David Brin - Earth

She brought him hard clumps that proved, under a magnifying glass, to be only hardened dirt. She retrieved agglomerates of clay and chunks of broken cement. Every sample turned into a revelation, a glimpse into the past. Each time she would hurry off again, only to return a few minutes later, breathless with the next sample to be dissected.

Finally, when Logan’s mother called them in for supper, he broke the news to Claire. “ There are no stones in Kansas, ” he had said. “ Or at least not in this part of the state. Even after all the terrible erosion, there’s still hardly anywhere you can find bedrock. It’s all a great plain built up over thousands of years, out of dust and tiny bits blown down from the Rockies .

“ There’s just no natural way for a stone to get here, honey .”

For an instant he had wondered if he’d taken a father’s license too far, teasing the child that way. But his daughter only looked at him and then pronounced, “Well, it was fun anyway. I guess I learned a lot.”

At the time Logan wondered at how easily she had accepted defeat. It was only three days later, as they prepared to depart for home, that she said to him, “ Hold out your hand ,” and placed in his palm a heavy, oblong shape, crusty, with a blackened, seared quality to it. Logan remembered blinking in surprise, hefting the stone. He took out his magnifier and then borrowed his father’s hammer to chip a corner.

No doubt about it. Claire had found a meteorite.

“ There is a way for a stone to get here, isn’t there ?” she had said. Silently, Logan pulled out coins and paid up.

Now, on this Wyoming slope, a much bigger Claire patted the slanting cliff where a sudden change in color could be seen, from mocha to a sort of toffee cream. She pointed to faint outlines, naming fossil creatures whose skeletons were set in stone when this had been the bottom of a great sea, millions of centuries ago. Logan’s own trip into memory was relatively minor in comparison, a mere eight years. But eight years which had changed that precocious little girl.

She won’t have to be picky to choose a man , he thought. She’ll scare off all but the few who can keep up with her .

“… and none of them appear above this line. They all died out right here!” She stroked the line again. “This has to be the Permian-Triassic boundary.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. Shall I take your picture next to it?”

Claire protested. “But we have to take a scraping! I want to take home—”

“Scraping second. Photo first. Humor Papa.”

Claire let out an exasperated sigh. But then , he thought, It’s a dad’s job to make light of things. To be hard to impress .

He touched the controls at the rims of his goggles. “Now smile,” he said.

“Oh all right. But wait a minute!”

She grabbed a flat electrobrush from her back pocket, flicked the switch to charge it, and began swiping at her tangled locks. Finally, she swept off her own goggles and ignored the ferocious sun to smile for the camera.

Logan grinned. In many ways, Claire was still quite sixteen.

It had been a good day. But returning to camp, dusty and with the grit of ages between his teeth, Logan looked forward to a quiet evening meal and collapsing in his sleeping bag. His pack, containing the full five kilos of rock samples allowed by Claire’s collector’s permit, he dropped with relief by the licensed fire ring.

Studiously, Logan pretended not to see the flashing light atop his tiny camp-transceiver. Until he touched the play button, he could still plead ignorance — claim he’d been out of reach somewhere on the mountain. Dammit. The others in his consulting firm had been told, forcefully. He wasn’t to be disturbed except in an emergency!

Washing his face with a cloth dipped in a crevice streamlet, Logan tried to be cynical. They probably want me back “urgently” to clear somebody’s drain spout . Returning to the tent, he tossed the wash cloth over the little red beacon.

But he couldn’t dismiss it that easily. His imagination betrayed him. While Claire rattled the cooking pot Logan kept envisioning scenes of moving water. As they ate quietly in the gathering dusk, he found himself — like some character out of a Joseph Conrad tale — picturing inundations, deluges, liquid calamities breaking through man’s flimsy barriers, setting all works, great and small, in peril.

It was incongruous, here in a parched land where one’s very pores gasped, where moisture was assessed in precious droplets. But he had little control over the train of images thrown up by his forboding unconscious. He pictured levees bursting, rivers shifting… the Mississippi finally spilling over the worn out dikes confining it, tearing through unprotected bayous to the sea.

Surrendering at last, he flung aside the tent flap and entered to read the damned message. He remained inside for some time.

Emerging at last, Logan saw that Claire had already packed away the utensils and was dismantling her own small shelter under the early stars. He blinked, wondering how she knew.

“Where’s the trouble?” she asked, as she rolled the soft fabric tent into a tight ball.

“Uh… Spain. There were some strange earthquakes. A couple of dams may be in danger.”

She looked up, excitement in her eyes. “Can I come? It won’t interrupt my schoolwork. I can study by hyper.”

Once again, Logan wondered what fine thing he must have done to deserve a kid like this. “Maybe next time. This’ll be just a quick dash. Probably they just want reassurance, so I’ll hold their hands a while and then hurry back.”

“But Daddy…”

“Meanwhile, you’ve got to spend a lot of time on the Net, catching up, or that college in Oregon could revoke your remote status. Do you want to have to go back to high school? At home in Louisiana? In person?”

Claire shivered. “High school. Ugh. All right. Next time, then. So get your gear ;I’ll take care of your tent. If we hurry we can make it to Drop Point by eight and catch the last zep into Butte.”

She grinned. “Hey. It’ll be fun. I’ve never done a three point five traverse in the dark before. Maybe it’ll even be scary.”

A dust wafts through the hills and valleys of Iceland.

The people of the island nation sweep it from their porches.

They wipe it from their windows. And they try not to scowl when tourists exclaim, pointing in delight at the red and orange twilight glow cast by suspended topsoil, scattering the setting sun.

Stalwart Northmen originally settled the land, whose rough democracy lasted longer than any other. For most of twelve centuries their descendants disproved the lie that says liberty must always be lost to aristocrats or demagogues.

It was a noble and distinguished heritage. And yet, the founders’ principal legacy to their descendants was not that freedom, but the dust.

Whose fault was it? Would it be fair to blame ninth century settlers, who knew nothing of science or ecological management? In the press of daily life, with a family to feed, what man of such times could have foreseen that his beloved sheep were gradually destroying the very land he planned leaving to his children? Deterioration was so gradual that it went unnoticed, except in the inevitable tales of oldsters, who could be counted on to claim the hillsides had been much greener in their day.

Was there ever a time when grandparents didn’t speak so?

It took a breakthrough… a new way of thinking… for a much later generation to step back at last and see what had happened year after year, century after century, to the denuded land… a slow but steady rape by degrees.