Earth
Poor fellow, Teresa thought. She saw through his pose of macho heliolatry. Probably he was a pussycat, and the only danger he presented came from his desperate anxiety not to let that show.
The Ra Boy frowned as he seemed to detect something in her smile. Trying harder to set her aback, he bared his teeth in a raffish grin. “Rough, wet loving. It’s what women like. No less Big Mama Gaia. No?”
Across the aisle, a woman wearing an Orb of the Mother pendant glared sourly at the Ra Boy. He noticed, turned, and lolled his tongue at her, causing her fashionably fair skin to flush. Not wearing True-Vus, she quickly looked away.
He stood up, turning to sweep in the other passengers. “Ra melts the glaciers! He woos her with his heat. He melts her frigid infundibulum with warm waters. He …”
The Ra Boy stammered to a halt. Blinking, he swept aside his dark glasses and looked left and right, seeking Teresa.
He spotted her at last, standing on the jerry-rigged third-floor landing of the Gibraltar Building. As the waterbus pulled away again, raising salty spumes in its wake, she blew a kiss toward the sun worshipper and his comrades. They were still staring back at her, with their masked eyes and patchy pink skins, as the boat driver accelerated to catch a yellow at First Street, barely making it across before the light changed.
“So long, harmless,” she said after the dwindling Ra Boy. Then she nodded to the doorman as he bowed and ushered her inside.
She had one stop to make before her meeting. A walk-in branch of a reputable bank offered an opportunity to unload her burden.
Usually a cash transaction would cause raised eyebrows, but in this case it was customary. The smiling attendant took her crisp fifties and led her to an anonymity booth, where Teresa promptly sealed herself in. She took a slim sensor from one pocket and plugged it into a jack in the side of her wallet, which then served as a portable console while she scanned every corner of the booth for leaks. Of course there were none. Satisfied she sat down and disconnected the sensor. As she was doing that, however, her hand accidentally stroked the worn nub of the wallet’s personal holo dial, causing a familiar image to project into space above the countertop.
Her father’s eyes crinkled with smile lines and he looked so proud of her as he silently mouthed words she had long ago memorized. Words of support. Words that had meant so much to her so often since he first spoke them … on every occasion since when she found herself bucking the odds.
Only none of those other crises was ever nearly as dire as the business she’d gotten herself into now. For that reason she held her hand back from touching the sound control or even replaying his well-remembered encouragement in her mind.
She was too afraid to test it. What if the words wouldn’t work this time? Might such a failure ruin the talisman forever, then? Uncertainty seemed preferable to finding out that this last touchstone in her life had lost its potency, that even her father’s calm confidence could offer no security against a world that could melt away any time it chose.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” she said quietly, poignantly. Teresa wanted to reach out and touch his gray-flecked beard. But instead she turned off his image and firmly turned her attention to the task at hand. From her pocket she drew one of two data spools, inserting it into a slot in the counter. Picking a code word from the name of a college roommate’s pet cat, she created a personal cache and fed in the contents of the spool. When the cylinder was empty and erased, she breathed a little easier.
She was still embarked on a dangerous enterprise that might cost her her job, or even lead to jail. But at least now she wouldn’t become a pariah for the modern sin of keeping secrets. She’d just registered her story—from the Erehwon disaster to her recent, surreptitious orbital data collection for Pedro Manella. If any of it ever did come to trial, now she’d be able to show with this dated cache that she had acted in good faith. The Rio Treaties did allow one to withhold information temporarily—or try to—so long as careful records were maintained. That exception had been left in order to satisfy the needs of private commerce. The treaties’ drafters—radical veterans of the Helvetian War—probably never imagined that “temporary” might be interpreted to be as long as twenty years or that the registering of diaries like hers would become an industry in itself.
Teresa sealed the file, swallowing the key in her mind. Such was her faith in the system that she simply left the empty spool lying there on the countertop.
“I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“Done what, Pedro?”
“You know what I mean. What you did when you got back to Earth.”
Manella regarded her like a disapproving father. Fortunately, Teresa’s own dad had been patient and understanding—and thin. In other words, nothing like Pedro Manella.
“All I did was refuse to shake hands with Colonel Spivey. You’d think I’d have slapped him across the face or shot him.”
Looking down at the blue lagoons of Houston, the portly newsman shook his head. “In front of net-zine cameras? You might as well have done exactly that. What’s the public to think when a shuttle pilot steps out of her spacecraft, accepts the thanks of all the other astronauts, but then pointedly turns away and spits when the mission supervisor steps up for his turn?”
“I did not spit!” she protested.
“Well it sure looked that way.”
Teresa felt warm under the collar. “What do you want from me? I’d just verified—at least to my satisfaction—that the bastard must have had a black hole on Erehwon. He recruited my husband into an illegal conspiracy that caused his death! Did you expect me to kiss him?”
Manella sighed. “It would have been preferable. As it is, you may have jeopardized our operation.”
Teresa folded her arms and looked away. “I wasn’t followed here. And I got you your data. You asked nothing else of me.” She felt put-upon and resentful. As soon as she had arrived, and Manella’s assistants scurried off with her second spool, Pedro had launched into this Dutch uncle lecture.
“Hmph,” he commented. “You didn’t actually say anything to Spivey, did you?”
“Nothing printable or relevant. Unless you count commentary on his ancestry.”
Manella’s scowl lifted slightly. Much as he disapproved of her actions, he clearly would have liked to have been there. “Then I suggest you let people assume the obvious—that you and Spivey had been having an affair—”
“What?” Teresa gasped.
“—and that your anger was the result of a lovers’—”
“Dumpit!”
“—of a lovers’ tiff. Spivey may suspect you’re on to his activities, but he’ll not be able to prove anything.”
Teresa’s jaw clenched. The unpalatability of Manella’s suggestion was matched only by its inherent logic. “I’m swearing off men forever,” she said, biting out the words.
Infuriatingly, Manella answered only with a raised eyebrow, economically conveying his certainty she was lying. “Come on,” he replied. “The others are waiting.”
A chart projection hung over the far end of the conference room. It wasn’t holographic, merely a high-definition, two-dimensional schematic of the multilayered Earth. A nest of simple, concentric circles.
Innermost, extending from the center about a fifth of the way outward, was a brown zone labeled SOLID INNER CORE —CRYSTALLINE IRON + NICKEL … 0-1227 KILOMETERS.
Next came a reddish shell, about twice as thick. LIQUID OUTER CORE—IRON + OXYGEN + SULFUR … 1227-3486 KILOMETERS, the caption read.
The beige stratum beyond that took up nearly the rest of the planet. MANTLE, the legend stated, OXIDES OF SILICON, ALUMINUM, AND MAGNESIUM (ECLOGITES AND PERIDOTITES IN PEROVSKITE FORM) … 3486-6350 KILOMETERS.
All three great zones featured subdivisions marked by dashed lines, tentative and vague lower down, with captions terminating in question marks. At the outermost fringe Teresa discerned a set of thin tiers labeled, ASTHENOSPHERE, LITH OSPHERE, OCEANIC CRUST, CONTINENTAL CRUST, H
YDROSPHERE (OCEAN), ATMOSPHERE, MAGNETOSPHERE. Outlining that final zone, curving arrows rose from near the south pole, to reenter in Earth’s far northern regions.
The speaker at the front of the room was a trim blonde woman who pointed to those arching field lines.
“We were especially interested in the intense high-energy region astronauts call the ‘South Atlantic devil,’ a magnetic dip that drifts westward about a third of a degree per year. These days it hovers over the Andes …”
Using a laser pointer, she traced the high, diffuse fields that were her specialty. The woman obviously knew a thing or two about space-borne instrumentation.
She ought to, Teresa thought.
As a consultant transferred to Houston two years ago, June Morgan had become friends with several members of the astronaut corps, including Teresa and her husband. In fact, Teresa had been glad, at first, when June was assigned to work with Jason on a recent Project Earthwatch survey. Now, of course, Teresa knew her husband had been using that assignment to cover other work for Colonel Spivey. That hadn’t kept him from getting to know June better, though. A whole lot better.
When Manella had brought Teresa in to introduce to everybody, June barely met her eyes. Officially, there was no grudge between them. But they both knew things had gone farther than any modern marriage contract could excuse. The one Teresa had signed with Jason made allowances for long separations and the planetbound spouse’s inevitable need for company. Their arrangement was no “open marriage” stupidity, of course. It set strict limits on the duration and style of any outside liaison and specified a long list of precautions to be taken.
The agreement had sounded fine four years ago. In theory. But dammit, Jason’s affair with this woman had violated the spirit, if not the letter, of their pact!
Perhaps it had been Teresa’s fault for following her curiosity, for checking who Jason had seen while she was away on a long-duration test flight. She had been shocked to learn that it was a NASA person … a scientist no less! A groupie, even a bimbo, would have been okay. No threat there. But an intelligent woman? A woman so very much like herself?
She recalled the feeling of menace that had flooded her then, creating a horrible tightness in her chest and a blindness in her eyes. For hours she had walked familiar neighborhoods completely lost, in a cold panic because she had absolutely no idea where she was or in what direction she was heading.
“You want me to give her up?” Jason had asked when she finally confronted him. “Well, of course I’ll give her up, if you want me to.”
His infuriating shrug had driven her crazy. He’d managed to make it sound as if she were the one being irrational, choosing this particular case to get jealous about all of a sudden. Perhaps illogically, she didn’t find his blithe willingness to go along with her wishes calming, for underneath his acquiescence she fantasized a regret she could not verify in any way.
His sojourns aloft were generally longer than hers. She had spent many more long days alone on Earth between missions, surrounded all the time by overtures. She’d seldom availed herself of those dubious comforts, whatever the freedoms allowed by their contract. That he’d been less reticent when he was home alone hadn’t bothered her till then. Men were, after all, inherently weasels.
She’d tried to remain civilized about it, but in the end Teresa let him go to space that last time with barely an acknowledgment of his farewell. For weeks their telemetered messages were terse and formal.
Then came that fatal day. As she was docking her shuttle, unloading her cargo and preparing to send Spivey’s peepers across the transitway, Teresa had been emotionally girding herself to make peace with Jason. To begin anew.
If only—
Teresa pushed away memory. It probably wouldn’t have worked out. What marriage lasted these days, anyway? All men are pigs. She missed him terribly.
One glance told Teresa she wasn’t alone in mourning. Meeting June Morgan’s eyes in that brief moment, she knew the other woman’s pain was akin to her own. Damn him. He wasn’t ever supposed to fling with anyone he liked. Especially someone like me! Someone who might compete for his love.
That instant’s communication seemed to cause the blonde scientist to stumble briefly in her address. But she quickly recovered.
“… so for … for most of the twentieth century, Earth’s total magnetic field weakened at an … average rate of four hundredths of a percent per year. And the decline has steepened recently. That, combined with a greater than expected drop in the Earth’s ozone layer, leads to a growing suspicion we may be about to experience a rare event—a complete geomagnetic reversal.”
The man across from Teresa raised his hand. “I’m sorry, Dr. Morgan. I’m just a poor mineralogist. Could you explain what you mean by that?”
June caused the display to zoom in upon a long, jagged, S-shaped range of undersea mountains, threading the middle of the sinuous Atlantic Ocean. “This is one of the great oceanic spreading centers, where older crust is pushed aside to make room for new basalt welling up from the mantle. As each fresh intrusion cools and hardens, the rock embeds a frozen record of Earth’s magnetism at the time. By studying samples along these ridges, we find the field has a habit of suddenly flipping its state … from northward to southward, or vice versa. The change can be quite rapid. Then, after a long period of stability, it flips back the other way again.
“Way back during the Cretaceous, one stable period lasted almost forty million years. But in recent times these flip-flops have taken to occurring much more rapidly—every three hundred thousand years or so.” June put up a slide showing a history of peaks and valleys crowding ever closer together, ending with a slightly wider patch near the right-hand edge. “Our latest stable interval has exceeded the recent average.”
“In other words,” Pedro Manella suggested, “we’re overdue for another flip.”
She nodded. “We still lack a good explanation of how geomagnetism is generated, down where the core meets the mantle. Some even think sea level has something to do with it, though according to the Parker model …” June stopped and smiled. “The short answer? Yes, we do seem overdue.”
“What might be the consequences, if it flipped today?” Another woman at the table asked.
“Again, we’re not sure. It would certainly impair many navigational instruments—”
Teresa’s nostrils flared. She’d known this. Yet hearing it said aloud felt like a direct challenge.
“—and it might eliminate some protection from solar proton storms. Space facilities would need shielding or have to be abandoned altogether.”
“And?” Manella prompted.
Isn’t that enough? Teresa thought, horrified.
The speaker sighed. “And it might wreck what’s left of the ozone layer.”
A murmur of consternation spread among those assembled. Pedro Manella loudly cleared his throat to get their attention. “Ladies, gentlemen! This is serious of course. Still, it’s only background to our purpose here today.” He turned to regard June. “Doctor Morgan, let’s get to the point. How might your geomagnetic data help us track down any illegal black hole singularities on or near the Earth?”
“Mmm, yes. Well it’s occurred to me there’ve been some recent anomalies, such as this new drift in the South Pacific …”
Teresa listened attentively. Still, she couldn’t help wondering. Why did Manella insist I come here today? I could have sent my data by courier.
Not that she had anything better to do. Perhaps Pedro wanted her to tell the others about the subjective sensations she’d experienced during the catastrophe, or to recite the story of Erehwon’s destruction one more time.
No matter. Teresa was used to being a team player. Even in a quasi-illegal band like this one, most of whose members she didn’t even know.
Damn it, she thought. I just want to know what’s going on.
For now that meant cooperating with Manella, and even June Morgan, putting aside personal feeling
s and helping any way she could.
Like most other religious special interest groups on the Net, we in the Friends of St. Francis Assembly [ SIG.Rel.disc. 12-RsyPD 634399889.058] have been discussing the Pope’s latest encyclical, Et in Terra pax et sapientia, which sanctions veneration of the Holy Mother as special protector of the Earth and its species. Some say this stands alongside his predecessor’s acceptance of the population oath as a breakthrough concession to common sense and the new worldview.
Not all take this attitude, however. Consider the manifesto published yesterday on the Return to the Robe Channel [ SlG.Rel.disc. 12-RsyPD 987623089.098] criticizing His Holiness for “… succumbing to both creeping Gaianism and secular humanism, both incompatible with Judeo-Christian hermeneutics …”
I just had a voice-text exchange with the Monsignor Nassan Bruhuni [ pers.addr. WaQ 237.69.6272-36 aadw], leading author of the manifesto, during an open question session. Here’s a replay of that exchange.
Query by T.M.: “Monsignor, according to the Bible, what was the very first injunction laid by the Lord upon our first ancestor?”
Reply by Msgr. Bruhuni: “By first ancestor I assume you mean Adam. Do you refer to the charge to be fruitful and multiply?”
T.M.: “That’s the first command mentioned, in Genesis 1. But Genesis 1 is clearly just a summary of the more detailed story in Genesis 2. Anyway, to ‘multiply’ can’t have been first chronologically. That could only happen after Eve appeared, after sex was discovered through sin, and after mankind lost immortality of the flesh!”
Msgr. B.: “I see your point. In that case, I’d say the command not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. It was by breaking that injunction that Adam fell.”
T.M.: “But that’s still only a negative commandment … ‘Don’t do that.’ Wasn’t there something else? Something Adam was asked actively to do?
“Consider. Every heavenly intervention mentioned in the Bible, from Genesis onward, can be seen as a palliative measure, to help mend a fallen race of obdurate sinners. But what of the original mission for which we were made? Have we no clue what our purpose was to have been if we hadn’t sinned at all? Why we were created in the first place?”