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.