The Carboniferous period actually came rather late in the planet’s history. Part of the “age of amphibians,” it spanned a hundred million years before the giants known as dinosaurs arrived. Wonderful beasts used to thrive near where he now trod. But it was mostly upon ocean bottoms that life’s epic was written, by countless microorganisms raining down as gentle sediment year after year, eon after eon, a process already three billion years old when these clay chapters were lain.
Of course Logan knew volcanic mountains, too. Only last week he’d been scrambling over vast igneous flows in eastern Washington state, charting some of the new underground streams awakened by the shifting rains. Still, mere pumice and tuff were never as fascinating as where the land had once quite literally been alive. In his work he’d walked across ages — from the Precambrian, when Earth’s highest denizens were mats of algae, to the nearly recent Pliocene, where Logan always watched out for traces of more immediate forebears, who might by then already have been walking on two legs and starting to wonder what the hell was going on. He regularly returned from such expeditions with boxes of fossils rescued from the bulldozers, to give away to local schools. Though of course Claire always got first choice for her collection.
“Daddy!”
He was negotiating a particularly tricky bend when his daughter’s call tore him from his drifting thoughts. A misstep cost him his footing, and Logan felt a sudden, teetering vertigo. He gasped, throwing himself against the sloping wall, spreading his weight over the largest possible area. The sudden pounding of his heart matched the sound of pebbles raining into the ravine below.
It was an instinctive reaction. An overreaction, as there were plenty of footholds and ledges. But he’d let his mind wander, and that was stupid. Now he’d pay with bruises, and dust from head to toe.
“What—” He spat grit and raised his voice. “What is it, Claire?”
From above and somewhere ahead he heard her voice. “I think I found it!”
Logan reset his footing and pushed away. Standing upright required that his ankles bend sharply as his climbing shoes pressed for traction. But beginning scramblers learned to do that on their first outing. Now that he was paying attention again, Logan felt steady and controlled.
Just so long as you do pay attention, he reminded himself.
“Found what?” he called in her general direction.
“Daddy!” came exasperated tones, echoing faintly down narrow sidechannels. “I think I found the boundary!”
Logan smiled. As a child, Claire never used to call him “Daddy.” It had been an affront to her dignity. But now that the state of Oregon had issued her a self-reliance card, she seemed to like using the word — as if a small degree of residual, calculated childishness was her privilege as an emerging adult.
“I’m coming, Geode!” He patted his clothes, waving away drifts of dust. “I’ll be right there!”
The badlands stretched all around Logan. Sculpted by wind and rain and flash floods, they no doubt looked much as they had when first seen by whites, or by any people at all. Humans had lived in North America for only ten or twenty thousand years, tops. And though the weather had changed during that time — mostly growing dryer and hotter — it had been even longer since any appreciable greenery found a purchase on these sere slopes.
Still, there was beauty here: beige and cream and cinnamon beauty, textured like hard layers of some great, petrified pastry that had been kneaded hard below and then exposed by rough scourings of wind and rain. Logan loved these rocky deserts. Elsewhere, Earth wore its carpet of life as a softening mask. But here one could touch the planet’s tactile reality — mother Gaia without her makeup on.
His job often took him to places like this… to map out schemes for managing precious water. It was a role much like the “wildcatters” of twentieth-century lore, who used to scramble far and wide in search of petroleum, until each of the six hundred major sedimentary basins had been probed, palpated, steamed, and sucked dry.
Logan liked to think his goals were more mature, his task more benign and well thought out than that. Still he sometimes wondered. Might future generations look back on him and his world-spanning fraternity the way teledramas now depicted oilmen? As shortsighted fools, even rapists?
His ex-wife, Claire’s mother, had decided about that long ago. After his involvement in the project to cover over the lower Colorado River — saving millions of acre-feet of water from evaporation and creating the world’s longest greenhouse — she had rewarded him by throwing him out of the house.
Logan understood Daisy’s feelings… her obsessions, actually. But what was I to do? We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.
All over the planet there were problems crying out for solutions, not tomorrow, but right now. Nations and cities wanted water shifted, pumped and diked. As the seas rose and rains migrated unpredictably, so did his labors, as governments strove desperately to adapt. Great changes were at work, in the air and land and oceans. They were the sort of global transformations one read of in the very rocks themselves… such as when one long epoch of geological stability would come suddenly and violently to an end, leaving everything forever recast.
And yet… Logan inhaled the scent of sage and juniper.
Nothing had altered this country within man’s memory. Not even the greenhouse effect. He rejoiced in places like this, where no one would ever ask for his services. Places invulnerable to any works he could imagine.
A red-tailed hawk patrolled the next mesa, cruising a thermal air current that made the intervening gullied slope swim before his eyes. He touched a control near the left strap of his goggles and the bird steadied in view, smart optics enabling him to share its hunt, vicariously. There was a gleam in the raptor’s yellow iris as it scanned the sparse cover, seeking prey that might be sheltered there.
The bird passed out of sight. Logan readjusted the goggles and resumed climbing.
Soon he encountered tricky territory. Shards of stone had broken from an undermined outcrop, leaving a treacherous scree in his path. Logan’s nostrils flared as he stepped off carefully, arms outstretched for balance. Then he hopped again, a little quicker.
This kind of ground was ideal, of course. Not particularly dangerous — he and Claire carried tracking beepers anyway, and Forest Service ’copters were less than thirty minutes away — but enough so to be thrilling. Logan leaped from boulder to tottering boulder. It lent an added spice of adrenaline to the exhilaration of just being out here in the open, far from the teeming cities or his growling bulldozers, without a care in the world beyond the crucial decision of where he was going to plant his feet next.
At last he landed, surefooted and elated, on another patch of easy slant — no more vertical than horizontal. Logan paused again to catch his breath.
He and Claire had seen many other hikers on their way here, of course. You needed reservations years in advance to get a camping permit. Ironically though, right now the two of them were completely alone in this particular area. While tourists thronged the easy nature trails and aficionados went for hard ascents, intermediate terrain like this often went unvisited for days at a stretch.
Squinting to blur vision a bit, Logan could almost smear out signs of recent human passage… those eroded spots where footprints had worn the stone in ways wind or water never could, or bits of paper or foil too small to qualify for antilitter fines. It was so quiet — no drone of aircraft engines at the moment, no voices — that one might even imagine one was treading ground no other person had explored in all of time.