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.
“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 moments 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.
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 just 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 jaw. 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 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 fide 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 just so …
The uninitiated would probably attribute it all to his Latin background—expressiveness in gestures as well as words—but what Teresa saw instead were crude but clear approximations of spacer hand talk.
… OPEN MIKE, she read. WATCH YOUR WORDS … CLASS 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, good-bye.”
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’LL RESPOND 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.
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.
• CORE
On his way back to Auckland after two days at the Tarawera Geothermal Works, Alex found himself ensnared in tourist traffic at Rotorua. Buses and minivans threaded the resort’s narrow ways, hauling Australian families on holiday, gushing Sinhalese newlyweds, serene-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 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 wprking 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.
“Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just 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 Hutton 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 evaporating Iquitos singularity, Alpha. To George Hutton and the others, that made him responsible by proxy—no matter how much they liked him personally—until Beta’s real makers were found.