David Brin - Earth

Or she could lay the blame on…

“Dumpit!” She cursed. All this introspection brought a tightness to her jaw. She’d hoped absolute openness — giving the shrinks everything inside of her — would get her through all these “grief phases” quickly. But personal matters were so completely unlike the physical world. They followed no reliable patterns, no predictabilities. Despite recent optimistic pronouncements about new models of the mind, there hadn’t yet been a Newton of psychology, an Einstein of emotions. Perhaps there never would be.

Teresa felt a constriction in her chest as tears began to flow again. “Damn… damn…”

Her hands trembled. The glass slipped from her fingers and fell to the carpet, where it bounced undamaged, but juice sprayed over her white pants. “Oh, cryo-bilge…”

The telephone rang. Teresa shouted on impulse, before the NASA secretaries could intervene.

“I’ll take it!” Of course she ought to let her temporary staff screen all calls. But she needed action, movement, something!

As soon as she’d wiped her eyes and stepped inside, however, Teresa knew she’d made a mistake. The broad, florid features of Pedro Manella loomed over her from the phone-wall. Worse, she must have left the unit on auto-send before departing on that last mission. The reporter had already seen her.

“Captain Tikhana…” He smiled, larger than life.

“I’m sorry. I’m not giving interviews from my home. If you contact the NASA—”

He cut in. “I’m not seeking an interview, Ms. Tikhana. This concerns another matter I think you’ll find important. I can’t discuss it by telephone—”

Teresa knew Manella from press conferences. She disliked his aggressive style. His moustache, too. “Why not?” she broke in. “Why can’t you tell me now?”

Manella obviously expected the question. “Well, you see, it has to do with matters conjoining onto your own concerns, where they overlap my own…”

He went on that way, sentence after sentence. Teresa blinked. At first she thought he was speaking one of those low-efficiency dialects civilians often used, bureauciatese , or social science babble … as impoverished of content as they were rich in syllables. But then she realized the man was jabbering the real thing — bona fide gibberish — phrases and sentences that were semantic nonsense!

She was about to utter an abrupt disconnect when she noticed him fiddling with his tie in a certain way. Then Manella scratched an ear, wiped his sweaty lip on a sleeve, wrung his hands just so …

The uninitiated would probably attribute it all to his Latin background — expressiveness in gestures as well as words — but what Teresa saw instead were crude but clear approximations of spacer hand talk.

… OPEN MIKE, she read, WATCH YOUR WORDS CLASS RED URGENCY… CURIOSITY…

It was all so incongruous, Teresa nearly laughed out loud. What stopped her was the look in his eyes. They weren’t the eyes of a babbler.

He knows something , she realized. Then — He knows something about Erehwon !

Manella was implying her phone line might be tapped. Furthermore, he was clearly making assumptions about the level of observation. Trained surveillance agents would find his sign language ruse ludicrously transparent. But the charade would probably fool most context-sensitive monitoring devices or agency flacks drafted to listen to the predictably boring conversations of a bus driver like herself. It would also get by any random eavesdropping hacker from the Net.

“All right.” She waved a hand to stop him in mid-sentence. “I’ve heard enough, Mr. Manella, and I’m not interested. You’ll have to go through channels like everybody else. Now, good-bye.”

The display went blank just as he seemed about to remonstrate. He was a good actor, too. For it was only in those brown eyes that she saw confirmation of her own hand signs. Signs by which she had answered: MAYBE I’LL RESPOND SOON.

She would think about it. But why does Manella imagine I’d be monitored in the first place? And what is it he wants to tell me ?

It had to be about Erehwon… about the calamity. Her heart rate climbed.

At which point she’d had quite enough of this emotional rebellion by her body. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, closed her eyes, and sought the calm-triggers taught to her in high school — laying cooling blankets over her thoughts, using biofeedback to drain away the tension. Whatever was happening, whatever Manella had to say, no good would come of letting ancient fight-flight reactions sweep her away. Cavemen might not have had much use for patience, but it was a pure survival trait in the world of their descendants.

Inhaling deeply, she turned away from the travails of consciousness. Vivaldi joined the chirping bluebirds in an unnoticed background as she sought the center, wherein she always knew when and where she was.

This time though, she couldn’t quite be sure that it — the center — was still there anymore at all.

After he succeeded in separating Sky-Father from Earth-Mother, giving their offspring room at last to stand and breathe, the forest god, Tane, looked about and saw that something else was lacking. Only creatures of ira atua — the spirit way — moved upon the land. But what could spirit entities ever be without ira tangata , mortal beings, to know them? Nothing.

So Tane attempted to bring mortal life to the world. But of all the female spirits with whom he mated, only one possessed ira tangata . She was Hine-titama, Dawn Maid. Daughter and wife of Tane, she became mother of all mortal beings.

Later, after the world had been given life, Hine-titama turned away from the surface, journeying deep into the realms below. There she became Hine-nui-te-po, Great Lady of Darkness, who waits to tend and comfort the dead after their journey down Whanui a Tane, the broad road.

There she waits for you, and for you too. Our first mortal ancestor, she sleeps below waiting for us all.

On his way back to Auckland after two days at the Tarawera Geothermal Works, Alex found himself en-snared in tourist traffic at Rotorua. Buses and minivans threaded the resort’s narrow ways, hauling Australian families on holiday, gushing Sinhalese newlyweds, serene-looking Inuit investors, and Han — the inevitable swell of black-haired Han — nudging and whispering in close-packed mobs that overflowed the pavements and lawns, thronging and enveloping anything that might by any stretch be quaint or “native.”

Most shops bore signs in International Ideogramatic Chinese, as well as English, Maori, and Simglish. And why not? The Han were only the latest wave of nouveau moyen to suddenly discover tourism. And if they engulfed all the beaches and scenic spots within four thousand kilometers of Beijing, they also paid well for their hard-earned leisure.

Yet more Chinese piled off flywheel buses just ahead of Alex’s little car, wearing garish sunhats and True-Vu goggles that simultaneously protected the eyes and recorded for posterity every kitsch purchase from friendly concessionaires touting “genuine” New Zealand native woodcraft.

Well, it’s their turn , Alex thought, nursing patience. And it surely does beat war .

Kiwi autumn was still warm and breezy, so he had the side window down. The smell of hydrogen sulfide from the geysers was pungent, but not too noticeable after all his time working underground with George Hutton’s people. Waiting for traffic to clear, Alex watched another silvery cruise zeppelin broach a tree-lined pass and settle toward the busy aerodrome at the edge of town. Even from here he made out the crowds crammed into steerage, faces pressed against windows to peer down at Rotorua’s steamy volcanic pools.