Soon, she told those who prayed electronically. Soon you’ll have release from all these worries that beset you.
Soon you shall know truth.
PART X
PLANET
Portrait of the Earth at night.
Even across its darkside face, the newborn planet glowed. Upwelling magma broke its thin crust, and meteor strikes lit the shaded hemisphere. Later, after the world ocean formed, its night tides glistened under the moon’s pearly sheen. For most of the next two thousand million years, ruptures glowed beneath the broad waters, and lightning offset the glistening phosphorescence of emerging life.
The next phase, lasting nearly as long, featured growing continents traced by strings of fiery volcanoes. Eventually, huge convection cells slowed the granite promenade. And yet. Earth’s night grew brighter still. For now life draped the land with vast forests, and the air was rich with oxygen. So flamelight illumined a valley here, a meadow there… sometimes an entire plain.
Within the very latest time-sliver, tiny campfires appeared — minuscule threats to evening’s reign. Yet sometimes curving scythes of grassland blazed as hunters drove panicky beasts toward precipices.
Then, quite suddenly, dim smudges told of the next innovation — towns. And when electrons were harnessed, man’s cities blossomed into glittering jewels. Nightside brightened rapidly. Oil drillers flared off natural gas just
to make easier their suckling of deep petroleum. Fishing lights rimmed shorelines. Settlers lay torch to rain forests. Strings of strobing, pinpoint brilliance traced shipping lanes and air corridors.
There were dark wells, also. The Sahara. Tibet. The Kalahari. In fact, the black zones grew. The methane flares flickered and went out. So did the fishing lights.
Cities, too, damped their extravagance. While their sprawl continued to spread, the former neon dazzle passed away like a memory of adolescence. The effervescent show wasn’t quite over, but it seemed to be waning. As night moved back in, any audience could tell the finale would come soon.
But turn the dial. Look at the planet’s surface, at night — in radio waves.
Brilliance! Blazing glory. The Earth seared. It shone brighter than the sun.
Perhaps it wasn’t over yet, after all.
Not quite.
□ Nation states are archaic leftovers from when each man feared the tribe over the hill, an attitude we can’t afford anymore. Look at how governments are reacting to this latest mess — yammering mysterious accusations at each other while keeping the public ignorant by mutual agreement. Something’s got to be done before the idiots wreck us all!
Have you heard the net talk about mass civil disobedience? Sheer chaos, of course. Not even Buddhists or NorA ChuGas can organize on such short notice. So it’s just happening, all by itself! Yesterday Han tried to stop it… ordered all Chinese net-links shut down, and found they couldn’t! Too many alternate routings and ways to slip around choke points. The severed links just got rerouted.
So are the nation states paying heed? Hell, no. They’re just doing what nationals always do — hunkering down. They say be patient. They’ll tell us all about it on Tuesday. Right!
I say it’s time to get rid of them, once and for all!
Only one problem, what do we replace them with?
• CRUST
Crat’s weighted boots were so hard to lift, he had to shuffle across the ocean bottom, kicking muddy plumes that settled slowly in his wake. Occasionally, a ray or some other muck-dwelling creature sensed his clunking approach and took off from its hiding place. Still, all told, there was a lot less to see down here than he’d imagined.
Of course this wasn’t one of the great coral reserves or shelf fisheries, where schools of hake and cod still teemed under the watchful eyes of UNEPA guardians. One of Crat’s instructors told him most of the ocean had always been pretty empty. And yet there was another obvious reason he met so little life down here.
What a junkyard, he thought while moving at a steady pace. I never figured a place so big could turn into such a sty.
He’d seen so much man-made garbage in just the last hour… from rusting buckets and cans and a corroded mop handle to at least a dozen plastic bags, drifting like trademarked jellyfish, advertising discount stores and tourist shops thousands of miles away.
And then there was that kilometer-wide spew of organic refuse looking like a half-digested meal some immense creature had recently voided. Crat knew who that creature was — the Sea State floating town, which had passed this way only a little while before. Despite their nominal agreement to abide by UNEPA rules, clearly the poor folk of the barges had more urgent things to worry about than where their rubbish went. After all, the ocean seemed willing to take everything dumped into it, with nary a complaint.
The towns must leave trails like this everywhere, Crat realized. It was gross. But then, what choice did they have? The rich may worry about garbage disposal, but when you’re poor your concern is getting food.
Which raised another curious question. Why was the barge-city sticking around in this area when the fishing was so poor? Crat suspected it had to do with the Company, which seemed intensely interested in this bit of continental shelf and presumably wanted to keep the floating town around as a base of operations.
Or as a cover? Crat wondered. But he had no idea how to follow up on that thought. Anyway, presumably the company men paid well for the privilege. Hard currency was hard currency, and curiosity generally a waste of time.
“Okay Courier Four. Now take a heading of niner zero degrees.”
“Roger control,” he answered, checking his compass and changing course. “Niner zero degrees.”
Crat liked talking like an astronaut to the company comm guys. Sure, the smelly suit must have been retired as unfit for human use long ago. And it was hard work just lifting your feet to take each step. But the job had its moments. Like when the trainers actually seemed pleased and impressed with his education! That was a complete first for Crat.
Of course countless Sea State citizens were innately smarter, and some had much better learning. But few of those were likely to volunteer for such dangerous work. The company men spoke of his being “uniquely well qualified” for the job.
Imagine that. He’d never been well qualified for anything in his life! I guess lots of good things can come your way, if you don’t give a damn how long you live.
“Courier Four, cut respiration rate to thirty per minute. Slow down if you have to. Site Thirteen needs your cargo for backup, but they don’t expect you early.”
“Aye aye.” He measured his pace more carefully. Crat had decided he wanted this job after all. And that meant getting known as a team player. Another milestone for him.
During his first week they’d put him through exhaustive and exhausting tests… like barochambers, flooding in different gases and examining his hand-eye coordination under pressure. Then there were chem-sensitivity exams and psych profiles he was sure he’d fail, but which, apparently, he passed.
The company was engaged in a big enterprise here in the ocean southwest of Japan. Crat found out just how big when he was moved to an underwater base bustling with tech types — Japanese, Siberian, Korean, and others. There was talk of surveying and tapping nearby veins of valuable ores, a much more ambitious enterprise than just collecting manganese nodules from the open seabed. Obviously, the company was planning ahead for when nodules became scarce and therefore “protected.”