David Brin - Earth

Those worries, Nelson knew, were reserved for the captain and crew. They were the special concerns of those who must stand watch.

□ … Although a body’s cells all carry the same inheritance, they aren’t identical. Specialists do their separate jobs, each crucial to the whole. If this weren’t so, if all cells were the same, you would have just an undifferentiated blob.

On the other hand, whenever a small group of cells strives, unrestricted, for its own supremacy, you get another familiar catastrophe, known as cancer.

What does any of this have to do with social theory?

Nations are often likened to living bodies. And so, oldtime state socialism may be said to have turned many a body politic into lazy, unproductive blobs. Likewise, inherited wealth and aristocracy were egoistic cancers that ate the hearts out of countless other great nations.

To carry the analogy further — what these two pervasive and ruinous social diseases had in common was that each could flourish only when a commonwealth’s immune system was weakened. In this case we refer to the free flow of information. Light is the scourge of error, and so both aristocracy and blob-socialism thrived on secrecy. Each fought to maintain it at all costs.

But the ideal living structure, whether creature or ecosystem, is self-regulating. It must breathe. Blood and accurate data must course through all corners, or it can never thrive.

So it is, especially, in the complex interactions among human beings.

Jen watched the glistening pyramid of ark four rise to meet the stars. Or at least that was the effect as the open-cage elevator dropped below the dry ground and began its rickety descent.

Illuminated by the car’s bare bulb, the walls of the lift shaft were fascinating to watch. Layer after layer of nitid, lustrous rock drifted past — probably sediments from ancient seas or lake beds or whatever. Stories of the fall and rise of species and orders and entire phyla ought to be revealed in this trip backward through time. But Jen was selectively myopic, unable to read any of the writings on this wall.

Of course, the days were long gone when any scientist, even a theoretician, could do it all alone. Jen had a reputation as an iconoclast. As a shit disturber. But every one of her papers, every analysis, had been based on mountains of data carefully collected and refined by hundreds, thousands of field workers, long before she ever got her hands on it.

I have always relied on the competence of strangers .

She, who had built a theoretical framework for understanding Earth’s history, had to depend on others, first, to find and lay out the details. Only then could she find patterns in the raw data.

It was ironic, then. Here she was, the one some called the living founder of modern Gaianism — a movement that had already gone through countless phases of heresy, reformation and counter-reformation. And yet she was illiterate with the Mother’s own diary right in front of her, written in palpable stone.

Ironic, yes. Jen appreciated paradoxes. Like taking on a new student when everything might prove futile and pointless within a few short months, anyway.

As pointless as my life… as pointless as everybody’s life, if some way isn’t found to get rid of Alex’s monster.

Of course it was unfair to name it so. In a sense, her grandson was humanity’s champion, leading their small fellowship to battle the demon. Still, a part of Jen seethed at the boy. It was an irrational corner which couldn’t help associating him with that awful thing down there, eating away at the Earth’s heart.

Each of us is many , she recalled. Within every human, a cacophony of voices rages. Despite all the new techniques of cerebrochemical balancing and sanity seeding, those inner selves will persist in thinking unfair thoughts from time to time, and make us utter things we later regret. It may not be nice, but it’s human .

What was it Emerson had said? “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” One might say she had lived by that adage. Watching the rock wall glide past, Jen determined she really must send Alex a note of encouragement. Even a few words could mean a lot to him in this time of struggle. It irritated her that she only seemed to think of it when she was away from her computer, plaque, or telephone.

Then there’s security , she thought, knowing full well she was rationalizing.

Dr. Kenda, head of the Tangoparu team here in Kuwenezi, really was fanatical about preventing leaks. Jen had been asked not even to hint to the Ndebele about their true mission here. She could only tell their hosts that the task was vitally important to the Mother. Fortunately, that had been enough so far.

But will it suffice later, when the Earth starts shaking?

Kenda had demanded maps of the entire mine complex. There was disturbing talk of emergency plans and escape scenarios, of dike barriers and aquifer pressures. Jen felt uneasy, hating to think Ndebele hospitality might be repaid with betrayal.

One thing at a time , she told herself. What mattered now was that they were on line, adding their machine’s throbbing power to whatever skein of forces Alex had devised to snare the beast below, the singularity .

Lost in her thoughts, she hardly noticed as the air grew warmer. Dank, fetid odors rose from deeper down, where decades of seepage had filled the unpumped mine’s lower sections. The lift stopped short of those realms, fortunately. Jen pushed open the rattling gate and set off down a tunnel lit by a string of tiny bulbs.

Here and in other similar mines, the old white oligarchy had skimmed the wealth from one of the richest countries in the world. Properly invested, the veins of gold and coal and diamonds might have provided for future generations, white and nonwhite, long after the minerals ran out. Most of the present black cantons did not blame the old oligarchs for racism, per se. After all, they practiced tribal separation themselves. What made them seethe was something much simpler. Theft. And the frittering away of a vast treasure by those too blind to see.

Today, the thieves’ blameless descendants were bitter refugees in faraway lands, and the victims’ equally blameless progeny had inherited a terrible anger.

Condensation glistened. Jen’s footsteps echoed down the side corridors like lifeless, skittering hauntings. At last the light ahead brightened as she neared the open cavern chosen by Kenda’s team. There, under a vaulted ceiling, lay the equipment they had brought from New Zealand. And in the center loomed a gleaming cylinder, anchored in bedrock.

The dour Japanese physicist glared sourly as she arrived. Clearly, he chafed at the condition she had imposed, in return for her help in acquiring this site… that she be notified before every run and be present as a witness.

“What was the damage, last scan?” she asked.

Kenda shrugged. “A few tremors southeast of the Hawaiian Islands. Nothing to speak of. Hardly any comments on the Net.”

Of course she had no way to check after him. Not without sending out her own search programs, which would inevitably leave a trail. So she relied on open news channels, which seemed to have hardly noticed the chain of minor disturbances circuiting the globe. Eventually, someone was sure to spy a pattern, of course. Hawaii, for instance, was at the antipodes from this site. All one had to do was draw a line from there, roughly through the Earth’s center…

… through the devil thing down there …