Mother of Storms (69 page)
Authors: John Barnes
Louie watches people who have never seen anyone other than the forty people in their little tribe meet the great wide world. He watches animals copulate, kill each other, grow old and die. He watches ponds become climax forest and revert to ponds; catches the immense complexity of a condor in flight and the simplicity of the nitrogen cycle.
He finds that he likes this a lot. One of the most interesting things that the creativity researchers found out (and Louie suddenly begins to wonder about creativity, and within a few minutes he has put together every study ever done on it, read them all, and formed his own view) was that esthetic pleasure is linked, on some deep level, to the complexity of what we see—sometimes to the complexity of its interrelations rather than to the complexity of the object itself.
One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them … these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension—between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see—is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain—or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create?—are the ones found in the world around us.
It looks like a good deal to Louie that we are constructed to like the world in which we find ourselves. He has looked at a lot of art by now and so much of it seems to be about how to see, and now that he knows how to see, he looks at art less and nature more. There is time for all sorts of things; for drops of dew on leaves, forests crawling up burned mountainsides, the breaking of surface tension around a duck’s feet as it takes off, and the sucking down of the Earth’s crust into mantle.
The amusements are endless; he augments them with data from the other planets, by comparison, and even squeezes a few orbiters into the launch schedule so that by the time he is on his way back he will have continuous monitoring of every major body in the solar system. But he
already knows, somehow, that Earth is his favorite planet … Earth with its living things, of course, and with an oxidizing atmosphere, plate tectonics, and water cycle to endlessly change the shape of its seas and coasts, where a tiny variation in temperature can make such a huge difference—
already knows, somehow, that Earth is his favorite planet … Earth with its living things, of course, and with an oxidizing atmosphere, plate tectonics, and water cycle to endlessly change the shape of its seas and coasts, where a tiny variation in temperature can make such a huge difference—
He sees that if Clem and Clem’s daughters are let alone, they will not put an end to Earth or life, and probably not even to human beings. With his own lifespan now extending to infinity (for he can repair and recopy himself as long as he cares to), Louie could, if he chose, sit back and watch the world re-invent complexity as it filled its empty niches, and the niches between the newly filled niches, and the new niches that created—
He could but he’d rather have Earth as it is. Call it a sentimental attachment.
On August 20, Louie Tynan crosses Jupiter’s orbit, a bit more than five astronomical units from the sun. The giant planet itself is nowhere nearby, of course; it’s a purely arbitrary boundary, the imaginary line that marks an ellipse in the black vacuum. Still, it’s the first of the gas giants, the four huge planets of the outer solar system that formed far enough away from the sun to keep their original loads of hydrogen and helium. He is now truly out in the cold and the dark.
By now the wiseguys in the asteroid belt are blasting away at him at an ever-increasing rate, and even with the longer catapult and laser boost it is taking six days for packages from the moon to catch up with him and pass through his funnel. He has been rearranging and climbing the train for a while now, so that more and more of his processing is distributed in the family of packages; there’s less waste of materials, and coordination gets better and better as he learns to pass the incoming packets, shrieking in the electromagnetic spectrum as clearly to him as a teakettle to human ears, from funnel to funnel the way a juggler passes balls, hands working independently and yet under unified control.
For a couple of days it was challenging, then as processors became more numerous and more tightly networked it became amusing but not difficult. Now it’s all but a habit; he catches them and passes them along as automatically as a worker on an old-fashioned assembly line might tighten a bolt.
With seventy plants online in the asteroids—and that number will quadruple before he’s done—he doesn’t really need the moon packages anymore, or rather he doesn’t need them right away. After a moment’s thought, he sends a message to Louie-on-the-moon—the lunar packages will be sent up a different pathway altogether, the one that he will descend as he works his way back toward the sun in a few weeks.
Ultimately the real way to do this would be to have belts of stations on highly elliptical orbits, all following each other around the sun, and then to toss ships like packages between them. Done properly it could create a
“railroad” to the far reaches of the solar system … it might be a matter of a mere couple of weeks even for ordinary flesh-and-blood humans to get out to Pluto or beyond. He works out the scheme … in fact, rather than having a single sequence of solar satellites following each other in a long elliptical orbit, it really might be better to have several such sequences … ultimately you could create a “grid” of moving bodies such that there was always a way to get thrown all the way up to wherever you wanted, and then caught at the other end.
“railroad” to the far reaches of the solar system … it might be a matter of a mere couple of weeks even for ordinary flesh-and-blood humans to get out to Pluto or beyond. He works out the scheme … in fact, rather than having a single sequence of solar satellites following each other in a long elliptical orbit, it really might be better to have several such sequences … ultimately you could create a “grid” of moving bodies such that there was always a way to get thrown all the way up to wherever you wanted, and then caught at the other end.
He’s going to need that when the time comes to settle the outer system, he decides. And for the first time in thousands of brain-years, Louie Tynan is startled; it had never occurred to him that he might do any such thing.
Yet the truth is he can build about as much habitat as he wants out here … and the beautiful Earth is being crapped up by an excess of people—lovely as individuals, towns, and cultures, but hideous in such profusion.
He has great fun thinking of a dozen ways to turn Jupiter into a midget sun and terraform its major moons, and working out which nations to settle where. It is so entertaining that he spends almost ten minutes on the project, idly catching a couple of packages along the way. Now that the Good Luck has extended into a stable train of a few hundred packages stretching over about a million miles, and he’s gotten himself distributed across all of it, this is really easy to do, and tossing and passing packages is like playing with a yo-yo, relaxing once you have the trick.
Just for grins, let’s see how many thousand years, using the resources he has or can produce, it would take for him to terraform everything in the solar system that he possibly could.
Figure Mars is easy; get some of the oxygen and nitrogen back out of the soil, add water and other volatiles … it had a billion years of life, anyway, based on what the expedition Louie was on found. Charge it up again and it’s good for another billion.
The moon is not much worse (it would leak air and water over the long run, but Louie could maintain it, now that he’s virtually immortal). The Jovian moons are a lot tougher—Jupiter’s magnetic field is a natural cyclotron and it’s bathed in hard radiation, and igniting nuclear fires in Jupiter’s core will pump a lot more particles into the process. You’d have to slow the giant planet’s rapid rotation to get a softer, gentler magnetic field … .
And the outer gas giants would be a lot tougher to start going and keep going; not much way to sustain a reaction in a ball that small. Maybe by beaming power from stations closer to the sun? Six big satellites in solar polar orbit … use the gas giants as reflectors … no reason to use Uranus at all since it doesn’t have a moon big enough for the job … .
The real bitch is Venus. Cooling it down from the temperature of boiling
lead, spinning it up to a decent rotational speed (without reheating everything), getting rid of air so thick it’s like a half mile of Earth ocean … figure you’d precipitate it out with metallic calcium, maybe, to get the carbon dioxide converted into carbonates, and if you had big enough lumps of calcium in orbit maybe you could use their gravitational drag to spin up Venus … they could also act as mirrors to keep the sun off … that would be a job. Mars would be a snap by comparison.
lead, spinning it up to a decent rotational speed (without reheating everything), getting rid of air so thick it’s like a half mile of Earth ocean … figure you’d precipitate it out with metallic calcium, maybe, to get the carbon dioxide converted into carbonates, and if you had big enough lumps of calcium in orbit maybe you could use their gravitational drag to spin up Venus … they could also act as mirrors to keep the sun off … that would be a job. Mars would be a snap by comparison.
Well, so simulate it. How long does it all take, and what does he do with all those worlds? Figure he’s making nine new habitable worlds: Venus, Mars, Luna, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Europa, Titan, and Triton. A couple of dozen continents and oceans … .
The thought is like a small orgasm. For twenty years now, the Library of Congress has been recording genomes; tailored viruses can rebuild the DNA, and cloning technology is there to bring the organism into being. They’ve done it for a few zoos, and they brought back the blue whale that way after the Japanese slaughtered the last dozen. For that matter, in the last decade they’ve brought back dodos, moas, woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons, and giant sloths.
They lost a few recordings in the Flash, but there are probably copies around … and for that matter there are plenty of samples one way or another.
He could bring it all back. And have plenty of room for beautiful cities and farms … nine Edens. Room enough not just for humanity but for life.
Herds of bison the size of Texas counties, whole continents of untouched jungles, snow leopards playing on Olympus Mons, and giant white sturgeon in the rivers of Ishtar. Wonder what an eagle flies like in low g? Heck, it could probably lift a small deer … on the smaller worlds you sure wouldn’t be able to keep anything that flew isolated.
How long?
Almost, he wishes for a physical heart again, so that it could pound. And he remembers that however long it might be, he has the time.
The answer comes to him. Just under a thousand years. He doesn’t quite believe it, tries again … but there it is. Once you have true self-replicating machinery, driven by abundant nuclear fuels or sunlight, you can have as much as you want of whatever you want.
His mind reels back to the implications. In the same thousand years human population could quite painlessly be brought a long way down—with everyone living a long life, no need to raise the death rate or even slow medicine down … everyone could be rich, everyone could have all the material happiness they wanted—
And right now, he knows, from the millions of brain-image recordings that the Comparative Psych Library at Kansas State has on file, exactly how
wretched people are made by hunger, cold, sickness, and fear. Figure that of the Earth’s nine billion people, about one and one half billion are suffering ill effects of malnutrition at the moment, a partially overlapping two and one quarter billion are inadequately sheltered, about three billion will contract a treatable illness and receive no treatment this year … .
wretched people are made by hunger, cold, sickness, and fear. Figure that of the Earth’s nine billion people, about one and one half billion are suffering ill effects of malnutrition at the moment, a partially overlapping two and one quarter billion are inadequately sheltered, about three billion will contract a treatable illness and receive no treatment this year … .
Fear is a little tougher to estimate.
The sheer quantity of
unnecessary
human unhappiness implied is beyond even Louie’s capabilities to comprehend. In a way he’s just as glad not to know.
unnecessary
human unhappiness implied is beyond even Louie’s capabilities to comprehend. In a way he’s just as glad not to know.
That word “unnecessary” keeps sticking to his mind. A thousand years and all the physical ills of mankind could be nothing more than bad memories, not living in any memory except Louie’s. And then there are those other dreams—lions stalking mustangs and kangaroos on the grassy plains of Aphrodite. Dolphins in the Sea of Tranquility, diving down to visit the site of the first moon landing. A grizzly breaking from the pines of the upper slopes of the Valle Marineris, on his way down to that great freshwater sea for a drink. Mighty Jupiter glowing blood-red in the sky above the endless oceans and floating islands of Ganymede and Europa.
All this and their health, too, Louie thinks, laughing to himself. Well, if he decides to deliver that … it slightly exceeds the specs on his contract, of course, but he doubts their descendants will complain.
Actually their descendants probably
will
complain, because there is something in human nature that looks for ways to make itself unhappy. But Louie can’t do anything about that. He’s not God.
will
complain, because there is something in human nature that looks for ways to make itself unhappy. But Louie can’t do anything about that. He’s not God.
Not exactly.
Not yet.
Mary Ann tends to think of the time that follows as the “phony hurricane.” Clem is still there and still real, and when Clem 500 blows across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and they spend a scary couple of days huddling in the dugouts, there’s plenty of reality. But it’s not the kind of terror it was before; the shelter is roomy enough to hold them, and strong enough to keep them safe. They all spend their time in the dugout singing, playing word games, sleeping, telling stories to children—it’s a kind of vacation from the endless hot walk. Everyone emerges healthy and in good spirits; the shelters are left as they are, so that future travelers can have the use of them if necessary.
The one thing Mary Ann finds depressing is that it all implies that the hurricanes will persist.
When the storm has passed they are up and walking again, clearing the road as they go. And as they do this, Clem is still moving over the Pacific, its fourth trip around now, scouring islands that were wiped out before.
There’s not much loss of life; the big waves roll out, but where they strike, big waves have been before, and you can kill someone only once.
There’s not much loss of life; the big waves roll out, but where they strike, big waves have been before, and you can kill someone only once.
Brittany Lynn Hardshaw finds that time to be painful for other reasons. The trouble with militarily occupying what Harris Diem calls a “cupiarchy” —a state built around people grabbing whatever they want—is that you can’t find anyone, good, bad, or indifferent, with any real interest in doing the work of government. Meanwhile a lot of young intellectuals and part-time kibitzers, now that they’re safe from the hired thugs of the various “cashlords”—another Diem term which is finding its way into the media—are spending all their time making life miserable for the occupation government.
Klieg at least thinks he can have something flying in a couple of months, so that the Southern Hemisphere might be spared; all estimates are that if nothing is done, given the much greater ratio of water to land, and the much higher seasonal thermal differential because the Southern Ocean is colder, the storm will be worse there.
But despite the urgency of Siberia, and the fact that it’s practically under the rule of an American proconsul, Hardshaw has to spend most of her time out on the road visiting refugee camps. So much water poured down the western slopes of the United States that the Coast Survey is using radar imaging just to assemble a picture of what the West Coast is shaped like now. There were rivers running sixty feet deep that had never held water since white settlers arrived, and so much snow landed in the Sierras that it seems to have compacted into new glaciers in many places.
The seventy percent or so of the West Coast population that fled east is now spread out across the Rockies and the desert states; the loads of water that hit those areas caused more flooding and more deaths, and there is no question now, according to NOAA, that runoff still coming down from the hills is going to refill many lake beds that have been dry since the Ice Age. Maybe that can be used in some kind of reclamation … there are people working on it, as Hardshaw tells everyone who asks her that.
With Carla secretly looking on, late one night Berlina Jameson succumbs to temptation and puts her arm around Naomi Cascade; when Naomi leans against her, Berlina gulps, lifts the younger woman’s chin, and firmly kisses her mouth. There’s a long moment before Naomi starts kissing back.
There is no new
Sniffings
for ten days while Berlina gets caught up after years of affection starvation. Naomi keeps saying she thinks she’s actually straight, but she really loves Berlina. It’s such a normal way for a young woman to behave that when Carla compares it to old records of Naomi making speeches at rallies and demonstrations, it doesn’t quite seem like the same person.
Sniffings
for ten days while Berlina gets caught up after years of affection starvation. Naomi keeps saying she thinks she’s actually straight, but she really loves Berlina. It’s such a normal way for a young woman to behave that when Carla compares it to old records of Naomi making speeches at rallies and demonstrations, it doesn’t quite seem like the same person.
Di Callare gets a long break, and goes back to get the family fully packed for the two-room apartment the Feds will put them up in, in Denver. The whole government is supposed to get moved there after Clem’s next pass. It would make more sense to move offices and departments as soon as possible, but there’s an impossible snarl of political infighting over questions of precedence, and for purely PR reasons, the highest levels can’t leave until most of the rest are evacuated. Just in case, Diem makes arrangements with the government of West Virginia; according to Di Callare, Charleston is the nearest sizable city to D.C. that can be expected to ride it out, and after all it’s only four hours by road, forty minutes by zipline, or twenty minutes by staticopter from Washington—in a crisis they can scoot there.
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