“It’s a shorter strand than usual,” Sax said. “Either a new viroid, or something like a viroid but smaller still.” In the Sabishii labs they were calling it “the virid.”
A long week later, Sax came back up to the basin. “We can try to remove it physically,” he said over dinner. “Then plant different species, ones that are resistant to viroids. That’s the best we can do.”
“But will that work?”
“The plants susceptible to infection are fairly specific. You got hit by a new one, but if you change grasses, and types of potatoes — perhaps cycle out some of your potato-patch soil…” Sax shrugged.
Nirgal ate with more appetite than he *had had for the previous week. Even the suggestion of a possible solution was a great relief. He drank some wine, felt better and better. “These things are strange, eh?” he said over an after-dinner brandy. “What life will come up with!”
“If you call it life.”
“Well, of course.”
Sax didn’t reply.
“I’ve been looking at the news on the net,” Nirgal said. “There are a lot of infestations. I had never noticed before. Parasites, viruses…”
“Yes. Sometimes I worry about a global plague. Something we can’t stop.”
“Ka! Could that happen?”
“There’s all kinds of invasions going on. Population surges, sudden die-offs. All over. Things in disequilibrium. Upsetting balances we didn’t even know existed. Things we don’t understand.” As always this thought made Sax unhappy.
“Biomes will eventually come into equilibrium,” Nirgal suggested.
“I’m not sure there is such a thing.”
“As equilibrium?”
“Yes. It may be a matter of…” He waved his hands about like gulls. “Punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium.”
“Punctuated change?”
“Perpetual change. Braided change — sometimes surging change — ”
“Like cascading recombinance?”
“Perhaps.”
“I’ve heard that’s a mathematics only a dozen people can really understand.”
Sax looked surprised. “That’s never true. Or else, true of every math. Depends on what you mean by understand. But I know a bit of that one. You can use it to model some of this stuff. But not predict. And I don’t know how to use it to suggest any — reactions on our part. I’m not sure it can be used that way.” He talked for a while about Vlad’s notion of holons, which were organic units that had subunits and also were subunits of greater holons, each level combining to create the next one up in emergent fashion, all the way up and down the great chain of being. Vlad had worked out mathematical descriptions of these emergences, which turned out to come in more than one kind, with different families of properties for each kind; so if they could get enough information about the behavior of a level of holons and the next level up, they could try to fit them into these mathematical formulae, and see what kind of emergence they had; then perhaps find ways to disrupt it. “That’s the best approach we can take for things this little.” “ The next day they called up greenhouses in Xanthe, to ask for shipments of new starts, and flats of a new strain of Himalayan-based grass. By the time they arrived, Nirgal had pulled out all the grass in the basin, and much of the moss. The work made him sick, he couldn’t help it; once, seeing a concerned marmot patriarch chattering at him, he sat down and burst into tears. Sax had retreated into his customary silence, which only made things worse, as it always reminded Nirgal of Simon, and of death generally. He needed Maya or some other courageous expressive speaker of the inner life, of anguish and fortitude; but here was Sax, lost in thoughts that seemed to happen in some kind of foreign language, in a private idiolect he was now unwilling to translate.
They went to work planting new starts of Himalayan grasses throughout the basin, concentrating on the stream banks and their veinlike tracery under the trickles and ice. A hard freeze actually helped, as it killed the infected plants faster than the ones free of infection. They incinerated the infected plants in a kiln down the massif. People came from the surrounding basins to help, bringing replacement starts for planting later.
Two months passed, and the invasion surge weakened.
The plants that remained seemed to be more resistant. Newly planted plants did not get infected or die. The basin looked like it was autumn, though it was midsummer; but the dying had stopped. The marmots looked thin, and more concerned than ever; they were a worrying species. And Nir-gal could see their point. The basin looked ravaged. But it seemed the biome would survive. The yiroid was subsiding, eventually they could hardiy even find it, no matter how hard and long they centrifuged samples. It seemed to have left the basin, as mysterious in departure as in arrival.
Sax shook his head. “If the viroids that infect animals ever get more robust…” He sighed. “I wish I could talk to Hi-roko about it.”
“I’ve heard them say she’s at the north pole,” Nirgal said sourly.
“Yes.”
“But?”
“I don’t think she’s there. And — I don’t think she wants to talk to me. But I’m still… I’m waiting.”
“For her to call?” Nirgal said sarcastically.
Sax nodded.
They stared into Nirgal’s lamp flame glumly. Hiroko — mother, lover — she had abandoned them both.
But the basin would live. When Sax went to his rover to leave, Nirgal gave him a bear hug, lifting him and twirling him. “Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” Sax said. “Very interesting.”
“What will you do now?”
“I think I will talk to Ann. Try to talk to Ann.”
“Ah! Good luck.”
Sax nodded, as if to say he would need it. Then he drove off, waving once before putting both hands on the wheel. In a minute he was over the rib and gone.
So Nirgal went at the hard work of restoring the basin, doing what he could to give it more pathogen resistance. More diversity, more of an indigenous parasite load. From the chasmoendolithic rock dwellers to the insects and mi-crobial fliers hovering in the air. A fuller, tougher biome. He seldom went into Sabishii. He replaced all the soil in the potato patch, planted a different kind of potato.
Sax and Spencer had come back to visit him, when a big dust storm began in the Claritas region near Senzeni Na — at their latitude, but all the way around the world. They heard about it over the news, and then tracked it over the next couple of days on the satellite weather photos. It came east, kept coming east; kept coming; looked like it was going to pass to the south of them; but at the last minute it veered north.
They sat in the living room of his boulder house looking south. And there it came, a dark mass filling the sky. Dread filled Nirgal like the static electricity causing Spencer to yelp when he touched things. The dread didn’t make sense, they had passed under a score of dust storms before. It was only residual dread from the viroid blight. And they had weathered that.
But this time the light of day browned and dimmed until it might as well have been night — a chocolate night, howling over the boulder and rattling the outer window. “The winds have gotten so strong,” Sax remarked pensively. Then the howl lessened, while it was still dark out. Nirgal felt more and more sick the less the wind howled — until the air was still, and he was so nauseated he could scarcely stand at the window. Global dust storms sometimes did this; they ended abruptly when the wind ran into a counterwind, or a particular landform. And then the storm dropped its load of dust and fines. It was raining dust now, in fact, the boulder’s windows a dirty gray. As if ash were settling over the world. In the old days, Sax was muttering uneasily, even the biggest dust storms would only have dropped a few millimeters of fines at the end of their runs. But with the atmosphere so much thicker, and the winds so much more powerful, great quantities of dust and sand were thrown aloft; and if they came down all at once, as sometimes happened, the drifts could be much deeper than a few millimeters.