"Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

• LITHOSPHERE

The rattling truck stank to high heaven.

It wasn’t just the fumes from its gasoline engine—

Logan Eng was used to riding high-priority construction equipment. Fragrant, high-octane aromatics were as familiar as the grit of countless deserts or the metal tang of grease and drilling mud. Even the sweat fetor pervading the cracked upholstery spoke pungently of honor-able work.

But in addition to all that, Logan’s driver was a tobacco addict. Worse, he didn’t take his nicotine in pills or spray. No, Enrique Vasquez actually smoked paper-trapped bundles of shredded weed, inhaling the sooty vapors with deep sighs of satisfaction.

Logan eyed in unwilling fascination the glowing ember that seemed ever about to fall off the tip of Enrique’s cigarette. So far in this lurching ride across rugged Basque countryside, that mesmerizing bit of ash hadn’t yet set off flaming catastrophe. But he could not help picturing it landing amid the floorboards, there igniting a great ball of exploding petrol fumes.

Of course Logan knew better. (With his forebrain!) Only a generation ago, over a billion cigarettes had been consumed each year. And back in TwenCen, the rate had reached staggering trillions. If the things were as unsafe as they looked, not a forest or city would be left standing.

“You will want to stay for our National Day celebrations!” Enrique bellowed to be heard over the engine and rattling springs. The hand holding the cigarette draped the open window casing, leaving the other to handle both steering and shifting. The complaining gearbox set Logan’s teeth on edge in sympathy.

“I wish I could!” he shouted back. “But my job in Iberia’s finished tomorrow. I’m due back in Louisiana—”

“Too bad! It would you make happy. Glorious fireworks we’ll see! Everyone drunk gets. Then the young men, fun with the bulls have!”

The Basque were the oldest people in Europe, and proud of their heritage. Some said their language came from the Neolithic hunters who first claimed this land from the retreating ice. In a Bilbao museum, Logan had seen replicas of tiny boats Basque sailors used long ago, to hunt whales out on the rude Atlantic. They must be very brave or suicidal, he thought, then and now.

Logan gasped as his guide swerved, sending plumes of dust and gravel billowing toward an onrushing lumber hauler. The drivers exchanged obscene gestures with a vehemence that seemed quite sociable, in its macho way. Enrique shouted parting insults as the pickup roared along the rocky verge of a hundred-meter drop. Logan swallowed hard.

They sped past tumbled stones that must once have been some ancient wall or boundary. Conifer forests blurred where hardscrabble farms and pastures once covered these slopes. Here and there, commercial quick-pine gave way to newer stands of cedar and oak, planted in grudging compliance with the Balanced Reforestation Treaty, though their slower growth would profit only future generations.

Enrique grinned at him, all traces of indignation already forgotten. “So. Have they, the dams’ safety, determined yet?”

Logan managed to parse the strange version of Simglish they taught here. He nodded.

“I spent a week in Badajoz, going over every datum within two hundred klicks of the quake epicenter. Those dams will last a long while yet.”

Enrique grunted. “In Castile they are good engineers. Not like down in Granada, where the land they are letting go to hell.” He spat out the window.

Logan refrained comment. Never get involved in interregional prejudices was a principal rule. Anyway, nobody could stop the climate from changing, since the Sahara had vaulted the Straits to begin southern Europe’s desertification.

Blame it on the greenhouse effect, Logan thought. Or the shifting Gulf Stream. Hell, blame it on gnomes. Let the scientists figure out causes. What matters to me is how much we can save.

Logan closed his eyes and tried to sleep. After all, if Enrique sent the truck over a cliff, watching it happen wouldn’t change it. Anyway, if he’d had ambitions to live forever he’d never have become field engineer. He hardly noticed the rhythmic jouncing of his skull against the metal door frame — a relatively trivial irritant. Dozing, he found himself recalling how Daisy — his former wife and Claire’s mother — used to approve of his professional plans.

You’ll fight the system from within, she had told him when they were students and in love. Meanwhile, I’ll battle it from the outside.

The plan had sounded bold and perfect then. Neither of them had figured on the way people change… he by learning compromise, she by growing more adamant with each passing year.

Maybe she only married me to get at her family. It wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to Logan. At Tulane, she had said he was the only boy who seemed completely unimpressed with her money and name — which was true enough. After all, financiers just own things, while a skilled person with a job he loves has much, much more.

How strange then, years later, for Daisy to accuse him of being a “tool of rich-pig land rapists.” All that time it had been in his head that he was keeping his side of their bargain, forsaking lucrative deals in favor of confronting incompetence in the field, compelling governments and egotistic planners with grandiose schemes to look more than a decade ahead, to work with nature instead of always against her.

Yes, he also had been motivated by a joy of craft and the pleasure of solving real, palpable puzzles. Was that a betrayal? Can’t a man have several loves at once — a wife, a child, and the world?

For Daisy, apparently, there could be only one. The world. And on her terms.

The truck passed out of the forest, zooming along dusty headlands. Sunlight reconnoitered the edges of Logan’s sunglasses as his thoughts drifted randomly. The zigzag speckles under his eyelids reminded him at one point of waves on a seismograph.

Queer waves, the professor from the University of C6r-doba had called them, ecstatically describing the recent surge of bizarre earthquakes. At first Logan’s interest had been solely to estimate possible hidden damage to large structures such as dams. But as he looked over the frequency spectrum of the tremors he saw one strangeness more peculiar than all the others.

Sharp peaks at wavelengths of 59, 470, 3,750, and 30,000 meters.

Octaves, Logan realized at the time. Eightfold harmonics. I wonder what that could possibly mean?

Then there was the mystery of one drilling tower that had vanished. Water miners, digging an exploratory well when the quakes struck, had run scurrying for shelter, some of them stumbling from vision blurred to the point of blindness. When it was over, and at last they could see again, it was only to stare blankly at the place where the rig had stood. There lay only a hole, as if. some giant had come along and uprooted everything!

Including its tower, the entire drill string had just reached a length of 470 meters.

Of course, it could be a coincidence. But even so, what on Earth could convert quake energy into . . .

“Senor.” The driver interrupted Logan’s lazy musing. Enrique nudged him with an elbow and Logan cracked one eyelid. “Hm?”

“Senor, you can the bay oversee now.”

Logan sat up, rubbing his eyes… then inhaled sharply. Instantly all thought of quakes and harmonic mysteries vanished. He gripped the door frame, looking across a sea that was the same color as Daisy McClennon’s eyes.

For all her craziness, her obsessiveness, the single-mindedness that eventually drove him from their home — his former wife’s eyes were still the ideal by which Logan measured all beauties. Amid the noisy student demonstrations where they first met, she had thought it was shared ideological fervor that made him ignore her money and look directly at her instead. But in truth, it had been those eyes.

Transfixed, he didn’t even look for the tidal power station that was their destination. He had room right then for just the sea. It was enough to fill his soul.

The poor, tortured transmission screamed as Enrique downshifted and sent the rattling truck careening toward the aquamarine waters of the Bay of Biscay.