David Brin - Earth

“I’m coming, Geode!” He patted his clothes, waving away drifts of dust. “I’ll be right there!”

The badlands stretched all around Logan. Sculpted by wind and rain and flash floods, they no doubt looked much as they had when first seen by whites, or by any people at all. Humans had lived in North America for only ten or twenty thousand years, tops. And though the weather had changed during that time — mostly growing dryer and hotter — it had been even longer since any appreciable greenery found a purchase on these sere slopes.

Still, there was beauty here: beige and cream and cinnamon beauty, textured like hard layers of some great, petrified pastry that had been kneaded hard below and then exposed by rough scourings of wind and rain. Logan loved these rocky deserts. Elsewhere, Earth wore its carpet of life as a softening mask. But here one could touch the planet’s tactile reality — mother Gaia without her makeup on.

His job often took him to places like this… to map out schemes for managing precious water. It was a role much like the “wildcatters” of twentieth-century lore, who used to scramble far and wide in search of petroleum, until each of the six hundred major sedimentary basins had been probed, palpated, steamed, and sucked dry.

Logan liked to think his goals were more mature, his task more benign and well thought out than that. Still he sometimes wondered. Might future generations look back on him and his world-spanning fraternity the way teledramas now depicted oilmen? As shortsighted fools, even rapists?

His ex-wife, Claire’s mother, had decided about that long ago. After his involvement in the project to cover over the lower Colorado River — saving millions of acre-feet of water from evaporation and creating the world’s longest greenhouse — she had rewarded him by throwing him out of the house.

Logan understood Daisy’s feelings… her obsessions, actually. But what was I to do? We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists .

All over the planet there were problems crying out for solutions, not tomorrow, but right now. Nations and cities wanted water shifted, pumped and diked. As the seas rose and rains migrated unpredictably, so did his labors, as governments strove desperately to adapt. Great changes were at work, in the air and land and oceans. They were the sort of global transformations one read of in the very rocks themselves… such as when one long epoch of geological stability would come suddenly and violently to an end, leaving everything forever recast.

And yet… Logan inhaled the scent of sage and juniper.

Nothing had altered this country within man’s memory. Not even the greenhouse effect. He rejoiced in places like this, where no one would ever ask for his services. Places invulnerable to any works he could imagine.

A red-tailed hawk patrolled the next mesa, cruising a thermal air current that made the intervening gullied slope swim before his eyes. He touched a control near the left strap of his goggles and the bird steadied in view, smart optics enabling him to share its hunt, vicariously. There was a gleam in the raptor’s yellow iris as it scanned the sparse cover, seeking prey that might be sheltered there.

The bird passed out of sight. Logan readjusted the goggles and resumed climbing.

Soon he encountered tricky territory. Shards of stone had broken from an undermined outcrop, leaving a treacherous scree in his path. Logan’s nostrils flared as he stepped off carefully, arms outstretched for balance. Then he hopped again, a little quicker.

This kind of ground was ideal, of course. Not particularly dangerous — he and Claire carried tracking beepers anyway, and Forest Service ’copters were less than thirty minutes away — but enough so to be thrilling. Logan leaped from boulder to tottering boulder. It lent an added spice of adrenaline to the exhilaration of just being out here in the open, far from the teeming cities or his growling bulldozers, without a care in the world beyond the crucial decision of where he was going to plant his feet next.

At last he landed, surefooted and elated, on another patch of easy slant — no more vertical than horizontal. Logan paused again to catch his breath.

He and Claire had seen many other hikers on their way here, of course. You needed reservations years in advance to get a camping permit. Ironically though, right now the two of them were completely alone in this particular area. While tourists thronged the easy nature trails and aficionados went for hard ascents, intermediate terrain like this often went unvisited for days at a stretch.

Squinting to blur vision a bit, Logan could almost smear out signs of recent human passage… those eroded spots where footprints had worn the stone in ways wind or water never could, or bits of paper or foil too small to qualify for antilitter fines. It was so quiet — no drone of aircraft engines at the moment, no voices — that one might even imagine one was treading ground no other person had explored in all of time.

It was a pleasant fantasy.

Logan scanned for his daughter, his goggles adapting to the changing glare. Now where has she gotten to ?

A giggle made him start. “I’m right above you, dummy!”

Sure enough, there she was. Not five meters uphill, perched on a fifty-degree slope. She must have lain in wait, quiet and unmoving, for at least ten minutes as he approached.

“I never should have let Kala M’Lenko teach you stalking,” he muttered.

She tossed her hair, red tinged from the sun. Her skin was copper colored too, saying to hell with the palefaced fashion of the day. Where a normal sixteen-year-old would have worn the latest style in sun hats, she sported a sweat-band visor and streaks of white onc-ex cream.

“But you said a girl today oughta have survival skills.”

“Thems, you have in plenty. Too plenty, maybe,” Logan answered in pidgin Simglish. But he grinned. “Let’s see what you found.”

Actually, he was pleased with her attitude. As she led him up a path too narrow for footprints, Logan found himself recalling a time some years ago when he had challenged her to “find a rock” in Kansas.

They had been visiting his parents, before the divorce, but long after the Big Drought had forced plains farmers to switch from their beloved corn to sorghum and amaranth. Claire loved the Eng spread, even though the agricooperative it was a part of scarcely resembled the Ma and Pa farms still vivid in story books. At least it was more real than the lavish estate where Daisy had grown up, where Claire hated visiting because her aristo cousins so often cast her in the role of their amusing hick relation, who didn’t even know enough to care that she was poor.

“ If you can find a rock, I’ll give you ten dollars ,” he had told his daughter on that day, thinking it a simple way to keep her amused during the sluggish stretch until dinnertime. And while the inducement had been mere pocket change, she nevertheless scampered off into the harvested fields, searching through stubble while he lazed in a hammock, catching up on his journals.

It didn’t take Claire long to realize plowed fields weren’t good places to find stones. So she moved to the verges, where windbreak trees swayed in a bone-dry sirocco. During all that lazy afternoon she kept running back to her father with bits of treasure to show him… bottle caps and machine parts, for instance. Or ancient aluminum soft-drink pull-rings, still shiny after seventy years. And all sorts of other detritus from two and a half centuries’ ceaseless cultivation. They had fun puzzling over these trophies, and Logan would have been happy with just that. But, typically, Claire never forgot the original challenge.