David Brin - Earth

One of the techs fortunately came to his rescue with a pad of paper and soon Alex was immersed, doodling with maths. On that day — he recalled vividly in later years — it had been the marvelous, intricate, and exacting world of matrices that had him enthralled.

At last Jen called to him as she removed her lab coat. Short, but deceptively strong, she took his hand as they left the hospital and rented two cycles from a hire/drop bubble near the elevated bikeway.

Alex had hoped they’d take a cab. He complained about the weather and distance, but Jen insisted a little mist never hurt anyone, and he could use the exercise.

In those days bicycles weren’t yet lords of London’s streets, and Alex had to endure a harrowing blur of horns and shouting voices. Keeping up with Jen seemed a matter of grim survival until at last the green swards of Regent’s Park opened up around them in a welcome haven of calm.

Black banners hung limply as they dropped off the bikes at a canal-side kiosk, below green and blue Earthwatch placards. Demonstrators stood nearby with ash-smeared brows, protesting both the ark program and the recent events that had made it necessary. One damp-haired speaker addressed tourists and visitors with an intensity that blazed in Alex’s memory ever afterward.

“Our world, our mother, has many parts. Each — like the organs in our bodies, like our very cells — participates in a synergistic whole. Each is a component in the delicate balance of cycle and recycle which has kept this world for so long an oasis of life in the dead emptiness of space.

“What happens when you or I lose a piece of ourselves? A finger? A lung? Do we expect to function the same afterward? Will the whole ever work as well again? How, then, can we be so blithe at the dismembering of our world? Our mother?

“Gaia’s cells, her organs, are the species that share her surface! “Here, today, hypocrites will tell you they’re saving species. But how? By amputating what’s left and storing it in a jar? You might as well cut out a drunkard’s liver and preserve it in a machine. For what purpose? Who is saved? Certainly not the patient!”

Alex watched the speaker while his grandmother bought tickets. Most of the fellow’s words left him perplexed on that day. Still, he recalled being fascinated. The orator’s passion was unusual. Those who held forth on Sundays at Speakers’ Corner seemed pallid and overwry in comparison.

One passage in particular he recollected with utter clarity. The fellow stretched his hands out at passersby, as if pleading for their souls.

“… humans brought intelligence, sentience, self-awareness to the world, it cannot be denied. And that, by itself, was good For how else could Gaia learn to know herself without a brain? That was our purpose — to furnish that organ — to serve that function for our living Earth.

“But what have we done? ”

The demonstrator wiped at the ash stains above each eye, runny from the intermittent drizzle. “What kind of brain slays the body of which it is a part? What kind of thinking organ kills the other organs of its whole? Are we Gaia’s brain? Or are we a cancer! One she’d be far better off without?”

For a moment, the speaker caught Alex’s eye and seemed to be addressing him especially. Staring back, Alex felt his grandmother take his hand and pull him away, past metal detectors and sniffer machines into the relative tranquility of the grounds inside.

On that day nobody seemed much interested in the bears or seals. The African section held few tourists, since that continent had been declared stabilized a few years before. Most people thought the great die-back there was over. For a time, at least.

Passing the Amazona section, Alex wanted to stop and see the golden lion tamarins, their large enclosure outlined in bright blue. There were quite a few other blue-rimmed areas there. Guards, both human and robot, focused on anyone who approached those specially marked exhibits too closely.

The yellow-maned tamarins looked at Alex dispiritedly, meeting his eyes as he passed. To him it seemed they too were aware of what today’s activity was about.

Crowds were already dispersing in the newly expanded section of the zoo devoted to creatures from the Indian subcontinent. He and Jen were too late for the official ceremony, naturally. Gran had never been on time for anything as long as he’d known her.

Still, it didn’t really matter. The mass of visitors wasn’t here to listen to speeches but to bear witness and know that history had marked yet another milestone. Jen told him they were “doing penance,” which he figured must mean she was a Gaian, too.

It wasn’t until many years later that he came to realize millions thought of her as the Gaian.

While they queued, the sun came out. Vapor rose from the pavement. Jen gave him a tenner to run off for an ice lollie, and he made it back just in time to join her at the place where the new border was being laid.

Half the exhibits in this section were already lined in blue. Guards now patrolled what had only a month ago been standard zoo enclosures, but which were now reclassified as something else entirely. This was before the hermetically sealed arks of later days, back when the demarcation was still mostly symbolic.

Of course the extra animals, the refugees, hadn’t arrived yet. They were still in quarantine while zoos all over the world debated who would take which of the creatures recently yanked out of the collapsing Indian park system. Over the months ahead, the exiles would arrive singly and in pairs, never again to see their wild homes.

Painters had just finished outlining the blackbuck compound. The deerlike animals flicked their ears, oblivious to their changed status. But in the next arena a tigress seemed to understand. She paced her enlarged quarters, tail swishing, repeatedly scanning the onlookers with fierce yellow eyes before quickly turning away again, making low rumbling sounds. Jen watched the beast, transfixed, a strange, distant expression on her face, as if she were looking far into the past… or to a future dimly perceived.

Alex pointed a finger at the great cat. Although he knew he was supposed to feel sorry for it, the tiger seemed so huge and alarming, it gave him a ritual feeling of security to cock his thumb and aim.

“Bang, bang,” he mouthed silently.

A new plaque glittered in the sunshine.

“I’ve looked into the gene pool figures,” Jen had said, though not to him. She stared at the beautiful, scary, wild thing beyond the moat and spoke to herself. “I’m afraid we’re probably going to lose this line.”

She shook her head. “Oh, they’ll store germ plasm. And maybe someday, long after the last one has died…”

Her voice just faded then, and she looked away.

At the time Alex had only a vague notion what it was all about, what the ark program was for, or why the agencies involved had at last given up the fight to save the Indian forests. All he knew was that Jen was sad. He took his grandmother’s hand and held it quietly until at last she sighed and turned to go.

Those feelings lingered with him even long after he went away to university and entered physics. Everyone is either part of the problem or part of the solution , he had learned from her. Alex grew up determined to make a difference, a big difference.

And so he sought ways to produce cheap energy. Ways that would require no more digging or tearing or poisoning of land. Ways to give billions the electricity and hydrogen they insisted on having, but without cutting any more forests. Without adding poisons to the air.