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

• HOLOSPHERE

Jen Wolling found the Ndebele Rites of Gaia charming. The canton’s Kuwenezi Science Collective pulled out all the stops, sparing nothing to put on a show of their piety. To watch the lavish torchlight celebration under a midnight moon, one might imagine they were commemorating Earth Day itself, and not just a going-away party for one old woman they had known barely a fort-night.

Dancers in traditional costumes capered and whirled before the dignitaries’ dais, stamping bare feet on the beaten ground to the tempo of pounding drums. Feathered anklets flapped like agitated captive birds. Spears thudded on shields as men in bright loincloths leaped in apparent defiance of gravity. Women in colorful dashikis waved bound sheaves of wheat, specially grown in hothouses for this out-of-season observance.

Jen appreciated the dancers’ lithe beauty, taut and powerful as any stallion’s. Perspiration flew in droplets or smeared to coat their dark brown bodies in a gleaming, athletic sheen. Their rhythm and power were mighty, exultory, and marvelously sexual, which brought a smile to Jen’s lips. Although tonight’s purpose was to venerate a gentle metaphoric goddess, the choreography had been co-opted from much older rites having to do with fertility and violence.

“It’s far, far better than in the days of neocolonialism.” the tall ark director said to her. Sitting cross-legged to her left, he had to lean close to be heard over the percussive cadence. “Back then, the Ndebele and other tribes maintained troupes of professional dancers to pander to tourists. But these young men and women practice in their spare time simply for the love of it. Few outsiders ever get to see this now.”

Jen admired the way the torchlight glistened on Director Mugabe’s brow, his tight-coiled hair. “I’m honored,” she said, crossing her arms over her heart and giving a shallow bow. He grinned and returned the gesture. Side by side, they watched rows of young “warriors” take terrific risks, exchanging whirling spears to the delight of clapping women and children.

Venerable and ancient this dance might be, but there was no correlation here with the primitive. Jen had just spent two weeks consulting with Kuwenezi’s experts, learning all about Ndebele Canton’s plans for new animal breeds better able to endure the challenging and ever-changing environment of southern Africa. They, in turn, had listened attentively to her own ideas about macroecological management. After all, Jen had virtually invented the field.

By now of course, it had accumulated all the trappings of a maturing technology, with enough details to leave a solitary dreamer-theoretician like her far behind. Specific analyses she left to younger, quicker minds these days.

Still, she occasionally managed to surprise them all. If Jen ever ceased being able to shock people, it would be time to give up this body’s brief manifestation and feed her meager store of phosphorus back into the Mother’s great mulch pile.

She recalled the expression on that fellow B’Keli’s face when, during her third and final lecture, she had begun talking about… specially designed mammalian chimeras… incorporating camels’ kidneys… birds’ lungs… bear marrow… chimps’ tendon linkages… Even Director Mugabe, who claimed to have read everything she’d written, was staring glassy-eyed by the end of her talk. Her conclusion about… the rough love of viruses… seemed to have been too much even for him.

When the house lights had come on, she was greeted with stunned silence from the packed crowd of brown faces. There was, at first, only one questioner — a very young man whose northern, Yoruba features stood out amid the crowd of Southern Bantu. The boy’s arms and face were bandaged, but he showed no outward sign of pain. All through the talk he had sat quietly in the front row, gently stroking a small baboon and her infant. When Jen called on him, he lowered his hand and spoke with a completely stunning Canadian accent, of all things.

“Doctor… are you sayin’ that — that people might someday be as strong as chimpanzees? Or be able to sleep through winter, like bears?”

Jen noticed indulgent smiles among the audience when the boy spoke, though Mugabe’s expression was one of mixed relief and angst. Anxiety that such an untutored member of their community had been the only one to offer the courtesy of a question. Relief that someone had done so in time.

“Yes. Exactly,” she had replied. “We have the entire human genome fully catalogued. And many other higher mammals. Why not use that knowledge to improve ourselves?

“Now I want to make clear I’m talking about genetic improvement here, and there are limits to how far one can go in that direction. We’re already by far the most plastic of animals, the most adaptable to environmental influences. The real core of any self-improvement campaign must remain in the areas of education and child-rearing and the new psychology, to bring up a generation of saner, more decent people.

“But there really are constraints on that process, laid down by the capabilities and limitations of our bodies and brains. And where did those capabilities and limitations come from? Our past, of course. A haphazard sequence of genetic experiments by trial and error, slowly accumulating favorable mutations generation by generation. Death was the means of our advancement… the deaths of millions of our ancestors. Or, to be more precise, those who failed to become our ancestors.

“Those who did survive to breed passed on new traits, which gradually accumulated into the suite of attributes now at our disposal — our upright stance, our better-than-average vision, our wonderfully dexterous hands. Our bloated brains.

“As for what the latter has done to our skull size, ask any woman who’s given birth…”

At that point the audience had laughed. Jen noticed some of the tension seeping away.

“Other species have meanwhile collected their own, similar catalogues of adaptations. Many of them at least as wonderful as those we’re so arrogantly proud of. But here’s the sad part. With one exception — the inefficient interspecies gene transfer performed by viruses — no animal species can ever profit from another’s hard-won lessons. Until now, each has been in it alone, fending for itself, hoarding what it’s acquired, learning from no one else.

“What I am proposing is to change all that, once and for all. Hell, we’re already doing it! Look at the century-old effort to blend characteristics among plants, to transfer, say, pest resistance from one hardy wild species into another that is a food crop. Take just one such product — legu-corn, which fixes its own nitrogen. How many productive farmlands and aquifers has it saved by eliminating the need for artificial fertilizer? How many people has it saved from starvation?

“Or take another program — to save those species of birds who cannot bear excess ultraviolet by inserting eagle codons, so their descendants’ eyes will be as impervious as those of hawks or falcons. The happy accidental discovery of one family can now be shared with others.

“Or take our experiments at London Ark, where we’re remaking a vanished species by slowly building a woolly mammoth genome within an elephant matrix. Someday, a species which has been extinct for thousands of years will walk again.”

A woman in the third row raised her hand. “But isn’t that exactly what the radical Gaians object to? They call it bastardization of species…”

Jen remembered laughing at that point. “I am not a favorite of the radicals.”

Quite a few in the audience had smiled then. The Ndebele shared her contempt for the taunts, even threats, of those who proclaimed themselves guardians of modern morality.

No doubt the original idea behind her invitation to come here had been prestige. Southern Africa suffered partial isolation from the world’s ever-tightening web of commerce and communication, largely because the commonwealth still practiced racial and economic policies long abandoned elsewhere. No doubt they were surprised when a Nobel laureate actually accepted. This visit would cause Jen problems when she returned home.

It was worth it though. She’d seen promise here. Cut off as they were, these archaic racialist-socialists were looking at familiar problems in unique ways. Often cockeyed wrong ways, but intriguing nonetheless. They had a great advantage in not caring what the rest of the world thought. In that way, they were much like Jen herself.

“What matters to me is the whole,” she had replied. “And the whole depends upon diversity. The radicals are right about that. Diversity is the key.

“But it need not be the same diversity as existed before mankind. Indeed, it cannot be the same. We are in a time of changes. Species will pass away and others take their place, as has happened before. An ecosystem frozen in stone can only become a fossil.

“We must become smart enough to minimize the damage, and then foster a new diversity, one able to endure in a strange new world.”

Of all those in the audience, some had looked confused or resentful. Others nodded in agreement. But one, the boy in the front row, had stared at her as if struck dumb. At the time she had wondered what she’d said that had affected him so.

Jen was jerked back to the present as Director Mugabe spoke her name over the rhythm of the beating drums. She blinked, momentarily disoriented, while hands gently took both her elbows, helping her to stand. Smiling women in bright costumes urged her forward. Their white, perfect teeth shone in the flickering torchlight.

Jen sighed, realizing. As the oldest woman present, and guest of honor, she couldn’t refuse officiating at the sacrifice… not without insulting her hosts. So she went through the motions — bowing to the Orb of the Mother, accepting the bound wheat, pouring the pure water.

So many people had taken to this sect, movement, Zeitgeist… call it what you will. It was an amorphous thing, without center or official dogma. Only a few of those paying homage to the Mother did so thinking it a religion per se.

Indeed many older faiths had taken the simple, effective measure of co-opting Gaian rituals into their own. Catholics altered celebrations of the Virgin, so that Mary now took a much more vigorous personal interest in planetary welfare than she had in the days of Chartres or Nantes.

And yet, Jen knew many for whom this was more than a mere statement or movement. More than just a way of expressing reverence for a danger-stricken world. There were radicals for whom Gaia worship was a church militant. They saw a return of the old goddess of prehistory, at last ready to end her banishment by brutal male deities — by Zeus and Shiva and Jehovah and the warlike spirits once idolized by the Ndebele. To Gaian radicals there were no “moderate” approaches to saving Earth. Technology and the “evil male principle” were foes to be cast down.

Evil male principle, my shriveled ass. Males have their uses.

For some reason Jen thought of her grandson, whose obsessions in the twin worlds of abstraction and engineering were stereotypical of what radicals called “penis science.” It was some time since she had last heard from the boy. She wondered what Alex was up to.

Probably something terribly silly, and utterly earth-shaking if I know him.

Soon came the final act of the evening. The Cleansing. Jen smiled and touched one by one the offerings brought before her by adults and children, each presenting a wicker basket containing broken bits of mundane archaeology.

Scraps of tin… broken spark plugs… shreds of adamant, insoluble plastic… One basket was nearly filled with ancient aluminum beer cans, still shiny thirty years after they had been outlawed everywhere on Earth. Each collection was the work of one member of this community, performed in his or her spare time over many months. Each basket contained the yield given up by one square meter of soil, painstakingly and lovingly sifted till no trace of human manufacture was detectible, as deep as the individual’s time, strength, and piety allowed. In this way, each person incrementally returned a small bit of the planet to its natural state.

Only what was natural? Certainly not the land’s contours, which had been eroded and moved wholesale by human enterprise.

Not the aquifers, whose percolating waters would never be quite the same, even where antidumping was enforced and where inspectors granted the precious label “pure and untainted.” That only meant the content of heavy metals and complex petro-organics was too sparse to affect one human’s health over a normal lifespan. It certainly didn’t mean “natural.”

Especially, the word didn’t apply to that complicated living thing known as topsoil! Winnowed of countless native species, filled with invaders brought inadvertently or on purpose from other continents — from earthworms to rotifers to tiny fungi and bacteria — the loam in some places thrived and elsewhere it died, giving up its dusty substance to the winds. Microscopic victories and defeats and- stalemates were being waged in every hectare all over the globe, and nowhere could a purist say the result was “natural” at all.

Jen glanced over her left shoulder to see Kuwenezi’s lambent towers. The main ark was dim, but its great glass-crystal face reflected a rippling sister to the moon. Within those artificial habitats dozed plants and animals rescued from a hundred spoiled ecosystems. To the radicals, such arks were glorified prisons — mere sops to humanity’s troubled conscience, so that nature’s slaughter could go on.

To Jen, though, the great arcologies weren’t jails, but nurseries.

Change can’t be prevented, only guided.

The radicals were right about one thing, of course. What finally emerged from those glass towers, someday, wouldn’t be the same as what had gone in. Jen’s public statements — that she did not find that in itself tragic — ensured continued hate mail, even death threats, from followers of a sect she herself had helped found.

So be it.

Death is just another change. And when the Mother needs my phosphorus, I’ll give it up gladly.

The local denomination, of course, held that Gaia’s true complexion must be that of pure, fecund earth, and yet they seemed not to care about the paleness of her skin. As Jen lifted her arms, they carried their offerings to outsized recycling bins, waiting under the stars. When the last contribution tumbled inside, a shout of celebration rose, commemorating the salvation of several thousand square meters.

This ceremony had delightful idiosyncrasies, but it was essentially similar to others she’d officiated at, from Australia to Smolensk. In all those places, people had taken it for granted that she was an appropriate surrogate — a stand-in for Gaia herself.

Only a surrogate… Jen smiled, offering her benediction and forgiving their error. The drums resumed, and dancers rejoined their exertions. But for a moment Jen watched the torchlight play across the faces and the glass towers beyond.

Modern folk, you pay homage to the Mother as a “parable.” And I am but a stand-in, tonight, for an abstract idea.

Well, we shall see about that, my children. We shall see.

She had planted seeds during her visit. Some would germinate, perhaps even flower into action.

The young man in the bandages appeared again. She saw him seated across the arena, his baboon companions resting against his knees. He nodded back as she smiled at him, and Jen had a sudden, clear recollection of his final question, yesterday afternoon in the lecture hall.

“You talk about a lot of possibilities Doctor Wolling…” he had said. “Maybe we could do some of those things… or even all o’ them, eh?

“But won’t we also have to give up somethin’ in return? They say there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. So what’ll it cost us, Doctor?”

Jen remembered thinking, What a bright boy. He understood that nothing was ever easy, which her own grandson never seemed to grasp, no matter how often the world smacked poor Alex in the head.

No, Jen thought. Humanity may have to give up more than a little, if the Earth is to be saved. We may, in the end, find the old gods were right after all. That nothing worthwhile comes without a sacrifice.

Jen smiled at the boy, at all of them. She opened her arms, blessing the dancers, the audience, the animals in the arks, and the ravaged countryside.

That sacrifice, my children, may turn out to be ourselves.