It was all so incongruous, Teresa nearly laughed out loud. What stopped her was the look in his eyes. They weren’t the eyes of a babbler.
He knows something, she realized. Then — He knows something about Erehwon!
Manella was implying her phone line might be tapped. Furthermore, he was clearly making assumptions about the level of observation. Trained surveillance agents would find his sign language ruse ludicrously transparent. But the charade would probably fool most context-sensitive monitoring devices or agency flacks drafted to listen to the predictably boring conversations of a bus driver like herself. It would also get by any random eavesdropping hacker from the Net.
“All right.” She waved a hand to stop him in mid-sentence. “I’ve heard enough, Mr. Manella, and I’m not interested. You’ll have to go through channels like everybody else. Now, good-bye.”
The display went blank just as he seemed about to remonstrate. He was a good actor, too. For it was only in those brown eyes that she saw confirmation of her own hand signs. Signs by which she had answered: MAYBE I’LL RESPOND SOON.
She would think about it. But why does Manella imagine I’d be monitored in the first place? And what is it he wants to tell me?
It had to be about Erehwon… about the calamity. Her heart rate climbed.
At which point she’d had quite enough of this emotional rebellion by her body. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, closed her eyes, and sought the calm-triggers taught to her in high school — laying cooling blankets over her thoughts, using biofeedback to drain away the tension. Whatever was happening, whatever Manella had to say, no good would come of letting ancient fight-flight reactions sweep her away. Cavemen might not have had much use for patience, but it was a pure survival trait in the world of their descendants.
Inhaling deeply, she turned away from the travails of consciousness. Vivaldi joined the chirping bluebirds in an unnoticed background as she sought the center, wherein she always knew when and where she was.
This time though, she couldn’t quite be sure that it — the center — was still there anymore at all.
After he succeeded in separating Sky-Father from Earth-Mother, giving their offspring room at last to stand and breathe, the forest god, Tane, looked about and saw that something else was lacking. Only creatures of ira atua — the spirit way — moved upon the land. But what could spirit entities ever be without ira tangata, mortal beings, to know them? Nothing.
So Tane attempted to bring mortal life to the world. But of all the female spirits with whom he mated, only one possessed ira tangata. She was Hine-titama, Dawn Maid. Daughter and wife of Tane, she became mother of all mortal beings.
Later, after the world had been given life, Hine-titama turned away from the surface, journeying deep into the realms below. There she became Hine-nui-te-po, Great Lady of Darkness, who waits to tend and comfort the dead after their journey down Whanui a Tane, the broad road.
There she waits for you, and for you too. Our first mortal ancestor, she sleeps below waiting for us all.
• CORE
On his way back to Auckland after two days at the Tarawera Geothermal Works, Alex found himself en-snared in tourist traffic at Rotorua. Buses and minivans threaded the resort’s narrow ways, hauling Australian families on holiday, gushing Sinhalese newlyweds, serene-looking Inuit investors, and Han — the inevitable swell of black-haired Han — nudging and whispering in close-packed mobs that overflowed the pavements and lawns, thronging and enveloping anything that might by any stretch be quaint or “native.”
Most shops bore signs in International Ideogramatic Chinese, as well as English, Maori, and Simglish. And why not? The Han were only the latest wave of nouveau moyen to suddenly discover tourism. And if they engulfed all the beaches and scenic spots within four thousand kilometers of Beijing, they also paid well for their hard-earned leisure.
Yet more Chinese piled off flywheel buses just ahead of Alex’s little car, wearing garish sunhats and True-Vu goggles that simultaneously protected the eyes and recorded for posterity every kitsch purchase from friendly concessionaires touting “genuine” New Zealand native woodcraft.
Well, it’s their turn, Alex thought, nursing patience. And it surely does beat war.
Kiwi autumn was still warm and breezy, so he had the side window down. The smell of hydrogen sulfide from the geysers was pungent, but not too noticeable after all his time working underground with George Hutton’s people. Waiting for traffic to clear, Alex watched another silvery cruise zeppelin broach a tree-lined pass and settle toward the busy aerodrome at the edge of town. Even from here he made out the crowds crammed into steerage, faces pressed against windows to peer down at Rotorua’s steamy volcanic pools.
A decade or two hence it might be the new bourgeois of Burma or Morocco who packed the great junket liners, taking advantage of cheap zep travel to swarm abroad in search of armloads of cheap souvenirs and canned memories. By then of course, the Han would have grown used to it all. They’d be sophisticated individual travelers, like the Japanese and Malays and Turks, who avoided frantic mobs and snickered at the gaucheries of first-generation tourists.
That was the curious nature of the “mixed miracle.” For as the world’s nations scrimped and bickered over dwindling resources, sometimes scrapping violently over river rights and shifting rains, its masses meanwhile enjoyed a rising tide of onetime luxuries — made necessary by that demon Expectation.
—Pure water cost nearly as much as your monthly rent. At the same time, for pocket change you could buy disks containing a thousand reference books or a hundred hours of music.
—Petrol was rationed on a need-only basis and bicycles choked the world’s cities. Yet resorts within one day’s zep flight were in reach to even humble wage earners.
—Literacy rates climbed every year, and those with full-reliance cards could self-prescribe any known drug. But in most states you could go to jail for throwing away a soda bottle.
To Alex the irony was that nobody seemed to find any of it amazing. Change had this way of sneaking up on you, one day at a time.
“Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid.”
That was how his grandmother had put it, once. And she ought to know. Everyone praised Jen Wolling for her brilliant foresight. But one day she had shown him her scorecard from the World Predictions Registry. After twenty-five years of filing prognostications with the group, her success rating was a mere sixteen percent! And that was better than three times the WPR average.
“People tend to get dramatic when they talk about the future. When I was young, there were optimists who foresaw personal spacecraft and immortality in the twenty-first century… while pessimists looked at the same trends and foretold collapse into worldwide famine and war.
“Both forecasts are still being made, Alex, with the deadlines always pushed back one decade, then another and another. Meanwhile, people muddle through. Some things get better, some a lot worse. Strangely enough, the future’ never does seem to arrive. ”
Of course Jen didn’t know everything. She had never suspected, for instance, that tomorrow could come abruptly, decisively, in the shape of a microscopic, titanically heavy fold of twisted space…