Genesis

by Poul Anderson

  “No, no. I realize you’ve had too much other claim on your attention.” Ruefulness: “Besides, that also is well behind me. Treatments, therapies, regenerations, the whole kit of somatics, can only hold off aging for so long.” Again he regarded her, and she thought that what he saw pained him a little. He continued faster: “Games and contests haven’t been everything. I’ve made a fair amount of yun both as a coach and as a personal counselor.”

  She raised her brows. “Yun?”

  “Local slang. I’ve spent the past decade mainly on Taiwan. If you haven’t happened to encounter the word, it means credit earned, over and above the basic issue. Do they still call it plusses in England?”

  “Yes. I should have guessed. But I feel a bit overwhelmed today.” Laurinda hesitated. “I don’t want—to be impertinent—but—”

  Omar chuckled, more nearly at ease than hitherto. “But you were never timid. Well, for the most part I’ve been happy. One ortho-marriage lasted more than forty years. We were allowed two children. We chose girls.” He must have seen her own quick pain; he must know she had never had any. Doubtless he assumed that was because, whatever her relationships with men, none had endured. Or did he go deeper and see that Terra Central had taken up too much of her time, of herself? He finished roughly: “And I’ve become active in public affairs.”

  She nodded. “Politics.”

  Scorn responded. “Not standing for election. What does any political office mean anymore? But advisory committees,”

  “That is today’s main form of politics, isn’t it? That, and working to create a general consensus on major issues.”

  “It’s why I’ve come here.”

  “Certainly. Again, welcome, old friend.”

  The house recognized a psychological moment. A servitor glided in to set down the newly synthesized coffee for him, tea for her, and small cakes. Incense wafted from a miniature brazier. As they partook they exchanged conventional remarks, empty of practical significance, full of emotional tones, two animals instinctively reassuring one another. This visit in person, from halfway around the globe, said more than any telepresence ever could.

  When he ended the interlude, she sensed that he must force himself. “You know what I’ll ask of you.”

  She looked away, off into one of the screens where the day outside shone. “Do you really believe I can grant it?”

  “I can hope. It’s not as if we were at a final decision point. The debate may go on for years.” His voice harshened. “Unless Terra Central strikes it down and orders an action.”

  Her head swung back toward him. She stiffened. “What makes you imagine that could happen?”

  “I said it before. What force is left in the World Charter or the law of any state? We talk, we vote, we go solemnly through our traditional motions, but the decisions that matter come from the machine intelligences—at the summit, from Terra Central.”

  “Not decisions, not commands. Advice, which we do best to follow.”

  “You imply the world has become too complex, too precarious, for mere humans to understand and control.”

  “It always was, wasn’t it?” she said quietly.

  Taken aback, he sat mute for a while. Perhaps he reflected that her books must have given her more knowledge of the historical past, the terrible past, than most people had. At last he replied, ‘Well, facts, logic, models, calculations, yes, of course we need Terra Central, the whole cybernetic system. But what we want, what we feel, that counts for at least as much.”

  “She welcomes this input too.”

  He stared. “She… ?” he whispered.

  “Just what do you wish of me?” Laurinda challenged.

  “That you, today, speak for liberty. The last liberty we have. If those proposals go through, we’ll lose it.”

  “I don’t agree.” Almost automatically, so often had she explained the viewpoint, she added, “True, if we take her counsel we’ll have to accept certain changes. But largely it will be less a matter of anything compulsory than of giving up some things for the sake of the future. Some parklands must be converted, some volcanoes awakened, some installations built, a number of other programs carried out. To pay for this, a slight reduction in basic credit issue; there will be things we can’t afford any longer, but, really, very minor. No worse. I honestly can’t find sense in the claims your faction has been making.”

  “The changes won’t be that minor. Nor the compulsions. Only think of the Siberian forest gone back to steppe, North Africa back to desert, lava burying the Gardens of Hawai’i—all the loss of recreation, places to be alone in, to draw a free breath in. More than that, the condemning of property, the displacement of residents. When instead we can simply—”

  She cut him off. “Please. We’ve both fallen into our set-piece speeches, haven’t we? Let me just point out that there’s nothing ‘simply’ about your scheme. It carries its own price. And the heaviest part of that price would fall on later generations who were never given a choice.”

  “Are you sure of that? They’ll have had nine thousand years to make ready, in whatever way they themselves find best.”

  “No, I am not sure. She isn’t. History is chaotic. Nobody and nothing can forecast what the situation, the possibilities and impossibilities, will be in another nine thousand years. We must secure these resources against that day, while we still definitely have them and have the means to use them.”

  Starkness yielded to sadness. “But why are we repeating these worn-out arguments, Omar? Did you actually believe you could convince me in two or three hours, or that I could then convince others?”

  “It seemed worth trying,” he admitted. “Your influence isn’t negligible. Oh, obviously I can’t change your basic opinion today, if ever. But I was hoping to persuade you to give ours honorable mention, to tell your audience they should listen to us and think seriously about what we have to say.” His voice gathered passion. “Laurinda, I know you love all the life on Earth. But doesn’t the freedom of that life—to cope for itself, to evolve—doesn’t that matter too? Do you like the prospect of life turned into nothing but a, 11 pet, controlled down to the last cell by a machine?”

  Stung, she snapped, “You know that’s ridiculous.”

  The thought flitted through her, not for the first time: Is it? She struck back: “Carry it just a little further, and you may as well join the Stormseekers.”

  Memory rose against her will, of a rally in North America. She had seen a bit of it on the news and ordered a complete replay. The words rolled thunderous: “—I say let the Ice come. It won’t be the end of the world, it will foe a strengthening and a liberation. Life was never more rich, more vigorous, than last time, in the Pleistocene, nor man more creative, more free. When Terra Central lies dead beneath the glacier, then from the cold tundras to the rainlands around the Equator, men will again make their own destinies.—” The gathering cheered, applauded, waved banners aloft. She took comfort from the fact that they were few, those misfits, misanthropes, technophobes, romantics, irrationalists of every kind. Yet they did warn her of an underlying rebellious lust for adventure, the hunter heritage of the entire race. And… young, blond, tall, broad-shouldered, totally male, how beautiful the speaker was!

  Omar’s retort called her back. “That’s unfair. Once you were more open-minded.”

  “Or I knew less,” she said.

  “Or Terra Central hadn’t become your own center.”

  His bitterness bit her. “Are you that angry, Omar?”

  He was instantly contrite. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” They sat silent for a number of heartbeats before he finished: “It seems, after all these years, we can still hurt one another.”

  And the years will not return. “Yes, I have changed,” she said. “You too, no doubt, but I more.” Sometimes, lying awake at night, I miss the girl I was. Less her heedless health, dizzying joyfulness, even the quick sharp sorrows, than her dreams that knew no bounds.

  “Well, I
’ll listen to you, dear,” she went on. “Then will you listen to me? While we can… Though I’d rather we talked about what’s happened to us, like old friends come back together at last.”

  And for the last time, she foreknew.

  2

  Laurinda Ashcroft did not much revise her global broadcast later that day. It was one among several by well-known interfaces, intended over a period of years to make the danger clear and explain Terra Central’s plan for coping. She had prepared most of it beforehand, the usual visuals plus occasional virtuals to invoke every sense.

  Watching, you saw Earth revolve around the sun. You saw her orbit drawn in three dimensions, a golden track against blackness and the stars. You saw how she, her moon, and her sister globes interplayed, a dance through billions of years wherein gravitation called the measures, subtly but inexorably. You saw the slow cycle of changeable eccentricity and obliquity, how it set the patterns of lightfall across the planet and how she responded with her air, seas, clouds, rains, snow, and ice.

  Since the Arctic Ocean became landlocked, the glaciers had some and gone and come again. In the great winters, northern Europe, half of North America, and huge tracts elsewhere lay under ice whose cliffs reared as high as two kilometers; drowned lands rose anew as sea level dropped a hundred meters; forests withered and died while south of them marshlands came into being and new forests overran the savannahs. Yes, life adapted. If some species suffered, others flourished. But this was on a millennial timescale, scant help to humans and their works.

  The next glaciation was overdue. They had unwittingly delayed its beginnings with their emission of greenhouse gases. Now that was past, together with the overpopulation that brought it about, and in any event would not have sufficed. Now more snow fell in winter than melted in summer. Meter by meter, faster each year, the glaciers crept down from the Pole and the mountains.

  “You have surely heard what we must do, and soon, before it is too late. Thicken the greenhouse. Thin the clouds. Darken the snows. Make Earth keep more of the sun’s warmth than she can unaided. But perhaps you don’t yet know the magnitude of this, the number of the centuries, or the delicacy and exactness underneath the enormous forces we will call on. Let me show you a little.”

  Again, visuals and virtuals. Carbon black strewn over the Arctic, tonne after colloidal tonne, repeated year after year as the layer washes away or sinks from sight. Immense electric discharges high aloft, to force rainfalls so that less light is cast back into space. Mats of brown algal weed carpeting the seas by millions of square kilometers; the care and feeding of these living artifacts. Underwater detonations to break up beds of methane hydrate and release the gas into the atmosphere. Forests set afire and afterward only grasses allowed, for they store less carbon than trees do. Holes drilled down into the very mantle of the planet; nuclear explosions to goad volcanoes into spewing forth carbon dioxide and water vapor more copiously than fossil fuels ever did. The new industries required, their claim on resources, their constructs and monitors everywhere.

  “Yes, this will be an Earth very different from the Earth we thought we had restored for ourselves.” Laurinda leaned forward, as if each person watching sat before her in the flesh. “But it will be far less changed than the Ice Age would change it. Our world will still be green, rich, kindly, from rim to rim of the Polar oceans. We will keep many of our woodlands, open waters, pure snowpeaks. And on the new prairies, what wildflowers will bloom, what herds will graze!”

  She gave them the images, the sounds, the sense of wind and fragrances, simulated but as vivid as reality. Idealized, yes. But not dishonest. We can have such places.

  “Please bear in mind, this will not happen at once. The work must go slowly, piecemeal, in pace with the astronomical cycle, constantly observed and measured, constantly adjusted to hold the giants of climate and weather under control. It will take thousands of years. Then finally, as Earth tilts back sunward, it will be undone, just as gradually and carefully. Most of us will notice little of it in our lifetimes. To our children and children’s children, hundreds of generations, it will be natural, a part of their universe like the moon and stars.”

  “That’s the worst,” Omar said. “To them Terra Central will foe what God was to their ancestors. Oh, I don’t suppose they’ll worship it. But they’ll know how utterly dependent on it they are. And meanwhile it will he doing what God never did, evolve itself till it’s beyond all human comprehension. What then, Laurinda?”

  Earlier, she had not meant to give his viewpoint as much voice as she now did. However, this might actually be the wisest course. He and his fellows were making their protests widely known. By taking them seriously, she, a designated speaker for the artificial intelligence, could perhaps better show why they were wrong.

  “Doubtless most of you have heard that certain people think this whole concept is mistaken.” She left out Omar’s Disastrously mistaken. The more so because it’s millennially slow and all pervading. She smiled. “They are not fools. They have studied the situation and done scientific analyses. Let me discuss their position as I see it. They are right when they say there is an easier, cheaper, and far less disruptive way to stop the Ice.”

  Robots in space. Asteroids mined, the stuff of them refined, nanotechnic assemblers forming titanic mirrors to precisions of micrometers, the judicious orbiting of these—no simple task, but well within present-day capabilities. Governed by mathematics and monitors less complex than in the rival scheme, the mirrors’ shine added sunlight onto Earth at the times, places, and intensities needed. The glaciers retreat, climates stabilize, the system stands guard through the necessary era and stands in reserve forever after.

  “It would take away the night skies we’ve regained. We would not see many stars, for there would be no full darkness. But simulacra are plentiful; or you can enjoy a holiday in space; and otherwise our world remains much the same.

  “Why, then, does Terra Central warn against this?” Again the bright, cold animated diagrams, but expanded first to a galactic scale, then contracted to Sol’s near neighborhood, then down to molecules and force fields.

  Space is not empty. Look at the Milky Way on a clear night and you will see bays in its river that are clouds of dust. The dust in such nebulas as Orion’s is luminous from the light of new-born stars, and more are condensing out of it. Hydrogen and helium, the primordial elements, far outmass these quantities of solid material, which are nevertheless colossal. Nowhere do the gas and motes of the interstellar medium reach a density equal to what would count as a hard vacuum on Earth; but taken together, through sevenfold billion cubic light-years, they dominate the visible universe.

  Nor are they spread evenly. In some regions they occur more thinly or thickly than elsewhere. Sometimes a knot in the medium grows tight enough to collapse in on itself, and stars and planets form.

  Sometimes, swinging around the galactic core on its two hundred million-year path, Sol encounters a dense cloud.

  The one immediately ahead was nothing extraordinary. It would never engender worlds. It was merely a few times more compact than the local average and merely a few light-years in extent. Early astronomers had caught no definite sight of it. Even after they were using spaceborne instruments, they were not sure.

  “Our interstellar outposts have the baselines to map this shoal with certainty. They have sent us their findings. In about nine thousand years, Sol will enter the region. Yes, it will only transect. A hundred thousand years later, it will be back in clear space. But a hundred thousand years is a long time for living creatures.”

  The contact presses on Sol’s wind and magnetic field until the heliosphere and its bow wave, the hydrogen wall, are inside the orbit of Saturn. With the protection they give thus lessened, Earth takes a sleet of cosmic rays, background count tripled or quadrupled. Oh, life has survived comparable events in the past, but species, genera, whole orders died, ecologies to which they had been vital avalanche into ruin, mass extinctions follo
wed. And, in the depths of this encounter, enough hydrogen atoms could reach Earth to deplete her oxygen, enough dust to fill her stratosphere with ice particles and bring on a world of winter like none before.

  “Nine thousand years, our well-wishing opponents say. Ample time to make ready. Meanwhile, why should we lock ourselves into a program that will transform our civilization?

  “People of Earth, through me and my colleagues Terra Central tells you that defense against the nebula calls for resources we dare not spend on anything less.”

  Monstrous constructions, thousands of them, in orbits that only machine intelligence can maintain—powered by thermonuclear reactions or often by the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter—and first the antimatter must be manufactured by megatonnes—generating forces to ionize alien atoms and whirl the plasmas away—a citadel around the entire globe, waging a war that lasts a tenth of a million years.

  “Sun-mirrors to hold back the glaciers in the near future won’t be compatible with this. Their advocates admit it, but say that come the time, we can make adjustments. Perhaps they are right. What they do not say is whether or not the mirrors will tie up too much material and effort. We’ll have to conduct a very thorough survey of the Solar System before we know. Meanwhile, every year we delay starting to take action, the Ice advances farther and becomes harder to fight.

  “But we, people of Earth, we now alive, who must make the decision that all our descendants must live with or die by—we should think beyond the engineering requirements. Let’s ask ourselves a simple and terrible question. In the course of nine thousand years, what can happen?”

  And she gave them history to show it was unforeseeable.

  The Neolithic Revolution tamed wildernesses, fed suddenly large populations, founded the earliest towns, built the earliest smithies—and turned free hunters into peasant masses with god-kings above them.

  Scarcely were the Pharaohs of Egypt laid to their eternal rest than thieves plundered the tombs. When railroads later ran through what had been their domains, for a while the steam engines were stoked with mummies.