“Then there was this light. It was so bright we had to turn and look. It was down in the south… over here at the dam—”
“We don’t know it was here at the dam! We just have the evidence of our eyes to go by, and we were still getting over the colors…”
The girl ignored her irate sibling. “There were these lines, of light? They went up, into the sky… sort of like this?” She propped her elbow on one hand and gestured at an angle toward the noctilucent clouds.
Logan looked to her brother for confirmation. “Did you see lines also?”
He nodded. “Except they didn’t go up like she said. She thinks everything comes out of the Earth. Naw. The lines came down! I think—” he edged closer, conspiratorially ” — I think it’s aliens, mister. Invaders. Using big solar-powered mirrors…”
His sister whacked him on the shoulder. “You should talk about the evidence of our own eyes! Of all the stupid…”
Logan held up both hands. “Thank you both very much. Right now, though, I think your dad needs your help more than I do. Why don’t you just give the ranger your access codes, and we’ll get in touch later if we need any more information.”
They nodded earnestly. Basically good kids, Logan thought. He also felt more grateful than ever for the undeserved gift of his own sensible daughter. He could hardly remember the last time Claire’s voice had taken on that shrill, whining tone, capable of shattering glass or any adult’s peace of mind at twenty paces.
“It opened up!”
Logan turned around. The kids’ father was pointing with a shaking hand toward a starry gap in the clouds. “The sky opened up like… like my folks used to tell me it would on the day.”
“On what day, sir?”
The man looked squarely at Logan, a queer shining in his eyes. “The day of… reckoning. They used to say the heavens would open up, and terrible judgment would be delivered.”
He gestured at his offspring. “I used to scoff, like these two with their pagan gods. But lately, it’s seemed to me as if… as if…” He trailed off, glassy eyed. The two teenagers stared, their sibling conflicts instantly abandoned. At that moment they looked almost like twins.
“Daddy?” the girl said, and reached for him.
“Stay away from me!” He pushed her aside. Striding to the edge of the bluff, the man shrugged out of his fishing jacket and threw it to the ground. Then he fell to his knees, looking across the ravaged waste.
Tentatively, perhaps fearing another rejection, first the girl and then her brother followed, standing on each side of their father at the brink of the overlook. But this time, instead of pushing them away, he flung his arms around their knees and clasped them tightly. Above the wailing sirens, the growling helicopters and the still noisy crash of ebbing floodwaters, Logan clearly heard the man sob.
Hesitantly at first, the girl stroked her father’s thinning hair. Then she looked across and took her brother’s hand.
Logan found the breath tight within his chest. And suddenly he realized why.
What if the guy is right?
Perhaps not precisely. Not about the exact cause of the disturbing omen. The boy’s “aliens” were as likely as any mumbledy-jumble from the Book of Revelations.
Still, until this moment it hadn’t quite occurred to Logan just what might be at stake. Hour by hour, reports poured in through Colonel Spivey’s new database, ranging from the picayune to the catastrophic. From towering chimeras glimpsed at sea to strange tremors and dust devils out in empty deserts. To the sudden disappearance of a great dam. Each day it got steadily stranger.
This may be serious, Logan thought, and felt intensely the late northern chill.
□ Worldwide Long Range Solutions Special Interest Group [□ SIG AeR.WLRS 253787890.546].
To the astonishment of many, we’ve so far avoided the great die-back people keep talking about. New crops plus better management and a shift away from many greedy habits have helped us feed our ten billions. Barely. Most of the time.
Solutions often breed other calamities though. So it was that pundits, seeing this trend, predicted a population runaway toward twenty billion or more, until our numbers finally did bring us to the oft-predicted Precipice of Malthus.
But look. The wave is cresting. After fifty years of struggle, birth rates now appear finally under control, and UNPMA now predicts we’ll top out at thirteen billion around the year 2060. Then, slowly, it should taper off a bit. That peak may just be low enough to let us squeak by.
Will it have been modern birth control that brought us up just short of the edge? (If, in fact, we don’t topple over it yet.) Or was it something else? A new study [□ Stat.Sur. 2037.582392.285-wELt] indicates human effort may deserve less credit than we smugly believe.
While vast amounts have been spent getting half the world’s women to hold their births to one or at most two, nearly as much money now pours into research and medical aid to help the other half carry even one pregnancy to term. Causes have been proposed for this pandemic of infertility… such as women deferring child-bearing until late in life or effects inherited from the sex-crazed eighties, the cancer plagues, or drug-happy 2010s. But new research shows that pollution may have played a principal role. Chemical mutagens in the air and water, causing early spontaneous abortions, now appear to lead all other forms of contraception in the industrialized world.
To some Gaian sects, of course, this just validates their worldview, that for every immoderation there is an inevitable counter, some negative feedback to restore a balance. In this case, it isn’t we the living who are dying, as Malthus predicted. (At least not in vast numbers.) Rather, equilibrium is being restored by the stressed environment itself, culling the unborn.
It’s a cruel, unpleasant notion. But then, anyone who’s been alive and aware for any part of the last fifty years is by now used to unpleasant notions…
• HYDROSPHERE
Daisy had been snooping again.
“Dumpit!” Claire pounded the arm of her chair.
This time, her mother had gone too far. She’d installed a watchdog program right outside Claire’s own mailbox!
“Did she actually think I wouldn’t notice something like that?”
Probably. So many parents were members of the
“reality disabled” when it came to having a clear mental image of their children. Perhaps Daisy still considered
Claire a child when it came to the demanding, grownup world of the Net.
“I’ll show you,” Claire muttered as she tapped out code of her own. Oh, she knew she’d never be able to tackle
Daisy one-on-one. But it just might be possible to take advantage of her mother’s preconceived notions.
Vivisector was an object program she’d borrowed from Tony just the other day… a tasty little routine going the rounds among young hackers that disassembled other programs and put them back together again without leaving a trace — even while those programs were running. Carefully, Claire sicked Vivisector on her mother’s watchdog. Soon its guts were laid out across her inspection screen.
“So, just as I thought.” Daisy had assigned the little surrogate to pluck anything piped to Claire from Logan Eng.
“He’s not your husband anymore, Mother. Can’t you leave the poor codder alone?”
Carefully, Claire excised a core gene from the watchdog, to use as a template. Then she dialed her father’s Net access code and performed a hybridization test on the protocols controlling access to his private cache. Sure enough, there was a match. Some lines throbbed redly near the heart of Logan’s own security system. Claire tsked.
“Very lazy, Mother. Using close genetic cousins to perform similar tasks? In related databases? I’m disappointed in you.”