“Like, a herd of deer depends on wolfs to keep deer numbers down, or else they’d overgrase and then all starve to death … And the wolfs’ numbers are controlled by how many deer there are to eat.
“This is what they mean by homeostasis, isn’t it? One kind of animal regulates another, and it’s regulated back …”
Jen skimmed ahead to a highlighted area.
“But what about Man? Who or what regulates us?”
She nodded appreciatively. There were scores of good books she could refer the young man to. But he must have already accessed the standard answers and found them unsatisfying.
We are an unregulated cancer, proclaimed many eco-radicals. Man must cut his numbers and standard of living by a factor of ten, or even a hundred, to save the world.
Some even suggested it would be better if the destroyer species—Homo sapiens—died out altogether, and good riddance.
Those pursuing the “organic” metaphor suggested the problem would be solved once humanity adjusted to its proper role as “brain” of the planetary organism. We can learn to regulate ourselves, pronounced the moderators of the North American Church of Gaia, as they pushed “soft” technologies and birth control. We must learn to be smart planetary managers.
There were still other opinions.
Everything would be fine on Earth if humans just left! That was the message of the space colonization movement, as they promoted plans for cities and factories in the sky. Out in space, resources are endless. We’ll move out and turn the little blue planet into a park!
To Madrid Catholics and some other old-line religious groups, The world was made for our use. The end of days will come soon. So why “regulate,” when it’s all temporary anyway? One unborn human fetus is worth all the whales in the sea.
A group based in California offered a unique proposal. “Sheckleyans” they called themselves, and they agitated—tongue in cheek, Jen imagined—for the genetic engineering of new predators smart and agile enough to prey on human beings. These new hunters would cull the population in a “natural” manner, allowing the rest of the race to thrive in smaller numbers. Vampires were a favorite candidate predator—certainly canny and capable enough, if they could be made—but another Sheckleyan subsect held out for werewolves, a less snooty, less aristocratically conceited sort of monster. Either way, romance and adventure would return, and mankind, too, would at last be “regulated.” Jen sent the Sheckleyans an anonymous donation every year. After all, you never could tell.
These were just some of the suggestions, both serious and whimsical. But Jen realized the young man deserved more than stock answers. She put his letter on the high-priority heap—the pile of items she would go over carefully later, in the hours before bed.
One letter to go then. The last one had arrived on auto-accept, so the sender knew her private code. Jen scanned with rising irritation. Someone seemed to be advertising vacation homes on the Sea of Okhotsk!
That’s all I need.
But then she suddenly remembered. Vacation homes …
It was a mnemonic cue. “Sri Ramanujan,” she said aloud. “I think this message may be in cipher. Please see if we own a key to break it.”
The face of the young Hindustani appeared briefly.
“Yes, Jen Wolling. It uses a private code given you years ago by the Pacific Society of Hine-marama. I’ll have it translated in a minute.”
Ah, Jen thought. This had to be from the New Zealand priestess, Meriana Kapur. It was ages since she’d seen the Maori woman, whose cult took the Gaia concept rather literally. But then, so had Jen during one phase.
“Here it is, Professor.”
Ramanujan vanished again, leaving a totally transformed message in his place.
A totally innocuous message, as well. What she read now consisted of a rambling series of disconnected reminiscences … some the two women had experienced together, long ago, and some clearly made up. Jen noticed that none of the sentences were even highlighted. Her semantic-content program couldn’t find a single explicit statement to set in bold!
But then, gradually, she smiled. Of course. This isn’t senility, it’s diamond blade sharpness! There are ciphers within ciphers. Codes within codes.
Apparently, Auntie Kapur wanted to be sure only Jen understood this message. Certainly no busybody hacker’s automatic snooping program would sort meaning out of this, not without the shared context of two women who had lived a very long time.
Vagueness can be an art in itself.
Jen’s smile faded when it began dawning on her how seriously the Maori priestess took this. The precautions began to make sense as glimmerings of meaning penetrated.
“… I’m afraid Mama’s unexpected ulcer has only one possible cure. Repairing the hole requires drastic measures … but the regular doctors would only interfere if they knew. (We think they originally caused the problem.) …”
There were more passages like that. Hints and allusions. Was Meriana saying the world itself was in danger? A danger worse than the big power nuclear standoff of long ago?
A passing reference was missed until her third reading. Then Jen realized Kapur was referring to her grandson.
Alex? But what could he be involved in that could pose such a threat to …
Jen gasped. Oh, that bloody boy. This time he must really have done it!
Nobody with any sense kept confidential notes on a computer. So from a desk drawer she took out an expensive pad of real paper and a pencil. Carefully this time, Jen went through her friend’s letter line by line, jotting references and probable meanings. It wasn’t any form of code-breaking a machine could perform, more like the ancient Freudian art of analyzing free associations, a sleuthing through the subjective world of impressions and wild guesses. A very human sort of puzzle, thousands of years older than the discrete patternings of cybernetics.
Exactly what is it they want of me? Jen wondered what she, an old woman, could do to help Auntie and Alex in a situation as dire as this. Finally, though, it became clear. Africa. Ndebele Canton … Meriana heard of my visit there. She thinks I can help get them in. Secretly.
Jen sat back, amazed. Secretly? These days?
The idea was absurd.
She chewed her lip.
Well … it would be a challenge, at least.
By Pauling and Orgell … I’ll bet I can do it.
One thing for certain, Auntie’s letter demanded an immediate response. No waiting till Friday for this one.
And that lad in Kuwenezi—Nelson Grayson. It looked as if the young man with the pet baboons might be getting his answers in person after all.
Net Vol. A8230-761, 04.01.38: 11:24:12 UT; User M12-44-6557-Bac990 STATISTICAL REQUEST [Level: generic/colloquial]
Earth Land Surface Area (In millions of square kilometers)
1988 2038
Total 149 142
In desert, mountain, tundra 101 111
In arable land 40 29
In cultivated land 13 11
In fish farms 0.002 0.12
Census Counts (in billions of individuals)
1988 2038
Human beings 5.2 10.6
Domestic cattle 1.2 0.2
Domestic sheep 1.0 0.5
Domestic hogs 0.5 0.5
Domestic dogs and cats 0.4 0.02
• HYDROSPHERE
On a different continent, but only milliseconds away by light-cable, another woman also sailed the data sea. Only while Jen Wolling carefully navigated a dinghy, Daisy McClennon sailed a privateer’s sloop, in search of prey.
On her work wall, a science fiction space epic stepped frame by frame through a flashy battle sequence—her video processor inserting new special effects, making already grand starships even more magnificent. Matted stars and planets grew three dimensional, and explosions more titanic than ever. With such magic Daisy breathed new life into old classics, though for a diminishing, specialized audience.
Again, however, Daisy’s attention swerve
d from her cash crop of embellished movies to other scenes and truer obsessions. The news services told of recent raids by Bedouin rebels, attacking the International Petroleum Reservation. She checked the reports’ accuracy by other means and discovered that U.N. peacekeepers were understating the amount of oil spilled from pipelines severed by the nationalists, but not by enough to cause a scandal, unfortunately. Daisy had learned from hard experience never to cry “coverup!” unless the payoff was worthwhile.
Now here was a likely target. Blue symbols off Luzon showed one of the floating barge-towns of the Sea State, heading northward toward Japan. UNEPA was supposed to make sure the nation of refugees obeyed its rules. But sure enough, only two inspector boats showed in the vicinity. Nowhere near enough.
I wonder what Sea State is up to, she asked herself.
Keying an oceanographic database, Daisy noted that a large migration of spinner porpoises would intersect the path of the flotilla in a few weeks’ time. UNEPA had recently downgraded spinners from “threatened” to “watch” status, which meant those with proven need were allowed to harvest limited numbers. Sea State could always establish proven need.
“Gotcha!” Daisy said, and sent a coded alert to an activist group in Nagasaki. When that Sea State flotilla reached its destination, there’d be a party waiting to pounce on the slightest infraction.
What next?
For a while she thought she had managed to trace a twisty money trail, proving that an official in Queensland had gor-sucked to local hotel interests. But the carni-man was smarter than usual. Computer taps on his accounts failed to report any unusual purchases in real estate or minerals futures.
For this case, her background as a McClennon helped. Before becoming a family black sheep, she had witnessed many of the ways her cousins and uncles sheltered and moved money without letting it show up on the net. So she called in a few favors from fellow radicals in Australia, who could arrange to snoop the Queensland official in person. Sooner or later, she was going to get the guy.
A timer beeped. She was supposed to get up and do some chores around the compound, or else Claire would raise a fit. This work in the Net was important for world survival, but her daughter didn’t seem to care about that … probably wished she lived more like her spoiled cousins.
Well, there’s no getting out of it, I suppose, Daisy sighed. It probably was past time she took a turn of her own at the cess pit. Or was it greenhouse maintenance Claire had been after her about?
But as she rose, Daisy caught a sudden change in one of her alert boxes, highlighting a name from her special watch list. For years she had maintained a tiny lamprey program attached to the home unit of the infamous Jennifer Wolling. All that time, her little spy had sampled and assessed what the apostate biologist was up to. Now, from London, it reported Wolling’s ciphered message.
“Hmm,” Daisy pondered, sitting down again. “The witch hardly ever tries to hide anything. What’s she up to now?”
With trivial ease, Daisy traced the memorandum to its source. Of course. The Pacific Gaians were just the sort to conspire with Wolling. Compromisers, they worshipped an anemic goddess who seemed willing to settle for a world only half destroyed by man, with most of its species preserved in glass bottles, relying on technological “solutions” thrown together by bright idiots like Logan Eng.…
The cipher code was a good one. It took an hour to crack it. And when Daisy finally read the decrypted letter, she found a second layer filled with personal references and context-laden hints—the hardest kind of puzzle for an outsider to untangle.
That only made it more tempting, of course. Daisy knew about some new language programs, almost intelligent in their own right, that might apply here. And there were human consultants who owed her favors, too. Some of them might pick up connections she missed.
If all else failed, she also had certain contacts among enemy groups, as well … big corporations and government agencies with fantastic resources at their command. Among those, too, were also men and women indebted to her for past services. Daisy had dealt with devils before, when it suited her purposes. Sometimes honest rapists were preferable to mealy-mouthed compromisers.
She transferred the partially deciphered letter into her “possible clues” file, along with other anomalies like her ex-husband’s paper on the mysterious Spanish quakes.
Ignored to her left, small screens monitored all twenty hectares of Six Oaks, the realm she and Logan had built here on the bayou, where she practiced self-reliance and “zero impact” far more faithfully than the pallid versions preached by the NorAChuGas. Not just “good faith efforts,” but independence from the mines and factories and polluting power plants of industrial society … and from her own damned, smug, aristocratic family.
One of those displays showed her daughter standing on a stepladder next to the greenhouse, her hair tied back in a kerchief and arms covered with putty as she scraped the labels off newly bought sheets of glass and fitted them one by one to replace those cracked in a recent storm.
But Daisy did not see, nor did she recall her promise. Drawn once more to the holo screens, her blue eyes roved the electronic sea, the data ocean, seeking the blood foes of her world. Practicing the art of vendetta. Pursuing prey.
No animal is as likeable as an individual, and yet so loathsome in large groups. Voracious, implacable, using up everything in sight, this creature has been a bane to the Earth. Within a few millennia it has stripped vast portions of the planet, turning them into barren desert.
The animal isn’t Man, though humankind helped it multiply in vast numbers. It is the goat. A boon to smalltime nomads, the goat is an immeasurable calamity to the planet’s biosphere. Even today, it shares as much blame for the advancing sands as global warming or ill-planned irrigation.
That is why we, the Preservation Alliance of North Africa, have reluctantly taken action to sacrifice one species for the good of all. It is why we come onto the Net today, via this untraceable routing, to announce what we have done.
Some say the preferred target of a winnowing should be humanity itself, which has perpetrated even worse harm. That may be so, but we admit to squeamishness about murdering the billions of people it would take to make a difference.
Besides, the Helvetian War proved Homo sapiens to be biologically adept, highly resistant to engineered diseases. The major powers’ biocrisis teams would make matters moot within a few weeks anyway. Only a few million would die before cures were found, resulting in no long-term ecological change, just our own pursuit as criminals.
None of these drawbacks apply to our other target species, however. We are certain the world will retrain the remaining pastoral shepherds once their destructive herds are eliminated. And we emphasize that our virus has been carefully tested. The disease is quite specific to goats. It should have no other effect than to correct a horrible mistake of man and nature.
One purpose of this announcement is to appeal to workers in biolabs. Think carefully when you’re asked to seek a cure. By your minor sabotage you may save a forest or a million hectares of Sahel! Drop that test tube into an autoclave, and you may save a hundred species otherwise doomed to perish before this rapacious menace! Remember, civil disobedience is your right under the Charter of Rio.
Another purpose is, of course, to seek public discussion. Criticism and data on the effects of our peremptory measure may be sent to the general and open display board [ OpDBaq1.779.-66-8258-BaB 689.] We will read your comments regularly, and we welcome your suggestions.
Sincerely,
The Preservation Alliance of North Africa
• MESOSPHERE
This time of year, Davis Strait thronged with traffic. Great freighters plowed the choppy waters, following strobing marker buoys all the way to Lancaster Sound and the shortcut to Asia. Solar arrays and rigid wing-sails lent the sleek vessels a family resemblance to the clipper ships of yore, on which men once upon a time had risked their lives seeking this selfsame North
west Passage. Now and then, the shadows of dirigibles, like passing clouds, darkened the sea nearby. The zeppelin crews, bound for Europe or Canada, leaned out to wave at the high-tech sailors below.
It was a far cry from when Roald Amundsen had come this way, to spend three hard years battling toward Alaska. Today the voyage took two weeks, and all looked peaceful here in the realm of the midnight sun.
Of course, Stan Goldman knew, appearances can be deceiving.
From this height he could make out a place along Greenland’s western verge where a vast, growling glacier met the open sea. Beacons detoured commerce round a chain of lumbering behemoths wrapped in reflective foil. The insulated bergs resembled great, silvery, alien mother ships, as mammoth engines pushed them south toward thirsty lands.
Eventually, the giant island would run out of white treasure, unbelievable as it might seem up here, where a snowy plateau still spanned one entire horizon. In fact, it had already retreated a long way, leaving stark, sheer fjords cut into a serrated coast. Lichens and mosses spread like velvet across new plains and valleys, just below this hired zeppelin. After close to a million years, spring had come at last to Greenland.
And yet, there is a cost. There’s always a cost.
Stan had just finished reading dire news about these northern seas. Species counts were down again. No one had seen a bowhead whale in years. And migratory birds, the litmus of ecological health, were laying fewer eggs.
Many blamed the old nemesis, pollution. Down below, UNEPA and Kingdom of Denmark launches sniffed among the great freighters … as if any captain would dare drop even a paper cup into this heavily policed waterway. Actually though, climatic changes, rather than dumping, might be at fault. Temperate-zone creatures could flee the spreading deserts by moving north. But where could polar bears go when their dens turned to slush?
Of course, palm trees wouldn’t be growing up here any time soon. A man immersed in those bright waters would still be unconscious in minutes and dead from hypothermia inside an hour. And six months from now, the sun would vanish for another winter.