“So I’ve got to go,” Teresa said, putting her glass aside. For some reason she wouldn’t meet Alex’s eyes now, which disturbed him. What’s going on? he wondered.
Teresa picked up the satchel June had brought along especially for her. Alex had assumed it contained tokens from Spivey, to signal all was forgiven. But Teresa acted as if it were something strictly between herself and the other woman, a peace offering of a different sort entirely. “Thanks for the stuff, June,” she said, lifting the case.
“No big deal. Just hardware store goods. What’re you going to do with all those catalysts and things?”
Teresa smiled enigmatically. “Oh, just a little tidying up, that’s all.”
“Mm,” June commented.
“Yeah. Mm. So.” Teresa shifted her feet. “Well. G’night you two.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the women kissed each other on the cheek. Teresa squeezed Alex’s shoulder, still without meeting his eyes, and went out into the night. He stood in the open doorway, watching her go.
From behind him, June’s arms slid under his and wrapped across his chest. She squeezed hard and let out a sigh. “Alex. Oh, Alex. What are we going to do with you?”
Puzzled, he turned around, letting the door close behind him. “What do you mean?”
“Oh …” She seemed about to say more, but finally shook her head. Taking his hand she said, “Come on, then. To bed. We both have busy days ahead.”
PART IX
PLANET
The Earth’s most permanent feature was the Pacific Ocean. Its shape might change with the passing eons, islands rising and falling as its plates collided, merged, and broke apart again. But the great basin remained.
Not so the Atlantic, which opened and closed many times. Slow heat built underneath a sequence of huge, granite supercontinents, splitting them asunder along bursting seams. Then, tens of millions of years later, the now cool center would sink again to halt the rivening and begin drawing the sleeves together again.
The cycle continued—breakup followed by remerging followed by breakup again. And this had important effects on the progress of life. Species that had roamed across broad ranges found themselves divided into subpopulations. Separated bands of cousins went their diverging genetic ways, adapting to new challenges, discovering diverse techniques for living. When the dispersed relations finally were reunited eons later by reconverging continents, these descendants of a common ancestor often could no longer interbreed. They met not as cousins, but as competitors.
As it happened, there came a later period when the vagaries of plate tectonics thrust up two huge mountain ranges—the Himalayas and the Rockies—which virtually blocked the flow of low, moist air across the Northern Hemisphere. This had dramatic consequences on the weather, which in turn isolated still more species, driving them to adapt.
Ebbing, flowing. Inhaling, exhaling. The cycle kept driving changes, improvements.
Eventually, dim flickers of light began to glow on the planet’s night side, flickers in the dark that weren’t forest fires or lightning.
All this heating and cooling, stirring and recombining had finally brought about something completely new.
Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ SIG AeR,WLRS 253787890.546], Special Subforum 562: Crackpot-Iconoclast Social Theories.
All this panic about how the Han are engaged in “economic conquest of the globe”—such rubbish! True, their huge, surging economy poses a challenge, especially to the PAN and GEACS trade groups. Instead of endlessly debating the University of Winnipeg Neomanagement Model, China has actually instituted many of its revolutionary features. We can all learn a lesson, especially the Sovs and Canucks, who keep finding themselves underpriced in the manufacture of desal equipment and nanocrystals. The Han already have a corner on blazers and lap-ticks, not to mention consumer items like torque zenners. But talk of “economic conquest” [ ref: A69802-111, 5/19/38 K-234-09-17826] or the Han “… buying up goddam everything …” [ ref: A69802-111, 5/12/38 M-453-65-5545] completely ignores history.
Consider the 1950s and 1960s. The United States of America, which then included California and Hawaii, but not Luzon or Cuba, was the world’s economic powerhouse. A famous Euroleader named Servan-Schreiber wrote a book called The American Challenge, predicting America would soon “… own everything worth owning …”
Of course it didn’t happen. Having achieved success, U.S. citizens demanded payoff for all their hard work. Instead of buying the world, they bought things from the world. It became the greatest transfer of wealth in history—far surpassing all forms of foreign aid. The American purchasing dynamo lifted Europe and East Asia into the twenty-first century … until the bubble finally burst and Yanks had to learn to pay as you go, like normal people.
For a brief time in the nineteen-seventies, the first and second oil crises made it seem that the new planetary kingpins would be Arab sheiks. Then, in the eighties, Japan scared the hell out of everybody. (Look it up!) Through hard work (and by adroitly catering to America’s adolescent buying frenzy) the Japanese boot-strapped themselves to economic power that held the world in awe. Everyone predicted that soon they “would own everything.”
But each of us takes our turn, it seems, driving the world economy. A new generation of Japanese, wanting more from life than endless toil and a tiny apartment, went on a new buying spree. And in the early years of this century, wasn’t it Russia—with nearly half the world’s trained engineers and newly released from two thousand years of stifling czars and commissars—who were suddenly only too glad to work hard, build to order, and sell cheap whatever the Japanese wanted? Many of you probably remember the consequence a while later, when Russian was proposed to replace Simglish as the second lingua franca. But that passed too, didn’t it?
Come on, droogs. Learn to step back and take a long view. Time will come (if the planet holds out) when even the Han will get tired of laboring themselves sick, piling money in the bank with nothing to spend it on.
Then care to predict where the next group of hard workers will arise? My money’s on those puritan secessionists in New England. Now those are people who know how to give an employer a good hour’s work for an hour’s wage …
• CRUST
No one congratulated Crat for saving his drowning crewmate. Nobody spoke much about the incident at all. Things happen, was the philosophy. So there were a few more widows back on one of the floating towns? Too bad. Life was short; what more could you say?
Still, Crat apparently wasn’t a “go-suck Yankee sof-boy” anymore. There were no more sour looks at mess, or strange objects found swimming in his gruel. Silently, they moved his hammock out of the steamy hold and up to the anchor room with the others.
Only one fellow actually commented on the misadventure with the fishing net. “Jeez, Vato,” he told Crat. “I never seen no bugger hold breath so long as you!”
To Crat, who had no idea how long he’d been underwater, the remark seemed like a signal from Providence. An experience that might have turned some men away from swimming forever, instead pointed him to an unexpected talent.
The story of his life had been mediocre plainness at best, and all too often less than that. His image of himself was slow and thick as a stone. The thought of haying any unusual abilities astonished Crat. And so, at the very moment he had won acceptance aboard the Congo, he renewed his vow to leave first chance—to act on his earlier loose talk about going into salvage.
Not that there was much he’d miss about this old tub. Life on a frontier didn’t offer many luxuries. Forced to live here for a week, the average American would never again complain about his own restricted water ration, which in some states topped a lavish hundred gallons a week.
Or take another necessity—Data-Net privileges. Here you simply didn’t have them.
Crat used to despise old folks back in Indiana for relying on so many electronic crutches … globe-spanning access to news on every topic, to
every library, to every dumpit research journal even, instantly translated from any obscure language for mere pennies. Then there were the hobby lines, special interest groups, net-zines, three-vee shows.
Until emigrating, Crat never realized how much he depended on all that, too. Aboard Congo, though, they had this strange, once-a-day ritual—mail call. Each man answered if his name was shouted, and swapped a black cube with the bosun. You were allowed to pipe two message blips, no more than fifty words each, through the ship’s single antenna, ruled dictatorially by the comm officer, a one-eyed, one-legged victim of some past oceanic catastrophe, whom everybody, even the captain, treated with utter deference.
Standing in line, waiting humbly for your miserable blips, was almost as humiliating as evening vitamin call, when a bored U.N. nurse doled each man his pressed capsule of “Nutritional Aid”—the sum total of the world’s sense of obligation to the pariah state of refugees. No wonder the great powers were even less generous with the world’s true lifeblood, information.
Now and then, during mail call, Crat caught himself wondering why Remi and Roland never wrote to him. Then he remembered with a sudden jerk. They’re dead. I’m the last. Last of the Quayle High Settlers.
Strange. Believing he was destined for a short life, Crat had long ago decided to live one with no compromises. He’d always been the one getting into jams, which his friends always reliably, sensibly got him out of.
Now Remi and Roland were gone, while he still lived. Who could figure it?
Roland, for some reason, had willed Crat his bank balance, augmented by a hero’s bonus. There was supposed to be a medal, too. It was probably still out there somewhere, following him around the world in the unreliable tangle of real-matter post. As for Roland’s money … Crat had blown it all in card games and buying rounds of drinks to his friends’ memory. But he did want the medal.
After mail call, off-duty crew retired to the aft deck, where three enterprising Annamese sold a pungent home brew from clay pots. While the flotilla sailed southward from the debacle with the green raiders, Crat discovered he could now stomach the foul-smelling beer. It was a milestone that showed he was adapting.
The evening was dark, with a heavy overcast cutting off most of the stars. A pearly opalescence in the west became a blaze whenever the clouds parted briefly to spill moonlight across the smooth water.
At the fantail, two sets of meditators seemed to square off for a silent, contemplative showdown. Sufis on the portside and neo-Zen adepts to starboard. Beginners in both groups were wired to brain-wave monitors the size of thimbles, which led to earplug button speakers. Using identical, inexpensive techno-aids, each side nevertheless claimed it was true tradition, while the other taught mere dazing. Whatever. Like the majority of the crew, Crat preferred more honest, traditional forms of intoxication.
“… Commodore bloody misreads his charts—” someone said in the darkness beyond the rear hatch. “That El Niño thing … It s’pozed drive all them fish over here Wes’ Pacific side, every ten-’leven year so. But bloody dammit commodore, he miss them sure.”
“It come more often than every ten year now, I hear,” someone else replied. Idly, Crat wondered who they were. Their English was better than average for this barge.
“Dey got de eco-loggy all fucked sure,” said someone with a Caribbean accent. “Evryt’ing all change. So I say don’t listen to UNEPA bastards, not at all. Dey don’ know no t’ing better than we do.”
Someone else agreed. “Ach, UNEPA. They wants us dead, just like greeners do, ’cause we mess up they stinking planet. Might catch wrong type dumpit fish. Ooh, bad thing! So better we just die. Maybe put something in vitamins. Do us cheap an’ quiet.”
That was the steady gossip of course, even when Sea State chemists—university-trained men and women from lands now drowned under the rising tides—went from boat to boat reassuring crews and urging them to take the pills, rumors nevertheless spread like viruses. Crat himself sometimes wondered. His tiredness no doubt came mostly from hard work. That probably also explained the low ebb of his sex drive. But if he ever did find out somebody was slipping something into the food …
The old rage flickered momentarily and he tried to nurse it. But it just damped out, ebbing of its own accord. He lifted his head to glance over Congo’s prow at the night lights of the floating town, up ahead. The old Crat would have already been pacing—eager to prowl the red-light district or find a good brawl. Now all he could think of were the clean if threadbare sheets of the transients’ barracks and then tomorrow’s visit to the meat market.
“Ah, I find you at last. Sorry. I was lost.”
Crat looked up. It was his new friend, the elderly Zuricher, Peter Schultheiss. Peter’s was the one face Crat would miss when he transferred off this misbegotten tub. He grinned and held out a full jar. “Got you another beer, Peter.”
“Goot. Thanks. Took me some time to find my notebook with the name of my comrade at the market. But I found.” He held up a heavy black volume. To Crat’s surprise, it wasn’t a cheap store-and-write plaque, such as even the poorest deckhand owned, but a binder fat with paper pages! Schultheiss murmured as he flipped the scratchy sheets. “Let’s see. He’s in here somewhere. This fellow should, if you mention my name, be able to get you jobs in salvage … maybe training for the deep-sea work you so desire. Ah, here, let me write it down for you.”
Crat accepted the slip of paper. Nearing his rendezvous with the recruiters, he had grown a little less sure he really wanted to try nodule mining—diving far below the reach of light encased in a slimy bubble, sifting mud for crusty lumps. Though well paid, such men tended to have short lives. The alternative of shallow dredging in drowned villages was beginning to sound attractive after all.
Schultheiss looked toward the town lights and sighed.
“What’cha thinkin’ about?” Crat asked.
“I was just remembering how, when I was a boy, my father took me with him on a business trip to Tokyo. As our plane came in at night, we saw an amazing sight. The ocean, around every island as far as you could see, was alight! So many lights I could not count them. The water seemed to be on fire. White fire.
“Such a spectacle, I asked my father what festival this was. But he said, no, it was no oriental holiday. It was like this every night, he said. Every night at sea around Japan.”
The idea of such extravagance made Crat blink. “But, why?”
“Fishing lights,” Peter answered plainly. “At night the ships would run big generators and draw in fish by millions. Very effective, I heard. Efficient, too, if you trade energy for food and don’t worry about tomorrow.”
Schultheiss paused. His voice seemed far away. “My father and his comrades … they prided themselves on future-sightedness. Unlike the Yankees of those days—no offense—he thought he was thinking about tomorrow. While the Yanks bought toys and spent themselves poor, my father and his compeers saved. He invested prudently other people’s funds for them. Took their money with no questions asked and made it grow like vegetables in a garden.”
The old Helvetian sighed. “Maybe it only shows there are many kinds of shortsightedness. Did it ever occur to the Japanese, I wonder, that evolution might change the species they called with their great lights? The easy, stupid ones would die in nets, certainly. But meanwhile those who stayed away would breed future generations. Did they ponder this? No, I think not.
“Likewise it never occurred to my father that the world might someday tire of all its bad men having nice safe places to stash their loot. He never dreamed all the nations might drop their bickering, might get together and say enough, we want our money back. We want the names of those bad men, too … men who betrayed our trust, who robbed our treasuries, or who sold drugs to our children.
“How could my poor father imagine the world’s masses might come pounding on his door someday to take back in anger what he’d invested so carefully, so well?”
The lights of the floating
village now glittered in the old man’s moist eyes. Stunned by the depth of this confession, Crat wondered. Why me? Why is he telling me all this?
Peter turned to look at him, struggling with a smile. “Did you see Pikeman, when she came to rescue us from the greeners? How beautiful she was? People used to joke about the Swiss navy. But only fools laugh now! Ton per ton, it gives Sea State—our adopted nation—the best fighting fleet in the world! So we adapt, in that way and so many others. We Helvetians find new roles in the world, performing them with pride in craft.”
Crat noticed the old man’s English had improved. Perhaps it was the passion of sudden memory. Or maybe he was letting down a mask.
“Oh, we and our allies were arrogant before the war. Mea culpa, we admit that now. And history shows the arrogant must always fall.
“But then, to fall can be a gift, no? What is diaspora, after all, except an opportunity, a second chance for a people to learn, to grow out of shallow self-involvement and become righteous, deep, and strong?”
Schultheiss looked at Crat. “Pain is how a people are tempered, prepared for greatness. Don’t you think so, fils? That wisdom comes through suffering?”
Crat could only blink in reply, moved, but not knowing what to say. In truth, he wasn’t sure he understood what Peter was talking about.
“Yes,” the old man agreed with himself, nodding firmly, both guilt and stark dignity evident in his voice. “My people have been chosen for some future, unknown task. Of that I’m sure. A task far greater than perching on safe mountaintops, high and aloof, living high off other people’s money.”
Peter stared into the night, much farther than Crat felt he himself could see.
“The world’s folk will need us yet. Mark my words. And when that day comes, we will not leave them wanting.”