At first, everyone thought that she was crazy. Indeed, they never actually stopped thinking that she was crazy—but they did not take long to remember how desperate they were to find some way out of the imprisoning Cubic Centimeter, or at least of making it a more comfortable confinement in which to dwell. Crazy or not, she was offering them a new hope: an alternative to yet more lectures on the Gaian vices and the need for everyone to become more virtuous.
Gaian vices and virtues did not figure in Gerda’s argument at all, even in the beginning. Even then, she did not seek to conceal—although she refrained from laboring the point—that neo-cycads could not and would not flourish in a cool world. If they offered hope now, it was only because the world had already warmed sufficiently to let them offer it. If they were to fulfill that hope generously, they would need to be gifted with the climatic environment that suited them best. Much more active than the trees that had driven their primitive ancestors into tiny corners of the land tens of millions of years in the past—living fast and dying young, by tree standards—the neo-cycads needed a higher ambient temperature in order to do their work, and bioelectric neo-cycads were especially thermophilic. Unlike Gaia’s favorite species, and Gaia herself, neo-cycads liked it hot.
The Gaian reaction was entirely predictable. Humankind, the Gaians argued, was the species that Gaia had favored more than any other, the one that had benefited most from a relatively cool Earth whose carbon was mostly locked away in inert deposits. The new ecosphere that Gerda’s radical biotech would eventually produce would be intrinsically inimical to human beings and human life; that was far too high a price to pay for effective bioelectricity. The core members of the great Gaian coalition regarded this argument as conclusive—but it failed to deliver the expected killer blow, and the coalition found itself leaking support on a serious scale for the first time in a century.
Gerda’s initial support base came from the first of her two potential constituencies—not merely from the Netherlands and Belgium, whose densely packed populations had suffered greater setbacks than any other European nation from the erosions of the sea, but most extravagantly of all from Britain, the Crazy Man of Europe, whose crazy jingoists saw the potential to become an even bigger sceptered isle than before, expanding gradually but majestically into the wilderness of the North Sea until it finally reached the continental shore again.
The Heavy Metal brigade was a little slower to come aboard, even though she took great care to emphasize that it was they who could provide the definitive answer to the Gaian challenge. Heavy Metal, Gerda reminded its power brokers, often and insistently, had always taken the blame for the CC, but it was also Heavy Metal that had made it possible for at least some people—the rich—to live quite comfortably in tropical heat, by means of air conditioning. The spread of air conditioning had long been inhibited by problems of energy generation, but now that those problems were potentially soluble, there was no reason why the Heavy Metal brigade had to continue thinking in terms of air-conditioned buildings or air-conditioned domed estates. The time had come—or soon would come, if the political will could be mustered—to think in terms of air-conditioned cities. If the neo-cycads could be gifted with the hothouse climate they needed and deserved, then Big Tech could start fulfilling its age-old dream of building glittering crystal cities, hermetically sealed by external membranes, whose internal atmospheres could be differentiated at will from the one that the neo-cycads breathed and sustained.
Privately, Gerda did not imagine that enclosed environments would be anything more than a stop-gap solution; her belief was that the lebensraum offered by the neo-cycads would inevitably give rise to a new human species that would love the heat as much as they did, whether by means of genetic engineering, natural selection, or cyborgization. As a practicing politician, however, she stuck to more pragmatic issues and carefully limited imaginative horizons. She was, after all, her mother’s daughter.
~ * ~
Gerda knew, and had always known—or at least felt—that she was bound to win in the end. The only real point at issue was how long it would take for the rotten ancien régime of the Gaian majority to crumble away, and for the new consensus to consolidate a step-by-step program.
Many a politician, from Moses onward, had sown the seeds of Promised Lands without living to see more than the faintest glimpse of their reality, but Gerda had always hoped that things might move faster for her, even in a world that was still essentially cool. As things eventually turned out, she was luckier than most, even though she shared the fate of many of those same visionaries in being forced to hand the reins of power over to others some time before the seeds she had sown began to germinate.
By the time Gerda’s sixty-fifth birthday came around, an unholy alliance of Heavy Metal entrepreneurs, Siberian Oligarchs, and resurgent Asian Not-so-Slow Developers had hijacked her prospectus and her party—but it was her slogans that they continued pushing and polishing. She lost the battle for personal control, but she won the war.
When Gerda and Kay met up in London to celebrate their sixty-fifth birthday, seven years had passed since they had last shared such a celebration. The previous one had ended badly, after Kay had accused Gerda of betraying him, by tricking him into investing not merely his own funds but those of hundreds of his allies and acquaintances in research in neo-cycad biotechnology. He really had felt betrayed, and really had believed that she had cruelly taken him for a ride in order to pursue an agenda directly opposite to his, with no other motive but malice aforethought.
When Kay agreed, in response to her urging, that they could get together for their sixty-fifth “to talk over old times,” he still had not forgiven her, but he had accepted the inevitability of circumstance. He had not deserted the ailing rump of the old Gaian coalition, but he had accepted that he was now doomed to be a has-been, to the extent that he had ever been at all, within the political arena. Gerda guessed that he only felt able to face her again because he now considered that she too was a has-been, having been deposed from her various positions of nominal political authority.
“You might have won the war,” he conceded, ungraciously, “and you’ll doubtless say that all’s fair in war, and that there’s no such thing as betrayal in politics, but that’s not what rankles. We were friends—practically brother and sister. It’s the personal betrayal that I can’t stomach. You didn’t have to play me for a sucker. You could have won without doing that.”
“I didn’t play you for a sucker, my love,” she told him. “Everything I told you was true.”
“But it wasn’t the whole truth,” he pointed out. “You never said anything to me about neo-cycads needing a higher atmospheric temperature. You let me believe that they’d be living carbon sinks, just like all the other trees we’d been planting for the last hundred years to soak up carbon emissions. You took advantage of my ignorance. You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to involve me at all. You could have left me out of it. That would have been the sisterly thing to do. When we were kids, you told me that we were two halves of the same whole—you should never have betrayed that just to score a point when we happened to end up on opposite sides of the chamber. You didn’t have to oppose me, you know, back in that stupid high school debate. You could have seconded me instead. We could have worked together.”
“You could have seconded me,” she pointed out.
“But you were on the wrong side!” he complained. “You still are, even though you’ve hooked the majority with your counsel of despair. The people who’ve usurped your throne aren’t saving the world—they’re changing it out of all recognition. We could have saved it, Gerda, you and I, if we’d only joined forces in the same cause. I don’t believe for a moment that neo-cycads were the only game in town, or even that your kind of booby-trapped neo-cycads were the only possible means of reclaiming the inundated shallows. We could have taken a different route entirely, biotechnologically speaking—and you should have. You didn’t just betray me; you
betrayed the species and the ecosphere.”
“You’re a tactician, Kay,” Gerda told him. “I’m the strategist, remember. I’m the long-term thinker. I didn’t betray you; I saved you—you just haven’t realized it yet. And you did make billions out of cycad speculation—far more money than I ever did.”
That shot struck home, just about—but there was no hint of a blush on Kay’s slightly tightened features. “Well, yes,” he admitted. “If it had only been about the money ... but why didn’t you make billions? Twenty-five years ago, when you gave me the tip about hemp, I thought it was because you were too cautious, too risk-averse ... well, I have to admit to being wrong about that. So why aren’t you super-rich? Why didn’t you back your winner, financially as well as in the chamber?”
“It wasn’t about the money, Kay, it never was.”
“Just a matter of wining the war, then? I never realized that you were so intensely competitive. Sibling rivalry is a terrible thing—and we were practically siblings, weren’t we? Only one barely functional set of parents between the two of us ... not that Miklos and Selma ever ... did they?”
“I don’t think so,” Gerda said. “Mind you, there’s time yet—they’re both retired from the chamber now, so they must be desperate for something to fill in time.”
“Perhaps we should have invited them along—maybe fixed them up?” Kay said, obviously not meaning it. The fact that he now felt able to say something that he blatantly didn’t mean seemed to Gerda to be progress. He couldn’t meet her stare, though, even though an unbiased observer glancing at their table would have taken him for the stronger and younger of the two. They no longer looked uncannily alike, or even remotely similar.
“Perhaps we should have invited your ex-wife,” Gerda countered, “or your son, at least.”
“I haven’t even let on that we’re meeting,” Kay confessed. “Lothar would consider it to be consorting with the enemy, cherishing the blade that stabbed me in the back.”
“And Magda too?” Gerda queried.
“Oh no—she never considered you an enemy or a threat. She always understood our friendship ... at least until you started your great crusade. Like you, she always took the trouble to point out that I had made billions out of neo-cycads, even if I hadn’t fully understood what the cost of the profits would be. She was delighted to take her share—if she were here, she’d be gladly proposing toasts in your honor.”
“For her,” Gerda said, casually, “it was only a matter of love, not war. She must have had a markedly different notion of what was fair—even if her blonde hair was only cosmetic.”
“It’s red now,” Kay told her. “Hot colors are back in fashion, thanks to you. Mind you, silver doesn’t look too bad on you—although you might want to think of having some skin-work done.” Kay’s own face and forehead, needless to say, had not a wrinkle in sight.
“I’m young at heart,” Gerda assured him. “Just like the New New New New World. We are up to four now, aren’t we?”
“Alas, yes,” he said—and then paused, apparently for reflection. Eventually, he went on: “You know, setting all joking and resentment aside, I believe that you and I really might have made a difference, as individuals. If you had only sided with me instead of reacting against me, it really might have been the salvation of the Gaian cause instead of its damnation. If only I had been able to keep you with me, instead of somehow contriving, unknowingly and unwillingly, to turn you against me....”
Gerda didn’t bother to point out that his manner of framing the argument was outrageously egocentric. Instead, she said: “No, Kay, we couldn’t have made that sort of difference. We couldn’t have made much more of a difference even if you’d sided with me instead of relentlessly following the herd. Gaia was always gong to lose the war, no matter how many successful defensive actions her myrmidons completed. The neo-cycads were always bound to carry the day. The Heavy Metal brigade, the Siberian Oligarchs, and the Asian Developers were always bound to end up in bed together, running the show. The only difference I made, and the only difference I was ever capable of making, was to warm things up a little, and hurry them along.”
“You must have felt rather lonely doing it,” Kay observed, retreating into pensive reflection. “It’s still different for a woman, isn’t it? Your mother managed to have it all, though, at least until that stupid accident. Maybe you felt that no one could ever quite live up to the memory of your father.”
“He was dead before I learned to talk,” Gerda said. “I never knew him.”
“My mother’s still alive, but I’ve hardly ever exchanged two words with her. To me, she’s just a sequence of pictures—but that didn’t stop me marrying Magda.”
“No,” Gerda agreed. “It didn’t.” And it was then, oddly enough, rather than at any of the more weighty or awkward moments in the conversation, that Gerda suddenly realized that her love for Kay had cooled somewhat while she had thrown her heart and soul into her cause, and that its once-fiery passion had been transformed by time and tide into something mellower and more even-tempered. It was still most definitely there, and still unfulfilled, but it no longer felt like a dagger of glass rudely jammed into her beating heart. By the same token, she no longer hated Gaia the Snow Queen quite as much as she had before. Their conflict had, after all, merely been a difference of opinion.
“It says something for us, I suppose,” Kay observed, glumly, as he raised his wine-glass in a vaguely celebratory gesture, “that we can still be friends, in spite of everything. The fact that, no matter who’s won and who’s lost, and no matter what becomes of the world now it’s all turned upside-down, we can still hold on to something of what we had when we were six years old says something good and precious not just about us but about the world. I can still think of you as my twin sister, my inevitable counterpart.”
“The world was upside-down before, my love,” Gerda told him, softly. “From now on, it’ll be able to right itself, slowly but surely. The deadly CC is no longer deadly—or, as they say here in dear old England, all’s now well at the beloved Cricket Club.”
“The trouble with you, darling,” Kay replied, with a contrived sigh that was as insincere as it was insulting, “is that you never could take anything seriously.”
<
~ * ~
ALFONSO THE WISE
Alfonso the Wise was king of Castile in the thirteenth century. He is now entirely forgotten but for one attributed remark. “Had I been present at the Creation,” he is reputed to have said, “I would have offered some useful advice as to the better arrangement of the universe.” It is, of course, mere coincidence that the man who discovered meta-DNA was also called Alfonso—and the coincidence is partly spoiled by the fact that it was his surname rather than his given name.
Professor Alfonso had always felt that life had made a slight mistake in selecting DNA as the carrier of its genetic code. DNA is, after all, highly unstable under physiological conditions. As long-chain molecules go, it lacks resilience; given half a chance it is apt to denature. He realized, of course, that there were advantages to this condition as well as disadvantages. The readiness of DNA to throw a chemical wobbly is, in essence, the root of all mutation, and hence of evolution by natural selection. Anyhow, the ability of DNA to form a double-helix and to serve as a mount for long strings of base-codons was what had selected it out to be the parent of all life as we know it; the more stable natural molecules whose names were legion had no such faculty, and had always been non-starters. All things considered. Creation had done what it could, and hadn’t made such a bad job of it.
It had, after all, produced Professor Alfonso.
Alfonso reasoned, however, that now that humans had invented genetic engineering, Creation no longer needed a source of random mutations. That job could be taken over by careful planners who could produce useful innovations deliberately, without bothering to go through all the messy cut and thrust of natural selection. By the same token, he figured, it
ought to be possible to design a molecule of which Creation had never dreamed, which would combine DNA’s codon-carrying ability with a bit more backbone.
As soon as organic molecule design program became sufficiently sophisticated, Alfonso and his desktop supercomputer were on the job—and such was the brilliance of their partnership that they came up with a brand new super-tough coding-molecule in a matter of months.
Out of respect for the excellent job that the old model had done during the previous four billion years, Alfonso called his new coding-molecule meta-DNA, although it wasn’t a particularly close relative, chemically speaking. Its greatest asset was that its simplest version retained the same ACGT genetic code that was already built into DNA, which meant that it could actually copy all the codes already in existence in order to build on them further. It was rather like designing an update for a word-processing program, so that it could process all existing documents but also incorporated lots of extra features that could be exploited in further edits.
The Golden Fleece Page 12