Aurora (69 page)

But for now it’s good-bye to the beaches, and indeed many a celebrated island of yore now lies deep under the waves. An entire world and way of life has disappeared with these fabled places, a lifeway that went right back to the beginning of the species in south and east Africa, where the earliest humans were often intimately involved with the sea. That wet, sandy, tidal, salty, sun-flecked, beautiful beach life: all gone, along with so much else, of course; animals, plants, fish. It’s part of the mass extinction event they are still struggling to end, to escape. So much has been lost that will never come back again, that the loss of the joy of the relatively few humans who were lucky enough to live on the strand, who combed the beaches, and fished, and rode the waves, and lay in the sun—that’s nothing much to grieve for, given everything else that has been lost, all the suffering, all the hunger, all the death, all the extinctions. Most of the mammal species are gone.

Still, it was a way of life much beloved, and still remembered in art and song, image and story—still legendary, still a lost golden age, vibrating at some level below thought, there in their salty blood and tears, in the long, curled waves of DNA that still break inside them all.

So there are people bringing that back. They are bringing the beaches back.

These people are one wing or element of the Earthfirsters. Tree huggers, space haters, they’re a mixed bag. Many of them renounce not just space, but also the many virtual, simulated, and indoor spaces that so many Terrans seem happy to inhabit. To the Earthfirsters these people are in effect occupying spaceships on the land, or have moved inside their screens or their heads. So many people stay indoors all the time, it seems crazy to Freya, even though she herself still cowers in the shelter of built spaces every waking moment. But she has an excuse, she thinks, having been locked in all her life, while the Terrans have no excuse: this place is their home. Their disregard for their natural inheritance, their waste of the gift given them, is part of what causes her to gnash her teeth, and drive herself to windows, even into open doorways, there to stand trembling on the threshold, terrified, willing her body to stop clenching, to step out. Willing herself to change. Finding in that moment of liminal panic that sometimes you can’t make yourself do even the things you most want to do, when fear seizes you by the throat.

So, but these beach lovers are apparently like her in this opinion or belief about how to regard Earth. They are kindred souls, perhaps. And they are expressing their love of that lost world of the seashore, by rebuilding it.

Freya listens amazed as Badim and Aram bring into their compound a short old woman, brown-skinned, silver-haired, who describes her people and their project.

“We do a form of landscape restoration called beach return. It’s a kind of landscape art, a game, a religion—” She grins and shrugs. “It’s whatever. To do it, we’ve adapted or developed several technologies and practices, starting with mines, rock grinders, barges, pumps, tubing, scoops, bulldozers, earthmovers, all that kind of thing. It’s heavy industry at first. A lot of landscape restoration is.
We’ve used this technology all over the world. It involves making arrangements with governments or other landholders, to get the rights to do it. It works best in certain stretches of the new coastlines. They’re mostly wastelands now, intertidal zones without being suited for that. Being amphibious”—she grins—“is weird.”

They nod. Freya says, “So what do you do, exactly?”

In these new tidal zones, the woman explains, they proceed to make beaches that are as similar to those that went away as can be arranged. “We bring them back, that’s all. And we love it. We devote our lives to it. It takes a couple of decades to get a new beach started, so any given beach person usually works on only three or four in a lifetime, depending on how things go. But it’s work you can believe in.”

“Ah,” Freya says.

It’s labor intensive, the woman continues. There is more work to do than there are workers. And now, even though the starfarers are controversial and in trouble—or rather, precisely because they are controversial and in trouble—the beach makers are offering to take them on. Meaning the entire complement of them.

“We can all go?” Freya says. “We can stay together?”

“Of course,” the woman says. “There are about a hundred thousand of us, and we send out working teams to various stretches of coastline. Each project needs about three or four thousand people during the most intensive phases. Some people move on when their part of a project is done, so the life can be a bit nomadic. Although some of them stick to the beaches they’ve made.”

“So you would take us in,” Badim says.

“Yes. I’m here to make that offer. We keep our whole thing a bit under the radar, you have to understand. It’s best to avoid political complications as much as possible. So we don’t go out of our way to publicize our projects. Our deals are discreet. We try to stay out of the news. I bet you can see why!”

She laughs as Aram and Badim and Freya all nod.

“Look,” she says, “there’s a political element to all this, which you need to understand. We don’t like the space cadets. In fact a lot of us hate them. This idea of theirs that Earth is humanity’s cradle is part of what trashed the Earth in the first place. Now there are many people on Earth who feel like it’s our job to make that right. It’ll be our job for generations to come. And now we’ve seen that you’re part of the damage they’ve done. It took us a while to get that, but when you punched that guy it became very obvious.” She laughs at the look on Freya’s face. “But look, it’s all right! We’ve taken in quite a few people who got in trouble by resisting that kind of shit one way or another. So, adding five hundred lost souls to one of our teams won’t be any big deal. You’ll blend in, and you can keep your heads down, do your work, and make your contribution. We can use the help, and you’ll have a way to go forward.”

Freya tries to take all this in and comprehend it. Beach building? Landscape restoration? Can it be? Would they like it?

Freya says, “Badim, will I like this?”

Badim smiles his little smile. “Yes, I think you will.”

The others are not so sure. After the woman leaves, there is a long discussion, and at a certain point Freya is asked to go out with an exploratory group and take a look at one of these projects and see what she thinks.

This will of course mean going outdoors.

Freya gulps.

“Yes,” she says. “Of course.”

Again they fly. This time it seems their Chinese hosts might be happy to see them go. More rooms and tunnels, planes and trams, trains and cars. Travel on Earth is not dissimilar to moving around in the spokes, although the g stays constant. They keep a low profile. Herded from one room to the next. Somewhere on Earth you go indoors, and move around in differently shaped rooms, which
either move or don’t, and the next time you go outdoors (if you do!) you are on the other side of the planet. This is so strange. Looking out of a plane window at the ocean planet below, under its layer of clouds, Freya resolves to master her fear, to make her body obey her will. She is tired of being afraid. Sometimes, you get sick of yourself, you change.

A west-facing coast somewhere. They tell her where and she promptly forgets. She hasn’t heard of it before. Temperate latitude, Mediterranean climate. Yellow sandstone bluffs jump right out of the white-edged sea. Used to be beaches at the foot of these bluffs, they are told, beaches so wide they held car races on the flat wet sand, back when cars were first invented. It was a morning’s walk from bluff to water, their guide says, and all flat sand. Laying it on a bit thick. Point of stories however being that there is a lot of sand still out there in the shallows. Some of it has been swept south by currents into a giant underwater canyon that runs from just offshore to the edge of the continental shelf, but even that canyon bottom is a now a kind of underwater river of sand flowing down toward the abyssal plain, a river of sand that can be vacuumed up in tubes onto barges, barged over to the land, brought into the estuaries of the little rivers that break the long curving line of bluffs, and put there. Old sand for new beaches, located right at the new tideline, up in the estuaries. They’re also trucking in giant granite boulders from inland, some to drop offshore and make reefs, others to drop at the foot of the bluffs to establish a new strand on, others to grind down into new sand, gravel, shingle, cobble—whatever type of rock that used to be there on the shore. It takes certain mixes of minerals to make a beach that will last, to make it nice. Also certain kinds of reefs offshore. Millions of tons of sand and rock have to be moved and installed. There is so much their guides want to tell them, these guides all sun-browned, hair crisped by sun and salt, eyes aglow.

The starfarers are tired by their journey—jet-lagged, they have
been taught to call it—out of synch with the planet’s rotation, diurnal rhythm, circadian rhythm—an odd malady that they are learning to recognize. After a first tour of this coastline, driven around in a car on roads along the top of the bluff, then around the shores of the estuary, with many stops to get out and look (but Freya does not get out), they are taken to an inn on the bluff’s edge. The inn seems to be a modest little conference center, with bungalows around a main building. Freya gets out when the car is parked inside a garage, and makes her way up to the lobby, then, in a controlled dash under a walkway, hustles to her assigned bungalow, next to the one occupied by Badim and Aram. Once she is settled, she looks out her open doorway to see the two old men stretched out on reclining chairs, in the shade of an overhang extending from their bungalow, looking out at the ocean. The overhang is called a ramada, they have been told.

Badim notices her and says, “Freya my dear, come on out and join us! Give it a try!”

“I will in a bit,” she replies irritably. “I’m unpacking.”

From the bluff they can see out over the ocean for a long way. A flat blue plate of stunning size, wrinkled with white light. Badim and Aram talk again about optical phenomena. They are aficionados at this point, and are hoping to see the green flash at sunset. Apparently Earth’s gravity, or atmosphere, they argue about which, bends the light from the sun in such a way that just before it dips under the horizon and disappears, the Earth is actually physically between the observer and the sun, but the sunlight is curving around the globe because of the atmosphere, or gravity, and as blue light curves more than red light, this curve around the Earth splits the light as if passing it through a prism, and this means that the last visible point of sunlight turns, not blue, which would be too much of a bend and too much like the sky’s color, but green, said to be a pure brilliant emerald green. “This we have to see!” Aram declares.

Badim agrees. “Strange to be as old as we are, and see it for the first time.” He turns and calls to Freya. “Girl, come see this green flash that may occur!”

“You’re not that old,” she says to him. “You’re like the hundredth-oldest person in the ship.”

“Well, even that would be old, but in fact I think I’m down to about fifteenth now. But let’s stay focused on the sunset. I’m told when the sun is three-quarters gone, you can look at it without damaging your eyes. Not for long, mind you, but long enough to see the green flash when it comes.”

She stands just inside her big ocean-facing double doorway and looks out, clenching her fists at her sides. The estuary is just visible beyond the point of the bluff to the left, a wave-creased bay. Where there used to be a beach at the river mouth, stretching between two points of bluff, there is now a white line of broken surf. They are building their beach out from the bluffs on each side, on top of the drowned one.

Waves slide in inexorably from the west, out of the slant sun mirrorflaking the ocean’s steely surface. Low but distinct lines of waves, visible as changes in the blue of the water, always approaching land. A strange thing to see. Out on the horizon is the faint gray bump of an island, poking over the clean line where sky meets ocean: light blue over dark blue, everything steely and dark in the late afternoon. Mild salty onshore breeze pouring in her doorway, seagulls planing by at eye level, their heads tilted down and off to the side. A line of pelicans below them passes north to south, a sudden vision out of the Jurassic, black silhouettes against the sun’s glare, slow flap of wings, though mostly they glide. The panic rises in Freya again, like a tide following its own mysterious pulls. She wants so badly to walk out into the open air, under the sky, but a clutch squeezes her heart, there’s nothing she can do about it, she can’t move. Even joining Badim and Aram under their ramada is too much for her. Nothing for it but go inside and try again later.

Even though it’s late, her hosts call her room, they want to show her more of how their project works, and as they will stay in the cab of a big earthmover of some kind, she figures she can just handle it. Jet lag has her quivering.

Out they go, room to room to cab. The earthmover moves sand from the giant piles of it in their receiving area, out onto the strand itself. In the horizontal light of late day they rumble and bounce down a long ramp to the new beach, now covered with vehicle tracks. Past smaller vehicles of various kinds, some plowing smaller and smaller piles of sand into flat surfaces, or pushing up dunes at the back of the beach. The important thing is to accept the new sea level and work with it, the people operating the earthmover tell her; it won’t go back down for centuries at best, and may never recede at all. But they are confident it won’t go any higher either; all the ice in the world that is likely to melt has already melted. There’s still a considerable ice cap in eastern Antarctica, but with temperatures stabilized at last, that one is likely to stay there. If not, well, too bad! More beaches to build!