A woman stood up, sixtyish, black. Joan knew her. Evelyn Smith was one of the premier evolutionary biologists of her time. Smith said coldly, “Natural selection has not been operating on human populations for some tens of millennia. Claims that it has show a lack of understanding of the basic mechanism. We fend off the winnowing processes that drive selection: Our weapons have eliminated predators, agricultural development has beaten back starvation, and so on. But this will change if the imminent collapse occurs. In that case, selection will return. This is the subject of my paper in Session Three, incidentally.”

There were some protests.

“…what ‘imminent collapse’?”

“…for all its surface brilliance, our society shows symptoms of decline: growing inequality, declining returns from economic expansion, collapsing educational standards and intellectual achievement.”

“…yes, and spiritual death. Even we Americans pay only lip service to totems — the flag, the Constitution, democracy — while we surrender power over our lives to the corporations and comfort ourselves with mysticism and muddle. It’s happened before. The parallels with Rome especially are very clear…”

“…except that now we’re all joined up, all over the world. If we do collapse, there might be nothing much left to un-collapse out of.”

“…absurdly pessimistic. We’re resilient — we achieved great things before…”

“We dug out all the easy ores and burnt all the easy oil and coal; if we did fall, we’d have nothing to build from…”

“My point,” said Smith doggedly, “is that we may not have much time.”

These words, softly spoken, briefly silenced everybody, and Joan saw her opportunity.

She said dryly, “So I guess that if we don’t want to go back to the bad old days of being just another animal in the ecology, we need to get a hold of this mess. But I think there’s a way we can do that.” Absently stroking her belly, she smiled. “A new way. But a way we’ve known about all along. A primate way.”

And she began to outline her vision.

Human culture, Joan said, had been an adaptation to help people live through the wild climate swings of the Pleistocene. Now, in a savage millennial irony, that culture was feeding back to cause still more drastic environmental damage. Culture, which had once been so profoundly adaptive, had become maladaptive, and would have to change.

“Life isn’t just about competition,” she said. “It’s also about cooperation. Interdependence. It always has been. The first cells depended on the cooperation of simpler bacteria. So did the first ecologies, the stromatolites. Now, our lives are so interdependent that they must, in the future, develop with a common purpose.”

“You’re just talking about globalization. What corporation is sponsoring you?”

“We’re back to Gaia and other Earth goddesses, aren’t we?”

Joan said, “Our global society is becoming so highly structured that it is becoming something akin to a holon: a single, composite entity. We have to learn to think of ourselves in that way. We have to build on the other half of our primate natures — the part that isn’t about competition and xenophobia. Primates cooperate a lot more than they compete. Chimps do; lemurs do; pithecines and erectus and Neandertals must have; we do. Human interdependence comes from our deepest history. Now, without anybody planning it, we have engulfed the biosphere, and we have to learn to manage it together.”

Alison Scott stood again. “What exactly is it you want, Joan?”

“A manifesto. A statement. A cosigned letter to the UN, from all of us. We have to give a lead, start something new. We have to start showing the path to a sustainable future. Who else but us?”

“Hoorah, we can save the world…”

“She’s right. Gaia will be not our mother, but our daughter.”

“What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before. This is pie in the sky…”

Evelyn Smith said, “They’ll listen if they are desperate enough.”

Alyce Sigurdardottir stood up. “Confucius said, ‘Those who say it cannot be done need to get out of the way of the people who are doing it.’ ” She raised her thin fist in a power salute. “We’re still primates — only more so. Right?”

Despite a few catcalls, Joan thought she saw a warmer response in the faces ranked before her. It’s going to work, she thought. It’s just a start, but it’s going to work. We can fix this. She stroked her belly.

In fact she was right; it might have worked.

The political and economic pressures might indeed have induced a receptivity in the global power brokers that hadn’t existed before. Joan Useb’s ideas could indeed have shown how to ally the interconnections offered by technology with older primate instincts of cooperation. And it might have gone beyond mere ecological management. After all no species before had had the potential to be linked globally, not in four billion years of life on Earth. Given time, Joan’s approach might have inspired a cognitive breakthrough as significant as the integration of Mother’s generation.

Humans had become smart enough to damage their planet. Now, just given a little more time, they might have become smart enough to save it.

Just a little more time.

But now the lights went out. There were explosions, like great footfalls. People screamed and ran.

Meanwhile, over Rabaul, the earthquakes had gotten increasingly severe. At last they cracked the seabed above Rabaul’s magma chamber. The magma was rising to the surface through great tunnels, some of them three hundred meters wide. Now seawater rushed into the tunnels and flashed instantly to steam. Meanwhile, other gases, carbon dioxide and sulfur compounds that had been kept dissolved in the magma by the higher pressure of the depths, like the carbon dioxide in a bottle of soda. But now the bottle was cracked, and the gases came bubbling out.

In the rock chambers, the pressure escalated exponentially.

Emergency lights came on, filling the room with a cold glow.

The false ceiling had broken up into polystyrene shards that hailed down on the fleeing attendees. Joan saw Alison Scott grab her two girls and huddle with them in a corner. The exposed roof space, filled with insulation-lagged ducts and cables, was cavernous, dark, dirty.

Fine nylon ropes tumbled down through air thick with polystyrene dust. She glimpsed black-clad shapes that moved, spiderlike, through the roof space, and slid down to the bar’s littered floor. They wore skintight black coveralls and balaclava hoods with silvery eye visors. She counted five, six, seven of them. She couldn’t tell if they were male or female. They all carried slim automatic weapons.

Alyce Sigurdardottir was tugging at her arm, trying to make her climb down from her table. But she resisted, aware that she was still the center here; she felt, maybe irrationally, that things would get even worse if she gave in to the chaos.

One of the invaders looked to be in command. On the floor, the others gathered around him as he surveyed the situation. He, she? No, he, Joan thought; in a group like this, it will be a he. Two of the intruders stayed with the leader. The other four made for the doors. With their backs to the walls they trained their weapons on the delegates, who herded, sheeplike, toward the center of the room.

There was only one hotel staff member here: the barman, the young Australian who had caught Alyce’s eye. He was slim, with curly black hair — at least part Aborigine, Joan thought — and he wore a bow tie and sparkling vest. Now, with great courage, he stepped forward, hands spread. “Listen,” he began. “I don’t know what you want here. But if you will let me call—”

The gun’s sound was quiet, oddly like a leopard’s cough, Joan thought absently. The boy fell, twitching. There was a sudden stink of death shit, a smell she hadn’t encountered since Africa. The delegates screamed, fell back, froze, as they each in their separate ways sought not to attract the attention of the murderers.