Earth

  George shrugged. “The Pacific’s cosmopolitan today. Hawaiian priests consult ours in matters of body magic, while we defer when it comes to volcanoes and planetary animism.”

  “Is that where you studied geophysics, then?” Alex smirked. “In a shaman’s hut, beside a lava flow?”

  He was surprised when George nodded earnestly, without taking offense. “There, and MIT, yes.” Hutton went on to explain. “Naturally, Western science is paramount. It’s the central body of knowledge, and the old gods long ago admitted that. Nevertheless, my ventures wouldn’t have got backing from my family and iwi and clan, had I not also apprenticed for a time with Pele’s priests, at the feet of Kilauea.”

  Alex sighed. He shouldn’t be surprised. Like California fifty years ago, contemporary New Zealand had gradually transformed its longstanding tradition of tolerance into a positive fetish for eccentricity. Of course George’s people saw nothing inconsistent in mixing old and new ideas to suit their eclectic style. And if that occasionally made staid outsiders blink in wonder, so much the better.

  Alex refused to give George the satisfaction. He shrugged and turned to regard the priestess once again.

  Here under the hand-carved beams of the centuries-old meeting house, he had only to squint to imagine himself transported in time. Even her tattoos looked genuine … unlike those the entertainers at Rotorua put on and took off as easily as hair or skin color. Still, it was doubtful many ancient Maori women, even priestesses, reached Auntie’s age with all their own teeth still in place, as hers were, gleaming straight and white from a life of hygiene and regular professional care.

  Alex realized she was waiting for a reply, and so he nodded slightly. “Thank you, Auntie. I’m glad the goddess found my attentions … pleasing.”

  George planted a hand on his shoulder. “Of course Pele liked them. Didn’t the Earth move for you?”

  Alex shrugged the hand aside. George had insisted they come here tonight, implying it was important. Meanwhile Alex chafed for the lab and his computer. One more simulation might break the logjam. Maybe if he kept at it, kept trying …

  “You pursue a great taniwha that has burrowed into Our Mother,” the priestess said. “You seek to grasp its nature. You fear it will devour Our Mother and ourselves.”

  He nodded. A colorful appraisal, but it summed things up rather well. Their most recent gravitational tomography scans had lit up Earth’s interior with a startling clarity that struck George’s technicians dumb, sketching the planet’s deep layers in fine, prickled, searing complexity that defied all previous geophysical models.

  The search had revealed both “taniwhas,” the two singularities slowly orbiting near the planet’s heart. Both the shriveled, evaporating remnant of his own Alpha and the ominous, massive spectre of Beta had shown up as tiny, perfect sparkles within the maelstrom. Everything he’d surmised about the larger beast had been confirmed in those scans. The cosmic knot was growing, all right. And the more closely he examined its convoluted world-sheets, its torturous topology of warped space-time, the more beautiful it grew in its implacable deadliness.

  Unfortunately, he was no closer to answering any of the really basic questions, such as when and where the thing had originated. Or how it was that probing for it triggered earthquakes at the surface, thousands of miles away.

  Hell, he couldn’t even figure out the thing’s orbit! Prior to these recent scans he’d been so sure he had Beta’s dynamics worked out—the way gravity and pseudo-friction and centrifugal forces balanced in its slow whirl about the inner core. But its trajectory had shifted after the first scan. Some additional factor must have nudged it. But what?

  Auntie Kapur tapped a steady beat on a miniature ceremonial drum—which some called a zzxjoanw—while making fatidic statements about amorous goddesses and other superstitious nonsense.

  “… You reach deep within Pele’s hidden places, touching Her secrets. She would not permit this of just any man. You are honored, nephew.”

  Gaia worship took many forms, and this Pele-venerating version seemed harmless enough. He’d even heard Jen speak favorably of Auntie’s cult, once. Under other circumstances he might have found all this very interesting, instead of a damned nuisance.

  “Have no fear,” she went on. “You will tame this beast you pursue. You will keep it from harming Our Mother.”

  She paused, looking at him expectantly. Alex tried to think of something to say.

  “I am an unworthy man,” he answered, modestly.

  But the old woman surprised him with a quick, reproachful glare. “It’s not for you to judge your worthiness! You serve, as a man’s seed serves the woman who chooses him. Even the taniwha serves. You would do well, boy, to consider the lesson of the tiny kiwi bird and her enormous egg.”

  Alex stared. The suggestion seemed so bizarre—and the tension of the last few weeks had him wound up so tight—that he couldn’t contain himself any longer. He guffawed.

  Auntie Kapur tilted her head. “You are amused by my metaphors?”

  “I …” He held up one hand placatingly.

  “Would you prefer I used other terms? That I ask you to contemplate the relationship between ‘zygotes’ and ‘gametes’? Would you understand better if I spoke to you of dissipative structures? Or the way, even amid catastrophe, life creates order out of chaos?”

  Alex was unable to react except by blinking. While she stirred the coals again, George whispered, “Auntie has a biophysics degree from the University of Otago. Don’t make assumptions, Lustig.”

  Trapped—by a movie cliche! Alex had known this was a modern person sitting across from him. And yet her pose—what Stan Goldman would call her “schtick”—had drawn him in.

  “You … you’re saying the singularity won’t harm the Earth? That it might instead trigger some …”

  Auntie reached over the coals and rapped him sharply on the back of his hand. “I say nothing! It’s not my job to tell you, a ‘genius,’ what to think—you, who have many times my brains and whose prowess impresses even Our Mother. Those are silly endowments but they serve their purposes.

  “No, I only pose you questions, at a time when you’re obviously concentrating much too closely on your problem. You show every sign of being ensnared by those very brains of yours—of being cornered by your postulates! To nudge you off balance then, I offer you the wisdom of sperm and egg.

  “Heed my words or not. Do as you will. I have confused you and that is enough. Your unconscious will do the rest.”

  She concluded rattling the drum, then put it aside and dismissed both men with a brusque wave. “I forbid further work until you’ve rested and distracted yourselves. You are commanded to get drunk tonight. Now go.”

  The priestess watched the fire pit silently as they stood up. Alex grabbed his shoes and followed George out of the meeting house, into a starry night. Ten feet down the path, however, the two men stopped, looked at each other, and simultaneously broke into fits of laughter. Alex nearly doubled over, his sides hurting as he desperately tried to catch his breath. George slapped him roughly on the back. “Come on,” the big Maori said. “Let’s get a beer. Or ten.”

  Alex grinned, wiping his eyes. “I … I’ll join you in an hour or so, George. Honestly. I only have to check one simulation and … what’s the matter?”

  Suddenly frowning, George shook his head. “Not tonight. You heard what Auntie said. Rest and distraction.”

  For the third time that evening, Alex gaped. “You can’t take that crazy old bat seriously!”

  George smiled sheepishly, but also nodded. “She is a bit of a ham. But where her authority applies, I obey. We get drunk tonight, white fellow. You and I, now. Whether you cooperate or not.”

  Alex had a sudden vision of this massive billionaire holding his head under a beer tap, while he sputtered and fought helplessly. The image was startlingly credible. Another believer, he sighed inwardly. They were everywhere.

  “Well … I wouldn’t want
to flout tradition.…”

  “Good.” George slapped Alex on the back once more, almost knocking him over. “And between rounds I’ll tell you how I once substituted for the great Makahuna, back in ’20, when the All Blacks smashed Australia.”

  Oh, no. Rugby stories. That’s all I need.

  Still, Alex felt a strange relief. He’d been commanded to seek oblivion, and by no less than a spokeswoman for Gaia herself. On such authority—despite his agnosticism—he supposed he could let himself forget for just one night.

  Alex had been in pubs all over the world, from the faded elegance of the White Hart, in Bloomsbury, to rickety, fire-trap shanties in Angolan boom towns. There had been that kitschy Russian tourist bistro, near the launch site at Kapustin Yar, where dilute, vitamin-enriched vodka was served in pastel squeeze tubes to background strains of moon muzak … very tacky. He’d even been to the bar of the Hotel Imperial, in Shanghai, just before the Great Big War Against Tobacco finally breached that mist-shrouded last bastion of smoking, driving grumbling addicts into back alleys to nurse their dying habit.

  In comparison, the Kai-Keri was as homey and familiar as the Washington, his own local back in Belsize Park. The bitter brown ale was much the same. True, the crowd around the dart board stood closer than in a typical British pub, and Alex had gotten lost during his last two trips to the loo. But he attributed that to the coriolis effect. After all, everything was upside down here in kiwi land.

  One thing you wouldn’t see in Britain was this easy fraternizing of the races. From full-blooded Maoris to palefaced, blond pakehas and every shade in between, nobody seemed to notice differences that still occasionally caused riots back home.

  Oh, they had names for every pigmentation and nationality, including postage stamp island states Alex had never even heard of. The New Zealand Herald just that morning had run an outraged exposé about promotion discrimination against Fijian guest-workers in an Auckland factory. It had sounded unfair, all right … and also incredibly picayune compared with the injustices and bigotries still being perpetrated almost everywhere else, all over the world.

  Actually, Alex figured Kiwis fretted over such small-scale imperfections so they wouldn’t feel left out. Harmony was all very good in theory, but in practice it sometimes seemed a bit embarrassing.

  Soon after arriving in New Zealand, he had asked Stan Goldman just how far the attitude stretched. How would Stan feel, for instance, if his daughter came home one night and said she wanted to marry a Maori boy?

  Alex’s former mentor had stared back in surprise.

  “But Alex, that’s exactly what she did!”

  Soon he also met George’s family, and the wives and husbands and kids of several Tangoparu engineers. They had all made him feel welcome. None seemed to blame him for the deadly thing that was growing in the Earth’s core.

  And you’re not responsible. It’s not your monster.

  Again, the reminder helped, a little.

  “Drink, Lustig. You’ve fallen behind Stan and me.”

  George Hutton was accustomed to getting his way. Dutifully, Alex took a breath and lifted the tapered glass of warm brew. He closed his eyes, swallowed, and put it down again, empty.

  When he reopened them, however, the pint had magically resurrected! Was this divine intervention? Or defiance of entropy? The detached portion of Alex’s mind knew someone must have poured another round, presumably from a pitcher that even now existed somewhere outside his diminishing field of vision. Still, it was fun to consider alternatives. A negentropic time-reversal had certain arguments in its favor.

  With yet another of his unraveling faculties, Alex listened to Stan Goldman’s recollections from dimly remembered days at the end of the last century.

  “I was thinkin’ about becoming a biologist in the late nineties,” his former research advisor said. “That’s where all the excitement was then. Biologists think of those days the way we physicists look back on the early nineteen-hundreds, when Planck an’ Schrödinger were inventing the quantum, and old Albert himself nailed the speed o’ light to the bleeding reference frame … when the basis for a whole science was laid down.

  “What a time that must have been! A century’s engineering came out of what those lucky bastards discovered. But by my time it was all lookin’ pretty dumpit boring for physics.”

  “C’mon, Stan,” George Hutton protested. “The late nineties, boring? For physics? Wasn’t that when Adler and Hurt completed grand unification? Combinin’ all the forces of nature into one big megillah? You can’t tell me you weren’t excited then!”

  Stan brought one spotted hand to his smooth dome, using a paper serviette to dab away spots of perspiration. “Oh, surely. The unification equations were brilliant, elegant. They called it a “theory of everything” … TOE for short.

  “But by then field theory was mostly a spectator sport. It took almost mutant brilliance to participate … like you have to be eight feet tall to play pro basketball these days. What’s more, you started hearing talk about closing the books on physics. There were profs who said ‘all the important questions have been answered.’ ”

  “That’s why you thought about leaving the field?” George inquired.

  Stan shook his head. “Naw. What really had me depressed was that we’d run out of modalities.”

  Alex had been pinching his numb cheeks, in search of any feeling. He turned to peer at Stan. “Modalities?”

  “Basic ways and means. Chinks in nature’s wall. The lever and the fulcrum. The wheel an’ the wedge. Fire an’ nuclear fission.

  “Those weren’t just intellectual curiosities, Alex. They started out as useless abstractions, sure. But, well, do you remember how Michael Faraday answered, when a member of Parliament asked him what use would ever come of his crazy ‘electricity’ thing?”

  George Hutton nodded. “I heard about that! Didn’t Faraday ask, um … what use was a newborn baby?”

  “That’s one version,” Alex agreed, commanding his head to mimic the approximate trajectory of a nod. “Another story has him answering—‘I don’t know, sir. But I’ll wagell, er … wager someday you’ll tax it!’ ” Alex laughed. “Always liked that story.”

  “Yeah,” Stan agreed. “And Faraday was right, wasn’t he? Look at the difference electricity made! Physics became the leading science, not just because it dealt in fundamentals but also ’cause it opened doors—modalities—offering us powers we once reckoned belonged to gods!”

  Alex closed his eyes. Momentarily it seemed he was back in the meeting house, with Auntie Kapur slyly referring to the ways of heavenly beings.

  “Grand unification depressed you because it wasn’t practical?” George asked unbelievingly.

  “Exactly!” Stan stabbed a finger toward the big geophysicist. “So Hurt described how the electroweak force unifies with chromodynamics and gravitation. So what? To ever do anything with the knowledge, we’d need the temperatures and pressures of the Big Bang!”

  Stan made a sour look. “Pfeh! Can you see why I almost switched to quantum biology? That was where new theories might make a difference, lead to new products, and change people’s lives.”

  Hutton regarded his old friend with clear disappointment. “And I always thought you math types were in it for the beauty. Turns out you’re as much a gadget junky as I am.” He waved to a passing barmaid, ordering another round.

  Goldman shrugged. “Beauty and practicality aren’t always inconsistent. Look at Einstein’s formulas for absorption and emission of radiation. What elegance! Such simplicity! He had no idea he was predicting lasers. But the potential’s right there in the equations.…”

  Alex felt the words wash over him. They were like swarming creatures. He had a strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young. Normally, he had little use for the popular multimind models of consciousness. But right now the normal, comforting illusion of personal unity seemed to have been dissolved by the solvent, alcohol. He felt h
e wasn’t singular, but many.

  One self watched in bemusement while a dark pint reappeared before him, again, as if by magic. Another sub-persona struggled to follow the thread of Stan’s rambling reminiscence.

  But then, behind his tightening brow, yet more selves wrestled over something still submerged. Benumbed by fatigue and alcohol, logic had been squelched and other, more chaotic forces seemed to romp unfettered. Ninety-nine to one the results would be just the sort that sounded great during a party and like gibberish the morning after.

  “… when, out of nowhere, the cavitron appeared! Imagine my delight,” Stan went on, spreading his gnarled hands. “All of a sudden we found there was, after all, a way to gain access to the heart of the new physics!”

  The elderly theoretician made a fist, as if grasping tightly some long-sought quarry. “One year the field seemed sterile, sexless, doomed to mathematical masturbation or worse—perpetual, pristine theoretical splendor. The next moment—boom! We had in our hands the power to make singularities! To move and shape space itself!”

  Stan appeared to have temporarily forgotten the tragic consequences of that discovery. Even so, Alex took sustenance from his friend’s enthusiasm. He recalled his own feelings on hearing the news—that the team at Livermore had actually converted raw vacuum into concentrated space-time. The possibilities seemed endless. What he himself had envisioned was cheap, endless energy for a shaky, impoverished world.

  “Oh, there remained limitations,” Stan went on. “But the chink was there. The new lever and fulcrum. Perhaps a new wheel! I felt as Charles Townes must have, the day he bounced light back and forth through the lattice in that pumped-up ruby crystal, causing it to …”

  Alex’s chair teetered backward as he stood suddenly. He steadied himself with his fingertips against the tabletop. Then, staring straight ahead, he stumbled awkwardly through the crowd, weaving toward the door.

  “Alex?” George called after him. “Alex!”

  A stand of Norfolk pine, twenty meters from the rural pub, drew him like flotsam from a roaring stream. In that eddy the air was fresh and the chatty hubbub no longer sought to overwhelm him. Here Alex had only the rustle of boughs to contend with, a gentle answer to the wind.