“Still, what is to be done? How can you keep alive a rain forest where there is no rain?”
[□ Link WEATHERNET ALPHA-YEAR SUMMARY 2037 — 2956a*.]
[Cut back to the resigned features of the reporter.]
“’Transpiration, evaporation, humidity renewal… science can give names to all the reasons why the preservation islands plan failed. Some blame the worldwide warming. Whatever the reason, however, it is we who must live with what remains. And it is the poor who in the end are caught in the middle.”
[Camera returns to the scene of burning. One dusty corpse, arms outstretched toward the supposed refuge of the forest, can be seen clutching a single green leaf.]
[□ Real-time image NorSat 12. $1.12/minute.]
“This is Nigel Landsbury… reporting from Amazonia. ”
[Reporter looks upward, and the camera follows his gaze to a sky dun with floating dust.]
[□ Reporter bio: N.LANDSBURY-BBC3. Credibility ratings: AaAb-2 Viewer’s Union (2038). AaBb-4, World Watchers Ltd. (2038).]
• MESOSPHERE
Stan Goldman watched Auntie Kapur stir the fire with a crooked stick. A mist of ash lifted in its wake, and the coals brightened briefly to compete with the old woman’s blue-flickering computer display. Beyond those twin pools of light, the ocher columns of the meeting house melted into moist shadows of a New Zealand mountain forest. Auntie preferred this setting for their final meeting before everyone dispersed to Earth’s four corners. Beginning such a covert enterprise in darkness seemed appropriate to their dim chances. “Rapa Nui will be easiest,” the priestess told Stan and George. The glinting sparks set her chin tattoo designs in eerie motion. “My sisters there will provide every facility, and the Chilean authorities will be no problem.”
“That’s good,” Stan said. He rubbed his eyes, blaming exhaustion and bits of drifting ash for the stinging. It was long past his normal bedtime — as if anything were “normal” anymore. But at least Ellen would be waiting up for him, and he hoped to salvage something of their last night together.
“That island’s the anchor point,” he went on. “Site one has to be there, with no allowance for error.”
“Then it’s agreed, that’s where Alex must go,” George Hutton said.
Stan nodded. “Of course. Alex should get the safest site, and the one where the most delicate control is needed, since only he truly understands that thing down there.”
“Do not count on Rapa Nui being safe.” Meriana Kapur regarded Stan severely. “It is an island of awful power. A place of death and horrible old gods. I agree Lustig must be the one to go there, to that focal point. But not because it is safe.”
Auntie had a way of making statements one could not answer. Stan glanced at George and saw his friend nod reverently. As a pakeha kiwi — a white New Zealander, and one who hadn’t even been born here — Stan felt it wiser simply to defer to the Maori when they spoke of such things.
“Very well. We still have to finalize the teams to go set up the other three resonators.”
George Hutton spoke gruffly. “I’ve decided I’ll handle Irian Jaya myself.”
Stan turned and blinked at him. “But we need you to coordinate everything. Our equipment…”
The billionaire waved one hand. “All can be accomplished by hyper, using company codes and colloquial Taupo speech. But some things have to be done in person. I must be there to arrange matters with certain friends among the Papuans.”
“Do you have a specific site in mind?”
George smiled. “The perfect site. I discovered it during a resource survey ten years ago… a series of deep caves even greater than the Mulu caverns, in Borneo.”
“But I never heard. How did you keep them secret? And why?”
“How is easy, my friend.” George put one finger to his lips. “Besides me, only chief engineer Raini knows about it, and she swore me an oath. It didn’t qualify as a “mineral resource,” per se, so we simply neglected mentioning it to the Papuan government.”
“But it is a resource! Caves like the Mulu generate income from tourism…”
Stan stopped, suddenly aware of the irony. No more than a kilometer away were the grottoes of Waitomo, wonders of nature now reduced to yet another brief stop in the travel itineraries of millions, its ancient floors trampled, its limestone seeps forever altered by rivulets of vapor condensed from myriad human exhalations, its glow-worm constellations demoted from silent, awesome mysteries to a few more frames in the next tourist’s automatic camera.
“That’s why enough for me,” George answered. “Another reason I want to take this task is to see the Irian caves once again. If there’s time near the end, you too must join me there, my old friend. You’ve never seen their like. We’ll drink a toast to Earth, down where no stone has ever felt the brush of human voices.”
The look in George’s eye told more than his words. But Stan shook his head. “If it gets that close and we know we’ve lost, I’ll take Ellen to Dunedin to be with the grandkids.” He shook his head. This was getting much too morbid. “Anyway, I’ll be doing a job of my own up north, at site three. That’ll be plenty vivid enough for me, staring at all that ice.”
Auntie Kapur was still studying her screen and the map overlay Alex Lustig had prepared. “According to our Pommie genius, your requirements are less severe. You can set up your small Greenland resonator anywhere within several hundred kilometers of the tip of our mythical pyramid. Do you have any place in mind?”
“I have some friends working on the Hammer Dig, east of Godhavn. Everyone knows I’m interested in the project, so it won’t be much of a surprise if I show up with a team to do some local gravity scans. It’ll be a perfect cover.”
“Hmm.” Auntie Kapur was clearly worried. Sites one and two were within the Pacific Rim, in reach of her network of sympathizers and coreligionists. There were Gaians in Greenland too, of course, but of a completely different sect. Stan and Teresa would be pretty much on their own up there.
“You know all this is going to make us subject to the secrecy laws,” Stan said dryly. “We could get in trouble.”
The others looked at him, then burst out laughing. It was a welcome if momentary break in the tension. Normally a serious thing, breaking the provisions of the Rio Treaties was at this point the least of their worries.
“That leaves Africa,” George summarized when they got back to business. And indeed, the final site would be the toughest. Tangoparu Ltd. had never done business in the area where they had to set up the last resonator. Their geological maps were obsolete, and to make matters worse, the region was on the U.N.’s Stability and Human Rights Watch List. Nobody on their team knew anyone there well enough to rely on. Not well enough to help them set up a thumper in absolute privacy.
“I’ve already started putting out feelers,” Auntie Kapur said. “With a nested hyper search I ought to find someone trustworthy who can get us in.”
“Just make sure to run your search routine by Pedro Manella. He’s in charge of net security,” Stan cautioned. “We don’t want some bored hacker’s ferret program arousing attention—”
He stopped when Auntie gave him an indulgent look, as if he were trying to teach his own mother to tie her shoes.
She’s not much older than me, he thought. I’m a grandfather and a full professor. So how does she always
manage to make me feel like a little boy, caught with a frog in his pocket?
Maybe it’s something she learned in priestess school, while I was studying inconsequential stuff like the workings of stars and the shape of space.
“I’ll be careful,” she promised, remaining vague. But in her eyes Stan read something that seemed to say she knew exactly what she was doing.