Sirens blared as emergency vehicles braved the dark, solitary road leading down to where catastrophe had struck only a short while ago. Behind Logan, the pilot of his commandeered helicopter kept its blades spinning as he argued by radio with the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Department, urging the SWAT team commander to be less trigger happy and a little more cooperative with a federal investigating team.
“… Look! Don’t give me all that dumpit load about state and local jurisdictions having priority. That don’t hold canned shit in a gor-sucked case like this! You see any sign of any burfing terrorists? Do we look like a bunch of fucking greeners?”
Logan ignored the racket. He stared at the panorama below, lit by the searchlights of sheriff ’copters already on the scene.
What was left of the Flaming Gorge Dam gleamed like jumbled, broken white teeth below the darker sheen of native canyon rock. Part of the glitter came from roaring water, still spilling over the remains. Most of the great reservoir had already departed downstream toward the Green River Valley. Breathless net reporters told of a swath of devastation, stretching from Wyoming through a corner of Utah, into northwestern Colorado and finally back to Utah again.
But then, Flaming Gorge lay near the intersection of three states, so that was a bit misleading. In fact, the only town evacuated was Jensen, several score miles downstream. And by then, most of the flood’s force had been spent ravaging the unpopulated canyons of Dinosaur National Monument.
Unpopulated … if you don’t count scores of missing or panicked campers. Nor a hapless paleontologist or two.
Logan refused to think about the hurt done those exquisite, fossil-yard badlands. One disaster at a time. He stared at the ruined dam, wondering how such total demolition was accomplished.
It could have been done more economically. Why blow a dam into smithereens when a good crack would serve as well?
Besides, why would any eco-guerrilla want to smash the Flaming Gorge Dam? No one left alive remembered the arroyo that had been drowned under the man-made lake. Anyway, even Neo-Gaian radicals recalled the debacle when someone had wrecked the huge Glen Canyon Dam. The resulting mess had been a caution to all sides and restored the world’s beauty not one iota.
This didn’t feel like a Greener action, anyway. Within an hour’s drive there were scores of more likely targets … places where Logan’s colleagues were busy altering the land for better or worse. Projects hotly debated in the pub-crit media, not a boring, stolid structure like this stodgy old dam.
No, this has to be our demon again.
Footsteps scuffed the loose gravel to Logan’s right. It was foe Redpath, the assistant assigned him only hours ago for this mission. The tall Amerindian wore twin braids … a fashion statement recently adopted on many university campuses as chic and declarative … though here Logan figured both hairstyle and attitude were genuine.
“Found some eyewitnesses, Eng,” Redpath announced tersely. “Be here in a minute.”
“Good. Any word when we’ll get satellite scans of the explosion itself?”
The other man nodded. “Half an hour, they say.”
“That long?” Logan felt a surge of resentment.
Redpath shrugged. “Spivey has lots of teams. You didn’t think you and me were his top boys, did you? Hell, we’re backups for the backups, man,”
Logan looked squarely at the part-time federal agent. A number of retorts crossed his mind—including telling Redpath where Spivey could take his priorities.
But no. Something was happening in the world. And if Logan wasn’t privy to secret knowledge at the top, at least his investigator’s warrant took him where events were breaking … where he might help solve the puzzle and do some good.
“What do you think of that?” he said, pointing toward the shattered dam.
Redpath watched Logan for another second before turning to survey the scene. “Don’t see how they did it.” He shrugged. “Shape’s all wrong.”
“What shape?”
Redpath gestured with his hands. “Shape of the explosion. Dams don’t break that way. No matter where you plant the charges.”
Logan wondered how Redpath knew. By investigating other cases? Or, perhaps, from practical experience on the other side? To some among society’s brightest, cooperation with authority was strictly a conditional matter, in each instance judged by sharply individualized standards. He could well imagine Redpath swinging one way on one occasion and quite another when it suited him.
“I agree. There’s a big piece missing.”
The local agent inhaled deeply, his eyes roving the tumbled remains. He exhaled and shrugged indifferently. “Carried downstream. We’ll find the chunks in the morning.”
Logan admired the man’s veil. His shield of inscrutability. In this situation, however, it didn’t work at all. He knows damn well the missing chunks aren’t downstream! He just doesn’t want to admit he’s as appalled as I am.
Their pilot finally gave up arguing with the sheriffs and shut down his whining engine, a sudden, welcome lessening of the din. Far better to wait for clearances from Washington, anyway, than be shot down by trigger-happy provincials.
More footsteps approached. A woman in a National Parks uniform, whom Redpath had deputized only an hour ago, entered the light with a middle-aged man in tow. Two teenagers rushed ahead to point at the blasted dam, making awed sounds.
“We … were farther up the reservoir,” the father explained when asked. He was dressed in fishing gear. Hand-tied flies dangled from his vest, along with a photo-ID camping permit.
“We’d come ashore and were setting up to cook … That’s when it all happened.” He covered his eyes. “Those poor night fishermen. They were caught in the flood.”
This fellow wasn’t going to be much use. Shock, Logan diagnosed, and wondered why the ranger had even brought him here. “What was the first thing you saw?” he asked, trying to be gentle.
The man blinked. “We lost the boat. You don’t think they’ll charge us, do you? I mean, we ought to get a refund for the whole trip …”
A tug at Logan’s elbow made him turn. “It started with a noise, mister.”
One of the teenagers, his hair cut short, Ra Boy style, gestured toward the muddy lake bed below. “It was this low hum. Y’know? Like the water sort of sang?”
His sister nodded. A little younger but nearly as tall, she wore a Church of Gaia gown at complete odds with her sibling’s sun-worshipper attire. Logan could only imagine the ideological climate in their household.
“It was beautiful but awfully sad,” she said. “I thought at first maybe it was the fish in the lake, you know, moaning? Because certain people were killing and eating them?”
The boy groaned, sending her a disgusted look. “The fish were put there so people could come and—”
“How long did the sound last?” Logan interrupted.
Both youths shrugged, nearly identically. The boy said, “How could we know? After what happened next, our subjective memory’s sure to be screwed up.”
The things they’re teaching kids, these days, Logan thought. For all the schools’ emphasis on practical psychology, kids still seemed to pick and choose what they wanted to absorb, in this case, apparently, a convenient and plausible excuse for imprecision.
“What did happen next?”
The boy started to speak, but his sister jabbed his ribs. “Things got all blurry for a second or two,” she said hurriedly. “With funny colors—”
“Like we were going down this laser suspensor tunnel ride, see?” the boy blurted out. “You know, like at—”
“Then there was this light. It was so bright we had to turn and look. It was down in the south … over here at the dam—”
“We don’t know it was here at the dam! We just have the evidence of our eyes to go by, and we were still getting over the colors …”
The girl ignored her irate sibling. “There were these lines, of light? They went up, into the sky … sort o
f like this?” She propped her elbow on one hand and gestured at an angle toward the noctilucent clouds.
Logan looked to her brother for confirmation. “Did you see lines also?”
He nodded. “Except they didn’t go up like she said. She thinks everything comes out of the Earth. Naw. The lines came down! I think—” he edged closer, conspiratorially “—I think it’s aliens, mister. Invaders. Using big solar-powered mirrors …”
His sister whacked him on the shoulder. “You should talk about the evidence of our own eyes! Of all the stupid …”
Logan held up both hands. “Thank you both very much. Right now, though, I think your dad needs your help more than I do. Why don’t you just give the ranger your access codes, and we’ll get in touch later if we need any more information.”
They nodded earnestly. Basically good kids, Logan thought. He also felt more grateful than ever for the undeserved gift of his own sensible daughter. He could hardly remember the last time Claire’s voice had taken on that shrill, whining tone, capable of shattering glass or any adult’s peace of mind at twenty paces.
“It opened up!”
Logan turned around. The kids’ father was pointing with a shaking hand toward a starry gap in the clouds. “The sky opened up like … like my folks used to tell me it would on the day.”
“On what day, sir?”
The man looked squarely at Logan, a queer shining in his eyes. “The day of … reckoning. They used to say the heavens would open up, and terrible judgment would be delivered.”
He gestured at his offspring. “I used to scoff, like these two with their pagan gods. But lately, it’s seemed to me as if … as if …” He trailed off, glassy eyed. The two teenagers stared, their sibling conflicts instantly abandoned. At that moment they looked almost like twins.
“Daddy?” the girl said, and reached for him.
“Stay away from me!” He pushed her aside. Striding to the edge of the bluff, the man shrugged out of his fishing jacket and threw it to the ground. Then he fell to his knees, looking across the ravaged waste.
Tentatively, perhaps fearing another rejection, first the girl and then her brother followed, standing on each side of their father at the brink of the overlook. But this time, instead of pushing them away, he flung his arms around their knees and clasped them tightly. Above the wailing sirens, the growling helicopters and the still noisy crash of ebbing floodwaters, Logan clearly heard the man sob.
Hesitantly at first, the girl stroked her father’s thinning hair. Then she looked across and took her brother’s hand.
Logan found the breath tight within his chest. And suddenly he realized why.
What if the guy is right?
Perhaps not precisely. Not about the exact cause of the disturbing omen. The boy’s “aliens” were as likely as any mumbledy-jumble from the Book of Revelations.
Still, until this moment it hadn’t quite occurred to Logan just what might be at stake. Hour by hour, reports poured in through Colonel Spivey’s new database, ranging from the picayune to the catastrophic. From towering chimeras glimpsed at sea to strange tremors and dust devils out in empty deserts. To the sudden disappearance of a great dam. Each day it got steadily stranger.
This may be serious, Logan thought, and felt intensely the late northern chill.
Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546].
To the astonishment of many, we’ve so far avoided the great die-back people keep talking about. New crops plus better management and a shift away from many greedy habits have helped us feed our ten billions. Barely. Most of the time.
Solutions often breed other calamities though. So it was that pundits, seeing this trend, predicted a population runaway toward twenty billion or more, until our numbers finally did bring us to the oft-predicted Precipice of Malthus.
But look. The wave is cresting. After fifty years of struggle, birth rates now appear finally under control, and UNPMA now predicts we’ll top out at thirteen billion around the year 2060. Then, slowly, it should taper off a bit. That peak may just be low enough to let us squeak by.
Will it have been modern birth control that brought us up just short of the edge? (If, in fact, we don’t topple over it yet.) Or was it something else? A new study [ Stat.Sur. 2037.582392.286-wELt] indicates human effort may deserve less credit than we smugly believe.
While vast amounts have been spent getting half the world’s women to hold their births to one or at most two, nearly as much money now pours into research and medical aid to help the other half carry even one pregnancy to term. Causes have been proposed for this pandemic of infertility … such as women deferring child-bearing until late in life or effects inherited from the sex-crazed eighties, the cancer plagues, or drug-happy 2010s. But new research shows that pollution may have played a principal role. Chemical mutagens in the air and water, causing early spontaneous abortions, now appear to lead all other forms of contraception in the industrialized world.
To some Gaian sects, of course, this just validates their worldview, that for every immoderation there is an inevitable counter, some negative feedback to restore a balance. In this case, it isn’t we the living who are dying, as Malthus predicted. (At least not in vast numbers.) Rather, equilibrium is being restored by the stressed environment itself, culling the unborn.
It’s a cruel, unpleasant notion. But then, anyone who’s been alive and aware for any part of the last fifty years is by now used to unpleasant notions …
• HYDROSPHERE
Daisy had been snooping again.
“Dumpit!” Claire pounded the arm of her chair. This time, her mother had gone too far. She’d installed a watchdog program right outside Claire’s own mailbox! “Did she actually think I wouldn’t notice something like that?”
Probably. So many parents were members of the “reality disabled” when it came to having a clear mental image of their children. Perhaps Daisy still considered Claire a child when it came to the demanding, grownup world of the Net.
“I’ll show you,” Claire muttered as she tapped out code of her own. Oh, she knew she’d never be able to tackle Daisy one-on-one. But it just might be possible to take advantage of her mother’s preconceived notions.
Vivisector was an object program she’d borrowed from Tony just the other day … a tasty little routine going the rounds among young hackers that disassembled other programs and put them back together again without leaving a trace—even while those programs were running. Carefully, Claire sicked Vivisector on her mother’s watchdog. Soon its guts were laid out across her inspection screen.
“So, just as I thought.” Daisy had assigned the little surrogate to pluck anything piped to Claire from Logan Eng.
“He’s not your husband anymore, Mother. Can’t you leave the poor codder alone?”
Carefully, Claire excised a core gene from the watchdog, to use as a template. Then she dialed her father’s Net access code and performed a hybridization test on the protocols controlling access to his private cache. Sure enough, there was a match. Some lines throbbed redly near the heart of Logan’s own security system. Claire tsked.
“Very lazy, Mother. Using close genetic cousins to perform similar tasks? In related databases? I’m disappointed in you.”
She wasn’t, really. Claire actually felt relieved. Comparing codons from two infiltrators was a technique she knew and understood. No doubt Daisy could have made the trick moot had she tried. And although it showed benign contempt, her mother was capable of worse emotions—like wrath. You didn’t want to tangle with Daisy when she was in the latter state. Not at all.
The red lines throbbed. Claire considered going ahead and excising the retrocode. Or writing a warning to her father.
But then, what would be the point? At best Daisy would wind up paying a fine. Then she’d just pay attention to doing the job right.
“Why is she suddenly so interested in Logan’s work, anyway?” Claire wondered. Of course her mothe
r disapproved of Logan’s career. But there were so many engineers out there who were far worse … far less sensitive to environmental concerns. Until now Daisy had seemed tacitly amenable to leaving her ex-husband alone and going after bigger game.
Claire bit her lip. There was one way to find out what was going on without triggering Daisy’s alarms. That was to have her mother’s infiltrator send duplicates of whatever it stole to her, as well as to Daisy.
No. She shook her head. I won’t do that. I’ll wait till Logan’s back in town and tell him in person.
Unfortunately, her father was hopping across the continent, sending her little blips from all the sites his new employer sent him to. His messages implied something was up, certainly, and Claire’s curiosity was piqued.
But I’ll respect his privacy, she determined. I’m not Daisy.
With that resolve, she carefully worded a simple message to her father, saying she missed him, and adding a final line: “Mirror-mirror, Daddy. Don’t take any funny-looking apples.”
It was a bit of shared context code, from back when she used to liken her mother to Snow White’s wicked queen, complete with all-seeing, all-knowing magic mirror.
I just hope Logan gets the meaning. It’s pretty thin.
Carefully, Claire exited that portion of the Net, leaving all her mother’s agents in place. That done, she went back to reading her own mail.
“HI, CLAIRE!”
Tony Calvallo’s bright, cheerful face popped out of one message blip, less than an hour old. Had she been wearing her wrist-comp while out repairing the mulch bin, she’d have been able to take his call in person.
“THERE’S A PARTY AT PAUL’S TONIGHT. YOU KNOW HE’S BY THE NORTH MAIN LEVEE, SO WE COULD STROLL OVER THERE ALONG THE WAY AND LOOK FOR SUBSIDENCE CRACKS.”
He grinned and winked.
Claire had to smile. Tony was getting better at this … keeping up a gentle pressure while remaining all the time light and easy, letting her ultimately control the pace. As for tonight’s pretext, it had been a long time since she’d inspected the levees over in Paul’s part of the valley. Tony was showing more imagination and insight all the time.