Alex’s face reddened. He looked to George Hutton, sitting on a woven mat nearby. “Now what’s she talking about?”
The big Maori glanced across the fire pit at Meriana Kapur, who grinned as she stirred the coals with an iron poker. Quiescent flames licked higher and the tattoos on her lips and chin seemed to flicker and dance. The crone appeared ageless.
“Auntie’s referring to the fact that there were fewer and milder quakes after the recent scans. That must mean the Earth goddess found your, er, probings… more acceptable this time.”
George said it with a straight face. Or almost straight. The ambiguity was just enough to make Alex suppress an impulse to laugh out loud.
“I thought Pele was a Hawaiian spirit, not Maori.”
George shrugged. “The Pacific’s cosmopolitan today. Hawaiian priests consult ours in matters of body magic, while we defer when it comes to volcanoes and planetary animism.”
“Is that where you studied geophysics, then?” Alex smirked. “In a shaman’s hut, beside a lava flow?”
He was surprised when George nodded earnestly, without taking offense. “There, and MIT, yes.” Hutton went on to explain. “Naturally, Western science is paramount. It’s the central body of knowledge, and the old gods long ago admitted that. Nevertheless, my ventures wouldn’t have got backing from my family and iwi and clan, had I not also apprenticed for a time with Pele’s priests, at the feet of Kilauea.”
Alex sighed. He shouldn’t be surprised. Like California fifty years ago, contemporary New Zealand had gradually transformed its longstanding tradition of tolerance into a positive fetish for eccentricity. Of course George’s people saw nothing inconsistent in mixing old and new ideas to suit their eclectic style. And if that occasionally made staid outsiders blink in wonder, so much the better.
Alex refused to give George the satisfaction. He shrugged and turned to regard the priestess once again.
Here under the hand-carved beams of the centuries-old meeting house, he had only to squint to imagine himself transported in time. Even her tattoos looked genuine… unlike those the entertainers at Rotorua put on and took off as easily as hair or skin color. Still, it was doubtful many ancient Maori women, even priestesses, reached Auntie’s age with all their own teeth still in place, as hers were, gleaming straight and white from a life of hygiene and regular professional care.
Alex realized she was waiting for a reply, and so he nodded slightly. “Thank you, Auntie. I’m glad the goddess found my attentions… pleasing.”
George planted a hand on his shoulder. “Of course Pele liked them. Didn’t the Earth move for you?.”
Alex shrugged the hand aside. George had insisted they come here tonight, implying it was important. Meanwhile Alex chafed for the lab and his computer. One more simulation might break the logjam. Maybe if he kept at it, kept trying…
“You pursue a great taniwha that has burrowed into Our Mother,” the priestess said. “You seek to grasp its nature. You fear it will devour Our Mother and ourselves.”
He nodded. A colorful appraisal, but it summed things up rather well. Their most recent gravitational tomography scans had lit up Earth’s interior with a startling clarity that struck George’s technicians dumb, sketching the planet’s deep layers in fine, prickled, searing complexity that defied all previous geophysical models.
The search had revealed both “taniwhas,” the two singularities slowly orbiting near the planet’s heart. Both the shriveled, evaporating remnant of his own Alpha and the ominous, massive spectre of Beta had shown up as tiny, perfect sparkles within the maelstrom. Everything he’d surmised about the larger beast had been confirmed in those scans. The cosmic knot was growing, all right. And the more closely he examined its convoluted world-sheets, its torturous topology of warped space-time, the more beautiful it grew in its implacable deadliness.
Unfortunately, he was no closer to answering any of the really basic questions, such as when and where the thing had originated. Or how it was that probing for it triggered earthquakes at the surface, thousands of miles away.
Hell, he couldn’t even figure out the thing’s orbit! Prior to these recent scans he’d been so sure he had Beta’s dynamics worked out — the way gravity and pseudo-friction and centrifugal forces balanced in its slow whirl about the inner core. But its trajectory had shifted after the first scan. Some additional factor must have nudged it. But what?
Auntie Kapur tapped a steady beat on a miniature ceremonial drum- — which some called a zzxjoanw — while making fatidic statements about amorous goddesses and other superstitious nonsense.
“… You reach deep within Pele’s hidden places, touching Her secrets. She would not permit this of just any man. You are honored, nephew.”
Gaia worship took many forms, and this Pele-venerating version seemed harmless enough. He’d even heard Jen speak favorably of Auntie’s cult, once. Under other circumstances he might have found all this very interesting, instead of a damned nuisance.
“Have no fear,” she went on. “You will tame this beast you pursue. You will keep it from harming Our Mother.”
She paused, looking at him expectantly. Alex tried to think of something to say.
“I am an unworthy man,” he answered, modestly.
But the old woman surprised him with a quick, reproachful glare. “It’s not for you to judge your worthiness! You serve, as a man’s seed serves the woman who chooses him. Even the taniwha serves. You would do well, boy, to consider the lesson of the tiny kiwi bird and her enormous egg”
Alex stared. The suggestion seemed so bizarre — and the tension of the last few weeks had him wound up so tight — that he couldn’t contain himself any longer. He guffawed.
Auntie Kapur tilted her head. “You are amused by my metaphors?”
“I…” He held up one hand placatingly.
“Would you prefer I used other terms? That I ask you to contemplate the relationship between ‘zygotes’ and ‘gametes’? Would you understand better if I spoke to you of dissipative structures? Or the way, even amid catastrophe, life creates order out of chaos?”
Alex was unable to react except by blinking. While she stirred the coals again, George whispered, “Auntie has a biophysics degree from the University of Otago. Don’t make assumptions, Lustig.”
Trapped — by a movie clichi! Alex had known this was a modern person sitting across from him. And yet her pose — what Stan Goldman would call her “schtick” — had drawn him in.
“You… you’re saying the singularity won’t harm the Earth?. That it might instead trigger some…”
Auntie reached over the coals and rapped him sharply on the back of his hand. “I say nothing! It’s not my job to tell you, a ‘genius,’ what to think — you, who have many times my brains and whose prowess impresses even Our Mother. Those are silly endowments but they serve their purposes.
“No, I only pose you questions, at a time when you’re obviously concentrating much too closely on your problem. You show every sign of being ensnared by those very brains of yours — of being cornered by your postulates! To nudge you off balance then, I offer you the wisdom of sperm and egg-
“Heed my words or not. Do as you will. I have confused you and that is enough. Your unconscious will do the rest.”
She concluded rattling the drum, then put it aside and dismissed both men with a brusque wave. “I forbid further work until you’ve rested and distracted yourselves. You are commanded to get drunk tonight. Now go.”
The priestess watched the fire pit silently as they stood up. Alex grabbed his shoes and followed George out of the meeting house, into a starry night. Ten feet down the path, however, the two men stopped, looked at each other, and simultaneously broke into fits of laughter. Alex nearly doubled over, his sides hurting as he desperately tried to catch his breath. George slapped him roughly on the back. “Come on,” the big Maori said. “Let’s get a beer. Or ten.”