The mystery singularity—Lustig’s “cosmic knot”—must have started small. But Beta had grown till now it teetered near a critical threshold. She read the accretion rate off a side screen. Clearly the thing was poised for a voracious binge that could have only one conclusion.
One conclusion … So far he had spared them an explicit simulation of what would happen when matter began flowing into Beta’s maw in megatons per second. Teresa figured it would start with shock waves disrupting the planet’s deep, ancient convection patterns. Earthquakes would roll and volcanoes spume as great seams opened in the crust. Then, undermined from within, the outer layers would collapse.
Ironically, little would happen to things in orbit, like the moon or satellites. Earth’s total mass below would stay the same, only converted into a far more compact form. If she happened to be on a mission at the time, she’d get to watch the whole show … until the singularity revealed its bare glory and seared her spacecraft out of existence in a blast of gamma radiation.
Teresa shook herself. This was no time for a funk. Later, at home, she could climb under the covers, curl in a ball, and hope to die.
“… that one of our problems was finding the inverted energy distribution that’s being tapped by the gazer beam. Where does all the power come from?” The Englishman ran a hand through his hair. “Then it all made sense! The Earth’s magnetic dynamo is the source. Specifically, discrete superconducting domains where—”
Teresa started, sitting upright. “What did you say?”
Alex Lustig regarded her with pale blue eyes. “Captain Tikhana? I was referring to current loops, where the lower mantle meets the liquid core—”
She interrupted again. “You spoke of superconductivity. Down there? We still have trouble cooling rapid transit lines on a summer day, but you say there are superconducting areas thousands of miles below, where temperatures reach thousands of degrees?”
The British physicist nodded. “Don’t forget, pressures at the base of the mantle exceed ten thousand newtons per square centimeter. And then there’s a delightful coincidence one of my colleagues noticed only recently. The bottommost mineral state, before mantle gives way to metallic core, seems to consist of various oxides pressed into a perovskite structure—”
“Per … ovskite?”
“A particularly dense oxide arrangement that forms readily under pressure.”
“I still don’t get it,” she said, frowning.
He spread his hands. “Relatives of these same perovskites happen to be among the best industrial superconductors! This coincidence led us to consider a weird notion … that there are places, thousands of kilometers below us, where electric current flows completely free of resistance.”
The very idea made Teresa close her eyes. Once upon a time, superconductivity had been associated only with utter cold, near absolute zero. Only in recent decades had “room temperature” superconductors joined a few other breakthroughs to help salvage the hard-pressed world economy. Now she envisioned loops and titanic circuits, flowing in perfect, resistance-free fire. It was a startling notion. “These superconducting domains … they’re the excited zones you tap with the gravity resonator?”
“We think so. Energy levels drop each time, but are quickly pumped up again by convection.”
Silence held. When Manella spoke again, he shook his head. “So many wonderful discoveries … all made under the shadow of an angel of death. Okay, Lustig, you’ve had your fun. Now tell us what we need to know.”
“Know for what?”
Pedro pounded the tabletop. “For revenge! Who released this thing? And when? Where do we find them?”
From the other man’s-countenance, Teresa guessed this wasn’t the first time he had heard that request. “I don’t know the answer yet,” he replied. “It’s hard to trace its trajectory back, taking into account friction and accretion and inhomogeneities in the core …”
“You can’t even begin to guess?”
The physicist shrugged. “By my calculations the thing shouldn’t even exist.”
“Of course it shouldn’t exist! But somebody made it, obviously. You said you understood the basic principles.”
“Oh, I do … or thought I did. But I’m having trouble seeing how anyone could make such a large knot with any energy source available on Earth today.”
“Wasn’t it smaller when it fell?”
“Surely. But remember, practical cavitronics is only about eight years old. When I extrapolate that far back from Beta’s present size and growth rate, it’s still too bloody heavy. No structure on Earth could have supported it.”
Manella glowered. “Obviously you’ve made some mistake.”
Teresa saw something flash briefly in Alex Lustig’s eyes—an anger that quenched as quickly as it came. With surprising mildness, he nodded. “Obviously. Perhaps it is eating faster than my theory predicts. This isn’t an area anyone has much experience in.”
At that moment Teresa felt the weight of the cave around her, as if all the tons overhead were pressing on her chest. Partly to overcome faintness, she spoke the critical question.
“How …” She swallowed. “How much time do we have?”
He blew a sigh. “Actually, that part’s fairly easy. However rapidly it grew in the past, the asymptotic threshold remains the same. If it continues sucking in matter, faster and faster … I’d say we have about two years until major earthquakes begin. Another year before volcanic activity chokes the atmosphere.
“Then of course, things accelerate rapidly as the singularity’s growth feeds on itself. Ninety-five percent of the Earth won’t be swallowed till the last hour. Ninety percent in the final minute or so.”
Teresa and Pedro shared a bleak look. “My God,” she said.
“That, of course, is what will happen if it continues along the path now marked out for it.” Alex Lustig spread his hands again. “I don’t know about you lot. But personally, I’d rather not leave the thing to do its job unmolested.”
Teresa turned and stared at the physicist. He glanced back with raised eyebrows.
“Do you mean …?” she began, and was unable to speak.
He answered with a shrug. “Surely you don’t imagine I agreed to meet with you two just to satisfy my arch nemesis and his craving for headlines, do you? We’ll need your help, if we’re to stand a chance of getting rid of the damned thing.”
Manella panted. “You … have a way?”
“A way, yes, though it doesn’t offer very good odds. And it’s going to take more resources than I or my friends have at hand.”
He looked back and forth between his two stunned visitors.
“Oh now, don’t take it like that. Look at it this way, Pedro. If we pull this off, you and my friend George can spend many fine years, forever if necessary, arguing how to find and punish the brainy bastards responsible for this thing.”
His expression then turned darker and he looked down. “That is, if this works.”
PART VI
PLANET
World Ocean rolled, stroked by driving winds and tugged by barren Sister Moon.
For millions of years, twin tidal humps of churning water swept round and round, meeting little resistance but the sea floor itself. Only here and there did some lone, steaming volcano thrust high enough to reach open sky, daring to split the driving waves.
Eventually more islands sweated out, then more still. As the crust heaved and shifted, many of those mafic barges collided and merged until newborn continents towered over the waters. Onto those sere platforms ceaseless rains fell, nurturing nothing.
Only sheltered below the waves did life wage its continuing struggle to improve or die. One-celled creatures divided prodigiously, without planning or intent, experimenting with new ways of living.
One lucky family line chanced onto the trick of using sunlight to split water and make carbohydrates. That green patrimony took off, filling half the world’s niches.
The day’s lengt
h altered imperceptibly as Earth exchanged momentum with her moon. Eon by eon, the seas grew saltier and then stabilized. The sun brightened, also gradually. Sometimes the rolling waters changed color as some innovative microbe gained a sudden temporary advantage, burgeoned, outstripped its food supply, and died back again.
Then one tiny organism consumed another, but failed to devour its prey. Instead, the two coexisted and a deal was struck. An accidental sharing of responsibilities. A symbiosis.
One from many, and metazoa—multicellular life—was born.
That innovation, cooperation, changed everything.
Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ SIG AeR,WLRS 253787890.546] special notice to our members.
See this morning’s major news release by the Los Alamos Peace Laboratory [ Alert K12-AP-9.23.38:11:00 S.pr56765.0] for the latest test results from their solenoidal fusion test reactor. They report achieving a confinement-temperature product more than five times better than before, with almost none of those pesky stray neutrons that caused the Princeton disaster of 2021.
This may be it! After so many false leads over so many years. According to LAPL’s chief of engineering, “… clean, efficient, and virtually limitless fusion power may now be only twenty or twenty-five years away.…”
Those wanting technical details or to see the raw data from yesterday’s experiment, just press [ Tech.PD1 23642399 4234.0975 aq], or voice-link “solenoid-fusion five” now.
• HYDROSPHERE
Claire Eng slogged through a pond of mucky water, hauling one end of a nylon net, concentrating hard to keep her footing on the plastic pool liner. She couldn’t afford to make one wrong move in this slimy soup.
Not if I don’t want to spend two hours washing gunk out of my hair, she thought.
Just beyond the net and its row of floating buoys, a throng of panicky fish protested being herded into this corner of the pond. Their splashing sent ripples lapping too close to the tops of her waders. The fish—and the odorous green gunk they lived in—were ready for harvest. Unfortunately, both smelled awfully ripe, too.
Claire spat greasy, rank droplets. “Come on, Tony!” she complained to the dark-haired boy at the other end of the net. “I still have homework to do, and Daisy’s sure to be a gor-suck pain about chores.”
Tony finished tying his end to a stainless steel grommet and hauled himself out of the pond. On the concrete bank, under a row of potted, overhanging mulberry trees, he used a hose to rinse off his waders before shucking them. “Be right with you, Claire,” he called cheerfully. “Just hold tight another minute!”
Claire tried to be patient, but her hat and sunglasses had come askew while helping drive hordes of hapless fish toward their doom. Now she had to face the relentless Louisiana sun unprotected. The afternoon was muggy, fly smitten, and she almost wished she’d had an excuse not to help her friend harvest this month’s tilapia crop. But, of course, she couldn’t let Tony down. Not with the Mexican megafarms cutting prices these days, driving small-time fish ranchers to the edge.
Angling her head away from the glare, she looked out across the endless flat expanse of Iberville Parish, dotted with cedar groves, rice paddies, and square dark patches of gene-designed quick-cane. And countless fish ponds—chains of low watery ovals, mulberry rimmed and glistening—the cool, efficient protein factories that let chefs in Baton Rouge and New Orleans maintain a spicy culinary tradition long after the Gulf coast fisheries had gone away.
In the distance, she made out a straight, tree-lined hummock, stretching north to south—the East Atchafalaya Basin Protection Levee, one of so many mammoth earthworks thrown up by the Army Corps of Engineers over more than a century, to forever stave off the meeting of two great waters. Endless miles of dikes and channels and monumental spillways lined the Mississippi River, the Gulf, and nearly every flow path conceived in the corp’s computerized contingency plans. Tagging along with her father, and later in her own right, Claire had walked nearly every meter of the vast project. From Logan she had inherited a fascination for hydraulic engineering and an abiding contempt for the sort of technoarrogance that spoke words like “forever.”
“Idiots,” she muttered. Now the corps was offering Congress a new plan, one “guaranteed” to keep the Mississippi from doing what it was absolutely bound to do eventually—shift its banks and find a new way to the sea. Logan’s private estimates suggested the new levees would keep Old Man River out of the Atchafalaya Valley for another three decades, maximum. Claire considered her father an optimist. “Ten more years, tops,” she said in a low voice.
She’d miss this land when it all disappeared … its criss-crossing little bayous and streams. The dead-still, humid air, thick with tangy Cajun cooking that bit right back when you put it in your mouth. And the old grempers and gremmers, sitting on benches, telling lies about days when there were still patches of mangrove swamp in these parts, thick with deer and ’gators and even “critters” never catalogued by science.
Claire narrowed her eyes and briefly saw the same flat parish roiling under hectare after kilohectare of foamy brown water, a mighty river hauling a continent’s silt down this shortcut to the sea—along with every farm and house and living soul in its path.
But Daisy won’t move. Hell, nobody listens to me, and I’m tired of being called “Cassandra” by all my friends.
In a matter of months she’d be gone from here anyway. Maybe people would pay better attention after she won a reputation elsewhere. After making a name for herself …
“Here, hand me the end.”
She gave a start as Tony tapped her shoulder from the concrete bank. Straining, she dragged the line nearer. It took both of them, hauling together, to pull it taut and tie it off.
“Thanks, Claire,” Tony said. “Here, let me help you out.”
To her astonishment, he didn’t wait for her to slosh over to the ladder. Tony grabbed her shoulder straps and hauled her onto the apron by strength alone. Dripping, she sat there while he hosed off her waders, grinning.
Showoff, she thought. Still, she couldn’t help being impressed. At seventeen Tony was in full growth, changing every day and proud of it. She remembered when he had first surged past her in height, only a short time ago, and she had felt a passing, irrational wave of envy toward her childhood friend. Even in a world leveled for women by technology, there were times when sheer size and power still had their advantages.
Testosterone has its drawbacks, too, Claire reminded herself as she hung the rubber overalls to dry. Her remote-school in Oregon included a curriculum about the many reasons why women could count their blessings that they weren’t male, after all. Still, lately she’d been surprised to catch Tony gazing at her with looks of bashful admiration. Surprising, that is, till she realized.
Oh. It’s sex.
Or something nicer, actually, but closely related. Anyway, whatever it was, Claire wasn’t ready to deal with it right now. Since puberty she had avoided girls her own age, because of their precocious, single-minded, one-topic focus. At fourteen and fifteen, boys seemed more interested in doing things—in projects on the World Net or neat stuff in the real world. Now though, inevitably, her male friends were catching up and starting to go goofy too.
“I’ve got to stay for the harvester truck,” Tony told her, looking down. “Want to wait with me? We could head over to White Castle, after. Maybe join Judy and Paul …”
Judy and Paul were a long-standing couple. To hang out with them in public would make a statement, turning Claire and Tony into “Tony-and-Claire.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to become half of such a four-legged creature, quite yet. Far safer the amorphous throngs of teenagers who gathered at the dry-skating rink, or the Holo-Sim Club.…
“I’m sorry, Tony. I really have to go. Daisy—”
“Yeah, I know.” He cut her off quickly, making a show of nonchalance. “You gotta deal with Daisy, poor kid. Well, good luck. Let me know if you can get away later.”
She clambered down slippery steps to the duckboard walkway. “Yeah, I’ll buzz. Or maybe tomorrow we’ll go out with the team after your lacrosse game.”
“Yeah.” He brightened, shouting after her. “Just watch. We’ll turn those guys into holey swiss cheese, full of rads and rems!”
Claire waved one last time and then turned to hurry home under the shadow of towering canebrakes, across tiny bridges where retirees idled with fishing poles, smiling at her with lazy familiarity, and finally past the long-abandoned refinery, now stripped of everything but crumbling, worthless concrete.
Why does being a teenager make you so impatient? she pondered as she neared Six Oaks, her mother’s tiny autarchy on the bayou. Claire knew she couldn’t put Tony off much longer without hurting him. The profiler at school says I’m just a gradual type. No cause for worry if I’m slower than other kids, or more cautious.
But what if the tests missed something? What if there’s something wrong with me?
Abstractly, Claire knew these were typical thoughts for her age. Every adolescent wonders if he or she’s the vanguard of the latest wave of mutants, made unhuman by some rare, fundamental flaw. Each quirk or idiosyncrasy gets magnified out of all proportion. A zit is the first stage of leprosy. A rebuff means banishment to the Sahara.
Knowing all that helped a little … though only a little.
I just hope that when I’m finally ready, Tony or someone like him will be ready for me.
She turned away from the refinery towers—slowly decomposing into gravelly sediment—without even seeing them, and took one last turn between an aisle of willows to hurry the rest of the way home.
Many houses in the area had columns and porticos more reminiscent of old movies than real history, but the effect was particularly anachronistic at Six Oaks. At first squint you might think you were looking at a miniature version of Tara, but satellite dishes and a forest of bristling antennas quickly dispelled any sense of antebellum charm. And while other families maintained rooftop photocells and supplementary water heaters, few kept enough to dispense entirely with the parish power grid.