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:
. . . 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:
. . . 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  1990 by Davit! Hrin
Cover tirt copyright  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
. . ."
"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
. . . 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 . . .
. . . 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. InEARTH 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.
. . ."
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
. . . 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
. . . 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 rotaEARTH	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
. . . 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
. . ." 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, "exEARTH 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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.
. . . 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
. . . 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, delEARTH 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 sprawl80 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 hap88 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
. . . 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
. . . 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 warn114 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
. . ."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
. . . 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 darkEARTH 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
. . . 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
. . . 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 "parEARTH 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
. . .
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
. . .
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 mo136 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.
. . . 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
. . . 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 earthquakes--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
. . .
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.
. . . 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
. . . 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, sol190 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
. . . 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
. . . 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"
. . . 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 se\f-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"
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . ."
"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
. . . 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
. . . 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.
. 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,
. , , , 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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

. . . 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.
. . ; 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
. . . 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
courtesy-worm chain program released in October 2036
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
years.] Under the civil disobedience sections of the Charter of
Rio, we accept in advance the fines and penalties that will come
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that's a small price to pay for the message brought to you by
EmilyPost.
In brief, dear friend, you are not a very polite person. Emily-
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Of course you enjoy free speech. But EmilyPost has been
designed by people who are concerned about the recent trend
toward excessive nastiness in some parts of the net. EmilyPost
homes in on folks like you and begins by asking them to please
consider the advantages of politeness.
For one thing, your credibility ratings would rise. (EmilyPost
has checked your favorite bulletin boards, and finds your ratings
aren't high at all. Nobody is listening to you, sir!) Moreover,
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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 . . .
. . . 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 . . .
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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.
. . . 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
. . . 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.
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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:

. . . flint knapping, entrail reading, arrow fletching
. . . smithing, barrel making, art appraising . . .
clock making, reindeer, herding, dentistry, handwriting
. . . game-show host, channeler, UFOIogist . . .
drug smuggler, golf course manager, confidential
banker . . . sunbathing, drinking tapwater . . .

New service professions:

. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . um, Teresa."
"My friends . . . ," she said, catching her breath as
she clutched him tightly. "Sometimes, my friends call me
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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.

. . . It's the melting of the ice caps that's making the Earth
shake . . .
. . . It's secret weapon testing. Treaty violations. We've got to call
in the tribunals before it's too late . . .
. . . These aren't earthly phenomena at all. We're being softened
up by UFOs . . .
. . . It's an alignment of the planets. The Babylonians were right
predicting . . .
. . . Overpopulation--ten billion souls can't stand the pressure.
The psychic strain alone . . .
. . . 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? . . .
. . . 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--

. . . the Russ ambassador was scared . . .
. . . the EUROP team knew more than they were telling . . .
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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

. . . 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

. . . 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!
. . . 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.
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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
. . . 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:
. . . 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]

. . . 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
. . . 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

. . . 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

. . . 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
. . . 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
2040. 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
. 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
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These new editions feature stunning new covers
which no collector will want to miss.

D Rama II (with Gentry Lee)
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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.
