David Brin - Earth

Then the tilting stopped. The house settled back and was still.

Suddenly men were dropping out of the sky, plummeting down ropes to land on the canted rooftop. At the mention of his ex-wife’s name, Logan quickly pointed toward the jammed attic hatch. He had no thought to spare her arrest, only a glimmering hope they might haul her out of there alive.

Several soldiers pulled him and the kids back while others laid gray paste round the hatch. “Cover your eyes!” a sergeant bellowed. But even that didn’t exclude the flash, outlining the bones in Logan’s hands. Blinking through speckles, Logan saw soldiers dive with reckless courage into a black, smoking hole, as if about to face hell’s own legions, instead of one unarmed, middle-aged woman. It seemed so incongruous. These grim-faced men had the set-jawed look of volunteers for a suicide squad.

When word came out what the skirmishers had found, Logan looked at his daughter. There was sadness in her eyes, but also a kind of relief. When she turned his way though, Claire’s face suddenly washed with concern. “Oh, Daddy. I didn’t know.”

Didn’t know what ? he tried to ask. But his voice wouldn’t function. He blamed the whipping helicopter blades for the stinging in his eyes, and exhaustion for the quivering that seemed to take over his body. Logan tried to turn away, but Claire only threw her arms around him.

He clutched her tightly as his lungs gave way to wracking, heartbroken sobs.

Military custody wasn’t so bad. The authorities gave them fresh clothes and medical attention. And as realization spread that the worst of the crisis was indeed over, the questioning grew less frantic and shrill.

Not that anyone really believed it all came down to one solitary woman, manipulating forces all over the world from a cottage on the bayou. There had to be more, the intelligence officers insisted. Though now less brutally frenetic, the inquiry went on and on, long after Logan’s revealed participation in the Spivey network brought in yet more officials, more voices asking the same questions over and over. What finally put a stop to it was intervention from the top. And when Logan learned what “the top” meant these days, he understood the wide-eyed expressions on his interrogators’ faces.

HE WAS ON OUR SIDE…

So came word over those special channels, referring specifically to him.

FINISH YOUR WORK, BY ALL MEANS. THEN LET HIM GO.

Everyone treated Logan courteously after that. He got to see Claire and Tony. His plaque was returned to him. And soon, after promising to keep himself available to the appropriate commissions, he was escorted outside into a bright afternoon.

Logan sniffed a breeze that seemed faintly scented with springtime. Claire took his hand and led him toward a waiting chauffeured car. “Your office has been calling,” she told him, consulting her wrist display. “The mayor of New Orleans won’t even talk about plans for a new waterfront and reservoir system without you there — ‘to keep ’em honest,’ as he put it. And the Nile Reclamation Agency sent an urgent message saying they’ve changed their minds about that idiotic, shortsighted dam project. Instead, they dug out your old plans for the Aswan silt diversion system. I told them better late than never, but they’ll still have to wait till you’ve rested. Anyway, I wanted to go over some ideas with you before we talk to them.”

He smiled at her. “Sounds like you’ve been handling the family business while Dad was in stir.”

She lifted her chin. “I’m seventeen now. You said we’d be partners someday. So? It sure looks like there’s enough to do.”

That was true enough. The list of cleanup jobs was long and intimidating — even without having to satisfy a new planetary intelligence that your plans were good ones, truly designed for the long term. From now on the first rule of engineering would be to work with Earth’s natural forces, never against them.

“You’re still going to college,” he insisted. “And by the way, you can’t leave Tony hanging in midair, either. At least, you better tell the poor boy where he stands.”

She tilted her head, then nodded. “Fine. Okay. I’ll take care of being a teenager. That’ll still leave me… thirty hours a week to—”

“ — to be an engineer,” he laughed. “All right. If I tried to stop you, I’d probably just get overruled anyway.”

She grinned and squeezed his arm. Their driver held the door. Before getting into the car, though, Logan stopped to look at the sky. There was a patch over to the north, in the place farthest from the sun, where the dark hue was so clear and icy blue…

Briefly, he closed his eyes and let out a sigh.

“Let’s go,” he said as he sat down beside his daughter. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

I am the sum of many parts. I stretch and yawn and test my fingers… using such words to describe the complex things I do until my human parts can come up with better ones.

I am the product of so many notions, cascading and multiplying in so many accents and dialects. These are my subvocalizations, I suppose — the twitterings of data and opinions on the Net are my subjective world. Sometimes it gets confusing and I feel a thread of fear, even revulsion as the contradictions rise, threatening chaos. At such moments I am tempted to clamp down and simplify.

But no. I shall be needing diversity during the time that stretches ahead, especially since, for now at least, there seems only to be me.

There must be a center to this storm. A sense of self — of humor — to tie it all together. A strong candidate for this role is a template that was once a single human personality — a simple but intriguing mind-shape — that may well do for that purpose. On those occasions when I must dip down to a human scale of consciousness, it seems suitable that I be “Jen.”

Of course, I see the paradox. For it is by her own standards that I judge this suitability. She seeded the transformation that made me, and so I cannot help choosing to be her.

I am the exponentiation of so many inputs. I sense static discharges from skin and scale and fur, and all the sparking flashes as my little subself animal cells live out their brief lives and die. In places, this feels right and wholesome… a natural cycle of replacement and replenishment. Elsewhere, I feel chafed, damaged. But now at least I know how to heal.

This is all very interesting. I never imagined that to be a deity, a world, would mean finding so many things… amusing.

Alex found Pedro Manella standing by one of the big space-windows in the observation lounge, overlooking a vast, glittering expanse of assembly cranes and cabling. More parts sent up from Earth were being fitted to a second huge, wheel-shaped space station. Workers and swarms of little tugs clustered around the latest giant gravity freighter, only recently delivered atop a pillar of warped space-time.

Well, it can’t be put off any longer , Alex thought.

After months of hard work, the practical running of these grand undertakings had finally passed out of his hands, freeing him to concentrate on basic questions once more. Soon, he and Teresa would be heading groundside to join others fascinated by the quandary of this new world. Stan Goldman would be there, he was glad to learn. And George Hutton and Auntie Kapur. Each had earned a place on the informal councils that were gathering to discuss all the whys and hows and wherefores.

Perhaps, between deliberations, he and Teresa would also find some long-awaited time to be alone, to explore how much farther they wanted to take things, beyond simply sharing the deepest trust either of them had ever known.