In the first few years, before the fusion glows began to fade, the experts made their measurements and their predictions: Earth life-forms would not return to the Virgin’s Navel for more than a millennium.
They had been wrong, outrageously wrong. The first seeds had germinated in less than a decade. Within a generation, crocuses were blooming along the Navel’s steep banks and within the deep, damp floor.
And yet in some ways the experts had been vindicated. Today the Virgin teemed with its own plants and animals.
But no birds sang, no bees buzzed, no coyotes howled. The purple-veined crocuses, their blossoms reaching taller than a tall man, were all carnivorous. Life at the Virgin’s Navel was abundant; but it was silent and fierce, and it felt alien to Earth.
The camera scanned steadily across the rugged landscape. Mondrian looked on silently, while Tatty shuddered again at the scene that she had recorded, at plants stunted or grossly overblown; at misshapen animals that parodied Nature.
At last Mondrian spoke. “Did you know that you can see the outline of The Virgin from the Moon? I don’t think it’s the color of the ground. It must be the altered vegetation.”
His voice was calm. Tatty cut short the presentation. Much more of that scene, and Mondrian would have to use the anesthetic on her.
She moved to another one of her private hates. Mondrian had recalled being taken to the Antarctic when he was little more than a baby. He had unpleasant memories of it. So had Tatty, but hers were recent. The travel guides spoke only of the bursting polar summer, with the new hybrid grains running their full course from germination to harvest in less than thirty days of twenty-four-hour light. Tatty had come away with different visions. Of savage winds, age-old ice, and cruel black water lapping at the edge of the ice cap. Beyond the surf the killer whales waited, until the current crop of frozen corpses whose storage payments had not been made were brought from the frigid Antarctic catacombs and dropped into the dark water. To the orcas, humans were nothing more than a frozen, or occasionally clumsy and noisy, form of seal.
Her images did not catch that. The corpse drops were made when no observers were present. But she knew that they happened, and her recordings did catch to perfection the desperate haste of the short summer, as Nature raced to fill a complete cycle of seasons in a few short weeks of continuous sun. The rate of plant growth was so fast, it created an illusion of time-lapse photography.
Mondrian watched, as the field of view scanned across a great flock of emperor penguins standing at the water’s edge. Still he seemed fully relaxed. “If you don’t like it there now,” — he had seen the expression of Tatty’s face — “you ought to go there in winter. Can you imagine the life of one of those birds? They mate when it s a hundred below. Then they stand right there through the blizzards, balancing the egg on their feet.”
Tatty gave him an angry glare as the display left Antarctica. Mondrian seemed to be enjoying himself.
She moved on to Patagonia. To her surprise, that far-off tip of South America had proved to be fascinating, her second favorite of the dozen places she had visited. When Mondrian first told her what he needed it sounded like an impossible job, hundreds of millions of square kilometers to be surveyed.
He had — as usual — persuaded her that she was wrong. For although the centuries-long exodus from Earth had provided a safety valve against population growth, it had never been quite enough. Those left behind could always breed faster than people could leave. As most of the planet gradually became more densely peopled, it also became more homogeneous. There was no need for Tatty to make recordings of BigSyd or Ree-o-dee, because in all essentials they were identical to Bosny or to Delmarva Town. Mondrian’s wilderness memories could not be hiding there.
The only remaining candidates were the equatorial and polar reservations, plus a few other areas of Earth that were still sparsely populated for other reasons. The Kingdom of the Winds, which Tatty was showing now, was a good example. People could live there, in the bleak Patagonian shadow of the Andes; but few would choose to. The west winds that blew with incessant gale force from the cold mountain peaks created a psychological vacuum. Every generation the area was settled; every generation the settlements were abandoned after a few years.”
But this too was not the source of Mondrian’s trauma. He stared at the wind-scoured landscape without enjoyment, but also without emotion. Tatty studied his impassive face. Couldn’t he see the beauty, of dark mountain lakes, of tangled forests of cypress, redwood, and Antarctic beech? Apparently not. She reluctantly moved on to the next location.
She had little hope for this one. She had never visited the great African game preserves before, but what she had seen on her recent trip had captivated her completely. She could not imagine this as a source of horror for any visitor.
Here was mankind’s first home. Earth’s remaining large herbivores and carnivores still lived here in natural conditions, grazing and prowling as they had for millions of years, except for one difference: their control implants made them harmless to humans.
Tatty had wandered on foot for many hours, savoring and recording the sights, sounds, and smells of the open plain. She loved to watch the herds break and wheel across the dusty ground as they responded to real or imagined danger. This was lightyears away from life in the Gallimaufries, a wonderful therapy after her confinement on Horus. She had brought no Paradox with her, and for the first time in years she had not craved it.
Mondrian did not seem to share her pleasure. He was lolling in his chair, apparently half-asleep as the images roamed back and forth across the rolling ground. Tatty prepared to move on to another region, but recalled that one of her own favorite memories was captured in a shot that came just a few seconds later on the recording.
“Watch this,” she said. “Here it comes. Ngorongoro Crater — isn’t that spectacular?” The display showed a majestic volcanic peak with the evening sun behind it. The broad red face of Sol was already on the horizon, sinking rapidly to an equatorial sunset. The great plain of Serengeti and the reservation lay beyond, dusty green and tan in the fading light.
“Beautiful!” said Tatty. She watched, as daylight bled away into a purple dusk, then turned at last to Mondrian. He was rigid in his chair, limbs trembling. She saw the protruding eyes and straining, swollen-veined countenance, and grabbed for the anesthetic.
It was not necessary. Before she could pull out the phial Esro Mondrian uttered a terrified whimper. While she watched, the spasm ended. He sighed, and sank low into the chair.
His eyes flickered once, and slowly closed; Mondrian slept. Tatty stood alone within the little circle of light, wondering what she was getting herself into. Her heart was racing, and she was perspiring profusely. At this depth in the basement warrens the circulators and coolers did little more than make the air marginally breathable.
She held the light higher and stared around her. This had to be the right place. But she was nowhere. She stood halfway down a long, deserted corridor, with no side branches visible in front or behind her.
Tatty bent her head to check the Tracker reading one more time. It was showing exactly zero. The little red trace arrow had disappeared. It was useless! And when she started out she had imagined that she was being so clever and cunning.
Mondrian had taken over an hour to emerge from his catatonic trance — an hour during which his pulse had slowed almost to zero, and she had been forced to inject adrenalin and powerful heart-stimulants. As soon as he became conscious he would not stay, would not even wait to recuperate. He grabbed the recordings that she had made and struggled to the apartment door. He looked like a corpse, but he would not say where he was going — not even when she did what she had never done, lost her temper, and shouted and stormed at him.