Welcome to the Greenhouse (27 page)

I noticed now that the mare wore a vaccinating effectuator too.

The haptic feedback, even though it didn’t go direct to my crotch, was still having its effect on my own dick. It felt weird and creepy— but too good to give up.

Before I could quite climax in my pants, the titanic horsey sex was over, and the male and female broke apart.

Very cautiously, I pinged the other FarmEarth player. They could always refuse to respond.

Anuta answered.

Back home in my bedroom, my face burned a thousand degrees hot. I was sure hers was burning too. We couldn’t even say a word to each other. In another minute, she had broken the communications link.

When we next met in the flesh, we didn’t refer to the incident in so many words. But we felt compelled to get away from the others and make out a little.

After a while, by mutual consent, we just sort of dribbled to a stop, without having done much more than snog and grope.

“I guess,” said Anuta, “that unless we mean to go all the way, we won’t get to where we were the other day.”

“Yeah, I suppose. And even then…”

She nodded her head in silent agreement. Regular people sex was going to have to be pretty special to live up to the equine sex we had vicariously experienced in FarmEarth.

I felt at that moment that maybe FarmEarth Master privileges were kept away from us kids for a reason.

And a few weeks later, when everything came crashing down, I was certain of it.

My Moms and Dad were all out of the house that fateful late afternoon. I was lying in bed at home, bored and chewing up subsoils with my pals and their effectuators, eking out a conduit which we had been told, by Adán, represented the last few yards of tunnel, in accordance with our schematics, when I felt a poke in my ribs. I disengaged from FarmEarth, coming out of augie space, and saw my dull-faced brother Benno hovering over me.

“Crispian,” he said, “do you know where you are?”

“Yeah, sure, I’m eating up hydrocarbons in the Gulf. Nom, nom, nom, good little Crispy Critter.”

“Your statement exists in noncompliance with reality.”

“Oh, just go away, Benno, and leave me alone.”

I dived back into augie space, eager to get this boring “Angry Sister” assignment over with. We were all hoping that the next task Adán gave us would be more glamorous and exciting. We all wanted to feel that we were big, bold cyber-cowboys of the planet, riding Gaia’s range, on the lookout for eco-rustlers, repairing broken fences. But of course, even without star-quality assignments, we still had the illicit Master privileges to amuse—and scare—us.

“Hey,” said Mallory when I returned to our subterranean workspace, “where’d you go?”

“Yeah,” chimed in Vernice, “no slacking off!”

“Oh, it was just my stupid grebnard brother. He wanted to harass me about something.”

Cheo said, “That’s Benno, right? Isn’t his mom Zoysia van Vollenhoven? I heard he’s hot stuff in FarmEarth. Inherited all his Mom’s chops, plus more. Maybe he had something useful to tell you.”

“I doubt it. He’s probably just jealous of me now.”

Anuta sounded worried. “You don’t think he knows anything about what we’re doing?”

“No way. I just mean that he sees me playing FarmEarth eagerly all the time now, so he must have some idea I’m enjoying myself, and that pisses him off. He’s always been jealous of me.”

At that moment, I felt a hand clamp onto my ankle in meatspace, and I was dragged out of bed with a
thump!
I vacated my John Deere and confronted Benno from my humiliating position on the floor.

“What exactly is the matter with you, Ben? Do you have a short circuit in your strap-on brain?”

Benno’s normally impassive face showed as much emotion as it ever did, like, say, at Christmas, when he got some grebnard present he had always wanted. The massive agitation amounted to some squinted eyes and trembling lower lip.

“If you do not want to admit your ignorance, Crispian, I will simply tell you where you are. You are at these coordinates: sixty-three degrees, thirty-eight minutes north, and nineteen degrees, three minutes west.”

I didn’t bother using my memtax to look up that latitude and longitude, because I didn’t want to give Benno’s accusations any weight. So I just sarcastically asked, “And where exactly is that?”

“You and your crew of naïve miscreants are almost directly underneath the Katla volcano in Iceland. How far down you are, I have not yet ascertained. But I would imagine that you are quite close to the magma reservoirs, and in imminent danger of tapping them with your tunnel. Other criminal crews spaced all around the volcano are in similar positions. May I remind you that whenever Katla has gone off in the past—the last time was in 1918—it discharged as much toxic substance per second as the combined fluid discharges of the Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers.”

Holy shit! Could he be right? My voice quivered a little, even though I tried to control it. “And why would we be in such a place?”

“Because Los Braceros Últimos plan to unleash the Pinatubo Option.”

Now I started to
really
get scared.

Every schoolkid from first grade on knew about the Pinatubo Option, named after a famous volcanic incident of the last century. It was a geoengineering scheme of the highest magnitude, intended to flood the atmosphere with ash and other aerosols so as to cut global temperatures by a considerable fraction. Consensus wisdom had always figured it was too risky and uncontrollable a proposition.

“I cannot let you and your friends proceed with this. You must tell them to halt immediately.”

For a minute, I had almost felt myself on Benno’s side. But when he gave me that order in his know-it-all way, I instantly rebelled. All the years of growing up together, with him always the favored one, stuck in my throat.

“Like hell! We’re just doing what’s good for the planet in the fastest way possible. Los Braceros must have studied everything better than you. You’re just a kid like me!”

Benno looked at me calmly with his stony face. “I am a Master Class Steward, and you are not.”

“Well, Mr. Master Class Steward, try and stop me!”

I started to climb to my feet when Benno tackled me and knocked me back down!

We began to wrestle. I expected to pin Benno in a couple of seconds. But that wasn’t how things went.

I had always believed my brother was a total lardass from all his FarmEarth physical inactivity. How the heck was I supposed to know that he spent two hours every weekend in some kind of martial arts training? Was I in charge of his frigging schedule? We didn’t even share the same mito-Mom!

I found myself snaffled up in about half a minute, with Benno clamping both my wrists together behind my back with just one big strong hand.

And then, with the other hand, he rawly popped out my memtax, being none too gentle.

I felt blinded! Awake, yet separated from augie space for more than the short interval it takes to swap in fresh memtax, I couldn’t access the world’s knowledge, talk to my friends, or even recall what I had had for breakfast that morning.

Next Benno stripped me of my haptic bling. Then he said, “You wait right here.”

He left, locking the bedroom door behind him.

I sat on the bed, feeling empty and broken. I couldn’t even tell you now how much time passed.

The door opened and in walked Benno, followed by his mito-Mom, Zoysia van Vollenhoven.

Aunt Zoysia always inspired instant guilt in me. Not because of anything she said or did, or any overbearing, sneering attitude, but only because of the way she looked.

Aunt Zoysia was the sexiest female I knew—and not in any kind of bulimic high-fashion designer-label manner either, like those thoroughbreds the Brazilians engineer for the runways of the world. I always thought that if Gaia could have chosen to incarnate herself, she would have looked just like Aunt Zoysia, all overflowing breasts and hips and wild mane of hair, lush wide mouth, proud nose and piercing eyes. She practically radiated exuberant joy and heartiness and sensuality. In her presence, I always got an incipient stiffy, and since she was family—even though she and I shared no genes—the stiffy was instantly accompanied by guilt.

But this was the one time I didn’t react in the usual manner, I felt so miserable.

Aunt Zoysia came over and sat on the mattress beside me and hugged me. Even those intimate circumstances did not stir up any horniness.

“Crispian, dear, Benno has described to me the trouble you’ve gotten into. It’s all right, I completely understand. You just wanted to play with the big boys. But now, I think you’ll admit, things have gone too far, and must be brought to a screeching halt. Benno?”

“Yes, Mother?”

“Please find a fresh pair of memtax for your brother. We will slave Crispian’s to ours, and bring him along for the shutdown of Los Braceros Últimos. It will be highly instructional.”

Benno went out and came back with new memtax in their organic blister pack. I wetted them and inserted them, and put on my restored haptic bling. I booted up all my apps, but still found myself a volition-less spectator to the shared augie space feed from Zoysia and Benno.

“All right, son, let’s take these sneaky bastards down.”

“Ready when you are, Mom.”

You know, I thought I was pretty slick with my Master Class privileges, could handle effectuators and the flora and fauna of various biomes pretty deftly. But riding Zoysia’s feed, I realized I knew squat.

The first thing she and Benno did was to go into God Mode, with Noclip Option, Maphack, Duping, and Smurfing thrown in. That much I could follow—barely.

But after that, I was just along for the dizzying ride.

Zoysia and Benno took down Los Braceros Últimos like a military sonic cannon disabling a pack of kittens. Racing around the globe in augie space, they undercut all the many plans of the Pinatubo-heads, disabling rogue effectuators and even using legal machines in off-label ways, such as to immobilize people in meatspace. I think the wildest maneuver, though, was when they stampeded a herd of springboks through the remote Windhoek encampment where some of the conspirators were operating from. The eco-agitators never knew what hit them.

The whole roundup lasted barely an hour. I found myself back in my familiar and yet somehow strange-seeming bedroom, actually short of breath and sweaty. Zoysia and brother Benno were unruffled.

“Now, Crispian,” said my aunt sweetly, no sign of the moderate outlaw blood she had spilled evident on her perfect teeth or nails, “I hope you’ve learned that privileges only come to those who have earned them, and know how to use them.”

“Yes’m.”

“Perhaps if you hung out a little more with your brother, and consented to allow him to mentor you…”

I turned to glare at Benno, but his homely, unaggressive expression defused my usual impatience and dislike. Plus, I was frankly a little frightened of him now.

“Yes’m.”

“Very well. I think then, in a few years, given the rare initiative and skills you’ve shown—even though you chose to follow an illegal path with them—you should be quite ready to join us in ensuring that people do not abuse FarmEarth.”

And of course, as I’ve often said to Anuta, wise and sexy Aunt Zoysia predicted everything just right.

Which is why I have to say goodbye now.

Something somewhere on FarmEarth is
wrong!

You never met her, child, so don’t drop Riki’s name like she would have taken your side. She would have wanted me to go. Sure, she would have cried about it, but she still would have wanted me to go. You need to understand.

Riki owned a small holding of land in a place called the Kaimai Mamaku Forest, not far from here. Her land would have looked huge to you, but to people of the time it was small: just an acre or two of cleared land surrounded by a national park. She ran animals called alpacas. They walked on four legs, had shaggy fur and long, long necks and they spat on people they didn’t like. Riki’s property was too small to make a living as a working farm, but she liked having animals and she liked the forest.

First Phase: Sundown

Riki used to get up every day before dawn to feed the alpacas. She was up as usual, tossing hay to her five alpacas, when she noticed the sky was darker than it should be and the morning birdsong was mysteriously quiet. She looked up at the sky and saw her namesake, Matariki: what we call the Pleiades. They shone brightly, like it was midnight. Riki knew that something was wrong.

The sound of her telephone began to ring from her cottage, and that was wrong, too. Nobody called her that early. She ran to the cottage and answered the phone. It was Max Cammen, and he said to her,

“I’m calling from Mauna Loa. You need to go outside and tell me what you see.”

So Riki went outside. She told Max about the dark sky, the quiet birds, and the bright stars.

He said, “Tell me about the sun.”

“It’s not sunrise here for another few minutes.”

“Well when the sun comes up, I need you to describe it for me.”

She asked, “What’s going on, Max?”

“The solar constant just dropped thirty percent in an hour,” he said. Max, you see, was a scientist who studied the sun. There were satellites—there still are, actually, but most of them don’t work anymore—and Max’s job was to read satellites that measured the light put out by the sun.

“That’s not possible,” said Riki.

“That’s what I thought,” said Max. At first Max had assumed that the readings were in error. He checked feeds from several sources. The data were consistent. He had even checked the internet for information from South Pacific nations to see if there were any eyewitness reports, but nothing was coming through. “I need to know exactly what the sun looks like, from an observer who can tell me what I need to know.”

So Riki gave him a running commentary.

Looking to the east, over the Pacific Ocean, a faint blue glow preceded the dawn, with a dim umber light nearer the water. Then the sun cracked the horizon. At first it looked no different from any other morning sun. As the sun crept higher, though, Riki could see that it had changed. Before that day, the sun burnt bright and yellow and you could not glance at it for more than a blink without hurting your eyes. What Riki saw was the sun we see today: dull and orange and cold. There was no warmth in the light.

She described the sun to Max, giving him every detail she could think of and answering his questions.

“When is the sun going to come back to normal?” she asked.

“Riki,” he said, “the solar constant is still dropping. I don’t even know where it’s going to bottom out.”

At first Riki refused to accept what was happening. There was no physical explanation and there was no precedent.

Max, though, had become aware earlier and had longer to adjust to the new information. He told Riki, as he told many others that day, that we don’t know everything about the universe. We can’t even identify all the lines in the sun’s spectrum. There are physical processes inside the sun that we don’t even recognize, let alone understand. Max had seen Fraunhofer lines changing in his satellite data. Something was happening inside the sun.

However absurd it might seem, it was happening. A man about to be gored by a minotaur should not waste his breath complaining to the minotaur about its biological implausibility.

As for the lack of precedent: Max said that we notice big events like exploding stars even though they are very rare, because they can be seen halfway across the universe. In comparison, a G-class star losing some magnitude would be near impossible to notice, even among our stellar neighbors. The night sky is lit with great infernos while our sun is just one ember-fleck that lost a little of its glow.

“So what now?” asked Riki.

“That’s the other reason I called you,” said Max. “We have work to do.”

Second Phase: The Frost

And so Riki set to work. She loaded up emergency supplies in her four-wheel drive and left the farm. That was the last time she ever saw her land.

She worked in a little research station just east of a city called Hamilton, and that was where she headed. It was around an hour’s drive back when the roads were still usable, and she used that time to phone as many workmates as she could. I was one of them.

I remember swearing at her for calling me so early. After Riki talked, I woke up plenty fast. The first thing I did was go out and look for myself. I know it’s hard to understand because the sun has always looked like this to you, but for us old-timers the new sun was a giant sign in the sky saying the world is doomed. Which it is and always was, but we used to think we had a few billion years to spare.

We each loaded our cars with whatever vital supplies we had at hand and we met at the lab.

Kiri’s experimental work was what saved us. She had created vats full of a special algae that was intended to feed astronauts on long missions to Mars. The algae grew under a wide range of conditions and had been engineered to produce vitamins and essential nutrients. We spooned the algae into as many buckets and tanks as we could load into our cars and utes.

Kiri had another experiment running besides. It was a micro-ecosystem rather than a single organism, and it was designed to test the possibility of terraforming cold planets and moons. These vats we took outside and emptied onto the ground. If the organisms were going to survive, they would have to manage by themselves.

Then we packed up and drove down to Rotorua, where the thermal springs are. As we drove, the air began to chill. Even though it was late summer, a light snow was falling. In open fields and meadows, the ground had frosted over and small streams started to freeze. We had to stop to put chains on our tires.

All the while we drove, we were phoning people we knew with skills we needed: carpenters, plumbers, seamstresses, engineers, mechanics, doctors, nurses, organizers, and told them to meet us at Rotorua.

Third Phase: The Ice Forest

By the time we got to Rotorua, the trees were dripping with ice.

We set up generators and tents and began building shelters. Belinda Larsson, who used to manage a hospital auxiliary group, ran the storage and distribution of food. Brad Longine, a carpenter who had built movie sets, and a bunch of helpers threw together our first hall, complete with scavenged insulation, in about five hours. It didn’t last, of course, but it was enough to keep a lot of people alive long enough to build a better shelter. Ngaire Butler installed a septic system, and Harry Viczak wired up a generator and an electrical system. It was amazing. There was very little I could do. My skill set as a biochemist would become vital, but at that time I could only give little bits of help here and there. Belinda Larsson knocked up a roster for people at a loose end and even those of us who couldn’t build a paper hat made ourselves busy helping those who could.

It was an extraordinary time for us. The community you see here now, diminished as it is, was founded in those hours. We worked together, for one and for all, and some of us paid with our lives, and each of us paid in one way or another with grief for distant loves who could not make it here.

That evening, we all went out to watch the sunset. As it went down in the west, the sun gave a feeble red cast over a stand of huge kauri trees that were now encased in rivulets of ice. But there, standing between us and the trees, was our little bit of hope. We stood on the shore of a small pond of liquid water in the surrounding ice. Steam rose from the surface, lit red by the dying light. And the only reason this pond had not frozen over was that its warmth did not rely on the sun. Our savior was the heat inside the earth itself.

Fourth Phase: The South Pacific Ice Sheet

There are only a few thousand of us left at Rotorua, but at least we’ve survived the winter. The sun is still cold, but even a cold spring gives us some hope. There are other communities like ours scattered over New Zealand. If it hadn’t been for Riki and her algae, none of us would be here at all. Through shortwave radio we know there are other communities out there around the world, mostly clustered around natural geothermal regions like us. We listened to the last days of people who had burrowed down into mines, where the temperature was fine but there was no way to make food. We heard from a distance the dying of the great power stations, which had become refuges for the desperate people all over the world. But even those stations eventually ran out of energy. Coal stations went offline as they ran out of coal to burn. The nuclear stations could have run almost forever on the planet’s natural resources, but nobody was able to dig uranium out of the ground anymore. Renewable power stations, hydroelectric, and wave-power came to a halt when lakes and rivers and eventually oceans froze solid. Even wind power, of which there is no natural shortage, collapsed because the generators were not engineered for the new conditions. All that remains is geothermal power and, paradoxically perhaps, a few communities that rely on solar panels for their energy.

It has been a terrible time, but we still live. As do others. Heat is no longer the crucial concern for our survival. The problem now is nutrition. We evolved in a food chain that no longer exists. Most survivors had managed by raiding supermarkets for protein and vitamin supplements, but the raids are becoming riskier as each source becomes exhausted and more distant targets are needed. And vitamins decay. Eventually we need a renewable source of food. That’s where we come in. Thanks to Riki, we have that, and we have managed to deliver it to the other communities in New Zealand. Those missions alone cost us dozens of lives, but they were essential not just for the communities we saved, but for ourselves as well.

I went back to the lab at Hamilton last week with the salvage team. There were a few green stains on the rocks around the buildings. We scraped a tiny bit off and tasted it. It may be nutritious, but it tasted damn bitter. Kiri’s cold organisms are growing, and one day they might colonize much of the planet. Growth will be slow, however, as the microbes can only reproduce on those few days when the sunlight is warm enough to create a meniscus of liquid water. This green revolution will take far too long to save anyone alive today.

The distant communities will die without Riki’s manna—and for those in the northern hemisphere, their first true winter is coming. That is why I must go. We have built a vehicle capable of crossing the Pacific ice sheet on diesel. I won’t lie to you. It will be very dangerous, more hazardous by far than our previous missions. We have to cross seven thousand kilometers of untested ice.

We’ll take Riki’s manna. We’ll also take some of her cold organisms and seed the Pacific as we crawl our way to Hawaii. From Hawaii, we’ll send missions to the west of the Americas and eastern Asia. If we had tried to live safe in Rotorua, we would have doomed ourselves from the start. Even with the other New Zealand communities, we need as much genetic and intellectual diversity as possible. If the communities across the ocean die, then eventually so will we. Besides, I’d like to meet Max Cammen face to face.

Riki did more than just provide our food. She was one of the people who molded our community, and although she was adamant that we not take unnecessary risks, she would have given her blessing to this.

You know that I love you and that, if I live long enough, I will come back across the ocean one day. I know it’s hard for you, and I know you think I would stay if I was your biological parent, but I must join the mission team and you’re not old enough to come with me.

Just before Riki died, she told me that the one thing that she regretted was leaving her alpacas behind. At first I thought she meant that they would have been useful for food, or maybe she missed their company. What she really meant, though, was that she still felt awful that she had left them to freeze. She wished that she had taken a few minutes to shoot them. After all that she had done for us, and all that she had been through, it seemed a strange thing for her to lament. After a time, though, I came to understand what she meant.

One day I think you will understand too.