FOREMAN: (continuing after commercial)… The Core Group is not an organization or an institution. It's an informal network of people who are connected only in their dedication to a common goal. The Core Group is an idea, an attitude, an approach, a commitment, an operating context, and a technology for achieving results. The underlying assertion is that when we as individuals align our separate purposes all in the same direction, like individual magnetic particles lining up toward a common pole, we can make an amazing difference on the planet. When enough individuals align, when the direction of the entire human species is aligned, then miraculous results are not only possible, they're inevitable.
ROBISON: (long pause) Okay. You've stated it clear enough. So what's this magical alignment supposed to produce? What's the goal?
FOREMAN: Thanks. I thought you'd never ask. When we created the distinction that there is a Core Group, the immediate goal was to create the political will to resist and repel the Chtorran invasion of the Earth. That was six years ago. Later, when we realized the scale of what we were dealing with, we realized we'd been shortsighted. We re-created our purpose and committed ourselves to the survival of humanity, and as much of the Earth's ecology as we could save, regardless of the circumstances. Today we know a whole lot more about the processes at work, and we've expanded our goal again. We've committed ourselves to the survival of Gaia as an ecological system, and ourselves as the responsible part of that whole.
ROBISON: Mm-hm. But it sounds like you've forgotten about the Chtorran infestation altogether. You're not building weapons, you're spewing jargon.
FOREMAN: On the contrary. We're recognizing the scale of the infestation may be beyond our immediate ability to resist and repel. It may have always been beyond our ability. We need to be clear about what's doable. But in one respect, we're lucky that this infestation did not happen sooner in our history; at least now we have the ability to move large parts of our genetic heritage offworld and safely beyond the reach of the infestation. We have more than sixty low-orbit shuttles operating and another thirty on the assembly line. We have at least six lift-offs from Maui every day. Every single flight takes another part of the seed bank into space. We're supplying Luna and the two Lagrange stations almost faster than they can receive cargo. Luna City is doming three more craters, just to turn them into biospheres. Both of the Lagrange installations are inflated, hardened, and airtight. Offworld emigration is reaching nearly a hundred a month, and by next year at this time, it will be up to a hundred a week. By moving into space, we're taking the high ground. We're giving ourselves an impregnable fortress from which we will eventually be able to counterattack in strength. And if it takes a thousand years for us to discover a weakness in the Chtorran ecosystem, we'll find it and we'll exploit it. This is our planet. I promise you, we are going to preserve and protect and restore what is most precious and special about this world.
ROBISON: Hmp. (standing on his chair and holding his hand up high) Save your watches, folks. It's getting deeper. (stepping back down) I'm sure glad I'm not wearing new shoes. They'd have been ruined. You sure know how to pile it up, Doc. I mean, that all sounds terrific, but as far as I'm concerned it's another wheelbarrow load of four-dollar jargon. Why don't you just come right out and say it, that we're in a full-scale retreat? That your science boys haven't been able to do much more than count the teeth on a worm from the inside and then tell us that it's dangerous.
FOREMAN: We're not in retreat-
ROBISON: Right. It's a strategic evacuation. But even that doesn't wash. There's at least a billion species left on this planet. Do you think you can save them all? I doubt it. And what about those of us who get left behind? What do we become? Worm food?
FOREMAN: Nobody's being left behind. You're assuming that some of us are abandoning all of us. That's not the case, all of us are making it possible for some of us to operate out of a safe harbor. Consider it insurance. We're making it possible for humanity to survive the very worst-case scenario…
To further amplify this point, consider the following thought experiment: suppose a gastropede leaves its own settlement and travels to a nearby camp. Whatever microorganisms that individual might be carrying, the stingfly swarm over the second camp will, in the course of its regular feeding, inevitably pick up those microorganisms; equally inevitably, the swarm will transmit the full range of those parasites and symbiants to every gastropede in the second settlement.
Conversely, the visiting gastropede will be almost instantaneously infected with the complete range of resident microorganisms found in the second settlement. If the visiting gastropede is not terminally affected by the sudden infection-and it appears that gastropedes are extremely resilient-the result will be that both the visiting individual and the resident population will end up hosting a combination of microorganism populations 9n their blood and organs.
When the visiting gastropede returns to its home camp, the process will be repeated. In this way, the microorganism population of the Chtorran ecology uses the stingfly as a mechanism for the transmission of new bacterial and viral forms.
It has been suggested that this mechanism is also the way that the neural symbiont spreads itself throughout Chtorran and human populations.
—The Red Book
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 30
Hieronymus Bosch
"Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two."
-SOLOMON SHORT
The airship was the size of a nightmare-and the same color too. She had been painted to look like a king-worm, and the resemblance was horrifying.
My first glimpse of her was an accident. I was looking out through the chopper window, admiring the lemon-and-rosecolored afternoon as we coursed over Panama City, when I spotted something red and purple glittering under stadium floodlights, looming huge against the skyline. My brain translated the image immediately into worm. Except it couldn't be-it was larger than the buildings that it sat beside. It sprawled across an open field, dwarfing everything around it like a set of precision miniatures.
My brain struggled for an instant with the disparity of images. The differences of scale refused to resolve, and for a moment I couldn't focus my eyes properly. What was I looking at anyway? King-worms didn't go out of their nests, so it couldn't be a king-worm. And those weren't houses; they were airplane hangars. And, oh my God! That's the Hieronymus Bosch, isn't it? She was incredible!
I wanted to say that she was beautiful, but I couldn't. Nothing painted those colors could be beautiful. Nothing that looked like that belonged on this planet. Except this one was ours. She was brighter and louder and more impressive than any Chtorran that had ever slimed its way out of a shell. I couldn't help but feel proud of her. And her mission.
She had been built by Amazement, Inc., back in the days when there were enough millionaires in the world to make luxurious lighter-than-air travel a profitable fantasy. Once upon a long-lost time, there had been a three-year waiting list for vacation bookings on this ship. It had always been one of my private dreams to put aside enough money for a luxury air cruise.
Since the Chtorrans had come, a.much higher proportion of the Earth's population had become millionaires, some by multiple inheritance, others by skillful application of the reclamation laws. But it hardly mattered. Labor inflation had eaten up most of the gains, and scarcity of goods had taken care of the rest. Some luxuries remained possible-coffee and chocolate to name twobut it was the idea of luxury that had become impossible. Unfashionable. Somehow shameful in the midst of all this dying.
Before the Chtorrans, this ship had been called the Fantasia. An airborne confection, she had carried three hundred passengers at a time in astonishing grandeur. She had sailed extravagantly across Europe and the Atlantic, up and down the Americas, over to Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and then back across. Alaska and the great northwestern wilderness, across Canada to New York and Boston, then to Ireland and Europe again. Once upon a lovely time, she had drifted across the skies of summer like a city in the clouds. All summer long, from May until September, she had floated above the cares of a simpler, less terrible world.