Caliban

10

SIMCOR Beddle was up betimes, thoughtfully reviewing the results of the Ironhead action against Settlertown. The results were not good. Sheriff Kresh’s deputies were simply getting too good at their jobs. Too many arrests, too little damage, and worst of all, the publicity was bad. It made the Ironheads look inept at best.

All right, then, it was time to come up with another tactic. Some way to tangle with the damned Settlers where Kresh’s people could not interfere so much.

Wait a moment. He had the very thing. Leving’s next lecture. If his information was even remotely reliable, the place would be crawling with Settlers. Yes, yes. An altercation there would do nicely.

But what about publicity? Not much point in staging a riot if no one saw it. Beddle leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Her first lecture had not drawn much of a crowd, though it should have, given the seditious material she had presented. Maybe that was the key. Plant a few belated reports here and there, accurate and otherwise, about what she had said then. Perhaps he could arrange for a few tame sources to drop a few inflammatory and extremely misleading speculations as to what the devil she was doing in the hospital.

Yes, yes. That was it. Properly brought along, reports on that first lecture should get the hall filled for the second, and live televisor coverage to boot. Disrupt those goings-on and no one could help but pay attention.

Simcor Beddle gestured for his secretary robot to come forward, and began dictating, setting down the details.

It ought to work quite nicely.

ALVAR Kresh strode into the Governor’s office, feeling far more alert and awake than he had any right to feel, as if his body were getting used to the idea of not sleeping properly.

The Governor rose from behind his desk and crossed half the length of the huge office, offering his hand to Alvar as he came closer. Grieg looked fresh, well rested, alert. He was dressed in a charcoal-grey suit of rather conservative cut, as if he were trying to appear as old as possible. Such was no doubt the case, given Grieg’s almost scandalously youthful election to the governorship.

Grieg’s office was as opulent as Alvar had remembered—but there was something missing since his last visit, something no longer there. What was it?

“Thank you for coming so early, Sheriff,” Governor Grieg said as he took Alvar’s hand.

As if the summons here had been an invitation and not an order, Alvar thought. But the courteous words were themselves significant. The Governor did not often feel the need to be polite to Alvar Kresh.

Alvar shook the Governor’s hand and looked him in the eye. There was no doubt about it. The man wanted something from him—no, needed something.

“It’s a pleasure to be here,” Alvar lied smoothly.

“I doubt that to be the case,” Grieg said with a politician’s overly frank smile, a smile born of too many years making promises. “But I assure you that it was necessary. Please, have a seat, Sheriff. Tell me, how is the investigation of the attack on Fredda Leving going?”

Nothing like getting right to the point, Kresh thought grimly. “It’s early times, yet. We’ve collected a lot of information, and a lot of it seems rather contradictory. But that’s almost to be expected at this stage. There is one thing, though, sir, that you could do to make work go a bit more smoothly.”

“And what might that be?”

“Call off Tonya Welton. I must admit I don’t know the political side of the situation, but I assure you that inserting her into the case has made more work for me. I can’t quite see why you wanted to do it.”

“Why I wanted to do it? She was the one who wanted it. Her people may have a connection to Leving Labs, but why would I want her interfering with local law enforcement? No, it was her idea to be attached to the case, and she was quite insistent about it. She made it clear that the political price would be high for Inferno if I did not allow her access to the investigation. In fact, she was the one who first told me about the case. She called me at home the night it happened and demanded that she be put into the picture.”

Alvar Kresh frowned in confusion. Given the speed with which she had arrived at the scene, that would have to mean she knew about the attack almost before the maintenance robot called in to report it. How had she found out? “I see. I must admit that she rather gave the impression that it was your idea.”

“Definitely not. As for calling her off, as you put it—I’m afraid the political situation is just too damned delicate. I’m very sorry, but I’ll have to ask you to endure her interference. I think you’ll understand why after you see what I brought you here to see.”

The Governor gestured toward a rather severe-looking chair in the middle of the room. Alvar sat, facing the empty center of the room. Donald followed a step or two behind and stood behind Alvar’s chair. Grieg took a seat himself at a control console that faced Alvar’s chair. That was it, Alvar realized. He looked around the big room and confirmed his suspicion. No robot. The Governor had no robot in attendance in his own private office. Now, there was a scandalous tidbit. No robot. Fredda Leving was one thing, but the Governor himself? Even if the politics of the moment had been calm and settled, it would have been titillating news, as if Grieg had gone out in public without his pants. With the Settlers so much in evidence, it was downright unpatriotic.

But this was not the moment to bring any such thing up with the Governor. Maybe he had seen that lecture of Leving’s—or maybe he knew something more. But Grieg was bent over the control unit, concentrating on it. Best to pay attention, Alvar told himself.

“This is a simglobe unit,” the Governor said, a bit absently, concentrating on the controls in front of him. “You may have seen one before, or seen a recorded playback from a simulation run on one. But I doubt you have seen one like this. In fact, I am certain of it. It’s a Settler model, much more sophisticated than our own units. It’s a gift from Tonya Welton—and before you can get suspicious of that, it was quite thoroughly tested by our own people, and programmed by our people. It has not been rigged in any way.”

“So what will it show me?” Alvar asked.

The Governor finished adjusting the controls and looked up at his guest, his face suddenly grim. “The future,” he answered in a flat, emotionless voice that put a chill in Alvar’s spine.

The windows made themselves opaque, and the room’s lights faded away into darkness. After a moment, a vague, dimly lit ball of light came into existence in the middle of the air between Alvar and Grieg. It quickly came into sharper and brighter focus, to become recognizably the globe of Inferno. Alvar found he was drawing in his breath sharply in spite of himself. There are few sights as beautiful to the human eye as a living world seen from space. Inferno was heart-stoppingly lovely, a blue-white gem gleaming in the void.

It was in half-phase from Alvar’s point of view, the terminator slicing neatly through the great equatorial island of Purgatory. Nearly all the southern hemisphere of Inferno was water, though there had been arid lowlands before the terraforming projects gave this world its seas.

The northern third of the world was given over to a single great landmass, the continent of Terra Grande. Even in summer, the polar regions of Terra Grande sported an impressive ice cap. In the winter months the ice and snow could reach halfway down to the sea…

Just north of Purgatory, a huge, semicircular chunk was neatly sliced out of the southern coast of Terra Grande, the visible scar of an asteroid impact some few million years ago. Hidden by the water, the arc of the landward edge of the crater extended out into the sea, forming a circular crater. Purgatory was actually the central promontory of the half-submerged crater. The huge water-filled crater was called, quite simply, the Great Bay.

Clouds and storm-whirls knotted and twisted about the southern seas, with the greens and browns and yellows of the sprawling northern continent half-hidden beneath their own cloud cover. Dots of lightning flickered in the midst of storms in the northwestern mountains, while the eastern edge of the Great Bay was cloudless in the morning light, dazzlingly bright, the coastal deserts gleaming in the sun, the greenswards of the forests and pastures beyond a darker, richer green.

A bit farther south and west along the coast of the bay, Alvar could just pick out the lights of Hades, a small, faint, glowing light in the predawn darkness.

“This is a real-time view of our world as it is today,” Grieg’s voice announced from the far side of the now solid-seeming globe. “We came to a waterless world with an unbreathable atmosphere. We gave it water and oxygen. Every drop of water in those oceans, we caused to be there. Every breath of oxygen in the air is there because we remade this world. We unlocked water from the rocks and soil and imported comets and ice meteors from the outer reaches of this star system. We put plant life in the sea and on the land and gave this world breathable air. We made this world bloom. But now the bloom is off the rose.

“Next you will see Inferno as it will be, if we merely rely on our own abilities, using just our own terraforming stations and technology, if we go on as we have been. First, to make it easy to observe, I will remove the atmosphere, cloud cover, and the day-night cycle.” Suddenly the half-lit globe was fully illuminated, and the storms and haze vanished. The hologram had seemed like a real world up to that moment, but, stripped of darkness and cloud, it was suddenly nothing more than a highly accurate map, a detailed globe. Quite irrationally Alvar felt a pang of loss even then. Something lovely that had been was suddenly gone, and he knew, beyond doubt, that the surviving image of the world would grow uglier still. “Now let me add a few supplementary graphics,” Grieg’s voice said. A series of bar charts and other displays appeared around the globe, showing the state of the forests, the sea and land biomass, temperatures, atmospheric gases, and other information.

“I will run the simulation forward at the rate of one standard year every ten seconds,” Grieg said, “and I will keep the western hemisphere positioned so you can watch the fate of Hades.” A white dot appeared at the appropriate position on the edge of the Great Bay. “That is Hades’s location.”

The governor spoke no more, but instead let the simglobe tell its own tale, partly in direct images, partly in readouts and graphic displays.

It was the oceans that died first. The predators at the top of the food chain overbred and all but wiped out the mid-chain species, the fish and other creatures that fed on each other and on the various species of plankton, and were in turn eaten by the high-end predators. Their food supply wiped out, the high-end predators died out as well.

With no controls on their reproduction, the plankton and algae in the ocean were next. They reproduced out of all control and the oceans bloomed a sickly, ghastly green. Then the seas turned brown as the algae died as well, having overrun their own food supply and absorbed virtually every molecule of carbon dioxide. With no animal life in the ocean, plant life everywhere, on land and sea, was starved for carbon dioxide. The loss of the greenhouse gas meant Inferno could retain less and less heat. The planet began to grow colder.

Alvar watched, an unwilling witness to the forthcoming doom of his own world, watched as the planet Inferno was strangled by ice. Water, water was the key. No living world could survive without it, but it could do no good—and could do great damage—if it was in the wrong state, in the wrong place. Now it was the ice cap that was the problem. The line on the chart displayed the size of the northern ice cap, but Alvar could see the cap itself growing. The ice advanced, and the northern forests fell before it, the great stands of trees dying in the too-cold, carbon-dioxide-starved air. With the atmosphere’s oxygen content far too high, and drought conditions taking hold, forest fires exploded everywhere, even as the ice pushed southward.

The white ice reflected back far more heat and light than the forests, and the planetary cooling trend locked itself in, strengthened itself, reinforced itself.

But the cooling was not universal: Alvar could see that. As the forest died and the ice advanced and the overall planetary temperature dropped, local temperatures dropped in some areas and rose in others. Wind patterns shifted. Storms grew more violent. Semipermanent snow hurricanes lodged themselves here and there along the southern coast of Terra Grande, while Purgatory became semitropical. But still the ice advanced, creeping farther and farther south, locking up more and more water in snow and ice, water that should have flowed back into the southern ocean.

The sea levels dropped. The oceans of Inferno, never very deep to begin with, receded at incredible speed as the ice grew ever deeper in the north. Islands began to appear out of the southern ocean. Still the waters drew back, until the Great Bay revealed its true form as a drowned crater. Now it was a circular sea, surrounded on all sides by land.

The ice mass continued to advance, and the city of Hades vanished under the snow and ice.

Suddenly the simulation froze. “You see this world as it will be, approximately seventy-five standard years from now. For all intents and purposes, by that time there will be no other life on this planet but ourselves. Some small remnant populations of this and that species might well survive in isolated pockets, but the world as a whole will be dead.” Alvar heard a grim graveyard chuckle in the darkness. “By the time the world is as we see it here, I suppose we humans ourselves could be regarded as a remnant in an isolated pocket.”

“I don’t understand,” Alvar protested, speaking to the faceless voice of the Governor somewhere in the dark. “I thought the danger was from the deserts growing, the planet getting too hot, the ice caps baking off.”

“That was what we all thought,” the Governor said bitterly. “Whatever desultory, token efforts my predecessor made to correct the situation were based on calculations and predictions to that effect. The deserts were supposed to grow, the ice cap to vanish completely, the sea levels to rise. There are plans in my files for dikes to be built around the city and hold back the rising water!”

Alvar heard the Governor step out from behind the console. He came around the side of the simglobe to stand by Alvar’s chair and look at the half-frozen world. “Perhaps I am being unfair. The situation is remarkably complex. If one or two variables shifted slightly, it would be the sea, and not the ice, that would overwhelm the city. In fact, stage one of our revised terraforming plan is to tip the scales back toward the collapse—into-desert, coastal-flooding scenario—it is a less drastic catastrophe than the ice age we otherwise face. You have not seen the worst of the ice age yet.”

“But why push toward the desert scenario? Why not work toward a stable middle ground?” Alvar asked.

“An excellent question. The answer is that our current situation is a result of aiming for that middle ground, a middle ground we may well not be able to achieve.”

“I don’t understand.”

The Governor sighed, his face dimly lit by the image of a dying world. “The groundwork for a stable ecology comfortable to humans was never properly laid in the first place, and we are paying the price for it. A properly terraformed world, when disturbed in some way, will always tend back toward that comfortable middle ground. Not here. Life is supposed to be a moderating factor in a planet’s environment, smoothing out the extremes. But life’s hold on Inferno is getting weaker, and a weakened system moves toward extremes. What we would view as a ‘normal’ terrestrial ecology has, on Inferno, become the abnormal, unstable transition point between two stable states—ice age or an overly arid continent with high sea levels. Of the two stable states, we are heading for the ice, and that will kill us.

“Creating an Inferno with a mostly desert, half-flooded Terra Grande may be the best we can do. It will only leave us halt and lame. You see, if we can force the trends back toward desert-spreading, then life would at least survive on this planet even when our civilization collapses!”

“When our civilization collapses!” Alvar cried out in astonishment. “What are you saying? Is that really going to happen?”

Grieg sighed, a tired-sounding noise of resignation. “I suppose I should say ‘if’ instead of ‘when,’ but I have been reading a whole series of classified reports that suggest that collapse is far more likely than anyone imagines. When it gets bad, people will start pulling out. Not everyone will be able to afford it. There will be too few ships available. Prices will be high. Some people will die, and many more will leave. I doubt there will be a large enough population left to keep society functioning, even with the robots. Maybe all the people will die off, but the robots will survive. Who knows?”

The Governor seemed to come back to himself a bit. He drew his shoulders up and looked down at Alvar and spoke in a firmer, more controlled voice. “Forgive me. There is a great deal on my mind.”

Chanto Grieg paced back and forth in front of Alvar once or twice, clearly working to collect his thoughts. At last he spoke. “We are in a knife-edge situation, Sheriff, in more ways than one. Political and social issues are intertwined with the ecological problems. In looking at the ecology, we therefore must plan for the likelihood that whatever survivors there are will not be able to do anything to save the planet, beyond whatever efforts we make. The ice age result is not survivable. The desert result is. So we force the planet back toward the desert pattern, and, if we get the chance, we can try and reterraform from there. That will certainly be preferable to our current future,” Grieg said, gesturing toward the simglobe.

“But the ice age doesn’t look that bad,” Alvar objected.

“Don’t forget that I have stopped the program,” Grieg said. “But yes, all this, we could survive, even if we ignore the great and terrible crime of allowing the planet to die.” The Governor regarded the globe thoughtfully. “Even the ice overwhelming the city is not an insurmountable problem, viewed on a global scale. We could dome over the town, or burrow underground, as the Settlers do. But this is not the end of the story.”

The Governor turned and stepped back into the darkness. Alvar heard the Governor tapping new commands into the console, and found himself struck by the random thought that buttons and switches were a typically Settler way to do things. Why not voice commands, or an interface to allow a robot to handle the machinery?

But he knew his mind was just finding ways to avoid facing the reality of what Grieg was showing him. What does all this have to do with me? he wondered, more than a bit uncomfortably. I’m just a cop chasing crooks. I’m not running the planet. But even as he told himself those things, Alvar knew there was a larger reality here. And all this might well have a great deal to do with him.

Chanto Grieg set the simglobe controls to move forward in time. The ice caps grew larger, the seas receded farther. “This is the crisis point,” Grieg said, “eighty-five standard years from now. The seas recede enough to expose the south polar highlands.” The simglobe tilted its south polar region toward Alvar, and he could see the polar landmass emerging from the water, instantly forming its own ice cap. “The polar lands have been hidden under the seas, but they are at significantly higher elevations than the surrounding lowlands. When the sea level shrinks enough, the polar continent emerges.

“And that is what will doom us. There has been ice over the southern polar ocean all along, but the water beneath the ice has always been able to flow freely. The circulation patterns are complex, but the effect of the currents is that the Antarctic waters have been able to blend with the temperate-zone and equatorial waters. The warm water cools down and the cold water warms up. But once both poles are landlocked, the planet’s ocean currents shift violently. Water no longer flows through either polar region, and thus the oceans’ currents will no longer be available to moderate the temperature differential between the south pole and the equatorial region. The oceans no longer have any place to dump their heat. What that means is that temperatures in the south polar regions drop precipitously—and equatorial and temperate-zone temperatures go through the roof. The absolute volume of water in the oceans is greatly reduced as well, which means the oceans simply are not able to hold as much heat energy.

“Air temperatures rise. Storms become more and more violent. The water in the oceans boils off while the poles descend into ever-greater cold. Within 120 years of today, the last of the free water on this planet will be locked up in massive ice caps at the north and south poles. It will get cold enough at the poles to form lakes of liquid nitrogen. But the temperate regions and the equator will simply be baked alive.

“Normal daytime temperatures at Hades’s location will be about 20 degrees below zero on the Celsius scale. Daytime temperatures on the equator will reach 140 degrees without any trouble at all. Without water, with temperatures that high, the last of the plant life will die. Without that plant life to put oxygen back into the air, the atmosphere will lose all its breathable oxygen as various chemical reactions cause the oxygen to bind to the rocks and soils of the surface. Other chemical reactions will bind up whatever nitrogen doesn’t freeze out onto the polar regions. The atmospheric pressure will drop drastically. Without the thermal insulation of a thick atmosphere, the planet’s ability to retain heat at the equator will decline. Equatorial temperatures will drop, until the entire planet is a frigid, airless wasteland, far more hostile to life than it was before humans reached it. That is the current prognosis for the planet Inferno.”

Alvar Kresh stared in horror at the image of a frozen, wizened, dead world that hung in front of him. The greens and blues were all gone. The planet was a dun-colored desert, both its poles buried under huge, gleaming-white ice caps. He discovered that his fingers were clenched into the arms of his chair and that his heart was racing. He forced his fingers to relax, inhaled deeply in an effort to calm himself. “All right,” he said, though it was clear things were anything but. “All right. I knew there were problems, even if I did not know they were this bad. But what does all this have to do with me?” he asked, his voice quiet.

The Governor brought the lights back out and stepped out from behind his console. “That is perfectly simple, Sheriff Kresh. Politics. It comes down to a question of politics and the qualities of human nature. I could make a frontal attack, try and get the public behind me, get all Infernals to come together and save the planet. To do that, I would have to put on the show you have just seen, for the benefit of the entire planet. Broadcast it by every means available. Some people would accept the facts. But not all of them. Probably not even most of them.”

“What would the rest of them do?” Kresh asked.

“No. No. You think about that for a minute. Think about it, and you tell me what they would do.”

Alvar Kresh looked up again, at the dry, wizened corpse of a world that hung in space before him. What would they do? How would they react? The musty old traditionalists who yearned for the glories of the past; the Ironheads; the less radical people—such as himself—who saw a Settler scheme under every rock. The ones who were simply comfortable with the world and their lives as they were, firmly opposed to any change. What would they do?

“Deny it,” he said at last. “There would be riots, and calls for your impeachment, and any number of people with axes to grind trotting out studies to prove that you were dead wrong and that everything was fine. People would claim you were a dupe of the Settlers—more people than think that now. One way or another, I doubt you’d serve out your term of office.”

“You’re too optimistic. I would say the odds would be poor on my living through my term of office, for what that is worth. But in a larger sense, that doesn’t matter. All men die. Planets need not, should not, die. Not after only a few centuries of life.” Grieg turned his back on Alvar and walked to the far end of his office. “It may sound grandiose, but if I am ejected from office and replaced by someone who insists that everything is fine—then I am convinced Inferno’s ecology will collapse. Maybe I am quite mad, or a raging egomaniac, but I do believe that to be true.”

“But how can you not inform the public about all this?”

“Oh, the people have to know, of course,” Grieg said, turning around to face Kresh again. “I didn’t mean to imply that I was going to try to keep this secret. That would be impossible over the long run. Any attempt to keep the lid on this permanently would be bound to fail. But so, too, would an effort to spring this information on the populace all at once. Today the average citizen simply believes that the terraforming system needs some fine tuning, some repairs and tidying up. They can’t quite see why we need to humble ourselves to the Settlers just for the sake of getting that job done.”

Grieg walked slowly down the length of the office, back toward Kresh. “It will take time to educate them, to prepare them for the knowledge of the danger. If the situation is handled properly, I can shape the debate, so that people want to decide how to rebuild the ecology and don’t waste time wondering if it even needs fixing. We need to get them to a thoughtful, determined frame of mind, where they can accept the challenge ahead. We can get to that point, I’m sure of it.

“But we must choose our path carefully. For the present, the situation is volatile, explosive. People are in the mood for argument, not reason. And yet we must start on the repair program now if there is to be any hope of success and survival. And we must use the strongest, most effective, fastest-moving tools available to us.”

Grieg came closer to Kresh, still talking, his eyes animated and intent. “In other words,” Grieg said, “the only hope for avoiding this disaster lies with the Settlers. Without their help this planet will be dead, for all intents and purposes, within a standard century. I find therefore that I am forced to accept their help, long before I have time to shape public opinion so that people will accept Settler help. I might add that the Settlers offered their help with certain conditions, which I was obliged to accept. One of those conditions will become apparent tonight.

“But my political alliance with the Settlers is shaky at best. If this robot assault case is not closed quickly and neatly, there can be no doubt that there will be a political explosion on this world, though I am not exactly certain what form it will take. If it gets out that a robot is suspected of a crime—or if Settlers are suspected of sabotaging robots—it will be hard, if not impossible, to prevent my enemies from expelling the Settlers. And if that move succeeds, the Settlers will wash their hands of us. Without their help, Inferno will die. And in the wake of the most recent Ironhead riots, I feel certain they are looking for an excuse to leave. We cannot afford to give them one.”

Grieg paced back and forth again, stepping through the edge of the simglobe hologram, his shoulder brushing through the ghostly-real image of a dead world to come. He crossed to Kresh and put his hands on the arms of Alvar’s chair. He leaned his face down close to Alvar’s, so close the Governor’s breath was warm against the Sheriff’s cheek. “Solve this case, Kresh. Solve it quickly and neatly and well. Solve it without complication or scandal.”

He spoke the last words in a whisper, the light of fear bright in his eyes. “If you do not,” he said quietly, “you will doom this planet.”