Surrendering at last, he flung aside the tent flap and entered to read the damned message. He remained inside for some time.
Emerging at last, Logan saw that Claire had already packed away the utensils and was dismantling her own small shelter under the early stars. He blinked, wondering how she knew.
“Where’s the trouble?” she asked, as she rolled the soft fabric tent into a tight ball.
“Uh… Spain. There were some strange earthquakes. A couple of dams may be in danger.”
She looked up, excitement in her eyes. “Can I come? It won’t interrupt my schoolwork. I can study by hyper.”
Once again, Logan wondered what fine thing he must have done to deserve a kid like this. “Maybe next time. This’ll be just a quick dash. Probably they just want reassurance, so I’ll hold their hands a while and then hurry back.”
“But Daddy…”
“Meanwhile, you’ve got to spend a lot of time on the Net, catching up, or that college in Oregon could revoke your remote status. Do you want to have to go back to high school? At home in Louisiana? In person?”
Claire shivered. “High school. Ugh. All right. Next time, then. So get your gear; I’ll take care of your tent. If we hurry we can make it to Drop Point by eight and catch the last zep into Butte.”
She grinned. “Hey. It’ll be fun. I’ve never done a three point five traverse in the dark before. Maybe it’ll even be scary.”
A dust wafts through the hills and valleys of Iceland.
The people of the island nation sweep it from their porches.
They wipe it from their windows. And they try not to scowl when tourists exclaim, pointing in delight at the red and orange twilight glow cast by suspended topsoil, scattering the setting sun.
Stalwart Northmen originally settled the land, whose rough democracy lasted longer than any other. For most of twelve centuries their descendants disproved the lie that says liberty must always be lost to aristocrats or demagogues.
It was a noble and distinguished heritage. And yet, the founders’ principal legacy to their descendants was not that freedom, but the dust.
Whose fault was it? Would it be fair to blame ninth century settlers, who knew nothing of science or ecological management? In the press of daily life, with a family to feed, what man of such times could have foreseen that his beloved sheep were gradually destroying the very land he planned leaving to his children? Deterioration was so gradual that it went unnoticed, except in the inevitable tales of oldsters, who could be counted on to claim the hillsides had been much greener in their day.
Was there ever a time when grandparents didn’t speak so?
It took a breakthrough… a new way of thinking… for a much later generation to step back at last and see what had happened year after year, century after century, to the denuded land… a slow but steady rape by degrees.
But by then it appeared already too late.
A dust drifts through the hills and valleys of Iceland. The people of the island nation do more than simply sweep it from their porches. They show it to their children and tell them it is life floating in ghostlike hazes down the mountain slopes. It is their land.
Families adopt an acre here, a hectare there. Some have been tending the same patch since early in the twentieth century, devoting weekends to watering and shoring up some stretch of heath or gorse or scrub pine.
Pilots on commuter flights routinely open their windows and toss grass seeds over the rocky landscape, in hopes a few will find purchase.
Towns and cities reclaim the produce of their toilets, collecting sewage as if it were a precious resource. As it is. For after treatment, the soil of the night goes straight to the barren slopes, to succor surviving trees against the bitter wind.
A dust colors the clouds above the seas of Iceland.
At the island’s southern fringe, a cluster of new volcanoes spills fresh lava into the sea, sending steam spirals curling upward. Tourists gawp at the spectacle and speak in envy of the Icelanders’ “growing” land. But when natives look to the sky, they see a haze of diminishment that could not be replaced by anything as simple or vulgar as mere magma.
A dusty wind blows away the hills of Iceland. At sea, a few plankton benefit, temporarily, from the unexpected nurturance. Then, as they are wont to do, they die and their carcasses rain as sediment upon the patient ocean bottom. In time the layers will creep underground, to melt and glow and eventually burst forth again, to bring another island to life.
Short-term calamities are nothing to the master recycling system. In the end, it reuses even dust.
• BIOSPHERE
Nelson Grayson had arrived in the Ndebele canton of Kuwenezi with two changes of clothes, a satchel of stolen Whatifs, and an inflated sense of his own importance. All were gone by the time, nine months later, he gathered his tools by the Level Fourteen Ape-iary and stepped through the hissing airlock into a bitter-bright, air-conditioned savannah. By then, of course, it was far too late to regret the reckless way he’d spent the profits from his smuggled software. Too late to seek another career path.
By then, Nelson felt irrevocably committed to shoveling baboon shit for a living.
It was not a highly regarded occupation. In fact, the keepers would have assigned robots the job, if not for the monkeys’ annoying habit of nibbling plastic. As yet, robots lacked the kind of survival instincts Nelson had been born with — courtesy of a million years of frightened ancestors.
At least, each of those ancestors had survived long enough to beget another in the chain leading to him. In his former life Nelson had never given much thought to that. But of late he’d grown to appreciate the accomplishment, especially as his employers reassigned him from habitat to habitat — catering to one wild and unpredictable species after another.
Most of his first months had been spent in the sprawling main ark — Kuwenezi Canton’s chief contribution to the World Salvation Project, where scientists and volunteers recreated entire ecosystems under multi-tiered, vaulting domes, where gazelles and wildebeest ran across miniature ranges that looked and felt almost real. Nelson’s first task had been to carry fodder to the ungulates and report when any looked sick. To his surprise, it wasn’t all that hard. In fact, boredom made him ask for a more demanding job. And so they named him dung inspector.
Great. I had to open my mouth. If I ever make it home to Canada, you can bet I’ll tell them what kind of hospitality you can expect in South Africa, these days.
It was apparently no different here in ark four — a tapered wedge of steel and reinforced glass two miles from Kuwenezi’s main tower, sitting atop the canton’s long-abandoned gold mine. Ark four was the gene-crafters’ lab, where new types were sought that might endure the sleeting ultraviolet outside or adapt to the creeping deserts and shifting rains.
Nelson had nursed a fantasy that his reassignment here was a promotion. But then the director had handed him the familiar electroprod and sampler, and sent him to face more baboons.
I hate baboons! I can feel them lookin’ at me. It’s like I can tell what they’re thinking.
Nelson did not like what he imagined going on in the minds of baboons.
These monkeys were different at least. He could tell soon after pushing into sight of a copse of grey-green acacia trees, their leaves drooping in the dusty heat. Clustered beneath those gnarled limbs were about forty creatures, darker than the tawny beasts he had known in the main ark, and noticeably larger, too. They moved lazily, as sensible creatures would under the noon sun — even moderated by the expanse of reinforced glass overhead. Only idiotic humans like Dr. B’Keli insisted on work in conditions like these;