Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

Gaianists. Retreating across the lawn, facing Anne, as if afraid to turn their backs. Anne was smiling and waving, the very picture of inoffence, but I really felt for the poor bastards. They probably never knew what hit them.

Sometimes, when Seventh-day Adventists came calling, Anne would actually invite them in for a little target practise. It was usually the Adventists who asked to leave.

“Did they have anything worthwhile to say?” I asked her now.

“Not really.” Anne stopped waving and turned to face me. Her smile morphed into a triumphant smirk. “We’re angering the sky gods, you know that? Thou shalt not inhabit a single-family dwelling. Thou shalt honour thy environmental impact, to keep it low.”

“They could be right,” I remarked. At least, there weren’t many people around to argue the point. Most of our former neighbours had already retreated into hives. Not that their environmental impact had had much to do with it.

“Well, I’ll grant it’s not as flakey as some of the things they come up with,” Anne admitted. “But if they’re going to blame me for the revenge of the cloud demons, they damn well better have a rational argument or two waiting in the wings.”

“I take it they didn’t.”

She snorted. “The same hokey metaphors. Gaia’s leaping into action to fight the human disease. I guess hurricanes are supposed to be some sort of penicillin.”

“No crazier than some of the things the experts say.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t necessarily believe them either.”

“Maybe you should,” I said. “I mean, we sure as hell don’t know what’s going on.”

“And you think they do? Just a couple of years ago they were denying everything, remember? Life can’t exist without stable organized structure, they said.”

“I sort of thought they’d learned a few things since then.”

“No kidding.” Anne’s eyes grew round with enlightenment. “And all this time I thought they were just making up trendy buzzwords.”

Jess wandered between us. Anne scooped her up; Jess scrambled onto her mother’s shoulders and surveyed the world from dizzying adult height.

I glanced back at the retreating evangelists. “So how did you handle those two?”

“I agreed with them,” Anne said.

“Agreed?”

“Sure. We’re a disease. Fine. Only some of us have mutated.” She jerked a thumb at our castle. “Now, we’re resistant to antibiotics.”

We are resistant to antibiotics. We’ve encysted ourselves like hermit crabs. We’ve been pruned, cut back, decimated but not destroyed. We are only in remission.

But now, outside the battlements, we’re naked. Even at this range the storm could reach out and swat us both in an instant. How can Jess just sit there?

“I can’t even enjoy sunny days any more,” I admit to her.

She looks at me, and I know her perplexity is not because I can’t enjoy clear skies, but because I would even think it worthy of comment. I keep talking, refusing the chronic realization that we’re aliens to each other. “The sky can be pure blue and sunshine, but if there’s even one fluffy little cumulus bumping along I can’t help feeling…watched. It doesn’t matter if it’s too small to think on its own, or that it’ll dissipate before it gets a chance to upload. I keep thinking it’s some sort of spy, it’s going to report back somewhere.”

“I don’t think they can see,” Jess says absently. “They just sense big things like cities and smokestacks, hot spots or things that…itch. That’s all.”

The wind breathes, deceptively gentle, in her hair. Above us a finger of gray vapour crawls between two towering masses of cumulonimbus. What’s happening up there? A random conjunction of water droplets? A 25,000-baud data dump between processing nodes? Even after all this time it sounds absurd.

So many eloquent theories, so many explanations for our downfall. Everyone’s talking about order from chaos: fluid geometry, bioelectric microbes that live in the clouds, complex behaviours emerging from some insane alliance of mist and electrochemistry. It looks scientific enough on paper, but spoken aloud it always sounds like an incantation…

And none of it helps. The near distance is lit with intermittent flashes of light. The storm walks toward us on jagged fractal legs. I feel like an insect under the heel of a descending boot. Maybe that’s a positive sign. Would I be afraid if I had really given up?

Maybe. Maybe the situation is irrelevant. Maybe cowards are always afraid.

Jess’s receiver is crying incessantly. “Whale songs,” I hear myself say, and the tremor in my voice is barely discernible. “Humpback whales. That’s what they sound like.”

Jess fixes her eyes back on the sky. “They don’t sound like anything, Dad. It’s just electricity. Only the receiver sort of…makes it sound like something we know.”

Another gimmick. We’ve fallen from God’s chosen to endangered species in only a decade, and the hustlers still won’t look up from their market profiles. I can sympathize. Looming above us, right now, are the ones who threw us into the street. The forward overhang is almost upon us. Ten kilometers overhead, winds are screaming past each other at sixty meters a second.

So far the storm isn’t even breathing hard.

There was a banshee raging through the foothills. It writhed with tornados; Anne and I had watched the whirling black tentacles tearing at the horizon before we’d fled underground. Tornados were impossible during the winter, we’d been assured just a year before. Yet here we were, huddling together as the world shook, and all our reinforcements might as well have been made of paper if one of those figments came calling.

Sex is instinctive at times like those. Jeopardy reduces us to automata; there is no room for love when the genes reassert themselves. Even pleasure is irrelevant. We were just another pair of mammals, trying to maximize our fitness before the other shoe dropped.

Afterwards, at least, we were still allowed to feel. We clung together, blind and invisible in the darkness, almost crushing each other with the weight of our own desperation. We couldn’t stop crying. I gave silent thanks that Jess had been trapped at daycare when the front came through. I wouldn’t have stood the strain of a brave facade that night.

After a while, Anne stopped shaking. She lay in my arms, sniffling quietly. Dim floaters of virtual light swarmed maddeningly at the edge of my vision.

“The gods have come back,” she said at last.

“Gods?” Anne was usually so bloody empirical.

“The old ones,” she said. “The Old Testament gods. The Greek pantheon. Thunderbolts and fire and brimstone. We thought we’d outgrown them, you know? We thought…”

I felt a deep, trembling breath.

“ I thought,” she continued. “I thought we didn’t need them any more. But we did. We fucked up so horribly on our own. There was nobody to keep us in line, and we trampled everything…”

I stroked her back. “Old news, Annie. You know we’ve cleaned things up. Hardly any cities allow gasoline any more, extinctions have levelled off. I even heard the other day that rainforest biomass increased last year.”

“That’s not us .” A sigh whispered across my cheek. “We’re no better than we ever were. We’re just afraid of a spanking. Like spoiled kids caught drawing naughty pictures on the walls.”

“Anne, we still don’t know for sure if the clouds are really alive. Even if they are, that doesn’t make them intelligent. Some people still say this is all just a weird side-effect of chemicals in the atmosphere.”

“We’re begging for mercy, Jon. That’s all we’re doing.”