David Brin - Earth

“Let me go!” he moaned, reaching out. But even then he heard the music climax and begin to fade. The brilliance turned golden and diminished too. Then it ended suddenly with a clap that set the ocean ringing.

In the rapid dimness, his irises couldn’t adapt fast enough. He never saw water rush in to fill the empty shaft, but he and the dolphins were taken by a spinning, tumbling chaos that yanked them like bits of weed in the surf. Crat grabbed his air-hose and just held on.

When, at last, the tugging currents let him go, for a second time Crat shakily picked himself up from the muddy bottom. It took a while to look around without everything spinning. Then he realized the dolphins were gone. So too were the light, the music. Even the ringing in his ears. The stinging afterimages faded till at last he heard an insistent voice yammering.

“… you need help? We had our comm messed up for a while. Some think maybe we were near one of those boggle things people are talking about. What a coincidence!

“Anyway, Courier Four, our telltales show you’re all right. Please confirm.”

Crat swallowed. It took some effort to relearn how to speak. “I’m… okay.” He looked around quickly and found the cargo — only a few meters away. Crat picked it up, shaking off more muck. “Want me to start back on course?”

The voice at the other end interrupted. “Good attitude, Courier Four. But no. We’re sending a sub that way anyway with some bigwigs to inaugurate Site Six. It’ll pick you up shortly. Just stand by.”

So he was going to get there after all… and Crat found that now he didn’t care a bit. Standing there waiting, more than ever he wished his fingers could pass through the glass faceplate as they had briefly penetrated that shining boundary. For those few moments, his hands had sought and found his life’s first real solace. Now he’d settle for just the memory of that gift, and a chance to wipe his streaming eyes.

□ I sometimes wonder what animals think of the phenomenon of humanity — and especially of human babies. For no creature on the planet must seem anywhere near so obnoxious.

A baby screams and squalls. It urinates and defecates in all directions. It complains incessantly, filling the air with demanding cries. How human parents stand it is their own concern. But to great hunters, like lions and bears, our infants must be horrible indeed. They must seem to taunt them, at full volume.

“Yoo-hoo, beasties!” babies seem to cry. “Here’s a toothsome morsel, utterly helpless, soft and tender. But I needn’t keep quiet like the young of other species. I don’t crouch silently and blend in with the grass. You can track me by my noise or smell alone, but you don’t dare!

“Because my mom and dad are the toughest, meanest sumbitches ever seen, and if you come near, they’ll have your hide for a rug.”

All day they scream, all night they cry. Surely if animals ever held a poll, they’d call human infants the most odious of creatures. In comparison, human adults are merely very, very scary.

The Maori guards wouldn’t let Alex go to Hanga Roa town to meet the stratojet, so he waited outside the resonator building. The afternoon was windy and he paced nervously.

At one point, before the incoming flight was delayed yet again, Teresa came by to help him pass the time. “Why is Spivey using a courier?” she asked. “Doesn’t he trust his secure channels anymore?”

“Would you? Those channels go through the same sky everyone else uses. They were secure only because the military paid top dollar and kept a low profile. These days, though?” He shrugged, his point obvious without further elaboration. If this messenger carried the news he expected, it would be worth any wait.

Teresa gave his shoulder an affectionate shove. “Well, I’ll bet you’re glad who the courier is.”

Teresa’s friendship was a fine thing. She understood him. Knew how to tease him out of his frequent dour moods. Alex grinned. “And what about you, Rip? Didn’t I see you eyeing that big fellow Auntie sent to cook for us.”

“Oh, him.” She blushed briefly. “Only for a minute or two. Come on, Alex. I told you how picky I am.”

Indeed, he kept learning new levels to her complexity. Last night, for instance, they had spent hours talking as he handed her tools and she wriggled behind Atlantis’s panels. If things went as expected, they’d be off to Reykjavik tomorrow or the next day, to testify before the special tribunal everyone was talking about. Alex thought it only fair to give her a hand tidying up the old shuttle before that.

Back in the caves of New Zealand, it had been concentration on something external — survival — that first eased the tensions between them. Even now, Teresa found it easier to talk while straining to tighten a bolt or giving some old instrument its first taste of power in forty years. So for the first time, last night, Alex heard the full story of her prior acquaintance with June Morgan, his part-time lover. It made him feel awkward — and yet Teresa said she liked June now. She seemed glad the other woman was coming back, for Alex’s sake.

And happier still because of what everyone assumed June would be carrying with her — Colonel Spivey’s surrender.

It had been hinted in George Hutton’s latest communique and confirmed in action. Since Alex’s demonstration yesterday — blasting a mountain of ice all the way to the moon — there had been a sudden drop in aggressive activity by other gazer systems worldwide. The Nihonese still pulsed at low “research” levels, and there were brief glimmers from other locations. But the big new NATO-ANZAC-ASEAN resonators were silent, mothballed, and the original four now obeyed Alex’s steady program unperturbed — pushing Beta gradually out of the boundary zone, where those intricate, superconducting threads flickered so mysteriously.

The number of pulses could be reduced now, and each beam targeted more carefully. Few additional civilian losses were expected, and diplomatic tension had been falling off for hours. Even the hysteria on the Net had abated a bit, as word went out about the new tribunal.

Maybe people are going to be sensible after all , Alex thought as he paced in front of the lab. After staying with him for a while, Teresa left again to resume her chores aboard Atlantis . Alex could have worked, too. But for once he was content just to look across grassy slopes toward the little, crashing baylet of Vaihu and a rank of Easter Island’s famed, forbidding monoliths. Beyond the restored statues, cirrus clouds streaked high over the South Pacific, like banners shredded by stratospheric winds.

This place had affected him, all right. Here earlier men and women had also struggled bitterly against the consequences of their own mistakes. But Alex’s education on Rapa Nui went beyond mere historical comparisons. Because of the nature of the battle he had waged here, he now knew far better than before how those winds and clouds out there were influenced by sunlight and the sea, and by other forces generated deep below. Each was part of a natural web only hinted at by what you saw with your eyes.

Jen was right , he thought. Everything is interwoven .

One didn’t have to be mystical about the interconnectedness. It just was . Science only made the fact more vivid and clear, the more you learned.

A touch of sound wafted from the direction of Rano Kao’s stern cliffs — first the whine of a hydrogen auto engine and then the complaint of rubber tires turning on gravel. He turned to see a car approach the Hine-marama cordon, where big, brown men paced with drawn weapons. After questioning both driver and passenger, they waved the vehicle through. Its fuel cells whistled louder as it climbed the hill and finally pulled up near the front door.