David Brin - Earth

“Hm.” Alex frowned. She sensed him begin to say something, stop, and then start again.

“I… I’ve started fighting him, you know.”

“Fighting who?” Then she stared. “You’re fighting Spivey! But how?”

“I’m tweaking the beams from South Africa and Rapa Nui, the ones I still control. Using them to pump Beta’s orbit higher… out to where it’ll lose mass faster. And also where the damn thing doesn’t leave those weird tracks in the lower mantle anymore—”

She interrupted. “Has he reacted? Has Spivey noticed?”

Alex laughed. “Oh has he! Got George to send me a telex. Here’s a copy.” He pulled the flimsy sheet from a breast pocket. “They’re both urging me to go along… not to let the side down. You know? All hang together or we’ll surely hang separately?

“Then, this morning, New Guinea fired three microseconds late on a routine run.”

“What did that do?”

He shook his head. “It pulled energy from Beta’s orbit, Rip, letting it fall a little lower. Seems our colonel isn’t about to let his mirror lose mass. Not while there are more experiments to run.”

Silence reigned for many heartbeats, their only measure of time’s passage. Finally, Teresa asked, “What can Glenn be trying to do? Surely he can’t be planning to use it as a weapon? His superiors can’t be that mad!”

Alex stared out through the streaked windshield, beyond a stretch of black-topped runway to a bluff of scrub grass growing scraggly out of the thin volcanic soil. Beyond lay the foam-capped waters of the ash-gray Pacific.

“I wish I knew. But whatever he’s after, I’m afraid you and I are mere pawns.”

□ How hot is it? You folks really want to know how hot it is? I see farmer Izzy Langhorne sitting under a cottonwood right now, having his lunch while watching the show. Hey, Izzy, how dumpit hot would you spec it?

Aw, no, Izzy, gimme euthanasia! Not with your mouth full! We’ll go back to Izzy after he’s cleaned up. Lessee now, gettin’ a shout-back from Jase Kramer, over by Sioux Falls. Looks like you’re having some trouble with your tractor, Jase.

“ No , Larry. It’s just you… have to climb under the suspension of these Chulalongkorn Sixes and clear the deadwood by hand. See, it gets trapped over here by the —”

Well that’s great, Jase. Nice of you to take the holo under with you so we could all get a look. Now tell me, how hot is it?

“ Well, hell, Larry. Yesterday my chickens laid hard-boiled eggs …”

Thank you, Jase Kramer. Whew. Send that codder some relief!

Now hold it just a millie… here’s an actinic flash for you current affairs junkies. Seems the latest round of those secrety-secret talks — pardon my urdu — have broken up for lunch over in New York village. Our affiliates there have joined the mob of news-ferret types chasing the delegates to the deli. For a direct feed, shout a hop-link to News-Line 82. For play-by-play plus color, call Rap-250. Or you can cake-and-eat-it. Just hang around with us while your unit does a rec-dense for later.

While we’re talking about the gremlin crisis, have any of you out there seen anything new today? Anything that might’ve been a gremmie? Yesterday Betty Remington of St. Low showed us a perfectly circular patch of amaranth where the kernels had all been mysteriously turned inside out. And in Barstow, Sam Chu claims one of his prize brood carps up and exploded, right in front of him! Day-pay-say!

So who’s got an opinion out there? You know the code, let’s hear the mode…

Jen remembered what a wise man told her long ago when she was similarly obsessed with the problem of consciousness. It had been an astronomer friend of Thomas’s, a very great mind, she recalled, who listened patiently for hours as she expounded the hottest new concepts of cognition and perception. Then, when at last she ran out of steam, he commented. “I’m uneducated in formal psychology. But in my experience, people generally react to any new situation in one of four ways:

Aha!… Ho-hum… Oy Vey!… and Yum, yum…

“These illustrate the four basic states of consciousness, dear Jennifer. All else is mere elaboration.”

Years later, Jen still found the little allegory delightful. It made you stop and ponder. But did those four “states” actually map onto human thought? Did they lead to new theories that might be tested by experiment? She recalled the astronomer’s smile that evening. Clearly he knew the deeper truth — that all theories are only metaphors, at best helpful models of the world. And even his clever notion was no more real than a mote in his own eye.

There are one hundred ways to view Mount Fuji, as Hokusai showed us. And each of them is right.

Jen wished she had someone like that old astronomer to talk to now.

Today I’m the aged professor with no one to talk to but a bright high school dropout. So who is there to give me reality checks? To tell me if I’m off on a wild goose chase ?

She was treading a narrow path these days, skirting all the pitfalls of pure reason — that most seductive and deceptive of human pastimes. Jen had always believed philosophers ought to have their heads knocked repeatedly, lest they become trapped in the rhythms of their own if-thens. But now she was hardly one to cast stones. While crises roiled on all sides, the compass of her own existence contracted, as if her once far-flung reach were drawing inward now, preparing for some forthcoming contest or battle.

But what battle? What contest?

Clearly she wasn’t equipped to participate in the struggles being waged by Kenda and her grandson. Likewise, the ferment surging through the Net would go on unaffected by anything she offered. By now it was starting to reach stochastic levels. A billion or more anxious world citizens had already been drawn from their myriad endeavors, hobbies, and distractions toward a single strange attractor, one gnawing focus of angst. Nothing like it had been seen since the Helvetian War, and back in those days the Net had been a mere embryo.

Messages piled up in her open-access mailbox as numberless correspondents sought her opinion. But rather than get involved, Jen only retreated further into the circumscribed world of thought.

Oh, she left the catacombs regularly, for exercise and human contact. In Kuwenezi’s squat, fortresslike ark she spent ninety minutes each day with her only student, answering his eager questions with puzzlers of her own, marveling at his voracious mind and wondering if he’d ever get a chance to develop it.

But then, walking home under the merciless sun, she would pass near towering termite mounds, built by patient, highly social creatures at regular intervals across the dry hills. They hummed with unparsed commentary, a drone that seemed to resonate inside her skull, even after the rickety lift cage started descending into the cool silence of the abandoned mine, gliding past layer after gritty layer of compressed sediments, returning her to those caverns where hard-driven men labored like Homeric figures under her grandson’s long-distance guidance, wrestling for the fate of the world.

Their efforts mattered to Jen, of course. It was just that no one seemed to need her at the moment. And anyway, something even more important had to be attended to.

Her train of thought. It was precious, tenuous. A thread of concentration that absolutely had to be preserved… not for the world, but for its own sake. It was a self-involved, even selfish attitude, but Jen had long known she was a solipsist. Except during the years when her children had been growing, what had always mattered to her most was the trail cf the idea. And this was a very big idea.