But first, though I dread the bad news, I guess a head count is in order. On my mark, please send your acknowledgment chops to nexus 486 in our administrative …
Just a nano. Ah! Holo’s coming back! Good pigment, too. Maybe we’ll be able to use spread-spec access after all.
Now back to that head count …
• BIOSPHERE
From the topmost tier of the life ark, Nelson watched Earth turn slowly against the Milky Way. It was the only splash of real color in a drab cosmos, and at this distance one might never imagine what chaos had just reigned on that peaceful-looking globe. Even the continent-long palls cast by still-smoldering volcanoes weren’t visible to the naked eye from here—though scientists were already predicting a rough winter ahead.
Until recently, Nelson had been too busy just keeping himself and the majority of his charges alive. Now, though, as the ark settled gradually toward a dusty, gray-brown plain, he could at last spare a moment to look up in wonder at the ocean-planet, swathed on its sunlit side with streamers of cottony clouds. Leftward, on its night side, city lights testified to humanity’s narrow escape—though gaping dark patches also showed what a terrible price had been paid in mankind’s final war.
That conflict was over now … guaranteed with more certainty than any peace treaty ever signed. All across the world, men and women still argued over what insured this. But few doubted any longer that a presence had made itself known, and from now on nothing would be the same.
“Ark four, we’re at three kilometers altitude. Descent under control with five minutes to landfall. Confirm readiness please.”
Nelson turned away from the blue-green world and sought northward across the starscape. There it was, the shuttle, hovering over the mountains rimming Mare Crisium. It was a battered-looking hulk, like something hijacked out of a neglected museum. And yet it flew more powerfully, with more assurance, than anything else made before by human hands. He lifted his belt-phone. “Yeah … uh, I mean, roger, Atlantis. I guess we’re as ready as ever.”
He lowered the phone, thinking, Sure. But just how ready can you be when you’ve been volunteered as the first permanent residents of another world?
He felt a tug at his pants leg. Shig, the little baboon, squeaked and demanded to be picked up. Nelson grinned. “So? You were all over the place when we were weightless. But now a little gravity makes you lazy again?”
Shig clambered from his arm onto his shoulder, perching there to look across their new home, one even drier and emptier than the savannas of Africa, to be sure, but theirs nonetheless, for better or worse. From the railing nearby, Shig’s mother glanced at Nelson in unspoken question. He shrugged. “I don’t know where the nearest water hole is, Nell. They say they’ll send some ice our way in a while, along with the first bunch of people. Don’t ask me how they’ll manage it, but we’ll be fine till then. Don’t worry.”
Nell’s expression seemed to say, “Who’s worried?” Indeed, after what they’d been through together, they couldn’t be faulted for a little team cockiness.
Uprooted from the soil of Africa and hurled into high orbit, Kuwenezi’s experimental ark four went through hours, days, during which disaster kept missing them by seconds. For instance, if certain circuits had failed during those first critical instants, Nelson wouldn’t have been able to order most of the hurtling pyramid sealed against hard vacuum. Nor could he have shifted fluids from one vast storage tank to another, gradually damping out the unwilling satellite’s awkward tumble.
As it was, fully a third of the biosphere’s life habitats were dead—their occupants having asphyxiated or been crushed against adamant glass-crystal barriers, or simply having succumbed to drastically altered circumstances.
He’d never have managed saving the rest without Shig and Nell, whose nimble grace in free fall made them invaluable at fetching floating tools or herding panicking creatures into makeshift stalls where they could be lashed down and sedated. Even so, the job had seemed utterly hopeless—a futile staving off of the inevitable—until that weird moment when Nelson felt something like a tap on his shoulder.
Whirling about in shock and exhaustion, he had turned to find no one there. And yet, that hallucinatory interruption had been enough to draw him back from a tunnel-torpor of drudgery … far enough to let him notice that his belt-phone was ringing.
“?-hello?” he had asked, unable to believe anyone knew or cared about his plight, east from the Earth, bound for oblivion aboard a glass and steel Flying Dutchman.
There had been a long pause filled with static. Then a voice had said, “NELSON …”
“Uh … yeah?”
“I WANTED YOU TO KNOW—HELP IS COMING. I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN YOU.”
He remembered blinking in amazement.
“D-Dr. Wolling? Jen?”
He couldn’t be sure in retrospect. The voice had seemed different in countless ways. Distant. Preoccupied. And yet, somehow it had made the hours of hectic labor that followed more bearable just knowing he hadn’t been overlooked—that someone knew he and the animals were out here, and cared.
So it wasn’t with total surprise when—after lashing the. last beast down, after sealing the last whistling crack, after adjusting gas and aeration balances in the complex panels that recycled the ark’s basic stuff of life—he suddenly heard the phone ring again, and lifted his eyes to see a stubby white and black arrow homing in on this derelict little worldlet.
Nelson’s knowledge of physics was too slender to truly appreciate what it meant when Atlantis’s pilot promised to provide gravity again to the ark’s weary inhabitants. He only felt gratitude as the shuttle’s crew somehow delivered, recreating up and down via some magic they generated at long range. Then they began hauling the drifting tower toward a promised new home.
En route, he finally had time to listen to condensed summaries of what had been going on, back on Earth. It was all too complex and bizarre to comprehend at first, in his dazed state. But later, as he took advantage of his first real chance at sleep, partial realization came to him in his dreams.
At one point he saw a dismembered snake writhe and bring together its many parts. He heard a hundred braying instruments settle down under a conductor’s baton to create symphonies where there had been mere noise.
E pluribus unum … a voice murmured. Many can make up a whole …
Now, as the time of landing approached, Nelson wondered if anyone on Earth had a better understanding of what had happened than he did.
They’re all so busy arguing about it, discussing the change and what it means—
Gaians claim it’s their Earth Mother … that she’s been shaken awake at last, to step in and save foolish mankind and all her other creatures.
Others say no, it’s the Net … the whole store of human knowledge that poured into all those unexpected new circuits deep inside the Earth. All that virgin computational power, suddenly multiplied, only naturally had to lead to some sort of self-awareness.
There was no end to theories. Nelson heard Jungians proclaiming a race consciousness had manifested itself during the crisis, one that had been there, waiting, all along. Meanwhile, Christians and Jews and Muslims made noises much like the Gaians’—only they seemed to hear the low voice of a “father” when they tuned in on those special channels that now carried new, awesome melodies. To them, recent miracles were only what had been promised all along, in prophecy.
Nelson shook his head. None of them seemed to understand that they—their very arguments and discussions—were helping define the thing itself. Yes, a greater level of mind had been born, but not as something separate, or even above them. All the little noisy, argumentative, even contradictory voices across the planet—these were parts of the new entity, just as a human being consists naturally of many disputing “selves.”
Nelson recalled his last conversation with his teacher, when the topic had swung to her latest project—her bold new model of consciousness. A model that, he knew som
ehow, must have played some key role in the recent coalescence.
“The problem with a top-down view of mind is this, Nelson,” she had said. “If the self at the top must rule like a tyrant, commanding all the other little subselves like some queen termite, then the inevitable result will be something like a termite colony. Oh, it might be powerful, impressive. But it will also be stiff. Oversimplified. Insane.
“Look at all the happiest, sanest people you’ve known, Nelson. Really listen to them. I bet you’ll find they don’t fear a little inconsistency or uncertainty now and then. Oh, they try always to be true to their core beliefs, to achieve their goals and keep their promises. Still, they also avoid too much rigidity, forgiving the occasional contradiction and unexpected thought. They are content to be many.”
Remembering her words made Nelson smile. He turned again to stare at Earth, the oasis everyone now spoke of as a single living thing. It hardly mattered whether that was a new fact, or one as old as life itself. Let the NorA ChuGas preach that Gaia had always been there, aware and patient. Let others point out that it had taken human technology and intervention to bring violent birth to an active planetary mind. Each extreme view was completely correct in its way, and each was just as completely wrong.
That was as it should be.
Competition and cooperation … yin and yang … Each of us participatin’ in the debate is like one of the thoughts that bubble and fizz in my own head—whether I’m concentrating on a problem or daydreaming at a cloud. Does one particular thought worry about its “lost independence” if it realizes it’s part of something larger?
Well, some prob’ly do, I guess. Others aren’t bothered at all. So it’ll be with us, too.
Nelson replayed his last musings to himself, and silently laughed. Listen to you! Jen was right. You’re a born philosopher. In other words, full of shit.
But then he had an answer to that, too. We may be mere thoughts, each of us a fragment. But that don’t mean some thoughts aren’t important! Thoughts could be the only things that never die.
From below decks a lowing wafted through the air grilles. Sedatives were wearing off and some of the wildebeests were waking up. Perhaps they sensed imminent arrival. Soon Nelson would have his hands full tending this, the first sapling cast forth by the mother world … the first of a myriad that might stream outward if the new gravity technologies proved workable. And if Earth’s nations agreed to the bold enterprise.
And if the new Presence let it be so.
Anyway, until the promised help came, he’d be too busy for philosophy … either for Gaia’s sake or for his own. Westward, the lunar mountains loomed higher and higher. The plains rose rapidly. And not too far below, he now saw the shadow of the ark. That dark patch coalesced and then spread across the gaping foundation awaiting it—freshly carved and vitrified within the ancient regolith by more magic from Atlantis.
Nelson put his arms around Shig and Nell during the final descent, which ended in a grating bump so gentle it was almost anticlimactic. The small, fluttering variations in gravity disappeared, and the moon’s light but firm grasp settled over them for good.
“Hello, ark four,” the voice of the woman pilot said. “Come in, ark. This is Atlantis. Is everything okay over there?”
Nelson lifted his belt phone.
“Hello, Atlantis. Everything’s just fine. Welcome to our world.”
Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [ SIG AeR,WLRS 253787890.546]
… found an old TwenCen novel in which something like our present-day Net got taken over by software “gods and demons” based on some Caribbean sect. If that’s what happened, we’re all in deep trouble. But what we’re seeing doesn’t seem to be anything like—
How can I tell? Yeah, I know it’s hard getting any sort of explicit answer from the Presence, whatever it is. But I’m sure all right. Call it a feeling.
Oh, yes, I agree with that! We are in for interesting times …
• EXOSPHERE
The contradiction was almost too absurd. Atlantis was the most capable ship in history. Atlantis was also a creaking wreck, threatening to fall apart at any moment.
The air recyclers kept leaking. The carbon dioxide scrubbers had to be kicked every ten minutes or so to unclog them. The toilet was so awful they’d taken to using plastic bags, tying them off and storing them under webbing at the back of the cargo bay.
At least the water coming out of her slapped-together fuel cells was pure. But for food they had only some bruised fruits provided by that lonely caretaker-ecologist—his way of saying thanks for rescuing his marooned ark and depositing it safely on the moon. The oranges were tart, but an improvement over what they’d survived on during the first few days in space—a single box of stale crackers and five suspicious candies found in Pedro Manella’s jacket pocket.
Now, at last, their travails seemed about to end. Teresa peered through the sighting periscope at the winking lights outlining the European space station just ahead. “Bearing six zero degrees azimuth,” she said into her chin mike. “Vector angle seventeen degrees, relative. Speed point eight four—”
“Okay, I’ve got it, Rip,” Alex’s voice crackled from the makeshift intercom. “Hang on, we’re heading in.”
It was hard getting used to this new mode of space travel. Using the puff-puff rockets of old, you had to calculate each rendezvous burn with a kind of skewed logic. To catch up with an object in orbit ahead of you, first you had to decelerate, which dropped you in altitude, which sped you up until you passed below your objective. Then you’d fire an acceleration burn to rise again, which slowed you down …
It was an art few would have much use for in the future. No more delicate, penny-pinching negotiation with Newton’s laws. All Teresa had to do now was tell Alex where to look and what to look for, and he took it from there. His magic sphere transmitted requests deep into the Earth, which elicited precise, powerful waves of gravity to propel them along. It made space travel almost as simple as pointing and saying, “Take me there!”
That was what made this the greatest spaceship ever, able to fly rings around anything else. And so it would remain for the next ten minutes or so, until they docked. Then arrangements would be made to transfer Alex and his gear to a modern craft, and poor old Atlantis would become another museum piece in orbit.
That’s all right, baby. She thought, patting the scratched, peeling console. Better this way, after one last wild ride, than sitting down there letting sea gulls crap all over you.
Now and then she still closed her eyes, remembering that hurtling launch—climbing just ahead of a pillar of volcanic flame as they were scooped into the sky by something greater than any rocket. Perhaps Jason had found it even more vivid and exalting as he bolted toward the stars. She hoped so. It felt fitting to think of him that way as she was finally able to say adieu.
Anyway, there were busy times ahead. After spending the better part of a week in hurried rescue missions, helping clean up the mess left in orbit by the war, she and Alex were about to take leading roles in the new international space plan. With Lustig-style resonators about to be mass produced, soon even skyscrapers and ocean liners might take to the sky. Within a year, there could be thousands living and working out here and on the moon. At least that seemed to be the general idea, though people still scratched their heads over how this had been agreed to so quickly.
In spite of having been close to the center of great events, Teresa admitted being as confused as anyone about what—or who—was in charge now. The “presence” that had been born out of recent chaos wasn’t wielding a heavy hand, which made it hard to really pin down or define.
Was it an independent entity with its own agenda to impose on subordinate humanity? Or should it be looked on as little more than a new layer of consensus overlaying human affairs, a personification of some global zeitgeist? Just one more step in a progression of such worldview revolutions—so-called renaissances—when the process of thi
nking itself changed.
Philosophers typed earnest queries into the special channels where the Presence seemed most intense. But even when there was a reply, it often came back as another question.
“WHAT AM I? YOU TELL ME … I’M OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS …”
That attitude, plus an impression of incredible, overpowering patience, sent some mystics and theologians into frenzies of hair pulling. But to the rest of humanity it brought something like relief. For the foreseeable future, most decisions would be left to familiar institutions—the governments and international bodies and private organizations that existed before everything went spinning off to hell and back again. Only in matters of basic priority had the Law been laid down, in tones that left no doubt in anybody’s mind.
Gravity resonators, for instance; they could be constructed by anyone who had the means—but not all “requests” made through them would be granted. Earth’s interior was no longer vulnerable to intrusion. The new, delicate webbery of superconducting circuits and “neuronal pathways” that now interlaced smoothly with humanity’s electronic Net had made itself impervious to further meddling.
It also became clear why the nations were expected to commence major space enterprises. Henceforth, the raw materials for industrial civilization were to be taken from Earth’s lifeless sisters, not the mother world. All mines currently being gouged through Terra’s crust were to be phased out within a generation and no new ones started. Henceforth, Earth must be preserved for the real treasures—its species—and man would have to look elsewhere for mere baubles like gold or platinum or iron.
That was the pattern of it. Certain forests must be saved at once. Certain offensive industrial activities had to stop. Beyond that, details were left to be worked out by bickering, debating, disputatious humankind itself.