David Brin - Earth

Nell’s expression seemed to say, “Who’s worried?” Indeed, after what they’d been through together, they couldn’t be faulted for a little team cockiness.

Uprooted from the soil of Africa and hurled into high orbit, Kuwenezi’s experimental ark four went through hours, days, during which disaster kept missing them by seconds. For instance, if certain circuits had failed during those first critical instants, Nelson wouldn’t have been able to order most of the hurtling pyramid sealed against hard vacuum. Nor could he have shifted fluids from one vast storage tank to another, gradually damping out the unwilling satellite’s awkward tumble.

As it was, fully a third of the biosphere’s life habitats were dead — their occupants having asphyxiated or been crushed against adamant glass-crystal barriers, or simply having succumbed to drastically altered circumstances.

He’d never have managed saving the rest without Shig and Nell, whose nimble grace in free fall made them invaluable at fetching floating tools or herding panicking creatures into makeshift stalls where they could be lashed down and sedated. Even so, the job had seemed utterly hopeless — a futile staving off of the inevitable — until that weird moment when Nelson felt something like a tap on his shoulder .

Whirling about in shock and exhaustion, he had turned to find no one there. And yet, that hallucinatory interruption had been enough to draw him back from a tunnel-torpor of drudgery . . far enough to let him notice that his belt-phone was ringing.

“H-hello?” he had asked, unable to believe anyone knew or cared about his plight, cast from the Earth, bound for oblivion aboard a glass and steel Flying Dutchman.

There had been a long pause filled with static. Then a voice had said, “nelson…”

“Uh… yeah?”

“I wanted you to know — help is coming. i haven’t forgotten you.”

He remembered blinking in amazement.

“D-Dr. Wolling? Jen?”

He couldn’t be sure in retrospect. The voice had seemed different in countless ways. Distant. Preoccupied. And yet, somehow it had made the hours of hectic labor that followed more bearable just knowing he hadn’t been overlooked — that someone knew he and the animals were out here, and cared.

So it wasn’t with total surprise when — after lashing the last beast down, after sealing the last whistling crack, after adjusting gas and aeration balances in the complex panels that recycled the ark’s basic stuff of life — he suddenly heard the phone ring again, and lifted his eyes to see a stubby white and black arrow homing in on this derelict little worldlet.

Nelson’s knowledge of physics was too slender to truly appreciate what it meant when Atlantis ’s pilot promised to provide gravity again to the ark’s weary inhabitants. He only felt gratitude as the shuttle’s crew somehow delivered, recreating up and down via some magic they generated at long range. Then they began hauling the drifting tower toward a promised new home.

En route, he finally had time to listen to condensed summaries of what had been going on, back on Earth. It was all too complex and bizarre to comprehend at first, in his dazed state. But later, as he took advantage of his first real chance at sleep, partial realization came to him in his dreams.

At one point he saw a dismembered snake writhe and bring together its many parts. He heard a hundred braying instruments settle down under a conductor’s baton to create symphonies where there had been mere noise.

E pluribus unum … a voice murmured. Many can make up a whole …

Now, as the time of landing approached, Nelson wondered if anyone on Earth had a better understanding of what had happened than he did.

They’re all so busy arguing about it, discussing the change and what it means —

Gaians claim it’s their Earth Mother… that she’s been shaken awake at last, to step in and save foolish mankind and all her other creatures.

Others say no, it’s the Net… the whole store of human knowledge that poured into all those unexpected

new circuits deep inside the Earth. All that virgin computational power, suddenly multiplied, only naturally had to lead to some sort of self-awareness.

There was no end to theories. Nelson heard Jungians proclaiming a race consciousness had manifested itself during the crisis, one that had been there, waiting, all along. Meanwhile, Christians and Jews and Muslims made noises much like the Gaians’ — only they seemed to hear the low voice of a “father” when they tuned in on those special channels that now carried new, awesome melodies. To them, recent miracles were only what had been promised all along, in prophecy.

Nelson shook his head. None of them seemed to understand that they — their very arguments and discussions — were helping define the thing itself. Yes, a greater level of mind had been born, but not as something separate, or even above them. All the little noisy, argumentative, even contradictory voices across the planet — these were parts of the new entity, just as a human being consists naturally of many disputing “selves.”

Nelson recalled his last conversation with his teacher, when the topic had swung to her latest project — her bold new model of consciousness. A model that, he knew somehow, must have played some key role in the recent coalescence.

“The problem with a top-down view of mind is this, Nelson,” she had said. “If the self at the top must rule like a tyrant, commanding all the other little subselves like some queen termite, then the inevitable result will be something like a termite colony. Oh, it might be powerful, impressive. But it will also be stiff. Oversimplified. Insane.

“Look at all the happiest, sanest people you’ve known, Nelson. Really listen to them. I bet you’ll find they don’t fear a little inconsistency or uncertainty now and then. Oh, they try always to be true to their core beliefs, to achieve their goals and keep their promises. Still, they also avoid too much rigidity, forgiving the occasional contradiction and unexpected thought. They are content to be many.”

Remembering her words made Nelson smile. He turned again to stare at Earth, the oasis everyone now spoke of as a single living thing. It hardly mattered whether that was a new fact, or one as old as life itself. Let the NorA ChuGas preach that Gaia had always been there, aware and patient. Let others point out that it had taken human technology and intervention to bring violent birth to an active planetary mind. Each extreme view was completely correct in its way, and each was just as completely wrong.

That was as it should be.

Competition and cooperation… yin and yang… Each of us participatin’ in the debate is like one of the thoughts that bubble and fizz in my own head — whether I’m concentrating on a problem or daydreaming at a cloud. Does one particular thought worry about its “lost independence” if it realizes it’s part of something larger ?

Well, some prob’ly do, I guess. Others aren’t bothered at all. So it’ll be with us, too.

Nelson replayed his last musings to himself, and silently laughed. Listen to you! Jen was right. You’re a born philosopher. In other words, full of shit .

But then he had an answer to that, too. We may be mere thoughts, each of us a fragment. But that don’t mean some thoughts aren’t important! Thoughts could be the only things that never die .

From below decks a lowing wafted through the air grilles. Sedatives were wearing off and some of the wildebeests were waking up. Perhaps they sensed imminent arrival. Soon Nelson would have his hands full tending this, the first sapling cast forth by the mother world… the first of a myriad that might stream outward if the new gravity technologies proved workable. And if Earth’s nations agreed to the bold enterprise.