The Millennium Blues

by James Gunn

  Hays had shivered with terror and excitement, thinking of the impermanence of the Earth's surface, not unlike in principle the oceans that covered much of its surface. She had thought all that was over, back in the primitive beginnings of the world, but the solid land on which she spent most of her days actually was only a thin raft floating on a sea of hot mush. She had not known then whether she had been shaken more by fear or by awe at the grandeur of the concept.

  “But now we're going to try to tap the mantle itself,” Sowers had said, “here where the crust is thinnest."

  The Resolution, she had said, held itself with computerized engines over the deepest place in the world, the Marianas trench, 210 miles south of Guam. They floated over more than 36,000 feet of water, five miles, straight down. Mount Everest, if they could lift it and turn it upside down, would fit into the trench with more than a mile to spare.

  Hays had shivered again to think of the depths beneath her feet. She might sink for hours, for days, and never touch bottom. What light would reach her then in those still, stygian waters? What sound could vibrate those compacted molecules?

  The Moho discontinuity, that sharp line where the crust met the mantle, seemed to lie from ten to forty miles below sea level. At the bottom of the Marianas Trench, Sowers had said, five miles below sea level, the crust was thought to be only three to five miles thick. Instead of drilling through eight or nine miles of crystalline rock, like the deepest well of the world in Russia's Kola peninsula, the Resolution could simply lower its lightweight, aluminum-alloy pipe through those miles of ocean before the turbine engine at the bottom had to drive the bit into rock. The entire string was lifted only to recover core samples or to replace the bit or repair the turbine.

  The secret to success was forecasting the weather. The ship had to remain in the same spot in spite of wind and waves, but a storm would overwhelm the capacity of their engines to compensate. Hurricane winds would force them to remove the upper few hundred meters of the string, mark what was left with a radio beacon and a buoy, and hope to recover their place later. So far the process had worked. They were nearly five miles through the crust; they might even reach the mantle before the year was over.

  All this had been communicated as the tour had progressed, a fascinating display of technology in action. Here the breakthrough in humanity's relationship to its environment had come to a focus: James Watts's improvement of the steam engine in the middle of the 18th century had brought humanity to this point. Here it could send exploring rockets into the universe in preparation for spreading its seed beyond the limits of the Earth, and probes into the depths of its native planet. Instead of a scattering of tribes tolerated by supernatural powers and subject to punishment or extermination at a godlike whim, humanity had become matter contemplating itself, that which exists to understand the rest.

  And yet Hays's exaltation had been underlain by unreasoning terror, like the buried fears of her childhood forcing themselves through ancient channels to erupt at the surface. The image of the Resolution's bit breaking through the Earth's crust into the as-yet-untouched mantle was like the ego forcing its way into the id. Who knew what monsters lay in wait? Who knew what damage they might do, unleashed?

  Hays had known where the images originated. She had remembered the stories she had read as a child, of exploration gone astray, of experiment gone awry, of the unsuspected strangeness of the universe striking back at human hubris. She had remembered stories about alien creatures awakened from long sleep at the bottom of the sea by submersibles or atomic explosives or deep-sea mining operations, and another about the planets themselves as eggs laid by a birdlike creature almost as big as Jupiter and about desperate drilling operations to kill the chick at the heart of the Earth before it hatched. And she had remembered all those movies about the monsters or gases or lava unleashed by scientists who did not think seriously enough about the possibility that they might be wrong, that they might not be able to anticipate the unpredictability, the outright malevolence, of nature.

  The Japanese were good at personifying (or creaturefying, she had amended) the dangers that lay unsuspected behind the placid assumption that rationality had prevailed, but the Americans were better at clothing modern terrors in the lab coats of everyday science. Contemporary fairy tales—compiled by the brothers Grimm, not Hans Christian Andersen.

  “Don't you ever worry,” Hays had said, “about what might happen when you break through?"

  “You mean that the job might be over?” Sowers had responded, deliberately misunderstanding. “There will always be new areas to explore, new knowledge to discover. Today's scientists find humility a great deal more appropriate to their state of knowledge than hubris."

  “What if you should unleash a flood of lava?” Hays had persisted, wanting to force reassurance from Sowers's lips.

  Sowers had laughed. “You've seen too many sci-fi movies."

  Hays had flinched at this too-accurate reading of her state of mind.

  “What we'll get is more like a flood of information that we never expected. Not lava. The drill hole is too small, for one thing, and the mantle itself already is erupting at the mid-oceanic ridges. Nothing new there. We do worry about fouling the Marianas trench with gas or oil, and we've been ready to plug the hole at any moment we struck a pocket or deep reservoir. But so far we've been lucky, or there are no hydrocarbons that deep. We did run across a pool of molten sulfur early, like the Bertha Rogers well in Oklahoma. But we were ready for that.

  “No monsters,” Sowers had concluded. “Only knowledge. That may be shattering enough."

  Hays thought about Sowers and her search for information as Minton's question bored through her outer layer of assurance. And then from deep within her she felt rising to the surface not the hot lava of anger and resentment but a new sense of herself, independent of George, independent of any of her husbands or the casual lovers she had taken in her younger days. She could, she thought, define herself.

  “Well, now,” she said, scarcely pausing after Minton's question, “that has nothing to do with me, you know. George Witherspoon and I married for the usual reasons, and are separated for the usual reasons and will be divorced soon for the usual reasons."

  “Are you announcing divorce proceedings?” Minton asked, his nose in the air like a cat scenting meat.

  “I'm not announcing anything,” Hays said coolly. “You have asked me an inconsequential question, and I have answered it in the same spirit. I'd like to talk about something important. With the world approaching an event in its struggle for survival, at a moment in time that we humans have awarded a significance beyond the ordinary, surely we can find something to discuss more vital than someone's marital status.

  “Just a few days ago, for instance, I watched a ship floating above the deepest spot on Earth drilling a hole that may reach through the planet's crust to the mantle beneath, and I realized—” And she launched into a description of the Mohole project that had even lubricous Jerry Minton so enthralled that he forgot to ask any more questions about scandals in Hays's life. Indeed, the news of her divorce proceedings made only a paragraph on the entertainment page of the local newspaper.

  But when Hays left the studio, she felt as if she had started a new play. It would be the drama of her own life, and the most challenging role she had ever accepted. She might be lost for awhile, looking for the playwright, trying to remember the lines and her motivation; she might often be afraid; she would not be able to dismiss her terrors, particularly her fears of the future, so easily. But she felt now like Sowers, looking for new knowledge. She could never be certain of what might lie undiscovered below or above, but she could be sure that it would be wonderful if unsettling, and that, whatever it was, she could cope with it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  November 19, 2000

  Sally Krebs

  The giant cement statue of Christ the Redeemer, spotlighted against the night sky like a vision of Judgment Day, dominated Sally Kre
bs's imagination more than the mystery of her companion, and even when she looked away, the afterimage remained, like the figure on the cross that had hung on the wall of her bedroom when she was a child. Sitting on the veranda of the Jockey Club, sipping an after-dinner brandy, she had felt as if a cold hand was clutching the pit of her stomach. Something terrible was about to happen.

  People she had interviewed over the past months had told her that they lived with apprehension every waking moment of their lives, and she had not understood until now. She recorded too much catastrophe to consider it anything more than the raw material of her trade; to know that the world is built on calamities is to deny them their power to terrify.

  She had always felt that journalists were different from other people because their addiction to information of all kinds gave them an experience of the world as panorama rather than closeup, as process rather than event. Yet she could not repress a shiver. Something was slouching toward this beautiful city to be born, something she had not yet identified but she knew was related to the guerrilla movements springing up here and there in the world, in Latin America, in Africa and the Middle East, in the remains of the Soviet Union and its former allies, and in the Orient as well. The End of the World was producing an end-of-the-world extravagance among those who could not share the abundance displayed on television screens everywhere.

  The image of the good life had been made available through the magic of satellite transmissions but not the substance. Communion without transubstantiation; today's religion of consumption offered its rewards only to the Elect.

  “You shiver,” Raul said at her right shoulder. “Are you cold? You must take my jacket."

  “No, no,” Krebs said. “It is quite warm.” She could not visualize the elegant Raul in shirtsleeves, although she was sure he would remain just as elegant and possibly even sexier; to her, men in shirtsleeves had always seemed erotic. In any case, Rio had been warm, in the mid-70s during the afternoon, and humid, although here, near midnight, the temperature had begun to cool.

  “It is the excitement, then,” Raul said. “The thrill of the great event. That for which you made the great journey to the south."

  Their dinner of chateaubriand (from Rio Grande de Sul, the waiter had said proudly, where the best beef comes from), asparagus and chuchu, chayote squash, and a heart of palm and tomato salad, had been accompanied by several bottles of Portuguese wine. Brazilian wine was just as good, Raul had said, but Portuguese wine had the cachet of the old country. The waiters had brought the food to the table on a tray, offering seconds at a nod or the wag of Raul's finger Had it not been for the shadow of her unrevealed assignment, the CNN cameraman, with his camera on the floor beside his chair, seated discreetly three tables away, and the escort of ragged Bolivians lurking somewhere near, she would have felt like a tourist, privileged to have been shown both the best and the worst of Rio. She had spotted a few of their guards earlier, each of them carrying at least one concealed weapon, she suspected, and she wondered why the police had not detained them. But she possessed information that the police did not.

  “They call themselves the ‘Dark Road,'” her boss had said, “and they are planning something dramatic to make their case before the world. After a great deal of soul-searching, we notified the State Department, but they say it's nothing. Well, we think it's worth the time and expense to check it out."

  “We don't often get invited to a revolution,” she said to Raul.

  “Not a revolution. Perhaps not even the beginning of one,” Raul said. The words came out like quicksilver, making her self-conscious about her own blunt, mid-western speech. “Perhaps the beginning of the beginning of a revolution. If we are lucky."

  “Or if the world is unlucky,” Krebs said, in spite of herself. “Don't we have enough problems without creating more?"

  “The tradition of the American press is support for the underdog,” Raul chided gently, laughing at her behind his dark eyes. “Or at least neutrality."

  “If I am neutral, I am neutral for civilization,” she said. “And I am neutral against chaos. In chaos too many people get hurt, these days maybe the whole damn human species. That's the one great virtue of the U.S. system. It allows us to have change without chaos."

  “The rest of the world learns only the worst from your country,” he said. “For us the way of desperation. When all other hope is gone, there is only chaos."

  “But why did you take a chance on CNN? Surely you must have been concerned that plans might leak?"

  “Have they?"

  “Not from me,” she said. “But CNN is a big organization."

  “We took that chance. And if we lose, after all there is only me, and perhaps a few others, and the movement will go on."

  “You'd gamble your life on that? Just for a little publicity?"

  “Revolutions have changed. Now the news is everywhere and even the remotest village may have a satellite dish. Revolutions are fought in the television studios of the world."

  She took a big sip of the brandy in front of her, as if the burning in her throat could restore her to reality. “And what if I refuse to take your pictures? What if I don't want to add your revolution to the troubles of the world?"

  He shrugged. “You would risk your job to protect the guilty?"

  “It's going to be that big?"

  “It will be so dramatic,” he said, “that your tape will be viewed all over the world. And you will be the only one who will have it. You will become famous."

  He was teasing her, this man without a last name who had flaunted his machismo before her like a toreador's cape, this Latin gentleman of wealth and position who had taken for his own the plight of the favela poor and the landless peasants.

  “And if I decide to carry out my assignment,” Krebs said. “What is it that I should instruct my cameraman to tape?"

  Raul looked at his watch, a wafer-thin gold Rolex. “It is almost midnight. You might wish to focus your camera up there."

  She followed his negligent wave. He was pointing at the giant figure of Christ the Redeemer atop nearby Corcovado peak.

  On the interminable flight from Miami, the tune of Flying Down to Rio had kept running through her head and as she looked out the window beside her she could imagine scantily-clad girls dancing on the wings of a propeller-driven airplane and Rogers and Astaire, in their first roles together, dancing the carioca. It all had been part of an era of innocence. Between two World Wars, to be sure, and in the depths of the Depression's massive loss of faith, but without the awareness of the ways in which the human species could really destroy itself and maybe even destroy the planet that had given it birth, and long before the arrival of the oppressive fears of a millennium almost at hand.

  The eternal drone of the jet engines had become part of her existence, and she had damned the economies of an organization that sent off its staff in coach. She had flown first-class only once, and then by accident of an overbooked coach class, but she imagined what it must be like ahead—good meals with real china and silverware and wine, with plentiful free liquor before and liqueurs afterwards, and room to stretch and move around and even ascend the 747's spiral staircase to the lounge. She had tried to straighten her legs once more under the seat ahead and then had stood up and stretched her back in the aisle before lurching down the narrow passage between the two seats on the side and the row of eight in the middle to the nearest horizontal row of stinking, littered toilets where she had to stand in line.

  The long ordeal in the air had been an unreal beginning to an unreal experience. After eight hours aloft, passengers began to get a little crazy, as if this cramped world, measured in inedible meals delivered on plastic trays, was all the life there was, and existence without vibration, with the solid ground beneath and the sky above, was the fantasy.

  Then the sun had come up like a red god born from the sea, and Krebs had seen beneath the wing the astonishing green carpet of the Amazon jungle extending from seashore to the ho
rizon on every side, and, appearing under the wing, the great ribbon of the Amazon itself, cutting a broad, brown swath through the green to Marajó Island at its mouth, bigger than Switzerland and Delaware combined. She imagined the smell of the rain forest and the chatter of monkeys, the rustle of agoutis, the slither of anacondas, the screech of macaws. That Edenic vision had redeemed the whole long trip.

  But as had she studied the landscape more closely, Krebs had seen the cruel muddy patches where the jungle had been cleared and tiny buildings scattered here and there like the toys of wanton children, and the ravines where the tropical rains had washed away the thin soil. Toward the western horizon she had seen wisps of smoke rising toward the cloud-dotted blue sky, where new portions of the rain forest were being razed, and she had felt a revulsion at the despoiling of landscape she had come to think of as hers, earned by her admiration and her ordeal.

  She had thought she understood the desires of the Brazilians to transform their nation and their lives by putting to use the vast resources that could make Brazil an economic power in the world. She had known that the official rate of deforestation was less than half of one per cent annually and that the other nations of the world had exploited their natural resources without public protest. Her own country had cut down its native forests to build houses and create farms, and then built cities on the farmland. Where were the Sierra Clubs then? But times and morality changed.

  Deforestation was not a problem when an entire continent was almost empty. Pollution did not exist when nature purified the air within a few hours and the water within a few miles. Overpopulation could scarcely be more than a theory when the majority of children died in infancy, and a family could always light out for the frontier. But what was reasonable behavior in one century became irrational in another, and the greatest problem the world faced was the survival of old patterns into eras when they no longer worked.