Read Earth Page 3


  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.

  If 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 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.”

  World Net News: Channel 265/General Interest/Level 9+ (transcript)

  “Three million citizens of the Republic of Bangladesh watched their farms and villages wash away as early monsoons burst their hand-built levees, turning remnants of the crippled state into a realm of swampy shoals covered by the rising Bay of Bengal.…”

  [Image of tear-streaked brown faces staring in numb dismay at the bloated bodies of animals and canted, drowned ruins of farmhouses.]

  [ Viewer option: For details on cited storm, voice-link STORM 23 now.]

  “These are the die-hards, who have refused all prior offers of resettlement. Now, though, they face a bitter choice. If they accept full refugee status, joining their brethren in Siberian or Australian New Lands, it will also mean taking all the conditions attached, particularly that they must swear population restriction oaths.…”

  [Image of a pregnant woman with four crying children, pushing her frightened husband toward fair-skinned medics. Zoom on one doctor’s hammer and sickle shoulder patch … a nurse’s Canadian maple leaf. Members of the screening team wear kindly smiles. Too nervous to show resentment, the young Bengali signs a clipboard and passes under the tent flap.]

  [ To read out specific oaths, voice-link REFUGE 43.]

  [ For specific medical procedures, voice-link VASECT 7.]

  “Having reached the limits of their endurance, many have agreed to the host nations’ terms. Still, it’s expected some will refuse even this last chance and elect instead the harsh but unregulated life as citizens of Sea State, whose crude rafts already sail the fens and shallows where formerly stretched great, jute estates.…”

  [View of barges, rafts, salvaged ships of all shapes and sizes, clustered under pelting rain. Crude dredges probe skeletons of a former village, hauling up lumber, furniture, odds and ends to use or sell for scrap. Other, quicker boats are seen pursuing schools of silvery anchovies through newly inundated shoals.]

  [ Real-time image 2376539.365x-2370.398, DISPAR XVII satellite. $1.45/minute.]

  [ For general background, link SEASTATE 1.]

  [ For data on specific flotilla, link SEA BANG LA 5.]

  “Already, spokesmen for Sea State are asserting sovereignty over the new fishing grounds, by right of reclamation.…”

  [ Ref. UN document 43589.5768/UNORRS 87623ba.]

  [Diplomats in marble halls, filing papers.]

  [Surveyors mapping ocean expanses.]

  [ Time-delayed images APW72150/09, Associated Press 2038.6683]

  “As expected, the Republic of Bangladesh has issued a protest through its U.N. delegation. Though, with their capital now underwater, the remonstrations begin to sound like those of a tragic ghost.…”

  [View of a brown-skinned youth in a greasy bandanna, grasping a rusty railing, staring toward an uncertain future.]

  • MESOSPHERE

  To Stan Goldman it was a revelation, watching Alex Lustig hurry from work site to work site under the vaulted, rocky ceiling. You never can tell about someone till you see him in a crisis, he mused.

  Take Alex’s familiar gangling stoop. It no longer appeared lazy or lethargic down here, half a kilometer underground. Rather, the lad seemed to lean forward for leverage as he moved, pushing a slow-moving tractor here, a recalcitrant drill bit there, or simply urging the workers on. Air resistance might have been the only 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. Hutton 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 just 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—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.

  I 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 eno
ugh, 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 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 just 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 two of the hanging rock-forms, just above where they fused. It looked like an awfully precarious perch.

  “How’d he get up there?”

  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 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 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?

  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.

  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 à heretic, let it be so.