Again, he thought he knew what Stan Goldman might say.
“Hey, all right. We make mistakes. But who told us, back when we started digging and mining and irrigating, that it would come to this? No one. We had to find out for ourselves, the hard way.
“So where were those damned UFOs and charioted gods and prophets when we really needed them? No one gave us a guidebook for managing a planet. We’re writing it ourselves now, from hard experience.”
Concealing a sad smile, George also knew how he’d reply.
I mourn the moa, whom my own ancestors drove into extinction. I mourn the herons and whales, slaughtered by the pakeha. I mourn you too, little fishes.
When all of this was done, he would fill glasses for his friends, and drink to each lost species. And then, if there was enough beer left in the world, he’d also toast those yet to die.
“Come on, Sepak,” George said, folding away his handkerchief. “You can help me adjust the crane assembly. It has to be perfect when we lift the cylinder out of its bath.”
“Precision, precision.” Sepak sighed. Notwithstanding his engineering degree from the University of Port Moresby—and skin no darker than George’s—he muttered, “You honkies put too much faith in your precious machines. They’ll steal your souls, trust me. We Gimi know about this. Why just the other day my grandfather was telling me …”
Content to receive a healthy dose of his own medicine, George listened politely while they worked together—suffering in ironic role reversal the very same sort of guilt trip he’d inflicted on countless others since he first learned how.
Stan would just love this, George thought, and listened humbly while Sepak turned the tables on him, milking the everflowing teat of Western shame for all it was worth.
… And so She stopped first at the planet Venus to see if that might be the place. But when She sipped the atmosphere, She exclaimed, “Oh no! This is much too hot!”
Then She went to Mars, and once more cried out. “Here it’s much too thin and cold!”
At last, however, She came to Earth, and when She tasted the sweet air She sang in delight. “Ah, now this one is just right!”
• CORE
It wasn’t much, as sculptures go. Especially on an island renowned for its monuments. A small pyramid of stone, that was all—jutting from a sandy slope, where sparse grasses swayed to restless ocean breezes. A black-winged Chilean kestrel took off with a screeching cry as Alex climbed the low hill to get a better look at a three-sided nub of polished granite. At first sight, it was something of a disappointment.
Come on, Lustig. Get with the spirit. It’s only the tip of something much, much bigger. Imagine it doesn’t end just below ground, but keeps slanting down, down, ever downward …
He knew how those edges were aimed, probably far better than the original artist who had put the sculpture here, seven decades ago.
Imagine the Earth surrounds a solid pyramid, with four faces and four vertices, whose tips just pierce the surface …
He pictured a vast, stony tetrahedron—like one of the magic geometric forms Johannes Kepler used to think kept planets well ordered in the sky. Before Alex stood not a modest, unassuming monument, but one apex of the largest sculpture in the world. One containing the greater part of the world.
Similar carvings had been placed in Greenland, New Guinea, and South Africa, in one of the only arrangements that let each vertex emerge on dry land. For reasons similar to the artist’s, Alex had chosen the same four sites to place his secret resonators. It was more than mere happenstance, therefore, that had brought him here to Rapa Nui.
Standing over the stone pinnacle, Alex turned slowly, hands in his pockets, taking in the treeless, rocky plain. Westward a few kilometers jutted the cliffs of Rano Kao, one of the island’s three large, dormant volcanoes, overlooking a sea of frothy whitecaps. Not counting trivial islets, the wind riven by that jagged prominence arrived after crossing eight thousand miles of unimpeded ocean.
How strange to think on such scales, when all my training is to contemplate the infinitely small.
Standing here, he knew with utter precision where the other Tangoparu teams were dispersed around the globe. Probably none of them would encounter their local portions of the Whole Earth Sculpture. Sites two and four were offset from the actual monuments by several hundred kilometers.
But this was the hub. Few islands were so small compared with the vast ocean surrounding them. Alex could not have missed this apex had he tried.
Some say pyramids are symbols of luck, he pondered. But I’d still prefer a dodecahedron.
Rapa Nui had been chosen as headquarters for other reasons, not least of which was security. Here the Pacific Society of Hine-marama had more influence than the “national” authorities in faraway Chile. Under the society’s umbrella they could bring in a large crew, sparing Alex the need to supervise construction, leaving him time to wrestle the cloud of numbers and images in his head.
Those images followed him everywhere, even walking along the cinder cone of an ancient volcano or contemplating strange monuments on an isle of monuments.
Just north of Rano Kao, for instance, near Rapa Nui’s solitary town and landing strip, squatted a white shape that had once been a proud bird of space. Now guano streaked and forlorn, the shuttle Atlantis perched permanently on a rusted platform for visitors to gawk at and birds to use in other ways. Keeping his promise to Captain Tikhana, Alex had paid his respects to the stripped hulk, once a multibillion-dollar vessel of aspiration, but now just another Easter Island obelisk. The sensations engendered had been forlorn.
Like the first time he had seen the native statues this place was famous for. There had been that same woebegone feeling.
… as if this were a place hopes came to die.
Alex turned southward. There, by the tiny, crashing bay of Vaihu, stood a row of seven towering carvings, called moai, pouting under heavy basalt brows. Several bore cylindrical topknots made of reddish scoria They faced inland, seamed with cement where latter-day restorers had pieced them together from broken fragments. The glowering sentinels did not seem grateful. Rather, they radiated grim, obdurate resentment.
Before departing for the Arctic, Stan Goldman had given Alex a slim book about Easter Island, with old-style paper pages. “You’re going to one of the saddest, most fascinating places on Earth,” the elderly physicist had told him. “In fact, it has a lot in common with Greenland, where I’m headed.”
Alex couldn’t imagine two places less alike—one a continent in its own right, covered with ice, the other a fly-speck, broiling and nearly waterless amidst the open ocean. But Stan explained. “Both were experiments in what it might be like to plant a colony on another world—tiny settlements, isolated, without trade or any outside support, forced to live by their wits and meager local resources for generation after generation.”
Stan concluded grimly. “In neither case, I’m afraid, did humanity do very well.”
Indeed, from what Alex later read, Stan had understated the case. Hollywood images of Polynesian paradises ignored the boom-and-bust cycles of overpopulation that hit every archipelago with desperate regularity—cycles resolved by one means chiefly—the bloody culling of the adult male population. Nor did movies refer to that other holocaust—the slaughter of native species—not just by people, but by the pigs and rats and dogs the colonists brought with them.
The Polynesians weren’t particularly blameworthy. Humans had a long history of making messes wherever they went. But Alex recalled his grandmother once explaining the importance of scale. The smaller, more isolated the ecosystem, the quicker any damage became fatal. And there were few places on Earth as small, isolated, or fatal as Rapa Nui.
Within a few generations of humanity’s arrival, around 800 AD, not a tree was left standing. Without wood for boats, the settlers then had to abandon the sea, along with all possibility of escape or trade. What remained was native rock, from which they cut rude homes ??
? and these desolate icons.
Overpopulation and boredom left open only the one option—endless war. One brief century after the great statues had been raised, nearly every one had been smashed in tribal forays and reprisals. By the time Europeans arrived—to arrogantly rename the place after a Christian holiday—the natives of Rapa Nui had nearly annihilated each other.
As if we moderns do much better. It only takes a bit more power, and greater numbers, to accomplish what the Easter Islanders never could … to foul something as big as the ocean itself.
Earlier, he had strolled the island’s one narrow beach, up at Anakena, where Hotu Matu’a long ago first landed with his band of hopeful settlers. And what Alex at first thought was white sand turned out to be bits of shredded styrofoam, ground from “peanuts” and other packing material spilled thousands of miles away. The stuff had been outlawed when he was still in university. Yet it still washed ashore everywhere. Scraggly sea birds poked through the detritus. They might not be dying, but they certainly didn’t look well, either.
Jen, he thought, wishing his grandmother were here to talk to. I need you to tell me it’s not already too late. I need to hear there’s enough left to be worth saving.
The glowering statues stared inland, seeming to share Alex’s gloomy premonitions.
Oh, the new gravity resonator worked all right. In its first test runs it had picked out Beta’s familiar glitter in brighter detail than ever. Echoes bracketed the massive, complex singularity within twenty meters inside Earth’s fiery bowels.
So far, so good. But in those reverberations Alex had also seen how fast the taniwha was growing.
Damn, we have hardly any time at all.
He looked beyond the dour stone figures, and in his imagination he suddenly pictured Ragnarok. Steam billowed as the sea was rent by sudden gouts of flame, leaving behind a measureless, bottomless hole.
Then, back into the unplugged depths, the despoiled ocean poured.
“Here’s the news,” June Morgan told him when he returned to the prefab hall the technicians had built not far from Vaihu. It felt like a small sports arena set upon a flat expanse of naked bedrock. Under the opaque roof they had erected their computers and the master resonator … a gleaming cylinder newly born from its vat of purified chemicals and now anchored to swiveled bearings. Alex said, “Just give me a summary, will you, June?”
Though she wasn’t part of the original cabal, June had proven invaluable, along with several of Pedro Manella’s “new people.” Her expertise on magnetism came in particularly handy as they traced the fields lacing Earth’s core, seeking those weird zones of superconducting current discovered only weeks ago.
Also, June was a demon for organization. As the hurried days passed, Alex came to rely on her more and more.
“Site two reports they’ll have full readiness in just a few hours,” the blonde woman said, confirming that George Hutton’s group in New Guinea was on schedule. “Greenland team says they’ll be in operation by tomorrow afternoon.”
“Good.” Alex had known Goldman and Tikhana would come through. “What about Africa?”
She lifted her eyes. “They were supposed to report in again two hours ago but …” She shrugged. With their program so delicately balanced, failure at even one location would be disastrous. And the African team was in territory completely out of their control. Still, it was amazing Jen had managed getting them into Kuwenezi at all.
“Don’t worry about it. My grandmother’s never been on time for an appointment in her life. Still, she somehow always comes through. We won’t need site four for a while yet.
“As for us, however, the time’s come,” he concluded, raising his voice. “So let’s get busy.”
He sat at a nearby station, showing the familiar holographic display of a cutaway Earth, with side projections for every factor he could possibly want to follow. Their earlier probes had set off all types of vibrations below—gravitational, sonic, electrical. Likening the planet to a complex, untempered bell seemed more appropriate each time they tapped it. At the world’s surface, all this “ringing” sometimes manifested in trembling movements—a resonant coupling Alex was just beginning to sort out. At worst, if they weren’t careful they might release pent-up faulting strains, already on the verge of bursting.
“Hmm,” he pondered, looking at the latest output. “Looks like the tremors weren’t so bad this time, even though we increased power. Maybe we’re getting the hang of this.”
New maps indicated many zones below where raw power waited to be tapped, as soon as their network was complete. It’s a whole world down there, Alex thought. And we’ve only just begun exploring it.
Now the border between liquid core and mantle was shown in such detail, it appeared like the surface of an alien planet. There were corrugations which looked startlingly like mountains, and rippling expanses that vaguely resembled seas. Shadow continents mimicked thousands of kilometers below the familiar ones. Far under Africa, for instance, an intrusion of nickel-iron bobbed like an echo of the granite frigate floating far above.
There was “weather,” too—plumes of plasti-crystalline convection circulating in slow-motion currents. Occasionally, unpredictably, these streamways flickered into that astonishing, newly discovered state, and electricity flowed in perfect strokes of lightning.
It even “rained.” Long after most of Earth’s iron and nickel had separated from the rocky minerals, settling into the deep core, metal droplets still coalesced and migrated downward, pelting the boundary with molten mists, drizzles, even downpours.
I shouldn’t be surprised. Convection and change of state would have to operate down there, too. Still, it all seemed eerie and suggested bizarre notions. Might there be “life” on those shadow masses? Life to which the plastic, tortured perovskites of the mantle made up an “atmosphere”? To whom the overhead scum of granite and basalt was as diaphanous and chill as high cirrus clouds were to him?
“Ten minutes.” June Morgan gripped her clipboard plaque nervously. And Alex noticed others glancing his way with similar looks. Still, in his own heart he sensed only icy calm. A grim, composed tranquility. They had studied the monster, and now teratology was finished. It was time to go after the thing, in its very lair.
“I’d better get ready then. Thanks, June.”
He reached for his subvocal, fitting the multistranded device over his head and neck. As he adjusted the settings, he recalled what Teresa Tikhana had said to him back in the Waitomo Caves, just before they parted.
“… It’s a long way to the next oasis, Dr. Lustig. You know that, don’t you? Someday we may find other worlds and perhaps do better with them. But without the Earth behind us, at our backs, we’ll never ever get that second chance …”
To which Alex mentally added, If we lose this battle, we won’t deserve another chance.
He showed none of this, however. For the sake of those watching him, he grinned instead and spoke with a soft, affected burr.
“All right, lads, lassies. Shall we invite our wee devil out to dance?”
They laughed nervously.
Swiveling in its gimbaled supports, the resonator turned with accuracy finer than any human eye could follow. It aimed.
And they began.
PART VII
PLANET
A tug of war began, between sea and sky and land.
In the ocean, life was carnivorous and simple, a pyramid founded on the very simplest forms, the phytoplankton, which teemed in great colored tides wherever sunlight met raw materials. Of the elements they needed to grow and flourish, hydrogen and oxygen could be taken from the water, and carbon from the air. But calcium and silicon and phosphorus and nitrates … these had to be acquired elsewhere.
Some you got by eating your neighbor. But sooner or later, everything suspended in the sea must drop out of the cycle to join the ever-growing sediments below. Cold upwelling currents replenished part of the loss, dragging nutrients back up from the mudd
y bottoms. But most of the deficit was made up at the mouths of rivers, draining rain-drenched continents. Silt and minerals, the raw fertilizer of life, dripped into the sea like glucose from an intravenous tap.
On land, it took a long time for life to gain a foothold. And for a very long time there were just frail films of cyanobacteria and fungi, lacing the bare rock surfaces with filaments and tiny fibers. These first soils kept moisture in contact with stone longer, so weathering hastened. The flow of calcium and other elements to the sea increased.
Plankton are efficient when well fed. And so, after the breakup of Gondwanaland, when many great rivers fed shallows teeming with green life, carbon was sucked from the air as never before. The atmosphere grew transparent.
At that time the sun was less warm. And so, deprived of its greenhouse shield, the air also cooled. Ice sheets spread, covering more and more of the Earth until, from north and south, glaciers nearly met at the equator.
This was no mere perturbation. No mere “ice age.” Reflecting sunlight into space, the icy surface stayed frozen. Sea levels dropped. Evaporation decreased because of the chill. There was less rain.
But less rain meant less weathering of continental rocks … less mineral runoff. The plankton began to suffer and grew less efficient at taking carbon out of the air. Eventually, the removal rate fell below replenishment by volcanoes and respiration. The pendulum began to swing the other way.
In other words, the greenhouse grew back. Naturally. Within a few tens of millions of years the crisis was over. Rivers flowed and warm seas lapped the shorelines again. Life resumed its march—if anything, stimulated by the close call.
A tug of war … or a feedback loop … either way it succeeded. What matter that each cycle took epochs, saw countless little deaths and untold tragedies? Over the long term, it worked.