Outward Borne (45 page)

Before doing anything with the
data, the memory arrays had to be secured, with some means to
access the information without risking confiscation if, or more
likely when, they came after me. I do not know whom DePat found to
set this up. I knew nothing about it until years later and I doubt
that most of the people involved knew what they were dealing with.
They probably thought it was porn. It seems that the flash arrays
were kept in a shoe store. In shoeboxes, I imagine. I do not know
where it was. When I needed to access one, I sent an e-mail that
contained a number. Someone ordered some shoes; the shoes were
delivered to some place, and the requested data somehow
appeared.

My meager cubical was on the first
floor of Dwinelle Hall. Dwinelle had housed the History Department
for the last 175 years. Like any pre-computer-age building, it has
been retrofitted with cables, routers, and switches needed by
succeeding versions of local-area and campus-wide networks, some of
which were still there years after they had been replaced by
wireless networks of ever increasing speed. An old network cable
ran through Dwinelle’s venerable walls, to an outlet near my desk
and nowhere else. When I connected a wire to the outlet, my
computer functioned as a dumb terminal, so that virtually none of
that valuable information ever resided in my core memory. And it
was a good thing that it didn’t.

Grandfather had downloaded a
tremendous amount of information from the cube; much of it was
video clips of people moving around, often without sound. Who were
they? What were they about? It took a lot of time to recognize
faces, put names to individuals, and string together what had
happened so long ago. DePat had gathered considerable information
about the People and their lives, but there were many other files,
including several about the planet ObLa. It was incredibly
interesting, but I could not understand a lot of the science
content.

The original Gwynyth wrote a
memoir of her life in the Saxon villages of the long fjord. She
began writing long after she had been taken to the Outward, and she
looked back on that time with a curious mix of opinions and
emotions. It was fascinating to see something written about those
times. There are virtually no earthly records of that dim era.
Those illiterate people left nothing to history and their cherished
memories are long forgotten, but the images collected by the
ObLaDas robotics during the abduction were shocking. Life was so
primitive. It is hard to imagine the unremitting labor that was
required to wrest a living, morning ‘til night, day in and day out,
from that dreary, muddy land.

The capture of the original People
was coldly efficient. An almost effortless mastery was imposed by
an experienced, supremely dominant force sweeping across the land,
flybots swooping in, putting everyone down, helpless, truck bots
inspecting, sorting, sampling, selecting, carting away. The
ObLaDas’ abduction left no mark on the land, and the memory of the
great silver landing craft disappeared unto the ancient Saxon
pantheon of giant birds.

It was heart-rending to see those
weak, ignorant, superstitious people enter into the synthetic
mechanical world of their Outward Voyager habitat. They came naked,
feeble, and confused after their capture and transport, and were
completely disoriented by their new life and surroundings. I wanted
to tell their story, present them as real individuals, people like
us who had been thrust into a new and extraordinary
world.

My work on the ObLaDa data became
all consuming. I found it hard to leave my office. Most often, I
ate lunch at my desk to save time, but some days were just too nice
and I went outside, usually to a bench next to Strawberry Creek. It
was beneath a large redwood so it was often littered by whatever
fell from the big tree. Few people used it, and when there was
someone there, I would wait for him or her to leave, but on a
particularly warm, partly sunny day there was a girl. She was a
petit little thing, with short brown hair, a little T-shirt, and
shorter than average shorts. Her trim legs, stretched out in the
sun, made her look taller than she was. I decided not to wait for
her to leave.

“
May I join you? I have just come
to eat my lunch.”

“
I, too, as you can
see.”

After a few moments of silence,
she turned toward me and noted, “You have no buttons.” Button
wearing was the new retro fad gone mad, ever since someone started
selling flexible disks that could be put through a printer,
everyone was festooning their chests with self-made messages. “You
probably want to be inconspicuous, but sometimes it becomes more
noticeable if you opt out rather than join in.” She examined her
collection and pulled one off, sticking it to my shirt. “There, no
one can take issue with that.” ‘Give Peace a Chance’, a
classic.

“
I guess not,” I mumbled. She was
prettier than I thought.

“
I know who you are. You are
Michael DePat Kiefer, everyone knows. I think its cool.”

I was usually discomforted by any
personal notice by strangers, and by girls under most
circumstances, for that matter, but this felt rather better. She
said it was cool after all.

“
What is your name, if I may
ask?”

“
Mildred Annagray
Aimsley”

“
Do people call you
that?”

“
Never.”

“
Well, what then?”

She paused a bit her face twisted
a little and, for the first time, wished she had a more respectable
nickname. ‘Poppet’, she finally said, and with that she jumped up
and ran off.

I met Poppet for lunch almost
every day after that and, after a week and our first dinner date,
she asked me to call her Millie. No one else did, but she said that
she would prefer it if I did. I am not sure she said that because I
was special to her or just different. Millie was in the School of
Environmental Sciences, and was passionate about species
preservation. She had more energy than she could manage and jumped
from one idea to another, it was her way. She had an endless string
of stories about this salamander and that frog that was about to go
extinct or might do so, and would I go with her to wherever was
necessary and collect issue specimens so that it could be revived.
It was part of her thesis project. She had three cloned stem cells
and needed two more to finish. It was all OK, because I liked her
and she seemed to like me.

“
But why won’t you come? Fifty of
us are going to Sacramento to picket the capital building and get
the governor to speak out against the land grab. This is very
important, you know.”

“
Millie, you know I believe in the
issue, but I don’t see how another protest march in our state will
make any difference to a multinational commission. It is more
symbolic than effective, you know that as well as I.”

“
But what else can we do?” she
asked.

I was not sure that I should tell her, at
least not yet. If I did what I was thinking of doing, the world
would learn that there was new, undisclosed ObLaDa data, and I
would have to deal with the consequences.

Those were the days of the Fallow
Land Scandal. The economic depression and energy crisis of the
2040’s, the resulting population decline, and the contraction the
world’s economy caused a great deal of havoc across the planet and
to its environment. A long series of ecology treaties collapsed
under the stress of the failed economies, deterioration of the
ocean’s tidal-waters followed, important fisheries were lost, and
coastal communities were abandoned. This swamp of abuse led to the
formation of the International Land Use Commission, ILUC. It was
the Earth’s first global governing body. DePat was outspoken in
support of the Commission, and he considered its creation as his
most important accomplishment. It was the first planet-wide
governing organization since the ill-fated United Nations, and the
first time governments relinquished powers from within their own
jurisdiction. Grandfather hoped it would establish a model for
future global commissions that would manage critically important
areas essential to our continued wellbeing.

The ILUC created the Fallow Lands
to protect coastal regions by setting aside large swaths of river-
and oceanfront land in exploited areas around the world. The
designated territories were reserved for habitat regeneration and
preservation, and were supposed to remain that way in perpetuity,
or so everyone thought. Recently, moneyed interests had purchased
large tracks in the Fallow Land reserves, though few knew it, and
they were now pressuring the ILUC to delist their properties.
Values would skyrocket if that happened. There was a lot of money
involved, some had already changed hands. The compromised
commissioners argued that this land should never have been
reserved, because the existing ecological composition was similar
to its historic land use pattern, and certainly, if any changes
might have occurred, they were not grave enough to threaten any
species’ survival. The fanatic eco-group claims to the contrary
were overstated and without proof, they asserted.

Millie, her friends, and a great
many others, were convinced that the ILUC’s excuses were wrong.
Industrial development and population overgrowth must have caused
important large-scale changes to the coastal environment, but they
needed historical ecology evidence to prove their point, or so said
the ILUC Commissioners.

That arcane science compares
current land use patterns to those of the distant past, or as
distant as they could go. Aerial photographs are the gold standard
of historical ecology, which means in practice, current land use
could be compared with that of the 1920s, or thereabouts, when
aerial photographs started to appear. Few of these old
predevelopment photos existed, however, and none of those covered
the remote countryside in which the Fallow Lands were located. In a
way, they were correct, the preservationists did not have the data
to prove their claims, but I did.

During its approach to Earth, the
Outward Voyager’s Planetary Probe conducted thorough surveys of the
land from the orbiter and from the lander during its decent.
DePat’s files contained high-resolution images, radar topography,
spectroscopic scans, and temperature maps from across all of the
Northern Hemisphere, and close up data for Europe, all from the
around the year 650.

The year 650 was in the depths of
the dark ages, a time of minimal human population throughout
Europe. No large cities or large-scale agriculture had existed for
centuries. Most of the land would have recovered from the
depredations of the Roman Empire, with its major cities, supportive
agriculture, and logging that were known to have altered much of
the forest cover surrounding the Mediterranean. In North America,
images showed signs of extensive brush fires that were scattered
across the continent, but there was little direct evidence of a
human population. Wherever they were taken, however, the images
showed that forest cover, tree species, riverbeds, and especially
the wetlands along the ocean’s coast were very different from what
exists today.

DePat, JiLo, and I met at
Grandfather’s home in late June. DePat thought that the ILUC was in
crisis. He was concerned that the integrity of the Commission be
maintained. It must continue to be effective and act responsibly.
Now ILUC members were under pressure to improperly remove
restrictions on some carefully selected out-of-the-way properties,
actually a lot of out-of-the-way properties. Something must be
done. DePat was adamant that the integrity of ILUC must be
preserved. It was more important to him than the ecological
issues.

Should I make the images known?
Publishing some secret ObLaDa material at that early date would be
a significant risk. Disclosure would reveal that new data existed
beyond the knowledge of the government. It would be like waving red
meat in front of a starving tiger; it would not just sit there and
drool.

I asked Millie to dinner. We went
to a quiet, not too popular University Avenue restaurant, and I
told her of my plan. She had been upset with me for not joining in
any of her protests. I was never into symbolic gestures, and she
did not understand that. Now I had something substantial to offer,
something that could make a real difference. This she understood
well enough. I had won her over.

The ILUC had arranged for the
Royal Geophysical Society in London to vet any information that
might impact the Fallow Land decision. We, therefore, needed to
gain the Societies’ support to have any influence. After some
negotiation, I gave the Society a small portion of the ObLaDas’
geological survey and environmental data for review. It was limited
to images of London and surrounding tidal pools, but they knew that
I had comparable data for most of the hemisphere. London itself was
no more than a village at that time, with a few buildings, and the
outline of some Roman walls clearly visible. The Society members
were intimately familiar with the London area, and would
immediately see the extensive changes that had occurred in the
ecology of that famed land over the centuries. They would not need
any prolonged parsing of facts to realize the importance of the
ObLaDa data.

The Society overwhelmingly agreed
that the images should be presented to the ILUC, and that any
immediate decisions on land sales should be deferred until this new
information had been reviewed. The effort was a success, in the
end, as the Fallow Land Commission’s decision on redevelopment was
indeed postponed. Politicians were happy for a while, the money was
flying their way even before we left London, but the new data and
its review took long enough for the backdoor deals to unravel, and
for the crooked scheme to be exposed.