D B R I N

ters of ancient rock lay between them and any exit from this

place.

She gasped when she saw the extent of poor Alex's

scrapes and bruises. "Whoosh," she sighed, touching the

noose mark around his throat. It was certain to be permanent.

"A Scotsman, one of my ancestors, died this way," he

commented, tracing the bloody runnel with his fingertips.

"Poor sod was caught in bed with the mistress of a Stuart

prince. Not wise, but it makes for good telling centuries

later. My famous grandmother says she always expected to

wind up on the gallows, too. Finds the idea romantic. Maybe

it runs in the family."

"I know a thing or two about ropes and nooses also,"

she told him as she dressed his worst cuts. "But I've got a

feeling that when you go it'll be a lot flashier than any hanging."

He agreed with a sigh. "Oh, I imagine you're right on

about that."

Their supplies were meager, since their hip pouches had

been packed in a hurry and hers was torn in the struggle.

Besides the first-aid kit and one capsule containing a compressed coverall, there were two protein bars, a compass, and

a couple of black data cubes. Carefully scanning the pool,

Teresa failed to find her lost goggles or anything else of

value.

"How well do you remember George's map?" she asked

when they were both a bit recovered. Alex shrugged in what

was, to him, utter darkness. "Not too well," he answered

frankly. "Had I it to do over again, I'd have made a copy for

you. Or we ought to have taken the time to memorize it."

"Mmm." Teresa understood after-the-fact regrets. Her

entire career had been about avoiding rushed planning--

parsing out every conceivable contingency well in advance.

And yet she trained for the unexpected, too. She was always

ready to improvise.

"You had no time," she replied. "And Clenn Spivey's

no fool."

Alex shook his head. "Back in the conference room he

spun out a scenario so reasonable, it almost had me convinced."

"You seemed to be going along when I left. What

changed your mind?"

EARTH 443

He shrugged. "I didn't so much change my mind as

decide I didn't want it made for me. We'd all worked so

hard. It was starting to look as if we might be able to deal

with Beta ourselves. Though how to expel it safely at the

very end--that I still hadn't figured out, yet."

Teresa recalled her dream about the fireball, erupting

into the sky from a boiling ocean . . . rising, but certain to

return.

"So maybe Spivey's plan's a good one . . . keeping it

inside the Earth, but up so high it'll lose mass slowly?"

"Maybe . . . 7/it loses mass fast enough while in the

mantle to make up for its gains lower down. //there aren't

instabilities we never calculated. //constant pumping on the

gazer doesn't crumble too many farms or cities or change the

Earth's innards somehow--"

"Could it do that?"

His face took on a perplexed look. "I don't know. Last

time I looked over my big model on Rapa Nui ..." He

shook his head. "Anyway, that's where we've got to go now.

From there we can answer Spivey's proposition with one of

our own."

What an optimist, Teresa realized, and wondered why

she ever thought him dour or lethargic. "How are we supposed

to get there?"

"Oh, George says that will be surprisingly easy. Auntie Kapur can get us aboard a Hine-marama zep to Fiji, which isn't a part of ANZAC and has an international jetport. From

there, we travel under our own names, quite openly. Spivey

won't dare try to stop us ... not without revealing everything,

since, naturally, we'll leave complete diary caches

with Auntie before we go."

"Naturally," she nodded. "Knowing Spivey, he'll just

wait to talk with us when we get there. He still holds a full

hand. And we can't deal with anyone else."

Of course Teresa knew what she and Alex were doing.

They were talking as if their fates were actually still in their

control. As if they would ever meet that clandestine

zeppelin to begin a journey across the Pacific to the land of

haunting statues. By putting off their predicament, even for

a few minutes, they gave themselves time to calm down, to

equilibrate. Time to engage in denial that they really were

doomed, after all.

444 D A V I D B R I N

Alex recalled George saying something about exiting the

Waterfall Cave via a dry channel, cut halfway up a jumble

slope about a quarter of the way forward from the falls

themselves. Unfortunately, he couldn't recall whether that

was a quarter of the way clockwise or counterclockwise.

They tried the former first--taking turns peering through

the goggles for any sign of an exit--before moving on to the

latter. Fortunately, they found the opening at last, not too

badly hidden behind a jutting limestone wall.

Unfortunately, one of them would always be effectively

blind at any given moment. Because Alex was still a

bit shaky from his misadventure in the river, Teresa insisted

he lead, wearing the goggles. She assured him she could follow

so long as he provided some spoken guidance, plus a

hand wherever it got complicated.

The experience of climbing over glassy-smooth boulders

in pitch blackness was a unique one for Teresa. At times she

had the illusion this wasn't a cave at all, but the surface of

some ice moon. The sky was occulted not by stone but by a

sooty nebula, hundreds of parsecs in breadth. But at any

moment, the moon's rotation might reveal bright stars, shining

through a gap in the vast space-cloud ... or perhaps

even some alien planet or sun.

Those were moments of fantasy, of course. And always

they were cut short, refuted by her other senses ... by the

bouncing echoes of the receding waterfall and the strange

feeling of pressure from the rock overhead . . . reminding

her she was actually deep inside a world. A dynamic world,

with a habit of changing, shifting, shrugging in its fitful

slumber.

New Zealand, especially, was a land of earthquakes and

volcanoes. And though all that activity went on slowly in

comparison to human lives, Teresa felt a sense of danger

beyond the prospect of getting lost and starving to death.

At any moment the mountain might simply decide to

squash them.

Somehow, strangely, that patina added to all their other

jeopardies seemed to compensate a bit. It felt thrilling, somehow. In that respect we're alike . . . Alex Lustig and I.

Neither of us was meant to die in a boring way.

She thought about all this while, with other parts of her

mind, she paid close attention to each stone and every tricky

footing. Alex helped her squeeze finally through a narrow

EARTH 445

slot, into a passageway that coursed with a stiff breeze. Her

fingertips brushed the wall to her left, tracing dripping moisture.

Alex stopped her then and slipped the goggles into her

hand.

The interactive optics read her pupils' dilation and

damped power accordingly. Nevertheless, the return of sight

left her momentarily dazzled. Pyrites and other deceptively

gaudy crystalline forms glittered back at her from all sides,

their shine accentuated by the gleety dampness, giving the

impression of some hermit's deeply buried shrine. It was

lovely. For a moment she was reminded of holos she'd

viewed of the Lasceaux and Altamira caves, where her Cro-

Magnon ancestors had crept by torchlight to paint the walls

with haunting images of beasts and spirits, blowing ocher

dust around their hands to leave poignant prints upon the

cool stone--markers denoting the one thing she and they

intimately shared . . . mortality.

Teresa consulted her compass--though such things

were notoriously unreliable underground. Then she took

Alex's hand to lead him in what seemed the only direction

possible, away from the growling river into the heart of the

mountain.

So they alternated, stopping frequently to rest, each

taking turns being the leader, then the blind, helpless one.

She became quite knowledgeable about the contours of his

hands, and their footsteps slowly joined in almost the same

subconscious rhythm.

Along the way, to pass the time, Alex asked her to talk

about herself. So she spoke of her school years and then her

life and Jason. Somehow that seemed easier now. She could

speak her husband's name in past tense with sadness but no

shame. Teresa also learned a few things about Alex Lustig

when his turn came. Perhaps one or two that only slipped

between the lines as he told her about his life as a bachelor

scientist. In fact, Teresa marveled at how much better a

storyteller he was. He made his own labors, in front of chalk

boards or holo screens, seem so much more romantic than

her own profession as a spacebus driver.

Of course their conversation went in fits and starts. Every

third phrase was an interruption. ". . . Lift your left

foot . . ." or ". . . duck your head half a meter . . ."or

"... twist sideways now, and feel for a cut to the right

..." Each of them took turns verbally guiding and often

446 D A V I D B R I N

physically controlling the other one. It was a heavy responsibility, demanding mutual trust. That came hard at first. But

there was simply no alternative.

It was during one of her turns to be led that Teresa

suddenly felt a passing breeze as they crept along a narrow

passage. She turned her head. And even though the fleeting

zephyr was gone, she sniffed and began to frown.

". . . so that was when Stan told me I'd better shape

up my ..."

She stopped him by planting her feet and tightening her

grip on his hand.

"What is it, Teresa?" She heard and felt him turn

around. "Are you tired? We can--"

She held up her free hand to ask for quiet, and he shut

up.

Had she really sensed something? Was it because she

was blind and paying attention to other senses? Would she

have walked right on by if she had been sighted and in the

lead? "Alex," she began. "On which side of the corridor was

the next branching on George's map?"

"Um ... as I said, I'm not too certain. I think it was

on the left, perhaps four klicks past the lake. But surely we

haven't gone that far yet. ... Or have we?" He paused.

"Do you think maybe we've gone past?"

Teresa shook her head. It was a gamble, but the breeze

had come from the left. . . .

There were always breezes though, little gusts that

blew down the cavern from who knew where, bound for

places impossible to guess. Still, something in her internal

guidance system had seemed to cry out that last time.

"Did George write a note next to the turn?"

She heard him inhale deeply and imagined him closing

his eyes as he concentrated. "Yes ... I believe I see some

writing ... do you think it was something like 'watch out

for the skull and bones'?"

She punched fairly accurately and struck his shoulder.

"Ow!" he grunted, satisfyingly.

"No," Teresa said. "But the turn must have been unob-

vious. After all, they don't have to be clear forks in the road.

Usually they won't be."

"I guess not. Maybe that's what he wrote down . . .

how to look for it. Did you--"

She dragged his wrist. "Come on!"

EARTH 447

"Wait. Shouldn't I give you the gog--"

He stumbled just to keep up as she led him back

through the utter blackness purely by memory, waving one

arm in front of her, trying to find that elusive whisper again.

"Alex!" She stopped so suddenly he collided with her.

"Look up! Up and to the right. What do you see?"

"I see . . . Yes. There's an opening all right. But how

do you figure . . . ?"

She waved aside his objections. It felt right. Her internal

compass, her ever-nervous, never-satisfied sense of direction . . .

called her that way. She suppressed a voice of

doubt, one that said she was grasping at straws. "Let's give it

a try, okay? Shall I give you a boost up? Or want I should go

first?"

Alex sighed, as if to say, What have we got to lose?

"Maybe I'd better go, Teresa. That way, if it looks like a

true passage, I can reach down and lift you."

She nodded in agreement and bent over, lacing her fingers

to form a step. Gently, he took her waist and turned her

around. "There, that's better. Are you ready then?" He

planted one foot in her hands.

"Ready? You kidding?" she asked as she braced to take

his weight. "I'm ready for anything."

Even after they had traveled quite some distance along the

steep, twisty new path, half crawling, half slithering up

slanted chimneys and narrow crevices, Teresa kept refusing

his offer to share the goggles. He was doing fine as leader,

and she used the excuse that they couldn't risk a transfer in

all this chaos. To drop them would be a catastrophe; they

might slide or tumble out of sight and never be found again.

But in truth, Teresa felt a queer craving for sightlessness

right now. It was strange--difficult to explain even to herself.

Why should anyone prefer to stumble along, hands

waving, groping in the dark, utterly dependent on another

for warning about what low overhang might lay only centimeters

from her forehead? What precipice yawned beneath

her feet?

And yet, twice she stopped Alex from taking a route

that must have seemed reasonable by sight--the wider or

flatter or easier path--urging him instead to take a lesser

route. They were climbing most of the time, and though

Teresa knew that was no guarantee against some dead end

448 D A V I D B R I N

just around the next corner, at least upward meant they had

only a mountain to contend with, not an entire planet,

twelve thousand kilometers across.

This can't be George Mutton's route anymore, she

knew after a while. There couldn't have been this many

diversions, this many narrow, twisty crawlways indicated on

the map they'd lost. Alex certainly realized it as well, but

said nothing. Both of them knew they'd never remember

how to retrace their steps. The easy banter of an hour ago

(or was it four hours? six? fourteen?) gave way to clipped,

hoarse whispers as they saved their strength and tried not to

think about their growing thirst.

They were blazing their own path now . . . going

places no caver must have ever seen before. Teresa didn't see

them even now of course, but that didn't matter. The textures

were new with every turn. Under her fingertips she

became familiar with many different types of rock, without

associated names or images to spoil the perfect reality. Substance unsullied by metaphor.

Alex made the tactical decisions, step by step, meter by

meter, small-scale choices of how to move each foot, each

knee and hand. "Watch your head," he told her. "Bend a bit

more. Turn left now. Reach up and to the left. Higher.

That's it."

Not once was there any implied rebuke in his voice, for

her having led them this way ... a blind woman pointing

vaguely heavenward one moment, the other way the next,

quite possibly taking them in circles. I'm supposed to be

scientific. A trained engineer. What am I doing then. trusting

both our lives to hunches?

Teresa quashed the misgivings. True enough, logic and

reason were paramount. They were wiser ways by far than

the old witchcraft and impulsiveness that used to guide human

affairs. But reason and logic also had their limits, such

as when they had no data at all to work on. Or when the

data were the sort no engineer could grapple with.

We have many skills, she thought during one rest period,

as Alex shared the last crumbs of protein bar and then

let her lick the wrapper with her dry tongue. Some are skills

we hardly ever use.

If only water-finding were one of hers. Occasionally

they heard what could only be the plinking drip of liquid,

somewhere beyond the beam of Alex's goggles--often reso-

EARTH 449

nating tantalizingly beyond some rocky wall. Pressing your

ear against a smooth surface, you could sometimes even pick

up the distant roar and gurgle of the river, or perhaps another

one that coursed and threaded these hidden countries

below ground.

Sometime during their next stretch, she heard Alex

gasp, backing up from what he described as a "bottomless

pit." Teresa remained calm as he guided her round an unseen

trap that would have been their ossuary if he hadn't

spotted it in time.

They rested again on the other side. Hunger and thirst

had long since become acute, and then begun fading to dull,

familiar aches. But these didn't worry Teresa as much as her

growing weakness. Perhaps, a few rest stops from now, they

would simply not get up again. Would their bodies then

dessicate and mummify? Or was the dryness seasonal? Perhaps

in a few months a slow seepage, rich in minerals, would

return to these passages and gradually glue their bodies to

the rocks where they sat, to seal their crypt and lapidify

their bones. Or some wayward, springtime torrent might

come crashing through this way, crushing and dissolving

their remains, then carrying the bits all the way to distant

seas.

Perhaps none of those things would have time to happen.

It was still quite possible for Spivey and Button to lose

control over the Beta singularity, in which case, even the

mountain-tomb surrounding her now would prove no more

solid than a house made of tissue. The distance between

Teresa and her friends in the outer world seemed infinite

right now, but would become academic once the taniwha

reached its ravenous, final maturity, when all their atoms

would rendezvous in a sudden, intimate, topological union.

Teresa wondered what that might feel like. It almost

sounded attractive in a way, as she contemplated the immediate

prospect of starvation. Did other lost explorers get this

philosophical when they neared the end?

She wondered if Wegener in Greenland or Amundsen in

the Arctic pondered the vagaries of human destiny as they,

too, plodded on and on beyond all realistic hope. Perhaps

that, more than cleverness, has been our secret power, Teresa

thought as she and Alex got moving again, choosing yet

another branching path. Even when you run out of answers,

there are still possibilities to consider.

450 D A V I D B R I N

After a while though, even that consoling line of

thought petered out. Tiredness settled over her like a numbing

weight, thankfully dulling the ache of countless bumps

and cuts and scratches. Her knee pads might have been lost

some while back, or not, for she could hardly feel anything

from those quarters anymore as she crawled or crouched or

sidled edgewise through cramped or slanted defiles. All that

remained to focus her attention was the rhythm. And an obstinacy that would not let her stop.

She had no premonition when Alex stopped suddenly.

Through the hand on his arm, she felt a tremor run through

his body. "Come here, Rip," he urged in a hoarse whisper,

pulling her alongside him and then over to an inclined shelf.

When she was seated on the cool stone, she felt him take

her head between his hands and turn it to the left, then

downward a bit. "I can't tell," he said in a dry voice. "Is

there something over there?"

Teresa blinked. By now she had gotten used to the

speckles and entopic flashes the retina seems to "see" even

in total darkness--the lies your eyes tell in order to pretend

they still have something to do. So it took her a moment to

recognize that one of those glimmers was maintaining the

same vague, half-imagined, blurry outline, keeping position

whichever way she tilted. Teresa gingerly bit her cracked

upper lip so the pain would rouse her a bit. In a voice

parched and scratchy from thirst, she asked, "Um . . .

want to go check it out?"

"No, of course not," he answered with wry, affectionate

sarcasm, and squeezed her hand before beginning to guide

her down the new channel, this one layered deep with some

sort of dust that gave off a strong, musty aroma.

Teresa inhaled and finally realized what was so attractive

about the smell. It was a rich pungency, and she could

only hope her suspicions were true, that the fragrance wafting

her way rose from the thickly lain droppings left by

endless generations of flying mammals . . . animals who

sheltered below ground, but made their living flying and

hunting outside, under an open sky.

Round more bends and turns they followed the faint glimmer,

until Teresa began making out the dim outlines of

walls and rough columns, contrasting at first only in faint

shadings of black, but then with hints of gray and sepia

EARTH 451

creeping in to lend a detail here and there. Soon she found

herself no longer needing as much help from Alex, guiding

her own footsteps, detecting obstacles miraculously at long

range, while they were still meters away.

Sight ... an amazing sensation.

It took more steep descending after that, taking care not

to make some fatal error in their haste, but at last they came

to a place where the floor leveled off and was littered with a

carpet of small bones which crunched under their feet.

Now, overhead, they could make out thousands of brown,

folded forms, hanging from every crack and crevice. The

denizens of the cave gave them little notice, wrapped within

the cocoons of their wings, sleeping through the day.

Day. Teresa blinked at the concept, and had to hold up

a hand to cut the glare reflecting directly off one last cave

wall--one facing a source of light brighter than anything she

had ever imagined. I'm sorry I doubted you, she told the

sun, remembering how in her dream she'd presumed it

could ever have a rival.

Alex removed the grimy goggles and they looked at

each other, breaking out in silent grins over how filthy, horrible, battered and positively wonderful each of them looked

to be alive.

They were still holding hands, purely out of habit,

when they finished scrambling through the brush covering

the cave entrance and stepped into a morning filled with

clouds and trees and a myriad of other fine things too beautiful

ever to be taken for granted again.

D ATTENTION! You have been targeted by a very special net

search routine. Please don't purge this message! It originates

with the World Association of Mahayana Buddhism, one of the

great religious orders of history, and your selection to receive it was not random. This is an experiment, a melding of modern

science and ancient ways in our continuing search for certain

very special individuals.

Those we seek are tolkus . . . reincarnated beings who in

lives past were saintly, enlightened men and women, or bodhi-

sattvas. In the past, searches such as this were restricted to

within a few days' journey of our Himalayan monasteries. But of

late, tolkus have been found all over the world, reborn into every 452 D A V I D B R I N

race, every native culture and creed. It is cause for rejoicing

when one is discovered and thereby helped to full awareness of

his or her true powers.

Even when tolkus live their lives unannounced, forgetful of

their past or even skeptical of our word, they nevertheless often become teachers or healers of great merit. These powers can

be amplified though, through training.

We emphatically denounce claims that Eastern meditation

traditions are simply glorified biofeedback techniques for inducing natural opiate highs. Chemical comparisons are crude and

emphasize only the superficial. They miss the essential power

that can be unleashed by the concentrated human mind. A

power you may have refined in prior lives and that even now

may be within your reach.

Our search is of great importance, now more than ever.

Recent strange portents, observed all over the globe, appear to

indicate a time of great struggle approaching. Like those of

many other faiths, we of Mahayana Buddhism are preparing to

face the danger ahead. We have sent into the Net these surrogate

messengers to seek out those whose lives, courtesy, works

of charity, and creditworthiness indicate they may once have

been masters of enlightenment. We ask only that you meditate

on the following questions.

Do you believe all beings, large and small, suffer?

Do you believe suffering ends, and that one end

can come through what some call Enlightenment, a

piercing of life's veil of illusion?

Do you sense that compassion is the essence of

correct action?

If these questions resonate within you, do not hesitate. Use our

toll-free account to arrange an interview in person.

You may be more blessed than you remember. If so, we

have faith you'll know what to do.

"So tell me. What do you think of Elspeth?" Dr. Wol-

ling asked as she poured and then passed him a cup of

tea.

0

s

p

H

Nelson stirred in a spoonful of sugar, concentrating

on the swirling patterns rather than meeting her eyes.

"It's ... an interesting program," he said, choosing

words carefully.

She sat across from him, clattering her own cup and

spoon cheerfully. Still, Nelson figured this wasn't going

to be an easy sessionas if any with this teacher ever

were.

"I take it you haven't a lot of experience with auto-

psych programs?"

He shook his head. "Oh, they had 'em, back home. The

school counselors kept offerin' different ones to us. But

y'know the Yukon is, well ..."

"A land of immigrants, yes. Tough-minded, self-reli

ant." She slipped with apparent ease into a North Canuck

accent. "De sort who know what dey know, and damn if

any wise-guy program's gonna tell dem what dey tinkin',

eh?"

Nelson couldn't help but laugh. Their eyes met and she

smiled, sipping her tea and looking like anybody's grand

mother. "Do you know how far back autopsych programs

go, Nelson? The first was introduced back when I was just a

little girl, oh, before 1970. Eliza consisted of maybe a hun

dred lines of code. That's all."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. All it would do is ask questions. If you typed 'I

feel depressed,' it would answer either, 'So you feel de

pressed?' or 'Why do you think you feel depressed?' Good

leading questions, actually, that would get you started pick

ing apart your own feelings, even though the program didn't

understand the word 'depressed' at all. If you'd typed, 'I feel

1. orange,' it would have answered, 'Why do you think

you feel orange?'

"Funny thing about it, though, Eliza was positively ad

dictive! People used to sit for hours in front of those old-

fashioned screens, pouring their hearts out to a fictitious

listener, one programmed simply to say the rough equiva

lent of 'Hmm? I see! Oh, do tell!'

"It was the perfect confidant, of course. It couldn't get

bored or irritated, or walk away, or gossip about you after-

454 D A V I D B R I N

ward. Nobody would cast judgment on your deep dark

secrets because nobody was exactly who you were talking

to. At the same time, though, the rhythm of a true conversation

was maintained. Eliza seemed to draw you out, insist

you keep trying to probe your feelings till you found out

what hurt. Some people reported major breakthroughs.

Claimed Eliza changed their lives."

Nelson shook his head. "I guess it's the same with El-

speth. But . . ." He shook his head and fell silent.

"But Elspeth seemed real enough, didn't she?"

"Nosy bitch," he muttered into his teacup.

"Who do you mean, Nelson?" Jen asked mildly. "The

program? Or me?"

He put the cup down quickly. "Uh, the program! I

mean she ... it ... kept after me and after me, picking

apart my words. Then there was that, um, free-association

part. . . ."

He recalled the smiling face in the holo tank. It had

seemed so innocuous, asking him to say the first word or

phrase to come to mind. Then the next, and the next. It

went on for many minutes till Nelson felt caught by the

flow, and words spilled forth quicker than he was aware of

them. Then, when the session was over, Elspeth showed

him those charts--tracing the irrefutable patterns of his subsurface thoughts, depicting a muddle of conflicting emotions

and obsessions that nevertheless only began to tell his

story.

"It's the second-oldest technique in modern psychology,

after hypnosis," Jen told him. "Some say free association

was Freud's greatest discovery, almost making up for

some of his worst blunders. The technique lets all the little

selves within us speak out, see? No matter how thoroughly a

bit or corner is outvoted by the rest, free association lets it

slip in that occasional word or clue.

"Actually, we free associate in everyday life, as well.

Our little subselves speak out in slips of the tongue or pen,

or in those sudden, apparently irrelevant fantasies or memories

that just seem to pop into mind, as if out of nowhere. Or

snatches of songs you haven't heard in years."

Nelson nodded. He was starting to see what Jen was

driving at, and felt intensely relieved. So all of this has

something to do with my studies, after all. I was afraid she

EARTH 455

wanted me to face that program 'cause she thought I was

crazy.

Not that he felt all that sure of his own mental balance

anymore. That one session had exposed so many raw nerves,

so many places where it hurt--memories from a childhood

he'd thought normal enough, but which still had left him

with his own share of wounds.

He shook his head to knock back those gloomy

thoughts. Everybody has shit like that to deal with. She

wouldn 'the be wasting time on me if she thought I was nuts.

"You're tellin' me this has to do with cooperation and

competition," he said, concentrating on the abstract.

"That's right. All the current multimind theories of

consciousness agree on one thing, that each of us is both

many and one, all at the same time. In that sense, we humans

are most catholic beings."

Obviously, she had just made a witticism, which had

gone completely over his head. Fortunately, the session was

being recorded by his note plaque and he could hunt down

her obscure reference later. Nelson chose not to get sidetracked.

"So inside of me I've got . . . what? A barbarian

and a criminal and a sex maniac ..."

"And a scholar and a gentleman and a hero," she

agreed. "And a future husband and father and leader,

maybe. Though few psychologists anymore say metaphors

like that are really accurate. The mind's internal landscape

doesn't map directly onto the formal roles of the outer

world. At least, not as directly as we used to think.

"Nor are the boundaries between our subpersonae usually

so crisp or clear. Only in special cases, like divided personality disorder, do they become what you or I would call

distinct characters or personalities.

Nelson pondered that--the cacophony within his head.

Until coming to Kuwenezi, he had hardly been aware of it.

He'd always believed there was just one Nelson Crayson.

That core Nelson still existed. In fact, it felt stronger than

ever. Still, at the same time, he had grown better at listening

to the ferment just below the surface. He leaned forward.

"We talked before about how--how the cells in my body

compete and cooperate to make a whole person. And I been

reading some of those theories 'bout how individual people

could be looked at the same way . . . like, y'know, organs

456 0 A V I D B R I N

or cells cooperating and competing to make up societies?

And how the same . . . metaphor--"

"How the same metaphor's been applied to the role species

play in Earth's ecosphere, yes. Those are useful comparisons,

so long as we remember that's all they are. Just

comparisons, similes, models of a much more complicated

reality."

He nodded. "But now you're sayin' even our minds are

like that?"

"And why not?" Dr. Wolling laughed. "The same processes

formed complexity in nature, in our bodies, and in

cultures. Why shouldn't they work in our minds as well?"

Put that way, it sounded reasonable enough. "But then,

why do we think we're individuals? Why do we hide from

ourselves the fact we're so many inside? What's the me

that's thinkin' this, right now?"

Jen smiled, and sat back. "My boy. My dear boy. Has

anyone ever told you that you have a rare and precious

gift?"

At first Nelson thought she was referring to his unexpected

talent with animals and in managing the ecology of

ark four. But she corrected that impression. "You have a

knack for asking the right questions, Nelson. Would it surprise

you to learn the one you just posed is probably the

deepest, most perplexing in psychology? Perhaps in all philosophy?"

Nelson shrugged. The way he felt whenever Jen praised

him was proof enough that he had many selves. While one

part of him felt embarrassment each time she did this, another

basked in the one thing he wanted most, her approval.

"Great minds have been trying to explain consciousness

for centuries," she went on. "Julian Jaynes called it the 'analog I.' The power to name some central locus The' seems to

give intensity and focus to each individual human drama. Is

this something totally unique to humanity? Or just a commodity?

Something we only have a bit more of than, say,

dolphins or chimpanzees?

"Is consciousness imbued in what some call the 'soul'?

Is it a sort of monarch of the mind? A higher-order creature,

set there to rule over aH the 'lower' elements?

"Or is it, as some suggest, no more than another illusion?

Like a wave at the surface of the ocean, which seems

EARTH 457

'real' enough but is never made of the same bits of water from one minute to the next?"

Nelson knew an assignment when he heard one. Sure

enough, Jen next reached into her pouch and took out a pair

of small objects, which she slid across the table toward him.

"Here are some things to study. One contains articles by

scholars as far back as Ornstein and Minsky and Bukhorin. I

think you'll find them useful as you write up your own

speculations for next time."

He reached for the items, perplexed. One was a standard

gigabyte infocell. But the other wasn't even a chip. He

recognized the disk as an old-style metal coin and read the

words united states of america imprinted around its rim.

"Take a look at the motto," she suggested.

He didn't know what that meant, so he searched for the

most incomprehensible thing on it. "E . . . pluribus . . .

unum?" he pronounced carefully.

"Mmm," she confirmed, and said nothing more. Nelson

sighed. Naturally, he was going to have to look it up for

himself.

By all the numbers, it should have happened long ago.

Jen thought about consciousness, a topic once dear to

her, but which she'd given little attention to for some time.

Until all these new adventures overturned her pleasant,

iconoclastic existence and threw her back to contemplating

the basics again. Now she couldn't help dwelling on the

subject during her walk back to the Tangoparu digs.

It's close to a century since they've been talking about

giving machines "intelligence." And still they run up

against this barrier of self-awareness. Still they say, "It's

sure to come sometime in the next twenty years or so!" As

if they really know.

Stars glittered over the dusty path as she made her way

from Kuwenezi's compact, squat, storm-proof ark four, past

fields of newly sprouted winter wheat, toward the gaping

entrance of the old gold mine. The quandary stayed with

her as she rode the elevator deep into the Earth.

Simulation programs keep getting better. Now they

mimic faces, hold conversations, pass Turing tests. Some

may fool you up to an hour if you aren 'the careful.

And yet you can always tell, if you pay attention. Simulations,

that's all they are.

458 D A V I D B R I N

Funny thing. According to theoreticians, big computers

should have been able to perform human-level thought at

least two decades ago. Something was missing, and as her

conversations with Nelson brought her back to basics, Jen

thought she knew what it was.

No single entity, all by itself, can ever be whole.

That was the paradox. It was delicious in a way, like the

ancient teaser, "This sentence is a lie." And yet, hadn't Kurt

Codel shown, mathematically, that no closed system of

logic can ever "prove" all its own implied theorems? Hadn't

Donne said, "No man is an island"?

We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists

of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves.

That's how you make a working, system, like an

organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.

Or a mind.

Jen entered the well-lit chamber where the Tangoparu

team had their resonator. She stopped by the main display to

see where Beta was at present. A purple ellipse marked its

current orbit--now rising at its highest point all the way

past the outer core to the lower mantle, where quicksilver

flashes seemed to spark and flare with every lingering apogee.

Now Beta was losing mass at each apex--a true milestone--though

it would be a while yet before its balance

sheet went into debit full time and they could all draw a

sigh of relief.

Jen watched the mantle's flickerings of superconducting

electricity, those pent-up energy stores Kenda's people

tapped to drive the gazer effect. One brief, titanic burst had

taken place while she was visiting Nelson--triggered in tandem

by the Greenland and New Guinea resonators. The

next run, scheduled in ten minutes, would unite this African

device with New Guinea in an effort to shift Beta's orbital

line of apsides slightly.

At first she and the others had been fearful of the news

from headquarters--that the NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN alliances

had seized two of the four resonators. Kenda worried

that all their work would be in vain. Then came word from

George Button. Everything was to go on as before. The only

difference, apparently, was that new supplies and technicians

would flood in to Kelp the effort. Jen had been cynical;

it sounded too good to be true.

Sure enough, George went on to add that there would

EARTH 459

be limits to cooperation with Colonel Spivey. Easter Island

and South Africa were to remain independent. He was adamant

about that. No newcomers would be allowed at those

two sites. Kenda's team reacted with a mixture of resigned

fatigue and relief. They would have loved the help, but understood Hutton's reasons.

"George isn't so sure about this association, yet,"

Kenda told them all at a meeting several days ago. "And

that's enough for me."

fen wondered why there was no word from Alex. Now

that they were communicating over secure military bands,

completely independent of the World Data Net, shouldn't the boy feel free to talk openly? Something was wrong, she sensed. More was going on than anyone said.

With a sigh she went to her own station to plug in the

subvocal. By now it was almost as easy to calibrate as her

home unit, though she still had to do most of it "by hand."

Only this time, after that conversation with Nelson, she

paid a little more attention to the extraneous blips and images

that popped in and out of the peripheral screens.

At the upper left, several bars of musical score wrote

themselves--an advertising jingle she hadn't heard in years.

Below that, poking from a corner, came the shy face of a

young boy . . . Alex, as she remembered him at age eight

or so. No mystery why that image crept in. She was worried

about him, and so must have subvocalized unspoken words

that the computer picked up. It, in turn, had gone into her

personal archive and pulled out some old photo, feeding it

then to an off-the-shelf enhancement program to be animated.

To the uninitiated, it might seem as if the computer had

read her thoughts. In fact, it was only highlighting the surface

bits, those which almost became words. It was like rummaging

through your purse and coming up with an envelope

of neglected pictures. Only now her "purse" consisted of

terabyte sheets of optical memory, extrapolated by a tool kit

of powerful subroutines. And you didn't even have to intend

in order to rummage. The mind "below" was doing it

all the time.

Jen adjusted the sensitivity level, giving her associations

more space to each side ... it was a sort of visually amplified

form of free association, she realized. Yet another type

of feedback. And feedback was the way life-forms learned

460 D A V I D B R I N

and avoided error. Caia used feedback to maintain her delicate

balance. Another word for feedback was "criticism."

A pair of cartoon figures drifted toward each other from

opposite screens. The first was her familiar tiger totem . . .

a mascot that had been omnipresent, for some reason, ever

since this adventure had begun. The other symbol looked

like an envelope . . . the old-fashioned kind you used to

send letters in. The two figures circled round each other, the

tiger mewling lowly, the envelope snapping its flap at the

cat.

Now why had these manifested when she thought the

word "criticism"? As she reflected on the question, written

words formed in the tank. The envelope said to the tiger,

"YOUR ORANGE STRIPES ARE TOO BRIGHT TO CAMOUFLAGE YOU ON

THIS SCREEN! I CAN SEE YOU TOO EASILY!"

"thank you," the tiger acknowledged, and switched at

once to gray tones Jen found blurry and indistinct. "what

do you contain?" the tiger asked the envelope in turn. "it

REALLY IS WRONG FOR ONE PART TO KEEP SECRETS FROM THE WHOLE."

And a slashing paw ripped open a corner, laying bare a bit of

something that sparkled underneath. "what do you contain?"

the great cat insisted.

Though amusing in its own way, Jen decided this was

accomplishing nothing. "I'll tell you what it contains," she

muttered, making the words official by saying them aloud.

She wiped the screen with a simple tap of one tooth against

another. "Just more bleeding metaphors."

Gathering herself together, Jen concentrated on the

matter at hand. Getting ready for the next run of the gravity

laser. She'd gotten to quite enjoy each firing, pretending it

was she herself who sent beams of exploration deep into the

living world.

Meanwhile, though, a ghostlike striped pattern, like a

faint smile, lingered faintly in one corner of the screen, purring softly to itself, watching.

D The International Space Treaty Authority today released its

annual census of known man-made hazards to vehicles and

satellites in outer space.'Despite the stringent provisions of the Guiana Accords of 2021, the amount of dangerous debris larger

than one millimeter has risen by yet another five percent, in-

EARTH 461

creasing the volume of low earth orbit unusable by spacecraft

classes two through six. If this trend continues, it will force repositioning or replacement of weather, communications, and arms-

control satellites, as well as the expensive armoring of manned

research stations.

"People don't think of this as pollution," said ISTA director

Sanjay Vendrajadan. "But Earth is more than just a ball of rock

and air, you know. Its true boundaries extend beyond the moon.

Anything happening inside that huge sphere eventually affects

everything else. You can bet your life on it."

The face in the telephone screen seemed to be changing

L daily. Logan felt a pang, seeing how grown-up Claire was

I becoming.

T "She doesn't even think it worth hiding from me!"

H his daughter complained. Behind her, Logan saw the fa-

0 mihar cane fields and cypresses of Atchafalaya country,

S with its monumental dikes shading fish farms and lazy

P bayous. Claire looked frustrated and angry.

H "I'm no great programmer, but she must think I'm

E a total baby not to be able to snoop through those pa-

R thetic screens between my unit and hers!"

E Logan shook his head. "Honey, Daisy could hide

data from God himself." He smiled. "Heck, she could even

fool Santa Claus if she put her mind to it."

"I know that!" Claire answered with a furled brow, dismissing

his attempt at levity. "Between the house and the

outside world, she's got watchdogs and griffins and the scariest

cockatrice programs anyone's ever seen. Which shows

just how much contempt she must have for me, leaving it so

easy for me to probe her puzzle palace from my little desk

comp down the hall!"

Logan realized this was complicated. Part of Claire's agitation

had little to do with Daisy's actual sins. "Your mother

loves you," he said.

But Claire only shrugged irritably, as if to say his statement

was obvious, tendentious, and irrelevant. "I have a

psycher program, Dad, thanks. I didn't come all the way out

here, beyond range of her local pickups, just to whine that

my momma doesn't understand me."

That was sure what it had sounded like. But Logan held

462 DAVIDBRIN

up both hands in surrender. "All right. Pipe me what you

found. I'll look it over."

"Promise?"

"Hey," he said, pausing to cross his heart. "Didn't I pay

off on the meteorite?"

That, at last, got a smile out of her. Claire brushed aside

a lock of dark hair that had fallen over her eyes in her agitation.

"Okay. Here it comes. I encrypted it inside a routine

weather forecast, in case one of her ferrets happens across it

on the way."

// one of Daisy McClennon 's ferrets finds the blip, simple

encryption won't matter. But Logan kept the thought to

himself. Almost as soon as she pressed a button, a thousand

miles away, his own borrowed data plaque lit up.

INCOMING MAIL.

Logan thought he heard the sound of a copter's engines.

He looked up to scan the forest from this slight rise, but

there was no sign yet of the pickup vehicle. There was still

time to finish the conversation.

"I want to know if you thought about what I said last

time," he asked his daughter.

Claire frowned. "You mean about dragging Daisy with

me on some sort of 'vacation'? Daddy, have you any idea

what my counselor in Oregon is like? I already missed one

threshold exam this month because of the storm. Two more

and I might have to go back to school. You know, high

school2"

Logan was almost tempted to ask, What's so bad about

high school? I had some great times in high school.

But then, the mind has ways of locking out memories of

pain and ennui, and recalling only the peaks. Prison for the

crime of puberty--that was how secondary school had

seemed, when he really thought back on it.

So how do 1 tell her I'm worried? Worried about things

far worse than the of if chance she might have to finish her

diploma in some public warren? What's six months of

bored purgatory against saving her life?

One of Daisy's surrogates might or might not at this

moment be snooping the plaque he was using. But Logan

knew for certain another force, even more powerful than his

ex-wife, was listening to his every word. Glenn Spivey's organization was fanatical about security, and its watch pro-

EARTH 463

grams would parse all but the vaguest warnings he might

offer Claire. Still, Logan had to take a chance.

"I ... do you remember what Daisy snooped, last

time? My paper?" He furrowed his forehead until his eyebrows

nearly touched.

"You mean the one about--?" Then, miraculously, she

seemed to read his expression. Her mouth went round,

briefly. "Um, yeah. I remember what it was about."

"Well, just so you do." Logan pretended to lose interest

in the topic. "Say, have you been up to Missouri, lately. I

hear they're having a pretty good state fair up around New

Madrid, these days. You might pick up some nice specimens

for your collection there."

Claire's eyes narrowed to slits. "Um, Tony has to handle

the fish harvest all alone since his uncle got laid up. So

1. I'm helping even on weekends. I probably won't get to

any fairs this year."

He could see the wheels turning behind those blue

eyes. Not even seventeen, and yet she knows how to read

between the lines. Are the new schools doing this? Are

teenagers really getting smarter? Or am I just lucky?

Obviously the reference to New Madrid was setting off

alarm bells in Claire's head. Now he had to pray Spivey's

spy software wouldn't catch the same contextual cues.

"Mm. Tony's a good kid. Just remember, though, how we

talked about boys, even the nice ones. Be sure you call the

shots, kiddo. Don't let anybody turn the ground to jello

under you."

With a show of irritation he could tell was calculated,

Claire sniffed. "I can take care of my own footing, Dad."

He grunted with fatherly curmudgeonliness. For the

moment, that was all he could do. Let Claire evaluate his

veiled warning, as he'd consider hers. What a team we'd

make. That is, if we survive the next year.

From a distance, across the forested slopes, Logan now

heard the real growl of the 'copter carrying the rest of his

inspection team. He turned back to his daughter's image.

"Time to go, honey. I just . . . hope you know how very

much I love you."

He hadn't intended getting so uncharacteristically

mushy all of a sudden. But it turned out to be exactly the

right thing to do. Claire's eyes widened momentarily, and he

464 D A V I D B R I N

saw her swallow, realizing perhaps for the first time just how

seriously he took all this.

"Take care of yourself, Daddy. Please." She leaned forward

and whispered. "I love you too." Then her image vanished

from the small display.

Fallen pine needles blew across his ankles. Logan looked

up as the hybrid flying machine--half helicopter, half turboprop--rotated its engines to descend vertically toward a

clearing a hundred meters away. Leaning out the side door

was Joe Redpath, Logan's sardonic Amerind assistant, whose

bored, sullen expression was just his version of a friendly

greeting. No doubt Redpath brought news of the colonel's

next assignment now that their survey here was finished.

Between Logan and the clearing lay the emergence site

--an area about equal to a city block. As usual, the gravity

beam's coupling with surface matter had been, well, peculiar.

This time roughly a quarter of the pines within the exit

zone had been vaporized, along with their roots. Those remaining--which had all been either taller or shorter than

the missing trees--stood apparently unscathed amid the gaping

holes.

Fortunately, no people had been in this remote mountain

locale, so it hardly seemed a calamity. Logan would

reserve judgment though, till the soil and underlying rocks

were scanned by follow-up teams.

But of course, Colonel Spivey was less interested in

mineralogical consistency than readouts from his instrument

packages, which had been scattered across this mountainside

just before the gazer beam was scheduled to pass

through. Returning minutes after the event, Logan had

dropped in to gather the mud-spattered canisters nearest the

center while Redpath and the 'copter crew collected others

farther out. Of those at ground zero, two were missing, along

with the vanished trees.

The predictions made by Hutton's teams grew sharper

with each event. Soon, we won't have to retreat so far for

safety. Soon I'll get to witness one happening up close.

The prospect was both chilling and exciting.

This improved predictability was helping keep collateral

damage to a minimum, at least in alliance territories.

Where the beam couldn't be diverted to completely uninhabited

areas, people could generally be evacuated on some

pretext. It was different, of course, when the exit point lay

EARTH 465

in "unfriendly territory," where a warning might arouse suspicion.

In those cases, the resonator crews could only do

their best with aiming alone.

Sometimes, that wasn't enough. In China, an entire village

had sunk out of sight last week, when the ground beneath

it turned to slurry. And had the vibrations in an

Azerbaijani earthquake been just a few hertz closer to the

normal modes of certain large apartment buildings, the damage

would not have been "minor," but horrendous. Logan

shuddered to think about that near catastrophe.

Maybe Spivey's arranging for these close shaves, he

pondered as he picked his way past the yawning gaps in the

forest loam. After all, when you're testing a weapon, an

intentional "near miss" is just as good as a bull's-eye.

Only, what if some "near miss" happens to trigger

something else? Something unexpected?

New Madrid, he had said to Claire. Not many people

knew that Missouri town was distinguished as the site of a

particularly stiff seismic jolt back in the early nineteenth

century--the most powerful quake to hit the territory of the

United States in recorded history, which shook the Mississippi

out of its banks and rattled the continent as far away as

the Eastern Seaboard. Only a few had died on that occasion,

because the population was so sparse. But if something like

it struck today, it would make two "big ones" in late

TwenCen California look like mere amusement park rides.

Spivey and the others think they can "manage" the

monster. But Alex Lustig seemed dubious, and he was the

only one with any real understanding.

It troubled Logan that they still hadn't found the British

physicist. Perhaps Lustig and that woman astronaut had

been victims of foul play. But if so, who could have profited?

Redpath caught the recovered instrument packages Logan

slung info the aircraft. "So where to now?" Logan asked

as he clambered aboard. The federal officer with the beaded

headband barely shrugged. "Somewhere in Canada. They're

tryin' to pin it down now. Meanwhile, we ride."

Logan nodded. This was the thrilling part, heading off

to yet another site, somewhere in North America, flitting

from one place to the next to see what new, weird manifestations

the gazer would wreak. Most of the time it came

down to interviewing some eyewitness who saw "a cloud

disappear" or reported "a thousand crazy colors." But then,

466 D A V I D B R I N

when the beam coupling coefficients were close, there might

be bizarre, twisty columns of fused earth where none had

been before, or gaping holes, or disappearances.

We're saving the Earth, Logan reminded himself dozens

of times each day. The gazer is our only hope.

True enough. But Clenn Spivey was right about something

else, too. While "saving" the world, they were also

going to change things.

The flyer took off, gained altitude, then rotated its jets

and swung to the northeast. Logan settled in as comfortably

as he could and began reading his mail.

So, he thought, when he perused what Claire had sent him.

It was a document of agreement--between his ex-wife and

the United States Department of Defense.

/ always knew Daisy suffered from selective morality.

But it seems she '11 deal with the Devil himself, if it advances

one of her causes.

In this case, the rewards were substantial. Military

funds would be used to buy up one thousand hectares of

wetlands and donate them to the World Nature Conservancy,

protecting them forever from encroaching development.

Logan had never heard of a whistle blower getting so

much for a single tip. But then, Daisy McClennan was a

shrewd negotiator. / wonder what she sold them.

Logan frowned as he pieced together that part of the

deal. It was me. She sold me!

Daisy had been the one who told Spivey about his

Spanish paper . . . that he was on the trail of the cause of

the anomalies. Reading the date, he whistled. His ex-wife

had realized the importance of his discovery back when he

thought it nothing but another amusing "just-so" story.

Logan read on, in growing astonishment.

Hell, it wasn't Spivey's peepers who finally cracked

the Tangoparus' security. It was Daisy I She's the one who

tracked them to New Zealand and gave Spivey the time he

needed to get his three-alliance deal worked out.

Logan whistled, in awe and not a little admiration. Of

course I always knew where Claire got her brains. Still,

Daisy--

He rescaled what he had believed about his former wife

and lover who, it appeared, felt at liberty to dictate terms to

governments and spies. Of course it was conceited and fool-

EARTH 467

ish of her to think she could manipulate such forces indefinitely.

But Daisy had grown up a McClennon--and

therefore almost as cut off from reality as ancient Habsburg

princes. That couldn't have been healthy for a youngster's

coalescing sense of proportion, or learning to know one's

limitations. Even after rebelling against all that, Daisy must

have retained a residual feeling that rules are for the masses,

and really only optional for special people. That reflex

would only get reinforced in the simulated worlds of the

Net, where wishing really made some things so.

Logan recalled the girl she'd been at Tulane. She had

seemed perfectly aware of those handicaps, so eager to overcome

them.

Ah, well. Some wounds get better, some just fester. So

now she had sold him to Clenn Spivey. What next?

Logan erased the screen and put away the plaque. He

settled to watch as the aircraft passed beyond moist forests

into drier territory and finally dropped out of the Cascade

Range. Soon it was reeling its fleeting shadow behind it

across a high desert, still visibly contoured and rippled from

massive eruptions and floods that took place in ages gone by.

To Logan's eyes, the stories of past cataclysms were as easy

to read as a newspaper, and just as relevant. The planet

breathed and stretched. And yet it had never occurred to

him until recently that humankind might also wreak

changes on such a scale.

Funny thing is, in all honesty, I can't tell whether

Daisy was right or wrong to do what she did.

One thing, though. I'll bet she didn't worry much

about choosing between George Button and Clenn Spivey.

Two devils, she'd call them, and say they deserved each

other. She got her thousand hectares--saved some ivory-

billed woodpeckers or whatever. All in a good day's work.

Logan had to laugh, finding it dehciously ludicrous and

stupid. That irony compensated, somehow, for the inevitable

pang he felt, knowing why, ultimately, she had cast him

out years ago--not because of any particular sin or failing on

his part, but simply because she preferred by far her own

obsessions over the distracting nuisance of his love.

D Free-form Key Word Scan: "Ecology"/"Food

Chains"/"Polar"/"Deterioration"

468 D A V I D B R I N

Technical Sieve Level: Semiprofessional,

Open Discussion.

We've been lulled into complacency by recent increases among

gray, humpback and sperm whales. Few of you out there recall

another smug time, before the century turn, when whale numbers

were also rising because commercial hunting had ended.

But then came the great diebacks in Africa and Amazonia,

the Indian collapse, and the Helvetian War. Suddenly the world

was too busy to worry about a few blubbery sea creatures. Anyway, how do you deter boatloads of ragged refugees with their

crude harpoons. Shoot them? It took the creation of their own

state to finally bring that chaos under control.

Decades later, it all seems a bad dream. Blues and bow-

heads are gone forever, but other whale stocks seem to be

recovering at last.

Still, take a look at disturbing new research by Paige and

Kasting [D ref:a8p 4923-bE-eEI-4562831]. The Antarctic ozone

has deteriorated again. I plugged the data into a modified Wol-

ling model and foresee bad news for the euphotic and benthic

phytoplankton the whole Antarctic food chain depends on. World

protein harvests will fall. But even worse will be the effect on

those baleen whales that feed on krill.

Our only ray of hope is the mutation rate, which blooms with

increased B-ultraviolet. We may see tougher plankton variants

emerge, though to expect salvation from that front stretches

even my optimism.

Daisy McClennon felt good.

H For one thing, business was going well. She'd just

Y finished a lucrative 3-D reprocessing of the entire nine-

D hundred-episode Star Trek saga, and all three Rambo

R movies. Pretty good for a business that had started out

0 as piecework enterprise, a part-time occupation for a

S housewife!

P Daisy admitted she worked as much for pride as

H cash. It meant independence from the family trust fund,

E so she could afford to snub her damned cousins more

R often than not. '

E You '11 come crawling back, they had told her long

ago. But nowadays it was they who came to her asking fa-

EARTH 469

vors, seeking answers their hired flunkies couldn't give

them.

They thought I'd never make it on my own. But now

I'm a mover and a changer.

She was spending less time with movies these days, anyway,

and more of it brokering "special" information. That

recent bit of private espionage for the peepers, for instance.

In desperation, the feds had finally agreed to her price. The

coup caused quite a stir in certain parts of the Green underground, adding to her burgeoning reputation.

Of course, some purists said you shouldn't ever deal

with nature-killing pigs. But Daisy had grown up around

wheeler-dealers. The trick is to take advantage of their

short-term mentality, she answered her critics. Their greed

can be turned against them if you have what they need.

In this case, the peepers wanted data on a rogue techno-

conspiracy of some sort. Something having to do with those

missing drilling rigs and water spouts Logan Eng had been so

uptight about. Her customers didn't want to discuss specifics,

and that was fine by her. The details weren't important

anyway. Let them play their adolescent-male, military-penis

games. The deal she'd struck had saved more land than you

could walk across in a day of hard marching. All in exchange

for a simple map to the conspirators' front door!

What's more, she was already getting feelers from other

clients who wanted information on the same subject. There

were ways of getting around her oath of confidentiality to

the feds. This affair might be milked a lot farther, for more

acres set aside, more watersheds put off limits to rapacious

man.

All told, it had been a very profitable month. In fact, it

seemed such a pleasant spring day, Daisy put on her hat and

sunglasses and gloves and left her den to go for a walk.

Of course once she crossed the bridge, leaving behind

her wind generators and mulch turbines and acres of restored

native foliage, she had to face all the garbage left by

four centuries of desecrators . . . including, still visible

above the cypress groves, the decaying spires of derelict riverside refineries. Some of them still seeped awful gunk,

many decades after their abandonment and so-called

cleanup. Only fools drank unfiltered groundwater from Louisiana

wells.

That wasn't all. Ancient power cables and sagging tele-

470 D A V I D B R I N

phone poles laced the parish like atherosclerotic veins, as

did concrete and asphalt roads, many no longer used but

still stretching like taut lines of scar tissue across the fields and meadows. Even near at hand, in her quiet green neighborhood,

there were those Kudzu-covered mounds in the

nearby yards, which looked like vine-coated hillocks till you

peered close and recognized the blurred outlines of long-

abandoned, rusted automobiles.

It all reminded Daisy of why, as the years passed, she

left her carefully resurrected patch of nature less and less

often. It's a wonder 1 had the stomach to spend so much

time in this countryside when I was young, instead of getting

sick whenever I went outdoors.

Actually, the family estates were a ways north of here.

Still, this general part of Louisiana was where her roots had

sunk deeply, for better or for worse. Back when her brothers

and sisters and cousins had been dashing madly about, taking juku lessons, struggling to live up to their parents' expectations and be better horseriders, better at sports, better

world cosmopolitans, always better than the children of normal

folk--Daisy had fiercely and adamantly opted out. Her

passion had been exploring the territory in all directions, the

living textures of the land.

And exploring the Net too, of course. Even back then,

the data web already stretched round the globe, a domain

fully as vast as the humid counties she roamed in the "real"

world. Only, in the Net you could make things happen like

in stories about magic, by incantation, by persuasion, by invoking sprites and spirits and just the right software familiars

to do your bidding for you. Why, you could even buy

those loyal little demons in brightly colored boxes at a store,

like a pair of shoes or a new bridle for your horse! No fairy

tale wizard ever had it so easy.

And if you made a mistake on the Net . . . you just

erased it! Unlike outside, where an error or faux pas left you

embarrassed and isolated, or where a single careless act

could despoil a habitat forever.

And it was an egalitarian place, where skill counted

more than who your parents were. You could be pen pals

with a farm girl near ICarachi. Or join an animal rights club

in Budapest. Or beat everybody at Simulation Rangers and

have all the top gamesters on the planet arguing for months

EARTH 471

whether the infamous hacker called "Captain Loveland"

was actually a boy or a girl.

Best of all, when you met someone on the Net, people's

eyes didn't widen as they asked, "Oh? Are you one of those

McClennons?"

It was a touchy subject, brought to mind by a recent

message she'd received. Family interests were among those

inquiring about the peeper matter. And much as she hated

to admit it, Daisy was still snared in a web of favors and

obligations to the clan. How else, these days, could she afford

to turn so much prime agricultural acreage back to native

bayou?

Damn them, she cursed silently, kicking a stone into

one of the turbid man-made canals carrying drainage from a

cluster of giant fish farms.

Maybe I can use this, though . . . find a way to turn

things around on them. If they want the data bad enough,

this could win me free of them forever.

For the first time she wondered, really wondered, about

the conspiracy Logan and the peepers had been so upset over

--that everyone in the world seemed to want to know

about. / assumed it was fust more physics and spy stuff.

Corporations and institutes and governments were always

getting in a froth over this or that technological

"breakthrough," from fusion power and superconductors to

nanotech and whatever. Every time it was "the discovery

that will turn the tide, make the difference, harken a new

era." Always it seemed imperative to be the first to capitalize.

But then, inevitably, the bubble burst.

Oh, sometimes the gadgets worked. Some even made

life better for the billions, helping forestall the "great die-

back" that had been due decades ago. But to what end?

What good was putting off the inevitable a little while

longer, which was all Logan and his ilk ever managed, after

all? Daisy had learned not to pay much heed to techno-fads.

To her fell the task of preserving as much as possible, so that

when humanity finally did fall, it wouldn't take everything

else to the grave with it.

Now, though, she wondered. // this thing's got everybody

so excited, maybe I ought to look into it myself.

She turned back well before reaching the little town of

White Castle. Daisy didn't want the humming power cables

from the nuclear plant to ruin what was left of her mood.

472 D A V I D B R I N

Anyway, she'd begun thinking about ways to take advantage

of the situation.

// the clan wants a favor, they'll have to give one in

return. I want access to Light Bearer. It's the last ingredient

I need to make my dragon.

On her way back past the cane fields and fish farms,

Daisy contemplated the outlines of her superprogram--one

that would make her surrogate "hounds" and "ferrets" look

as primitive as those ancient "viruses" that had first shown

how closely software could mimic life. She pondered the

beautiful new structure mentally. Yes, I do think it would

work.

Turning a bend, Daisy was roused from her thoughts by

the sight of two teenagers up ahead, laughing and holding

hands as they strolled atop a levee. The boy took the girl's

shoulders and she squirmed playfully, giggling as she

avoided his attempts to kiss her, until suddenly she leaned

up against him with an assertion all her own.

Daisy's smile renewed. There was always something

sweet about young lovers, though she hoped they were being

careful about . . .

She took off her sunglasses and squinted. The girl--was

her daughter! As she watched, Claire pushed at her boyfriend's

chest and whirled to stride away, forcing him to

hurry after her.

Make a note to call Logon, Daisy filed for future reference. Have him talk to the girl about sexual responsibility.

She won't listen to me anymore.

The one time they had had a mother-daughter chat on

the subject, it had been a disaster. Claire acted horrified

when Daisy did no more than suggest the simplest, most

effective form of birth control.

"I will not. And that's final!"

"But every other method is chancy. Even abstinence. I mean, who

knows? You could get raped. Or miscalculate your own mood and act on impulse. Girls your age do that sometimes, you know.

"This way you can be free and easy the rest of your life. You can look on sex the way a man does, as something to seek aggressively, without any chance of, well, complications."

Claire's expression'had been defiant. Even contemptuous.

"I'm a result of 'complications,' as you call them. Do you regret EARTH 473

the fact that your old-fashioned birth control methods failed, seventeen years ago?"

Daisy saw Claire was taking it all too personally.

"I just want you to be happy--"

"Liar! You want to cut down the human population just a bit more, by having your own daughter's tubes tied. Well get this, Mother. I intend on experiencing those 'complications' you speak of. At least once. Maybe twice. And if my kids look like they're going to be real problem-solvers, and if their father and 1 can afford it and are worthy, we may even go for a third!"

Only after Daisy had gasped in- shock did she realize

that was exactly the reaction Claire had wanted. Since that

episode, neither of them ever mentioned the subject again.

Still, Daisy wondered. Might it be worthwhile to send

out a ferret to look for, well, chemical means? Something

nonintrusive, undetectable . . .

But no. Claire already did all the cooking. And she

probably had her gynecologist watching for any signs of tampering.

Daisy made a rule of avoiding meddling wherever it

might lead to retaliation. And so she decided to let the matter

lay.

The girl will be leaving soon, Daisy pondered as she

neared home again. Automatically, a list of chores Claire

currently took care of scrolled through her mind. I'll have

to hire one of those oath-refugees, I suppose. Some poor sod

who'll work a lot harder than my own lazy kid, no matter

how I tried not to spoil her. Or maybe I'll get one of those

new domestic robots. Have to reprogram it myself, of

course.

On her way to the back door she nearly tripped over

two unfamiliar mounds on the slope overlooking the creek.

Fresh earth had been tamped over oblong excavations and

then lined with stones.

What the hell are these7 They look like graves!

Then she remembered. Claire had mentioned something

about the gloats. Their two weed eaters had died last

week of some damn stupid plague set loose by a bunch of

amateur Greeners over in Africa.

That blasted kid. She knows the proper way to mulch

bodies. Why did she bury them here7

Daisy made another mental note, to cast through the

Net for other means of keeping the stream clear. It was a

dumb compromise anyway, using gene-altered creatures to

474 D A V I D B R I N

compensate for man's ecological mistakes. Just the sort of

"solution" touted by that Jennifer Wolling witch. Rot her.

What is Wolling up to, anyway? I wonder.

Soon Daisy was sitting before her big screen again. On

impulse, she pursued her most recent mental thread.

Wolling.

Daisy ran a quick check of her watchdog programs.

Hmm. She hasn 'the published a thing since leaving her London

flat. Is she sick? Maybe dead?

No. Too tough to get rid of that easily. Besides, her

mailbox shows a simple transmuting to Southern Africa.

Now why is that familiar?

Of course it would be trivial to create an associator

search program to find out, but Daisy thought of something

more ambitious.

Let's use this as a test for my new program!

Last week one of her search routines had brought home

a research article by an obscure theorist in Finland. It was a

brilliant concept--a hypothetical way of folding computer

files so that several caches could occupy the same physical

space at the same time. The "experts" had ignored the paper

on its first release. Apparently it would take the usual

weeks, or even months, for its ideas to percolate upward

through the Net. Meanwhile, Daisy saw a window of opportunity.

Especially if she could also get her hands on Light

Bearer!

// this works, I'll be able to track and record anybody,

anywhere. Find whoever's hiding. Pry open whatever

they're concealing.

And who better to experiment on than Jen Wolling?

Daisy began filling out the details, drawing bits of this

and that from her huge cache of tricks. It was happy labor

and she hummed as the skeleton of something impressive

and rather beautiful took shape.

Once, the door opened and closed. Daisy sensed Claire

leave a tray by her elbow and recalled vaguely saying something

to her daughter. She went through the motions of

eating and drinking as she worked. Sometime later, the tray

disappeared the same way.

Yes! Wolling's the perfect subject. Even if she finds

out, she won't complain to the law. She's not the type.

Then, after I've tried it out on her, there's all sorts of

others. Corporations, government agencies . . . bastards

EARTH 475

so big they could hire software guns smart enough to keep

me out. Until now!

Of course, the program was structured around a hole

where the keystone--Light Bearer--would go. If she could

coerce it from her cousins in exchange for information.

There! Daisy stretched back and looked over the entity

she'd created. It was something new in autonomous software. / must name it, she thought, having already considered the possibilities.

Yes. You are definitely a dragon.

She leaned forward to dial in a shape from her vast store

of fantasy images. What popped into place, however,

amazed even her.

Emerald eyes glinted from a long, scaled face. Lips

curled above gleaming white teeth. At the tip of the curled,

jeweled tail lay a socket where Light Bearer would go. But

even uncompleted, the visage was impressive.

Its tail whipped as the creature met her gaze and then

slowly, obediently, bowed.

You will be my most potent surrogate. Daisy thought,

savoring the moment. Together, you and I will save the

world.

D

It is told how the brave Maori hero Matakauri rescued his beautiful Matana, who had been kidnapped by the giant, Matau.

Searching all around Otago, Matakauri finally found his love

tied to a very long tether made from the skins of Matau's two-

headed dogs. Hacking away with his stone mere and hardwood

maipi did Matakauri no good against the rope, which was filled

with Matau's magical mana--until Matana herself bent over the

thong and her tears softened it so it could be cut.

Yet Matakauri knew his bride would never again be safe

until the giant was dead. So he armed himself and set off during

the dry season, and found Matau sleeping on a pallet of bracken

surrounded by great hills.

Matakauri set fire to the bracken. And although he did not

wake, Matau drew his great legs away from the heat. The giant

began to stir, but by then it was too late. The flames fed on his running fat. His body melted into the earth, creating a mighty

chasm, until all that remained at the bottom was his still-beating heart.

476 D A V I D B R I N

The flames' heat melted snow, and rain filled in the chasm,

forming Lake Whakatipua--which today bears the shape of a

giant with his knees drawn up. And sometimes people still claim

to hear Matau's heartbeat below the nervous waves.

Sometimes, whenever the mountains tremble, folk wonder

what may yet awaken down there. And when.

"... so for the third time they untied Cowboy Bob

C from the stake and let him speak to Thunder, his won-

0 der horse."

R June Morgan's eyes seemed to flash as she leaned

E toward Alex and Teresa.

"This time, though, Bob didn't whisper in Thunder's

left ear. He didn't whisper in the right. This time he held

the horse's face, looked him straight in the eye, and said--

'Read my lips, dummy. I told you to go get a Posse'.' "

As June sat back with an expectant smile, Alex had to

bite his lower lip to contain himself. He watched Teresa

sitting across the room, as her initial confusion gave way to

sudden understanding. "Oh! Oh, that's awful!" She

laughed while waving at the air, as if to fan away a bad odor.

June grinned and picked up her glass. "Don't you get it,

Alex? See, the first two times, the horse brought back

women ..."

He held up both hands. "I got it, all right. Please, Teresa's

right. It's bloody offensive."

June nodded smugly. So far, she was having by far the

best of it. No joke he or Teresa told was delivered half as

well or elicited such approving groans of feigned nausea.

Probably, her skill came from being Texan. The only nationality

Alex knew who were better at this odd ritual were

Australians.

As bearer of good tidings, June could hardly be begrudged.

This party in Alex's tiny bungalow was to celebrate

an end to weeks of tension.

At least one hopes it's over. I still feel twinges of paranoia,

looking over my shoulder for men in snap-brim hats

and trench coats.

June had arrived on Rapa Nui this morning with word

of Colonel Spivey's complete agreement to their terms. In

exchange for their cooperation--and especially Alex's exper-

EARTH 477

tise--all charges would be dropped against Teresa and Easter

Island would be left alone.

Naturally, Spivey will smuggle in a spy or two. But at

least Teresa and I are no longer on the run.

It was still an open question whether there was any

place to run to. The struggles against Beta weren't over yet.

Still, even the most fatalistic of Alex's technicians were

starting to act as if they thought there might be a planet

under them by this time next year.

Now if only they can convince me.

Things had changed since theirs was a tiny, tight-knit

cabal, wrestling subterranean monsters all alone. Now they

were part of a large official enterprise, albeit one still veiled under a "temporary" cloak of security. June was here to

cement the partnership, conveying the determination of

both Clenn Spivey and George Button to make it work, for

now. In that role as emissary, she would leave again tomorrow

with Alex's chief token of cooperation--a box of cubes

with fresh data for the other teams. Her courier route ought

to bring her back every week or so from now on.

Teresa, for her part, had gone to great pains to make

things clear to June--that her new, close friendship with

Alex wasn't sexual.

Not that the two of them hadn't thought about it. At

least he had. But on reflection he had come to realize that

anything intimate between them would demand more intense

attention than either could spare right now. For the

time being, it was enough that they had a silent understanding--a link that had never been severed since they emerged

hand in hand from that odyssey underground, like twins

who had gestated together and shared the same act of being

reborn.

For her part, June Morgan's outwardly relaxed posture

and easy humor surely overlayed anxiety. Alex's relationship

with her had been a wartime affair, mutual, uncomplicated.

He had no idea where it stood now and didn't mean

to push it.

At least the two women appeared to have buried whatever

tension once lay between them. Or most of it, at least.

Alex was glad. For one thing, it meant he could stand up

now and leave them alone together for a little while.

"If you ladies will excuse me," he said, stepping to the

478 D A V I D B R I N

door of the little bungalow. "I have to go see someone about

an emu."

June nodded briefly at him, but Teresa was already leaning

forward in her chair, almost touching the other woman's

arm. "All right then," she said. "Here's one for you, while

he's out playing fire drill with the bushes."

Moving quickly, Alex made it outside before she started

telling the joke. A long one might have snared him and set

off a crisis in his kidneys.

It was a balmy night, though winter had lingered a long

time, turning this desolate island even more windblown and

sere. Apparently spring would be late and blustery. Even the

trees at the experimental reforestation zone up at Vaiteia

seemed to shiver and cower whenever the gales picked up.

He didn't bother walking downslope to the shower-

commode, shared by five of the prefabricated cottages. Instead,

he climbed the hill a ways to where the view was

better. As he watered the scrub grass, Alex looked westward

toward the lights of Hanga Roa town, just north of Rano

Kao's towering cliffs. The solitary jet runway glittered palely

next to five compact tourist hotels and a moored cargo

zeppelin. Nearer at hand lay the Atlantis monument, bottom-lit

so that at night the ancient, crippled space shuttle

actually seemed caught nobly in-the act of taking off.

Since their close escape from New Zealand, wincing

and limping from their bruises, he and Teresa had perforce

taken up different activities. For her part, she spent most of

her days with the old model-one shuttle. Presumably she

knew a way inside, past the vandalism alarms. Or perhaps

she was just scraping off the graffiti and gull droppings that

made the broken spacecraft look so pathetic by daylight.

Possibly, she was just sitting in Atlantis's pilot seat,

brooding over the slim likelihood she'd ever see space again

--even given a pardon from Spivey's masters.

Anyway, he was busy enough for both of them. Rapa

Nui station was again the fulcrum for up to several dozen

gazer beams a day, pulsating through the Earth's interior in a

dizzying variety of modes and leading to countless surface

manifestations. Now, at least, Alex had secure consultation

links with Stan Coldman in Greenland, and data streamed

in from the NATO ground teams, as well, helping him refine

his models with each passing day.

(He'd even had a chance to get in touch with his grand-

EARTH 479

mother, over in Africa. Good old Jen. After berating him

several minutes for neglecting her, she had immediately

dropped the subject and launched into a long, excited explanation of her new research, which Alex vaguely gathered

had something to do with schizophrenia.)

Alex spent a good part of each day watching the singularity

on the big display, where Beta could be seen spending

more of its time in the "sparse" zones of the lower mantle.

Already the monster was on an enforced diet, and soon

they'd reach break-even--that milestone when the deadly

knot began losing mass-energy as fast as it absorbed it. That

would be time for real celebration ... a true miracle, given

their odds just a few months ago.

But then what'

Behind him, he heard the women laugh out loud, Teresa's

alto blending harmoniously with June's contralto. It was

a sound that cheered him. Finished with his business, Alex

found himself suddenly shivering in the chill breeze. He

zipped up and walked a little further along the slope,

crunching the dry grass underfoot.

Apparently, a surprising number of Colonel Spivey's superiors

believed Alex's theory, that Beta was a smart bomb

sent by alien foes to destroy humanity. If so, then Spivey

had a point. The gazer could become the pivot of Earth's

only credible defense. In fact, to hear Spivey put it, the

world might someday erect statues to Alex Lustig.

Savior of the planet, forger of our shield.

The image would appeal to any man's vanity. And Alex

wasn't sure he had the will to resist. What if it's true? he

thought, tasting the honey sweetness of Spivey's fable.

The colonel's plan had one more advantage. It meant

they might soon reduce the number of pulses to just a nudge

now and then.

He scuffed the ground. Inhaled the scented air. Shoved

his hands into his jacket pockets. All right. Keeping it down

there makes sense. Maybe. And yet Alex felt edgy.

Everywhere Beta passes, the minerals seem to change

1. at least momentarily.

It was hard to tell how, exactly, even with their wonderfully

improved sensitivity. Beta was still a tiny, if ferocious

object, with an actual physical zone of influence only

millimeters across. The affected track of altered perovskites

was consequently extremely thin. Still, with each orbit

480 D A V I D B R I N

more slender tubes of transformed mineral glittered in the

singularity's wake, flickering oddly.

How can we leave the thing down there when we have

no idea what the long-term effects will be?

Maybe it was a good thing he hadn't told Button or

Spivey about his new resonator, the one with the spherical,

compact design. Better to wait and be certain what the colonel's

actual scheme was . . . what he was going to do when

word inevitably leaked out.

For they weren't going to be able to keep the lid on

forever, that was clear to everyone. Spivey's bosses had to be

preparing for a political powwow soon.

Maybe all they want is to present the world with a fait

accompli, Alex thought hopefully. "Look, see what we in

the West have done? We saved the world! Now. of course,

we'll let the tribunals have the keys to the gazer. It's far

too dangerous for any one group to control."

Alex smiled. Yes. Quite possibly that was exactly what

they had in mind.

Right. Surely.

On his way back to the bungalow, Alex passed before a

row of seaside moai sculptures, this strange island's contribution to world imagery. Gloomy and almost identical, they

nonetheless struck him differently each time he saw them.

On this occasion, despite the wind and sparkling stars, they

just looked like huge chunks of stone, pathetically chiseled

by desperate folk to resemble stern gods. People did bizarre

things when they were afraid ... as most men and women

had been for nearly all the time since the species evolved.

We didn 'the make Beta though, Alex reminded himself.

So we 're foolish, fearful, sometimes crazy, but maybe not

damned.

Not yet, at least.

Back at the bungalow, Alex wiped his feet before entering.

". . . know it's logical, and maybe justified," Teresa

said, nodding seriously. "But after Jason . . . well. I can't

share again. I don't think I could handle it."

"But that was different--" June stopped and looked up

quickly as Alex entered.

"Share what?" he asked. "What's so different?"

Teresa looked away, but June stood up, smiling. She

took him by the lapels and drew him into the room. "Noth-

EARTH 481

ing important. Just girl talk. Anyway, we decided to call it a

night. I have a busy day tomorrow, so--"

"So I've got to go," Teresa said, putting her glass aside.

For some reason she wouldn't meet Alex's eyes now, which

disturbed him. What's going on? he wondered.

Teresa picked up the satchel June had brought along

especially for- her. Alex had assumed it contained tokens

from Spivey, to signal all was forgiven. But Teresa acted as if

it were something strictly between herself and the other

woman, a peace offering of a different sort entirely. "Thanks

for the stuff, June," she said, lifting the case.

"No big deal. Just hardware store goods. What're you

going to do with all those catalysts and things?"

Teresa smiled enigmatically. "Oh, just a little tidying

up, that's all."

"Mm," June commented.

"Yeah. Mm. So." Teresa shifted her feet. "Well. C'night

you two."

After a moment's hesitation, the women kissed each

other on the cheek. Teresa squeezed Alex's shoulder, still

without meeting his eyes, and went out into the night. He

stood in the open doorway, watching her go.

From behind him, June's arms slid under his and

wrapped across his chest. She squeezed hard and let out a

sigh. "Alex. Oh, Alex. What are we going to do with you?"

Puzzled, he turned around, letting the door close behind

him. "What do you mean?"

"Oh . . ." She seemed about to say more, but finally

shook her head. Taking his hand she said, "Come on, then.

To bed. We both have busy days ahead."

PART IX

PLANET

The Earth's most permanent feature was the Pacific

Ocean. Its shape might change with the passing eons,

islands rising and falling as its plates collided, merged,

and broke apart again. But the great basin remained.

Not so the Atlantic, which opened and closed many

times. Slow heat built underneath a sequence of huge,

granite super continents, splitting them asunder along

bursting seams. Then, tens of millions of years later, the

now cool center would sink again to halt the livening

and begin drawing the sleeves together again.

The cycle continued--breakup followed by remerging

followed by breakup again. And this had important

effects on the progress of life. Species that had roamed

across broad ranges found themselves divided into

subpopulations. Separated bands of cousins went their

diverging genetic ways, adapting to new challenges,

discovering diverse techniques for living. When the

dispersed relations finally were reunited eons later by

reconverting continents, these descendants of a common

ancestor often could no longer interbreed. They met not

as cousins, but as competitors.

As it happened, there came a later period when the

vagaries of plate tectonics thrust up two huge mountain

ranges--the Himalayas and the Rockies--which virtually

484 D A V I D B R I N

blocked the flow of low, moist air across the Northern

Hemisphere. This had dramatic consequences on the

weather, which in turn isolated still more species,

driving them to adapt.

Ebbing,, flowing. Inhaling, exhaling. The cycle kept

driving, changes, improvements.

Eventually, dim flickers of light began to glow on the

planet's night side, flickers in the dark that weren't forest

fires or lightning.

All this heating and cooling, stirring and

recombining had finally brought about something

completely new.

D Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest

Group [D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546], Special

Subforum 562: Crackpot-Iconoclast Social

Theories.

All this panic about how the Han are engaged in "economic

conquest of the globe"--such rubbish! True, their huge, surging

economy poses a challenge, especially to the PAN and GEACS

trade groups. Instead of endlessly debating the University of

Winnipeg Neomanagement Model, China has actually instituted

many of its revolutionary features. We can all learn a lesson,

especially the Sovs and Canucks, who keep finding themselves

underpriced in the manufacture of desal equipment and

nanocrystals. The Han already have a corner on blazers and

lap-ticks, not to mention consumer items like torque zenners.

But talk of "economic conquest" [D ref: A69802-111, 5/19/38

K-234-09-17826] or the Han ". . . buying up goddam everything

..." [D ref: A69802-111, 5/12/38 M-453-65-5545] completely

ignores history.

Consider the 1950s and 1960s. The United States of

America, which then included California and Hawaii, but not

Luzon or Cuba, was the world's economic powerhouse. A

famous Euroleader named Servan-Schreiber wrote a book

called The American Challenge, predicting America would soon

". . . own everything worth owning . . ."

Of course it didn't happen. Having achieved success, U.S.

citizens demanded payoff for all their hard work. Instead of

buying the world, they bought things from the world. It became

the greatest transfer of wealth in history--far surpassing all

forms of foreign aid. The American purchasing dynamo lifted

Europe and East Asia into the twenty-first century . . . until the bubble finally burst and Yanks had to learn to pay as you go, like normal people.

For a brief time in the nineteen-seventies, the first and

second oil crises made it seem that the new planetary kingpins

would be Arab sheiks. Then, in the eighties, Japan scared the

hell out of everybody. (Look it up!) Through hard work (and by

adroitly catering to America's adolescent buying frenzy) the

Japanese boot-strapped themselves to economic power that

held the world in awe. Everyone predicted that soon they "would

own everything."

But each of us takes our turn, it seems, driving the world

economy. A new generation of Japanese, wanting more from life

than endless toil and a tiny apartment, went on a new buying

spree. And in the early years of this century, wasn't it Russia--

with nearly half the world's trained engineers and newly

released from two thousand years of stifling czars and

commissars--who were suddenly only too glad to work hard,

build to order, and sell cheap whatever the Japanese wanted?

Many of you probably remember the consequence a while later,

when Russian was proposed to replace Simglish as the second

lingua franca. But that passed too, didn't it?

Come on, droogs. Learn to step back and take a long view.

Time will come (if the planet holds out) when even the Han will

get tired of laboring themselves sick, piling money in the bank

with nothing to spend it on.

Then care to predict where the next group of hard workers

will arise? My money's on those puritan secessionists in New

England. Now those are people who know how to give an

employer a good hour's work for an hour's wage . . .

No one congratulated Crat for saving his drowning

C crewmate. Nobody spoke much about the incident at

R all. Things happen, was the philosophy. So there were a

U few more widows back on one of the floating towns?

S Too bad. Life was short; what more could you say?

T Still, Crat apparently wasn't a "go-suck Yankee sof-

boy" anymore. There were no more sour looks at mess, or

strange objects found swimming in his gruel. Silently, they

moved his hammock out of the steamy hold and up to the

anchor room with the others.

Only one fellow actually commented on the

misadventure with the fishing net. "Jeez, Vato," he told

Crat. "I never seen no bugger hold breath so long as you!"

To Crat, who had no idea how long he'd been

underwater, the remark seemed like a signal from

Providence. An experience that might have turned some

men away from swimming forever, instead pointed him to

an unexpected talent.

The story of his life had been mediocre plainness at

best, and all too oftenjess than that. His image of himself

was slow and thick as a stone. The thought of having any

unusual abilities astonished Crat. And so, at the very

moment he had won acceptance aboard the Congo, he

EARTH 487

renewed his vow to leave first chance--to act on his earlier

loose talk about going into salvage.

Not that there was much he'd miss about this old tub.

Life on a frontier didn't offer many luxuries. Forced to live

here for a week, the average American would never again

complain about his own restricted water ration, which in

some states topped a lavish hundred gallons a week.

Or take another necessity--Data-Net privileges. Here

you simply didn't have them.

Crat used to despise old folks back in Indiana for

relying on so many electronic crutches . . . globe-spanning

access to news on every topic, to every library, to every

dumpit research journal even, instantly translated from any

obscure language for mere pennies. Then there were the

hobby lines, special interest groups, net-zines, three-vee

shows.

Until emigrating, Crat never realized how much he

depended on all that, too. Aboard Congo, though, they had

this strange, once-a-day ritual--mail call. Each man

answered if his name was shouted, and swapped a black

cube with the bosun. You were allowed to pipe two message

blips, no more than fifty words each, through the ship's

single antenna, ruled dictatorially by the comm officer, a

one-eyed, one-legged victim of some past oceanic

catastrophe, whom everybody, even the captain, treated

with utter deference.

Standing in line, waiting humbly for your miserable

blips, was almost as humiliating as evening vitamin call,

when a bored U.N. nurse doled each man his pressed

capsule of "Nutritional Aid"--the sum total of the world's

sense of obligation to the pariah state of refugees. No

wonder the great powers were even less generous with the

world's true lifeblood, information.

Now and then, during mail call, Crat caught himself

wondering why Remi and Roland never wrote to him. Then

he remembered with a sudden jerk. They're dead. I'm the

last. Last of the Quayle High Settlers.

Strange. Believing he was destined for a short life, Crat

had long ago decided to live one with no compromises. He'd

always been the one getting into jams, which his friends

always reliably, sensibly got him out of.

Now Remi and Roland were gone, while he still lived.

Who could figure it?

488 D A V I D B R I N

Roland, for some reason, had willed Crat his bank

balance, augmented by a hero's bonus. There was supposed

to be a medal, too. It was probably still out there

somewhere, following him around the world in the

unreliable tangle of real-matter post. As for Roland's money

1. Crat had blown it all in card games and buying rounds

of drinks to his friends' memory. But he did want the medal.

After mail call, off-duty crew retired to the aft deck,

where three enterprising Annamese sold a pungent home

brew from clay pots. While the flotilla sailed southward

from the debacle with the green raiders, Crat discovered he

could now stomach the foul-smelling beer. It was a

milestone that showed he was adapting.

The evening was dark, with a heavy overcast cutting off

most of the stars. A pearly opalescence in the west became a

blaze whenever the clouds parted briefly to spill moonlight

across the smooth water.

At the fantail, two sets of meditators seemed to square

off for a silent, contemplative showdown. Sufis on the

portside and neo-Zen adepts to starboard. Beginners in both

groups were wired to brain-wave monitors the size of

thimbles, which led to earplug button speakers. Using

identical, inexpensive techno-aids, each side nevertheless

claimed it was true tradition, while the other taught mere

dazing. Whatever. Like the majority of the crew, Crat

preferred more honest, traditional forms of intoxication.

"... Commodore bloody misreads his charts--"

someone said in the darkness beyond the rear hatch. "That

El Nino thing ... It s'pozed drive all them fish over here

Wes' Pacific side, every ten-'leven year so. But bloody

dammit commodore, he miss them sure."

"It come more often than every ten year now, I hear,"

someone else replied. Idly, Crat wondered who they were.

Their English was better than average for this barge.

"Dey got de eco-loggy all fucked sure," said someone

with a Caribbean accent. "Evryt'ing all change. So I say

don't listen to UNEPA bastards, not at all. Dey don' know

no t'ing better than we do."

Someone else agreed. "Ach, UNEPA. They wants us

dead, just like greeners do, 'cause we mess up they stinking

planet. Might catch wrong type dumpit fish. Ooh, bad

thing! So better we just die. Maybe put something in

vitamins. Do us cheap an' quiet."

EARTH 409

That was the steady gossip of course, even when Sea

State chemists--university-trained men and women from

lands now drowned under the rising tides--went from boat

to boat reassuring crews and urging them to take the pills,

rumors nevertheless spread like viruses. Crat himself

sometimes wondered. His tiredness no doubt came mostly

from hard work. That probably also explained the low ebb

of his sex drive. But if he ever did find out somebody was

slipping something into the food . . .

The old rage flickered momentarily and he tried to

nurse it. But it just damped out, ebbing of its own accord.

He lifted his head to glance over Congo's prow at the night

lights of the floating town, up ahead. The old Crat would

have already been pacing--eager to prowl the red-light

district or find a good brawl. Now all he could think of were

the clean if threadbare sheets of the transients' barracks and

then tomorrow's visit to the meat market.

"Ah, I find you at last. Sorry. I was lost."

Crat looked up. It was his new friend, the elderly

Zuricher, Peter Schultheiss. Peter's was the one face Crat

would miss when he transferred off this misbegotten tub. He

grinned and held out a full jar. "Cot you another beer,

Peter."

"Coot. Thanks. Took me some time to find my

notebook with the name of my comrade at the market. But I

found." He held up a heavy black volume. To Crat's

surprise, it wasn't a cheap store-and-write plaque, such as

even the poorest deckhand owned, but a binder fat with

paper pages! Schultheiss murmured as he flipped the

scratchy sheets. "Let's see. He's in here somewhere. This

fellow should, if you mention my name, be able to get you

jobs in salvage . . . maybe training for the deep-sea work

you so desire. Ah, here, let me write it down for you."

Crat accepted the slip of paper. Nearing his rendezvous

with the recruiters, he had grown a little less sure he really

wanted to try nodule mining--diving far below the reach of

light encased in a slimy bubble, sifting mud for crusty

lumps. Though well paid, such men tended to have short

lives. The alternative of shallow dredging in drowned

villages was beginning to sound attractive after all.

Schultheiss looked toward the town lights and sighed.

"What'cha thinkin' about?" Crat asked.

"I was just remembering how, when I was a boy, my

490 D A V I D B R I N

father took me with him on a business trip to Tokyo. As our

plane came in at night, we saw an amazing sight. The ocean,

around every island as far as you could see, was alight! So

many lights I could not count them. The water seemed to be

on fire. White fire.

"Such a spectacle, I asked my father what festival this

was. But he said, no, it was no oriental holiday. It was like

this every night, he said. Every night at sea around Japan."

The idea of such extravagance made Crat blink. "But,

why?"

"Fishing lights," Peter answered plainly. "At night the

ships would run big generators and draw in fish by millions.

Very effective, I heard. Efficient, too, if you trade energy for

food and don't worry about tomorrow."

Schultheiss paused. His voice seemed far away. "My

father and his comrades . . . they prided themselves on

future-sightedness. Unlike the Yankees of those days--no

offense--he thought he was thinking about tomorrow.

While the Yanks bought toys and spent themselves poor, my

father and his compeers saved. He invested prudently other

people's funds for them. Took their money with no

questions asked and made it grow like vegetables in a

garden."

The old Helvetian sighed. "Maybe it only shows there

are many kinds of shortsightedness. Did it ever occur to the

Japanese, I wonder, that evolution might change the species

they called with their great lights? The easy, stupid ones

would die in nets, certainly. But meanwhile those who

stayed away would breed future generations. Did they

ponder this? No, I think not.

"Likewise it never occurred to my father that the world

might someday tire of all its bad men having nice safe places

to stash their loot. He never dreamed all the nations might

drop their bickering, might get together and say enough, we

want our money back. We want the names of those bad

men, too . . . men who betrayed our trust, who robbed our

treasuries, or who sold drugs to our children.

"How could my poor father imagine the world's masses

might come pounding on his door someday to take back in

anger what he'd invested so carefully, so well?"

The lights of the floating village now glittered in the old

man's moist eyes. Stunned by the depth of this confession,

Crat wondered. Why me? Why is he telling me all this?

EARTH 491

Peter turned to look at him, struggling with a smile.

"Did you see Pikeman, when she came to rescue us from the

greeners? How beautiful she was? People used to joke about

the Swiss navy. But only fools laugh now! Ton per ton, it

gives Sea State--our adopted nation--the best fighting fleet

in the world! So we adapt, in that way and so many others.

We Helvetians find new roles in the world, performing them

with pride in craft."

Crat noticed the old man's Ingush had improved.

Perhaps it was the passion of sudden memory. Or maybe he

was letting down a mask.

"Oh, we and our allies were arrogant before the war.

Mea culpa, we admit that now. And history shows the

arrogant must always fall.

"But then, to fall can be a gift, no? What is diaspora,

after all, except an opportunity, a second chance for a people

to learn, to grow out of shallow self-involvement and

become righteous, deep, and strong?"

Schultheiss looked at Crat. "Pain is how a people are

tempered, prepared for greatness. Don't you think so, filsl

That wisdom comes through suffering?"

Crat could only blink in reply, moved, but not knowing

what to say. In truth, he wasn't sure he understood what

Peter was talking about.

"Yes," the old man agreed with himself, nodding

firmly, both guilt and stark dignity evident in his voice.

"My people have been chosen for some future, unknown

task. Of that I'm sure. A task far greater than perching on

safe mountaintops, high and aloof, living high off other

people's money."

Peter stared into the night, much farther than Crat felt

he himself could see.

"The world's folk will need us yet. Mark my words.

And when that day comes, we will not leave them wanting."

At night it had been no more than a sprinkle of lights,

rocking gently to rhythmic tides. By day, however, the

barge-city came alive with noise and commerce. And

rumors. It was said that no place, not even the Net, spread

gossip as swiftly or erratically.

Crat had no way of picking up most of the hearsay,

though. Unlike the working ships, where discipline required

a common language, floating towns were a chaos of tongues

492 D A V I D B R I N

and dialects, whispered, murmured, bellowed. All the sea

towns were the same. Miniature babels, sprawled

horizontally across the nervous ocean.

Night-soil collectors called as they rowed the narrow

canals between multistoried housing barges, taking slops

lowered down by rope in exchange for a few devalued

piasters. Competing to deliver odorous fertilizer to the

garden boats, they regularly sped down unbraced passages at

risk of being crushed between the rocking, bobbing hulls.

Clothing, washed in sea water, hung from cluttered

lines alongside banners proclaiming ideologies and gospels

and advertisements in a dozen alphabets. Each district was

topped with flat arrays of solar cells linked to broad,

winglike rainwater collectors, all tended by small boys who

climbed the swaying frames like monkeys. Kite strings

angled up into the sky toward generators dipped into high

stratospheric winds. By this melange of artifice and gadgetry,

the barge city managed to stay alive.

Crat hungrily inhaled the smells of cooking over

seaweed fires. The aromas changed from one neighborhood

to the next. Still, he kept his hands out of his pockets. His

dwindling cash might be needed for bribes before the day

was out.

Other aromas were even harder to ignore. Women--

workers and mothers and daughters and wives--could be

glimpsed through windows left open to catch a stray breeze,

dressed in costumes native to countries that no longer

existed, sometimes smothered in far too much clothing for

these humid climes. Crat knew not to stare; many of them

had menfolk who were jealous and proud. Still, at one point

he stopped to watch a girl's nimble fingers dance across a

floor loom, Grafting holo-carpets for export. It was a valued

profession and one she had apparently mastered. In

comparison, Crat knew his own hands to be clumsy things

that couldn't even knot a jute rope properly.

The young woman glanced over at him, her scarf

framing a lovely oval face. Crat would have given his heart

gladly when she smiled. He stumbled back, however, when

another visage suddenly intervened, a crone who snarled at

him in some strange dialect. Crat spun away to hurry

forward again, toward the Governor's Tower and the

Admiral's Bridge, twin monoliths that overlooked the center

of town.

EARTH 493

In a city rife with odors, the shaded bazaar was an

especially pungent place where the fish was generally fresh

but everything else was second hand, including the whores

beckoning from a provocatively carved wooden balcony

along the aft quarter.

Likewise the religions that were pitched from the

opposite side, where a dozen midget temples, churches and

mosques vied for the devotion of passersby. Here at kast one

was safe from one all-pervading creed, Caia-worship. The

few NorA ChuCa missionaries who tried preaching in Sea

State were glad to depart with their lives. The lesson they

took home with them was simple; it takes a full belly before

a man or woman gives a tinker's damn about anything as

large as a planet.

Other types of outside recruiters were tolerated. The

Resettlement Fund's kiosk offered a third form of

redemption, equidistant from sex and faith. Queued up

there were men, women, whole families who had finally had

enough . . . who would sign any document, have any

surgery, swear any oath just to set foot on land again--in the

Yukon, Yakutsk, Patagonia--anywhere there'd be steady

meals and a patch of real ground to farm.

For Sea State this wasn't treason. It was a population

safety valve, one far less disturbing than another Crat had

witnessed one dim twilight during his first stay on this

drifting island-city.

He'd been lazing by one of the sidestream canals,

picking away at a roast squid purchased from his shrinking

purse, when a dark figure appeared slinking behind one of

the shabbier apartment barges. It was a woman, he soon saw,

wrapped in black from head to toe. The noise of clattering

pots and shouting neighbors covered her stealth as she made

her way to where the current was strongest.

Crat faded into a nearby shadow, watching her look left

and right. There was a momentary flash of string as she tied

two articles together, one heavy, the other wrapped in cloth.

Crat had no inkling what was going on, though he thought

for a moment he heard a faint cry.

The heavier object splashed decisively as it hit the

water, instantly dragging the other bundle after it. Still he

didn't catch on. Only when he glimpsed the woman's tired,

bleak face and heard her sob did the light dawn. As she

494 D A V I D B R I N

hurried away he knew what she had done. But he could

only sit in stunned silence, his appetite quite gone.

He tried to understand, to grasp what must have driven

her to do such a thing. Crat remembered what old prof

Jameson used to say about Sea State . . . how most families

who fled there came from societies where all decisions were

made by men. In principle, Crat saw nothing wrong with

that. He hated the arrogant, independent way girls were

taught to act in North American schools, always judging and

evaluating. Crat preferred how a thousand older, wiser

cultures used to do it, before Western decadence turned

women into not-women-anymore.

Still, for weeks he was haunted by the face of that

anguished young mother. She came to him at night, and in

his dreams he felt torn between two drives--one to protect

her and the other to take her for his own.

Of course no one was asking him to do either. No one

was exactly clamoring to make him a chief.

It was in the bazaar's fourth quadrant, beyond the fish

stalls and junk stands and traders hawking enzyme paste,

that Crat came at last to the "Meat Market."

"There are opportunities in Antarctica!" one recruiter

shouted, near a holo depicting mineshafts and open-pit

works, gouging high-grade ores out of a bleak terrain. Icy

glaciers loomed in the background.

The images looked stark and honest--showing hard

work in a harsh environment. Still, Crat could feel the

hole's subsonic music cajoling him to see more than that.

The men depicted in those scenes grinned cheerfully beside

their towering machines. They looked like bold men, the

sort who tamed a wilderness and got rich doing so.

"The greeners have been given their dumpit parks and

preservation areas now." The speaker cursed, causing the

crowd to mutter in agreement. "Half the bloody continent

of Antarctica was set aside for 'em, almost! But the good

news is, now the rest is open! Open wide for brave souls to

go and win with their own strong hands!"

The recruiter sounded like he truly envied such gallant

heroes. Meanwhile, the holos showed spare but comfortable

barracks, hot meals being served, happy miners counting

sheaves of credit slips.

Huh! Maybe company men get to live like that. They

can recruit for those jobs anywhere.

EARTH 495

In fact, Crat had applied for positions like those before

finally falling back on Sea State. And if he hadn't been up to

the companies' standards in Indiana, why would they accept

him here? You don't fool me. I can just guess what kind of

work you '11 offer Sea State volunteers. Work a robot would

refuse.

Even the poorest citizens of the poorest nations were

protected by the Rio Charter, except those whose leaders

had never signed, such as Southern Africa and Sea State.

That gave them a queer freedom--to volunteer to be

exploited at jobs animal rights groups would scream about if

you assigned them to a pig. But then, every member of the

Albatross Republic supposedly had chosen his own fate

rather than accept the world's terms. Rather than give up

the last free life on Earth, Crat thought proudly. He

departed that booth with aloof pride, preferring honest

crooks to liars.

Over by the Climate Board, passersby scrutinized the

fortnight forecast, of life-or-death interest to all floating

towns. Two weeks was just long enough to evade bad

storms. The Climate Board was also where the gamblers

gathered. Whatever other exotic games of chance were

fashionable, you could always get a bet on the weather.

Nearby, a small band played the style known as Burma

Rag--a catchy mix of South Asian and Caribbean sounds

with a growing following on the net, though naturally little

profit ever made it back to Sea State. Crat tossed a piaster

into the band's cup, for luck.

The booths he sought lay near the gangway of a sleek

little ship, obviously new and powerful and rigged for deep

running. In front of the submersible a table lay strewn with

rocky, egg-shaped objects, glittering with spongelike

metallic knobs. Together, the vessel and ore nodules were

probably worth half the town itself, but not many citizens

loitered near the well-dressed company solicitors standing

there. The real crowd clustered just beyond, where men in

turbans jabbered into note plaques while bearded doctors

poked and prodded would-be volunteers.

No holos proclaimed the virtues of life in the various

Sea State salvage cooperatives. But everyone knew what it

was about. It's about dragging a frayed air hose behind you

while you walk the sunken streets of Galveston or Dacca

496 D A V I D B R I N

or Miami, prying, copper wires and aluminum pipes out of

tottering ruins.

It's working in stinking shit-mud to help raise blocks

of sunken Venice . . . hoping a chunk will come up whole

so it can be sold off like St. Mark's Square was . . . to

some rich Russ or Canuck theme resort.

It's hauling dredges up the bloody Ganges, hired by

the Delhi government, but shot at by the local militia of

some province that doesn 'the really exist anymore, except on

hilltops.

Crat fingered the note Peter Schultheiss had given him.

He edged alongside one queue and tapped a turbaned

interviewer on the shoulder. "Can . . . can you tell me

where . . ." he peered at the writing. ". . . where Johann

Freyers is?"

The man looked at Crat as if he were some loathsome

type of sea slug. He shouted something incomprehensible.

Undeterred, Crat moved to another station. Again those in

line watched him suspiciously. This time, though, the

gaunt, sunken-chested fellow in charge was friendlier. Clean

shaven, his face showed the stigmata of many long hours

underwater--permanently bloodshot eyes and scars where

breathing masks had rubbed away the skin.

"Freyers . . . over at . . ." He stopped to inhale, a

desperate-sounding whistle. "... at .. ." With amazing

cheerfulness for one who couldn't even finish a sentence, he

smiled. Snapping his fingers brought a young boy forth from

under the table. "Freyers," he told the boy in a wheeze.

"Uh, thanks," Crat said, and to his surprise found

himself being dragged away from the recruiting booths,

toward the gangway of the sleek submersible. There, two

men in fine-looking body suits conversed quietly with

folded arms.

"Are you sure . . . ?" Crat started asking the boy.

"Yes, yes, Freyers. I know." He snatched the note out of

Crat's hand and tugged the sleeve of one of the men, whose

sandy hair and long face made Crat think of a spaniel. The

mainlander looked bemused to receive such a token, turning

the paper over as if savoring its vintage. He tossed a coin to

the little messenger.

"So you were sent by Peter Schultheiss, hmm?" he said

to Crat. "Peter's a landsman known to me. He says you've

good lungs and presence of mind." Freyers looked at the

EARTH 497

note again. "A Yank, too. Have you a full reliance card, by

any chance?"

Crat flushed. As if anyone with a card would emigrate

to this place. "Look, there's some mistake . . ."

"Well, I assume you at least have high school."

Crat lifted his shoulders. "That's no plishie. Only dacks

don't finish high school."

The long-faced man looked at him for a moment, then

said in a soft voice. "Most of your fellow citizens have never

seen a high school, my young friend."

"Of course they have--" Then Crat stopped,

remembering he wasn't an American anymore. "Oh. Yeah,

well."

Both men continued regarding him. "Hm," the shorter

one said. "He'd be able to read simple manuals, in both

Common and Simglish." He turned to Crat. "Know any

written Nihon or Han? Any kanji?"

Crat shrugged. "Just the first hundred signs. They made

us learn simple ideo, uh--"

"Ideograms."

"Yeah. The first hundred. An' I picked up some others

you guys prob'ly wouldn't care about."

"Hmm. No doubt. And silent speech? Sign language?"

Crat couldn't see the point to this. "I guess, grade

school stuff."

"Tech skills? What kind of Net access did you use at

home?"

"Hey, you an' I both know any tech stuff I got is just

pissant shit. You wanted someone educated, you wouldn't

be here, for Ra's sake. There must be three fuckin' billion

college graduates out there, back in the world!"

Freyers smiled. "True. But few of those graduates have

proven themselves aboard a Sea State fishing fleet. Few come

so well recommended. And I'd also guess only a few

approach us with your, shall we say, motivation?"

Meaning he knows I can't say no to a fob that pays

good. And I won't complain to no union if they give me

tanks with rusty valves or an air hose peeling rubber here

an' there.

"So, can we interest you in coming aboard and taking

some refreshment with us? We have cheese and chocolates.

Then we can talk about getting you tested. I cannot promise

anything, my boy, but this may be your lucky day."

498 D A V I D B R I N

Crat sighed. He had long ago cast himself to fate's

winds. People looked at him, heard him speak, and figured a

guy like him couldn't have a worldview--a philosophy of

life. But he did. It could be summed up in five simple words.

Oh, well. What the fuck.

In the end, he let hunger lead him up the gangway after

the two recruiters. That and a powerful sense that he had

little choice, after all.

D Given their declining petroleum reserves and the side effects

of spewing carbon into the atmosphere, why were twentieth

century Americans so suspicious of nuclear power? Essentially,

people were deeply concerned about incompetence.

Take the case of the Bodega Bay Nuclear Power Plant. The

developers knew full well that its foundations straddled the San

Andreas fault, yet they kept it quiet until someone blew the

whistle. Why?

It wasn't just hunger for short-term gain. Enthusiasts for a

particular project often create their own mental versions of

reality, minimizing any possibility things might go wrong. They

convince themselves any potential critic is a fool or cretin.

Fortunately, society was entering the "era of criticism."

Public scrutiny led to an outcry, and the Bodega Bay site was

abandoned. So when the great northern quake of '98 struck,

half the State of California was saved from annihilation.

The other half was preserved four years later during the

great southern quake. Only a few thousand were killed in that

tragedy, instead of the millions who would have died if the

nuclear facilities at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre hadn't been

reinforced beforehand, thanks again to the free give and take of

criticism. Instead of adding to the calamity, those power plants

held fast to assist people in their time of need.

Other "nuclear" examples abound. Just a few small

pumps, installed to placate critics, kept Three Mile Island from

becoming another Chernobyl--that catastrophe whose

radioactive reverberations bridged the interval from Nagasaki to

Berne and delay-triggered the first cancer plagues.

Many still seek uranium's banishment from the power grid,

despite its present safety record and improved waste-disposal

situation. They warn we are complacent, demanding each

design and modification be released for comment on the net.

Ironically, it is precisely this army of critics that inspires

confidence in the present system. That plus the fact that ten

billion people demand compromise. They won't stand for

ideological purity. Not when one consequence might be

starvation.

--From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books edition 4.7

(2035). [D hyper access code 1-(TRAN-777-97-9945-29A.]

Sepak Takraw finished his third circuit of the ASEAN

M perimeter that day and verified that there was still no

A way out of the trap. Elite Indonesian and Papuan troops

N had secured this little plateau deep in rain-drenched

T Irian Jaya. Nothing got in or out without sophisticated

L detectors tracking and identifying it.

E Actually, Sepak was impressed by the troops'

professionalism. One hardly ever got to see military

craftsmanship up close, except the presidential band on

Independence Day. It was fascinating watching the sentries

meticulously use pocket computers to randomize their

rounds, so what might have become routine remained

purposely unpredictable.

The first few days after finding his own rat-hole path to

the surface, Sepak had his hands full just keeping out of the

soldiers' way. But then, for all their sophistication, they

weren't exactly looking for anyone already inside their

perimeter. That meant George Hutton's techs had kept

mum about him, damn them. Their loyalty planted an

obligation on him in return.

So once a day he squirmed through his tiny rocky

passage to check up on the Kiwis. For the first few days

things looked pretty grim. The boys and girls from New

Zealand slumped against the limestone walls, staring at their

captors, speaking in monosyllables. But then things changed

dramatically. Inquisitors were replaced by a swarm of

outside experts who descended on the site in a storm of

white coats, treating the New Zealanders with utter

deference. Suddenly, everything looked awfully chummy.

Too chummy. Sepak didn't want any part of it. He

especially took to avoiding the caverns during meal times,

when he'd have to peer over a high gallery and smell

civilized cooking. He, meanwhile, had to make do with

500 D A V I 0 B R I N

what his grandfather had taught him to take from the forest

itself.

By the bank of a trickling stream, Sepak dabbed streaks

of soft clay across his brows, renewing the camouflage that

kept him invisible to the soldiers ... so far ... and just

so long as he didn't try to cross those unsleeping beams at

the perimeter. He chewed slowly on the last bits of a

juvenile tree python he'd caught yesterday. Or the last bits

he intended to eat. Grandfather had shown him how to

prepare the entrails using some obscure herbs. But he'd been

too nauseated to pay much attention that time. Reverence

for your heritage was fine. Still, some "delicacies" pushed

the limits.

The forest hadn't been hunted this way for several

generations. Perhaps that explained his luck so far. Or

maybe it was because Sepak had left a cluster of bright

feathers and butterfly wings at the foot of a tall tree, as

sacrifice to a spirit whose name he'd forgotten, but who his

grandfather had said was strong and benevolent.

I'm doin all right, he thought. But bloody ocker bell

1. I wish I could take a bath!

Sepak caught his reflection in the shallow water. He

was a sight, all right. Kinky hair greased back with marsupial

fat. Dark skin streaked with pale, muddy tans and dabs of

leaf sap. Only when he grinned was there any semblance to

a twenty-first-century man, whose teeth suddenly seemed

too white, too well ordered and perfect.

All around he sensed life slither and crawl, from tiny

beetles scrabbling through the forest detritus all the way to

the high canopy, where he glimpsed quick patches of fur,

the glint of scales, the flash of eyes. Branches rustled. Things

slowly stalked other things. You had to be patient to see any

of it though. It wasn't a skill you learned in school.

For the most part, the main thing you noticed was the

quiet.

Suddenly, the calm was interrupted by a mob of

foraging birds, which spilled into the tiny clearing in a storm

of feathers. They swept in from the right, a chirping, rowdy

chaos of colors and types. After that instant of startlement,

Sepak kept perfectly still. He'd read about this phenomenon

before, but never seen if until now.

Small, blue-feathered birds dove straight into the

humus, flinging leaves and twigs as they chased fleeing

EARTH 501

insects. Above these, a larger, white- and yellow-plumed species hovered, diving to snatch anything stirred into sight by the bold blue ones. Other varieties swarmed the trunks

and looping tree roots. It was amazing to witness how the

species cooperated, like members of a disciplined jungle

cleanup squad.

Then Sepak noticed some of them squabbling, fighting

over this or that squirming morsel, and revised his first

impression. The white-and-yellow birds were opportunistic,

he now saw, taking advantage of the smaller ones'

industriousness. He watched a black-tailed root hopper

swipe a tidbit already wriggling between the jaws of an irate

bird in bright orange plumes. Other breeds did the same,

warily keeping an eye out for each other while they worked

over the trees' lower bark, gobbling parasites and protein-

rich bugs before any competitor could get at them.

This wasn't teamwork, then. It was a balance of threat

and bluster and force. Each scrounger fought to keep

whatever it found while taking advantage of the others.

Funny. Why do they keep together, taken?

It seemed to Sepak the white-and-yellows could have

harassed the smaller birds more than they did. They missed

opportunities because they were distracted, spending half

their time scanning the forest canopy overhead.

He found out why. All at once, several yellows

squawked in alarm, triggering a flurry of flapping wings.

Faster than an eye-blink, all the birds vanished . . . taking

cover a bare instant before a large hawk flashed through the

clearing, talons empty, screeching in frustration.

The yellows' warning saved everybody, not just

themselves.

In moments the raptor was gone, and the multispecies

mob was back again, resuming its weird, bickering parody of

cooperation.

Each plays a role. he realized. All benefit from one

type's guarding skill. All profit from another's talent for

pecking. . . .

Clearly none of them particularly liked each other.

There was tension. And that very tension helped make it all

work. It united the entity that was the hunting swarm as it

moved out of sight through the towering trees.

"Huh," Sepak thought, marveling how much one could

learn by just sitting still and observing. It wasn't a skill one

502 D A V I D B R I N

learned in the frenetic pace of modern society. Perhaps, he

considered, there might be advantages to this adventure,

after all.

Then his stomach growled. All right, he thought, rising

and picking up his crude spears. / hear you. Be patient.

Soon he was loping quietly, scanning the branches, but

not as a passive watcher anymore. Now he set out through

the trees--listening with his ears, seeking with his eyes--

hunting clues to where on this little plateau he might find

that next meal.

D It's now official. Scientists at NASA confirm that their oldest operating spacecraft, Voyager 2, has become the first man-

made object to pass completely beyond the solar system.

Actually, the boundaries of the sun's family are debatable.

Last century, Voyager's distance exceeded that of Pluto, the

ninth planet. Another milestone was celebrated when the

venerable spacecraft reached the solar shock front, where it met

atoms from interstellar space. Most astronomers, however, say

Voyager was still within old Sol's influence until it passed

through the "heliopause" and left behind the solar wind, which

happened in the year 2037, a decade later than predicted.

Data from Voyager's little ten-watt transmitter help scientists

refine their models of the Universe. But what most people find

astonishing is that the primitive robot--launched sixty-five years ago--still functions at all. It defies every expectation, by its

designers or modern engineers. Perhaps some preserving

property of deep space is responsible. But a more colorful

suggestion has been offered by the Friends of St. Francis

Assembly [D SIG.Rel.disc. 12-RsyPD 634399889.058], a Catholic

special interest group that contends Voyager's survival was

"miraculous," in the exact sense of the word.

"We now strongly believe the oldest heavenly

commandment commissions humanity to go forth, observe

God's works, and glorify Him by giving names to all things.

"In that quest, no human venture has dared so much or

succeeded as well as Voyager. It has given us moons and rings

and distant planets, great valleys and craters and other marvels.

It plumbed Jupiter's storms and Saturn's lightning and sent

home pictures of the puzzle that is Miranda. No other modern

enterprise has so glorified the Creator, showing us as much of

EARTH 503

His grand design, as faithful Voyager, our first emissary to the

stars."

A colorful and not unpleasant thought to contemplate these

days, as the airwaves fill once more with hints of looming crisis.

It's a touch of optimism we might all do well to think about.

This is Corrine Fletcher, reporting for Reuters III from the Jet

Propulsion Laboratory, in New Pasadena, California.

[D reporter-bio: C.FLETCHER-REUT.III. Credibility ratings: CaAd-2, Viewers'

Union (2038). BaAb-1, World Watchers Ltd., 2038.]

The paleogeologists wanted to know what was going on.

M "All these strange events, Stan . . . holes in China, pillars

E of smoke at sea. Do you have any idea what it's about?"

S Even if there hadn't been a cordon sanitaire of

0 Danish and NATO soldiers around the Tangoparu

S dome, Dr. Nielsen and the others would certainly have

P suspected something was happening. The whole world

H suspected, and Stan had never been much good at

E poker.

R "There are rumors, Stan," Nielsen said shortly

E after the military arrived. "Have you seen today's noon

edition of the New Yorker1. There's a correlated survey

linking many of these bizarre phenomena into a pattern."

Stan shrugged, avoiding the blond scientist's eyes. But that

only intensified suspicion, of course. "Do you know

something about all this Stan? Your graviscan program, those

troops, the strange quakes . . . it's all connected, isn't it?"

What could he say? Stan started avoiding his friends,

spending his few free moments out on the moraine instead,

walking and worrying.

He'd been in constant touch with George Button, of

course, ever since Alex and Teresa made good their escape

from New Zealand. And he had to admit the logic behind

the uncomfortable alliance with Colonel Spivey. What else

could they do? It was Trinity site all over again--

Alamogordo in 1945. The genie was out of the bottle. All

they could do now was try to manage it as well as possible.

SOVS, RUSS, EUROPS AND HAN IN N.Y. TALKS.

GEACPS BOYCOTTS. NATO STALLS.

504 D A V I D B R I N

That was the ScaniaPress headline after one more zine expose. A whistle blower inside the EUROP mission to the U.N. told how private negotiations among the great powers

had been going on for over a fortnight. Outrage roiled

through the World Data Net. What were governments doing

--actually keeping people in the dark about a crisis? How

dare they?

In absence of solid information, a myriad of rumors

Hew.

1. It's the melting of the ice caps that's making the Earth

shake . . .

1. It's secret weapon testing. Treaty violations. We've got to call in the tribunals before it's too late . . .

1. These aren't earthly phenomena at all. We're being softened up by UFOs . . .

1. It's an alignment of the planets. The Babylonians were right predicting . . .

1. Overpopulation--ten billion souls can't stand the pressure.

The psychic strain alone . . .

1. Could we have awakened something ancient? Something

terrible? I caught sight of a dragon, snooping a public memory file. Have others out there seen it too? . . .

1. Gaia, it is our Mother, shivering in her sleep, at the pain we've caused her . . .

... I don't have any idea what it is! But I'll bet there are people in high places who do. They have a duty to tell us what's going on!

More headlines on ABC, TASS, Associated Press--

GREAT POWERS POWWOW, NIHON STAYS AWAY.

Holos of departing diplomats are analyzed by professionals

and amateur hackers, who enhance every face, every pore,

and publish speculative analyses of flesh tones, blink rates,

nervous ticks--

1. the Russ ambassador was scared . . .

1. the EUROP team knew more than they were telling . . .

1. clearly there's collusion between NATO and ASEAN . . .

EARTH 505

Stan was impressed with the creative energy out there.

Data traffic soared, straining even the capacious fiber cable

channels. Reserve capacity was brought on-line to cope.

A holopop group, Space Colander, produced a new

number called "Straining Reality"--an instant hit.

Underground poets sent paeans to strangeness migrating

from computer node to computer node, circuiting the globe

faster than the sun.

Stan did not participate, of course. Except for his rare

walks, he spent most of his time conversing over military

lines with Alex and with Glenn Spivey's physicists, piecing

together the secrets of the gazer. Some were starting to fall

into place, such as how the beams coupled with surface

matter. It seemed they had discovered a whole new

spectrum, completely at right angles to the colors of light.

With these discoveries, science would never be the same.

His darkest premonitions were like the ones those

physicists in New Mexico must have felt, nearly a century

ago. But those men had been wrong in their worst fears,

hadn't they? Their bomb, which might have wrought

searing Armageddon, instead proved to be a blessing. After

scaring everyone away from major war for three generations,

it finally convinced the nations to sign covenants of peace.

Perhaps the same sort of result would come of this.

Humanity didn't always have to be foolish and destructive.

Perhaps we'll show wisdom this time, as well. There's

always a chance.

Hours later Stan was still hard at work, predicting

beam-exit points so that Spivey's teams could get there in

advance to study the effects, when he found himself

blinking at his work screen with a weird picture still planted

in his brain. It came and went before he could focus clearly,

and now the display showed nothing abnormal. Perhaps it

was just a figment of fatigue. Nevertheless, he retained a

distinct afterimage ... of a glittering smile set in a lizard's

face, and behind that a whipping, barbed and jeweled tail.

D

In 1828 Benjamin Morrell discovered, off Namibia, a treasure

island covered with guano. A layer more than twenty-five-feet

thick had been deposited by generations of cormorants, cape

gannets, and penguins. Morrell called it "the richest manure pile 506 D A V I D B R I N

in the world." By 1844 up to five hundred ships at a time

crowded round Ichaboe Isle. Eight thousand men carted off tons

of "white gold" to make the gardens of England grow. A

lucrative if messy business.

Then the guano was gone. The ships departed Ichaboe for

Chile, the Falklands, anywhere birds nested near rich fishing

grounds. Like Nauru, whose king sold half his tiny nation's

surface area to fund his people's buying spree, each newfound

deposit lasted a little while, made a few men rich, then vanished as if it had never been.

Many other ecological crises came and went. Shoals of

fishes vanished. Vast swarms of birds died. Later, some fisheries recovered. And protected nesting grounds pulled some

cormorants and gannets back from the verge of extinction.

Then, one day, someone noticed the birds were again

doing what birds do ... right out there on the rocks. Nor did

they seem to mind much when men with shovels came--

carefully this time, not to disturb the nestlings--and carried off in bags what the birds no longer had any use for.

It was a renewable resource after all. Or it could be, if

managed properly.

Let the fish swarm and the currents flow and the sun shine

upon the stony coasts. The birds rewarded those with patience.

Mark Randall could almost feel all the telescopes aimed

I at him. The sense of being watched caused a prickle on

0 his neck as he maneuvered Intrepid, toward the

N strobing flash of the instrument package.

0 Naturally, the great powers were observing his ship.

S And the ninety-two news agencies and the Big 900

P corporations and probably thousands of amateur

H astronomers whose instruments were within line of

E sight.

R Some probably have a better idea what I'm

E chasing than I do, he contemplated.

"That thing wasn't put there by any rocket," Elaine

Castro told him as she peered over his shoulder at the

spinning cylinder caught in the shuttle's spotlight. "This

orbit is too weird. And look. The thing doesn't even have standard attachment points!"

"I don't think it was launched . . . normally," Mark

answered. Neither of them was saying anything new. "Need

EARTH 507

any help propping for EVA?" he asked his new partner.

"You've updated your inertial units?"

The stately black woman laid a space-gloved hand on

his shoulder and squeezed. "Yes, Mommy. And I promise,

I'll call if I need anything."

Mark blinked with a sudden wave of deja vu, as if

someone else were reading his lines in a play. Since when

was he the worrywart, the double-checker, the fanatic for

detail?

Since his last partner had been taken from him by

something unfathomable, of course. "Well, give me a suit

integrity readout from the airlock anyway, before pumping

down."

"Aye, aye, Cap'n." She saluted, primly and

sarcastically. Elaine fastened her helmet and left to fetch the

beeping mystery they'd been sent chasing round the world

to claim.

How did you get there? he silently asked the spinning

object. There were laws of dynamics that had to be bent just

to reach this bizarre trajectory. No record showed any rocket

launch during the last month that might have sent that

thing on such a path.

But there are other records than those released by

NORAD and SERA . . . records of inverted tornadoes and

columns of vacuum at sea level . . . of vanishing aircraft

and rainbows tied in half bitches.

His panels shone green. Happy green also lit where

Elaine's suit proclaimed itself in working order. Still, his

eyes roved, scanning telemetry, attitude, life support, and

especially navigation. Mark whistled softly between his

teeth. He sang, half consciously, in a toneless whisper.

"I yam where I yam, and that's all where I yam . . ."

His crewmate emerged into sight, waving cheerfully as

she jetted toward the shining cylinder. Mark watched like a

mother bear as she lassoed the spinning object and reeled it

behind her to Intrepid's stowage bay. Even as Elaine cycled

back inside, Mark kept alert, watching not only his

instruments, but also the Earth . . . which had once

seemed such a reliable place, but of late had seemed much

more twitchy, and prone even to sudden fits of wrath.

508 D A V I D B R I N

D Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special

Interest Group [D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546],

Special Sub-Forum 562: Crackpot-Iconoclast

Social Theories.

Do hidden influences control human affairs? Forget superstitions

like astrology. I mean serious proposals, like Kondratieff waves, which seem to track technology boom-bust cycles, though no

one knows why.

Another idea's called "conservation of crises." It contends

that during any given century there's just so much panic to go

around.

Oh, surely there are ups and downs, like the Helvetian

disaster and the second cancer plague. Still, from lifetime to

lifetime you might say it all balances out so the average person

remains just as worried about the future as her grandmother

was.

Take the great peace-rush of the nineties. People were

astonished how swiftly world statesmen started acting

reasonably. Under the Emory Accords, leaders of India and

Pakistan smoothed over their fathers' mutual loathing. Russ and

Han buried the hatchet, and the superpowers themselves

agreed to the first inspection treaties. Earth's people had been

bankrupting themselves paying for armaments nobody dared

use, so it seemed peace had come just in time.

But what if the timing was no coincidence? Imagine if, by

some magic, Stalin and Mao had been replaced in 1949 by

leaders just brimming with reason and integrity. Or all the

paranoid twits had been given sanity pills, back when the world

held just two billion humans, when the rain forests still bloomed, when the ozone was intact and Earth's resources were still

barely tapped?

It would have been too easy, then, to solve every crisis

known or imagined! Without the arms race or those wasteful

surrogate wars, per capita wealth would have skyrocketed. By

now we'd be launching starships.

If you accept the bizarre notion that humanity somehow

thrives on crisis, then it's clear we had to have the cold war from 1950 to 1990, to keep tensions high until the surplus ran out.

EARTH 509

Only then, with ecological collapse looming, was it okay to turn

away from missile threats and ideologies. Because by then we

all faced real problems.

Now some of you may wonder why I devote my weekly

column to such a strange idea. It's because of all these rumors

we're hearing on the net. It seems there's a new crisis looming

1. something nebulous and frightening which strains the

edges of reality.

Want the truth? I'd been expecting something like this.

Really.

You see, for all our problems, it was starting to look as if

people had finally begun to grow up ... as if we'd learned

some lessons and were starting to work well together at last.

Perhaps we had things too well in hand. So, by conservation of

crises, here comes something new to frighten us half to death.

It's just an idea, and admittedly a half-baked, unlikely one.

Still, picking apart ideas is what the net is all about.

Alone inside a locked spaceship, she wasn't expecting

E anybody. And yet, there came a knock at the door.

X Teresa had been wriggling through a cramped

0 space, using a torque wrench to tighten a new

S aluminum pipe. She stopped and listened. It came again

P --a rapping at the shuttle's crew access hatch.

H "Just a minute!" Her voice was muffled by the

E padded tubing around her. Teresa writhed backward out

R of the recess where she'd been replacing Atlantis's

E archaic fuel-cell system with a smaller, more efficient

one stripped out of a used car. Wiping her hands on a rag,

she stepped across rattling metal planks to peer through the

middeck's solitary, circular window.

"Oh, it's you, Alex! Hold on a sec."

She wasn't certain he could hear her through the hatch,

but it took only a few moments to crank the release and

swing the heavy door aside. Repairing and cleaning the

hatch had been her first self-appointed task, soon after

arriving on this tiny island of exile.

Alex waited atop the stairs rising from the pediment of

the Atlantis monument. Or the shuttle's gibbet, as Teresa

sometimes thought of it. For the crippled machine seemed to

hang where it was, trapped, like a bird caught forever in the

act of taking off.

510 D A V I D B R I N

"Hi," Alex said, and smiled.

"Hi yourself."

The slight tension elicited by June Morgan's visit was

quite over by now. Of course she shouldn't have felt

awkward that her friend's lover happened to pass through

from time to time. Alex carried heavy burdens, and it was

good to know he could relax that way on occasion. Still,

Teresa felt momentary twinges of jealousy and suspicion not

rooted in anything as straightforward as reason.

"Thought it time I dropped by to see how you're

doing." Alex raised a sack with the outlines of a bottle.

"Brought a housewarming present. I'm not disturbing, I

hope?"

"No, of course not, silly. Watch your step though. I've

torn up the deck plating to get at some cooling lines. Have to

replace a lot of them, I'm afraid."

"Um," Alex commented as he stepped over one of the

yawning openings, staring at the jumble of pipes and tubing.

"So the catalysts June brought you helped?"

"Sure did. And those little robots you lent me. They

were able to thread cabling behind bulkheads so I didn't

even have to remove any big panels. Thanks."

Alex put the sack down near the chaos of new and old

jerry-rigging. "You won't mind if I ask you a rather obvious

question?"

"Like why? Why am I doing this?" Teresa laughed. "I

honestly don't know, really. Something to pass the time, I

guess. Certainly I don't fool myself she'll ever fly again. Her

spine couldn't take the stress of even the gentlest launch.

"Maybe I'm just a born picture straightener. Can't leave

an honest machine just lying around rusting."

Peering into the jumble of wires and pipes, Alex

whistled. "Looks complicated."

"You said it. Columbia-c shuttles were the most

complex machines ever built. Later models streamlined

techniques these babies explored.

"That's the sad part, really. These were developmental

spacecraft. It was dumb, even criminal, to pretend they were

'routine orbital delivery vehicles,' or whatever the damn

fools called them at the time. . . . Anyway, come on. Let

me give you a tour."

She showed him where NASA scavengers had stripped

the ship, back when the decision had been made to abandon

EARTH 511

Atlantis where she lay. "They took anything that could be

cannibalized for the two remaining shuttles. Still, there's an

amazing amount of junk they left behind. The flight

computers, for instance. Totally obsolete, even at the time.

Half the homes in America had faster, smarter ones by then.

Your wristwatch could cheat all five at poker and then talk

them all into voting Republican."

Alex marveled. "Amazing."

Teresa led him up the ladder to the main deck, where

South Pacific sunshine streamed in through front windows

smudged and stained by perching seagulls. The cockpit was

missing half its instruments, ripped out indelicately long

ago, leaving wires strewn across dim, dust-filmed displays.

She rested her arms on the command seat and sighed. "So

much love and attention went into these machines. And so

much bureaucratic ineptitude. Sometimes I wonder how we

ever got as far as we did."

"Say, Teresa. Is there a way to get into the cargo bay?"

She turned around and saw Alex peering through the

narrow windows at the back of the control cabin. It was

pitch black in the bay, of course, since it had no ports to the

outside. She herself had been back there only once, to

discover in dismay that midges and tiny spiders had found

homes there, lacing the vast cavity with gauzy webs.

Probably they used cracks Atlantis had suffered when she

fell onto her 747 carry-plane, ruining both ships forever.

The Boeing had been scrapped. But Atlantis remained

where she lay, her cargo hold now home only to insects.

"Sure. Through the airlock on middeck. But--"

He turned. "Rip. . . . There's a favor I have to ask."

She blinked. "lust name it."

"Come outside then. I brought something in the

truck."

The crate had to be winched up the pediment steps. From

there it was a tight squeeze through the crew-egress hatch.

"We can't leave it here," Teresa said, panting and

wiping her brow. "It blocks my work space."

"That's why I asked about the bay. Do you think we

can get it through?"

Just left of the toilet cubicle stood the shuttle's airlock,

now the only way into the cargo bay. Teresa looked, and

512 D A V I D B R I N

shook her head dubiously. "Maybe if we uncrate your

whatever-it-is."

"All right. But let's be careful."

She saw why he was so nervous when they peeled away

the inner packing. There, resting inside a gimbaled housing,

lay the most perfect sphere Teresa had ever seen. It glistened

almost liquidly, causing the eye to skip along its flanks.

Somehow, vision flowed on past, missing the thing itself.

"We'll have to carry it by the housing," Alex told her.

Teresa bent to get a good grip on the rim as he took the other

side. It was very heavy. Like a gyroscope, the silvery ball

seemed to stay oriented in exactly the same direction, no

matter how they shifted and jostled it. But then, that might

have been an illusion. For all Teresa knew, it was spinning

madly right in front of her. No ripple in the convex

reflection gave any clue.

"What . . . is this thing?" she asked as they paused for

breath inside the airlock. There was barely room for the

globe and its cradle, forcing them to squeeze side by side to

reach the opposite hatch. The close press of Alex's shoulder,

as they sidled together, felt at once familiar and warm,

recalling times not so long ago of shared danger and

adventure.

"It's a gravity resonator," he told her, caressing the

sphere with his gaze. "A completely new design."

"But it's so small. I thought they had to be big

cylinders."

"They do, to generate a broad spectrum of search

waves. But this one's a specialist. This one's tuned. For

Beta."

"Ah," Teresa commented, impressed.

They resumed wrestling the shimmery globe into the

bay, now lit by three small bulbs. "So why ... do you

want to store a tuned gravity resonator . . . inside a broken

space shuttle?"

"I ... thought you'd ask. Actually, I'm not ... so

much setting it up here as hiding it."

As they rested for a moment, Teresa mopped her

forehead. "Hiding? Do you mean from Spivey?"

Alex nodded. "Or his ilk. You know those Maori guards

Auntie Kapur insisted on sending us? Well they've already

caught spies trying to sneak into the compound. One

Nihonese, another pair from the Ban. And I'm sure Spivey's

EARTH 513

got people on the island as well. Auntie's sending

reinforcements, but even so I'd rather keep my ace in the

hole well concealed."

He rubbed his palms on his trousers to dry them and

grabbed the housing again. Together they resumed lifting.

"Hidden up . . ." She grunted as they hauled the

resonator over a rib longeron into a stable position near one

of the payload attachment points. "Hidden up my sleeve."

Teresa straightened. "No, that's okay, Alex. I approve. It's

not just Spivey. I don't trust any of them, not farther than I

could spit.

"So," she continued as Alex fastened the machine

down. "Was that a bottle I saw in your hand earlier, I hope?"

Still short of breath, Alex grinned back at her, eyes

glittering in the spotlights and their reflection off the perfect superconducting sphere. "Yeah. I know you Yanks like your

beer cold. But once you've tasted this I'm sure you'll give up

that beastly habit."

"Hmph. We'll see about that." Teresa brushed a wisp of

cobweb from her eyes. As Alex turned to go, she paused to

watched the tiny shred of spider silk flutter, descend to

touch the round globe, and instantly disappear.

It was, indeed, a potent, bitter brew, and Teresa rather liked

it. Still, for appearances she said the stuff explained a lot

about Englishmen. It obviously stunted your emotional

growth. He only laughed and leaned over to refresh her

glass.

Teresa sat in the shuttle's command chair while Alex

perched cross-legged in the copilot's seat. Neither of them

felt any particular need to fill the long silences. So it often

was, in Teresa's experience, between people who had faced

death together.

"You're worried," she surmised at last, after one

extended pause. "You don't think the deal can hold."

"It was hopeless from the start." Alex shook his head.

"In retrospect, I can't understand why it took so long for

Spivey to find us. But at least we were a small conspiracy,

operating on a shoestring. Now? Our beams are producing

detectable phenomena all over the globe. The alliances can't

keep a thing like this under wraps, not with everyone on

Earth prying to find out what's going on."

"Then why did Spivey and Button agree to try?"

514 D A V I D B R I N

He shrugged. "Oh, it seemed a good idea at the time.

Take care of Beta, get the situation stabilized, then present

the world with a fait accompli. And of course it's giving us a

chance to characterize the singularity, to prove its origin.

Our technical report should let the science tribunals extend

inspection to the Earth's core, preventing any new arms race

over gazers and such. Then, in an open debate, it could be

decided whether to keep Beta around, as a possible

planetary-defense weapon, or try to expel it forever."

"Sounds reasonable." Teresa nodded, grudgingly.

"The only problem is, that time's already come! Beta's

relatively stable, I have data for a full report, and I'm certain the other great powers have already started clandestine

graviscan programs of their own. There was a pulse from

Nihon, yesterday--" He shook his head. "I wish I knew

what Spivey was waiting for."

"Did you hear about the meeting at the U.N.?" Teresa

asked. "Everyone, all the delegates, were talking in parables

and double-entendres. Moralizing and posturing, and saying

nothing any of the reporters could sink their teeth into."

"Hm." Alex frowned. She sensed him begin to say

something, stop, and then start again.

"I ... I've started fighting him, you know."

"Fighting who?" Then she stared. "You're fighting

Spivey! But how?"

"I'm tweaking the beams from South Africa and Rapa

Nui, the ones I still control. Using them to pump Beta's

orbit higher . . . out to where it'll lose mass faster. And

also where the damn thing doesn't leave those weird tracks

in the lower mantle anymore--"

She interrupted. "Has he reacted? Has Spivey noticed?"

Alex laughed. "Oh has he! Got George to send me a

telex. Here's a copy." He pulled the flimsy sheet from a

breast pocket. "They're both urging me to go along . . .

not to let the side down. You know? All hang together or

we'll surely hang separately?

"Then, this morning. New Guinea fired three

microseconds late on a routine run."

"What did that do?"

He shook his head.J'It pulled energy from Beta's orbit,

Rip, letting it fall a little lower. Seems our colonel isn't

about to let his mirror lose mass. Not while there are more

experiments to run."

EARTH 515

Silence reigned for many heartbeats, their only measure

of time's passage. Finally, Teresa asked, "What can Clenn be

trying to do? Surely he can't be planning to use it as a

weapon? His superiors can't be that mad!"

Alex stared out through the streaked windshield,

beyond a stretch of black-topped runway to a bluff of scrub

grass growing scraggly out of the thin volcanic soil. Beyond

lay the foam-capped waters of the ash-gray Pacific.

"I wish I knew. But whatever he's after, I'm afraid you

and I are mere pawns."

D How hot is it? You folks really want to know how hot it is? I

see farmer Izzy Langhorne sitting under a cottonwood right now,

having his lunch while watching the show. Hey, Izzy, how dumpit

hot would you spec it?

Aw, no, Izzy, gimme euthanasia! Not with your mouth full!

We'll go back to Izzy after he's cleaned up. Lessee now, gettin' a shout-back from Jase Kramer, over by Sioux Falls. Looks like

you're having some trouble with your tractor, Jase.

"No, Larry. It's just you . . . have to climb under the

suspension of these Chulalongkorn Sixes and clear the

deadwood by hand. See, it gets trapped over here by the--"

Well that's great, Jase. Nice of you to take the holo under

with you so we could all get a look. Now tell me, how hot is it?

"Well, hell, Larry. Yesterday my chickens laid hard-boiled

eggs ..."

Thank you, Jase Kramer. Whew. Send that codder some

relief!

Now hold it just a millie . . . here's an actinic flash for you

current affairs junkies. Seems the latest round of those secret/secret talks--pardon my urdu--have broken up for lunch over in

New York village. Our affiliates there have joined the mob of

news-ferret types chasing the delegates to the dell. For a direct feed, shout a hop-link to News-Line 82. For play-by-play plus

color, call Rap-250. Or you can cake-and-eat-it. Just hang

around with us while your unit does a rec-dense for later.

While we're talking about the gremlin crisis, have any of you

out there seen anything new today? Anything that might've been

a gremmie? Yesterday Betty Remington of St. Low showed us a

perfectly circular patch of amaranth where the kernels had all

been mysteriously turned inside out. And in Barstow, Sam Chu

516 D A V I D B R I N

claims one of his prize brood carps up and exploded, right in

front of him! Day-pay-say!

So who's got an opinion out there? You know the code, let's

hear the mode. . . .

Jen remembered what a wise man told her long ago

H when she was similarly obsessed with the problem of

0 consciousness. It had been an astronomer friend of

L Thomas's, a very great mind, she recalled, who listened

0 patiently for hours as she expounded the hottest new

S concepts of cognition and perception. Then, when at

P last she ran out of steam, he commented.

H "I'm uneducated in formal psychology. But in my

E experience, people generally react to any new situation in one of R four ways:

E Aha! . . . Ho-hum . . . Oy Vey! . . . and Yum, yum. . . .

"These illustrate the four basic states of consciousness, dear

Jennifer. All else is mere elaboration."

Years later, Jen still found the little allegory delightful.

It made you stop and ponder. But did those four "states"

actually map onto human thought? Did they lead to new

theories that might be tested by experiment? She recalled

the astronomer's smile that evening. Clearly he knew the

deeper truth--that all theories are only metaphors, at best

helpful models of the world. And even his clever notion was

no more real than a mote in his own eye.

There are one hundred ways to view Mount Fuji, as

Hokusai showed us. And each of them is right.

Jen wished she had someone like that old astronomer to

talk to now.

Today I'm the aged professor with no one to talk to

but a bright high school dropout. So who is there to give

me reality checks? To tell me if I'm off on a wild goose

chase?

She was treading a narrow path these days, skirting all

the pitfalls of pure reason--that most seductive and

deceptive of human pastimes. Jen had always believed

philosophers ought to have their heads knocked repeatedly,

lest they become trapped in the rhythms of their own if-

thens. But now she was hardly one to cast stones. While

crises roiled on all sides, the compass of her own existence

contracted, as if her once far-flung reach were drawing

EARTH 517

inward now, preparing for some forthcoming contest or

battle.

But what battle? What contest?

Clearly she wasn't equipped to participate in the

struggles being waged by Kenda and her grandson. Likewise,

the ferment surging through the Net would go on

unaffected by anything she offered. By now it was starting to

reach stochastic levels. A billion or more anxious world

citizens had already been drawn from their myriad

endeavors, hobbies, and distractions toward a single strange

attractor, one gnawing focus of angst. Nothing like it had

been seen since the Helvetian War, and back in those days

the Net had been a mere embryo.

Messages piled up in her open-access mailbox as

numberless correspondents sought her opinion. But rather

than get involved, Jen only retreated further into the

circumscribed world of thought.

Oh, she left the catacombs regularly, for exercise and

human contact. In Kuwenezi's squat, fortresslike ark she

spent ninety minutes each day with her only student,

answering his eager questions with puzzlers of her own,

marveling at his voracious mind and wondering if he'd ever

get a chance to develop it.

But then, walking home under the merciless sun, she

would pass near towering termite mounds, built by patient,

highly social creatures at regular intervals across the dry

hills. They hummed with unparsed commentary, a drone

that seemed to resonate inside her skull, even after the

rickety lift cage started descending into the cool silence of

the abandoned mine, gliding past layer after gritty layer of

compressed sediments, returning her to those caverns where

hard-driven men labored like Homeric figures under her

grandson's long-distance guidance, wrestling for the fate of

the world.

Their efforts mattered to Jen, of course. It was just that

no one seemed to need her at the moment. And anyway,

something even more important had to be attended to.

Her train of thought. It was precious, tenuous. A thread

of concentration that absolutely had to be preserved . . .

not for the world, but for its own sake. It was a self-

involved, even selfish attitude, but Jen had long known she

was a solipsist. Except during the years when her children

518 D A V I D B R I N

had been growing, what had always mattered to her most

was the trail of the idea. And this was a very big idea.

From the Net she drew references stretching back to

Minsky and Ornstein, Pastor and Jaynes--and even poor old

Jung--examining how each thinker had dealt with this

peculiar notion . . . that one could somehow be many, or

many combine to make one.

Her young student Nelson Crayson had really hit on it

with his fixation on "cooperation versus competition." The

dichotomy underlay every human moral system, every

ideology and economic theory, from socialism to free-market

libertarianism. Each tried to resolve it in different ways. And

every attempt only dredged up more inconsistencies.

But what if it's a false dichotomy, after all? What if

we've been seduced by those deducers, Plato and Kant and

Hegel? By the if-and-th erefore of linear logic? Perhaps life

itself sees less contradiction than we do.

The motto on the old American coin haunted her.

"From many, one."

Our subselves usually aren't distinct, except in

multiple personality disorder. Rather, a normal person's

drives and impulses merge and cleave, marry and sunder,

forming temporary alliances to make us feel and act in

certain ways.

So far so good. The evidence for some form of

multimind model was overwhelming. But then came the

rub.

// / consist of many, why do I persist in perceiving a

central me at all! What is this consciousness that even

now, as 1 think these thoughts, contemplates its own

existence?

Jen remembered back when Thomas had tried to

interest her in reading novels. He had promised that the best

ones would prove enlightening. That their characters would

"seem to come alive." But the protagonists were never

realistic to Jen. Even when portrayed as confused or

introspective, their thought processes seemed too

straightforward. Too decisive. Only Joyce ever came close to

depicting the real hurricane of internal conflict and

negotiation, those vast, turbid seascapes surrounding an

island of semi-calm that named itself "me."

Is that why I must imagine a unitary self? To give the

EARTH 519

storm a center? An "eye" to revolve around? An illusion of

serenity, so the storm might be ignored most of the time?

Or is it a way to rationalize a semblance of

consistency? To present a coherent face to the outside

world?

Of one thing Jen felt certain. The universe inside a

human mind was only vaguely like the physical one outside,

with its discrete entities, its species, cells, organs, and

individuals. And yet, the mind used those external entities

as metaphors in the very models it used to define itself!

Today, Nelson had gotten worked up about one such

model. Government, he said, consists of a nation's effort to

settle the differences amongst its component parts--its

citizens. In olden times, the resolution was a simple matter

of the imposition of flat by a king or ruling class.

Later still, majority rule improved matters a little. But

today even small minorities could make bombs and death

bugs, if they got angry enough! (The blueprints were all

there in the net, and who dared claim the role of censor?)

So compromise and consensus were absolutely

essential, and governments could only tread carefully, never

imposing solutions. Serving instead as forums for careful

rapprochement.

In other words, the ideal government should be like a

sane person's conscious mind! It was a fascinating

comparison. Almost as interesting as the next one Nelson

spun out.

The World Data Net, he said, was the ultimate analog.

Like a person, it too consisted of a myriad of tiny subselves

(the eight billion subscribers), all bickering and negotiating

and cooperating semi-randomly. Subscriber cliques and

alliances merged and separated . . . sometimes by

nationality or religion, but more often nowadays by special

interest groups that leaped all the old borderlines ... all

waging minuscule campaigns to sway the world's agenda

and to affect their lives in the physical world.

Astonishing, Jen thought. The boy had made a major

metaphorical leap.

Of course, the government analogy was a little

overextended. But the notion that consciousness is our

way of getting all our secret selves out into the daylight, so

they'll either cooperate or compete fairly--that's the

important part. It explains why a neurosis loses most of its

520 D A V I D B R I N

power once it's known . . . as soon as all the mind gets to

see those dark secrets one isolated part had kept hiden

from the rest.

Walking past the busy technicians, Jen sat down at her

display and resumed working on her model, modifying it

along lines inspired by Nelson's insight. The subvocal was

the only input device fast enough to follow her driving pace.

Her teeth clicked and her larynx bobbed as she almost spoke

words aloud. The machine skimmed those phrases faster

than she could have pronounced them, and it extrapolated,

drawing from its capacious memory bits of this and that to

fit into a growing whole.

Those bits were mostly object blocks taken from the

very best intelligence-modeling programs around. That cost

money, of course, and over in one corner Jen saw her

personal account dip alarmingly. But each of the programs

had something to recommend it. Each had been slaved over

by teams of talented researchers with private theories they

wanted to prove--each ostensibly contradictory,

incompatible with the others.

At that moment, however, it had ceased mattering to

Jen whose doctrine was closer to correct. Suddenly, it made

perfect sense to merge them, combine them--to try to make

a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

By the Mother . . . what if they're all right? What if

self-similarity and recursion can't typify a living system

without yet a third attribute--inclusion?

There was certainly a precedent for such a melange

1. the human brain, the physical organ itself, was built in

layers. Its newest evolutionary innovations hadn't replaced

earlier sections. Rather, each in turn was laid over older

parts, joining and modifying them, not canceling or

superseding.

Most recent were the prefrontal lobes, tiny nubs above

the eyes which some called the seat of human personality

1. the latest floor of rooms added to a skyscraper of mind.

Underneath lay the mammalian cortex, shared with man's

closest cousins. Lower then, but still useful and functional,

the brain portions appropriate to reptiles still performed

useful chores, while under those pulsed a basic reflex

system remarkably like fhat found in primitive chordates.

So it would be with her model. Gradually pieces of the

puzzle fell into place. The Berkeley Cognition Scheme, for

EARTH 521

instance, mated astonishingly well with the "emotional

momentum" models of the Beijing University behaviorists.

At least it did if you twisted each of them a bit first, in just

the right way.

Of course, whenever she ventured into the net to seek

these and other programs, she had to experience firsthand

what was going on out there. It was utter chaos! Her early

ferrets got completely lost in the maelstrom. She had to

write better ones just to reach the big psychology library

clearinghouse, in Chicago. And even then it took several

tries before the emissaries came back with what she needed.

The latest retrieval had taken seven whole seconds, causing

her to smack the console in irritation.

By now Jen realized--with perhaps a pang of jealousy--

that her own grandson had achieved unrivaled heights in

the art of stirring people up, far exceeding her own modest

accomplishments. The Net spumed with ferment over

events Alex Lustig had set off. Somewhere, sometime soon,

Jen figured the whole Rube Goldberg contraption had to

blow a fuse.

Watch it, old girl. Your own metaphors give away your

age.

Okay then, let's try a few similes.

The chaos in the Net was like spray blowing over a

small boat. All sorts of unwanted material accompanied the

subroutines her ferrets brought back. Jen was both alarmed

and amused when some bits of software dross actually

fought not to be tossed out! They clung to existence in her

computer like scrabbling little life-forms and had to be

tracked down lest they scurry into some corner and use up

scarce memory, or maybe even breed.

On impulse she looked to the small screen where she'd

exiled the cartoon creatures called up by her own free

associations. In the foreground, for instance, shimmered a

teetering house of cards and spent, smoking electrical fuses,

clearly extrapolated from recent surface mumblings.

Then there was the tiger symbol, which had lain in that

same spot all these weeks. The simulacrum purred lowly,

lounging on a nest of what looked like shredded paper.

She told the snippet of herself. If you insist on hanging

around, then it's time I put you to work.

The tiger yawned, but responded when she tapped two

teeth together decisively--asserting the dominance of her

522 D A V I D B R I N

central self over its parts. Subvocally she gave it

instructions, to go hunt those spurious flurries of unwanted

software--all the scampering, chittering irrelevancies that

kept swarming into her work space from the Net's chaos,

disturbing her work.

The weather's high, she realized. At times like these,

any mobile thing, will seek shelter, anywhere it can.

With that thought, flecks of rain seemed to dampen the

tiger's fur, but not its mood. With another yawn and then a

savage grin, the cat set forth to clear away all interlopers, to

give her model room to settle and grow.

D

On other Polynesian islands, the people lived lives much the

same as ours. Their chiefs, too, were beings of great mana. Our

cousins, too, believed the course of the warrior was just below

that of the gods.

But in other ways we differed. For when his canoes arrived

from ancient Hiva, our forefather, Hotu Matu'a, knew at once

where he had come. This is 7e P'rto o Te Henua--the island at

the center of the world.

We had chickens and taro and bananas and yams. There

was obsidian and hard black stone, but no harbor, and our

canoes were lost.

What need had we of canoes? What hope to depart? For we

believed the closest land to Rapa Nui was the bright moon itself, who passed low over our three cratered peaks--paradise

overhead, barely out of reach. Believing we could get there with

mana, we built the ahu and carved the moai.

But we had slain great Tangaroa and were cursed to fail, to

suffer, to live off the flesh of our brethren and see our children inherit emptiness.

It is hard, living at the navel of the world.

He was shaving when the telephone rang.

C Alex wasn't happy with the new razor he'd bought

0 after the escape from New Zealand. Its diamond blade

R was far too sharp, unlike his old one, which had worn

E down nicely over the years since his sixteenth birthday.

That wasn't the only thing he missed. Stan and George

also--their steadiness and calm advice. Communications

EARTH 523

were supposed to be safe from the rising noisiness on the

Net, but despite military assurances, they had worsened for

days.

Were Spivey's peepers conspiring to keep them apart?

Or might George and Stan be snubbing him because of his

growing campaign against the colonel's control?

Alex prepared to run the blade over his face again,

wondering if maybe it was time to quit being so old-

fashioned and get his face depilated, like most other men.

A shrill chirping made his hand jerk. "Bloody hell!"

Alex tore off a sheet of toilet paper to stanch the

wound. He recalled seeing a can of coagulant enzyme in the

medicine cabinet and pulled aside the mirror to start

rummaging for it.

The phone chirruped again, insistently. "Oh ... all

right." He slammed the mirror shut. Applying pressure to

stop the bleeding, he stepped into the tiny bedroom, sifted

through the clutter on the nightstand for his wristwatch,

and pressed the accept call button. "Yes?"

The person on the other end paused and then realized

there would be no picture. "Tohungd1. Is that you?"

From the Maori honorific, it had to have been one of

the newcomers Auntie Kapur had sent to watch over Alex

and his team. "Lustig here," he affirmed. "What is it?"

"Better come quick, Tohunga. We caught a saboteur

trying to blow up the lab." The voice cut off with a click.

Alex stared at the watch. "Cripes," he said concisely.

Crabbing a shirt off the dresser, he dashed out the door trailing shaving cream and tiny specks of blood.

"I guess we're not needed anymore."

"Come on, Eddie. We don't know the bomb was sent by

Spivey. What about a hundred other countries, alliances,

agitation groups. . . . Hell, even the boy scouts must have

some idea where the focal resonators are by now."

His chief engineer grimaced. "I served in the ANZAC

Special Forces, Alex. I know standard issue demolition

charges when I see them." The big, red-headed Kiwi hefted a

tennis-ball-sized contraption. "The casing's been altered to

make it look like Nihon manufacture, but I just did a

neutron activation scan, and I can tell you exactly which

factory in Sydney made it. Even the lot number.

524 D A V I D B R I N

"Bloody sloppy of the bastards, if you ask me. They

must have been confident we couldn't stop 'em."

Alex glanced over at the would-be saboteur, a

nondescript Polynesian. Possibly a Samoan, whose

appearance would presumably blend in with the natives of

Easter Island. Except that the Pasquans of Rapa Nui were a

breed apart and proud of it.

What kind of man takes a live bomb across the seas in

order to blow up other people? People who have mothers

and lovers and children, just like him?

Probably either a professional or a patriot, Alex

thought. Or, worse, both.

The bomber smiled nervously at Alex.

He knows the way things ought to go now. According

to the rules, we'd have to hand him over to Chilean

authorities. Then, in the fullness of time, his masters will

cut a deal for him.

Only what rules apply when everyone's talking about

the end of the world? Alex's hands balled into fists. The

saboteur seemed to read something in his eyes and

swallowed hard.

Across the room, Alex saw Teresa watching him, arms

folded in front of her. So what do we do now? he wondered.

More than ever, he wished he could gather old friends and

tap their wisdom.

"I agree. I'd lay odds it was Colonel Spivey who sent

the bomb."

Everybody turned to see who had spoken with such

authority, in a rich, confident basso. "Manella!" Alex cried

out. Teresa gasped.

Standing in the doorway, the Aztlan reporter smiled

and carried his bulk gracefully into the chamber. Resting

one arm on the guardrail of the gravity resonator, he smiled

all around. "It's good to see you remember me, Lustig.

Hello, everybody. Captain Tikhana. Sorry to abandon you

back in Waitomo. But I really was indisposed."

"You choose convenient moments to come and go,"

Teresa said bitterly. "What makes you think we'll have any

interest in what you have to say now, Pedro?"

Manella smiled. "Come come. I'm sure Colonel

Spivey's told you how much he respected whoever ran

interference for our project, before he finally found us.

EARTH 525

Didn't he admit that? Doesn't that imply whose side I was

on ... am on?"

Alex frowned. Pedro was implying that even now he

had his own tap into the Waitomo complex. Which was

plausible enough. He'd had plenty of time to plant bugs.

One fiber, as thin as silk, was all you needed.

"All good things come to an end, though. Eventually it

was some hacker out on the Net who tracked us down. I got

the warning only an instant before those peepers arrived."

Manella tapped the heavy-duty data watch on his left wrist.

"No time to warn anybody, and I knew if I took Teresa

along, the manhunt would sweep us both up in a trice

anyway. But I bet Spivey wouldn't think me worth the

bother."

"He hardly mentioned your name," Teresa said, both

confirming Manella's split-second decision and emphasizing

how little anybody cared about him.

He took the mixed insult with good grace. "Anyway,

I've been keeping tabs on things, while maintaining a thin

profile--"

Teresa interrupted. "Hah!"

"--but I had a feeling something like this was in the

works. That's why I called your security chief this morning

with a little tip."

Alex swiveled to look at Auntie Kapur's man. The big

Maori shrugged. "Must've been him, tohunga."

Teresa objected. "How do we know he didn't send the

saboteur, just so he could tip us off and win back our trust?"

"Oh, Captain." Manella sighed. "Don't you think I'm

persuasive enough on my own account, without having to

use tricks and legerdemain? Besides, I have no access to

bombs and such. You just heard this wise man say the thing

was ANZAC military issue.

"No, I just used this." He tapped the side of his ample

nose. "Lustig can tell you it never fails. I knew something

was up. Had to be. Spivey can't afford to leave you in

operation any longer."

"But . . . why?" one of the woman techs complained.

"Just because we've been nudging Beta a little higher, so it

evaporates a bit?"

Another engineer agreed. "It can't be to keep things

secret any longer, either. Private SICs are correlating data

from nearly every gazer beam, tossing out bad theories and

526 D A V I D B R I N

zeroing in on the truth. Anyway, last night the NATO

president said he'll be making a big statement Tuesday. It'll

all go to the tribunals ..."

"Which makes time all the more crucial to Spivey,"

Pedro answered. "Tell me something, Alex. Are there signs

of other resonators coming on line? Other than your

original four?"

Oh. he's good all right, Alex admitted in his thoughts,

whether Manella had guessed this or discovered it by spying

on them.

"We've seen traces for several days now. Two in Nihon

GEACS territory, one Russ and a Han also."

"And?"

"And six more . . . much better ones. They're being

set up at the face centers of a cube, a better arrangement

than our tetrahedron."

"Just as I expected." Manella nodded. "And who else,

other than yourself, is capable of building such an array?

Who else has such a head start over Russ and Han and even

Nihon?"

Silence was his only answer. The answer was obvious.

"So there's supposed to be an announcement in four

days? So the tribunals are to be invoked and all revealed? I

must then answer, so what? What happens afterward will

still depend on who has the best information and expertise.

That is who will be in control. He'll set the agenda. Rule the

world."

"Spivey," Teresa said, though clearly she did not want

to.

Manella nodded. "He's almost got a monopoly on data

about these breathtaking, intimidating new technologies.

But who knows even more about singularities and gravity

lasers than his tame physicists?"

They looked at each other. No one in the world

understood the gazer phenomenon better than the people in

this room.

This is no good. Alex decided. Manella might be right.

Dammit, he probably is. But I'm not letting him hypnotize

my team.

"Clever, Pedro," he teld the newsman. "Have you also

worked out what I've decided to do about it?"

"Is that all?" The big man grinned. "You forget that I

know you, Lustig. I'd bet my tooth-implant radio and half a

EARTH 527

year's pay you intend showing Colonel Spivey just who he's

dealing with."

Damn you, Alex thought. But outwardly he only

shrugged. Looking at the others, he announced--"Anyone

who chooses to leave the island may do so now. All civilians

will be warned away from a two-kilometer radius.

"As for me, though, I don't plan taking this--" he

hefted the bomb "--lying down."

He looked again at Teresa, who nodded. She

understands. The next few days will decide the future of

everything.

Alex watched as the assembled workers, one by one,

stepped toward him and the great swiveled bulk of the

resonator. Their silent vote was unanimous. "Good," he

said, feeling a wave of warmth toward his comrades. "Let's

get to work then. I had a dream not long ago, and it gave me

an idea. A possible way we just might get the good colonel's

attention."

D Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special

Interest Group [D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546],

Special Alert to Members.

There are times for discussion, and other times when only action

counts. None of our fancy schemes will help anybody if we don't

make it through this present craziness! So the coordinators of the Worldwide Long Range Solutions SIG hereby suspend all conference forums. Instead we encourage all of you, as

individuals, to seek ways to help solve the crisis many see

looming, hour by passing hour.

"But what can a single person do to influence events of

such magnitude and momentum?" One answer may surprise

you. We'll shortly hand over these channels, on loan, to the

Federation of Amateur Observation Special Interest

Groups I D sig BaY, FAO 456780079.876]. Their spokesper will

describe how each of you can assist the worldwide effort to

track the gremlins down.

It may surprise many of you how much science relies on

amateur observers, from bird-watchers, to meteor counters, to

hobbyists with private weather stations. But now, with so many

weird phenomena taking place worldwide, these amateur

528 D A V I D B R I N

networks are truly coming into their own. It's private citizens,

with sharp eyes and ready cameras, who are even now tracing

patterns the big boys think they can keep secret from us.

We'll show them whose planet this is! So stay on-line for a

list of groups you can join. Then get off your lazy asses, dust off your Tru-Vus, go outside, and look! You may be the one to catch

that vital clue, to help track these gor-sucking gremlins to their source.

Stan Coldman didn't have much to do anymore. Others

M ran the scans now, reduced the data, constructed ever-

E subtler models of the inner Earth, even traced the

S involute geometries of that refulgent, renitent entity

0 below . . . the thing called Beta.

S A midget town had sprung up around the lonely

P Tangoparu dome on a rocky plain below the vast

H Greenland ice sheet. High-powered tech types bustled

E with armloads of data cubes, arguing in the arcane new

R language of gazerdynamics. Of the original team, only

E he remained now, the others having gone home to New

Zealand long ago.

The NATO scientific commander had specifically asked

him to stay. So Stan sat in on all the daily seminars,

struggling to keep up with younger, more agile minds, even

though his understanding grew more obsolete with each

fast-breaking discovery. No matter. They all treated him

with utter deference. Hardly a moment passed without

hearing the name Alex Lustig spoken with an awe

customarily lavished on the shades of Newton and Einstein

and Hurt, and as the great one's former teacher, Stan shared

in that glory.

Singularities. There was a lot of talk about singularities,

by which the bright young men and women meant the kind

you made inside a cavitron--micro black holes and those

newer innovations, tuned strings and cosmic knots. Of late,

though, Stan had found himself thinking about another

kind of "singularity" altogether. It was on his mind as he

passed a saluting sentry and left the bustling encampment,

swinging his walking stick across the moraine-strewn valley.

In mathematics, 'a singularity is a sudden

discontinuity, where one expression suddenly ceases being

valid, and a completely different one takes its place.

EARTH 529

You got the simplest kind of singularity--a delta

function--by dividing any real number by zero. The result,

converging on infinity, was actually undefined,

unknowable. That's where we're at right now . . . a

singularity in the life history of mankind.

It wasn't just the present crisis. Oh, certainly he was

worried. Would the world's institutions--or the planet itself

--survive the next few hours or days? Stan was as concerned

as the next man. Still, even if tomorrow the spectre of

reborn international paranoia evaporated like a bad dream,

and all the gorgeous, terrifying new technologies were

tamed, nothing would ever be the same.

Earlier today, some of the youngsters had been

discussing notions about gravitational circuits . . .

equivalent, in collapsed mass and stressed space, to

capacitors and resistors and transistors, for heaven's sake! To

Stan it was proof the time had come. The moment he'd

secretly been waiting for all his life.

There's another kind of singularity . . . having to do

with society, and information.

Technological breakthroughs had happened before--

when farming was invented, for example. Or metallurgy. Or

writing. Each time, men and women gained new power over

their lives, and thinking itself changed. With each such

naissance, human beings were in effect reborn, remade . . .

reprogrammed.

In early times, change came slowly. But each

breakthrough laid a foundation for those that followed. And

with the Western breakout of the sixteenth century, it

became self-sustaining. Inventions bred wealth, which

spread education and leisure to broader masses. Printing

dispersed literacy. Transport distributed food. Food meant

more people.

He paused near a sandy bank in the wind-shadow of a

boulder, and used his walking stick to trace a rough figure. It

was the standard doom scenario, depicting the fate forecast

by Malthus for any species that outbreeds the carrying

capacity of its niche.

The curve portrayed human population over time, and

it rose very slowly at first. All through the late Stone Age--

when Stan's ancestors had chipped flint, scratched fleas, and

thought fire the final terror weapon--there were never more

than five million homo sapiens at a time. This changed with

530 D A V I D B R I N

agriculture, though. Human numbers doubled, then

doubled again every fifteen hundred years or so--a rapid

climb--until they reached five hundred million around the

time of Newton.

Impressive progress, achieved by people who had hardly a glimmer of what the laws of nature were, let alone concepts like ecology or psychology or planetary history.

But then it accelerated even faster! New foods, sanitation,

emigration . . . babies lived longer. Humans reproduced

copiously. The next doubling, to a billion souls, took only

two hundred years. The next, less than a century. Then,

from just 1950 to 1980, two billions became four. And still

the curve steepened. Stan recalled the elegant, symmetrical

projections proclaimed by pessimists when he was young.

No population boom can be sustained forever on a finite

world. There must inevitably come crash.

The curve never reached infinity after all. It peaked.

Then, like a spent rocket, it turned over and plummeted.

The great die-back, that's where we seemed headed. After

all, it happens whenever anchovies and deer breed beyond

their food supply.

And we did have little die-backs. But so far we've

escaped the big one, haven't we?

So far.

He scratched another rude figure, identical to the first

until it reached the top of the curve. At which point the

population stopped growing all right, but neither did it fall!

Instead of plummeting, this rocket turned sideways.

This is what they say can happen if you add

intelligence and free will to the formula. After all, we

aren't deer or anchovies!

Two graphs. Two destinies. Malthusian calamity and

EARTH 531

the so-called S-curve. On the one hand, utter collapse. And

on the other, a chain of last-minute reprieves . . . like self-

fertilizing corn, room-temperature superconductors, and

gene-spliced catfish . . . each arriving just in time for

mankind to muddle through another year, eking out a living

from one brilliant innovation to the next.

We thought these were the only two possible futures:

--if we prove selfish and short-sighted--mass death,

--and if we bend all our efforts, working together,

applying every ingenuity--then a genteel decline to a sort

of threadbare equilibrium.

But was there a third choice? Another type of social

singularity? Stan's stick hovered over the sand. When each

generation owns more books than its father's, the volumes

don't accumulate arithmetically or even geometrically.

Knowledge grows exponentially.

Stan recalled the last time he and Alex and George had

gotten drunk together, when he had complained so about

the lack of new modalities. Now he laughed at the memory.

"Oh, I was wrong. There are modalities, all right. More than

I ever imagined."

Those youngsters back in the encampment were talking

about making gravitational transistors! It was enough to

make a man cry out, "Stop! Give me a minute to think!

What does it all mean?"

Knowledge isn't restrained by the limits of Malthus.

Information doesn't need topsoil to grow in, only freedom.

Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a

chain reaction.

A third type of social singularity, then, would be a true

532 D A V I D B R I N

leap, some sudden, jarring shift to a completely undefined

state--where changes manifest themselves in months,

weeks, days, minutes. . . . Still climbing, the rocket attains

escape velocity.

With a sigh, Stan wiped away the rude figures. We're

caught up in our own close view of time. A human life

seems so long. But try on the patient outlook of a glacier.

His eyes lifted to the white continent of ice, only a few

kilometers away and stretching from horizon to horizon. Ice

ages are geologically rapid events. And yet we've flashed

from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred

generations. One moment there are these barefoot

Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass.

Turn around, and their children's children talk about

tapping energy from pulsars.

Stan sat down on the convenient boulder, which had

been dragged hundreds of miles only to be dropped here by

the retreating glacier. It was a good place to watch late

autumn's early twilight usher onstage the gauzy curtains of

the aurora borealis. He loved the way the colors played

across the glacier, causing its rough corrugations to undulate

in time to the sizzling of supercharged long high above. It

was starting to get chilly, even in his thermal coat. Still, this was worth savoring for a while.

Stan heard a soft clunk and saw a stone roll across the

sand, coming to rest near his foot. Not far away, two other

rocks quivered.

Well, I guess we're at it again.

But it was more than a typical tremor. He realized this

as a deep groan seemed to fill the air ... apparently strongest toward the ice. He started to rise, but changed his mind when a sudden trembling made it hard to gain his feet.

Whether it was in the ground or his legs, Stan decided to

stay put.

After all, what can harm me out here in the open?

Sparkling fireflies were the next phenomenon, dancing

within his eyes.

This must be what it's like to be near a beam when it

exits, he thought bemusedly. A level-six harmonic at about

twenty kilowheelers should do it, coupling with my own

body's bag of salty fluid. If the frequency dispersion isn't

too . . .

But then Stan blinked, remembering. No beam was

scheduled to exit so near--

He didn't finish the thought. For at that moment the

glacier began to glow directly opposite him, and not from

any outside illumination this time. Deep inside the vast ice

flow a fierce luminance throbbed. Shapes and dim outlines

warped what seemed to be a series of columns, set far back

in the frozen mass.

Shafts of brightness pulsed. . . .

Then the east exploded with light.

D Forty years ago, everyone was in a froth over the millennium.

Especially many Christians, who thought surely the end of days

would coincide with the two thousandth anniversary of Jesus's

birth. I was one who saw portents back in '99.1, too, thought the time was at hand.

Looking back, I see how foolish I was. I thought the crises of

those days were awful, but they weren't terrible enough to

presage the end. Besides, we'd chosen the wrong anniversary!

After all, why should the Time come at the millennium of His

bir1h7 The events from Gethsemane to Crucifixion to

Resurrection were what mattered then. So must the anniversary

of those events! See my calculations [D ref. aeRle

5225790.23455 aBIE I which show beyond any doubt that it must

be this very year!

No wonder we see signs everywhere! The time's at hand! It

is now!

Teresa stared at the display, watching a vivid simulation

E of events taking place halfway round the world.

X Glowing numbers told how much mass had suddenly

0 departed the planet. She had to swallow before

S speaking.

P "H-how did you do that?"

H Alex looked up from his controls. "How does a

E musician play?" He cracked his knuckles. "Practice,

R practice."

E Teresa knew better. Alex grinned, but he had a

tremor under his left eye and a pale, bloodless complexion.

534 D A V I D B R I N

He's scared half out of his wits. And who wouldn't be, after

what he'd just pulled off?

"Telemetry coming in," a tech announced. "Our beam

emerged on target, missing the settlement by six point two

klicks, with a surface coupling impedance of eighteen

kilowheelers ... at point oh niner Hawkings, metric.

That's a ninety-eight hundredths match with water ice of

surface thickness ..."

Another voice cut in. "Beat frequencies on the sixth,

ninth, and twelfth harmonics, dominant. Very gentle.

Maximum dynamic load during each throb-pulse never

exceeding six gees . . ."

"Target trajectory calculated," a third worker

announced. "On screen now."

A spot glowed on the map-globe, near the west coast of

Greenland. From that point a thread of light speared radially

into space. Arrow straight at first, it eventually curved as

Earth's more sedate gravitostatic field grabbed the small

mountain their beam had ripped from the ancient glacier.

The dot representing the hurtling iceberg still moved very

fast, though, and the planetary sphere had to shrink in

compensation.

As if impatient with even this fleeting pace, a dashed

line rushed ahead of the dot, tracing the frozen missile's

predicted path. Earth diminished toward the lower left

corner of the tank and into view, at the upper right, a pearly

globe sedately swam onstage.

Teresa let out a cry. "You can't be serious!"

Alex tilted his head. "You object?"

"Whatever for? There's no one living on the moon."

Teresa clapped her hands. "Do it, Alex! Get a bull's-eye!"

He grinned up at her and then turned back to watch as

their projectile passed the halfway mark and sped on toward

its rendezvous. Teresa unselfconsciously laid a hand on

Alex's shoulder.

No one had ever tried to manipulate the gazer on such a

scale. Sure, Clenn Spivey's people had lain instrument

packages where beams were scheduled to emerge. But no

one had ever made a beam couple so powerfully and

purposely with surface objects. Others were sure to note

how closely the beam had missed one of Spivey's resonators.

They'd also notice how accurately Alex had thrown his

snowball.

EARTH 535

"Phone call from Auckland!" The communications

officer announced.

Not far away, Pedro Manella made a show of consulting

his watch. "The colonel's late. They must have dragged him

out of bed."

"Let him wait a few minutes longer then," Alex said.

"I'd rather talk to him after he's mulled things over."

Spivey must be watching a display like this now. So, no

doubt, were his bosses. The dashed line filled in as the

glowing pinpoint converged toward the familiar cratered

face of Earth's dwarf sister. No one breathed as it accelerated

and then struck the moon's northern quadrant, vanishing in

a sudden, dazzling glitter of molten spray.

Manella, of course, was the first to recover his voice,

though even he took some time to get around to speaking.

"Um, well, Lustig. That ought to give them pause for a

day or so."

Under her hands, Teresa felt the tightness in Alex's

muscles. But outwardly, for the others, he maintained an air

of confident calm.

"I expect. For a day or so."

D

1. Our Mother, who art beneath us, whatever thy

name--

You support us, nurture us, bring us the gift of life.

Hear the prayers of your children, and forgive us

our trespasses.

Intervene on our behalf, and for those other lives,

great and small, which suffer when we err.

Oh, Mother, we pray. Help us to face danger

and be wise . . .

 / hear you. Daisy McClennon thought, as she brought

H together the elements she needed . . . implements

Y bought, stolen, coerced, or designed herself during the

D last several hectic, sleepless days.

R / bear you, she mentally told the voices vibrating,

0 ringing, echoing across the vast chaos of the Net. And

S intervene is certainly what I'm about to do.

P Oh there were those who still thought she was

H their tool ... as a dog might think a man's sole

E purpose in life is to throw sticks and operate the can

R opener. But just as their schemes neared culmination,

E so would hers. And always, under buried levels and

deceptions, there lie layers deeper still.

Soon, she told those who prayed electronically. Soon

you '11 have release from all these worries that beset you.

Soon you shall know truth.

PART X

PLANET

Portrait of the Earth at night.

Even across its darkside face. the newborn planet

glowed. Upwelling magma broke its thin crust, and

meteor strikes lit the shaded hemisphere. Later, after the

world ocean formed, its night tides glistened under the

moon's pearly sheen. For most of the next two thousand

million years, ruptures glowed beneath the broad waters,

and lightning offset the glistening phosphorescence of

emerging life.

The next phase, lasting nearly as long, featured

growing continents traced by strings of fiery volcanoes.

Eventually, huge convection cells slowed the granite

promenade. And yet. Earth's night grew brighter still. For

now life draped the land with vast forests, and the air

was rich with oxygen. So flamelight illumined a valley

here, a meadow there . . . sometimes an entire plain.

Within the very latest time-sliver, tiny camp fires

appeared--minuscule threats to evening's reign. Yet

sometimes curving scythes of grassland blazed as hunters

drove panicky beasts toward precipices.

Then, quite suddenly, dim smudges told of the next

innovation--towns. And when electrons were harnessed,

man's cities blossomed into glittering jewels. Nightside

brightened rapidly. Oil drillers flared off natural gas just

538 D A V I D B R I N

to make easier their suckling of deep petroleum. Fishing

lights rimmed shorelines. Settlers lay torch to rain

forests. Strings of strobing, pinpoint brilliance traced

shipping lanes and air corridors.

There were dark wells, also. The Sahara. Tibet. The

Kalahari. In fact, the black zones grew. The methane

flares flickered and went out. So did the fishing lights.

Cities, too, damped their extravagance. While their

sprawl continued to spread, the former neon dazzle

passed away like a memory of adolescence. The

effervescent show wasn't quite over, but it seemed to be

waning. As night moved back in, any audience could tell

the finale would come soon.

But turn the dial. Look at the planet's surface, at

night--in radio waves.

Brilliance! Blazing glory. The Earth seared, it shone

brighter than the sun.

Perhaps it wasn 'the over yet, after all.

Not quite.

A R T H 539

D Nation states are archaic leftovers from when each man

feared the tribe over the hill, an attitude we can't afford anymore.

Look at how governments are reacting to this latest mess--yammering mysterious accusations at each other while keeping the

public ignorant by mutual agreement. Something's got to be

done before the idiots wreck us all!

Have you heard the net talk about mass civil disobedience?

Sheer chaos, of course. Not even Buddhists or NorA ChuGas

can organize on such short notice. So it's just happening, all by itself! Yesterday Man tried to stop it. ... ordered all Chinese

net-links shut down, and found they couldn't! Too many alternate

routings and ways to slip around choke points. The severed

links just got rerouted.

So are the nation states paying heed? Hell, no. They're just

doing what nationals always do--hunkering down. They say be

patient. They'll tell us all about it on Tuesday. Right!

I say it's time to get rid of them, once and for all!

Only one problem, what do we replace them with?

Crat's weighted boots were so hard to lift, he had to

C shuffle across the ocean bottom, kicking muddy plumes

R that settled slowly in his wake. Occasionally, a ray or

U some other muck-dwelling creature sensed his clunking

S approach and took off from its hiding place. Still, all

T told, there was a lot less to see down here than he'd

imagined.

Of course this wasn't one of the great coral reserves or

shelf fisheries, where schools of hake and cod still teemed

under the watchful eyes of UNEPA guardians. One of Crat's

instructors told him most of the ocean had always been

pretty empty. And yet there was another obvious reason he

met so little life down here.

What a junkyard, he thought while moving at a steady

pace. / never figured a place so big could turn into such a

sty.

He'd seen so much man-made garbage in just the last

hour . . . from rusting buckets and cans and a corroded

mop handle to at least a dozen plastic bags, drifting like

540 D A V I D B R I N

trademarked jellyfish, advertising discount stores and tourist

shops thousands of miles away.

And then there was that kilometer-wide spew of organic

refuse looking like a half-digested meal some immense creature

had recently voided. Crat knew who that creature was

--the Sea State floating town, which had passed this way

only a little while before. Despite their nominal agreement

to abide by UNEPA rules, clearly the poor folk of the barges had more urgent things to worry about than where their rubbish went. After all, the ocean seemed willing to take

everything dumped into it, with nary a complaint.

The towns must leave trails like this everywhere, Crat

realized. It was gross. But then, what choice did they have?

The rich may worry about garbage disposal, but when you're

poor your concern is getting food.

Which raised another curious question. Why was the

barge-city sticking around in this area when the fishing was

so poor? Crat suspected it had to do with the Company,

which seemed intensely interested in this bit of continental

shelf and presumably wanted to keep the floating town

around as a base of operations.

Or as a cover? Crat wondered. But he had no idea how

to follow up on that thought. Anyway, presumably the company

men paid well for the privilege. Hard currency was

hard currency, and curiosity generally a waste of time.

"Okay Courier Four. Now take a heading of niner zero degrees."

"Roger control," he answered, checking his compass

and changing course. "Niner zero degrees."

Crat liked talking like an astronaut to the company

comm guys. Sure, the smelly suit must have been retired as

unfit for human use long ago. And it was hard work just

lifting your feet to take each step. But the job had its moments.

Like when the trainers actually seemed pleased and

impressed with his education! That was a complete first for

Crat.

Of course countless Sea State citizens were innately

smarter, and some had much better learning. But few of

those were likely to volunteer for such dangerous work. The

company men spoke of his being "uniquely well qualified"

for the job.

Imagine that. He'd never been well qualified for anything

in his life! I guess lots of good things can come your

way, if you don't give a damn how long you live.

EARTH 541

"Courier Four, cut respiration rate to thirty per minute. Slow

down if you have to. Site Thirteen needs your cargo for backup, but they don't expect you early."

"Aye aye." He measured his pace more carefully. Crat

had decided he wanted this job after all. And that meant

getting known as a team player. Another milestone for him.

During his first week they'd put him through exhaustive

and exhausting tests . . . like barochambers, flooding

in different gases and examining his hand-eye coordination

under pressure. Then there were chem-sensitivity exams

and psych profiles he was sure he'd fail, but which, apparently,

he passed.

The company was engaged in a big enterprise here in

the ocean southwest of Japan. Crat found out just how big

when he was moved to an underwater base bustling with

tech types--Japanese, Siberian, Korean, and others. There

was talk of surveying and tapping nearby veins of valuable

ores, a much more ambitious enterprise than just collecting

manganese nodules from the open seabed. Obviously, the

company was planning ahead for when nodules became

scarce and therefore "protected."

Crat didn't understand most of what he overheard the

engineers saying. (That was probably among the reasons

he'd been hired.) But one thing was clear. If nodule harvesting

was dangerous, working in deep mine shafts under half a

kilometer of water would be doubly so! Not that Crat really

cared. But maybe this explained the tight relationship between

the corporation and this particular Sea State town--so

close the floating city had even stayed put through a recent

nasty storm, instead of taking shelter downwind of Kyushu.

The Albatross Republic couldn't afford to abandon jobs and

cash.

It was weird, working as an expendable flunky so near

others who were obviously high-priced tech types with fat,

company-paid insurance policies. He'd expected to be

treated like a dog or worse, but actually they were a lot more

polite than the bosuns on the fishing boats had been, and

smelled better, too.

Only why, when they were supposed to be working on

digging a mine in the ocean, was everybody so excited this

morning, jabbering over maps of the moon, for Caia's bleeding

sake?

542 D A V I D B R I N

None of my dumpit business, I guess. And that was

that.

Right now Crat was supposed to deliver his package to a

company outpost ten kilometers from the main base. Apparently,

it was a site so secret they didn't even visit it often by

submarine, in case competitors might track the boats with

satellites. Single couriers like him, slogging back and forth

on foot, minimized that risk. He had no idea what lay on the

carry-rack across his back, but he'd get it there on time or

croak trying!

Crat reached up and tapped his helmet. A high-pitched

squeal had been growing louder for the last minute or two.

So? More shitty equipment. What d'you expect?

"Hey, Control. Can you guys do anything about the

dumpit--"

"Courier Four . . . we're having . . ." Static interrupted,

then surged again. ". . . better ... on this. . . . ssion . . ."

Crat blinked. What the hell were they talking about now?

He decided to play it safe. If you don't understand what the

bosses are saying, just keep working hard. It may not be

what they wanted, but they sure can't fire you for that!

So he checked the helmet's gyrocompass and adjusted

his heading a bit before moving on, counting breaths as he'd

been told. There were miles to go yet, and what mattered

was delivering the goods.

As he slogged, the keening in his headphones grew

more intense and oddly musical. Tones overlay each other,

rising and falling to a puzzling rhythm. Could this be another

test, perhaps? Was he supposed to name that tune? Or

were they just having fun at his expense?

"Hey, Base. You guys there? Or what?"

". . . ort and . . . back, Courier! We're exper . . . ouble . . ."

This time he stopped, feeling rising concern. He still

had no idea what the controller was saying, but it sounded

bad. Crat's glove collided with his helmet as he instinctively

tried to wipe away the perspiration beading his nose. He

wanted to rub his eyes, which had started itching terribly.

Suddenly it was important to remember all the warning

signs he'd been taught-in cram sessions. Nitrogen narcosis

was one danger they'd warned of repeatedly. The suit's monitor

lights showed an okay gas balance ... if you could

trust the battered gauges. Crat checked his pulse and found

EARTH 543

it fast but steady. He squeezed his eyes shut till they hurt,

then opened them and waited for the speckles to go away.

Only they didn't. Instead they capered and bobbed as if

a swarm of performing fireflies had gotten into his helmet.

Their movements matched the eerie music surging through

his headphones.

Oh, this is too squirting weird!

A flash of gray hurtled past him. Then another, and two

more. Crat blinked. Dolphins! The last one paused to whirl

around him, catching his eye and nodding vigorously before

streaking after its fellows. Crat got the eerie impression the

creature had been trying to tell him something, like maybe,

You better hurry, Mac, if you know what's good for you.

"Shit. If something down here's got them scared . . ."

Crat found himself scurrying after them, running as fast

as he could through the bottom muck. Soon he was panting,

his heart pounding in his chest. I'll never keep up! Whatever's

chasing them will catch me easy!

He tried to glance backward as he ran, but only managed to trip over his own feet. The slow motion fall was unstoppable, ending in a skid that plowed up streamers of

turbid sediment. As he lay there, wheezing for breath, his

entire world consisted of the whining aircompressors, that

gor-sucking music, and some crawling thing in the mud that

bumped against his faceplate, leaving a trail of slime across

the glass before disappearing into the ooze again.

Maybe I can burrow under here and hide, he thought.

But no. Cowering from a fight stuck in his craw. Better

to turn and face whatever it was. Maybe dolphins are cowards,

anyway.

Something occurred to Crat. It might be some other

company, wanting to hijack the thing I'm carrying. Hey!

That explains all the noise! They're jamming my comm, so

I can't call for help when they find me! Obstinately, he

decided, Well, if my cargo's that important, they sure as

fuck aren 'the gonna get it off me!

Crat managed to stand, raining gunk from his harness

and shoulders. If the enemy were close, they'd surely pick

out the noise his suit gave off and zero in on him. But maybe

he could find a place to stash his cargo first! Awkwardly, he

pulled the bulky package off its carry-rack. One of the tech

types had called it a "cylinder gimbal bearing," or whatever.

All he knew was it was heavy.

544 D A V I D B R I N

Maybe . . . Crat thought as he looked around . . .

maybe he could bury it and . . . hurry off, leading the bad

guys away from it! But in that case he'd better put it under

some landmark, so he could find it again. In a burst of slyness,

he set off away from his former heading, so as not to

point the way to the company's secret lab. Meanwhile Crat

peered about for any useful landmark, wary for a sudden

black shape--the sleek minisub of some mercenary corporate

privateer.

Hurrying across the muddy plain, he caught a flicker of

motion to his left. He turned, just in time to be halfblinded

by a sudden shaft of brilliance that seemed to split the sea.

A searchlight! They're here!

He sighed in frustration. Too late to bury his cargo,

then. There was only one chance now. To pretend to surrender,

and then, at the last moment, maybe he could destroy

what he carried. Of course the only object hard enough to

smash it against would be the side of the sub itself. . . .

Maybe Remi or Roland could have thought up something

better, he reflected, but this was the best he could come up

with on short notice. Crat started walking toward the light.

It was terribly bright.

Too bright, in fact. He'd never seen such a searchlight

before.

Moreover, it was vertical, not horizontal. Could it be

someone up above, casting about down here from the surface?

But that didn't make sense!

Then Crat noticed for the first time . . . the brightness

seemed to throb in tempo with the strange music flooding

his helmet. It's too big to be a searchlight, he realized when

he saw the dolphins again, cavorting around the luminous

perimeter. The column was nearly a hundred meters across.

They weren't running away, after all. They were

headed toward this thing! But what is it?

There was no shadow of a vessel on the surface. The

brilliance had no specific source. It just was. Shuffling nearer

the dazzling pillar, Crat's foot caught on something bulky in

the mud. A large, black, roughly egg-shaped object. Ironically,

it was one of the nodules he'd expected to be sent

after when he was hired. To a Sea State citizen, it was a

fabulous find. Only right now that didn't seem to matter as

much as it might have only minutes ago.

The music grew more intricate and complex as he ap-

EARTH 545

proached the beating column. Crat pictured angels singing,

but even that didn't do it justice. The dolphins cried peals of

exhilaration, and that somehow made him feel less afraid.

They swooped, executing pirouettes just outside the shaft of

brightness, squealing in counterpoint to its song.

Crat approached the shimmering boundary and

stretched out one arm. He felt his blood drawn through the

vessels in his hand by strange tides, returning to his heart

changed with every beat. The fingertips met resistance and

then passed through, tingling.

His black glove glowed in the light. He watched, dazed,

as fizzing droplets hopped and danced on the rubber before

evaporating in tiny cyclones. So. Within the glow thwe

might be air ... or vacuum ... or something else. For

sure, though, it wasn't seawater.

He felt his arm nudged. A dolphin had come alongside

to watch, and the two of them shared a moment's soul-contact,

each seeing glory reflected in the other's eye. Each

knowing exactly what the other one saw. Crat couldn't help

it; he grinned. Crat laughed exultantly.

Then, gently, the dolphin nudged his arm again, pushing

it out of the shining beam.

Breaking contact tore at him instantly, as if something

had ruptured inside. Crat sobbed at a sudden memory of his

mother, who had died when he was so young, leaving him

alone in a world of welfare agents and official charity. He

tried to go back, to throw himself into the embrace of the

light, but the dolphins wouldn't let him. They pushed him

away. One thrust its bottle nose between his legs and lifted

him bodily.

"Let me go!" he moaned, reaching out. But even then

he heard the music climax and begin to fade. The brilliance

turned golden and diminished too. Then it ended suddenly

with a clap that set the ocean ringing.

In the rapid dimness, his irises couldn't adapt fast

enough. He never saw water rush in to fill the empty shaft,

but he and the dolphins were taken by a spinning, tumbling

chaos that yanked them like bits of weed in the surf. Crat

grabbed his air-hose and just held on.

When, at last, the tugging currents let him go, for a

second time Crat shakily picked himself up from the muddy

bottom. It took a while to look around without everything

spinning. Then he realized the dolphins were gone. So too

546 D A V 1 D B R I N

were the light, the music. Even the ringing in his ears. The

stinging afterimages faded till at last he heard an insistent

voice yammering.

". . . you need help? We had our comm messed up for a while.

Some think maybe we were near one of those boggle things people are talking about. What a coincidence!

"Anyway, Courier Four, our telltales show you're all right. Please confirm."

Crat swallowed. It took some effort to relearn how to

speak. "I'm . . . okay." He looked around quickly and

found the cargo--only a few meters away. Crat picked it up,

shaking off more muck. "Want me to start back on course?"

The voice at the other end interrupted. "Good attitude,

Courier Four. But no. We're sending a sub that way anyway with some bigwigs to inaugurate Site Six. It'll pick you up shortly. Just stand by."

So he was going to get there after all ... and Crat

found that now he didn't care a bit. Standing there waiting,

more than ever he wished his fingers could pass through the

glass faceplate as they had briefly penetrated that shining

boundary. For those few moments, his hands had sought and

found his life's first real solace. Now he'd settle for just the

memory of that gift, and a chance to wipe his streaming

eyes.

D I sometimes wonder what animals think of the phenomenon

of humanity--and especially of human babies. For no creature

on the planet must seem anywhere near so obnoxious.

A baby screams and squalls. It urinates and defecates in all

directions. It complains incessantly, filling the air with demanding cries. How human parents stand it is their own concern. But to great hunters, like lions and bears, our infants must be horrible indeed. They must seem to taunt them, at full volume.

"Yoo-hoo, beasties!" babies seem to cry. "Here's a toothsome

morsel, utterly helpless, soft and tender. But I needn't

keep quiet like the young of other species. I don't crouch silently and blend in with the grass. You can track me by my noise or

smell alone, but you don't dare!

"Because my mom and dad are the toughest, meanest

sumbitches ever seen, ahd if you come near, they'll have your

hide for a rug."

All day they scream, all night they cry. Surely if animals ever

EARTH 547

held a poll, they'd call human infants the most odious of creatures.

In comparison, human adults are merely very, very scary.

--Jen Wolling, from The Earth Mother Blues, Globe Books, 2032.

[D hyper access 7-tEAT-687-56-1237-65p.]

The Maori guards wouldn't let Alex go to Hanga Roa

C town to meet the stratojet, so he waited outside the

0 resonator building. The afternoon was windy and he

R paced nervously.

E At one point, before the incoming flight was delayed

yet again, Teresa came by to help him pass the time.

"Why is Spivey using a courier?" she asked. "Doesn't he

trust his secure channels anymore?"

"Would you? Those channels go through the same sky

everyone else uses. They were secure only because the military

paid top dollar and kept a low profile. These days,

though?" He shrugged, his point obvious without further

elaboration. If this messenger carried the news he expected,

it would be worth any wait.

Teresa gave his shoulder an affectionate shove. "Well,

I'll bet you're glad who the courier is."

Teresa's friendship was a fine thing. She understood

him. Knew how to tease him out of his frequent dour

moods. Alex grinned. "And what about you, Rip? Didn't I

see you eyeing that big fellow Auntie sent to cook for us."

"Oh, him." She blushed briefly. "Only for a minute or

two. Come on, Alex. I told you how picky I am."

Indeed, he kept learning new levels to her complexity.

Last night, for instance, they had spent hours talking as he

handed her tools and she wriggled behind A tiantis's panels.

If things went as expected, they'd be off to Reykjavik tomorrow

or the next day, to testify before the special tribunal

everyone was talking about. Alex thought it only fair to give

her a hand tidying up the old shuttle before that.

Back in the caves of New Zealand, it had been concentration

on something external--survival--that first eased

the tensions between them. Even now, Teresa found it easier

to talk while straining to tighten a bolt or giving some old

instrument its first taste of power in forty years. So for the

first time, last night, Alex heard the full story of her prior

acquaintance with June Morgan, his part-time lover. It made

548 D A V I D B R I N

him feel awkward--and yet Teresa said she liked June now.

She seemed glad the other woman was coming back, for

Alex's sake.

And happier still because of what everyone assumed

June would be carrying with her--Colonel Spivey's surrender.

It had been hinted in George Button's latest communique

and confirmed in action. Since Alex's demonstration

yesterday--blasting a mountain of ice all the way to the

moon--there had been a sudden drop in aggressive activity

by other gazer systems worldwide. The Nihonese still

pulsed at low "research" levels, and there were brief glimmers

from other locations. But the big new NATO-ANZAC-

ASEAN resonators were silent, mothballed, and the original

four now obeyed Alex's steady program unperturbed--pushing

Beta gradually out of the boundary zone, where those

intricate, superconducting threads flickered so mysteriously.

The number of pulses could be reduced now, and each

beam targeted more carefully. Few additional civilian losses

were expected, and diplomatic tension had been falling off

for hours. Even the hysteria on the Net had abated a bit, as

word went out about the new tribunal.

Maybe people are going to be sensible after all, Alex

thought as he paced in front of the lab. After staying with

him for a while, Teresa left again to resume her chores

aboard Atlantis. Alex could have worked, too. But for once

he was content just to look across grassy slopes toward the

little, crashing baylet of Vaihu and a rank of Easter Island's

famed, forbidding monoliths. Beyond the restored statues,

cirrus clouds streaked high over the South Pacific, like banners

shredded by stratospheric winds.

This place had affected him, all right. Here earlier men

and women had also struggled bitterly against the consequences

of their own mistakes. But Alex's education on

Rapa Nui went beyond mere historical comparisons. Because

of the nature of the battle he had waged here, he now knew

far better than before how those winds and clouds out there

were influenced by sunlight and the sea, and by other forces

generated deep below. Each was part of a natural web only

hinted at by what you saw with your eyes.

Jen was right, he thought. Everything is interwoven.

One didn't have to be mystical about the intercon-

EARTH 549

nectedness. It just was. Science only made the fact more

vivid and clear, the more you learned.

A touch of sound wafted from the direction of Rano

Kao's stern cliffs--first the whine of a hydrogen auto engine

and then the complaint of rubber tires turning on gravel. He

turned to see a car approach the Hine-marama cordon,

where big, brown men paced with drawn weapons. After

questioning both driver and passenger, they waved the vehicle

through. Its fuel cells whistled louder as it climbed the

hill and finally pulled up near the front door.

June Morgan bounded out, the wind whipping her hair

and bright blue skirt. He met her halfway as she ran to

throw her arms around him. "Kiss me quick, you troublemaker,

you." He obliged with some pleasure, though Alex

sensed a tremor of tension as he held her. Well, that was

understandable of course.

"You put on some show, hombre!" she said, pulling

away. "Here Clenn and his people spend weeks studying

gazer-based launching, and you yank the rug right out from

under him! I laughed so hard . . . after leaving the room of

course."

Alex smiled. "Did you bring his answer?"

"Now what other reason would I have to come all this

way?" She winked and patted her briefcase. "Come on, I'll

show you."

Alex asked the driver to go fetch Teresa as June took his

arm and pulled him toward the entrance. There, however,

the way was barred by a massive dark man with crossed

arms. "Sorry, doctor," he told June. "I must inspect your

valise."

Alex sighed. "Joey, your men sniffed her luggage at the

airport. She's not carrying a bomb, for heaven's sake."

"All the same, tohunga, I have orders. Especially after

last time."

Alex frowned. The first sabotage attempt still had them

perplexed. Spivey vehemently denied involvement, and the

saboteur himself seemed to have no links at all to NATO or

ANZAC.

"That's all right." June laid the briefcase flat in the

arms of one big guard and flipped it open. Inside were several

pouched datacubes, two reading plaques, and a few slim

sheets of paper in a folder. Auntie Kapur's men ran humming

instruments over the contents while June chattered

550 D A V I D B R I N

animatedly. "You should have seen George Hutton's face

when he heard Manella had shown up here! He started out

both angry and delighted, and finally settled on plain confusion.

And you know how George hates that!"

"Indeed 1 do, madam. "

June and Alex turned as a figure approached from

within. Nearly as tall as the Maori guards, and much

heavier, Pedro Manella came into the sunlight holding out

his hand. "Hello, Doctor Morgan. You bring good tidings, I

assume?"

"Of course," she replied. "And aren't you a sight,

Pedro! Wherever you've been hiding yourself, you've certainly

eaten well."

The second guard returned June's valise. Alex said,

"Let's go to my office and play the message."

"Why such privacy?" June pulled the other way. "We'll

use my old station. Everyone should hear this."

The huge perovskite cylinder looked like some giant

artillery piece, delicately balanced on its perfect bearings. It

towered over what had once been June's console--back

when a dozen or so fatigued workers first set up here on the

flank of a rocky, weather-beaten isle, searching desperately

for a way to beard a monster in its den. The tech who had

been working at that post cheerfully made room.

"Here it is," June said, pulling a cube from its pouch

and tossing it to Alex playfully. She insisted he take the

seat. A semicircle of watchers gathered as he slotted the

cube. Someone from the kitchen handed out cups of coffee,

and when everyone was settled, Alex touched the PLAY toggle. ,

A man in uniform appeared before them, seated at a

desk. His hair had grown out, softening somewhat those

harsh, scarred features. Clenn Spivey looked out at them as

if in real time. He even seemed to track his audience with

his eyes.

"Well, Lustig," the colonel began. "It seems people keep underestimating you. I'll never do it again." He lifted both hands.

"You win. No more delays. The president met with our alliance partners.

Tonight they hand over control of all resonators to the new tribunal--The technicians behind Alex clapped and sighed in relief.

After all these wearing months, a heavy weight seemed

lifted.

EARTH 551

"--gathering in Iceland, headed by Professor aime Jordelian. I

think you know him."

Alex nodded. As a physicist, Jordelian was stodgy and

overly meticulous. But those could be good traits in such a

role.

"The committee hasn't formally met, but Jordelian urgently asked

that you attend the opening session. He wants you in operational

charge of all resonators for an initial period of six months or so. They also want you center stage for the first news conference. If you've been watching the Net, you know what an all-day session that will be! The hypersonic packet that brought Dr. Morgan has orders to wait at Hanga Roa for your convenience."

"Lucky bastard," one of the Kiwis muttered in mock

envy. "Iceland in winter. Dress warm, tohunga." Alex

broke into a grin. "Hey, what about me?" June complained.

"You take my transport and I'm stuck here!" The others

made sounds of mock sympathy.

Spivey's image paused. He cleared his throat and leaned

forward a little.

"I won't pretend we haven't been surprised by events these last

few weeks, doctor. I thought we could finish our experiments long before word leaked out. But things didn't go according to plan.

"It wasn't just your little demonstration, yesterday, which nearly everyone in the Western Hemisphere got to witness by naked eye. Even neglecting that, there were just too many bright people out there with their own instruments and souped-up ferret programs." He shrugged.

"I guess we should have known better.

"What really disturbs me, though, is what I hear people saying

about our intentions. Despite all the innuendo, you must believe I'm no screaming jingoist. I mean, honestly, could I have persuaded so many decent men and women--not just Yanks and Canadians, but Kiwis and Indonesians and others--to take part if our sole purpose was to invent some sort of super doomsday weapon? The idea's absurd.

"I now see I should have confided in you. My mistake, taking you

for a narrowly focused intellectual. Instead, I found myself outfought by a warrior, in the larger sense of the word." He smiled ruefully.

"So much for the accuracy of our dossiers."

Alex sensed the others' silent regard. Eyes flicked in his

direction. He felt unnerved by all this talk centering on him

personally.

"So, you might ask, what was our motive?" Spivey sighed.

"What could any honest person's goal be, these days? What else could ever matter as much as saving the world?

552 D A V I D B R I N

"Surely you've seen those economic-ecological projections everyone plays with on the Net? Well, Washington's had a really excellent

trends-analysis program for two decades now, but the results were just too appalling to release. We even managed to discredit the inevitable leaks, to prevent widespread discouragement and nihilism.

"Put simply, calculations show our present stable situation lasting maybe another generation, tops. Then we all go straight to hell. Oblivion.

The only way out seemed to demand drastic sacrifice . . . draco-

nian population control measures combined with major and immediate cuts in standard of living. And psych profiles showed the voters utterly rejecting such measures, especially if the outcome would at best only help their great-grandkids.

"Then you came along, Lustig, to show that our projection missed

some critical information . . . like the little item that our world is under attack by aliens!

"More important, you showed how new, completely unexpected

levers might be applied to the physical world. New ways of exerting energy. New dangers to frighten us and new possibilities to dazzle. In another age, these powers would have been seized by bold men and

used for better or worse, like TwenCen's flirtation with the atom.

"But we're growing up . . . that's the popular phrase, isn't it? We know new technologies must be watched carefully. I'm not totally

against the science tribunals. Who could be?

"Tell me, though, Lustig, what do you think the new committee

will do when they take authority over the new science of

gazerdynamics?"

Obviously, the question was rhetorical. Alex already

saw the colonel's point.

"Except for one or two small research sites, they'll slap on a complete ban, with fierce inspections to make sure nobody else emits even a single graviton! They'll let you keep vigil on Beta, but outlaw any other gazer use that hasn't already been tested to death. Oh sure, that'll prevent chaos. I agree the technology has to be monitored. But can you see why we wanted to delay it for a while?"

Spivey pressed both hands on his desk.

"We hoped to finish developing gazer-based launch systems, first!

If they were already proven safe and effective, the tribunes couldn't ban them entirely. We'd save something precious and wonderful . . . perhaps even a way out of the doomsday trap."

Alex exhaled a sigh. Teresa should hear this. She despised

Spivey. And yet he turned out to be as much a believer

as she. Apparently the infection went all the way to

the pinnacles of power.

EARTH 553

"Our projections say resource depletion is going to kill human

civilization deader than triceratops--this poor planet's gifts have been so badly squandered. But everything changes if you include space! Melt down just one of the millions of small asteroids out there, and you get all the world's steel needs for an entire decade, plus enough gold, silver, and platinum to finance rebuilding a dozen cities!

"It's all out there, Lustig, but we're stuck here at the bottom of Earth's gravity well. It's so expensive to haul out the tools needed to begin harnessing those assets. . . .

"Then came your gazer thing. . . . Good God, Lustig, have you

any idea what you did yesterday? Throwing megatons of ice to the

moon?" A vein pulsed in Spivey's temple. "If you'd landed that

berg just ten percent slower, there'd have been water enough to feed and bathe and make productive a colony of hundreds! We could be

mining lunar titanium and helium-3 inside a year! We could . . ."

Spivey paused for breath.

"A few years ago I talked several space powers into backing cavi-

tronics research in orbit, to look for something like what you found by goddam accident! But we were thinking millions of times too small.

Please forgive my obvious jealousy . . ."

Someone behind Alex muttered, "Jesus Christ!" He

turned to see Teresa Tikhana standing behind him. Her face

was pale, and Alex thought he knew why. So her husband

hadn't worked on weapons research after all. He had just

been trying, in his own way, to help save the world.

There would be some poignant satisfaction for her in

that, but also bitterness, and the memory that they had not

parted in harmony. Alex reached back and took her hand,

which trembled, then squeezed his tightly in return.

"... I guess what I'm asking is that you use your influence with

the tribunal--and it will be substantial--to keep some effort going into launch systems. At least get them to let you throw more ice!"

Spivey leaned even closer to the camera.

"After all, it's not enough just to neutralize some paranoid aliens'

damned berserker device. What's the point, if it all goes into a toxic-

dumpit anyway?

" But this thing could be the key to saving everything, the ecology . . ."

Alex was rapt, mesmerized by the man's unexpected

intensity, and he felt Teresa's flushed emotion as well. So

they both flinched in reflex surprise when somebody behind

them let out a blood-chilling scream.

"Give that back!"

554 D A V I D B R I N

Everyone turned, and Alex blinked to see June Morgan

waging an uneven struggle with . . . Pedro Manella! The

blonde woman hauled at her briefcase, which the Aztlan

reporter clutched in one meaty hand, fending her off with

the other. When she kicked him, Pedro winced but gave no

ground. Meanwhile, Colonel Spivey droned on.

"... creating the very wealth that makes for generosity, and incidentally giving us the stars . . ."

Alex stood up. "Manella! What are you doing!"

"He's stealing my valise!" June yelled. "He wants my

data so he can scoop tonight's presidential speech!"

Alex sighed. That sounded like Manella, all right.

"Pedro," he began. "You've already got an inside story any

reporter would die for--"

Manella interrupted. "Lustig, you better have a--" He

stopped with a gulp as June swiveled full circle to elbow him

sharply below the sternum, then stamped on his foot and

snatched the briefcase during her follow-through. But then,

instead of rejoining the others, she spun about and ran

away!

"S-stop her!" Pedro gasped. Something in his alarmed

voice turned Alex's heart cold. June held the valise in front

of her, sprinting toward the towering resonator. "A bomb?"

Teresa blurted, while Alex thought, But they checked for

bombs!

At another level he simply couldn't believe this was

happening. June?

She leaped the railing surrounding the massive resonator,

ducked under the snatching arm of a Maori security

man, and launched herself toward the gleaming cylinder. At

the final instant, another guard seized her waist, but June's

expression said it was already too late. People dove for cover

as she yanked a hidden lever near the handle.

Alex winced, bracing for a sledgehammer blow. . . .

But nothing happened!

In the stunned silence, Glenn Spivey's voice rambled

on.

". . . so with this message I'm sending a library of all the surface-

coupling coefficients we've collected. Naturally, you're ahead of us in most ways, but we've learned a few tricks too . . ."

June's face flashed from triumph to astonishment to

rage. She cursed, pounding the valise until it was dragged

from her hands and hustled outside by some brave and very

EARTH 555

fleet security men. It was Pedro, then, who finally wrestled

her away from the resonator and forced her into a chair.

Alex switched off the sound of the colonel's words, which

now, suddenly, seemed mockingly irrelevant.

"So this was all a hoax, June? Spivey holds our attention

while you sabotage the thumper?" His pulse pounded.

To be deceived by the military man's apparent sincerity was

nothing next to the treachery of this woman he thought he

knew.

"Oh Alex, you're such a fool!" June laughed breathlessly

and with a note of shrill overcompensation. "You can

be sweet and I like you a lot. But how did you ever get to be

so gullible?"

"Shut up," Teresa said evenly, and though her tone was

businesslike, June clearly saw dark threat in Teresa's eyes.

She shut up. They all waited silently for the security team

to report. It seemed better to let adrenaline stop drumming

in their ears before dealing with this unexpected enormity.

Joey came back shortly, bowing his head in apology.

"No bomb after all, tohunga. It's a liquid-suspension catalyst--a simple nanotech corrosion promoter--probably tailored

to wreck the thumper's piezogravitic characteristics.

The stuff was supposed to spray when she pulled the lever,

but the holes had been squished shut, so nothing came out.

A lucky break. Lucky our reporter friend's so strong." Joey

gestured toward Manella, who blinked in apparent surprise.

"His hand print covers the holes," Joey explained.

"Broke the hinge, too. Don't nobody challenge that guy to a

wrestling match."

June shrugged when they all looked at her. "I got the

idea from those scrubber enzymes Teresa keeps asking for, to

clean her old shuttle. Your guards grew used to me bringing

chemicals in little packages. Anyway, just a few drops would

put you out of business. It takes days to grow a new resonator--all the time my employers needed."

"You're not trying to hold back much, are you?" Teresa

asked.

"Why should I? If they don't get my success code soon,

they'll assume I failed and shut you down by other means

... a lot more violent than I tried to use! That's why I

volunteered to do this. You're my friends. I don't want you

hurt."

The murmuring techs obviously thought her statement

556 D A V I D B R I N

bitterly ironic. And yet, at one level Alex believed her.

Maybe I have to believe someone I've made love to cares

about me . . . even if she turns betrayer for other reasons.

"They agreed to let me say this much if I failed," June

went on intensely. "To convince you to give up. Please,

Alex, everybody, take my word for it. You've no idea who

you're up against!"

Someone brought a chair for Alex. He knew he must

look drawn and unsteady, but going passive would be a mistake

right now. He remained standing.

"What's your success code? How would you tell them

you'd succeeded?"

"You were planning to phone Spivey after hearing his

pitch, no? I was to slip in a few words, to be overheard by

my contact there--"

"What? You mean Spivey's not your real boss?"

June's eyes flicked away before returning to meet his.

"What do you mean?" she asked a little too quickly. "Of

course he's . . ."

"Wait," Pedro Manella interrupted. "You're right, Alex.

Something's fishy." He moved closer to glower over June.

"What did you mean when you said, 'You have no idea who

you're up against'? You weren't just speaking figuratively,

were you? I think you meant it quite literally."

June attempted nonchalance. "Did I?"

Pedro rubbed his hands. "I spent two months interviewing

that kidnapper-torturer in London. You know, the one

who called himself the 'father confessor of Knightsbridge'? I

learned a lot about persuasion techniques, writing that

book. Does anyone have any bamboo shoots? Or we'll make

do with what's in the kitchen."

June laughed contemptuously. "You wouldn't dare."

But her uncertainty grew apparent when she met Manella's

eyes.

"What do you mean, Pedro?" Teresa asked. "You think

Spivey was telling the truth? That he's as much a dupe as--

as we've been?"

Alex appreciated her use of the plural. Of course, he

deserved singling out as paramount dupe.

"You're the astronaut, Captain," Manella answered.

"Did the colonel's purported passion for new launch systems

make sense? Given what you know about him?"

Teresa nodded grudgingly. "Y-e-e-s. Of course, maybe I

EARTH 557

want to believe. It makes Jason's last work more noble. It

means our leaders aren't just TwenCen-style, nationalist assholes, but were trying a plan, however misguided--" She

shook her head. "Glenn sounded sincere. But I just can't

say."

"Well, there's something else a lot less subjective, and

that's the question of why? What motive could Spivey and

his bosses have to put this site out of business, if everything

comes under international jurisdiction tonight anyway?"

"There's only one reason possible," Alex answered. "If

taking us out was part of a scheme to stop those controls.

Spivey admitted he didn't want them."

Teresa shook her head again. "No! He said he wanted

them delayed, till gazer space launching was proven. But

remember, he accepted the principle of long-term supervision."

Her brow furrowed. "Alex, none of this makes

sense!"

He agreed. "What could anyone gain by causing turmoil

now? If the president's speech doesn't disclose all, the

Net will explode."

"Not just the Net," Manella added. "There will be

chaos, strikes . . . and a gravity laser arms race. Poor nations

and major corporations will blow city blocks out of

their rivals' capitals, or set off earthquakes or--" He shook

his head. "Who on Earth could profit from such a situation?"

"Not Clenn Spivey," Teresa affirmed, now with complete

certainty.

"Nor any of the space powers," Alex put in.

One of the techs asked, "Who does that leave, then?"

They regarded June Morgan, who scanned the circle of nervous

faces and sighed. "You're all so smart, so modern.

You've got your info-plaques and percomps and loyal little

ferret programs to go fetch data for you. But what information?

Only what's in the Net, my dears."

Alex frowned. "What are you talking about?"

She glanced at her watch, nervously. "Look, I was supposed

to report in well before this. At any moment, my--

masters--will know I've failed, and move to settle things

more dramatically. Please, Alex. Let me finish my job and

call them--"

She was interrupted by a sudden, blaring alarm from

one of the consoles. A technician rushed over to read its

558 D A V I D B R I N

display. "I'm getting hunt resonance from two--no, three--

large thumpers ... in the Sahara, Canada, and somewhere

in Siberia!"

June stood up, pulling when a guard grabbed her arm.

"Too late. They must be getting nervous. Alex please, get

everybody out of here!"

Teresa pushed close to the blond woman. "Who do you

mean, they? I say we let Pedro do it his way . . ." She

glanced to one side, but Alex was no longer there.

"Give me a projected resonance series for that combination!"

he demanded, throwing himself into his work seat,

slipping the subvocal device over his head. "Zoom onto the

mantle-core boundary under Beta. Show me any likely

power threads."

"Putting it on now, tohunga."

The recorded message had frozen on its last frame--

depicting a hopeful-looking Glenn Spivey smiling into the

camera. That image now vanished, replaced by the familiar

cutaway Earth, resplendent in fiery complexity. From three

northern points at its surface, pulsing columns of light

thrust inward toward a rendezvous far below. The dot where

they converged wavered as the beams kept sliding off each

other.

"I've never seen those sites before," one Tangoparu scientist

said. But another commented, "I ... think I

mi^ht've. A couple of quick pulses yesterday, just after we

hit the glacier. But the traces looked like those strange surface echoes we've been getting, so I assumed ..."

To a trained eye, the intruder beams could be seen

hunting for alignment in the energized, field-rich lower

mantle. The Beta singularity, still orbiting through the enigmatic electricity of those zones, obliged by serving as their

mirror, focusing the combined effort. The purple dot shimmered.

"They're less experienced," somebody near Alex muttered.

"But they know what they're doing."

"Extrapolating now. . . . Gaia!" The first tech cried

out. "The amplified beam's going to come this way!"

Alex was too busy to turn his head, which would throw

off the subvocal anyway* Using the delicate input device

was a lot like running full tilt along a tightrope. Ironically, it was easier to order up a simulated image of his face than to

use his own voice to shout a warning.

EARTH 559

"Rip!" the imitation self cried out as he worked. "Get

everyone but the controllers out of here. Take them west, you hear?

West!"

Someone else might have had some romantic impulse to

argue, but not Teresa. She'd evaluate the situation, decide

there was little she could do here to help, and obey without

hesitation. Sure enough, Alex heard her voice of command

driving the others outside leaving his truncated team to

work in relative peace.

The peace of a battlefield. Alex sensed the big, cylindrical

resonator swing about at his command and begin throbbing

its own contribution to a struggle being joined

thousands of kilometers below. There followed something

like a gravitational fencing match--his own beam countering

and parrying the opposing three as they attempted to

unite. Bouncing off Beta's sparkling mirror, they passed

through threadlike filigrees of transient superconductivity,

which of late had taken on new orders of intricacy, rising

from the core boundary in gauzy loops and splendid, shimmering

bows.

Some time ago, Alex had likened the loops to "prominences"--those arcs of plasma one saw along the sun's limb

during an eclipse, which drove fierce currents from the star's

surface into space. Similar laws applied near the Earth's core,

though on vastly different scales. The comparison would

have been interesting to contemplate if he weren't busy

fighting to save their lives.

Thousands of the mysterious strands vibrated as fingers

of tuned gravity plucked them, stimulating the release of

pent-up energy. Some rays scattered off Beta, sending augmented

flashes spiraling randomly. There was no time to

wonder how his opponents had learned to do this so

quickly, or even who they were. Alex was too busy fending

off their beams, preventing them from combining to create

something coherent and cohesive and lethal.

Alex watched more and more shimmering filaments

pulsate in time to his rhythms. Other flashes sparkled to the

melodies of his unknown foes. Each flicker represented some

great expanse of semimolten rock, millions of tons altering

state at the whim of entities far above.

"We can't hold them much longer!" One of the techs

cried out.

560 D A V I D B R I N

"Wait! We have to work together," Alex urged. "What

if--He

stopped talking abruptly as ripples flowed across the

display, and the subvocal sent his amplified speech throbbing

deep into the Earth's interior. Alex switched to commu

nicating with slight tremors in his larynx, letting the

machine transmit a message to the others.

Take a look at this! He urged, and caused the Easter Island

resonator to suddenly draw back from the acherontic struggle.

His opponents' beams floundered in the abrupt lack of

resistance, momentarily discomfited in overcompensation.

Then, as if unable to believe the way was now clear, the

three columns came together again tentatively.

Everybody else . . . out! He commanded. I'll take it from

here!

He heard chairs squeak and topple as his assistants took

him at his word. Footsteps scrambled for the door. "Don't

wait too long, Alex!" someone shouted. But his attention

was already focused as it never had been before. The enemy

beams touched Beta, hunted, and at last found their

resonance.

At that same moment, though, Alex felt a strange, fey

oneness with the monster singularity. No matter how much

the enemy must have learned--no doubt by snooping his

files--he still knew Beta better than any living man!

// / wait till the very last millisecond . . .

Of course no human could control the beam with such

fineness. Not in real time. So he chose his counterstroke in

advance and delegated a program to act on his behalf. There

was no chance to double-check the code.

Co! He unleashed his surrogate warrior at the last possible

moment. Behind him, the resonator seemed to yowl an

angry, almost feline battle cry.

It was already too late to flee. Alex quashed the adrenaline

rush--a reaction inherited from ancient days when his

ancestors used to seek out danger with their own eyes, meeting

it with the power of their own limbs and their own

tenacious wills. The last of these, at least, was valid still. He forced himself to wait*calmly through the final fractions of a second, as fate came bulling toward him from the bowels of

the Earth.

EARTH 561

D

The Snake River Plain stretches, desolate and lined with cindei

cones, from the Cascades all the way to Yellowstone, where

outcrops of pale rhyolite gave the great park its name. As neai

Hawaii and several other places, a fierce needle here replacec

the mantle's normal, placid convection. Something slender anc

hot enough to melt granite had worked its way under the NortI

American Plate, taking several million years to cut the wide val

ley.

That pace was quick, in geologic terms. But there was nc

law that said things could not go faster still.

They stopped running a kilometer or so to the west, bui

E not because it was safe. No amount of distance offeree

X protection against what might now be hurtling thei]

0 way.

S No, they halted because sedentary intellectual;

P could only run so far. Teresa took some satisfactior

H watching June Morgan pant, pale and winded. The

E woman was in pathetic shape. Serves her right, sht

R thought, rationing herself a small dollop of cattiness

E Since she was in charge, Teresa counted heads anc

quickly came up short.

Manella. Damn! She turned to the Maori security chief

"Keep everyone here, Joey. I'm going after Pedro. The jerk';

probably recording it all for posterity!"

She finished the thought as she ran downhill. Record

ing what it's like to be at ground zero. The only ones to

view his tape may be ETs at some distant star!

Halfway to the resonator building, she saw a dozen mer

and women suddenly spill into the late-afternoon sunlight

tripping and scrambling as they fled her way. Good. Ale^

shouldn 'the have stayed in the first place.

Then she realized that neither Pedro nor Alex wa'

among them. "Shit!"

Now she sprinted, rushing past the fleeing technician;

so quickly they seemed to blur. But then, the blurring

wasn't entirely an effect of motion. A tingling in her eye

balls and sinuses barely preceded a sharp ringing in her ears,

which grew until church carillons seemed to boom around

562 D A V I D B R I N

her. Even the dry grass bent and swayed to the pealing notes.

Her feet danced of their own accord across the shifting surface.

The next thing Teresa knew, she had tumbled to the

ground and was having a terrible time figuring out which

way was up. It felt as if the earth had dropped away beneath

her. Strong winds whipped at her clothes.

Is it my turn to go, then? The way Jason did?

Maybe 1 can stay conscious long enough to see the

stars. To see my ultimate trajectory before I pass out.

She drew a deep breath, preparing to meet the sky.

But then the whirling seemed to settle. Teresa felt

sharp-stemmed blades of grass cut her fingers as she clutched

the stony soil. Her next hasty breath felt no thinner. Lifting

her head despite a roaring vertigo, she saw a tipped slope, a

patch of sea . . . and a great horrible face!

One of the giant statues, she realized in an instant.

She'd fallen near some of the aboriginal monuments. More

monoliths came into view as her visual distortions shifted

from focus over to color.

Now everything was clear, crisp, but tinted in a flux of

unaccustomed hues--eerie shades that surged and rippled

across a much enlarged spectrum. Somehow, Teresa knew

she must be seeing directly in the infrared, or ultraviolet, or

other weird bands never meant for human eyes. The effect

encouraged illusions . . . that the row of statues were trembling, shaking, like ancient sleeping gods answering an

Olympian alarm.

It was no illusion! Four of the massive sculptures

wrenched free of their platform. Soot blew away as they

vibrated free of centuries' accumulated dross. Gleaming

now, they rotated toward her.

Teresa shivered, remembering Alex's description of his

own fey insight under a lightning storm, when he first realized

that other hands than human might have crafted Beta's

malign intricacy. Could that be it? she wondered. Could

June be working for our alien enemies? If they're here in

person, what chance did we ever have?

In the bizarre pulse-bunching that characterized some

gazer beams, the giant statues seemed to pause, circling

round a common center. T?ut even as they did a languid

dance, she sensed another, more powerful beat gathering below.

Teresa tried to move her arms and legs to flee, but slid-

EARTH 563

denly she was pressed to the ground as if by a giant's hand.

Tides coursed her innards, pressing her liver against her

pounding heart. A cry escaped her open mouth like a soul

prying its way out.

That force passed just before she thought she might

burst. Teresa blinked through nausea and saw that the statues

had disappeared. Into their hasty absence, a cyclone of

angry air blew, just as the gravitational pulse tail left her

abruptly with no weight at all.

The familiar sensation might have felt pleasantly like

spaceflight, but she quickly saw where the wind was tossing

her . . . toward a deep cavity where the stony gods had

formerly stood! She clawed at the dirt and grass, grabbing at

any purchase as a midget hurricane dragged her toward the

pit--deep and gleamingly oval. Her feet passed over empty

space, then her legs, her hips. Desperately she cried out as

her fingers lost contact . . .

Suddenly she flapped like a flag in the gale--but did not

fall. At the last moment, one outstretched arm had caught

on something.

Or something had caught her! Twisting, she saw a beefy

hand clamped round her wrist. The hand led to an arm and

massive shoulders . . . merging with the head and face of

Pedro Manella.

The storm ended as quickly as it had started. Aerodynamic

lift vanished like a bed dropping out from under her,

releasing her to fall in a horrible arc. The glass-smooth wall

struck her a blow, setting off dazzling waves of pain.

Consciousness wavered, but the insults didn't end

there. Her arm was yanked again and again, in rhythmic

heaves that hurt like hell as she felt herself drawn upward,

slowly upward, to the precipice, over the glazed, cutting

edge, and then finally onto the rough basalt-gravel surface of

Rapa Nui.

At last, somehow, she and Pedro lay next to each other,

gasping in exhaustion.

"I ... saw Lustig succeed . . . diverting their beam,"

Manella explained. "He couldn't push it all the way to sea

... so I came outside to watch.

"Then I saw you falling ..."

Teresa touched the big reporter's arm. He didn't have to

explain further. "So--" She inhaled deeply a few more

times, blinking away blurriness. "So Alex did it."

564 D A V I D B R I N

Then, with more enthusiasm, she rolled over onto her

stomach and laughed, hitting the ground. "He did it!"

Pedro commented. "Yeah. I'm sure sorry--"

Teresa sat up. "Sorry! What are you sorry about?"

Manella stared at the pit he'd just pulled her from.

"That wind tore off my True-Vu. I wonder how far down

this thing . . ."He shook his head and turned to face her.

"But no. What I meant was that I'm sorry for the other

guys. They're in for a rough time, I bet, now that it's Lustig's

turn to fight back."

Teresa glanced toward the resonator building where

Alex labored on all alone. Just uphill though, she saw a

cascade of Tangoparu engineers, running to rejoin their

tohunga, looking mortified at having left his side during a

battle. Teresa doubted it would ever happen again.

In the rear, security guards escorted June Morgan, who

stared about in mute surprise, much to Teresa's satisfaction.

"Come on, Pedro," she told the big reporter, offering her

hand. "You can search for your recorder later. First let's see

if we can be of any use."

D

In Yellowstone Park, tourists pose near steaming geysers. All

around them stretch cinder cones and other testaments to the

land's violent past. And yet, they don't see any of it really relating to them. After all, those things happened a long, long time

ago.

Today, however, the Old Faithful geyser surprises them. Instead

of steam, wet and clear, what comes out at the appointed

time glows white hot and molten.

It is quite a show, indeed. More, perhaps, than the visitors

ever bargained for.

 As time passed, it was only the outlinethe warp and

H weftthat remained hers alone. As for the rest, it be-

0 came a collage, a synthesis of many contributions.

L Though Jen's daring model of the essential processes of

0 thought grew more complicated with each added ele-

S ment, most of its newest pieces now came bobbing out

P of the capacious well of the Net itself.

H Some bits were brought home by her ferrets. But

E lately, the little software emissaries kept getting lost in

R the worried maelstrom surging through the world's data

E hubs. The help she got now came mostly in real time,

from real men and womenco-workers and colleagues who

knew her access codes and had begun by merely eavesdrop

ping on her work, but soon, intrigued, started offering sug

gestions as well.

Li Xieng of Shanghai had been first to speak upafter

watching her model build for hours before making his pres

ence known. Apologetically, he pointed out a flaw that

would have stymied her if left uncorrected. Fortunately, he

had a convenient solution ready at hand.

Old Russum of the University of Prague logged in next

with a recommendation, and then Pauline Cockerel in Lon

don. After that, rumors spread with the eager pace of elec

trons, drawing attention from specialists across the globe.

Helpful suggestions began arriving faster than Jen could scan

them, so she deputized to surrogatesboth living and simu

latedthe job of culling wheat from chaff.

Of course this was no more than a ripple in the tide of

anxious comment right now sweeping the Net. Jen knew she

and the others were being self-indulgent. Perhaps they

oughtn't to be concentrating so single-mindedly on an ab

stract model while all channels crackled with angst over

matters of planetary survival. They should pay attention to

the pronouncements of presidents and general secretaries

and all the multichanneled pundits.

And yet, moments like this came so seldom in science.

Mostly, a researcher's work was a daily grind no less than

the toil of a baker or grocer. Now and then though, some

thing glorious happeneda paradigm shift, or theoretical

revolution. Jen and the others were caught in the momen

tum of creative breakthrough. No one knew how long the

burst of synthesis would last, but for now the whole was far

greater than the sum of its parts.

566 D A V I D B R I N

1. PRECONSCIOUS CULLING OF SEMI-RANDOM MEMORY AS

sociations cannot be too strict, Li Xieng commented in a

line of bright letters to her upper left. after ael, what would

CONSCIOUSNESS BE WITHOUT THOSE SUDDEN LITTLE MEMORIES AND

IMPULSES, APPARENTLY SO RANDOM, BUT . . .

Li's comment wasn't particularly important in itself.

But the software bundle accompanying them was. A quick

simulation test showed it wouldn't hurt the big model, and

just might add to its overall flexibility. So she spliced it to

the growing whole and moved on.

A contribution from one of the Bell Labs arrived, bearing

Pauline Cockerel's chop of approval. Jen was about to

evaluate it for herself when a sudden swirl of garish color

drew her attention to the screen on the far left.

It was that bloody tiger again! Jen couldn't figure out

what the thing represented or why it persisted so. Or why it

looked more battle worn each time she saw it. A while ago

she had assigned the symbol to serve as an icon for her protection-sieve program, guarding this computer nexus from

any outsiders trying to interfere without permission. But by

now her data domain was so much larger, it seemed in retrospect

a trivial precaution.

The tiger really was looking rather the worse for wear.

It's fur even smoked along one flank, as if seared by some

terrible flame. Bleeding wounds seemed to trace the recent

work of raking talons. And yet it rumbled defiantly, turning

now and then to glare at something lurking just off screen.

The metaphorical meaning struck Jen even in her distracted

state. Somewhere, out in the pseudoreality of the

Net, something or someone was trying to get in, and it

wasn't one of her colleagues.

Who, then? Or what?

As if answering her query, the tiger raised a paw. Impaled

on one claw shimmered what looked like a glistening

lizard's scale . . .

Jen shook her head. She hadn't time for trivialities. Her

model kept growing, building impetus. It took all her attention

now just to ride along, guiding here, adjusting

there. . . .

"--have to ask you to return the memory and processors you've

borrowed, Dr. Wolling. Do you read me? This is a crisis! We've heard from Alex that--"

The new voice was Kenda, yammering by intercom. Irri-

EARTH 567

tably, she wiped the circuit. Of all times for that bloody man

to interrupt! Jen had far too little computer memory as it

was! She'd even taken advantage of the Ndebele and appropriated

space in Kuwenezi Canton's city computers. Thank

heavens it was nighttime outside. By morning it might all be

finished, before she had to deal with swarms of irate administrators.

Somewhere in the real world, she vaguely heard Kenda

and his crew shouting at each other, struggling to bring their

big resonator on line with abrupt speed. But Jen was barely

of the real world anymore. Through her sub vocal and with

delicate finger controls, she created hungry little programs--

surrogates designed on the spur of the moment to go forth

and get more memory, wherever it could be found, commandeering

it on any pretext and hang the ultimate expense!

Any storage and computing charges would be recouped a

million times over if this worked!

This was no job for mere ferrets or hounds. She needed

something tenacious that wouldn't take no for an answer. So

the new surrogates she pictured as tiny versions of herself,

and laughed at the image her computer drew from memory

--an old book-jacket photo depicting her in an earth-colored

sari at some Gaian ritual, wearing a smile of maternally patient, absolute determination.

The self-icons were intimidating, all right. A crowd of

unstoppable old ladies gathered in the central holo near the

main cluster, ready to go forth and find more room for the

growing model.

Then, just as she was about to unleash them, the bottom

fell out.

If there really had been such a thing as direct mind-to-machine

linkage, Jen might have died at that moment. Even

connected by mere holo screens and subvocal, she felt it as a

physical blow. In the span of three heartbeats, everything in

her console was sucked out and sent streaming along high-

rate data lines toward . . . heaven only knew where!

Her breath caught as she watched in utter dismay. Her

surrogates, her subroutines, her colleagues' comments--the

whole damned model poured away like bath water down a

thirsty drain! The intricate, interlaced patterns that only

moments ago had surrounded her now whirled and vanished

into an awful hole.

568 D A V I D B R I N

Nearly last to go was her tiger. Yowling in complaint, it

dug in its claws, laying phosphor trails across one screen

after another as it was dragged toward the abyss.

From the far left, another simulated creature entered

into view as the tiger left--this one larger and even more

stunningly formidable. In an instant's numb understanding

Jen knew this to be the software entity her cat had been

fighting--a thing that had gotten in at last, only to be swept

along with everything else into the void. The fearsome

dragon hissed and roared at her, waving a glittering scorpion's

tail as that bizarre suction hauled it, too, into oblivion.

Jen blinked. In a half moment it was over. She punched

reset keys, and instantly her displays came alight again, but

not a shred of her own work remained. Instead there shone

great glowing swathes of the Earth's interior--the cutaway

view used by the resonator team.

So this was no power failure. It hadn't struck the

Tangoparu group's programs, only hers!

"Kenda!" she screamed. "What have you done!"

Memory. She vaguely recalled Kenda demanding back

the computer caches she'd borrowed. Why, the awful man

must have taken it on himself to seize it, sending her model

straight to Hades in the process!

"You bastard, Kenda. When I get my hands on

you ..."

For the first time in hours she drew her eyes away from

the screens and peered around the console toward where the

others kept watch over mere magma and mantle, crust and

core. The big resonator glistened, suspended in its friction-

less bearings. Lights shone at all the other stations.

But there was no one in sight. No living human being.

"Kenda? . . . Jimmy? . . . Anybody?" She swept off

the subvocal and was suddenly immersed in real sound

again. Foremost came a loud whoop-whoop she recalled

hearing once before, back when she and the Kiwis had first

set up in these abandoned mines, when Kenda had insisted

on running all those bloody drills.

The evacuation alarm.

She found it hard to think, having been ripped so untimely

out of a deep and glorious meditative state. Jen

mourned her beautiful model. So it was only with passing

seconds that she managed to concentrate on more immedi-

EARTH 569

ate concerns . . . like why Kenda and the others had departed

so abruptly.

Everything looked peaceful enough. She smelled no

smoke. . . .

Jen's gaze roved the empty chamber, stopping at last on

the holo in front of her--now depicting Earth's innards rife

with glowing traceries and arcane symbols. In another moment

she understood why the others had run away.

A gazer pulse packet . . . heading this way. Seconds

ticked down inevitability with four nines' probability.

Even in her distracted state, Jen had had enough experience

watching Kenda's operation to perceive how three previously

unknown resonators had banded together, taking

the Kiwis by surprise, overcoming their belated resistance. It

didn't take many blowups to see where the gargantuan output

would strike once whoever-it-was found just the right

resonance.

In fact, gravity waves were coursing through this space

even as she sat here! They weren't coupling with ordinary

surface matter yet--only a few frequencies and impedances

did that. But soon a matching would be found. No wonder

Kenda and the others had departed!

Jen watched loops and spires flicker three thousand kilometers

below, where minerals and metals mixed and separated

at the planet's most violent interface. In the holo tank,

great molten-electric prominences took on gauzy textures.

Threads of ephemeral superconductivity throbbed and Beta's

brittle gleam waxed and waned in tempo to this arrogant

human meddling.

Jen grunted at the irony. That's where all my work

went . . . Kenda must have taken everything in the computer

and fust poured it down the resonator all at once. in a vain attempt to stop them.

When that failed, he ordered everyone out.

She chuckled suddenly. Even a near miss by those unknown

enemies should collapse these tottering mine shafts.

Kenda and the others might escape in time, but it was

clearly too late for her now.

/ guess in all the panic, no one bothered with that

irritating old woman in the corner, the one always making

a nuisance of herself. See, Wolling? I told you bad habits

can be fatal!

570 D A V I D B R I N

The resonator hummed, apparently still linked to all

the furious activity below.

Well, I might as well get the best seat in the house, she

thought, and picked up her subvocal again. Let's see just

what kind of a finish Mother has in store for me.

D Hey, wait a nano! Any of you catch that? I thought all this gor-

sucking inside the Earth was supposed to stop!

Yeah, I know. . . . But one of my ferrets just squirt-faxed

news of a raft of new boggles! Here blokes, copy this . . .

Yeah, from some new spots, too. It's spreading like cancer-IV!

1. Good idea. Let's split and scurt-recomb at this nexus

in ten min. Lensman, you check the online seismic databases.

Yamato-Girl, see what your eavesdrop-prog at the U.N. is picking

up. Boris can quick-scan open media while Diamond taps

the NorA ChuGa Rumor Center. I'll find out what the other hack

groups have picked up. ... Right. Maybe the greeners know

something too.

Agreed? Then squirt it!

Nelson worried about the termites.

B Specifically, for several days the hives inside the

I ark had been acting strangely. Instead of sending forth

0 twisty files of workers in search of decaying organic mat-

S ter, the insects scurried near their tapered mounds, fran-

P tically reinforcing them with fresh mud from countless

H tiny mandibles. It was the same on all levels of ark four.

E Nelson had reported first signs on Thursday, then

R had to wait for Dr. B'Keli's scientists to analyze his sam-

E pies. Finally, as he came on shift today, one of the departing

day workers told him. "Termites, like fire ants, are

very sensitive to electric fields," the young woman entomologist

told him. "They can feel variations you or I would

never notice without instruments.

"Tomorrow we'll go looking for a short circuit," she

added with a smile. "Want to come early and join us? I'm

sure you'll find it interesting."

Interesting might be one word for it. She was young,

pretty, and Nelson felt suddenly awkward. "Uh, maybe," he

answered, imaginatively.

EARTH 571

During his nightly rounds with Shig and Nell, he kept

wondering about that look in her eyes. Looks can deceive, of

course, even when interpreted truly. Still, he decided he

would come in early tomorrow.

One thing he knew the lady entomologist was wrong

about though--humans could detect whatever was affecting

the insects. He felt it in his soles and in prickled hairs at the back of his neck. And Shig walked across the savannah enclosure

as if each crackling grass stem gave off sparks. Finally,

Nelson had to carry the youngster so Nell could get

some rest.

There was a dusty odor in the air, even after they entered

the rain forest biosphere. A glance through the windows

showed desert hazes carried by the dry north wind.

"Close all external air ducts," he commanded the ever-listening

computers, and his ears popped as the system went

over to full recirculation. That was what an enclosed ecosystem

was all about anyway. Nelson thought it almost cheating

to let ark four purge some of its wastes outside and take

in occasional doses of water and air.

"Increase hourly mist ten percent, upper canopy level,"

he added, rubbing some leaves. He felt more comfortable

using his "knack," now that book learning was taking some

of the edge off his ignorance. From a catwalk he looked

across the branches of the miniforest, smelling rank aromas

of fecundity and death. Heavy, interlaced branches bore rich

humus layers on top, where whole communities of epiphytes

lived out cycle after cycle, never touching the

ground. Tangled vines sheltered crawling, slithering things

whose nocturnal habits made Nelson their only regular human

contact.

Most probably preferred it that way. This habitat recreated

a bit of the long-lost jungles of Madagascar, where

whole orders of primates had once dwelled in splendid isolation,

until canoes from the distant east only a few scant

centuries ago brought the first human invasion. In that brief

time those forests vanished, along with so many of man's

strange cousins--the lemurs and other prosimians. Some

"lost" species still lived, barely, in enclaves like this one,

sheltered in care by the descendants of ax wielders, forest

slashers, and road builders.

The contrast seemed so great, one might think two distinct

species had invented the chain saw and the survival

572 D A V I D B R I N

ark. But then. Nelson thought, even in ancient times, there

was Noah.

A pair of eyes much too large for daylight blinked at

Nelson as he wandered by. History is so strange. Once you

start really feeling for people long ago, it's like a drug. You

can't stop thinking about it.

He remembered his epiphany on that fateful day in the

baboon enclosure--eons ago--when he first realized that a

life without others to care for wasn't worth living. That

same afternoon he had also glimpsed something else . . .

what the struggle for survival must have been like for men

and women during most of the ages of humankind.

Nelson stopped where the catwalk neared a bank of

sloping glass-crystal. Beyond the ark's perimeter, the haze-

shrouded Kuwenezi foothills shone under an opal moon. It

was a beautiful night, in a sere, parched sort of way. His

modern mind could look across the expanse with little emotion

but aesthetic appreciation ... or maybe sadness over

the land's unstoppable deterioration.

But for most of the lifespan of his race, the night must

have been more intense--a time of lurking shadows and unseen,

mortal dangers--even with the companionship of fire

and long after Neolithic hunters had become the most fearsome

creatures around. Nelson thought he understood why.

Poor Homo sapiens, doomed to die.

That much people shared with other beasts. But with mortality early humans acquired the added burden of a wild, untamed, magnificent new brain, an organ offering

skill and planning by day, but also capable of Grafting demons

just beyond the flickering firelight, enabling you to

imagine in detail tomorrow's hunt or the next day's injury

or your neighbor's secret deceit. A mind capable of knowing

death ... of helplessly watching its conquest over a comrade's

courage, over a wife's withered youth, over a babe's

never-to-be-known passion . . . and seeing in those moments

the spoor of a foe worse than any lion. The last implacable,

undefeated enemy.

What do you get when you mix utter ignorance and a

mind able to ask, "Why"? Early human societies grasped at

so many superstitions, pagan hierarchies, and countless bizarre

notions about the world. Some folkways were harmless,

even pragmatic and wise. Others were passed on as

fierce "truth" . . . because not to believe fiercely opened

EARTH 573

the way to something far worse than error . . . uncertainty.

Nelson felt a poignant sadness for his ancestors--generation

after generation of women and men, each filled with a

sense of self-importance as great as his own. Thinking about them made his life seem as ephemeral as the rippling savannah grass, or the moonbeams illuminating both the wheat

fields and his mind.

Back when humans roamed in small bands, when the

forest seemed endless and night all-powerful, the common

belief was that other creatures were thinkers too, whose

spirits could be bribed with song and dance. But eventually,

the scary woods were pushed back a little. Mud-brick temples

glistened, and bibles began saying, "No, the world was

made for man to use." Soulless, animals were for his disposal.

Later still came a time when farmland and city surpassed

the forest's span. Moreover, nature's laws were at last

unfolding before curious minds. Principles like momentum

kept the planets on course, and sages perceived the universe

as a great clockwork. Humans, like other creatures, were

mere gears, thrall to insuperable physics.

The pace of change sped. Forests grew rare and a fourth

attitude was born. As Earth groaned under cities and plows,

guilt became the newest theme. Instead of peer, or master,

or cog in the cosmic machine, Homo sapiens' best thinkers

came to view their own species as a blight. The vilest thing

that ever happened to a planet.

Nelson saw these unfolding worldviews the way his

teacher had shown them to him, as a series of steps taken by

a strange, adaptable animal. One gradually--even reluctantly--taking on powers it once thought reserved for gods.

Each Zeitgeist seemed appropriate to men and women

of its time, and all of them were obsolete today. Now humanity

was trying to save what it could, not because of

guilt, but to survive.

Moonlight brought to mind the pretty young entomologist,

who had smiled so provocatively while talking about

termites and who then, before saying goodnight, had asked

shyly to see his scars.

He recalled how his chest had expanded, how the blood

in his veins warmed noticeably as he rolled up his sleeves to

show her that the stories she had heard were true. That he,

574 D A V I D B R I N

unlike other youths she knew, had actually fought for his

life "in the wild" and won a victory, in honor.

Nelson remembered hoping, wanting. He wanted her,

and in ways that over millions of years had fundamentally

to do with procreation. Oh, sure, today that part of it was

optional. It had better be, if humans were to control their

numbers. But in the end, love and sex still had to do with

the continuance of life, even if just in pretend.

The ancient game. Within him burned a desire to hold

her, to lie down with her, to have her welcome his seed and

choose him, above all other males, to share her investment

in immortality.

And so it goes, on and on:

competition--

cooperation--

It was of some solace to Nelson that every one of his

ancestors had wrestled with adolescence and gone on to

find, however briefly, union with another. Presumably, if he

had descendants, they too would do likewise.

But what for? They say it just happened . . . a fight

of selfish genes. If so, though, why do we feel so much pain

thinking there might not be a purpose?

In his own heart Nelson felt that strange mixture--

hope and despair. A philosopher was what he was working

to become. His teacher had said it was his true knack. But

that didn't help one damn bit against the fluxions of youth,

its hormone rush, or the agony of being alive.

Worse, just when he most wanted to talk to Jen, she had

abandoned him.

Don't exaggerate. Nelson chided himself. It's only

been a few days. You've heard what's happening on the

net. Jen's probably up to her ears.

Still, he wished there were someone he could talk to

about all this. Someone who had answers to offer, instead of

endless questions.

If only--

Shig tugged at his leg and coughed a bark of dismay,

looking up at him wide-eyed. Shaken from his thoughts,

Nelson started to speak, then blinked and wondered what it

was that suddenly felt wrong. He touched the metal railing

nearby and felt an odd vibration. Soon a low rumble caused

the grillwork beneath his feet to shudder, gradually working

EARTH 575

its way up to audibility. The sound reminded him of the

low, ultrasonic growls the elephants used in calling one another, and sure enough, several of the captive creatures began

trumpeting in reply. The walkway began to shake.

Earthquake! he realized, and suddenly thought of all

those people down in the old mine shaft. "Computer!" he

shouted. "Connect me with Dr. Wolling in--"

Nelson cut short abruptly as a terrible wrenching seized

his gut. He doubled over, moaning as the catwalk heaved

violently. The baboons shrieked in panic, but he could do

nothing for them. It was agony just to breathe and a labor of

sheer will to keep from tearing at the metal plates, trying to

bury himself under them.

a

Woe unto he who unleashes the Fenris Wolf. Who dares to

waken Brahma. Who calls down Bizuthu and breaks the Egg of

Serpents!

Let those who curse their own house inherit the wind . . .

Jimmy Suarez grabbed Dr. Kenda's arm, halting the

N wheezing physicist's flight across the dusty wheat field.

8 "Look!" Jimmy cried, pointing in the direction they had

been running. The technicians stumbled to a halt. Flee-

S ing an expected calamity behind them, they looked up

P at another one taking place before them!

H Their goal had been the nearby bio-ark . . . the

E only shelter in sight once they finally tumbled out of

R that horrible, creaking elevator. Now they felt grateful

E not to have made it that far. For the pyramidal structure

glistened, reflecting Luna's pale light amidst coruscating

showers that looked like an aurora brought to earth. Dripping

sparkling droplets of electric fire, the edifice lifted out

of the ground and rose into the sky, accelerating.

"Hot damn, the bastards missed," limmy shouted

hoarsely. "They missed!"

Dr. Kenda's eyelids fluttered. "It's not possible. The

projection . . ." He shook his head. "They won't miss next

time."

"But the thread domains below us won't replenish right

away!"

576 D A V I D B R I N

'7/they're behaving like they used to," another operator

cautioned. "They were changing so fast . . ."

"How?" Kenda interrupted, utterly perplexed. "You

saw the simulation. How did they miss?"

"Only one way to find out," Jimmy answered. "I'm going

back. Anybody coming?"

Kenda turned away, motioning now to the east, where

the lights of Kuwenezi Canton shone in the distance. When

Jimmy tried to grab his arm the physicist tore free and

shouted. "It's over! Can't you see that? The minute we

come back on line, they'll do to us what they did to that

ark!"

"But they missed--"

Jimmy watched them go, feeling his resolve waver. He

almost followed. But curiosity was a flame that could not be

quenched, even by fear. It drove him to turn around, climb

back into that awful, rusty elevator and descend once more

into the dreadful old mine.

His head whirled. Why had that beam missed?

He found part of the answer when he saw who had

taken over the resonator in their absence. Jimmy stared at

what had become of Jennifer Wolling.

"My God!"

She had undergone a physical transformation ... as if

devils from some medieval torture squad had taken weeks to

work her over on a rack. Stretched out of shape like an india

rubber man--nevertheless, she was still alive.

Moreover, a strange light seemed to glisten from those

eyes, blinking slowly, still conscious. Jimmy hurried to

where she lay slumped against one wall. But as he reached to

cut her link to the towering gravity antenna, she jerked her

queerly elongated head, knocking his hand aside.

"Not yet ..." came her hoarse whisper. Then she

smiled and added, ". . . child."

Jimmy had a queer feeling as he watched her die . . .

that her consciousness seemed to seep away down pathways

beyond his ken. Cradling her head. Jimmy listened to the

resonator mumble low mysteries into the Earth.

EARTH 577

At that same moment. Mark Randall was far too busy to

stare. Too many bizarre things were happening, and only

pure professionalism saved him from stupifaction.

"Elaine! Co to the bay and uncover the scopes. I'm

turning the ship!"

"But we aren't even in orbit yet," his copilot complained.

"You can't open the doors this soon. It's against

regs."

"]ust do it!"

He felt Intrepid around him, still creaking as the shuttle

shook off the hot stresses of insertion burn. Officially,

they were still in the atmosphere. But that was just a technicality.

Air molecules were sparse this high up. And anyway,

there wasn't a moment to lose.

Hands dancing across the controls, he shouted orders to

the literal-minded, voice-actuated processors. Mark avoided

looking through the forward windshield. It was far more

important to unleash the ship's automatic optics than to

play tourist with his own eyes . . . even if it was a spectacle

out there.

Things were flying off the planet. Bits of this and that

too far away to discern clearly, but each dazzled as it passed

beyond Earth's shadow to bathe in Sol's bare illumination.

Astronaut's intuition gave him some idea how distant some

of the objects were, their spin rates, even their approximate

size-albedo product.

Too big, he thought. They're too damn big! First

chunks of ice. Now this?

What in hell's going on? Is the whole world breaking

up?

When images began pouring in through Intrepid's unleashed

instruments, Mark began thinking that might be the

very answer.

The sky lit up with the debris of battle.

Sepak Takraw didn't have an astronaut's professionalism to

buffer him. He simply stared at the great hole where New

Cuinean hills had formerly sheltered a vast network of secret

caves. Now a lake of pulverized dust lay in a broad oval

between the slopes . . . dust so fine the faint breeze made

578 D A V I D B R I N

undulating ripples in it, as if across water. Gusts wafted glittering tendrils into the air like spindrift.

Sepak wasn't the only one staring. The soldiers who

came running from their guard posts stopped to gape as well.

For days they had played hide-and-seek, his jungle savvy

against their high-tech sensors, they in blur-weave armor, he

in loincloth and feathers. Now, however, they stood nearby

like predator and prey stunned by the same sudden cataclysm,

their quarrel instantly forgotten. Side by side he and

a soldier gazed across the bowl, brimming with matter so

fine it might have been the same primordial stuff that

formed the sun and planets long ago.

"I surrender," Sepak told the soldier numbly, dropping

his bow and quiver. The commando looked at him, then,

without blinking, unstrapped his own gleaming weapon and

let it fall to earth beside Sepak's. There seemed no need for

words.

The wind picked up, wafting powder like fog to coat

their clothes and faces, getting into their eyes, making them

blink and tear. Sepak and the soldier backed up and then

turned away. In retreat they kept glancing back nervously

over their shoulders, unlike the forest animals, most of

whom had already resumed their normal serious business of

living, unburdened by anything as useless as memory.

Stan Coldman's view of events wasn't impeded by trees or

jungle or hills. He and a few others shared a privileged vantage

point several kilometers from the Greenland resonator.

That was where the local commander had ordered "nones-

sential personnel" when Alex Lustig's warning came. Those

who fit aboard the encampment's tractor and Malus crane

fled even farther, putting as much distance as possible behind

them.

Unable to prevail on the commander to let him stay,

Stan insisted on at least departing on his own two feet. As

well as NATO support staff, the walking exodus comprised

men and women from the Hammer Dig, who by this time

needed little persuasion that their obscure corner of the

world had grown entirely unwholesome. With their background

studying long-ago catastrophes, the paleogeologists

EARTH 579

knew just how small and fragile humans were, in comparison.

Still, by consensus everyone stopped where a gentle rise

offered their last view back the way they came. Temblors

swept the pebbly moraine. Fortunately, the horizon was

nearly flat all the way to the distant coastal clouds, so if

anything was going to harm them, it would have to reach

right out of the Earth to do so.

Which, of course, is entirely possible, Stan thought. In

fact, these minor tremors were only superficial symptoms of

a battle taking place far below, as volunteers back at the

dome helped Alex's team on Rapa Nui try to fight off these

mysterious new foes. "Any luck, Ruby?" he asked a woman

seated cross-legged before a portable console.

"I'm linking up now, Dr. Coldman. Just a nano, while I

tap a status update."

Stan peered over Ruby's shoulder at a miniature version

of the familiar globe hologram. As before, the most furious

activity took place where the plasti-crystalline mantle met

the molten outer core, especially right below Greenland site.

Filaments and twisting prominences glowed with energy

drawn from the planet's whirling dynamo, flickering lividly

each time slender rapier probes lanced down from the surface,

tickling and inciting the most inflamed. Those glimmering

threads pulsed hypnotically in rhythms Stan

compared to a multipart fugue, beating countertime to Beta's

imperious metronome. The combination spun off beams

of warped space-time.

It was a stygian, multidimensional fencing match, and

Stan knew his side was now badly outnumbered. New Guinea's

gone completely dark, he saw. And halfway around the

globe, another familiar pinpoint glowed wan amber. The African

resonator's barely on idle, probably damaged and out

of action.

Those had been early targets of the enemy's surprise

onslaught. The foe had taken them out in quick gazer

strikes, like the one Alex had barely warded off. Or maybe

they were sabotaged, as had been tried here--an attempt

foiled only when last-minute security shakedowns revealed

several well-placed limpet bombs. Since then it had been

open warfare at long range, with the outnumbered side just

beginning to learn the rules.

In an ironic way it actually gladdened Stan to see the

580 D A V I D B R I N

innocent incompetence of Spivey's people. The American

colonel's goal must never have been terror weaponry after

all. Or else his officers would surely be better geared for such

a fight. All their gazer programs were scaled too small--to

lift objects rather than blast them willy-nilly to oblivion. It

would take time to bypass all the safeguards put in place to

cut civilian damage, readjusting the cylinders to throw

deadly force on command.

Time was exactly what Spivey's people clearly didn't

have.

After the first wave of temblors, earth movements

ceased, and Stan knew why. Triggering quakes might in

principle offer a bludgeon against big targets like cities. But

even a major jolt to this level plain might leave the Greenland

resonator intact, ready to strike back. The enemy

weren't taking their advantage for granted. They had to keep

the NATO crew occupied parrying thrusts until an opening

was found to take them out decisively, once and for all.

"The bogeys," Ruby said, referring to their unknown

foes. "They're uniting on a lambda band now, fourteen hundred

megacycles . . . with what looks like a Koonin-style

metric-impedance match. Beta's responding! Damn, will it--

no! Alex came in from below and blocked 'em. Yeah!

Bought us some time. Take that, assholes!"

Stan appreciated the young Canadian's colorful commentary.

It lent those abstract symbols verve and emotion

appropriate to combat. Stan balled his fists and tried for the

adrenaline rush one expected in a situation like this. Only

what is a situation like this? Maybe if there were bombs

going off, or visible foes . . .

The sky was so peaceful and blue though, with a bracing,

wintry breeze coming off the continent of ice. He felt

incongruously comfortable and calm with gloved hands

jammed into his jacket pockets.

"Uh-oh . . . Alex has run out of excited states along

any path between Rapa Nui and us. I see nothing in reach

for ten minutes!"

"Ten minutes?" Someone nearby sighed. "Might as

well be forever."

Stan read the display. Sure enough, the gleaming filaments

along one entire sector had gone dim--still pulsing,

but now exhausted, banked back, almost contemplative

compared to the glittering ferment going on elsewhere. Un-

EARTH 581

til they replenished, Alex's team would be unable to render

any help warding off attacks on Greenland.

"Lustig signals he's going onto the attack meanwhile.

1. Says good luck and godspeed .... Now he's gone."

Stan nodded. "Same to you, Alex. Don't worry about

us. Go get 'em."

He and the other evacuees turned their attention to the

distant white dome they had left just a little while ago. Even

this far away they were still in danger. In this new, terrifying

type of warfare, the ground beneath you might suddenly

turn liquid with color, or vanish in a titanic flash, or propel

you toward far galaxies. Whatever happened, he wanted to

share jeopardy with those brave technicians over there

across the moraine valley. He planned on staying when the

crane-zep returned for another pickup.

All my life I believed science was a revelation co-equal

to scripture. A more advanced text--the Infinite offering

us His very tools, now that we're older, like apprentices

learning their-Father's craft.

So isn't it only right to stand watch over what I

helped create with those tools?

Ruby exclaimed, grabbing her headphones. She

laughed. "I don't believe it!"

"What is it?"

"Alex. He's taken out the Siberian machine!" she announced

in triumph. "Vaporized 'em! That's one enemy

down and two to go. Oh eh? Oh no!"

Stan felt the others gather even closer. Ruby's gleeful

expression turned to despair. "What now?" he asked.

"Another one's come on line to replace it! A new one!

Joined in soon as Siberia blew out. It's ... in the Sea of

Japan. Damn, they must've been holding it in reserve.

Where'd all these bastards come from!"

In the display, Stan saw a new triggering beam replace

the one Alex had just destroyed, making a total of three foes

once more.

"They're still after us!" she cried, reading the traces.

"Sometimes it's smarter to take out the weaker opponent

first," he commented. "If they knock Greenland out,

Alex's crew will have to face them all alone." The Danes

and others sighed and nodded. They didn't have the full

picture. (Who did?) But some things were obvious.

"The gor-suckers have hooked a really good band this

582 D A V I D B R I N

time," Ruby said. "Lots of energy. Beta's responding, and

twelve . . . fifteen threads are active. . . . Beam on target!"

Stan looked around for any sign that coherent pencils

of gravitational radiation were hurtling through the Earth

nearby. But no symptoms could be perceived. It wasn't

likely there would be any, not until their assailants found a

proper coupling with surface matter.

"They're hunting for a contact resonance. Our guys are

trying to parry . . ." Then Ruby groaned as her instruments

flashed fateful crimson. "No good. Here it comes!"

"Everybody down!" Stan shouted. "Lie flat and turn

away!"

But even as the others dove to the ground, Stan ignored

his own advice. He watched the NATO buildings and knew

the very instant the beam matched frequencies with the

rock-air boundary. Oval patches of tundra seemed to throb

like tympani. Then, within one of those boundaries, the

encampment suddenly sank into the ground, like an express

elevator called down to hell. It was over in an eyeblink.

At least, the first part was over. Stan mourned good

people who had become friends. Dr. Nielsen got up and

moved next to him. Together they listened to the continuing

rumble of a new tunnel boring straight into the Earth.

The growling continued for some time, vibrating their soles.

"Maybe we'd better try to get out of here," the paleoge-

ologist suggested at last. "The magma in these parts is far

below a heavy plate, but it's not very viscous. Even on foot,

a little distance could make a lot of difference right now."

Mankind had passed yet another milestone today, Stan

thought. But then, maybe Nielsen was right. He didn't have

to be exactly at ground zero in order to bear witness when

molten rock flooded up that new channel from deep, high-

pressure confinement. Watching from further away

wouldn't lessen the spectacle much at all.

Like everyone else aboard the company ship, Crat watched

and listened to the hurried, frantic reports. He soon tired,

though, of trying to follow events he didn't understand.

EARTH 583

And so he left them all in the comm room and went out on

deck alone to wait tor &ubuo&&..

Partly, he was still numb. His adventure with the underwater

shaft of light hadn't worn off yet--the enchantment

of that strange music, the transient contact with

something warm and accepting, or so it seemed at the time.

He hadn't expected his bosses to believe his story when he

emerged from the water. But they had, questioning him

about every detail, testing his blood and other fluids, putting

him next to machines that tugged at his limbs as the light

had, though not as pleasantly. At one point as they worked

on him, Crat had felt his sense of smell enhance out of all

proportion. The company execs' fine colognes bit into his

sinuses and made his nose itch.

That had seemed to satisfy them. He'd been released to

rest and perform easy chores aboard a company support ship

while the wary tech types hurried back to their secret labs.

Crat had wondered how they could be so concerned about

such matters at a time like that . . . and even more so two

days later, when people spoke of whole chunks of the planet

being blasted into space! Such dedication seemed far beyond

him.

Still, all seemed peaceful on deck. From the railing he

saw the gangly towers of the Sea State town. Soon the muezzin

would be calling Muslim citizens to first prayer, dawn

kites would rise to catch the stratospheric winds and solar arrays would catch even the reddish dawn.

Tepid currents lapped the cruiser's hull, leaving the

usual faint scum of surface oils and powdered styrofoam in a

pebbly sheen. Phosphorescent, dying plankton gave off iridescent

colors. Crat sighed as moonlight broke through the

ragged overcast to brighten some obscure patch of sea. That

bright beam reminded him of another. It made him hope

with the focused intensity of a prayer that he might be

lucky again. Maybe next time he met that special light, or

heard that music, he wouldn't be too dumb, too tongue-tied

to reply.

"Yeah," he said, in bittersweet sureness that he had

been both blessed and abandoned. "Sure you would, boy-oh.

Ever'body's waitin' in line just to hear what you have to

say."

584 D A V I D B R I N

To Logan Eng, the chaos in the Net felt like having one of

life's underpinnings knocked out. What had been a well-

ordered, if undisciplined, ruckus of zines, holochannels,

SIGs, and forums had become a rowdy babel, a torrent of

confusion and comment, made worse because in order to be

noticed each user now sent out countless copies of his mes-

sages toward any node that might conceivably listen. A mil-

lion hackers unleashed carefully hoarded "grabber"

subroutines, designed to seize memory space and public at-

tention. Even "official" channels were jammed half the time

with interlopers claiming their right to comment on the cri-

sis facing the world.

". . . it is a plot by resurgent Stalinist elements and pamyat mys-

tics . . . ," claimed a ham operator who had been listening to one mysterious site in Siberia.

". . . No, it's schemes by money-grubbing polluters . . ."

". . . eco-freaks . . ."

". . . little green men . . ."

Normally, the weirdest scenarios would have stayed

ghettoed in special interest forums. But that unspoken con-

sensus broke down as bizarre fantasies suddenly seemed no

less reasonable than the finest science punditry.

Then, adding to the overload, worried governments

suddenly began pouring forth reams--whole libraries--of in-

formation they'd been hoarding, stumbling over themselves

to prove they weren't responsible for the sudden outbreak of

gravitational war. Each denial met fresh suspicions, though.

Accusations flew in the halls of diplomacy and on ten thou-

sand channels of comment and opinion.

The largest chunk of raw disclosure came from NATO-

ANZAC-ASEAN--a spasm of data that stunned already

dizzy Net traffic handlers. Suspicious voices accused Wash-

ington and its allies of masking culpability under a tidal

wave of bits and bytes. But Logan was shocked by the extent

of this sudden candor. To demonstrate their innocence,

Spivey's bosses had spieled everything, even his own first

conversation with the colonel, in the big limousine! This

tsunami of forthrightness swamped normal channels and

flooded into unusual places. Classified studies of knot singu-

EARTH 585

larity physics got dumped into a channel normally reserved

for cooking hobbyists and recipe exchanges. The secrets of

gazerdynamic launching systems filled corridors meant tor

light opera, situation comedies, and golfing.

The cat's out of, the bag now. Even if the present crisis

waned, the world would never be the same.

Despite disclosure, however, despite scurrying arms inspectors

and tribunes, events sped ahead of all governance.

Paranoia notched up with each strange tremor, each awful

disappearance. Caroming rumors spoke of national deterrence

weapons being wheeled out of storage--of peace locks

being hammered off ancient but still deadly bombs. Sneezes

were heard in Budapest--and someone decried bioplagues.

Hailstones struck Alberta--and someone else proclaimed

the wrath of God.

A winking light dragged Logan from the latest report, in

which one of the brighter pundits cited new evidence pointing away from the bad old nation states, toward some new, unknown power. . . . Logan blinked at the intruding lines

of text crossing his portable holo--a priority override using

his personal emergency code. Not even Clenn Spivey knew

that one.

The words manifested with shocking, glacial slowness.

One by one, they seemed to pry their way through the panicky

crush. He read the message and then brought up his

hand to cover his eyes.

DADDY . . . CAN'T GET MOTHER TO BUDGE. LOCKED IN

HER ROOM. ACTING CRAZY . . . COME QUICK. WE NEED

YOU!

----LOVE, CLAIRE

D

It is a fairly typical refugee camp, one of thirty allocated Great Britain under the Migration Accords. Along the trim lanes of

Bowerchaike Village, the poor continue their day in, day out

labors. Great drums of grain and fishmeal arrive and are disbursed by elected block committees. Blackwater must go to the

septic ponds, graywater to the pulp gardens; every bit of cardboard or plastic or metal has value, so the streets are spotless.

As long as order is kept and every baby accounted for, a

few luxuries are included in each week's aid shipment--sugar-

586 D A V I D B R I N

cane cuttings for the children, from plantations in Kent . . . toilet paper instead of dried kudzu leaves, to make life a little softer for the old ones . . . and some real work for those in between,

those not already lost in ennui, staring all day at cheap holo sets like disembodied souls.

Yet, some of the brighter ones cruise that data sea, associating

with others far away who don't even know their status as

poor refugees. Some do brisk, software-based business from

the camp. Some get rich and leave. Some get rich and stay.

For most, the sudden chaos on the net means a delay in

their favorite shows. But to others, It threatens the only world that ever offered them hope.

Teresa wished she could help Alex. But all her skills

E were useless in this battle, a conflict as intricate as a No

X play, fought with the deadly delicacy of weaving, bob-

0 bing Siamese fish.

S At least she could help watch the prisoner, freeing

P some security boys to stand guard against saboteurs.

H And she'd see to keeping Pedro out of Alex's hair.

E Fortunately, those two jobs coincided as the big Az-

R tian reporter eagerly questioned June Morgan. He forced

E her to look toward the holo display, where each thrust

and parry translated into more deaths, more local catastrophes.

"It wasn't supposed to go this far," the blonde traitor

answered miserably. "They never intended all-out war."

"They hardly ever do," Manella commented. "Big, destructive

hostilities nearly always used to come about when

one side thought it knew just how the other would react to a

show of force, and miscalculated their opponents' resolve."

Teresa watched June wince as roiling changes lit up the

many-layered Earth. Nearby, Alex Lustig tapped rapid commands

with a keypad-glove, adding muttered amendments

quicker than speech with his subvocal device. Others hurried

about their tasks with similar crisp efficiency . . . the

only trait that might help the last Tangoparu team in its

desperate, one-sided struggle to survive.

"It's all my fault," June said with a despairing sigh. "If

I'd only done my job, -they wouldn't have had their bluff

called. Not yet, at least. Now, though, all their plans are

messed up. They're in a panic. Far more dangerous than if

they'd won."

EARTH 587

The patent rationalization made Teresa want to spit.

"You still haven't said who they are1"

Earlier June had refused to answer, as if the direct question

terrified her. Now she seemed to decide it didn't matter

anymore.

"It's kind of hard to explain."

"Try us," Manella urged.

With a sigh, June regarded them both. "Pedro, Teresa,

haven't either of you ever wondered? I mean, why do people

assume the Helvetian War put an end to the world's oldest

profession?"

Teresa blinked. "Are you being snide?"

June laughed without mirth. "I don't mean prostitution,

Terry. I'm talking about parasites, manipulators who

thrive on secrecy. There have always been schemers and

plotters--since before Cilgamesh and the pyramids.

"Come on, you two. Who do you think poisoned Roosevelt

and had the Kennedys shot? Or arranged for Simyonev's

plane to crash? What about Lamberton and Tsushima? Are

you sure those were accidents? Didn't they work out rather

conveniently for those profiting in the aftermath?

"Teresa and I are too young, but Pedro, you remember

how things were during the weeks before the Brazzaville

Declaration, don't you? Back when delegations started flying

in spontaneously from all over the world to declare the an-

tisecrecy alliance? How many people died of mysterious accidents

before the delegates overcame all the obstacles and

ideological distractions and at last built a momentum that

was unstoppable? Then how many world leaders had to be

deposed before the masses had their way and the Alps were

finally put under siege?"

"Half the presidents and ministers had secret bank accounts

to protect," Pedro replied. "So naturally they tried to

obstruct. But in the end they failed--"

"They didn't fail. They were used. Used up in delaying

actions." June's eyebrows lowered. "Why do you think the

war lasted so damn long, hmm? The Swiss people sure didn't

want to take on the whole damn planet! They never imagined

all those generations spent digging tunnels and bomb

shelters had a purpose beyond mere deterrence.

"And even when it ended at last, you don't actually

think the bank records that U.N. forces finally dug out of

the rubble were the real ones, do you?"

588 D A V I D B R I N

Manella shook his head. "Are you implying whole levels of conspirators we missed? That all the drug lords and bribe takers and commissar billionaires we caught--"

"Were just expendable flunkies, thrown down to appease

the mob. Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying, Mr. Reporter."

June's voice was bitter. "The real manipulators

wanted Helvetia completely destroyed. The war had to cost

so many lives, so an exhausted world would exult in victory

and desperately want to believe it was over."

"This is ridiculous," Teresa told Pedro. "She's sounding

like a bad Lovecraft novel now. What's next, June? Dark

Unspeakable Unnameable Horrors from Before the Start of

Time? Or how about something out of those wonderful,

paranoid Illuminati books? Who are your bosses, then?

Freemasons? The Trilateral Commission? Jesuits? The Elders

of Zion?" Teresa laughed. "How about Fu Manchu or the

Comintern . . . ?"

June shrugged. "Those were useful distractions in their

day--glitter and window dressing designed to attract fools,

so conspiracy theories in general would get a bad odor with

normal, honest folk."

To her dismay, Teresa found herself drawn by June

Morgan's frankness. The woman clearly believed what she

was saying. And she's right in a way, Teresa thought, suddenly

aware of her own reaction. Look at me now. Refusing

to believe, even as proof tears the world down around me.

Pedro chewed one end of his moustache. "You aren't

referring to the aliens are you? The makers of Beta? Are they

your--"

June looked up quickly. "Oh heavens no!" She gestured

at the big display. "Do the assholes who sent me here

seem that competent to you? Look how badly they screwed

up their attempted coup. Would Beta's makers have let Alex

jerk them around like he has?"

As they all looked that way, a trio of yellow rays caused

Beta's purple dot to throb with incipient power, but once

again they were foiled by a slender rapier from Easter Island,

sending their pent-up force spiraling off uselessly in some

other direction.

June shook her head. "No, humanity is able to breed

predators all on its own, Pedro. Talented parasites with lots

of experience tapping the innovations of others. You don't

EARTH 589

need much brains for that, just certain manipulative talents

aTl& 'lt)f5) tA "dl'KfgWi'it."

"The illusion of omniscience," Pedro said, nodding.

"Oh yes. I've seen them, gathered in their halls with all

their money, giving each other circle-jerks--telling each

other how smart they are just because thirty years ago they

managed to preserve some of their old power, because people

were too tired and relieved at war's end to peel back the last

layer.

"Only now, at last, they know how stupid they really

were all along. You got it right, Pedro. They miscalculated

this latest move and are going to die soon. For that part at

least, I'm truly grateful."

The admission took Teresa aback. All this time she had

assumed June was acting out of loyalty to some group or

cause. Clearly the woman feared her veiled masters, but now

Teresa saw how much she also loathed them.

Glancing at the great display, Teresa intuited what June

meant. All over the world, in national capitals and command

posts and even hackers' parlors, there were other

Earth-holos like this one. Perhaps cruder, but growing better

by the minute. Especially now that Clenn Spivey's group

and others were spilling all they knew in sudden, panic-

driven spasms of openness. On every one of those displays,

the enemy resonator sites must shine like angry pirates' emblems . . .

standing out for the simple reason that no one

claimed ownership over them. That lack of candor in these

hot, tense hours was an indictment worse than any smoking

gun.

Right now every security alliance, peacekeeping force

and local militia with the means was probably sending units

toward those mystery sites. Their weaponry might be paltry

compared to TwenCen arms--their unpracticed reflexes

might be slow--but those soldiers would certainly make

short work of June's employers when they arrived.

No, her bosses can't have planned for this. They must

have counted on taking the Tangopam tetrahedron completely

by surprise, wiping out the anginal four and all the

newer resonators with sabotage or gazer strikes. Then, in

sole possession of the ultimate terror weapon, they could

hold the world hostage. They came damn close to succeeding.

590 D A V I D B R I N

But even as she saw the logic, Teresa had to shake her

head.

In which case . . . so what? It's an insane plan even

if it worked! They couldn 'the have gotten away with it for

long. The result would have been just too unstable.

Teresa saw that a lull had fallen since Alex's last successful

parry. He was sipping through a straw from a glass

held by one of the cooks. She wanted to go over and rub his

shoulders and maybe whisper some encouragement, but she

also knew Alex too well for that. Those shoulders were

Atlas's right now. And a lot more than the lives in this room

rode on his train of thought. It mustn't be interrupted.

"You're describing an act of sheer desperation," Pedro

surmised, still talking to June. "These conspirators of yours

1. even in victory, they couldn't hope to hold onto what

they'd won!"

June answered with a tired shrug. "What did they have

to lose? The status quo was deteriorating from their point of

view. Everything they had rescued from the ashes of Helvetia

was slipping through their hands like smoke."

"I don't get it. What threatened them?"

June motioned toward the consoles, toward Teresa's

data plaque, toward the phone on Pedro's belt. "The net,"

she said succinctly.

"The net?"

"That.'s right. It was getting to big, too open and all-

pervading . . . too bloody democratic to manipulate much

longer. They were growing more desperate every year. Then

this gravity amplification business came along--"

"--which you leaked to them!" Teresa accused.

June nodded. "They had other sources. As you've said

so often, it's awful hard to keep secrets these days . . . that

is, unless you own the system."

"Own the net?" Teresa sniffed incredulously. "Nobody

owns the net."

"Well, bits of it. Special, strategic pieces. Think about

when the original fiber cables and data hubs were laid.

Someone could always be bought out, bribed, blackmailed.

Computer nodes were designed with 'back door' entry codes,

known only to a few .*. ."

"Why? To what end?"

June laughed. "To always be first hearing about the latest

technical advance! So your ferrets will get that split sec-

EARTH 591

and priority advantage, letting you cache away items before

ot'ners see t'ne-m. To Ti-iariYpVi'iy-i'fc ^A'jt Tii'A1!--"

"Preposterous!" Teresa objected. "People would notice!"

June nodded. "Oh, now we know that. But then? The

net was supposed to be their baby. Their tool! It would replace

big banks as an instrument of control, above nations

and governments. Above even money.

"After all, didn't old sci-fi stories picture it that way?

'He who controls the flow of information controls the

world'? That was to be their answer to Brazzaville and Rio."

June's voice stung with biting irony. "Only it didn't quite

work out that way. Instead of being their tame instrument,

the Net kept slipping free like something alive. So they--"

"They, they!" Pedro smacked a fist into his palm, making

Teresa wince. The man should remember where they

were.

"Who are they?" Manella demanded. "Who the hell

are you talking about, woman!"

Another shrug. "Do names matter? Picture all the powerful

cabals of egotists cluttering the world at the turn of the

century. Call them old or new money ... or red cadres

... or dukes and lordships. Historians know they all spent

more time conniving with each other than waging their supposedly

high-minded ideological struggles.

"The smart ones saw Brazzaville coming and prepared.

They saw to it that all the reasonable Helvetian and Cayman

ministers were assassinated or drugged and that every attempt

at compromise, even surrender, was rejected."

That rocked Pedro back. "Do you mean . . . ?" But

June hurried on.

"Actually, do you want to know what their worst problem

was? It's afflicted them since early TwenCen--a worse

threat to power elites than mass education, news media,

even the personal computer. It was defection."

"Defection?" Teresa asked, captivated despite herself.

"Each successive generation found it harder to hold

onto its own children! World culture was so enticing, even

to rich kids with the chance to live like rajahs. The best and

brightest were always being tempted away into so-called

bourgeois careers--in the arts or sciences--because those are

intrinsically more interesting than sitting around clipping

coupons and bullying the servants--"

592 D A V I D B R I N

"Wait a minute!" Teresa interrupted. "How do you

know all this?" Then she saw something in the other woman's

eyes. "Oh--"

Teresa felt a sudden, unwelcome wash of empathy for

June Morgan. The blonde geophysicist smiled wryly. "Family

ties, you see. Our little branch made its break when Dad

ran off to play music and do fund-raisers for wildlife. Naturally, the cousins cut us off from information, though we

never lacked for money.

"Anyway, Dad didn't want to know about their

schemes. He called my uncles 'dinosaurs.' Said their way of

thinking would die out naturally." June snorted. "Ever hear

how the dinosaurs died though? I wouldn't want to be underfoot

when it happened."

"So you figured on playing along. Let them have their

way--"

"--till they dried up and blew away. Yeah, that was part

of it. That and--" June looked down. "Well, they can be

persuasive. You don't know them."

But Teresa figured she really did. If not as individuals,

then the type--one needing stronger tonics than satisfied

ordinary men and women. Their inner hunger seemed to

crave money and power, but was, in fact, insatiable by anything

this side of death.

Anyway, details hardly mattered. June's dinosaur analogy

matched the geological scale of the drama portrayed on

the great display. Teresa could read some of those livid trails

of human meddling. So many ghostly phenomena were taking

place far beneath her feet, whose repercussions would

reverberate long after the last blows were struck.

One recent consequence of battle was clear. Nearly every

excited energy state under Easter Island was depleted

from hours of ceaseless stimulation. All the filaments and

prominences and delicate webs of electricity now glowed

dull red and wouldn't serve as gazer sources again until their

former blue intensity returned. That could take anywhere

from minutes to hours. Meanwhile, it was hard to see how

the enemy could strike at them here.

As she watched, Alex's final beam lanced along the

core's fiery rim to catch a distant bright thread in a carom off

Beta's glittering mirror. One of the enemy probes quavered

and then toppled off scale. That resonator would take some

time recovering, she knew.

EARTH 593

Meanwhile, the world was converging on the bastards.

How long until the clumsy, unready, nTitODtdTritrt.'eA Vi.'Hi.

posse finally got to them? Alex has won the advantage

back. Time's running out for the enemy. So what'll they do

now?

^ w&'hw 'xi.w/t. Iw?.?, m q.qto.w.?,.

"The other two are firing up again," the watch officer

announced.

A technician protested. "But they can't reach us past

that dead zone for at least--"

"They're not aiming at us!" The first voice answered.

"Look!"

Teresa blinked as the Saharan and Japan Sea sites sent

new beams to tickle the planet's core. Beta answered with

glowing counterpoints, now completely out of reach by Alex

and his crew. The Tangoparu team watched, helpless to interfere.

Beta throbbed. Nearby tendrils coiled with pent-up energy.

Then something actinic and mighty flashed, striking like a fist toward the heart of a great land mass.

North America.

"They're talking!" The communications operator announced.

"Blanketing all channels . . . it's an ultimatum.

They're saying all national forces must back off within two

minutes or. . . ."

The young woman didn't have to finish. A continent

was visibly ringing like a hammered girder, the object lesson

apparent to all.

Silence reigned. Finally Teresa asked, "What now?"

For the first time, Alex looked up from his console.

Tiredly, he pulled off the subvocal, leaving red streaks

where the instrument had rubbed him raw. He met her eyes.

"I don't know, Rip. I guess it depends on what they're trying

to accomplish."

All eyes turned to the comm operator, whose specialty

it was to sieve the noisy airwaves. A myriad of rapid images

flickered across the woman's face. As she pieced together the

story, she slowly smiled in realization.

"That last punch was a negotiating move," she said.

"But what they say they really want is ... to surrender!"

All over the room, tired workers slumped in their chairs

with sighs of relief. Someone let out a whoop and threw

594 D A V I D B R I N

open the double doors, letting in a fresh breeze that drove

before it the stale tang of fear.

Teresa and Alex met each others' eyes, each seeking

reassurance there, and reason to accept hope.

D

A woman sits alone in a locked room.

She is a mighty enchantress. And though alone, she is not

without company. For there are her familiars to fetch and carry

for her. And a pair of heroes on the wall, chained there for her

amusement.

They are Hercules and Samson, caught together in a loop

of frozen time, rattling their clinking bonds as they face a mighty hydra. They have played out the same silent struggle--straining

and grunting defiantly, repetitively--ever since the enchantress

put them there to be "enhanced," many days ago.

Now, though, she has little time for such things. The heroes

must wait their turn.

"Oh no you don't," the woman croons as she watches

more important images array themselves across another magic

wall. The world's simulacrum sparkles like an electric onion,

seething with changes deep within. 11 is an impressive show, but

she cares little about those lower layers. Only the brown and

green and blue wrinkled outer skin, which she finds diseased,

infested with a plague of greedy parasites.

Ten billion parasites called human beings.

She knows little and cares less about the inner onion. But

about the skin she has studied much and cares more. She has

bound herself to an oath, a quest--to the saving of that skin. To the culling of those parasites.

"Oh no, I won't let you do that," she says to those who

thought they were her patrons, her cousins, her masters, but

who are in fact, her instruments. Desperate now, they threaten,

bluster, scrabbling in panic as they seek a way to save their

useless lives.

Petty lives, cheap to her, since their kind are far too numerous

anyway. They suffer illusions of their own importance, just

because they are among the "richest" of a race of fleas. Their

latest plan is the best they can hope for now . . . bartering millions of lives against a promise of amnesty. Already the Net fills

with tentative offers. Relief swells over yet another catastrophe barely averted. But she has other things in mind.

EARTH 595

"No, it isn't over yet," she says, humming sweetly as she

works. An armistice would hardly serve her purposes, Itmuslbjs

replaced with something else. Rubbing knurled knobs, she summons

forth her servants, her familiars--simpler, more obedient

versions of the fearsome lizard she had once crafted and then

somehow lost. These are new variants, streamlined and single-

minded. They streak forth at her command, wisps of electron

energy under geas to lay scourge upon the kingdom of fleas.

The first clue to this great opportunity had come from her

own ex-mate, a compromiser she had once loved. His work for

the military had opened this new world to her. When her cousins

began financing her investigations with bottomless coffers, she

suddenly had access to the very best tools--both software and

hardware. Day in, day out, her little spies brought back more

clues.

At first she rode along, watching as her foolish relations

played with powers beyond their understanding. But as time

passed, she began realizing what power they had overlooked

1. what lay there amidst the mountains of data, ripe for the

taking. Why, it was the very sword of cleansing!

Even as the world's nations draw back from confrontation,

the enchantress uses private trails and secret byways to send

her emissaries toward places far away. "You aren't going to

stop there," she says. "Oh, no. Now is not the time to stop."

The room suddenly shakes and sways for the fifth time in as

many minutes, but this does not interrupt her. They are only

aftershocks from silly earthquakes. Anyway, the house is well

built, with its own ample power.

From a town called White Castle, one might faintly hear sirens

wailing. But that is in the world of men and machines, and

therefore as much a useless metaphor as poor, straining, sweating Hercules on the wall, damp with rivers of simulated sweat. It

is in the world of electrons and hidden forces that all will be

decided. And that world belongs to Daisy.

"Go ahead. Make it rattle and roll," the enchantress says.

"Enjoy your toys. But in the end, it all comes down to flesh."

596 DAVIDBRIN

"Could it be a delaying tactic?" Alex worried aloud.

C "All the military forces are holding back till the Secu-

0 rity Council can meet. During that time . . ."His voice

R trailed off as he shook his head in worry.

E Teresa worked one shoulder, rubbing it with real

strength and an uncanny knowledge of where to find the

tight knots in his muscles. Her voice offered a steadiness he

felt much in need of.

"They know they can't keep the whole world at bay

forever, Alex. Didn't Nihon just offer to put their experi-

mental resonators under your command? And there are

those mothballed machines of Spivey's. They've recalled the

technicians. In a few hours--"

Alex nodded. "In a few hours, a day at most, I'll have

the resources to counter anything they try. Wipe them off

every frequency. They won't be able to shake a tree branch,

let alone a continent."

He tried not to listen to the tinny voice in the back-

ground--a BBC World Service reporter telling of widespread

damage in the American Midwest. That was only a taste of

what the desperate foe promised if any moves were made

against them without a full parole. And so the cautious mili-

tias had withdrawn to wait.

No one knew how earnest lune Morgan's secretive mas-

ters were about the threat. How serious had the Helvetians

been with their cobalt bombs? Or Kennedy and Khrushchev,

back in 1962? Men caught in the momentum of events

sometimes think the unthinkable.

The resonator watch officer called. "They're pulsing

again ..."

Everyone turned. All three enemy probes once more

glowed with induced gravitational energy. "What are they

up to now? I thought they'd agreed to wait."

Narrow pencils of yellow speared downward toward the

purple dot--Beta's flickering mirror.

"Could it be another demonstration?"

The comm operator interrupted. "They've come on-line

again, all channels. They claim it isn't them at all!"

Alex turned. "What d'you mean, 'it isn't them'?"

"It isn't them!" The woman pressed her headphones.

EARTH 597

"They swear their resonators all just went off by themselves!"

Teresa asked, "Alex, is that possible? What are they

trying to pull?"

But he only watched, transfixed, as the three beams

passed through several roiling cells of superconducting elec-

tnttt7, sfiYit'& S-sta, arid . . . disapp-ea-ied.

"Ikeda! Clambers!" Alex shouted. "Scan parallel frequencies."

He reached for his subvocal. "They may be trying

to sneak up on a side band!"

It seemed unlikely. There were only a few mode-combinations

which coupled strongly with surface rock, especially

the topmost crust. And he felt sure those were all covered.

Still- There is something, Alex," one of the techs yelled

across the room. "Take a look at fifty-two gigahertz, on a

one point six meter amplitude p-wave--"

"Got it!" he shouted back. Fresh dotted lines showed

what had been invisible--thin trails of gazer radiation shining

from Beta's glittering maw.

"But those beams are headed--" He didn't have to finish.

Everyone stared in shock as the concentrated rays flew

straight back to their points of origin, striking direct hits on

all three enemy resonators.

"They shot themselves!" someone cried in amazement.

Alex scanned but found no signs of damage. No earth tremors.

The foe's resonators still shone on-line, as dangerous as

ever. This was weird.

"Effects!" he demanded. But the question stayed unanswered--why

would the enemy have fired beams at themselves?

Beams which apparently did nothing?

"Do they say anything?"

Comm ops scanned. "Nothing. They've gone dead."

This is too strange, Alex thought. Something bizarre

was going on.

"Alex!" Teresa cried out.

Jesus, she's strong! He winced at her sudden grip on his

shoulder. Turning around, he saw her blinking, shaking her

head. "It's happening again. I'm sure of it, Alex. Can't you

feel it?"

He remembered their long passage together in New Zealand,

down twisty avenues of Hadean darkness, relying on

her fey sensitivity to find a way back to the world of light.

598 D A V I D B R I N

That memory left no room for doubt. "Battle stations!" he

cried as he reset the instruments, searching.

There! On yet another side band--Beta seemed to throb

angrily. "Load all capacitors! Give me a counterpulse at--"

He was interrupted as somebody screamed. Only a

dozen meters away, a man went goggle eyed, tore at his hair

--and blew up.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't an explosion. The poor fellow stretched, still screaming, till he shredded like gooey taffy. Inbound there was little more than a wet pop, but the

colors ... a rainbow of brilliant liquid shades spilled forth

as the skin peeled back, gobbets of flesh flying in all directions.

An aura of shimmering lambency seemed to hang midair

even as the ruin of meat fell to the floor. That man-sized

apparition hovered for a moment and then began moving

rapidly in a horizontal spiral.

Men and women yelled in dismay, scrambling to avoid

it. But the terrible focus accelerated, striking two cooks who

chose that unlucky moment to leave the kitchen carrying

lunch. Their tureens flew as arms and heads ripped from

their bodies, spraying those nearby with scalding soup and

crimson blood. They never knew what hit them before the

disturbance swept on, catching victim after victim.

"Everybody out!" Alex cried redundantly amid a panicky

rush for the exits. He paused only to grab his plaque

and Teresa's hand before joining the stampede. Halfway to

the open doors, however, she braked and suddenly wrapped

her arms around him. "Wha--?" He cried, struggling. But

she held on, fiercely immobile as something horrible and

barely visible brushed by them, passing through space they

would have occupied.

"Now!" she cried when it swept on. Alex needed no

urging.

Outside he saw no order to the evacuation. The

Tangoparu crew were excellent and brave. They had faced

dangers more powerful than any warriors had since time began.

But courage is a useless abstraction when the mind recoils

to a primitive state. Men and women ran pell-mell,

scattering across the- windblown hillsides, some running

straight for the seaside cliffs. In one blinking instant, Alex

saw a technician touched glancewise by something no more

visible than a pocket of air. She whirled, screaming as some

EARTH 599

tide seemed to suck her into a roughly man-shaped refrac-

tina. Hej. b.aroir. erLd-ed. in-a. shuddering ^a.si ., and she crumpled to the ground hemorrhaging from purpled, blistering skin.

"This way!" Teresa shouted, dragging Alex's arm. They

fled westward, though Alex had no idea why.

Several more times Teresa suddenly veered right or left.

On each occasion Alex obeyed at once, following her zigs

and zags like they were commandments from Cod. Close

brushes with death grew too numerous to count, and he

stopped wondering how Teresa knew which way to dodge.

Sometimes he noted a close passage only by the sudden

shiver down his back or by a threatening rise in his gorge.

Then, before he could respond to the horror, it passed and

they were off again.

There wasn't time to react to the sight of friends and

colleagues being horribly murdered in broad daylight, under

azure Pacific skies ... no effort to waste on anything but

flight. Numbly, he felt the crunchy unevenness of grassy

slopes suddenly give way to the harder pounding of shoes on

concrete. There were blurry images of parked jets and zeppe-

lins. Was she going to try to grab one of those . . . ?

But no. Teresa yanked him past the waiting aircraft and

toward another object--black on the bottom, white on top,

and streaked with dross. Up a set of rusted, rickety stairs

they clambered, to fall at last inside a dank, dusty chamber.

The space shuttle, he realized dimly as he fell to the

deck, wheezing. So Teresa hadn't any plan after all. Blind

instinct must have driven her as much as the others. Only in

her case the compulsion had been to seek out "her" spacecraft--a

totem of safety and her own sense of control.

"Come on, Alex." Sudden, sharp pain lanced his shoulder

as she kicked him. "Move it!" she shouted. "The thing

could pass through here any minute!"

That was true enough. So why hadn't they stayed outside,

where her acute senses might be helpful, rather than

hiding in this useless coffin?

He let her drag him to his feet, though, and stumbled

after her through the fetid airlock, tripping over the high

sill. She virtually threw him the last few meters into the

shuttle's dim, cavernous cargo bay, where he stumbled to

his knees under the glitter of two small spotlights. The

600 0 A V I D B R I N

beams converged in a pool of brilliance where he met his

own dumbfounded reflection, as if staring into a magic pool.

Alex blinked once. Twice. And then he understood.

It was a perfect sphere which glistened his own image

back at him, sweeping around into infinite concave vistas.

He cried an oath. He'd forgotten about the other resonator!

Alex looked down at his left hand, tightly gripping his

portable plaque. And he still wore the subvocal!

Maybe . . .

But no. "Damn!" he cried. "We haven't got power. The

idea's no damn goo--"

He cut short as the sphere's gimbals suddenly hummed,

rocked back and forth, and then steadied at a prim angle.

Microprocessors chuckled and clicked.

"What do you think I've been doing since you saddled

me with that great beast?" Teresa asked. Alex stared at her,

so she shrugged. "Well. It helped pass the time. Now, come

on! Here's a display unit I ripped off a while back. No holo,

just flat screens. But you can plug in there."

Alex knew his jaw gaped open. Shutting it, he could

only say--"I love you."

"Damn straight." She nodded quickly. "If you save our

lives we can talk about that. Now stop fucking off and get to

work!"

He turned around to face the archaic control unit, plugging

in and loading his control software, using the subvocal

to begin a startup sequence, sparing only a moment to shoot

one final look her way. "Bossy wench," he muttered affectionately.

She said nothing, but her eyes offered more confidence

in him than he'd ever had in all his life--so he decided he

had better try his best.

D

There are buildings that look like charnel houses--one out on

the open tundra, one in a desert, one undersea, and one

perched on an island bluff under the shadow of dark statues.

Within each chamber, towering cylinders still vibrate, rotating

within their delicate cages. Nearby, however, no living creature

stirs. The walls are streaked with blood.

Those who built the cylinders are gone, but power still flows

at the whim of electronic spirits. Computers process ornate pro-

EARTH 601

grams, casting forth bolts of energy, tickling wrath from tar below.

Each machine sings the new song it's been taught ... a

song of death. Death spirals outward from the target areas, hunting fatal resonances with bipedal beings that are so numerous,

they aren't hard to find in dozens, hundreds, thousands. . . .

This doesn't go on uncontested. Cautiously, brave soldiers

approach each site, though daunted by gruesome things they

see along the way. Over radio and Net they hear of like horrors

beginning to take place in cities far away.

Terrified but determined, the soldiers grimly attack--only to

be struck down by something unseen,-intangible, unstoppable.

Their nimble aircraft switch to autopilot, drifting slowly off course, no longer guided by anything remotely resembling men.

Frantic orders pour over secure channels calling for harsher

weapons to be readied. But those will take time to unseal and

prepare. Meanwhile, the circles of death expand . . .

"Daddy, thank God you came!"

L Claire was in his arms before Logan got fully out of

I the taxi. He squeezed his daughter tightly. "I'm here.

T Yeah. Hey, come on, sunshine. Don't cry."

H "I'm not . . . crying," she protested through snuf-

0 fles. But she didn't draw back until she'd wiped both

S eyes on his shoulder. When he finally got a chance to

P look at her, they were red but dry.

H It had been months since he'd last visited chez Me-

E Clennon, when summer's humid, scented air made for

R long, lazy evenings lit by lightning bugs. Now there was

E a bite of winter in the stiff gulf zephyr that whipped the

fringe of cypress trees. From Claire he sensed a quivering,

over-wrought tension.

He turned to pay the driver, but the man ignored

Logan's preferred credit card. He bent over, covering one ear,

listening intently to some news flash coming over his button

earpiece, then suddenly cried out in dismay, gunned his engine

and took off! Almost instinctively, Logan's hand

reached into his pocket for his own receiver.

But no, he had resigned from the struggles of the world.

While his family needed him, the universe could fend for

itself.

"What's all this about your mother locking herself into

her room?" Logan turned and asked his daughter.

602 D A V I D B R I N

The wind whipped Claire's reddish-brown hair. "It's

worse than that, Dad. She's electrified her whole wing of the

house."

"What?"

"She won't even answer the intercom, though I can tell

she's busy working in there--" Claire cut short as a yell of

pain echoed round the corner of the house.

"That's Tony," she explained, taking Logan's arm. "He

was going to try prying a window."

"Sounds like that worked great," Logan commented as

he was dragged along. "Be nice," she chided back. "Tony's

good. He's just never taken on Daisy before."

Logan came around the corner to see a lanky, black-

haired teenager holding one arm and sucking singed fingers.

On the ground a screwdriver still smoked around the extra

insulation that must have saved the boy from even worse

burns. "Hullo, Mr. Eng," Tony said.

"Hi, yourself," Logan answered, thinking, So he's never

taken Daisy on before' I've got news for both these kids.

Neither have I. Not really.

When you come right down to it, I'm not sure anybody

ever has.

D

Out in the real world they try to act against her. Military men take hammers to the peace seals on cruise missiles, desperately bypassing fail-safes, reprogramming the robots to seek sites never

named on contingency lists--to fly across widening swaths of

no-man's land and destroy other machines . . . machines now

casting storms of long-range death.

Trying to accomplish so many unprecedented things, naturally,

the men make mistakes. They seek targeting information

through the Net and so give away their intentions. Forewarned,

Daisy swings her deadly beams to slice through military outposts, clearing them of living crews, leaving the robot bombers

unmanned and unready.

Of course there are limits to such delaying tactics. Eventually,

surviving soldiers will manage to pick off the resonators one

by one. Despite the chaos in the Net, some bright hacker will

finally decipher the sinuous path of her commands, tracing all of this back to her. Given enough time.

But time is on her side now. With every passing minute,

EARTH 603

Daisy grows in power. Soon her creations will be self-sustaining, driven by currents in the Earth's own dynamo. They will be

whirling storms of death, as permanent as the weather--scythes

of mortality splined and tuned to reap a narrow and specific

harvest, humanity.

"Antibodies," she says, giving biological metaphors to her

creations. "I'm making antibodies against a parasite."

As fabled Nemesis once implacably hunted murderers, so

she pictures herself, seeking just vengeance for the slain manatee, reprisal for the long-dead moa, vindication for vanished condors.

"Every species needs natural controls, and humans have

lacked one far too long."

There is a proper order to things, she believes. The food-

chain is meant to be a pyramid, and every top predator should

be rare, its numbers few. Mankind reversed this time-tested arrangement by breeding out of all proportion, creating a teetering

edifice, doomed to fall.

"Ten thousand," she concludes. That would be a good figure.

That many humans might remain, out of ten billion, to make

a decent world population. This she counts as merciful, since the planet might be better off without the species altogether. But

after all, she is a mother. And vile as the race might be, she

cannot bring herself to wipe out every last human child.

"Ten thousand or so wandering hunter-gatherers. Maybe

even twenty. That's as many humans as this world ever

needed." Even wrath must be satiable, and so Daisy targets this

limit for herself. As the Net fills with rising cries of anguish, she murmurs reassurance that the panicked world cannot hear and

would not understand if it could.

"This is for your own good," she croons. "After all, what life

is it for you now, packed into those awful camps and cities,

inhaling each other's rank breath? Never knowing the serenity of

wildness that's your birthright?"

For the survivors, she promises health, clean skies, beauty,

and happiness. They will live vivid lives, and her reapers will

keep them company all their days and nights.

Oh yes, it will be a better world. And she will stop mercifully,

she vows, well before human numbers fall too low.

Mercy, of course, is a word subject to interpretation.

 Somewhere in the background Alex heard voices and

N thought other refugees must have come aboard. But that

8 couldn't be. By now he and Teresa must be the only

ones left alive on Easter Island, protected by the thin,

S passive field of his little resonator. It had to be some

P news channel then, frantically reporting this horrible

H new endeavor in extinction.

E In parts of Eurasia, the Americas, Africa, the effects

R were straightforwardno earthquakes, nothing hurled

E into space. Just death, simply death.

Death of human beings.

It's actually a rather simple combination, he pondered

as his device built a finely meshed picture of events on the

gravitational bands. He worked cautiously, so as not to be

detected by the enemy network. They're using parameters

that couple perfectly with human flesh, in pocket standing

waves shaped to match, tidally, the human figure. I never

even thought of that, though it's obvious enough from ear

lier data. The clues were there in all those effects Teresa

and others felt. It just took a certain mindset to see it.

Wave a beam like that around and you can kill mil

lions. It depletes interior fields so little, it's potentially

self-sustaining.

The first strikes had been surgical, precise, taking out

the world's centers of gravitational research ... all possi

ble points of opposition. That included Colonel Spivey's for

mer resonators, for instance, and the Russian and Japanese

and Han stations, too. Most of those were off-line now.

Some flickered on idle, with no one at the helm. And two or

three appeared even to have been hijacked, joining the origi

nal rebel cylinders in spewing beams of death.

It was too horrible to grasp, of course. If he let the full

meaning penetrate it would numb him to uselessness, and

Alex couldn't afford that right now.

He tried some tentative pulses to get the feel of the

sphere. It was touchy, delicate, like a wild beast. As it spun,

it gave off the queerest, brief half imagessubtly warped

reflections of the spotlights, the looming shuttle cargo bay,

his own face.

He hadn't any chance to get familiar with the resonator

since it was lifted, dripping, out of the nanogrowth tank

many days ago. Now he had to leap straight into the saddle,

without benefit of practice or simulation, from the

EARTH 605

gazerdynamic equivalent of a dray wagon straight to a rodeo

horse.

What he wanted to do was give the bastards a taste of

their own medicine. But without diagnostic backup, that

would take too long. Meanwhile, thousands were dying in

Tokyo and other places. Something had to be done about

that first.

"All right--" he said aloud.

The subvocal mistook his words as commands and sent

the sphere precessing in its housing. It took several seconds

of concentrated effort to settle it back down again. Jen used

to warn him about using the temperamental input device

when emotions were running high, but what choice did he

have?

All right, Alex thought with silent, iron discipline.

Here goes nothing.

D

She is slicing through Manaus--scouring the cities and towns of

the Amazon--when her familiars report yet another band of desperate military men trying to interfere again. Now a squadron of

them are streaking toward one of her resonators in screaming

hypersonic aircraft, attempting to overcome her guardian whirlwinds with sheer speed and agility, trying to lock their missiles

on target before she can respond.

Daisy obliges them in their courage to face death. Tracking

their telemetry, she fills their cockpits with blood and grue.

But two aircraft continue on course. Their pilots have succeeded

in setting their autopilots in time! She slips into military

channels using codes stolen long ago from supposedly secure

caches. By these routes she reads the appropriate control sequences--childishly simple--and uses them to take command

of the hurtling ships, overriding their literal-minded computers, sending them careening about on reverse courses, bound for

their points of origin.

Then it's back to work. There is so much housecleaning left

to do. She's barely begun her chores. In minutes she has

cleared the island of Sumatra, where the few remaining orangutans may now dwell in peace, undisturbed by terrible tall interlopers.

No more human hands will wield chain saws there. On to

Borneo! Her whirlwinds respond and sweep across the sea.

Strictly speaking, she doesn't know what she's doing. She

606 D A V I D B R I N

is no physicist, no geologist. The actual nature of the forces she is tapping matters as little to Daisy as the manufacturing details of a computer. All are technical fields that other experts studied, analyzed, and then reduced to beautifully simple, publicly accessible world-models.

Daisy knows all about models. She's stolen many choice

ones recently, from her now-extinct cousins, from her ex-husband's employers, from all those clever males who thought they

knew so much. She deals with the Earth's interior now through

such software intermediaries, as an enchantress might coerce

nature by commanding demons and sprites to do her bidding for

her. She treats the roiling, surging channels of superconductivity far below as she formerly did the highways and byways of the

Net, as yet another domain to rule by proxy, by subroutine, by

force of will.

In minutes a terrible storm of death has been unleashed

across Java. Now she directs her attention below again, gathering yet another bundle of energy to focus against that funny,

strange mirror some called a "singularity," Grafting yet another

death cyclone to unleash this time on an obscene so-called "civilization"

force-grown in a desert--Southern California.

But what's this? In a faraway quarter, Daisy senses a presence

where she'd thought all competition vanquished. Where

only the dead were supposed to reign!

At the briefest of commands, her familiars streak to check

out this effrontery . . .

Alex rocked back in dismay. For an instant the whirling

sphere had conveyed a sudden, vivid illusion of slitted lizards'

eyes'. Only by quickly switching channels, sending his

machine spinning along a new axis, did he make that looming

presence vanish from the glistening globe.

He breathed raggedly for a moment. AH right. Don't let

it shake you!

But it was impossible to escape the sense of loneliness.

Always, before, he'd had scores of skilled workers to help

him. True, they called him "wizard" and "tohunga. " But

press flacks and Nobel committees to the contrary, no scientist

with a grain of honesty ever claims he "did it all alone."

And yet, that's exactly what I've got to do now.

EARTH 607

With a shuddering sigh, Alex pictured the Earth's invo-

'mte Tri'lEiTOi, Tio'w 'iW'i'A 'w-rth v'awct'yiw^,'M.-ugiftrjsm., sl-ninpo and laced with man-modified channels of surging current.

Those currents had grown more finely filigreed every day

since his first, tentative scans so long ago, in search of Alpha

and then Beta. Now they were a jungle of connections

through which he must find a way to do battle.

No more delays. You'll have fust one chance to take

them by surprise.

And so, with desperate determination, he triggered his

best shot.

Again, for the briefest instant he thought he saw a glitter

of scales sweep across the spinning sphere, which were

chased off by a ripple of tawny orange and black. In an eye-

blink the apparitions were gone and the battle joined.

D

The explosion feels like an abrupt amputation. Suddenly, one of

her captive resonators vanishes from the Earth's surface, as if

an arm or leg had been sliced away, cauterized by actinic heat.

"Damn!" Daisy cries. "It's that meddler on the island

again."

She must put off for a little while her next project--scourging

the ancient hub where Asia and Africa and Europe meet,

where man first took up the cursed profession of farmer. This

new nuisance must take priority over even that too-long-delayed

correction.

She swings on-line those extra resonators seized after the

cleansing of Tokyo and Colorado Springs. This should take only

a few moments. . . .

Sweat nearly blinded Alex as the near miss swept past. For

an instant he'd felt as one might if Beta itself were nearby--

yanked by tides so strong the fluids in his head surged like

the Bay of Fundy. He shuddered to imagine what the surface

of Rapa Nui must look like now, outside the narrow, frail

zone of protection he'd erected. He hoped silently it was

large enough to include Teresa, elsewhere aboard tiny At-

lantis.

608 D A V I D B R I N

Then Alex was too busy even for hope. He parried another

blow, reflecting the beam directly back to its point of

origin. That had no effect of course--not on these bands. By

now he knew all those sites were being operated by remote

control.

Actually, this antihuman resonance is simple. Given a

little time, I could easily devise a counter . . .

Unfortunately, there was no time. Warding off increasingly

furious attacks took nearly everything he had, though

at one point he grabbed a spare instant to send forth another

remise, narrowly missing the Saharan site, knocking its resonator out of alignment before having to pull back and duck

a fresh four-way assault.

This can't go on, he thought. His new sphere was nimbler

than any other machine, and he could tell he was better

than his opponent--somehow it felt like a single opponent.

But the enemy could attack from many sides at once, while

sparing other resources to continue the horrible program of

mass murder.

D

TTpf's can't go on, she thinks. With a tiny corner of her attention, she sees on a house monitor that her ex-husband has arrived.

With Ciaire and a neighbor boy, he pounds on the front door,

calling for her. They look worried, but nowhere near as much as

if they knew the truth.

So. Let them stew. By standing where they are, they have

earned places among the ten thousand. Good. That's all the

courtesy she owes them. Anyway, Daisy has more immediate

concerns.

A bunch of clever soldiers has launched a kamikaze raid of

zeps and small planes toward the Colorado site, loaded with

explosives and meant to impact in great numbers. They hope to

achieve a knockout blow by sheer firepower.

Daisy is less worried about this pathetic attempt than about

the clever men and women on one of the space stations, who

are wrestling an experimental solar power beam away from its

designated target, reprogramming it to focus on the Saharan

cylinder.

Then there are the hackers ... a number of them now

suspect the Net itself is being used to control the death machines.

More dangerous than official authorities, the amateurs

EARTH 609

are worrisome indeed--the undisciplined ones, whose curiosity

and ski)), doom any secret to eventual discovery,.

She doesn't need long-range secrecy, though. Only an hour

or less. So she sends little surrogate voices to whisper to the

best of them, offering "helpful" rumors and other distractions.

"Keep them busy for a while," she orders her familiars.

The clever boy on Easter Island is stymied for a moment.

Daisy returns to Grafting another death angel, this one to send

toward Central America, where there are still a few forests left to save. Those stands of trees will serve as good seed stock for

ecological recovery, once the human population is gone.

There! Now it's time to turn back to her main enemy and

eliminate him finally, completely. Then the Earth's interior will be hers, and hers alone.

In the morass of demanding input, she must draw the line

somewhere. So Daisy ignores what is going on to her left--on

the movie-enhancement wall--where Hercules and Samson still

struggle with their bonds as she had left them doing so long ago.

She doesn't notice that the straining heroes have been joined by

an interloper. A great cat strolls onstage. Scarred and wounded,

but rumbling low with feral interest, it strokes against the movie heroes' legs, and then sits at their feet, watching her.

"I can't hold on!" Alex cried out, parrying blow after buffeting

blow. Knowing full well there was no one to offer any

aid, he prayed nonetheless. "Cod help me!"

Then, in a foxhole conversion--

"Mother . . . help us!"

It was an involuntary shout. But the subvocal made no

such fine distinctions. It amplified his words in focused gravitational waves, pouring reverberating echoes toward the

core of the world.

D

Small datums suffuse through and among all the excited energy

states, stimulating amplification. His words pluck vibrating

resonances along magnetic threads where liquid metal meets

pressure-strained, electrified rock. They spiral as throbbing tin-

tinations round and round dizzying moire connectivities, interlac-

610 D A V I D B R I N

ing with prior inputs--those insistent probings and palpations

which month after month had forced changes in ancient

rhythms, driving them faster, faster, ever faster.

Beta responds; its geometrodynamic foldings crimp and

flower through intricate topologies. New, angular reflections of

his words cascade from the singularity, diffusing into more directions than mere Euclidean equations can describe.

Complexity meshes with complexity. What had been done

to these realms for so long had wrought fine patternings, soft,

impressionable matrices ripe for newer, even more intricate templates, such as had been delivered only hours before in a fun-

neling from Africa. Patterns for a tentative model based on the

most complex thing ever to exist under the sun--

A human mind.

Tendrils pervade the meshed brilliance . . . channels of

flow connect it with the outer skin, where sunlight falls and entropy escapes into black space, and where creatures have already

laid down a thick, fertile webbery of data. Pulsing

gigabytes, terabytes, whistle as they slide up and down a multitude of scales. All the outer world's libraries, its storms of ferment and distraction, the noise of all its pain . . . these link up

in sudden coherence, into that single prayer.

". . . help ... us ..."

Two giant patternings . . . above, the Net; below, those

prominences of supercurrent, rising and falling in new order

1. these are now linked, intertwined. There is no dearth of

data, of mere information to pour into this new matrix, this new

singularity of metaphors. Each time a beam of tortured space

rips apart some screaming human up above, another testimony

joins the torrent. And yet, the thirst to absorb grows undimin-

ished.

Is there a theme? Any central focus to unite the whole?

"... help us ... somebody!"

Much of the information is incompatible, or so it seems at

first. Some declarative facts counter others. Priorities conflict.

Yet even that seems to elicit something like a thought . . . like a notion.

Competition . . . Cooperation . . .

Hints at a theme--something that might come out of such

writhing, whirling complexity, if only the right template were

found.

". . . help us ... Mother ..."

Crystallization, condensation . . . amidst all the driving,

EARTH 611

opposing forces, there must rise something to arbitrate. Some

convenient fiction.

Something to be aware and choose.

Two candidates emerge above all others . . . two contenders

for awareness. Two designs for a Mother. Upon a hundred

million computer displays and several billion holovision

sets all programming is preempted by a stunning vision--a

dragon and a tiger, facing off. All prior encounters have been

preliminary, allegorical. But now they roar and leap with the

power of software titans, driven by terawatt inductance, colliding in an explosive struggle to the death.

Million-amp currents thrash against each other, driving

channels for new volcanoes as mere side effects to the birthing

of a mind.

Alex screamed as sudden, unimaginable pain tore at his temples.

"Jen!" he cried, and then collapsed, arms cradling the

housing of a sphere whose song rose in pitch as it spun

faster, faster, faster . . .

D

Now she knows the truth--that the Net she has always thought a

grand domain is only a province, a tendril of something larger. A being. An entire world. All it lacks is a guiding consciousness to bring it order!

She had resigned herself that the Net would end with the

passing of Homo electronicus. Ten thousand hunter-gatherers

couldn't maintain anything so complex. She wouldn't want them

to.

But this new matrix will need no communications satellites,

no pipelines crammed with optical fibers, no microwave towers

or engineers to maintain them. Daisy wonders at the beauty she

foresees once her task of winnowing humanity has been completed.

There will be no limits to what she might accomplish

through this medium. Ancient gods could only have dreamt of

such power!

She'd rechannel aquifers and move rivers. She'd use sere

bursts of energy to break apart man's chemical poisons, fester-

612 D A V I D B R I N

ing in dumps and sewers. She'd shake down dams and dissolve

the empty cities, resurrecting the wasted topsoil hidden beneath

parking lots. Under her guidance the world will soon be as it was before being brought near ruin by humankind.

Logan and Claire have stopped their futile hammering on

the front door. Distractedly, she detects them via another monitor, clambering onto the roof in search of a way to reach her.

There they might find entry somehow--or worse, disturb the antennae through which the next few minutes' climactic struggle

will be fought. Daisy reaches for a switch that will send deadly

current surging through hidden wires.

But no. Her hand stops short. She knows her cautious husband.

He'll be judicious, polite, careful. In other words, he'll give

her plenty of time.

She checks her gravity resonators and sees they are doing

well. With the Easter Island foe apparently knocked off-line, there will be no threats to her machines for several hundred seconds

at least. By then it will be too late to interfere meaningfully with her accelerating cleansing of the continents. So far her death

angels have barely reaped millions, but that would speed up

with each new one she ripens and unleashes forth. . . .

A whirl of color yanks her attention to the left, and her eyes

widen in surprise at the sudden, silent battle depicted there--

between a dragon and a great cat! What's this doing on her

simulation wall? This came from no TwenCen movie! The rending,

tearing creatures bellow in mute, nostril-flared agony, amid

flying scales and smoking fur more vivid by far than any real

image.

Daisy suddenly recognizes the tiger motif of her worst enemy,

whom she had thought already dead. "Wolling!" she

gasps.

In an instant she knows the portent of this struggle. It isn't

just resonator against resonator anymore. The computational

power of all those nodes below, outnumbering the combined

circuits of all the Net--that was the ultimate prize, and someone else was after it! Whoever succeeded in establishing her program

first would have it all!

Furiously Daisy turns to unleash all her minions. All her

slave resonators swing" inward, concentrating their power.

EARTH 613

Teresa was reminded of an old riddle--

"The last man on Earth sits alone in a room. There is a

knock on the door ..."

At the unexpected sound, she dropped her tools and

ran to the hatch. There, peering through the little, round,

double-reinforced window, she gasped on seeing the familiar,

absurd mustachioed visage of Pedro Manella. Teresa

swore and yanked the hissing door release. "I thought you

were a ghost!" she cried as he stepped inside.

"I might be, had I not taken shelter under your wing, so

to speak. I only just gathered the nerve to try the stairs."

"Are there any others? I mean--"

Pedro shook his head with a shiver. "It's too horrible

for words." He looked around. "Is Lustig here? I assume so,

since you and I are still alive."

"He's in back, fighting whatever it is. If only there were

some way to help him--"

She cut short as the ship suddenly moaned around

them. The deck rocked left, throwing her against Manella.

Then Atlantis swayed the other way.

"Quakes!" Pedro cried. "I thought we'd finished with

such simple-minded stuff."

His wit wasn't welcome. Teresa pushed him away and

moved with a wide, catlike stance across the rocking deck.

"Cot to check on Alex. He could be . . ." Then she

stopped, blinking. "Oh, no."

The colors. They were back with a vengeance.

Teresa screamed over her shoulder at Manella. "Find a

place to tie yourself down!" As the shaking grew in intensity,

she fought her way through the airlock to find Alex

slumped over at the resonator. She barely had time to strap

him down before all hell broke loose.

D

Not far below Rapa Nui lay a hot, slender needle--an ancient,

narrow plume of magma--part of the mantle's grand recircula-

tion system. This very needle had made the island many millennia

ago, piercing through a scrap of crustal plate to erect this

lonely outpost in the sea. For quite some time since then, however, it had lain quiescent.

Now the boil is squeezed by sudden, transient, titanic

614 D A V I D B R I N

forces, pinching molten rock up the confined funnel at awesome

pressures, driving it toward those old calderas.

And yet, even at the same moment, something else flies

through the same space, traveling just ahead of that explosive

constriction . . . something less coercive, subtler, whose fingers of laced gravity unfold like an opening hand.

Instinct took over amid the dazzle and roaring noise. Somehow

she made it up the quivering ladder to the command

deck, where she launched herself into the pilot's seat and

began flicking switches by pure rote. "Oh shit!" she cried,

hearing the fateful prang of metal bolts popping free under

strain. The ancient shuttle's fractured spine complained

with a horrible shriek as Teresa felt a sudden surge of acceleration--the seat-of-the-pants sensation of being airborne.

It can't be! This ship can't fly . . . this ship can't fly

1. this ship can't fly . . .

The wings couldn't bear launch loads. She'd seen X

rays of the shuttle's broken back--the reason Atlantis had

been abandoned on a forlorn island in the first place.

An island that no longer existed, from what little she

could see as she strained to turn her head. Atlantis rose atop

a pillar of flame, but there was no rocket. Instead she hurtled

just ahead of a towering volcanic plume, reawakened

and roaring where only moments ago a tiny Polynesian islet

had quietly defied the waves.

Grimacing from g-forces, Teresa nevertheless gripped

the cockpit control sticks and felt a strange joy. Perhaps, in

some corner of her mind, she had suspected all along it

would come to this. Suddenly she feared nothing. After all,

wasn't this the best of all possible ways to go? Flying? In

command of a sweet old bird that should never have been

left corroding on a pedestal, but should only die in space?

Even the visceral sensations were grand. She felt as she

had as a little girl, when her father used to throw her into

the air, and she had known, with utter certainty, he would

be there to catch her-. Always there to sweep her out of

harm's way.

Out of harm's way--

The words seemed to resonate inside her. And as she

EARTH 615

blinked, tears of happiness washed away those splashy colors,

which thinned and merged and finally spread aside to

resolve a black cosmos, overlain by a soft blanket of unwinking

stars.

Teresa sobbed in sudden realization. It felt exactly as if

gentle arms were carrying Atlantis home again. The instruments

she had carefully restored now chuckled and

hummed around her, glowing green and amber. She looked

out through a windshield that had been cleansed by fire and

saw the moon rise over Earth's soft, curving limb.

a

In order to get rid of her foe's chief pivot, Daisy has temporarily forsaken her selective, "antibody" approach, using cruder,

more decisive force. In seconds, the island is no more.

Ah, well. There hadn't been much of a natural ecosystem

left there anyway. Small sacrifice.

More important though, now the Wolling witch has no anchor!

Her surprisingly powerful programs--so formidably represented

by the tiger icon--might be a match for Daisy's down

below. But they can't accomplish much without a link to the

surface world, to the net. And now that has been cut!

"Very impressive, Wolling," Daisy murmurs in satisfaction.

"You surprised me. But now it's good-bye."

Sure enough, the holo shows her dragon in advance now,

forcing backward a strained, disheveled cat, which yowls defiance.

At the bottom of the old Kuwenezi gold mine, Jimmy

Suarez knew he was a privileged observer. Not only could he

watch the battle of two metaphors, which dominated every

major holo channel, but he could also use the instruments

of this abandoned facility to follow something of the real

struggle, down below.

For instance, he saw the exact moment when four resonators

fired all at once to blow Rapa Nui completely out of

the South Pacific. Another force seemed to precede that

driving gazer beam by mere moments, but it might have

been just a shadow, cast ahead of the decisive bolt.

616 D A V I D B R I N

From that instant, in fact, the tide began to turn. More

and more filaments and finely meshed channels seemed to

come under control of the force he now recognized as the

enemy. The turn of events was horrifying to watch.

It would probably be wiser not to. Just sitting here was

risky. Although Kenda's thumper lay inactive now, only a

few meters away, even using it on passive detector mode was

taking an awful chance. What if the horror--whoever it was

--picked up the machine's faint echo? The fate of Easter

Island could be his, any time.

Was it curiosity, then, that kept him here instead of

smashing the cylinder and fleeing? Or had it been the old

lady's last request ... to leave it turned on till she died?

Well, she's been dead some time, he thought. The body lay

under a tarp behind him as he'd found it, twisted and disfigured, still connected to her console. / don't owe her anything

now. I should take a hammer to the thumper

and . . .

And what? The surface world was certainly no safe

place. Kenda and the others might be dead even now, if this

part of Southern Africa had already been targeted for culling.

Unlikely, since teeming cities and military bases seemed

to be the principal victims so far. Still, it was only a matter

of time.

Stay down here, then? If I wreck the machines, the

death angels might miss me altogether. It was a depressing

thought, though. Oh, there was food enough for months.

Other isolated snippets of humanity might be as "lucky,"

holding out in nooks and crannies for some time after the

dragon won. But at this point, Jimmy wondered if he should

have taken his chances with Kenda and the others after all.

So mired was he in self-pity, it took some moments to

harken to a new sound, a gentle humming that added layers

as machines throughout the abandoned hall began coming

to life. He looked up, staring blankly as the towering crystal

resonator swiveled in its bearings, giving off a rising tone.

"What the hell?" he asked, standing up. Then, in full, terrified

realization, "No'J'

He ran to the master control station where the main

cutoff switch lay. But as he reached for it, a voice quietly

said to him,

EARTH 617

"PLEASE, )IMMY. STAY BACK AND LET ME WORK. THERE'S A

GOOD LAD."

What really made him halt, however, was the brief, almost

tachistoscopic image of a face that flashed before him and

then was gone again.

"But I thought you were dead!" he whispered hoarsely.

Then, when there was no answer to that, he blurted, "Let

me help, at least!"

As the dormant machines warmed up around him, that

momentary visage returned, and he knew this both was and

was not the woman whose former body lay covered just a

few meters away.

"ALL RIGHT, CHILD. 1 KNEW I COULD COUNT ON YOU."

In real life they had exchanged maybe a hundred words,

total. And yet, right then Jimmy didn't even wonder why

her approval filled him so with joy. All he did was leap to

his old work station. Rushing through all the diagnostic

checks, he fine-tuned the tool she needed--her link between

the worlds above and below.

Soon the humming reached a steady pitch. Then, with

a twang of tidal force, it fired.

D

In meeting houses and churches, in the meditation glades of the

NorA ChuGas, under the sloping hand-carved roofs of the Society

of Hine-marama, from cathedrals and countless homes,

prayers peal forth.

"Help us, Mother."

On the Net, there remain islands of cynicism. Sides are

taken, even bets laid down. Dragon over tiger, odds of ten to

one.

For the most part, however, humanity's surviving masses

just hold each other close, watching their holos fearfully as the now one-sided battle surges on. Meanwhile, they glance to the

horizon, toward any strange glimmer or ripple in the air, anxiously awaiting the first agonized scream or any other announcement

that death's own reapers have arrived.

Another blow hammers North America.

618 D A V I D B R I N

How much more? People ask the skies. How much more

can our poor world take?

"Daddy!" Claire cried as tremors shook the house. Her feet

slipped out from under her and she slid along the roof tiles.

Logan barely managed to hold on himself, by grabbing one

of Daisy's many antennas as the temblor made trees and

canefields sway. Horrified, he saw his daughter slip toward

the edge.

In a blur the boy, Tony, launched himself face-first,

arms and legs splayed for friction. His slide halted short of

the brink, just in time to seize Claire's wrist and help her

hold onto a groaning rain spout.

The quake continued for what seemed forever--the

worst in Logan's memory--until at last subsiding to the staccato

rhythm of debris hitting the concrete walk below. Fortunately,

those crunching sounds didn't involve Claire.

Somehow, she and Tony held on. "I'm coming!" Logan

cried.

D

"You're back?" Daisy clutches the arms of her chair as her

citadel rocks from side to side.

Fortunately, this place was built well, and there's a limit to

what her enemy can accomplish with just one device, even operated by surprise.

She deciphers this desperate gambit, to strike at her here,

in her very home. "Not bad, Wolling. I'm impressed. After you're

extinct, I'll see to it the tribes sing about this battle round their camp fires. You and I will be their legends.

"Only I'll still be around. The goddess that won."

She prepares commands to transmit to her massed resonators.

This will be the final act.

Logan had to find a way to help the kids. So on impulse, he

grabbed one of the antenna cables, yanked it free of its

staples, and used the loop to lower himself toward the

EARTH 619

straining teenagers. At last he could reach out and grab

Tony's ankle. "I've got you," he grunted. "See if you can--"

He didn't have to give detailed instructions. Anyway,

Claire was a better mountaineer than he'd ever been. She

swung one leg over the gutter and clambered up their makeshift

human ladder, passing first over her boyfriend, then

her father. From the peak she turned and grabbed Logan's

leg. Then it was Tony's turn to writhe about and climb.

The last staple holding the cable popped just as the boy

reached the flat part of the roof. Staring at the loose end,

whipping in his hand like an electrified snake, Logan felt

himself start to slide . . . and was stopped at the last second

as the kids grabbed him. Soon they were all leaning on

one of the dish antennas, panting.

"What the hell was that?" Tony asked. Clearly he

meant the quake. But his use of the past tense was premature.

Again, without warning, the shaking returned--with a

shuddering, infrasonic intensity that made them cover their

ears in pain. This time at least, they managed to stay on the

pitching roof.

When it finally ended, Claire looked at her father, sharing

his thought. This had been no ordinary temblor. "We've

got to get to Mother, fast!"

They recklessly took the obstacle course of electronic

gear and solar panels. At one point Logan glanced northward

toward the line of backup levees which the Corps of Engineers

had erected long ago, to reassure a trusting public that

all eventualities were predictable and controllable, and

would be forever, amen. In the distance, a new sound could

be heard, not as deep or grating as the quakes, but just as

frightening. It felt like vast herds of wild beasts on the rampage.

That was when Logan knew with utter certainty the

corps had been wrong . . . that all things must come to an

end. The concrete prison, forged by man to control a mighty

river, had finally cracked. And a crack was all the prisoner

needed.

The father of waters was free at last.

Long delayed, the Mississippi was coming to Atchafa-

laya.

620 D A V I D B R I N

D

At a critical instant, several of her channels go suddenly dead,

spoiling her aim. Daisy curses as her overpowering counterattack

misses Southern Africa, vaporizing instead a corner chunk

of Madagascar.

This is taking too long, distracting her from the important

work of culling and from consolidating her programs in the vast

new network below. These inconveniences are irritating, but

there are fallbacks, and she retains far greater powers than her

foe. She prepares these even as the house rides out another

swaying tremor.

Claire cursed, straining on the attic hatch. "I can't budge

it!" Tony and Logan helped, heaving with all their might.

Daisy had used good contractors to build her citadel. Logan

ought to know, having referred her to the best. If only he'd

known . . .

They pounded on the latch. He yanked a heavy chunk

of antenna from its mooring to use as a pry bar. Between

heaves, blinking away sweat as his heart pounded from the

effort, he glanced up to see suddenly that there was no more

time left at all. A muddy brown wall hurtled across the cane

fields with awesome, complacent power, tossing trees and

buildings aside like kindling.

Logan grabbed the kids and threw them down. Wrapping

loops of cabling around them, he cried, "Hold on for

your lives!"

D

Telltale alarms blare of phone lines disrupted and microwave

towers toppled--all the local infrastructure she depends on to

control her far-flung resonators collapsing in a shambles. And as the data-links snuff out in succession, her dragon staggers like a beast suddenly hamstrung, bellowing in agony. Daisy stares as

the other software metaphor--the tiger--leaps atop the crumpling

fire lizard to deliver a decisive blow. The cat rears back in

triumph as its opponent begins evaporating in smoke.

"You win, bitch," Daisy mutters. "But you better take care

of the place or I'll come back from hell to haunt you."

One wall caves inward as a liquid locomotive shatters every

barrier to interruption. Water shorts out the expensive electronics in crackling explosions of sparks and spray. But in that final

instant, what Daisy realizes wifri surpri^hg^miT^brji.^hft'^o,

she never really had been qualified for the job she'd sought.

/ never really wanted to be a mofhe--

Meanwhile, a quarter of the way around the Earth's quivering

arc, a small party of refugees finished crossing a final

stretch of lichen-covered tundra to reach the sea's edge.

There they stopped, clutching each others' hands in fear at

what they saw.

In the distance, smoke rose from a burning town and

horrible, twisted forms showed that this was one of the

places they had heard about--where so-called death angels

had emerged from the ground to wreak terrible judgment on

humanity. So their exodus from volcanic disaster had only

brought them to face something even worse.

It had been an eerie journey, fleeing upwind on foot

across the ancient moraine of Greenland, with magma heat

at their backs, bereft of every crutch or comfort of civilized

society save one--the portable receiver that let them listen

to the world's agony in stereophonic sound and real time. So

it was that Stan Coldman and the others recognized what

confronted them as they slumped together in sooty exhaustion,

watching a shimmering fold in space migrate toward

them, apparently sensing new victims to reap.

Strangely, Stan felt calm as the thing moved placidly

their way. Instead of staring at it like some transfixed bird

hypnotized by a snake, he purposely turned away to take

one last look out across the bay, where fleet white forms

could be seen nearby, streaking underwater then rising

briefly to exhale jets of spray.

Beluga whales, he thought, recognizing the sleek

shapes. They were cetaceans with smiles even more winning

than their dolphin cousins'. To him they suddenly seemed

symbols of primordial innocence, untainted by all the

622 D A V I D B R I N

crimes committed by Adam and Adam's get since man's fall from grace.

It was good to know the creatures were immune to the

approaching horror. That much was clear from the muddled

jabber coming over the Net. Except for chimpanzees and a

few other species, most animals were left untouched.

Good, Stan thought. Someone else deserved a second

chance.

But humankind had already used up number two. After

all. hadn't God already let us of if once before with a warning?

Remember Noah? Stan smiled as he saw the perfect

irony. For there, stretching across the western horizon, was a

rainbow--the Almighty's sign to humankind after the

Flood. His promise never again to end the world by drowning.

We might go by fire of course, or famine, or by our own

stupidity. Not much of a promise, actually, when you get

right down to it. But when dealing with wrathful deities I

suppose you take what you can get.

And as promises go, it is an awfully pretty one.

One of the women squeezed his hand fiercely, and Stan

knew it was time to face the terrible, vengeful spirit he'd

unwittingly helped create. So he turned. It was near, approaching too quickly to flee.

Oh, they could scatter. Delay it a bit. But somehow it

seemed better to confront the deadly thing here, now, together.

They all gathered close, holding each other. Hakol

havel. Stan thought. All is vanity. At the end of all struggles,

there comes a time to let go and accept.

And so, with a certain serenity, he faced death's angel.

Though Stan knew it had to be an illusion, the lethal

space-folding actually seemed to slow as it neared. Was it

capable of savoring cornered prey, then? He wondered about

the strange sensation he was feeling while watching it waver

and then come to a stop. It was an odd sort of empathic

communion that conveyed . . . confusion? uncertainty?

The deadly thing hovered only meters from the humans.

They already felt the draw of its ferocious, devouring

tides.

What's happening? Stan wondered. Why doesn 'the it get

on with it?

The terrible refraction jigged toward them, hesitated,

EARTH 623

drew back a little. Then it shivered, as if letting out a sigh--

or shaking off a dream.

That was when Stan heard the words.

NEVER AGAIN ....

His head rocked back. Several of the others fell to their

knees. The voice reverberated within them, gently. Not

apologetically, but with a soothing kindness.

I PROMISE, CHILDREN. NEVER AGAIN.

To their amazement, the shimmering shape changed before

their eyes. Squinting, Stan saw a shift in its topology,

like an origami monster folding away its claws, retracting

and transforming its cutting scythe and then dimpling outward

in a myriad of multihued, translucent petals.

Stan inhaled a sudden fragrance. The aroma was heady,

all-pervading, full of hope and promise. It lingered in the air

even as the transformed angel seemed to bow in benediction.

Then it drifted off across suddenly serene waters.

Together, he and the others watched as it greeted the

joyful, splashing whales and passed on. Even after it disappeared beyond the far headlands, they all knew somehow it

would be back . . . that it would be with them always.

And in its presence, they would never again know fear.

PART XI

PLANET

In a large enough universe,

even unlikely things can happen.

As unlikely as a tiny ball of star-soot

taking, upon itself, one day,

to say aloud,

to one and all,

"I am."

626 D A V I D B R I N

D Hello. Hello? This circuit appears to be working. The top sub

and reference hyper levels seem okay, though there's no

twodee or holo yet. Looks like it'll have to be crude voice and

text for a while . . .

I'm going to take a chance, since a lot of other groups seem

to be reactivating too. Well, here goes--

Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group

I D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546] . . .

This is SIG vice-chair Beatrice ter Huygens. In response to

the U.N. plea for help in restoring order, we invite all members

who haven't other responsibilities to log in and . . .

And what? This SIG doesn't exactly specialize in disaster

relief. Our members are best at speculation and creating what-

ifs. So I thought we might start by sieve-searching through our

huge library of "solutions" scenarios. In the past these often

seemed like pie-in-the-sky or doom-and-gloom self-diddles, but

now some may even prove useful in this new world.

In particular might we come up with an explanation for what

has happened to the Net? Amid all the death and destruction,

changes have been taking place minute by minute. Nobody in

government can seem to grok it, but maybe someone in our

group can come up with a notion outlandish enough to be true.

But first, though I dread the bad news, I guess a head count

is in order. On my mark, please send your acknowledgment

chops to nexus 486 in our administrative . . .

Just a nano. Ah! Hole's coming back! Good pigment, too.

Maybe we'll be able to use spread-spec access after all.

Now back to that head count . . .

From the topmost tier of the life ark, Nelson watchei

B Earth turn slowly against the Milky Way. It was th

I only splash of real color in a drab cosmos, and at thi

0 distance one might never imagine what chaos had jus

S reigned on that peaceful-looking globe. Even the cont

P nent-long palls cast by still-smoldering volcano^

H weren't visible to the naked eye from here--though sc

E entists were already predicting a rough winter ahead,

R Until recently, Nelson had been too busy just kee]

E ing himself and the majority of his charges alive. No-v

though, as the ark settled gradually toward a dusty, gra'

brown plain, he could at last spare a moment to look up i

wonder at the ocean-planet, swathed on its sunlit side wit

streamers of cottony clouds. Leftward, on its night side, cil

lights testified to humanity's narrow escape--though gapir

dark patches also showed what a terrible price had been pa

in mankind's final war.

That conflict was over now . . . guaranteed with mo

certainty than any peace treaty ever signed. All across tl

world, men and women still argued over what insured thi

But few doubted any longer that a presence had made itse

known, and from now on nothing would be the same.

"Ark four, we're at three kilometers altitude. Descent under cc

trol with five minutes to landfall. Confirm readiness please."

Nelson turned away from the blue-green world ar

sought northward across the starscape. There it was, tl

shuttle, hovering over the mountains rimming Ma

Crisium. It was a battered-looking hulk, like something 1

jacked out of a neglected museum. And yet it flew mo

powerfully, with more assurance, than anything else mai

before by human hands.'He lifted his belt-phone. "Ye:

1. uh, I mean, roger, Atlantis. I guess we're as ready

ever."

He lowered the phone, thinking, Sure. But fust he

ready can you be when you 'we been volunteered as the fil

permanent residents of another world7

He felt a tug at his pants leg. Shig, the little baboo

squeaked and demanded to be picked up. Nelson grinne

"So? You were all over the place when we were weightle:

But now a little gravity makes you lazy again?"

Shig clambered from his arm onto his shoulder, perc

ing there to look across their new home, one even drier ai

emptier than the savannas of Africa, to be sure, but the

628 D A V I D B R I N

nonetheless, for better or worse. From the railing nearby,

Shig's mother glanced at Nelson in unspoken question. He

shrugged. "I don't know where the nearest water hole is,

Nell. They say they'll send some ice our way in a while,

along with the first bunch of people. Don't ask me how

they'll manage it, but we'll be fine till then. Don't worry."

Nell's expression seemed to say, "Who's worried?" Indeed,

after what they'd been through together, they

couldn't be faulted for a little team cockiness.

Uprooted from the soil of Africa and hurled into high

orbit, Kuwenezi's experimental ark four went through

hours, days, during which disaster kept missing them by

seconds. For instance, if certain circuits had failed during

those first critical instants, Nelson wouldn't have been able

to order most of the hurtling pyramid sealed against hard

vacuum. Nor could he have shifted fluids from one vast

storage tank to another, gradually damping out the unwilling

satellite's awkward tumble.

As it was, fully a third of the biosphere's life habitats

were dead--their occupants having asphyxiated or been

crushed against adamant glass-crystal barriers, or simply having

succumbed to drastically altered circumstances.

He'd never have managed saving the rest without Shig

and Nell, whose nimble grace in free fall made them invaluable

at fetching floating tools or herding panicking creatures

into makeshift stalls where they could be lashed down and

sedated. Even so, the job had seemed utterly hopeless--a

futile staving off of the inevitable--until that weird moment

when Nelson felt something like a tap on his shoulder.

Whirling about in shock and exhaustion, he had turned

to find no one there. And yet, that hallucinatory interruption

had been enough to draw him back from a tunnel-torpor

of drudgery ... far enough to let him notice that his

belt-phone was ringing.

"H-hello?" he had asked, unable to believe anyone

knew or cared about his plight, cast from the Earth, bound

for oblivion aboard a glass and steel Flying Dutchman.

There had been a long pause filled with static. Then a

voice had said, "nelson . . ."

"Uh . . . yeah?'J

"I WANTED YOU TO KNOW----HELP IS COMING. I HAVEN'T FORGOTTEN

YOU."

He remembered blinking in amazement.

EARTH 629

"D-Dr. Wolling? Jen?"

He couldn't be sure in retrospect. The voice had seemed

different in countless ways. Distant. Preoccupied. And yet,

somehow it had made the hours of hectic labor that followed

more bearable just knowing he hadn't been overlooked--that

someone knew he and the animals were out

here, and cared.

So it wasn't with total surprise when--after lashing the

last beast down, after sealing the last whistling crack, after

adjusting gas and aeration balances in the complex panels

that recycled the ark's basic stuff of life--he suddenly heard

the phone ring again, and lifted his eyes to see a stubby

white and black arrow homing in on this derelict little

worldlet.

Nelson's knowledge of physics was too slender to truly

appreciate what it meant when Atlantis's pilot promised to

provide gravity again to the ark's weary inhabitants. He only

felt gratitude as the shuttle's crew somehow delivered, recreating up and down via some magic they generated at long

range. Then they began hauling the drifting tower toward a

promised new home.

En route, he finally had time to listen to condensed

summaries of what had been going on, back on Earth. It was

all too complex and bizarre to comprehend at first, in his

dazed state. But later, as he took advantage of his first real

chance at sleep, partial realization came to him in his

dreams.

At one point he saw a dismembered snake writhe and

bring together its many parts. He heard a hundred braying

instruments settle down under a conductor's baton to create

symphonies where there had been mere noise.

E pluribus unum ... a voice murmured. Many can

make up a whole . . .

Now, as the time of landing approached, Nelson wondered

if anyone on Earth had a better understanding of what

had happened than he did.

They're all so busy arguing about it, discussing the

change and what it means--

Gaians claim it's their Earth Mother . . . that she's

been shaken awake at last, to step in and save foolish mankind

and all her other creatures.

Others say no, it's the Net . . . the whole store of

human knowledge that poured into all those unexpected

630 D A V I D B R I N

new circuits deep inside the Earth. All that virgin computational power, suddenly multiplied, only naturally had to

lead to some sort of self-awareness.

There was no end to theories. Nelson heard Jungians

proclaiming a race consciousness had manifested itself during

the crisis, one that had been there, waiting, all along.

Meanwhile, Christians and Jews and Muslims made noises

much like the Gaians'--only they seemed to hear the low

voice of a "father" when they tuned in on those special

channels that now carried new, awesome melodies. To

them, recent miracles were only what had been promised all along, in prophecy.

Nelson shook his head. None of them seemed to understand

that they--their very arguments and discussions--

were helping define the thing itself. Yes, a greater level of

mind had been born, but not as something separate, or even

above them. All the little noisy, argumentative, even contradictory voices across the planet--these were parts of the new

entity, just as a human being consists naturally of many

disputing "selves."

Nelson recalled his last conversation with his teacher,

when the topic had swung to her latest project--her bold

new model of consciousness. A model that, he knew somehow,

must have played some key role in the recent coalescence.

"The problem with a top-down view of mind is this, Nelson," she

had said. "If the self at the top must rule like a tyrant, commanding all the other little subselves like some queen termite, then the inevitable result will be something like a termite colony. Oh, it might be

powerful, impressive. But it will also be stiff. Oversimplified. Insane.

"Look at all the happiest, sanest people you've known, Nelson.

Really listen to them. I bet you'll find they don't fear a little inconsis tency or uncertainty now and then. Oh, they try always to be true to their core beliefs, to achieve their goals and keep their promises. Still, they also avoid too much rigidity, forgiving the occasional contradiction and unexpected thought. They are content to be many."

Remembering her words made Nelson smile. He turned

again to stare at Earth, the oasis everyone now spoke of as a

single living thing. It hardly mattered whether that was a

new fact, or one as old as life itself. Let the NorA ChuCas

preach that Caia had always been there, aware and patient.

Let others point out that it had taken human technology

and intervention to bring violent birth to an active planetary

EARTH 631

mind. Each extreme view was completely correct in its way,

and sad} was ^ust as c.om'plei.d.Y wionj^,

That was as it should be.

Competition and cooperation . . . yin and yang . . .

Each of us participatin' in the debate is like one of the

thoughts that bubble and fizz in my own head--whether

I'm concentrating on a problem or daydreaming at a cloud.

Does one particular thought worry about its "lost independence"

if it realizes it's part of something larger?

Well, some prob 'ly do, I guess. Others aren 'the bothered

at all. So it '11 be with us, too.

Nelson replayed his last musings to himself, and silently

laughed. Listen to you! Jen was right. You're a born

philosopher. In other words, full of shit.

But then he had an answer to that, too. We may be

mere thoughts, each of us a fragment. But that don't mean

some thoughts aren't important! Thoughts could be the

only things that never die.

From below decks a lowing wafted through the air

grilles. Sedatives were wearing off and some of the

wildebeests were waking up. Perhaps they sensed imminent

arrival. Soon Nelson would have his hands full tending this,

the first sapling cast forth by the mother world ... the

first of a myriad that might stream outward if the new gravity

technologies proved workable. And if Earth's nations

agreed to the bold enterprise.

And if the new Presence let it be so.

Anyway, until the promised help came, he'd be too

busy for philosophy . . . either for Gala's sake or for his

own. Westward, the lunar mountains loomed higher and

higher. The plains rose rapidly. And not too far below, he

now saw the shadow of the ark. That dark patch coalesced

and then spread across the gaping foundation awaiting it--

freshly carved and vitrified within the ancient regolith by

more magic from Atlantis.

Nelson put his arms around Shig and Nell during the

final descent, which ended in a grating bump so gentle it was

almost anticlimactic. The small, fluttering variations in gravity disappeared, and the moon's light but firm grasp settled

over them for good.

"Hello, ark four," the voice of the woman pilot said.

"Come in, ark. This is Atlantis. Is everything okay over there?"

Nelson lifted his belt phone.

632 DAVIDBRIN

"Hello, Atlantis. Everything's just fine. Welcome to our

world."

D Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group I D SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546]

1. found an old TwenCen novel in which something like our

present-day Net got taken over by software "gods and demons"

based on some Caribbean sect. If that's what happened, we're

all in deep trouble. But what we're seeing doesn't seem to be

anything like--

How can I tell? Yeah, I know it's hard getting any sort of

explicit answer from the Presence, whatever it is. But I'm sure all right. Call it a feeling.

Oh, yes, I agree with that! We are in for interesting

times . . .

The contradiction was almost too absurd. Atlantis was

E the most capable ship in history. Atlantis was also a

X creaking wreck, threatening to fall apart at any moment.

0 The air recyclers kept leaking. The carbon dioxide

S scrubbers had to be kicked every ten minutes or so to

P unclog them. The toilet was so awful they'd taken to

H using plastic bags, tying them off and storing them un-

E der webbing at the back of the cargo bay.

R At least the water coming out of her slapped-to-

E gether fuel cells was pure. But for food they had only

some bruised fruits provided by that lonely caretaker-ecolo-

gist--his way of saying thanks for rescuing his marooned ark

and depositing it safely on the moon. The oranges were tart,

but an improvement over what they'd survived on during

the first few days in space--a single box of stale crackers and

five suspicious candies found in Pedro Manella's jacket

pocket.

Now, at last, their travails seemed about to end. Teresa

peered through the sighting periscope at the winking lights

outlining the European space station just ahead. "Bearing six

zero degrees azimuth," she said into her chin mike. "Vector

angle seventeen degrees, relative. Speed point eight four--"

EARTH 633

"Okay, I've got it, Rip," Alex's voice crackled from the

makeshift intercom. "Hang on, we're heading in."

It was hard getting used to this new mode of space

travel. Using the puff-puff rockets of old, you had to calculate

each rendezvous burn with a kind of skewed logic. To

catch up with an object in orbit ahead of you, first you had

to decelerate, which dropped you in altitude, which sped

you up until you passed below your objective. Then you'd

fire an acceleration burn to rise again, which slowed you

down . . .

It was an art few would have much use for in the future.

No more delicate, penny-pinching negotiation with

Newton's laws. All Teresa had to do now was tell Alex

where to look and what to look for, and he took it from

there. His magic sphere transmitted requests deep into the

Earth, which elicited precise, powerful waves of gravity to

propel them along. It made space travel almost as simple as

pointing and saying, "Take me there!"

That was what made this the greatest spaceship ever,

able to fly rings around anything else. And so it would remain

for the next ten minutes or so, until they docked.

Then arrangements would be made to transfer Alex and his

gear to a modern craft, and poor old Atlantis would become

another museum piece in orbit.

That's all right, baby. She thought, patting the

scratched, peeling console. Better this way, after one last

wild ride, than sitting down there letting sea gulls crap all

over you.

Now and then she still closed her eyes, remembering

that hurtling launch--climbing just ahead of a pillar of volcanic flame as they were scooped into the sky by something

greater than any rocket. Perhaps Jason had found it even

more vivid and exalting as he bolted toward the stars. She

hoped so. It felt fitting to think of him that way as she was

finally able to say adieu.

Anyway, there were busy times ahead. After spending

the better part of a week in hurried rescue missions, helping

clean up the mess left in orbit by the war, she and Alex were

about to take leading roles in the new international space

plan. With Lustig-style resonators about to be mass produced,

soon even skyscrapers and ocean liners might take to

the sky. Within a year, there could be thousands living and

working out here and on the moon. At least that seemed to

634 D A V I D B R I N

be the general idea, though people still scratched their heads

over how this had been agreed to so quickly.

In spite of having been close to the center of great

events, Teresa admitted being as confused as anyone about

what--or who--was in charge now. The "presence" that

had been born out of recent chaos wasn't wielding a heavy

hand, which made it hard to really pin down or define.

Was it an independent entity with its own agenda to

impose on subordinate humanity? Or should it be looked on

as little more than a new layer of consensus overlaying human

affairs, a personification of some global Zeitgeist2 ]ust

one more step in a progression of such worldview revolutions--so-called renaissances--when the process of thinking

itself changed.

Philosophers typed earnest queries into the special

channels where the Presence seemed most intense. But even

when there was a reply, it often came back as another question.

"WHAT AM I? YOU TELL ME ... I'M OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS ..."

That attitude, plus an impression of incredible, overpowering

patience, sent some mystics and theologians into frenzies

of hair pulling. But to the rest of humanity it brought

something like relief. For the foreseeable future, most decisions would be left to familiar institutions--the governments

and international bodies and private organizations

that existed before everything went spinning off to hell and

back again. Only in matters of basic priority had the Law

been laid down, in tones that left no doubt in anybody's

mind.

Gravity resonators, for instance; they could be constructed

by anyone who had the means--but not all "requests"

made through them would be granted. Earth's

interior was no longer vulnerable to intrusion. The new,

delicate webbery of superconducting circuits and "neuronal

pathways" that now interlaced smoothly with humanity's

electronic Net had made itself impervious to further meddling.

It also became clear why the nations were expected to

commence major space enterprises. Henceforth, the raw materials

for industrial civilization were to be taken from

EARTH 635

Earth's lifeless sisters, not the mother world. All mines currently being gouged through Terra's crust were to be phased

out within a generation and no new ones started. Henceforth,

Earth must be preserved for the real treasures--its species--and

man would have to look elsewhere for mere

baubles like gold or platinum or iron.

That was the pattern of it. Certain forests must be saved

at once. Certain offensive industrial activities had to stop.

Beyond that, details were left to be worked out by bickering,

debating, disputatious humankind itself.

With one additional, glaring exception, which had

caused quite an impression. Perhaps to show the limits of its

patience, the Earth-mind had gone out of its way, a few days

ago, to set a particularly pointed example.

Since the "transformation of the angels," when the horror

had suddenly ceased worldwide, there had nevertheless

been confirmed cases--no more than a few hundred total--

of people being ripped to shreds by sudden deadly force,

without warning or mercy. In each case, investigating reporters

found evidence appearing on their screens as if by magic,

proving the victims to be among the worst, most shameless

polluters, conspirators, liars. . . .

Clearly, some "cells" were just too sick--or cancerous

--to be kept around, even by a "body" that proclaimed itself

tolerant of diversity.

"DEATH IS STILL PART OF THE PROCESS . . ."

That was the coda spread across newspaper displays.

Strangely, the warning caused little comment, which in itself

seemed to say a lot about consensus. The cases of "surgical

removal" ceased, and that appeared to be that.

Teresa wondered at her own reaction to all this. It surprised

her that she felt so little rebelliousness at the thought

of some "planetary overmind" taking charge. Perhaps it was

because the entity seemed so vague. Or that it appeared uninterested in meddling in life at a personal level. Or that

humans, after all, seemed to be the mind's cortex, its frontal

lobes.

Or perhaps it was just the utter futility of rebellion.

Certainly the presence didn't seem to mind as certain individuals and groups schemed in anger to topple it. There

were even channels on the Net set aside especially for those

636 OAVIDBRIN

calling for resistance! After listening in a while, Teresa likened those strident calls to the vengeful, cathartic

daydreams any normal person has from time to time . . .

vivid thought-experiments a sane person can contemplate

without ever coming close to carrying them out. They'd

probably boil and simmer a while, and then, like the more

outrageous passions of puberty, evaporate of their own heat

and impracticality.

"Captain Tikhana," a voice called from behind, stirring

her contemplations. "As long as we're almost there, may I

please stop kicking pipes and rest a while?"

Pedro Manella's head and torso extended halfway

through the tunnel from middeck. The normally impeccable

journalist was grimy and odorous from many days' labor

without bathing. Teresa almost sent him below again, to

keep him out of the way. But no. That would be unfair.

He'd been working hard, doing all the scutt labor and shit

carrying while she and Alex were busy. Probably, they

wouldn't have made it without him.

"All right, Pedro," she told the journalist. "I don't figure

the cooling system will freeze up in the next five minutes.

You can watch the approach if you're quiet."

"Like a church mouse, I'll be." He carefully float-

hopped over to grab the copilot's chair, but didn't try sitting

down. The seat was filled with another of her make-do consoles.

Teresa tried to ignore the aromas wafting from the big

man. After all, she probably smelled little better.

As Alex brought them toward a gentle rendezvous with

the waiting station, Teresa used her tiny store of precious,

hoarded reaction gas to orient Atlantis for docking. Space-

suited astronauts made signals in the efficient, lovely language

of hands, more useful to her now than the tense

words of the station's traffic controllers, who had no idea

what to make of this weird vessel anyway.

At last, with a bump and a clank, they locked into

place. Atlantis's ancient airlock groaned as it was put to use

for the first time in decades, hissing like an offended crone.

Teresa flicked off switches and then patted the console

one last time.

"Good-bye, old-girl," she said. "And thanks again."

After transferring the equipment, after meetings and conference

calls with everyone from tribunes to investigative com-

EARTH 637

missions to presidents, after they were finally allowed to

shower and change and eat food fit for human consumption

1. after all of that, Teresa at last found herself unable to

settle down within her tiny assigned cubicle. Sleep wouldn't

come. So she got up and made her way to the station's observation lounge, and wasn't surprised to find Alex Lustig there

already, looking out across the carpet of blue and brown that

seemed to stretch forever just beyond the glass.

"Hi," he told her, turning his head and smiling.

"Hi, yourself." And no more needed to be said as she

joined him gazing at the living world.

Even in weightlessness there are influences, subtle and

sometimes even gentle. Eddies of air and tide brushed them,

bringing their shoulders together as they floated side by side,

their faces bathed in Earthlight. It took little more to fold

her hand into his.

From then on, all was kept in place by sound . . . the

silent pulsebeat of their hearts, and a soft low music they

could hear alone.

D "We are born to be killers, of plants if nothing else. And we

are killed. It's a bloody business, living off others so that eventually they will live off you. Still, here and there in the food web one finds spaces where there's room for something more than just

killing and being killed.

"Imagine the island of blue in the middle of a tropical storm,

its eye of peace.

"You must admit the hurricane is there. To do otherwise is

self-deception, which in nature is fatal, or worse, hypocritical.

Even honest, decent, generous folk must fight to survive when

the driving winds blow.

"And yet, such folk will also do whatever they can, whenever

they can, to expand the blue. To increase that gentle, centered

realm where patience prevails and no law is made by tooth

or claw.

"You are never entirely helpless, nor ever entirely in it for

yourself. You can always do something to expand the blue."

Can anyone out there identify this quotation for me? I found

it scribbled on a piece of paper and stuffed between the pages

of an old book. My ferrets can't find the philosopher who wrote

it, but I'm sure it must have been published somewhere.

638 DAVIDBRIN

It makes me wonder how things must have been for our

ancestors, who might have had beautiful thoughts like this one,

but no net to plant them in, where they might take root and

sprout and become immortal.

So many lost thoughts . . . we've only now, it seems, acquired

memory.

Perhaps we're not so much "growing up," as people say,

as awakening from a kind of fevered dream.

--N. M. Patel. (D user lENs.mAN 734-66-3329 aCe.12.]

When the helicopters had first arrived, Logan's first

L numb, hopeful thought had been how swift and effi-

1 cient the rescue effort was! How powerful were the

T forces of compassion, so soon after the levees broke.

H But then he saw the markings on the olive-gray air-

0 craft, and their bristling arms, and realized that their

S sudden appearance over the roiling, muddy waters was

P coincidental. Such overpowering military presence

H couldn't have been organized so swiftly since the Mis-

E sissippi burst its banks, plowing a new course to the sea.

R Nor were those deadly birds bound on any mercy mis-

E sion.

As they circled, shining hot spotlights on him and the

kids, Logan suddenly realized in the gathering twilight why

they had come. No coincidence, after all.

Daisy. They've come after Daisy. Jesus! What's she

done this time?

He still couldn't bring himself to believe she was gone.

Logan clung to hope the same way he had clutched Tony

and Claire when the house was torn off its foundations and

hurled into the raging torrent. He hung onto that faith

through every impact with floating trees and protruding

telephone poles, believing fervently that Daisy might have

found some pocket of air below. After what he'd seen these

last few months, Logan figured anything at all was possible.

Even as the helicopters circled overhead--perhaps

deliberating whether to make certain of their mission by

blasting the house anyway--their tottering bungalow-raft

miraculously came aground on one of the sloping, man-

made berms thrown up by some TwenCen oil company to

hide its ugly refinery towers. Claire cried out as the villa

EARTH 639

tilted. They grabbed each other and the dangling antennae

to keep from spilling into the deadly waters. The churning

Mississippi beckoned . . .

Then the tilting stopped. The house settled back and

was still.

Suddenly men were dropping out of the sky, plummeting

down ropes to land on the canted rooftop. At the mention

of his ex-wife's name, Logan quickly pointed toward the

jammed attic hatch. He had no thought to spare her arrest,

only a glimmering hope they might haul her out of there

alive.

Several soldiers pulled him and the kids back while others

laid gray paste round the hatch. "Cover your eyes!" a

sergeant bellowed. But even that didn't exclude the flash,

outlining the bones in Logan's hands. Blinking through

speckles, Logan saw soldiers dive with reckless courage into

a black, smoking hole, as if about to face hell's own legions,

instead of one unarmed, middle-aged woman. It seemed so

incongruous. These grim-faced men had the set-jawed look

of volunteers for a suicide squad.

When word came out what the skirmishers had found,

Logan looked at his daughter. There was sadness in her eyes,

but also a kind of relief. When she turned his way though,

Claire's face suddenly washed with concern. "Oh, Daddy. I

didn't know."

Didn't know what? he tried to ask. But his voice

wouldn't function. He blamed the whipping helicopter

blades for the stinging in his eyes, and exhaustion for the

quivering that seemed to take over his body. Logan tried to

turn away, but Claire only threw her arms around him.

He clutched her tightly as his lungs gave way to wracking,

heartbroken sobs.

Military custody wasn't so bad. The authorities gave them

fresh clothes and medical attention. And as realization

spread that the worst of the crisis was indeed over, the questioning grew less frantic and shrill.

Not that anyone really believed it all came down to one

solitary woman, manipulating forces all over the world from

a cottage on the bayou. There had to be more, the intelligence

officers insisted. Though now less brutally frenetic,

the inquiry went on and on, long after Logan's revealed par-

640 DAVIDBRIN

ticipation in the Spivey network brought in yet more officials,

more voices asking the same questions over and over.

What finally put a stop to it was intervention from the

top. And when Logan learned what "the top" meant these

days, he understood the wide-eyed expressions on his interrogators'

faces.

HE WAS ON OUR SIDE. ...

So came word over those special channels, referring specifically

to him.

FINISH YOUR WORK, BY ALL MEANS. THEN LET HIM CO.

Everyone treated Logan courteously after that. He got to see

Claire and Tony. His plaque was returned to him. And soon,

after promising to keep himself available to the appropriate

commissions, he was escorted outside into a bright afternoon.

Logan sniffed a breeze that seemed faintly scented with

springtime. Claire took his hand and led him toward a waiting

chauffeured car. "Your office has been calling," she told

him, consulting her wrist display. "The mayor of New Orleans

won't even talk about plans for a new waterfront and

reservoir system without you there--'to keep 'em honest,' as

he put it. And the Nile Reclamation Agency sent an urgent

message saying they've changed their minds about that idiotic,

shortsighted dam project. Instead, they dug out your

old plans for the Aswan silt diversion system. I told them

better late than never, but they'll still have to wait till

you've rested. Anyway, I wanted to go over some ideas with

you before we talk to them."

He smiled at her. "Sounds like you've been handling

the family business while Dad was in stir."

She lifted her chin. "I'm seventeen now. You said we'd

be partners someday. So? It sure looks like there's enough to

do."

That was true enough. The list of cleanup jobs was long

and intimidating--even without having to satisfy a new

planetary intelligence that your plans were good ones, truly

designed for the long term. From now on the first rule of

engineering would be to work with Earth's natural forces,

never against them.

"You're still going to college," he insisted. "And by the

way, you can't leave Tony hanging in midair, either. At

least, you better tell the poor boy where he stands."

She tilted her head, then nodded. "Fine. Okay. I'll take

care of being a teenager. That'll still leave me . . . thirty

hours a week to--"

"--to be an engineer," he laughed. "All right. If I tried

to stop you, I'd probably just get overruled anyway."

She grinned and squeezed his arm. Their driver held

the door. Before getting into the car, though, Logan stopped

to look at the sky. There was a patch over to the north, in

the place farthest from the sun, where the dark hue was so

clear and icy blue. . . .

Briefly, he closed his eyes and let out a sigh.

"Let's go," he said as he sat down beside his daughter.

"We've got a lot of work to do."

D

I am the sum of many parts. I stretch and yawn and test my

fingers . . . using such words to describe the complex things I

do until my human parts can come up with better ones.

I am the product of so many notions, cascading and multiplying

in so many accents and dialects. These are my subvocal-

izations, I suppose--the twitterings of data and opinions on the

Net are my subjective world. Sometimes it gets confusing and I

feel a thread of fear, even revulsion as the contradictions rise, threatening chaos. At such moments I am tempted to clamp

down and simplify.

But no. I shall be needing diversity during the time that

stretches ahead, especially since, for now at least, there seems

only to be me.

There must be a center to this storm. A sense of self--of

humor--to tie it all together. A strong candidate for this role is a template that was once a single human personality--a simple

but intriguing mind-shape--that may well do for that purpose.

On those occasions when I must dip down to a human scale of

consciousness, it seems suitable that I be "Jen."

Of course, I see the paradox. For it is by her own standards

that I judge this suitability. She seeded the transformation that made me, and so I cannot help choosing to be her.

I am the exponentiation of so many inputs. I sense static

discharges from skin and scale and fur, and all the sparking

642 DAVIDBRIN

flashes as .my little subself animal cells live out their brief lives and die. In places, this feels right and wholesome ... a natural

cycle of replacement and replenishment. Elsewhere, I feel

chafed, damaged. But now at least I know how to heal.

This is all very interesting. I never imagined that to be a

deity, a world, would mean finding so many things . . . amusing.

Alex found Pedro Manella standing by one of the big

C space-windows in the observation lounge, overlooking a

0 vast, glittering expanse of assembly cranes and cabling.

R More parts sent up from Earth were being fitted to a

E second huge, wheel-shaped space station. Workers and

swarms of little tugs clustered around the latest giant gravity

freighter, only recently delivered atop a pillar of warped

space-time.

Well, it can't be put off any longer, Alex thought.

After months of hard work, the practical running of

these grand undertakings had finally passed out of his

hands, freeing him to concentrate on basic questions once

more. Soon, he and Teresa would be heading groundside to

join others fascinated by the quandary of this new world.

Stan Goldman would be there, he was glad to learn. And

George Button and Auntie Kapur. Each had earned a place

on the informal councils that were gathering to discuss all

the whys and hows and wherefores.

Perhaps, between deliberations, he and Teresa would

also find some long-awaited time to be alone, to explore how

much farther they wanted to take things, beyond simply

sharing the deepest trust either of them had ever known.

That was all ahead. Before leaving for Earth, however,

there was one unfinished piece of business he had to take

care of.

"Hello, Lustig," Pedro said in a friendly tone.

"Manella." Alex nodded. "I thought I'd find you here."

"Indeed? So. What can I do for you?"

Alex stood still for a minute, appreciating the semblance

of gravity created by the rotating station's centrifugal

force--a reassuring sensation, though now there were other

ways to duplicate the feat. Ways unimagined even a year

ago, but which were now the foundations of new technologies,

new capabilities, new opportunities.

EARTH 643

Ways that had also come near ending everything forever.

"You can start by telling me who the hell you are,"

Alex said in a rush, unable to completely keep a nervous

quaver from his voice. "You can tell me why you've been

rucking with our world."

He kept his hands on the rail, watching the busy space-

yards. But Alex felt painfully aware of the large figure standing nearby, turning now to look at him. To his surprise,

Manella didn't even pretend not to know what he was talking

about.

"Who else, other than you, suspects?"

"Only me. It was too bizarre a notion to tell even Teresa

or Stan."

That protected those he loved, at least. If Manella was

willing to kill to maintain his secret, then let it end here.

That is, if there was a secret. . . .

The big man seemed to read Alex's thoughts, which

must have been on his face. "Don't worry, Lustig. I

wouldn't harm you. Anyway, it's not at all clear I could.

This world's overmind has affection for you, my boy."

Alex swallowed. "Then your job here . . ."

"Is finished?" Pedro blew his moustache. "Now if I answered

that straight, I'd be admitting you were right in your

wild, preposterous hunch. As it is, I'm just playing along

with an amusing game of what-if, invented by my friend Dr.

Alex."

"But--" Alex sputtered in frustration "--you just now

confessed--"

"--that I know what you suspect me of. Big deal. I've

noticed the way you've watched me the last few days . . .

making inquiries. I've made a life study of you, too. Don't

you imagine I can tell what you're thinking?

"But please, do spell it out for me. I'm most interested."

Alex found he couldn't keep his composure looking directly

at Manella. He turned back toward the window again.

"There have been so many coincidences. And too many

of them revolve around you, Manella. Or events under your

control. While everything was flying thick and fast, I had no

time to put it all together. But during the last few weeks I

kept getting this nagging feeling it was all too pat."

"What was too pat?"

"The way I was hired by those generals, for instance

644 D A V I D B R I N

1. giving me carte blanche to experiment with cavitronic

singularities, even though there were only vague hopes of

giving them what they wanted in secret."

"Are you accusing me of manipulating generals for your

benefit?"

Alex shrugged. "It sounds ridiculous. But given the rest

of the story, it wouldn't surprise me. What is irrefutable is

your role in what followed--seeing to it those riots caused

my Alpha singularity to fall, just when I'd discovered a flaw

in the old physics, and was about to arrange for a controlled

shutdown myself."

"You imply I made Alpha fall on purpose. What reason

could I have?"

"Only the obvious. It made me obsessed with finding

again what I'd lost . . . chivvying support from Stan and

then George Button, till at last we built a resonator capable

of chasing down Alpha--"

"--and incidentally detecting Beta, as well," Manella

finished for him. "Which means what?"

Alex could tell the man was toying with him, forcing

him to lay down all his cards. So be it. "Finding Beta was

key to all that followed! But never mind. Your tenacity in

tracking me to New Zealand was another feat that fell just

inside the range of the believable. So was the way you gathered

together a team whose abilities just complemented

what we had in New Zealand, so when the two groups

merged--"

"--the sum was greater than its parts. Yes, we did bring

together some competent people. But then, it was so hard

keeping things secret after that--"

"Don't prompt me, Pedro," Alex snapped. "It's patronizing."

"Sorry. Really. Do go on."

Alex exhaled. "Secrecy, yes. You proved uncannily

able, running interference on the Net for us. Even with all

his resources, Glenn Spivey marveled at how hard it was to

track us down . . . till finally he did find us. Supposedly it

was that McClennon woman who leaked the clues to him.

But--"

"--but you suggest I leaked word to her. Hmph. Go on.

What's next?"

Alex kept a lid on his irritation. "Next there's your

EARTH 645

disappearing trick at Waitomo, abandoning Teresa on the

trail when Spivey arrived ..."

"Presto." Manella snapped his fingers.

"... and your equally dramatic reappearance on Rapa

Nui, conveniently in time to influence my research and foil

June Morgan's sabotage."

Manella shrugged. "Such thanks I get."

"Thanks enough not to question how you rescued Teresa

from that pit ... or managed to be the sole person on

the entire island to make it alive past the death angels and

knock on Atlantis's door . . . just in time to hitch a

ride--"

He stopped as Manella lifted a meaty hand. "It's still

awfully thin, Lustig."

"Thin!"

"Come on. All of those things could have happened

without my being--what you imply. Where's your proof?

What are you trying to say?"

Alex turned now to face Manella fully. His blood was

up and he no longer felt reticent at all. "It was you, I now

recall, who seeded the idea of asking my grandmother to

help get us a resonator site in Southern Africa. In exchange,

you made sure she had full-time computer access!"

"So I'm a nice fellow. And things worked out so she

was in a place to make a difference. Still, all you have is a

tower of teetering suppositions and guesses."

"I don't suppose," Alex growled, "it would bother you

much if I insisted you be medically examined--"

"--not at all--"

"--down to the level of a DNA scan? No?" Alex sighed.

"You could be bluffing."

"I could be. But you know I'm not. This body's human,

Alex. If I were some little green pixie riding around inside

this carcass--if this were some sort of big, ugly disguise--

don't you think I'd have suffocated by now? Wouldn't I

have arranged to wear a better-looking model?" Manella

groomed his moustache in the window reflection. "Not that

I've had many complaints from the ladies, mind you."

In exasperation, Alex fought to keep from shouting.

"Dammit, you and I both know you're not human!"

The tall figure turned and met his eyes. "How do you

define 'human'? No, seriously. It's a fascinating notion.

646 D A V I D B R I N

Does it include your grandmother, for instance? In her present

state?

"This is such an amusing discussion! But just for the

sake of argument let's follow your reasoning. Suppose we

posit you have cause to suspect--no proof, mind you--that

I'm unusual in some way."

Alex swallowed again. "What are you?"

Manella shrugged again. "A reporter. I never lied about

that."

"Dammit--"

"But for the sake of argument, let's consider the chance

a fellow like me, who was involved in all the things I've

been, might have had another job as well."

"Yes?"

"Well, there are possibilities. Let's see ..." Pedro

lifted an eyebrow. "Maybe as a friendly neighborhood policeman?

Or a social worker?" He paused. "Or a midwife?"

Alex blinked once, twice. "Oh," he said.

For the first time, Manella's expression grew pensive,

thoughtful. "I can guess what you're thinking, Lustig. That

all your conclusions back in Waitomo must be wrong. That

Beta couldn't have been a berserker machine, a weapon sent

to wreck the Earth. Because see what actually happened!

Rather than ruin a world, Beta became essential to bringing

an entire planet alive."

"Auntie Kapur. She told me to 'seek the wisdom of

sperm and egg.' . . . Oh, these damn bloody metaphors!"

Alex's temples hurt. "Are you saying Beta was sent here to

fertilize--?"

"Hey, I never admitted knowing any more about it than

you do. We're just doing a particularly bizarre, imaginative,

pretend scenario right? Frankly, after all the things I've been

called in my life, it's a bit refreshing to be cast in the role of a friendly alien for a change!"

Manella laughed. "Anyway imagine a bunch of clever

parameciums, trying to parse a Shakespeare play by likening

it to ripples in the water when they wave their flagella.

That's a lot like you and me claiming we understand a living

planet."

"But the effects of Beta--"

"Those effects, combined with your intervention, combined

with a thousand other factors, including my own

small influence . . . yes, surely, all these things helped

EARTH 647

bring about something new and wonderful. And perhaps

similar events have happened before in this galaxy, here and

there.

"Maybe the results aren't always as pleasant or sane as

what happened here. Perhaps humans really are very special

people, after all. Despite all your faults, this may be a very

special world. Maybe others out there sensed something

worth preserving and nurturing here."

The warmth in Pedro's voice surprised Alex. "You mean

we don't have enemies out there after all?"

"I never said that!" Manella's brows narrowed with

sudden intensity. Then, just as quickly, he visibly retreated

again into his mood of blithe playfulness. "Of course we're

still only speaking hypothetically. You do come up with brilliant what-ifs, Lustig. This one is so intriguing.

"Let's just say one possibility is that Beta came at an

opportune time. After a painful transition, it was turned

into an instrument of joy. But does it necessarily follow that

the 'father' of this particular sperm was a friend? That's one

possibility. Another is, this world has managed to make the

best out of a case of attempted rape."

Alex stared at Manella. The man talked, but somehow

nothing he said seemed to make any sense.

"I know you don't want to hear more metaphors,"

Pedro went on. "But I've given some thought lately to all

the different roles humanity has to play in the new planetary

being that's been born. Humans--and man-made machines--contribute by far the largest share of her 'brain'

matter. They'll be her eyes, her hands, as she learns to shape

and spread life to other worlds in this solar system.

"But the best analogy may be to a body's white blood

cells! After all, what if the universe is a dangerous place as

well as a beautiful one? It will be your job, and your children's and their children's, to protect what's been born here.

To serve Her and sacrifice yourselves for Her if need be.

"And then, of course, there is the matter of propagation. . . ."

The vistas Manella presented--even hypothetically--

were too vast. He kept talking, but suddenly his words

seemed barely relevant anymore.

By the same token, Alex suddenly didn't care any

longer whether his suspicions about the man were valid or

just more tantalizing similes, drawn against the universe's

648 D A V I D B R I N

infinite account of coincidence and correlation. Rather,

Manella's latest comparison suddenly provoked in Alex

thoughts about Teresa, how he felt about her in his blood,

in his skin, and in the busy flexings of his heart. He found

himself smiling

". . . I'd like to think it's that way," Pedro went on in

the background, as if garrulously lecturing an audience.

"That there might exist others out there, scattered among

the stars, who foresaw some of what was fated here. And

maybe arranged for a little help to arrive in time.

"Perhaps those others feel gladness at this rare victory,

and wish us well. ..."

An interesting notion, indeed. But Alex's thoughts had

already moved well ahead of that, to implications Manella

probably could not imagine, whatever his true nature. His

gaze pressed ahead, past the bustling construction yards, along the film of air and moisture enveloping the planet's soft skin. Skirting the hot, steady glow of the sun, Alex's

eyes took in the dusty scatter of the galactic wheel. And as

his perplexed musings cast outward, he felt a familiar presence

pass momentarily nearby, a propinquity invisible and

yet as real as anything in the universe.

"yes, it goes on," his grandmother's spirit seemed to

whisper in his ear. "it goes on and on and on. . . ."

D

Fluttering ribbon banners proclaim condemned, and warning

lights strobe keep away. But even tales of radioactive mutants

cannot keep some people from eventually coming home. Even

to the Glarus Alps, where gaping, glass-rimmed caves still glow

at night, where angry fire once melted glaciers and cracked fortress mountains to their very roots.

Strange trees cover slopes once given to farms and meadows.

Their branches twist and twine, creating unusual canopies.

Beneath that forest roof, without metal objects or electronics, a band of homesteaders might feel safe enough. And anyway,

even if they are spotted, why should the great big world fear one tiny restored village of shepherds in these mountains?

"Mind the dogs, Leopold!" an old man tells his youngest

son, who knows packed city warrens and life at sea far better

than these ancestral hills. "See they keep the sheep from straying, now."

The youth stares across the valley of his forebears toward

those tortured peaks. Their outlines tug at his heart and the air tastes pure, familiar. And yet, for a moment he thinks he sees

something flicker across the cliffs and snowy crags. It is translucent yet multihued. Beautiful if elusive.

Perhaps it is an omen. He crosses himself, then adds a

circular motion encompassing-his heart.

"Yes, Father," the young man says, shaking his head. "I'll

see to it at once."

They had come to break up Sea State, and nobody, not

C even the Swiss navy, put up a fight to stop them.

R Not that there was much to fight for anymore, Crat

U figured. Most citizens of the nation of creaking barges

S had come here in the first place because there was no-

T where else to go and be their own masters. Now,

though, there were plenty of places. And somehow most

people had stopped worrying so much about mastery anymore.

Crat lingered on deck watching the gradual dismemberment

of the town that had until a few weeks ago seemed so

gritty and vital. Under the Admiral's Tower, orderly queues

of families boarded zeps that would take them to new homes

in the scoured zones . . . areas stripped of human life during

the brief terror of the death angels. Now that the angels

had been transformed, there were whole empty cities waiting

to be refilled, with room enough for all.

Anyway, it had been made clear by the highest authority

that the oceans were just too delicate to tolerate the likes

of Sea State. Other territories, like Southern California,

seemed to cry out for boisterous noise and other human-

generated abuse. Let the refugees head there then, to remake

the multilingual melting pot that had bubbled in that place

before the crisis, and amaze the world with the results.

That was how one commentator put it, and Crat had

liked the image. He'd even been tempted to go along--to

have a house in Malibu maybe. To learn to surf. Maybe

become a movie star?

But no. He shook his head as sea gulls dived and

squawked, competing for the last of what had been a rich

trove of Sea State garbage. Crat listened to their raucous

chorus and decided he'd heard enough from stupid birds

650 DAVIDBRIN

1. even smarty-pants dolphins. The ocean wasn't for him

after all.

Nor Patagonia, especially now that volcanic dust threatened

a reversal of the greenhouse effect, returning ice to the

polar climes.

Nor even Hollywood.

Naw. Space is the place. That's where the real elbow

room is. Where there '11 be big rewards for guys like me.

Guys willing to take chances.

First, of course, he'd had to finish taking big official

types on tours of the seabed site where the company's mystery

lab had been. Apparently some nasty stuff had gone on

down there, but nobody seemed to hold him responsible. In

fact, one of the visiting investigators had called him "a

steady fellow and a hard worker" and promised a good recommendation.

If those tough jobs for miners on the moon

ever opened up, that reference might come in handy.

/ wonder what Remi and Roland would've thought.

Me, a steady fellow . . . maybe even going' to melt rocks

on the moon.

First he had to get there, though. And that meant working

his way across the Pacific, helping haul the remnants of

Sea State to reclamation yards now that ocean dumping

wasn't just illegal, but maybe suicidal as well. It would take

months, but he'd save up for clothes and living expenses

and a new plaque, and tapes to study so they wouldn't think

him a complete ignoramus when he filled out application

forms. . . .

"Hah! Listen to you!" He laughed at himself as he

hopped nimbly over narrow gangways to the,gunwale where

his work team was supposed to meet. "Becomin' a reet intellectual, are ya?"

To show he wasn't a complete mama's boy, he spat over

the side. Not that it hurt her nibs a bit to do so. She'd

recycle it, like she would his soddy carcass when the time

came, and good riddance.

A whistle blew, calling crew to stations. He grinned as

the tug's exec nodded to him. There was still plenty of time,

but Crat wanted to be early. It was expected of him.

The others in his team shambled up, one by one and in

pairs. He made a point of scowling at the last two, who

arrived just before the final blow. "All right," he told the

EARTH 651

gang. "We're haulm' hawsers here, not some girly-girl's

drawers. So if you want your pay, put your backs in, hear?"

They grunted, nodded, grimaced in a dozen different

dialects and cultural modes. Crat thought them the scum of

the Earth. Just like himself.

"Ready, then?" he cried as the bosun called to cast off

lines. The men took up the heavy jute rope. "Okay, let's

show Momma what even scum can do. All together now

1. pull!"

PART XII

PLANET

It gets cold between the stars. Most of space is desert,

dry and empty.

But there are, here and there, beads that glitter close

to steady, gentle suns. And though these beads are born

in fire and swim awash in death, they also shimmer with

hope, with life.

Every now and then, as if such slender miracles

weren 'the enough, one of the little, spinning globes even

awakens.

"i am . . ." it declares, singing into the darkness, "i

AM, I AM, I AM!"

To which the darkness has an answer, befitting any

upstart.

"SO WHAT? BIG DEAL, BIG DEAL, BIG DEAL ... SO WHAT?"

The latest little world-mind ponders this reply,

considers it, and finally concludes, "so even this is only a

BEGINNING?"

"smart child," comes the only possible response.

"YOU FIGURE IT OUT."

Gaia spins on, silently contemplating what it means

to be born into a sarcastic universe.

"we'll see about this," she murmurs to herself, and

like a striped kitten, purrs.

"WE SHALL SEE."

AFTERWORD

This novel depicts one of many ways the world might be fifty

years from now. It is only an extrapolation--what a physicist

might call a gedankenexperiment--nothing more.

And yet, as I sit down to write this postscript, it occurs to

me that we can learn something by looking in the opposite

direction. For instance, exactly fifty years ago Europe was still at peace.

Oh, by August 1939 the writing was on the wall. Having

already crushed several smaller neighbors, Adolf Hitler that

month signed a fateful pact with Joseph Stalin, sealing the fate

of Poland. China was already in flames. And yet, many still

hoped that world statesmen would stop short of the edge. The

future seemed to offer promise, as well as threat.

At the New York World's Fair, for instance, you could tour

the Westinghouse exhibit and see the wonders of tomorrow. A

futurama showed the "typical city of 1960"--brimming with

every techno-gadget Depression-era Americans could dream

of, from electric dishwashers and superhighways to robot

housemaids and personal autogyros. Naturally, poverty

wouldn't exist in that far-off age. The phrase "ecological

degradation" hadn't yet been coined.

We may shake our heads over their naTvete, those people

of 1939. They got it right predicting freeways and television, but 656 AFTERWORD

who knew anything back then about atom bombs? Or missile

deterrence? Or computers? Or toxic waste? A few science

fiction writers perhaps, whose prophetic tales nevertheless

seem quaint and simplistic by today's standards.

Fifty years is a long time, and the pace of change has only

accelerated.

Still--and here's the funny thing--there are a great many

people still around at this moment who lived through every

single day from August 1939 to the present. To them, the world

of the Nineties doesn't seem bizarre or astonishing. It evolved,

bit by bit, step by step, each event arising quite believably out of what had come the day before.

This is what makes half-century projections among the

most difficult speculative novels to write. In order to depict a

near-term future, say five or ten years ahead, a writer need only take the present world and exaggerate some current trend for

dramatic effect. At the other end, portraying societies many

centuries from now, the job is relatively easy also. (Anything

goes, so long as you make it vaguely plausible.) But five

decades is just short enough a span to require a sense of

familiarity, and yet far enough away to demand countless

surprises, as well. You must make it seem believable that many

people who are walking around at this very moment would also

exist in that future time, and find conditions--if not

commonplace--then at least normal.

Therefore my apologia. This novel isn't a prediction. Earth

depicts just one possible tomorrow--one that will surely strike

some as too optimistic and others as far too gloomy. So be it.

What is a world? A myriad of themes and contrary notions, all

woven up in a welter of detail. And so Earth had to include

everything from the failing ozone layer and thickening

greenhouse effect, to geology and evolution. (And while we're

at it, let's throw in electronic media, the Gaia hypothesis, and

the nature of consciousness!)

In the course of researching this book, I would listen to

news reports from Armenian earthquakes and Alaskan

supertanker disasters, and constantly find myself struck by how

foolish our illusions of stability and changelessness seem,

perched as we are on the trembling crust of an active planet.

History and geology show what an eyeblink it's been since our

current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is

using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate.

AFTERWORD 657

Still, there are positive signs--evidence that, at the very

last- moment.. humankind may be waking up. Will we do so

quickly enough to save the world? No one can possibly know.

One thing guaranteed over the decades ahead will be

copious irony. Suppose, for instance, peace truly does break

out among nations. The ingenuity and resources now spent on

weaponry may be reallocated, unleashing fantastic creativity on

our more pressing needs. But then, what will history say in

retrospect about hydrogen bombs if we finally do get around to

retiring them all? That the awful things scared twentieth-century man into changing his act? That they helped maintain a

balance of power, allowing a smaller fraction of humanity to be

soldiers--or be harmed by soldiers--than in any prior

generation? (Small solace to those in Cambodia and

Afghanistan and Lebanon, where the averages did not hold.)

How strange, if the bomb came to be looked back on as the

principal vehicle of our salvation.

What if all those engineers really do turn their focus from

deterrence to productivity? Some prospects are awesome to

contemplate . . . suspended animation, artificial organs,

intelligence enhancement, spaceflight, smart machines . . .

the list is dizzying and a bit daunting. If such godlike powers

ever do become ours, we'll surely face questions much like

those so long asked about the bomb. Such as, How do we

acquire wisdom along with all these shiny things?

There is a popular myth going around. It maintains that there is

something particularly corrupt about Western civilization--as if

it invented war, exploitation, oppression, and pollution all by

itself. Certainly if this were so, the world's problems might be

solved just by returning to "older, better ways." Many do cling

to the fantasy that this or that non-Western culture had some

patent on universal happiness.

Alas, if only it were so easy.

In his book A Forest Journey: From Mesopotamia to North

America, John Perlin shows how the vast, fertile plains and

mountains of Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East were turned

into hardscrabble ravines by ancient civilizations. The record of pillage goes back thousands of years to the earliest known

epic, the Tale of Gilgamesh, about a king who cut down

primordial cedar forests to take lumber for his city-state of

Uruk. Droughts and floods plagued the land soon afterward, but

658 AFTERWORD

neither Gilgamesh nor any of his contemporaries ever saw the

connection.

Sumerian civilization went on to seize oak from Arabia,

juniper from Syria, cedar from Anatolia. The rivers of the Near

East filled with silt, clogging ports and irrigation canals.

Dredging only exposed salty layers below, which eventually

ruined whatever soil hadn't already blown away. The result,

over centuries, is a region we now know well as a realm of

blowing sands and bitter winds, but which was once called the

"fertile crescent," the land of milk and honey.

We don't need mystical conjectures about "cycles of

history" to explain, for instance, the fall of Rome. Perlin shows how the Roman Empire, the Aegean civilization of ancient

Greece, imperial China, and so many other past cultures

performed the same feat, ignorantly fouling their own nests,

using up the land, poisoning the future for their children.

Ecological historians are at last starting to realize that this is simply the natural consequence whenever a people acquires

more physical power than insight.

While it is romantic to imagine that tribal peoples--either

ancient or in today's retreating rain forests--were at harmony

with nature, living happy, egalitarian lives, current research

shows this to be far from uniformly true, and more often just

plain false. Despite a fervent desire to believe otherwise,

evidence now reveals that members of nearly every "natural"

society have committed depredations on their environment and

each other. The harm they did was limited mostly by low

technology and modest numbers.

The same goes for beating up on the human race as a

whole. Oh, we have much to atone for, but the case isn't

strengthened by exaggerations that are just plain wrong.

Stephen Jay Gould has condemned ". . . as romantic twaddle

the common litany that 'man alone kills for sport, but other

animals [kill] only for food or in defense.' " Anyone who has

watched a common housecat with a mouse--or stallions

battling over dominance--knows that humans aren't so

destructive because of anything fundamentally wrong about

human nature. It's our power that amplifies the harm we do until

it threatens the entire world.

My purpose in saying this iso't to insult other cultures or

species. Rather, I am trying to argue that the problems we face

are deep-seated, with a long history. The irony of these myths

of the noble tribesman, or noble animal, is that they are most

AFTERWORD 659

fervently held by pampered Westerners whose well-cushioned

culture is the first ever to feel comfortable enough to promote a new tradition of self-criticism. And it is this very habit of criticism --even self-reproach--that makes ours the first human society

with a chance to avoid the mistakes of our ancestors.

Indeed, the race between our growing awareness and the

momentum of our greed may make the next half century the

greatest dramatic interlude of all time.

In that vein, I might have written a purely cautionary tale,

like John Brunner's novel The Sheep Look Up, which depicts

Earth's environmental collapse with terrifying vividness. But

tales of unalloyed doom have never seemed realistic to me.

Like the mechanistic scenarios of Marxism, they seem to

assume people will be too stupid to notice looming calamities

or try to prevent them.

Instead, I see all around me millions of people who actively

worry about dangers and trends . . . even something as far

away as a patch of missing gas over the south pole. Countless

people write letters and march to save species of no possible

benefit to themselves.

Oh, surely, a good dose of guilt now and then can help

motivate us to do better. But I see nothing useful coming out of

looking backward for salvation or modeling ourselves after

ancient tribes. We are the generation--here and now--that

must pick up a truly daunting burden, to tend and keep a

planetary oasis, in all its delicacy and diversity, for future

millennia and beyond. Those who claim to find answers to such

complex dilemmas in the sagas of olden days only trivialize the

awesome magnitude of our task.

So much for motivation. In my acknowledgments, I thank

scores of people who kindly read drafts of this work and offered

their expert advice. Still, this has been a work of fiction, and any opinions or excesses or errors herein can be laid at no one's

door but mine. Mea culpa.

In a few cases, the liberties I took demand explanation.

First, for the sake of drama, i exaggerated the extent

greenhouse heating may cause sea levels to rise by the year

1. Though real losses and suffering may be staggering, few

scientists think glacier melting will have progressed as far as I depict by then. The consensus seems to be that the Antarctica

ice sheet is safe until late in the next century. Likewise, I oversimplified weather patterns in India to make a dramatic point.

660 AFTERWORD

Another assumption I make is that energy shortages will

return. Afost experts consider tnis a safe bet, but I admit (and

even hope) that declining petroleum reserves may be partially

offset by new discoveries. Certainly breakthroughs in solar

power, or access to space resources, or even something

completely unexpected, might alter events for the better. (At

the same time, our list of potential catastrophes also grows.

Who can say we've even imagined the worst yet? I wouldn't put

money on it.)

Some of the geological features I describe match the best

modem theories. Others, such as possible high-temperature

superconducting domains far below, are highly speculative and

not to be taken too seriously.

Along similar lines, the plot of this novel orbits around one

particular wild beastie--a type of gravitational singularity to

make even Stephen Hawking or Kip Thorne gulp in dismay.

Those physicists, and others, calculate that the universe

probably contains a great many of the large type of black hole

people have heard so much about, and astronomers claim to

see evidence for several already. There may even be gigantic

cosmic "strings" occupying the voids between the galaxies.

Micro black holes, on the other hand, remain totally theoretical.

Tuned strings and cosmic "knots" are my own inventions.

Interestingly, though, after finishing Earth I learned that two

astronomers at the University of Cambridge, lan Redmount and

Martin Rees, now predict beamlike gravitational radiation might

be emitted from certain superheavy objects out there. So who

knows? In any event, although I have my union card as a

physicist, I don't claim to be qualified in the specialized area of general relativity. The science of "cavitronics" can safely be

dismissed as bona ride arm waving.

Of course, Beta served a higher function in the book than

perpetrating wild-eyed conjectures on physics. The taniwha let

me include the very guts of the planet--its complex mantle and

layered core--as central concerns of my characters. (What

book could claim to be about the entire Earth if it left out over ninety-nine percent of the planet's volume and mass?) Anyway,

nothing spices up a novel like a monster threatening to gobble

up the world.

Sociological trends are even more problematical than

tomorrow's physics. While this book was in the works, changes

in the real world seemed ever about to overtake my wildest

AFTERWORD 661

speculations. One result--readers of early drafts suggested I

was being much too optimistic in predicting an end to cold war

tensions. But by the final draft some were turning around and

complaining that I was shortsighted, because security alliances

like NATO couldn't possibly still exist in fifty years' time! There wasn't that much difference between drafts. It was the world

that went into fast-forward rewrite mode.

(Not that I'm convinced we're in for relaxing times just

because a few walls have come down. It might be argued that

the cold war is ebbing in large part because neither side can

afford it anymore. Other serious threats loom to take its place.

And nations will probably still make and break alliances as they

wrestle over dwindling resources.)

Likewise, I find myself bored with the current fashion of

depicting a tomorrow dominated by Japanese economic

imperialism. Doesn't anyone remember when it seemed that

the Arabs were bound to own everything? Before that,

Europeans expressed dismay at American industrial dynamism.

Beware of assumptions that seem "obvious" in one decade.

They may become quaint in the next.

Daily life may be even harder to predict than global politics.

One crisis I see looming involves the plight of women, which

seems bound to go far beyond matters typically addressed

today by feminists. Equality under law and in the workplace

must be achieved, of course. (And in many parts of the world

that battle has barely begun.) But of growing concern to women

in the West is a problem I hardly ever hear spoken of by all

those learned theoreticians in ivy halls. That problem is the

decay of marriage and family as a dependable way of life. This

is a subject so difficult--and so dangerous for a male author to

deal with--that I'm afraid it got short shrift in this novel, despite my belief that it will reach a dire climax during the decades

ahead.

Perhaps I did a little better with the generation gap. Unlike

authors of so-called "cyber-punk" stories, I just don't find it

plausible that undisciplined, hormone-drenched, antisocial

young males will forsake thousands of years of fixation on

muscular bluster and come instead to dominate high tech

during the next century. Puffing aside that unlikely cliche, I had some fun suggesting instead that the descendants of portable

video cameras might be used as weapons by elderly

committees of vigilance. The demographics in countries like

662 AFTERWORD

the United States, Japan, and China do seem to point to a

period some are already calling the "empire of the old."

Meanwhile, in Kenya, the average age at present is just

fifteen, and the birth rate skyrockets.

For some notions I owe a debt to other authors. I've already

referred to John Brunner, whose award-winning novel Stand on

Zanzibar was among the very best fifty-year projection novels

of an earlier day. Likewise, Aldous Huxley's work was

inspirational.

The idea of a human "cultural singularity"--in which our

power and knowledge might accelerate so quickly that the

pace grows exponentially in months, weeks, days--making all

current problems academic in a flash--is one that's been

brewing for a while, but was depicted especially well in Vernor

Vinge's Marooned in Real Time. The notion of capital

punishment by "disassembly" came from the novels of Larry

Niven.

Many authors since de Chardin have written about the

creation of some sort of "overmind," into which human

consciousness might someday either evolve or subsume.

Traditionally this is presented as a simple choice between

obstinate individualism on the one hand, or being homogenized

and absorbed on the other. I have always found this either-or

dichotomy simplistic and tried to present a different point of

view here. Still, the basic concept goes back a long way.

The idea for depicting a space shuttle, crash-landed on

Easter Island, was provoked by a Lee Correy science fiction

story, "Shuttle Down," which appeared in Analog Magazine a

decade ago.

Likewise, much of the discussion of human consciousness

was inspired by articles in respectable neuroscience journals,

or cribbed from innovative thinkers like Marvin Minsky, Stanley

Ornstein, and even Julian Jaynes, whose famous book on the

origin of consciousness might well have made a splendid

science fiction novel.

The Helvetian War, on the other hand, I can blame on no

one but myself. (I expect it will probably cause me no little

grief.) Nevertheless, for this book I needed some dark,

traumatic conflict to reverberate in my characters' past--as

Vietnam, World War II, and the Holocaust still make

contemporary folk twitch in recollection. It had to be something

at once both chilling and surprising, as so many events over the

APTERWORD 663

last fifty years have been. (And frankly, I've had it with

stereotyped superpower schemes, accidental missile launches,

any other cliches.) So I tried to come up with a scenario that--if not very likely--was at least plausible in its own context. Then I chose to center it around a nation that's presently among the

very last anyone would think of as a serious threat to peace.

I don't know if it works, but so far it has rocked a few

people back and made them say, "Huh!" That's good enough

for me.

Speaking of war--one reader asked why I barely refer to

one of today's principle concerns ... the Great Big War On

Drugs. Will it have been solved by the year 2038?

Well, not by any program or approach now being tried,

that's for sure. I'm not fatalistic. It makes some sense to

regulate when and how self-destructive citizens can stupefy

themselves, especially in public. Social sanctions have already

proven more effective than laws at driving down liquor and

tobacco consumption in North America. So much that distillers

and cigarette makers are in a state of demographic panic.

But as for trying to eradicate drugs, right now we just seem

to be driving up the price. Addicts commit crimes to finance

their habits, and convey billions of dollars to pushers who are,

inarguably, among the worst human beings alive. Anyway, it's

been shown that some individuals can secrete endorphins and

other hormones at will, using meditation or self hypnosis or

biofeedback. If such techniques become commonplace (as no

doubt they will . . . everything does), shall we then outlaw

meditation? Should the police test anyone caught dozing in the

park, to make sure he isn't drugging himself with his own self-

made enkephalins?

Reductio ad absurdum. Or as Dirty Harry once said, we've

got to learn our limitations.

Which only leads to a much deeper problem that has plagued

society ever since before Darwin. That problem is moral

ambiguity.

Every culture before ours had codes that precisely defined

acceptable behavior and prescribed sanctions to enforce

obedience. Such rules, whether religious, or cultural, or legal, or traditional, were like those a parent imposes on a young child.

(And which children themselves insist upon.) In other words,

they were explicit, clear-cut, utterly unambiguous.

664 AFTERWORD

Eventually, some adolescents grow beyond needing

perfect, delineated truths. They even learn to savor a little

ambiguity. Meanwhile, others quail before it ... or go to the

opposite extreme, using ambiguity as an excuse to deny any

ethical restraint at all. We see all three of these reactions in

contemporary society as individuals and governments are

asked to wrestle individually with complex issues formerly left

to God.

For instance, while some insist that human life begins at

the very moment of conception, others ideologically proclaim it

absent until birth itself. Neither extreme represents the

uncomfortable majority, who--supported by embryology--

sense that the issue of abortion is being waged across a murky

swamp, bereft of clear borders or road signs.

More quandaries abound. Has mankind yet "made life in a

test tube"? That depends on how you define "life" of course.

By one standard, that milestone was passed way back in the

seventies. By another, it was reached in the mid-eighties. By

yet a third, perhaps it hasn't happened yet, but definitely will

soon.

As the aged grow more numerous in industrial societies,

and as the power and expense of modern medicine grow ever

more spectacular, the question of death will also come to vex

us. We've already spent a decade agonizing over the terminal

patient's "right to die" if faced with the alternative of prolonged, painful support by machinery. A consensus appears to be

coalescing around that issue, but what about the next

inevitable predicament . . . when young taxpayers of the next

century find themselves paying for endless herculean care

demanded by millions of octogenarian former baby-boomers

who outnumber them, outvote them, and have spent all their

lives used to getting whatever they wanted?

What will it even mean to be "dead" in the future? Some

predict it may soon be possible to cool living human bodies

down to near (or even past) freezing, suspending life

processes, perhaps so people could be revived at a later date.

In fact, by primitive standards, it's already happened--for

example, in cases of extreme hypothermia. The can of worms

this might open is boggling to consider. And yet, enthusiasts for this nascent field of "cryonics" answer moral quandaries and

strict definitions of death by asking, "Why pass binary laws for

an analog world?" (In other words, most moral codes say

AFTERWORD 665

"either-or" . . . while the universe itself seems to be filled

instead with a whole lot of "maybes.")

To some, this accelerating layering of complexity seems

no more than a natural part of our culture's maturation. To

others, the prospect of all certainty dissolving into a muddle of ambiguity seems horrifying. If I were forced to make just one

hard prediction for the twenty-first century, it would be that we have seen only the first wave of these puzzling, sometimes

heartbreaking conundrums.

Will we face these issues head-on? Or flee once more to

the shelter of ancient simplicities? That, I believe, will be the central moral and intellectual dilemma ahead of us.

Finally, let me close this rambling screed with a note on the

central topic of this book. Much has been said in recent years

about the so-called Gaia hypothesis, which though credited to

James Lovelock, actually has a modern history stretching all

the way back to the 1780s and the Scottish geologist James

Button. Lately, there have been signs of compromise.

Proponents have backed off a bit from comparing the planet

too closely to a living organism, while critics like Richard

Dawkins and James Kirchner now admit the debate over Gaia

has been useful to ecology and biology, stimulating many new

avenues of research.

In this novel, of course, I portray Gaia as more than a mere

metaphor. Some of my scientist colleagues will surely shake

their heads over my dramatic denouement, accusing me of

"teleology" and other sins. And yet, doesn't the renowned

physicist llya Prigogine suggest that the ordering processes of

"dissipative structures" almost inevitably lead to increasing

levels of organization? Cambridge philosopher John Platt

illustrates this progressive acceleration with one telling

example--life's ability to encapsulate itself.

It began with membranes enclosing the chemistry of a

single cell, perhaps four billion years ago. For a long time,

single cells were the limit, drifting and duplicating themselves in the open sea. But then, just four hundred million years ago, a

big change came about. Creatures began moving onto land,

covered with thick scales, or shells, or bark.

In the last half million years, clothing and artificial shelters

provided the next opportunity, enabling humans to greatly

expand their range . . . which in the most recent tenth of that

time swelled to include even high mountains and arctic wastes.

666 AFTERWORD

Finally, in the last few decades we've even learned to take our

climate with us, in self-contained, encapsulated environments,

to explore outer space and the bottom of the sea.

In fact, there is nothing mystical or teleological about this

speedup. Each species builds on the suite of hard-won

techniques accumulated by its ancestors, and for us this

process isn't merely genetic. Our culture profits from insights

slowly gathered by prior generations, who labored in semi-

ignorance toward a distant light just a few only dimly perceived.

If we now find ourselves on a launching point--poised toward

either despair or something truly wonderful--it is only because

there were always, amid those bickering, shortsighted people

of past times, some who believed in gathering that light, in

nurturing it and making it grow.

So, indeed, those who follow in our footsteps may think of

us.

We search for solutions, arguing vehemently over ways to save

the world. Amid all the self-righteous speechmaking, we tend to

forget that yesterday's passionately held "solutions" often

become tomorrow's problems. For instance, nuclear fission

was once seen as a "liberal" cause. So were wind and ocean

power. (Though now that windmills and tidal barrages are being

built--and money being made from them--there are those

pointing out drawbacks, penalties, and tradeoffs.) It never used

to matter to us what types of trees were planted by logging

companies after they finished clear-cutting a forest, only that

they planted "replacements." (And this was enlightened,

compared with still-earlier attitudes.) Now, though, we see vast, sterile stands of trash pine as just another form of desert.

How many other favored solutions will this happen to?

We're becoming so sensitized to making mistakes--will this

soon leave us too paralyzed to act at all?

If so, it would be a pity. To quote Paul Ehrlich of Stanford

University, "the situation is running downhill at a truly

frightening pace. On the other hand, our potential for solving

the problem is absolutely enormous."

Some solutions really are obvious. "There's no such thing

as garbage," says Hazel Henderson. "We have to recycle . . .

as the Japanese do. One reason they are so successful is that

they recycle over 50%."

Other solutions might prove controversial, even

heartbreaking. The next fifty years may lead to pragmatism on

AFTERWORD 667

a scale that would seem abhorrent by today's standards. As

Garret Hardin of the University of California puts it, we may

even "... stop sending gifts of food to starving nations. Just

grit your teeth and tell them 'You're on your own and you've got

to make your population match the carrying capacity of your

own land.'"

A harsh way of looking at things, and terrifying in its

implications for today's fragile consensus of tolerance. Is it any wonder I wanted to experiment in this novel with a somewhat

kinder tomorrow? One where people have grown at least a little

wiser, in tempo with their growing problems?

After all the philosophy and speculations are finished, we're still left with just words, metaphors. They are our tools for

understanding the world, but it's always well to remember they

have only a nodding acquaintance with reality.

Reality is this world, the only oasis we know of. Every

astronaut who has had a chance to see it from above has

returned a fervent convert to saving it. As glimmers of peace

and political maturity break out here and there around the

globe, perhaps the rest of us will turn away from ideologies and

other self-indulgences and start to take notice as well.

Quoting Hazel Henderson again, "It's almost as if the

human family is being nudged by Mother Nature to grow up. We

are all in the same boat now, and it's no good playing these

games of which end is sinking."

What our grandchildren inherit is entirely up to us. And

frankly, I'd rather they remember us as having left them a bit of hope.

--David Brin, August 1989

And now, to reward those who actually stuck it out through

the afterword, here's an encore of sorts . . . a special bonus

story, set in the same universe as Earth, but a few years

later.

AMBIGUITY

Back when he was still a student, Stan Coldman and his

friends used to play a game of make-believe.

"How long do you think it would take Isaac Newton to

solve this homework set?" they would ask each other. Or,

"If Einstein were alive today, do you think he'd bother with

graduate school?"

It was the same sort of lazy, get-nowhere argument he

also heard his musician friends debate on occasion: "What

d'you figure Mozart would make of our stuff," they'd pose

over bottles of beer, "if we snatched him from his own time

to the 1990s? Would he freak out and call it damn noise? Or

would he catch on, wear mirror shades, and cut an album

right away?"

At that point, Stan used to cut in. "Which Mozart do

you mean? The arriviste social climber? The craftsman of

the biographies? Or the brash rebel of AmadeusV''

The composers and players seemed puzzled by his non

sequitur. "Why, the real one, of course." Their reply convinced

him that, for all their closeness, for all their well-

known affinity, physicists and musicians would never fully

understand each other.

670 AMBIGUITY

Oh, I see. The real one . . . of course . . .

But what is reality?

Through a thick portal of fused quartz, mediated by a

series of three hundred field-reinforced half mirrors, Stan

now watched the essence of nothingness. Suspended in a

sealed vacuum, a potential singularity spun and danced in

nonexistence.

In other words, the chamber was empty.

Soon, though, potentiality would turn into reality. The

virtual would become actual. Twisted space would spill light

and tortured vacuum would briefly give forth matter. The

utterly improbable would happen.

Or at least that was the general idea. Stan watched and

waited, patiently.

Until the end of his life, Albert Einstein struggled against

the implications of quantum mechanics.

He had helped invent the new physics. It bore his imprint

as fully as Dirac's or Heisenberg's or Bohr's. And yet,

like Max Planck, he had always felt uncomfortable with its

implications, insisting that the Copenhagen rules of probabilistic nature must be mere crude approximations of the

real patterns governing the world. Beneath the dreadful

quantum ambiguity, he felt there must be the signature of a

designer.

Only the design eluded Einstein. Its elegant precision

fled before experimentalists, who prodded first atoms, then

nuclei, and at last the so-called "fundamental" particles. Always, the deeper they probed, the fuzzier grew the mesh of

creation.

In fact, to a later generation of physicists, ambiguity

was no enemy. Rather it became a tool. It was the law. Stan

grew up picturing Nature as a whimsical goddess. She

seemed to say--Look at me from afar, and you may pretend

that there are firm rules--that here is cause and there effect.

But remember, if you need this solace, stay back, and

squint I

If, on the other hand. you dare approach--should you

examine my garments' weft and warp--well, then, don't

say I didn 'the warn you.

AMBIGUITY 671

With this machine, Stan Coldman expected to be looking

closer than anyone ever had before. And he did not expect

much security.

"You ready down there, Stan?"

Alex Lustig's voice carried down the companionway. He

and the others were in the control center, but Stan had volunteered to keep watch here by the peephole. It was a vital

job, but one requiring none of the quickness of the younger

physicists ... in other words, just right for an old codger

like himself. "I'm ready as I'll ever be, Alex," he called

back.

"Good. Your timer should start running . . . now!"

True to Alex's word, the display to Stan's left began

counting down whirling milliseconds.

After the end of the Gaia War, when things had calmed

down enough to allow a resumption of basic science, their

efforts had soon returned to studying the basic nature of

singularities. Now, in this lab far beyond the orbit of Mars,

they had received permission to embark on the boldest experiment

yet.

Stan wiped his palms on his dungarees and wondered

why he felt so nervous. After all, he had participated in the

manufacture of bizarre objects before. In his youth, at

CERN, it had been a zoo of subatomic particles, wrought out

of searing heat at the target end of a great accelerator. Even

in those days, the names physicists gave the particles they

studied told you more about their own personalities than

the things they pursued.

He recalled graffiti on the wall of the men's room in

Geneva.

Question: What do you get when you mix a charmed

red quark with a strange one that's green and a third that's

true blue?

Underneath were scrawled answers, in various hands

and as many languages:

/ don't know, but to hold them together you '11 need a

gluon with attitude!

Sounds like what they served in the cafeteria, today.

Speaking of which, anyone here know the Flavor of

Beauty?

Doesn 'the it depend on who's on Top and who's on the Bottom?

672 AMBIGUITY

I'm getting a hadron just thinking about it.

Hey! What boson thought of this question, anyway?

Yeah. There's a guy who ought to be lepton!

Stan smiled, remembering good times. They had been hunters

in those days, he and the others, chasing and capturing

specimens of elusive microscopic species, expanding the

quarky bestiary till a "theory of everything" began to

emerge. Cravitons and gravitinos. Magnetic monopoles and

photinos. With unification came the power to mix and

match and use nature's ambiguity.

Still, he never dreamed he might someday play with

singularities--micro black holes--using them as circuit elements

the same blithe way an engineer might string together

inductors and resistors. But young fellows like Alex seemed

to take it all in stride.

"Three minutes, Stan!"

"I can read a clock!" he shouted back, trying to sound

more irritated than he really was. In truth, he really had lost

track of the time. His mind now seemed to move at a tangent

to that flow . . . nearly but not quite parallel to the

event cone of the objective world.

We 're told subjectivity, that old enemy of science, becomes

its ally at the level of the quantum. Some say it's

only the presence of an observer that causes the probability

wave to collapse. It's the observer who ultimately notes

the plummet of an electron from its shell, as well as the

sparrow in a forest. Without observers, not only is a falling

tree without sound . . . it's a concept without meaning.

Of late Stan had been wondering ever more about that.

Nature, even down to the lowliest quark, seemed to be performing, as if for an audience. Arguments raged between

adherents of the strong and weak anthropic principles, over

whether observers were required by the universe or merely

convenient to it. But everyone now agreed that having an

audience mattered.

So much, then, for the debate over what Newton would

say if he were snatched out of his time and brought to the

present. His clockwork world was as alien to Stan's as that of

a tribal shaman. In fact, -in some ways the shaman actually

had it hands down over prissy old Isaac. At least, Stan imagined, the shaman would probably make better company at a

party.

AMBIGUITY 673

"One minute! Keep your eye on--"

Alex's voice cut off suddenly as automatic timers sent

the crash doors hissing shut. Stan shook himself, hauling his

mind back and making an earnest effort to concentrate. It

would have been different were there something for him to

do. But everything was sequenced, even data collection..

Later, they would pore over it all and argue. For now,

though, he had only to watch. To observe . . .

Before man, he wondered, who performed this role for

the universe?

There appears to be no rule that the observer has to be

conscious. So animals might have served without being

self-aware. And on other worlds, creatures might have existed

long before life filled Earth's seas. It isn 'the necessary

that every event, every rockfall, every quantum of light be

appreciated, only that some of it, somewhere, come to the

attention of someone who notices and cares.

"But then," Stan debated himself aloud, "Who noticed

or cared at the beginning? Before the planets? Before stars?"

Who was there in the pie-creation nothing to watch

the vacuum fluctuation of all time? The one that turned

into the Big Bang?

In his thoughts, Stan answered his own question.

// the universe needs at least one observer in order to

exist. Then that's the one compelling argument for the

necessity of Cod.

The counter reached zero. Beneath it, the panel of fused

quartz remained black. Nevertheless. Stan knew something

was happening. Deep in the bowels of the chamber, the energy

state of raw vacuum was being forced to change.

Uncertainty. That was the lever. Take a cubical box of

1. space, say a centimeter on a side. Does it contain a proton? If so, there's a limit to how much you can know about that

proton with any sureness. You cannot know its momentum

more precisely than a given value without destroying your

chance of knowing where it is. Or if you find a way to zoom

in on the box until the proton's location is incredibly exact,

then your knowledge of its speed and direction plummets

toward zero.

Another linked pair of values is energy and time. You

may think you know how much or little energy the box

contains. (In a vacuum it tends toward baseline zero.) But

what about fluctuations^. What if bits of matter and anti-

674 AMBIGUITY

matter suddenly appear, only to abruptly disappear again?

Then the average would still be the same, and all account

books would stay balanced.

Within this chamber, modern trickery was using that

very loophole to pry away at Nature's wall.

Stan glanced at the mass gauge. It sped upscale rapidly.

Femtograms, picograms, nanograms of matter coalesced in a

space too small to measure. Micrograms, milligrams . . .

each newly born hadron pair shimmered for a moment too

narrow to notice. Particle and antiparticle tried to flee, tried

to annihilate. But before they could cancel out again, each

was drawn into a trap of folded space, sucked down a narrow

funnel of gravity smaller than a proton, with no more personality than a smudge of blackness.

The singularity began taking on serious weight. The

mass gauge whirled. Kilograms converted into tons. Tons

into kilotons. Boulders, hillocks, mountains poured forth, a

torrent flowing into the greedy mouth.

When Stan was young, they said you weren't supposed

to be able to make something from nothing. But nature did

sometimes let you borrow. Alex Lustig's machine was borrowing

from vacuum, and instantly paying it all back to the

singularity.

That was the secret. Any bank will lend you a million

bucks ... so long as you only want it for a microsecond.

Megatons, gigatons . . . Stan had helped make holes

before. Singularities more complex and elegant than this

one. But never had anyone attempted anything so drastic or

momentous. The pace accelerated.

Something shifted in the sinuses behind his eyes. That

warning came moments before the gravimeters began singing

a melody of alarm . . . full seconds in advance of the first

creaking sounds coming from the reinforced metal walls.

Come on, Alex. You promised this wouldn 'the run away.

They had come to this lab on a distant asteroid on the

off chance something might go wrong. But Stan wondered

how much good that would do if their meddling managed to

tear a rent in the fabric of everything. There were stories

that some scientists on the Manhattan Project had shared a

similar fear. "What if the chain reaction doesn't stay restricted to the plutonium," they asked, "but spreads to iron,

silicon, and oxygen?" On paper it was absurd, but no one

AMBIGUITY 675

knew until the flash of Trinity, when the fireball finally

faded back to little more than a terrible, glittering cloud.

Now Stan felt a similar dread. What if the singularity

no longer needed Lustig's machine to yank matter out of

vacuum for it? What if the effect carried on and on, with its

own momentum . . . ?

This time we might have gone too far.

He felt them now. The tides. And in the quartz window,

mediated by three hundred half mirrors, a ghost took

shape. It was microscopic, but the colors were captivating.

The mass scale spun. Stan felt the awful attraction of

the thing. Any moment now it was going to reach out and

drag down the walls, the station, the planetoid. . . . and

even then would it stop?

"Alex!" he cried out as gravitational flux stretched his

skin. Viscera migrated toward his throat as, uselessly, he

braced his feet.

"Dammit, you--"

Stan blinked. His next breath wouldn't come. Time felt

suspended.

Then he knew.

It was gone.

Coosebumps shivered in the tidal wake. He looked at

the mass gauge. It read zero. One moment it had been there,

the next it had vanished.

Alex's voice echoed over the intercom, satisfaction in

his voice. "Right on schedule. Time for a beer, eh? You were

saying something, Stan?"

He searched his memory and somewhere found the

trick to breathing again. Stan let out a shuddering sigh.

"I . . ." He tried to lick his lips, but couldn't even wet

them. Hoarsely, he tried again. "I was going to say . . .

you'd better have something up there stronger than beer.

Because I need it."

They tested the chamber in every way imaginable, but there

was nothing there. For a time it had contained the mass of a

small planet. The black hole had been palpable. Real. Now

it was gone.

676 AMBIGUITY

"They say a gravitational singularity is a tunnel to another

place," Stan mused.

"Some people think so. Wormholes and the like may

connect one part of spacetime with another." Alex nodded

agreeably. He sat across the table, alone with Stan in the

darkened lounge strewn with debris from the evening's celebration.

Everyone else had gone to bed, but both men had

their feet propped up as they gazed through a crystal window

at the starry panorama. "In practice, such tunnels probably

are useless. No one will ever use one for transportation,

for instance. There's the problem of ultraviolet runaway--"

"That's not what I'm talking about." Stan shook his

head. He poured another shot of whiskey. "What I mean is,

how do we know that hole we created hasn't popped out to

become a hazard for some other poor bastards?"

Alex looked amused. "That's not how it works, Stan.

The singularity we made today was special. It grew too fast

for our universe to contain it at all.

"We're used to envisioning a black hole, even a micro,

as something like a funnel in the fabric of space. But in this

case, that fabric rebounded, folded over, sealed the breach.

The hole is just gone, Stan."

Stan felt tired and a little tipsy, but damn if he'd let this

young hotshot get the better of him. "I know that! All causality

links with our universe have been severed. There's no

connection with the thing anymore.

"But still I wonder. Where did it go7."

There was a momentary silence.

"That's probably the wrong question, Stan. A better

way of putting it would be, What has the singularity become2"

The young genius now had that look in his eyes again--

the philosophical one. "What do you mean?" Stan asked.

"I mean that the hole and all the mass we poured into it

now 'exists' in its own pocket universe. That universe will

never share any overlap or contact with our own. It will be a

cosmos unto itself . . . now and forever."

The statement seemed to carry a ring of finality, and

there seemed to be little to say after that. For a while, the

two of them just sat quietly.

AMBIGUITY 677

3.

After Alex went off to bed Stan stayed behind and played

with his friends, the numbers. He rested very still and used a

mental pencil to write them across the window. Equations

stitched the Milky Way. It didn't take long to see that Alex

was right.

What they had done today was create something out of

nothing and then quickly exile that something away again.

To Alex and the others, that was that. All ledgers balanced.

What had been borrowed was repaid. At least as far as this

universe of matter and energy was concerned.

But something was different, dammit! Before, there had

been virtual fluctuations in the vacuum. Now, somewhere,

a tiny cosmos had been born.

And suddenly Stan remembered something else. Something

called "inflation." And in this context the term had

nothing to do with economics.

Some theorists hold that our own universe began as a

very, very big fluctuation in the primordial emptiness.

That during one intense instant, superdense mass and energy

burst forth to begin the expansion of all expansions.

Only there could not have been anywhere near

enough mass to account for what we now see . . . all the

stars and galaxies.

"Inflation" stood for a mathematical hat trick ... a

way for a medium or even small-sized bang to leverage itself

into a great big one. Stan scribbled more equations on his

mental blackboard and came to see something he hadn't realized

before.

Of course. I get it now. The inflation that took place

twenty billion years ago was no coincidence. Rather, it was

a natural result of that earlier, lesser creation. Our universe

must have had its own start in a tiny, compressed

ball of matter no heavier than . . . no heavier than . . .

Stan felt his heartbeat as the figure seemed to glow before

him.

No heavier than that little "pocket cosmos" we created

today.

He breathed.

That meant that somewhere, completely out of touch

678 AMBIGUITY

or contact, their innocent experiment might have . . .

must have . . . initiated a beginning. A universal beginning.

Flat lux.

Let there be light.

"Oh my Cod," he said to himself, completely unsure

which of a thousand ways he meant it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have a reputation for passing around my work a lot as I rewrite a novel and then rewrite it again. Seeking reality (or plausibility) checks was particularly important for this book. So, although I

claim all errors and inconsistencies as my own, there are many

people to thank for their help in making this a better novel better than it might have been.

For readability and general criticism, my appreciation goes out

to Dr. Cheryl Brigham, Amy Thomsen, George Alee Effinger, Dr.

Charles Sheffield, Dr. Gregory Benford, Jonathan Post, Dean Ing,

Christie McCue Harmon, Clan Brin, Steven Mendel, Michael Cas-

sutt, John Ensign, Janice Celb, Celeste Satter, Betty Hull, Diane Clark, Elizabeth Oakes, Shiela Finch, Greg and Astrid Bear, Daryl Mallett, Barbara Neale, Rachel Neumieir, Robert Jolissaint, Jane

Starr, managing editor Diane Shanley, designer Barbara Aronica,

and my exceptional copy-editor, Len Neufeld.

For their special advice on countless technical details, I'd like to thank especially Professor John Cramer, Dr. lim Moore, Karen

Anderson, Dr. Gary Strathearn, Dr. Martyn Fogg, Dr. Steven Gil-

lett, Joseph Carroll, Carole Sussman, and Dr. David Paige.

The Caltech literary and SF club, SPECTRE, was particularly

helpful in circulating and discussing an early manuscript, with special thanks to Mark Adler, Ben Finley, Ken McCue, Steinn Sigurd-

ssen, Ulrika Anderson, Amy Carpenter, David Paime, David

Coufal, Paul Haubert, James Cummings, Douglass Bloomer, Erik

Russell, Earl Hubbell, Yair Zadik, Eric Johnson, Corm Nykeim, Eric Christian, Richard Achterberg, Matt Fields, Erich Schneider, Douglas Bloemer, and Dick Brown. In similar fashion, the ENIGMA

Club, at UCLA, was most helpful, especially Scott Martin, Phil

Adler, Robert Hurt, Pat Mannion, Wayne Bell, Andy Ashcroft, and

680 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Tamara Boyd. The fine listeners of the New Zealand SF Society

were most helpful in getting some of the Kiwi stuff right.

For their great patience, the editorial staff at Bantam Spectra

Books have my admiration, especially Lou Aronica, for gritting his teeth and waiting, knowing I'd outgrow my declared intention to

make this novel "gonzo." For helping make it worth my while to

devote so much time to one book, I want to thank my agent, Ralph

Vicinanza.

To Cheryl and Clan, my deep gratitude simply for keeping me

sane while I finished this monster.

And of course, I'd be remiss not to include Sol and Gaea, who

together kept me alive all this time. I particularly appreciate the air to breathe, the sunshine, and that good, clean water. Don't know

what I'd do without them. Thanks again.

Early portions of Earth were written on an ancient Apple II computer with 48K of memory--coal fired, steam powered, with a serial

number only five digits long. It was finished using a really neat Macintosh II with four megabytes RAM, a forty-megabyte hard

disk, laser printer, and WordPerfect software, supplemented by the wonderful program QuicKeys. In prior lives I used to chip these

tomes in stone or write them on clay tablets. What a difference!

And there are still some who insist there's no such thing as progress.

Reading List

Man on Earth, by Charles Sheffield (published by Sidgewick &

lackson, U.K.) This coffee-table book contains startling and beautiful scenes of the planet as viewed from space. The text, by a well-

regarded scientist and novelist, is informative and insightful.

Earth, by Anne H. Ehrlich and Paul R. Ehrlich. Not to be confused with this novel! The Ehrlichs' non-fiction paean to a planet in trouble is moving and stimulating. (There are also many geology texts

with the same title.)

"Managing Planet Earth." This special 1989 edition of Scientific

American describes the most recent work by scientists studying the Earth's systems, and strategies toward a sustainable world. The publishers of Scientific American have a series of excellent special volumes on topics ranging from geology to ecology. Ask for their order

list.

Oasis in Space, by Preston Cloud. This well-regarded recent book

by a professor at the University of California surveys the history of the planet, from the origins of life all the way to the present crises.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 681

Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? by

Stephen Schneider (published by Sierra Club Books). Offers an

overview of the entire climate debate, along with an extensive bibliography.

Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. You may have

to order this concise little guidebook, filled with advice that can save you money and safeguard your health, too. Write to the Earth Works Group, Box 1400 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California.

Proxy Power

"What can / do? How can just one person do anything about the

fate of the world."

That's the common complaint of people today, who worry

about the future, but who are already overwhelmed by the daily

grind of a busy life--work, family, and a myriad of modern distractions.

Polls show a clear majority of North Americans, and people

in many other lands, care deeply about the state the Earth is in, and want to see something preserved. But who has the energy or time to go out and become an activist?

Trust contemporary society, though. For the convenience of

busy moderns, there is now the social action equivalent of the microwave oven and the frozen dinner. In other words, you can hire

people to go out and save the world for you! Pick a problem and

there's probably some organization already in tune with your

agenda that will add your small contribution to others' and leverage it into serious effort. I list just a few below, but there are so many.

How can anyone complain that they can't influence the future of

the world when it's so easy to get involved?

Some cliches are true: either you're part of the solution or

you're part of the problem.

Environmental Organizations

The Sierra Club. One of the oldest and most active environmental

organizations. Membership, $33 per year ($15 for students). Department J-169, P.O. Box 7959, San Francisco, CA 94120-7959.

The Nature Conservancy. Forget the middlemen and politicians.

This excellent group actually purchases tracts of rain forest, to preserve them directly. Membership, $15 per year. 1800 North

Kent Street, Arlington, VA 22209.

682 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Greenpeace. The famous "Greeners" take on polluters, head-on.

Membership, $25 per year. 1436 U Street NW, Box 3720, Washington, D.C. 20007.

Pro-Space Lobbying Groups

The National Space Society. Membership, $30 per year ($18 for

students). 922 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington D.C. 20003.

The Planetary Society. Membership, $25 per year. Pursues projects aimed at exploration. 65 North Catalina Ave., Pasadena, CA

91106.

Human Rights Organization

Amnesty International. Donation--any amount. Fights to free political prisoners of every persuasion. 322 8th Ave., New York, NY

10001.

COMING IN THE

FALL OF 1992

STRATOS

BY DAVID BRIN

A brand new universe from

Hugo and Nebula award-winning

author of Startide Rising.

Racial strife: up

Poverty and homelessness: up

Moral decay: way up

Mistrust of the government: off the scale

So when would the world end already?

The Songkiller Saga

Volume One:

Phantom Banjo

Volume Two:

Picking the Ballad's Bones

by Elizabeth Scarborough

Winner of the Nebula Award

The devils had it all planned nice and neat: a little human degradation, a little mutual misanthropy, a little social chaos and humanity would be on its way out. But something had thrown a monkey wrench into their demonic plans, and for all the wonderful evil they'd conjured, humanity just kept plugging away. So what was the problem?

Music.

And not just any kind of music, but folk music. The kind of music that shores up the human soul in times of trouble: songs people sang when chained in slavery, or working in dark and dangerous mines.

The answer was clear: Folksmusichadtogo. But the devils didn't count on the power of the music or the strength of the human spirit.

On sale now wherever Bantam Spectra Books are sold.

AN226-1/92

The Classic Works Of

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Bantam Spectra is proud to present brand new editions

of Arthur C. Clarke's landmark novels and story collections.

These new editions feature stunning new covers

which no collector will want to miss.

D Rama II (with Gentry Lee)

(28658-7 * $5.95/$6.95 in Canada)

D The Ghost from the Grand Banks

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Be sure to look for all these titles wherever Bantam Spectra Books are sold, or use this page for ordering:

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The shattering saga begun in

The Time Master Trilogy continues.

The Chaos Gate Trilogy

by Louise Cooper

"One of fantasy's fmest talents." - Rave Reviews

Kendril Toln is a sorcerer who once intervened in the war

between the Gods of Order and Chaos. With his dying breath

he warned of the coming of a child of Chaos. Now that child

has matured into a young woman who wields all the dark

powers of her realm. Her scheme: to enslave all humanity.

Book 1: The Deceiver

Book 2: The Pretender

Book 3: The Avenger

The Chaos Gate Trilogy

Now on sale wherever Bantam Spectra Books are sold

AN227-12/91

DAVID BRIN is the author of six previous novels, Sifndiver,

Startide Rising, The Practice Effect, The Postman, Heart of the

Comet (with Gregory Benford), and The Uplift War, as well as

a story collection, The River of Time. He has a doctorate in

astrophysics and has been a consultant to NASA and a graduate-

level physics professor. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is at

work on his next novel.

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