“Get ready to jump!” Lars shouted over wind as he jockeyed the minicrane toward a sandy bank. Teresa slid the door open and watched the ground rise. Glancing back, she caught a look of shared adventure from the young Greenlander. “Thanks!” she said, and leaped. Recoil sent the lifter soaring as she braced for a hard landing.
The impact knocked the breath out of her, but it wasn’t as bad as some training exercises. She rolled to her feet only slightly bruised and waved to show all was well. The pilot banked his craft nimbly and gave her thumbs up. He called, but all she could make out was, “… see you soon, maybe!” Then he was gone, blown downwind by the icy freshet.
Shivering suddenly, Teresa closed her collar zip and stepped into that breeze. Soon she was scrambling over rocky debris that must have been freshly exposed only this very spring.
Ice. So much ice, she thought.
Ice like this was a spacer’s dream—to make water for life-support or fuels for transport. There were a thousand ways spaceflight could be made cheaper and safer and better, if only enough ice were available out there. Earth had her oceans. There was water in the Martian permafrost, in comets, and in the moons of Jupiter. But all those sources were too far away, or too deep inside a gravity well, to offer hope to a parched space program.
If only orbital surveys had found deposits at the moon’s poles, as if wishing ever made things so.
But this … this continent of ice.
She reached out to touch the glacier’s flank. Under a. rough crust, Teresa found a thin layer much softer than expected. Deep within, though, she knew it had to be almost diamond hard.
At the very point where the ice stopped, she bent and picked up a polished pebble.
Among the oldest rocks known, he said. And I’m probably the first to touch this one. The first sentient being to stand at this particular spot.
That was why she had been drawn here, she now realized. There are no unclimbed mountains left on Earth … and no plans to let anyone scale the peaks of Aristarchus or the shield volcanoes of Tharsus.
Jungles crash to make way for houses. The world sweats in every pore the breath and touch of humanity. There’s not a single place left where you can go and say to a new part of the universe—“Hello, we’ve never met. Let me introduce myself. I am Man.”
A new thought occurred to her.
If I were this planet, I guess I’d be feeling pretty damn sick of us by now.
Teresa inhaled the bracing air flowing off the ice. In evaporating, it gave off odors trapped inside crystal lattices ages ago—back when there were no living beings around with minds or speech … nor any concept that it can be worth half a lifetime just to reach such a place … to stand where no one ever has before.
She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn’t let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and worshipped the only way a person like her could worship—in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky.
Net Commercial Data Comparison request Uit 152383568.2763: Price contrasts in standard 1980 international dollars.
Skilled Services (typical in each category) Average 2038 Price Annual Trend
Cosmetic surgery (complete face-lift) $202.00 –1.0%
Custom-designed ferret program $113.00 –2.0%
Full genetic susceptibilities workup $176.00 –2.5%
One-hour lawyer consultation $ 21.00 –3.5%
One-hour home visit, microtoxin surveyor
$ 76.00 +1.0%
Standard Material Products Average 2038 Price Annual Trend
One liter gasoline $ 93.00 + 2.5%
One ream bleached bond paper $ 52.00 + 5.5%
D-cell non-rechargeable battery $ 47.00 +40%
One pair true-vu sensu-record goggles, with net access
$ 8.50 –2.0%
Commentary: The effects of rising education continue devastating prices of once prestigious services, while resource exhaustion keeps pushing up the cost of material goods, except photonics and electronics, which have escaped upward spirals because of competitive innovation. One ironic consequence is that profit margins in those fields are narrow, and the industries now flourish principally due to the sustained inventiveness of amateurs.
• MANTLE
The pakeha had a saying … “It’s only a little white lie.”
George Hutton enjoyed collecting inanities like that. To whites, there seemed to be as many shades of untruth as Eskimos had words for snow. Some lies were evil, of course. But then there were “half-truths” and “metaphors” and the sort your parents told you, “for your own good.”
As he crawled through a narrow, twisty stone passageway, George remembered one fine, lazy evening at the Quark and Swan, bearding poor Stan Goldman about such western hypocrisies. Because it would gall his friend, who loved novels, George particularly disparaged that mendacity called “fiction,” in which one person, a “reader,” actually pays an “author” to lie about events that never happened to people who never even existed.
“So all your Maori fairy tales are true?” Stan had asked in hot response.
“In their own way, yes. We non-western peoples never made this artificial distinction between real and imagined … between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective.’ We don’t have to suspend disbelief in order to hear and accept our legends …”
“Or to adopt six impossible worldviews before breakfast! That’s how you Maori get away with claiming your ancestors never lied. How can anyone lie when they’re able to believe two contradictory things at the same time?”
“Are you accusing me of inconsistency, white fellow?”
“You? A man with fifty technical patents in geophysics, who still makes sacrifices to Pele? Never!”
Inevitably, the argument ended with them shouting, noses half a meter apart … then breaking up in waves of laughter until someone recovered enough to order the next round.
All right, George admitted to himself as he felt for a narrow ledge along the polished stone of an underground streamway. It’s easy to be sanctimonious about the lies of others. But it’s quite another thing when you find yourself trapped, having to deceive or face losing all you love.
Pulling back from the rock face, he sent his helmet beam ahead and saw that the worst was over. A few more teetering steps and he’d be able to jump to something vaguely like a walking path, with enough headroom to stand instead of hunching like a gnome in a maze.
He took the traverse quickly and landed agilely, hands spread wide for balance. Adjusting the lamp, George peered up a narrow, scending tube of water-smoothed limestone to where a sharp wedge divided the twisting channel. One passage scattered his beam among tapered, glittering columns, where mineral-rich seeps had formed arches reminiscent of the Caliph’s Palace in Córdoba. He hadn’t noticed that gallery on his outward journey. Now he paused to sketch the opening in his pocket plaque.
The accepted thing to do would be to publish the map, of course. There would be money, prestige. But the Net wasn’t ever getting this datum, he had vowed.
How do you justify a lie? George asked himself as he carefully retraced his steps, heading back the way he’d come.
A decade ago, on first discovering these immense caverns beneath the mountains of New Guinea, he had chosen to refrain from telling his clients about them. Was that theft, to keep this marvel for himself? Perhaps. Worse than theft though, was the lie itself.
To believe six impossible or contradictory things before breakfast … Yes, Stan. And one impossible thing I believed was that I could save this place.
He had to squeeze headfirst through the next opening, sliding down a chute into a sparkling, miniature chapel. Knobby calcite growths covered not only the walls but the floor as well, catching the lamplight in dazzling crystalline reflections. “Cave coral,” it was called … a common enough phenomenon till humans invented spelunking, penetrating the depths to seek Earth’s hidden treasures. Now the cora
l was gone from nearly every known cave on Earth, scavenged bit by bit by souvenir hunters—each rationalizing that just one more fragment wouldn’t be missed.
Passing again through the minute cathedral, George sought the exact footprints he had made on the trip out—tiny breaks and smudges among the glassy shards. These he tried to step in, but there was no way to avoid adding some slight, incremental harm this time, as well.
“The world is made of compromises,” he seemed to hear Stan Goldman say, though his friend was far away at the moment, doing his own part amid the icy wastes of Greenland. “You must make trade-offs, George, and live with the consequences.”
“A pakeha way of looking at things …,” George muttered half aloud as he exited the coral suite, wriggling sideways through a narrow crack into another streamway. Whispering echoes skittered around him like tiny creatures. Among the soft reverberations he imagined Stan’s reply.
“Hypocrisy, Hutton! Who do you think you’re talking to, some California tourist? Using ‘pakeha’ science made you a bloody billionaire! It gave you power to do good in the world. So use it!”
One of life’s joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks … who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it. Stan Goldman was such a friend. Together, in Wellington, their wives still had each other for company. But now George, alas, would have to make do imagining what Stan might say.
As he panted, squeezing his massive bulk through a cramped stricture between sodastraw draperies, the echoes of his breathing came back to him as a voice that wasn’t there.
“Dump the sanctimony about wishing you were really a noble savage, Hutton … Admit you’re as Western as I am.”
“Never!” George grunted as he popped free, into the final stretch of open passageway. Gasping, with hands on his knees, he seemed to hear his friend’s voice converging like a conscience from every wall.
“What, never …?”
George stood up straight at last, and grinned.
“Well … hardly ever.” The ringing in his ears sounded musically like laughter until it faded away. Setting out again, he thought, There are no non-Western peoples anymore.
Indeed, there wasn’t a Maori alive whose blood didn’t flow with multicolored blends of English, Scots, Samoan, and scores of other flavors. Nor had any living Maori grown up without color video or the omnipresent, all-pervading influence of the Net.
Still, I am more than just another homogenized gray man of bland gray times! And if I’m forced by circumstances to lie, then at least I can look on my lies as a Maori should, as appalling things!
And to that, at last, Stan Goldman’s surrogate voice remained silent. His friend, George knew, would not disagree.
Turning a bend in the passage, he stopped and turned off his lamp. At first the sudden blackness was so utter, his hand was lost in front of his face. At last, however, he made out an incredibly faint glimmer, reflecting off a rupicoline wall ahead. That could only mean one thing, that he was nearly back to the site.
Dialed to its lowest level, the lamp still made him blink when it came back on. He set out again, first scrambling over a ledge and then ducking under a hanging rock drapery to emerge at last on a balcony overlooking the grotto where he and the others had come to battle demons.
Unlike their comfortable, furnished caverns back in New Zealand, only a few stark floodlights cast intimidating shadows across this great gallery. Sleeping bags lay strewn on piles of hay purchased from a Papuan farmer who plowed the hillsides overhead, not suspecting what vast counties lay beneath his hissing tractor. A portable recycling unit stood in one corner, taking in the team’s wastes and returning a necessary if unpalatable fraction of their needs.
None of these discomforts mattered to George’s veterans, of course. So it had to be the virgin nature of these secret caves that had everyone talking in whispers, softly, respectfully, as if to spare the place any more violation than necessary. George wasn’t the only one to go off on solitary reverent explorations. During the brief rest periods their medic demanded between long stints of labor, most of the crew now and then took off just to get away for a little while.
There were other, larger caverns in this network—one even bigger than Good Luck Cave, in Sarawak, dwarfing forty sports stadia. But this one served their needs and so had been sacrificed for the project. Several meters of sediment had been cleared away, exposing hard rock where a large hemispherical basin had been dug.
Nearby lay the metal frame that would hold their new thumper, and beyond that stood the tank where the crystal cylinder itself was slowly growing, atom by atom, under the direction of a myriad of simple, tireless nanomachines. In two days the perfect lattice would be a finely tuned superconducting antenna, and their real work would begin.
George climbed down a series of gour pools over which small waterfalls had once cascaded. He’d been away only half an hour, yet his crew had already resumed work.
No need to play foreman here. It’s amazing what a strong motivator it can be, when you have a slim chance to save the world.
A slight, dark-featured man looked up at George from inside the bowl-like excavation, standing on a wooden scaffold.
“So my friend, did you find your river?”
George’s Papuan friend, Sepak Takraw, had enlisted to help their shorthanded team. Enlisted under false pretenses, for George had told him they were probing for deep methane—a recurring grail ever sought by countries that had once been rich in oil, but now grew used to paucity again and hated it. Sepak’s vow of confidentiality was titanium clad, of course. Still, George couldn’t justify letting any more people know the true nature of their mission. Perhaps later he’d get to tell Sepak. After they succeeded. Or when they knew for sure they’d failed.
“Ah.” George lifted his shoulders. “The river is no more.”
“Too bad.” Sepak sighed. “Maybe the farmers took it away.”
“It’s a thirsty world.” George nodded. “So. How does the foundation look?”
Sepak gestured into the bowl, where two of George’s engineers were scrutinizing the smooth wall with instruments. “As you see, we’re all but finished. Only bloody-damn Kiwi perfectionism keeps them at it. Since Helvetians went extinct, you lot are the worst nit-pickers around.”
George smiled at the mixed compliment. However much they bickered, both Maori and pakeha New Zealanders agreed that any job worth doing was worth doing well. Tangoparu Ltd. had built its reputation on that fetish for accuracy.
And all the more so this time. The parameters Alex Lustig gave us will be difficult enough to meet without human error.
“They finally tired of my impatience and chased me away. Such impertinence. Here, help me out of this pit, will you?”
George hoisted his small friend. Once on his feet, Sepak laid down his tool bag and took out a small flask. It was a mild local brew, but one notorious for playing hell with anyone not used to it. So naturally, he offered George a swig. George shook his head. He had taken a vow.
When next I drink, it will be to our world’s salvation … or standing over the bloody ruin of the bastards who wrecked her.
“Suit yourself.” Sepak knocked back a swallow and then slipped the flask into a pouch embroidered with beaded butterfly designs. He was a full-blooded member of the Gimi tribe, which took pride in a very special distinction. Of all nations, clans, and peoples on Earth, only among native Papuans were there still a few left alive who remembered when the planet had not been a single place.
This year was the centennial of the 1938 Australian expedition which discovered the Great Valley of central New Guinea, isolated until then from any contact with the outside world. The last “unknown” tribes of any size had been found there, living as they had for countless generations—tending crops, waging war, worshipping their gods, thinking their long notch between the mountains the sum totality of existence.
Until the Australians arrived, that is. From that moment, the A
ge of Stone was extinct. The universal Era of the Electron soon enveloped everyone—one world, one culture, one shared vocabulary. One shared Net.
Overhead, Sepak’s great-great-uncle was among the celebrities being interviewed for global news channels—one of just a few who remembered when the tall white outsiders arrived. “The last first contact,” was how media referred to the event.
Or at least, Stan Goldman might insist optimistically, the last first contact to occur on Earth.
Sepak would talk about it at the least excuse. Clearly, he saw no distinction between Maori and pakeha, dismissing all non-Papuans as “whites,” in the generic sense. In the odd, reverse pecking order of modern ethnicity-chic, there was no higher status than to have a great-grandfather who had once chipped his own tools from native stone. Who, in pure, primitive innocence used to reverently and with relish consume the flesh of his neighbors.
Sepak looked along one of the galleries, where polished stone ripples fell away toward shrouded mysteries. “So. No more river. Too bad. What good is a glorious cave without a stream to make it laugh and sing? What’s become of the thing that carved this mighty place? Such a mundane end, to be sucked away to irrigation wells.”
“There are signs the river flowed only a few decades ago.” From his pocket, George unfolded a handkerchief. Sepak peered at a few glinting slivers. “What are they?”
“Fish bones.”
The Papuan sighed. Whatever sightless species had once lived atop this tiny ecosphere’s food chain, a few wan skeletons were its only legacy.
George knew that millions above ground would share his sense of loss if they were told. These days, it might even lead to calls for action. Although the uniqueness of this particular line was forever gone, perhaps some other species, locked away in some preserve or life ark, might prosper here if only the water returned. But George would keep his secret, only wondering what these parched channels might have been like when a chuckling, lightless miracle coursed their hidden beds.