And yet, Jen knew many for whom this was more than a mere statement or movement. More than just a way of expressing reverence for a danger-stricken world. There were radicals for whom Gaia worship was a church militant. They saw a return of the old goddess of prehistory, at last ready to end her banishment by brutal male deities — by Zeus and Shiva and Jehovah and the warlike spirits once idolized by the Ndebele. To Gaian radicals there were no “moderate” approaches to saving Earth. Technology and the “evil male principle” were foes to be cast down.
Evil male principle, my shriveled ass. Males have their uses.
For some reason Jen thought of her grandson, whose obsessions in the twin worlds of abstraction and engineering were stereotypical of what radicals called “penis science.” It was some time since she had last heard from the boy. She wondered what Alex was up to.
Probably something terribly silly, and utterly earth-shaking if I know him.
Soon came the final act of the evening. The Cleansing. Jen smiled and touched one by one the offerings brought before her by adults and children, each presenting a wicker basket containing broken bits of mundane archaeology.
Scraps of tin… broken spark plugs… shreds of adamant, insoluble plastic… One basket was nearly filled with ancient aluminum beer cans, still shiny thirty years after they had been outlawed everywhere on Earth. Each collection was the work of one member of this community, performed in his or her spare time over many months. Each basket contained the yield given up by one square meter of soil, painstakingly and lovingly sifted till no trace of human manufacture was detectible, as deep as the individual’s time, strength, and piety allowed. In this way, each person incrementally returned a small bit of the planet to its natural state.
Only what was natural? Certainly not the land’s contours, which had been eroded and moved wholesale by human enterprise.
Not the aquifers, whose percolating waters would never be quite the same, even where antidumping was enforced and where inspectors granted the precious label “pure and untainted.” That only meant the content of heavy metals and complex petro-organics was too sparse to affect one human’s health over a normal lifespan. It certainly didn’t mean “natural.”
Especially, the word didn’t apply to that complicated living thing known as topsoil! Winnowed of countless native species, filled with invaders brought inadvertently or on purpose from other continents — from earthworms to rotifers to tiny fungi and bacteria — the loam in some places thrived and elsewhere it died, giving up its dusty substance to the winds. Microscopic victories and defeats and- stalemates were being waged in every hectare all over the globe, and nowhere could a purist say the result was “natural” at all.
Jen glanced over her left shoulder to see Kuwenezi’s lambent towers. The main ark was dim, but its great glass-crystal face reflected a rippling sister to the moon. Within those artificial habitats dozed plants and animals rescued from a hundred spoiled ecosystems. To the radicals, such arks were glorified prisons — mere sops to humanity’s troubled conscience, so that nature’s slaughter could go on.
To Jen, though, the great arcologies weren’t jails, but nurseries.
Change can’t be prevented, only guided.
The radicals were right about one thing, of course. What finally emerged from those glass towers, someday, wouldn’t be the same as what had gone in. Jen’s public statements — that she did not find that in itself tragic — ensured continued hate mail, even death threats, from followers of a sect she herself had helped found.
So be it.
Death is just another change. And when the Mother needs my phosphorus, I’ll give it up gladly.
The local denomination, of course, held that Gaia’s true complexion must be that of pure, fecund earth, and yet they seemed not to care about the paleness of her skin. As Jen lifted her arms, they carried their offerings to outsized recycling bins, waiting under the stars. When the last contribution tumbled inside, a shout of celebration rose, commemorating the salvation of several thousand square meters.
This ceremony had delightful idiosyncrasies, but it was essentially similar to others she’d officiated at, from Australia to Smolensk. In all those places, people had taken it for granted that she was an appropriate surrogate — a stand-in for Gaia herself.
Only a surrogate… Jen smiled, offering her benediction and forgiving their error. The drums resumed, and dancers rejoined their exertions. But for a moment Jen watched the torchlight play across the faces and the glass towers beyond.
Modern folk, you pay homage to the Mother as a “parable.” And I am but a stand-in, tonight, for an abstract idea.
Well, we shall see about that, my children. We shall see.
She had planted seeds during her visit. Some would germinate, perhaps even flower into action.
The young man in the bandages appeared again. She saw him seated across the arena, his baboon companions resting against his knees. He nodded back as she smiled at him, and Jen had a sudden, clear recollection of his final question, yesterday afternoon in the lecture hall.
“You talk about a lot of possibilities Doctor Wolling…” he had said. “Maybe we could do some of those things… or even all o’ them, eh?
“But won’t we also have to give up somethin’ in return? They say there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. So what’ll it cost us, Doctor?”
Jen remembered thinking, What a bright boy. He understood that nothing was ever easy, which her own grandson never seemed to grasp, no matter how often the world smacked poor Alex in the head.
No, Jen thought. Humanity may have to give up more than a little, if the Earth is to be saved. We may, in the end, find the old gods were right after all. That nothing worthwhile comes without a sacrifice.
Jen smiled at the boy, at all of them. She opened her arms, blessing the dancers, the audience, the animals in the arks, and the ravaged countryside.
That sacrifice, my children, may turn out to be ourselves.
PART III
PLANET
The newborn world liquefied under pummeling asteroid impacts. Heavy elements sank, generating still more heat, and a dowry of radioactive atoms kept the planet’s interior warm even after the surface cooled and hardened.
Eventually, the inmost core crystallized under intense pressure, but the next layer remained a swirling metal fluid, a vast electric dynamo. Higher still congealed a mantle of semisolid minerals — superdense pyroxenes and olivines and lighter melts that squeezed up crustal cracks to spill forth from blazing volcanoes.
Heat drove the circulating convection cells, jostled the plates, drove the fields. Heat built continents and made the Earth throb.
Heat also kept some water molten at the surface. Preorganic vapors sloshed in solution, under lightning and fierce sunbeams…
The process started taking on a life of its own.
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A range of minor mountains divides the city of Los Angeles. During the city’s carefree youth, great battalions of trucks streamed toward the little valleys between those hills, brimming with kilotons of urban garbage.