“That leaves Africa,” George summarized when they got back to business. And indeed, the final site would be the toughest. Tangoparu Ltd. had never done business in the area where they had to set up the last resonator. Their geological maps were obsolete, and to make matters worse, the region was on the U.N.’s Stability and Human Rights Watch List. Nobody on their team knew anyone there well enough to rely on. Not well enough to help them set up a thumper in absolute privacy.
“I’ve already started putting out feelers,” Auntie Kapur said. “With a nested hyper search I ought to find someone trustworthy who can get us in.”
“Just make sure to run your search routine by Pedro Manella. He’s in charge of net security,” Stan cautioned. “We don’t want some bored hacker’s ferret program arousing attention—”
He stopped when Auntie gave him an indulgent look, as if he were trying to teach his own mother to tie her shoes.
She’s not much older than me, he thought. I’m a grandfather and a full professor. So how does she always manage to make me feel like a little boy, caught with a frog in his pocket?
Maybe it’s something she learned in priestess school while I was studying inconsequential stuff like the workings of stars and the shape of space.
“I’ll be careful,” she promised, remaining vague. But in her eyes Stan read something that seemed to say she knew exactly what she was doing.
Back in the year 1990, the people of the United States of America paid three billion dollars for eighteen thousand million disposable diapers. Into these snug, absorbent, well-engineered products went one hundred million kilograms of plastic, eight hundred million kilograms of wood pulp, and approximately five million babies. The babies weren’t disposable, but all the rest went straight into the trash stream.
Early designs for “disposable” diapers had included degradable inner liners, meant to be flushed down the toilet while the outer portion was reused. But that method was soon abandoned as inconvenient and unpleasant. Modern parents preferred just balling up the whole offensive mess and tossing it into the garbage. Tons of feces and urine thus bypassed urban sewage systems and went instead by flyblown truck through city streets to landfills, incinerators, and the new, experimental recycling plants. Along with them went hepatitis A, the Norwalk and Rota viruses, and a hundred other air- and water- and insect-borne threats.
As the price of landfill dumping rose above $100 a ton, by 1990 it was costing Americans $350 million a year just to get rid of single-use diapers, so for every dollar spent by parents on disposables, other taxpayers contributed more than ten cents in hidden subsidy.
That didn’t include, of course, the untold cost of the 1996 New Jersey Rota epidemic. Or the nationwide hepatitis outbreaks of ’99.
But what could be done? To busy young families, needing two wage earners just to make ends meet, convenience was a treasure beyond almost any price. It could make the difference between choosing to have a child or giving up the idea altogether.
Packaging and disposal fees might have let old-fashioned diaper services compete on even terms. But that, and other bullet-biting measures, voters succeeded in putting off for another generation … for another, harder century.
These, after all, were the waning years of high-flying TwenCen. And nothing was too good for baby.
Anyway, if the bill wouldn’t come due for another twenty years or so, all the better. Baby would be a superkid, raised on tofu and computers and quality time. So baby could pay for it all.
• HOLOSPHERE
Jen Wolling missed her postman.
Who would have imagined it, back when she was a blonde fireball tearing up turn-of-the-century biology? Even then she’d known the future would offer surprises, but the changes that amazed her most turned out not to be the grand ones—those milestones noted breathlessly by media pundits—but little things, the gradual shifts people overlooked simply because they crept up on you bit by bit, day by day.
Such as the steady disappearance of postmen. Amid the growing worldwide data culture few had foreseen that consequence—an end to those punctual footsteps on the walk, to the creak of the letter box, to the friendly “hello” rustle of paper envelopes.…
Without fanfare, Britain’s twice-a-day deliveries went every other day, then once weekly. Letter carrying was “deregulated”—turned over to private services, which then charged by the minute and made a production number of signing over a single envelope.
What Jen missed most was the routine mundanity of mail time. It used to come as a welcome break, an excuse to tear herself away from the flat, cramped, eye-wearying computer screens of those days, stretching her crackling back as she hobbled over to pick up the daily offering of multicolored envelopes.
Most of it had been junk of course. What was Sturgeon’s first law? Ninety percent of anything is crap.
But ah, that remaining ten percent!
There were letters from dear friends (which, amidst a month-long wrestling bout of abstract theory, often served to remind her she had friends). And there were technical journals to leaf through, scribble on the margins, and leave in the corner to pile up like geologic sediments.…
And beautiful, real-paper magazines—Natural History and National Geographic and Country Life—their glossy pages conveying what modern hyper versions could not, despite high-fidelity sound and stereo projection.
Trees regularly died for human literacy in those days. But that was one sacrifice even Jen didn’t begrudge. Not then, nor even today as she opened the curtains to spill morning light onto library shelves stacked high with books printed on rag paper, some even bound in burnished leather that had once adorned the backs of proud animals.
This library could bring a small fortune from collectors … and the sharp opprobrium of vegetarians. But one of the advantages of the electronic age was that you could maintain a universe of contacts while keeping all prying eyes out of your own home, your castle.
It also has disadvantages, she thought as she scanned the list of bulletins awaiting her this morning. Her autosecretary displayed a column of daunting figures. Back when communication had still been a chore, half these correspondents would have been too lazy or thrifty to spend the time or a stamp. But now, message blips were as easy and cheap as talk itself. Easier, for copies could be made and transmitted ad infinitum.
Yes, indeed. Sometimes Jen longed for her postman.
You don’t miss water or air, either—not till the well runs dry, or the oxygen partial pressure drops to twenty percent.
She took a subvocal input device from its rack and placed the attached sensors on her throat, jaw, and temples. A faint glitter in the display screens meant the machine was already tracking her eyes, noting by curvature of lens and angle of pupil the exact spot on which she focused at any moment.
She didn’t have to speak aloud, only intend to. The subvocal read nerve signals, letting her enter words by just beginning to will them. It was much faster than any normal speech input device … and more cantankerous as well. Jen adjusted the sensitivity level so it wouldn’t pick up each tiny tremor—a growing problem as her once athletic body turned wiry and inexact with age. Still, she vowed to hold onto this rare skill as long as possible.
Tapping certain teeth made colors shift in the tanks and screens. A yawn sent cyclones spinning within a blue expanse. Sometimes, under a talented operator, a subvocal could seem almost magical, like those “direct” brain-to-computer links science fiction writers were always jabbering about, but which, for simple neurological reasons, had never become real. This was as close as anyone had come, and still ninety percent of existing subvocals were used at most to make pretty 3-D pictures.
How ironic then, that Jen had been taught to use hers at age sixty-two. So much for adages about old dogs and new tricks!
“Hypersecretary, Sri Ramanujan,” she said.
Mists cleared and a face formed, darkly handsome, with noble Hindu features. For her computer’s “shell” persona Jen co
uld have chosen anything from cartoon alien to movie star. But she had picked this system’s unique designer as a model. In those eyes she recognized something of the young consultant from Nehruabad, his life-spark peering out from the cage of his useless body.
“Good morning, Professor Wolling. During the last twenty-four hours there have been three priority-nine world news items, two regional alerts for Britain, and four on general topics from Reuters, your chosen neutral-bias news agency. None of the alerts were in categories listed by you as critical.”
Citizens had to subscribe to a minimum news-input or lose the vote. Still, Jen was anything but a public events junky, so her nine-or-greater threshold was set as high as allowed. She’d scan the headlines later.
“You have received six letters and thirty five-message blips from individuals on your auto-accept list. Sixty-five more letters and one hundred and twelve blips entered your general delivery box on the Net.
“In addition, there were four hundred and thirteen references to you, in yesterday’s scientific journals. Finally, in popular media and open discussion boards, your name was brought up with level seven or greater relevance fourteen hundred and eleven times.”
It was clearly another case of human profligacy—this typical turning of a good thing into yet another excuse for overindulgence. Like the way nations suffering from greenhouse heat still spilled more than five billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. A prodigious yield that was nevertheless nothing compared to the species’ greatest harvest—words.
And to think, some idiots predicted that we’d someday found our economy on information. That we’d base money on it!
On information? The problem isn’t scarcity. There’s too damned much of it!
The problem usually wasn’t getting access to information. It was to stave off drowning in it. People bought personalized filter programs to skim a few droplets from that sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became the selected entertainments and special-interest zines passed through by those tailored shells.
Here a man watches nothing but detective films from the days of cops and robbers—a limitless supply of formula fiction. Next door a woman hears and reads only opinions that match her own, because other points of view are culled by her loyal guardian software.
To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. “Let’s see what happens to that list,” she said aloud, “when we use threshold seven, categories one through twenty.”
“And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?”
Jen felt in a good mood. “Let’s go with twenty percent.”
That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in defiance of her own parameters. This way she asked Ramanujan to unleash purposely on her a little of the chaos his devilish virus-symbiont had once wreaked on thirteen million Net subscribers in South Asia—jiggling their complacent cyberworlds to show them glimpses of different realities, different points of view.
After he was caught, being sent to that hospital-jail in Bombay hardly mattered to Sri Ramanujan, whose own body had been a prison since infancy. But cutting off his net privileges had been an added punishment far worse than any death sentence.
“As you wish, Jen Wolling.”
The simulated visage seemed pleased. He bowed and disappeared, making way for unreeling sheaves of data. Colors demarked significant passages, enhanced by her semantic-content filter.
Her eyes focused on text which glowed with reddish highlights. Ah, the little devil, she thought, for the program had slipped in a cluster of hate mail.
“… Wolling has become a loose cannon. Her recent trip to Southern Africa proves she’s lost all sense of propriety.
“But what irks most is her recent cavalier reassessment of the essential Gaian paradigm—a scientific model she herself helped develop so many years ago! She is becoming a senile embarrassment to biological science …”
Jen found the style familiar, and sure enough, the signature was that of an old colleague, now a bitter opponent. She sighed. It was strange to find herself regularly assaulted as unscientific whenever she deviated an iota from “accepted” principles … principles based upon her own earlier theories.
Well, she admitted to herself. Maybe sometimes I deviate more than an iota. And I do enjoy causing a stir.
She flicked her tongue. Electromagnetic sensors read her intent and swept the diatribe away without comment. Another glowed redly in its place.
“… Wolling is an embarrassment to our cause to save Our Mother. Isn’t it enough’ she pays homage to the reductionist values of patriarchal western science, giving that discredited realm the devotion she properly owes Gaia?
“In giving ammunition to Earth-rapists—to Zeus-Jehovah-Shiva worshippers—she betrays Our Mother …”
Strange how one word could mean so many things to so many different people. To biologists, “Gaia” described a theory of planetary ecological balance and regulated feedback loops. But to devoted mystics it named a living goddess.
Another tongue flick, and a third tirade slid into place.
“… Evolution has always been driven by the death of species. Take the so-called catastrophes of the Permian and Triassic and Cretaceous, when countless living types were annihilated by environmental shocks. Now, according to Wolling and Harding, these were dangerous times for the Earth, when the so-called “Gaia homeostasis” almost collapsed. But that simply isn’t true! Today’s so-called ecological crisis is just another in a long series of natural …”
Smiling made the display shimmer. Here were representatives of three different, unasinous points of view, each deeply opposed to the others, and yet all attacking her! She leafed through other crimson diatribes. Some Madrid Catholics poured calumny on her for assisting the gene-resurrection of mastodons. A white antisegregation society fired fusillades at her for visiting Kuwenezi. One of the “ladybug combines” accused her of undermining the trillion-dollar organic pest-control industry, and so on. In most cases the writer clearly didn’t even understand her real position. Should a rare piece of vituperation actually show cleverness, it would go into a clipping file. But none of today’s hate-grams offered anything illuminating, alas.
The technical citations were hardly any more interesting. Most were doctoral theses referring to her old papers … the “classics” that had led to that damned Nobel prize. She selected five promising ones for later study, and dumped the rest.
Among the personal messages was one bona fide letter from Pauline Cockerel, asking Jen to come visit London Ark.
“Baby misses you.”
The young geneticist added an animated montage of the young demi-mastodon in action. Jen laughed as Baby lifted her trunk in a grinning trumpet of victory, while chewing a stolen apple.
There were a few other friendly notes, from loyal colleagues and former students. And a data packet from Jacques, her third husband—containing a folio of his latest paintings and an invitation to his next showing.
All of these merited replies. Jen tagged and dictated first-draft answers, letting the syntax-checker convert her clipped short-speech into clear paragraphs. In fact, sometimes thoughts streamed faster than judgment. So Jen never “mailed” letters till Tuesdays or Fridays, when she scrupulously went over everything carefully a second time.
She glanced at the clock. Good, the chore would be done well before morning tea. Only two letters to go.
“… I’m real sorry to bother you. You probably don’t remember me. I sat in the front row during your talk …”
This writer wasn’t adroit at short-speech. Or he lacked a conciseness program to help him get to the point. Jen was about to call up one of her standard fan mail replies when one highlighted line broke through.
“… at Kuwenezi. I was the guy with the little baboons …”
Indeed, Jen remembered! The boy’s name had been … Nelson something-or-other. Uneducated, but bright and earnest, he had a
sked the right questions when his more sophisticated elders were still trapped in a morass of details.
“… I’ve been studying hard, but I still don’t understand some things about the Gayan Paradime …”
Jen nodded sympathetically. The word “Gaian” had become nearly as meaningless as “socialist” or “liberal” or “conservative” were half a century ago … a basket full of contradictions. She sometimes wondered what James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis would have thought of where their original, slim monographs had led. Or the Russian mystic, Vernadsky, who even earlier had proposed looking at the Earth as a living organism.
Perhaps these times were ripe for a new church militant, as in the waning days of the Roman Empire. Maybe great movements liked having living prophets to both idealize and later crucify. Veneration followed by varicide seemed the traditional pattern.
With Lovelock and Margulis and Vernadsky long gone, the new faithful had to settle for Jen Wolling—founding saint and heretic. At times it got so she even wished she’d never had that epiphany, so long ago on the frosty shoulders of Mount Snowdon, when the turning leaves had suddenly revealed to her the jewellike mathematical clarity of the Gaia metaphor.
No regrets. Jen shook her head. I cannot regret those equations. for they are true.
Once, when young Alex had come to her complaining of the awful burden, being a Nobelist’s grandson, she had told him, “Some fools think I’m smart because I found a few tricks, to make math serve biology. But you and I know a secret … that someday you’ll go places where I can’t. Prize or no damned prize.”
She missed her grandson and wondered what mischief he was up to.
Jen shook herself out of a mental random walk. Bearing down, she returned to the letter from the black teenager in Kuwenezi.
“… the part that confuses me most is how animals and plants fight each other for survival. Like hunting and being hunted? Nobody ‘wins’ those wars, cause every soldier dies anyway, eventually? Most of the time, what looks to them like fighting isn’t really fighting at all! Cause each of them depends on the others.