Earth
Msgr. B.: “Our purpose was to glorify the Lord.”
T.M.: “As a good Catholic, I agree. But how was Adam to glorify? By singing praises? The heavenly hosts were already doing that, and even a parrot can make unctuous noises. No, the evidence is right there in Genesis. Adam was told to do something very specific, something before the fall, before Eve, before even being told not to eat the fruit!”
Msgr. B.: “Let me scan and refresh my … Ah. I think I see what you refer to. The paragraph in which the Lord has Adam name all the beasts. Is that it? But that’s a minor thing. Nobody considers it important.”
T.M.: “Not important? The very first request by the Creator of His creation? The only request that has nothing to do with the repair work of mortality or rescue from sin? Would such a thing have been mentioned so prominently if the Lord were merely idly curious?”
Msgr. B.: “Please, I see others queued for questions. Your point is?”
T.M.: “Only this—our original purpose clearly was to glorify God by going forth, comprehending, and naming the Creator’s works. Therefore, aren’t zoologists, crawling through the jungle, struggling to name endangered species before they go extinct, doing holy labor?
“Or take even those camera-bearing probes we have sent to other planets.… What is the first thing we do when awe-inspiring vistas of some faraway moon are transmitted back by our little robot envoys? Why, we reverently name the craters, valleys, and other strange beasts discovered out there.
“So you see it’s impossible for the end of days to come, as your group predicts, till we succeed in our mission or utterly fail. Either we’ll complete the preservation and description of this Earth and go forth to name everything else in God’s universe, or we’ll prove ourselves unworthy by spoiling what we started with—this, our first garden. Either way, the verdict’s not in yet!”
Msgr. B.: “I … really don’t know how to answer this. Not in real time. At minimum you’ve drawn an intriguing sophistry to delight your fellow Franciscans. And those neo-Gaian Jesuits, if they haven’t thought of it already.
“Perhaps you’ll allow me time to send out my own ferrets and contemplate? I’ll get back to you next week, same time, same access code.”
So that’s where we left it. Meanwhile, any of you on this SIG are welcome to comment. I’ll answer any useful remarks or suggestions. After all, if there’s anything I seem to have on my hands these days, it’s free time.
—Brother Takuei Minamoto [ UsD 623.56.2343 -alfe.]
• CORE
It was a laser.
He still couldn’t get used to the idea. A gravity laser. Imagine that.
I wonder where the power comes from.
“Mr. Sullivan? May I freshen your drink, sir?”
The flight attendant’s smile was professional. Her features and coloration clearly Malay. “Yes, thank you,” he replied as she bent to pour, her delicate aroma causing him to inhale deeply. “That’s a lovely scent. Is it Lhasa Spring?”
“Why … yes sir. You are perceptive.”
She met his eyes, and for an instant her smile seemed just that much more than perfunctory. It was a well-measured look that fell short of provocative, but also seemed to promise a litle more than mere professionalism during the long flight ahead.
Alex felt content as she moved on to serve the next passenger. It was nice flirting amiably with an exotic beauty, without the slightest temptation to ruin it by trying for too much. The last few months had left his libido in a state of suspension, which had the pleasant side effect of allowing him the freedom to appreciate a young woman’s smile, the fine, well-trained grace of her movements, without flashing hormones or unwarranted hopes getting in the way.
It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandaries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions.
The mapping wasn’t exact, of course. According to fen, biological systems never translated exactly onto mathematical models, anyway. Still, at the time he acquired certain practical skills, which garnered him a reputation among his classmates and friends.
Then, curiosity sated, his interests changed trajectory. Companionship and compatibility became desiderata more important than sex, and he even aspired for joy. But these proved more elusive. Seduction, it seemed, contained fewer variables and relied less on fate than did true love.
Disappointment never banished hope exactly, but he was persuaded to shelve aspiration for a while and return to science. Only at Iquitos did hope suffer truly mortal wounds. Compared to that loss, sex was a mere incidental casualty.
I know what Jen would tell me, he thought. We modems think sex can be unlinked from reproduction. But the two are connected, deep down.
Alex knew most of the time he was in denial about the coming end of the world. He had to be, in order to do his work. In such a state he could even enjoy studying Beta, the elegant, deadly monster in the Earth’s core.
But denial can only rearrange pain, like a child re-sorting unloved vegetables on his plate, hoping a less noticeable pattern will deceive parental authority. Alex knew where he’d quarantined his bitter outrage. It still affected the part of him most intimately tied to life and the propagation of life.
Alex imagined how his grandmother might comment on all this.
“Self-awareness is fine, Alex. It helps make us interesting beasts, instead of just another band of crazy apes.
“But when you get right down to it, self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn’t need it in order to be successful, or even smart.”
Thinking about Jen made Alex smile. Perhaps, after the hard work of the months ahead was done, there’d be time to go home and visit her before the world ended.
Stan Goldman had been left in charge in New Zealand, continuing to track Beta while Alex went to California on a mission to beg, wheedle, and cajole ten years’ raw data from the biggest observatory in the world. This was a mission he had to take on himself, for it required calling in many old favors.
From a small building on the UC Berkeley campus, his old friend Heinz Reichle ran three thousand neutrino detectors dispersed all over the globe. The planet was almost transparent to those ghostly particles, which penetrated rock like X rays streaming through soft cheese, so Reichle could use the entire worldwide instrument round the clock to track nuclear reactions in the sun and stars. For his part though, Alex hoped the disks full of data in his luggage would show a thing or two about the Earth’s interior as well, perhaps helping the Tangoparu team track the awful Beta singularity to its source.
Alex still wanted to meet the person or persons responsible—almost as badly as George Hutton did.
I’d like to know how they were able to create such a complex, twisted knot of space. They can’t have used anything as simple as a Witten mapping. Why, even renormalization would have taken—
The airplane’s public address system came to life, interrupting his thoughts. From the seat back in front of him projected the smiling, confident visage of their captain, informing everyone that the Hawaiian Islands were coming into view.
Alex shaded his window against internal reflections and gazed down past layers of stratospheric clouds to a necklace of dark jewels standing out from the glittering sea. Back in the days of turbojets, this would have been a refueling stop. But modern hypersonic aircraft—even restricted by the ozone laws—just streaked on by.
He had seen Hawaii much closer than this anyway, so it wasn’t the chain itself but the surrounding waters that suddenly interested him. From this height he saw patterns of tide and color—resonant standing waves and subtly shaded shoals of plankton luminance—outlining each bead in the nearly linear necklace of islands.
Polarized sunglasses, especially, brought out a richness of detail.
Once, Alex would have looked on this phenomenon with pleasure but little understanding. Time spent with George Hutton’s geologists had corrected that. The islands weren’t static entities anymore, but epic, rocky testimonials to change. From the big island westward, beyond the thousand-meter cliffs of Molokai, all the way past lowly Midway, a chain of extinct volcanoes continued arrow straight for thousands of miles before zigging abruptly north toward the Aleutians. That bent path to the arctic circle was also a trip back in time, from the towering, ten thousand cubic mile basalt heap of Mauna Loa, past weathered, craggy elder isles like Kauai, to ancient coral atolls and eventually prehistoric, truncated seamounts long conquered by the persistent waves.
On the big island, two memorable volcanoes still spumed. But most activity had already shifted still further east, where the newest sibling was being born—an embryonic, as yet unemerged isle already named Loihi.
Most of the planet’s volcanoes smoldered where the edges of great crustal plates met gratingly, or rode up over each other—as along this great ocean’s famous Ring of Fire. But Hawaii’s trail of ancient calderas lay smack in the middle of one of the biggest plates, not at its rim. The Hawaiian Islands had their origins in a completely different process. They were the dashed scars left as the Central Pacific Plate cruised slowly above the geological equivalent of a blowtorch, a fierce, narrow tube of magma melting through anything passing over it.
George Hutton had likened it to pushing thick aluminum foil slowly over an intermittent arc welder. Part of George’s wealth had come from tapping power from such hot spots in the mantle.
Oh, yes. Hawaii certainly testified that there was energy down there.
But you can’t generate a laser … or a gazer … from just any lump of hot matter. You need excited material in an inverted state.…
There it was again—his thoughts kept drawing back to the problem, just as the taniwha kept pulling in atoms as it orbited round and round the Earth’s core.
At first he’d been certain the amplified gravity waves originated from Beta itself. After all, what bizarre energy levels might lay within the roiling, folded world-sheets of a cosmic knot? In fact, on that night in New Zealand when Alex experienced his moment of drunken inspiration, he had also felt a wave of desperate hope. What if the knot itself was being stimulated to emit gravity radiation? Could Beta be forced somehow to give up energy faster than it could suck atoms from the core?
Alas, scans showed the beast hadn’t lost any weight at all, despite the titanic, Earth-rattling power released in the gazer beam. The only apparent effect on Beta had been to shift its orbit slightly, making it harder than ever to trace its history.
And so Alex still had no idea where the energy came from. Add another gnawing, frustrating mystery to the list. It was one thing to know he and everyone else were doomed to be destroyed. But to die ignorant? Not even having looked on the face of his destroyer? It was not acceptable.
“Mr. Sullivan? Pardon me, sir.”
Alex blinked. By now Hawaii was long gone from sight. He turned away from the blue Pacific to meet the almond eyes of the beautiful ASEAN Air flight attendant.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Sir, you’ve received a message.”
From her palm he took a gleaming data sliver. Alex thanked her. Unfolding his comp-screen, he slipped the chip inside and keyed access. Instantly, a holo of George Hutton frowned at him, sternly, under bushy eyebrows. A short row of block letters appeared.
THIS JUST ARRIVED ON A NET RECEPTION BOARD IN AUCKLAND, UNDER YOUR REAL NAME, MARKED URGENT. THOUGHT YOU’D BETTER SEE IT RIGHT QUICK—GEORGE.
Alex blinked. Only a few people on the planet knew he’d gone to New Zealand, and those obligingly used his cover name. Hesitantly, he touched the screen and instantly a flat-image photograph appeared in front of him, rather smudgy and amateurish looking. It showed a crowd of people—tourists, apparently—looking admiringly at a disheveled, youngish man, lanky and a little underweight. The center of attention was holding another man to the ground—a wild-eyed fellow with flecks of froth at the corners of his mouth.
I should have expected this, Alex thought with a sigh. Tourists loved using their True-Vu goggles. There must have been many records of his minor “heroics” in Rotorua. Apparently a few had made it onto the net.
He looked at his own image and saw a fellow who didn’t really want to be where he was, or doing what he was doing.
I should not have interfered. Now look what’s happened.
He touched the screen again to see the rest of the message, and suddenly a new visage loomed out at him—one he knew all too well.
Talk about looking on the face of your destroyer …
It was Pedro Manella, dressed in a brown suit that matched his pantry-brush mustache. The portly reporter grinned a frozen, knowing grin. Alex read the text below and groaned.
ALEX LUSTIG, I KNOW YOU’RE IN NEW ZEALAND SOMEWHERE. FROM THERE GENERAL DELIVERY WILL GET THIS TO YOU.
ARRANGE A MEETING WITHIN TWO DAYS, OR THE ENTIRE WORLD WILL BE HUNTING FOR YOU, NOT I ALONE.
—MANELLA
That man was as tenacious as a remora, as persistent as any taniwha. Alex sighed.
Still, he wondered if it really mattered anymore. In a way, he looked forward to watching Pedro Manella’s face when he told the man the news.
It was an unworthy anticipation. A grown man shouldn’t covet revenge.
Ah, he thought, but we are legion. I contain multitudes. And some of the people making up “me” aren’t grown-ups at all.
Each of the allies had its own reasons for entering the bloody conflict now variously known as the “Helvetian War,” the “Secrecy War,” and the “Last-We-Hope”—perhaps the most bizarre and furious armed struggle of all time.
A leading factor in the industrial north was the laundering of profits for drug merchants and tax cheaters. Overburdened with TwenCen debt, citizens of America and Pan-Europe demanded those groups at least pay their fair share, and resented the banking gnomes for sheltering criminals’ ill-gotten gains.
International banking secrecy was even more hated in the developing world. Those nations’ awesome debts were aggravated by “capital flight,” whereby leading citizens had for generations smuggled mountains of cash to safe havens overseas. Whether honestly earned or looted from national treasuries, this lost capital undermined frail economies, making it even harder for those left behind to pay their bills. Nations like Venezuela, Zaire and the Philippines tried to recover billions removed by former ruling elites, to no avail. Eventually, a consortium of restored democracies stopped railing at their ex-dictators and instead turned their ire on the banking havens themselves.
Still, neither taxpayer outrage up north nor cash starvation in the south would have been enough to drive the world to such a desperate, unlikely confrontation were it not for two added factors—a change in morality and the burgeoning Information Age.
Those were the days of the great arms talks, when mutual, on-site inspection was seen as the only possible way to ensure de-escalation. As each round of weapons reductions raised the verification ante, the international corps of inspectors became sacrosanct. Words like “secrecy” and “concealment” began taking on their modern, obscene connotations.
To increasing numbers of “blackjacks”—or children of century twenty-one—the mere idea of secrecy implied scheming dishonesty. “What’re you hiding, zygote?” went the now corny phrase. But in those days it conveyed the angry, revolutionary spirit of the times.
That wrath soon turned against the one remaining power center in whom secrecy was paramount and unrepentant. By the time the members of the Brazzaville Consortium gathered to write their final ultimatum, they were no longer in a mood for compromise. Belated conciliatory words, broadcast from Berne and Nassau and Vaduz, were too little and far too late to stifle the new battle cry: … Open the books. All of them
. Now!
Would the allies have gone ahead, suspecting what death and horror awaited them?
Knowing what we do now, about what lay buried under the Glarus Alps, most agree their only mistake was not declaring war sooner. In any event, by the second year of fighting, mercy was hardly on anybody’s agenda anymore. Only vengeful modern Catos could be heard, crying from the rooftops of the world—
Helvetia delenda est!
By then it was to the death.
—From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books, edition 4.7 (2035). [ hyper access code 1-tTRAN-777-97-9945-29A]
• EXOSPHERE
Pedro insisted they change vehicles three times during their roundabout journey from the Auckland aerodrome. At one point he bought them both new clothes, straight off the rack in a tourist clip joint in Rotorua. Changing at the store, they abandoned their former attire on the off chance someone might have planted a tracking device on them.
Teresa went along with these measures stoically, absurd and melodramatic as they seemed. Without appropriate experience or instincts to guide her, she could only hope Manella knew what he was doing.
Strangely, the Aztlan reporter appeared to grow calmer, the closer they neared the arranged rendezvous. He drove the final kilometers of winding forest highway with a peaceful smile, humming atonal compositions of dubious lineage.
Teresa’s contribution was to work away silently at her cuticles and rub a hole in the thin carpet with her right foot each time Pedro tortured the little rental car’s transmission or took a curve too fast. It didn’t help that they still drove on the left in this country, putting the passenger in a position she normally associated with having control. She had never found it easy letting someone else drive—even Jason. She was close to snatching the wheel out of Pedro’s hands by the time bright signs began appearing along the side of the road.