After all, though, this was Daisy McClennon’s “island,” where self-sufficiency meant more than a trendy fad or even good citizenship, but had over the years become a militant faith. And Claire was fast turning into an apostate.
Unlike the neighbors, chez McClennon had no account with any of the local food-testing services. Why bother, when you grew amaranth and pejibaye palm fruit and marama beans and lentils in your own little horticultural paradise … a glassed-in wonder of nutritional productivity that Claire’s mother had designed herself? It had been purchased with inherited money, but of late Daisy seemed to expect Claire to maintain it single-handedly.
Not much longer though, Daisy. Six months more and I’m gone.
Probably, her mother would barely notice when she left. Daisy’d just hire on some oath-pledged refugee, or one of those Han or Nihonese college kids who kept passing through these days, taking a year off working their way around the world from zep passage to zep passage in the latest Asian fad. If so, Daisy was due for a surprise. No modern, self-indulgent Nihonese kid would work as hard as Daisy expected for just room and board and electric.
“Aw, hell,” Claire sighed on catching sight of the wind generator. Speaking of electric, those limp vanes meant current would be rationed again. And guess who had top priority around here?
Claire made her rounds with rapid efficiency, starting at the methane pit, where she checked fluid levels in the crap digester. It was supposed to be “zero maintenance,” but that guarantee was by now a bitter joke. I’ll bet my rich cousins never have to do chores, she thought with halfhearted crankiness. Alas, even Logan agreed with her mother on one thing: that “hard work builds character.” So even if she had been able to live with her father, it wouldn’t have been that much easier. And to be honest, she had met her relatives in the McClennon clan. Horrible, stuck-up creatures, living off wealth neither they nor their parents ever had a hand in creating. None of them would be hurt by a little honest labor, for sure.
Still, there’s got to be a middle ground. Claire grunted as she fought to clear a drip-irrigator in the main greenhouse, blowing down one nozzle till spots swam before her eyes. Maybe I just wish Daisy’d do her share around here.
At least the bee zapper was working. For years their hives had been under seige by Africanized swarms, seeking to take over as they had everywhere else in the area, ruining all the once-profitable apiaries in the parish. Chemicals and spray parasites did no good. But a few weeks ago Claire had found a net reference by a fellow in Egypt, who’d discovered that the African strain beat their wings faster than the tame European variety. Burrowing into archaic TwenCen military technology, he had adapted sensor-scanner designs from an old, defunct project called “Star Wars.” Now Claire and a few thousand others were testing his design and reporting weekly results to a network solutions SIG.
Like a glittering scarecrow, the cruciform laser system watched over her squat hives. When she had first turned it on, the surrounding fields had come startlingly alight with hundreds of tiny, flaming embers. The next morning, ash smudges were all that remained of the vicious invaders within line of sight. But her own honeybees were untouched. Now she looked forward to a sweet profit and her first stingless summer.
Perfect timing, she thought ironically. Just as I’m about to move away.
Before going inside, there was one last chore to do. Claire clambered down to the little creek behind the house, to check on Sybil and Clyde.
The piebald gloats bleated at her. They had finished eating all the water hyacinths within reach along that stretch of bank, so she readjusted their tethers to bring them near another weed-clogged area. Without such creatures, every waterway in the South would be choked with rank tropical opportunists by now, flourishing unstoppably for lack of natural controls.
Some neighbors made pets of their channel-clearing gloats, or the other type bred specially to eat kudzu vines. Claire liked animals, but she didn’t want to feel any ties here, so she kept this relationship strictly businesslike. Anyway, what was the point in trying to maintain every tiny canal, as if canals weren’t mortal like everything else?
The Mississippi’s coming anyway, she thought, looking out toward the land she both loved and longed to leave behind. You better get used to the idea, Atchafalaya. You’re gonna know greatness, whether you like it or not.
After adjusting Clyde’s protective goggles, Claire brushed at his speckled coat. “What’s this? Some sort of mange?” The gloat bleated irritably as puffs of dry fur floated from its patchy side. “All right. All right. I’ll look into it.” Sighing, Claire took a sample and patted the creatures, who were soon munching exotic weeds again, contentedly.
Echoes of gunfire and rocking explosions rattled the walls as she passed her mother’s suite of rooms. Music blared—the strains of some oldtime movie Daisy was condensing for a Net entertainment group. Though she perpetually proclaimed contempt for the industry, Daisy’s expertise at compressing oldtime flicks was legendary. Skillfully, she could pack ninety tedious minutes into a crisp forty or less, speeding the languid pace of classics like The Terminator or Deliverance to suit the time-devouring appetites of modern viewers.
Or, for others wanting more out of a particular film, Daisy McClennon would expand the original … adding material from film archives or even computer-generated extrapolations. It brought in a steady income that allowed her to contemptuously spurn the despised family trust fund.
Most of the time.
Besides, a career working on the Net had one more advantage—the occupation lacked any obvious impact on the real environment of the Earth.
“Tread lightly on our world’s toes” went the motto of one of Daisy’s eco-freak organizations, the sort whose members didn’t take off their shoes inside their houses, but instead removed them before going outside. That particular group had as their totem emblem a fierce Chinese dragon, curled and snarling, representing an angry, violated ecosphere fed up with swarming, pestilential humanity. The same reptilian icon stretched above the hearth of the main sitting room, Daisy’s favorite part of the villa, but one seldom visited anymore by Claire.
Hell, she was too damn busy maintaining the rest of it! Claire cursed roundly when she saw that Daisy had neglected even to empty the trash, supposedly on her own list of chores. Not content with the normal five recycling bins, her mother insisted this house have twelve. And three mulch piles. Then there were the soap maker, the yoghurt maker, the midget brewery …
Claire thought of a recent stylish trend among her peers. Oh, I’d make a swell Settler. I can grow herbal medicines, make my own paper, grind ink from bark and lamp black … and fix the water pump’s gaskets myself, since mother hates buying parts from Earth-raping manufacturers.
City folk, tending high-yield gardens and a few clip-wing ducks on the roof, loved pretending that made them rough and independent, blithely ignoring all the ways they still counted on society’s nurturing web, the tubes and ducts that piped in clean water, power, gas … and carried off a steady stream of waste. Ironically, few kids ever grew up better qualified to homestead a new frontier than Claire. And few had so little desire to do so.
After all, who in their right mind would want to live that way?
Oh, reducing your impact was moral and sensible, up to a point. Beyond which there was a lot to be said for labor-saving devices! Claire swore her own place would have a microwave-infrasound cooker. And an electric garbage disposal, oh please. And maybe, just for that first year of celebration—a licentious, never-ending gallon of store-bought ice cream.
Changing out of her sweaty work clothes in the privacy of her own room, Claire paused by a shelf of mementos brought by her father from trips all over the planet. A ten-million-year-old spider, encased in Dominican amber, lay next to fossils from the Afar desert and a beautiful hardwood dolphin, carved by a Brazilian engineer Logan had met in Belem.
Her mineral collection wasn’t exactly world class. But there was a lovely polis
hed slab of bright green smithsonite, alongside its cousins jadeite and entrancing malachite. More yellowish than green, the hypnotic, translucent autainite had come from France, and the purple erythrite from deep in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
None of these minerals were particularly rare, not even the disk of glittering “star” quality quartz hanging over her mirror—where she let down her reddish-brown hair and checked for stray droplets from Tony’s pond. Picking up the crystal lens, she peered through it at her own image, wishing the highlights it gave her hair might somehow translate into the real world, where she so often envied other girls their shining locks.
As a child, she had thought the bit of quartz magical. But Logan had emphasized that it was a routine miracle. The Earth contained veins and seams and whole flows of beautiful mineral forms that took only a practiced eye to discover and a little skill to prepare. In contrast, Claire had been shocked when an uncle thought to please her one birthday with a “unique” gift—a slice of fossilized tree trunk. It had subsequently taken her weeks to investigate and discover its origins, then anonymously donate it back to the petrified forest it had been stolen from in the first place.
There was a difference, of course. Many common things could be beautiful, even magical. But in a world of ten billion people, true rarities shouldn’t be owned. At least on that point she, Logan, and Daisy all agreed.
Claire put the crystal back. Beside the mirror lay her favorite treasures, several beautiful chert arrowheads. Not archaeological relics, but even better. Logan had taught her to chip them herself, during one of their too infrequent camping trips. To be fair, Claire admitted both her parents had taught her useful things. Only Logan’s lessons always seemed much more fun.
Under the window, nesting in her neglected model of the Bonnet Carré Spillway, her pet mouse, Isador, twitched his nose as Claire stopped to pet him and feed him seeds.
The wall screens of her Net unit flickered on idle, showing new assignments from the remote-school in Oregon. But Claire first checked for personal messages. And sure enough, there was a blip from her father winking on her priority screen! At a spoken command, it lit up with a bright picture of Logan Eng standing atop a bluff overlooking a bay of brilliant blue water. To save power, she took the message in written form. Rows of letters shone.
HI MICRO-BIOTA. SAW AMAZING THINGS HERE IN SPAIN. SPELL THAT “UH-MAZING!” ( SEE ATTACHED PIX.)
HAVE CRAZY THEORY TO EXPLAIN THESE EVENTS. WROTE A PAPER ABOUT IT FOR A SPEC-FACT SIG. IF I’M RIGHT, SOMETHING MIGHTY FISHY IS GOING ON!
ATTACHED A DRAFT () FOR YOU TO LOOK AT, IF YOU LIKE. A LITTLE TECHNICAL. NOTION’S PRO’BLY NONSENSE. BUT YOU MAY FIND THE ABSTRACT AMUSING.
MY BEST TO DAISY. SAY I’LL COME TO DINNER AFTER CLEARING PAPERWORK JAM AT OFFICE.
LOVE YOU, HONEY.—DADDY
Claire smiled. He wasn’t supposed to call himself “Daddy.” That was her affectation.
She touched the DATA APPENDED tag and called up Logan’s speculative paper. Claire recognized the net-zine he was submitting it to … one where scientists could let their hair down without risking their reputations. She had a hunch Logan was really going to set off a ripe one this time.
Then she frowned. Suddenly suspicious, Claire queried her security program.
“Dumpit!” she cursed, stamping her feet in annoyance. Logan’s blip had been snooped since reception. And it didn’t take a genius to know who the snooper was. “Dumpit, Daisy!”
The older generation as a whole seemed to have no respect for privacy, but this was downright insulting. As a brilliant hacker, Daisy could have brushed aside her daughter’s simple security system and read Claire’s mail without leaving traces. That she hadn’t even bothered to cover her tracks showed either blithe indifference or straight contempt.
“Only half a year and I’m gone from here,” Claire told herself, repeating it like a mantra to calm down. “Only half a year.”
She wished, oh how she wished, that at sixteen, almost seventeen, that didn’t feel like eternity.
Meanwhile, in another room not far away, all four walls flickered with light and sound. And every glimmer found its own reflection in Daisy McClennon’s eyes.
To the left, a full-sized Davy Crockett—soot smeared and bloodied, but undaunted—defended the Alamo in color far more brilliant than ever imagined by the original director. Soon, sophisticated equipment under Daisy’s subtle guidance would add a third dimension and more. For the right price, she’d even intensify the experience with smell and the floor-rattling concussion of Mexican cannonballs.
Her best, most pricey enhancements were so good, in fact, they had to carry a truth-in-reality warning … a little pink diamond flashing in one corner, signifying “this isn’t real” to those with weak hearts or soft minds. While many called her an artist, Daisy did holo-augmentations for cash income, period. The other walls of her laboratory were devoted to her really important work.
Columns of data flowed like spume over a waterfall. Torrents—and yet mere samplings from the river, the ocean of information that was the Net. Daisy’s blue eyes skimmed scores of readouts at once.
Here a UNEPA survey assayed remaining rain-forest resources. Next to it rippled a project proposal by a major mining company. And over to the right, one of her subroutines patiently worked its way through a purloined list of antisabotage security procedures for the West Havana Nuclear Power Station … still apparently impregnable, but Daisy had hopes.
The visible portion of the flow was only a sliver, a fragment distilled and sent back to this nexus by her electronic servants—her ferrets and foxes, her badgers and hounds—data-retrieval programs euphemistically named after beasts, some now extinct but known in earlier times for their tenacity, hunger, and unwillingness to take “no” for an answer. All over the world, Daisy’s electronic emissaries searched and probed at her bidding, prying loose secrets, correlating, combining, devouring.
Daisy’s cover business helped explain her prodigious computing needs, her means. But actually, she lived and worked for ends. Into the universe of data she sent forth guerrillas, her personal contingents in the war against planet rapists.
Such as Chang. It was she who had tipped UNEPA off to the whereabouts of that awful man’s grisly cache near Taipei. News of Chang’s death had come as a welcome surprise. She’d been so sure he’d escape or at worst get a wrist slap. Perhaps those wimps at UNEPA were getting some guts, after all.
But now, on to other things. Daisy sat padmasama on a silk cushion amidst a cyclone of pictures and data. Her eyes quickly sifted what her creatures brought her … industrial “development” plans … laxity by weak, compromise-ridden public agencies … betrayal by bribed, gor-sucked officials. And worse.
Within the movement, her name was spoken in hushed tones, with respect, awe, and a little fell dread. In another era, Daisy might have heard the voices of angels in church bells. Today, though, her talents truly flowered as she plucked the schemes of builders as well as the prevarications of moderates, even half a world away.
“So Logan thinks his idea’s just amusing … probably nonsense …” she whispered as she wove her ex-husband’s recent paper into a special database. Of course she couldn’t follow his more arcane mathematical derivations, but that didn’t matter. She had programs for that. Or human consultants just a net call away.
“… the station’s anchor boom couldn’t have been lifted by any known explosive. For lack of other explanations, I’m led to imagine incredibly focused seismic waves …”
Daisy’s nostrils flared as she watched a panned view of the hated tidal power project. Yet another example of Logan’s selling out. Of his futile, foredoomed effort to “solve” the world’s problems. In bargaining with evil, of course, he had bartered away his soul.
Still, she knew him. She knew her former love better than he knew himself. Logan’s poorest hunches were often better than other engineers’ best analyses.
“It’d be just like
him to latch onto something big and not even trust his own instincts,” she sighed.
Daisy stared at the broken tidal barrage. Anything that could disrupt a big project like that interested her. There were people she knew … others who also despised the slow, reformist methods of the North American Church of Gaia. A loose network of men and women who knew how to take action. This news of Logan’s might mean some new threat. Or perhaps an opportunity.
Daisy’s eyes stroked the data flow pouring endlessly from the Net sea. The blue eyes of a hunter, they flashed and sought. Their patience was that of mission, and in them dwelled the perseverance of dragons.
Sleep little children, you be good,
Do your chores just like you should.
Eat your food now, clean your plate,
Poor kids dream of getting what you ate.
Play square always, don’t tell lies,
’Cause secret-keepers always die,
Grumbling and all alone,
Underground just like a Gnome.
Do you like money? Just you know,
Some types help while others glow.
Earth-Bonds serve us, all our days,
But Swiss gold gives off gamma rays.
• CORE
“Whatever we do,” Teresa Tikhana had said earlier, before the meeting broke up. “We can’t let any of the space powers in on this. I’m sure now they were all in cahoots with Spivey’s illegal research on Erehwon. Heaven only knows what they’d do if they got their hands on gravity lasers and cosmic knots.”
So they decided not to publicly announce the impending end of the world, or their bold, if unlikely, plan to fight it. Big governments were already the prime suspects for having created Beta, losing it, and then hiding the story to escape responsibility. If so, the powers that be wouldn’t think twice about wiping out George Hutton’s little band to keep the foul secret a little longer.