David Brin - Earth

No one worried overmuch when Joseph failed to show up one Saturday. On the second unexplained absence though, Remi and the others grew concerned. At home, sitting at his desk comp, Remi wrote a quick ferret program and sent it into the Net.

The ferret returned two seconds later with the old man’s obituary.

The mulching ceremony was peaceful. A few detached-looking adult grandchildren showed up, looking eager to be elsewhere. If they had been the sort to cry, Remi, Roland, and Crat would have been the only ones shedding tears.

Still, he had been old. “If any man’s led a full life, it was me,” Joseph once said. And Remi believed him.

I only hope I do half as well , he thought.

So it came as a shot from the sky when Remi answered the message light on his home comp one evening, and found logged there a terse note from Roland.

OUR NAMES LISTED IN PROGRAM GUIDE FOR A NET SHOW …

“Right!” Remi laughed. The law said whenever anyone was depicted, anywhere in the Net, it had to go into the listings. That made each weekly worldwide directory bigger than all the world’s libraries before 1910.

“Probably some Quayle High senior’s doing a Net version of the yearbook…”

But his laughter trailed off as he read the rest.

IT’S ON A REMINISCENCE DATABASE FOR WAR VETS, AND GUESS WHO’S LISTED AS AUTHOR

Remi read the name and felt cold.

Now, don’t jump to conclusions , he told himself. He might’ve just mentioned us… a nice note about getting to know three young guys before he died.

But his heart raced as he sought the correct Net address, sifting through layer after layer, from general to specific to superspecified, until at last he arrived at the file, dated less than a month ago.

THE REMEMBRANCES OF JOSEPH MOYERS: EPILOGUE: MY LAST WEEKS — ENCOUNTERS WITH THREE CONFUSED YOUNG MEN.

This was followed by full sight and sound, plus narration, beginning on that afternoon when they had met and held impromptu court where an elm tree shaded them from the glaring sky.

Perhaps someone neutral would have called the account compassionate, friendly. Someone neutral might even have described Joseph’s commentary as warm and loving.

But Remi wasn’t neutral. He watched, horrified, as his image, Roland’s, and Crat’s were depicted in turn, talking about private things, things spoken as if to a confessor, but picked up anyway by some hidden, hi-fidelity camera.

He listened, numbed, as Joseph’s editorial voice described the youths who shared his final weeks.

“… had I the heart to tell them they were never going to Patagonia or Antarctica? That the New Lands are reserved for refugees from catastrophe nations? And even so there isn’t enough thawed tundra to go around?

“These poor boys dream of emigrating to some promised land, but Indiana is their destiny, now and tomorrow…”

I knew that , Remi thought, bitterly. But did you have to tell the world I was dumb enough to have a dream? Dumpit, Joseph! Did you have to bare it all to everybody ?

A neutral party might have reassured Remi. The old man hadn’t told very many people. It was in the nature of the Net, that vast ocean of information, that most published missives were read by only one or two others besides the author himself. Maybe one percent were accessed by a hundred or more. And fewer than one piece in ten thousand ever had enough viewers, worldwide, to fill even a good size meeting hall.

Perhaps all that had gone through Joseph’s mind when he made this last testament… that it would be seen by only a few old men like himself and never come to his young friends’ attention. Perhaps he never understood how far ferret-tech had come, or that others, who had grown up with the system, might use the directories better than he.

Remi knew it wasn’t very likely Joseph’s memoirs would work their way up, through good reviews and word of mouth, to best-seller status. But that hardly mattered. It could happen. For all the old man knew, Remi’s nonchalant ramblings and dreams could be sifted by a million voyeurs or more!

“Why, Joseph?” he asked, hoarsely. “Why?”

Then another face came on screen. Delicate features framed in white. It was a voice Remi had managed to purge from memory, until now.

“I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t be interested in a man so egotistical as to insist, in a world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately needed. If you haven’t done the right thing, can you point to some great accomplishment or virtue… ?”

Remi screamed as he threw the unit through his bedroom window.

Strangely, Roland and Crat didn’t seem to grasp what he was so upset about. Perhaps, for all their stylish talk, they didn’t really understand privacy. Not really.

They worried, though, over his listlessness and learned not to speak of Joseph when each of them received small royalty checks in their accounts, for their parts in what was fast becoming a small-time social-documentary classic. They spent their shares on their diverging interests, while Remi took his out in cash and gave it to the next NorAChuGa he met… for the Trillion Trees.

And so there came a day when he encountered, once again, a small band of Ra Boys in the park, this time without his friends, without any company but his loneliness.

This time the odds mattered not at all. He tore them up, top to bottom, using sarcasm like a slug rifle, assaulting them as he might have taken on Gnome mercenaries, had he been born in a time when there was honorable work for brave men to do and an evil that could be grappled with.

To the Ra Boys’ amazement it was he who demanded to exchange net codes. It was he who challenged them to a rendezvous.

By the time Remi actually met them later, in the darkness behind the monorail tracks, however, they’d done their own net research, and understood.

Understanding made their greeting solemn, respectful. Their champion exchanged bows with Remi across the makeshift arena, and even held back for a while, letting his clumsy opponent draw honorable blood before it was time at last to end it. Then, dutifully, one tribesman to another, he gave Remi what he desired most in the world.

For weeks afterward, then, the Ra Boys spoke his name in honor under the Sun.

The Sun, they said, was where at last he had settled.

The Sun was the final home of warriors.

Living species adapt when individuals stumble onto new ways of doing things and pass on those new ways to their descendants. This is generally a slow process. Sometimes, however, a species accidentally opens a door to a whole new mode of existence, and then it flourishes, pushes aside its competition, and brings on many changes.

Sometimes those changes benefit more than just itself.

In the beginning, the Earth’s atmosphere contained copious amounts of nitrogen, but not in a form living things could easily turn to protein. Soon however, an early bacterium hit on the right combination of chemical tricks — enabling it to “fix” nitrogen straight from the air. The advantage was profound, and that bacterium’s descendants proliferated. But other species profited too. Some plants grew tiny knobs on their roots, to shelter and succor the inventive microbes, and in return they received the boon of natural fertilizer.

In a similar way, once upon a time, the ancestor of all grasses fell upon a way to cover soil like a carpet, with tough, fibrous leaves that soak up nearly every ray of sunlight. Other plants were driven back by an onslaught of grasses, some even to extinction. But for certain animals — those making the right counter-adaptations — the advent of grass opened opportunities. Ungulates, with multiple stomachs and the knack of chewing cud, could graze on the tough stems and so spread onto uplands and plains formerly barren of much animal life.