Earth

PLANET

A modest fire burns longer. So it is, also, with stars.

The brightest rush through lives of spendthrift extravagance to finally explode in terminal fits of self-expression, briefly outshining whole galaxies. Meanwhile, humbler, quieter suns patiently tend their business, aging slowly, gracefully.

Ironically, it takes both types to make a proper potion. For without the grand immoderation of supernovas there would be no ingredients — no oxygen, carbon, silicon, or iron. And yet the steady yellow suns are also needed — to bake the concoction slowly, gently, or the recipe will spoil.

Take a solar mix of elements. Condense small lumps and accrete them to a midsized globe. Set it just the right distance from the flame and rotate gently. The crust should bubble and then simmer for the first few million years.

Rinse out excess hydrogen under a wash of sunlight.

Pound with comets for one eon, or until a film of liquid forms.

Keep rotating under an even heat for several billion years.

Then wait…

• LITHOSPHERE

It was truly “mad dogs and Englishmen” weather. Claire wore her goggles, of course, and was slathered with skin cream. Nevertheless, Logan Eng wondered if he really oughtn’t get his daughter out of this blistering sun-shine.

Not that, to all appearances, anything could possibly harm that creature up ahead, with the form of a girl but moving along the striated rock face like a mountain goat. It never occurred to Logan that Claire might fall, for instance, here on a mere class-four slope. His red-headed offspring strode ahead as if she were crossing a lawn, rather than a forty-degree grade, and disappeared around the next bend in the canyon wall with a final flash of bronzed legs.

Logan puffed, reluctantly admitting to himself why he’d been about to call her back. I can’t keep up with her anymore. It was inevitable, I guess.

Realizing this, he smiled. Envy is an unworthy emotion to feel toward your own child.

Anyway, right now he was occupied with greater spans of time than a mere generation. Logan teetered on the edge of the period called “Carboniferous.” Like some ambitious phylum, aspiring to evolve, he sought a path to rise just a few more meters, into the Permian.

That landmark, which had seemed so stark from far away — a distinct border between two horizontal stripes of pale stone — became deceptive and indistinct up this close. Reality was like that. Never textbook crisp, but gritty, rough-edged. It took physical contact, breathing chalky sediments or tracing with your fingertips the outline of some paleozoic brachiopod, to truly feel the eons imbedded in a place like this.

Logan knew by touch the nature of this rock. He could estimate its strength and permeability to seeping water — a skill learned over years perfecting his craft. Also, as an amateur, he had studied its origins in prehistoric days.

The Carboniferous period actually came rather late in the planet’s history. Part of the “age of amphibians,” it spanned a hundred million years before the giants known as dinosaurs arrived. Wonderful beasts used to thrive near where he now trod. But it was mostly upon ocean bottoms that life’s epic was written, by countless microorganisms raining down as gentle sediment year after year, eon after eon, a process already three billion years old when these clay chapters were lain.

Of course Logan knew volcanic mountains, too. Only last week he’d been scrambling over vast igneous flows in eastern Washington state, charting some of the new underground streams awakened by the shifting rains. Still, mere pumice and tuff were never as fascinating as where the land had once quite literally been alive. In his work he’d walked across ages — from the Precambrian, when Earth’s highest denizens were mats of algae, to the nearly recent Pliocene, where Logan always watched out for traces of more immediate forebears, who might by then already have been walking on two legs and starting to wonder what the hell was going on. He regularly returned from such expeditions with boxes of fossils rescued from the bulldozers, to give away to local schools. Though of course Claire always got first choice for her collection.

“Daddy!”

He was negotiating a particularly tricky bend when his daughter’s call tore him from his drifting thoughts. A misstep cost him his footing, and Logan felt a sudden, teetering vertigo. He gasped, throwing himself against the sloping wall, spreading his weight over the largest possible area. The sudden pounding of his heart matched the sound of pebbles raining into the ravine below.

It was an instinctive reaction. An overreaction, as there were plenty of footholds and ledges. But he’d let his mind wander, and that was stupid. Now he’d pay with bruises, and dust from head to toe.

“What—” He spat grit and raised his voice. “What is it, Claire?”

From above and somewhere ahead he heard her voice. “I think I found it!”

Logan reset his footing and pushed away. Standing upright required that his ankles bend sharply as his climbing shoes pressed for traction. But beginning scramblers learned to do that on their first outing. Now that he was paying attention again, Logan felt steady and controlled.

Just so long as you do pay attention, he reminded himself.

“Found what?” he called in her general direction.

“Daddy!” came exasperated tones, echoing faintly down narrow sidechannels. “I think I found the boundary!”

Logan smiled. As a child, Claire never used to call him “Daddy.” It had been an affront to her dignity. But now that the state of Oregon had issued her a self-reliance card, she seemed to like using the word — as if a small degree of residual, calculated childishness was her privilege as an emerging adult.

“I’m coming, Geode!” He patted his clothes, waving away drifts of dust. “I’ll be right there!”

The badlands stretched all around Logan. Sculpted by wind and rain and flash floods, they no doubt looked much as they had when first seen by whites, or by any people at all. Humans had lived in North America for only ten or twenty thousand years, tops. And though the weather had changed during that time — mostly growing dryer and hotter — it had been even longer since any appreciable greenery found a purchase on these sere slopes.

Still, there was beauty here: beige and cream and cinnamon beauty, textured like hard layers of some great, petrified pastry that had been kneaded hard below and then exposed by rough scourings of wind and rain. Logan loved these rocky deserts. Elsewhere, Earth wore its carpet of life as a softening mask. But here one could touch the planet’s tactile reality — mother Gaia without her makeup on.

His job often took him to places like this… to map out schemes for managing precious water. It was a role much like the “wildcatters” of twentieth-century lore, who used to scramble far and wide in search of petroleum, until each of the six hundred major sedimentary basins had been probed, palpated, steamed, and sucked dry.

Logan liked to think his goals were more mature, his task more benign and well thought out than that. Still he sometimes wondered. Might future generations look back on him and his world-spanning fraternity the way teledramas now depicted oilmen? As shortsighted fools, even rapists?

His ex-wife, Claire’s mother, had decided about that long ago. After his involvement in the project to cover over the lower Colorado River — saving millions of acre-feet of water from evaporation and creating the world’s longest greenhouse — she had rewarded him by throwing him out of the house.

Logan understood Daisy’s feelings… her obsessions, actually. But what was I to do? We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

All over the planet there were problems crying out for solutions, not tomorrow, but right now. Nations and cities wanted water shifted, pumped and diked. As the seas rose and rains migrated unpredictably, so did his labors, as governments strove desperately to adapt. Great changes were at work, in the air and land and oceans. They were the sort of global transformations one read of in the very rocks themselves… such as when one long epoch of geological stability would come suddenly and violently to an end, leaving everything forever recast.

And yet… Logan inhaled the scent of sage and juniper.

Nothing had altered this country within man’s memory. Not even the greenhouse effect. He rejoiced in places like this, where no one would ever ask for his services. Places invulnerable to any works he could imagine.

A red-tailed hawk patrolled the next mesa, cruising a thermal air current that made the intervening gullied slope swim before his eyes. He touched a control near the left strap of his goggles and the bird steadied in view, smart optics enabling him to share its hunt, vicariously. There was a gleam in the raptor’s yellow iris as it scanned the sparse cover, seeking prey that might be sheltered there.

The bird passed out of sight. Logan readjusted the goggles and resumed climbing.

Soon he encountered tricky territory. Shards of stone had broken from an undermined outcrop, leaving a treacherous scree in his path. Logan’s nostrils flared as he stepped off carefully, arms outstretched for balance. Then he hopped again, a little quicker.

This kind of ground was ideal, of course. Not particularly dangerous — he and Claire carried tracking beepers anyway, and Forest Service ’copters were less than thirty minutes away — but enough so to be thrilling. Logan leaped from boulder to tottering boulder. It lent an added spice of adrenaline to the exhilaration of just being out here in the open, far from the teeming cities or his growling bulldozers, without a care in the world beyond the crucial decision of where he was going to plant his feet next.

At last he landed, surefooted and elated, on another patch of easy slant — no more vertical than horizontal. Logan paused again to catch his breath.

He and Claire had seen many other hikers on their way here, of course. You needed reservations years in advance to get a camping permit. Ironically though, right now the two of them were completely alone in this particular area. While tourists thronged the easy nature trails and aficionados went for hard ascents, intermediate terrain like this often went unvisited for days at a stretch.

Squinting to blur vision a bit, Logan could almost smear out signs of recent human passage… those eroded spots where footprints had worn the stone in ways wind or water never could, or bits of paper or foil too small to qualify for antilitter fines. It was so quiet — no drone of aircraft engines at the moment, no voices — that one might even imagine one was treading ground no other person had explored in all of time.

It was a pleasant fantasy.

Logan scanned for his daughter, his goggles adapting to the changing glare. Now where has she gotten to?

A giggle made him start. “I’m right above you, dummy!”

Sure enough, there she was. Not five meters uphill, perched on a fifty-degree slope. She must have lain in wait, quiet and unmoving, for at least ten minutes as he approached.

“I never should have let Kala M’Lenko teach you stalking,” he muttered.

She tossed her hair, red tinged from the sun. Her skin was copper colored too, saying to hell with the palefaced fashion of the day. Where a normal sixteen-year-old would have worn the latest style in sun hats, she sported a sweat-band visor and streaks of white onc-ex cream.

“But you said a girl today oughta have survival skills.”

“Thems, you have in plenty. Too plenty, maybe,” Logan answered in pidgin Simglish. But he grinned. “Let’s see what you found.”

Actually, he was pleased with her attitude. As she led him up a path too narrow for footprints, Logan found himself recalling a time some years ago when he had challenged her to “find a rock” in Kansas.

They had been visiting his parents, before the divorce, but long after the Big Drought had forced plains farmers to switch from their beloved corn to sorghum and amaranth. Claire loved the Eng spread, even though the agricooperative it was a part of scarcely resembled the Ma and Pa farms still vivid in story books. At least it was more real than the lavish estate where Daisy had grown up, where Claire hated visiting because her aristo cousins so often cast her in the role of their amusing hick relation, who didn’t even know enough to care that she was poor.

“If you can find a rock, I’ll give you ten dollars,” he had told his daughter on that day, thinking it a simple way to keep her amused during the sluggish stretch until dinnertime. And while the inducement had been mere pocket change, she nevertheless scampered off into the harvested fields, searching through stubble while he lazed in a hammock, catching up on his journals.

It didn’t take Claire long to realize plowed fields weren’t good places to find stones. So she moved to the verges, where windbreak trees swayed in a bone-dry sirocco. During all that lazy afternoon she kept running back to her father with bits of treasure to show him… bottle caps and machine parts, for instance. Or ancient aluminum soft-drink pull-rings, still shiny after seventy years. And all sorts of other detritus from two and a half centuries’ ceaseless cultivation. They had fun puzzling over these trophies, and Logan would have been happy with just that. But, typically, Claire never forgot the original challenge.

She brought him hard clumps that proved, under a magnifying glass, to be only hardened dirt. She retrieved agglomerates of clay and chunks of broken cement. Every sample turned into a revelation, a glimpse into the past. Each time she would hurry off again, only to return a few minutes later, breathless with the next sample to be dissected.

Finally, when Logan’s mother called them in for supper, he broke the news to Claire. “There are no stones in Kansas, ” he had said. “Or at least not in this part of the state. Even after all the terrible erosion, there’s still hardly anywhere you can find bedrock. It’s all a great plain built up over thousands of years, out of dust and tiny bits blown down from the Rockies.

“There’s just no natural way for a stone to get here, honey.”

For an instant he had wondered if he’d taken a father’s license too far, teasing the child that way. But his daughter only looked at him and then pronounced, “Well, it was fun anyway. I guess I learned a lot.”

At the time Logan wondered at how easily she had accepted defeat. It was only three days later, as they prepared to depart for home, that she said to him, “Hold out your hand,” and placed in his palm a heavy, oblong shape, crusty, with a blackened, seared quality to it. Logan remembered blinking in surprise, hefting the stone. He took out his magnifier and then borrowed his father’s hammer to chip a corner.

No doubt about it. Claire had found a meteorite.

“There is a way for a stone to get here, isn’t there?” she had said. Silently, Logan pulled out coins and paid up.

Now, on this Wyoming slope, a much bigger Claire patted the slanting cliff where a sudden change in color could be seen, from mocha to a sort of toffee cream. She pointed to faint outlines, naming fossil creatures whose skeletons were set in stone when this had been the bottom of a great sea, millions of centuries ago. Logan’s own trip into memory was relatively minor in comparison, a mere eight years. But eight years which had changed that precocious little girl.

She won’t have to be picky to choose a man, he thought. She’ll scare off all but the few who can keep up with her.

“… and none of them appear above this line. They all died out right here!” She stroked the line again. “This has to be the Permian-Triassic boundary.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. Shall I take your picture next to it?”

Claire protested. “But we have to take a scraping! I want to take home—”

“Scraping second. Photo first. Humor Papa.”

Claire let out an exasperated sigh. But then, he thought, It’s a dad’s job to make light of things. To be hard to impress.

He touched the controls at the rims of his goggles. “Now smile,” he said.

“Oh all right. But wait a minute!”

She grabbed a flat electrobrush from her back pocket, flicked the switch to charge it, and began swiping at her tangled locks. Finally, she swept off her own goggles and ignored the ferocious sun to smile for the camera.

Logan grinned. In many ways, Claire was still quite sixteen.

It had been a good day. But returning to camp, dusty and with the grit of ages between his teeth, Logan looked forward to a quiet evening meal and collapsing in his sleeping bag. His pack, containing the full five kilos of rock samples allowed by Claire’s collector’s permit, he dropped with relief by the licensed fire ring.

Studiously, Logan pretended not to see the flashing light atop his tiny camp-transceiver. Until he touched the play button, he could still plead ignorance — claim he’d been out of reach somewhere on the mountain. Dammit. The others in his consulting firm had been told, forcefully. He wasn’t to be disturbed except in an emergency!

Washing his face with a cloth dipped in a crevice streamlet, Logan tried to be cynical. They probably want me back “urgently” to clear somebody’s drain spout. Returning to the tent, he tossed the wash cloth over the little red beacon.

But he couldn’t dismiss it that easily. His imagination betrayed him. While Claire rattled the cooking pot Logan kept envisioning scenes of moving water. As they ate quietly in the gathering dusk, he found himself — like some character out of a Joseph Conrad tale — picturing inundations, deluges, liquid calamities breaking through man’s flimsy barriers, setting all works, great and small, in peril.

It was incongruous, here in a parched land where one’s very pores gasped, where moisture was assessed in precious droplets. But he had little control over the train of images thrown up by his forboding unconscious. He pictured levees bursting, rivers shifting… the Mississippi finally spilling over the worn out dikes confining it, tearing through unprotected bayous to the sea.

Surrendering at last, he flung aside the tent flap and entered to read the damned message. He remained inside for some time.

Emerging at last, Logan saw that Claire had already packed away the utensils and was dismantling her own small shelter under the early stars. He blinked, wondering how she knew.

“Where’s the trouble?” she asked, as she rolled the soft fabric tent into a tight ball.

“Uh… Spain. There were some strange earthquakes. A couple of dams may be in danger.”

She looked up, excitement in her eyes. “Can I come? It won’t interrupt my schoolwork. I can study by hyper.”

Once again, Logan wondered what fine thing he must have done to deserve a kid like this. “Maybe next time. This’ll be just a quick dash. Probably they just want reassurance, so I’ll hold their hands a while and then hurry back.”

“But Daddy…”

“Meanwhile, you’ve got to spend a lot of time on the Net, catching up, or that college in Oregon could revoke your remote status. Do you want to have to go back to high school? At home in Louisiana? In person?”

Claire shivered. “High school. Ugh. All right. Next time, then. So get your gear_; I’ll take care of your tent. If we hurry we can make it to Drop Point by eight and catch the last zep into Butte.”

She grinned. “Hey. It’ll be fun. I’ve never done a three point five traverse in the dark before. Maybe it’ll even be scary.”

• BIOSPHERE

Nelson Grayson had arrived in the Ndebele canton of Kuwenezi with two changes of clothes, a satchel of stolen Whatifs, and an inflated sense of his own importance. All were gone by the time, nine months later, he gathered his tools by the Level Fourteen Ape-iary and stepped through the hissing airlock into a bitter-bright, air-conditioned savannah. By then, of course, it was far too late to regret the reckless way he’d spent the profits from his smuggled software. Too late to seek another career path.

By then, Nelson felt irrevocably committed to shoveling baboon shit for a living.

It was not a highly regarded occupation. In fact, the keepers would have assigned robots the job, if not for the monkeys’ annoying habit of nibbling plastic. As yet, robots lacked the kind of survival instincts Nelson had been born with — courtesy of a million years of frightened ancestors.

At least, each of those ancestors had survived long enough to beget another in the chain leading to him. In his former life Nelson had never given much thought to that. But of late he’d grown to appreciate the accomplishment, especially as his employers reassigned him from habitat to habitat — catering to one wild and unpredictable species after another.

Most of his first months had been spent in the sprawling main ark — Kuwenezi Canton’s chief contribution to the World Salvation Project, where scientists and volunteers recreated entire ecosystems under multi-tiered, vaulting domes, where gazelles and wildebeest ran across miniature ranges that looked and felt almost real. Nelson’s first task had been to carry fodder to the ungulates and report when any looked sick. To his surprise, it wasn’t all that hard. In fact, boredom made him ask for a more demanding job. And so they named him dung inspector.

Great. I had to open my mouth. If I ever make it home to Canada, you can bet I’ll tell them what kind of hospitality you can expect in South Africa, these days.

It was apparently no different here in ark four — a tapered wedge of steel and reinforced glass two miles from Kuwenezi’s main tower, sitting atop the canton’s long-abandoned gold mine. Ark four was the gene-crafters’ lab, where new types were sought that might endure the sleeting ultraviolet outside or adapt to the creeping deserts and shifting rains.

Nelson had nursed a fantasy that his reassignment here was a promotion. But then the director had handed him the familiar electroprod and sampler, and sent him to face more baboons.

I hate baboons! I can feel them lookin’ at me. It’s like I can tell what they’re thinking.

Nelson did not like what he imagined going on in the minds of baboons.

These monkeys were different at least. He could tell soon after pushing into sight of a copse of grey-green acacia trees, their leaves drooping in the dusty heat. Clustered beneath those gnarled limbs were about forty creatures, darker than the tawny beasts he had known in the main ark, and noticeably larger, too. They moved lazily, as sensible creatures would under the noon sun — even moderated by the expanse of reinforced glass overhead. Only idiotic humans like Dr. B’Keli insisted on work in conditions like these;

Procrastinating, Nelson looked the troop over. Perhaps they weren’t completely natural baboons at all. Nelson had heard rumors about some experiments…

His nostrils flared as fickle air currents wafted his way. They sure smelled like baboons. And when he shuffled through the sharp savannah grass toward them, Nelson soon knew that any genetic differences had to be minor. They still moved about on four feet, tails flicking, stopping to pry open nuts or groom each other or snarl and cuff their neighbors, jockeying for status and dominance within the stepped hierarchy of the troop.

Oh, they’re baboons, all right.

As soon as he came in sight, the troop rearranged itself, with strong young males taking posts at the periphery. Grizzled, powerful elders rose up on haunches to watch him nonchalantly.

Nelson knew these creatures lived mostly as vegetarians. He also knew they ate meat whenever they could. Until the collapse of the planetary ozone layer and the accompanying weather changes, baboons had been among the most formidable wild species in Africa. It had amazed Nelson when he first overheard, a month ago, one scientist commenting that mankind had evolved alongside such adversaries.

I’ll never call a caveman stupid again, he vowed as one of the creatures lazily bared impressive fangs at him. Paranoid, yes. Cavemen must’ve been real paranoid. But paranoia ain’t so dumb.

At least the troop appeared calm and well fed. But that was deceptive. Back in the main ark Nelson had come to compare life in a baboon troop with an ongoing — often violent — soap opera without words.

He saw one senior male rock on his haunches, watching a pregnant female seek tasty grubs under nearby rocks. Rhythmically smacking his lips, the patriarch pulled in his chin and flattened his ears, exposing white eyelid patches. The female responded by ambling over to sit by him, facing away. Methodically, he began picking through her fur, removing dirt, bits of dead skin, and the occasional parasite.

Another female approached and began nudging the expectant mother to move over and share the male’s attention. The screeching fit that ensued was brief and inconsequential as such things went. In a minute the two had been cuffed into silence and all three monkeys turned away, minding their own business again.

Nelson’s job was to sample monkey droppings for a routine microflora survey — whatever that was. As he approached, he recalled what Dr. B’Keli had told him after his first, unpleasant encounter with baboons.

“Don’t ever look them in the eye. That was exactly the wrong thing to do! The dominant males will take it as a direct challenge.”

“Fine,” Nelson had answered, wincing as the nurse sutured two narrow bites on his posterior. Wow you tell me!”

But of course, it really had all been in the introductory tapes he was supposed to have watched, back when his funds first ran out and he found himself willing to take a job, any job. Those painful bites reinforced the then startling revelation that tape learning might actually have practical value, after all.

Tutored by experience, he now kept the electroprod ready, but pointed away in a nonthreatening manner. With his other hand, Nelson pushed the sticklike dung sampler into a brown mass half hidden in the grass. Buzzing flies rose indignantly.

I don’t like Dr. B’Keli. For one thing, despite his “authentic” sounding name, the biologist’s caramel features were suspiciously pale. He even had light-colored eyes.

Of course whites could legally work in all but two of the Federation’s cantons. And nobody else, from the director on down, seemed to care that a blanke held high position among the Ndebele. Still, Nelson nursed resentment over the subtle discrimination his settler parents used to suffer from whites, back in the Yukon new town of his birth, and had imagined the tables would be turned here, where blacks ruled and even U.N. rights inspectors were held at bay.

Now he knew how naive he’d been, expecting these people to welcome him like a long-lost brother. In fact, Kuwenezi was a lot like those boom town suburbs of White Horse. Both seethed with ambition and indolence, with rising and falling hopes… and with authority figures insisting on hard work if you wanted to eat.

Hard work had turned his parents’ filthy refugee camp into bustling, prosperous Little Nigeria — commercial center for the new farming districts scattered across the thawing tundra. Little Nigeria’s immigrant merchants and shopkeepers turned their backs on Africa. They sang “Oh, Canada” and cheered the Voyageurs on the teli. His folks worked dawn to dusk, sent money to his sister at that Vancouver college, and politely pretended not to hear when some drunkard patronizingly “welcomed” them to a frontier that belonged as much to them as to any beer-swilling Canuck land speculator.

Well, I didn’t forget. And I won’t.

The sampler finished digesting its bit of dung and signaled. Nelson shook loose the brown remnant. After the initial sensation of his arrival the baboons had settled down again. Calm prevailed. Momentarily, at least.

Strange, how over the last few weeks he had grown so much more confident in his ability to “read” the moods of his animal charges. Behaviors that had been opaque to him before were now clear, such as their never-ending struggle over hierarchy. The word was used repeatedly in those dreary indoctrination tapes, but it had taken personal contact to start seeing all the ladders of power running through baboon society.

The males’ struggles for dominance were noisy, garish affairs. Their bushy manes inflated to make them seem twice their size. That, plus snarling displays of teeth, usually caused one or the other to back down. Still, over in the main ark Nelson had witnessed one male savannah baboon spilling a rival’s entrails across the gray earth. The red-muzzled victor screamed elation across the waving grasses.

It had taken a bit longer to realize that females, too, battled over hierarchy… seldom as extravagantly as the males, and involving not so much simple breeding rights as food and status. Still, their rancor could be longer lasting, more resolute.

The troop’s dominant male stared at him, a huge brute massing at least thirty-five kilos. Scars along the creature’s grizzled flanks sketched testimony of former battles. Wherever he moved, others quickly got out of his way. The patriarch’s expression was serene.

Now there’s a bloke who gets respect.

Nelson couldn’t help thinking of his own triumphs and more frequent failures back in White Horse, where the flash of a knife sometimes decided a boy’s claim to the “tribal pinnacle” — or even his life. Girls, too, had their ways of cutting each other down. Then there were all the power pyramids of school and town, of work and society. Hierarchies. They all had that in common.

Moreover, not one of those hierarchies had appeared to want or value him. It was an uncomfortable insight, and Nelson hated the baboons all the more for making it so clear.

Nelson’s sweaty grip on the electroprod tightened as a pair of young adults, maybe twenty kilos each, settled down a few meters away to pick through each others’ fur. One adolescent turned and yawned at him, gaping wide enough to swallow Nelson’s leg up to his calf. Nelson edged away some distance before resuming with another pile of turds.

“I think I might like to work with animals,” he had told them when he first arrived at Kuwenezi, his one-way air ticket used up and his supply of bootlegged Whatifs spread across the placement officer’s desk.

Shortly before making the fateful decision to come here, Nelson had seen a documentary about the canton’s scientists — Africans fighting to save Africa. It was a romantic image. So when asked what work he’d like to do as a new citizen, the first thing to come to mind had been the Ark Project. “Of course I’ll want to invest my money first I may prefer to work part-time, y’know. ”

The placement officer had glanced down at the software capsules Nelson had pirated from the White Horse office of the CBC. “Your contribution suffices for provisional admission, ” he had said. “And I think we can find you suitable work.”

Nelson grimaced at the recollection. “Right. Shoveling monkey shit. That’s real suitable.” But his money was gone now, lavished on instant new friends who proved stylishly fickle when the juice ran out. And back in Canada the CBC had sworn out a local warrant for his arrest.

The sampler beeped. Nelson wiped its tip and glanced back at the two young males. They had been joined by a small female carrying a baby. As he moved on in search of more dung, they followed him.

Nelson kept them in sight while he probed the next pile. The young female looked fidgety. She kept glancing back at the troop. After a couple of minutes, she approached one of the males and held out her baby to him.

After six months in the arks, Nelson had a pretty good idea what the young mother was trying to do. Adult baboons were often fascinated by babies. Top-rank females, tough mamas Nelson called them, used this to their advantage, letting others help care for their infants, as if granting their inferiors a special favor.

Other females feared uninvited attention to their offspring. Sometimes the one taking the baby never gave it back again. So a low-status mother sometimes tried to recruit protectors.

Still, this was the first time Nelson had ever seen the attempt so direct. The infant cooed appealingly at the big male, and its mother made grooming gestures. But the male only inspected the baby idly and then turned away to scratch after insects in the soil.

Nelson blinked, suddenly experiencing one of those unexpected, unwanted moments of vivid recollection. It was a memory of one Saturday night two years ago, and a girl he had met at the New Lagos Club.

The first part of that encounter had been perfection. She seemed to dial in on him from across the room, and when they danced her moves were as smooth as a rapitrans rail and just as electric. Then there were her eyes. In them he was so sure he read a promise of enthusiasm for whoever won her. They left early. Escorting her home to her tiny coldwater flat, Nelson had felt alive with anticipation.

Meeting her elderly aunt in the kitchen hadn’t been promising, but the girl simply sent the old woman off to bed. He remembered reaching for her then. But she held him off and said, “I’ll be right back. ”

While waiting, he heard soft noises from the next room. The rustle of fabric heightened his sense of expectation. But when she emerged again, she was still fully dressed, and in her arms she held a two-year-old child.

“Isn’t he cute?” she said, as the infant rubbed his eyes and looked up from Nelson’s lap. “Everyone says he’s the best-behaved little boy in White Horse. ”

Nelson had shelved his sexual hopes at once. His memory was vague about what followed, but he recalled a long, embarrassed silence, punctuated by fumbling words as he maneuvered the child off his lap and worked his way toward the door. But one image he recalled later with utter clarity — it was that last, unnerving, patient expression on the young woman’s face before he turned and fled.

Nelson realized later she’d been worse than crazy. She’d had a plan. And for some reason he came away from that episode feeling he was the one who had failed.

The little mother baboon turned to look directly at him and Nelson shivered at a strange moment of deja vu. Summoning B’Keli’s injunction against direct eye contact, he found much to do, searching for more piles to check.

The expanse of superhard glass overhead might keep out the ultraviolet, but it hardly eased the savannah heat. Artificial mimicry of the greenhouse effect made it stifling, in spite of the blowing fans. As he had been doing for a few weeks now, Nelson took humidity and temperature readings from his belt monitor and noted the direction of the desultory breeze. Slowly, he was coming to recognize the way even a man-made environment had its “seasons,” its “natural” responses to unnatural controls.

His sampling path soon took him toward the edge of the habitat where slanted panes met the rim wall. Trays of cables circuited the habitat two meters high. Through the transparent barrier he could see the dun hillsides and sunburnt wheat fields of a land once called Rhodesia, then Zimbabwe, and several other names before finally becoming Ndebele Canton of the Federation of Southern Africa.

It wasn’t like any “Africa” Nelson had seen while growing up, lying prone in front of the B-movie channel. No elephants. No rhinos. Certainly no Tarzan here. At least he’d had enough sense not to flee Canada for his parents’ lamented homeland. Everyone knew what had become of Nigeria. The rains that had abandoned this land now drenched the Bight of Africa, engulfing abandoned cities there.

Deserts or drowning. Africa just could not get a break.

Closer in view were the sealed chambers below this one, a series of glistening ziggurat terraces leading step by step toward the dusty ground, each sheltering a different habitat, a different midget ecosphere rescued from the ruined continent.

The coterie of curious baboons in his trail had grown by the time Nelson came closest to the glassy wall. They went about their business — eating, grooming, scuffling — but all the time watching him with a nonchalant fascination that drew them in his wake. Each time he finished sampling a pile of feces, several monkeys would poke at the disturbed mass, perhaps curious what he found so attractive about ordinary turds.

Why are they following me? he wondered, perplexed by the monkeys’ behavior, so unlike that of their cousins in the main ark. Once, the alpha male stared directly at Nelson, who was careful not to accept the implied challenge.

Nervously, he realized the entire troop now lay between him and the corridor airlock.

The little mother and her baby remained his closest adherents. Nelson noticed her anxiety grow as five larger females approached, several of them clearly high-status matriarchs, whose sleek infants rode their backs like lords. One of the newcomers handed her baby to a helper and then began sidling toward the solitary mother.

The young one screeched defiance, clutching her infant close and backing away. Her eyes darted left and right, but none of the creatures nearby seemed more than vaguely interested in her plight. Certainly none of the big, lazy males offered any succor.

Nelson felt a twinge of sympathy. But what could he do? Rather than watch, he turned and hurried several meters to another set of droppings. He wiped his brow on his shirtsleeve and put his back to the blazing sun. In the muggy heat daydreams transported him back to his own room in the cool northlands, with his own bed, his own teli, his own little fridge stuffed with icy Labatts, and his mother’s pungent Yoruba cooking wafting upstairs from the kitchen. The reverie was pleasant beyond all expectation, but it shattered in an instant when he felt a sudden sharp tug on his pants leg.

Nelson swiveled, holding the stun-prod in both shaking hands. Then he exhaled an oath. It was only the little female again — now wide-eyed and sweat-damp, wearing a grimace of fear. Still, she did not back away when he shook the rod at her. Rather, she edged forward, trembling and awkward on two feet, clasping her infant with one paw while in the other she held forth something small and brown.

Nelson broke into nervous laughter. “Great! That’s all I need. She’s offering me shit!”

Flies buzzed as she shuffled another step, extending her piquant gift.

“G’wan, beat it, eh? I got enough to sample. And it’s supposed t’be undisturbed shit, get it?”

She seemed to understand at least part of it. The rejection part. With some retained dignity she spilled the feces onto the dry earth and wiped her paw on grass stems, all the time watching him.

The other monkeys had backed away when he shouted. Now they returned to their affairs as if nothing had happened. At first glance, one might guess they were content, foraging and lazing in the warm afternoon. But Nelson could sense undercurrents of tension. The patriarch’s nostrils flared as he sniffed, then resumed grooming one of his underlings.

This is one troop of insane monkeys, all light. Nelson wondered if there were still openings hauling hay to giraffes. With a resigned sigh he moved on, calculating how many more piles of crap he had to cover before at last he could get out of here, shower, and go nurse a beer or two — or four.

Screams suddenly erupted behind him, shrill peals of panic and fury. Nelson turned, his nerves finally tipped over into anger. “Now I’ve had enough …”

The words choked off as a small maelstrom of dark brown landed in his arms. Flailing for balance, he nearly fell over as a screeching creature clawed at his dungarees, scratching his shoulders and arms. Nelson staggered backward swearing, trying to protect his face and throw the baboon off. But the creature only scrambled around behind his shoulders, enclosing his neck in a fierce constriction.

Nelson wheezed. “Damn stupid crazy…” Then, just as suddenly, he forgot all about the small monkey on his back. He gaped at the entire troop, now arrayed in a half circle around him.

Moments ticked by, punctuated by the pounding of his heart. Most of the dark animals merely watched, as if this were great entertainment. The lead male licked himself lazily.

But facing Nelson directly now were five large, grimacing beasts who appeared to have something much more active in mind. They paced back and forth, turning and barking at him, tails flicking expressively.

The troop’s dominant females, he knew quickly. But why were they angry with him? The matriarchs’ band moved forward. Nelson did not like the gleam he saw in their eyes.

“Stay… stay back,” he gasped, and brandished the stunner-prod. At least he thought it was the prod, until a second glance showed it to be the sampler. Where had the damned prod gone!

He saw it at last several meters away. The biggest male was pressing his broad, multicolored snout against the white plastic, sniffing it. Cursing, he realized he must have dropped his only weapon in that initial moment of panic.

Nelson had more immediate problems than recovering Kuwenezi Ark property. Less savagely intimidating than adult males, the females nonetheless growled impressively. Their teeth shone saliva-bright, and he knew why even leopards and hyenas did not dare attack baboons in a group.

It wasn’t hard to figure who it was cowering on his back, pressing her infant between them. In desperation, the little mother had apparently decided to enlist his “protection” whether he offered it or not. He stepped sideways, in the direction of the exit, speaking soothingly to the angry females. “Now… take it easy, eh? Peace an’ love… uh, nature is harmony, right?”

They didn’t seem particularly interested in reason, nor in slogans borrowed from the Earth Mother movement. They spread to cut him off.

I heard they can be pretty mean in their fights between females… I even saw one kill the baby of another. But this is ridiculous! Don’t they care I’m a man? We feed them. We made this place, to save them!

He realized with a sinking sensation that only one of these monkeys had any respect for him. And that shivering creature had turned to him only because nobody more important gave a damn.

Nelson looked around. One of the outer airlocks was just thirty meters away, opening onto the roof of the habitat below. He had no sun hat or goggles, but could easily stand the harsh daylight long enough to dash to another entrance. He began sidestepping that way slowly, maintaining a soothing monologue. “That’s right… I’ll just be goin’, then… no need for trouble, eh?”

He was halfway to his destination when the following monkeys seemed to grasp his intent. In a blur, two of them moved quickly to cut off that escape. Together, the pair of irate females blocking his path didn’t even equal his mass, but their tough hides looked all but impervious while Nelson’s own skin, already throbbing and bleeding from his little passenger’s unintended damage, seemed tender and useless against those savage, glistening canines.

Both airlocks were out, then. A utilities tray circuited the wall at about man height — the only conceivable refuge in sight. Nelson dropped the sampler and ran for it.

Their angry screeches amplified off the reflecting glass. His pursuers’ rapid footfalls paced the pounding of his heart as Nelson poured everything he had into reaching the wall. The sound of snapping jaws triggered a jolt of adrenaline. He took two final strides and leaped for the conduit tray, his fingers tearing for a hold on the slippery metal mesh. Fangs snagged his pants and laid a bloody runnel along his right calf as he swung his legs up at the last moment.

As soon as he was wrapped around the tray, his little passenger scrambled over him to clamber onto the cluster of pipes and cables. One foot squashed his nose as she hoisted her infant onto a nearby stanchion, but Nelson was too exhausted to do more than just hang there while the creatures below leaped and snapped at him some more, missing his rear end by inches. Inside, he had left only enough energy to curse himself for an idiot.

They gave me a chance! he realized. The matriarchs had waited after the young female leaped on him, to see what he’d do. He could have rejected her then — could have pried her loose and put her down.

Hell, all I’d have had to do was sit down… she’d have had to run for it.

Of course, the conclusion was inevitable anyway. The little monkey didn’t have a chance. But at least it wouldn’t have involved him. Now Nelson understood the other baboons’ anger. He’d violated his own neutrality. He had taken sides.

When he finally caught his breath, he wriggled and puffed his way atop the narrow platform. Seated a meter away, his unwelcome charge licked her baby and watched him. When he moved to sit up, she backed off a bit to give him room.

“You,” he panted, pointing at her, “are a lot of trouble.”

To his surprise she turned her back on him in a motion he recognized. She was asking him to groom her!

“Fat chance o’ that,” he muttered.

Morosely, he looked around. The troop seemed content simply to observe for a while. The big male examining Nelson’s stunner hadn’t found the trigger — worse luck — but he had dragged it halfway to the acacia grove before losing interest and abandoning it. Now the nearest exit was much closer than his weapon.

The cabal of high-status females sat calmly on their haunches, looking up at him. One by one they left briefly to check on their own infants — in “day care” with lower-status monkeys — then quickly rejoined the impromptu posse-lynch mob.

Nelson turned and pounded the thick pane of barrier glass behind him in frustration. A low hum was the only response… that and bruised knuckles. The Bangkok crystal sheeting was incredibly tough. He didn’t even contemplate trying to break it.

Beyond lay lower terraces of the ark tower, each sheltered beneath still more tightly-sealed glass. Nelson could make out forest growth within the ecosystem just below this one. In addition to preserving a patch of jungle, it provided part of the passive atmosphere regeneration that made ark four all but self-sufficient.

Movement caught his eye. Along the treetops below he saw people walking through the forest canopy, along a catwalk skyway. Nelson squinted, and recognized both the dark face of the ark director and the coffee features of Dr. B’Keli. They were showing off the new artificial ecosphere to a white woman, small and frail and quite elderly. From their expressions, they seemed eager to make a good impression. She nodded, and at one point reached out to pluck a leaf and rub it between her hands.

“Hey! Up here! Look up here!” Nelson beat the glass — an effort that seemed required given his circumstances, though he had no real hope of being heard.

Sure enough, the group strolled on, oblivious to the drama unfolding over their heads.

Damn them. Damn the arks. Damn the Salvation Project… and damn me for ever getting myself into this mess!

At that moment Nelson loathed everybody he could think of — from twentieth-century humanity, who had wrecked Earth’s delicate balance, to the voters and bureaucrats of the twenty-first, who spent fortunes trying to save what was left, to his caveman ancestors, who had been stupid enough to grow big, useless brains that everybody was always trying to cram with book learning, when what a guy really needed were claws, and big teeth, and skin as tough as old leather!

He remembered the leader of the Bantus, a “youth club” he had tried to join back in White Horse. It wasn’t supposed to be run like an old-style urban gang, but that was how it turned out anyway. For months Nelson had come home from an endless series of “initiations,” each time more bruised than the last — until it finally dawned on him that he just wasn’t wanted… that his only use to them was as an outlet for their “organized group activity” — the tribe strengthening its internal bonding by beating up on someone else.

He glanced across the prairie at the top male baboon, so serene and in charge, yawning complacently and ferociously. Nelson hated the patriarch and envied him.

If I had a hide like that… If I had fangs…

His attention was drawn back by the shaking of his unsteady platform. Nelson turned to see that the little female was hopping up and down, grimacing, tugging at his sleeve. “Stop that!” he cried. “This thing isn’t built to take that kind of…” Then he looked beyond and saw what had her so upset.

Her foes must have found one of the access ladders. Or maybe they had boosted each other, forming a multimonkey pyramid. However they managed it, three of the largest were now picking their way along the cable tray, heading in this direction.

“Oh hell,” he sighed. The young mother backed against him. Her infant’s dark eyes were wide with fear.

Nelson glanced down at the ground, and saw with surprise that the way was clear below! As he watched, the head male and his followers cleared a path, cuffing other baboons aside. The alpha male looked up at Nelson then, and tilted his head.

With uncanny insight, Nelson suddenly understood. He had only to jump, and he could run all the way to the airlock unmolested before the crazy females caught up with him!

Perhaps. But he’d never make it encumbered. He exchanged a look with the bull. That, it seemed, was part of the bargain. He was not to interfere in the natural working out of their social order. Nelson nodded, comprehending. He waited till the small female next to him was fully engaged, all her attention given to answering the threatening grimaces of her stalkers. At that moment Nelson slipped over the edge.

It was a bad landing. He came to his feet gasping at a sharp twinge in his ankle. Hurriedly, though, he hopped away several meters before pausing to glance back.

Nobody was following him. In fact, the troop mostly faced the other way, watching the drama reach its climax on the ledge overhead. The bull appeared to have dismissed him completely now that he was leaving the scene.

Burdened by her infant, though, the small mother could not follow him. She stared after him instead, blinking with a mute disappointment he could read only too well. Then she had no time for anything but immediate concerns; with her infant on her back, she turned to bare her teeth at her assailants.

Nelson backed away another two steps toward the safety of the exit, now beckoning only twenty or so meters away. Still, he couldn’t tear his eyes away. He was captivated by the small baboon’s stand, grimacing final defiance at her foes, holding them back with brave lunges. It was an effort she could not keep up for long.

From experience, he knew the other females did not seek her death, only the baby’s. It was a bit of savagery he had not questioned until today. Now though, for the very first time, Nelson wondered… why.

It was so cruel. So awful. It reminded him of human nastiness. And yet, in all the time he had been here, he had never asked the experts about this or any other matter. It had been as if… as if to do so would be to admit too openly the ignorance he had nurtured for so long. His frail, rigid facade of cynicism could not bear curiosity. Once he started asking questions, where would it stop?

Nelson felt a pressure building in his head. It couldn’t be restrained…

“Why?” he demanded aloud, and felt his voice catch at the sound.

Protecting her child, the mother backed away awkwardly, shrieking at her enemies.

“Why’s it like this!” he asked, to no one present save himself.

Barely aware of what he was doing, Nelson found himself limping forward. He felt eyes track him as he held up his arms.

“Hey, you!” he called. “I’m back. Come on down…”

He had no need to repeat himself. The mother monkey grabbed her baby and launched herself from the doomed redoubt, landing in his arms as a taut bundle of scrawny brown fur, clawing for purchase on his already bleeding shoulders. Nelson hurriedly stepped away, fully resigned that now there was no way he’d reach the airlock in time. Sure enough, when he glanced back a crowd of angry baboons were catching up fast. The original pursuers had now been joined by several more irate monkeys, at least two of them large, pink-faced males, all dashing his way, screaming.

Nelson did not bother trying to run any further. He turned and scanned the ground for anything — anything at all — until his gaze fell upon a white rod.

His dung sampler.

Sighing that it wasn’t even the inadequate shock-prod, Nelson snatched it up, carrying the motion through just in time to catch a leaping baboon in the snout. The creature screamed and tumbled whimpering away.

The females scattered, dispersing on all sides. Dark eyes peered at him through the tall grass.

Panting, blinking in surprise, Nelson wondered. Was that it? Hey, maybe all it takes is the right bluff!

Then he saw why the females had given up so easily. They were moving aside to make room for a new force.

Rumbling with a low rage, the patriarch and his entourage arrived. Nine big males, their manes fully inflated, ambled with patient assuredness toward him and his frightened, weary charge. Their pace might be confident, but flecks of saliva dripped from their curled lips. Nelson read their eyes, and knew them for killers.

And yet, in that same suspended moment, Nelson had time to feel something he had never before imagined… a strange, crystal calm. As if this was all somehow familiar. As if he had been in this place, in this very predicament, many times before.

We were all like this, once, he realized, feeling the weight of his makeshift cudgel. White, black, yellow… men, women… our ancestors all shared this, long ago…

Back when Africa was new…

Human beings had changed the world, for well and ill. Would their efforts now save what was left? Nelson couldn’t begin to guess.

All he knew for sure was that for the first time he cared.

Nelson and the little mother shared communion in a moment’s eye contact. Leaving her baby clinging to his shoulder, she slipped down to stand beside his left knee, guarding his flank.

The pack slowed and circled. The bull shook his head, as if reading something different in Nelson’s stance, in his eyes. But Nelson suddenly knew the creature saw only part of it.

We humans almost wrecked the whole world. Humans may yet save it…

You don’t mess with guys who can do shit like that.

“Okay, it’s nine against two,” he said, hefting his rude club, smacking its reassuring weight in the palm of his left hand.

“That sounds about right.”

When at last they charged, Nelson was ready for them.

• LITHOSPHERE

The rattling truck stank to high heaven.

It wasn’t just the fumes from its gasoline engine—

Logan Eng was used to riding high-priority construction equipment. Fragrant, high-octane aromatics were as familiar as the grit of countless deserts or the metal tang of grease and drilling mud. Even the sweat fetor pervading the cracked upholstery spoke pungently of honor-able work.

But in addition to all that, Logan’s driver was a tobacco addict. Worse, he didn’t take his nicotine in pills or spray. No, Enrique Vasquez actually smoked paper-trapped bundles of shredded weed, inhaling the sooty vapors with deep sighs of satisfaction.

Logan eyed in unwilling fascination the glowing ember that seemed ever about to fall off the tip of Enrique’s cigarette. So far in this lurching ride across rugged Basque countryside, that mesmerizing bit of ash hadn’t yet set off flaming catastrophe. But he could not help picturing it landing amid the floorboards, there igniting a great ball of exploding petrol fumes.

Of course Logan knew better. (With his forebrain!) Only a generation ago, over a billion cigarettes had been consumed each year. And back in TwenCen, the rate had reached staggering trillions. If the things were as unsafe as they looked, not a forest or city would be left standing.

“You will want to stay for our National Day celebrations!” Enrique bellowed to be heard over the engine and rattling springs. The hand holding the cigarette draped the open window casing, leaving the other to handle both steering and shifting. The complaining gearbox set Logan’s teeth on edge in sympathy.

“I wish I could!” he shouted back. “But my job in Iberia’s finished tomorrow. I’m due back in Louisiana—”

“Too bad! It would you make happy. Glorious fireworks we’ll see! Everyone drunk gets. Then the young men, fun with the bulls have!”

The Basque were the oldest people in Europe, and proud of their heritage. Some said their language came from the Neolithic hunters who first claimed this land from the retreating ice. In a Bilbao museum, Logan had seen replicas of tiny boats Basque sailors used long ago, to hunt whales out on the rude Atlantic. They must be very brave or suicidal, he thought, then and now.

Logan gasped as his guide swerved, sending plumes of dust and gravel billowing toward an onrushing lumber hauler. The drivers exchanged obscene gestures with a vehemence that seemed quite sociable, in its macho way. Enrique shouted parting insults as the pickup roared along the rocky verge of a hundred-meter drop. Logan swallowed hard.

They sped past tumbled stones that must once have been some ancient wall or boundary. Conifer forests blurred where hardscrabble farms and pastures once covered these slopes. Here and there, commercial quick-pine gave way to newer stands of cedar and oak, planted in grudging compliance with the Balanced Reforestation Treaty, though their slower growth would profit only future generations.

Enrique grinned at him, all traces of indignation already forgotten. “So. Have they, the dams’ safety, determined yet?”

Logan managed to parse the strange version of Simglish they taught here. He nodded.

“I spent a week in Badajoz, going over every datum within two hundred klicks of the quake epicenter. Those dams will last a long while yet.”

Enrique grunted. “In Castile they are good engineers. Not like down in Granada, where the land they are letting go to hell.” He spat out the window.

Logan refrained comment. Never get involved in interregional prejudices was a principal rule. Anyway, nobody could stop the climate from changing, since the Sahara had vaulted the Straits to begin southern Europe’s desertification.

Blame it on the greenhouse effect, Logan thought. Or the shifting Gulf Stream. Hell, blame it on gnomes. Let the scientists figure out causes. What matters to me is how much we can save.

Logan closed his eyes and tried to sleep. After all, if Enrique sent the truck over a cliff, watching it happen wouldn’t change it. Anyway, if he’d had ambitions to live forever he’d never have become field engineer. He hardly noticed the rhythmic jouncing of his skull against the metal door frame — a relatively trivial irritant. Dozing, he found himself recalling how Daisy — his former wife and Claire’s mother — used to approve of his professional plans.

You’ll fight the system from within, she had told him when they were students and in love. Meanwhile, I’ll battle it from the outside.

The plan had sounded bold and perfect then. Neither of them had figured on the way people change… he by learning compromise, she by growing more adamant with each passing year.

Maybe she only married me to get at her family. It wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to Logan. At Tulane, she had said he was the only boy who seemed completely unimpressed with her money and name — which was true enough. After all, financiers just own things, while a skilled person with a job he loves has much, much more.

How strange then, years later, for Daisy to accuse him of being a “tool of rich-pig land rapists.” All that time it had been in his head that he was keeping his side of their bargain, forsaking lucrative deals in favor of confronting incompetence in the field, compelling governments and egotistic planners with grandiose schemes to look more than a decade ahead, to work with nature instead of always against her.

Yes, he also had been motivated by a joy of craft and the pleasure of solving real, palpable puzzles. Was that a betrayal? Can’t a man have several loves at once — a wife, a child, and the world?

For Daisy, apparently, there could be only one. The world. And on her terms.

The truck passed out of the forest, zooming along dusty headlands. Sunlight reconnoitered the edges of Logan’s sunglasses as his thoughts drifted randomly. The zigzag speckles under his eyelids reminded him at one point of waves on a seismograph.

Queer waves, the professor from the University of C6r-doba had called them, ecstatically describing the recent surge of bizarre earthquakes. At first Logan’s interest had been solely to estimate possible hidden damage to large structures such as dams. But as he looked over the frequency spectrum of the tremors he saw one strangeness more peculiar than all the others.

Sharp peaks at wavelengths of 59, 470, 3,750, and 30,000 meters.

Octaves, Logan realized at the time. Eightfold harmonics. I wonder what that could possibly mean?

Then there was the mystery of one drilling tower that had vanished. Water miners, digging an exploratory well when the quakes struck, had run scurrying for shelter, some of them stumbling from vision blurred to the point of blindness. When it was over, and at last they could see again, it was only to stare blankly at the place where the rig had stood. There lay only a hole, as if. some giant had come along and uprooted everything!

Including its tower, the entire drill string had just reached a length of 470 meters.

Of course, it could be a coincidence. But even so, what on Earth could convert quake energy into . . .

“Senor.” The driver interrupted Logan’s lazy musing. Enrique nudged him with an elbow and Logan cracked one eyelid. “Hm?”

“Senor, you can the bay oversee now.”

Logan sat up, rubbing his eyes… then inhaled sharply. Instantly all thought of quakes and harmonic mysteries vanished. He gripped the door frame, looking across a sea that was the same color as Daisy McClennon’s eyes.

For all her craziness, her obsessiveness, the single-mindedness that eventually drove him from their home — his former wife’s eyes were still the ideal by which Logan measured all beauties. Amid the noisy student demonstrations where they first met, she had thought it was shared ideological fervor that made him ignore her money and look directly at her instead. But in truth, it had been those eyes.

Transfixed, he didn’t even look for the tidal power station that was their destination. He had room right then for just the sea. It was enough to fill his soul.

The poor, tortured transmission screamed as Enrique downshifted and sent the rattling truck careening toward the aquamarine waters of the Bay of Biscay.

• CRUST

“Watching, all the time watching… goggle-eye geeks. Soon as I get out, I’m gonna Patagonia, buy it? That’s where the youth growth is. More ripe fruit like us, Cuzz. And not so many barrel spoilers… rotten old apples that sit an’ stink and stare atcha…” Remi agreed with Crat’s assessment as the three of them strode side by side down a gravel path through the park. Roland also expressed approval, nudging Crat’s shoulder. “That’s staccato code, boy-oh.”

What brought on Crat’s sudden outburst was the sight of yet another babushka, glaring at them from a bench under one of the force-grown shade trees as Remrand Roland and Crat scrambled up a grassy bank from the culvert where they’d been smoking. The very moment they came into view, the old woman laid her wire-knitting aside and fixed them with the bug-eyed, opaque gape of her True-Vu lenses — staring as if they were freaks or aliens out of some space-fic vid, instead of three perfectly normal guys, just hanging around, doing nobody any harm.

“My, my!” Remi whined sarcastically. “Is it my breath? Maybe she smells… tobacco!

“No joke, bloke,” Roland replied. “Some of those new goggles’ve got sniffer sensors on ’em. I hear the geek lobby in Indianapolis wants to put even home-grown on the restrict list.”

“No shit? Tobacco? Even? Roll over, Raleigh! I just gotta move outta this state.”

“Settlers ho, Remi?”

“Settlers ho.”

The stare got worse as they approached. Remi couldn’t see the babushka’s eyes, of course. Her True-Vu’s burnished lenses didn’t really have to be aimed directly at them to get a good record. Still, she jutted out her chin and faced them square on, aggressively making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted to her home unit, blocks from here, in real time.

Why do they have to do that? To Remi it felt like a provocation. Certainly no one could mistake her tight-lipped expression as friendly.

Remi and his pals had promised their local tribes supervisor not to lose their tempers with “senior citizens on self-appointed neighborhood watch.” Remi did try, really. It’s just another geek. Ignore her.

But there were so gor-sucking many geeks! According to the Net census, one in five Americans were over 65 now. And it felt far worse in Bloomington — as if oldsters were a ruling majority, staking out every shady spot with their electronic sun hats and goggle-scanners, watching from porches, watching from benches, watching from lawn chairs…

It was Crat whose reserve broke as they approached that baleful inspection. Suddenly he capered. “Hey, granny!” Crat bowed with a courtly flourish. “Why don’t you record this!” Roland giggled as Crat swept off his straw cowboy hat to display a garish scalp tattoo.

Merriment redoubled when she actually reacted! A sudden moue of surprise and revulsion replaced that glassy stare. She rocked back and turned away.

“Astonishing!” Roland cried, mimicking their least favorite teen-behaviors teacher at J. D. Quayle High School. He continued in a snooty, midwestern drawl. “It should be noted that this small urban band’s totemistic innovation achieved its desired effect… which was? Anybody?”

“Shock value!” all three of them shouted in unison, clapping hands, celebrating a minor victory over their natural enemy.

Used to be, you could break a babushka’s stare with an obscene gesture or show of muscular bluster — both protected forms of self-expression. But the biddies and codgers were getting harder to shake. Any time nowadays you actually made one of them yank back that awful, silent scrutiny was a triumph worth savoring.

“Freon!” Crat cursed. “Just once I’d like to catch some goggle geek alone, with fritzed sensors and no come-go record. Then I’d teach ’em it’s not polite to stare.”

Crat emphasized his point with a fist, smacking his palm. Today, since it was cloudy, he had forsaken his normal Stetson for a plaid baseball cap, still acceptable attire for a Settler. His sunglasses, like Remi’s, were thin, wire framed, and strictly for eye protection. Nothing electronic about them. They were a statement, repudiating the rudeness of geriatric America.

“Some people just got too much free time,” Roland commented as the three of them sauntered near the babushka, barely skimming outside the twenty-centimeter limit that would violate her “personal space.” Some oldsters were gearing up with sonar, even radar, to catch the most innocent infraction. They went out of their way to tempt you, creating slow-moving bottlenecks across sidewalks whenever they saw young people hurrying to get somewhere. They hogged escalators, acting as if they hoped you’d bump them, giving them any excuse to squeeze that police-band beeper, or raise the hue and cry, or file a long list of nuisance charges.

These days, in Indiana, juries were composed mostly of TwenCen grads anyway. Fellow retirement geeks who seemed to think youth itself a crime. So naturally, a guy had to accept the endless dares, skirting the edge whenever challenged.

“Granny could be doin’ something useful,” Crat paused to snarl, bending to really scrape the zone. “She could be gardening or collectin’ litter. But no! She’s gotta stare!”

Remi worried Crat might spit again. Even a miss would be a four-hundred-dollar fifth offense, and despite Granny’s averted gaze those sensors were still active.

Fortunately, Crat let Remi and Roland drag him out of sight into the formal hedge garden. Then he leaped, fist raised, and shouted, “Yow, tomodachis!” pumped by nicotine and a sweet, if minor, victory. “Patagonia, yeah!” Crat gushed. “Would that be dumpit great? Kits like us run it all there.”

“Not like here, in the land o’ the old and the home of the grave,” agreed Remi.

“Huh, say it! Why, I hear it’s better’n even Alaska, or Tasmania.”

“Better for Settlers!” Roland and Remi chanted in unison.

“And the music? Fuego-fire’s the only beat that Yakuti Bongo-Cream can’t meet.”

Remi didn’t care much about that. He liked the idea of emigrating for other reasons.

“Naw, cuzz. Patagonia’s only the first step. It’s a staging area, see? When they open up Antarctica, settlers from Patagonia’ll have the jump. Just a hop across the water.” He sighed. “We’ll have new tribes, real tribes when the ice melts enough. Set it up our way. Real freedom. Real people.”

Roland glanced at him sidelong. Months ago they had qualified as a youth gang, which meant mandatory tribal behaviors classes. That was okay, but Remi’s friends sometimes worried he might actually be listening to what the profs were saying. And sometimes he did have to fight that temptation… the temptation to be interested.

No matter. It was a good afternoon to be with pals, drooping out in the park. It was well past the sweltering heat of midday — when those without air-conditioning sought shade in the hedge garden for their siestas — so right now people were scarce in this section of the garden. Just a couple of seedy ragman types, slumped and snoring under the fragrant oleanders. Whether they were dozers or dazers, Remi couldn’t tell from here. As if the difference mattered.

“Real privacy, maybe,” Roland agreed. “You just make sure that’s in the constitution, Rem, if they nom you to write it.”

Remi nodded vigorously. “Dumpit A-okay! Privacy! No gor-suckers watchin’ your every move. Why, I hear back in TwenCen… aw, shit.”

Sure enough, bored with just talking, Crat had gone over the top again. With no one in sight from this hedge-lined gravel path, he started drum-hopping down a line of multicolored trash bins, rattling their plastic sides with a stick, leaping up to dance on their flexing rims.

“Sweet perspiration… Sweat inspiration …” Crat chanted, skipping to the latest jingle by Phere-o-Moan.

“Sniffin’ it stiffens it… ” Roland countertimed, catching the excitement. He clapped, keeping time.

Remi winced, expecting one of the bins to collapse at any moment. “Crat!” he called.

“Damn what, damn who?” His friend crooned from on high, dance-walking the green container, shaking its contents of grass cuttings and mulch organics.

“U-break it — U-buy it,” Remi reminded.

Crat gave a mock shiver of fear. “Look around, droogie. No civic-minded geepers, boy-chik. And cops need warrants.” He hopped across to the blue bin for metals, making cans and other junk rattle.

True, no goggle-faces were in sight. And the police were limited in ways that didn’t apply to citizens… or else even the aphids on the nearby bushes could be transmitting this misdemeanor to Crat’s local youth officer, in real time.

“An aroma for home-a, and a reek for the street …”

Remi tried to relax. Anyway, what harm was Crat doing? Just having a little fun, was all. Still, he reached his limit when Crat started kicking wrappers and cellu-mags out of the paper-recycle bin. Misdemeanor fines were almost badges of honor, but mandatory-correction felonies were another matter!

Remi hurried to pick up the litter. “Get him down, Rollie,” he called over his shoulder as he chased a flapping page of newsprint.

“Aw petrol! Lemme ’lone!” Crat bitched as Roland grabbed him around the knees and hauled him out of the last container. “You two aren’t sports. You just—”

The complaint cut short suddenly, as if choked off. Picking up the last shred of paper, Remi heard rhythmic clapping from the path ahead. He looked up and saw they were no longer alone.

Bleeding sores, he cursed inwardly. All we needed were Ra Boys.

Six of them slouched by the curving hedge, not five meters away, grinning and watching this tableau — Remi clutching his flapping load of paper, and Roland holding Crat high like some really homely ballerina.

Remi groaned. This could be really bad.

Each Ra Boy wore from a thick chain round his neck the gleaming symbol of his cult — a sun-sigil with bright metal rays as sharp is needles. Those overlay open-mesh shirts exposing darkly tanned torsos. The youths wore no head coverings at all, of course, which would “insult Ra by blocking the fierce love of his rays.” Their rough, patchy complexions showed where anti-one creams had sloughed precancerous lesions. Sunglasses were their only allowance for the sleeting ultraviolet, though Remi had heard of fanatics who preferred going slowly blind to even that concession.

One thing the Ra Boys had in common with Remi and his friends. Except for wristwatches, they strode stylishly and proudly unencumbered by electronic gimcrackery… spurning the kilos of tech-crutches everyone over twenty-five seemed to love carrying around. What man, after all, relied on crap like that?

Alas, Remi didn’t need Tribal Studies 1 to tell him that was as far as teen solidarity went in the year 2038.

“Such a lovely song and dance,” the tallest Ra Boy said with a simper. “Are we rehearsing for a new amateur show to put on the Net? Do please tell us so we can tune in. Where will it be playing? On Gong channel four thousand and three?”

Roland dropped Crat so hurriedly, the Ra Boys broke up again. As for Remi, he was torn between a dread of felonies and the burning shame of being caught picking up litter like a citizen. To walk just three steps and put it in the bin would cost him too much in pride, so he crumpled the mass and stuffed it in his pocket — as if he had plans for the garbage, later.

Another one joined the leader, sauntering forward. “Naw, what we have here… see… are some neo-fem girlie-girls… dressed up as Settlers. Only we caught them being girlie when… when they thought no one was looking!” This Ra Boy seemed short of breath and a bit droopy eyed. Remi knew he was a dozer when he lifted an inhaler and took a long hit of pure oxygen from a hip flask.

“Hmm,” the tall one nodded, considering the proposition. “Only problem with that hypothesis is, why would anyone want to dress up like a gor-sucking Settler in the first place?”

Remi saw Roland seize the growling Crat, holding him back. Clearly the Ra Boys would love to have a little physical humor with them. And just as clearly, Crat didn’t give a damn about the odds.

But even though no geeps were watching now, dozens must have recorded both parties converging on this spot… chronicles they’d happily zap-fax to police investigating a brawl after the fact.

Not that fighting was strictly illegal. Some gangs with good lawyer programs had found loopholes and tricks. Ra Boys, in particular, were brutal with sarcasm… pushing a guy so hard he’d lose his temper and accept a nighttime battle rendezvous or some suicidal dare, just to prove he wasn’t a sissy.

The tall one swept off his sunglasses and sighed. He minced several delicate steps and simpered. “Perhaps they are Gaians, dressing up as Settlers in order to portray yet another endangered species. Ooh. I really must watch their show!” His comrades giggled at the foppish act. Remi worried how much longer Roland could restrain Crat.

“Funny,” he retaliated in desperation. “I wouldn’t figure you could even see a holo show, with eyes like those.”

The tall one sniffed. Accepting Remi’s weak gambit, he replied in Posh Speech. “And what, sweet child of Mother Dirt, do you imagine is wrong with my eyes?”

“You mean besides mutant ugliness? Well it’s obvious you’re going blind, oh thou noonday mad dog.”

Sarcasm gave way to direct retort. “The Sun’s rays are to be appreciated, Earthworm. Momma’s pet. Even at risk.”

“I wasn’t talking about UV damage to your retinas, dear Mr. Squint. I refer to the traditional penalty for self-abuse.”

Paydirt! The Ra Boy flushed. Roland and Crat laughed uproariously, perhaps a little hysterically. “Got him, Rem!” Roland whispered. “Go!”

From the scowls on the Ra Boys’ patchy faces, Remi wondered if this was wise. Several of them were fingering their chains, with the gleaming, sharp-rayed amulets. If one or more had tempers like Crat’s…

The lead Ra Boy stepped closer. “That a slur on my stamina, oh physical lover of fresh mud?”

Remi shrugged, it was too late to do anything but go with it. “Fresh mud or fecund fern, they’re all out of reach to one like you, whose only wet licks come from his own sweaty palm.”

More appreciative laughter from Roland and Crat hardly made up for the lead Ra Boy’s seething wrath, turning him several shades darker. I didn’t know I’d strike such a nerve with that one, Remi thought. Apparently this guy had a lousy sex life. Some victories aren’t worth the price.

“So you’re the manly man, Joe Settler?” Ra Boy sneered. “You must be Mister Testo. An Ag-back with a stacked stock, and whoremones for all Indiana.”

Here it comes. Remi foresaw no way to avoid exchanging Net codes with this character, which in turn would lead to a meeting in some dark place, with no neighborhood watch busybodies to interfere.

With a small part of his mind, Remi realized the encounter had built up momentum almost exactly along the positive feedback curve described in class by Professor Jameson… bluster and dare and counterbluff, reinforced by a desperate need to impress one’s own gang… all leading step by step to the inevitable showdown. It would be an interesting observation — if that knowledge had let Remi prevent anything, but it hadn’t. As it was, he wished he’d never even learned any of that shit.

He shrugged, accepting the Ra worshipper’s gambit. “Well, I’m already man-ugly enough, I don’t have to pray for more from a great big gasball in the sky. I admit, though, your prayers sure look like they’ve been—”

Remi realized, mid-insult, that both groups were turning toward a sound — a new set of interlopers had entered the hedge garden. He turned. Along the path at least a dozen figures in cowled white gowns approached, slim and graceful. Their pendants, unlike the Ra Boys’, were patterned in the womblike Orb of the Mother.

“NorA ChuGa,” one of the Ra Boys said in disgust. Still, Remi noticed the guys in both gangs stood up straighter, taking up masculine poses they must have thought subtle, rather than pretentious. Feminine laughter cut off as the newcomers suddenly noticed the male gathering ahead of them. But their rapid pace along the path scarcely tapered. The North American Church of Gaia hardly ever slowed for anybody.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” several girls in the front rank said, almost simultaneously. Even shaded by their cowls, Remi recognized several of them from the halls of Quayle High. “Can we interest you in donating to the Trillion Trees Campaign?” one of the dedicants asked, coming face to face with Remi. And he had to blink past a moment’s fluster — she was heartbreakingly beautiful.

In her palm she held out brightly colored leaflet chips for any of the boys who would take one. There was an outburst of derisive laughter from the other side of the trail. These were surely young, naive Gaians if they thought to hit up Ra Boys for reforestation money!

Settlers, on the other hand, weren’t as ideologically incompatible. More importantly, it struck Remi that this offered a possible out.

“Why yes, sisters!” he effused. “You can interest us. I was just saying to my Settler friends here that tree planting will have to be our very first priority when we get to Patagonia. Soon as it’s warmed up down there. Yup, planting trees…”

Crat was still exchanging glares with the craziest looking Ra Boy. Grabbing his arm, Remi helped Roland tow him amidst the gliding tide of white-garbed girls. All the way, Remi asked enthusiastic questions about current Gaian projects, ignoring the taunts and jeers that followed them from the harsh-faced young sun worshippers. The Ra Boys could say whatever they wanted. On the scale of coups in tribal warfare, scoring with girls beat winning an insult match, hands down. Not that actual scoring was likely here. Hardcore Gaian women tended to be hard to impress. This one, for example.

“… don’t you see that hardwood reforestation in Amazonia is far more important than planting conifers down in Tierra del Fuego or Antarctica? Those are new ecologies, still delicate and poorly understood. You Settlers are much too impatient. Why, by the time those new areas are well understood and ready for humans to move in, the main battle, to save the Earth, could be lost!”

“I see your point,” Remi agreed. Anxious to make good their getaway, he and Roland nodded attentively until the Ra Boys were out of sight. Then Remi kept on smiling and nodding because of the speaker’s heart-shaped face and beautiful complexion. Also, he liked what he could make out of her figure under the gown. At one point he made a show of depositing the trash from his pocket in a brown recycle bin, giving the impression that litter gathering was his routine habit, and winning a brief approving pause in her lecture.

When they passed a row of hooded cancer plague survivors in wheelchairs, he slipped some dollar coins into their donation cups, getting another smile in reward.

Encouraged, he wound up accepting a pile of chip brochures, until at last she began running low on breath as they passed near the superconducting rails of the cross-park rapi-trans line. Then came a really lucky moment. A newly arriving train spilled youngsters in school uniforms onto the path, shouting and dashing about. The cascade of children broke apart the tight-knit squadron of Gaians. Remi and the young woman of his dreams were caught in the whirling eddies and pushed to one side under one of the rapitrans pillars. They looked at each other, and shared laughter. Her smile seemed much warmer when she was off her planet-saving pitch.

But Remi knew it would only be a moment. In seconds, the others would reclaim her. So, as casually as he could, he told her he would like to see her personally and asked for her net code to arrange a date.

She, in turn, met his gaze with soulful brown eyes and asked him sweetly to show his vasectomy certificate.

“Honestly,” she said with apparent sincerity. “I just couldn’t be interested in a man so egotistical he insists, in a world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately needed. If you haven’t done the right thing, can you point to some great accomplishment or virtue, to justify clinging to… ?”

Her words trailed off in perplexity, addressing his back as Remi seized his friends’ arms and rapidly departed.

“I’d show her somethin’ more important than genes!” Crat snarled when he heard the story. Roland was only slightly more forgiving. “Too damn much theory crammed into that pretty little head. Imagine, invading a guy’s privacy like that! Tell you one thing, that’s one bird who’d be happier, and a whole lot quieter as a farm wife.”

“Right!” Crat agreed. “Farm wife’s got what life’s about. There’s plenty room in Patagonia for lots of kids. Overpop’s just propa-crap—”

“Oh, shut up!” Remi snapped. His face still burned with shame, made worse by the fact that the girl obviously hadn’t even known what she was doing. “You think I care what a bleeding NorA ChuGa thinks? They only teach ’em how to be — what?.”

Roland was holding his wristwatch in front of Remi’s face, tapping its tiny screen. Lights rippled and the machine sang a warning tone.

Remi blinked. They were being scanned again, and it wasn’t just someone’s True-Vu this time, but real eavesdropping. “Some tokomak’s got a big ear on us,” Roland reported irritably.

It was just one thing after another! Remi felt like a caged tiger. Hell, even tigers had more privacy nowadays, in the wildlife survival arks, than a young guy ever got here in Bloomington. The park used to be a place where you could get away, but not anymore!

He looked around quickly, searching for the voyeur. Over to the south citizens of many ages were busy tending high-yield vegetables in narrow strip gardens, leased by the city to those without convenient rooftops. Bean pole detectors watched for poachers, but those devices couldn’t have set off Roland’s alarm.

Nor could the children, running about in visors and sun-goggles, playing tag or beamy. Or the ragged men in their twenties and thirties, over by the reflecting pond, draped in saffron sheets, pretending to be meditating, but fooling no one as they used biofeedback techniques to supply their bottomless, self-stimulated addiction… dazing out on endorphin chemicals released by their own brains.

There were other teens around too… though none wore gang colors. The silent, boring majority then, who neither slip-shaded nor dazed — students dressed for fashion or conformity, with little on their minds — some even carrying pathetic banners for tonight’s B-ball contest between the Fighting Golfers and the Letterman High Hecklers.

Then he saw the geek — a codger this time — leaning against one of the slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector, looking directly at the three of them. And sure enough, amid the bushy gray curls spilling under his white sun hat, Remi saw a thin wire, leading from an earpiece to a vest made of some sonomagnetic fabric.

Wheeling almost in step, the boys reacted to this new provocation by striding straight toward the geezer. As they neared, Remi made out the ribbons of a Helvetian War veteran on his chest, with radiation and pathogen clusters. Shit, he thought. Veterans are the worst. It would be hard winning any points over this one.

Then Remi realized the coot wasn’t even wearing goggles! Of course he could still be transmitting, using smaller sensors, but it broke the expected image, especially when the gremper removed even his sunglasses as they approached, and actually smiled!

“Hello, boys,” he said, amiably. “I guess you caught me snooping. Owe you an apology.”

Out of habit, Crat squeezed the fellow’s personal zone, even swaying over a bit as he flashed his scalp tattoo. But the geek didn’t respond in the usual manner, by flourishing his police beeper. Rather, he laughed aloud. “Beautiful! Y’know, I once had a messmate… a Russkie commando he was. Died in the drop on Liechtenstein, I think. He had a tattoo like that one, only it was on his butt! Could make it dance, too.”

Remi grabbed Crat’s arm when the idiot seemed about to spit. “You know using a big ear’s illegal without wearing a sign, tellin’ people you’ve got one. We could cite you, man.”

The oldster nodded. “Fair enough. I violated your privacy, and will accept in situ judgment if you wish.”

Remi and his friends looked at each other. Geriatrics — especially those who had suffered in the war — hardly ever used the word “privacy” except as an epithet, when accusing someone of hiding foul schemes. Certainly Remi had never heard of a codger willing to settle a dispute as gang members would, man to man, away from the all-intrusive eye of the Net.

“Shit no, gremper! We got you—”

“Crat!” Roland snapped. He glanced at Remi, and Remi nodded back. “All right,” he agreed. “Over by that tree. You pitch, we’ll swing.”

That brought another smile. “I used that expression when I was your age. Haven’t heard it since.*Did you know slang phrases often come and go in cycles?”

Still chatting amiably about the vagaries of language fashion since his day, the geep led them toward their designated open-air courtroom, leaving a puzzled Remi trailing behind, suddenly struck by the unasked-for exercise of visualizing this wrinkled, ancient remnant as a youth, once as brimming as they were now with hormones and anger.

Logically, Remi supposed it might be possible. Perhaps a few grempers even remembered what it had been like, with some vague nostalgia. But it couldn’t have been as bad to be young back then, he thought bitterly. There was stuff for guys like me to do. Old farts didn’t control everything.

Hell, at least you had a war to fight!

After the Helvetian holocaust, the frightened international community finally acted to prevent any more big ones, putting muscle into the inspection treaties. But that didn’t seem like much of a solution to Remi. The world was going straight to hell anyway, no detours. So why not do it in a way that was at least honorable and interesting?

Do not go gentle into that good night… Poetry class was just about the only one Remi really liked. Yeah. Back in TwenCen there were some guys who had it right.

From a grassy step they could look out over much of downtown Bloomington, a skyline still dominated by preserved TwenCen towers, though several of the more recent, slablike ’topias canted like ski slopes to the north. From somewhere beyond the park boundaries could be heard the ubiquitous sound of jackhammers as the city waged its endless, unwinnable war against decay, renovating crumbling sidewalks and sewer pipes originally designed to last a hundred years… back more than a century ago, when a hundred years must have sounded like forever. Bloomington looked and felt seedy, like almost any town, anywhere.

“I like listening to people, watching people,” the codger explained as he sat cross-legged before them, displaying a surprising limberness.

“So what?” Roland shrugged. “All you geeks listen and watch. All the time.”

The old man shook his head. “No, they stare and record. That’s different. They were raised in a narcissistic age, thinking they’d live forever. Now they compensate for their failing bodies by waging a war of intimidation against youth.

“Oh, it started as a way to fight street crime — retired people staking out the streets with video cameras and crude beepers. And the seniors’ posse really worked, to the point where perps couldn’t steal anything or hurt anybody in public anymore without getting caught on tape.

“But after the crime rate plummeted, did that stop the paranoia?” He shook his gray head. “You see, it’s all relative. That’s how human psych works. Nowadays seniors — you call us geeks — imagine threats where there aren’t any anymore. It’s become a tradition, see. They’re so busy warning off potential trouble, challenging threats before they materialize, they almost dare young men like you—”

Roland interrupted. “Hey, gremper. We get all this in Tribes. What’s your point?”

The old man shrugged. “Maybe pretending there’s still a need for neighborhood watch makes them feel useful. There’s a saying I heard… geeks find their own uses for technology.”

“I wish nobody ever invented all this tech shit,” Remi muttered.

The war veteran shook his head. “The world would be dead, dead now, my young friend, if it weren’t for tech stuff. Want to go back to the farm? Send ten billion people back to subsistence farming? Feeding the world’s a job for trained experts now, boy. You’d only screw things up worse than they already are.

“Tech eventually solved the worst problems of cities, too: violence and boredom. It helps people have a million zillion low-impact hobbies—”

“Yeah, and helps ’em spy on each other, too! That’s one of the biggest hobbies, isn’t it? Gossip and snooping!”

The old man shrugged. “You might not complain so much if you’d lived through the alternative. Anyway, I wasn’t trying to catch you fellows in some infraction. I was just listening. I like listening to people. I like you guys.”

Crat and Roland laughed out loud at the absurdity of the remark. But Remi felt a queer chill. The geezer really seemed to mean it.

Of course Professor Jameson kept saying it was wrong to overgeneralize. “… because you are gang members, that will color your views of everything. Young males do that when engaged in us-versus-them group bonding. They have to stereotype their enemies, dehumanize them. The problem’s really bad here in this part of the city, where the young-old conflict has deteriorated …”

Everybody hated Jameson, all the girlie gangs and dudie gangs — staying in his class only because a pass was required for any hope of earning a self-reliance card… as if half the kids were ever going to qualify. Shit.

“I like you because I remember the way it was for me,” gremper went on, unperturbed. “I remember when I felt I could bend steel, topple empires, screw harems, burn cities…” He closed his wrinkled eyelids for a moment, and when he reopened them, Remi felt a sudden thrill tickle his spine. The old guy seemed to be looking faraway into space and time.

“I did burn cities, y’know,” he told them in a low, very distant voice. And Remi somehow knew he had to be remembering things far more vivid than anything to be found in his own paltry store of recollections. Suddenly, he felt awash in envy.

“But then, each generation’s got to have a cause, right?” the oldster continued, shaking free of reminiscence. “Ours was ending secrecy. It’s why we fought the bankers and the bureaucrats and mobsters, and all the damned socialists to bring everything out into the open, once and for all, to stop all the underhanded dealing and giga-cheating.

“Only now our solution’s causing other problems. That’s the way things go with revolutions. When I overheard you guys dreaming aloud of privacy — like it was something holy — Jesus, that took me back. Reminded me of my own dad! People used to talk that way back at the end of TwenCen, till my generation saw through the scam—”

“Privacy’s no scam!” Roland snapped. “It’s simple human dignity!”

“Yeah!” Crat added. “You got no right to follow guys’ every move…”

But the old man lifted one hand placatingly. “Hey, I agree! At least partly. What I’m trying to say is, I think my generation went too far. We overthrew the evils of secrecy — of numbered bank accounts and insider deals — but now you guys are rejecting our excesses, replacing them with some of your own.

“Seriously though, what would you boys do if you had your way? You can’t just ban True-Vu and other tech-stuff. You can’t rebottle the genie. The world had a choice. Let governments control surveillance tech… and therefore give a snooping monopoly to the rich and powerful… or let everybody have it. Let everyone snoop everyone else, including snooping the government! I mean it, fellows. That was the choice. There just weren’t any other options.”

“Come on,” Roland said.

“All right, tell me. Would you go back to the illusion of so-called privacy laws, which only gave the rich and powerful a monopoly on secrecy?”

Crat glowered. “Maybe. At least when they had a…

monopoly, they weren’t so dumpit rude! People could at least pretend they were being left alone.”

Remi nodded, impressed with Crat’s brief eloquence. “There’s something to that. Who was it said life’s just an illusion, anyway?”

The gremper smiled and answered dryly. “Only every transcendental philosopher in history.”

Remi lifted his shoulders. “Oh, yeah, him. It was on the tip of my tongue.”

The old man burst out laughing and slapped Remi on the knee. In an odd way, Remi felt warmed by the gesture, as if it didn’t matter that they disagreed in countless ways or that a gap of half a century yawned between them.

“Damn,” the gremper said. “I wish I could take you back to those days. The guys in my outfit… the guys would’ve liked you. We could’ve shown you some times.”

To his amazement, Remi believed him. After a momentary pause, he asked, “Tell us… tell us about the guys.”

The three of them deliberated later, some distance from the tree, as dusk shadows began stretching across the park. Of course the old man left his big-ear unplugged while they passed judgment. He looked up when they returned to squat before him.

“We decided on a penalty for the way you invaded our privacy,” Roland said, speaking for all.

“I’ll accept your justice, sirs,” he said, inclining his head.

Even Crat grinned as Roland passed sentence. “You gotta come back here again next week, same time, and tell us more about the war.”

The old man nodded — in acceptance and obvious pleasure. “My name is Joseph,” he said, holding out his hand. “And I’ll be here.”

Over the next few weeks he kept his promise. Joseph told them tales they had never imagined, even after watching a thousand hypervideos. About climbing the steep flanks of the Pennine Alps, for instance, and then the Bernese Oberland — slogging through gas and bugs and radioactive mud. He described digging out booby traps nearly every meter of the way, and prying out the bankers’ mercenaries every ten or so. And he told them of his comrades, dying beside him, choking in their own sputum as they coughed their lungs out, still begging to be allowed to press on though, to help bring the Last War to an end.

He told them about the fall of Berne and the last gasp of the Gnomes, whose threat to “take the world down” with them turned out to be backed by three hundred cobalt-thorium bombs… which were defused only when Swiss draftees finally turned their rifles on their own officers and emerged from their shattered warrens, hands high over their heads, into a new day.

As spring headed toward summer, Joseph commiserated over the futility of high school, even under a “new education plan” that forced on students lots of supposedly “practical” information, but never did a guy any good anyway. He held them transfixed talking about the way girls used to be, back before they were taught all that modern crap about psychology and “sexual choice criteria.”

“Boy crazy, that’s what they were, my young tomodachis. No girlie wanted to be caught for even a minute without a boyfriend. It was where they got their sense of worth, see? Their alpha to omega. They’d do anything for you, believe most anything you said, so long as you promised you loved ’em.”

Remi suspected Joseph was exaggerating. But that didn’t matter. Even if it was all a load of bull semen, it was great bull semen. For the first time in his life, he contemplated the prospect of getting older — actually living beyond twenty-five — with anything but a vague sense of horror. The idea of someday being like Joseph didn’t seem so bad… as long as it took a long time happening, and providing he got to do as much as Joseph had along the way.

It was the profession of soldiering that fascinated Roland. Its camaradarie and traditions. Crat loved hearing about faraway places and escape from the tight strictures of urban life.

But as for Remi, he felt he was getting something more… the beginnings of a trust in time.

Joseph was a great source of practical advice, too — subtle verbal put-downs nobody here in Indiana had heard in years, but which would burrow like smart bombs dropped among the gang’s foes, only to blow up minutes, even hours, later with devastating effect. One day they met the same group of Ra Boys in the park and left them all scratching their heads in confusion, reluctant even to think of tackling Settlers anytime soon.

Roland talked about joining the Guard, maybe trying for one of the peacekeeping units.

Remi began tapping history texts from the Net.

Even Crat seemed to grow more reflective, as if every time he was about to lose his temper, he’d stop and think what Joseph would say.

No one worried overmuch when Joseph failed to show up one Saturday. On the second unexplained absence though, Remi and the others grew concerned. At home, sitting at his desk comp, Remi wrote a quick ferret program and sent it into the Net.

The ferret returned two seconds later with the old man’s obituary.

The mulching ceremony was peaceful. A few detached-looking adult grandchildren showed up, looking eager to be elsewhere. If they had been the sort to cry, Remi, Roland, and Crat would have been the only ones shedding tears.

Still, he had been old. “If any man’s led a full life, it was me,” Joseph once said. And Remi believed him.

I only hope I do half as well, he thought.

So it came as a shot from the sky when Remi answered the message light on his home comp one evening, and found logged there a terse note from Roland.

OUR NAMES LISTED IN PROGRAM GUIDE FOR A NET SHOW…

“Right!” Remi laughed. The law said whenever anyone was depicted, anywhere in the Net, it had to go into the listings. That made each weekly worldwide directory bigger than all the world’s libraries before 1910.

“Probably some Quayle High senior’s doing a Net version of the yearbook…”

But his laughter trailed off as he read the rest.

IT’S ON A REMINISCENCE DATABASE FOR WAR VETS, AND GUESS WHO’S LISTED AS AUTHOR

Remi read the name and felt cold.

Now, don’t jump to conclusions, he told himself. He might’ve just mentioned us… a nice note about getting to know three young guys before he died.

But his heart raced as he sought the correct Net address, sifting through layer after layer, from general to specific to superspecified, until at last he arrived at the file, dated less than a month ago.

THE REMEMBRANCES OF JOSEPH MOYERS: EPILOGUE: MY LAST WEEKS — ENCOUNTERS WITH THREE CONFUSED YOUNG MEN.

This was followed by full sight and sound, plus narration, beginning on that afternoon when they had met and held impromptu court where an elm tree shaded them from the glaring sky.

Perhaps someone neutral would have called the account compassionate, friendly. Someone neutral might even have described Joseph’s commentary as warm and loving.

But Remi wasn’t neutral. He watched, horrified, as his image, Roland’s, and Crat’s were depicted in turn, talking about private things, things spoken as if to a confessor, but picked up anyway by some hidden, hi-fidelity camera.

He listened, numbed, as Joseph’s editorial voice described the youths who shared his final weeks.

“… had I the heart to tell them they were never going to Patagonia or Antarctica? That the New Lands are reserved for refugees from catastrophe nations? And even so there isn’t enough thawed tundra to go around?

“These poor boys dream of emigrating to some promised land, but Indiana is their destiny, now and tomorrow…”

I knew that, Remi thought, bitterly. But did you have to tell the world I was dumb enough to have a dream? Dumpit, Joseph! Did you have to bare it all to everybody?

A neutral party might have reassured Remi. The old man hadn’t told very many people. It was in the nature of the Net, that vast ocean of information, that most published missives were read by only one or two others besides the author himself. Maybe one percent were accessed by a hundred or more. And fewer than one piece in ten thousand ever had enough viewers, worldwide, to fill even a good size meeting hall.

Perhaps all that had gone through Joseph’s mind when he made this last testament… that it would be seen by only a few old men like himself and never come to his young friends’ attention. Perhaps he never understood how far ferret-tech had come, or that others, who had grown up with the system, might use the directories better than he.

Remi knew it wasn’t very likely Joseph’s memoirs would work their way up, through good reviews and word of mouth, to best-seller status. But that hardly mattered. It could happen. For all the old man knew, Remi’s nonchalant ramblings and dreams could be sifted by a million voyeurs or more!

“Why, Joseph?” he asked, hoarsely. “Why?”

Then another face came on screen. Delicate features framed in white. It was a voice Remi had managed to purge from memory, until now.

“I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t be interested in a man so egotistical as to insist, in a world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately needed. If you haven’t done the right thing, can you point to some great accomplishment or virtue… ?”

Remi screamed as he threw the unit through his bedroom window.

Strangely, Roland and Crat didn’t seem to grasp what he was so upset about. Perhaps, for all their stylish talk, they didn’t really understand privacy. Not really.

They worried, though, over his listlessness and learned not to speak of Joseph when each of them received small royalty checks in their accounts, for their parts in what was fast becoming a small-time social-documentary classic. They spent their shares on their diverging interests, while Remi took his out in cash and gave it to the next NorAChuGa he met… for the Trillion Trees.

And so there came a day when he encountered, once again, a small band of Ra Boys in the park, this time without his friends, without any company but his loneliness.

This time the odds mattered not at all. He tore them up, top to bottom, using sarcasm like a slug rifle, assaulting them as he might have taken on Gnome mercenaries, had he been born in a time when there was honorable work for brave men to do and an evil that could be grappled with.

To the Ra Boys’ amazement it was he who demanded to exchange net codes. It was he who challenged them to a rendezvous.

By the time Remi actually met them later, in the darkness behind the monorail tracks, however, they’d done their own net research, and understood.

Understanding made their greeting solemn, respectful. Their champion exchanged bows with Remi across the makeshift arena, and even held back for a while, letting his clumsy opponent draw honorable blood before it was time at last to end it. Then, dutifully, one tribesman to another, he gave Remi what he desired most in the world.

For weeks afterward, then, the Ra Boys spoke his name in honor under the Sun.

The Sun, they said, was where at last he had settled.

The Sun was the final home of warriors.

• HOLOSPHERE

Jen Wolling found the Ndebele Rites of Gaia charming. The canton’s Kuwenezi Science Collective pulled out all the stops, sparing nothing to put on a show of their piety. To watch the lavish torchlight celebration under a midnight moon, one might imagine they were commemorating Earth Day itself, and not just a going-away party for one old woman they had known barely a fort-night.

Dancers in traditional costumes capered and whirled before the dignitaries’ dais, stamping bare feet on the beaten ground to the tempo of pounding drums. Feathered anklets flapped like agitated captive birds. Spears thudded on shields as men in bright loincloths leaped in apparent defiance of gravity. Women in colorful dashikis waved bound sheaves of wheat, specially grown in hothouses for this out-of-season observance.

Jen appreciated the dancers’ lithe beauty, taut and powerful as any stallion’s. Perspiration flew in droplets or smeared to coat their dark brown bodies in a gleaming, athletic sheen. Their rhythm and power were mighty, exultory, and marvelously sexual, which brought a smile to Jen’s lips. Although tonight’s purpose was to venerate a gentle metaphoric goddess, the choreography had been co-opted from much older rites having to do with fertility and violence.

“It’s far, far better than in the days of neocolonialism.” the tall ark director said to her. Sitting cross-legged to her left, he had to lean close to be heard over the percussive cadence. “Back then, the Ndebele and other tribes maintained troupes of professional dancers to pander to tourists. But these young men and women practice in their spare time simply for the love of it. Few outsiders ever get to see this now.”

Jen admired the way the torchlight glistened on Director Mugabe’s brow, his tight-coiled hair. “I’m honored,” she said, crossing her arms over her heart and giving a shallow bow. He grinned and returned the gesture. Side by side, they watched rows of young “warriors” take terrific risks, exchanging whirling spears to the delight of clapping women and children.

Venerable and ancient this dance might be, but there was no correlation here with the primitive. Jen had just spent two weeks consulting with Kuwenezi’s experts, learning all about Ndebele Canton’s plans for new animal breeds better able to endure the challenging and ever-changing environment of southern Africa. They, in turn, had listened attentively to her own ideas about macroecological management. After all, Jen had virtually invented the field.

By now of course, it had accumulated all the trappings of a maturing technology, with enough details to leave a solitary dreamer-theoretician like her far behind. Specific analyses she left to younger, quicker minds these days.

Still, she occasionally managed to surprise them all. If Jen ever ceased being able to shock people, it would be time to give up this body’s brief manifestation and feed her meager store of phosphorus back into the Mother’s great mulch pile.

She recalled the expression on that fellow B’Keli’s face when, during her third and final lecture, she had begun talking about… specially designed mammalian chimeras… incorporating camels’ kidneys… birds’ lungs… bear marrow… chimps’ tendon linkages… Even Director Mugabe, who claimed to have read everything she’d written, was staring glassy-eyed by the end of her talk. Her conclusion about… the rough love of viruses… seemed to have been too much even for him.

When the house lights had come on, she was greeted with stunned silence from the packed crowd of brown faces. There was, at first, only one questioner — a very young man whose northern, Yoruba features stood out amid the crowd of Southern Bantu. The boy’s arms and face were bandaged, but he showed no outward sign of pain. All through the talk he had sat quietly in the front row, gently stroking a small baboon and her infant. When Jen called on him, he lowered his hand and spoke with a completely stunning Canadian accent, of all things.

“Doctor… are you sayin’ that — that people might someday be as strong as chimpanzees? Or be able to sleep through winter, like bears?”

Jen noticed indulgent smiles among the audience when the boy spoke, though Mugabe’s expression was one of mixed relief and angst. Anxiety that such an untutored member of their community had been the only one to offer the courtesy of a question. Relief that someone had done so in time.

“Yes. Exactly,” she had replied. “We have the entire human genome fully catalogued. And many other higher mammals. Why not use that knowledge to improve ourselves?

“Now I want to make clear I’m talking about genetic improvement here, and there are limits to how far one can go in that direction. We’re already by far the most plastic of animals, the most adaptable to environmental influences. The real core of any self-improvement campaign must remain in the areas of education and child-rearing and the new psychology, to bring up a generation of saner, more decent people.

“But there really are constraints on that process, laid down by the capabilities and limitations of our bodies and brains. And where did those capabilities and limitations come from? Our past, of course. A haphazard sequence of genetic experiments by trial and error, slowly accumulating favorable mutations generation by generation. Death was the means of our advancement… the deaths of millions of our ancestors. Or, to be more precise, those who failed to become our ancestors.

“Those who did survive to breed passed on new traits, which gradually accumulated into the suite of attributes now at our disposal — our upright stance, our better-than-average vision, our wonderfully dexterous hands. Our bloated brains.

“As for what the latter has done to our skull size, ask any woman who’s given birth…”

At that point the audience had laughed. Jen noticed some of the tension seeping away.

“Other species have meanwhile collected their own, similar catalogues of adaptations. Many of them at least as wonderful as those we’re so arrogantly proud of. But here’s the sad part. With one exception — the inefficient interspecies gene transfer performed by viruses — no animal species can ever profit from another’s hard-won lessons. Until now, each has been in it alone, fending for itself, hoarding what it’s acquired, learning from no one else.

“What I am proposing is to change all that, once and for all. Hell, we’re already doing it! Look at the century-old effort to blend characteristics among plants, to transfer, say, pest resistance from one hardy wild species into another that is a food crop. Take just one such product — legu-corn, which fixes its own nitrogen. How many productive farmlands and aquifers has it saved by eliminating the need for artificial fertilizer? How many people has it saved from starvation?

“Or take another program — to save those species of birds who cannot bear excess ultraviolet by inserting eagle codons, so their descendants’ eyes will be as impervious as those of hawks or falcons. The happy accidental discovery of one family can now be shared with others.

“Or take our experiments at London Ark, where we’re remaking a vanished species by slowly building a woolly mammoth genome within an elephant matrix. Someday, a species which has been extinct for thousands of years will walk again.”

A woman in the third row raised her hand. “But isn’t that exactly what the radical Gaians object to? They call it bastardization of species…”

Jen remembered laughing at that point. “I am not a favorite of the radicals.”

Quite a few in the audience had smiled then. The Ndebele shared her contempt for the taunts, even threats, of those who proclaimed themselves guardians of modern morality.

No doubt the original idea behind her invitation to come here had been prestige. Southern Africa suffered partial isolation from the world’s ever-tightening web of commerce and communication, largely because the commonwealth still practiced racial and economic policies long abandoned elsewhere. No doubt they were surprised when a Nobel laureate actually accepted. This visit would cause Jen problems when she returned home.

It was worth it though. She’d seen promise here. Cut off as they were, these archaic racialist-socialists were looking at familiar problems in unique ways. Often cockeyed wrong ways, but intriguing nonetheless. They had a great advantage in not caring what the rest of the world thought. In that way, they were much like Jen herself.

“What matters to me is the whole,” she had replied. “And the whole depends upon diversity. The radicals are right about that. Diversity is the key.

“But it need not be the same diversity as existed before mankind. Indeed, it cannot be the same. We are in a time of changes. Species will pass away and others take their place, as has happened before. An ecosystem frozen in stone can only become a fossil.

“We must become smart enough to minimize the damage, and then foster a new diversity, one able to endure in a strange new world.”

Of all those in the audience, some had looked confused or resentful. Others nodded in agreement. But one, the boy in the front row, had stared at her as if struck dumb. At the time she had wondered what she’d said that had affected him so.

Jen was jerked back to the present as Director Mugabe spoke her name over the rhythm of the beating drums. She blinked, momentarily disoriented, while hands gently took both her elbows, helping her to stand. Smiling women in bright costumes urged her forward. Their white, perfect teeth shone in the flickering torchlight.

Jen sighed, realizing. As the oldest woman present, and guest of honor, she couldn’t refuse officiating at the sacrifice… not without insulting her hosts. So she went through the motions — bowing to the Orb of the Mother, accepting the bound wheat, pouring the pure water.

So many people had taken to this sect, movement, Zeitgeist… call it what you will. It was an amorphous thing, without center or official dogma. Only a few of those paying homage to the Mother did so thinking it a religion per se.

Indeed many older faiths had taken the simple, effective measure of co-opting Gaian rituals into their own. Catholics altered celebrations of the Virgin, so that Mary now took a much more vigorous personal interest in planetary welfare than she had in the days of Chartres or Nantes.

And yet, Jen knew many for whom this was more than a mere statement or movement. More than just a way of expressing reverence for a danger-stricken world. There were radicals for whom Gaia worship was a church militant. They saw a return of the old goddess of prehistory, at last ready to end her banishment by brutal male deities — by Zeus and Shiva and Jehovah and the warlike spirits once idolized by the Ndebele. To Gaian radicals there were no “moderate” approaches to saving Earth. Technology and the “evil male principle” were foes to be cast down.

Evil male principle, my shriveled ass. Males have their uses.

For some reason Jen thought of her grandson, whose obsessions in the twin worlds of abstraction and engineering were stereotypical of what radicals called “penis science.” It was some time since she had last heard from the boy. She wondered what Alex was up to.

Probably something terribly silly, and utterly earth-shaking if I know him.

Soon came the final act of the evening. The Cleansing. Jen smiled and touched one by one the offerings brought before her by adults and children, each presenting a wicker basket containing broken bits of mundane archaeology.

Scraps of tin… broken spark plugs… shreds of adamant, insoluble plastic… One basket was nearly filled with ancient aluminum beer cans, still shiny thirty years after they had been outlawed everywhere on Earth. Each collection was the work of one member of this community, performed in his or her spare time over many months. Each basket contained the yield given up by one square meter of soil, painstakingly and lovingly sifted till no trace of human manufacture was detectible, as deep as the individual’s time, strength, and piety allowed. In this way, each person incrementally returned a small bit of the planet to its natural state.

Only what was natural? Certainly not the land’s contours, which had been eroded and moved wholesale by human enterprise.

Not the aquifers, whose percolating waters would never be quite the same, even where antidumping was enforced and where inspectors granted the precious label “pure and untainted.” That only meant the content of heavy metals and complex petro-organics was too sparse to affect one human’s health over a normal lifespan. It certainly didn’t mean “natural.”

Especially, the word didn’t apply to that complicated living thing known as topsoil! Winnowed of countless native species, filled with invaders brought inadvertently or on purpose from other continents — from earthworms to rotifers to tiny fungi and bacteria — the loam in some places thrived and elsewhere it died, giving up its dusty substance to the winds. Microscopic victories and defeats and- stalemates were being waged in every hectare all over the globe, and nowhere could a purist say the result was “natural” at all.

Jen glanced over her left shoulder to see Kuwenezi’s lambent towers. The main ark was dim, but its great glass-crystal face reflected a rippling sister to the moon. Within those artificial habitats dozed plants and animals rescued from a hundred spoiled ecosystems. To the radicals, such arks were glorified prisons — mere sops to humanity’s troubled conscience, so that nature’s slaughter could go on.

To Jen, though, the great arcologies weren’t jails, but nurseries.

Change can’t be prevented, only guided.

The radicals were right about one thing, of course. What finally emerged from those glass towers, someday, wouldn’t be the same as what had gone in. Jen’s public statements — that she did not find that in itself tragic — ensured continued hate mail, even death threats, from followers of a sect she herself had helped found.

So be it.

Death is just another change. And when the Mother needs my phosphorus, I’ll give it up gladly.

The local denomination, of course, held that Gaia’s true complexion must be that of pure, fecund earth, and yet they seemed not to care about the paleness of her skin. As Jen lifted her arms, they carried their offerings to outsized recycling bins, waiting under the stars. When the last contribution tumbled inside, a shout of celebration rose, commemorating the salvation of several thousand square meters.

This ceremony had delightful idiosyncrasies, but it was essentially similar to others she’d officiated at, from Australia to Smolensk. In all those places, people had taken it for granted that she was an appropriate surrogate — a stand-in for Gaia herself.

Only a surrogate… Jen smiled, offering her benediction and forgiving their error. The drums resumed, and dancers rejoined their exertions. But for a moment Jen watched the torchlight play across the faces and the glass towers beyond.

Modern folk, you pay homage to the Mother as a “parable.” And I am but a stand-in, tonight, for an abstract idea.

Well, we shall see about that, my children. We shall see.

She had planted seeds during her visit. Some would germinate, perhaps even flower into action.

The young man in the bandages appeared again. She saw him seated across the arena, his baboon companions resting against his knees. He nodded back as she smiled at him, and Jen had a sudden, clear recollection of his final question, yesterday afternoon in the lecture hall.

“You talk about a lot of possibilities Doctor Wolling…” he had said. “Maybe we could do some of those things… or even all o’ them, eh?

“But won’t we also have to give up somethin’ in return? They say there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. So what’ll it cost us, Doctor?”

Jen remembered thinking, What a bright boy. He understood that nothing was ever easy, which her own grandson never seemed to grasp, no matter how often the world smacked poor Alex in the head.

No, Jen thought. Humanity may have to give up more than a little, if the Earth is to be saved. We may, in the end, find the old gods were right after all. That nothing worthwhile comes without a sacrifice.

Jen smiled at the boy, at all of them. She opened her arms, blessing the dancers, the audience, the animals in the arks, and the ravaged countryside.

That sacrifice, my children, may turn out to be ourselves.