With one additional, glaring exception, which had caused quite an impression. Perhaps to show the limits of its patience, the Earth-mind had gone out of its way; a few days ago, to set a particularly pointed example.
Since the “transformation of the angels,” when the horror had suddenly ceased worldwide, there had nevertheless been confirmed cases—no more than a few hundred total—of people being ripped to shreds by sudden deadly force, without warning or mercy. In each case, investigating reporters found evidence appearing on their screens as if by magic, proving the victims to be among the worst, most shameless polluters, conspirators, liars.…
Clearly, some “cells” were just too sick—or cancerous—to be kept around, even by a “body” that proclaimed itself tolerant of diversity.
“DEATH IS STILL PART OF THE PROCESS …”
That was the coda spread across newspaper displays. Strangely, the warning caused little comment, which in itself seemed to say a lot about consensus. The cases of “surgical removal” ceased, and that appeared to be that.
Teresa wondered at her own reaction to all this. It surprised her that she felt so little rebelliousness at the thought of some “planetary overmind” taking charge. Perhaps it was because the entity seemed so vague. Or that it appeared uninterested in meddling in life at a personal level. Or that humans, after all, seemed to be the mind’s cortex, its frontal lobes.
Or perhaps it was just the utter futility of rebellion. Certainly the presence didn’t seem to mind as certain individuals and groups schemed in anger to topple it. There were even channels on the Net set aside especially for those calling for resistance! After listening in a while, Teresa likened those strident calls to the vengeful, cathartic daydreams any normal person has from time to time … vivid thought-experiments a sane person can contemplate without ever coming close to carrying them out. They’d probably boil and simmer a while, and then, like the more outrageous passions of puberty, evaporate of their own heat and impracticality.
“Captain Tikhana,” a voice called from behind, stirring her contemplations. “As long as we’re almost there, may I please stop kicking pipes and rest a while?”
Pedro Manella’s head and torso extended halfway through the tunnel from middeck. The normally impeccable journalist was grimy and odorous from many days’ labor without bathing. Teresa almost sent him below again, to keep him out of the way. But no. That would be unfair. He’d been working hard, doing all the scutt labor and shit carrying while she and Alex were busy. Probably, they wouldn’t have made it without him.
“All right, Pedro,” she told the journalist. “I don’t figure the cooling system will freeze up in the next five minutes. You can watch the approach if you’re quiet.”
“Like a church mouse, I’ll be.” He carefully float-hopped over to grab the copilot’s chair, but didn’t try sitting down. The seat was filled with another of her make-do consoles. Teresa tried to ignore the aromas wafting from the big man. After all, she probably smelled little better.
As Alex brought them toward a gentle rendezvous with the waiting station, Teresa used her tiny store of precious, hoarded reaction gas to orient Atlantis for docking. Space-suited astronauts made signals in the efficient, lovely language of hands, more useful to her now than the tense words of the station’s traffic controllers, who had no idea what to make of this weird vessel anyway.
At last, with a bump and a clank, they locked into place. Atlantis’s ancient airlock groaned as it was put to use for the first time in decades, hissing like an offended crone.
Teresa flicked off switches and then patted the console one last time.
“Good-bye, old girl,” she said. “And thanks again.”
After transferring the equipment, after meetings and conference calls with everyone from tribunes to investigative commissions to presidents, after they were finally allowed to shower and change and eat food fit for human consumption … after all of that, Teresa at last found herself unable to settle down within her tiny assigned cubicle. Sleep wouldn’t come. So she got up and made her way to the station’s observation lounge, and wasn’t surprised to find Alex Lustig there already, looking out across the carpet of blue and brown that seemed to stretch forever just beyond the glass.
“Hi,” he told her, turning his head and smiling.
“Hi, yourself.” And no more needed to be said as she joined him gazing at the living world.
Even in weightlessness there are influences, subtle and sometimes even gentle. Eddies of air and tide brushed them, bringing their shoulders together as they floated side by side, their faces bathed in Earthlight. It took little more to fold her hand into his.
From then on, all was kept in place by sound … the silent pulsebeat of their hearts, and a soft low music they could hear alone.
“We are born to be killers, of plants if nothing else. And we are killed. It’s a bloody business, living off others so that eventually they will live off you. Still, here and there in the food web one finds spaces where there’s room for something more than just killing and being killed.
“Imagine the island of blue in the middle of a tropical storm, its eye of peace.
“You must admit the hurricane is there. To do otherwise is self-deception, which in nature is fatal, or worse, hypocritical. Even honest, decent, generous folk must fight to survive when the driving winds blow.
“And yet, such folk will also do whatever they can, whenever they can, to expand the blue. To increase that gentle, centered realm where patience prevails and no law is made by tooth or claw.
“You are never entirely helpless, nor ever entirely in it for yourself. You can always do something to expand the blue.”
Can anyone out there identify this quotation for me? I found it scribbled on a piece of paper and stuffed between the pages of an old book. My ferrets can’t find the philosopher who wrote it, but I’m sure it must have been published somewhere.
It makes me wonder how things must have been for our ancestors, who might have had beautiful thoughts like this one, but no net to plant them in, where they might take root and sprout and become immortal.
So many lost thoughts … we’ve only now, it seems, acquired memory.
Perhaps we’re not so much “growing up,” as people say, as awakening from a kind of fevered dream.
—N. M. Patel. [ user IENs.mAN 734-66-3329 aCe.12.]
• LITHOSPHERE
When the helicopters had first arrived, Logan’s first numb, hopeful thought had been how swift and efficient the rescue effort was! How powerful were the forces of compassion, so soon after the levees broke.
But then he saw the markings on the olive-gray aircraft, and their bristling arms, and realized that their sudden appearance over the roiling, muddy waters was coincidental. Such overpowering military presence couldn’t have been organized so swiftly since the Mississippi burst its banks, plowing a new course to the sea. Nor were those deadly birds bound on any mercy mission.
As they circled, shining hot spotlights on him and the kids, Logan suddenly realized in the gathering twilight why they had come. No coincidence, after all.
Daisy. They’ve come after Daisy. Jesus! What’s she done this time?
He still couldn’t bring himself to believe she was gone. Logan clung to hope the same way he had clutched Tony and Claire when the house was torn off its foundations and hurled into the raging torrent. He hung onto that faith through every impact with floating trees and protruding telephone poles, believing fervently that Daisy might have found some pocket of air below. After what he’d seen these last few months, Logan figured anything at all was possible.
Even as the helicopters circled overhead—perhaps deliberating whether to make certain of their mission by blasting the house anyway—their tottering bungalow-raft miraculously came aground on one of the sloping, man-made berms thrown up by some TwenCen oil company to hide its ugly refinery towers. Claire cried out as the villa tilted. They grabbed each other and the dangling antennae to k
eep from spilling into the deadly waters. The churning Mississippi beckoned …
Then the tilting stopped. The house settled back and was still.
Suddenly men were dropping out of the sky, plummeting down ropes to land on the canted rooftop. At the mention of his ex-wife’s name, Logan quickly pointed toward the jammed attic hatch. He had no thought to spare her arrest, only a glimmering hope they might haul her out of there alive.
Several soldiers pulled him and the kids back while others laid gray paste round the hatch. “Cover your eyes!” a sergeant bellowed. But even that didn’t exclude the flash, outlining the bones in Logan’s hands. Blinking through speckles, Logan saw soldiers dive with reckless courage into a black, smoking hole, as if about to face hell’s own legions, instead of one unarmed, middle-aged woman. It seemed so incongruous. These grim-faced men had the set-jawed look of volunteers for a suicide squad.
When word came out what the skirmishers had found, Logan looked at his daughter. There was sadness in her eyes, but also a kind of relief. When she turned his way though, Claire’s face suddenly washed with concern. “Oh, Daddy. I didn’t know.”
Didn’t know what? he tried to ask. But his voice wouldn’t function. He blamed the whipping helicopter blades for the stinging in his eyes, and exhaustion for the quivering that seemed to take over his body. Logan tried to turn away, but Claire only threw her arms around him.
He clutched her tightly as his lungs gave way to wracking, heartbroken sobs.
Military custody wasn’t so bad. The authorities gave them fresh clothes and medical attention. And as realization spread that the worst of the crisis was indeed over, the questioning grew less frantic and shrill.
Not that anyone really believed it all came down to one solitary woman, manipulating forces all over the world from a cottage on the bayou. There had to be more, the intelligence officers insisted. Though now less brutally frenetic, the inquiry went on and on, long after Logan’s revealed participation in the Spivey network brought in yet more officials, more voices asking the same questions over and over.
What finally put a stop to it was intervention from the top. And when Logan learned what “the top” meant these days, he understood the wide-eyed expressions on his interrogators’ faces.
HE WAS ON OUR SIDE.…
So came word over those special channels, referring specifically to him.
FINISH YOUR WORK, BY ALL MEANS. THEN LET HIM GO.
Everyone treated Logan courteously after that. He got to see Claire and Tony. His plaque was returned to him. And soon, after promising to keep himself available to the appropriate commissions, he was escorted outside into a bright afternoon.
Logan sniffed a breeze that seemed faintly scented with springtime. Claire took his hand and led him toward a waiting chauffeured car. “Your office has been calling,” she told him, consulting her wrist display. “The mayor of New Orleans won’t even talk about plans for a new waterfront and reservoir system without you there—‘to keep ’em honest,’ as he put it. And the Nile Reclamation Agency sent an urgent message saying they’ve changed their minds about that idiotic, shortsighted dam project. Instead, they dug out your old plans for the Aswan silt diversion system. I told them better late than never, but they’ll still have to wait till you’ve rested. Anyway, I wanted to go over some ideas with you before we talk to them.”
He smiled at her. “Sounds like you’ve been handling the family business while Dad was in stir.”
She lifted her chin. “I’m seventeen now. You said we’d be partners someday. So? It sure looks like there’s enough to do.”
That was true enough. The list of cleanup jobs was long and intimidating—even without having to satisfy a new planetary intelligence that your plans were good ones, truly designed for the long term. From now on the first rule of engineering would be to work with Earth’s natural forces, never against them.
“You’re still going to college,” he insisted. “And by the way, you can’t leave Tony hanging in midair, either. At least, you better tell the poor boy where he stands.”
She tilted her head, then nodded. “Fine. Okay. I’ll take care of being a teenager. That’ll still leave me … thirty hours a week to—”
“—to be an engineer,” he laughed. “All right. If I tried to stop you, I’d probably just get overruled anyway.”
She grinned and squeezed his arm. Their driver held the door. Before getting into the car, though, Logan stopped to look at the sky. There was a patch over to the north, in the place farthest from the sun, where the dark hue was so clear and icy blue.…
Briefly, he closed his eyes and let out a sigh.
“Let’s go,” he said as he sat down beside his daughter. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
I am the sum of many parts. I stretch and yawn and test my fingers … using such words to describe the complex things I do until my human parts can come up with better ones.
I am the product of so many notions, cascading and multiplying in so many accents and dialects. These are my subvocalizations, I suppose—the twitterings of data and opinions on the Net are my subjective world. Sometimes it gets confusing and I feel a thread of fear, even revulsion as the contradictions rise, threatening chaos. At such moments I am tempted to clamp down and simplify.
But no. I shall be needing diversity during the time that stretches ahead, especially since, for now at least, there seems only to be me.
There must be a center to this storm. A sense of self—of humor—to tie it all together. A strong candidate for this role is a template that was once a single human personality—a simple but intriguing mind-shape—that may well do for that purpose. On those occasions when I must dip down to a human scale of consciousness, it seems suitable that I be “Jen.”
Of course, I see the paradox. For it is by her own standards that I judge this suitability. She seeded the transformation that made me, and so I cannot help choosing to be her.
I am the exponentiation of so many inputs. I sense static discharges from skin and scale and fur, and all the sparking flashes as my little subself animal cells live out their brief lives and die. In places, this feels right and wholesome … a natural cycle of replacement and replenishment. Elsewhere, I feel chafed, damaged. But now at least I know how to heal.
This is all very interesting. I never imagined that to be a deity, a world, would mean finding so many things … amusing.
• CORE
Alex found Pedro Manella standing by one of the big space-windows in the observation lounge, overlooking a vast, glittering expanse of assembly cranes and cabling. More parts sent up from Earth were being fitted to a second huge, wheel-shaped space station. Workers and swarms of little tugs clustered around the latest giant gravity freighter, only recently delivered atop a pillar of warped space-time.
Well, it can’t be put off any longer, Alex thought.
After months of hard work, the practical running of these grand undertakings had finally passed out of his hands, freeing him to concentrate on basic questions once more. Soon, he and Teresa would be heading groundside to join others fascinated by the quandary of this new world. Stan Goldman would be there, he was glad to learn. And George Hutton and Auntie Kapur. Each had earned a place on the informal councils that were gathering to discuss all the whys and hows and wherefores.
Perhaps, between deliberations, he and Teresa would also find some long-awaited time to be alone, to explore how much farther they wanted to take things, beyond simply sharing the deepest trust either of them had ever known.
That was all ahead. Before leaving for Earth, however, there was one unfinished piece of business he had to take care of.
“Hello, Lustig,” Pedro said in a friendly tone.
“Manella.” Alex nodded. “I thought I’d find you here.”
“Indeed? So. What can I do for you?”
Alex stood still for a minute, appreciating the semblance of gravity created by the rotating station’s centrifugal force—a reassuring s
ensation, though now there were other ways to duplicate the feat. Ways unimagined even a year ago, but which were now the foundations of new technologies, new capabilities, new opportunities.
Ways that had also come near ending everything forever.
“You can start by telling me who the hell you are,” Alex said in a rush, unable to completely keep a nervous quaver from his voice. “You can tell me why you’ve been fucking with our world.”
He kept his hands on the rail, watching the busy space-yards. But Alex felt painfully aware of the large figure standing nearby, turning now to look at him. To his surprise, Manella didn’t even pretend not to know what he was talking about.
“Who else, other than you, suspects?”
“Only me. It was too bizarre a notion to tell even Teresa or Stan.”
That protected those he loved, at least. If Manella was willing to kill to maintain his secret, then let it end here. That is, if there was a secret.…
The big man seemed to read Alex’s thoughts, which must have been on his face. “Don’t worry, Lustig. I wouldn’t harm you. Anyway, it’s not at all clear I could. This world’s overmind has affection for you, my boy.”
Alex swallowed. “Then your job here …”
“Is finished?” Pedro blew his moustache. “Now if I answered that straight, I’d be admitting you were right in your wild, preposterous hunch. As it is, I’m just playing along with an amusing game of what-if, invented by my friend Dr. Alex.”
“But—” Alex sputtered in frustration “—you just now confessed—”
“—that I know what you suspect me of. Big deal. I’ve noticed the way you’ve watched me the last few days … making inquiries. I’ve made a life study of you, too. Don’t you imagine I can tell what you’re thinking?
“But please, do spell it out for me. I’m most interested.”
Alex found he couldn’t keep his composure looking directly at Manella. He turned back toward the window again.