Earth

PLANET

A tug of war began, between sea and sky and land.

In the ocean, life was carnivorous and simple, a pyramid founded on the very simplest forms, the phytoplankton, which teemed in great colored tides wherever sunlight met raw materials. Of the elements they needed to grow and flourish, hydrogen and oxygen could be taken from the water, and carbon from the air. But calcium and silicon and phosphorus and nitrates… these had to be acquired elsewhere.

Some you got by eating your neighbor. But sooner or later, everything suspended in the sea must drop out of the cycle to join the ever-growing sediments below. Cold upwelling currents replenished part of the loss, dragging nutrients back up from the muddy bottoms. But most of the deficit was made up at the mouths of rivers, draining rain-drenched continents. Silt and minerals, the raw fertilizer of life, dripped into the sea like glucose from an intravenous tap.

On land, it took a long time for life to gain a foothold. And for a very long time there were just frail films of cyanobacteria and fungi, lacing the bare rock surfaces with filaments and tiny fibers. These first soils kept moisture in contact with stone longer, so

weathering hastened. The flow of calcium and other elements to the sea increased.

Plankton are efficient when well fed. And so, after the breakup of Gondwanaland, when many great rivers fed shallows teeming with green life, carbon was sucked from the air as never before. The atmosphere grew transparent.

At that time the sun was less warm. And so, deprived of its greenhouse shield, the air also cooled. Ice sheets spread, covering more and more of the Earth until, from north and south, glaciers nearly met at the equator.

This was no mere perturbation. No mere “ice age. ” Reflecting sunlight into space, the icy surface stayed frozen. Sea levels dropped. Evaporation decreased because of the chill. There was less rain.

But less rain meant less weathering of continental rocks… less mineral runoff. The plankton began to suffer and grew less efficient at taking carbon out of the air. Eventually, the removal rate fell below replenishment by volcanoes and respiration. The pendulum began to swing the other way.

In other words, the greenhouse grew back. Naturally. Within a few tens of millions of years the crisis was over. Rivers flowed and warm seas lapped the shorelines again. Life resumed its march — if anything, stimulated by the close call.

A tug of war… or a feedback loop . . . either way it succeeded. What matter that each cycle took epochs, saw countless little deaths and untold tragedies? Over the long term, it worked.

But nowhere was it written, in water or in stone, that it absolutely had to next time.

• LITHOSPHERE

When the tiny settlement had first been established on the salty verge of the Gulf of Mexico, tall ships wearing high-top wings of white sailcloth had to ride the tidal flow through a measureless, reedy delta in order to reach it. Negotiating the shifting channels took a good pilot. Still, the new trading post lay within easy reach of piping seabirds. Sailors at anchor could hear breakers boom against sand bars.

The port was meant to be a point of contact between three worlds — freshwater, saltwater, and the continental ocean of prairie rumored to stretch beyond the western hills. The village thrived in this role and became a town. The town, a metropolis. Time crawled by, as inexorable as the river.

Once a city has grown great and venerable, it takes on its own justification. Centuries passed. Eventually, the original raison d’etre for New Orleans hardly mattered anymore. A living thing, it fought to survive.

Logan Eng strolled a levee watching barges glide past sunken abandoned docks. Once, this had been the second-busiest port in North America, but today cargo ships passed on by, toward the big tube-reloading stations at Memphis, for example. This muggy evening, the main redolence was of mint-scented pine oils, added by the city to cover other, less pleasant aromas. Environment Department launches sniffed each barge suspiciously. But according to Logan’s ex-wife, it wasn’t bilge dumping that gave the river that greasy brown pungency, but the town’s own creaking sewers.

Of course, Daisy McClennon never lacked for causes. As student protestors, long ago, they had shared the same battles. Those had been great days to be young and on the side of righteousness.

But time affects relationships, as well as cities. And Daisy, the purist, found it ever harder to accept Logan, who had in his heart something called compromise. Their first big fight came early on, when Alaska, Idaho, and other holdouts finally began taxing household toxics like canned paints and pesticides, to encourage proper disposal. Logan had been elated, but Daisy wrinkled her nose, detecting a sellout. “You don’t know string pullers and deal makers like I do,” she had declared. “If they gave in so easily, it was to forestall bigger sanctions later. They’re experts at testing the wind, then giving you moderates just enough rope…”

Logan came to envy other people, whose marriages might wither or flourish over mundane things like money or sex or children. For their part, he and Daisy had always earned more than they needed, even in these tight times. And their lovemaking used to be so good that even in middle age he still thought her the most desirable woman alive.

How absurd that little differences in politics should come between them! Differences he, personally, found inscrutable.

He still vividly recalled that final, bitter evening, wiping biodegradable dish soap from his hands as he tried to catch her eyes. “Hey! I’m on your side!” he had pleaded.

“No you’re not!” she had screamed back. A handmade plate shattered on the wall. “You build dams! You help irrigators ruin fertile land!”

“But we have new ways…”

“And every one of your new ways will just bring on more catastrophes! I tell you, I can’t live anymore with a man who sends bulldozers tearing across the countryside…”

He recalled her eyes, that evening ten years ago, so icy blue and yet so full of fire. He had wanted to hold her, to inhale her familiar scent and beg her to reconsider. But in the end he went out into the night… a humid night like this one… carrying suitcases and a feeling ever afterward of exile.

Ironically, Daisy had been as good as her word. She could tolerate him, if not his views, just so long as he didn’t live in the same house. Shared custody of Claire was handled so easily, Logan had to wonder. Was it because Daisy knew he was a good father? Or because the issue simply didn’t loom as large to her as the latest cause?

“People talk as if the old days of capitalist rapists ended on the beaches of Vanuatu, and with the sack of Vaduz,” she had pronounced just last Sunday, over a dinner of neo-Cajun blackened soycake. “But I know better. They’re still there, behind the scenes, the profiteers and money men. Anti-secrecy laws just drove them undercover.

“All this talk of using tax policy to ‘assess social costs’… what a dumb idea. The only way to stop polluters is to put them against walls and shoot them.”

This from a vegetarian, who thought it murder to harm a perennial plant! At one point during the meal, Logan’s daughter caught his eye. I just have to live with Daisy till college — Claire’s look of commiseration seemed to say — You had to be married to her!

Actually, a part of Logan perversely enjoyed these monthly exposures to Daisy’s fanaticism. Among his engineering peers he so often took the pro-Gaian side in arguments, it was actually refreshing to have the roles reversed occasionally.

Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.

Take the scene from this levee. Logan found it hard to get excited over simple sewage. It was only biomatter, after all, headed straight for the gulf. Not something really serious, like heavy metals in an aquifer or nitrates in a lake. The brown stuff out there wouldn’t make pleasant drinking water. (Who drank from the Mississippi anyway?) But the ocean could absorb one hell of a lot of fertilizer. No cities lay downstream, so officials looked away when the Old Dame… leaked. New Orleans had special problems anyway.

From atop the splattered dike, Logan spied the massive flood barrier city fathers had built to fight aggressive tidal surges. The price for that impressive edifice lay behind him — a town still elegant and proud, but wracked by neglect.

Logan had toured Alexandria, Rangoon, Bangkok, and other threatened cities, assessing similar panoramas of grandeur and loss. Sometimes his advice had actually helped, like at Salt Lake, where the rising inland sea now surrounded a thriving sunken municipality. More often, though, he came home feeling he’d been battling mud slides with his bare hands. The death of Venice, apparently, hadn’t taught anybody anything.

Sometimes you just have to say good-bye.

Here in New Orleans, earnest men and women worked to save their unique town. He’d recently helped the Urban Corporation anchor seventeen downtown blocks against further sinking into the softening ground. Tonight they were rewarding him with a night in the old French Quarter, still gay and full of life — though now the Dixieland strains echoed off these riverside barricades, and barges rolled by even with wrought-iron balconies.

At one point he just had to get away, for his ringing ears to cool off and the fiery cuisine to settle. Excusing himself, he left to stroll the muggy, jacaranda-scented evening, stepping aside for lovers and wandering groups of Ra Boys on the prowl. The Big Easy had class all right. In decline, there remained an air of seedy blaisance, and even the inevitable bandit types believed in courtesy.

He listened to the barge horns and thought of the manatees that had inhabited this area, back when La Salle’s men first poled their way through endless marshes, trading ax heads for furs. The manatees were long gone, of course. And soon… relatively soon… so would New Orleans.

The dying of any city begins at its foundation. The French had faced a huge expanse of bayous and reed beds where the Mississippi deposited silt far into the Gulf. This posed a problem. You want to build a town at the mouth of a great river, but which mouth? Natural rivers have many.

They chose the most navigable one, and used a Chippewa word to call it “Mississippi.” But nature paid no heed to names. Channels silted up, and the river kept bulling new paths to the sea.

It was natural, but men found it inconvenient. So they started dredging, saying, “This shall be the main channel, always and forever.”

Dredged mud piled up along the banks of a trough that pushed ever outward, carrying its load of plains dust and mountain sediment deeper into the gulf. Not a fan but a finger, poking mile by mile, year after year, in the general direction of Cuba.

Meanwhile the rest of the delta began eroding.

Logan had inspected hundreds of kilometers of embankments, thrown up in forlorn efforts to save the doomed shore. More tall levees contained the river, whose gradient flattened over time. Suspended silt began falling out even north of Baton Rouge. Soon the sluggish current no longer held back the sea. Salinity increased.

Upstream, the Mississippi fought like an anaconda, writhing to escape. The contest was one of raw power. And Logan knew where it would be lost.

Can you hear it calling? He asked the captive waters. Can you hear the Atchafalaya, beckoning you?

Fortunately, Claire would move away long before the Mississippi burst through the Old River Control Structure or some other weak point, spilling into that peaceful plain of cane fields and fish farms. But Daisy? She’d never budge. Perhaps she didn’t believe because the warning came from him, and that made Logan feel vaguely guilty.

In effect, he could only pray the Corps’ new barriers were as good as they claimed. It was possible. Schools now taught youngsters to think in terms of decades, not mere months or years anymore. Maybe that culture had worked its way even to Washington.

But rivers see decades, even centuries, as mere trifles.

The Mississippi rolled by. And, not for the first time, Logan wondered if Daisy might be right after all. I try to find solutions that work with Earth’s forces. I like to think I’ve learned from the mistakes of past engineers.

But didn’t they, too, think they built for the ages?

He remembered what Shelley had written, about an ancient pharaoh.

Now the pyramids of Giza, symbols of man’s conquest of time, were crumbling under the smoggy breath of fifty million denizens of Cairo. The monuments of Ramses were flaking to dust, blowing away to become thin layers in some future geologist’s dissection of the past.

Can we build nothing that lasts? Nothing worth lasting?

Logan sighed. He had been away too long. He turned away from the patient river and took the rusted, creaking iron stairs back into the ancient city.

A man in blue stood near the door of the restaurant, his crewcut and patchy skin exaggerated by the rhodium flicker of the entrance sign. At first, Logan thought the fellow was a Ra Boy in mufti. But a second glance showed him to be too old, and much too formidable to be a Ra Boy.

Normally, Logan would have left out the second glance, but one does look twice when someone steps up and grabs your elbow. Logan blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“No. It’s I who must apologize. You’re Logan Eng, may I assume?”

“Uh… I won’t serve time for keeping it mum.” The flip clichi rolled out before he could regret it, but the sallow-faced man appeared not to notice. He let go of Logan’s arm only as they moved away from the doorway.

“My name is Glenn Spivey, colonel, United States Aerospace Force.”

The stranger held out an ID that projected a holographic sphere ten centimeters across, emblazoned with crusty military emblems.

“Please go ahead and use your wallet plaque to verify my credentials, Mr. Eng.”

Logan started to laugh. Partly in relief this wasn’t a robbery and partly at the incongruity. As if anyone would want to fake such a garish thing!

“I’m sure I believe you…”

But the other man insisted. “I really would prefer you check, sir.”

“Hey, what’s this about? I have people waiting…”

“I know that. This shouldn’t take long. We can talk soon as you’ve verified my bona fides. It’s for your own protection, sir.”

In the stranger’s eyes, Logan recognized a tenacity far exceeding his own. Arguing was clearly futile.

“Oh, all right.” He took out his wallet and aimed its lens first at Spivey and then at the man’s glowing credential. Quickly he dialed the private security service he used for such things and pressed his thumb to the ident-plate. In three seconds the tiny screen flashed a terse confirmation.

All right, the fellow was who he said he was. Logan might have preferred a robber.

“Shall we go for a walk then, Mr. Eng?” Spivey motioned with one arm.

“I just finished walking a piece. Can we sit down? I really only have a moment…”

His protest trailed off as the officer showed him to a long black car parked at the curb. One glance told Logan the thing was made of steel throughout, and ran on high-octane gasoline.

Astounding. Work vehicles were one thing. Out in the field, machines needed that kind of power. But what use was it here in a city? This told him more than he’d learned by reading Spivey’s ID.

Logan felt like a desecrator, planting his work pants on the plush upholstery. When the door hissed shut, all sound from the blaring, cacophonous street instantly vanished.

“This is a secure vehicle,” Spivey told him, and Logan quite believed it.

“All right, Colonel. What’s all this about?”

Spivey held up one hand. “First I must tell you, Mr. Eng, that what we’re about to discuss is highly classified. Top secret.”

Logan winced. “I want my lawyer program.”

The officer smiled placatingly. “I assure you it’s all legal. You must be aware certain government agencies are exempt from the open-access provisions of the Rio Treaties.”

Logan knew that. Disarmament hadn’t ended all threats to peace or national security. Nations still competed, and in principle he accepted the need for secret services. Still, the idea made him intensely uncomfortable.

Spivey went on. “If you wish, though, we can record our conversation, and you may deposit a copy with a reputable registration service. Which one do you use for business? I’m sure you often sequester proprietary techniques for weeks or months before applying for patents.”

Logan relaxed just a bit. Sequestering a conversation, to keep it confidential for a short time, was another matter entirely… so long as a legal record was kept in a safe place. In that case, he wondered why Spivey used the word “secret” at all.

“I deposit with Palmer Privacy, but—”

Spivey nodded. “Palmer will be satisfactory. Because we’ll be discussing matters of national safety, however, and a possible threat to public welfare, I must ask for a ten-year sequestration, at ultimate level.”

At that level, only a high court could open the record before expiration. Logan swallowed. He felt as if he had stepped into a bad flat-movie from the twentieth century, one made all too realistic in Daisy McClennon’s enhancement lab. He was tempted to look around for the flashing pink star, installed to cue viewers that this wasn’t real.

“Naturally, my agency will reimburse the extra cost, if that’s a concern,” Spivey added.

After a moment’s hesitation, Logan nodded. “Okay.” His voice felt very dry.

Spivey took out two recording cubes, black, with tamper-proof seals, and set them into a taper. Together, they went through the ritual, establishing names and conditions, time and location. At last, with both cubes winking, the colonel settled back in his seat. “Mr. Eng, we’re interested in your theories about the incident at the Biscay tidal barrage.”

Logan blinked. He had been imagining things this might be about, from person smuggling, to waste-dumping scams, to insider trading. He traveled widely and met so many colorful types that there was no telling how many might be involved in the ceaseless, sometimes shady jockeying of governments and corporations. But Spivey had surprised him with this!

“Well, Colonel, I’d have to classify that paper more under the heading of science fiction than theory. After all, I published in a database for speculative…”

“Yes, Mr. Eng. The Alternate View. Actually, you may be surprised to learn our service keeps close tabs on that zine, and similar ones.”

“Really? It’s just a forum for crackpot ideas…” He read the other man’s look. “Well, maybe not as crackpot as some. Most subscribers are technical people. Let’s say it’s where we can publish things that don’t belong elsewhere — certainly not the formal journals. Most of the ideas aren’t to be taken seriously.”

He felt uncomfortably sure Spivey was watching his every move, taking his measure. Logan didn’t like it.

“Are you saying you think your hypotheses worthless?” the man asked levelly.

Logan shrugged. “There are lots of notions that seem to work on paper, or in Net simulations, but can’t be justified in the real world.”

“And your notion was?” Spivey prompted.

Logan thought back to the case of the missing drill rig in southern Spain — and the anchor boom that had been lifted on end at the tidal power station — both without any sign of sabotage.

“All I did was calculate how a special type of Earth movement could have caused the strange things I saw.”

“What kind of Earth movement?”

“It’s…” Logan lifted both hands parallel. “It’s like, well, pushing a child on a swing. If you shove at the right frequency, matching the natural pendulum rhythm, you’ll build momentum with each stroke—”

“I’m aware of how resonance works, Mr. Eng. You suggested the Spanish anomalies were caused by a special type of seismic resonance. Specifically, the sudden arrival of extremely narrowly focused earthquakes and corresponding gravity variations—”

“No! I didn’t say that was the cause! I merely showed such waves would be consistent with observed events. It’s an amusing idea, that’s all. I can’t really say why I even bothered with it.”

The government man inclined his head slightly. “I’m sorry I misspoke. You sound upset about it.”

“A man’s reputation is important. Especially in my field. People understand play, of course. So I was careful to make clear that’s all I was doing, playing with an idea! It’s quite another thing to say, ‘this is what happened.’ I didn’t do that.”

Spivey regarded him for a long interval. Finally, he opened a slim briefcase and pulled out a large-format reading plaque. “I’d appreciate it if you’d leaf through this, Mr. Eng, and consider what you see in light of your… playful exercise.”

Logan thought of protesting. By now his associates in the restaurant might be worried. Or they might be incoherent from alcohol or assume he’d gone off to bed…

He took the plaque. Making certain the recording cubes could read over his shoulder, he put his thumb on the page-turn button and began skimming. Silence stretched in the limo as he read. Finally, he said, “I don’t believe it.”

“Now you understand why I insisted you check my credentials, Mr. Eng, so you’ll know this is no hoax.”

“But this episode here”

“You haven’t seen the actual recording, yet. It’s much more vivid than numbers. Allow me.” The man expertly dialed the correct data page. “This was taken by a high-altitude reconnaissance blimp, above our Diego Garcia Naval Station, in the Indian Ocean.”

Depicted now in front of Logan was a moonlit seascape. Calm waters glistened under still tropical air.

Suddenly, the ocean surface flattened in eight places. Despite the angle of view and foreshortening, Logan could tell the dimples formed a perfect octagon.

As quick as the dips appeared, they suddenly ballooned outward, joined now by an outer ring of smaller bulges, twenty in all. Scale numbers ran down the side of the screen, and Logan whistled.

The hillocks collapsed again, much quicker than nor-mal gravity could have pulled them down. Forty-nine depressions replaced them this time. The center eight were now too deep for the camera to measure.

Then, suddenly, the screen erupted with light. Faster than Logan could follow, a handful of bright streaks speared upward, perpendicular to the ocean. They were gone in an instant, leaving behind a diffracting pattern of circular ripples, spreading and subsiding until at last all was still once more.

“That’s the best example,” Spivey commented. “It was accompanied by seismic activity bearing some similarity to the Spanish quakes.”

“Where…” Logan asked hoarsely. “Where did the water go?”

The colonel’s smile was distant, enigmatic. “Just missed the moon, by less than three diameters. Of course, by that point it was pretty diffuse… Are you all right, Mr. Eng?” Genuine concern suddenly crossed Colonel Spivey’s face as he leaned forward. “Would you like a drink?”

Logan nodded. “Yes… thank you. I think I need one very much.”

For a little while, despite the car’s whispering air-conditioner, he found it rather difficult to breathe.

• BIOSPHERE

Nelson Grayson was having trouble grasping “cooperation” and “competition.” The two words were defined as opposites, and yet his teacher claimed they were essentially the same thing.

Moreover, at some deep level Nelson felt he’d secretly suspected it all along.

“I’m still confused, Professor,” he admitted at their next meeting, though it cost him to say it. Each time Dr. Wolling granted one of these sessions, he feared she was finally going to give up on his slowness, his need for palpable examples at every point of theory.

She looked pale, sitting across the table from him. That might just be because she spent so much time with those enigmatic strangers, performing mysterious surveys in the abandoned gold mine below ark four. Still, Nelson worried about her health.

Frail she might seem, but her gaze was unwavering. “Why don’t you start off where you do understand, Nelson?”

He quashed an urge to consult his note plaque. Once, Dr. Wolling had slapped his hand when he did that too often. “Respect your own thoughts!” she had snapped.

“All right,” he breathed. “The Gaia theory says Earth stays a good place for life because life itself keeps changing the planet. Otherwise, it would’ve gone into a permanent ice age, like Mars. Or a runaway, um, greenhouse instability — losing all its water like Venus did.”

“More likely Venus than Mars, actually,” she agreed. “Earth is rather close to its sun for a water world, near the inner edge of the habitable zone. So how did we avoid a Venus-style trap?”

For this he had a ready answer, the standard one. “Early algae and bacteria helped ocean chemistry take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They bound the carbon into their skeletons, which, uh, sedimented to the sea floor. So the atmosphere got clearer—”

“More transparent to heat radiation.”

“Yeah. So heat could escape, and the oceans could stay wet even as the sun got hotter. In fact, the air temperature’s stayed roughly the same for four billion years.”

“Including ice ages?”

Nelson shrugged. “Trivial fluctuations.”

He liked the phrase. Liked the way it rolled off the tongue. He had practiced it last night, hoping there’d be a chance to use ^;t. “Like the heating everybody’s so worried about these days. Sure it’s making terrible problems, and a big die-back may be coming… including maybe us. But that’s not so unusual. In a million years or so, the balance will swing back.”

Jen Wolling’s nod seemed to say he was both right and wrong. Right that the greenhouse effect of the twenty-first century wasn’t the first upward jolt in Earth’s thermostat. But perhaps wrong that this excursion was like all the others.

Keep to the topic! He reminded himself. That was the problem with intellectual talk. It spun out so many sidetracks, you never got where you were going unless you used discipline. As if “intellectual” and “discipline” were words he had ever imagined applying to himself, only six months ago!

“So,” Dr. Wolling said, placing one hand on the other. “Life kept changing Earth’s atmosphere in just the right way to maintain a suitable environment for itself. Was this on purpose?”

Nelson felt briefly miffed she’d try to snare him so. Then he realized she was only being a good teacher and giving him an easy one. “That’d be the strong Gaia hypothesis,” he answered. “It says the homeo… um, homeostasis… life’s balancing act… is all part of a plan. The religious Gaian people—” Nelson chose his words carefully out of respect for the Ndebele ” — say Earth’s history proves there’s a god, or goddess, who designed it all to happen this way.

“Then there’s the middle Gaia hypothesis… where people say the Earth behaves like a living organism. That it has all the properties of a living creature. But they don’t say it was actually planned. If the organism has any consciousness, it’s us.”

“Yes, go on,” she prompted. “And what’s the standard scientific view?”

“That’s the weak Gaia theory. It says natural processes just interact in a predictable way with things like oceans and volcanoes… calcium runoff from continents and such… so carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere when it’s cold, but when things get too hot the gas is pulled out, letting heat escape again.”

“It’s a process, then.”

“Yeah, but one with all sorts of built-in stabilities. Not just in temperature. Which is why so many people see a plan.”

“Indeed. But I only made you review all that because it bears on your question. How can competition be looked at as a close cousin to cooperation?

“Think about the Precambrian Era, Nelson, two to three billion years ago, when green algae in the ocean began pulling all that carbon out of the air in earnest. Tell me, what did they pour forth in its place?”

“Oxygen,” he answered quickly. “Which is transparent…”

She waved one hand. “Forget that for a moment. Think about the biological effects. Remember, oxygen burns. It was—”

“A poison!” Nelson interrupted. “Yeah. The old bacteria were Anna…”

“Anaerobic. Yes. They couldn’t deal with such a corrosive gas, even though they were the ones putting it there! It was a classic case of learning to live in your own waste products.”

Nelson blinked. “Then… then there must have been pressure to adapt.”

Dr. Wolling’s smile transmitted more than just satisfaction. The encouragement both warmed and confused Nelson.

“Exactly,” she said. “A crisis loomed for Gaia. Oxygen pollution threatened to end it all. Then some species stumbled onto a correct biochemical solution — how to take advantage of the new high-energy environment. Today, nearly everything you see around you is descended from those adaptable ones. The few surviving anaerobes are exiled to brewery vats and sea bottoms.”

Nelson nodded, eager to keep that expression in her eyes. “So Gaia went on changing and getting better—”

“ — more subtle. More complicated.”

His head hurt from trying so hard. “But… it sounds like both at the same time! It was cooperation, because the species making the change had to shift together. Y’know, hunter and hunted. Eater and eaten. None of them could have made it alone.

“But it was competition, too, ’cause each of them was struggling only for itself!”

Dr. Wolling absently waved away a wisp of gray hair. “All right, you see the essential paradox. We’ve all, at one time or another, wondered about this strange thing — that death seems so evil. Our basic nature is to oppose it. And yet, without it there’d be no change, nor any life at all.

“Darwin made the cruel efficiency of the process clear when he showed that every species on Earth tries to have more offspring than it needs in order to replace the prior generation. Every one tries, in other words, to overpopulate the world, and must be regulated by something outside itself.

“What this universal trait means is that the lion not only cannot lie down with the lamb… he cannot even be completely comfortable lying down with other lions! At least not without always keeping one eyelid cracked.”

Nelson looked at her. “I… think I understand.”

She tapped the table and sat up. “Tell you what. Let’s take an even better example. Do you know anything about the nervous system?”

“You mean the brain and stuff?” Nelson shook his head. How much could a guy learn in a few months? Damn! Even using hypertexts, there was so much knowledge and so little time.

Jen smiled. “This is simple. We’ll use a holo.”

She must have planned this. One muttered word and the desk projector displayed a cutaway view of a human cranium. Nelson recognized the outlines, of course. As early as third grade, kids were taught about the two hemispheres — how both sides of the brain “thought” in different ways that somehow combined to make a single mind.

Sophistication about such matters increased as you grew older, and sometimes not for the better, as when teenagers put together homemade tomography-scan kits to get real-time activity images of their own brains. Not for greater self-awareness, but so they could learn how to “daze out” — to release the brain’s own natural opiates on demand. That honey pot had never tempted Nelson, thank goddess. But he’d seen what it did to friends and almost agreed with those who wanted to outlaw self-scanning devices.

“See the complicated blue mesh?” Dr. Wolling asked. “Those are nerve cells, billions of them, connected so intricately that computer scientists, with all their nanodissectors, still haven’t duplicated such complexity. Each synapse — each little nonlinear electric switch — contributes its own tiny syncopated lightning to a whole that’s far, far greater than the sum of its parts — the towering standing wave that composes the symphony of thought.”

If only I could talk like that, he wished, and instantly chided himself for even dreaming it. He might as well aspire to win his own Nobel prize.

“But look closely, Nelson. The volume taken up by nerve cells is actually small. The rest is water, lymph, and a structure of glial cells and other insulating bodies, which feed and support the nerves and keep them from shorting out.

“Now, consider instead the brain of a fetus.”

The image shrank to a smaller, simpler shape. Within the bulging dome, the dazzling blue tracery was now absent.

“Instead of nerves,” Jen went on, “we have millions of primitive protocells, pretty much undifferentiated and dividing like mad. So how is it some of these cells know to become nerves, and others humble supporters? Is it all laid down in some plan?”

“Well, sure there’s a plan! It’s in the DNA…” Nelson’s voice trailed off as he noticed her watching him. She had to be drawing a parallel, somehow, with the planetary condition. But he couldn’t see the connection.

There’s a plan, all right. But how? Is there some little guy inside the baby’s skull who reads the DNA like a blueprint and says, “You! Become a nerve cell! You there! Become a supporter!”

Or is it done in some simpler…

“Uh!” Nelson’s head snapped up suddenly and he met her cool gray eyes. “The protocells… compete with each other… ?”

“To become nerve cells, yes. Excellent insight, Nelson. Here, watch closely.” Jen touched another control and multicolored lights glowed at pinpoints along the rim of the skull. “These are sites where neural growth factors secrete into the mass of protocells. A different chemical from each control point. Coding in each cell tells it what to do if it encounters such and such a mixture of growth factors. If it gets enough of just the right combination, it gets to be a nerve cell. If not, it becomes a supporter.”

Nelson watched, fascinated, as flows of color spread out from each secretion site. Here red and white merged to form a distinct pink blending. Elsewhere a blue stimulant overlapped a green one and formed complex swirls, like stirred paint.

“Also,” Dr. Wolling went on, “the cells secrete chemicals of their own, to suppress their neighbors, a lot like the quiet chemical warfare waged by plants…”

Nelson grabbed his own set of controls and zoomed in for a closer look. He saw cells writhe and jostle, striving to soak where the colors shone brightest. Different chemical combinations seemed to trigger different behaviors… here a frenzy of growth leading to tight bundles of successful nerves. Over there, a sparser network with only a few winners, whose long, spindly appendages resembled spiders’ legs.

“It’s like… as if the different mixes make different environments, eh? Like how different amounts of sunshine and water make a desert here, a jungle there? Like… ecological niches?”

“Very good. And we know what happens when one niche is damaged or fails. Inevitably it affects the whole, even far away. But go on. How do the cells deal with the different demands of the different environments?”

“They adapt, I guess. So it’s…” Nelson turned to face his teacher. “It’s survival of the fittest, isn’t it?”

“Never did like that expression.” But she nodded. “You’re right again. Only here, the ‘food’ they compete for isn’t really food. It’s a brew of substances needed for further development. If a cell gets too little it dies, in a manner of speaking. As an astrocyte or other support cell, it lives on. But as a potential nerve cell, it is no more.”

“Amazing,” Nelson muttered. “Then, the arrangement of nerves in our brain, it comes about because of those scattered little glands, all giving out different chemicals?”

“Not just scattered, Nelson. Well placed. Later I’ll show you how just one small difference in the amount of testosterone boys get before birth can make crucial changes. Of course, after birth learning takes over, fully as important as anything that came before. But yes… this part really is amazing.”

Dr. Wolling shut off the display. Nelson rubbed his eyes.

“Evolution and competition go on inside us,” he said in awe.

She smiled. “You really are a bright young fellow. I can’t tell you how many of my students fail to make that leap. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense to use inside us the same techniques that helped perfect life on the planet as a whole.”

“Then our bodies are just like…”

She stopped him. “That’s enough for now. More than enough. Go feed your pets. Get some exercise. I slipped some readings into your plaque. Go over them by next time. And don’t be late.”

Still blinking, his mind awhirl, Nelson stood up to go. It wasn’t until much later that he seemed to recollect her standing on her toes to kiss his cheek before he left. But by then he was sure he must have imagined it.

As his duties expanded, taking him from the regulated pools and fountains of the recycling dome to the rain forest habitat to the enclosed plain where elands stretched their legs under reinforced crystal panes, the two baboons accompanied Nelson like courtiers escorting a prince. Or more likely, apprentices attending their wizard. For wherever Nelson strode, magical things happened.

I speak a word, and light streams forth, he thought as he made his nightly rounds. Another, and water rises for animals to drink.

Voice-sensitive computers made it possible, of course. But even sophisticated systems weren’t good enough to manage a place like this. Not without human expertise.

Or where that ain’t available, let blind guesswork substitute, eh?

Nelson’s reaction to his spate of promotions had been pleasure mixed with irritation.

After all, I don’t really know anything!

True, he seemed able to tell when certain animals were about to get sick, or when something needed fixing in the air or water. He had a knack for setting overhead filters so the grass grew properly, but guesswork was all it was. He had talents never imagined back in the crowded Yukon, but talent was a poor substitute for knowing what you were doing!

So Nelson went about his duties a troubled wizard, pointing at ducts and commanding them to open, sending squat robots off on errands, rubbing and tasting leaves… worrying all along that he hadn’t earned this gift. It was like a big joke perpetrated by some capricious fairy godmother. Not knowing where it came from made it seem revokable at any time.

In his reading he encountered another phrase — “idiot savant” — and felt a burning shame, suspecting it referred to him.

A human being knows what he’s doin’. Otherwise, what’s the point in being human?

So he walked his rounds nodding, listening to the button player in his left ear. Every spare moment, Nelson studied. And the more he learned, the more painfully aware he grew of his ignorance.

Shig and Nell helped. He’d point at a piece of fruit, and they would scurry to bring back the sample. What genetic magic had made them so quick to understand? he wondered.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m part monkey.

This evening both baboons were subdued as he led them on rounds with unusual intensity. In his head, Nelson’s thoughts roiled.

With images of high school… the sports teams and the gangs… cooperation and competition.

Images of his parents, hard at work side by side, striving for long hours to make their business thrive… competition and cooperation.

Images of cells and bodies, species and planets.

Cooperation and competition. Are they really the same? How can they be?

To some, the conflict seemed inherent. Take economics. The white immigrant, Dr. B’Keli, had given Nelson texts praising enterprise capitalism, in which striving for individual success delivered efficient goods and services. “The invisible hand” was the phrase coined long ago by a Scotsman, Adam Smith.

In contrast, some still promoted the visible hand of socialism. In Southern Africa, cosmopolitans like B’Keli were rare. More often, Nelson heard derision of the “soullessness” of money-based economies, and speeches extolling paternalistic equality.

The debate sounded eerily like the one raging in biology, over the supposed sentience of Gaia. “The blind watchmaker” was how some agnostics referred to the putative designer of the world. To them, creation required no conscious intervention. It was a process, with competition the essential element.

Religious Caians retorted furiously that their goddess was far from blind or indifferent. They spoke of a world in which too many things meshed too well to have come about by any means but teamwork.

Again and again, the same dichotomy. The conflict of opposites. But what if they’re two sides of the same coin?

He hoped some of Dr. Wolling’s, references would offer answers. Usually, though, the readings only left him with more questions. Endless questions.

At last he closed the final reinforced airtight door and led Shig and Nell home, leaving behind all the animals he half envied for their lack of complex cares. They didn’t know they were locked inside a fragile rescue craft, aground and anchored to the soil of an ailing, perhaps dying, continent. They didn’t know of the other arks in this flotilla of salvation, scattered across the Earth like grails, holding in trust what could never be replaced.

They didn’t have to try to understand the why of anything, and certainly not the how.

Those worries, Nelson knew, were reserved for the captain and crew. They were the special concerns of those who must stand watch.

• HOLOSPHERE

Jen watched the glistening pyramid of ark four rise to meet the stars. Or at least that was the effect as the open-cage elevator dropped below the dry ground and began its rickety descent.

Illuminated by the car’s bare bulb, the walls of the lift shaft were fascinating to watch. Layer after layer of nitid, lustrous rock drifted past — probably sediments from ancient seas or lake beds or whatever. Stories of the fall and rise of species and orders and entire phyla ought to be revealed in this trip backward through time. But Jen was selectively myopic, unable to read any of the writings on this wall.

Of course, the days were long gone when any scientist, even a theoretician, could do it all alone. Jen had a reputation as an iconoclast. As a shit disturber. But every one of her papers, every analysis, had been based on mountains of data carefully collected and refined by hundreds, thousands of field workers, long before she ever got her hands on it.

I have always relied on the competence of strangers.

She, who had built a theoretical framework for understanding Earth’s history, had to depend on others, first, to find and lay out the details. Only then could she find patterns in the raw data.

It was ironic, then. Here she was, the one some called the living founder of modern Gaianism — a movement that had already gone through countless phases of heresy, reformation and counter-reformation. And yet she was illiterate with the Mother’s own diary right in front of her, written in palpable stone.

Ironic, yes. Jen appreciated paradoxes. Like taking on a new student when everything might prove futile and pointless within a few short months, anyway.

As pointless as my life… as pointless as everybody’s life, if some way isn’t found to get rid of Alex’s monster.

Of course it was unfair to name it so. In a sense, her grandson was humanity’s champion, leading their small fellowship to battle the demon. Still, a part of Jen seethed at the boy. It was an irrational corner which couldn’t help associating him with that awful thing down there, eating away at the Earth’s heart.

Each of us is many, she recalled. Within every human, a cacophony of voices rages. Despite all the new techniques of cerebrochemical balancing and sanity seeding, those inner selves will persist in thinking unfair thoughts from time to time, and make us utter things we later regret. It may not be nice, but it’s human.

What was it Emerson had said? “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” One might say she had lived by that adage. Watching the rock wall glide past, Jen determined she really must send Alex a note of encouragement. Even a few words could mean a lot to him in this time of struggle. It irritated her that she only seemed to think of it when she was away from her computer, plaque, or telephone.

Then there’s security, she thought, knowing full well she was rationalizing.

Dr. Kenda, head of the Tangoparu team here in Kuwenezi, really was fanatical about preventing leaks. Jen had been asked not even to hint to the Ndebele about their true mission here. She could only tell their hosts that the task was vitally important to the Mother. Fortunately, that had been enough so far.

But will it suffice later, when the Earth starts shaking?

Kenda had demanded maps of the entire mine complex. There was disturbing talk of emergency plans and escape scenarios, of dike barriers and aquifer pressures. Jen felt uneasy, hating to think Ndebele hospitality might be repaid with betrayal.

One thing at a time, she told herself. What mattered now was that they were on line, adding their machine’s throbbing power to whatever skein of forces Alex had devised to snare the beast below, the singularity.

Lost in her thoughts, she hardly noticed as the air grew warmer. Dank, fetid odors rose from deeper down, where decades of seepage had filled the unpumped mine’s lower sections. The lift stopped short of those realms, fortunately. Jen pushed open the rattling gate and set off down a tunnel lit by a string of tiny bulbs.

Here and in other similar mines, the old white oligarchy had skimmed the wealth from one of the richest countries in the world. Properly invested, the veins of gold and coal and diamonds might have provided for future generations, white and nonwhite, long after the minerals ran out. Most of the present black cantons did not blame the old oligarchs for racism, per se. After all, they practiced tribal separation themselves. What made them seethe was something much simpler. Theft. And the frittering away of a vast treasure by those too blind to see.

Today, the thieves’ blameless descendants were bitter refugees in faraway lands, and the victims’ equally blameless progeny had inherited a terrible anger.

Condensation glistened. Jen’s footsteps echoed down the side corridors like lifeless, skittering hauntings. At last the light ahead brightened as she neared the open cavern chosen by Kenda’s team. There, under a vaulted ceiling, lay the equipment they had brought from New Zealand. And in the center loomed a gleaming cylinder, anchored in bedrock.

The dour Japanese physicist glared sourly as she arrived. Clearly, he chafed at the condition she had imposed, in return for her help in acquiring this site… that she be notified before every run and be present as a witness.

“What was the damage, last scan?” she asked.

Kenda shrugged. “A few tremors southeast of the Hawaiian Islands. Nothing to speak of. Hardly any comments on the Net.”

Of course she had no way to check after him. Not without sending out her own search programs, which would inevitably leave a trail. So she relied on open news channels, which seemed to have hardly noticed the chain of minor disturbances circuiting the globe. Eventually, someone was sure to spy a pattern, of course. Hawaii, for instance, was at the antipodes from this site. All one had to do was draw a line from there, roughly through the Earth’s center…

… through the devil thing down there…

Jen shivered. She was no invalid at mathematical modeling. But just two pages into one of Alex’s papers she’d gotten utterly lost in a maze of gauzy unrealities that left her head spinning. She still couldn’t bring up an image of their enemy. Vanishingly small, titanically heavy, infinitely involute — it was the essence of deadliness. And from childhood, Jen had always feared most those dangers without faces.

“Five minutes, Dr. Wolling,” one of the technicians said, looking up from his station. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” His friendly smile was a marked contrast to Kenda’s sour attitude.

“Thank you, Jimmy. No, I think I’d better go get ready now.” He shrugged and rejoined the others, staring into video and holo displays, their hands gripping controller knobs or slipped into waldo gloves. Jen walked past them all to the corner unit she’d been assigned, where she was grudgingly allowed to tap in her subvocal. She donned the device and let holographic displays surround her.

She coughed, yawned, cleared her throat, swallowed — setting off waves of color as the unit tried to compensate for all the involuntary motions. With her own computer back home, the clearing process was quick and automatic. Here, deprived of all the custom design that made her terminal a virtual alter ego, she had to do it fresh each time.

Mists dissolved into blankness. Jen dialed the unit’s sensitivity upward…

… and a Tiger flashed out at her,

roared, and then quickly receded into _the

^{background…}

… sparkles ^dashed and ^hopped…

… coruscating words with images…

Even the tiniest signal to her jaw or larynx might be interpreted as a command. Keeping one hand on the sensitivity knob, she concentrated to erase mistakes the machine kept interpreting as nascent words.

Few people used subvocals, for the same reason few ever became street jugglers. Not many could operate the delicate systems without tipping into chaos. Any normal mind kept intruding with apparent irrelevancies, many ascending to the level of muttered or almost-spoken words the outer consciousness hardly noticed, but which the device manifested visibly and in sound.

Tunes that pop into your head… stray associations you generally ignore… memories that wink in and out… impulses to action… often rising to tickle the larynx, the tongue, stopping just short of sound…

As she thought each of those words, lines of text appeared on the right, as if a stenographer were taking dictation from her subvocalized thoughts. Meanwhile, at the left-hand periphery, an extrapolation subroutine crafted little simulations. A tiny man with a violin. A face that smiled and closed one eye… It was well this device only read the outermost, superficial nervous activity, associated with the speech centers.

When invented, the subvocal had been hailed as a boon to pilots — until high-performance jets began plowing into the ground. We experience ten thousand impulses for every one we allow to become action. Accelerating the choice and decision process did more than speed reaction time. It also shortcut judgment.

Even as a computer input device, it was too sensitive for most people. Few wanted extra speed if it also meant the slightest subsurface reaction could become embarrassingly real, in amplified speech or writing.

If they ever really developed a true brain-to-computer interface, the chaos would be even worse.

Jen had two advantages over normal people, though. One was a lower-than-average fear of embarrassment. And second was her internal image of her own mind.

Modern evidence notwithstanding, most people didn’t really believe their personalities comprised many subselves. Dealing with stray thoughts was to them a matter of control, and not, as fen saw it, negotiation.

I also have the advantage of age. Fewer rash impulses. Imagine giving a machine like this to young, libidinous, hormone-drenched male pilots! Of all the silly things to do.

Having thought that, she had a sudden memory of Thomas, on that summer day when he took her aloft in his experimental midget-zeppelin, back when such things were rare and so romantic. Her golden hair had whipped in his eyes as he held her close, high over Yorkshire. He had been so young, and so very male…

The unit couldn’t interpret any detail in her vivid recollection, thank heavens! But the sensitivity was set so high, multicolored flashes filled the display, in rhythm to her emotions. Again, a candy-striped feline poked its nose around a corner and mewed.

Back into your lair, tiger, she commanded her totem beast. The creature snarled and slunk back out of sight. The colors also cleared away as Jen consciously acknowledged all the extraneous impulses, quelling their irrelevant clamor.

A clock ticked down. At the one-minute mark there appeared in front of her an image of the Earth’s interior — a complex, many-layered globe.

This wasn’t one of her own, ideogenous constructs, but a direct feed from Kenda’s panel. Deep inside the core, a stylized purple curve showed the orbit of their enemy, Beta. Already that trajectory showed marginal deviations, disturbed by earlier proddings from the four Tangoparu resonators.

Outside that envelope lay a region of blue strands where channels of softened mantle flickered with sudden, superconducting electricity — the temporary concentrations of extra energy Kenda’s team needed for the coming push. She listened as the techs maintained a running commentary. They would wait till Beta’s orbit brought it behind a likely looking thread, then set off the “gazer” — Alex’s bizarre, incredible invention — releasing coherent gravitational waves and giving their foe another tiny nudge.

Jen felt a surge of adrenaline. Whatever the outcome, this was memorable. She hoped she’d live long enough to be proud of all this someday.

Hell, there’s a part of me that doesn’t care about the pride. It just wants to live longer, period.

There is, within me, a bit that wants to live forever.

It was a conceit that demanded a reply. And so, from some recess of imagination, something caused the subvocal to display a string of gilt words, right in front of her.

… If that is what you want, my daughter, that is what you shall have. For did I not promise you exactly that, long, long ago?

Jen laughed. In a low voice she answered. “Yes you did, Mother. You promised. I remember it well.” She shook her head, marveling at the texture of her own imagination, even after all these years. “Oh, I am a pip. I am.”

Concentrating carefully, Jen ignored further input from her goddess or any other extraneous corner of her mind. She focused instead upon the planned procedure and paid attention to the Earth.

• EXOSPHERE

Teresa rose toward consciousness and for a fey moment felt as if she were in two places at once.

With the deceitful certainty of dreams, she lay lazily, contentedly, beside Jason’s warmth. She heard her husband’s breath and felt his man-sized bulk nearby

— its weight and strength — which only a little while ago she had welcomed upon her, creating a continuum of he, she, and the world.

At the same time, another part of her knew that

Jason’s nearness was ersatz, based on a close but oh so different reality.

There’s no urgency, a third voice urged, pleading compromise. No duty calls. Hold onto the illusion a little longer.

So she tried to go on pretending. After all, can’t believing sometimes make dreams come true?

No, it can’t. Besides, you’re awake now.

And anyway, she went on, just to be mean. Jason’s on a one-way trip to some far star.

Without opening her eyes, she remembered where she was now. The ice told her. Even kilometers away, the Greenland glacier made her senses dip, tugged at her equilibrium, set her teetering. Just as the sloping mattress seemed to draw her toward the weight beside her.

He doesn’t twitch much, she thought about the man sleeping only a foot away, his mass pushing a well into the foam rubber pad. Jason used to give those sudden, tiny jerks… like a dog dreaming he’s chasing rabbits.

A woman has to get used to a lot when she marries, and so Jason’s nighttime movements had caused some sleeplessness back at the beginning. But that wasn’t half as bad as when he would suddenly, for no apparent reason, stop breathing! The rhythm of his soft snores would cease and she’d snap wide awake in alarm.

It took the base surgeon and a dozen scholarly references to convince her that mild, intermittent apnea in adult males was nothing by itself to worry about. In time she grew accustomed to all of it. To the twitches, the snores, the sudden pauses. In fact, what had been irritating became familiar, comforting, normal.

But just when you get used to someone. Just when you’ve reached the point where there’s nowhere else in the world you feel safer. When you feel all is well. That’s when it all gets ripped away from you again. Damned world.

Tears offered one benefit. They washed away the scratchy, “rusty drawer” effect of opening your eyes from sleep. The liquid blur blinked away and the cabin swam into focus — an insulated prefab with ribs of cured, undressed pine. The furniture was spare and economical — a small bureau, chairs, and a table bearing two used candles, two glasses, and an empty wine bottle. An open closet held exactly six changes of clothes, including an impressive arctic suit that wouldn’t need much alteration to work on Mars.

If anyone ever got to Mars.

Pervading the room were odors, from the candles, from machinery… and others Teresa admitted feeling ambivalent about. Powerful ambivalence.

Hers for instance. Her own sweat. Her shampoo. All mingled with the overpowering aroma of a man.

“Good morning, Emma.”

She turned her head on the pillow and saw his pale blue eyes looking into hers. He’s been watching me, she realized. He was so still. I thought he was asleep.

“Mmmp,” she said, rubbing her eyes to wipe away any trace of tears. “G’mornin’. What time is it?”

Lars glanced over her head. “Plenty early, yes. Did you sleep well?”

“Fine. Fine.” She pushed her pillow back against the headboard and sat up, keeping the sheet above her breasts. They still throbbed pleasantly from his attentive study hours earlier. So intent had he been, so assiduous, one might have” thought he intended memorizing them and every other contour of her body.

It had felt good. Had been good. A woman needs appreciation, worship, from time to time. There had been a dozen good reasons to say yes to this. He was a nice man. Their quick-scan blood tests had checked out okay. It had been far too long. And Teresa knew she didn’t talk in her sleep.

Teresa lived by checklists. They were modern mantras to peace of mind. By any logical checklist, she should feel okay about this. Still, there remained an unreasoning part of her which adamantly sought excuses to feel guilty.

“I… have packing to do,” she said.

“It’s only six. I wish you’d stay a while. I will cook breakfast. I melted glacier ice already for coffee.” In Japan, they paid fifty thousand yen a kilo for the best ten-thousand-year-old blue ice. Here, of course, one didn’t have to pay freight or refrigeration charges or even a resource-depletion tax. Ancient ice lay right outside the front door, in gigatons.

“I have one more survey scan to help with this morning… and the zep picks me up at fifteen hundred…”

“Emma, I almost have the feeling you want to get away from me.”

She’d been avoiding his eyes. Now she looked up again quickly. Ah, she thought. No fair smiling at me like that!

Lars was everything the teenager inside her could hope to swoon for. Built for power and endurance, he nevertheless was gentle and tactile with those calloused hands. His face was a regular delight: rugged and yet retaining a touch of innocence about the eyes. It pleased Teresa such a young, handsome fellow showed so much enthusiasm for her. It was good for the morale. Good for her self-esteem.

Hell, last night was much better than good. If ever one night’s solitary consummation can be called “good.” And clearly one right was all this could ever be.

She reached up and caressed his cheek, thrilling to the prickly touch of his morning stubble. For the moment, reality was nice enough. When his hand stroked gently up her side, settling eventually over one breast, she exhaled a sigh that was ninety-five percent pleasure. The rest could go to hell.

“No, Lars. I don’t feel I have to get away from you.”

As he bent to whisper in her ear, Teresa knew yet another way to feel good about this. “Emma,” he murmured, speaking the name on her passport, the woman she was during this brief interlude.

As Emma then, she clung to him and again sighed.

Stan Goldman escorted her to the aerodrome when it was time for her to leave. The small cargo zeppelin was already moored, its transparent flanks turned toward the sun to focus every available watt onto its internal photocells.

Together they walked the long way across the open moraine, he immersed in his own thoughts and she in hers. “Here, take a look at this,” Stan said at one point, leading her a few meters to the left. “Do you see that?”

“See what?” He was pointing at a jumble of stones.

“Yesterday those were in a stack. I put them there. Today it’s toppled.”

Teresa nodded. “Quakes.” In her valise she carried data on the recent increase in local, low-level Earth tremors, gathered with the finest instruments. “Why the poor man’s seismograph, Stan?”

The elderly physicist smiled. “Never put all your confidence in sophisticated gadgets, my dear. It’s as bad as trusting faith alone, or math, or your own senses.”

Actually, Teresa’s nickname in the Bus Driver’s Guild was “Show Me” Tikhana. She nodded in agreement. “I’ll try to remember that.”

“Good. The Lord gave us eyes and imagination, faith and reason, enthusiasm and obstinacy. Each has its place.” He kicked one of the fallen rocks. “I’m afraid it won’t be long before a lot more people suspect something’s going on.”

So far only a few obscure sources on the Net were commenting on the pickup in worldwide seismic activity. But she knew what incident had Stan particularly worried.

“Have they found that plane yet?” she asked. “The one in Antarctica?”

He shook his head. “They’re assuming it crashed. But there’s not a peep from the flight transponder. And you heard the report of that ozone scientist, who claimed seeing something flash into the sky? The location corresponds with the plane’s last known position… and the emergence point of one of our recent beams.

“I’m afraid we’ve probably inflicted our first casualties.”

Teresa forgave Stan his oversight. Or maybe he was right to leave out those killed on Erehwon. That debacle had been a true accident, after all. This time though, despite all their precautions, they were directly to blame. Everyone in the cabal knew this venture would cost even more lives before it was over.

For a few minutes they walked in silence. Teresa thought about cracks in the ice, fractures in the ground, peals of thunder in the sky.

She also thought about how good it felt to breathe the crisp air. To feel the breeze off the glacier on her skin. To be alive.

“I wish I could go with you,” Stan said as they neared the bobbing zeppelin. “I’d give anything to talk to Alex and George and find out what’s going on in the big picture. Our images of the interior are poor with this slave resonator. The master must be giving Alex such a view of the beast.”

Teresa realized he must envy Lustig the chance to map their enemy’s anatomy, too small to measure except in units familiar to atoms, denser than a neutron star. “I’ll have him send you a portrait with the next courier. You can keep it by your bedside, along with Ellen and the grandkids.”

Her gentle teasing made him grin. “You do that.”

Standing near the gangway, he offered his hand. She threw her arms around him instead. I’ll also tell Ellen she’s a lucky old girl.

Lifting her eyes over his shoulder, she saw a much taller man at the edge of the field, standing near a big, round lifter-crane. His hands are probably already stained with oil, she thought, recalling how, even after Lars had washed, his skin had given off the piquant, exciting tang of engines. They had said their good-byes… she with a promise of a future message or visit he probably knew to be a lie. And so he simply lifted his hand and shared with her a soft smile of no regrets.

NASA thought she was still at a seclusion resort in Australia. It wouldn’t do to have a random Net inventory show her flitting about on the other side of the globe. But at any moment there were millions drifting across the sky in everything from cruise liners to economy “cattle cars” to tramp freighters like this one. That was why the trip back to New Zealand would include several lighter-than-air legs, linking points where she could sneak long passages on Tangoparu Ltd. turboprops. Settling near a window to observe the crew cast off, Teresa resigned herself to a long time alone with her thoughts.

Two men watched her go. One waving from the docking site and the other farther off, standing next to an open cowling. But as the airship leaped in a rush of released buoyancy, Teresa’s gaze lifted beyond the airstrip, beyond the dome where Stan’s crew conspired to chivvy a monster, beyond the stony pit where sleuths sought clues to ancient cataclysms. She skimmed breathlessly over the great ice sheet, but even its mass could not hold her. Teresa felt a lifting in her heart. The soft, happy thrumming of the little zep’s engines seemed to resonate with the tempo of her pulse.

It was no unaccustomed thing, this affair she had with flight. And yet each time felt as if she’d fallen in love again. It was a romance separate from all earthly ardors, more steadfast, yet unjealous of any other passion.

It’s not speed that matters, she thought. It’s the act. It’s breaking the bonds.

Far beyond the unsetting sun, she felt the pull of faraway planets and longed to follow even there.

It’s flying… she thought.

So Teresa crossed her arms and settled in to make the best of a long voyage round the world.

• CORE

Across eight thousand miles of open ocean, the autumn gale had plenty of time to accelerate, to pick up power and momentum. So did the waves and tides. Over that great stretch, each grew accustomed to mastery. When they met the island’s stiff resistance, therefore, they protested in fists of spume that climbed the steep shelf then clenched and shook in rage.

Alex stood at the window of his hut, listening to the storm. Even indoors, he felt each boom with his fingertips. Each breaker set the glass panes vibrating. Rain bursts assaulted the roof in sudden, pelting furies, rattling it like a war drum before receding just as quickly again, driven by the wind to drench some other place.

Out beyond the bluffs, over the sea, luminous backlit clouds advanced on parade, parting now and then to let the moon spread a brief, pearly sheen across the turbid waters.

A lonely color, he thought. No wonder they say moonlight is for lovers. It makes you want someone to cling to.

Alex was remembering. Remembering when weather like this had been his friend.

As a student he used to walk the fens and dikes of Norfolk, traveling all the way from Cambridge at the rumor of a squall. They were seldom as powerful as this gale, of course. Easter Island lay unsheltered in the middle of a vast ocean, after all. Still the North Sea used to put on some impressive shows.

The locals must have thought him daft to go out in his wellies and slicker, striding into stiff gusts and cloudbursts. But that hardly mattered. Nothing in the world felt as vivid or as potent as a tempest. That year, facing the torture of exams, he had felt a real need for vividness, for potency. Others craved sunny days, punting on the Cam, but to Alex the sky’s power seemed to offer something even better — an anodyne to the ethereal ghostliness of his mathematics and to those uncertain adolescent qualms.

Once, while walking in keraunophilic splendor through a thunderstorm, he had actually experienced a sudden insight into mysteries of transactional quantum mechanics, an intuition that had led to his first important paper. Another time he shouted into the rain, demanding it explain to him why Ingrid… yes, that had been her name… why Ingrid had dropped him for another boy.

Generally, the thunder answered only irrelevancies. But perhaps it had been the shouting itself that provided a cleansing generally unavailable to Englishmen indoors. Whatever. He usually came away drenched, drained, restored.

Now, though, the fens and farms of Norfolk were drowned. The dikes had surrendered to the sea at last and those problems that once had vexed Alex now seemed trivial in retrospect. What wouldn’t he give to have them back, in exchange for today’s?

From the darkness behind him there came a rustle. “Alex? Can’t you sleep?”

Momentary moonlight filled a trapezoid-shaped portion of the small room as he turned around. June Morgan lay half within that canted illumination, propped on one elbow, watching him from bed. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Her smile was warm, if tired. June’s blonde hair was tousled and flattened on one side. “I reached out,” she said. “You weren’t there.”

Alex inhaled deeply. “I’m going to the lab for a little while. I’ll be back soon.”

“Oh, Alex,” she sighed and got out of bed, wrapping the sheet around herself. She crossed the narrow floor and reached up to brush at his wild hair. “If you keep this up you’ll kill yourself. You’ve got to get more rest.”

She had a pleasant smell — a feature more important to Alex than it was to most men. Still, there are some women whose aroma hits me like… ah, never mind.

It was no reflection on June, whom he liked a lot. Probably, it was just a matter of mysterious complementarity — of the right interlocking pheromones. Lucy and Ingrid had smelled like goddesses to him, he recalled similarities between two otherwise completely different lovers, known more than a decade apart. If only one complementarity carried with it all the others, he thought wistfully. Then all we’d have to do is go around sniffing each other behind the ear, to find the perfect mate.

“I’m all right, really. Much more relaxed.” He threw his shoulders back, stretching. “You’d do professionally, as a masseuse.”

Her eyes seemed to twinkle. “I have. Someday I’ll show you my license.”

“I quite believe you. And… thanks for being so patient.”

She looked up at him. Since it seemed expected of him, and because he knew he really ought to want to, Alex took her into his arms and kissed her. All the while though, he chided himself.

She deserves better. Much better than you can give her now.

Of course she had her own memories and pain. As he held her, Alex wondered if maybe she felt the same way toward him as he did toward her. More grateful than in love.

Sometimes it was enough just to have someone to hold.

Alex said hello to the techs on duty when he arrived. They, in turn, waved and greeted their tohunga, their pakeha-pommie expert on weird monsters and cthonic exorcism. Several of them crawled over scaffolding surrounding the gleaming gravity wave resonator, giving it required servicing. Their unit’s next run wouldn’t be for several hours yet, so nearly everyone else was taking advantage of the lull to catch up on sleep.

Those of us who can.

He sat down at his own station, touching panels and bringing displays to light. The subvocal he left on its stand. Lately he’d been having trouble controlling the hypersensitive device. It picked up too many random, useless surface thoughts which insistently manifested in his clenching jaw muscles and a recurring tightness in his throat.

All right, he thought, grimly. What’s the latest death toll?

Alex dialed the special database he’d set up to track their guilt. Instantly, the far left display unrolled a list of “accidents” reported in the media, whose time and location coincided with one of their emergent beams… a ripped zeppelin… a minor tidal wave… a missing aircraft… a mile-long freshwater tanker with its rear end shorn off.

Surely some of these would have happened without our intervention.

Yes, surely. Mishaps occurred all the time, especially at sea. This epoch’s ocean sediment consisted of a rain of manmade junk, sunken vessels, and myriad other debris.

But looking at the list, Alex knew some would never join the growing layer on the sea bottom. Some, in all probability, were no longer on Earth at all.

He thought of Teresa Tikhana, the first person he knew who had lost someone to this strange war. She had forgiven him, even now helped carry the burden. After all, what were a few lives against ten billion?

But what if we fail? Those men and women will have been robbed of precious months. Months to spend with their families, with lovers, with summer skies or rain. Robbed of their good-byes.

It was about to get worse, too, because the project had been going exceptionally well. Until yesterday, each of the four resonators had acted independently. Almost every gazer beam had emerged along a line nearly straight through the Earth’s core. And opposite each of their four sites lay only open ocean.

But now they had the right parameters. Beta, their taniwha, had pulsed and throbbed with every scan. Each time it mirrored amplified gravitons, it also experienced a kick. Those kicks were starting to add up. Soon, if luck held, the trough of its orbit would rise out of Earth’s crystalline inner core.

And so the tricky part began — coordinated scans from two or more stations at once. That would be arduous to arrange in secrecy, but Alex wasn’t daunted by that, only by the inevitability of doing even more harm. From now on, the beam would emerge in a different location every time, and he’d face hard choices.

Should he scrub one run because a beam might graze a suburb? There were so many vast suburbs. What if it happened at a crucial stage, when a beam deferred might mean losing control of their monster for an orbit, or ten… or perhaps forever?

Anyway, only a fraction of the beams interacted with the surface world at all. Most passed through silently, invisibly. Alex was only starting to piece together clues as to why some did so while others coupled so dramatically with seismic faults, seawater, or even man-made objects. Unfortunately, they couldn’t delay to figure it all out before continuing. They had to go on.

The holo showed Earth’s inmost regions. The pink core still enclosed two pinpoints, but his Iquitos singularity had nearly evaporated. Another day and it would be invisible.

The other object, though, was heavier than ever. Ponderously, Beta rose, hovered, and fell again. To Alex it appeared to throb angrily.

Each day, seemingly, he got coded queries from George Hutton asking about the monster singularity’s origin. Pedro Manella, running interference for the project in Washington — routing their communications through the most secure channels he could find — added his own insistent questions.

Who had created the thing? When and where did the idiots let it fall? Was there evidence that could be shown to the World Court?

Next week Alex would have to answer in person. It was frustrating to have learned so much and still be unable to give a conclusion. But something was queer about Beta’s life history, that was certain.

It’s got to be fundamental. The thing can’t be less than ten years old. And yet it has to be, or no one could have made it!

Above the liquid outer core, the lower mantle glowed many shades of green, tracing ten thousand details of hot, slowly convecting, plasti-crystalline minerals. Some currents looked patient and smooth, like trade winds, while others were spiked cyclones, spearing toward the distant surface.

Dotted lines tracked intense magnetic and electric fields — June Morgan’s contribution to the model. Most currents flowed slow and uniform, like heat eddies. But there were also faint traceries of lambent blue — slender, snaking threads that flickered even as he watched in real time — the superconducting domains they had only just discovered. Fragile and ephemeral, they were the energy source used to drive the gazer.

Have they changed? Alex wondered. Every time he looked, the pattern of interlaced strands seemed different, captivating.

A tone startled him, but the watch officer only glanced over from his own console, reassuringly. “New Guinea’s about to fire in tandem with Africa, tohunga. Don’t worry. We’re off line ourselves for another four hours.”

Alex nodded. “Uh, good.” Internally he sighed. June is right. I’m running myself straight into the ground.

He was grateful she stayed with him, despite his moodiness and hesitant libido. Theirs was a wartime comradeship of course, to be lived moment by moment, without playing “push me, pull you” over intangibles like permanence or commitment. People tend to worry less about such things when the world itself seems a makeshift, temporary place. One was grateful for what one got.

Among other things, June had at least given him back his sexuality.

Or maybe it’s the gazer, Alex wondered. For all the machine’s potential destructiveness, he still felt a thrill whenever it suddenly cast beams of titanic power. No one had ever created anything so mighty. Those brief rays were powerful enough to be detected a galaxy away… provided someone looked in the right direction, at the right moment, tuned to an exact frequency.

He touched a key and saw the computer had finished reworking his design for the next-generation resonator — this one a sphere only a little over a meter across. Spiderweb domain traceries laced an otherwise flawless crystalline structure. Even in simulation it was beautiful, though probably they’d never have time to use it.

He entered a few slight modifications and put the file away again. Alex yawned. Perhaps he might sleep now.

Still he lingered a few minutes to watch the next pulse-run. Seconds ticked down. Beta’s image passed beneath a channel of pulsing blue. Suddenly, as Alex watched, yellow lines lanced inward — George Hutton’s New Guinea resonator casting its triggering beam inward simultaneously with the one in Southern Africa. The lines met deep within the core, right on target.

Beta throbbed. Blue threads pulsed. And from the combination something flickered like a fluorescent tube coming to life. Suddenly a beam, white and brilliant, speared outward at a new angle, through all the layered shells and into space beyond.

Alex read the impulse generated, compared the recoil coefficients with those calculated in advance and saw they matched within twenty percent. Only then did he check for point of exit, and blinked.

North America. Right in the middle of a populated continent. He sighed. Well, it had to begin sometime, somewhere.

He wasn’t masochistic enough to sit and wait for damage reports. There’d be guilt enough for later. Right now his duty was to rest. At least he wouldn’t be alone. And June didn’t seem to mind if he occasionally moaned in his sleep.

Halfway back to his hut, however, negotiating a slippery, narrow path through the wet, waving grass, Alex was caught suddenly in a glare of lightning.

The flash didn’t startle him entirely, since bursts of rain still rolled like traffic across the plateau and the air tingled with the scent of ions. Nevertheless he jumped, for the sudden light brought figures out of the gloom — stark, tall shapes whose shadows seemed to reach like grasping fingers toward him. During that first stroke, and the black seconds that followed, Alex felt abruptly cornered. His heart raced. The next burst only reinforced that impression of encirclement, but cut off too soon to show what or who was really there. Or, indeed, if anything was there at all.

Only with the third stroke did he make out what company of things stalked the dim slope. Alex exhaled through nostrils flared by pumped adrenaline. Lord. I must be keyed up, to jump half out of my knickers at the sight of those things.

It was only the statues, of course… more of the eerie monoliths constructed long ago by the native folk of Rapa Nui, in their pessimistic, manic isolation.

They saw the end coming, he thought, looking down the file of awful figures. But they were dead wrong about the reasons why. They assumed only gods had the power to wreak such havoc on their world, but people caused the devastation here.

Alex felt compassion for the ancient Pasquans — but a superior sort nevertheless. In blaming gods, they had conveniently diverted censure from the real culprit. The designer of weapons. The feller of trees. The destroyer. Man himself.

More rain pelted him, finding entrance under his hat and collar to send chill rivulets down his spine. Still he watched the nearest of the great statues, pursuing a reluctant thought. Lightning flashed again, exposing stark patterns of white and black underneath those brooding brows. The pouting lips pursed in sullen disapproval.

For more than a hundred years we’ve known better. No outside power can approach human destructiveness. So we managed not to fry ourselves in nuclear war? We only traded in that damoclean sword for others even worse…

Something was wrong, here. Alex felt a familiar nagging sensation — like the tension just before a headache — that often warned him when he was on a false trail. He could sense the brooding stares of the ancient basalt figures. Of course it was the night and the storm, encouraging superstitious musings — and yet still, it felt as if they were trying to tell him something.

Our ancestors used to see all disasters originating

outside themselves, he thought. But we know better. Now we know humanity’s the culprit. We assume…

Alex grabbed at the idea before it could get away. Lightning struck again, this time so close the pealing thunder shook his body.

… we assume…

He knew it was only static electricity, crackling and pounding around him. The atmosphere’s equilibration of charge, that was all. And yet, for the first time Alex listened… really listened as his ancestors must have, when they too used to stand as he did now, under a growling sky.

The next crackling stroke shook the air and bellowed at him.

… Don’t assume!

Alex gasped, stumbling backward, staggered by a sudden thought more dazzling and frightening than anything he’d ever known. All at once the great statues made horrifying sense to him. And within the thunder, he now heard the angry voices of jealous gods.

• LITHOSPHERE

Logan ignored the insistent beeping of his wrist-pager. Whoever was calling, they’d have to wait till his hands stopped shaking. Besides, it was easy to dismiss one tiny sound in this cacophony of disaster. Sirens blared as emergency vehicles braved the dark, solitary road leading down to where catastrophe had struck only a short while ago. Behind Logan, the pilot of his commandeered helicopter kept its blades spinning as he argued by radio with the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Department, urging the SWAT team commander to be less trigger happy and a little more cooperative with a federal investigating team.

“… Look! Don’t give me all that dumpit load about state and local jurisdictions having priority. That don’t hold canned shit in a gor-sucked case like this! You see any sign of any burring terrorists? Do we look like a bunch of fucking greeners?”

Logan ignored the racket. He stared at the panorama below, lit by the searchlights of sheriff ’copters already on the scene.

What was left of the Flaming Gorge Dam gleamed like jumbled, broken white teeth below the darker sheen of native canyon rock. Part of the glitter came from roaring water, still spilling over the remains. Most of the great reservoir had already departed downstream toward the Green River Valley. Breathless net reporters told of a swath of devastation, stretching from Wyoming through a corner of Utah, into northwestern Colorado and finally back to Utah again.

But then, Flaming Gorge lay near the intersection of three states, so that was a bit misleading. In fact, the only town evacuated was Jensen, several score miles downstream. And by then, most of the flood’s force had been spent ravaging the unpopulated canyons of Dinosaur National Monument.

Unpopulated… if you don’t count scores of missing or panicked campers. Nor a hapless paleontologist or two.

Logan refused to think about the hurt done those exquisite, fossil-yard badlands. One disaster at a time. He stared at the ruined dam, wondering how such total demolition was accomplished.

It could have been done more economically. Why blow a dam into smithereens when a good crack would serve as well?

Besides, why would any eco-guerrilla want to smash the Flaming Gorge Dam? No one left alive remembered the arroyo that had been drowned under the man-made lake. Anyway, even Neo-Gaian radicals recalled the debacle when someone had wrecked the huge Glen Canyon Dam. The resulting mess had been a caution to all sides and restored the world’s beauty not one iota.

This didn’t feel like a Greener action, anyway. Within an hour’s drive there were scores of more likely targets… places where Logan’s colleagues were busy altering the land for better or worse. Projects hotly debated in the pub-crit media, not a boring, stolid structure like this stodgy old dam.

No, this has to be our demon again.

Footsteps scuffed the loose gravel to Logan’s right. It was Joe Redpath, the assistant assigned him only hours ago for this mission. The tall Amerindian wore twin braids… a fashion statement recently adopted on many university campuses as chic and declarative… though here Logan figured both hairstyle and attitude were genuine.

“Found some eyewitnesses, Eng,” Redpath announced tersely. “Be here in a minute.”

“Good. Any word when we’ll get satellite scans of the explosion itself?”

The other man nodded. “Half an hour, they say.”

“That long?” Logan felt a surge of resentment.

Redpath shrugged. “Spivey has lots of teams. You didn’t think you and me were his top boys, did you? Hell, we’re backups for the backups, man.”

Logan looked squarely at the part-time federal agent. A number of retorts crossed his mind — including telling Redpath where Spivey could take his priorities.

But no. Something was happening in the world. And if Logan wasn’t privy to secret knowledge at the top, at least his investigator’s warrant took him where events were breaking… where he might help solve the puzzle and do some good.

“What do you think of that?” he said, pointing toward the shattered dam.

Redpath watched Logan for another second before turning to survey the scene. “Don’t see how they did it.” He shrugged. “Shape’s all wrong.”

“What shape?”

Redpath gestured with his hands. “Shape of the explosion. Dams don’t break that way. No matter where you plant the charges.”

Logan wondered how Redpath knew. By investigating other cases? Or, perhaps, from practical experience on the other side? To some among society’s brightest, cooperation with authority was strictly a conditional matter, in each instance judged by sharply individualized standards. He could well imagine Redpath swinging one way on one occasion and quite another when it suited him.

“I agree. There’s a big piece missing.”

The local agent inhaled deeply, his eyes roving the tumbled remains. He exhaled and shrugged indifferently. “Carried downstream. We’ll find the chunks in the morning.”

Logan admired the man’s veil. His shield of inscrutability. In this situation, however, it didn’t work at all. He knows damn well the missing chunks aren’t downstream! He just doesn’t want to admit he’s as appalled as I am.

Their pilot finally gave up arguing with the sheriffs and shut down his whining engine, a sudden, welcome lessening of the din. Far better to wait for clearances from Washington, anyway, than be shot down by trigger-happy provincials.

More footsteps approached. A woman in a National Parks uniform, whom Redpath had deputized only an hour ago, entered the light with a middle-aged man in tow. Two teenagers rushed ahead to point at the blasted dam, making awed sounds.

“We… were farther up the reservoir,” the father explained when asked. He was dressed in fishing gear. Hand-tied flies dangled from his vest, along with a photo-ID camping permit.

“We’d come ashore and were setting up to cook… That’s when it all happened.” He covered his eyes. “Those poor night fishermen. They were caught in the flood.”

This fellow wasn’t going to be much use. Shock, Logan diagnosed, and wondered why the ranger had even brought him here. “What was the first thing you saw?” he asked, trying to be gentle.

The man blinked. “We lost the boat. You don’t think they’ll charge us, do you? I mean, we ought to get a refund for the whole trip…”

A tug at Logan’s elbow made him turn. “It started with a noise, mister.”

One of the teenagers, his hair cut short, Ra Boy style, gestured toward the muddy lake bed below. “It was this low hum. Y’know? Like the water sort of sang¹.”

His sister nodded. A little younger but nearly as tall, she wore a Church of Gaia gown at complete odds with her sibling’s sun-worshipper attire. Logan could only imagine the ideological climate in their household.

“It was beautiful but awfully sad,” she said. “I thought at first maybe it was the fish in the lake, you know, moaning?. Because certain people were killing and eating them?”

The boy groaned, sending her a disgusted look. “The fish were put there so people could come and—”

“How long did the sound last?” Logan interrupted.

Both youths shrugged, nearly identically. The boy said, “How could we know? After what happened next, our subjective memory’s sure to be screwed up.”

The things they’re teaching kids, these days, Logan thought. For all the schools’ emphasis on practical psychology, kids still seemed to pick and choose what they wanted to absorb, in this case, apparently, a convenient and plausible excuse for imprecision.

“What did happen next?”

The boy started to speak, but his sister jabbed his ribs. “Things got all blurry for a second or two,” she said hurriedly. “With funny colors—”

“Like we were going down this laser suspensor tunnel ride, see?” the boy blurted out. “You know, like at—”

“Then there was this light. It was so bright we had to turn and look. It was down in the south… over here at the dam—”

“We don’t know it was here at the dam! We just have the evidence of our eyes to go by, and we were still getting over the colors…”

The girl ignored her irate sibling. “There were these lines, of light? They went up, into the sky… sort of like this?” She propped her elbow on one hand and gestured at an angle toward the noctilucent clouds.

Logan looked to her brother for confirmation. “Did you see lines also?”

He nodded. “Except they didn’t go up like she said. She thinks everything comes out of the Earth. Naw. The lines came down! I think—” he edged closer, conspiratorially ” — I think it’s aliens, mister. Invaders. Using big solar-powered mirrors…”

His sister whacked him on the shoulder. “You should talk about the evidence of our own eyes! Of all the stupid…”

Logan held up both hands. “Thank you both very much. Right now, though, I think your dad needs your help more than I do. Why don’t you just give the ranger your access codes, and we’ll get in touch later if we need any more information.”

They nodded earnestly. Basically good kids, Logan thought. He also felt more grateful than ever for the undeserved gift of his own sensible daughter. He could hardly remember the last time Claire’s voice had taken on that shrill, whining tone, capable of shattering glass or any adult’s peace of mind at twenty paces.

“It opened up!”

Logan turned around. The kids’ father was pointing with a shaking hand toward a starry gap in the clouds. “The sky opened up like… like my folks used to tell me it would on the day.”

“On what day, sir?”

The man looked squarely at Logan, a queer shining in his eyes. “The day of… reckoning. They used to say the heavens would open up, and terrible judgment would be delivered.”

He gestured at his offspring. “I used to scoff, like these two with their pagan gods. But lately, it’s seemed to me as if… as if…” He trailed off, glassy eyed. The two teenagers stared, their sibling conflicts instantly abandoned. At that moment they looked almost like twins.

“Daddy?” the girl said, and reached for him.

“Stay away from me!” He pushed her aside. Striding to the edge of the bluff, the man shrugged out of his fishing jacket and threw it to the ground. Then he fell to his knees, looking across the ravaged waste.

Tentatively, perhaps fearing another rejection, first the girl and then her brother followed, standing on each side of their father at the brink of the overlook. But this time, instead of pushing them away, he flung his arms around their knees and clasped them tightly. Above the wailing sirens, the growling helicopters and the still noisy crash of ebbing floodwaters, Logan clearly heard the man sob.

Hesitantly at first, the girl stroked her father’s thinning hair. Then she looked across and took her brother’s hand.

Logan found the breath tight within his chest. And suddenly he realized why.

What if the guy is right?

Perhaps not precisely. Not about the exact cause of the disturbing omen. The boy’s “aliens” were as likely as any mumbledy-jumble from the Book of Revelations.

Still, until this moment it hadn’t quite occurred to Logan just what might be at stake. Hour by hour, reports poured in through Colonel Spivey’s new database, ranging from the picayune to the catastrophic. From towering chimeras glimpsed at sea to strange tremors and dust devils out in empty deserts. To the sudden disappearance of a great dam. Each day it got steadily stranger.

This may be serious, Logan thought, and felt intensely the late northern chill.

• HYDROSPHERE

Daisy had been snooping again.

“Dumpit!” Claire pounded the arm of her chair.

This time, her mother had gone too far. She’d installed a watchdog program right outside Claire’s own mailbox!

“Did she actually think I wouldn’t notice something like that?”

Probably. So many parents were members of the

“reality disabled” when it came to having a clear mental image of their children. Perhaps Daisy still considered

Claire a child when it came to the demanding, grownup world of the Net.

“I’ll show you,” Claire muttered as she tapped out code of her own. Oh, she knew she’d never be able to tackle

Daisy one-on-one. But it just might be possible to take advantage of her mother’s preconceived notions.

Vivisector was an object program she’d borrowed from Tony just the other day… a tasty little routine going the rounds among young hackers that disassembled other programs and put them back together again without leaving a trace — even while those programs were running. Carefully, Claire sicked Vivisector on her mother’s watchdog. Soon its guts were laid out across her inspection screen.

“So, just as I thought.” Daisy had assigned the little surrogate to pluck anything piped to Claire from Logan Eng.

“He’s not your husband anymore, Mother. Can’t you leave the poor codder alone?”

Carefully, Claire excised a core gene from the watchdog, to use as a template. Then she dialed her father’s Net access code and performed a hybridization test on the protocols controlling access to his private cache. Sure enough, there was a match. Some lines throbbed redly near the heart of Logan’s own security system. Claire tsked.

“Very lazy, Mother. Using close genetic cousins to perform similar tasks? In related databases? I’m disappointed in you.”

She wasn’t, really. Claire actually felt relieved. Comparing codons from two infiltrators was a technique she knew and understood. No doubt Daisy could have made the trick moot had she tried. And although it showed benign contempt, her mother was capable of worse emotions — like wrath. You didn’t want to tangle with Daisy when she was in the latter state. Not at all.

The red lines throbbed. Claire considered going ahead and excising the retrocode. Or writing a warning to her father.

But then, what would be the point? At best Daisy would wind up paying a fine. Then she’d just pay attention to doing the job right.

“Why is she suddenly so interested in Logan’s work, anyway?” Claire wondered. Of course her mother disapproved of Logan’s career. But there were so many engineers out there who were far worse… far less sensitive to environmental concerns. Until now Daisy had seemed tacitly amenable to leaving her ex-husband alone and going after bigger game.

Claire bit her lip. There was one way to find out what was going on without triggering Daisy’s alarms. That was to have her mother’s infiltrator send duplicates of whatever it stole to her, as well as to Daisy.

No. She shook her head. I won’t do that. I’ll wait till Logan’s back in town and tell him in person.

Unfortunately, her father was hopping across the continent, sending her little blips from all the sites his new employer sent him to. His messages implied something was up, certainly, and Claire’s curiosity was piqued.

But I’ll respect his privacy, she determined. I’m not Daisy

With that resolve, she carefully worded a simple message to her father, saying she missed him, and adding a final line: “Mirror-mirror, Daddy. Don’t take any funny-looking apples.”

It was a bit of shared context code, from back when she used to liken her mother to Snow White’s wicked queen, complete with all-seeing, all-knowing magic mirror.

I just hope Logan gets the meaning. It’s pretty thin.

Carefully, Claire exited that portion of the Net, leaving all her mother’s agents in place. That done, she went back to reading her own mail.

“hi, claire!”

Tony Calvallo’s bright, cheerful face popped out of one message blip, less than an hour old. Had she been wearing her wrist-comp while out repairing the mulch bin, she’d have been able to take his call in person.

“there’s a party at paul’s tonight, you know he’s by the north main levee, so we could stroll over there along the way and look for subsidence cracks.”

He grinned and winked.

Claire had to smile. Tony was getting better at this… keeping up a gentle pressure while remaining all the time light and easy, letting her ultimately control the pace. As for tonight’s pretext, it had been a long time since she’d inspected the levees over in Paul’s part of the valley. Tony was showing more imagination and insight all the time.

Claire bit her lip — enjoying the pressure on sensitive nerve endings. A couple of times lately, she had let Tony kiss her and had been surprised both by his eager roughness and by how much she liked it.

Maybe I’m only a little slower than other girls, instead of plain retarded, as I thought.

Her mother’s generation, of course, had been precocious and downright crazy, starting sex on average around age eleven — an appalling notion she figured explained a lot about the present state of the world.

Still, there might be such a thing as moving too slowly…

All right, let’s see what happens. Anyway, I can always insist on actually looking for cracks in the levee.

With a smile, she punched Tony’s number. Predictably, he answered before the second ring.

At the same moment, Daisy McClennon watched rivers of data stream down the walls of her private chamber, each reflecting another view of the world.

One screen panned the recent Wyoming dam collapse… pictures laxly stored by her ex-husband where she could easily get at them. Taking into account other case studies in his file, this series of “coincidences” had gone well beyond happenstance into the realm of enemy action.

She’d already tapped her usual sources and come up with, at best, rumors and vague hints. One of the rich expatriate banking co-ops in Ulan Bator seemed to have an intense interest in these events. So did a Canadian old-money clan in Quebec. Then there were the government spook agencies — one of whom Logan was clearly working for. They were hard to crack, and risky, too. For one thing, some of their best hackers were about her equal. Daisy preferred sniffing round the edges till she knew enough to warrant a full assault.

One possible hint turned in a nearby holo tank — a pictorial globe of the Earth, sliced in half, with lines drawn through the cutaway. The anonymous tip had found its way into her box this morning — no doubt from someone in her web of worldwide contacts. At first it made little sense. Then she saw how each line was pinned, at one end, on the location of one of the “anomalies” in Logan’s file. Each line then passed through the center of the Earth to arrive inside one of four broad ovals at the antipodes.

What could that mean? So far nothing much had occurred to her. Daisy was about to discard the hint as spurious when she saw one of the ovals centered on Southern Africa.

I wonder. Jen Wolling seemed to be involved in something she thought serious, even dangerous. Then she up and left for Southern Africa again. Could there be a connection?

There was another link, now that she thought about it.

Wolling’s collaborators were based in New Zealand. Wasn’t that where some of the earliest quakes had been centered?

Daisy poked away at the puzzle, sending her electronic servant beasts to seek and fetch new pieces. Brazenly, she rifled the files of several companies owned by a cousin she hadn’t seen in years, but who owed her more favors than an aristocratic prig like him would ever want to be reminded of. One of his companies handled data transfers from Australasia…

Slowly, pieces fell into place. They’re using a communication nexus in Washington. A very good one, in fact. Wouldn’t have caught on if it weren’t for that little glitch there… happened just this morning. What luck.

Meanwhile, ignored for the moment, the last wall of her workroom shone with her latest video-enhancement handiwork… a bootleg, colorized, 3-D version of The Maltese Falcon, with extra scenes extrapolated for a set of Chicago collectors who were apparently unhappy that some works were protected in primitive form by the National Treasures Act.

Miles Archer smiled, then took two bullets in the belly, as he had so many times for about a hundred years. Only this time his groans were in digital quad, and the blood that seeped three-dimensionally round his fingers was vivid, spectrally certified to be exactly the correct shade of arterial red.

• IONOSPHERE

The moon shone on the horizon, setting in an unusual direction. Almost due south.

Of course at that moment all land headings were approximately southward. Such was the trickery of crossing over the north pole. Or near it. Drifting alongside the tiny model-three shuttle

Intrepid, Mark Randall turned from the moon to look down upon the estuary of the arctic River Ob, artery of the new Soviet grainlands. The steppe stretched across a flat expanse below him, an infinity of dun and green. Mark spoke a single word of command.

“Magnify.”

In response, a portion of his faceplate instantly displayed an amplified image. The Ob delta leaped toward him in fine, amplified detail.

“Prepare record sheet six,” he continued, as a reticle scale overlaid the ribbon of muddy blue, weaving across a vast, thawing tundra plain. Sensors tracked every movement of his pupils, so Mark could roll the scene as fast as he could look. “Zero in on position twelve point two by three point seven… expand eightfold.”

Smoothly, the main telescope in Intrepid’s observation bay turned microscopically on magnetic gimbals, focusing on the specified coordinates. Or at least the inertial tracker said they were the right coordinates. But Mark’s experience working with Teresa Tikhana had rubbed off, especially after the Erehwon disaster, so he double-checked by satellite references and two distinct landmarks — the Scharansky Power Station and the Cargil Corporation grain silos, bracketing the river from opposite shores. “Commence recording,” he said.

Between those two landmarks, the waters showed severe agitation — surface ripples and stirred-up bottom mud — each symptom detected in another optical or infrared or polarization band. A flotilla of vessels nosed about the disturbed area. Mark wondered what had churned the River Ob so. It must be important for Intrepid’s orders to be changed so abruptly, extending this simple peeper run far beyond normal.

I’m going to talk to the guild about this, Mark thought. Polar assignments pile up too many rads. They shouldn’t be prolonged without extra shielding, or bonus pay. Or at least a damn good reason…

It got especially inconvenient when a model-three shuttle was involved. The HOTOL technology was a pilot’s dream during takeoff and landing, but a bizarre, unexpected, and uncorrectable vibration mode meant the crew had to step “outside” during high-resolution camera work, in order not to ruin the pictures with their slightest movements. The flaw would be fixed in the next generation of vehicles… in maybe twenty years or so.

He spoke again, commanding the telescope to zero in even closer on the activity below. Now he clearly made out machinery on the dredges, and men standing at the gunwales of squat barges, peering into the river. Mark even saw black figures in the water. Probably divers, since as yet the burgeoning Ob was still too chilly to support other life forms so large. Lab-enhanced photos would, of course, make out even manufacturers’ labels on the divers’ masks.

Green telltales showed the recording was going well. This kind of precision wasn’t possible with surveillance satellites, and manned space stations didn’t operate this high in latitude, so Intrepid was the only platform available. Mark hoped it was worth it.

Anyway, so much for the rewards of fame and good works. After Erehwon and his tour for NASA on the lecture circuit, it had been good to be promoted to left seat on a shuttle. Still, of late he’d begun wondering if maybe Teresa weren’t right to be so suspicious, after all. Something smelled funny about the way he’d been glad-handed and diverted from asking questions about what Spivey and his crew had learned about the disaster.

Apparently that was who he was working for now, anyway… Glenn Spivey. The peeper had a large and growing group under him. Quite a few of Mark’s friends had been swept into the colonel’s growing web of subordinates and investigative teams. But what were they investigating? When Mark asked, old comrades looked away embarrassed, muttering phrases like national security or even — it’s secret.

“Bloody hell,” Mark muttered. Fortunately, his suit computer was narrow minded, and didn’t try to interpret it as an instruction. After hard experience, the astronaut corps went for literal-minded equipment that was difficult to confuse, if less “imaginative” than what civilians used.

Something moved at the corner of Mark’s field of view. He shut down the helmet projection and turned. The spacesuited figure approaching wasn’t hard to identify, since his copilot was the only other person within at least a hundred kilometers. Drifting alongside, Ben Brigham touched two fingers of his gloved right hand to a point along the inside of his left sleeve. This was followed by two quick chopping motions, a hand turn, and an elbow flick.

The sun was behind Mark, shining into Ben’s face, turning his helmet screen opaque and shiny. But Mark didn’t need to see Ben’s expression to read his meaning.

Big chiefs hope to catch coyote in the act, his partner had said in sign talk, descended not from the speech of the deaf, but from the ancient Indian trade language of the American plains.

Mark laughed. He left the comm channel turned off and used his own hands to reply. Chiefs will be disappointed … Lightning never strikes twice in same place…

Although space sign talk formally excluded any gesture that might be hidden by a vacuum suit, Ben answered with a simple shrug. Clearly they’d been sent to observe the latest site of the “disturbances”… weird phenomena that were growing ever creepier since Erehwon was blown to kingdom come.

Still, are we really needed here? Mark wondered. By treaty, NATO and U.N. and USAF officers were probably already prowling the disaster site below in person, even cruising by in observation zeps. The only way Intrepid’s orbital examination would add appreciably to what on-site inspectors learned would be for the shuttle’s instruments to catch a gremlin in the very act. So far routine satellite scans had captured a few bizarre events on film, at extreme angle, but never yet with a full battery of peeper gear…

Mark’s thoughts arrested as he blinked. He shook his head and then cursed.

“Oh, shit. Intercom on. Ben, do you feel—”

“Right, Mark. Tingling in my toes. Speckles around the edge of my visual field. Is it like when you and Rip, on Pleiades — ?”

“Affirmative.” He shook his head again, vigorously, though he knew that wouldn’t knock away the gathering cobwebs. “It’s different in some ways, but basically… oh hell.” Mark couldn’t explain, and besides, there wasn’t time for chatter. He spoke another code word to start their suits transmitting full physiological data to ship recorders. “Full view, main scope,” he ordered then. “Secondary cameras — independent targeting of transient phenomena.”

The picture of the river loomed forth again. Now, though, the scene was no longer efficient and businesslike. Men scurried about the barges like angry ants, some of them diving off craft that bobbed and shook in the suddenly choppy water.

Tiny windows appeared on Mark’s faceplate, surrounding the main scene as Intrepid’s secondary telescopes began zooming in under independent control. Half the scenes were too blurry to make out as Mark’s eyesight grew steadily worse. Bright pinpoints swarmed inward like irritating insects.

“What do we do?” Ben’s voice sounded scared. Mark, who had been through this before, didn’t blame him.

“Make sure of your tether,” he told his copilot. “And memorize the way back to the cabin. We may have to return blind. Otherwise…” He swallowed. “There’s nothing we can do but ride it out.”

At least the ship is probably safe. There aren’t other structures around, like Teresa had to deal with. And a model-three shuttle is too small to worry about tides.

Mark had himself convinced, almost.

The outer half of his visual field was gone, though it kept fluctuating moment by moment. Through the remaining tunnel, Mark watched a drama unfold far below, where the Ob jounced and writhed as if someone were poking it with invisible rods. Flow deformed the hills and depressions nearly as quickly as they formed. Still, the undulations seemed to take clear geometric patterns.

Then, within a circular area, the Ob simply disappeared!

It was only pure luck none of the study vessels were inside the radius when it happened. As it was, the boats had a rugged ride as the columnar hole rapidly filled in.

“Where… where’d the water go?” Ben asked.

Joining the growing ringing in Mark’s ears came the blare of a camera alert. One of the secondary pictures suddenly ballooned outward, rimmed in red. For a moment Mark couldn’t make out what had the computer so excited. It looked like another view of the river valley, but at much lower magnification, or from higher altitude.

But this image appeared warped somehow. Then he realized it wasn’t unfocused. He was looking down at the Ob through a lens. The lens was a glob of water, which had suddenly manifested in midair at an altitude of… he squinted to read the lidar numbers… twenty-six kilometers!

Mark breathed the sweaty incense of his own dread. Something tiny and black squiggled inside the murky liquid blob that paused, suspended high above the planet. But before he could order the telescope to magnify, the entire watery mass was gone again! In its wake lay only a rainbow fringe of vapor, melting into the speckles at his eyes’ periphery.

“What the… ?”

“It’s back!” Ben cried. “Fifty-two klicks high! Here…” and he rattled off some code. Another scene, from another instrument, popped into view.

Now the ground looked twice as far below. The Ob was a thin ribbon. And the portion of stolen river had reappeared at double the altitude. Mark had time to blink in astonishment. The black object within looked like…

The spherule vanished again. “Mark,” Ben gasped. “I just calculated the doubling rate. It’s next appearance could be — Jesus!”

Mark felt his copilot’s hand grab the fabric of his suit and shake it. “There!” Ben’s voice crackled over the intruding roar of static. An outstretched arm and hand entered Mark’s narrow field of view and he followed the trembling gesture out to black space.

There, in the direction of Scorpio, an object had appeared. He didn’t have to command amplification. Even as telescopes slewed to aim at the interloper Mark cleared all displays with one whispered word and stared in direct light at the oblate spheroid that had paused nearby, shimmering in the undiminished sunlight.

What strange force might have hurled a portion of the Ob out here — momentarily, magically co-orbital with Intrepid — Mark couldn’t begin to imagine. It violated every law he knew. Small flickerings told of bits being thrown free of the central mass. But in its center there floated a large object—

— a woman. A diver, wearing a black wetsuit and scuba gear, with twin tanks that Mark bemusedly figured ought to last her another couple of hours, depending on how much she’d already used.

Mark had left only a narrow tunnel of vision, but it was enough. Through the diver’s face mask he caught the woman’s strange expression — one of rapt fulfillment mixed with abject terror. She began to make a sign with her hands.

“We’ve got to help her!” he heard Ben shout over the roar of static, preparing to launch himself toward the castaway.

Realization came instantly, but too late. “No, Ben!” Mark cried out. “Grab something. Anything!” Mark fumbled and found a stanchion by the cargo bay door. This he now gripped for all his life.

“Hold tight!” he screamed.

At that moment his helmet seemed to fill with a terrible song, and the world exploded with colors he had never known.

When it was all over, quivering from sore muscles and wrenched joints, Mark gingerly reeled in his copilot’s frayed, torn tether. He searched for Ben everywhere. Radar, lidar, telemetry… but no instrument could find a trace. Of the hapless Russian diver, also, there was no sign.

Perhaps they have each other for company, wherever they’re going, he thought at one point. It was a strange solace.

He did detect other things nearby… objects that command insisted he pick up for study. These were bits of flotsam… a mud-filled vodka bottle… a piece of weed… a fish or two.

Then, preparing to head home, he went through the retro protocols several times, double-checking until Command accused him of stalling.

“Can it!” he told them sharply. “I’m just making sure I know exactly where I am and where I’m going.”

As the pyrotechnics of reentry erupted around the cockpit windows, Mark later realized he’d spoken exactly as Teresa Tikhana would have. To the mission controllers, he must have sounded just like her.

“Hell, Rip,” he muttered, apologizing to her in absentia. “I never knew how you felt about that, till now. I promise, I won’t ever make fun of you again.”

Even much later, when he was once more on the steady ground, Mark walked cautiously toward the crowd of anxious, waiting officials with a cautious gait, as if the tarmac weren’t quite as certain- a platform as the others believed. And even when he began answering their fevered questions, Mark kept glancing at the horizon, at the sun and sky, as if to check and check again his bearings.

• EXOSPHERE

How much difference could a month make? The last time Teresa had sat at this table, deep inside the secret warrens of Waitomo, her personal world had only recently crashed in on her. Now her grief was stabilized. She could look back at her passionate interlude in Greenland as part of a widow’s recovery, and begin thinking about other things than Jason. Of course, last time she had also been numb from a completely different shock — learning about Earth’s dire jeopardy. That fact hadn’t changed.

But at least we’re doing something about it now. Futile or not, their efforts were good for the spirit.

George Hutton was just finishing his overall status report. Their limited success so far was visible in the large-scale display where their foe could now be seen swinging about on an elongated orbit, rising briefly out of the crystalline inner sphere into the second layer — the outer core of liquid metal. No longer a complacent eater, squatting undisturbed amid a banquet of high-density matter, the purple dot now seemed to throb angrily.

Teresa approved. We’re coming after you, beast. We’ve begun defending ourselves.

That was the good news. Give or take a few panicky moments, all four resonators had commenced firing sequences of tandem pulses to convert the planet’s own stored energy into beams of coherent gravity, recoiling against Beta and gradually shoving it outward toward—

Toward what? We still haven’t figured out what to do with the damned thing. Push until its growing orbit takes it out of the Earth, I suppose. But then what? Let a decaying singularity, blazing at a million degrees, keep whizzing round and round, entering and leaving, entering and leaving till it dissipates at last in a huge burst of gamma rays?

Teresa shrugged. As if by then the choice will still be in our hands. That was one reason the mood at the table was somber.

Another cause was visible on the outermost shell of the planetary model… a pattern of lights signifying where gazer beams had emerged at land or sea.

Actually, most of the beams pulsed at modes and wavelengths interacting not at all with surface objects. Often, the only effect was a local wind shift or eddies in an ocean current. Still, from a quarter of the sites came rumors of strange colors or thunderclaps in a clear blue sky. Hearsay about water spouts or disappearing clouds. Accounts of dams destroyed, of circular swirls cut in wheat fields, of aircraft vanishing without a trace.

Teresa glanced over at Alex Lustig. He had already told of his efforts to avoid population centers, and she didn’t doubt his sincerity. Still, something had changed in the man since she had seen him last. By now, in all honesty, she had expected to find him a wreck. Tossed by guilt as he had been when they first met, Teresa figured him due for a nervous breakdown when the toll of innocent victims began to rise.

Oddly, he now seemed at peace listening patiently to each speaker as the meeting progressed, exhibiting none of the nervous gestures she recalled. His expression appeared almost serene.

Maybe it isn’t so odd at that, Teresa thought. Beyond the pool of light cast by the display, she saw June Morgan move over behind Lustig and start massaging his shoulders. Teresa’s nostrils flared. They deserve each other, she , thought, and then frowned, wondering what she meant by that.

“We’ve tried to avoid predictable patterns,” George Hutton was saying. “So it would be hard to track down our resonators’ locations. No doubt several major nations and alliances and multinationals already suspect the disturbances are of human origin. In fact, we’re counting on a suspicious reaction. So long as they’re blaming each other, they’ll not go looking for a private group.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Teresa asked. “What if someone panics? Especially one of the deterrence powers? It doesn’t take much effort to break the treaty seals on a squadron of cruise missiles, you know. Just hammers and some simple software.”

Pedro Manella leaned into the light. “That’s under control, Captain. First, the seismic occurrences are taking place impartially, worldwide. The only organized pattern anyone will notice is that the disturbances statistically avoid major population centers.

“Second — I’ve taken care to deposit sequestered announcements with a secret registration service, triggered for net release the instant any power goes to yellow alert.”

Alex shook his head. “I thought we weren’t going to trust any of the services.”

Manella shrugged. “After your own unpleasant experience, Lustig, I don’t blame you for feeling that way. But there’s no chance of premature release this time. Anyway, the announcement only gives enough hints to get some trigger-happy crisis team to slow down and consult their geologists.”

George Hutton touched a control, dimming the globe display and bringing up the room lights. Alex squeezed June Morgan’s hand and she returned to her seat. Teresa looked away, feeling at once voyeuristic and resentful. She’s a collector, Teresa thought. How can a woman who^once wanted Jason also be attracted to a man like Lustig?

She suppressed an urge to turn around and look at him again, this time in frank curiosity.

“Besides,” George Hutton added. “There’s a limit to how long we can keep this secret anyway. Sooner or later someone’s going to track us down.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Pedro countered. “Our weakest link is the Net, but I have some very bright people working for me in Washington. By keeping traffic to a minimum and using tricks like your Maori mountain-iwi dialect, we could mask our short blips for as long as six months, even a year.”

“Hmph.” George sounded doubtful and Teresa agreed. Manella’s optimism seemed farfetched. There were too many bored hackers out there with free time and kilobit parallel correlators, looking for any excuse to stir up a sensation. Frankly, she wasn’t at all sure whether she’d be greeted by her tame NASA flunkies when she got back to Houston or by a pack of security boys, wearing total-record goggles and slapping her with inquiry warrants.

Even so, she looked forward to the trip, riding a stratoliner again under her own name. I’ve had it with zeps and aliases for a while.

“Don’t you think the secret will come out when Beta finally emerges through the surface?” George asked. “We won’t be hiding from just ferrets then. The whole pack of hounds will be baying for blood.”

“Conceded. But by then we’ll have our report ready to present to the World Court, won’t we, Alex?”

Lustig looked up, as if his thoughts had been far away. “Um. Sorry, Pedro?”

Manella leaned toward him. “We’ve been after you about this for months! Second only to getting rid of Beta is our need to find out who made the cursed thing. It’s not just revenge — though making an example of the bastards will be nice. I’m talking about saving our own skins!”

Teresa blinked. “What do you mean?”

Manella groaned as if he were the only one in the room able to see the obvious. “I mean that, after all the havoc we’ve set off, and are going to set off in the future, do you think people will simply take our word we just found the awful thing down there?

“Hell no! Here we are, led by the one man ever caught building an illegal black hole on Earth. Who do you think they’ll blame for Beta? Especially if the real villains are powerful men, eager to divert responsibility.”

Teresa swallowed. “Oh.”

All the illegal things they had done — including maintaining secrets and harming innocents — all those she was willing to stand to bar for. The salvation of Earth was powerful justification, after all. But it hadn’t occurred to her that that very defense might be denied them… that their group might actually be blamed for causing Beta in the first place!

“Shit,” she said, in a low voice. Now she understood how Alex Lustig must have felt when he seemed so bitter, last time. Which made it even harder to comprehend the man’s tranquil expression right now.

“I hadn’t thought of that either,” June Morgan said, looking at her as if she’d read her mind. Teresa found herself recalling their friendship, back before things started getting so damned messy. The flux of contrary emotions made her quickly turn away to avoid June’s eyes.

Manella concluded. “Beyond all thought of revenge, we need the real culprits to hand over to the mob in our stead. So I ask again, Lustig. Who are they?”

On the tabletop Alex’s hands lay folded. “We’ve learned a lot lately,” he said in a low voice. “Though I do wish Stan Goldman were here to help. Yes, surely he’s needed in Greenland. But what I’m trying to say is, despite many handicaps, I think we’ve made progress.

“For instance, with June’s assistance, we’ve now got a much better idea how matters must have been when the singularity first fell through the most intense regions of magnetism, which must have trapped the thing for some time before chaotic interactions finally let its apo-axis decay.”

“Chaos? You mean you can’t ever tell… ?”

“Forgive me. I was imprecise. The word ‘chaos’ in this sense doesn’t mean randomness. The solution isn’t perfect, but it can be worked out.”

Manella leaned forward again. “So you’ve traced its orbit back? To the fools who let it go?”

Teresa sat up, feeling chilled. A strange light seemed to shine in Alex Lustig’s eyes.

“It’s not easy,” he began. “Even a tiny, weighty object like Beta must have suffered deflections. Besides magnetic fields, there were inhomogeneities in the crust and mantle—”

Manella would have none of it. “Lustig, I know that look on your face. You’ve got something. Tell us! Where and when did it fall? How close can you pinpoint it?”

The British physicist shrugged. “Within approximately two thousand kilometers in point of entry—”

Manella moaned, disappointed.

“ — and within nine years, plus or minus, for date of initial impact.”

“Years!” Pedro stood up. He slapped the tabletop. “Nine years ago, nobody on Earth was capable of building singularities! Cavitronics was still a harmless theory. Lustig, your results are worse than useless. You’re saying that while we’re still likely to be destroyed, there’s no way to track and punish the guilty ones!”

For the first time, Teresa saw Alex smile openly, a look both empathic and feral, as if he had actually been looking forward to this. “You’re right on one count, but wrong on two,” he told Manella. “Can’t blame you, really. I made the same faulty assumptions myself.

“You see I, too, figured Beta had to have entered the Earth sometime since cavitronics became a practical science. Only after tracing Beta’s rate of growth and correcting for some hairy internal topologies did I realize it just has to be a lot older than we’d thought. In fact, those error bars I mentioned are pretty damn good.

“The date of entry was probably 1908. The region, Siberia.”

Teresa brought a hand to her breast. “Tunguska!”

George Hutton looked at her. “Do you mean… ?” he prompted. But Teresa had to swallow before finding her voice again. “It was the greatest airburst explosion in recorded history — even including that electromagnetic pulse thing the Helvetians set off. Barometers picked up pressure waves all the way round the world.”

Everyone watched her. Teresa spread her hands. “Trees were flattened for hundreds of kilometers. But nobody ever found a crater, so it wasn’t a regular meteorite. Theorists have suggested a fluffy comet, exploding in the atmosphere, or a bit of intergalactic antimatter, or…”

“Or a micro black hole.” Alex nodded. “Only now we know it wasn’t simply a black hole, but a far more complex construct. A singularity so complex and elegant, it couldn’t be an accident of nature.” He turned to face the others. “You see our problem. Our models say the thing has to come from a time before mankind possessed the ability to build such things… if we could do so even now.”

This time both Teresa and Pedro were speechless, staring. George Hutton asked, “Are you absolutely certain no natural process could have made it?”

“Ninety-nine percent, George. But even if nature did stumble onto just the right topology, it’s absurd to imagine such an object just happening to arrive when it did.”

“What do you mean?”

Alex closed his eyes briefly. “Look. Why would something so rare and terrible just happen to strike the planet at the very time we’re around to notice? Earth has been here four and one half billion years, but humans only a quarter million or so. And for less than two centuries have we been capable of noticing anything at all but the bitter end. That coincidence stretches all credulity! As my grandmother might say — it’s ridiculous to claim an impartial universe is performing a drama solely for our benefit.”

He paused.

“The answer, of course, is that the universe isn’t impartial at all. The singularity arrived when we’re here because we’re here.”

Silence stretched. Alex shook his head. “I don’t blame you for missing the point. I, too, was trapped by my modern, Western-masochistic conceit. I assumed only humans were clever or vicious enough to destroy on such a scale. It took a reminder from the past to show me what a stupid presumption that is, after all.

“Oh, I can give you the date and point of entry now. I can even tell you something about the thing’s makers. But don’t ask me how to take vengeance on them, Pedro. I suspect that’s far beyond our capabilities at present.”

Some of the others looked at each other in confusion. But Teresa felt queasy. She fought the effects, breathing deeply. No physical crisis could affect her as this series of abstract revelations had.

“Somebody wants to destroy us,” she surmised. “It’s… a weapon.”

“Oh yes,” Alex said, turning to meet her eyes. “It is that, Captain Tikhana. A slow but omnipotent weapon. And the coincidence of timing is easily enough explained. The thing arrived only a decade or two after the first human experiments with radio.

“Actually, the idea’s rather old in science fiction, a horror tale of paranoia that’s chillingly logical when you work it out. Somebody out there got into space ahead of us and doesn’t want company. So it — or they — fashioned an efficient way to eliminate the threat.”

“Threat?” Manella shook his head. “What threat? Hertz and Marconi make a few dots and dashes, and that’s a threat to beings who can make a thing like this?” He pointed to one of the flat screens, where Alex’s latest depiction of the cosmic knot writhed and wriggled in malefic, intricate splendor.

“Oh yes, certainly those dots and dashes represented a threat. Given that some lot out there doesn’t want competition, it would make sense to eliminate potential rivals like us as early and simply as possible, before we develop into something harder to deal with.”

He gestured upward, as if the rocky ceiling were invisible and the sky were all around them. “Consider the constraints such paranoid creatures have to work under, poor things. It may have taken years for our first signals to propagate to their nearest listening post. At that point they must fabricate a smart bomb to seek and destroy the source.

“But recall how difficult it is to send anything through interstellar space. If you want to dispatch it anywhere near the speed of light, it had better be small! My guess is they sent a miniature cavitron generator, one just barely adequate to make the smallest, lightest singularity that could do the job.

“Of course, if you start with a small singularity it’ll require quite some time absorbing mass inside the target planet before it can really take off. In this case, about a hundred and thirty years. But that should be adequate, usually.”

“It almost wasn’t, in our case,” Teresa said, bitterly. “If we’d invested more in space, we’d have had colonists on Mars by now. Maybe the beginnings of cities on asteroids or the moon. We could have evacuated some of the life arks…”

“Oh, you’re right,” Alex agreed. “My guess is we’re unusually bright, as neophyte races go. Probably most others experience longer intervals between discovering radio and inventing spaceflight. After all, the Chinese almost did something with electricity a couple of times, Babylon and the Romans.”

Pedro Manella looked down at his hands. “Smart, but not smart enough. So even if we eliminate this horrible thing the nightmare may not be over?”

Alex shrugged. “I suppose not. We and our descendants, should we live to have any, are at best in for a rough time ahead. As a Yank might put it—” and his voice dropped to a drawl ” — the galaxy we’re livin’ in appears t’be a mighty tough neighborhood.”

Manella’s face reddened. “You’re taking this awfully well to be joking about it, Lustig. Has the news driven you over the edge? Or are you saving up for yet another surprise? Maybe another deus ex machina to pull out of your hat, like last time?”

Teresa suddenly realized that was, indeed, what she was holding her breath for! He’s done it before… turned despair around with fresh hope. Maybe this time, too?

Seeing Alex smile, she felt a surge. But then he shook his head and simply said, “No. I have no new tricks.”

“Then why are you grinning like an idiot, Lustig!” Manella roared.

Alex stood up. And though he continued smiling, his hands clenched to a slow beat. “Don’t you understand? Can’t you see what this means?” He turned left and right, staring at each person in turn, getting back only blank looks.

In frustration, he shouted. “It means we’re not guilty. We haven’t destroyed ourselves and our world!”

He pressed both hands on the table, leaning forward intensely. “You all saw what shape I was in, before. I was destroyed by this. Oh, sure, we might succeed in ejecting Beta — I give it a one in four chance now, the best odds yet.

“But what would be the point? If we produce the sort of men who’d drop something like that into the world, and not even care enough to go looking for it again? Would we deserve to go on?

“You all kept telling me, ‘Don’t take it so personally, Alex.’ You said, ‘It’s not your fault, Alex. Your singularity was harmless, not an all-devouring monster like Beta. You’re our champion against this thing!’ ”

“Champion?” His laughter was acrid. “Couldn’t any of you see how that really made me feel?”

Every other person stared. The physicist’s reserve had cracked, and underneath now lay exposed someone more human than the Alex Lustig that Teresa had seen before this. A man, she realized, who had stepped deeper into the borderlands of endurance than most ever dream of.

“I had to identify with the makers of that thing!” He went on. “So long as I knew them to be my fellow humans, I had to take responsibility. Couldn’t any of you see that?”

He had started out grinning, but now Alex shivered. June Morgan started to rise, but then suppressed the move. Teresa understood and agreed. She, too, felt an urge to do something for him, and knew the only way to help was to listen till he stopped.

Listen humbly, for she knew with sudden conviction that he was right.

“I…” Alex had to inhale to catch his breath. “I’m smiling, Pedro, because I was ashamed to be human, and now I’m not anymore. Mere death can’t take that from me now. Nothing can.

“Isn’t… isn’t that enough for anyone to smile about?”

It was George Hutton who reached him first — who drew his shaking friend into his massive arms. Then, all at once, the rest of them were there as well. And none of their former jealousies or conflicts seemed to matter anymore. They embraced each other and for a time shared the horror of their newly known danger… along with the solace of their restored hope.