Solutions. Everybody’s got solutions.
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One group wanted to draft the entire space program into an effort to suspend ozone generators in the stratosphere. A preposterous idea, but at least it was bold and assertive, unlike the panacea offered by those calling for the abandonment of technology altogether, and a return to “simpler ways.” As if simpler ways could feed ten billion people.
As if simpler ways hadn’t also done harm. Astronauts suffered few illusions about the so-called “benign pastoral life-style,” having seen from space the deserts spread by earlier civilizations — Sumerians, Chinese, Berbers, Amerinds — armed with little more than sheep, fire, and primitive agriculture.
Teresa had her own ideas about solutions. There were more riches on the moon and asteroids than all the bean counters in all the capitals of the world could add up in their combined lifetimes. Lots of astronauts shared the dream of using space to cure Earth’s ills.
She and Jason had. They had met in training, and at first it had seemed some magical dating service must have intervened on their behalf. It went beyond obvious things, like their shared profession.
No. I just never met anyone who could make me laugh so.
Their consensus had extended to shopping among the pattern-marriage styles currently in vogue. After long discussion, they finally selected a motif drawn up by a consultant recommended by some other couples they knew. And it seemed to work. Jealousy never loomed as a question between them.
Until late last year, that is.
Until that Morgan woman appeared.
Teresa knew she was being unfair. She might as well blame Glenn Spivey. It was also about when Jason started working for that awful man that their troubles began.
Or she could lay the blame on…
“Dumpit!” She cursed. All this introspection brought a tightness to her jaw. She’d hoped absolute openness — giving the shrinks everything inside of her — would get her through all these “grief phases” quickly. But personal matters were so completely unlike the physical world. They followed no reliable patterns, no predictabilities. Despite recent optimistic pronouncements about new models of the mind, there hadn’t yet been a Newton of psychology, an Einstein of emotions. Perhaps there never would be.
Teresa felt a constriction in her chest as tears began to flow again. “Damn… damn…”
Her hands trembled. The glass slipped from her fingers and fell to the carpet, where it bounced undamaged, but juice sprayed over her white pants. “Oh, cryo-bilge…”
The telephone rang. Teresa shouted on impulse, before the NASA secretaries could intervene.
“I’ll take it!” Of course she ought to let her temporary staff screen all calls. But she needed action, movement, something!
As soon as she’d wiped her eyes and stepped inside, however, Teresa knew she’d made a mistake. The broad, florid features of Pedro Manella loomed over her from the phone-wall. Worse, she must have left the unit on auto-send before departing on that last mission. The reporter had already seen her.
“Captain Tikhana…” He smiled, larger than life.
“I’m sorry. I’m not giving interviews from my home. If you contact the NASA—”
He cut in. “I’m not seeking an interview, Ms. Tikhana. This concerns another matter I think you’ll find important. I can’t discuss it by telephone—”
Teresa knew Manella from press conferences. She disliked his aggressive style. His moustache, too. “Why not?” she broke in. “Why can’t you tell me now?”
Manella obviously expected the question. “Well, you see, it has to do with matters conjoining onto your own concerns, where they overlap my own…”
He went on that way, sentence after sentence. Teresa blinked. At first she thought he was speaking one of those low-efficiency dialects civilians often used, bureauciatese, or social science babble … as impoverished of content as they were rich in syllables. But then she realized the man was jabbering the real thing — bona fide gibberish — phrases and sentences that were semantic nonsense!
She was about to utter an abrupt disconnect when she noticed him fiddling with his tie in a certain way. Then Manella scratched an ear, wiped his sweaty lip on a sleeve, wrung his hands just so…
The uninitiated would probably attribute it all to his Latin background — expressiveness in gestures as well as words — but what Teresa saw instead were crude but clear approximations of spacer hand talk.
… OPEN MIKE, she read, WATCH YOUR WORDS CLASS RED URGENCY… CURIOSITY…
It was all so incongruous, Teresa nearly laughed out loud. What stopped her was the look in his eyes. They weren’t the eyes of a babbler.
He knows something, she realized. Then — He knows something about Erehwon!
Manella was implying her phone line might be tapped. Furthermore, he was clearly making assumptions about the level of observation. Trained surveillance agents would find his sign language ruse ludicrously transparent. But the charade would probably fool most context-sensitive monitoring devices or agency flacks drafted to listen to the predictably boring conversations of a bus driver like herself. It would also get by any random eavesdropping hacker from the Net.
“All right.” She waved a hand to stop him in mid-sentence. “I’ve heard enough, Mr. Manella, and I’m not interested. You’ll have to go through channels like everybody else. Now, good-bye.”
The display went blank just as he seemed about to remonstrate. He was a good actor, too. For it was only in those brown eyes that she saw confirmation of her own hand signs. Signs by which she had answered: MAYBE I’LL RESPOND SOON.
She would think about it. But why does Manella imagine I’d be monitored in the first place? And what is it he wants to tell me?
It had to be about Erehwon… about the calamity. Her heart rate climbed.
At which point she’d had quite enough of this emotional rebellion by her body. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, closed her eyes, and sought the calm-triggers taught to her in high school — laying cooling blankets over her thoughts, using biofeedback to drain away the tension. Whatever was happening, whatever Manella had to say, no good would come of letting ancient fight-flight reactions sweep her away. Cavemen might not have had much use for patience, but it was a pure survival trait in the world of their descendants.
Inhaling deeply, she turned away from the travails of consciousness. Vivaldi joined the chirping bluebirds in an unnoticed background as she sought the center, wherein she always knew when and where she was.
This time though, she couldn’t quite be sure that it — the center — was still there anymore at all.
After he succeeded in separating Sky-Father from Earth-Mother, giving their offspring room at last to stand and breathe, the forest god, Tane, looked about and saw that something else was lacking. Only creatures of ira atua — the spirit way — moved upon the land. But what could spirit entities ever be without ira tangata, mortal beings, to know them? Nothing.
So Tane attempted to bring mortal life to the world. But of all the female spirits with whom he mated, only one possessed ira tangata. She was Hine-titama, Dawn Maid. Daughter and wife of Tane, she became mother of all mortal beings.
Later, after the world had been given life, Hine-titama turned away from the surface, journeying deep into the realms below. There she became Hine-nui-te-po, Great Lady of Darkness, who waits to tend and comfort the dead after their journey down Whanui a Tane, the broad road.
There she waits for you, and for you too. Our first mortal ancestor, she sleeps below waiting for us all.