“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 Gordian 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, tnen 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. 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.”
Hutton 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?”
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,” Hutton looked across the underground chamber, past the waiting technicians to the gleaming new thumper, freshly built to specifications Alex and Stan Goldman 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. Go on, give the order. Let’s see what the thing has to say, face to face.”
Alex waved to Stan Goldman, 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.
Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ SIG AeR,WLRS 253787890.546], random sampling of today’s bulletin board queries. [ 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?”
# (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 …”
• LITHOSPHERE
The Bay of Biscay glowed with the same radiant, sapphire hues Logan remembered in Daisy McClennon’s eyes. He fell for those delicate shades again as he traveled swiftly southward aboard a Tide Power Corporation minizeppelin. The beauty of the waters was chaste, serene, pure, but all that would change once Eric Sauvel’s engineers had their way.
Sauvel sat next to him, behind the zep’s pilot, gesturing to encompass the brilliant seascape. “Our silt stirrers are already scattered across eight hundred square kilometers, where bottom sediments are richest,” he 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 École 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 funneled 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.
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 Garonne 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?” Logan 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 Niño.
“Preliminary tests indicate we’ll create a phytoplankton bloom covering half the bay. Photosynthesis will … is the correct expression skyrocket?”
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 potential. 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’t we, how awful the effects can be on land, if irrigation is mishandled. I wonder what the price will be here, if we’ve 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 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 subsonics 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 Logan 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 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 f
lashed 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 earthquakes—and the case of the mysterious, disappearing drilling rig. Logan made a mental note to tap the world seismological database as soon as they reached shore. Maybe there was a connection this time, as well.
Something new had entered the world all right. Of that much, he now felt certain.
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.