To Sandra, again. And to the rest of us, in hope of long perspectives

As the plane descended toward Darwin it ran into a cloud of billowing black smoke. The windows suddenly darkened, blocking out the Australasian summer light, and the engines whined.

Joan had been talking quietly to Alyce Sigurdardottir. But now she shifted in her seat, the belt uncomfortably tight across her bulge. This was a roomy, civilized airplane, with even the economy seats set in blocks of four or six around little tables, quite unlike the cattle truck conditions Joan remembered from a childhood spent traveling around the world with her paleontologist mother. In the year 2031, a time of troubles, not so many people traveled, and those who did were granted a little more comfort.

Suddenly, as danger brushed by, she was aware of where she was, the people around her.

Joan watched the girl sitting opposite Alyce and herself. The girl, aged around fourteen at a guess, with a silvery gadget stuck in her ear, had been viewing tabletop images of the toiling Mars lander. Even here, ten thousand meters above the Timor Sea, she was connected to the electronic web that united half the planet’s population, immersed in noise and shining, dancing images. Her hair was pale blue — aquamarine, perhaps. And her eyes were bright orange red, the color of the Martian dust that filled up the smart tabletop. Doubtless she featured many other genetic “improvements” less visible, Joan thought sourly. Cocooned in her own expanded consciousness the girl had not even registered the presence of the two middle-aged women sitting opposite her — nothing save for a slight widening of the eyes at Joan’s figure when she had sat down, a reaction which Joan could read like a book: Somebody so old got pregnant? Yuck…

But as the plane labored through the cluttered sky, the girl had turned to gaze out of the obscured window, distracted from her high-technology bubble, and the flawless skin of her brow was slightly furrowed. The girl looked scared — as well she might, Joan thought; all her genriched perfection wouldn’t help her a bit if this plane fell out of the sky. Joan felt an odd touch of meanness, envy wholly inappropriate in a woman of thirty-four. Be an adult, Joan. Everybody needs human contact, genriched or not. Isn’t that the whole point of your conference, that human contact is going to save us all?

Joan leaned forward and reached out her hand. “Are you all right, dear?”

The girl flashed a smile, showing teeth so white they all but glowed. “I’m fine. It’s just, you know, the smoke.” Her accent was nasal U.S. West Coast.

“Forest fires,” Alyce Sigurdardottir said, her leathery face creased into a smile. The primatologist was a slender woman of about sixty, but she looked older than that, her face deeply lined. “That’s all it is. The seasonal fires in Indonesia, and the Australian east coast; they last for months now, every year.”

“Oh,” the girl said, not really reassured. “I thought it might be Rabaul.”

Joan said, “You know about that?”

“Everybody knows about it,” the girl said, a hint of dummy in her intonation. “It’s a huge volcanic caldera in Papua New Guinea. Just to the north of Australia, right? It’s suffered minor earthquakes and eruptions every two years or so for the past century. And in the last couple of weeks there have been Richter one earthquakes like every day.”

“You’re well informed,” Alyce said.

“I like to know what I’m flying into.”

Joan nodded, suppressing a smile. “Very wise. But Rabaul hasn’t suffered a major eruption in more than a thousand years. It would be a little unlucky if it were to come just when you happen to be within a few hundred kilometers, uh—”

“I’m Bex. Bex Scott.”

Bex — for Rebecca? — Scott. Of course. Alison Scott was one of the conference’s more high-profile attendees, a very media-friendly genetic programmer with a brace of beautifully engineered daughters. “Bex, the gunk outside the window really is from the forest fires. We aren’t in any danger.”

Bex nodded, but Joan could see that under her bluster she wasn’t reassured.

“Well,” Joan said brightly, “if we are all going to get crisped in a volcanic caldera, we ought to get to know each other first. My name’s Joan Useb. I’m a paleontologist.”

Bex said brightly, “A fossil hunter?”

“Near enough. And this lady—”

“My name’s Alyce Sigurdardottir.” Alyce extended a slim hand. “I’m pleased to meet you, Bex.”

“Sorry, but your names are kind of strange,” Bex said, staring.

Joan shrugged. “Useb is a San name — or an anglicized version; the real thing is pretty much unpronounceable. My family has deep roots in Africa, very deep roots.”

“And I,” said Alyce, “had an American father and an Icelandic mother. A military romance. Long story.”

Joan said, “We live in a mixed-up world. Humans have always been a wandering species. Names and genes scattered all over the place.”

Bex frowned at Alyce. “I know your name, I think. Chimpanzees?”

Alyce nodded. “I took over some of Jane Goodall’s work.”

Joan said, “Alyce is one of a long line of prominent female primatologists. I always wondered why women did so well in the field.”

Alyce smiled. “Isn’t that stereotyping, Joan? But, well, primate behavioral studies in the wild take — took — decades of observation, because that’s how long the animals themselves take to live out their lives. So you need patience, and an ability to observe without interfering. Maybe those are female traits. Or maybe it was just nice to get away from all the usual male hierarchies in academia. The forest is a lot more civilized.”

“Still,” Joan said, “it’s a powerful tradition. Goodall, Birute Galdikas, Dian Fossey.”

“I’m the last of a dying breed.”

“Like your chimps,” said Bex, with surprising brutality. She smiled at their silence. “They’re all gone from the forests now, aren’t they? Wiped out by climate change.”

Alyce shook her head. “No, actually. It was the bushmeat trade.” Briefly she told Bex how, toward the end, she had worked in Cameroon, as the loggers had worked their way out into the virgin rain forest, and the hunters had followed.

“Wasn’t it illegal?” Bex asked. “I thought all those old species were protected.”

“Of course it was illegal. But bushmeat was money. Oh, the locals had always taken apes. A gorilla was prestige meat; if your father-in-law visited, you couldn’t give him chicken. But when the European loggers arrived, it got much worse. Bushmeat actually became a faddish food.”

The black hole theory of extinction, Joan thought: all life, everything, ultimately disappears into the black holes in the centers of human faces. But what next? Will we keep on eating our way out through the great tree of life until there’s nothing left but us and the blue-green algae?

“But,” said Bex reasonably, “there are still chimps and gorillas in the zoos, right?”

“Not all the species made it,” Alyce said. “Even the populations we did save, like the common chimps, don’t breed well in captivity. Too smart for that. Look: The chimps are our closest surviving relatives. In the wild they lived in families. They used tools. They mounted wars. Kanzi, the chimp who learned a little sign language, was a bonobo chimp. Did you ever hear of her? And now the bonobos are extinct. Extinct. That means gone forever. How can we understand ourselves if we never understood them?”