David Brin - Earth

“But then, once the laws and tribunals were in place, you became the loudest complainers! Hollering like frustrated children about restraints on your right to do whatever you please!”

Teresa didn’t say anything, but answered silently. We never expected all the damned bureaucracy .

Her personal grudge was the tribunals’ slowness in releasing new rocket designs — studying, then restudying whether this propellant or that one would produce noxious or greenhouse gases. Closing the barn door too late on one problem and closing opportunity’s door at the same time.

“The world is too small,” Manella went on. “Our frail, frugal prosperity teeters on a precipice. Why do you think I devote myself to hunting down little would-be Fausts like Alex Lustig?”

She looked up. “For the headlines?”

Manella lifted his wine glass. “Touchi. But my point remains, Captain Tikhana. Something went on aboard that station. Let’s put aside illegality and talk about secrecy. Secrecy meant it wasn’t subject to scrutiny and criticism. That’s how calamities like Chernobyl and Lamberton and Tsushima happen. It’s also why — to be horribly blunt — your husband is right now hurtling at relativistic velocities toward Sagittarius.”

Teresa felt the blood drain out of her face. She had a sudden memory… not of Jason, but of the slippery way Colonel Glenn Spivey had managed to avoid testifying. Spivey had to know more, much more than he was telling.

Oh, Manella was smart all right. Right down to knowing when his point was made . . „ when it was best to stop talking while his victim squirmed for some way out of his infernal trap of logic.

Despairingly, Teresa saw no escape. She had to make a choice between two equally unpalatable avenues.

She could go to the inspector general with this. By federal and treaty law she’d be protected from retribution. Her rank and pay and safety would be secure.

But there was no way the IG could protect the most precious thing left to her — her flight status. Any way it went, “they” would find an excuse not to let her back into space again.

The other choice Manella was clearly, implicitly offering. She subvocalized the half obscenity… a conspiracy .

Something scratched at the window. She looked outside to see a creature scrabbling against the smooth surface of the glass — a large insect, bizarre and startling until she remembered.

A cicada. Yes, the Net had stories about them.

The city had braced for the reemergence of the seventeen-year cicadas, which from time beyond memory had flooded one summer every generation with noisy, ratcheting insect life, swarming through the trees and keeping everybody awake until they at last mated, laid their eggs, and died. A nuisance, but one whose recurrence was so rare and well timed that Washington regularly made an event of it, with special studies in the schools and humorous reports on the zines.

Only this year something had gone wrong.

Perhaps it was the water, or maybe something let into the soil. No one knew why yet… only that when a few, straggling cicadas finally did emerge from their seventeen winters underground, they were warped, sickly things, mutated and dying. It brought back memories of the cancer plague, or the Calthingite babies of twenty years ago, and led to dire conjectures about when something like it would next happen to people again.

Teresa watched the pitiful, horrible little insect crawl away amid the shrubbery… a victim, one of so many without names.

“What is it you want of me?” she asked the reporter in a whisper.

Somehow, she had expected him to smile. She was glad, even grateful, that he was sensitive enough not to exult openly. With a sincerity that might even be genuine, Pedro Manella touched her hand.

“You must help me. Help me find out what is going on.”

□ The World Predictions Registry is proud to present our twenty-fifth annual Prognostication Awards, for accomplishments in the fields of trend analysis, meteorology, economic forecasting, and whistle blowing. In addition this year, for the first time in a decade, there will be a new category.

For some time a debate has raged in our portion of the Net over the purpose of the registry. Are we here simply to collate the projections of various experts, so that over time those with the best accuracy scores may “win” in some way? Or should our objective be something more far-reaching?

It can be argued that there’s nothing more fascinating and attractive to human beings than the notion of predicting a successful path through the pitfalls and opportunities that lie ahead. Entertainment Net-zines are filled with the prophecies of psychics, soothsayers, astrologers, and stock market analysts, all part of a vast market catering to this basic human dream.

Why not — some of our members have asked — expand the registry to record all those visions as well, and score them as we do the more academic models? At the very least we’d provide a service by debunking charlatans. But also there’s the possibility, even if most offer no more than sensationalism and fancy, that just a few of these would-be seers could be making bona fide hits.

What if some crank — without knowing how or why — stumbled onto a rude but promising trick or knack, one offering him or her a narrow window onto the obstacle course ahead? These days, with the world in the condition it’s in, can we afford to ignore any possibility?

For this reason, on our silver anniversary, we’re establishing the new category of “random prophecy.” It will require a database store larger than all other categories combined. Also, as in the department for whistle blowing, we’ll be accepting anonymous predictions under codenames to protect those fearful for their reputations.

So send them in, you would-be Johns and Nostrodami… only please, try not to be quite as obscure as the originals. As in the other sections, part of your score will be based on the explicitness and testability of your projections.

And now for honorable mentions in the category of trends analysis…

— World Predictions Registry. [□ AyR 2437239.726 IntPredReg. 6.21.038:21:01.]

Once, when he was very young, Alex’s gran took him out of school to witness a life ark being launched. Nearly thirty years later, the memory of that morning still brought back feelings of childlike wonder. For one thing, in those days an adult might think nothing of sending a big, black, gasoline-powered taxi to Croydon to pick up a small boy and then take him all the way back to where St. Thomas’s Hospital squatly overlooked long queues of cargo barges filing down the Thames past Parliament. After politely thanking the cabbie, young Alex had taken the long way to the hospital entrance, so he could dawdle near the water watching the boats. Set free temporarily from uniforms and schoolyard bullying, he savored a little time alone with the river before turning at last to go inside.

As expected, Jen was still busy, running back and forth from her research lab to the clinic, giving both sets of assistants revised instructions that only served to introduce still more chaos. Alex waited contentedly, perched on a lab stool while patients from all over Greater London were tested and prodded and rayed to find out what was wrong with them. Back then, while still involved in practical medicine, Jen used to complain she was always being sent the cases no one else could diagnose. As if she’d have had it any other way.

Laboratory science interested Alex, but biology seemed so murky, so undisciplined and subjective. Watching them test victims of a dozen different modern urban maladies, brought on by pollution, tension or overcrowding, he wondered how the workers were able to conclude anything at all.