2312

Wahram on Earth

That he would alter his plans, not to say change his life, all to help and please a person he did not know very well or trust very much, someone who was often angry at him and just as likely to punch his chest as smile at him; someone who might give him the evil eye at any time, might snarl at him contemptuously, so that really all his efforts to please her could be labeled a form of cowardice rather than affection—this surprised him. And yet it was turning out to be the case. He had already spent the greater part of the previous year traveling all over the system, rallying diplomatic and material support for Alex’s plans to revivify Earth and to deal with the qube problem; now added to this campaign, he spent a lot of time thinking about ways to implement Swan’s notion of rapidly improving conditions for the Terran forgotten ones. Whether Swan was aware of his efforts he doubted, but he felt she could find out if she wanted to, as his life was an open book, except for the parts he was hiding from her. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her what he had done. It seemed to him that the intensity of her engagement with him at their last crossing—beating on him and yelling at him—meant she had been paying attention, and would continue to. And actions were what mattered.

The nature of this new work was terribly hard on his pseudoiterative mode, which became so much more pseudo than iterative that it tipped over into the flux of sheer exfoliation, every day different and no patterns possible. This was hard for him, and as day followed day, then week week, and month month, he began to wonder, not why he was doing what he was doing, but why Swan was not contacting him to join forces. They would have accomplished more working as a team. Combining the powers of the innermost and outermost societies in the solar system would have some good effects, and it would seem therefore that Mercury and Saturn should be natural partners and, if they were, become a force almost the equal of the big bangers in the middle. Wahram could see several potential leverages. But she had not called or sent any messages.

So he continued to work. In some countries their campaign was called Rapid Noncompliance Alleviation—RNA. The noncompliance was with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and the infractions involved many articles of that document, but most often articles 17, 23, and 25, with 28 occasionally waved about as a reminder to recalcitrant governments. In other countries their programs were based on a venerable Indian government office, the Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP). This organization had never gotten much traction in its stated goal, but it was an already existing agency, and these had been identified by the Mondragon as the best of the bad options for channeling assistance. Wahram had thought it generally agreed that the whole development-aid model had been demonstrated to be an example of the Jevons Paradox, in which increases in efficiency trigger more consumption rather than less; increased aid had always somehow increased suffering, in some kind of feedback loop, poorly theorized—or else theorized perfectly well, but in such a way that revealed the entire system to be a case of vampiric rich people moving around the Earth performing a complicated kleptoparasitism on the poor. No one wanted to hear that news, so they kept on repeating errors identified four hundred years before, on ever-grander scales. So, the Planet of Sadness.

There were of course very powerful forces on Earth adamantly opposed to tinkering from above in general, and to creating full employment in particular. Full employment, if enacted, would remove “wage pressure”—which phrase had always meant fear struck into the hearts of the poor, also into the hearts of anyone who feared becoming poor, which meant almost everyone on Earth. This fear was a major tool of social control, indeed the prop that held up the current order despite its obvious failures. Even though it was a system so bad that everyone in it lived in fear, either of starvation or the guillotine, still they clutched to it harder than ever. It was painful to witness.

Nevertheless, the immiserated were ready to try anything. So something ought to be possible.

So Wahram crisscrossed the Old World like a modern-day Ibn Battuta, talking to government agencies in a position to do something. This was awkward work that took a real diplomatic touch to avoid being offensive in various ways. It was interesting. But he heard nothing from Swan. And Earth was big. There were 457 countries, and many associations of countries, and units within countries with significant power. Wahram was not going to run into Swan just because she also was at work on Earth.

So he looked her up. Apparently she was working near North Harare, a small country carved out of what had been Zimbabwe.

He read about the place on the flight there. Zimbabwe, rich in resources; a particularly dismal postcolonial history; splintered into a dozen residual countries, many still mired in problems; the great droughts exacerbating the situation; lately a recent population spike, and thus more trouble. North Harare was a slum in the shape of a crescent moon. The other little countries around it were better off.

He contacted Pauline and told her that he was coming to the area on RNA-related business, and soon enough Pauline got back to him with a hello from Swan and a suggested meeting on the very evening of his arrival, which was reassuring but meant that he had to meet her oppressed by jet lag. He was almost quivering with fatigue, and felt as if he weighed two hundred kilograms, when Swan burst into the room and it was time to perk up.

She gave him a nod and a quick appraisal. “You look like you’ve had a long trip. Come on in and I’ll make you some tea and you can tell me about it.”

She started the tea and then excused herself to deal with a visitor, talking in Chinese. Wahram tried hard to grasp what she was like now, vividly before him again. Still intense, that was clear.

Over tea they shared the news. Certain space elevators were slapping tariffs on equipment coming down; others were completely denied to spacers, an absurd situation. People were calling the Quito elevator the Umbilical Cord. It looked like the elevator problem would be a bottleneck, but there was a plan afoot to send down self-replicating factories from cislunar space, deployed in a single timed invasion of thousands of atmospheric landers. A wide variety of space-to-Earth landers were available, including some that split successively as they descended, until individual people or packages floated down in aerogel bubbles.

“That’s like the reverse of what hit Terminator,” Swan said sourly. “Instead of little bits convening to make a big mass, the big mass dissociates into parts. And when they land, things get built rather than destroyed.”

“They might get shot down.”

“There would be too many for that.”

“I don’t like the aggressive look of it,” Wahram said. “I thought we were trying to make it look like a charity thing.”

“Charity is always aggressive,” Swan said. “Don’t you know that?”

“No, I don’t think I do.”

It seemed clear to him that aggressive aid wasn’t going to work. But Swan was not a patient person. Now she was trying to do diplomatic work in the way Alex would have; but Alex had had a genius for diplomacy, while Swan had none. And they were facing one of the longest-standing problems in human history.

The whole thing transcended their own opinions about it in any case, as it was a Mondragon effort, with the Venusians on board too. So all kinds of things were happening. News screens seemed to be transmitting news from ten Earths at once, all writhing in the same space. Earth meant people like gods and people like rats: and in a paroxysm of rage they were going to reach out and wreck everything, even the space worlds that kept them from starvation. In the big merry-go-round, Earth spun like a red horse with a bomb in it. And they could not get off the merry-go-round.

Absentmindedly Wahram whistled under his breath the opening notes of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, trying to cheer her up. But she pursed her lips to make a little frown. Still, he had reminded her of the tunnel.

Many spacers were scared to go to sub-Saharan Africa, because the disease vector loads there were so much higher than in most space habitats. Wahram supposed that Swan had gone to Africa partly in defiance of that kind of caution; she would be one to believe in hormesis if anyone would, given her ingestion of the Enceladan aliens. So here she was in Nyabira, directing the deployment of self-replicating construction sheds. They planned to start by reconstructing the part of Harare called Domboshawa, transforming its northernmost ring of shantytowns into garden city versions of themselves. This “refurbishing of the built infrastructure” was not a complete solution, but the selfreps did build wells, health centers, schools, clothing factories, and housing in several styles already used in Domboshawa, including aspects of the traditional local rondavels.

The selfreps were nearly autonomous, and with proper programming, sufficient materials feed, and good troubleshooting, they rolled over evacuated portions of the shantytowns like enormous blimp hangars, leaving behind a new strip of buildings, whitewashed and impressively practical and homey. As the gigantic barns slowly grumbled over targeted neighborhoods, the hopeful residents cheered them on. That the barns themselves grew longer and longer in the process and finally split into two units went almost unremarked upon. It was an excellent tech and had built many a fine city-state in the asteroid belt and on the big moons of Jupiter. It had been a crucial component of the Accelerando, in fact.

But on Earth it wasn’t working out. The transformations involved were too great; there grew furious objections, often from elsewhere than the areas being renovated. Only if residents voted for the project by a very large majority would it happen in something close to concord, and it was best when they themselves were programming the selfrep AIs.

Then a selfrep in Uttar Pradesh was blown up; no one knew why. The state government that should have investigated refused to do so, and there were signs that they might even have supported the attack. News of the attack created copycat crimes; it would take only a few more to make the project collapse worldwide.

This made Swan furious. “They attacked us when we didn’t help, and now when we do,” she said bitterly.

Wahram, feeling uneasy as he watched her get more and more tightly wound, said, “Even so, we must persevere.”

It was happening all over Earth, Wahram saw on the screens; their restoration projects were getting tangled in dense networks of law and practice and landscape, and the occasional sabotage or accident didn’t help. One couldn’t change anything on Earth without several different kinds of mess resulting, some of them paralyzing. Every square meter of the Earth’s land was owned in several different ways.

In space it was different. On Venus if a single roomful of planners agreed, then you could blast most of the atmosphere into space. On Titan it was similar, around Jupiter the same; throughout the solar system massive terraforming projects were proceeding. Excavate ocean beds, change out atmospheres, heat up or chill things by hundreds of K… But not on Earth. In many places the selfreps were forbidden, even reviled.

No matter what they did, it seemed that the misery of the forgotten ones would keep pulling civilization down, like an anchor they had tied around their own neck. Terran elites would stay on top of an artificial Great Chain of Being until it snapped and everyone fell into the void. A pathetic Götterdämmerung, stupid and banal, and yet still horrible.

The prospect of that was making Swan angry. Wahram, more and more aware of her bitterness, more and more the target of her anger, watched her one morning abuse one of the Harare women who helped run their operation—saw the woman’s face as she was chastised—realized that if he stayed, he was going to end up crossing Swan in some catastrophic way, or simply not liking her. So that afternoon he excused himself, and the next day flew to America to join a Saturnian crew, newly arrived to help raise Florida back above the sea. On the day he left, Swan, distracted by some vexing problem of the moment, only waved him away like a mosquito.

Florida had been an unusually low-lying peninsula, it turned out, with only a thin spine down the center of the state higher than the eleven-meter rise of the oceans. One could still see the state in outline from the air, as a dark reef under a shallow sea, a reef that still bled yellow into the slightly deeper waters around it. The skyscrapers of the Miami corridor had been occupied, like those in Manhattan and elsewhere, but by and large the state had had to be abandoned. However, as most of its soil was still there, topping the reef as a layer of mud that was not particularly damaged by inundation, the opportunity existed to scoop it up, then raise the rock foundation of the peninsula with rock trained down from the Canadian Rockies, and after that put the soil back in place on top of the newly raised bedrock platform.

In other words, it was like Greenland: one of the few places on Earth where terraforming could be performed without too much collateral damage. Naturally there were defendants of the new reefs and fishing grounds to protest, but they had been mollified or steamrolled, and the project approved in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., which itself existed in a polder behind a giant system of barrier dams on the Potomac. Washington’s vestigial but still powerful government, now itself located largely below sea level, was sympathetic to the idea of “raising Florida from the drowned.”

It was one of the ten biggest microterraforming projects currently being performed on Earth, and Wahram was happy to join his Saturnian colleagues, who were part of a work unit put together by an Alabama-Amsterdam cooperative venture. Teams in Alaska, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Nunavut were excavating the interiors of mountain ranges, creating galleries down in the bedrock, which were then being filled with frozen carbon dioxide they had elsewhere sucked out of the atmosphere. Whether all this could be done in a manner that was geologically and environmentally stable, Wahram doubted. It was a prodigious amount of rock, for one thing; Florida was on average five meters underwater, and they wanted to build it up slightly higher than it had been originally, in case Greenland or East Antarctica also gave their ice to the sea. Using the narrow finger of a peninsula that was the state’s only remaining land as their causeway, they were moving the segmented mountain interiors on trains and building the state as they had built rock jetties in older times. The Everglades were to be plumbed to function at the new higher elevation; newly generated analogs of the many extinct species of birds and animals that had graced the peninsula before European immigration were to be introduced. They were going to recreate Florida. Enough carbon dioxide was to be buried under the northern Rockies to make the project on balance carbon negative.

The building and transport crews for the job were hired primarily from the Suffering South, as it had been called in the years when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet had come off and sea level made its biggest rise. The Florida work did not create full employment by itself, but riding the rails, Wahram had a lot of time to look at the passing country and think about it, and once he sent a note to Swan: Remember what you said on Venus about giving everyone here a job doing landscape restoration? It could work.

So he rode the trains back and forth from Canada to Florida. The land was huge, and mostly flat. Heat had parched land that had once grown wheat without irrigation, so they had changed crops and started irrigating, but large regions in Manitoba and the Dakotas had reverted to high desert. Now people were saying the prairies had always been high desert. They were becoming home to buffalo again. On the other hand, the forests flanking the Mississippi were back, more subtropical than ever. Missouri and Arkansas looked like South America.

There were long hours when he could stand between cars, protected from the wind of their passage, and look at the big land. Landscapers and gardeners, animal handlers and vets, environmental engineers and designers, heavy equipment operators, porters and diggers—all were essential in the work of making a landscape. The giant waldos, the selfrep hangars, they were only good for certain things. Local people working their land was a better image than selfreps dropping out of the sky. The people he talked to were more accepting of the Florida project, and the relevant governments also. Not a few people were enthusiastic to an almost religious degree. To have their drowned land hauled back out of the water was their dream. Rebuilding the infrastructure here was a task without negative consequences, except for those who had been enjoying the new reefs, and they would be given new new reefs. Florida was going to end up like a big Venice, resting on pilings stuck deep into the Earth. Assisted migration would replant and reanimate the land as quickly as it was ready.

On one train ride north, Wahram listened to one of the reef engineers explain that the corals they were replanting all released their eggs on the same night of the year, and even within the same twenty minutes, though they were scattered over hundreds of miles. Apparently they accomplished this by way of two color-sensitive cells in each coral, which together were able to distinguish the particular blue of the twilight sky on the night after the first full moon following the spring equinox. This moon rose right after sunset, when the sky was still also lit by the recently departed sun, and this brief double illumination lit the sky to a particular shade of blue that the corals could recognize.

“I have to tell Swan about this,” Wahram said, amazed at the thought of such brainless but living precision. Sentience, what was it?

Meanwhile the Florida raising prospered. Wahram watched the people working in what he recognized as the euphoria of the project, which he had felt so strongly himself in his youth, building cities on Titan. There they had had to carve a world out of the ice; here they had to raise one out of the sea. But it was the same feeling.

Once on a train going south he was out between cars with a Dutch woman he was working with, a blond firebrand, and going slow at one road crossing, they looked down at a group of young men who were throwing stones at the train cars and chanting, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” and she leaned out and shouted, “Hey, fuck you back! We are reconstructing the South! And you have to like it!” With an evil Germanic laugh that hopefully they did not hear.