• CORE

On his way back to Auckland after two days at the Tarawera Geothermal Works, Alex found himself ensnared in tourist traffic at Rotorua. Buses and minivans threaded the resort’s narrow ways, hauling Australian families on holiday, gushing Sinhalese newlyweds, serene-looking Inuit investors, and Han—the inevitable swell of black-haired Han—nudging and whispering in close-packed mobs that overflowed the pavements and lawns, thronging and enveloping anything that might by any stretch be quaint or “native.”

Most shops bore signs in International Ideogramatic Chinese, as well as English, Maori, and Simglish. And why not? The Han were only the latest wave of nouveau moyen to suddenly discover tourism. And if they engulfed all the beaches and scenic spots within four thousand kilometers of Beijing, they also paid well for their hard-earned leisure.

Yet more Chinese piled off flywheel buses just ahead of Alex’s little car, wearing garish sunhats and True-Vu goggles that simultaneously protected the eyes and recorded for posterity every kitsch purchase from friendly concessionaires touting “genuine” New Zealand native woodcraft.

Well, it’s their turn, Alex thought, nursing patience. And it surely does beat war.

Kiwi autumn was still warm and breezy, so he had the side window down. The smell of hydrogen sulfide from the geysers was pungent, but not too noticeable after all his time working underground with George Hutton’s people. Waiting for traffic to clear, Alex watched another silvery cruise zeppelin broach a tree-lined pass and settle toward the busy aerodrome at the edge of town. Even from here he made out the crowds crammed into steerage, faces pressed against windows to peer down at Rotorua’s steamy volcanic pools.

A decade or two hence it might be the new bourgeois of Burma or Morocco who packed the great junket liners, taking advantage of cheap zep travel to swarm abroad in search of armloads of cheap souvenirs and canned memories. By then of course, the Han would have grown used to it all. They’d be sophisticated individual travelers, like the Japanese and Malays and Turks, who avoided frantic mobs and snickered at the gaucheries of first-generation tourists.

That was the curious nature of the “mixed miracle.” For as the world’s nations scrimped and bickered over dwindling resources, sometimes scrapping violently over river rights and shifting rains, its masses meanwhile enjoyed a rising tide of onetime luxuries—made necessary by that demon Expectation.

—Pure water cost nearly as much as your monthly rent. At the same time, for pocket change you could buy disks containing a thousand reference books or a hundred hours of music.

—Petrol was rationed on a need-only basis and bicycles choked the world’s cities. Yet resorts within one day’s zep flight were in reach to even humble wage earners.

—Literacy rates climbed every year, and those with full-reliance cards could self-prescribe any known drug. But in most states you could go to jail for throwing away a soda bottle.

To Alex the irony was that nobody seemed to find any of it amazing. Change had this way of sneaking up on you, one day at a time.

“Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid.”

That was how his grandmother had put it, once. And she ought to know. Everyone praised Jen Wolling for her brilliant foresight. But one day she had shown him her scorecard from the World Predictions Registry. After twenty-five years of filing prognostications with the group, her success rating was a mere sixteen percent! And that was better than three times the WPR average.

“People tend to get dramatic when they talk about the future. When I was young, there were optimists who foresaw personal spacecraft and immortality in the twenty-first century … while pessimists looked at the same trends and foretold collapse into worldwide famine and war.

“Both forecasts are still being made, Alex, with the deadlines always pushed back one decade, then another and another. Meanwhile, people muddle through. Some things get better, some a lot worse. Strangely enough, ‘the future’ never does seem to arrive.”

Of course Jen didn’t know everything. She had never suspected, for instance, that tomorrow could come abruptly, decisively, in the shape of a microscopic, titanically heavy fold of twisted space.…

Alex maneuvered slowly past a crowd that had spilled into the street, watching dancers perform a haka on the marae platform of an imposing Maori meeting house. Sloping beams of extravagantly carved red wood overhung the courtyard where bare-chested men stuck out their tongues and shouted, stamping in unison and flexing tattooed thighs and arms to intimidate the delighted tourists.

George Hutton had taken Alex to see the real thing a while back, at the wedding of his niece. It was quite a show, the haka. Evidence of a rich cultural heritage that lived on.

For a while, at least …

Alex shook his head. It’s not my fault there won’t be any more hakas—or Maori—in a few years’ time. I’m not responsible for the thing swallowing the Earth from within.

Alex hadn’t made that monster—the singularity they called Beta. He’d only discovered it.

Still, in ancient Egypt they used to kill the messenger.

He would have no such easy out. He might not have been the one to set Beta on its course, but he had made the evaporating Iquitos singularity, Alpha. To George Hutton and the others, that made him responsible by proxy—no matter how much they liked him personally—until Beta’s real makers were found.

Alex recalled the image that had begun unblurring in the holo tank as they probed the monster’s involute topology. It was horrible, voracious, and beautiful to behold. Undeniably there was a genius somewhere … someone a whole lot better than Alex at his own game. The realization was humbling, and a bit frightening.

Immersed in his own thoughts, he had been driving the little Tangoparu company car on mental autopilot, threading past one bottleneck after another. Just when it seemed traffic would open up again, red brake lights forced him to stop hard. Shouts and horns blared somewhere up ahead.

Alex leaned out the window to get a better look. Emergency strobes flashed. A bobbing magnus-effect ambulance hovered near one of the massive, blocky tourist hotels, where budget-conscious travelers rented tiny, slotlike units by the cubic meter. The vehicle’s spherical gas bag rotated slowly around a horizontal pivot, using small momentum shifts to maneuver delicately near white-suited emergency workers. Alex had no view of the injured, but stains on the clothes of shocked bystanders told of some bloody episode that must have gone down only moments ago.

The crowds suddenly parted and more police hove into view, wrestling along a figure swaddled in restraint netting, who howled and writhed, wild-eyed, with face and clothes flecked in blood and spittle. A green gas cannister at his belt showed him to be a dozer—one of those unfortunates more affected by excess carbon dioxide than other people. In most, such borderline susceptibilities caused little more than sleepiness or headaches. But sometimes a wild mania resulted, made far worse by the close press of crowding human flesh.

Apparently, supplemental oxygen hadn’t helped this fellow … or the poor victims of his murderous fit. Alex had never seen a mucker up close like this before, but on occasion he had witnessed the effects from a distance.

“You don’t get anything, but what something else gets taken away …” He distantly recalled Jen saying that last time he visited her office in London, as they stood together at the window watching the daily bicycle jam turn into a riot on Westminster Bridge. “True-Vu tech put a stop to purposeful street crime,” she had said. “So today most killings are outrages of pure environmental overload. Promise me, Alex, you’ll never be one of those down there … the honestly employed.”

Horribly fascinated, they had observed in silence as the commuter brawl spread onto Brunner Quay, then eastward toward the Arts Center. Recalling that episode, Alex suddenly saw this one take an unexpected turn. The officers hauling the wild-eyed mucker, distracted by frantic relatives at their sleeves, let their grip loosen for just a moment. Even then, a normal man might not have been able to tear free. But in a burst of hysterical strength the maniac yanked loose and ran. Ululating incoherently, he knocked down bystanders and then hurtled through the traffic jam—directly toward Alex’s car!

The mucker’s arms were pinned. He can’t get far, Alex thought. Somebody will stop him.

Only no one did. Nobody sensible messed with a mucker, bound or unbound.

Deciding at the last moment, Alex kicked his door open. The madman’s eyes seemed to clarify in that brief instant, replacing rage with an almost lucid, plaintive expression—as if to ask Alex, What did I ever do to you? Then he collided with the door, caroming a few meters before tumbling to the street. Somehow Alex felt guilty—as if he’d just beaten up a helpless bloke instead of possibly saving lives. That didn’t stop him, though, from leaping out and throwing himself atop the kicking, squalling man—now suddenly awash with incongruous tears as he cursed in some inland dialect of Han. With no better way to restrain him, Alex simply sat on him till help arrived.

The whole episode—from breakaway to the moment officers applied the spray sedatives they should have used in the first place—took little more than a minute. When the trussed-up mucker looked back at him through a crowd of snapping True-Vu lenses, Alex had a momentary feeling that he understood the fellow … far better, perhaps, than he did the gawking tourists around him. There was something desperately fearful and yet longing in those eyes. A look reminding Alex of what he sometimes saw in a mirror’s momentary, sidelong glance.

It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.

After wading through congratulatory backpats to his car, Alex looked down and saw for the first time that his clothes were smeared with blood. He sighed. Why does everything happen to me? I thought academics were supposed to lead boring lives.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some good old-fashioned British boredom about now.…

No sooner was he seated than the driver behind him blew his horn. So much for the rewards of heroism. Edging around a final tourist bus he saw open lanes ahead at last. Carefully Alex fed the engine hydrogen, spun up the little car’s flywheel, and gradually built up speed. Soon the northern reaches of the Mamaku range sped by as he left Rotorua behind and set off across the central plateau.

This highway shared the chief attribute of Kiwi roads—a stubborn resistance to straight lines. Driving entailed carefully swooping round hairpin bends and steep crags, intermittently staring over precipices into gaping, cottony nothingness.

It was easy to see how New Zealand had got its Maori name—Ao Tearoa—Land of the Long White Cloud. Mist-shrouded peaks resembled recumbent giants swathed in fog. The slumbering volcanoes’ green slopes supported rich forests, meadows, and over twenty million sheep. The latter were kept mostly for their wool nowadays, though he knew George Hutton and many other natives ate red meat from time to time and saw nothing wrong with it.

In this land of steam geysers and rumbling mountains, one never drove far without encountering another of Hutton’s little geothermal power stations, each squatting on a taproot drilled near a vein of magma. Mapping such underground sources had made George wealthy. The network of sensors left over from that effort now helped Alex’s team define what was happening in the Earth’s core.

Not that anyone expected the scans to offer hope. How, after all, do you get rid of an unwanted guest weighing a million million tons? A monster ensconced safely in a lair four thousand kilometers deep? You surely don’t do it the way the Maori used to placate taniwha … demons … by plucking a hair and dropping it into dark waters.

Still, George wanted the work continued, to learn how much time was left, and who was responsible. Alex had wrung one promise from George, in case they ever did find the culprit. He wanted an hour with the fellow … one hour to talk physics before George wreaked vengeance on the negligent genius with his own hands.

Thinking about the poor man he had encountered so roughly back in Rotorua—remembering the sad yet bloody look in the mucker’s eyes—Alex wondered if any of them really had a right to judge.

He had always liked to think he had a passing education in fields outside his own. Alex had known, for instance, that even the greatest mountains and canyons were mere ripples and pores on the planet’s huge bulk. Earth’s crust—its basalts and granites and sedimentary rocks—made up only a hundredth of its volume and half a percent of its total mass. But he used to picture a vast interior of superdense, superhot melt, and left it at that. So much for geology.

Only when you truly study a subject do you find out how little you knew all along.

Why, just two months ago Alex had never heard of Andrija Mohoroviĉić!

In 1909 the Yugoslav scientist had used instruments to analyze vibration waves from a Croatian earthquake. Comparing results from several stations, Mohoroviĉić discovered he could, like bats or whales, detect objects by their reflected sound alone. On another occasion he found a thin layer that would later bear his name. But in 1909 what he heard were echoes of the Earth’s very core.

As instruments improved, seismic echolocation showed other abrupt boundaries, along with fault lines, oil fields, and mineral deposits. By century’s end, millions were being spent on high-tech listening as desperate multinationals sought ever-deeper veins, to keep the glory days going just a little longer.

A picture took shape, of a dynamic world in ceaseless change. And while most geologists went on studying the outer crust, some curious men and women cast their nets much deeper, beyond and below any conceivable economic reward.

Such “useless” knowledge often makes men rich—witness George Hutton’s billions. Whereas Alex’s own “practical” project, financed by money-hungry generals, had turned unprofitable to a rare and spectacular degree.

It just goes to show … he thought. You never can tell what surprises life has in store for you.

Even as Alex admitted his ignorance of geophysics, it was his own expertise that Hutton’s techs called upon as they struggled to improve their tools. The gravity antennas employed superconducting wave generators like those in a cavitron—the still-unlicensed machine he’d used in Iquitos. So he was able to suggest shortcuts saving months of development.

It was fun exchanging ideas with others … building something new and exciting, out of sight of the suspicious bureaucrats of the scientific tribunals. Unfortunately, each time they laughed together, or they celebrated overcoming some obstacle, someone inevitably stopped short and turned away, remembering what it was all about and how futile their work was likely to be in the long run. Alex doubted that even his great-grandparents’ generation, during the awful nuclear brinksmanship of the cold war, had ever felt so helpless or hopeless.

But we have to keep trying.

He switched on the radio, looking for some distracting music. But the first station he found carried only news bulletins, in Simplified English.

“We now tell you more news about the tragedy of Reagan Station. Two weeks ago, the American space station exploded. The ambassador to the United Nations, from Russia, accuses that the United States of North America was testing weapons on Reagan Station. The Russian ambassador does say that he has no proof. But he also does say that this is the most likely explanation …”

Most likely explanation indeed, Alex thought. It just goes to show … you never can tell.

In olden times, to be “sane” meant you behaved in ways both sanctioned by and normal to the society you lived in.

In the last century some people—especially creative people—rebelled against this imposition, this having to be “average.” Eager to preserve their differences, some even went to the opposite extreme, embracing a romantic notion that creativity and suffering are inseparable, that a thinker or doer must be outrageous, even crazy, in order to be great. Like so many other myths about the human mind, this one lingered for a long time, doing great harm.

At last, however, we have begun to see that true sanity has nothing at all to do with norms or averages. This redefinition emerged only when some got around to asking the simplest of questions.

“What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of mental illness?”

The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack—

flexibility—to be able to change your opinion or course of action, if shown clear evidence you were wrong.

satiability—the ability to feel satisfaction if you actually get what you said you wanted, and to transfer your strivings to other goals.

extrapolation—an ability to realistically assess the possible consequences of your actions and to empathize, or guess how another person might think or feel.

This answer crosses all boundaries of culture, age, and language. When a person is adaptable and satiable, capable of realistic planning and empathizing with his fellow beings, those problems that remain turn out to be mostly physiochemical or behavioral. What is more, this definition allows a broad range of deviations from the norm—the very sorts of eccentricities suppressed under older worldviews.

So far so good. This is, indeed, an improvement.

But where, I must ask, does ambition fit under this sweeping categorization? When all is said and done, we remain mammals. Rules can be laid down to keep the game fair. But nothing will ever entirely eliminate that will, within each of us, to win.

—From The Transparent Hand, Doubleday Books, edition 4.7 (2035)
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