David Brin - Earth

What next?

For a while she thought she had managed to trace a twisty money trail, proving that an official in Queensland had gor-sucked to local hotel interests. But the carni-man was smarter than usual. Computer taps on his accounts failed to report any unusual purchases in real estate or minerals futures.

For this case, her background as a McClennon helped. Before becoming a family black sheep, she had witnessed many of the ways her cousins and uncles sheltered and moved money without letting it show up on the net. So she called in a few favors from fellow radicals in Australia, who could arrange to snoop the Queensland official in person. Sooner or later, she was going to get the guy.

A timer beeped. She was supposed to get up and do some chores around the compound, or else Claire would raise a fit. This work in the Net was important for world survival, but her daughter didn’t seem to care about that… probably wished she lived more like her spoiled cousins.

Well, there’s no getting out of it, I suppose , Daisy sighed. It probably was past time she took a turn of her own at the cess pit. Or was it greenhouse maintenance Claire had been after her about?

But as she rose, Daisy caught a sudden change in one of her alert boxes, highlighting a name from her special watch list. For years she had maintained a tiny lamprey program attached to the home unit of the infamous Jennifer Wolling. All that time, her little spy had sampled and assessed what the apostate biologist was up to. Now, from London, it reported Wolling’s ciphered message.

“Hmm,” Daisy pondered, sitting down again. “The witch hardly ever tries to hide anything. What’s she up to now?”

With trivial ease, Daisy traced the memorandum to its source. Of course. The Pacific Gaians were just the sort to conspire with Wolling. Compromisers, they worshipped an anemic goddess who seemed willing to settle for a world only half destroyed by man, with most of its species preserved in glass bottles, relying on technological “solutions” thrown together by bright idiots like Logan Eng…

The cipher code was a good one. It took an hour to crack it. And when Daisy finally read the decrypted letter, she found a second layer filled with personal references and context-laden hints — the hardest kind of puzzle for an outsider to untangle.

That only made it more tempting, of course. Daisy knew about some new language programs, almost intelligent in their own right, that might apply here. And there were human consultants who owed her favors, too. Some of them might pick up connections she missed.

If all else failed, she also had certain contacts among enemy groups, as well… big corporations and government agencies with fantastic resources at their command. Among those, too, were also men and women indebted to her for past services. Daisy had dealt with devils before, when it suited her purposes. Sometimes honest rapists were preferable to mealy-mouthed compromisers.

She transferred the partially deciphered letter into her “possible clues” file, along with other anomalies like her ex-husband’s paper on the mysterious Spanish quakes.

Ignored to her left, small screens monitored all twenty hectares of Six Oaks, the realm she and Logan had built here on the bayou, where she practiced self-reliance and “zero impact” far more faithfully than the pallid versions preached by the NorAChuGas. Not just “good faith efforts,” but independence from the mines and factories and polluting power plants of industrial society… and from her own damned, smug, aristocratic family.

One of those displays showed her daughter standing on a stepladder next to the greenhouse, her hair tied back in a kerchief and arms covered with putty as she scraped the labels off newly bought sheets of glass and fitted them one by one to replace those cracked in a recent storm.

But Daisy did not see, nor did she recall her promise. Drawn once more to the holo screens, her blue eyes roved the electronic sea, the data ocean, seeking the blood foes of her world. Practicing the art of vendetta. Pursuing prey.

□ No animal is as likeable as an individual, and yet so loathsome in large groups. Voracious, implacable, using up everything in sight, this creature has been a bane to the Earth. Within a few millennia it has stripped vast portions of the planet, turning them into barren desert.

The animal isn’t Man, though humankind helped it multiply in vast numbers. It is the goat . A boon to smalltime nomads, the goat is an immeasurable calamity to the planet’s biosphere. Even today, it shares as much blame for the advancing sands as global warming or ill-planned irrigation.

That is why we, the Preservation Alliance of North Africa, have reluctantly taken action to sacrifice one species for the good of all. It is why we come onto the Net today, via this un-traceable routing, to announce what we have done.

Some say the preferred target of a winnowing should be humanity itself, which has perpetrated even worse harm. That may be so, but we admit to squeamishness about murdering the billions of people it would take to make a difference.

Besides, the Helvetian War proved Homo sapiens to be biologically adept, highly resistant to engineered diseases. The major powers’ biocrisis teams would make matters moot within a few weeks anyway. Only a few million would die before cures were found, resulting in no long-term ecological change, just our own pursuit as criminals.

None of these drawbacks apply to our other target species, however. We are certain the world will retrain the remaining pastoral shepherds once their destructive herds are eliminated. And we emphasize that our virus has been carefully tested. The disease is quite specific to goats. It should have no other effect than to correct a horrible mistake of man and nature.

One purpose of this announcement is to appeal to workers in biolabs. Think carefully when you’re asked to seek a cure. By your minor sabotage you may save a forest or a million hectares of Sahel! Drop that test tube into an autoclave, and you may save a hundred species otherwise doomed to perish before this rapacious menace! Remember, civil disobedience is your right under the Charter of Rio.

Another purpose is, of course, to seek public discussion. Criticism and data on the effects of our peremptory measure may be sent to the general and open display board [□ OpDBaqi .779.-66-8258-BaB 689.] We will read your comments regularly, and we welcome your suggestions.

Sincerely,

time of year, Davis Strait thronged with traffic. Great freighters plowed the choppy waters, following strobing marker buoys all the way to Lancaster Sound and the shortcut to Asia. Solar arrays and rigid wing-sails lent the sleek vessels a family resemblance to the clipper ships of yore, on which men once upon a time had risked their lives seeking this selfsame Northwest Passage. Now and then, the shadows of dirigibles, like passing clouds, darkened the sea nearby. The zeppelin crews, bound for Europe or Canada, leaned out to wave at the high-tech sailors below.

It was a far cry from when Roald Amundsen had come this way, to spend three hard years battling toward Alaska. Today the voyage took two weeks, and all looked peaceful here in the realm of the midnight sun.

Of course , Stan Goldman knew, appearances can be deceiving .

From this height he could make out a place along Greenland’s western verge where a vast, growling glacier met the open sea. Beacons detoured commerce round a chain of lumbering behemoths wrapped in reflective foil. The insulated bergs resembled great, silvery, alien mother ships, as mammoth engines pushed them south toward thirsty lands.