Between Logan and the clearing lay the emergence site—an area about equal to a city block. As usual, the gravity beam’s coupling with surface matter had been, well, peculiar. This time roughly a quarter of the pines within the exit zone had been vaporized, along with their roots. Those remaining—which had all been either taller or shorter than the missing trees—stood apparently unscathed amid the gaping holes.
Fortunately, no people had been in this remote mountain locale, so it hardly seemed a calamity. Logan would reserve judgment though, till the soil and underlying rocks were scanned by follow-up teams.
But of course, Colonel Spivey was less interested in mineralogical consistency than readouts from his instrument packages, which had been scattered across this mountainside just before the gazer beam was scheduled to pass through. Returning minutes after the event, Logan had dropped in to gather the mud-spattered canisters nearest the center while Redpath and the ’copter crew collected others farther out. Of those at ground zero, two were missing, along with the vanished trees.
The predictions made by Hutton’s teams grew sharper with each event. Soon, we won’t have to retreat so far for safety. Soon I’ll get to witness one happening up close.
The prospect was both chilling and exciting.
This improved predictability was helping keep collateral damage to a minimum, at least in alliance territories. Where the beam couldn’t be diverted to completely uninhabited areas, people could generally be evacuated on some pretext. It was different, of course, when the exit point lay in “unfriendly territory,” where a warning might arouse suspicion. In those cases, the resonator crews could only do their best with aiming alone.
Sometimes, that wasn’t enough. In China, an entire village had sunk out of sight last week, when the ground beneath it turned to slurry. And had the vibrations in an Azerbaijani earthquake been just a few hertz closer to the normal modes of certain large apartment buildings, the damage would not have been “minor,” but horrendous. Logan shuddered to think about that near catastrophe.
Maybe Spivey’s arranging for these close shaves, he pondered as he picked his way past the yawning gaps in the forest loam. After all, when you’re testing a weapon, an intentional “near miss” is just as good as a bull’s-eye.
Only, what if some “near miss” happens to trigger something else? Something unexpected?
New Madrid, he had said to Claire. Not many people knew that Missouri town was distinguished as the site of a particularly stiff seismic jolt back in the early nineteenth century—the most powerful quake to hit the territory of the United States in recorded history, which shook the Mississippi out of its banks and rattled the continent as far away as the Eastern Seaboard. Only a few had died on that occasion, because the population was so sparse. But if something like it struck today, it would make two “big ones” in late TwenCen California look like mere amusement park rides.
Spivey and the others think they can “manage” the monster. But Alex Lustig seemed dubious, and he was the only one with any real understanding.
It troubled Logan that they still hadn’t found the British physicist. Perhaps Lustig and that woman astronaut had been victims of foul play. But if so, who could have profited?
Redpath caught the recovered instrument packages Logan slung into the aircraft. “So where to now?” Logan asked as he clambered aboard. The federal officer with the beaded headband barely shrugged. “Somewhere in Canada. They’re tryin’ to pin it down now. Meanwhile, we ride.”
Logan nodded. This was the thrilling part, heading off to yet another site, somewhere in North America, flitting from one place to the next to see what new, weird manifestations the gazer would wreak. Most of the time it came down to interviewing some eyewitness who saw “a cloud disappear” or reported “a thousand crazy colors.” But then, when the beam coupling coefficients were close, there might be bizarre, twisty columns of fused earth where none had been before, or gaping holes, or disappearances.
We’re saving the Earth, Logan reminded himself dozens of times each day. The gazer is our only hope.
True enough. But Glenn Spivey was right about something else, too. While “saving” the world, they were also going to change things.
The flyer took off, gained altitude, then rotated its jets and swung to the northeast. Logan settled in as comfortably as he could and began reading his mail.
So, he thought, when he perused what Claire had sent him. It was a document of agreement—between his ex-wife and the United States Department of Defense.
I always knew Daisy suffered from selective morality. But it seems she’ll deal with the Devil himself if it advances one of her causes.
In this case, the rewards were substantial. Military funds would be used to buy up one thousand hectares of wetlands and donate them to the World Nature Conservancy, protecting them forever from encroaching development. Logan had never heard of a whistle blower getting so much for a single tip. But then, Daisy McClennan was a shrewd negotiator. I wonder what she sold them.
Logan frowned as he pieced together that part of the deal. It was me. She sold me!
Daisy had been the one who told Spivey about his Spanish paper … that he was on the trail of the cause of the anomalies. Reading the date, he whistled. His ex-wife had realized the importance of his discovery back when he thought it nothing but another amusing “just-so” story.
Logan read on, in growing astonishment.
Hell, it wasn’t Spivey’s peepers who finally cracked the Tangoparus’ security. It was Daisy! She’s the one who tracked them to New Zealand and gave Spivey the time he needed to get his three-alliance deal worked out.
Logan whistled, in awe and not a little admiration. Of course I always knew where Claire got her brains. Still, Daisy—
He rescaled what he had believed about his former wife and lover who, it appeared, felt at liberty to dictate terms to governments and spies. Of course it was conceited and foolish of her to think she could manipulate such forces indefinitely. But Daisy had grown up a McClennon—and therefore almost as cut off from reality as ancient Habsburg princes. That couldn’t have been healthy for a youngster’s coalescing sense of proportion, or learning to know one’s limitations. Even after rebelling against all that, Daisy must have retained a residual feeling that rules are for the masses, and really only optional for special people. That reflex would only get reinforced in the simulated worlds of the Net, where wishing really made some things so.
Logan recalled the girl she’d been at Tulane. She had seemed perfectly aware of those handicaps, so eager to overcome them.
Ah, well. Some wounds get better, some just fester. So now she had sold him to Glenn Spivey. What next?
Logan erased the screen and put away the plaque. He settled to watch as the aircraft passed beyond moist forests into drier territory and finally dropped out of the Cascade Range. Soon it was reeling its fleeting shadow behind it across a high desert, still visibly contoured and rippled from massive eruptions and floods that took place in ages gone by. To Logan’s eyes, the stories of past cataclysms were as easy to read as a newspaper, and just as relevant. The planet breathed and stretched. And yet it had never occurred to him until recently that humankind might also wreak changes on such a scale.
Funny thing is, in all honesty, I can’t tell whether Daisy was right or wrong to do what she did.
One thing, though. I’ll bet she didn’t worry much about choosing between George Hutton and Glenn Spivey. Two devils, she’d call them, and say they deserved each other. She got her thousand hectares—saved some ivory-billed woodpeckers or whatever. All in a good day’s work.
Logan had to laugh, finding it deliciously ludicrous and stupid. That irony compensated, somehow, for the inevitable pang he felt, knowing why, ultimately, she had cast him out years ago—not because of any particular sin or failing on his part, but simply because she preferred by far her own obsessions over the distracting nuisance of his love.
Free-form Key Word Sca
n: “Ecology”/“Food Chains”/“Polar”/“Deterioration”
Technical Sieve Level: Semiprofcssional, Open Discussion.
We’ve been lulled into complacency by recent increases among gray, humpback and sperm whales. Few of you out there recall another smug time, before the century turn, when whale numbers were also rising because commercial hunting had ended.
But then came the great diebacks in Africa and Amazonia, the Indian collapse, and the Helvetian War. Suddenly the world was too busy to worry about a few blubbery sea creatures. Anyway, how do you deter boatloads of ragged refugees with their crude harpoons. Shoot them? It took the creation of their own state to finally bring that chaos under control.
Decades later, it all seems a bad dream. Blues and bow-heads are gone forever, but other whale stocks seem to be recovering at last.
Still, take a look at disturbing new research by Paige and Kasting [ ref:aSp 4923-bE-eEI-4562831]. The Antarctic ozone has deteriorated again. I plugged the data into a modified Wolling model and foresee bad news for the euphotic and benthic phytoplankton the whole Antarctic food chain depends on. World protein harvests will fall. But even worse will be the effect on those baleen whales that feed on krill.
Our only ray of hope is the mutation rate, which blooms with increased B-ultraviolet. We may see tougher plankton variants emerge, though to expect salvation from that front stretches even my optimism.
• HYDROSPHERE
Daisy McClennon felt good.
For one thing, business was going well. She’d just finished a lucrative 3-D reprocessing of the entire nine-hundred-episode Star Trek saga, and all three Rambo movies. Pretty good for a business that had started out as piecework enterprise, a part-time occupation for a housewife!
Daisy admitted she worked as much for pride as cash. It meant independence from the family trust fund, so she could afford to snub her damned cousins more often than not.
You’ll come crawling back, they had told her long ago. But nowadays it was they who came to her asking favors, seeking answers their hired flunkies couldn’t give them.
They thought I’d never make it on my own. But now I’m a mover and a changer.
She was spending less time with movies these days, anyway, and more of it brokering “special” information. That recent bit of private espionage for the peepers, for instance. In desperation, the feds had finally agreed to her price. The coup caused quite a stir in certain parts of the Green underground, adding to her burgeoning reputation.
Of course, some purists said you shouldn’t ever deal with nature-killing pigs. But Daisy had grown up around wheeler-dealers. The trick is to take advantage of their short-term mentality, she answered her critics. Their greed can be turned against them if you have what they need.
In this case, the peepers wanted data on a rogue technoconspiracy of some sort. Something having to do with those missing drilling rigs and water spouts Logan Eng had been so uptight about. Her customers didn’t want to discuss specifics, and that was fine by her. The details weren’t important anyway. Let them play their adolescent-male, military-penis games. The deal she’d struck had saved more land than you could walk across in a day of hard marching. All in exchange for a simple map to the conspirators’ front door!
What’s more, she was already getting feelers from other clients who wanted information on the same subject. There were ways of getting around her oath of confidentiality to the feds. This affair might be milked a lot farther, for more acres set aside, more watersheds put off limits to rapacious man.
All told, it had been a very profitable month. In fact, it seemed such a pleasant spring day, Daisy put on her hat and sunglasses and gloves and left her den to go for a walk.
Of course once she crossed the bridge, leaving behind her wind generators and mulch turbines and acres of restored native foliage, she had to face all the garbage left by four centuries of desecrators … including, still visible above the cypress groves, the decaying spires of derelict riverside refineries. Some of them still seeped awful gunk, many decades after their abandonment and so-called cleanup. Only fools drank unfiltered groundwater from Louisiana wells.
That wasn’t all. Ancient power cables and sagging telephone poles laced the parish like atherosclerotic veins, as did concrete and asphalt roads, many no longer used but still stretching like taut lines of scar tissue across the fields and meadows. Even near at hand, in her quiet green neighborhood, there were those Kudzu-covered mounds in the nearby yards, which looked like vine-coated hillocks till you peered close and recognized the blurred outlines of long-abandoned, rusted automobiles.
It all reminded Daisy of why, as the years passed, she left her carefully resurrected patch of nature less and less often. It’s a wonder I had the stomach to spend so much time in this countryside when I was young, instead of getting sick whenever I went outdoors.
Actually, the family estates were a ways north of here. Still, this general part of Louisiana was where her roots had sunk deeply, for better or for worse. Back when her brothers and sisters and cousins had been dashing madly about, taking juku lessons, struggling to live up to their parents’ expectations and be better horseriders, better at sports, better world cosmopolitans, always better than the children of normal folk—Daisy had fiercely and adamantly opted out. Her passion had been exploring the territory in all directions, the living textures of the land.
And exploring the Net too, of course. Even back then, the data web already stretched round the globe, a domain fully as vast as the humid counties she roamed in the “real” world. Only, in the Net you could make things happen like in stories about magic, by incantation, by persuasion, by invoking sprites and spirits and just the right software familiars to do your bidding for you. Why, you could even buy those loyal little demons in brightly colored boxes at a store, like a pair of shoes or a new bridle for your horse! No fairy tale wizard ever had it so easy.
And if you made a mistake on the Net … you just erased it! Unlike outside, where an error or faux pas left you embarrassed and isolated, or where a single careless act could despoil a habitat forever.
And it was an egalitarian place, where skill counted more than who your parents were. You could be pen pals with a farm girl near Karachi. Or join an animal rights club in Budapest. Or beat everybody at Simulation Rangers and have all the top gamesters on the planet arguing for months whether the infamous hacker called “Captain Loveland” was actually a boy or a girl.
Best of all, when you met someone on the Net, people’s eyes didn’t widen as they asked, “Oh? Are you one of those McClennons?”
It was a touchy subject, brought to mind by a recent message she’d received. Family interests were among those inquiring about the peeper matter. And much as she hated to admit it, Daisy was still snared in a web of favors and obligations to the clan. How else, these days, could she afford to turn so much prime agricultural acreage back to native bayou?
Damn them, she cursed silently, kicking a stone into one of the turbid man-made canals carrying drainage from a cluster of giant fish farms.
Maybe I can use this, though … find a way to turn things around on them. If they want the data bad enough, this could win me free of them forever.
For the first time she wondered, really wondered, about the conspiracy Logan and the peepers had been so upset over—that everyone in the world seemed to want to know about. I assumed it was just more physics and spy stuff.
Corporations and institutes and governments were always getting in a froth over this or that technological “breakthrough,” from fusion power and superconductors to nanotech and whatever. Every time it was “the discovery that will turn the tide, make the difference, harken a new era.” Always it seemed imperative to be the first to capitalize. But then, inevitably, the bubble burst.
Oh, sometimes the gadgets worked. Some even made life better for the billions, helping forestall the “great die-back” that had been due decades ago. But to what end? What good was putting off the in
evitable a little while longer, which was all Logan and his ilk ever managed, after all? Daisy had learned not to pay much heed to techno-fads. To her fell the task of preserving as much as possible, so that when humanity finally did fall, it wouldn’t take everything else to the grave with it.
Now, though, she wondered. If this thing’s got everybody so excited, maybe I ought to look into it myself.
She turned back well before reaching the little town of White Castle. Daisy didn’t want the humming power cables from the nuclear plant to ruin what was left of her mood. Anyway, she’d begun thinking about ways to take advantage of the situation.
If the clan wants a favor, they’ll have to give one in return. I want access to Light Bearer. It’s the last ingredient I need to make my dragon.
On her way back past the cane fields and fish farms, Daisy contemplated the outlines of her superprogram—one that would make her surrogate “hounds” and “ferrets” look as primitive as those ancient “viruses” that had first shown how closely software could mimic life. She pondered the beautiful new structure mentally. Yes, I do think it would work.
Turning a bend, Daisy was roused from her thoughts by the sight of two teenagers up ahead, laughing and holding hands as they strolled atop a levee. The boy took the girl’s shoulders and she squirmed playfully, giggling as she avoided his attempts to kiss her, until suddenly she leaned up against him with an assertion all her own.
Daisy’s smile renewed. There was always something sweet about young lovers, though she hoped they were being careful about …
She took off her sunglasses and squinted. The girl—was her daughter! As she watched, Claire pushed at her boyfriend’s chest and whirled to stride away, forcing him to hurry after her.