Goldman pored over his screen “Looks like just under a trillion tons. That’s several orders heavier than Alex’s … than the first one. Than Alpha.”
“And its other dimensions?”
“Too small to measure on linear scales. It’s another singularity, all right.”
George turned to Alex. “Why didn’t we detect this other thing before?”
“It seems there are more ways to modulate gravity waves than anyone imagined.” Alex motioned with his hands. “To pick any one object out of the chaos below, we have to calculate and match narrow bandwidths and impedances. Our earlier searches were tuned to find Alpha, and picked up Beta only by inference.”
“You mean—” George gestured at the tank—“there may be more of the things down there?”
Alex blinked. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Give me a minute.”
Speaking softly into a microphone, he pulled subroutines from his utility library, creating charts and simulations near the hologram. “No,” he said at last. “If there were more they’d affect the others’ orbits. It’s just those two. And my … and singularity Alpha is decaying rapidly.”
George grunted. “What about the big one? I take it that damn thing is growing?”
Alex nodded, reluctant to speak. As a physicist he was supposed to accept the primacy of objective reality. Yet there remained a superstitious suspicion in his heart, that dark potentialities become real only after you have spoken them aloud.
“Seems to be,” he said, with difficulty.
“I agree,” added Stan.
Hutton paced through the still-drifting dust, in front of the gleaming gravity-wave generator. “If it’s growing, we know several things.” He held up one finger. “First, Beta can’t be terribly old, or it would have consumed the Earth long ago, neh?”
“It could be a natural singularity left over from the Big Bang, which hit Earth only recently,” Stan suggested.
“Weak, very weak. Wouldn’t an interstellar object be moving at hyperbolic speeds?” Hutton shook his head. “It might pass through a planet on a fluke, but then it’d just fly off into space again, barely slowed at all.”
Alex nodded, accepting the point.
“Also,” Hutton went on, “it stretches credulity that such an object would happen to arrive just now, when we have the technology to detect it. Besides, you yourself said small singularities are unstable—be they holes or strings or whatever—unless they’re specially tuned to sustain themselves!”
“You’re saying someone else has …?”
“Obviously! Come on, Lustig. Do you think you’re the only bright guy on the planet? Face it, you’ve been scooped. Preceded! Someone beat you to it, by inventing a better cavitron perhaps, or using something different.
“Probably something different, more sophisticated, since this taniwha is worse than your pathetic thing, your Alpha!” George spread a grin absent of mirth. “Accept it, Alex boy. Someone out there whipped you at your own game … somebody better at playing mad scientist.”
Alex didn’t know what to say. He watched the big man’s expression turn thoughtful.
“Or maybe it’s not just a lone madman this time. I wonder.… Governments and ruling cliques are good at coming up with ways to destroy the world. Maybe one was developing some sort of doomsday device? An ultimate deterrent? Maybe, like you, they released it by mistake.”
“Then why keep it secret?”
“To prevent retribution, of course. Or to gain time while they plot an escape to Mars?”
Alex shook his head. “I can’t speculate about any of that. All I can do is—”
“No.” George stabbed a finger at him. “Let me tell you what you can do. First off, you can get busy confirming this data. And then, after that …”
The fire seemed to drain out of Hutton’s eyes. His shoulders slumped. “After that you can tell me how much time I have left with my children, before that thing down there swallows up the ground beneath our feet.”
The frightened techs shifted nervously. Stan Goldman watched his own hands. Alex, however, felt a different sense of loss. He wished he too could react in such a way—with anger, defiance, despair.
Why do I feel so little? Why am I so numb?
Was it because he’d been living with this possibility so much longer than George?
Or is George right? Am I miffed that someone else obviously did a bigger, better job of monster making than I ever could?
Whoever it had been, they were certainly no more competent at keeping monsters caged. Small satisfaction there.
“Before we do more gravity probes,” Stan Goldman said. “Hadn’t we better find out why that last scan set off seismic tremors? I’ve never heard of anything like it before.”
George laughed. “Tremors? You want quakes? Just wait till Beta’s grown to critical size and starts swallowing up the Earth’s core. Chunks of mantle will collapse inward … then you’ll see earthquakes!”
Swiveling in disgust, Hutton strode off toward the stairs to climb back to Ao-mārama—to the world of light. For some time after he departed, nobody did or said much. The staff desultorily cleaned up. Once, Stan Goldman seemed about to speak, then closed his mouth and shook his head.
A nervous engineer approached Alex, holding a message plaque. “Um, speaking of earthquakes, I thought you’d better see this.” He slid the sheet onto the console between Stan and Alex. On its face rippled the bold letters of a standard World Net tech-level press release:
TEMBLORS, LEVEL 3 THROUGH 5.2, HAVE HIT SPAIN, MOROCCO, BALAERICS. CASUALTIES LOW. SWARM FOLLOWED UNUSUAL PATTERN IN SPACE, TIME, AND PHASE DOMAINS. INITIAL ONSET—
“Hm, what does this have to do with …?” Then Alex noticed—the Spanish quakes had struck at exactly the same time as the jolts here in New Zealand! Turning to the whole-Earth cutaway, he made some comparisons, and whistled. As nearly as the eyeball had it, the two swarms had taken place one hundred and eighty degrees apart—on exactly opposite sides of the globe.
In other words, a straight line, connecting New Zealand and Spain, passed almost exactly through the planet’s core.
He watched the new singularity, the one called Beta, follow a low, lazy trajectory, never climbing far from the inmost zone where density and pressure were highest, where its nourishment was richest.
It does more than grow, Alex realized, amazed the universe could awe him yet again. It does one hell of a lot more than grow.
“Stan—” he began.
“You’ve noticed too? Puzzling, isn’t it?”
“Mm. Let’s find out what it means.”
So they were immersed in arcane mathematics, barely even aware of the world outside, when someone turned a dial to amplify the breathless voices of news reporters, describing a disaster in space.
PART II
PLANET
A modest fire burns longer. So it is, also, with stars.
The brightest rush through lives of spendthrift extravagance to finally explode in terminal fits of self-expression, briefly outshining whole galaxies. Meanwhile, humbler, quieter suns patiently tend their business, aging slowly, gracefully.
Ironically, it takes both types to make a proper potion. For without the grand immoderation of supernovas there would be no ingredients—no oxygen, carbon, silicon, or iron. And yet the steady yellow suns are also needed—to bake the concoction slowly, gently, or the recipe will spoil.
Take a solar mix of elements. Condense small lumps and accrete them to a midsized globe. Set it just the right distance from the flame and rotate gently. The crust should bubble and then simmer for the first few million years.
Rinse out excess hydrogen under a wash of sunlight.
Pound with comets for one eon, or until a film of liquid forms.
Keep rotating under an even heat for several billion years.
Then wait.…
For consideration by the 112 million members of the Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Discussion Grou
p [ SIG AeR,WLRS 253787890.546], we the steering committee commend this little gem one of our members [ Jane P. Gloumer QrT JN 233-54-2203 aa] found in a late TwenCen novel. She calls it the “Offut-Lyon Plan.” Here’s Ms. Gloumer to describe the notion:
“Our problem isn’t too many people, per se. It’s that we have too many right now. We’re using up resources at a furious rate, just when the last of Earth’s surplus might be used to create true, permanent wellsprings of prosperity. Projects such as reforestation, or orbital solar power, or [ list of other suggestions hyper-appendixed, with appropriate references] aren’t making any progress because our slender margin must be spent just feeding and housing so many people.
“Oh, surely, the rate of population growth has slackened. In a century, total numbers may actually taper off. But too late to save us, I’m afraid.
“Now some insensitive members of this very SIG have suggested this could be solved by letting half the people die. A grim Malthusian solution, and damn stupid in my opinion. Those five billions wouldn’t just go quietly for the common good! They’d go down kicking, taking everybody else with them!
“Anyway, do billions really need to die, in order to save the world? What if those billions could be persuaded to leave temporarily?
“Recent work at the University of Beijing shows we’re only a decade away from perfecting cryosuspension … the safe freezing of human beings, like those with terminal diseases, for reliable resuscitation at a later time. Now at first that sounds like just another techno-calamity—plugging another of the drain holes and letting the tub fill still higher with people. But that’s just small thinking. There’s a way this breakthrough could actually prove to be our salvation.
“Here’s the deal. Let anyone who wants to sign up be suspended until the twenty-fourth century. The U.N. guarantees their savings will accumulate at 1% above inflation or the best government bond rate, whichever is higher. Volunteers are assured wealth when they come out the other end.
“In return, they agree to get out of the way, giving the rest of us the elbow room we need. With only half the population to feed, we problem solvers could roll up our sleeves and use the remaining surplus to fix things up.
“Of course, there are a few bugs to work out, such as the logistics of safely freezing five billion people, but that’s what SIG discussion groups like this one are for—coming up with ideas and solving problems!”
Indeed. Jane’s provocative suggestion left us breathless. We expect more than a million responses to this one, so please, try to be original, or wait until the second wave to see if your point has already been stated by someone else. For conciseness, the first round will be limited to simple eight-gig voice-text, with just one subreference layer. No animation or holography, please. Now let’s start with our senior members in China …
• LITHOSPHERE
It was truly “mad dogs and Englishmen” weather. Claire wore her goggles, of course, and was slathered with skin cream. Nevertheless, Logan Eng wondered if he really oughtn’t get his daughter out of this blistering sunshine.
Not that, to all appearances, anything could possibly harm that creature up ahead, with the form of a girl but moving along the striated rock face like a mountain goat. It never occurred to Logan that Claire might fall, for instance, here on a mere class-four slope. His redheaded offspring strode ahead as if she were crossing a lawn, rather than a forty-degree grade, and disappeared around the next bend in the canyon wall with a final flash of bronzed legs.
Logan puffed, reluctantly admitting to himself why he’d been about to call her back. I can’t keep up with her anymore. It was inevitable, I guess.
Realizing this, he smiled. Envy is an unworthy emotion to feel toward your own child.
Anyway, right now he was occupied with greater spans of time than a mere generation. Logan teetered on the edge of the period called “Carboniferous.” Like some ambitious phylum, aspiring to evolve, he sought a path to rise just a few more meters, into the Permian.
That landmark, which had seemed so stark from far away—a distinct border between two horizontal stripes of pale stone—became deceptive and indistinct up this close. Reality was like that. Never textbook crisp, but gritty, rough-edged. It took physical contact, breathing chalky sediments or tracing with your fingertips the outline of some paleozoic brachiopod, to truly feel the eons imbedded in a place like this.
Logan knew by touch the nature of this rock. He could estimate its strength and permeability to seeping water—a skill learned over years perfecting his craft. Also, as an amateur, he had studied its origins in prehistoric days.
The Carboniferous period actually came rather late in the planet’s history. Part of the “age of amphibians,” it spanned a hundred million years before the giants known as dinosaurs arrived. Wonderful beasts used to thrive near where he now trod. But it was mostly upon ocean bottoms that life’s epic was written, by countless microorganisms raining down as gentle sediment year after year, eon after eon, a process already three billion years old when these clay chapters were lain.
Of course Logan knew volcanic mountains, too. Only last week he’d been scrambling over vast igneous flows in eastern Washington state, charting some of the new underground streams awakened by the shifting rains. Still, mere pumice and tuff were never as fascinating as where the land had once quite literally been alive. In his work he’d walked across ages—from the Precambrian, when Earth’s highest denizens were mats of algae, to the nearly recent Pliocene, where Logan always watched out for traces of more immediate forebears, who might by then already have been walking on two legs and starting to wonder what the hell was going on. He regularly returned from such expeditions with boxes of fossils rescued from the bulldozers, to give away to local schools. Though of course Claire always got first choice for her collection.
“Daddy!”
He was negotiating a particularly tricky bend when his daughter’s call tore him from his drifting thoughts. A misstep cost him his footing, and Logan felt a sudden, teetering vertigo. He gasped, throwing himself against the sloping wall, spreading his weight over the largest possible area. The sudden pounding of his heart matched the sound of pebbles raining into the ravine below.
It was an instinctive reaction. An overreaction, as there were plenty of footholds and ledges. But he’d let his mind wander, and that was stupid. Now he’d pay with bruises, and dust from head to toe.
“What—” He spat grit and raised his voice. “What is it, Claire?”
From above and somewhere ahead he heard her voice. “I think I found it!”
Logan reset his footing and pushed away. Standing upright required that his ankles bend sharply as his climbing shoes pressed for traction. But beginning scramblers learned to do that on their first outing. Now that he was paying attention again, Logan felt steady and controlled.
Just so long as you do pay attention, he reminded himself.
“Found what?” he called in her general direction.
“Daddy!” came exasperated tones, echoing faintly down narrow sidechannels. “I think I found the boundary!”
Logan smiled. As a child, Claire never used to call him “Daddy.” It had been an affront to her dignity. But now that the state of Oregon had issued her a self-reliance card, she seemed to like using the word—as if a small degree of residual, calculated childishness was her privilege as an emerging adult.
“I’m coming, Geode!” He patted his clothes, waving away drifts of dust. “I’ll be right there!”
The badlands stretched all around Logan. Sculpted by wind and rain and flash floods, they no doubt looked much as they had when first seen by whites, or by any people at all. Humans had lived in North America for only ten or twenty thousand years, tops. And though the weather had changed during that time—mostly growing dryer and hotter—it had been even longer since any appreciable greenery found a purchase on these sere slopes.
Still, there was beauty here: beige and cream and cinnamon beauty, textured like
hard layers of some great, petrified pastry that had been kneaded hard below and then exposed by rough scourings of wind and rain. Logan loved these rocky deserts. Elsewhere, Earth wore its carpet of life as a softening mask. But here one could touch the planet’s tactile reality—mother Gaia without her makeup on.
His job often took him to places like this … to map out schemes for managing precious water. It was a role much like the “wildcatters” of twentieth-century lore, who used to scramble far and wide in search of petroleum, until each of the six hundred major sedimentary basins had been probed, palpated, steamed, and sucked dry.
Logan liked to think his goals were more mature, his task more benign and well thought out than that. Still he sometimes wondered. Might future generations look back on him and his world-spanning fraternity the way teledramas now depicted oilmen? As shortsighted fools, even rapists?
His ex-wife, Claire’s mother, had decided about that long ago. After his involvement in the project to cover over the lower Colorado River—saving millions of acre-feet of water from evaporation and creating the world’s longest greenhouse—she had rewarded him by throwing him out of the house.
Logan understood Daisy’s feelings … her obsessions, actually. But what was I to do? We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.
All over the planet there were problems crying out for solutions, not tomorrow, but right now. Nations and cities wanted water shifted, pumped and diked. As the seas rose and rains migrated unpredictably, so did his labors, as governments strove desperately to adapt. Great changes were at work, in the air and land and oceans. They were the sort of global transformations one read of in the very rocks themselves … such as when one long epoch of geological stability would come suddenly and violently to an end, leaving everything forever recast.
And yet … Logan inhaled the scent of sage and juniper.