Earth

PLANET

World Ocean rolled, stroked by driving winds and tugged by barren Sister Moon.

For millions of years, twin tidal humps of churning water swept round and round, meeting little resistance but the sea floor itself. Only here and there did some lone, steaming volcano thrust high enough to reach open sky, daring to split the driving waves.

Eventually more islands sweated out, then more still. As the crust heaved and shifted, many of those mafic barges collided and merged until newborn continents towered over the waters. Onto those sere platforms ceaseless rains fell, nurturing nothing.

Only sheltered below the waves did life wage its continuing struggle to improve or die. One-celled creatures divided prodigiously, without planning or intent, experimenting with new ways of living.

One lucky family line chanced onto the trick of using sunlight to split water and make carbohydrates. That green patrimony took off, filling half the world’s niches.

The day’s length altered imperceptibly as Earth exchanged momentum with her moon. Eon by eon, the seas grew saltier and then stabilized. The sun brightened, also gradually. Sometimes the rolling waters changed color as some innovative microbe gained a sudden temporary advantage, burgeoned, outstripped its food supply, and died back again.

Then one tiny organism consumed another, but failed to devour its prey. Instead, the two coexisted and a deal was struck. An accidental sharing of responsibilities. A symbiosis.

One from many, and metazoa — multicellular life — was born.

That innovation, cooperation, changed everything.

• HYDROSPHERE

Claire Eng slogged through a pond of mucky water, hauling one end of a nylon net, concentrating hard to keep her footing on the plastic pool liner. She couldn’t afford to make one wrong move in this slimy soup. Not if I don’t want to spend two hours washing gunk out of my hair, she thought. Just beyond the net and its row of floating buoys, a throng of panicky fish protested being herded into this corner of the pond. Their splashing sent ripples lapping too close to the tops of her waders. The fish — and the odorous green gunk they lived in — were ready for harvest. Unfortunately, both smelled awfully ripe, too.

Claire spat greasy, rank droplets. “Come on, Tony!” she complained to the dark-haired boy at the other end of the net. “I still have homework to do, and Daisy’s sure to be a gor-suck pain about chores.”

Tony finished tying his end to a stainless steel grommet and hauled himself out of the pond. On the concrete bank, under a row of potted, overhanging mulberry trees, he used a hose to rinse off his waders before shucking them. “Be right with you, Claire,” he called cheerfully. “Just hold tight another minute!”

Claire tried to be patient, but her hat and sunglasses had come askew while helping drive hordes of hapless fish toward their doom. Now she had to face the relentless Louisiana sun unprotected. The afternoon was muggy, fly smitten, and she almost wished she’d had an excuse not to help her friend harvest this month’s tilapia crop. But, of course, she couldn’t let Tony down. Not with the Mexican megafarms cutting prices these days, driving small-time fish ranchers to the edge.

Angling her head away from the glare, she looked out across the endless flat expanse of Iberville Parish, dotted with cedar groves, rice paddies, and square dark patches of gene-designed quick-cane. And countless fish ponds — chains of low watery ovals, mulberry rimmed and glistening — the cool, efficient protein factories that let chefs in Baton Rouge and New Orleans maintain a spicy culinary tradition long after the Gulf coast fisheries had gone away.

In the distance, she made out a straight, tree-lined hummock, stretching north to south — the East Atchafalaya Basin Protection Levee, one of so many mammoth earthworks thrown up by the Army Corps of Engineers over more than a century, to forever stave off the meeting of two great waters. Endless miles of dikes and channels and monumental spillways lined the Mississippi River, the Gulf, and nearly every flow path conceived in the corp’s computerized contingency plans. Tagging along with her father, and later in her own right, Claire had walked nearly every meter of the vast project. From Logan she had inherited a fascination for hydraulic engineering and an abiding contempt for the sort of techno-arrogance that spoke words like “forever.”

“Idiots,” she muttered. Now the corps was offering Congress a new plan, one “guaranteed” to keep the Mississippi from doing what it was absolutely bound to do eventually — shift its banks and find a new way to the sea. Logan’s private estimates suggested the new levees would keep Old Man River out of the Atchafalaya Valley for another three decades, maximum. Claire considered her father an optimist. “Ten more years, tops,” she said in a low voice.

She’d miss this land when it all disappeared… its criss-crossing little bayous and streams. The dead-still, humid air, thick with tangy Cajun cooking that bit right back when you put it in your mouth. And the old grempers and gremmers, sitting on benches, telling lies about days when there were still patches of mangrove swamp in these parts, thick with deer and ’gators and even “critters” never catalogued by science.

Claire narrowed her eyes and briefly saw the same flat parish roiling under hectare after kilohectare of foamy brown water, a mighty river hauling a continent’s silt down this shortcut to the sea — along with every farm and house and living soul in its path.

But Daisy won’t move. Hell, nobody listens to me, and I’m tired of being called “Cassandra” by all my friends.

In a matter of months she’d be gone from here anyway. Maybe people would pay better attention after she won a reputation elsewhere. After making a name for herself…

“Here, hand me the end.”

She gave a start as Tony tapped her shoulder from the concrete bank. Straining, she dragged the line nearer. It took both of them, hauling together, to pull it taut and tie it off.

“Thanks, Claire,” Tony said. “Here, let me help you out.”

To her astonishment, he didn’t wait for her to slosh over to the ladder. Tony grabbed her shoulder straps and hauled her onto the apron by strength alone. Dripping, she sat there while he hosed off her waders, grinning.

Showoff, she thought. Still, she couldn’t help being impressed. At seventeen Tony was in full growth, changing every day and proud of it. She remembered when he had first surged past her in height, only a short time ago, and she had felt a passing, irrational wave of envy toward her childhood friend. Even in a world leveled for women by technology, there were times when sheer size and power still had their advantages.

Testosterone has its drawbacks, too, Claire reminded herself as she hung the rubber overalls to dry. Her remote-school in Oregon included a curriculum about the many reasons why women could count their blessings that they weren’t male, after all. Still, lately she’d been surprised to catch Tony gazing at her with looks of bashful admiration. Surprising, that is, till she realized.

Oh. It’s sex.

Or something nicer, actually, but closely related. Anyway, whatever it was, Claire wasn’t ready to deal with it right now. Since puberty she had avoided girls her own age, because of their precocious, single-minded, one-topic focus. At fourteen and fifteen, boys seemed more interested in doing things — in projects on the World Net or neat stuff in the real world. Now though, inevitably, her male friends were catching up and starting to go goofy too.

“I’ve got to stay for the harvester truck,” Tony told her, looking down. “Want to wait with me? We could head over to White Castle, after. Maybe join Judy and Paul…”

Judy and Paul were a long-standing couple. To hang out with them in public would make a statement, turning Claire and Tony into “Tony-and-Claire.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to become half of such a four-legged creature, quite yet. Far safer the amorphous throngs of teenagers who gathered at the dry-skating rink, or the Holo-Sim Club…

“I’m sorry, Tony. I really have to go. Daisy—”

“Yeah, I know.” He cut her off quickly, making a show of nonchalance. “You gotta deal with Daisy, poor kid. Well, good luck. Let me know if you can get away later.”

She clambered down slippery steps to the duckboard walkway. “Yeah, I’ll buzz. Or maybe tomorrow we’ll go out with the team after your lacrosse game.”

“Yeah.” He brightened, shouting after her. “Just watch. We’ll turn those guys into holey swiss cheese, full of rads and rems!”

Claire waved one last time and then turned to hurry home under the shadow of towering canebrakes, across tiny bridges where retirees idled with fishing poles, smiling at her with lazy familiarity, and finally past the long-abandoned refinery, now stripped of everything but crumbling, worthless concrete.-

Why does being a teenager make you so impatient? she pondered as she neared Six Oaks, her mother’s tiny autarchy on the bayou. Claire knew she couldn’t put Tony off much longer without hurting him. The profiler at school says I’m just a gradual type. No cause for worry if I’m slower than other kids, or more cautious.

But what if the tests missed something? What if there’s something wrong with me?

Abstractly, Claire knew these were typical thoughts for her age. Every adolescent wonders if he or she’s the vanguard of the latest wave of mutants, made unhuman by some rare, fundamental flaw. Each quirk or idiosyncrasy gets magnified out of all proportion. A zit is the first stage of leprosy. A rebuff means banishment to the Sahara.

Knowing all that helped a little… though only a little.

I just hope that when I’m finally ready, Tony or someone like him will be ready for me.

She turned away from the refinery towers — slowly decomposing into gravelly sediment — without even seeing them, and took one last turn between an aisle of willows to hurry the rest of the way home.

Many houses in the area had columns and porticos more reminiscent of old movies than real history, but the effect was particularly anachronistic at Six Oaks. At first squint you might think you were looking at a miniature version of Tara, but satellite dishes and a forest of bristling antennas quickly dispelled any sense of antebellum charm. And while other families maintained rooftop photocells and supplementary water heaters, few kept enough to dispense entirely with the parish power grid.

After all, though, this was Daisy McClennon’s “island,” where self-sufficiency meant more than a trendy fad or even good citizenship, but had over the years become a militant faith. And Claire was fast turning into an apostate.

Unlike the neighbors, chez McClennon had no account with any of the local food-testing services. Why bother, when you grew amaranth and pejibaye palm fruit and marama beans and lentils in your own little horticultural paradise… a glassed-in wonder of nutritional productivity that Claire’s mother had designed herself? It had been purchased with inherited money, but of late Daisy seemed to expect Claire to maintain it single-handedly.

Not much longer though, Daisy. Six months more and I’m gone.

Probably, her mother would barely notice when she left. Daisy’d just hire on some oath-pledged refugee, or one of those Han or Nihonese college kids who kept passing through these days, taking a year off working their way around the world from zep passage to zep passage in the latest Asian fad. If so, Daisy was due for a surprise. No modern, self-indulgent Nihonese kid- would work as hard as Daisy expected for just room and board and electric.

“Aw, hell,” Claire sighed on catching sight of the wind generator. Speaking of electric, those limp vanes meant current would be rationed again. And guess who had top priority around here?

Claire made her rounds with rapid efficiency, starting at the methane pit, where she checked fluid levels in the crap digester. It was supposed to be “zero maintenance,” but that guarantee was by now a bitter joke. I’ll bet my rich cousins never have to do chores, she thought with halfhearted crankiness. Alas, even Logan agreed with her mother on one thing: that “hard work builds character.” So even if she had been able to live with her father, it wouldn’t have been that much easier. And to be honest, she had met her relatives in the McClennon clan. Horrible, stuck-up creatures, living off wealth neither they nor their parents ever had a hand in creating. None of them would be hurt by a little honest labor, for sure.

Still, there’s got to be a middle ground. Claire grunted as she fought to clear a drip-irrigator in the main greenhouse, blowing down one nozzle till spots swam before her eyes. Maybe I just wish Daisy’d do her share around here.

At least the bee zapper was working. For years their hives had been under seige by Africanized swarms, seeking to take over as they had everywhere else in the area, ruining all the once-profitable apiaries in the parish. Chemicals and spray parasites did no good. But a few weeks ago Claire had found a net reference by a fellow in Egypt, who’d discovered that the African strain beat their wings faster than the tame European variety. Burrowing into archaic TwenCen military technology, he had adapted sensor-scanner designs from an old, defunct project called “Star Wars.” Now Claire and a few thousand others were testing his design and reporting weekly results to a network solutions SIG.

Like a glittering scarecrow, the cruciform laser system watched over her squat hives. When she had first turned it on, the surrounding fields had come startlingly alight with hundreds of tiny; flaming embers. The next morning, ash smudges were all that remained of the vicious invaders within line of sight. But her own honeybees were untouched. Now she looked forward to a sweet profit and her first stingless summer.

Perfect timing, she thought ironically. Just as I’m about to move away.

Before going inside, there was one last chore to do.

Claire clambered down to the little creek behind the house, to check on Sybil and Clyde.

The piebald gloats bleated at her. They had finished eating all the water hyacinths within reach along that stretch of bank, so she readjusted their tethers to bring them near another weed-clogged area. Without such creatures, every waterway in the South would be choked with rank tropical opportunists by now, flourishing unstoppably for lack of natural controls.

Some neighbors made pets of their channel-clearing gloats, or the other type bred specially to eat kudzu vines. Claire liked animals, but she didn’t want to feel any ties here, so she kept this relationship strictly businesslike. Anyway, what was the point in trying to maintain every tiny canal, as if canals weren’t mortal like everything else?

The Mississippi’s coming anyway, she thought, looking out toward the land she both loved and longed to leave behind. You better get used to the idea, Atchafalaya. You’re gonna know greatness, whether you like it or not.

After adjusting Clyde’s protective goggles, Claire brushed at his speckled coat. “What’s this? Some sort of mange?” The gloat bleated irritably as puffs of dry fur floated from its patchy side. “All right. All right. I’ll look into it.” Sighing, Claire took a sample and patted the creatures, who were soon munching exotic weeds again, contentedly.

Echoes of gunfire and rocking explosions rattled the walls as she passed her mother’s suite of rooms. Music blared — the strains of some oldtime movie Daisy was condensing for a Net entertainment group. Though she perpetually proclaimed contempt for the industry, Daisy’s expertise at compressing oldtime flicks was legendary. Skillfully, she could pack ninety tedious minutes into a crisp forty or less, speeding the languid pace of classics like The Terminator or Deliverance to suit the time-devouring appetites of modern viewers.

Or, for others wanting more out of a particular film, Daisy McClennon would expand the original… adding material from film archives or even computer-generated extrapolations. It brought in a steady income that allowed her to contemptuously spurn the despised family trust fund.

Most of the time.

Besides, a career working on the Net had one more advantage — the occupation lacked any obvious impact on the real environment of the Earth.

“Tread lightly on our world’s toes” went the motto of one of Daisy’s eco-freak organizations, the sort whose members didn’t take off their shoes inside their houses, but instead removed them before going outside. That particular group had as their totem emblem a fierce Chinese dragon, curled and snarling, representing an angry, violated eco-sphere fed up with swarming, pestilential humanity. The same reptilian icon stretched above the hearth of the main sitting room, Daisy’s favorite part of the villa, but one seldom visited anymore by Claire.

Hell, she was too damn busy maintaining the rest of it! Claire cursed roundly when she saw that Daisy had neglected even to empty the trash, supposedly on her own list of chores. Not content with the normal five recycling bins, her mother insisted this house have twelve. And three mulch piles. Then there were the soap maker, the yoghurt maker, the midget brewery…

Claire thought of a recent stylish trend among her peers. Oh, I’d make a swell Settler. I can grow herbal medicines, make my own paper, grind ink from bark and lamp black… and fix the water pump’s gaskets myself, since mother hates buying parts from Earth-raping manufacturers.

City folk, tending high-yield gardens and a few clip-wing ducks on the roof, loved pretending that made them rough and independent, blithely ignoring all the ways they still counted on society’s nurturing web, the tubes and ducts that piped in clean water, power, gas… and carried off a steady stream of waste. Ironically, few kids ever grew up better qualified to homestead a new frontier than Claire. And few had so little desire to do so.

After all, who in their right mind would want to live that way?

Oh, reducing your impact was moral and sensible, up to a point. Beyond which there was a lot to be said for labor-saving devices! Claire swore her own place would have a microwave-infrasound cooker. And an electric garbage disposal, oh please. And maybe, just for that first year of celebration — a licentious, never-ending gallon of store-bought ice cream.

Changing out of her sweaty work clothes in the privacy of her own room, Claire paused by a shelf of mementos brought by her father from trips all over the planet. A ten-million-year-old spider, encased in Dominican amber, lay next to fossils from the Afar desert and a beautiful hardwood dolphin, carved by a Brazilian engineer Logan had met in Belem.

Her mineral collection wasn’t exactly world class. But there was a lovely polished slab of bright green smithsonite, alongside its cousins jadeite and entrancing malachite. More yellowish than green, the hypnotic, translucent autainite had come from France, and the purple erythrite from deep in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

None of these minerals were particularly rare, not even the disk of glittering “star” quality quartz hanging over her mirror — where she let down her reddish-brown hair and checked for stray droplets from Tony’s pond. Picking up the crystal lens, she peered through it at her own image, wishing the highlights it gave her hair might somehow translate into the real world, where she so often envied other girls their shining locks.

As a child, she had thought the bit of quartz magical. But Logan had emphasized that it was a routine miracle. The Earth contained veins and seams and whole flows of beautiful mineral forms that took only a practiced eye to discover and a little skill to prepare. In contrast, Claire had been shocked when an uncle thought to please her one birthday with a “unique” gift — a slice of fossilized tree trunk. It had subsequently taken her weeks to investigate and discover its origins, then anonymously donate it back to the petrified forest it had been stolen from in the first place.

There was a difference, of course. Many common things could be beautiful, even magical. But in a world of ten billion people, true rarities shouldn’t be owned. At least on that point she, Logan, and Daisy all agreed.

Claire put the crystal back. Beside the mirror lay her favorite treasures, several beautiful chert arrowheads. Not archaeological relics, but even better. Logan had taught her to chip them herself, during one of their too infrequent camping trips. To be fair, Claire admitted both her parents had taught her useful things. Only Logan’s lessons always seemed much more fun.

Under the window, nesting in her neglected model of the Bonnet Carre Spillway, her pet mouse, Isador, twitched his nose as Claire stopped to pet him and feed him seeds.

The wall screens of her Net unit flickered on idle, showing new assignments from the remote-school in Oregon. But Claire first checked for personal messages. And sure enough, there was a blip from her father winking on her priority screen! At a spoken command, it lit up with a bright picture of Logan Eng standing atop a bluff overlooking a bay of brilliant blue water. To save power, she took the message in written form. Rows of letters shone.

Claire smiled. He wasn’t supposed to call himself “Daddy.” That was her affectation.

She touched the data appended tag and called up Logan’s speculative paper. Claire recognized the net-zine he was submitting it to… one where scientists could let their hair down without risking their reputations. She had a hunch Logan was really going to set off a ripe one this time.

Then she frowned. Suddenly suspicious, Claire queried her security program.

“Dumpit!” she cursed, stamping her feet in annoyance. Logan’s blip had been snooped since reception. And it didn’t take a genius to know who the snooper was. “Dumpit, Daisy!”

The older generation as a whole seemed to have no respect for privacy, but this was downright insulting. As a brilliant hacker, Daisy could have brushed aside her daughter’s simple security system and read Claire’s mail without leaving traces. That she hadn’t even bothered to cover her tracks showed either blithe indifference or straight contempt.

“Only half a year and I’m gone from here,” Claire told herself, repeating it like a mantra to calm down. “Only half a year.”

She wished, oh how she wished, that at sixteen, almost seventeen, that didn’t feel like eternity.

Meanwhile, in another room not far away, all four walls flickered with light and sound. And every glimmer found its own reflection in Daisy McClennon’s eyes.

To the left, a full-sized Davy Crockett — soot smeared and bloodied, but undaunted — defended the Alamo in color far more brilliant than ever imagined by the original director. Soon, sophisticated equipment under Daisy’s subtle guidance would add a third dimension and more. For the right price, she’d even intensify the experience with smell and the floor-rattling concussion of Mexican cannonballs.

Her best, most pricey enhancements were so good, in fact, they had to carry a truth-in-reality warning… a little pink diamond flashing in one corner, signifying “this isn’t real” to those with weak hearts or soft minds. While many called her an artist, Daisy did holo-augmentations for cash income, period. The other walls of her laboratory were devoted to her really important work.

Columns of data flowed like spume over a waterfall. Torrents — and yet mere samplings from the river, the ocean of information that was the Net. Daisy’s blue eyes skimmed scores of readouts at once.

Here a UNEPA survey assayed remaining rain-forest resources. Next to it rippled a project proposal by a major mining company. And over to the right, one of her subroutines patiently worked its way through a purloined list of antisabotage security procedures for the West Havana Nuclear Power Station… still apparently impregnable, but Daisy had hopes.

The visible portion of the flow was only a sliver, a fragment distilled and sent back to this nexus by her electronic servants — her ferrets and foxes, her badgers and hounds — data-retrieval programs euphemistically named after beasts, some now extinct but known in earlier times for their tenacity, hunger, and unwillingness to take “no” for an answer. All over the world, Daisy’s electronic emissaries searched and probed at her bidding, prying loose secrets, correlating, combining, devouring.

Daisy’s cover business helped explain her prodigious computing needs, her means. But actually, she lived and worked for ends. Into the universe of data she sent forth guerrillas, her personal contingents in the war against planet rapists.

Such as Chang. It was she who had tipped UNEPA off to the whereabouts of that awful man’s grisly cache near Taipei. News of Chang’s death had come as a welcome surprise. She’d been so sure he’d escape or at worst get a wrist slap. Perhaps those wimps at UNEPA were getting some guts, after all.

But now, on to other things. Daisy sat padmasama on a silk cushion amidst a cyclone of pictures and data. Her eyes quickly sifted what her creatures brought her… industrial “development” plans… laxity by weak, compromise-ridden public agencies… betrayal by bribed, gor-sucked officials. And worse.

Within the movement, her name was spoken in hushed tones, with respect, awe, and a little fell dread. In another era, Daisy might have heard the voices of angels in church bells. Today, though, her talents truly flowered as she plucked the schemes of builders as well as the prevarications of moderates, even half a world away.

“So Logan thinks his idea’s just amusing… probably nonsense…” she whispered as she wove her ex-husband’s recent paper into a special database. Of course she couldn’t follow his more arcane mathematical derivations, but that didn’t matter. She had programs for that. Or human consultants just a net call away.

Daisy’s nostrils flared as she watched a panned view of the hated tidal power project. Yet another example of Logan’s selling out. Of his futile, foredoomed effort to “solve” the world’s problems. In bargaining with evil, of course, he had bartered away his soul.

Still, she knew him. She knew her former love better than he knew himself. Logan’s poorest hunches were often better than other engineers’ best analyses.

“It’d be just like him to latch onto something big and not even trust his own instincts,” she sighed.

Daisy stared at the broken tidal barrage. Anything that could disrupt a big project like that interested her. There were people she knew… others who also despised the slow, reformist methods of the North American Church of Gaia. A loose network of men and women who knew how to take action. This news of Logan’s might mean some new threat. Or perhaps an opportunity.

Daisy’s eyes stroked the data flow pouring endlessly from the Net sea. The blue eyes of a hunter, they flashed and sought. Their patience was that of mission, and in them dwelled the perseverance of dragons.

• CORE

“Whatever we do,” Teresa Tikhana had said earlier, be-fore the meeting broke up. “We can’t let any of the space powers in on this. I’m sure now they were all in cahoots with Spivey’s illegal research on Erehwon. Heaven only knows what they’d do if they got their hands on gravity lasers and cosmic knots. ”

So they decided not to publicly announce the impending end of the world, or their bold, if unlikely, plan to fight it. Big governments were already the prime suspects for having created Beta, losing it, and then hiding the story to escape responsibility. If so, the powers that be wouldn’t think twice about wiping out George Hutton’s little band to keep the foul secret a little longer.

Perhaps he and the others were leaping to wrong conclusions. All in all, Alex did find the scenario garish and a bit too weird. But it fit the facts as they knew them. Besides, they simply couldn’t afford to take chances.

“We’ll deal with the taniwha ourselves, then,” George Hutton had summarized at the end of the meeting.

“It’ll be hard to set up the resonators without anyone noticing,” Alex reminded everybody. But Pedro Manella had agreed with George. “Leave that part to Hutton and me. We’ll provide everything you need.”

The portly Aztlan reporter had seemed so relaxed, so confident. No sign remained of the emotion he’d shown on first hearing of the monster at the planet’s heart. Even a slim hope, it seemed, was enough to fill him with energy.

Alex felt uncomfortable putting such trust in a man who — by his own recent reckoning — had ruined his life. Of course it was actually thanks to those riots in Iquitos, triggered by Manella, that his own crude Alpha singularity had fallen and he’d been forced to go looking for it. If not for the fellow’s meddling in Peru, Alex would probably have paid no more attention to the center of the Earth than…

He leaned back in his swivel chair and realized he had no adequate simile for comparison. The center of the Earth was essentially the last place one thought of. And yet, without it where would any of us be?

In front of Alex, the planet’s many layers glowed fulgent in the final schematic presented at the now-adjourned meeting. This ghostly, near-spherical Earth circumscribed a geometric figure — a tetrahedral pyramid whose tips pierced the surface at four evenly spaced locations.

EASTER ISLAND (RAPA NUI): 27° 6' 20'' S, 109° 24' 30'' W

SOUTH AFRICA (NEAR REIVILO): 27° 30' 36° S, 24° 6' E

IRIAN JAYA (NEW GUINEA): 2° 6' 36'' S, 137° 23' 24'' E

WEST GREENLAND (NEAR GODHAVN): 70° 38' 24'' N, 55° 41' 12'' W

Four sites. I’d rather have had twelve. Or twenty.

He’d said as much to Stan and George and the other geophysicists. There’s no telling what will happen when we start pushing at Beta in earnest. It’s certain to drift and tumble. That array of resonators should be a dodecahedron or icosahedron for full coverage, not a pyramid.

But a pyramid was all they could manage.

It wasn’t a matter of money. That George had in plenty, and he was willing to spend every farthing. His political contacts in the Polynesian Federation meant two sites would be readily available, no questions asked. But to set up beyond the Pacific basin, their tiny cabal would need help. Especially if word wasn’t to leak out.

Back in the last century, undercover, secret maneuverings were more the rule than the exception. Nations, corporations, drug cartels, and even private individuals habitually concealed monumental schemes. But arms inspections were followed by tourism, as jetliners and then zeps began nosing through swathes of sky once reserved for warcraft. Data-links laced metropoleis to donkey-cart villages. Of the three great centers of TwenCen secrecy, state socialism had collapsed before Alex was even born, and finance capitalism met its ruin soon after that, amidst the melted Alps.

In hindsight, the Helvetian tragedy probably hadn’t even been necessary, for not even the fabled gnomes could have kept their records private much longer in a world filled with amateur snoops — data hackers with as much free time and computing power as ingenuity.

That left the third relict, and the strongest. The great nation states still maintained “confidential” services — permitted the victors by the same treaty that had ended such things for everyone else. Those agencies could have helped the Tangoparu team set up their gravity-wave array in total secrecy. But then, those same agencies were almost certainly the enemy, as well.

George thinks they made Beta and are hiding their mistake to save their own hides, even if it means eventually dooming everyone.

Alex couldn’t imagine that kind of thinking. It made him ashamed to be a member of the same species. To hear Teresa Tikhana describe her Colonel Spivey, though, she might as well be talking about a creature from another planet.

Were Spivey and his collaborators even now struggling to find a solution as well? Perhaps that’s what Teresa’s husband had been working on, out in space. If so, the government boys never seemed to have stumbled on the gravity laser effect. And at this point, Alex would be damned if he’d give it to them.

Of course if we succeed the secret will come out near the end anyway. It’ll be hard to ignore a sunlike fireball rising out of the Earth, accelerating toward deep space at relativistic speeds.

By then, he and the others had better have prepared to go into hiding. In addition, Alex himself would feel compelled to take memory destroyers as soon as Beta was safely on its way, to prevent spilling what he had learned by coincidence and accident and mental fluke. In principle, it was only what he deserved, of course, for the sin of hubris. Still, he’d regret losing his mental image of the knot singularity, its intricate ten-space foldings, its awful, ignescent beauty. That loss would haunt him, he knew. Almost, he would rather die.

As if I’ll get a choice. It’s a long shot this will work at all.

They were taking a terrible chance. Using gravity-wave recoil to move Beta sounded fine in theory. But some of their initial test gazer beams for unknown reasons had interacted with matter at the planet’s surface — coupling with an earthquake fault in one case, with man-made objects in another. It was still a mystery why this happened or what the consequences might be once they really got started.

But what choice do we have?

Alex looked at the glowing points where the tetrahedron met Earth’s surface. Four sites where they must build mammoth superconducting antennas without anyone finding out. And they had so little time.

The resonators had to be evenly spaced and on dry land — not easy to arrange on a world two thirds covered in water. It had taken his computer two whole seconds to search and finally find the best arrangement.

“We only have a few months,” Teresa Tikhana said, interrupting Alex in his brooding. The American astronaut sat across the table from him in the darkened room, watching the same display. They had both fallen silent after the others left, each thinking alone.

In response, he nodded. “After that, Beta will be too massive to budge, even with the gazer. We’d only excite resonant states Stan thinks could make it even worse.”

Teresa shivered. When she sat up, she looked around in a way Alex had noticed before — as if she were checking her surroundings in some manner he couldn’t fathom. “You’ll be setting up the resonator on Rapa Nui, won’t you?” she asked, suddenly.

“Yes. That’s the anchor point, so—”

“It’s a special place, you know.” Her voice was hushed. “That’s where Atlantis is.”

“Um… Atlantis?” Perplexed, at first he thought she must be referring to the island’s eerie Neolithic history, or the haunting monoliths to be found there. Then he remembered. “Oh. The space shuttle that crashed long ago. Is it still there?”

Teresa Tikhana’s jaw tightened briefly. “It didn’t crash. Captain Iwasumi made a perfect emergency landing under impossible conditions. It was the fools in charge of bringing Atlantis home… they dropped her.”

It must have happened when she was only a child, yet the woman covered her eyes in pain. “She’s still down there, stripped, a shell. A monument on a pedestal. You should visit her if you get the chance.”

“I’ll do that. I promise.”

She looked up. Their eyes met briefly, then Teresa sighed. “I’d better pack. Dr. Goldman and I have a plane to catch.”

“Of course.” He stood up. “I… I’m glad you’re with us, Captain Tikhana. Your help is going to be vital.” Alex paused. “Also… as I said. I’m so very sorry about your husband—”

She raised a hand, cutting off another embarrassing apology. “It was an accident. If anyone’s to blame for blindness — for not picking up on what was happening…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “We’ll drop you a coded message when we get to Godhavn, Dr. Lustig.”

“Have a safe trip, Captain.” Hesitantly, he offered his hand. After a moment, she took it. Her slim, calloused grip betrayed a single faint tremor before she quickly let go again. Then she turned away, departing for her quarters in another part of the cave.

“And good luck,” Alex added softly after she had gone. “We’re all going to need more than a little of that, too.”

• MESOSPHERE

Stan Goldman watched Auntie Kapur stir the fire with a crooked stick. A mist of ash lifted in its wake, and the coals brightened briefly to compete with the old woman’s blue-flickering computer display. Beyond those twin pools of light, the ocher columns of the meeting house melted into moist shadows of a New Zealand mountain forest. Auntie preferred this setting for their final meeting before everyone dispersed to Earth’s four corners. Beginning such a covert enterprise in darkness seemed appropriate to their dim chances. “Rapa Nui will be easiest,” the priestess told Stan and George. The glinting sparks set her chin tattoo designs in eerie motion. “My sisters there will provide every facility, and the Chilean authorities will be no problem.”

“That’s good,” Stan said. He rubbed his eyes, blaming exhaustion and bits of drifting ash for the stinging. It was long past his normal bedtime — as if anything were “normal” anymore. But at least Ellen would be waiting up for him, and he hoped to salvage something of their last night together.

“That island’s the anchor point,” he went on. “Site one has to be there, with no allowance for error.”

“Then it’s agreed, that’s where Alex must go,” George Hutton said.

Stan nodded. “Of course. Alex should get the safest site, and the one where the most delicate control is needed, since only he truly understands that thing down there.”

“Do not count on Rapa Nui being safe.” Meriana Kapur regarded Stan severely. “It is an island of awful power. A place of death and horrible old gods. I agree Lustig must be the one to go there, to that focal point. But not because it is safe.”

Auntie had a way of making statements one could not answer. Stan glanced at George and saw his friend nod reverently. As a pakeha kiwi — a white New Zealander, and one who hadn’t even been born here — Stan felt it wiser simply to defer to the Maori when they spoke of such things.

“Very well. We still have to finalize the teams to go set up the other three resonators.”

George Hutton spoke gruffly. “I’ve decided I’ll handle Irian Jaya myself.”

Stan turned and blinked at him. “But we need you to coordinate everything. Our equipment…”

The billionaire waved one hand. “All can be accomplished by hyper, using company codes and colloquial Taupo speech. But some things have to be done in person. I must be there to arrange matters with certain friends among the Papuans.”

“Do you have a specific site in mind?”

George smiled. “The perfect site. I discovered it during a resource survey ten years ago… a series of deep caves even greater than the Mulu caverns, in Borneo.”

“But I never heard. How did you keep them secret? And why?”

“How is easy, my friend.” George put one finger to his lips. “Besides me, only chief engineer Raini knows about it, and she swore me an oath. It didn’t qualify as a “mineral resource,” per se, so we simply neglected mentioning it to the Papuan government.”

“But it is a resource! Caves like the Mulu generate income from tourism…”

Stan stopped, suddenly aware of the irony. No more than a kilometer away were the grottoes of Waitomo, wonders of nature now reduced to yet another brief stop in the travel itineraries of millions, its ancient floors trampled, its limestone seeps forever altered by rivulets of vapor condensed from myriad human exhalations, its glow-worm constellations demoted from silent, awesome mysteries to a few more frames in the next tourist’s automatic camera.

“That’s why enough for me,” George answered. “Another reason I want to take this task is to see the Irian caves once again. If there’s time near the end, you too must join me there, my old friend. You’ve never seen their like. We’ll drink a toast to Earth, down where no stone has ever felt the brush of human voices.”

The look in George’s eye told more than his words. But Stan shook his head. “If it gets that close and we know we’ve lost, I’ll take Ellen to Dunedin to be with the grandkids.” He shook his head. This was getting much too morbid. “Anyway, I’ll be doing a job of my own up north, at site three. That’ll be plenty vivid enough for me, staring at all that ice.”

Auntie Kapur was still studying her screen and the map overlay Alex Lustig had prepared. “According to our Pommie genius, your requirements are less severe. You can set up your small Greenland resonator anywhere within several hundred kilometers of the tip of our mythical pyramid. Do you have any place in mind?”

“I have some friends working on the Hammer Dig, east of Godhavn. Everyone knows I’m interested in the project, so it won’t be much of a surprise if I show up with a team to do some local gravity scans. It’ll be a perfect cover.”

“Hmm.” Auntie Kapur was clearly worried. Sites one and two were within the Pacific Rim, in reach of her network of sympathizers and coreligionists. There were Gaians in Greenland too, of course, but of a completely different sect. Stan and Teresa would be pretty much on their own up there.

“You know all this is going to make us subject to the secrecy laws,” Stan said dryly. “We could get in trouble.”

The others looked at him, then burst out laughing. It was a welcome if momentary break in the tension. Normally a serious thing, breaking the provisions of the Rio Treaties was at this point the least of their worries.

“That leaves Africa,” George summarized when they got back to business. And indeed, the final site would be the toughest. Tangoparu Ltd. had never done business in the area where they had to set up the last resonator. Their geological maps were obsolete, and to make matters worse, the region was on the U.N.’s Stability and Human Rights Watch List. Nobody on their team knew anyone there well enough to rely on. Not well enough to help them set up a thumper in absolute privacy.

“I’ve already started putting out feelers,” Auntie Kapur said. “With a nested hyper search I ought to find someone trustworthy who can get us in.”

“Just make sure to run your search routine by Pedro Manella. He’s in charge of net security,” Stan cautioned. “We don’t want some bored hacker’s ferret program arousing attention—”

He stopped when Auntie gave him an indulgent look, as if he were trying to teach his own mother to tie her shoes.

She’s not much older than me, he thought. I’m a grandfather and a full professor. So how does she always

manage to make me feel like a little boy, caught with a frog in his pocket?

Maybe it’s something she learned in priestess school, while I was studying inconsequential stuff like the workings of stars and the shape of space.

“I’ll be careful,” she promised, remaining vague. But in her eyes Stan read something that seemed to say she knew exactly what she was doing.

• HOLOSPHERE

Jen Wolling missed her postman. Who would have imagined it, back when she was a blonde fireball tearing up turn-of-the-century biology? Even then she’d known the future would offer surprises, but the changes that amazed her most turned out not to be the grand ones — those milestones noted breathlessly by media pundits — but little things, the gradual shifts people overlooked simply because they crept up on you bit by bit, day by day.

Such as the steady disappearance of postmen. Amid the growing worldwide data culture few had foreseen that consequence — an end to those punctual footsteps on the walk, to the creak of the letter box, to the friendly “hello” rustle of paper envelopes…

Without fanfare, Britain’s twice-a-day deliveries went every other day, then once weekly. Letter carrying was “deregulated” — turned over to private services, which then charged by the minute and made a production number of signing over a single envelope.

What Jen missed most was the routine mundanity of mail time. It used to come as a welcome break, an excuse to tear herself away from the flat, cramped, eye-wearying computer screens of those days, stretching her crackling back as she hobbled over to pick up the daily offering of multicolored envelopes.

Most of it had been junk of course. What was Sturgeon’s first law? Ninety percent of anything is crap.

But ah, that remaining ten percent!

There were letters from dear friends (which, amidst a month-long wrestling bout of abstract theory, often served to remind her she had friends). And there were technical journals to leaf through, scribble on the margins, and leave in the corner to pile up like geologic sediments…

And beautiful, real-paper magazines — Natural History and .National Geographic and Country Life — their glossy pages conveying what modern hyper versions could not, despite high-fidelity sound and stereo projection.

Trees regularly died for human literacy in those days. But that was one sacrifice even Jen didn’t begrudge. Not then, nor even today as she opened the curtains to spill morning light onto library shelves stacked high with books printed on rag paper, some even bound in burnished leather that had once adorned the backs of proud animals.

This library could bring a small fortune from collectors… and the sharp opprobrium of vegetarians. But one of the advantages of the electronic age was that you could maintain a universe of contacts while keeping all prying eyes out of your own home, your castle.

It also has disadvantages, she thought as she scanned the list of bulletins awaiting her this morning. Her autosecretary displayed a column of daunting figures. Back when communication had still been a chore, half these correspondents would have been too lazy or thrifty to spend the time or a stamp. But now, message blips were as easy and cheap as talk itself. Easier, for copies could be made and transmitted ad infinitum.

Yes, indeed. Sometimes Jen longed for her postman.

You don’t miss water or air, either — not till the well runs dry, or the oxygen partial pressure drops to twenty percent.

She took a subvocal input device from its rack and placed the attached sensors on her throat, jaw, and temples. A faint glitter in the display screens meant the machine was already tracking her eyes, noting by curvature of lens and angle of pupil the exact spot on which she focused at any moment.

She didn’t have to speak aloud, only intend to. The subvocal read nerve signals, letting her enter words by just beginning to will them. It was much faster than any normal speech input device… and more cantankerous as well. Jen adjusted the sensitivity level so it wouldn’t pick up each tiny tremor — a growing problem as her once athletic body turned wiry and inexact with age. Still, she vowed to hold onto this rare skill as long as possible.

Tapping certain teeth made colors shift in the tanks and screens. A yawn sent cyclones spinning within a blue expanse. Sometimes, under a talented operator, a subvocal could seem almost magical, like those “direct” brain-to-computer links science fiction writers were always jabbering about, but which, for simple neurological reasons, had never become real. This was as close as anyone had come, and still ninety percent of existing subvocals were used at most to make pretty 3-D pictures.

How ironic then, that Jen had been taught to use hers at age sixty-two. So much for adages about old dogs and new tricks!

“Hypersecretary, Sri Ramanujan,” she said.

Mists cleared and a face formed, darkly handsome, with noble Hindu features. For her computer’s “shell” persona Jen could have chosen anything from cartoon alien to movie star. But she had picked this system’s unique designer as a model. In those eyes she recognized something of the young consultant from Nehruabad, his life-spark peering out from the cage of his useless body.

“Good morning, Professor Wolling. During the last twenty-four hours there have been three priority-nine world news items, two regional alerts for Britain, and four on general topics from Reuters, your chosen neutral-bias news agency. None of the alerts were in categories listed by you as critical.”

Citizens had to subscribe to a minimum news-input or lose the vote. Still, Jen was anything but a public events junky, so her nine-or-greater threshold was set as high as allowed. She’d scan the headlines later.

“You have received six letters and thirty five-message blips from individuals on your auto-accept list. Sixty-five more letters and one hundred and twelve blips entered your general delivery box on the Net.

“In addition, there were four hundred and thirteen references to you, in yesterday’s scientific journals. Finally, in popular media and open discussion boards, your name was brought up with level seven or greater relevance fourteen hundred and eleven times.”

It was clearly another case of human profligacy — this typical turning of a good thing into yet another excuse for overindulgence. Like the way nations suffering from greenhouse heat still spilled more than five billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. A prodigious yield that was nevertheless nothing compared to the species’ greatest harvest — words.

And to think, some idiots predicted that we’d someday found our economy on information. That we’d base money on it!

On information? The problem isn’t scarcity. There’s too damned much of it!

The problem usually wasn’t getting access to information. It was to stave off drowning in it. People bought personalized filter programs to skim a few droplets from that sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became the selected entertainments and special-interest zines passed through by those tailored shells.

Here a man watches nothing but detective films from the days of cops and robbers — a limitless supply of formula fiction. Next door a woman hears and reads only opinions that match her own, because other points of view are culled by her loyal guardian software.

To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. “Let’s see what happens to that list,” she said aloud, “when we use threshold seven, categories one through twenty.”

“And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?”

Jen felt in a good mood. “Let’s go with twenty percent.”

That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in defiance of her own parameters. This way she asked Ramanujan to unleash purposely on her a little of the chaos his devilish virus-symbiont had once wreaked on thirteen million Net subscribers in South Asia — jiggling their complacent cyberworlds to show them glimpses of different realities, different points of view.

After he was caught, being sent to that hospital-jail in Bombay hardly mattered to Sri Ramanujan, whose own body had been a prison since infancy. But cutting off his net privileges had been an added punishment far worse than any death sentence.

“As you wish, Jen Wolling.”

The simulated visage seemed pleased. He bowed and disappeared, making way for unreeling sheaves of data. Colors demarked significant passages, enhanced by her semantic-content filter.

Her eyes focused on text which glowed with reddish highlights. Ah, the little devil, she thought, for the program had slipped in a cluster of hate mail.

“… Wolling has become a loose cannon. Her recent trip to Southern Africa proves she’s lost all sense of propriety.

“But what irks most is her recent cavalier reassessment of the essential Caian paradigm — a scientific model she herself helped develop so many years ago! She is becoming a senile embarrassment to biological science…”

Jen found the style familiar, and sure enough, the signature was that of an old colleague, now a bitter opponent. She sighed. It was strange to find herself regularly assaulted as unscientific whenever she deviated an iota from “accepted” principles… principles based upon her own earlier theories.

Well, she admitted to herself. Maybe sometimes I deviate more than an iota. And I do enjoy causing a stir.

She flicked her tongue. Electromagnetic sensors read her intent and swept the diatribe away without comment. Another glowed redly in its place.

“… Wolling is an embarrassment to our cause to save Our Mother. Isn’t it enough she pays homage to the reductionist values of patriarchal western science, giving that discredited realm the devotion she properly owes Gaia?

“In giving ammunition to Earth-rapists — to Zeus-Jehovah-Shiva worshippers — she betrays Our Mother…”

Strange how one word could mean so many things to so many different people. To biologists, “Gaia” described a theory of planetary ecological balance and regulated feedback loops. But to devoted mystics it named a living goddess.

Another tongue flick, and a third tirade slid into place.

“… Evolution has always been driven by the death of species. Take the so-called catastrophes of the Permian and Triassic and Cretaceous, when countless living types were annihilated by environmental shocks. Now, according to Wolling and Harding, these were dangerous times for the Earth, when the so-called “Gaia homeostasis” almost collapsed. But that simply isn’t true! Today’s so-called ecological crisis is just another in a long series of natural…”

Smiling made the display shimmer. Here were representatives of three different, unasinous points of view, each deeply opposed to the others, and yet all attacking her! She leafed through other crimson diatribes. Some Madrid Catholics poured calumny on her for assisting the gene-resurrection of mastodons. A white antisegregation society fired fusillades at her for visiting Kuwenezi. One of the “ladybug combines” accused her of undermining the trillion-dollar organic pest-control industry, and so on. In most cases the writer clearly didn’t even understand her real position.

Should a rare piece of vituperation actually show cleverness, it would go into a clipping file. But none of today’s hate-grams offered anything illuminating, alas.

The technical citations were hardly any more interesting. Most were doctoral theses referring to her old papers… the “classics” that had led to that damned Nobel prize. She selected five promising ones for later study, and dumped the rest.

Among the personal messages was one bona fide letter from Pauline Cockerel, asking Jen to come visit London Ark.

“Baby misses you.”

The young geneticist added an animated montage of the young demi-mastodon in action. Jen laughed as Baby lifted her trunk in a grinning trumpet of victory, while chewing a stolen apple.

There were a few other friendly notes, from loyal colleagues and former students. And a data packet from Jacques, her third husband — containing a folio of his latest paintings and an invitation to his next showing.

All of these merited replies. Jen tagged and dictated first-draft answers, letting the syntax-checker convert her clipped short-speech into clear paragraphs. In fact, sometimes thoughts streamed faster than judgment. So Jen never “mailed” letters till Tuesdays or Fridays, when she scrupulously went over everything carefully a second time.

She glanced at the clock. Good, the chore would be done well before morning tea. Only two letters to go.

“… I’m real sorry to bother you. You probably don’t remember me. I sat in the front row during your talk…”

This writer wasn’t adroit at short-speech. Or he lacked a conciseness program to help him get to the point. Jen was about to call up one of her standard fan mail replies when one highlighted line broke through.

“… at Kuwenezi. I was the guy with the little baboons…”

Indeed, Jen remembered! The boy’s name had been… Nelson something-or-other. Uneducated, but bright and earnest, he had asked the right questions when his more sophisticated elders were still trapped in a morass of details.

“… I’ve been studying hard, but I still don’t understand some things about the Gayan Paradime…”

Jen nodded sympathetically. The word “Gaian” had become nearly as meaningless as “socialist” or “liberal” or “conservative” were half a century ago… a basket full of contradictions. She sometimes wondered what James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis would have thought of where their original, slim monographs had led. Or the Russian mystic, Vernadsky, who even earlier had proposed looking at the Earth as a living organism.

Perhaps these times were ripe for a new church militant, as in the waning days of the Roman Empire. Maybe great movements liked having living prophets to both idealize and later crucify. Veneration followed by varicide seemed the traditional pattern.

With Lovelock and Margulis and Vernadsky long gone, the new faithful had to settle for Jen Wolling — founding saint and heretic. At times it got so she even wished she’d never had that epiphany, so long ago on the frosty shoulders of Mount Snowdon, when the turning leaves had suddenly revealed to her the jewellike mathematical clarity of the Gaia metaphor.

No regrets. Jen shook her head. I cannot regret those equations. For they are true.

Once, when young Alex had come to her complaining of the awful burden, being a Nobelist’s grandson, she had told him, “Some fools think I’m smart because I found a few tricks, to make math serve biology. But you and I know a secret… that someday you’ll go places where I can’t. Prize or no damned prize.”

She missed her grandson and wondered what mischief he was up to.

Jen shook herself out of a mental random walk. Bearing down, she returned to the letter from the black teenager in Kuwenezi.

“… the part that confuses me most is how animals and plants fight each other for survival. Like hunting and being hunted? Nobody ‘wins’ those wars, cause every soldier dies anyway, eventually? Most of the time, what looks to them like fighting isn’t really fighting at all! Cause each of them depends on the others.

“Like, a herd of deer depends on wolfs to keep deer numbers down, or else they’d overgrase and then all starve to death… And the wolfs’ numbers are controlled by how many deer there are to eat.

“This is what they mean by homeostasis, isn’t it? One kind of animal regulates another, and it’s regulated back…”

Jen skimmed ahead to a highlighted area.

“But what about Man? Who or what regulates us?”

She nodded appreciatively. There were scores of good books she could refer the young man to. But he must have already accessed the standard answers and found them unsatisfying.

We are an unregulated cancer, proclaimed many eco-radicals. Man must cut his numbers and standard of living by a factor of ten, or even a hundred, to save the world.

Some even suggested it would be better if the destroyer species — Homo sapiens — died out altogether, and good riddance.

Those pursuing the “organic” metaphor suggested the problem would be solved once humanity adjusted to its proper role as “brain” of the planetary organism. We can learn to regulate ourselves, pronounced the moderators of the North American Church of Gaia, as they pushed “soft” technologies and birth control. We must learn to be smart planetary managers.

There were still other opinions.

Everything would be fine on Earth if humans just left! That was the message of the space colonization movement, as they promoted plans for cities and factories in the sky. Out in space, resources are endless. We’ll move out and turn the little blue planet into a park!

To Madrid Catholics and some other old-line religious groups, The world was made for our use. The end of days will come soon. So why “regulate,” when it’s all temporary anyway? One unborn human fetus is worth all the whales in the sea.

A group based in California offered a unique proposal. “Sheckleyans” they called themselves, and they agitated — tongue in cheek, Jen imagined — for the genetic engineering of new predators smart and agile enough to prey on human beings. These new hunters would cull the population in a “natural” manner, allowing the rest of the race to thrive in smaller numbers. Vampires were a favorite candidate predator — certainly canny and capable enough, if they could be made — but another Sheckleyan subsect held out for werewolves, a less snooty, less aristocratically conceited sort of monster. Either way, romance and adventure would return, and mankind, too, would at last be “regulated.” Jen sent the Sheckleyans an anonymous donation every year. After all, you never could tell.

These were just some of the suggestions, both serious and whimsical. But Jen realized the young man deserved more than stock answers. She put his letter on the high-priority heap — the pile of items she would go over carefully later, in the hours before bed.

One letter to go then. The last one had arrived on auto-accept, so the sender knew her private code. Jen scanned with rising irritation. Someone seemed to be advertising vacation homes on the Sea of Okhotsk!

That’s all I need.

But then she suddenly remembered. Vacation homes…

It was a mnemonic cue. “Sri Ramanujan,” she said aloud. “I think this message may be in cipher. Please see if we own a key to break it.”

The face of the young Hindustani appeared briefly.

“Yes, Jen Wolling. It uses a private code given you years ago by the Pacific Society of Hine-marama. I’ll have it translated in a minute.”

Ah, Jen thought. This had to be from the New Zealand priestess, Meriana Kapur. It was ages since she’d seen the Maori woman, whose cult took the Gaia concept rather literally. But then, so had Jen during one phase.

“Here it is, Professor.”

Ramanujan vanished again, leaving a totally transformed message in his place.

A totally innocuous message, as well. What she read now consisted of a rambling series of disconnected reminiscences… some the two women had experienced together, long ago, and some clearly made up. Jen noticed that none of the sentences were even highlighted. Her semantic-content program couldn’t find a single explicit statement to set in bold!

But then, gradually, she smiled. Of course. This isn’t senility, it’s diamond blade sharpness! There are ciphers within ciphers. Codes within codes.

Apparently, Auntie Kapur wanted to be sure only Jen understood this message. Certainly no busybody hacker’s automatic snooping program would sort meaning out of this, not without the shared context of two women who had lived a very long time.

Vagueness can be an art in itself.

Jen’s smile faded when it began dawning on her how seriously the Maori priestess took this. The precautions began to make sense as glimmerings of meaning penetrated.

“… I’m afraid Mama’s unexpected ulcer has only one possible cure. Repairing the hole requires drastic measures… but the regular doctors would only interfere if they knew. (We think they originally caused the problem.)…”

There were more passages like that. Hints and allusions. Was Meriana saying the world itself was in danger? A danger worse than the big power nuclear standoff of long ago?

A passing reference was missed until her third reading. Then Jen realized Kapur was referring to her grandson.

Alex? But what could he be involved in that could pose such a threat to…

Jen gasped. Oh, that bloody boy. This time he must really have done it!

Nobody with any sense kept confidential notes on a computer. So from a desk drawer she took out an expensive pad of real paper and a pencil. Carefully this time, Jen went through her friend’s letter line by line, jotting references and probable meanings. It wasn’t any form of code-breaking a machine could perform, more like the ancient Freudian art of analyzing free associations, a sleuthing through the subjective world of impressions and wild guesses. A very human sort of puzzle, thousands of years older than the discrete patternings of cybernetics.

Exactly what is it they want of me? Jen wondered what she, an old woman, could do to help Auntie and Alex in a situation as dire as this. Finally, though, it became clear. Africa. Ndebele Canton… Meriana heard of my visit there. She thinks I can help get them in. Secretly.

Jen sat back, amazed. Secretly? These days?

The idea was absurd.

She chewed her lip.

Well… it would be a challenge, at least.

By Pauling and Orgell… I’ll bet I can do it.

One thing for certain, Auntie’s letter demanded an immediate response. No waiting till Friday for this one.

And that lad in Kuwenezi — Nelson Grayson. It looked as if the young man with the pet baboons might be getting his answers in person after all.

• HYDROSPHERE

On a different continent, but only milliseconds away by light-cable, another woman also sailed the data sea. Only while Jen Wolling carefully navigated a dinghy, Daisy McClennon sailed a privateer’s sloop, in search of prey.

On her work wall, a science fiction space epic stepped frame by frame through a flashy battle sequence — her video processor inserting new special effects, making already grand starships even more magnificent. Matted stars and planets grew three dimensional, and explosions more titanic than ever. With such magic Daisy breathed new life into old classics, though for a diminishing, specialized audience.

Again, however, Daisy’s attention swerved from her cash crop of embellished movies to other scenes and truer obsessions. The news services told of recent raids by Bedouin rebels, attacking the International Petroleum Reservation. She checked the reports’ accuracy by other means and discovered that U.N. peacekeepers were understating the amount of oil spilled from pipelines severed by the nationalists, but not by enough to cause a scandal, unfortunately. Daisy had learned from hard experience never to cry “coverup!” unless the payoff was worthwhile.

Now here was a likely target. Blue symbols off Luzon showed one of the floating barge-towns of the Sea State, heading northward toward Japan. UNEPA was supposed to make sure the nation of refugees obeyed its rules. But sure enough, only two inspector boats showed in the vicinity. Nowhere near enough.

I wonder what Sea State is up to, she asked herself.

Keying an oceanographic database, Daisy noted that a large migration of spinner porpoises would intersect the path of the flotilla in a few weeks’ time. UNEPA had recently downgraded spinners from “threatened” to “watch” status, which meant those with proven need were allowed to harvest limited numbers. Sea State could always establish proven need.

“Gotcha!” Daisy said, and sent a coded alert to an activist group in Nagasaki. When that Sea State flotilla reached its destination, there’d be a party waiting to pounce on the slightest infraction.

What next?

For a while she thought she had managed to trace a twisty money trail, proving that an official in Queensland had gor-sucked to local hotel interests. But the carni-man was smarter than usual. Computer taps on his accounts failed to report any unusual purchases in real estate or minerals futures.

For this case, her background as a McClennon helped. Before becoming a family black sheep, she had witnessed many of the ways her cousins and uncles sheltered and moved money without letting it show up on the net. So she called in a few favors from fellow radicals in Australia, who could arrange to snoop the Queensland official in person. Sooner or later, she was going to get the guy.

A timer beeped. She was supposed to get up and do some chores around the compound, or else Claire would raise a fit. This work in the Net was important for world survival, but her daughter didn’t seem to care about that… probably wished she lived more like her spoiled cousins.

Well, there’s no getting out of it, I suppose, Daisy sighed. It probably was past time she took a turn of her own at the cess pit. Or was it greenhouse maintenance Claire had been after her about?

But as she rose, Daisy caught a sudden change in one of her alert boxes, highlighting a name from her special watch list. For years she had maintained a tiny lamprey program attached to the home unit of the infamous Jennifer Wolling. All that time, her little spy had sampled and assessed what the apostate biologist was up to. Now, from London, it reported Wolling’s ciphered message.

“Hmm,” Daisy pondered, sitting down again. “The witch hardly ever tries to hide anything. What’s she up to now?”

With trivial ease, Daisy traced the memorandum to its source. Of course. The Pacific Gaians were just the sort to conspire with Wolling. Compromisers, they worshipped an anemic goddess who seemed willing to settle for a world only half destroyed by man, with most of its species preserved in glass bottles, relying on technological “solutions” thrown together by bright idiots like Logan Eng…

The cipher code was a good one. It took an hour to crack it. And when Daisy finally read the decrypted letter, she found a second layer filled with personal references and context-laden hints — the hardest kind of puzzle for an outsider to untangle.

That only made it more tempting, of course. Daisy knew about some new language programs, almost intelligent in their own right, that might apply here. And there were human consultants who owed her favors, too. Some of them might pick up connections she missed.

If all else failed, she also had certain contacts among enemy groups, as well… big corporations and government agencies with fantastic resources at their command. Among those, too, were also men and women indebted to her for past services. Daisy had dealt with devils before, when it suited her purposes. Sometimes honest rapists were preferable to mealy-mouthed compromisers.

She transferred the partially deciphered letter into her “possible clues” file, along with other anomalies like her ex-husband’s paper on the mysterious Spanish quakes.

Ignored to her left, small screens monitored all twenty hectares of Six Oaks, the realm she and Logan had built here on the bayou, where she practiced self-reliance and “zero impact” far more faithfully than the pallid versions preached by the NorAChuGas. Not just “good faith efforts,” but independence from the mines and factories and polluting power plants of industrial society… and from her own damned, smug, aristocratic family.

One of those displays showed her daughter standing on a stepladder next to the greenhouse, her hair tied back in a kerchief and arms covered with putty as she scraped the labels off newly bought sheets of glass and fitted them one by one to replace those cracked in a recent storm.

But Daisy did not see, nor did she recall her promise. Drawn once more to the holo screens, her blue eyes roved the electronic sea, the data ocean, seeking the blood foes of her world. Practicing the art of vendetta. Pursuing prey.

• MESOSPHERE

time of year, Davis Strait thronged with traffic. Great freighters plowed the choppy waters, following strobing marker buoys all the way to Lancaster Sound and the shortcut to Asia. Solar arrays and rigid wing-sails lent the sleek vessels a family resemblance to the clipper ships of yore, on which men once upon a time had risked their lives seeking this selfsame Northwest Passage. Now and then, the shadows of dirigibles, like passing clouds, darkened the sea nearby. The zeppelin crews, bound for Europe or Canada, leaned out to wave at the high-tech sailors below.

It was a far cry from when Roald Amundsen had come this way, to spend three hard years battling toward Alaska. Today the voyage took two weeks, and all looked peaceful here in the realm of the midnight sun.

Of course, Stan Goldman knew, appearances can be deceiving.

From this height he could make out a place along Greenland’s western verge where a vast, growling glacier met the open sea. Beacons detoured commerce round a chain of lumbering behemoths wrapped in reflective foil. The insulated bergs resembled great, silvery, alien mother ships, as mammoth engines pushed them south toward thirsty lands.

Eventually, the giant island would run out of white treasure, unbelievable as it might seem up here, where a snowy plateau still spanned one entire horizon. In fact, it had already retreated a long way, leaving stark, sheer fjords cut into a serrated coast. Lichens and mosses spread like velvet across new plains and valleys, just below this hired zeppelin. After close to a million years, spring had come at last to Greenland.

And yet, there is a cost. There’s always a cost.

Stan had just finished reading dire news about these northern seas. Species counts were down again. No one had seen a bowhead whale in years. And migratory birds, the litmus of ecological health, were laying fewer eggs.

Many blamed the old nemesis, pollution. Down below, UNEPA and Kingdom of Denmark launches sniffed among the great freighters as if any captain would dare drop even a paper cup into this heavily policed waterway. Actually though, climatic changes, rather than dumping, might be at fault. Temperate-zone creatures could flee the spreading deserts by moving north. But where could polar bears go when their dens turned to slush?

Of course, palm trees wouldn’t be growing up here any time soon. A man immersed in those bright waters would still be unconscious in minutes and dead from hypothermia inside an hour. And six months from now, the sun would vanish for another winter.

There are limits, Stan reassured himself. Mankind may be able to mess with the climate, but we can’t change the seasons or shift Earth’s axial tilt.

Almost at once, however, he reconsidered. Is even that beyond our reach now? He pondered some implications of Alex Lustig’s equations and found himself weighing notions unimaginable only weeks ago. I wonder if it might be possible to…

Stan shook his head firmly. Such meddling had already brought about nothing but calamity.

“Kalâtdlit-Nunât.”

Stan turned to his traveling companion. “I beg your pardon?”

Teresa Tikhana lifted a small reading plaque. “Kalâtdlit-Nunât. It’s what the Inuit people — the Eskimos — call Greenland.”

“The Inuit? I thought their second language was Danish.”

Teresa shrugged. “Who says two languages are enough? How does the saying go? ‘A man with only one ethnicity stands on just one leg.’… Come on, Stan. How many languages do you speak?”

He shrugged. “You mean besides International English and Physics?… And the Maori and Simglish and Han they taught us in school?” He paused. “Well, I can get along in General Nihon and French, but…”

He laughed, seeing her point. “All right. Let’s hear it again.”

Teresa coached him till he could pronounce a few indigenous politenesses. Not that there’d be much time for idle chitchat where they were going — a rough outpost in the middle of a wasteland. He’d always wanted to see this tremendous frozen island, but this mission wasn’t for tourism.

Stan glanced across the aisle. The other members of their expedition had gathered near a forward window, whispering and pointing as the cargo ships and vacuum-packed icebergs fell behind. Stan listened now and then, to make sure the technicians kept their voices low and stayed away from taboo subjects.

“You’re sure we can’t use the old NATO base at Godhavn?” Teresa asked. “It’s got every facility. And the science commune using it now is pretty free and open, I hear.”

“They’re mostly atmosphere researchers, right?” Stan asked.

“Yeah. First set up to monitor radioactive fallout from the Alps. Now they’re part of the Ozone Restoration Project, such as it is.”

“Reason enough to avoid the place, then. You’d surely be recognized.”

The woman astronaut blinked. “Oh, yeah.” Self-consciously Teresa brushed back strands of newly blonde hair, dyed just for this journey. “I — guess I’m just not used to this way of thinking, Stan.”

In other words, she hadn’t the advantage of growing up as he had, during the paranoid twentieth, when people routinely maintained poses for the sake of anything from ideology to profit to love — sometimes for whole lifetimes.

“Try to remember,” he urged, dropping his voice. “We’re breaking Danish territorial law, bringing you in under a false passport. You’re supposed to be on vacation in Australia, right? Not halfway around the world, smuggling undocumented gear into… Kal3tdlit-Nunat.”

She tried to look serious, but couldn’t suppress a smile. “All right, Stan. I’ll remember.”

He sighed. If their conspiracy hadn’t been critically shorthanded, he’d never have agreed to bringing Teresa along. Her competence, charm and fascinating mind would be welcome of course. But the risk was awfully great.

“Come on,” she said, nudging his elbow. “Now you’re starting to look like Alex Lustig.”

Nervously, he laughed. “That bad?”

She nodded. “I thought we ’nauts were a sober-pussed bunch. But Lustig makes Glenn Spivey look like a yuk artist. Even when he smiles, I feel like I’m attending a wake.”

Maybe, Stan thought. But how would you look if you had that poor boy’s burdens on your back?

Stan withheld comment though. He knew Teresa, too, was suffering from a. coping reaction. Her way of dealing with this awful crisis was to go into denial. Certainly she’d never let it interfere with her work, but Stan imagined she simply let the reason for their desperate venture slip her mind, any chance she got.

“It’s poor Alex’s upbringing at fault,” Stan answered in his best Old Boy accent. “English public schools do that to a lad, don’t’cha know.”

Teresa laughed, and Stan was glad to hear the pure, untroubled sound. She has enough reason for denial. Of all the members of their cabal, she had been the first struck personally by the lashing tail of the taniwha — the monster in the Earth’s core.

More of them would share that honor before long. Stan thought of Ellen and the grandkids and his daughter back in England. Faces of students and friends kept popping up at odd moments, especially during sleep. Sometimes it felt like going through a photo album of treasures already lost.

Stop. It’s useless to maunder this way.

He sought distraction outside. The Northwest Passage lay behind them, now. To the left, fleets of smaller boats could be seen threading craggy offshore islets, bound for a bustling seaport just ahead.

“Godhavn,” Teresa said, reading her guidebook again. She gestured at the piers and factories lining the bay. “And what does the Net say is this city’s principal industry?” She inhaled deeply through her nose. “I’ll give you three guesses.”

Stan didn’t have to sniff the cannery aroma. Those trawlers were returning from the rich banks offshore — where arctic upwellings nourished clouds of silvery fish. So far UNEPA safeguards had managed to save that vital resource for mankind’s ravenous billions, so all wasn’t lost up here. Not yet at least.

The canneries had created a boomtown, and no lack of eager immigrants seeking their fortunes on a new frontier. Others came simply for elbow room, to escape the close press of neighbors back home.

It probably wasn’t all that different a thousand years ago, Stan figured. Back then, too, men chased wealth and breathing space. And Red Erik knew just how to lure them to this faraway shore. Even its name — Greenland — was an early, inspired example of sneaky advertising.

Viking settlements had sprouted along the rocky coast.

And the Scandinavians were lucky at first, arriving during a warm spell brought on by sunspots and Earth’s subtly variable orbit.

But what astronomy gave, astronomy could take away. By the fifteenth century, cycles had turned again. The “little ice age” — a time of scanty summers and scarcer sunspots — froze the rivers Seine and Thames at Christmastime, and icebergs were seen off Spain. Ironically, Irish sailors reported news from the struggling Greenland colony only decades before another dawning — when Christopher Columbus and John Cabot drew the world’s attention back to strange lands rimming the ocean sea. But by the time voyagers next set foot on the great island, all sign of living Europeans had vanished.

Stan found it hard to imagine history repeating itself here. The wharves and factories all shared a thick-walled look of determined permanence, as if defying nature to do her worst.

And yet, Stan pondered. Other eras had their certainties, and look at them now.

Soon the cannery town fell away as their pilot steered up one of the broad valleys, carved over ages by endless tons of ancient, compressed snow. Now the vales below flowed with newborn streams. Reindeer clattered over algae-stained rocks, spooked by the airship’s shadow into skittish flight.

Up ahead lay the grand glacier itself. Here, and in Antarctica, the ice ranges grew three kilometers thick, storing half the fresh water on Earth. Only the fringes of that stockpile had melted so far, but when it thawed in earnest, the world’s coastlines would really start to rise.

The removal of so much weighty ice couldn’t help but affect the crust underneath. Rebound-reverberations were already being felt far away. In Iceland, two fierce new volcanoes sputtered. There would be more as time went on.

Especially if we don’t solve the problem of gazer beams coupling with surface matter, Stan thought. It still puzzled him that resonant gravity waves sometimes set off tremors in the outer crust. He hoped there’d be an answer soon, or just trying to get rid of the taniwha might cause massive harm.

Two days to get set up… another three to grow our thumper and test Manella’s data-links to the other stations… got to figure ways to work in tandem with Alex’s group — and George’s and Kenda’s…

He’d gone over it all so many times, and still it seemed a wild-eyed plan — trying to shove a superheavy, microscopic bit of folded space into a higher orbit by poking at it repeatedly with invisible rays… yep, it sounded pretty farfetched, all right.

Stan caught a metallic glint up ahead, just short of the fast-approaching ice sheet. That- must be their goal, where the glacier’s retreat had recently revealed clues to an enigma. Where some believed an awful killing had taken place a long time ago.

They say every spot on Earth has a story, a library of stories to tell. If that is so, then this island specializes in mysteries.

With rising impatience Stan watched Greenland’s second coast, its inner shore, where a new, encroaching fringe of land lapped against a continent of ancient whiteness.

The tiny scientific outpost perched beside an icy rivulet, near enough towering cliffs to wear their shadow each long arctic morning. A greeting party waited by the mooring towers as automatic snaring devices seized the zep and gently drew it down.

Every other dirigible landing in Teresa’s experience had been at commercial aerodromes, so she found this rough-and-ready process fascinating, and oddly similar to the no-frills approach used in space.

The pilot certainly would have let her sit in the cockpit, if only she identified herself. But of course that wasn’t possible. So she made do instead by leaning out the window like a gawking tourist, bursting with questions she wasn’t allowed to ask and suggestions she dared not offer. After the gondola settled with a bump and scrape, Teresa was the last to get off, lingering by the control cabin listening to the crew go through their shutdown checklist.

The Tangoparu techs had already begun offloading their supplies when she finally debarked. Teresa started over to lend a hand, but Stan Goldman called her to meet some people wearing knit caps and Pendleton shirts. It was hard to pay attention to introductions, though. She felt distracted by the ice plateau, towering so near it set her senses quivering.

Then there was the smell — cool, invigorating, and inexplicably drawing. She helped her colleagues haul the gear and inflate their solitary dome. But all the while Teresa kept glancing toward the glacier, feeling its presence. At last, when all the heavy labor was done, she could bear it no longer. “Stan, I’ve got to go to the ice.”

He nodded. “I understand. We’ll erect the toilet next. I’m sorry…”

Teresa laughed. “No, I mean really. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. It’s just something I have to do.”

The elderly physicist blinked twice and then smiled. “Of course. You worked hard studying gravitonics all the way out here. Go ahead. We’ll just be setting up the vats anyway. You won’t be needed until tomorrow morning.”

She touched his sleeve. “Thanks, Stan.” Then, impulsively, Teresa leaned over and kissed his grizzled cheek.

The Tangoparu team had set up some distance from the rest of the settlement, so she shunned the main path and set off cross-country, over the gravelly moraine. Having never approached a primary glacier before, she had no way of judging distances. There were no trees or familiar objects for comparison; by eye alone, it might be anywhere from one to ten kilometers away. But her inner sensoria told Teresa she could make it there and back before supper. Anyway, nothing out here could harm her even if she miscalculated. In her thermal suit she could even wait out the brief summer night if she had to.

No, this wasn’t a dangerous place — certainly not compared to space.

Nevertheless, her heart leaped in her chest when a shadow swept the pebbly surface, looming from behind her with startling speed. Teresa felt its sudden presence and whirled in a crouch, squinting at a blurry form like a huge ball cupped in an open fist.

She sighed, straightening and trying to pretend the abrupt appearance hadn’t scared the wits out of her. Even against the afternoon sun, she recognized one of those Magnus effect minicranes, used all over the world for utility lifting and hauling. They were to helicopters what a zep was to a stratojet. In other words, cheap, durable, and easy to run on minimal fuel. Like zeps, minicranes maintained buoyancy with inflated hydrogen. But this smaller machine moved by rotating the bag itself between vertical prongs. A queer, counterintuitive effect of physics let it maneuver agilely.

Shading her eyes, Teresa watched the operator lean out of his tiny cabin. He shouted something in Danish. She called back. “Jeg tale ikke dansk! Vil De tale engelsk?”

“Ah,” he answered quickly. “Sorry! You must be one of Stanley Goldman’s people. I’m on my way to the dig now and could use some ballast. Do you want a ride?”

Actually, she didn’t. But Teresa found it hard to say no. After all, it would be selfish to stay away from camp any longer than she had to.

“How do I board?”

As the machine drew close, the whir of the spinning bag was no longer swept away by the wind. The small control assembly hung suspended beneath by two forks from the central axis, and its engine gave off a hissing whine. In answer to her question, the pilot simply leaned down and offered his hand.

Well, she who hesitates is lost…

Teresa ran to meet the little airship. At the last moment, she leaped, his grip seized her wrist and she was hauled, gently but swiftly, inside.

“Lars Stürup,” he said as the bouncing settled down. There was a hiss of released gas and they began rising.

“I’m Ter…”

She stopped and covered her gaffe by coughing, as if from exertion. “… terribly glad to meet you, Lars. I’m… Emma Neale.” It was the name on her borrowed passport, lent by a Tangoparu scientist whose skills were less needed here than Teresa’s.

Blond and fair, Lars looked more Swedish than Danish. He wore his sleeves rolled up, displaying well-developed forearms. “Pleased to meet you, Emma, I’m sure. We don’t get many new people up here. What’s your line? Paleontology? Paleogeochemistry?”

“None of the above. I’m just here to help Stan do some seismic scans.”

“Ah.” Lars nodded. “Those will be useful. Or so Dr. Rasmussen says. She hopes they’ll help us find remnants of the meteorite.”

Looking across the crushed moraine, Teresa thought that rather optimistic. “How can anything be left, after what this land has been through since then?”

The pilot grinned. “The thing hit pretty dumpit hard. Buried lots of stuff good. Of course the ice scraped off hundreds of meters. But by using radar from space you can find plenty of buried features that are invisible up close.”

Tell me about it. Teresa had assisted in many such orbital surveys, using microwaves to trace lost tombs in Egypt, Mayan ruins in Mexico, and the tracks of ancient watercourses that had last flowed back when the Sahara bloomed and prehistoric humans hunted hippos in the lush fens of Libya.

She was tempted to demonstrate her own knowledge, but then, what would Emma Neale know of such things? “That’s very interesting,” she said. “Please go on.”

“Ah! Where to begin? To start off, it’s on Greenland we find some of the oldest rocks ever discovered — formed less than half a billion years after the planet itself!”

Lars gestured broadly as he spoke, frequently taking his hands from the controls to point out features of the terrain below. Teresa found his cavalier piloting both disturbing and somehow exciting. Of course, one could take liberties with a slow, forgiving vehicle like this. Still, the young man’s proud confidence permeated the tiny cabin. A streak of oil stained the calloused edge of his right hand, where in hurried washing he mightn’t notice it among the curling hairs. He probably did all his own maintenance, something Teresa envied since guild rules only let astronauts watch and kibitz when their craft were serviced.

“… so underneath we find remnants of a huge crater. One of several that asteroids made when they struck the Earth about sixty-five million years ago…”

He kept glancing sideways’ at her, pointing here and there across the tumbled terrain. Teresa suddenly realized, He’s preening for me! Naturally, she was used to men trying to impress her. But this time, her reaction came out more pleased than irritated. It was a dormant, unaccustomed feeling that made her suddenly nervous and oddly exhilarated. I should consider remaining a blonde, she thought idly.

The glacier loomed now — a chill mass that set her internal compass quivering. She could sense it stretching on and on toward the deep heart of this minicontinent, where it lay in layers so dense the rocky crust sagged beneath it. Layers that had been put down, snowflake by snowflake, over inconceivable time.

Now coming into view below the white cliff was the site where machines could be seen biting into the frozen ground, scientifically sifting a deep excavation for ancient clues. Still talking and pointing things out like a tour guide, Lars steered his craft toward the activity.

“Um… could I ask a favor?” Teresa interrupted the young pilot’s monologue.

“Of course. What may I do for you?”

Teresa pointed nearby. “Could you drop me off there? Near the ice?”

Lars clearly wasn’t one to let schedules interfere with gallantry. “Anything you wish, Emma.” With a sure hand on the controls he turned his machine into the wind spilling off the glacier, increasing spin and plowing through the stiff, cold current. As the buffeting grew, Teresa began regretting her request. After all, she could have walked. It would be silly to survive so many orbital missions only to meet her end in a wrecked utility craft, just because a young man wanted to impress her.

“Lars…” she began, then stopped herself, recalling how bravely and silently Jason used to watch whenever she let him sit behind her pilot’s seat during a launch.

Jason … A flux of images and feelings rose like steamy bubbles. Diverting them, Teresa inexplicably found herself instead picturing Alex Lustig! And especially the gray worry forever coloring that strange man’s eyes. Almost, she let herself recall the terrible thing he hunted.

“Get ready to jump!” Lars shouted over wind as he jockeyed the minicrane toward a sandy bank. Teresa slid the door open and watched the ground rise. Glancing back, she caught a look of shared adventure from the young Greenlander. “Thanks!” she said, and leaped. Recoil sent the lifter soaring as she braced for a hard landing.

The impact knocked the breath out of her, but it wasn’t as bad as some training exercises. She rolled to her feet only slightly bruised and waved to show all was well. The pilot banked his craft nimbly and gave her thumbs up. He called, but all she could make out was, “… see you soon, maybe!” Then he was gone, blown downwind by the icy freshet.

Shivering suddenly, Teresa closed her collar zip and stepped into that breeze. Soon she was scrambling over rocky debris that must have been freshly exposed only this very spring.

Ice. So much ice, she thought.

Ice like this was a spacer’s dream — to make water for life-support or fuels for transport. There were a thousand ways spaceflight could be made cheaper and safer and better, if only enough ice were available out there. Earth had her oceans. There was water in the Martian permafrost, in comets, and in the moons of Jupiter. But all those sources were too far away, or too deep inside a gravity well, to offer hope to a parched space program.

If only orbital surveys had found deposits at the moon’s poles, as if wishing ever made things so.

But this… this continent of ice.

She reached out to touch the glacier’s flank. Under a rough crust, Teresa found a thin layer much softer than expected. Deep within, though, she knew it had to be almost diamond hard.

At the very point where the ice stopped, she bent and picked up a polished pebble.

Among the oldest rocks known, he said. And I’m probably the first to touch this one. The first sentient being to stand at this particular spot.

That was why she had been drawn here, she now realized. There are no unclimbed mountains left on Earth… and no plans to let anyone scale the peaks of Aristarchus or the shield volcanoes of Tharsus.

Jungles crash to make way for houses. The world sweats in every pore the breath and touch of humanity. There’s not a single place left where you can go and say to a new part of the universe — “Hello, we’ve never met. Let me introduce myself. I am Man. ”

A new thought occurred to her.

If I were this planet, I guess I’d be feeling pretty damn sick of us by now.

Teresa inhaled the bracing air flowing off the ice. In evaporating, it gave off odors trapped inside crystal lattices ages ago — back when there were no living beings around with minds or speech… nor any concept that it can be worth half a lifetime just to reach such a place… to stand where no one ever has before.

She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn’t let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and worshipped the only way a person like her could worship — in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky.

• MANTLE

The pakeha had a saying… “It’s only a little white lie.”

George Hutton enjoyed collecting inanities like that. To whites, there seemed to be as many shades of untruth as Eskimos had words for snow. Some lies were evil, of course. But then there were “half-truths” and “metaphors” and the sort your parents told you, “for your own good.”

As he crawled through a narrow, twisty stone passageway, George remembered one fine, lazy evening at the Quark and Swan, bearding poor Stan Goldman about such western hypocrisies. Because it would gall his friend, who loved novels, George particularly disparaged that mendacity called “fiction,” in which one person, a “reader,” actually pays an “author” to lie about events that never happened to people who never even existed.

“So all your Maori fairy tales are true?” Stan had asked in hot response.

“In their own way, yes. We non-western peoples never made this artificial distinction between real and imagined… between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective.’ We don’t have to suspend disbelief in order to hear and accept our legends…”

“Or to adopt six impossible worldviews before breakfast! That’s how you Maori get away with claiming your ancestors never lied. How can anyone lie when they’re able to believe two contradictory things at the same time?”

“Are you accusing me of inconsistency, white fellow?”

“You? A man with fifty technical patents in geophysics, who still makes sacrifices to Pele? Never!”

Inevitably, the argument ended with them shouting, noses half a meter apart… then breaking up in waves of laughter until someone recovered enough to order the next round.

All right, George admitted to himself as he felt for a narrow ledge along the polished stone of an underground streamway. It’s easy to be sanctimonious about the lies of others. But it’s quite another thing when you find yourself trapped, having to deceive or face losing all you love.

Pulling back from the rock face, he sent his helmet beam ahead and saw that the worst was over. A few more teetering steps and he’d be able to jump to something vaguely like a walking path, with enough headroom to stand instead of hunching like a gnome in a maze.

He took the traverse quickly and landed agilely, hands spread wide for balance. Adjusting the lamp, George peered up a narrow, scending tube of water-smoothed limestone to where a sharp wedge divided the twisting channel. One passage scattered his beam among tapered, glittering columns, where mineral-rich seeps had formed arches reminiscent of the Caliph’s Palace in C6rdoba. He hadn’t noticed that gallery on his outward journey. Now he paused to sketch the opening in his pocket plaque.

The accepted thing to do would be to publish the map, of course. There would be money, prestige. But the Net wasn’t ever getting this datum, he had vowed.

How do you justify a lie? George asked himself as he carefully retraced his steps, heading back the way he’d come.

A decade ago, on first discovering these immense caverns beneath the mountains of New Guinea, he had chosen to refrain from telling his clients about them. Was that theft, to keep this marvel for himself? Perhaps. Worse than theft though, was the lie itself.

To believe six impossible or contradictory things before breakfast… Yes, Stan. And one impossible thing I believed was that I could save this place.

He had to squeeze headfirst through the next opening, sliding down a chute into a sparkling, miniature chapel. Knobby calcite growths covered not only the walls but the floor as well, catching the lamplight in dazzling crystalline reflections. “Cave coral,” it was called… a common enough phenomenon till humans invented spelunking, penetrating the depths to seek Earth’s hidden treasures. Now the coral was gone from nearly every known cave on Earth, scavenged bit by bit by souvenir hunters — each rationalizing that just one more fragment wouldn’t be missed.

Passing again through the minute cathedral, George sought the exact footprints he had made on the trip out — tiny breaks and smudges among the glassy shards. These he tried to step in, but there was no way to avoid adding some slight, incremental harm this time, as well.

“The world is made of compromises,” he seemed to hear Stan Goldman say, though his friend was far away at the moment, doing his own part amid the icy wastes of Greenland. “You must make trade-offs, George, and live with the consequences.”

“A pakeha way of looking at things…” George muttered half aloud as he exited the coral suite, wriggling sideways through a narrow crack into another streamway. Whispering echoes skittered around him like tiny creatures. Among the soft reverberations he imagined Stan’s reply.

“Hypocrisy, Hutton! Who do you think you’re talking to, some California tourist? Using ‘pakeha’ science made you a bloody billionaire! It gave you power to do good in the world. So use it!”

One of life’s joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks… who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it. Stan Goldman was such a friend. Together, in Wellington, their wives still had each other for company. But now George, alas, would have to make do imagining what Stan might say.

As he panted, squeezing his massive bulk through a cramped stricture between sodastraw draperies, the echoes of his breathing came back to him as a voice that wasn’t there.

“Dump the sanctimony about wishing you were really a noble savage, Hutton… Admit you’re as Western as I am.”

“Never!” George grunted as he popped free, into the final stretch of open passageway. Gasping, with hands on his knees, he seemed to hear his friend’s voice converging like a conscience from every wall.

“What, never… ?”

George stood up straight at last, and grinned.

“Well… hardly ever.” The ringing in his ears sounded musically like laughter until it faded away. Setting out again, he thought, There are no non-Western peoples anymore.

Indeed, there wasn’t a Maori alive whose blood didn’t flow with multicolored blends of English, Scots, Samoan, and scores of other flavors. Nor had any living Maori grown up without color video or the omnipresent, all-pervading influence of the Net.

Still, I am more than just another homogenized gray man of bland gray times! And if I’m forced by circumstances to lie, then at least I can look on my lies as a Maori should, as appalling things!

And to that, at last, Stan Goldman’s surrogate voice remained silent. His friend, George knew, would not disagree.

Turning a bend in the passage, he stopped and turned off his lamp. At first the sudden blackness was so utter, his hand was lost in front of his face. At last, however, he made out an incredibly faint glimmer, reflecting off a rupicoline wall ahead. That could only mean one thing, that he was nearly back to the site.

Dialed to its lowest level, the lamp still made him blink when it came back on. He set out again, first scrambling over a ledge and then ducking under a hanging rock drapery to emerge at last on a balcony overlooking the grotto where he and the others had come to battle demons.

Unlike their comfortable, furnished caverns back in New Zealand, only a few stark floodlights cast intimidating shadows across this great gallery. Sleeping bags lay strewn on piles of hay purchased from a Papuan farmer who plowed the hillsides overhead, not suspecting what vast counties lay beneath his hissing tractor. A portable recycling unit stood in one corner, taking in the team’s wastes and returning a necessary if unpalatable fraction of their needs.

None of these discomforts mattered to George’s veterans, of course. So it had to be the virgin nature of these secret caves that had everyone talking in whispers, softly, respectfully, as if to spare the place any more violation than necessary. George wasn’t the only one to go off on solitary reverent explorations. During the brief rest periods their medic demanded between long stints of labor, most of the crew now and then took off just to get away for a little while.

There were other, larger caverns in this network — one even bigger than Good Luck Cave, in Sarawak, dwarfing forty sports stadia. But this one served their needs and so had been sacrificed for the project. Several meters of sediment had been cleared away, exposing hard rock where a large hemispherical basin had been dug.

Nearby lay the metal frame that would hold their new thumper, and beyond that stood the tank where the crystal cylinder itself was slowly growing, atom by atom, under the direction of a myriad of simple, tireless nanomachines. In two days the perfect lattice would be a finely tuned superconducting antenna, and their real work would begin.

George climbed down a series of gour pools over which small waterfalls had once cascaded. He’d been away only half an hour, yet his crew had already resumed work.

No need to play foreman here. It’s amazing what a strong motivator it can be, when you have a slim chance to save the world.

A slight, dark-featured man looked up at George from inside the bowl-like excavation, standing on a wooden scaffold.

“So my friend, did you find your river?”

George’s Papuan friend, Sepak Takraw, had enlisted to help their shorthanded team. Enlisted under false pretenses, for George had told him they were probing for deep methane — a recurring grail ever sought by countries that had once been rich in oil, but now grew used to paucity again and hated it. Sepak’s vow of confidentiality was titanium clad, of course. Still, George couldn’t justify letting any more people know the true nature of their mission. Perhaps later he’d get to tell Sepak. After they succeeded. Or when they knew for sure they’d failed.

“Ah.” George lifted his shoulders. “The river is no more.”

“Too bad.” Sepak sighed. “Maybe the farmers took it away.”

“It’s a thirsty world.” George nodded. “So. How does the foundation look?”

Sepak gestured into the bowl, where two of George’s engineers were scrutinizing the smooth wall with instruments. “As you see, we’re all but finished. Only bloody-damn Kiwi perfectionism keeps them at it. Since Helvetians went extinct, you lot are the worst nit-pickers around.”

George smiled at the mixed compliment. However much they bickered, both Maori and pakeha New Zealanders agreed that any job worth doing was worth doing well. Tangoparu Ltd. had built its reputation on that fetish for accuracy.

And all the more so this time. The parameters Alex

Lustig gave us will be difficult enough to meet without human error.

“They finally tired of my impatience and chased me away. Such impertinence. Here, help me out of this pit, will you?”

George hoisted his small friend. Once on his feet, Sepak laid down his tool bag and took out a small flask. It was a mild local brew, but one notorious for playing hell with anyone not used to it. So naturally, he offered George a swig. George shook his head. He had taken a vow.

When next I drink, it will be to our world’s salvation… or standing over the bloody ruin of the bastards who wrecked her.

“Suit yourself.” Sepak knocked back a swallow and then slipped the flask into a pouch embroidered with beaded butterfly designs. He was a full-blooded member of the Gimi tribe, which took pride in a very special distinction. Of all nations, clans, and peoples on Earth, only among native Papuans were there still a few left alive who remembered when the planet had not been a single place.

This year was the centennial of the 1938 Australian expedition which discovered the Great Valley of central New Guinea, isolated until then from any contact with the outside world. The last “unknown” tribes of any size had been found there, living as they had for countless generations — tending crops, waging war, worshipping their gods, thinking their long notch between the mountains the sum totality of existence.

Until the Australians arrived, that is. From that moment, the Age of Stone was extinct. The universal Era of the Electron soon enveloped everyone — one world, one culture, one shared vocabulary. One shared Net.

Overhead, Sepak’s great-great-uncle was among the celebrities being interviewed for global news channels — one of just a few who remembered when the tall white outsiders arrived. “The last first contact,” was how media referred to the event.

Or at least, Stan Goldman might insist optimistically, the last first contact to occur on Earth.

Sepak would talk about it at the least excuse. Clearly, he saw no distinction between Maori and pakeha, dismissing all non-Papuans as “whites,” in the generic sense. In the odd, reverse pecking order of modern ethnicity-chic, there was no higher status than to have a great-grandfather who had once chipped his own tools from native stone. Who, in pure, primitive innocence used to reverently and with relish consume the flesh of his neighbors.

Sepak looked along one of the galleries, where polished stone ripples fell away toward shrouded mysteries. “So. No more river. Too bad. What good is a glorious cave without a stream to make it laugh and sing? What’s become of the thing that carved this mighty place? Such a mundane end, to be sucked away to irrigation wells.”

“There are signs the river flowed only a few decades ago.” From his pocket, George unfolded a handkerchief. Sepak peered at a few glinting slivers. “What are they?”

“Fish bones.”

The Papuan sighed. Whatever sightless species had once lived atop this tiny ecosphere’s food chain, a few wan skeletons were its only legacy.

George knew that millions above ground would share his sense of loss if they were told. These days, it might even lead to calls for action. Although the uniqueness of this particular line was forever gone, perhaps some other species, locked away in some preserve or life ark, might prosper here if only the water returned. But George would keep his secret, only wondering what these parched channels might have been like when a chuckling, lightless miracle coursed their hidden beds.

Again, he thought he knew what Stan Goldman might say.

“Hey, all right. We make mistakes. But who told us, back when we started digging and mining and irrigating, that it would come to this? No one. We had to find out for ourselves, the hard way.

“So where were those damned UFOs and charioted gods and prophets when we really needed them? No one gave us a guidebook for managing a planet. We’re writing it ourselves now, from hard experience.”

Concealing a sad smile, George also knew how he’d reply.

I mourn the moa, whom my own ancestors drove into extinction. I mourn the herons and whales, slaughtered by the pakeha. I mourn you too, little fishes.

When all of this was done, he would fill glasses for his friends, and drink to each lost species. And then, if there was enough beer left in the world, he’d also toast those yet to die.

“Come on, Sepak,” George said, folding away his handkerchief. “You can help me adjust the crane assembly. It has to be perfect when we lift the cylinder out of its bath.”

“Precision, precision.” Sepak sighed. Notwithstanding his engineering degree from the University of Port Moresby — and skin no darker than George’s — he muttered, “You honkies put too much faith in your precious machines. They’ll steal your souls, trust me. We Gimi know about this. Why just the other day my grandfather was telling me…”

Content to receive a healthy dose of his own medicine, George listened politely while they worked together — suffering in ironic role reversal the very same sort of guilt trip he’d inflicted on countless others since he first learned how.

Stan would just love this, George thought, and listened humbly while Sepak turned the tables on him, milking the everflowing teat of Western shame for all it was worth.

• CORE

It wasn’t much, as sculptures go. Especially on an island renowned for its monuments. A small pyramid of stone, that was all — jutting from a sandy slope, where sparse grasses swayed to restless ocean breezes. A black-winged Chilean kestrel took off with a screeching cry as Alex climbed the low hill to get a better look at a three-sided nub of polished granite. At first sight, it was something of a disappointment.

Come on, Lustig. Get with the spirit. It’s only the tip of something much, much bigger. Imagine it doesn’t end

just below ground, but keeps slanting down, down, ever downward…

He knew how those edges were aimed, probably far better than the original artist who had put the sculpture here, seven decades ago.

Imagine the Earth surrounds a solid pyramid, with four faces and four vertices, whose tips just pierce the surface…

He pictured a vast, stony tetrahedron — like one of the magic geometric forms Johannes Kepler used to think kept planets well ordered in the sky. Before Alex stood not a modest, unassuming monument, but one apex of the largest sculpture in the world. One containing the greater part of the world.

Similar carvings had been placed in Greenland, New Guinea, and South Africa, in one of the only arrangements that let each vertex emerge on dry land. For reasons similar to the artist’s, Alex had chosen the same four sites to place his secret resonators. It was more than mere happenstance, therefore, that had brought him here to Rapa Nui.

Standing over the stone pinnacle, Alex turned slowly, hands in his pockets, taking in the treeless, rocky plain. Westward a few kilometers jutted the cliffs of Rano Kao, one of the island’s three large, dormant volcanoes, overlooking a sea of frothy whitecaps. Not counting trivial islets, the wind riven by that jagged prominence arrived after crossing eight thousand miles of unimpeded ocean.

How strange to think on such scales, when all my training is to contemplate the infinitely small.

Standing here, he knew with utter precision where the other Tangoparu teams were dispersed around the globe. Probably none of them would encounter their local portions of the Whole Earth Sculpture. Sites two and four were offset from the actual monuments by several hundred kilometers.

But this was the hub. Few islands were so small compared with the vast ocean surrounding them. Alex could not have missed this apex had he tried.

Some say pyramids are symbols of luck, he pondered. But I’d still prefer a dodecahedron.

Rapa Nui had been chosen as headquarters for other reasons, not least of which was security. Here the Pacific Society of Hine-marama had more influence than the “national” authorities in faraway Chile. Under the society’s umbrella they could bring in a large crew, sparing Alex the need to supervise construction, leaving him time to wrestle the cloud of numbers and images in his head.

Those images followed him everywhere, even walking along the cinder cone of an ancient volcano or contemplating strange monuments on an isle of monuments.

Just north of Rano Kao, for instance, near Rapa Nui’s solitary town and landing strip, squatted a white shape that had once been a proud bird of space. Now guano streaked and forlorn, the shuttle Atlantis perched permanently on a rusted platform for visitors to gawk at and birds to use in other ways. Keeping his promise to Captain Tikhana, Alex had paid his respects to the stripped hulk, once a multi-billion-dollar vessel of aspiration, but now just another Easter Island obelisk. The sensations engendered had been forlorn.

Like the first time he had seen the native statues this place was famous for. There had been that same woebegone feeling.

… as if this were a place hopes came to die.

Alex turned southward. There, by the tiny, crashing bay of Vaihu, stood a row of seven towering carvings, called moai, pouting under heavy basalt brows. Several bore cylindrical topknots made of reddish scoria. They faced inland, seamed with cement where latter-day restorers had pieced them together from broken fragments. The glowering sentinels did not seem grateful. Rather, they radiated grim; obdurate resentment.

Before departing for the Arctic, Stan Goldman had given Alex a slim book about Easter Island, with old-style paper pages. “You’re going to one of the saddest, most fascinating places on Earth,” the elderly physicist had told him. “In fact, it has a lot in common with Greenland, where I’m headed.”

Alex couldn’t imagine two places less alike — one a continent in its own right, covered with ice, the other a fly-speck, broiling and nearly waterless amidst the open ocean. But Stan explained. “Both were experiments in what it might be like to plant a colony on another world — tiny settlements, isolated, without trade or any outside support, forced to live by their wits and meager local resources for generation after generation.”

Stan concluded grimly. “In neither case, I’m afraid, did humanity do very well.”

Indeed, from what Alex later read, Stan had understated the case. Hollywood images of Polynesian paradises ignored the boom-and-bust cycles of overpopulation that hit every archipelago with desperate regularity — cycles resolved by one means chiefly — the bloody culling of the adult male population. Nor did movies refer to that other holocaust — the slaughter of native species — not just by people, but by the pigs and rats and dogs the colonists brought with them.

The Polynesians weren’t particularly blameworthy. Humans had a long history of making messes wherever they went. But Alex recalled his grandmother once explaining the importance of scale. The smaller, more isolated the ecosystem, the quicker any damage became fatal. And there were few places on Earth as small, isolated, or fatal as Rapa Nui.

Within a few generations of humanity’s arrival, around 800 ad, not a tree was left standing. Without wood for boats, the settlers then had to abandon the sea, along with all possibility of escape or trade. What remained was native rock, from which they cut rude homes… and these desolate icons.

Overpopulation and boredom left open only the one option — endless war. One brief century after the great statues had been raised, nearly every one had been smashed in tribal forays and reprisals. By the time Europeans arrived — to arrogantly rename the place after a Christian holiday — the natives of Rapa Nui had nearly annihilated each other.

As if we moderns do much better. It only takes a bit more power, and greater numbers, to accomplish what the Easter Islanders never could… to foul something as big as the ocean itself.

Earlier, he had strolled the island’s one narrow beach, up at Anakena, where Hotu Matu’a long ago first landed with his band of hopeful settlers. And what Alex at first thought was white sand turned out to be bits of shredded styrofoam, ground from “peanuts” and other packing material spilled thousands of miles away. The stuff had been outlawed when he was still in university. Yet it still washed ashore everywhere. Scraggly sea birds poked through the detritus. They might not be dying, but they certainly didn’t look well, either.

Jen, he thought, wishing his grandmother were here to talk to. I need you to tell me it’s not already too late. I need to hear there’s enough left to be worth saving.

The glowering statues stared inland, seeming to share Alex’s gloomy premonitions.

Oh, the new gravity resonator worked all right. In its first test runs it had picked out Beta’s familiar glitter in brighter detail than ever. Echoes bracketed the massive, complex singularity within twenty meters inside Earth’s fiery bowels.

So far, so good. But in those reverberations Alex had also seen how fast the taniwha was growing.

Damn, we have hardly any time at all.

He looked beyond the dour stone figures, and in his imagination he suddenly pictured Ragnarok. Steam billowed as the sea was rent by sudden gouts of flame, leaving behind a measureless, bottomless hole.

Then, back into the unplugged depths, the despoiled ocean poured.

“Here’s the news,” June Morgan told him when he returned to the prefab hall the technicians had built not far from Vaihu. It felt like a small sports arena set upon a flat expanse of naked bedrock. Under the opaque roof they had erected their computers and the master resonator… a gleaming cylinder newly born from its vat of purified chemicals and now anchored to swiveled bearings. Alex said, “Just give me a summary, will you, June?”

Though she wasn’t part of the original cabal, June had proven invaluable, along with several of Pedro Manella’s “new people.” Her expertise on magnetism came in particularly handy as they traced the fields lacing Earth’s core, seeking those weird zones of superconducting current discovered only weeks ago.

Also, June was a demon for organization. As the hurried days passed, Alex came to rely on her more and more.

“Site two reports they’ll have full readiness in just a few hours,” the blonde woman said, confirming that George Hutton’s group in New Guinea was on schedule. “Greenland team says they’ll be in operation by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Good.” Alex had known Goldman and Tikhana would come through. “What about Africa?”

She lifted her eyes. “They were supposed to report in again two hours ago but…” She shrugged. With their program so delicately balanced, failure at even one location would be disastrous. And the African team was in territory completely out of their control. Still, it was amazing Jen had managed getting them into Kuwenezi at all.

“Don’t worry about it. My grandmother’s never been on time for an appointment in her life. Still, she somehow always comes through. We won’t need site four for a while yet.

“As for us, however, the time’s come,” he concluded, raising his voice. “So let’s get busy.”

He sat at a nearby station, showing the familiar holographic display of a cutaway Earth, with side projections for every factor he could possibly want to follow. Their earlier probes had set off all types of vibrations below — gravitational, sonic, electrical. Likening the planet to a complex, untempered bell seemed more appropriate each time they tapped it. At the world’s surface, all this “ringing” sometimes manifested in trembling movements — a resonant coupling Alex was just beginning to sort out. At worst, if they weren’t careful they might release pent-up faulting strains, already on the verge of bursting.

“Hmm,” he pondered, looking at the latest output. “Looks like the tremors weren’t so bad this time, even though we increased power. Maybe we’re getting the hang of this.”

New maps indicated many zones below where raw power waited to be tapped, as soon as their network was complete. It’s a whole world down there, Alex thought. And we’ve only just begun exploring it.

Now the border between liquid core and mantle was shown in such detail, it appeared like the surface of an alien planet. There were corrugations which looked startlingly like mountains, and rippling expanses that vaguely resembled seas. Shadow continents mimicked thousands of kilometers below the familiar ones. Far under Africa, for instance, an intrusion of nickel-iron bobbed like an echo of the granite frigate floating far above.

There was “weather,” too — plumes of plasti-crystalline convection circulating in slow-motion currents. Occasionally, unpredictably, these streamways flickered into that astonishing, newly discovered state, and electricity flowed in perfect strokes of lightning.

It even “rained.” Long after most of Earth’s iron and nickel had separated from the rocky minerals, settling into the deep core, metal droplets still coalesced and migrated downward, pelting the boundary with molten mists, drizzles, even downpours.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Convection and change of state would have to operate down there, too. Still, it all seemed eerie and suggested bizarre notions. Might there be “life” on those shadow masses? Life to which the plastic, tortured perovskites of the mantle made up an “atmosphere”? To whom the overhead scum of granite and basalt was as diaphanous and chill as high cirrus clouds were to him?

“Ten minutes.” June Morgan gripped her clipboard plaque nervously. And Alex noticed others glancing his way with similar looks. Still, in his own heart he sensed only icy calm. A grim, composed tranquility. They had studied the monster, and now teratology was finished. It was time to go after the thing, in its very lair.

“I’d better get ready then. Thanks, June.”

He reached for his subvocal, fitting the multistranded device over his head and neck. As he adjusted the settings, he recalled what Teresa Tikhana had said to him back in the Waitomo Caves, just before they parted.

“… It’s a long way to the next oasis, Dr. Lustig. You know that, don’t you? Someday we may find other worlds and perhaps do better with them. But without the Earth behind us, at our backs, we’ll never ever get that second chance…”

To which Alex mentally added, If we lose this battle, we won’t deserve another chance.

He showed none of this, however. For the sake of those watching him, he grinned instead and spoke with a soft, affected burr.

“All right, lads, lassies. Shall we invite our wee devil out to dance?”

They laughed nervously.

Swiveling in its gimbaled supports, the resonator turned with accuracy finer than any human eye could follow. It aimed.

And they began.