Such as Chang. It was she who had tipped UNEPA off to the whereabouts of that awful man’s grisly cache near Taipei. News of Chang’s death had come as a welcome surprise. She’d been so sure he’d escape or at worst get a wrist slap. Perhaps those wimps at UNEPA were getting some guts, after all.
But now, on to other things. Daisy sat padmasama on a silk cushion amidst a cyclone of pictures and data. Her eyes quickly sifted what her creatures brought her… industrial “development” plans… laxity by weak, compromise-ridden public agencies… betrayal by bribed, gor-sucked officials. And worse.
Within the movement, her name was spoken in hushed tones, with respect, awe, and a little fell dread. In another era, Daisy might have heard the voices of angels in church bells. Today, though, her talents truly flowered as she plucked the schemes of builders as well as the prevarications of moderates, even half a world away.
“So Logan thinks his idea’s just amusing… probably nonsense…” she whispered as she wove her ex-husband’s recent paper into a special database. Of course she couldn’t follow his more arcane mathematical derivations, but that didn’t matter. She had programs for that. Or human consultants just a net call away.
“… the station’s anchor boom couldn’t have been lifted by any known explosive. For lack of other explanations, I’m led to imagine incredibly focused seismic waves…”
Daisy’s nostrils flared as she watched a panned view of the hated tidal power project. Yet another example of Logan’s selling out. Of his futile, foredoomed effort to “solve” the world’s problems. In bargaining with evil, of course, he had bartered away his soul.
Still, she knew him. She knew her former love better than he knew himself. Logan’s poorest hunches were often better than other engineers’ best analyses.
“It’d be just like him to latch onto something big and not even trust his own instincts,” she sighed.
Daisy stared at the broken tidal barrage. Anything that could disrupt a big project like that interested her. There were people she knew… others who also despised the slow, reformist methods of the North American Church of Gaia. A loose network of men and women who knew how to take action. This news of Logan’s might mean some new threat. Or perhaps an opportunity.
Daisy’s eyes stroked the data flow pouring endlessly from the Net sea. The blue eyes of a hunter, they flashed and sought. Their patience was that of mission, and in them dwelled the perseverance of dragons.
• CORE
“Whatever we do,” Teresa Tikhana had said earlier, be-fore the meeting broke up. “We can’t let any of the space powers in on this. I’m sure now they were all in cahoots with Spivey’s illegal research on Erehwon. Heaven only knows what they’d do if they got their hands on gravity lasers and cosmic knots. ”
So they decided not to publicly announce the impending end of the world, or their bold, if unlikely, plan to fight it. Big governments were already the prime suspects for having created Beta, losing it, and then hiding the story to escape responsibility. If so, the powers that be wouldn’t think twice about wiping out George Hutton’s little band to keep the foul secret a little longer.
Perhaps he and the others were leaping to wrong conclusions. All in all, Alex did find the scenario garish and a bit too weird. But it fit the facts as they knew them. Besides, they simply couldn’t afford to take chances.
“We’ll deal with the taniwha ourselves, then,” George Hutton had summarized at the end of the meeting.
“It’ll be hard to set up the resonators without anyone noticing,” Alex reminded everybody. But Pedro Manella had agreed with George. “Leave that part to Hutton and me. We’ll provide everything you need.”
The portly Aztlan reporter had seemed so relaxed, so confident. No sign remained of the emotion he’d shown on first hearing of the monster at the planet’s heart. Even a slim hope, it seemed, was enough to fill him with energy.
Alex felt uncomfortable putting such trust in a man who — by his own recent reckoning — had ruined his life. Of course it was actually thanks to those riots in Iquitos, triggered by Manella, that his own crude Alpha singularity had fallen and he’d been forced to go looking for it. If not for the fellow’s meddling in Peru, Alex would probably have paid no more attention to the center of the Earth than…
He leaned back in his swivel chair and realized he had no adequate simile for comparison. The center of the Earth was essentially the last place one thought of. And yet, without it where would any of us be?
In front of Alex, the planet’s many layers glowed fulgent in the final schematic presented at the now-adjourned meeting. This ghostly, near-spherical Earth circumscribed a geometric figure — a tetrahedral pyramid whose tips pierced the surface at four evenly spaced locations.
EASTER ISLAND (RAPA NUI): 27° 6' 20'' S, 109° 24' 30'' W
SOUTH AFRICA (NEAR REIVILO): 27° 30' 36° S, 24° 6' E
IRIAN JAYA (NEW GUINEA): 2° 6' 36'' S, 137° 23' 24'' E
WEST GREENLAND (NEAR GODHAVN): 70° 38' 24'' N, 55° 41' 12'' W
Four sites. I’d rather have had twelve. Or twenty.
He’d said as much to Stan and George and the other geophysicists. There’s no telling what will happen when we start pushing at Beta in earnest. It’s certain to drift and tumble. That array of resonators should be a dodecahedron or icosahedron for full coverage, not a pyramid.
But a pyramid was all they could manage.
It wasn’t a matter of money. That George had in plenty, and he was willing to spend every farthing. His political contacts in the Polynesian Federation meant two sites would be readily available, no questions asked. But to set up beyond the Pacific basin, their tiny cabal would need help. Especially if word wasn’t to leak out.
Back in the last century, undercover, secret maneuverings were more the rule than the exception. Nations, corporations, drug cartels, and even private individuals habitually concealed monumental schemes. But arms inspections were followed by tourism, as jetliners and then zeps began nosing through swathes of sky once reserved for warcraft. Data-links laced metropoleis to donkey-cart villages. Of the three great centers of TwenCen secrecy, state socialism had collapsed before Alex was even born, and finance capitalism met its ruin soon after that, amidst the melted Alps.
In hindsight, the Helvetian tragedy probably hadn’t even been necessary, for not even the fabled gnomes could have kept their records private much longer in a world filled with amateur snoops — data hackers with as much free time and computing power as ingenuity.
That left the third relict, and the strongest. The great nation states still maintained “confidential” services — permitted the victors by the same treaty that had ended such things for everyone else. Those agencies could have helped the Tangoparu team set up their gravity-wave array in total secrecy. But then, those same agencies were almost certainly the enemy, as well.