The sand, the leisurely flowing Nile, and the clumps of date palm trees were as she remembered them. The solar power plant was gone, though.
Hagar looked around. In her subjective timeline, only one year had passed since 1913, when she’d last visited the place. In her mind’s eye, she could see the ladies with parasols by the shade of the date trees, the German delegation walking through the mirrored parabolic troughs and heated pipelines, taking careful notes, and Lord Kitchener in animated discussion with the inventor, Frank Shuman.
She spotted something: a small concrete block with a rod of rusted iron poking out. Hagar moved closer, knelt, and inspected it. She was in the right location; the block had been a part of the solar power plant.
“They dismantled it. Needed the metal for the Great War,” said a deep voice from somewhere.
Hagar looked up.
“It was the patriotic thing to do and all that,” said the same voice.
She spotted a lone, stocky figure in a violet robe seated under the shade of two date palms. A white napkin fastidiously tied around his neck, he was eating with gusto a salted fish he held in one hand. The other hand rested on a small table filled with an assortment of hors d’oeuvres.
He didn’t stop or even slow down his chewing, but his eyes tracked her approach.
“Howdy, boss,” he said.
Hagar bent over and kissed his mahogany-brown bald head. “Good to see you, Puddeck.”
“Those nipples of yours.” He ogled them admiringly and run a hand over her full breasts, tweaking a nipple.
She slapped his hand away. “What the hell happened to the power plant?”
“Oh, that.” He finally tore his gaze away from her bosom and took a mighty bite from the fish. She waited for him to resume talking. “Gone,” he eventually said and smacked his lips. A diamond-like decorative speck glittered in one of his white teeth.
She stared at him, unblinking, and waited for her old-time companion to tell her why in blazes the Earth people had dismantled the solar power plant.
His heavy shoulders sagged, but then his expression brightened. “You see, they had another one of their wars. You know how excitable the Terraneans, the Earth people, can get—”
She growled wordlessly at him, incensed.
“Come on, boss, turn around. Let me see that tight ass of yours. Been over twenty years.”
The only viable solar power plant in the world gone. She’d desperately hoped the people on this world would avert an ecological disaster of their own making. This was a major setback. Things had started to seem grim on Earth. Very grim. Hagar screwed her eyes shut and braced herself against a palm tree. The wind picked up, and she felt the grit of sand against her bare arms.
Puddeck’s voice reached her. “About now you must be wondering if they ever did construct the solar power plant to irrigate the thirty-thousand acres in Sudan.” For Puddeck, it was just another planet he had spent a few centuries on, just another entertaining assignment. Like Hagar, he’d been on multiple worlds. But unlike Hagar, who cared deeply about the ecosystem, he’d paid little heed to the natural world. Rather, he took delight in the antics and dysfunction of human societies.
Hagar massaged her temples then opened her eyes, fixing him with a baleful look.
“Come off it,” he protested, a hint of glee in his voice. “The Terraneans intended to pump water to grow shitload of cotton for export. Would have salted up the land in a few decades anyway and made the area uninhabitable.”
Hagar ran a hand angrily through her hair. “Never mind that. This technology could have been used in other ways. This could have been the beginning. A beltway of concentrated-solar power plants across Sahara, British India, Gobi, and the Chihuahuan Desert would have set the people here on a cleaner path.”
Puddeck used his nail to dislodge food stuck in his teeth. “I don’t see how. Humanity’s centers are elsewhere.”
“Long-distance transmission lines, that’s how. It’s a stretch but not impossible given the technological stage they’re at.”
“They might as well do it the right way,” he suggested, “and lay underground superconducting cables.”
She ignored the sarcasm. “Think about it, Puddeck,” she said. “A beltway of solar farms providing power for humanity. In perpetuity.”
He absently rubbed the back of his neck. “Get real, boss,” he finally said. “For decades, Earth people have known how to desalinate water, and by using concentrated-solar power at that.” He cackled. “They could have set up arrays of solar parabolic troughs along the shoreline. They could have electrified the entire region and they could have desalinated and used water from the Mediterranean for irrigation. Instead, the local people still use the shadoof, a three-stick arrangement with a bucket. And the rich who want electric power are hauling coal from thousands of kilometers away.”
Her chest constricted painfully. “Those newspaper articles I’ve read,” she murmured to herself. “They noted the impact fossil-fuel usage had on climate change. The reports—” She faltered. Puddeck was looking at her, impassive.
The newspaper articles were real enough. The related reports she’d later received had been made up.
Hagar turned away. She wasn’t sure how much to confide. Could Puddeck be behind the colossal sabotage of her data-gathering network and the fabricated reports?
“Oil became big,” he said from behind. “Really big. And it’s going to get a lot bigger. In the last couple of years, Standard Oil has made half a dozen drillings on the Saudi coast, right across Bahrain island. It’s probably only a matter of months before they hit the mother of all gushers.”
“Blast it!”
Puddeck joined her. “I doubt there is more fire in their mythological hell than the one they are getting ready to generate with fossil fuel.”
Hagar did not bother to inquire about the electric car of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Announcing the intent to mass-produce the cars by Ford had happened all right; she’d attended the press conference in Belmont Hotel herself—January 9, 1914, the last night of her previous stay on Earth. The cheery reports that had been submitted to her in later years were undoubtedly bogus. Now that she thought of it, maybe it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Instead of petroleum, cars would have indirectly run on coal, which would have been the likely candidate to generate their required electricity from the grid.
She decided not to share her musings and to mask some of her ignorance. It was impossible Puddeck had betrayed her or that he’d authored the fabricated reports that had reached her. And it was impossible that her analyst network would be taken out. But there it was—all but two analysts, one of whom had gone insane. Now she was grateful for a moment of paranoia she’d in the 1860s that had pushed her to set up a far-fetched back-up plan.
She glanced at him. “What about Schlichten’s decorticator?” Depression and numbness were setting in.
“The machine that separated the hemp fibers from the woody interior?”
Hagar didn’t deign to reply. They’d both seen the decorticator stripping off the leaves and then crushing open the stalks through a series of rollers and flappers. The machine made paper from hemp economically viable.
“Nah. It never got commercialized,” said Puddeck. He picked a piece of lint from his sleeve. “In the end, the money guy decided to stick with good ol’ trees as a feedstock for paper.”
“And Schlichten?”
“Got old and died.” The figure in violet robes shrugged. “Happens even to the best of them.”
She screamed from pent-up rage. Her hopes for a more sustainable future were being dashed one by one.
Eventually she said, “So it’s noisy gasoline cars and foul coal plants throughout?”
“Pretty much.”
Puddeck eyed his mistress. She looked hot when she was furious.
Minutes w
ent by.
Hagar turned and faced Puddeck. “Time to put a stop to it.”
He inclined his head. “I kind of reckoned you wou—” Puddeck’s body froze, immobilized, his mouth open in mid-sentence.
Hagar whirled around, and her eyes widened in disbelief. “You!” Starting to move, her arms froze still at her sides.
A man and a woman stepped forward. The man held a small black device in his hand. They both regarded Hagar, suspended motionless like an insect trapped in amber. Hagar and Puddeck were engulfed in a timefold. As long as they remained in a stasis, the mountains of Earth would grind to dust and the oceans dry up before a second would pass for them.
“That takes care of Hagar and her bid to cut things short,” said the woman. She leered up close at the still figure. Then she spun away and shrieked in laughter. “Oil and guns,” she hollered, spreading her arms wide. “Hot vinyl pants, supersonic airplanes, and power boats. Let the party begin!”
Part Two 2013
Chapter 8
Ortega Mountains West, Northern New Mexico
No one on Earth knew they have been watched. Nor did the watchers know that someone had watched over them after a fashion.
Lee was hired for life. Enlisted to do only one thing. And if everything was to go even remotely well, she’d never have to do it. She was the backup for the backup. The last line of defense for the biosphere.
She was a sleeper agent, living and breathing for one eventuality: for an alarm that was never expected to go off and did so anyway only moments ago, announcing with finality the first day of the rest of her life.
Lee heaved herself up onto the ledge. She swung her legs over and sat atop the massive boulder staring numbly at her chalky hands and at the four-wheeler ATV fifty feet down below.
She remained in this position for a long time, dimly registering the occasional fierce gusts of wind. The forest stretched in all directions, the nearest town many miles away.
The alarm going off meant the biosphere was about to enter a terminal phase.
For twenty-nine years, ever since Lee had assumed the mantle of responsibility from her predecessors at the ripe age of fourteen, she’d reckoned the state of the planetary ecosystem wasn’t as bad as it appeared to her. She had never met her boss, Hagar. All the same, she knew neither Hagar nor, in the event she was out of commission, any of her analysts would let things go to pot on this planet. They wouldn’t have. Unless of course they weren’t in a position to do anything about it. That is to say, dead.
The sinking realization this might be the case hit her like a sack of bricks.
Whatever happened to her boss and to the analyst network was likely to have happened years, maybe even generations ago. She had no way of knowing. This was a part of the plan, too. There was little wisdom in making her existence known to those responsible for taking out Hagar and the network. If someone was able to do those things, that someone might also be able to neutralize the sleeper agent before he or she could act. That’s why Hagar’s protocol dictated the sleeper agent was to become activated as far into the future as was viable. That is, when the biosphere was about to cross the ecological red line. At that point, there was precious little to lose in coming out of hiding and everything to gain. Evidently, today was that day.
She pushed her body over the edge of the cliff and started climbing down.
A couple of hours later, Lee was sitting in a bustling restaurant in Santa Fe. The sounds of animated conversations and giggles of small children filled the space. She sipped coffee and absently regarded the traffic from the window. She felt more isolated than ever.
Lee wasn’t like everyone else. A gulf had set her apart. Through the years, she had let a veil of normalcy settle down and obscure it. This had been ripped away a few hours ago. She had no one she could consult, no one she could confide in. Now, she was standing truly alone.
Lee paid the tab and left. The long journey south was a blur. She mechanically drove and duly stopped at gas stations.
Her hundred-acre estate was at the foothills of the Organ Mountains, the city lights of Las Cruces twinkling in the far distance. She drove on the private winding dirt road leading to her sprawling adobe villa, the path lights casting a soft glow on the barrel cacti and tall yucca plants along the way. Usually, this sight brought her a sense of comfort and joy. Tonight, though, her awareness of the severe degradation of the natural world pressed down heavily upon her.
She kicked off her shoes in the anteroom and strode into the spacious living room.
The moment had come. She raised her left arm. “Activate,” she said, and her bracelet glowed to life. “This is Lee Evans. I initiate Last Protocol: Gideon’s Trumpet.”
With this, she was coming out of hiding; her location and identity were transmitting. Presumably, the analysts would instantaneously become aware of her existence and report in. But she didn’t hold her breath.
It was all quite straightforward. Come what may, Hagar was to send a confirmation signal to each of her analysts once a decade, at the very least. If they didn’t receive such a signal, this meant that Hagar was incapacitated, and the analysts were to open the gateway and alert the powers that be. The very gateway a few hundred yards from the villa Lee was in.
Lee was now fairly certain Hagar was out of the picture because under no circumstances would she have let things on Earth get to a point where the alarm would sound. And Lee was also fairly certain the data-gathering analysts were out of the picture as well because she knew for a fact there’d been no attempts to open the portal on her property, the only fixed portal on Earth.
But she would have felt foolish had she got it wrong—and they were alive and well. Lee had to make sure. And so she sent a transmission, asking any and all who were alive to report back. Then she sat back, fingering a string of wood beads, marking time.
An hour passed, and she deemed it official that they were all dead. The good guys and probably whoever had taken them out as well.
It was on her shoulders now. All she had to do was stay on the sofa hugging her knees and the planetary ecosystem would spiral past the point of no return. No one would realize events could have played out any differently.
But no, this was not going to happen, not on her watch.
Lee got up, went outside, and walked a fair distance on her property. Flashlight in hand, she worked her way between the junipers and ocotillos, down a gully, and came to a stop by a rust orange boulder. She simultaneously pressed two indentations in the rock. Part of the rock swung sideways, revealing a spiral staircase leading underground and bathed in soft light.
Even if someone had discovered this trapdoor, it would have done them little good. Without the bracelet on her wrist, which refashioned itself into a unique glowing key, all they would have found at the bottom of the stairwell was something that resembled a massive metal vault door with nothing but solid earth behind. It was, in fact, a portal: a last-resort route for letting those outside this realm become aware that the ecosystems on Earth were waning.
Heat wafted from below as she descended. Her brow furrowed from a sudden pang of anxiety. The heat was more pronounced the farther she went. Her climb down the stairs turned hurried. Then frantic. Lee all but ran down the last set of stairs. She leaped into the narrow, short tunnel at the bottom of the staircase.
“No!” Lee shouted and raised one arm against the blinding glow of hot metal at the far end of the corridor. The thick plated steel door had all but melted away. She screamed wordlessly and ran toward the blazing inferno, arm extended with the exotic-looking, glowing key. But there was no portal. Nothing but molten metal oozing downward.
Lee fled from the impossible heat and bright-yellow rivulets snaking their way down the tunnel. She worked her way up to the surface, going around and around up the stone staircase, sobbing in frustration.
Chapter 9
Hag
ar was out of the picture. The analysts were dead. The portal was destroyed.
It was all over.
Lee went to sleep that night and remained in bed most of the next day.
Time and again, she went over the melting of the vault door in her mind. It was impossible. Who could know about the portal and demolish it when she was about to travel through it? How and who could have melted a seven-inch-thick vault door remotely and without any apparent heat source? And what did it take to dissolve such a volume of steel, anyway?
What was she up against?
Well, she wasn’t up against anything. Not anymore. Traveling through the portal and alerting the three gods was the one ace in the hole move she’d had. With the portal destroyed, she could do no more than the cashier at the gas station down the road. With the gateway gone, she could just as well take on knitting.
Evening fell, and Lee got up and padded around the house in her slippers. She fixed herself some English breakfast tea with milk, brought out a small leather chest from the safe, and put it on the coffee table.
Jazz was playing quietly, mixing with the occasional soft crackling sounds from the fireplace. Lee sat down, took a sip of warm tea, and opened the leather box. It contained three photo albums. Must have been a decade since she’d last peeked at them, maybe longer.
There were photos of her with her parents in the first album. A picture of her as a baby carried in a sling by Mom. The three of them in a panda preserve in China. Sliding in a playground in Las Cruces. Eating ice cream at Disney World when she’d turned twelve. And many other photos from the time she was born until, of course, around the time she’d turned fourteen.
Life as she knew it had come tumbling down. Even their faithful Chevrolet Camaro had been crushed beyond recognition. After her parents’ death in the car crash, the social workers would have placed her in foster care—if it hadn’t been for the bracelet she wore. With its aid, she has been able to access and manipulate any database. She had altered records to indicate she was eighteen. The fact she’d been “homeschooled” made the paper and electronic trail that much easier to doctor. Electronically conjuring a continuous, hefty deposit stream into her bank account was just as easy. For this reason, money was never a problem for Lee. She was as wealthy as she chose to be.
The Earth Hearing Page 7