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.
• EXOSPHERE
Twinkle, twinkle, little star …
Despite some trepidation, Teresa schooled herself to stay calm during her first trip back into space. She checked frequently, but her beacons didn’t wobble. The continents hadn’t shifted perceptibly. Her old friends, the stars, lay arrayed as she remembered them. Sprinkled road signs, offering unwinking promises of a constancy she had always relied upon.
How I wonder what you are …
“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 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 effects the psychers had largely dismissed as stress hallucinations, but which had given her an instant’s warning last time.
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.
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 if … she pondered. What if, each trip to Erehwon, 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 everyone 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 concentrate 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 balance—offset 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.
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 it 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 to shout back good explanations. Meanwhile, let’s have some zip-zep from the Skywriters themselves. Here’s “Tethered to a Rain Cloud.”
• CRUST
Roland fingered the rifle’s plastic stock as his squad leaped off the truck and lined up behind Corporal Wu. He had a serious case of dry mouth, and his ears still rang from the alert bell that had yanked them out of exhausted slumber only an hour before.
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 pre
pare 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. 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-Gaian 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.…