He felt uncomfortably sure Spivey was watching his every move, taking his measure. Logan didn’t like it.
“Are you saying you think your hypotheses worthless?” the man asked levelly.
Logan shrugged. “There are lots of notions that seem to work on paper, or in Net simulations, but can’t be justified in the real world.”
“And your notion was?” Spivey prompted.
Logan thought back to the case of the missing drill rig in southern Spain—and the anchor boom that had been lifted on end at the tidal power station—both without any sign of sabotage.
“All I did was calculate how a special type of Earth movement could have caused the strange things I saw.”
“What kind of Earth movement?”
“It’s …” Logan lifted both hands parallel. “It’s like, well, pushing a child on a swing. If you shove at the right frequency, matching the natural pendulum rhythm, you’ll build momentum with each stroke—”
“I’m aware of how resonance works, Mr. Eng. You suggested the Spanish anomalies were caused by a special type of seismic resonance. Specifically, the sudden arrival of extremely narrowly focused earthquakes and corresponding gravity variations—”
“No! I didn’t say that was the cause! I merely showed such waves would be consistent with observed events. It’s an amusing idea, that’s all. I can’t really say why I even bothered with it.”
The government man inclined his head slightly. “I’m sorry I misspoke. You sound upset about it.”
“A man’s reputation is important. Especially in my field. People understand play, of course. So I was careful to make clear that’s all I was doing, playing with an idea! It’s quite another thing to say, ‘this is what happened.’ I didn’t do that.”
Spivey regarded him for a long interval. Finally, he opened a slim briefcase and pulled out a large-format reading plaque. “I’d appreciate it if you’d leaf through this, Mr. Eng, and consider what you see in light of your … playful exercise.”
Logan thought of protesting. By now his associates in the restaurant might be worried. Or they might be incoherent from alcohol or assume he’d gone off to bed.…
He took the plaque. Making certain the recording cubes could read over his shoulder, he put his thumb on the page-turn button and began skimming. Silence stretched in the limo as he read. Finally, he said, “I don’t believe it.”
“Now you understand why I insisted you check my credentials, Mr. Eng, so you’ll know this is no hoax.”
“But this episode here …”
“You haven’t seen the actual recording, yet. It’s much more vivid than numbers. Allow me.” The man expertly dialed the correct data page. “This was taken by a high-altitude reconnaissance blimp, above our Diego Garcia Naval Station, in the Indian Ocean.”
Depicted now in front of Logan was a moonlit seascape. Calm waters glistened under still tropical air.
Suddenly, the ocean surface flattened in eight places. Despite the angle of view and foreshortening, Logan could tell the dimples formed a perfect octagon.
As quick as the dips appeared, they suddenly ballooned outward, joined now by an outer ring of smaller bulges, twenty in all. Scale numbers ran down the side of the screen, and Logan whistled.
The hillocks collapsed again, much quicker than normal gravity could have pulled them down. Forty-nine depressions replaced them this time. The center eight were now too deep for the camera to measure.
Then, suddenly, the screen erupted with light. Faster than Logan could follow, a handful of bright streaks speared upward, perpendicular to the ocean. They were gone in an instant, leaving behind a diffracting pattern of circular ripples, spreading and subsiding until at last all was still once more.
“That’s the best example,” Spivey commented. “It was accompanied by seismic activity bearing some similarity to the Spanish quakes.”
“Where …” Logan asked hoarsely. “Where did the water go?”
The colonel’s smile was distant, enigmatic. “Just missed the moon, by less than three diameters. Of course, by that point it was pretty diffuse.… Are you all right, Mr. Eng?” Genuine concern suddenly crossed Colonel Spivey’s face as he leaned forward. “Would you like a drink?”
Logan nodded. “Yes … thank you. I think I need one very much.”
For a little while, despite the car’s whispering air-conditioner, he found it rather difficult to breathe.
Net Vol. A69802-11 04/06/38 14:34:12UT. User G-654-11-7257-Aab12 AP News Alert: 7+: Key-select: “Conservation,” “animal rights,” “conflict”:
In the ongoing, sometimes violent confrontation between the International Fish and Fowl Association and the animal rights group known as No-Flesh, a surprise development today. To the amazement of many, the Hearth Conclave of the North American Church of Gaia has intervened in favor of the world’s largest organization of duck hunters.
According to the Most Reverend Elaine Greenspan, sister-leader of Washington State and this month’s spokesper for the conclave:
“We have examined all the evidence and decided that in this case neither hunting nor the consumption of animal tissue harms Our Mother. Rather, the activities of IFFA are clearly beneficial and meritorious.”
In light of the church’s long-standing abjuration of the slaughter of warm-blooded animals, Greenspan explained:
“Our position against red meat is often misunderstood. It’s not a moral stand against carnivorality, per se. There is nothing inherently evil about eating or being eaten, for that is clearly part of Gaia’s plan. Human beings evolved with meat as part of their diet.
“Our campaign has been waged because great herds of grazing cattle and sheep were destroying much of the Earth. Vast quantities of needed grain were being wasted as fodder. And finally, modified food animals such as beef steers are abominations, robbed of the ultimate dignity of wild creatures, to have a chance to fight or flee, to struggle to survive.
“After hearing the arguments of IFFA representatives, we find that none of these objections apply to them.
“Similarly, our broad stand against hunting was based on the scarcity of wildlife in comparison with the chief predator, humankind. But this does not hold where hunters are few, responsible, and sportsmanly, and where the prey species is renewable.
“Contrary to our initial expectations, we have determined that IFFA duck hunters have been among the most ardent supporters of conservation, spending millions to buy up and preserve wetlands, pursuing polluters and poachers, and regulating their own activities admirably. Any complete ban on hunting would, we estimate, lead to catastrophic loss of remaining migratory routes. The church therefore rules that IFFA is beneficial to society and to Gaia, and grants its blessing.”
In fact, there are precedents for this surprising action. Thirty years ago, for instance, the church campaigned against the selling off of many obsolete military bases, which they deemed better preserved in that state than sold to be developed as commercial property.
To today’s announcement, however, a spokesper for No-Flesh had only this comment:
“This takes NorA ChuGa hypocrisy to new heights. Killing is killing and murder is murder. All animals have rights, too. Let IFFA and their new allies beware. What they do unto others may yet be visited on them!”
When asked if this was a threat of violence, the spokesper declined elaboration.
• BIOSPHERE
Nelson Grayson was having trouble grasping “cooperation” and “competition.” The two words were defined as opposites, and yet his teacher claimed they were essentially the same thing.
Moreover, at some deep level Nelson felt he’d secretly suspected it all along.
“I’m still confused, Professor,” he admitted at their next meeting, though it cost him to say it. Each time Dr. Wolling granted one of these sessions, he feared she was finally going to give up on his slowness, his need for palpable examples at every point of theory.
She looked pale, sitting a
cross the table from him. That might just be because she spent so much time with those enigmatic strangers, performing mysterious surveys in the abandoned gold mine below ark four. Still, Nelson worried about her health.
Frail she might seem, but her gaze was unwavering. “Why don’t you start off where you do understand, Nelson?”
He quashed an urge to consult his note plaque. Once, Dr. Wolling had slapped his hand when he did that too often. “Respect your own thoughts!” she had snapped.
“All right,” he breathed. “The Gaia theory says Earth stays a good place for life because life itself keeps changing the planet. Otherwise, it would’ve gone into a permanent ice age, like Mars. Or a runaway, um, greenhouse instability—losing all its water like Venus did.”
“More likely Venus than Mars, actually,” she agreed. “Earth is rather close to its sun for a water world, near the inner edge of the habitable zone. So how did we avoid a Venus-style trap?”
For this he had a ready answer, the standard one. “Early algae and bacteria helped ocean chemistry take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They bound the carbon into their skeletons, which, uh, sedimented to the sea floor. So the atmosphere got clearer—”
“More transparent to heat radiation.”
“Yeah. So heat could escape, and the oceans could stay wet even as the sun got hotter. In fact, the air temperature’s stayed roughly the same for four billion years.”
“Including ice ages?”
Nelson shrugged. “Trivial fluctuations.”
He liked the phrase. Liked the way it rolled off the tongue. He had practiced it last night, hoping there’d be a chance to use it. “Like the heating everybody’s so worried about these days. Sure it’s making terrible problems, and a big die-back may be coming … including maybe us. But that’s not so unusual. In a million years or so, the balance will swing back.”
Jen Wolling’s nod seemed to say he was both right and wrong. Right that the greenhouse effect of the twenty-first century wasn’t the first upward jolt in Earth’s thermostat. But perhaps wrong that this excursion was like all the others.
Keep to the topic! He reminded himself. That was the problem with intellectual talk. It spun out so many sidetracks, you never got where you were going unless you used discipline. As if “intellectual” and “discipline” were words he had ever imagined applying to himself, only six months ago!
“So,” Dr. Wolling said, placing one hand on the other. “Life kept changing Earth’s atmosphere in just the right way to maintain a suitable environment for itself. Was this on purpose?”
Nelson felt briefly miffed she’d try to snare him so. Then he realized she was only being a good teacher and giving him an easy one. “That’d be the strong Gaia hypothesis,” he answered. “It says the homeo … um, homeostasis … life’s balancing act … is all part of a plan. The religious Gaian people—” Nelson chose his words carefully out of respect for the Ndebele”—say Earth’s history proves there’s a god, or goddess, who designed it all to happen this way.
“Then there’s the middle Gaia hypothesis … where people say the Earth behaves like a living organism. That it has all the properties of a living creature. But they don’t say it was actually planned. If the organism has any consciousness, it’s us.”
“Yes, go on,” she prompted. “And what’s the standard scientific view?”
“That’s the weak Gaia theory. It says natural processes just interact in a predictable way with things like oceans and volcanoes … calcium runoff from continents and such … so carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere when it’s cold, but when things get too hot the gas is pulled out, letting heat escape again.”
“It’s a process, then.”
“Yeah, but one with all sorts of built-in stabilities. Not just in temperature. Which is why so many people see a plan.”
“Indeed. But I only made you review all that because it bears on your question. How can competition be looked at as a close cousin to cooperation?
“Think about the Precambrian Era, Nelson, two to three billion years ago, when green algae in the ocean began pulling all that carbon out of the air in earnest. Tell me, what did they pour forth in its place?”
“Oxygen,” he answered quickly. “Which is transparent …”
She waved one hand. “Forget that for a moment. Think about the biological effects. Remember, oxygen burns. It was—”
“A poison!” Nelson interrupted. “Yeah. The old bacteria were Anna …”
“Anaerobic. Yes. They couldn’t deal with such a corrosive gas, even though they were the ones putting it there! It was a classic case of learning to live in your own waste products.”
Nelson blinked. “Then … then there must have been pressure to adapt.”
Dr. Wolling’s smile transmitted more than just satisfaction. The encouragement both warmed and confused Nelson.
“Exactly,” she said. “A crisis loomed for Gaia. Oxygen pollution threatened to end it all. Then some species stumbled onto a correct biochemical solution—how to take advantage of the new high-energy environment. Today, nearly everything you see around you is descended from those adaptable ones. The few surviving anaerobes are exiled to brewery vats and sea bottoms.”
Nelson nodded, eager to keep that expression in her eyes. “So Gaia went on changing and getting better—”
“—more subtle. More complicated.”
His head hurt from trying so hard. “But … it sounds like both at the same time! It was cooperation, because the species making the change had to shift together. Y’know, hunter and hunted. Eater and eaten. None of them could have made it alone.
“But it was competition, too, ’cause each of them was struggling only for itself!”
Dr. Wolling absently waved away a wisp of gray hair. “All right, you see the essential paradox. We’ve all, at one time or another, wondered about this strange thing—that death seems so evil. Our basic nature is to oppose it. And yet, without it there’d be no change, nor any life at all.
“Darwin made the cruel efficiency of the process clear when he showed that every species on Earth tries to have more offspring than it needs in order to replace the prior generation. Every one tries, in other words, to overpopulate the world, and must be regulated by something outside itself.
“What this universal trait means is that the lion not only cannot lie down with the lamb … he cannot even be completely comfortable lying down with other lions! At least not without always keeping one eyelid cracked.”
Nelson looked at her. “I … think I understand.”
She tapped the table and sat up. “Tell you what. Let’s take an even better example. Do you know anything about the nervous system?”
“You mean the brain and stuff?” Nelson shook his head. How much could a guy learn in a few months? Damn! Even using hypertexts, there was so much knowledge and so little time.
Jen smiled. “This is simple. We’ll use a holo.”
She must have planned this. One muttered word and the desk projector displayed a cutaway view of a human cranium. Nelson recognized the outlines, of course. As early as third grade, kids were taught about the two hemispheres—how both sides of the brain “thought” in different ways that somehow combined to make a single mind.
Sophistication about such matters increased as you grew older, and sometimes not for the better, as when teenagers put together homemade tomography-scan kits to get real-time activity images of their own brains. Not for greater self-awareness, but so they could learn how to “daze out”—to release the brain’s own natural opiates on demand. That honey pot had never tempted Nelson, thank goddess. But he’d seen what it did to friends and almost agreed with those who wanted to outlaw self-scanning devices.
“See the complicated blue mesh?” Dr. Wolling asked. “Those are nerve cells, billions of them, connected so intricately that computer scientists, with all their nanodissectors, still haven’t duplicated such complexity. Each synapse—each little nonlinear electric
switch—contributes its own tiny syncopated lightning to a whole that’s far, far greater than the sum of its parts—the towering standing wave that composes the symphony of thought.”
If only I could talk like that, he wished, and instantly chided himself for even dreaming it. He might as well aspire to win his own Nobel prize.
“But look closely, Nelson. The volume taken up by nerve cells is actually small. The rest is water, lymph, and a structure of glial cells and other insulating bodies, which feed and support the nerves and keep them from shorting out.
“Now, consider instead the brain of a fetus.”
The image shrank to a smaller, simpler shape. Within the bulging dome, the dazzling blue tracery was now absent.
“Instead of nerves,” Jen went on, “we have millions of primitive protocells, pretty much undifferentiated and dividing like mad. So how is it some of these cells know to become nerves, and others humble supporters? Is it all laid down in some plan?”
“Well, sure there’s a plan! It’s in the DNA …” Nelson’s voice trailed off as he noticed her watching him. She had to be drawing a parallel, somehow, with the planetary condition. But he couldn’t see the connection.
There’s a plan, all right. But how? Is there some little guy inside the baby’s skull who reads the DNA like a blueprint and says, “You! Become a nerve cell! You there! Become a supporter!”
Or is it done in some simpler …
“Uh!” Nelson’s head snapped up suddenly and he met her cool gray eyes. “The protocells … compete with each other …?”
“To become nerve cells, yes. Excellent insight, Nelson. Here, watch closely.” Jen touched another control and multicolored lights glowed at pinpoints along the rim of the skull. “These are sites where neural growth factors secrete into the mass of protocells. A different chemical from each control point. Coding in each cell tells it what to do if it encounters such and such a mixture of growth factors. If it gets enough of just the right combination, it gets to be a nerve cell. If not, it becomes a supporter.”