2312

Swan in Africa

Swan was not enjoying the Earth project. She stuck it out because she believed in it and thought it was her best way to help; she thought it was what Alex would be doing, and so she couldn’t abandon it just because it was hard, frustrating, stupid. She cursed the day she had ever left Terminator; she dreamed of the day when she could dance down the Great Staircase to the park and the farm.

She got impatient so fast. Wahram would have been better for stuff like this, but he had flown off to America, frustrated like so many before him by irrefragable Africa. Swan wanted to be tougher than that, and was irritated with him. That added to her general irritation, and her patience often disappeared and left her seething. She became abrasive with people, thus even more ineffective. She woke wondering how many days she had left of this. Someone in the office repeated something Zasha had said, “Earth itself is a development sink,” and she shouted in his face.

Another day she got into another shouting match with a woman from the African League, down visiting from Dar to make trouble, and to keep from striking her Swan had to just walk away, hustling down the crowded streets of the city, cursing in Chinese. She realized that in her current state of mind she was a liability to the cause.

Earth the bad planet. Despite its wind and its sky, she was coming to hate it again, and not just because of the awful g but rather because of the evidence everywhere of what her species had done to the place, and was still doing. The dead hand of the past, so huge, so heavy. The air seemed a syrup she had to struggle through. Out in the terraria one lived free, like an animal—one could be an animal, make one’s own life one way or another. Live as naked as you wanted. On the God-damned Earth the accumulated traditions and laws and habits made something that was worse than any body bra; it was one’s mind that was held in place, tied in straitjackets, obliged to be like all the others in their ridiculous boxed habits. Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they had no choice—as if they were in a space station—as if the bad old days of the caged centuries had never gone away. They didn’t even look up at the stars at night. Walking among them, she saw that it was so. Indeed if they had been people who were interested in the stars they would not have still been here. There overhead stood Orion at his angle, “the most beautiful object any of us will ever know in the world, spread out on the sky like a true god, in whom it would only be necessary to believe a little.” But no one looked.

Despite her discontent, another North Harare shantytown near Dzivarasekwa had agreed to work with her and her team. The shantytown was banked on the side of a steep ridge, and the people there were squatters, with the ridge near enough to the borders of New Zimbabwe and Rhodesia to make for confusion about sovereignty. A good prospect, therefore, in political terms, but the steepness of the ridge was a problem for the selfreps. Swan’s team had designed a platting for the process that had the hangars moving in a warp-and-weft pattern, with some following contour intervals, while others climbed straight up slopes using telescoping pillar jacks to keep the factories horizontal. In this manner they were managing to transform the swath of their passage into a stylish white village with some touches of color; it would be quite beautiful.

But one morning one of their hangars suddenly veered downhill from the ridge, chomping through first a park and then the leafy suburb Kuwadzana. The locally trained minders of the selfrep had given up trying to control the thing and had jumped off ladders on its sides into the arms of a growing crowd.

When Swan arrived on the scene, she shouted and shoved her way through the crowd, then leaped onto the bottom of the hangar ladder; even when out of control, the behemoth was crunching along at only about a kilometer an hour. Up the ladder she climbed, then slipped through a door into the control room, like a tugboat’s bridge. It was empty. She went to the back wall and smashed down the override switch with her fists. Nothing happened; the leviathan ground on over the streets and homes of the suburb, with a rumble like a muffled Niagara Falls coming from its hidden underside. Now she began to understand why the local minders had abandoned ship. With the override not working, there wasn’t anything else obvious that one could do.

Swan sat down before the operation console and began to type at speed, while also commanding it verbally to stop. She was first calm, then demanding, then persuasive, then pleading, finally shouting in a fury. The selfrep AI neither responded nor stopped the hangar moving. Something in it must have been jammed; that couldn’t have been easy, a matter of clever industrial sabotage, fighting through some tough security. Swan thought she knew some relevant codes, but nothing she tried was working. “What the hell!” she said. “Why is so much tech support out of reach?”

“There are other attacks now ongoing, possibly timed with this one,” Pauline informed her.

“So can you give me any help here?”

Pauline said, “Type in the sentence ‘Fog is thick in Lisbon.’ ”

Swan did this, and then Pauline said, “Now you can drive the unit manually. There are four controls on the panel—”

“I know how to drive the damn thing!” Swan said. “Shut up!”

“So therefore you can now apply the brakes.”

Swan cursed her qube and then, without ceasing to curse, turned the hangar in a tight half circle (meaning it took a few hundred meters) back up the hill, but now crunching over streets lined with prosperous villas. “I wish this thing worked backwards,” she said furiously. “I wish we could give these rich bastards here the hovels they deserve.”

“Possibly it would be better just to stop,” Pauline noted.

“Shut up!” Swan let the hangar crunch over the neighborhood for a while longer before bringing it to a halt. “So this thing was sabotaged,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Damn it. And now we’re going to get arrested.”

“Very likely,” Pauline said.

It followed as Swan had predicted. The local government demanded that the damaged selfrep be impounded and its operators arrested, prosecuted, and deported or imprisoned. Swan was taken into custody and held in a set of rooms in the government house; it was not a jail, but she could not leave, and it seemed possible that she would be sentenced to time in prison.

At that possibility she began to spiral down into a furious despair. “We were invited here,” she kept insisting to her keepers. “We were only trying to help. The sabotage was not our fault!” None of her keepers appeared to be listening to her. One spoke ominously of a sentence designed to shut her up for good.

Into this nightmare Wahram suddenly appeared, accompanied by an African League officer, a short slight man from Gabon named Pierre, who spoke beautiful French and a much more rudimentary English. He said, “You are released to your colleague here, but must leave North Harare. The construction machines will be taken over by locals. Locals only must run them. So.” He held out a hand as if pointing her to the exit.

Swan, surprised, almost refused on principle to agree. Then she saw Wahram’s eyebrows shoot up and his eyes go round; his dismay reminded her of how much her situation had been frightening her, and after a moment more she humbly agreed with Pierre’s conditions and followed Wahram out to a car, which drove them to an airfield where a big dirigible was tethered to a tall mast.

“Let’s get out while the getting’s good,” Wahram suggested.

“Yeah yeah,” Swan said.

The dirigible was as long as an oil tanker, one of a big fleet of similar craft that were constantly circling the Earth from west to east, tugged by kites that were cast up into the jet stream, delivering freight slowly but surely as they circumnavigated the globe time after time. This particular dirigible had a balloon shaped like a cigar, and the gondola under it was lined with windows stacked four and five high.

Wahram led her into the mast elevator and they rose to the loading platform. Inside the dirigible they walked a long hall to the bow, where there was a viewing deck somewhat like the bubble at the fore end of a terrarium. Wahram had reserved two chairs and a table there for later in the day, after they had launched and hummed up to altitude. So that afternoon when they sat at their table, they could look down at the green hills of Earth, passing below in a stately parade. It was beautiful, but Swan was not looking.

“Thank you,” Swan said stiffly. “I was in serious trouble there.”

Wahram shrugged. “Happy to help.” He talked about the work in North America, the problems there and elsewhere. Much of it Swan had not heard about yet, but the pattern was depressingly clear. Nothing new to learn here: the Earth was fucked.

Wahram had come to a more measured conclusion, as was his way. “I’ve been thinking that our first wave of help has been too… too blunt, for lack of a better word. Too focused on the built environment, and on housing in particular. Maybe people like to feel they’ve had a hand in building their homes.”

“I don’t think people care who builds it,” Swan said.

“Well, but in space we do. Why not here?”

“Because when your home can fall apart and kill you and your kids just because it rains, then you’re happy to see a machine replace it with something better! You don’t worry about feelings until your material needs are met. You know that. The hierarchy of needs is a real thing.”

“But granting that,” Wahram said, “which I do, there have still been a lot of complaints about our efforts. And there is no denying that the project is getting snarled. It’s like Gulliver tied down by strings.”

“That’s not a good image,” Swan said, thinking of the talls and smalls in the sexliner. “A lot of opposition is disguised to look like it comes from the people, but really it’s the usual reactionary obstructionism. We have to break those strings if they try to wrap us!”

“It seems to me that the image is somewhat apt,” Wahram said mildly. “The lines holding Gulliver down are laws, and that makes them important. But look, there’s a way around the lines. We can slip through. The work we’ve been doing in Canada has been very suggestive.”

Their tea tray arrived, and he poured her a cup, which she promptly forgot. He sipped his slowly, watching the Indian Ocean appear, and then in the distance to the south a rumpled green island: Madagascar, one of the most completely devastated ecosystems in history, now a model of Ascension-type hybridization. One of the biggest islands on Earth, now completely a work of landscape art, and thriving. People went there to see its gardens and forests.

Wahram gestured at it. “Landscape restoration is going on all over, as people try to cope with the changes. And it’s very labor intensive, and very tied to place. You can’t do it from somewhere else. You can’t take advantage of differential currencies. You can’t really extract a profit from it. So it’s already well situated in terms of our purposes. It’s a public good and it needs to be done. All the coastlines need it. It’s hard to believe how much needs to be done. It isn’t even restoration exactly, because the old coastlines are gone for good, or for hundreds of years. It’s actually creating new coastlines at the higher sea level. Right now they’re raw. The ocean rips up what it inundates, and a lot of toxic stuff gets released. The new shoreline and tidal zone is usually a disaster. Fixing all that is very labor intensive. And yet everyone living on the new coasts wants to see it done. Many want to do it themselves. So, what I’ve been involved with in Florida is a bit of an unusual case, because it looks like restoration, but really it’s creation from scratch. Another kind of terraforming. It only resembles restoration because Florida used to be there. Actually you could do the same thing in shallow water anywhere. It might not even take moving mountains into the sea. There are fast corals now that could be used as foundation builders. Bioceramics expressed more broadly. I’ve seen groups using these corals, and they can grow them fast at many of the new coastlines, and pretty soon you get wonderful pure-white sand, very fine. It squeaks when you walk on it.”

Swan shrugged. “All right, sure. But I’m still not willing to stop working directly on housing.”

“I know.” He watched the land below. Seemed like he might even sleep.

After a few minutes he stirred and began to say something, but hesitated. Swan saw this and said, “What? Tell me.”

“There’s something else,” he said, glancing at her almost as if shyly. “I’ve been thinking that one of the things we’ve been doing here is providing more evidence that reform inside the paradigm of the current system on Earth is never going to be enough. That there is still, in other words, the necessity for revolution.”

“But that’s what I’ve been saying! That’s what I said to you on Venus!”

“I know. So now I’m coming to agree. So… you remember the project I told you about that Alex was leading, the stocking up of animals in the terraria, so we could bring them back to Earth?”

“Yes, of course. She wanted there to be enough animals to resupply Earth when the right time came.”

“Right. And so… I’ve been wondering if the time has come.”

Swan was startled. “You mean the time to bring the animals back?”

A feeling filled her then that she couldn’t name: oceans of clouds, roiling inside her chest, building to some kind of thunderhead… “Do you think so? What do you mean?”

He lifted his gaze from Madagascar and looked at her. He had a goofy little grin, brief and crooked, a toad’s grin, and yet warm. “Yes.”