He spread his hands. “I first grew suspicious because things were going too bloody well! The power plant was extremely efficient, you see. We didn’t have to feed in much matter to keep it from dissipating. The generals were delighted of course. But I started thinking … might I have accidentally created a new type of hole in space? One that’s stable? Able to grow by devouring mere rock?”
Stan gaped. Alex, too, had been numbed by that first realization, then agonized for weeks before deciding to take matters into his own hands, to defy his employers and defang the tiny, voracious beast he’d helped create.
But Pedro Manella arrived first, amid a flurry of accusations, and suddenly it was too late. Alex’s world collapsed around him before he could act, or even find out for certain what he’d made.
“So it is a monster … a taniwha,” George Hutton breathed. The Maori word sounded fearsome. The big man drummed his fingers on the table. “Let’s see if I’ve got this right. We have a purported stable black hole, that you think may orbit thousands of miles below our feet, possibly growing unstoppably even as we speak. Correct? I suppose you want my help finding what you so carelessly misplaced?”
Alex was nearly as impressed with Hutton’s quickness as he was irked by his attitude. He suppressed a hot response. “I guess you could put it that way,” he answered, levelly.
“So. Would it be too much to ask how you’d go about looking for such an elusive fiend? It’s a little hard to go digging around down there in the Earth’s core.”
Hutton obviously thought he was being ironic. But Alex gave him a straightforward answer. “Your company already makes most of the equipment I’d need … like those superconducting gravity scanners you use for mineral surveys.” Alex started reaching for his valise. “I’ve written down modifications—”
Hutton raised a hand. All trace of sardonicism was gone from his eyes. “I’ll take your word for now. It will be expensive, of course? No matter. If we find nothing, I’ll take the cost out of your pakeha hide. I’ll skin you and sell the pale thing in a tourist shop. Agreed?”
Alex swallowed, unable to believe it could be so simple. “Agreed. And if we do find it?”
Lines furrowed Hutton’s brow. “Why … then I’d be honor bound to take your pelt anyway, tohunga. For creating such a devil to consume our Earth, I should …”
The big man stopped suddenly. He stood up, shaking his head. At the window, Hutton stared down at the city of Auckland, its evening lights beginning to spread like powdered gemstones across the hills. Beyond the metropolis lay forested slopes slanting to Manukau Bay. Twilight-stained clouds were moving in from the Tasman Sea, heavy with fresh rain.
The scene reminded Alex of a time in childhood, when his grandmother had taken him to Wales to watch the turning of the autumn leaves. Then, as now, it had struck him just how temporary everything seemed … the foliage, the drifting clouds, the patient mountains … the world.
“You know,” George Hutton said slowly, still contemplating the peaceful view outside, “back when the American and Russian empires used to face each other at the brink of nuclear war, this was where people in the Northern Hemisphere dreamed about fleeing to. Were you aware of that, Lustig? Every time there was a crisis, airlines suddenly overbooked with “vacation” trips to New Zealand. People must have thought this the ideal spot to ride out a holocaust.
“And that didn’t change with the Rio Treaties, did it? Big War went away, but then came the cancer plague, greenhouse heat, spreading deserts … and lots of little wars of course, over an oasis here, a river there.
“All the time though, we Kiwis still felt lucky. Our rains didn’t abandon us. Our fisheries didn’t die.
“Now all those illusions are gone. There’s no safe place any longer.”
The big man turned to look at Alex, and despite his words there was no loathing in the tycoon-engineer’s eyes. Nor even bleakness. Only what Alex took to be a heavy resignation.
“I wish I could hate you, Lustig, but you’ve obviously subcontracted that job quite ably yourself. And so you deprive me even of revenge.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex apologized sincerely.
Hutton nodded. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“All right then, let’s get to work. If Tane, father of the Maori, could go into the bowels of the Earth to battle monsters, who are we then to refuse?”
For more than two decades, we at The Mother have maintained our famed list of Natural Tranquility Reserves—rare places on Earth where one might sit for hours and hear no sounds but those of wilderness.
Our thirty million worldwide subscribers have led in vigilantly protecting these reserves. All it takes is a single thoughtless act, by air traffic planners for instance, to convert a precious sanctuary into yet another noisy, noisome place, ruined by the raucous clamor of humanity.
Unfortunately, even so-called “conservation-oriented” officials still seem obsessed by archaic, TwenCen views of preservation. They think it’s enough to save a few patches of forest here and there from development, from chemical leaks or acid rain. Even when they succeed, however, they celebrate by opening hiking trails and encouraging ever higher quotas of sightseers, who predictably leave litter, trample root systems, cause erosion, and worst of all jabber at the top of their lungs in gushing excitement over “being one with nature.”
It’s surprising the few animals left can find each other amid the bedlam, to breed.
Excluding Greenland and Antarctica, seventy-nine Tranquility Reserves were reported in our last roundup. We’re now sad to report that two failed this year’s test. At this rate, soon there will be no terrestrial silence zones left at all.
And our Oceania correspondents report matters growing worse there, as well. Too many landlubbers seem to be heading off the standard shipping lanes—vacationers who seek out nature’s serenity, but in so doing bring to silent places the plague of their own voices.
(And then there is that catastrophe the Sea State, perhaps better left unmentioned here, lest we despair entirely!)
Even the southern Indian Ocean, Earth’s last frontier of solitude, trembles under the cacophony of our cursed ten billions and their machines. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise this writer if Gaia eventually had enough, if she awoke from her fitful slumber and answered our noise with a shaking such as this tired planet has never known.
—From the March 2038 edition of The Mother. [ Net access P1-63-AA-1-888-66-7767.]
• HOLOSPHERE
There are many ways to propagate. (Such a lovely word!) This late in her long life, Jen Wolling figured she knew just about all of them.
Especially where the term applied to biology—to all the varied means Life used to foil its great enemy, Time. So many were those ways, Jen sometimes puzzled why everyone fussed so over the traditional one, sex.
True, sex had its points. It helped ensure variability in a species—a gambler’s game, mixing one’s own genes with another’s, betting that beneficial serendipities will outweigh the inevitable errors. In fact, sex had served most higher life forms well enough and long enough, to become reinforced with many pleasurable neural and hormonal responses.
In other days Jen had plumbed those pathways in vivo and with gusto. She had also mapped those same roads more precisely, in charts of pristine yet still passionate mathematics. Hers had been the earliest computer models to show theoretical bases for feeling, logical rationales for ecstasy, even theorems for the mysterious art of motherhood.
Two husbands, three children, eight grandchildren, and one Nobel Prize later, Jen knew motherhood from every angle, even though its fierce hormonal flows were now only memories. Ah, well. There were other types of propagation. Other ways even an old woman might leave an imprint upon history.
“No, Baby!” she chided, pulling a bright red apple away from the bars dividing the spacious lab in two. A gray tentacle waved between the steel rods, snatching at the fruit.
“No! Not till you ask for it pol
itely.”
From her desk nearby, a young black woman sighed. “Jen, will you stop teasing the poor creature?” Pauline Cockerel shook her head. “You know Baby won’t understand unless you accompany words with signs.”
“Nonsense. She comprehends perfectly. Observe.”
The animal let out a squeaky trumpet of frustration. Acquiescing, it rolled back its trunk to wind the tip round a mat of shaggy fur, hanging low over its eyes.
“That’s a good girl,” Jen said, tossing the apple. Baby caught it deftly and crunched happily.
“Pure operant conditioning,” the younger woman sniffed. “Hasn’t anything to do with intelligence or cognition.”
“Cognition isn’t everything,” Jen replied. “Politeness, for instance, needs to be ingrained at deeper levels. It’s a good thing I came down here. She’s getting spoiled rotten.”
“Hmph. If you ask me, you’re just rationalizing another bout of PNS.”
“PNS?”
“Post-Nobel syndrome,” Pauline explained.
“Still?” Jen sniffed. “After all these years?”
“Why not? Who said anyone recovers?”
“You make it sound like a disease.”
“It is. Look at the history of science. Most prizewinners turn into either stodgy defenders of the status quo—like Hayes and Kalumba—or iconoclasts like you, who insist on throwing stones at sacred cows—”
“Mixed metaphor,” Jen pointed out.
“—and carping about details, and generally making nuisances of themselves.”
“Have I been making a nuisance of myself?” Jen asked innocently.
Pauline cast her eyes heavenward. “You mean besides coming here randomly, unannounced, and meddling in Baby’s training?”
“Yeah. Besides that.”
With a sigh Pauline plucked one data plaque from a jumble of the wide, wafer-thin reading devices. This one was dialed to the latest issue of Nature … a page in the letters section.
“Oh, that,” Jen observed. She had come here to the hermetic, air-conditioned pyramid of London Ark, in order to escape the flood of telephone and Net calls piling up at her own lab. Inevitably, one would be from the director of St. Thomas’s, inviting her to a pleasant lunch overlooking the river, where he’d once again hint that an emeritus professor in her nineties really ought to spend more time in the country, watching ultraviolet rays turn the rhododendrons funny shades of purple, instead of gallivanting around the globe poking her nose into other researchers’ business and making statements about issues that were none of her concern.
Had anybody else spoken as she had, at last week’s World Ozone Conference in Patagonia, they would have returned home to more than mere letters and phone calls. In today’s political climate, the gentlest outcome might have been forced retirement. Good-bye lab in the city. Good-bye generous consultancies and travel allotments.
That little Swedish medal certainly did have its compensations. To become a laureate was a little like being transformed into that famous nine-hundred-pound gorilla—the one who slept anywhere it wanted to. Glimpsing her own tiny, wiry reflection in the laboratory window, Jen found the metaphor delicious.
“I only pointed out what any fool should see,” she explained. “That spending billions to blow artificial ozone into the stratosphere isn’t going to solve anything. Now that greedy idiots have stopped spewing chlorine compounds into the air, the situation will correct itself soon.”
“Soon?” Pauline was incredulous. “Decades is soon enough to restore the ozone layer? Tell that to the farmers, who have to fit their livestock with eye covers.”
“Shouldn’t eat meat anyway,” Jen grumbled.
“Then tell all the humans who’ll get skin lesions because …”
“The U.N. supplies hats and sunglasses to everyone. Besides, a few pence worth of cream clears away precancerous—”
“What about wild animals then? Savannah baboons were doing fine, their habitat declared safe just ten years ago. Now so many are going blind, they have to be collected into the arks after all. How do you think we’ll cope with that here?” Pauline gestured into the vast atrium of London Ark, with its tier upon tier of enclosed, artificial habitats. The huge edifice of hanging gardens and meticulously regulated environments was a far cry from its origins in the old Regent’s Park Zoo. And it was only one out of almost a hundred such structures, scattered all over the world.
“You’ll cope the way you have all along,” Jen answered. “By stretching facilities, putting in extra hours, making do—”
“For now! But what about tomorrow? The next catastrophe? Jen, I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You led the fight for the arks, from the beginning!”
“So? Am I a traitor then, if I say that part of the job has succeeded? Why, in some places we’ve even made additions to the gene pool, like Baby here.” She nodded toward the furry pachyderm inside the big cage. “You should have faith in your own work, Pauline. Habitat restoration will come off the drawing boards someday. Most of these species should be back outside in only a few centuries—”
“Centuries!”
“Yes, surely. What’s a few hundred years, compared to the age of this planet?”
Pauline sniffed dubiously. But Jen cut in, putting on a touch of Cockney accent for good measure. “Cor, why d’ye take it all so bloody personally, dearie-o? Step back a minute. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“We could lose every unprotected terrestrial species massing over ten kilos!” the young woman replied fiercely.
“Yes? For good measure, let’s throw in the contents of these arks—the protected species—and every human being. All ten billion of us. That’d be some holocaust, to be sure.
“But how much difference would it make to the Earth, Pauline? Say, ten million years from now? Not much, I’ll wager. The old girl will wait us out. She’s done it before.”
Pauline’s mouth was slack, her expression stunned. For a moment Jen wondered if she’d really gone over the top, this time.
Her young friend blinked. Then a suspicious smile spread. “You are awful! For a minute there I actually started taking you seriously.”
Jen grinned. “Now … you know me better than that.”
“I know you’re an unrepentant curmudgeon! You live to get a rise out of people, and someday your contrary habits will be your undoing.”
“Hmph. Just how do you think I’ve remained interested in life this long? Finding ways to keep amused … that’s my secret of longevity.”
Pauline tossed the reading plaque back onto the cluttered desk. “Is that why you’re going to South Africa next month? Because it’ll outrage everybody on both sides?”
“The Ndebele want me to look over their arks from a macrobiological perspective. Whatever their politics and race problems, they are still vital members of the Salvation Project.”
“But—”
Jen clapped her hands. “Enough of that. It has nothing to do with our little project in stirpiculture, right here. Mammut americanum. Let’s have a look at Baby’s file, shall we? I may be retired, but I’ll bet I can still recommend a better neural factor gradient than the one you’re using.”
“You’re on! It’s in the next room. I’ll be right back.”
With a youthful grace that Jen watched lovingly, Pauline hurried out of the lab, leaving Jen to ponder alone the mysterious ways of ambiguity in language.
It was, indeed, a bad habit, this toying with people. But as the years flickered by it grew easier. They all forgave so, almost as if they expected it … demanded it of her. And because she tested everybody, taking contrary positions without prejudice, fewer and fewer people seemed to believe she meant anything she said at all!
Perhaps, Jen admitted honestly, that would be the world’s long-term revenge on her. To attribute everything she said to jest. That would be some fate for the so-called “mother of the modern Gaian paradigm.”
Jen stroked Baby’s trunk, scratching the bulgi
ng forehead where induced neoteny had given the elephant-mammoth hybrid an enlarged cortex. Baby’s brow-fur was long and oily, and gave off a pungent, tangy, yet somehow pleasant odor. The worldwide network of genetic arks had a surfeit of pachyderms, even this new breed—“Mammontelephas”—with half its genes salvaged from a 20,000-year-old cadaver exposed by the retreating Canadian tundra. So many of them bred true, in fact, that there were some to spare for experiments in extended childhood in mammals. Under strict supervision by the science tribunals and animal rights committees, of course.
Certainly the creature seemed happy enough. “How about it, Baby?” Jen murmured. “Are you glad to be smarter than the average elephant? Or would you rather be out on the plains, rolling in mud, uprooting trees, complaining about ticks, and getting pregnant before you’re ten?”
The pink-tipped trunk curled around her hand. She stroked it, tenderly. “You’re awfully important to yourself, aren’t you? And you are part of the whole.
“But do you really matter, Baby? Do I?”
Actually, she had meant every word she said to Pauline—about how even mass extinctions would be essentially meaningless in the long run. A lifetime spent building the theoretical foundations of biology had convinced her of that. The homeostasis of the planet—of Gaia—was powerful enough to survive even great cataclysms.
Many times, sudden waves of death had wiped out species, genuses, even entire orders. Dinosaurs were only the most glamorous victims of one episode. And yet, across each murderous chasm, plants kept removing carbon dioxide from the air. Animals and volcanoes continued putting it back again, give or take a few percentage points.
Even the so-called greenhouse effect that had everyone worried—melting icecaps, spreading deserts, and driving millions before the rising seas—even that catastrophic outcome of human excess would never rival the great inundations following the Permian age.
Jen very much approved of the way everyone marched and spoke out and wrote letters these days, passing laws and designing technologies to “save the Earth” from twentieth-century errors. After all, only silly creatures fouled their own nests, and humanity couldn’t afford much more silliness. Still, she took her own, admittedly eccentric view, based on a personal, quirky, never-spoken identification with the living world.