Nelson watched, fascinated, as flows of color spread out from each secretion site. Here red and white merged to form a distinct pink blending. Elsewhere a blue stimulant overlapped a green one and formed complex swirls, like stirred paint.
“Also,” Dr. Wolling went on, “the cells secrete chemicals of their own, to suppress their neighbors, a lot like the quiet chemical warfare waged by plants …”
Nelson grabbed his own set of controls and zoomed in for a closer look. He saw cells writhe and jostle, striving to soak where the colors shone brightest. Different chemical combinations seemed to trigger different behaviors … here a frenzy of growth leading to tight bundles of successful nerves. Over there, a sparser network with only a few winners, whose long, spindly appendages resembled spiders’ legs.
“It’s like … as if the different mixes make different environments, eh? Like how different amounts of sunshine and water make a desert here, a jungle there? Like … ecological niches?”
“Very good. And we know what happens when one niche is damaged or fails. Inevitably it affects the whole, even far away. But go on. How do the cells deal with the different demands of the different environments?”
“They adapt, I guess. So it’s …” Nelson turned to face his teacher. “It’s survival of the fittest, isn’t it?”
“Never did like that expression.” But she nodded. “You’re right again. Only here, the ‘food’ they compete for isn’t really food. It’s a brew of substances needed for further development. If a cell gets too little it dies, in a manner of speaking. As an astrocyte or other support cell, it lives on. But as a potential nerve cell, it is no more.”
“Amazing,” Nelson muttered. “Then, the arrangement of nerves in our brain, it comes about because of those scattered little glands, all giving out different chemicals?”
“Not just scattered, Nelson. Well placed. Later I’ll show you how just one small difference in the amount of testosterone boys get before birth can make crucial changes. Of course, after birth learning takes over, fully as important as anything that came before. But yes … this part really is amazing.”
Dr. Wolling shut off the display. Nelson rubbed his eyes.
“Evolution and competition go on inside us,” he said in awe.
She smiled. “You really arc a bright young fellow. I can’t tell you how many of my students fail to make that leap. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense to use inside us the same techniques that helped perfect life on the planet as a whole.”
“Then our bodies are just like …”
She stopped him. “That’s enough for now. More than enough. Go feed your pets. Get some exercise. I slipped some readings into your plaque. Go over them by next time. And don’t be late.”
Still blinking, his mind awhirl, Nelson stood up to go. It wasn’t until much later that he seemed to recollect her standing on her toes to kiss his cheek before he left. But by then he was sure he must have imagined it.
As his duties expanded, taking him from the regulated pools and fountains of the recycling dome to the rain forest habitat to the enclosed plain where elands stretched their legs under reinforced crystal panes, the two baboons accompanied Nelson like courtiers escorting a prince. Or more likely, apprentices attending their wizard. For wherever Nelson strode, magical things happened.
I speak a word, and light streams forth, he thought as he made his nightly rounds. Another, and water rises for animals to drink.
Voice-sensitive computers made it possible, of course. But even sophisticated systems weren’t good enough to manage a place like this. Not without human expertise.
Or where that ain’t available, let blind guesswork substitute, eh?
Nelson’s reaction to his spate of promotions had been pleasure mixed with irritation.
After all, I don’t really know anything!
True, he seemed able to tell when certain animals were about to get sick, or when something needed fixing in the air or water. He had a knack for setting overhead filters so the grass grew properly, but guesswork was all it was. He had talents never imagined back in the crowded Yukon, but talent was a poor substitute for knowing what you were doing!
So Nelson went about his duties a troubled wizard, pointing at ducts and commanding them to open, sending squat robots off on errands, rubbing and tasting leaves … worrying all along that he hadn’t earned this gift. It was like a big joke perpetrated by some capricious fairy godmother. Not knowing where it came from made it seem revokable at any time.
In his reading he encountered another phrase—“idiot savant”—and felt a burning shame, suspecting it referred to him.
A human being knows what he’s doin’. Otherwise, what’s the point in being human?
So he walked his rounds nodding, listening to the button player in his left ear. Every spare moment, Nelson studied. And the more he learned, the more painfully aware he grew of his ignorance.
Shig and Nell helped. He’d point at a piece of fruit, and they would scurry to bring back the sample. What genetic magic had made them so quick to understand? he wondered.
Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m part monkey.
This evening both baboons were subdued as he led them on rounds with unusual intensity. In his head, Nelson’s thoughts roiled.
With images of high school … the sports teams and the gangs … cooperation and competition.
Images of his parents, hard at work side by side, striving for long hours to make their business thrive … competition and cooperation.
Images of cells and bodies, species and planets.
Cooperation and competition. Are they really the same? How can they be?
To some, the conflict seemed inherent. Take economics. The white immigrant, Dr. B’Keli, had given Nelson texts praising enterprise capitalism, in which striving for individual success delivered efficient goods and services. “The invisible hand” was the phrase coined long ago by a Scotsman, Adam Smith.
In contrast, some still promoted the visible hand of socialism. In Southern Africa, cosmopolitans like B’Keli were rare. More often, Nelson heard derision of the “soullessness” of money-based economies, and speeches extolling paternalistic equality.
The debate sounded eerily like the one raging in biology, over the supposed sentience of Gaia. “The blind watchmaker” was how some agnostics referred to the putative designer of the world. To them, creation required no conscious intervention. It was a process, with competition the essential element.
Religious Gaians retorted furiously that their goddess was far from blind or indifferent. They spoke of a world in which too many things meshed too well to have come about by any means but teamwork.
Again and again, the same dichotomy. The conflict of opposites. But what if they’re two sides of the same coin?
He hoped some of Dr. Wolling’s references would offer answers. Usually, though, the readings only left him with more questions. Endless questions.
At last he closed the final reinforced airtight door and led Shig and Nell home, leaving behind all the animals he half envied for their lack of complex cares. They didn’t know they were locked inside a fragile rescue craft, aground and anchored to the soil of an ailing, perhaps dying, continent. They didn’t know of the other arks in this flotilla of salvation, scattered across the Earth like grails, holding in trust what could never be replaced.
They didn’t have to try to understand the why of anything, and certainly not the how.
Those worries, Nelson knew, were reserved for the captain and crew. They were the special concerns of those who must stand watch.
… Although a body’s cells all carry the same inheritance, they aren’t identical. Specialists do their separate jobs, each crucial to the whole. If this weren’t so, if all cells were the same, you would have just an undifferentiated blob.
On the other hand, whenever a small group of cells strives, unrestricted, for its own supremacy, you get another familiar catastrophe, known as cancer.
What does any of this have to do with social theory?
Nations are often likened to living bodies. And so, oldtime state socialism may be said to have turned many a body politic into lazy, unproductive blobs. Likewise, inherited wealth and aristocracy were egoistic cancers that ate the hearts out of countless other great nations.
To carry the analogy further—what these two pervasive and ruinous social diseases had in common was that each could flourish only when a commonwealth’s immune system was weakened. In this case we refer to the free flow of information. Light is the scourge of error, and so both aristocracy and blob-socialism thrived on secrecy. Each fought to maintain it at all costs.
But the ideal living structure, whether creature or ecosystem, is self-regulating. It must breathe. Blood and accurate data must course through all corners, or it can never thrive.
So it is, especially, in the complex interactions among human beings.
—From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books, edition 4.7 (2035). [ hyper access code 1-tTRAN-777-97-9945-29A.]
• HOLOSPHERE
Jen watched the glistening pyramid of ark four rise to meet the stars. Or at least that was the effect as the open-cage elevator dropped below the dry ground and began its rickety descent.
Illuminated by the car’s bare bulb, the walls of the lift shaft were fascinating to watch. Layer after layer of nitid, lustrous rock drifted past—probably sediments from ancient seas or lake beds or whatever. Stories of the fall and rise of species and orders and entire phyla ought to be revealed in this trip backward through time. But Jen was selectively myopic, unable to read any of the writings on this wall.
Of course, the days were long gone when any scientist, even a theoretician, could do it all alone. Jen had a reputation as an iconoclast. As a shit disturber. But every one of her papers, every analysis, had been based on mountains of data carefully collected and refined by hundreds, thousands of field workers, long before she ever got her hands on it.
I have always relied on the competence of strangers.
She, who had built a theoretical framework for understanding Earth’s history, had to depend on others, first, to find and lay out the details. Only then could she find patterns in the raw data.
It was ironic, then. Here she was, the one some called the living founder of modern Gaianism—a movement that had already gone through countless phases of heresy, reformation and counter-reformation. And yet she was illiterate with the Mother’s own diary right in front of her, written in palpable stone.
Ironic, yes. Jen appreciated paradoxes. Like taking on a new student when everything might prove futile and pointless within a few short months, anyway.
As pointless as my life … as pointless as everybody’s life, if some way isn’t found to get rid of Alex’s monster.
Of course it was unfair to name it so. In a sense, her grandson was humanity’s champion, leading their small fellowship to battle the demon. Still, a part of Jen seethed at the boy. It was an irrational corner which couldn’t help associating him with that awful thing down there, eating away at the Earth’s heart.
Each of us is many, she recalled. Within every human, a cacophony of voices rages. Despite all the new techniques of cerebrochemical balancing and sanity seeding, those inner selves will persist in thinking unfair thoughts from time to time, and make us utter things we later regret. It may not be nice, but it’s human.
What was it Emerson had said? “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” One might say she had lived by that adage. Watching the rock wall glide past, Jen determined she really must send Alex a note of encouragement. Even a few words could mean a lot to him in this time of struggle. It irritated her that she only seemed to think of it when she was away from her computer, plaque, or telephone.
Then there’s security, she thought, knowing full well she was rationalizing.
Dr. Kenda, head of the Tangoparu team here in Kuwenezi, really was fanatical about preventing leaks. Jen had been asked not even to hint to the Ndebele about their true mission here. She could only tell their hosts that the task was vitally important to the Mother. Fortunately, that had been enough so far.
But will it suffice later, when the Earth starts shaking?
Kenda had demanded maps of the entire mine complex. There was disturbing talk of emergency plans and escape scenarios, of dike barriers and aquifer pressures. Jen felt uneasy, hating to think Ndebele hospitality might be repaid with betrayal.
One thing at a time, she told herself. What mattered now was that they were on line, adding their machine’s throbbing power to whatever skein of forces Alex had devised to snare the beast below, the singularity.
Lost in her thoughts, she hardly noticed as the air grew warmer. Dank, fetid odors rose from deeper down, where decades of seepage had filled the unpumped mine’s lower sections. The lift stopped short of those realms, fortunately. Jen pushed open the rattling gate and set off down a tunnel lit by a string of tiny bulbs.
Here and in other similar mines, the old white oligarchy had skimmed the wealth from one of the richest countries in the world. Properly invested, the veins of gold and coal and diamonds might have provided for future generations, white and nonwhite, long after the minerals ran out. Most of the present black cantons did not blame the old oligarchs for racism, per se. After all, they practiced tribal separation themselves. What made them seethe was something much simpler. Theft. And the frittering away of a vast treasure by those too blind to see.
Today, the thieves’ blameless descendants were bitter refugees in faraway lands, and the victims’ equally blameless progeny had inherited a terrible anger.
Condensation glistened. Jen’s footsteps echoed down the side corridors like lifeless, skittering hauntings. At last the light ahead brightened as she neared the open cavern chosen by Kenda’s team. There, under a vaulted ceiling, lay the equipment they had brought from New Zealand. And in the center loomed a gleaming cylinder, anchored in bedrock.
The dour Japanese physicist glared sourly as she arrived. Clearly, he chafed at the condition she had imposed, in return for her help in acquiring this site … that she be notified before every run and be present as a witness.
“What was the damage, last scan?” she asked.
Kenda shrugged. “A few tremors southeast of the Hawaiian Islands. Nothing to speak of. Hardly any comments on the Net.”
Of course she had no way to check after him. Not without sending out her own search programs, which would inevitably leave a trail. So she relied on open news channels, which seemed to have hardly noticed the chain of minor disturbances circuiting the globe. Eventually, someone was sure to spy a pattern, of course. Hawaii, for instance, was at the antipodes from this site. All one had to do was draw a line from there, roughly through the Earth’s center …
… through the devil thing down there …
Jen shivered. She was no invalid at mathematical modeling. But just two pages into one of Alex’s papers she’d gotten utterly lost in a maze of gauzy unrealities that left her head spinning. She still couldn’t bring up an image of their enemy. Vanishingly small, titanically heavy, infinitely involute—it was the essence of deadliness. And from childhood, Jen had always feared most those dangers without faces.
“Five minutes. Dr. Wolling,” one of the technicians said, looking up from his station. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” His friendly smile was a marked contrast to Kenda’s sour attitude.
“Thank you, Jimmy. No, I think I’d better go get ready now.” He shrugged and rejoined the others, staring into video and holo displays, their hands gripping controller knobs or slipped into waldo gloves. Jen walked past them all to the corner unit she’d been assigned, where she was grudgingly allowed to tap in her subvocal. She donned the device and let holographic displays surround her.
She coughed, yawned, cleared her throat, swallowed—setting off waves of color as the unit tried to compensate for all the involuntary motions. With her own computer back
home, the clearing process was quick and automatic. Here, deprived of all the custom design that made her terminal a virtual alter ego, she had to do it fresh each time.
Mists dissolved into blankness. Jen dialed the unit’s sensitivity upward …
… and a Tiger flashed out at her, roared, and then quickly receded into the background …
… sparkles dashed and hopped …
… coruscating words with images …
Even the tiniest signal to her jaw or larynx might be interpreted as a command. Keeping one hand on the sensitivity knob, she concentrated to erase mistakes the machine kept interpreting as nascent words.
Few people used subvocals, for the same reason few ever became street jugglers. Not many could operate the delicate systems without tipping into chaos. Any normal mind kept intruding with apparent irrelevancies, many ascending to the level of muttered or almost-spoken words the outer consciousness hardly noticed, but which the device manifested visibly and in sound.
Tunes that pop into your head … stray associations you generally ignore … memories that wink in and out … impulses to action … often rising to tickle the larynx, the tongue, stopping just short of sound …
As she thought each of those words, lines of text appeared on the right, as if a stenographer were taking dictation from her subvocalized thoughts. Meanwhile, at the left-hand periphery, an extrapolation subroutine crafted little simulations. A tiny man with a violin. A face that smiled and closed one eye … It was well this device only read the outermost, superficial nervous activity, associated with the speech centers.
When invented, the subvocal had been hailed as a boon to pilots—until high-performance jets began plowing into the ground. We experience ten thousand impulses for every one we allow to become action. Accelerating the choice and decision process did more than speed reaction time. It also shortcut judgment.
Even as a computer input device, it was too sensitive for most people. Few wanted extra speed if it also meant the slightest subsurface reaction could become embarrassingly real, in amplified speech or writing.