Humanity may have taken to the stars, but we have destroyed our home planet. Such has been the lament of the Naturalists for eons.
“But why do you think we’re a problem that needs solving?” asked a child who bartered with me. (I gave him a box of antibiotics, and he served me chicken rice.) “Sunken Singapore was once a part of the Developed World; we’re not. We don’t call ourselves refugees; you do. This is our home. We live here.”
I could not sleep that night.
This is our home. We live here.
* * *
The prolonged economic depression in much of North America has led to a decline of the region’s once-famous pneumatic tube transportation networks that connected the climate-controlled domed cities, so the easiest way to get to the Sea of Massachusetts these days is by water.
I embarked in balmy Iceland on a cruise ship bound for the coast of the Federation of Maritime Provinces and States—November is an excellent time to visit the region, as the summer months are far too hot—and then, once in Acton, I hired a skiff to bring me out to visit Asa in her floating habitat.
“Have you been to Mars?” asked Jimmy, my guide. He was a man in his twenties, stocky, sunburnt, with gaps in his teeth that showed when he smiled.
“I have,” I said.
“Is it warm?” he asked.
“Not quite warm enough to be outside the domes for long,” I said, thinking about the last time I visited Watney City on Acidalia Planetia.
“I’d like to go when it’s ready,” he said.
“You won’t miss home?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Home is where the jobs are.”
It’s well known that the constant bombardment of the Martian surface with comets pulled from the Oort Cloud and the increased radiation from the deployment of solar sails, both grand engineering efforts began centuries ago, had managed to raise the temperature of Mars enough to cause sublimation of much of the red planet’s polar dry ice caps and restart the water cycle. The introduction of photosynthesizing plants is slowly turning the atmosphere into something resembling what we could breathe. It’s early days yet, but it isn’t impossible to imagine that a habitable Mars, long a dream of humanity, would be reality within two or three generations. Jimmy might go there only as a tourist, but his children may settle there.
As our skiff approached the hemisphere bobbling over the waves in the distance, I asked Jimmy what he thought of the world’s most well-known hermit, who had recently returned to the Sea of Massachusetts, whence she had started her circumnavigation of the globe.
“She brings the tourists,” he said, in a tone that strove to be neutral.
Asa’s collected writings about her life drifting over the ruins of the world’s ancient sunken cities has been a publishing phenomenon that defies explanation. She eschews the use of XP-capturing or even plain old videography, instead conveying her experiences through impressionistic essays composed in a florid manner that seems at once anachronistic and abiding. Some have called her book bold and original; others said it was affected.
Asa has done little to discourage her critics. It was said by the Zen masters that the best place for hermits to find the peace they sought was in the crowd, she wrote. And you could almost hear the disgusted groan of her detractors at this kind of ornate, elusive mysticism.
Many have accused her of encouraging “refugee-tourism” instead of looking for real solutions, and some claim that she is merely engaging in the timeless practice of intellectuals from privileged societies visiting those less fortunate and purporting to speak for her subjects by “discovering” romanticized pseudo-wisdom attributed to them.
“Asa Whale is simply trying to soothe the neuroses of the Developed World with a cup of panglossian chicken soup for the soul,” declared Emma
Be that as it may, the Federation of Maritime Provinces and States tourist czar, John
Before I could follow up on the complicated look in his eyes, Jimmy turned his face resolutely away to regard our destination, which was growing bigger by the minute.
Spherical in shape, the floating dwelling was about fifteen meters in diameter, consisting of a thin transparent outer hull to which most of the ship’s navigation surfaces were affixed and a thicker metal-alloy inner pressure hull. Most of the sphere floated below the surface, making the transparent bridge-dome appear like the pupil of some sea monster’s eye staring into the sky.
On top of the pupil stood a solitary figure, her back as straight as the gnomon of a sundial.
Jimmy nudged the skiff until it bumped gently against the side of the habitat, and I gingerly stepped from one craft to the other. Asa steadied me as her habitat dipped under my added weight; her hand felt dry, cool, and very strong.
I observed, somewhat inanely, that she looked exactly like her last public scan-gram, when she had proclaimed from the large central forum of Valentina Station that United Planets was not only going to terraform Mars, but had also successfully bought a controlling stake in Blue Cradle, the public-private partnership for restoring Earth to a fully habitable state.
“I don’t get many visitors,” she said, her voice tranquil. “There’s not much point to putting on a new face every day.”
I had been surprised when she replied to my request to stay with her for a few days with a simple “Yes.” She had never so much as granted an interview to anyone since she started her life adrift.
“Why?” I had asked.
“Even a hermit can grow lonely,” she had replied. And then, in another message that immediately followed the first, she added, “Sometimes.”
Jimmy motored away on his skiff. Asa turned and gestured for me to descend through the transparent and open “pupil” into the most influential refugee bubble in the Solar System.
* * *
The stars are invisible from the metal cocoons floating in the heavy atmosphere of Venus; nor do we pay much attention to them from the pressurized domes on Mars. On Earth, the denizens of the climate-controlled cities in habitable zones are preoccupied with scintillating screens and XP implants, the glow of meandering conversation, brightening reputation accounts, and the fading trails left by falling credit scores. They do not look up.
One night, as I lay in the habitat drifting over the balmy subtropical Pacific, the stars spun over my face in their habitual course, a million diamantine points of crisp, mathematical light. I realized, with a startled understanding reminiscent of the clarity of childhood, that the face of the heavens was a collage.
Some of the photons striking my retinas had emerged from the crease in the rock to which Andromeda is chained when nomadic warriors from the last ice age still roamed Doggerland, which connected Britain to the European mainland; others had left that winking point at the wingtip of Cygnus when bloody Caesar fell at the feet of Pompey’s statue; still more had departed the mouth of Aquarius’s jar when the decades-long genocidal wars swept through Asia, and aerial drones from Japan and Australia strafed and sank the rafts of refugees fleeing their desertified or flooded homelands; yet others had sparked from the distant hoof of Pegasus when the last glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica disappeared, and Moscow and Ottawa launched the first rockets bound for Venus …
The seas rise and fall, and the surface of the planet is as inconstant as our faces: lands burst forth from the waters and return beneath them; well-armored lobsters scuttle over seafloors that but a geologic eyew
ink ago had been fought over by armies of wooly mammoths; yesterday’s Doggerland may be tomorrow’s Sea of Massachusetts. The only witnesses to constant change are the eternal stars, each a separate stream in the ocean of time.
A picture of the welkin is an album of time, as convoluted and intricate as the shell of the nautilus or the arms of the Milky Way.
* * *
The interior of the habitat was sparsely furnished. Everything—the molded bunks, the stainless-steel table attached to the wall, the boxy navigation console—was functional, plain, stripped of the elaborate “signature” decorations that seem all the rage these days with personal nanites. Though the space inside was cramped with two people, it seemed larger than it was because Asa did not fill it with conversation.
We ate dinner—fish that Asa had caught herself roasted over an open fire, with the canopy up—and went to bed silently. I fell asleep quickly, my body rocked by the gentle motions of the sea and my face caressed by the bright, warm New England stars that she had devoted so many words to.
After a breakfast of instant coffee and dry biscuits, Asa asked me if I wanted to see Boston.
“Of course,” I said. It was an ancient citadel of learning, a legendary metropolis where brave engineers had struggled against the rising sea for two centuries before its massive seawalls finally succumbed, leaving the city inundated overnight in one of the greatest disasters in the history of the Developed World.
While Asa sat in the back of the habitat to steer and to monitor the solar-powered water-jet drive, I knelt on the bottom of the sphere and greedily drank in the sights passing beneath the transparent floor.
As the sun rose, its light gradually revealed a sandy floor studded by massive ruins: monuments erected to long-forgotten victories of the American Empire pointed toward the distant surface like ancient rockets; towers of stone and vitrified concrete that had once housed hundreds of thousands loomed like underwater mountains, their innumerable windows and doors silent, empty caves from which shoals of colorful fish darted like tropical birds; between the buildings, forest of giant kelp swayed in canyons that had once been boulevards and avenues filled with steaming vehicles, the hepatocytes that had once brought life to this metropolis.
And most amazing of all were the rainbow-hued corals that covered every surface of this urban reef: dark crimson, light orange, pearly white, bright neon vermillion.…
Before the Second Flood Wars, the sages of Europe and America had thought the corals doomed. Rising sea temperature and acidity; booming algae populations; heavy deposits of mercury, arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals; runaway coastal development as the developed nations built up the machinery of death against waves of refugees from the uninhabitable zones—everything seemed to spell doom for the fragile marine animals and their photosynthesizing symbiotes.
Would the ocean become bleached of color, a black-and-white photograph bearing silent witness to our folly?
But the corals survived and adapted. They migrated to higher latitudes north and south, gained tolerance for stressed environments, and unexpectedly, developed new symbiotic relationships with artificial nanoplate-secreting algae engineered by humans for ocean-mining. I do not think the beauty of the Sea of Massachusetts yields one inch to the fabled Great Barrier Reef or the legends of long-dead Caribbean.
“Such colors…” I murmured.
“The most beautiful patch is in Harvard Yard,” Asa said.
We approached the ruins of the famed academy in Cambridge from the south, over a kelp forest that used to be the Charles River. But the looming presence of a cruise ship on the surface blocked our way. Asa stopped the habitat, and I climbed up to gaze out the domed top. Tourists wearing GnuSkin flippers and artificial gills were leaping out of the ship like selkies returning home, their sleek skin temporarily bronzed to endure the scorching November sun.
“Widener Library is a popular tourist spot,” said Asa, by way of explanation.
I climbed down, and Asa drove the habitat to dive under the cruise ship. The craft was able to submerge beneath the waves as a way for the refugees in coastal raft-cities to survive typhoons and hurricanes, as well as to avoid the deadly heat of the tropics.
Slowly, we descended toward the coral reef that had grown around the ruined hulk of what had once been the largest university library in the world. Around us, schools of brightly colored fish wove through shafts of sunlight, and tourists gracefully floated down like mermaids, streams of bubbles trailing behind their artificial gills.
Asa guided the habitat in a gentle circle around the kaleidoscopic sea floor in front of the underwater edifice, pointing out various features. The mound covered by the intricate crimson folds of a coral colony that pleated and swirled like the voluminous dress of classical flamenco dancers had once been a lecture hall named after Thoreau’s mentor, Emerson; the tall, spear-like column whose surface was tiled by sharp, geometric patches of coral in carmine, cerulean, viridian, and saffron had once been the steeple of Harvard’s Memorial Church; the tiny bump in the side of another long reef, a massive brain-shaped coral formation whose gyri and lobes evoked the wisdom of generations of robed scholars who had once strolled through this hallowed temple to knowledge, was in fact the site of the renowned “Statue of Three Lies”—an ancient monument to John Harvard that failed to depict or identify the benefactor with any accuracy.
Next to me, Asa quietly recited,
The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.
The classical verses of the Early Republican Era poet Dickinson evoked the vanished beauty of the autumns that had once graced these shores, long before the sea had risen and the winters driven away, seemed oddly appropriate.
“I can’t imagine the foliage of the Republican Era could be any more glorious than this,” I said.
“None of us would know,” Asa said. “Do you know how the corals get their bright colors?”
I shook my head. I knew next to nothing about corals except that they were popular as jewelry on Venus.
“The pigmentation comes from the heavy metals and pollutants that might have once killed their less hardy ancestors,” said Asa. “They’re particularly bright here because this area was touched by the hand of mankind the longest. Beautiful as they are, these corals are incredibly fragile. A global cooling by more than a degree or two would kill them. They survived climate change once by a miracle. Can they do it again?”
I looked back toward the great reef that was Widener Library, and saw that tourists had landed on the wide platform in front of the library’s entrance or against its sides in small groups. Young tour guides in bright crimson—the color of Harvard achieved either by skin pigmentation or costume—led each group in their day-excursion activities.
Asa wanted to leave—she found the presence of the tourists bothersome—but I explained that I wanted to see what they were interested in. After a moment of hesitation, she nodded and guided the craft closer.
One group, standing on what used to be the steps ascending to the entrance of Widener, stood in a circle and followed their guide, a young woman dressed in a crimson wetsuit, through a series of dance-like movements. They moved slowly, but it was unclear whether they were doing so because the choreography required it or because the water provided too much drag. From time to time, the tourists looked up at the blazing sun far above, blurred and made hazy by a hundred feet of intervening water.
“They think they’re doing taiji,” said Asa.
“It looks nothing like taiji,” I said, unable to connect the languorous, clumsy movements with the quick, staccato motion I was familiar with from sessions in low-gravity gyms.
“It’s believed that taiji once was a slow, measured art, quite different from its modern incarnation. But since so few recordings of the pre-Diaspora years are left, the cruise ships just make up whatever they want for the tourists.
&nb
sp; “Why do taiji here?” I was utterly baffled.
“Harvard was supposed to have a large population of Chinese scholars before the wars. It was said that the children of many of China’s wealthiest and most powerful inhabitants studied here. It didn’t save them from the wars.”
Asa steered the craft a bit farther away from Widener, and I saw more tourists strolling over the coral-carpeted Yard or longing about, holding what appeared to be paper books—props provided by the cruise company—and taking scans of each other. A few danced without music, dressed in costumes that were a mix of Early and Late Republican fashions, with an academic gown or two thrown in for good measure. In front of Emerson, two tour guides led two groups of tourists in a mimed version of some debate, with each side presenting their position through ghostly holograms that hovered over their heads like comic thought bubbles. Some tourists saw us but did not pay much attention—probably thinking that the drifting refugee bubble was a prop added by the cruise ship to provide atmosphere. If only they knew they were so close to the celebrity hermit …
I gathered that the tourists were re-enacting imagined scenes from the glory days of this university, when it had nurtured the great philosophers who delivered jeremiads against the development-crazed governments of the world as they heated the planet without cease, until the ice caps had collapsed.
“So many of the world’s greatest conservationists and Naturalists had walked through this Yard,” I said. In the popular imagination, the Yard is the equal of the Athenian Acropolis or the Roman Forum. I tried to re-envision the particolored reef below me as a grassy lawn covered by bright red and yellow leaves on a cool New England fall day as students and professors debated the fate of the planet.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 81