With Lovelock and Margulis and Vernadsky long gone, the new faithful had to settle for Jen Wolling — founding saint and heretic. At times it got so she even wished she’d never had that epiphany, so long ago on the frosty shoulders of Mount Snowdon, when the turning leaves had suddenly revealed to her the jewellike mathematical clarity of the Gaia metaphor.
No regrets. Jen shook her head. I cannot regret those equations. For they are true.
Once, when young Alex had come to her complaining of the awful burden, being a Nobelist’s grandson, she had told him, “Some fools think I’m smart because I found a few tricks, to make math serve biology. But you and I know a secret… that someday you’ll go places where I can’t. Prize or no damned prize.”
She missed her grandson and wondered what mischief he was up to.
Jen shook herself out of a mental random walk. Bearing down, she returned to the letter from the black teenager in Kuwenezi.
“… the part that confuses me most is how animals and plants fight each other for survival. Like hunting and being hunted? Nobody ‘wins’ those wars, cause every soldier dies anyway, eventually? Most of the time, what looks to them like fighting isn’t really fighting at all! Cause each of them depends on the others.
“Like, a herd of deer depends on wolfs to keep deer numbers down, or else they’d overgrase and then all starve to death… And the wolfs’ numbers are controlled by how many deer there are to eat.
“This is what they mean by homeostasis, isn’t it? One kind of animal regulates another, and it’s regulated back…”
Jen skimmed ahead to a highlighted area.
“But what about Man? Who or what regulates us?”
She nodded appreciatively. There were scores of good books she could refer the young man to. But he must have already accessed the standard answers and found them unsatisfying.
We are an unregulated cancer, proclaimed many eco-radicals. Man must cut his numbers and standard of living by a factor of ten, or even a hundred, to save the world.
Some even suggested it would be better if the destroyer species — Homo sapiens — died out altogether, and good riddance.
Those pursuing the “organic” metaphor suggested the problem would be solved once humanity adjusted to its proper role as “brain” of the planetary organism. We can learn to regulate ourselves, pronounced the moderators of the North American Church of Gaia, as they pushed “soft” technologies and birth control. We must learn to be smart planetary managers.
There were still other opinions.
Everything would be fine on Earth if humans just left! That was the message of the space colonization movement, as they promoted plans for cities and factories in the sky. Out in space, resources are endless. We’ll move out and turn the little blue planet into a park!
To Madrid Catholics and some other old-line religious groups, The world was made for our use. The end of days will come soon. So why “regulate,” when it’s all temporary anyway? One unborn human fetus is worth all the whales in the sea.
A group based in California offered a unique proposal. “Sheckleyans” they called themselves, and they agitated — tongue in cheek, Jen imagined — for the genetic engineering of new predators smart and agile enough to prey on human beings. These new hunters would cull the population in a “natural” manner, allowing the rest of the race to thrive in smaller numbers. Vampires were a favorite candidate predator — certainly canny and capable enough, if they could be made — but another Sheckleyan subsect held out for werewolves, a less snooty, less aristocratically conceited sort of monster. Either way, romance and adventure would return, and mankind, too, would at last be “regulated.” Jen sent the Sheckleyans an anonymous donation every year. After all, you never could tell.
These were just some of the suggestions, both serious and whimsical. But Jen realized the young man deserved more than stock answers. She put his letter on the high-priority heap — the pile of items she would go over carefully later, in the hours before bed.
One letter to go then. The last one had arrived on auto-accept, so the sender knew her private code. Jen scanned with rising irritation. Someone seemed to be advertising vacation homes on the Sea of Okhotsk!
That’s all I need.
But then she suddenly remembered. Vacation homes…
It was a mnemonic cue. “Sri Ramanujan,” she said aloud. “I think this message may be in cipher. Please see if we own a key to break it.”
The face of the young Hindustani appeared briefly.
“Yes, Jen Wolling. It uses a private code given you years ago by the Pacific Society of Hine-marama. I’ll have it translated in a minute.”
Ah, Jen thought. This had to be from the New Zealand priestess, Meriana Kapur. It was ages since she’d seen the Maori woman, whose cult took the Gaia concept rather literally. But then, so had Jen during one phase.
“Here it is, Professor.”
Ramanujan vanished again, leaving a totally transformed message in his place.
A totally innocuous message, as well. What she read now consisted of a rambling series of disconnected reminiscences… some the two women had experienced together, long ago, and some clearly made up. Jen noticed that none of the sentences were even highlighted. Her semantic-content program couldn’t find a single explicit statement to set in bold!
But then, gradually, she smiled. Of course. This isn’t senility, it’s diamond blade sharpness! There are ciphers within ciphers. Codes within codes.
Apparently, Auntie Kapur wanted to be sure only Jen understood this message. Certainly no busybody hacker’s automatic snooping program would sort meaning out of this, not without the shared context of two women who had lived a very long time.
Vagueness can be an art in itself.
Jen’s smile faded when it began dawning on her how seriously the Maori priestess took this. The precautions began to make sense as glimmerings of meaning penetrated.
“… I’m afraid Mama’s unexpected ulcer has only one possible cure. Repairing the hole requires drastic measures… but the regular doctors would only interfere if they knew. (We think they originally caused the problem.)…”
There were more passages like that. Hints and allusions. Was Meriana saying the world itself was in danger? A danger worse than the big power nuclear standoff of long ago?
A passing reference was missed until her third reading. Then Jen realized Kapur was referring to her grandson.
Alex? But what could he be involved in that could pose such a threat to…
Jen gasped. Oh, that bloody boy. This time he must really have done it!
Nobody with any sense kept confidential notes on a computer. So from a desk drawer she took out an expensive pad of real paper and a pencil. Carefully this time, Jen went through her friend’s letter line by line, jotting references and probable meanings. It wasn’t any form of code-breaking a machine could perform, more like the ancient Freudian art of analyzing free associations, a sleuthing through the subjective world of impressions and wild guesses. A very human sort of puzzle, thousands of years older than the discrete patternings of cybernetics.
Exactly what is it they want of me? Jen wondered what she, an old woman, could do to help Auntie and Alex in a situation as dire as this. Finally, though, it became clear. Africa. Ndebele Canton… Meriana heard of my visit there. She thinks I can help get them in. Secretly.
Jen sat back, amazed. Secretly? These days?
The idea was absurd.