Earth

PLANET

The newborn world liquefied under pummeling asteroid impacts. Heavy elements sank, generating still more heat, and a dowry of radioactive atoms kept the planet’s interior warm even after the surface cooled and hardened.

Eventually, the inmost core crystallized under intense pressure, but the next layer remained a swirling metal fluid, a vast electric dynamo. Higher still congealed a mantle of semisolid minerals — superdense pyroxenes and olivines and lighter melts that squeezed up crustal cracks to spill forth from blazing volcanoes.

Heat drove the circulating convection cells, jostled the plates, drove the fields. Heat built continents and made the Earth throb.

Heat also kept some water molten at the surface. Preorganic vapors sloshed in solution, under lightning and fierce sunbeams…

The process started taking on a life of its own.

• EXOSPHERE

So now Teresa was a hero, and a recent widow. No combination was more appealing to the masses… or to NASA press flacks, whose attentions she welcomed like an invasion of nibbling rodents. Fame was a pile of dumpit she could live without.

Fortunately, operational people had her for several weeks after the Erehwon disaster. Teams of engineers spent from dawn to dusk coaxing every bit of useful description from her memory, until each night she would fall into bed and a deep, exhausted, dreamless slumber. Some outsiders got wind of the intense debriefing and railed for her sake against “gestapo grilling tactics” — until Teresa herself emerged one day to tell all the well-meaning do-gooders to go fuck off.

Not in so many words, of course. Their intentions were fine. Under normal circumstances it would be cruel to scrutinize a recent survivor so. But Teresa wasn’t normal. She was an astronaut. A pilot astronaut. And if some all-knowing physician prescribed for her right now, the slip might say — “Surround her with competent people. Keep her busy, useful. That will do more good than a thousand floral gifts or ten million sympathy-grams.”

Certainly she’d been traumatized. That was why she also cooperated with the NASA psychers, letting them guide her through all the stages of catharsis and healing. She wept. She railed against fate and wept again. Though each step in grieving was accomplished efficiently, that didn’t mean she felt it any less than a normal person. She just felt it all faster. Teresa didn’t have time to be normal.

Finally, the technical types had finished sifting her story to the last detail. Other questioners took over then — center chiefs, agency directors, congressional committees. Masters of policy.

Sitting next to Mark at hearing after hearing, Teresa felt waves of ennui as she listened to the same praise, the same lofty sentiments. Oh, not every public servant was posing. Most were intelligent, hardworking people, after their own fashion. But theirs was a realm as alien to her as the bottom of the sea. She was sworn to protect this system, but that didn’t make sitting through it any easier.

“They talk and talk… but they never ask any of the real questions!” she muttered to Mark, sotto voce.

“Just keep smiling,” he whispered back. “It’s what we’re paid for, now.”

Teresa sighed. Anyone in NASA who refused her turn in the public relations barrel was a slacker who did real harm. But why did your smile-burden multiply whenever you did something particularly well? Was that any way to repay initiative? If there were justice, it’d be Colonel Glenn Spivey and the other peepers forced to sit through this, and she’d get the reward she wanted most.

To get back to work.

To help find out what had killed forty people. Including her husband.

Instead, Spivey was probably in the thick of things, helping design a new station, while she had to endure media attention any Hollywood star would swoon for.

As weeks passed, she began suspecting there was more to this than just an awkward overlap of two cultures. They kept urging her to do chat shows and go on lecture circuits. Or, if either she or Mark wanted to take off on a two-month vacation on St. Croix, that would be all right, too.

Tempted by a chance to graduate from astronaut to superstar, Mark succumbed. But not Teresa. She was adamant. And finally she asserted her right to go home.

A domestic service had come by regularly to water the plants. Still, the Clear Lake condo felt cryptlike when she walked through the front door. She went from window to window, letting in the listless, heavy-sweet smells of Texas springtime. Even traffic noise was preferable to the silence.

NASA had forwarded her important messages, providing secretaries to handle fan mail and bills. So she was denied even the solace of busywork during those awkward first hours. Her autosec flashed the queue of her clipping program… a backlog of fifteen thousand headlines culled from news services and Net-zines in every time zone. She flushed everything having to do with the accident, and the tally dropped below a hundred. Those she might scan later, to catch up with what was happening in the world.

Teresa wandered room to room, not exactly avoiding thoughts of Jason, but neither did she go straight to the photo album, shelved between the bound-paper encyclopedia and her husband’s collection of rare comic books. She didn’t need photographs or holo-pages in order to replay moments from her marriage. They were all in her head — the good and not so good — available on ready recall.

All too ready…

She slipped two hours of Vivaldi into the sheet-reader and went out to the patio with a glass of orange juice. (Someone had read her file and left two liters of the real thing in her cooler, fresh squeezed from Oregon oranges.)

Beyond the polarized UV screen, Teresa looked out on the swaying elms sheltering several blocks of low apartment buildings, ending abruptly at the white dikes NASA had erected against the rising Gulf of Mexico. The tracks of a new rapitrans line ran atop the levee. Trains swept past on faintly humming superconducting rails.

A bluebird landed on the balcony and chirped at her, drawing a brief smile. When she was little, bluebirds had been threatened all over North America by competition from starlings and other invaders brought to the continent by prior, careless generations of humans. Worried devotees of native fauna built thousands of shelters to help them survive, but still it seemed touch and go for the longest time.

Now, like the elms, bluebirds were resurgent. Just as no one could have predicted which plants or animals would suffer most from the depleted ozone and dryer climate, nobody seemed to have imagined some might actually benefit. But apparently, in a few cases, it was so.

On the downside, Teresa remembered one awful autumn when she and Jason came home almost daily to find pathetic creatures dying on the lawn. Or worse, hopping about in panic because they could no longer see.

Blind robins. Some threshold had been reached, and within weeks they were all dead. Since then Teresa sometimes wondered — had the extinction been universal? Or was the die-off just a local “adjustment,” restricted to south Texas? A few words to her autosecretary would send a ferret program forth to fetch the truth in milliseconds. But then, what good would knowing do? The Net was such a vast sea of information, sipping from it sometimes felt like trying to slake your thirst from a fire hose.

Besides, she often found the Net tedious. So many people saw it as a great soapbox from which to preach recipes for planetary salvation.

Solutions. Everybody’s got solutions.

[INSERT IMAGE HERE]

One group wanted to draft the entire space program into an effort to suspend ozone generators in the stratosphere. A preposterous idea, but at least it was bold and assertive, unlike the panacea offered by those calling for the abandonment of technology altogether, and a return to “simpler ways.” As if simpler ways could feed ten billion people.

As if simpler ways hadn’t also done harm. Astronauts suffered few illusions about the so-called “benign pastoral life-style,” having seen from space the deserts spread by earlier civilizations — Sumerians, Chinese, Berbers, Amerinds — armed with little more than sheep, fire, and primitive agriculture.

Teresa had her own ideas about solutions. There were more riches on the moon and asteroids than all the bean counters in all the capitals of the world could add up in their combined lifetimes. Lots of astronauts shared the dream of using space to cure Earth’s ills.

She and Jason had. They had met in training, and at first it had seemed some magical dating service must have intervened on their behalf. It went beyond obvious things, like their shared profession.

No. I just never met anyone who could make me laugh so.

Their consensus had extended to shopping among the pattern-marriage styles currently in vogue. After long discussion, they finally selected a motif drawn up by a consultant recommended by some other couples they knew. And it seemed to work. Jealousy never loomed as a question between them.

Until late last year, that is.

Until that Morgan woman appeared.

Teresa knew she was being unfair. She might as well blame Glenn Spivey. It was also about when Jason started working for that awful man that their troubles began.

Or she could lay the blame on…

“Dumpit!” She cursed. All this introspection brought a tightness to her jaw. She’d hoped absolute openness — giving the shrinks everything inside of her — would get her through all these “grief phases” quickly. But personal matters were so completely unlike the physical world. They followed no reliable patterns, no predictabilities. Despite recent optimistic pronouncements about new models of the mind, there hadn’t yet been a Newton of psychology, an Einstein of emotions. Perhaps there never would be.

Teresa felt a constriction in her chest as tears began to flow again. “Damn… damn…”

Her hands trembled. The glass slipped from her fingers and fell to the carpet, where it bounced undamaged, but juice sprayed over her white pants. “Oh, cryo-bilge…”

The telephone rang. Teresa shouted on impulse, before the NASA secretaries could intervene.

“I’ll take it!” Of course she ought to let her temporary staff screen all calls. But she needed action, movement, something!

As soon as she’d wiped her eyes and stepped inside, however, Teresa knew she’d made a mistake. The broad, florid features of Pedro Manella loomed over her from the phone-wall. Worse, she must have left the unit on auto-send before departing on that last mission. The reporter had already seen her.

“Captain Tikhana…” He smiled, larger than life.

“I’m sorry. I’m not giving interviews from my home. If you contact the NASA—”

He cut in. “I’m not seeking an interview, Ms. Tikhana. This concerns another matter I think you’ll find important. I can’t discuss it by telephone—”

Teresa knew Manella from press conferences. She disliked his aggressive style. His moustache, too. “Why not?” she broke in. “Why can’t you tell me now?”

Manella obviously expected the question. “Well, you see, it has to do with matters conjoining onto your own concerns, where they overlap my own…”

He went on that way, sentence after sentence. Teresa blinked. At first she thought he was speaking one of those low-efficiency dialects civilians often used, bureauciatese, or social science babble … as impoverished of content as they were rich in syllables. But then she realized the man was jabbering the real thing — bona fide gibberish — phrases and sentences that were semantic nonsense!

She was about to utter an abrupt disconnect when she noticed him fiddling with his tie in a certain way. Then Manella scratched an ear, wiped his sweaty lip on a sleeve, wrung his hands just so…

The uninitiated would probably attribute it all to his Latin background — expressiveness in gestures as well as words — but what Teresa saw instead were crude but clear approximations of spacer hand talk.

… OPEN MIKE, she read, WATCH YOUR WORDS CLASS RED URGENCY… CURIOSITY…

It was all so incongruous, Teresa nearly laughed out loud. What stopped her was the look in his eyes. They weren’t the eyes of a babbler.

He knows something, she realized. Then — He knows something about Erehwon!

Manella was implying her phone line might be tapped. Furthermore, he was clearly making assumptions about the level of observation. Trained surveillance agents would find his sign language ruse ludicrously transparent. But the charade would probably fool most context-sensitive monitoring devices or agency flacks drafted to listen to the predictably boring conversations of a bus driver like herself. It would also get by any random eavesdropping hacker from the Net.

“All right.” She waved a hand to stop him in mid-sentence. “I’ve heard enough, Mr. Manella, and I’m not interested. You’ll have to go through channels like everybody else. Now, good-bye.”

The display went blank just as he seemed about to remonstrate. He was a good actor, too. For it was only in those brown eyes that she saw confirmation of her own hand signs. Signs by which she had answered: MAYBE I’LL RESPOND SOON.

She would think about it. But why does Manella imagine I’d be monitored in the first place? And what is it he wants to tell me?

It had to be about Erehwon… about the calamity. Her heart rate climbed.

At which point she’d had quite enough of this emotional rebellion by her body. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, closed her eyes, and sought the calm-triggers taught to her in high school — laying cooling blankets over her thoughts, using biofeedback to drain away the tension. Whatever was happening, whatever Manella had to say, no good would come of letting ancient fight-flight reactions sweep her away. Cavemen might not have had much use for patience, but it was a pure survival trait in the world of their descendants.

Inhaling deeply, she turned away from the travails of consciousness. Vivaldi joined the chirping bluebirds in an unnoticed background as she sought the center, wherein she always knew when and where she was.

This time though, she couldn’t quite be sure that it — the center — was still there anymore at all.

• CORE

On his way back to Auckland after two days at the Tarawera Geothermal Works, Alex found himself en-snared in tourist traffic at Rotorua. Buses and minivans threaded the resort’s narrow ways, hauling Australian families on holiday, gushing Sinhalese newlyweds, serene-looking Inuit investors, and Han — the inevitable swell of black-haired Han — nudging and whispering in close-packed mobs that overflowed the pavements and lawns, thronging and enveloping anything that might by any stretch be quaint or “native.”

Most shops bore signs in International Ideogramatic Chinese, as well as English, Maori, and Simglish. And why not? The Han were only the latest wave of nouveau moyen to suddenly discover tourism. And if they engulfed all the beaches and scenic spots within four thousand kilometers of Beijing, they also paid well for their hard-earned leisure.

Yet more Chinese piled off flywheel buses just ahead of Alex’s little car, wearing garish sunhats and True-Vu goggles that simultaneously protected the eyes and recorded for posterity every kitsch purchase from friendly concessionaires touting “genuine” New Zealand native woodcraft.

Well, it’s their turn, Alex thought, nursing patience. And it surely does beat war.

Kiwi autumn was still warm and breezy, so he had the side window down. The smell of hydrogen sulfide from the geysers was pungent, but not too noticeable after all his time working underground with George Hutton’s people. Waiting for traffic to clear, Alex watched another silvery cruise zeppelin broach a tree-lined pass and settle toward the busy aerodrome at the edge of town. Even from here he made out the crowds crammed into steerage, faces pressed against windows to peer down at Rotorua’s steamy volcanic pools.

A decade or two hence it might be the new bourgeois of Burma or Morocco who packed the great junket liners, taking advantage of cheap zep travel to swarm abroad in search of armloads of cheap souvenirs and canned memories. By then of course, the Han would have grown used to it all. They’d be sophisticated individual travelers, like the Japanese and Malays and Turks, who avoided frantic mobs and snickered at the gaucheries of first-generation tourists.

That was the curious nature of the “mixed miracle.” For as the world’s nations scrimped and bickered over dwindling resources, sometimes scrapping violently over river rights and shifting rains, its masses meanwhile enjoyed a rising tide of onetime luxuries — made necessary by that demon Expectation.

—Pure water cost nearly as much as your monthly rent. At the same time, for pocket change you could buy disks containing a thousand reference books or a hundred hours of music.

—Petrol was rationed on a need-only basis and bicycles choked the world’s cities. Yet resorts within one day’s zep flight were in reach to even humble wage earners.

—Literacy rates climbed every year, and those with full-reliance cards could self-prescribe any known drug. But in most states you could go to jail for throwing away a soda bottle.

To Alex the irony was that nobody seemed to find any of it amazing. Change had this way of sneaking up on you, one day at a time.

“Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid.”

That was how his grandmother had put it, once. And she ought to know. Everyone praised Jen Wolling for her brilliant foresight. But one day she had shown him her scorecard from the World Predictions Registry. After twenty-five years of filing prognostications with the group, her success rating was a mere sixteen percent! And that was better than three times the WPR average.

“People tend to get dramatic when they talk about the future. When I was young, there were optimists who foresaw personal spacecraft and immortality in the twenty-first century… while pessimists looked at the same trends and foretold collapse into worldwide famine and war.

“Both forecasts are still being made, Alex, with the deadlines always pushed back one decade, then another and another. Meanwhile, people muddle through. Some things get better, some a lot worse. Strangely enough, the future’ never does seem to arrive. ”

Of course Jen didn’t know everything. She had never suspected, for instance, that tomorrow could come abruptly, decisively, in the shape of a microscopic, titanically heavy fold of twisted space…

Alex maneuvered slowly past a crowd that had spilled into the street, watching dancers perform a haka on the marae platform of an imposing Maori meeting house. Sloping beams of extravagantly carved red wood overhung the courtyard where bare-chested men stuck out their tongues and shouted, stamping in unison and flexing tattooed thighs and arms to intimidate the delighted tourists.

George Hutton had taken Alex to see the real thing a while back, at the wedding of his niece. It was quite a show, the haka. Evidence of a rich cultural heritage that lived on.

For a while, at least…

Alex shook his head. It’s not my fault there won’t be any more hakas — or Maori — in a few years’ time. I’m not responsible for the thing swallowing the Earth from within.

Alex hadn’t made that monster — the singularity they called Beta. He’d only discovered it.

Still, in ancient Egypt they used to kill the messenger.

He would have no such easy out. He might not have been the one to set Beta on its course, but he had made the evaporating Iquitos singularity, Alpha. To George Hutton and the others, that made him responsible by proxy — no matter how much they liked him personally — until Beta’s real makers were found.

Alex recalled the image that had begun unblurring in the holo tank as they probed the monster’s involute topology. It was horrible, voracious, and beautiful to behold. Undeniably there was a genius somewhere… someone a whole lot better than Alex at his own game. The realization was humbling, and a bit frightening.

Immersed in his own thoughts, he had been driving the little Tangoparu company car on mental autopilot, threading past one bottleneck after another. Just when it seemed traffic would open up again, red brake lights forced him to stop hard. Shouts and horns blared somewhere up ahead.

Alex leaned out the window to get a better look. Emergency strobes flashed. A bobbing magnus-effect ambulance hovered near one of the massive, blocky tourist hotels, where budget-conscious travelers rented tiny, slotlike units by the cubic meter. The vehicle’s spherical gas bag rotated slowly around a horizontal pivot, using small momentum shifts to maneuver delicately near white-suited emergency workers. Alex had no view of the injured, but stains on the clothes of shocked bystanders told of some bloody episode that must have gone down only moments ago.

The crowds suddenly parted and more police hove into view, wrestling along a figure swaddled in restraint netting, who howled and writhed, wild-eyed, with face and clothes flecked in blood and spittle. A green gas canister at his belt showed him to be a dozer — one of those unfortunates more affected by excess carbon dioxide than other people. In most, such borderline susceptibilities caused little more than sleepiness or headaches. But sometimes a wild mania resulted, made far worse by the close press of crowding human flesh.

Apparently, supplemental oxygen hadn’t helped this fellow… or the poor victims of his murderous fit. Alex had never seen a mucker up close like this before, but on occasion he had witnessed the effects from a distance.

“You don’t get anything, but what something else gets taken away . . “He distantly recalled Jen saying that last time he visited her office in London, as they stood together at the window watching the daily bicycle jam turn into a riot on Westminster Bridge. “True-Vu tech put a stop to purposeful street crime,” she had said. “So today most killings are outrages of pure environmental overload. Promise me, Alex, you’ll never be one of those down there… the honestly employed. ”

Horribly fascinated, they had observed in silence as the commuter brawl spread onto Brunner Quay, then eastward toward the Arts Center. Recalling that episode, Alex suddenly saw this one take an unexpected turn. The officers hauling the wild-eyed mucker, distracted by frantic relatives at their sleeves, let their grip loosen for just a moment. Even then, a normal man might not have been able to tear free. But in a burst of hysterical strength the maniac yanked loose and ran. Ululating incoherently, he knocked down bystanders and then hurtled through the traffic jam — directly toward Alex’s car!

The mucker’s arms were pinned. He can’t get far, Alex thought. Somebody will stop him.

Only no one did. Nobody sensible messed with a mucker, bound or unbound.

Deciding at the last moment, Alex kicked his door open. The madman’s eyes seemed to clarify in that brief instant, replacing rage with an almost lucid, plaintive expression — as if to ask Alex, What did I ever do to you? Then he collided with the door, caroming a few meters before tumbling to the street. Somehow Alex felt guilty — as if he’d just beaten up a helpless bloke instead of possibly saving lives. That didn’t stop him, though, from leaping out and throwing himself atop the kicking, squalling man — now suddenly awash with incongruous tears as he cursed in some inland dialect of Han. With no better way to restrain him, Alex simply sat on him till help arrived.

The whole episode — from breakaway to the moment officers applied the spray sedatives they should have used in the first place — took little more than a minute. When the trussed-up mucker looked back at him through a crowd of snapping True-Vu lenses, Alex had a momentary feeling that he understood the fellow… far better, perhaps, than he did the gawking tourists around him. There was something desperately fearful and yet longing in those eyes. A look reminding Alex of what he sometimes saw in a mirror’s momentary, sidelong glance.

It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.

After wading through congratulatory backpats to his car, Alex looked down and saw for the first time that his clothes were smeared with blood. He sighed. Why does everything happen to me? I thought academics were supposed to lead boring lives.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some good old-fashioned British boredom about now…

No sooner was he seated than the driver behind him blew his horn. So much for the rewards of heroism. Edging around a final tourist bus he saw open lanes ahead at last. Carefully Alex fed the engine hydrogen, spun up the little car’s flywheel, and gradually built up speed. Soon the northern reaches of the Mamaku range sped by as he left Rotorua behind and set off across the central plateau.

This highway shared the chief attribute of Kiwi roads — a stubborn resistance to straight lines. Driving entailed carefully swooping round hairpin bends and steep crags, intermittently staring over precipices into gaping, cottony nothingness.

It was easy to see how New Zealand had got its Maori name — Ao Tearoa — Land of the Long White Cloud. Mist-shrouded peaks resembled recumbent giants swathed in fog. The slumbering volcanoes’ green slopes supported rich forests, meadows, and over twenty million sheep. The latter were kept mostly for their wool nowadays, though he knew George Hutton and many other natives ate red meat from time to time and saw nothing wrong with it.

In this land of steam geysers and rumbling mountains, one never drove far without encountering another of Hut-ton’s little geothermal power stations, each squatting on a taproot drilled near a vein of magma. Mapping such underground sources had made George wealthy. The network of sensors left over from that effort now helped Alex’s team define what was happening in the Earth’s core.

Not that anyone expected the scans to offer hope. How, after all, do you get rid of an unwanted guest weighing a million million tons? A monster ensconced safely in a lair four thousand kilometers deep? You surely don’t do it the way the Maori used to placate taniwha… demons… by plucking a hair and dropping it into dark waters.

Still, George wanted the work continued, to learn how much time was left, and who was responsible. Alex had wrung one promise from George, in case they ever did find the culprit. He wanted an hour with the fellow… one hour to talk physics before George wreaked vengeance on the negligent genius with his own hands.

Thinking about the poor man he had encountered so roughly back in Rotorua — remembering the sad yet bloody look in the mucker’s eyes — Alex wondered if any of them really had a right to judge.

He had always liked to think he had a passing education in fields outside his own. Alex had known, for instance, that even the greatest mountains and canyons were mere ripples and pores on the planet’s huge bulk. Earth’s crust — its basalts and granites and sedimentary rocks — made up only a hundredth of its volume and half a percent of its total mass. But he used to picture a vast interior of superdense, superhot melt, and left it at that. So much for geology.

Only when you truly study a subject do you find out how little you knew all along.

Why, just two months ago Alex had never heard of Andrija Mohoroviĉić!

In 1909 the Yugoslav scientist had used instruments to analyze vibration waves from a Croatian earthquake. Comparing results from several stations, Mohoroviĉić discovered he could, like bats or whales, detect objects by their reflected sound alone. On another occasion he found a thin layer that would later bear his name. But in 1909 what he heard were echoes of the Earth’s very core.

As instruments improved, seismic echolocation showed other abrupt boundaries, along with fault lines, oil fields, and mineral deposits. By century’s end, millions were being spent on high-tech listening as desperate multinationals sought ever-deeper veins, to keep the glory days going just a little longer.

A picture took shape, of a dynamic world in ceaseless change. And while most geologists went on studying the outer crust, some curious men and women cast their nets much deeper, beyond and below any conceivable economic reward.

Such “useless” knowledge often makes men rich — witness George Hutton’s billions. Whereas Alex’s own “practical” project, financed by money-hungry generals, had turned unprofitable to a rare and spectacular degree.

It just goes to show … he thought. You never can tell what surprises life has in store for you.

Even as Alex admitted his ignorance of geophysics, it was his own expertise that Hutton’s techs called upon as they struggled to improve their tools. The gravity antennas employed superconducting wave generators like those in a cavitron — the still-unlicensed machine he’d used in Iquitos. So he was able to suggest shortcuts saving months of development.

It was fun exchanging ideas with others… building something new and exciting, out of sight of the suspicious bureaucrats of the scientific tribunals. Unfortunately, each time they laughed together, or they celebrated overcoming some obstacle, someone inevitably stopped short and turned away, remembering what it was all about and how futile their work was likely to be in the long run. Alex doubted that even his great-grandparents’ generation, during the awful nuclear brinksmanship of the cold war, had ever felt so helpless or hopeless.

But we have to keep trying.

He switched on the radio, looking for some distracting music. But the first station he found carried only news bulletins, in Simplified English.

“We now tell you more news about the tragedy of Reagan Station. Two weeks ago, the American space station exploded. The ambassador to the United Nations, from Russia, accuses that the United States of North America was testing weapons on Reagan Station. The Russian ambassador does say that he has no proof. But he also does say that this is the most likely explanation…”

Most likely explanation indeed, Alex thought. It just goes to show… you never can tell.

• EXOSPHERE

“… the most likely explanation. Come now, Captain Tikhana. Surely you aren’t taken in by that silly cover story they’re spreading? That America was conducting secret weapons tests aboard Erehwon?” . Teresa shrugged, wondering again why she had let Pedro Manella set up this luncheon meeting in the first place. “Why not?” she responded. “The space secretary denies it. The President denies it. But you press people keep printing it.”

“Exactly!” Manella spread his hands expansively.

“The government’s charade is working perfectly. It’s a venerable tactic. Keep loudly denying something you didn’t do, so nobody will look for what you really did!”

Teresa stared as he twirled a forkful of linguini and made a blithe insouciance of taking it under the portal of his moustache. Fighting a nascent headache, she pressed the pressure points above her eyes. The plastic table top rocked under her elbows, setting plates and glasses quivering.

“Exactly-what-are-you-talking-about?” she said irritably, speaking the words individually. “If you don’t start making sense soon, I’m going to switch languages. Maybe you can make yourself understood in Simglish.”

The reporter gave her a look of distaste. Known to be fluent in nine tongues, he clearly had no love for the experimental bastard son of English and Esperanto.

“All right, Ms. Tikhana. Let me spell it out for you. I think your husband’s team on the space station’s Farpoint platform was experimenting with captive black holes.”

She blinked, then broke out laughing. “I knew it. You are crazy.”

“Am I?” Manella wiped his moustache and leaned toward her. “Consider. Although cavitronics research is allowed in a few places, in only one location have investigators been licensed to go all the way — to create full-scale singularities. And then only in orbit around the moon.”

“So?”

“So imagine some government decided to do an end run around the international team. What if they wanted to experiment on singularities of their own, in secret, to get a technological head start before the moratorium ends?”

“But the risks of getting caught—”

“Are substantial, yes. But those repercussions would be lessened by keeping all experiments at high altitude until everyone is sure microholes are safe and the tribunals start issuing licenses. Look what happened to that poor imbecile Alex Lustig, when he got caught jumping the gun right on the Earth’s surface.”

Teresa shook her head. “You’re implying the United States was engaged in secret, illegal research in space,” she said coolly.

Manella’s smile was patronizing, infuriating. Teresa steeled herself to ignore everything but content.

“I’m suggesting,” he replied. “That your husband might have been involved in such a program, and never bothered telling you about it.”

“I’ve heard enough.” Teresa crumpled her napkin and threw it on the table. She stood, but then stopped as she saw the reporter pull out several glossy photographs and lay them between the place settings. Teresa’s fingertips traced the outline of Jason’s face.

“Where was this taken?”

“At a conference on gravity physics last year, in Snowbird. See? You can read his name tag. Of course he wasn’t in uniform at the time…”

“Do you carry a secret camera in your bow tie?”

“In my moustache,” he said, with such a straight face that Teresa almost believed him. “This was back when I was hunting for clues to Alex Lustig’s whereabouts, before I broke the story on his own particular—”

Teresa flipped the last picture aside. “Nobody trusts photographs anymore, as proof of anything at all.”

“True enough,” Manella conceded. “They could be faked. But it was a public conference. Call the organizers. He used his own name.”

Teresa paused. “So? Among other things, Jason was studying anomalies in the Earth’s gravitational field. They’re important to orbital mechanics and navigation.” Because of that aspect, Teresa had done more than a little reading on the subject herself.

Manella commented with his shoulders. “The Earth’s field is twenty orders of magnitude less intense than the sort of gravity they talk about at conferences on the theory of black holes.”

Teresa slumped into her seat again. “You’re crazy,” she repeated. But this time her voice didn’t carry as much conviction.

“Come now, Captain. You’re an adult. Do not sink to abuse. Or at least keep the abuse relevant. Call me overzealous. Or pushy. Or even pudgy. But don’t say I’m crazy when you know I might be right.”

Teresa wanted to look anywhere but into the man’s dark, piercing eyes. “Why can’t you just leave it alone! Even if everything you suspect were true, they paid for it with their lives. The only ones they harmed were themselves.”

“And the taxpayers, Ms. Tikhana. I’m surprised you forget them. And perhaps your space program. What will happen to it during the lengthy investigations?”

Teresa winced, but said nothing.

“Besides, even if they only harmed themselves, does that excuse their bosses for violating basic principles of international law? True, most physicists agree cavitrons can’t make anything truly dangerous. But until that’s verified by a science tribunal, the technology is still quarantined. You know the reasons for the New Technologies Treaty as well as I do.”

Teresa felt like spitting. “The treaty’s a millstone, dragging us back—” But Manella disagreed, interrupting.

“It’s our salvation! You, of all people, should know what harm was done before its enactment. Care to try stepping outside right now without protection? Our grandparents could do so safely, even on a day like today.”

She glanced through the coated panes of the restaurant. It was bright out, not a cloud in the sky. Many strollers were enjoying an afternoon on the Mall. But everyone, without exception, wore sun hats and protective glasses.

Teresa knew the UV danger was often overstated. Even a few days’ sunbathing on a beach wouldn’t appreciably shorten the average person’s lifespan. The ozone layer wasn’t that badly depleted yet. Still, she got Manella’s point. Human shortsightedness had shredded that protective veil, just as it accelerated the spreading deserts and rising seas.

“You Americans astonish me,” he went on. “You dragged the rest of us, kicking and screaming, into environmental awareness. You and the Scandinavians chivvied and coerced until the treaties were signed… possibly in time to save something of this planet.

“But then, once the laws and tribunals were in place, you became the loudest complainers! Hollering like frustrated children about restraints on your right to do whatever you please!”

Teresa didn’t say anything, but answered silently. We never expected all the damned bureaucracy.

Her personal grudge was the tribunals’ slowness in releasing new rocket designs — studying, then restudying whether this propellant or that one would produce noxious or greenhouse gases. Closing the barn door too late on one problem and closing opportunity’s door at the same time.

“The world is too small,” Manella went on. “Our frail, frugal prosperity teeters on a precipice. Why do you think I devote myself to hunting down little would-be Fausts like Alex Lustig?”

She looked up. “For the headlines?”

Manella lifted his wine glass. “Touchi. But my point remains, Captain Tikhana. Something went on aboard that station. Let’s put aside illegality and talk about secrecy. Secrecy meant it wasn’t subject to scrutiny and criticism. That’s how calamities like Chernobyl and Lamberton and Tsushima happen. It’s also why — to be horribly blunt — your husband is right now hurtling at relativistic velocities toward Sagittarius.”

Teresa felt the blood drain out of her face. She had a sudden memory… not of Jason, but of the slippery way Colonel Glenn Spivey had managed to avoid testifying. Spivey had to know more, much more than he was telling.

Oh, Manella was smart all right. Right down to knowing when his point was made . . „ when it was best to stop talking while his victim squirmed for some way out of his infernal trap of logic.

Despairingly, Teresa saw no escape. She had to make a choice between two equally unpalatable avenues.

She could go to the inspector general with this. By federal and treaty law she’d be protected from retribution. Her rank and pay and safety would be secure.

But there was no way the IG could protect the most precious thing left to her — her flight status. Any way it went, “they” would find an excuse not to let her back into space again.

The other choice Manella was clearly, implicitly offering. She subvocalized the half obscenity… a conspiracy.

Something scratched at the window. She looked outside to see a creature scrabbling against the smooth surface of the glass — a large insect, bizarre and startling until she remembered.

A cicada. Yes, the Net had stories about them.

The city had braced for the reemergence of the seventeen-year cicadas, which from time beyond memory had flooded one summer every generation with noisy, ratcheting insect life, swarming through the trees and keeping everybody awake until they at last mated, laid their eggs, and died. A nuisance, but one whose recurrence was so rare and well timed that Washington regularly made an event of it, with special studies in the schools and humorous reports on the zines.

Only this year something had gone wrong.

Perhaps it was the water, or maybe something let into the soil. No one knew why yet… only that when a few, straggling cicadas finally did emerge from their seventeen winters underground, they were warped, sickly things, mutated and dying. It brought back memories of the cancer plague, or the Calthingite babies of twenty years ago, and led to dire conjectures about when something like it would next happen to people again.

Teresa watched the pitiful, horrible little insect crawl away amid the shrubbery… a victim, one of so many without names.

“What is it you want of me?” she asked the reporter in a whisper.

Somehow, she had expected him to smile. She was glad, even grateful, that he was sensitive enough not to exult openly. With a sincerity that might even be genuine, Pedro Manella touched her hand.

“You must help me. Help me find out what is going on.”

• CORE

Once, when he was very young, Alex’s gran took him out of school to witness a life ark being launched. Nearly thirty years later, the memory of that morning still brought back feelings of childlike wonder. For one thing, in those days an adult might think nothing of sending a big, black, gasoline-powered taxi to Croydon to pick up a small boy and then take him all the way back to where St. Thomas’s Hospital squatly overlooked long queues of cargo barges filing down the Thames past Parliament. After politely thanking the cabbie, young Alex had taken the long way to the hospital entrance, so he could dawdle near the water watching the boats. Set free temporarily from uniforms and schoolyard bullying, he savored a little time alone with the river before turning at last to go inside.

As expected, Jen was still busy, running back and forth from her research lab to the clinic, giving both sets of assistants revised instructions that only served to introduce still more chaos. Alex waited contentedly, perched on a lab stool while patients from all over Greater London were tested and prodded and rayed to find out what was wrong with them. Back then, while still involved in practical medicine, Jen used to complain she was always being sent the cases no one else could diagnose. As if she’d have had it any other way.

Laboratory science interested Alex, but biology seemed so murky, so undisciplined and subjective. Watching them test victims of a dozen different modern urban maladies, brought on by pollution, tension or overcrowding, he wondered how the workers were able to conclude anything at all.

One of the techs fortunately came to his rescue with a pad of paper and soon Alex was immersed, doodling with maths. On that day — he recalled vividly in later years — it had been the marvelous, intricate, and exacting world of matrices that had him enthralled.

At last Jen called to him as she removed her lab coat. Short, but deceptively strong, she took his hand as they left the hospital and rented two cycles from a hire/drop bubble near the elevated bikeway.

Alex had hoped they’d take a cab. He complained about the weather and distance, but Jen insisted a little mist never hurt anyone, and he could use the exercise.

In those days bicycles weren’t yet lords of London’s streets, and Alex had to endure a harrowing blur of horns and shouting voices. Keeping up with Jen seemed a matter of grim survival until at last the green swards of Regent’s Park opened up around them in a welcome haven of calm.

Black banners hung limply as they dropped off the bikes at a canal-side kiosk, below green and blue Earthwatch placards. Demonstrators stood nearby with ash-smeared brows, protesting both the ark program and the recent events that had made it necessary. One damp-haired speaker addressed tourists and visitors with an intensity that blazed in Alex’s memory ever afterward.

“Our world, our mother, has many parts. Each — like the organs in our bodies, like our very cells — participates in a synergistic whole. Each is a component in the delicate balance of cycle and recycle which has kept this world for so long an oasis of life in the dead emptiness of space.

“What happens when you or I lose a piece of ourselves? A finger? A lung? Do we expect to function the same afterward? Will the whole ever work as well again? How, then, can we be so blithe at the dismembering of our world? Our mother?

“Gaia’s cells, her organs, are the species that share her surface! “Here, today, hypocrites will tell you they’re saving species. But how? By amputating what’s left and storing it in a jar? You might as well cut out a drunkard’s liver and preserve it in a machine. For what purpose? Who is saved? Certainly not the patient!”

Alex watched the speaker while his grandmother bought tickets. Most of the fellow’s words left him perplexed on that day. Still, he recalled being fascinated. The orator’s passion was unusual. Those who held forth on Sundays at Speakers’ Corner seemed pallid and overwry in comparison.

One passage in particular he recollected with utter clarity. The fellow stretched his hands out at passersby, as if pleading for their souls.

“… humans brought intelligence, sentience, self-awareness to the world, it cannot be denied. And that, by itself, was good For how else could Gaia learn to know herself without a brain? That was our purpose — to furnish that organ — to serve that function for our living Earth.

“But what have we done? ”

The demonstrator wiped at the ash stains above each eye, runny from the intermittent drizzle. “What kind of brain slays the body of which it is a part? What kind of thinking organ kills the other organs of its whole? Are we Gaia’s brain? Or are we a cancer! One she’d be far better off without?”

For a moment, the speaker caught Alex’s eye and seemed to be addressing him especially. Staring back, Alex felt his grandmother take his hand and pull him away, past metal detectors and sniffer machines into the relative tranquility of the grounds inside.

On that day nobody seemed much interested in the bears or seals. The African section held few tourists, since that continent had been declared stabilized a few years before. Most people thought the great die-back there was over. For a time, at least.

Passing the Amazona section, Alex wanted to stop and see the golden lion tamarins, their large enclosure outlined in bright blue. There were quite a few other blue-rimmed areas there. Guards, both human and robot, focused on anyone who approached those specially marked exhibits too closely.

The yellow-maned tamarins looked at Alex dispiritedly, meeting his eyes as he passed. To him it seemed they too were aware of what today’s activity was about.

Crowds were already dispersing in the newly expanded section of the zoo devoted to creatures from the Indian subcontinent. He and Jen were too late for the official ceremony, naturally. Gran had never been on time for anything as long as he’d known her.

Still, it didn’t really matter. The mass of visitors wasn’t here to listen to speeches but to bear witness and know that history had marked yet another milestone. Jen told him they were “doing penance,” which he figured must mean she was a Gaian, too.

It wasn’t until many years later that he came to realize millions thought of her as the Gaian.

While they queued, the sun came out. Vapor rose from the pavement. Jen gave him a tenner to run off for an ice lollie, and he made it back just in time to join her at the place where the new border was being laid.

Half the exhibits in this section were already lined in blue. Guards now patrolled what had only a month ago been standard zoo enclosures, but which were now reclassified as something else entirely. This was before the hermetically sealed arks of later days, back when the demarcation was still mostly symbolic.

Of course the extra animals, the refugees, hadn’t arrived yet. They were still in quarantine while zoos all over the world debated who would take which of the creatures recently yanked out of the collapsing Indian park system. Over the months ahead, the exiles would arrive singly and in pairs, never again to see their wild homes.

Painters had just finished outlining the blackbuck compound. The deerlike animals flicked their ears, oblivious to their changed status. But in the next arena a tigress seemed to understand. She paced her enlarged quarters, tail swishing, repeatedly scanning the onlookers with fierce yellow eyes before quickly turning away again, making low rumbling sounds. Jen watched the beast, transfixed, a strange, distant expression on her face, as if she were looking far into the past… or to a future dimly perceived.

Alex pointed a finger at the great cat. Although he knew he was supposed to feel sorry for it, the tiger seemed so huge and alarming, it gave him a ritual feeling of security to cock his thumb and aim.

“Bang, bang,” he mouthed silently.

A new plaque glittered in the sunshine.

“I’ve looked into the gene pool figures,” Jen had said, though not to him. She stared at the beautiful, scary, wild thing beyond the moat and spoke to herself. “I’m afraid we’re probably going to lose this line.”

She shook her head. “Oh, they’ll store germ plasm. And maybe someday, long after the last one has died…”

Her voice just faded then, and she looked away.

At the time Alex had only a vague notion what it was all about, what the ark program was for, or why the agencies involved had at last given up the fight to save the Indian forests. All he knew was that Jen was sad. He took his grandmother’s hand and held it quietly until at last she sighed and turned to go.

Those feelings lingered with him even long after he went away to university and entered physics. Everyone is either part of the problem or part of the solution, he had learned from her. Alex grew up determined to make a difference, a big difference.

And so he sought ways to produce cheap energy. Ways that would require no more digging or tearing or poisoning of land. Ways to give billions the electricity and hydrogen they insisted on having, but without cutting any more forests. Without adding poisons to the air.

Well, Alex reminded himself for the latest time. I may have failed at that. I may have been useless. But at least I’m not the one who killed the Earth. Someone else did that.

It was a strange, ineffective solace.

No, another part of him agreed. But the ones who did it — whatever team or government or individual manufactured Beta — they, too, might have begun with the purest of motives.

Their mistake might just as easily have been my own.

Alex remembered the tigress, her savage, reproachful eyes. The slow, remorseless pacing.

The hunger…

Now he pursued a far deadlier monster. But for some reason the image of the great cat would not leave him.

He remembered the blackbucks, gathered in their pen all facing the same way, seeking security and serenity in numbers, in doing everything alike. Tigers weren’t like that. They had to be housed separately. Except under rare circumstances, they could not occupy the same space. That made them harder to maintain.

There were analogies in physics… the blackbucks were like those particles called bosons, which all sorted together. But fermions were loners like tigers…

Alex shook his head. What a bizarre line of contemplation! Why was he thinking about this right now?

Well, there was that postcard from Jen…

Not really a postcard — more a snapshot, sent to one of his secret mail drops in the Net. It showed his grandmother, apparently as spry as ever, posing with several black men and women and what looked like a tame rhinoceros — if such a thing were possible. Transmission marks showed it had been sent from the pariah Confederacy of Southern Africa. So Jen was making waves, still.

It runs in the family, he thought, smiling ironically.

He jerked slightly as someone nudged him on the shoulder. Looking up, he saw George Hutton standing over him.

“All right, Lustig, I’m here. Stan tells me you wanted to show me something before we begin the next test run. He says you’ve added to your bestiary.”

Alex jerked, still remembering the life ark. “I beg your pardon?”

“You know… black holes, microscopic cosmic strings, tuned strings…” George rubbed his hands in mock anticipation. “So, what have you come up with this time?”

“Well, I’ve been wrong before…”

“And you may be again. So? Each time you goof, it’s brilliant! Come on, then. Show me the final loop, or lasso, or lariat, or-…”

He trailed off, eyes widening at what Alex manifested in the holo tank. “Bozhe moi,” George sighed. An expression Alex knew was definitely not Maori.

“I call it a knot singularity,” he replied. “An apt name, don’t you think?”

The blue thing did resemble a knot of sorts — a Gordian monstrosity with the same relationship to a boy scout’s clove hitch as a spaceship had to a firecracker. The writhing orb was in ceaseless motion — loops popping out of the surface and quickly receding again — making Alex think of a ball of angry worms. All around the rippling sphere was emitted a shining light.

“I — I suppose that thing is made of… strings?” George asked, then swallowed.

Alex nodded. “Good guess. And before you ask, yes, they’re touching each other without reconnecting and dissipating. Think of a neutron, George. Neutrons can’t exist for long outside an atom. But contained inside, say, a helium nucleus, they can last nearly forever.”

George nodded soberly. He pointed. “Look at that!”

The loops popping out of the roiling mass mostly throbbed and flailed quickly before being drawn back in.

Now though, a string extended farther out than usual and managed to cross over on itself beyond the knot.

In a flash it burned loose and floated away from the greater body. Released from the whole, the liberated loop soon twisted round itself again. With another flash of reconnection there were two small ones in its place. Then four. Soon, the rebel string had vanished in a rush of division and self-destruction.

As they watched, another loop cut itself off in the same way, drifting off to die. Then another. “I think I see,” George said. “This thing, too, is doomed to destroy itself, like the micro black hole and the micro string.”

“Correct,” Alex said. “Just as a black hole is a gravitational singularity in zero macrodimensions, and a cosmic string is a singularity in one, a knot is a discontinuity in space-time that can twist in three, four… I haven’t calculated how many directions it can be tied in. I can’t even dream what the cosmological effects might be, if any truly big ones were made back at the beginning of the universe.

“What all three singularities have in common is this. It doesn’t pay to be small. A small knot is just as unstable as a microstring or a microhole. It dissipates — in this case by emitting little string loops which tear themselves apart in a blaze of energy.”

“So,” George said. “This is what you now think you made in your cavitron, in Peru?”

“Yes, it is.” Alex shook his head, still unable to really believe it himself. And yet no other model so accurately explained the power readings back at Iquitos. None so well predicted the mass and trajectory they had observed during the last week. It still astonished Alex he could have constructed such a thing without knowing it was even theoretically possible. But there it was.

Silence between the two men remained unbroken for moments.

“So now you have a model that works,” George said at last. “First you thought you had dropped a black hole into the Earth, then a tuned string. Now you call it a knot… and yet it still is harmless, dissipating.”

Hutton turned back to look at Alex again. “That still doesn’t help you explain Beta, does it? You still have no idea why the other monster is stable, self-contained, able to grow and feed at the Earth’s core, do you?”

Alex shook his head. “Oh, it’s a knot all right. Some kind of knot singularity. But exactly what type… that’s what we try to start finding out today.”

“Hmm,” Hutton looked across the underground chamber, past the waiting technicians to the gleaming new thumper, freshly built to specifications Alex and Stan Goldman had developed, now tuned and ready to send probing beams of gravity downward, inward.

“I’m concerned about those earthquakes,” George said.

“So am I.”

“But there’s no way to avoid taking risks, is there, hm? All right, Lustig. Go on, give the order. Let’s see what the thing has to say, face to face.”

Alex waved to Stan Goldman, stationed by the thumper itself, who rolled his eyes in a swift prayer and then threw the master timing switch. Naturally, nobody in the chamber actually heard the sound of coherent gravitons, fired downward from the superconducting antenna. Still, they could imagine.

Alex wondered if the others, too, were listening for an echo, and fearing just what would be heard.

• LITHOSPHERE

The Bay of Biscay glowed with the same radiant, sapphire hues Logan remembered in Daisy McClennon-’s eyes. He fell for those delicate shades again as he traveled swiftly southward aboard a Tide Power Corporation minizeppelin. The beauty of the waters was chaste, serene, pure, but all that would change once Eric Sauvel’s engineers had their way.

Sauvel sat next to him, behind the zep’s pilot, gesturing to encompass the brilliant seascape. “Our silt stirrers are already scattered across eight hundred square kilometers, where bottom sediments are richest,” he told Logan, raising his voice slightly above the softly hissing motors.

“You’ll provide power directly from the Santa Paula barrage?”

“Correct. The tidal generators at Santa Paula will feed the stirrers via superconducting cables. Of course any excess will go to the European grid.”

Sauvel was a tall, handsome man in his early thirties, a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique and chief designer of this daring double venture. He hadn’t welcomed Logan’s first visit a few weeks ago, but changed his mind when the American suggested improvements for the main generator footings. He kept pressing to have Logan back for a follow-up. It would be a lucrative consultancy, and the partners back in New Orleans had insisted Logan accept.

At least this trip was more comfortable than that hair-raising truck ride from Bilbao had been. That first time, Logan had only seen the tidal barrage itself — a chain of unfinished barriers stretching across a notch in the Basque seaboard. Since then he’d learned a lot more about this bold type of hydraulic engineering.

All along this coastline the Atlantic tides reached great intensity, driven by wind and gravity and funneled by the convergence of France and Spain. Other facilities already drew gigawatts of power from water flooding into the Iberian bight twice a day, without adding a single gram of carbon to the atmosphere or spilling an ounce of poison upon the land. The energy came, ultimately, from an all but inexhaustible supply — the orbital momentum of the Earth-Moon system. On paper it was an environmentalist’s dream — the ultimate renewable resource.

But try telling that to those demonstrators, back in Bordeaux.

This morning he had toured the facility already in place across the former mudflats of the Bassin d’Arcachon, near where the rivers Garonne and Dordogne flowed past some of the best wine country in the world. The Arcachon Tidal Power Barrage now supplied clean energy to much of southwestern France. It had also been bombed three times in the last year alone, once by a kamikaze pilot pedaling a handmade ornithopter.

Demonstrators paced the facility’s entrance as they had for fourteen years, waving banners and the womb-shaped Orb of the Mother. It seemed that even a pollution-free power plant — one drawing energy from the moon’s placid orbit — was bound to have its enemies these days. The protestors mourned former wetlands, which some had seen as useless mud flats, but which had also fed and sheltered numberless seabirds before being turned into a dammed-up plain of surging, turbid saltwater.

Then there was the other half of Eric Sauvel’s project, about which still more controversy churned. “How much sediment will you raise with your offshore impellers?” Logan asked the project manager.

“Only a few tons per day. Actually, it’s amazing how little sea bottom muck has to be lifted, if it’s well dissolved. One thousand impellers should turn over enough nutrients to imitate the fertilizing effect of the Humboldt Current, off Chile. And it will be much more reliable of course. We won’t be subject to climatic disruptions, such as El Nino.

“Preliminary tests indicate we’ll create a phytoplankton bloom covering half the bay. Photosynthesis will… is the correct expression skyrocket*.”

Logan nodded. Sauvel went on. “Zooplankton will eat the phytoplankton. Fish and squid will consume zooplankton. Then, nearer to the shore, we plan to establish a large kelp forest, along with an otter colony to protect it from hungry sea urchins…”

It all sounded too good to be true. Soon, yields from the Bay of Biscay might rival the anchovy fisheries of the eastern Pacific. Right now, in comparison, the bright waters below were as barren as the gleaming sands of Oklahoma.

That, certainly, was how Sauvel must see the bay today, as a vast, wet desert, a waste, but one pregnant with potential. Simply by lifting sea floor sediments to nourish the bottom of the food chain — drifting, microscopic algae and diatoms — the rest of life’s pyramid would be made to flourish.

Dry deserts can bloom if you provide water. Wet ones need little more than suspended dirt, I suppose.

Only we learned, didn’t we, how awful the effects can be on land, if irrigation is mishandled. I wonder what the price will be here, if we’ve forgotten something this time?

A lover of deserts, and yet their implacable foe, Logan knew stark beauty was often found in emptiness, while life, burgeoning life, could sometimes bring with it a kind of ugly mundanity.

So the tradeoffs — a bird marsh exchanged for a dead but valuable energy source… a lifeless but beautiful bay bartered for a fecund sea jungle that could feed millions…

He wished there were a better way.

Well, we could institute worldwide compulsory eugenics, as some radicals propose — one child per couple, and any male convicted of any act of violence to be vasectomized. That’d work all right… though few effects on population or behavior would be seen for decades.

Or we could ration water even more strictly. Cut energy use to 200 watts per person… though that would also stop the worldwide information renaissance in its tracks.

We might ground all the dirigible liners, end the tourism boom, and settle down to regional isolationism again. That would save energy, all right… and almost certainly finish the growing internationalism that’s staved off war.

Or we could force draconian recycling, down to the last snippet of paper or tin foil. We could reduce caloric intake by 25 percent, protein by 40 percent…

Logan thought of his daughter and threw out all brief temptation to side with the radicals. He and Daisy had responsibly stopped at one child, but of late Logan was less sure about even that restriction. A person like Claire would cure many more of the world’s ills than she created by living in it.

In the end, it came down to utter basics.

Nobody’s cutting my child’s protein intake. Not while I’m alive to prevent it. Whatever Daisy says about the futility of “solving” problems, I’m going to keep on trying.

That meant helping Sauvel, even if this pristine ocean-desert had to be overwhelmed by clouds of silt and algae and noisome, teeming fish.

The glare of sunlight off the water must have been stronger than he realized. Logan’s eyes felt funny. A spectral, crystal shine seemed to transform the air. He blinked in a sudden daze, staring across a sea made even more mesmerizing than any mere iris shade. It loomed toward him, seizing him like a lover, with a paralyzing captivation of the heart.

Shivers coursed his back. Logan wondered if a microbe might feel this way, looking with sudden awe into a truly giant soul.

All at once he knew that the sensations weren’t subjective after all! The minizep shook. Tearing his gaze from the hypnotic sea, Logan saw the pilot rub her eyes and slap her earphones. Eric Sauvel shouted to her in French. When she answered, Sauvel’s face grew ashen.

“Someone has sabotaged the site,” he told Logan loudly to be heard over the noise. “There’s been an explosion.”

“What? Was anybody hurt?”

“No major casualties, apparently. But they wrecked one of the anchor pylons.”

The weird effects were ebbing even as Sauvel spoke. Logan blinked. “How bad is it?”

The engineer shrugged, an expressive gesture. “I do not know. Everyone appears to have been affected in some way. Even I sensed something just a moment ago — perhaps sub-sonics from the blast.”

Sauvel leaned to his left and peered. “We’re coming into sight now.”

At first it was hard to see that anything had happened at all. There were no plumes of smoke. No sirens wailed across the sloping shelf overlooking Santa Paula inlet. On both banks the half-finished energy storage facilities looked much as Logan remembered them.

The fjordlike cove began as a wide gap in the coastline that narrowed as it penetrated inland. Crossing it at a chosen point lay rows of monoliths, like gray military bunkers, each linked to the next by a flexible dam. Twice daily, tides would drive up the natural funnel and over those barriers, pushing turbines in the process. Then, as moon and sun drew the water away again, it would pay another toll. Back and forth, ebb and flow, the system needed no steady stream of coal or oil or uranium, nor would it spill forth noxious waste. Spare parts would be the only ongoing cost, and electricity its sole output.

Logan scanned the pylons and generator housings. One or two of his suggestions had already been put into effect, he saw. Apparently, the modifications had worked. But as yet he saw no signs of damage.

“Over there!” Sauvel pointed to one end of the barrage chain. Emergency vehicles flashed strobe lights, while magnus floaters and police helicopters scoured the surrounding hillsides. Their pilot answered repeated demands for identification.

Logan sought telltale signs of violence but spotted no blackened, twisted wreckage, no sooty debris. When Sauvel gasped, he shook his head. “I don’t see…”

He followed Sauvel’s pointing arm and stared. A new tower had been erected on the shore, reaching like a construction crane fifty meters high. Its nose drooped, heavy with some cargo.

Only as they neared did Logan notice that the spire was strewn with green, stringy stuff — seaweed, he realized, and from the sagging tip there dangled a man! The “tower” was no tower at all, but an important piece of the tidal barrage… the shoreline anchor boom. A horizontal structure. At least it was supposed to be horizontal. Designed to withstand fierce Atlantic storms, it had lain flat in the water, until…

“The devil’s work!” Sauvel cursed. Some force had contrived to stand the boom on end like a child’s toy. Watching rescue vehicles close in to save the dangling diver, they verified by radio that there were no other injuries. Emergency crews could be heard complaining, there was no trace to be found of the purported bomb!

Logan felt a growing suspicion they’d never find any.

He didn’t laugh. That would be impolite to his hosts, whose work had been set back days, perhaps weeks. But he did allow a grim smile, the sort a cautious man wears on encountering the truly surprising. He felt as he had a few weeks ago, when examining those strange Spanish earth-quakes — and the case of the mysterious, disappearing drilling rig. Logan made a mental note to tap the world seismological database as soon as they reached shore. Maybe there was a connection this time, as well.

Something new had entered the world all right. Of that much, he now felt certain.

• EXOSPHERE

Twinkle, twinkle, little star… Despite some trepidation, Teresa schooled herself to stay calm during her first trip back into space. She checked frequently, but her beacons didn’t wobble. The continents hadn’t shifted perceptibly. Her old friends, the stars, lay arrayed as she remembered them. Sprinkled road signs, offering unwinking promises of a constancy she had always relied upon. How I wonder what you are…

“Liars,” she accused them. For their promise had proven false once already. Who, after going through what she had, could ever be certain those constellations might not choose to go liquid again, melting and flowing and becoming one with the chaos within her?

“What was that, Mother? Did you say something?”

Teresa realized she’d spoken aloud to an open mike. She glanced outside, where distant, spacesuit-clad figures crawled over a latticework of girders and fibrous pylons. They were too far away to make out individual faces.

“Uh, sorry,” she said. “I was just…”

A second voice cut in. “She’s just cluckin’ to make sure her chicks are okay. Right, Mommy?”

That voice she knew. Traditional it might be, for a work party on EVA to call the watch pilot “Papa.” Or in her case, “Mother.” But only Mark Randall had the nerve to call her “Mommy” over an open channel.

“Can it, Randall.” Colonel Glenn Spivey this time, stepping in to curtail idle chatter. “Is anything the matter, Captain Tikhana?”

“Um… no, Colonel.”

“Very well, then. Thank you for continuing to monitor us, quietly.”

Teresa punched her thigh. Damn the man! Spivey’s version of politeness would spoil fresh-picked apples. She twisted her cheek-mike away so the next stray word wouldn’t draw that awful man’s attention.

I’m not myself, she knew. Extraneous talk on open channel just wasn’t her style. But then, neither were espionage or treason.

She glanced toward her left knee. The tiny recorder she’d placed there was tucked well out of sight, tapping the shuttle’s main computer via a fiber barely thick enough to see. It had been almost too easy. The instruments required were already aboard Pleiades. It was just a matter of modifying their settings slightly, so narrow windows of data could be snooped by her little data store.

It helped that this was a construction mission. For hours at a stretch, she would be left alone while Randall and Spivey and the others were outside, supervising the robots that were erecting Erehwon II. Defense wanted the new edifice put in place quickly, which involved using those undamaged portions of Reagan Station, plus parts cobbled from spares and rushed up on heavy boosters.

That was an advantage of “national security” as a priority. The calamity wouldn’t be allowed to paralyze all space activity, as happened after the Challenger disaster or that horrible Lamberton fiasco. On the other hand, other programs were being stripped for this. Civilian space was going to suffer for a long time to come.

Out in the blackness, Teresa watched figures systematically dismantle a giant cargo lifter — opening the great rocket like an unfolding flower. Space Jacks, like butchers in an oldtime abattoir, bragged they could find a use for “everything but the squeal.” It was a far cry from back when NASA had first tried to assemble an entire working space station, unbelievably, out of nothing but tiny capsules and gridwork, every bit hauled to orbit inside shuttles.

Unhappy over the hurried pace, this construction squad had unanimously chosen her to be Mother, to watch over them from Pleiades’ control deck. Management dared not buck the drivers’ and spinners’ unions when it came to crew safety, so Teresa had escaped the talk-show circuit, after all.

The irony was, for the first time in her career she found herself preoccupied in other ways. She did her job, of course. Because the other ’nauts were counting on her, she meticulously took telemetry readings, making doubly sure her “chicks” were all right. Still, Teresa kept turning around to glance through the rear window at the Earth. It wasn’t the planet’s beauty that distracted her, but a nervous sense of expectation.

The NASA psychologist had warned there were always difficulties, first time up again after a trouble mission. But that wasn’t it. Teresa knew it was important to get back in the saddle. She had confidence in her skills.

No, her gaze kept drifting Earthward because that was where she’d seen the first symptoms. Those weird optical effects the psychers had largely dismissed as stress hallucinations, but which had given her an instant’s warning last time.

Stop being so nervous, she told herself. If Manella’s right, it can’t happen again. He thinks Erehwon was torn apart when some stupid malf released a micro black hole up at Farpoint lab. Whatever Frankenstein device they were playing with must have blown its energy all at once.

By that reasoning it was a single exploding singularity that had, by some unknown means, carried the first men — or what was left of them — to the stars.

For the fortieth time, she tried to figure out how they might have done it. How could anybody build and conceal a black hole, for heaven’s sake — even a micro black hole — in space without word getting out? The smallest hole with a temperature low enough to be contained would need the mass of a midget mountain. You don’t go hauling that kind of material into low earth orbit without someone noticing. No, the thing would have been built by cavitronics — that new science of quantum absurdities, of forces nobody had even heard of forty years ago, which let foolish men create space-warped sinkholes out of the raw stuff of vacuum itself.

Cavitronics. In spite of reading popular accounts, Teresa knew next to nothing about the field. Who did?

Well, Jason, apparently. She had thought him incapable of ever lying to her. Which showed just how little she knew about people after all.

What amazed Teresa most was that Spivey and his co-conspirators could actually hide such a massive thing up here, in Earth’s crowded exosphere. True, Farpoint had been isolated. Getting there required two consecutive twenty-kilometer elevator rides.

Still, how does one hide a gigaton object in Low Earth Orbit? Even compressed to a pinpoint, its presence would have perturbed the trajectory of the whole complex. She’d have been able to tell every time she piloted a mission to Erehwon, from subtle differences in her readings. No. Manella had to be wrong!

Then she remembered how those DOD men in powder blue uniforms had sequestered the recordings, as soon as Pleiades returned from that horribly extended mission. Teresa had assumed it was for accident analysis. But somehow the data never were made public.

She mentally catalogued ways a pilot could really tell the mass of the upper tip, assuming all shuttles docked far below. The list was shockingly small.

What if… she pondered. What if, each trip to Erehwon, the shuttle’s operating parameters were adjusted, its inertial guidance units altered beforehand?

It wouldn’t take much, she decided. Worse than dishonest, it would be horribly unprincipled to lie to a pilot about her navigation systems, to purposely make them give false readings.

But it could be done. After all, she’d only see what she expected to see.

The thought was appalling. This wasn’t the sort of thing one took to the union steward!

Over the next hour Teresa answered calls from the work party, computed some corrections for them, and shepherded one woman and her robot back on course from a five-degree deviation. She double-checked the modification and watched till the astronaut and her cargo were back on station. Meanwhile though, her head churned with arguments both for and against the scenario.

“They simply couldn’t have gotten away with it!” she cried out at one point.

“Beg pardon, Mama?”

It was Mark again, calling from the site where he was unreeling great spools of ultra-strong spectra fiber.

“Pleiades here. Um, never mind.”

“I distinctly heard you say—”

“I’m — practicing for the Space Day talent show. We’re doing Hound of the Baskervilles.”

“Cheery play. Remind me to lose my ticket.”

Teresa sighed. At least Spivey hadn’t cut in. He must have been preoccupied.

“They couldn’t have gotten away with it,” she muttered again after turning her mike completely off. “Even if they could have finagled Pleiades to give false readings…”

She stopped, suddenly too paranoid to continue aloud.

Even if they could fool Pleiades, and me, into ignoring gigatons of excess mass, they couldn’t have disguised it from the real observers… the other space powers! They all keep watch on every U.S. satellite, as we watch every-

one else up here. They would have spotted any anomaly as big as Manella talks about.

Teresa felt relieved… and silly for not having thought of this sooner. Manella’s story was absurd. Spivey couldn’t have hidden a singularity on Farpoint. Not unless…

Teresa felt a sudden resurgent chill. Not unless all the space powers were in on it.

Pieces fell into place. Such as the bland, perfunctory way the Russians had accused America of weapons testing, then let the matter drop. Or the gentlemen’s agreement about not making orbital parameters public beyond three significant figures.

“Everyone is cheating on the treaty!” she whispered, in awe.

Now she understood why Manella was so insistent on acquiring her help. There might be more of the damned things up here! Half the stations between LEO and the moon might contain singularities, for all she knew! The data in her little recorder might be the key to tracking them down.

The enormity of her situation was dawning on her. Much as she resented the science tribunals for blocking some space technologies, Teresa nevertheless wondered what the world might have been like by now without them. Probably a ruin. Did she then dare help cause a scandal that could bring the entire system crashing down?

After all, she thought, it’s not as if Spivey’s people ignored the ban completely. They put their beast out here, where…

Again she slammed her thigh.

… where it killed friends, her husband… and put the space program back years!

Teresa’s eyes filmed. Her balled fist struck over and over until the hurt turned into a dull, throbbing numbness. “Bastards!” she repeated. “You gor-sucking bastards.”

So it was with grief-welled eyes that Teresa didn’t even notice sudden waves of color sweep the cabin, briefly clothing what had been gray in hues of spectral effervescence, then quickly fading again.

Outside, among the growing girders and tethers, one or two of the workers blinked as those ripples momentarily affected peripheral vision. But they were trained to concentrate on their jobs and so scarcely noticed as the phenomena came and swiftly passed away again.

By Teresa’s knee, however, the little box quietly and impartially recorded, taking in everything the shuttle’s instruments fed it.