• LITHOSPHERE

The Bay of Biscay glowed with the same radiant, sapphire hues Logan remembered in Daisy McClennon’s eyes. He fell for those delicate shades again as he traveled swiftly southward aboard a Tide Power Corporation minizeppelin. The beauty of the waters was chaste, serene, pure, but all that would change once Eric Sauvel’s engineers had their way.

Sauvel sat next to him, behind the zep’s pilot, gesturing to encompass the brilliant seascape. “Our silt stirrers are already scattered across eight hundred square kilometers, where bottom sediments are richest,” he told Logan, raising his voice slightly above the softly hissing motors.

“You’ll provide power directly from the Santa Paula barrage?”

“Correct. The tidal generators at Santa Paula will feed the stirrers via superconducting cables. Of course any excess will go to the European grid.”

Sauvel was a tall, handsome man in his early thirties, a graduate of École Polytechnique and chief designer of this daring double venture. He hadn’t welcomed Logan’s first visit a few weeks ago, but changed his mind when the American suggested improvements for the main generator footings. He kept pressing to have Logan back for a follow-up. It would be a lucrative consultancy, and the partners back in New Orleans had insisted Logan accept.

At least this trip was more comfortable than that hair-raising truck ride from Bilbao had been. That first time, Logan had only seen the tidal barrage itself—a chain of unfinished barriers stretching across a notch in the Basque seaboard. Since then he’d learned a lot more about this bold type of hydraulic engineering.

All along this coastline the Atlantic tides reached great intensity, driven by wind and gravity and funneled by the convergence of France and Spain. Other facilities already drew gigawatts of power from water flooding into the Iberian bight twice a day, without adding a single gram of carbon to the atmosphere or spilling an ounce of poison upon the land. The energy came, ultimately, from an all but inexhaustible supply—the orbital momentum of the Earth-Moon system. On paper it was an environmentalist’s dream—the ultimate renewable resource.

But try telling that to those demonstrators, back in Bordeaux.

This morning he had toured the facility already in place across the former mudflats of the Bassin d’Arcachon, near where the rivers Garonne and Dordogne flowed past some of the best wine country in the world. The Arcachon Tidal Power Barrage now supplied clean energy to much of southwestern France. It had also been bombed three times in the last year alone, once by a kamikaze pilot pedaling a handmade ornithopter.

Demonstrators paced the facility’s entrance as they had for fourteen years, waving banners and the womb-shaped Orb of the Mother. It seemed that even a pollution-free power plant—one drawing energy from the moon’s placid orbit—was bound to have its enemies these days. The protestors mourned former wetlands, which some had seen as useless mud flats, but which had also fed and sheltered numberless seabirds before being turned into a dammed-up plain of surging, turbid saltwater.

Then there was the other half of Eric Sauvel’s project, about which still more controversy churned. “How much sediment will you raise with your offshore impellers?” Logan asked the project manager.

“Only a few tons per day. Actually, it’s amazing how little sea bottom muck has to be lifted, if it’s well dissolved. One thousand impellers should turn over enough nutrients to imitate the fertilizing effect of the Humboldt Current, off Chile. And it will be much more reliable of course. We won’t be subject to climatic disruptions, such as El Niño.

“Preliminary tests indicate we’ll create a phytoplankton bloom covering half the bay. Photosynthesis will … is the correct expression skyrocket?”

Logan nodded. Sauvel went on. “Zooplankton will eat the phytoplankton. Fish and squid will consume zooplankton. Then, nearer to the shore, we plan to establish a large kelp forest, along with an otter colony to protect it from hungry sea urchins …”

It all sounded too good to be true. Soon, yields from the Bay of Biscay might rival the anchovy fisheries of the eastern Pacific. Right now, in comparison, the bright waters below were as barren as the gleaming sands of Oklahoma.

That, certainly, was how Sauvel must see the bay today, as a vast, wet desert, a waste, but one pregnant with potential. Simply by lifting sea floor sediments to nourish the bottom of the food chain—drifting, microscopic algae and diatoms—the rest of life’s pyramid would be made to flourish.

Dry deserts can bloom if you provide water. Wet ones need little more than suspended dirt, I suppose.

Only we learned, didn’t we, how awful the effects can be on land, if irrigation is mishandled. I wonder what the price will be here, if we’ve forgotten something this time?

A lover of deserts, and yet their implacable foe, Logan knew stark beauty was often found in emptiness, while life, burgeoning life, could sometimes bring with it a kind of ugly mundanity.

So the tradeoffs—a bird marsh exchanged for a dead but valuable energy source … a lifeless but beautiful bay bartered for a fecund sea jungle that could feed millions …

He wished there were a better way.

Well, we could institute worldwide compulsory eugenics, as some radicals propose—one child per couple, and any male convicted of any act of violence to be vasectomized. That’d work all right … though few effects on population or behavior would be seen for decades.

Or we could ration water even more strictly. Cut energy use to 200 watts per person … though that would also stop the worldwide information renaissance in its tracks.

We might ground all the dirigible liners, end the tourism boom, and settle down to regional isolationism again. That would save energy, all right … and almost certainly finish the growing internationalism that’s staved off war.

Or we could force draconian recycling, down to the last snippet of paper or tin foil. We could reduce caloric intake by 25 percent, protein by 40 percent …

Logan thought of his daughter and threw out all brief temptation to side with the radicals. He and Daisy had responsibly stopped at one child, but of late Logan was less sure about even that restriction. A person like Claire would cure many more of the world’s ills than she created by living in it.

In the end, it came down to utter basics.

Nobody’s cutting my child’s protein intake. Not while I’m alive to prevent it. Whatever Daisy says about the futility of “solving” problems, I’m going to keep on trying.

That meant helping Sauvel, even if this pristine ocean-desert had to be overwhelmed by clouds of silt and algae and noisome, teeming fish.

The glare of sunlight off the water must have been stronger than he realized. Logan’s eyes felt funny. A spectral, crystal shine seemed to transform the air. He blinked in a sudden daze, staring across a sea made even more mesmerizing than any mere iris shade. It loomed toward him, seizing him like a lover, with a paralyzing captivation of the heart.

Shivers coursed his back. Logan wondered if a microbe might feel this way, looking with sudden awe into a truly giant soul.

All at once he knew that the sensations weren’t subjective after all! The minizep shook. Tearing his gaze from the hypnotic sea, Logan saw the pilot rub her eyes and slap her earphones. Eric Sauvel shouted to her in French. When she answered, Sauvel’s face grew ashen.

“Someone has sabotaged the site,” he told Logan loudly to be heard over the noise. “There’s been an explosion.”

“What? Was anybody hurt?”

“No major casualties, apparently. But they wrecked one of the anchor pylons.”

The weird effects were ebbing even as Sauvel spoke. Logan blinked. “How bad is it?”

The engineer shrugged, an expressive gesture. “I do not know. Everyone appears to have been affected in some way. Even I sensed something just a moment ago—perhaps subsonics from the blast.”

Sauvel leaned to his left and peered. “We’re coming into sight now.”

At first it was hard to see that anything had happened at all. There were no plumes of smoke. No sirens wailed across the sloping shelf overlooking Santa Paula inlet. On both banks the half-finished energy storage facilities looked much as Logan remembered them.

The fjordlike cove began as a wide gap in the coastline that narrowed as it penetrated inland. Crossing it at a chosen point lay rows of monoliths, like gray military bunkers, each linked to the next by a flexible dam. Twice daily, tides would drive up the natural funnel and over those barriers, pushing turbines in the process. Then, as moon and sun drew the water away again, it would pay another toll. Back and forth, ebb and flow, the system needed no steady stream of coal or oil or uranium, nor would it spill forth noxious waste. Spare parts would be the only ongoing cost, and electricity its sole output.

Logan scanned the pylons and generator housings. One or two of his suggestions had already been put into effect, he saw. Apparently, the modifications had worked. But as yet he saw no signs of damage.

“Over there!” Sauvel pointed to one end of the barrage chain. Emergency vehicles flashed strobe lights, while magnus floaters and police helicopters scoured the surrounding hillsides. Their pilot answered repeated demands for identification.

Logan sought telltale signs of violence but spotted no blackened, twisted wreckage, no sooty debris. When Sauvel gasped, he shook his head. “I don’t see …”

He followed Sauvel’s pointing arm and stared. A new tower had been erected on the shore, reaching like a construction crane fifty meters high. Its nose drooped, heavy with some cargo.

Only as they neared did Logan notice that the spire was strewn with green, stringy stuff—seaweed, he realized, and from the sagging tip there dangled a man! The “tower” was no tower at all, but an important piece of the tidal barrage … the shoreline anchor boom. A horizontal structure. At least it was supposed to be horizontal. Designed to withstand fierce Atlantic storms, it had lain flat in the water, until …

“The devil’s work!” Sauvel cursed. Some force had contrived to stand the boom on end like a child’s toy. Watching rescue vehicles close in to save the dangling diver, they verified by radio that there were no other injuries. Emergency crews could be heard complaining, there was no trace to be found of the purported bomb!

Logan felt a growing suspicion they’d never find any.

He didn’t laugh. That would be impolite to his hosts, whose work had been set back days, perhaps weeks. But he did allow a grim smile, the sort a cautious man wears on encountering the truly surprising. He felt as he had a few weeks ago, when examining those strange Spanish earthquakes—and the case of the mysterious, disappearing drilling rig. Logan made a mental note to tap the world seismological database as soon as they reached shore. Maybe there was a connection this time, as well.

Something new had entered the world all right. Of that much, he now felt certain.

A great reservoir lay under the North American prairie. The Ogallala aquifer spread beneath a dozen states—a vast hidden lake of pure, sweet water that had trickled into crevices of stone through the coming and going of three ice ages.

To the farmers who had first discovered the Ogallala it must have seemed a gift from Providence. Even in those days, the sun used to parch Oklahoma and Kansas, and the rains were fickle. But wells drilled only a little way down tapped a life source as clear and chaste as crystal. Soon circles of irrigation turned bone-dry grassland into the world’s richest granary.

Day by day, year after year, the Ogallala must have seemed as inexhaustible as the forests of the Amazon. Even when it became widely known that it was being drawn down several feet each year, while recharging only inches, the farmers didn’t change their plans to drill new wells, or to install faster pumps. In abstract, to be sure, they knew it could not last. But abstractions don’t pay the bank. They don’t see you through this year’s harvest. The Ogallala was a commons without a protector, bound for tragedy.

So the American Midwest was fated to suffer through another of the many little water wars that crackled across the early part of the century. Still, although bitterness ran high, the casualty figures were lower than from the rioting in La Plata, or the Nile catastrophe. That was probably because, by the time the battle over the Ogallala aquifer was fully joined, there remained little but damp pores, here and there, for anyone to fight over.

Dust settled over brown, circular patches where bounty had briefly grown, coating rusting irrigation rigs and the windows of empty homes.

Following close behind the dust, there blew in sand.