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.
“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. “Touché. 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 Glenn 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 IG 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.
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 seventeen-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.”
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 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 fide hits.
What if some crank—without knowing how or why—stumbled 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. [ AyR 2437239.726 IntPredReg. 6.21.038:21:01.]
• CORE
Once, when he was very young, Alex’s gran took him out of school to witness a life ark being launched. Nearly thirty years later, the memory of that morning still brought back feelings of childlike wonder.
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 maladie
s, 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 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 Sundays 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 Gaia 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 the other organs of its whole? Are we Gaia’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.
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,” Jen 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.
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. I 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 th
e 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 been sent from the pariah Confederacy of Southern Africa. So Jen 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 Hutton 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?”