“But there really are constraints on that process, laid down by the capabilities and limitations of our bodies and brains. And where did those capabilities and limitations come from? Our past, of course. A haphazard sequence of genetic experiments by trial and error, slowly accumulating favorable mutations generation by generation. Death was the means of our advancement … the deaths of millions of our ancestors. Or, to be more precise, those who failed to become our ancestors.
“Those who did survive to breed passed on new traits, which gradually accumulated into the suite of attributes now at our disposal—our upright stance, our better-than-average vision, our wonderfully dexterous hands. Our bloated brains.
“As for what the latter has done to our skull size, ask any woman who’s given birth …”
At that point the audience had laughed. Jen noticed some of the tension seeping away.
“Other species have meanwhile collected their own, similar catalogues of adaptations. Many of them at least as wonderful as those we’re so arrogantly proud of. But here’s the sad part. With one exception—the inefficient interspecies gene transfer performed by viruses—no animal species can ever profit from another’s hard-won lessons. Until now, each has been in it alone, fending for itself, hoarding what it’s acquired, learning from no one else.
“What I am proposing is to change all that, once and for all. Hell, we’re already doing it! Look at the century-old effort to blend characteristics among plants, to transfer, say, pest resistance from one hardy wild species into another that is a food crop. Take just one such product—legu-corn, which fixes its own nitrogen. How many productive farmlands and aquifers has it saved by eliminating the need for artificial fertilizer? How many people has it saved from starvation?
“Or take another program—to save those species of birds who cannot bear excess ultraviolet by inserting eagle codons, so their descendants’ eyes will be as impervious as those of hawks or falcons. The happy accidental discovery of one family can now be shared with others.
“Or take our experiments at London Ark, where we’re remaking a vanished species by slowly building a woolly mammoth genome within an elephant matrix. Someday, a species which has been extinct for thousands of years will walk again.”
A woman in the third row raised her hand. “But isn’t that exactly what the radical Gaians object to? They call it bastardization of species …”
Jen remembered laughing at that point. “I am not a favor ite of the radicals.”
Quite a few in the audience had smiled then. The Ndebele shared her contempt for the taunts, even threats, of those who proclaimed themselves guardians of modern morality.
No doubt the original idea behind her invitation to come here had been prestige. Southern Africa suffered partial isolation from the world’s ever-tightening web of commerce and communication, largely because the commonwealth still practiced racial and economic policies long abandoned elsewhere. No doubt they were surprised when a Nobel laureate actually accepted. This visit would cause Jen problems when she returned home.
It was worth it though. She’d seen promise here. Cut off as they were, these archaic racialist-socialists were looking at familiar problems in unique ways. Often cockeyed wrong ways, but intriguing nonetheless. They had a great advantage in not caring what the rest of the world thought. In that way, they were much like Jen herself.
“What matters to me is the whole,” she had replied. “And the whole depends upon diversity. The radicals are right about that. Diversity is the key.
“But it need not be the same diversity as existed before mankind. Indeed, it cannot be the same. We are in a time of changes. Species will pass away and others take their place, as has happened before. An ecosystem frozen in stone can only become a fossil.
“We must become smart enough to minimize the damage, and then foster a new diversity, one able to endure in a strange new world.”
Of all those in the audience, some had looked confused or resentful. Others nodded in agreement. But one, the boy in the front row, had stared at her as if struck dumb. At the time she had wondered what she’d said that had affected him so.
Jen was jerked back to the present as Director Mugabe spoke her name over the rhythm of the beating drums. She blinked, momentarily disoriented, while hands gently took both her elbows, helping her to stand. Smiling women in bright costumes urged her forward. Their white, perfect teeth shone in the flickering torchlight.
Jen sighed, realizing. As the oldest woman present, and guest of honor, she couldn’t refuse officiating at the sacrifice … not without insulting her hosts. So she went through the motions—bowing to the Orb of the Mother, accepting the bound wheat, pouring the pure water.
So many people had taken to this sect, movement, Zeitgeist … call it what you will. It was an amorphous thing, without center or official dogma. Only a few of those paying homage to the Mother did so thinking it a religion per se.
Indeed many older faiths had taken the simple, effective measure of co-opting Gaian rituals into their own. Catholics altered celebrations of the Virgin, so that Mary now took a much more vigorous personal interest in planetary welfare than she had in the days of Chartres or Nantes.
And yet, Jen knew many for whom this was more than a mere statement or movement. More than just a way of expressing reverence for a danger-stricken world. There were radicals for whom Gaia worship was a church militant. They saw a return of the old goddess of prehistory, at last ready to end her banishment by brutal male deities—by Zeus and Shiva and Jehovah and the warlike spirits once idolized by the Ndebele. To Gaian radicals there were no “moderate” approaches to saving Earth. Technology and the “evil male principle” were foes to be cast down.
Evil male principle, my shriveled ass. Males have their uses.
For some reason Jen thought of her grandson, whose obsessions in the twin worlds of abstraction and engineering were stereotypical of what radicals called “penis science.” It was some time since she had last heard from the boy. She wondered what Alex was up to.
Probably something terribly silly, and utterly earth-shaking if I know him.
Soon came the final act of the evening. The Cleansing. Jen smiled and touched one by one the offerings brought before her by adults and children, each presenting a wicker basket containing broken bits of mundane archaeology.
Scraps of tin … broken spark plugs … shreds of adamant, insoluble plastic.… One basket was nearly filled with ancient aluminum beer cans, still shiny thirty years after they had been outlawed everywhere on Earth. Each collection was the work of one member of this community, performed in his or her spare time over many months. Each basket contained the yield given up by one square meter of soil, painstakingly and lovingly sifted till no trace of human manufacture was detectible, as deep as the individual’s time, strength, and piety allowed. In this way, each person incrementally returned a small bit of the planet to its natural state.
Only what was natural? Certainly not the land’s contours, which had been eroded and moved wholesale by human enterprise.
Not the aquifers, whose percolating waters would never be quite the same, even where antidumping was enforced and where inspectors granted the precious label “pure and untainted.” That only meant the content of heavy metals and complex petro-organics was too sparse to affect one human’s health over a normal lifespan. It certainly didn’t mean “natural.”
Especially, the word didn’t apply to that complicated living thing known as topsoil! Winnowed of countless native species, filled with invaders brought inadvertently or on purpose from other continents—from earthworms to rotifers to tiny fungi and bacteria—the loam in some places thrived and elsewhere it died, giving up its dusty substance to the winds. Microscopic victories and defeats and stalemates were being waged in every hectare all over the globe, and nowhere could a purist say the result was “natural” at all.
Jen glanced over her left shoulder to see Kuwenezi’s lambent towers. The main ark was dim, b
ut its great glass-crystal face reflected a rippling sister to the moon. Within those artificial habitats dozed plants and animals rescued from a hundred spoiled ecosystems. To the radicals, such arks were glorified prisons—mere sops to humanity’s troubled conscience, so that nature’s slaughter could go on.
To Jen, though, the great arcologies weren’t jails, but nurseries.
Change can’t be prevented, only guided.
The radicals were right about one thing, of course. What finally emerged from those glass towers, someday, wouldn’t be the same as what had gone in. Jen’s public statements—that she did not find that in itself tragic—ensured continued hate mail, even death threats, from followers of a sect she herself had helped found.
So be it.
Death is just another change. And when the Mother needs my phosphorus, I’ll give it up gladly.
The local denomination, of course, held that Gaia’s true complexion must be that of pure, fecund earth, and yet they seemed not to care about the paleness of her skin. As Jen lifted her arms, they carried their offerings to outsized recycling bins, waiting under the stars. When the last contribution tumbled inside, a shout of celebration rose, commemorating the salvation of several thousand square meters.
This ceremony had delightful idiosyncracies, but it was essentially similar to others she’d officiated at, from Australia to Smolensk. In all those places, people had taken it for granted that she was an appropriate surrogate—a stand-in for Gaia herself.
Only a surrogate … Jen smiled, offering her benediction and forgiving their error. The drums resumed, and dancers rejoined their exertions. But for a moment Jen watched the torchlight play across the faces and the glass towers beyond.
Modern folk, you pay homage to the Mother as a “parable.” And I am but a stand-in, tonight, for an abstract idea:
Well, we shall see about that, my children. We shall see.
She had planted seeds during her visit. Some would germinate, perhaps even flower into action.
The young man in the bandages appeared again. She saw him seated across the arena, his baboon companions resting against his knees. He nodded back as she smiled at him, and fen had a sudden, clear recollection of his final question, yesterday afternoon in the lecture hall.
“You talk about a lot of possibilities Doctor Wolling …” he had said. “Maybe we could do some of those things … or even all o’ them, eh?
“But won’t we also have to give up somethin’ in return? They say there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. So what’ll it cost us, Doctor?”
Jen remembered thinking, What a bright boy. He understood that nothing was ever easy, which her own grandson never seemed to grasp, no matter how often the world smacked poor Alex in the head.
No, Jen thought. Humanity may have to give up more than a little, if the Earth is to be saved. We may, in the end, find the old gods were right after all. That nothing worthwhile comes without a sacrifice.
Jen smiled at the boy, at all of them. She opened her arms, blessing the dancers, the audience, the animals in the arks, and the ravaged countryside.
That sacrifice, my children, may turn out to be ourselves.
PART III
PLANET
The newborn world liquefied under pummeling asteroid impacts. Heavy elements sank, generating still more heat, and a dowry of radioactive atoms kept the planet’s interior warm even after the surface cooled and hardened.
Eventually, the inmost core crystallized under intense pressure, but the next layer remained a swirling metal fluid, a vast electric dynamo. Higher still congealed a mantle of semisolid minerals—superdense pyroxenes and olivines and lighter melts that squeezed up crustal cracks to spill forth from blazing volcanoes.
Heat drove the circulating convection cells, jostled the plates, drove the fields. Heat built continents and made the Earth throb.
Heat also kept some water molten at the surface. Preorganic vapors sloshed in solution, under lightning and fierce sunbeams.…
The process started taking on a life of its own.
A range of minor mountains divides the city of Los Angeles. During the city’s carefree youth, great battalions of trucks streamed toward the little valleys between those hills, brimming with kilotons of urban garbage.
Coffee grounds and melon rinds, cereal boxes and disposable trays …
In those profligate times every purchased commodity seemed to come inside its own weight of packing material. The average family generated enough waste each year to fill home and garage combined.
Newspapers, magazines, and throwaway advertisements …
Even earlier, during the fight against Germany and Japan, Los Angeles mandated limited recycling to help the war effort. Citizens separated metals for curbside pickup. Bound paper was returned to pulp mills; even cooking grease was saved for munitions. Those few who weren’t glad to help still complied, to avoid stiff fines.
Milk cartons and paper towels … and never-used, slightly dented goods, discarded at the factory …
After the war, people found themselves released from decades of privation into a sudden age of plenty. With the crisis over, recycling seemed irksome. A mayoral candidate ran on a one-issue promise, to revoke the inconvenient law. He won by a landslide.
Peanut hulls, fast-food bags, and takeaway pizza boxes …
The hills dividing L.A. had been formed as the Earth’s Pacific Plate ground alongside the North American Plate. As the two huge, rocky masses pressed and scraped, a coastal range squeezed out at the interface, like toothpaste from a tube. The Santa Monica Mountains and Hollywood Hills were mere offshoots from that steady accumulation, but they helped shape the great city that eventually surrounded them.
Boxes from frozen dinners, boxes from new stereos and computers, boxes from supermarket produce sections, boxes, boxes, boxes …
Between the hills once lay little valleys of oak and meadow, where mule deer grazed and condors soared—ideal out-of-view spots for landfills. The regiments of trucks came and went, day in and day out. Hardly anyone noticed until quite late that all suitable and legal crevices would be topped off within a single generation. By century’s end flat plains stretched between onetime peaks, eerily lit at night by tiki torches burning methane gas—generated underground by the decaying garbage.
Beer and soft-drink cans, ketchup bottles and disposable diapers … engine oil, transmission fluid, and electroplating residue … chipped ceramic knickknacks and worn-out furniture …
Harder times came. New generations arrived with new sensibilities and less carefree attitudes. Pickup fees were enacted and expensive processes found to stanch the flow … to cut the flood of trash in half, then to a tenth, then still more.
And yet that left the question of what was to be done with the plateaus between the hills. Plateaus of waste?
Plastic bottles and plastic bags, plastic spoons and plastic forks …
Some suggested building there to help relieve the stifling overcrowding—though of course there would be the occasional explosion, and a house or two could be expected to disappear into a sudden mire from time to time.
The family pet, sealed in a bag … hospital waste … construction debris …
Some suggested leaving the sites exactly as they were, so future archaeologists could find a wealth of detail from the prodigal middens of TwenCen California. With an even longer view, paleontologists speculated what the deposits might look like in a few million years, after grinding plates compressed them into layers of sedimentary stone.
Tires and cars, broken stereos and obsolete computers, missing rent money and misplaced diamond rings …
It might have been predictable, and yet few saw the answer coming. In a later day of harder times, of short resources and mandatory recycling, it was inevitable that those landfills should draw the eyes of innovators, looking for ways to get rich.
Iron, aluminum, silica … nickel, copper, zinc … methane, ammonia, phosphates … silver, gold, platinum … br />
Claims were filed, mining plans presented and analyzed. Refining methods were perfected and approved. Excavation began between the ancient hills.
Into a past generation’s waste, their desperate grandchildren dug for treasure.
The garbage rush was on.
• EXOSPHERE
So now Teresa was a hero, and a recent widow. No combination was more appealing to the masses … or to NASA press flacks, whose attentions she welcomed like an invasion of nibbling rodents. Fame was a pile of dumpit she could live without.
Fortunately, operational people had her for several weeks after the Erehwon disaster. Teams of engineers spent from dawn to dusk coaxing every bit of useful description from her memory, until each night she would fall into bed and a deep, exhausted, dreamless slumber. Some outsiders got wind of the intense debriefing and railed for her sake against “gestapo grilling tactics”—until Teresa herself emerged one day to tell all the well-meaning do-gooders to go fuck off.
Not in so many words, of course. Their intentions were fine. Under normal circumstances it would be cruel to scrutinize a recent survivor so. But Teresa wasn’t normal. She was an astronaut. A pilot astronaut. And if some all-knowing physician prescribed for her right now, the slip might say—“Surround her with competent people. Keep her busy, useful. That will do more good than a thousand floral gifts or ten million sympathy-grams.”
Certainly she’d been traumatized. That was why she also cooperated with the NASA psychers, letting them guide her through all the stages of catharsis and healing. She wept. She railed against fate and wept again. Though each step in grieving was accomplished efficiently, that didn’t mean she felt it any less than a normal person. She just felt it all faster. Teresa didn’t have time to be normal.