• HOLOSPHERE

There are many ways to propagate. (Such a lovely word!) This late in her long life, Jen Wolling figured she knew just about all of them.

Especially where the term applied to biology—to all the varied means Life used to foil its great enemy, Time. So many were those ways, Jen sometimes puzzled why everyone fussed so over the traditional one, sex.

True, sex had its points. It helped ensure variability in a species—a gambler’s game, mixing one’s own genes with another’s, betting that beneficial serendipities will outweigh the inevitable errors. In fact, sex had served most higher life forms well enough and long enough, to become reinforced with many pleasurable neural and hormonal responses.

In other days Jen had plumbed those pathways in vivo and with gusto. She had also mapped those same roads more precisely, in charts of pristine yet still passionate mathematics. Hers had been the earliest computer models to show theoretical bases for feeling, logical rationales for ecstasy, even theorems for the mysterious art of motherhood.

Two husbands, three children, eight grandchildren, and one Nobel Prize later, Jen knew motherhood from every angle, even though its fierce hormonal flows were now only memories. Ah, well. There were other types of propagation. Other ways even an old woman might leave an imprint upon history.

“No, Baby!” she chided, pulling a bright red apple away from the bars dividing the spacious lab in two. A gray tentacle waved between the steel rods, snatching at the fruit.

“No! Not till you ask for it politely.”

From her desk nearby, a young black woman sighed. “Jen, will you stop teasing the poor creature?” Pauline Cockerel shook her head. “You know Baby won’t understand unless you accompany words with signs.”

“Nonsense. She comprehends perfectly. Observe.”

The animal let out a squeaky trumpet of frustration. Acquiescing, it rolled back its trunk to wind the tip round a mat of shaggy fur, hanging low over its eyes.

“That’s a good girl,” Jen said, tossing the apple. Baby caught it deftly and crunched happily.

“Pure operant conditioning,” the younger woman sniffed. “Hasn’t anything to do with intelligence or cognition.”

“Cognition isn’t everything,” Jen replied. “Politeness, for instance, needs to be ingrained at deeper levels. It’s a good thing I came down here. She’s getting spoiled rotten.”

“Hmph. If you ask me, you’re just rationalizing another bout of PNS.”

“PNS?”

“Post-Nobel syndrome,” Pauline explained.

“Still?” Jen sniffed. “After all these years?”

“Why not? Who said anyone recovers?”

“You make it sound like a disease.”

“It is. Look at the history of science. Most prizewinners turn into either stodgy defenders of the status quo—like Hayes and Kalumba—or iconoclasts like you, who insist on throwing stones at sacred cows—”

“Mixed metaphor,” Jen pointed out.

“—and carping about details, and generally making nuisances of themselves.”

“Have I been making a nuisance of myself?” Jen asked innocently.

Pauline cast her eyes heavenward. “You mean besides coming here randomly, unannounced, and meddling in Baby’s training?”

“Yeah. Besides that.”

With a sigh Pauline plucked one data plaque from a jumble of the wide, wafer-thin reading devices. This one was dialed to the latest issue of Nature … a page in the letters section.

“Oh, that,” Jen observed. She had come here to the hermetic, air-­conditioned pyramid of London Ark, in order to escape the flood of telephone and Net calls piling up at her own lab. Inevitably, one would be from the director of St. Thomas’s, inviting her to a pleasant lunch overlooking the river, where he’d once again hint that an emeritus professor in her nineties really ought to spend more time in the country, watching ultraviolet rays turn the rhododendrons funny shades of purple, instead of gallivanting around the globe poking her nose into other researchers’ business and making statements about issues that were none of her concern.

Had anybody else spoken as she had, at last week’s World Ozone Conference in Patagonia, they would have returned home to more than mere letters and phone calls. In today’s political climate, the gentlest outcome might have been forced retirement. Good-bye lab in the city. Good-bye generous consultancies and travel allotments.

That little Swedish medal certainly did have its compensations. To become a laureate was a little like being transformed into that famous nine-hundred-pound gorilla—the one who slept anywhere it wanted to. Glimpsing her own tiny, wiry reflection in the laboratory window, Jen found the metaphor delicious.

“I only pointed out what any fool should see,” she explained. “That spending billions to blow artificial ozone into the stratosphere isn’t going to solve anything. Now that greedy idiots have stopped spewing chlorine compounds into the air, the situation will correct itself soon.”

“Soon?” Pauline was incredulous. “Decades is soon enough to restore the ozone layer? Tell that to the farmers, who have to fit their livestock with eye covers.”

“Shouldn’t eat meat anyway,” Jen grumbled.

“Then tell all the humans who’ll get skin lesions because …”

“The U.N. supplies hats and sunglasses to everyone. Besides, a few pence worth of cream clears away precancerous—”

“What about wild animals then? Savannah baboons were doing fine, their habitat declared safe just ten years ago. Now so many are going blind, they have to be collected into the arks after all. How do you think we’ll cope with that here?” Pauline gestured into the vast atrium of London Ark, with its tier upon tier of enclosed, artificial habitats. The huge edifice of hanging gardens and meticulously regulated environments was a far cry from its origins in the old Regent’s Park Zoo. And it was only one out of almost a hundred such structures, scattered all over the world.

“You’ll cope the way you have all along,” Jen answered. “By stretching facilities, putting in extra hours, making do—”

“For now! But what about tomorrow? The next catastrophe? Jen, I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You led the fight for the arks, from the beginning!”

“So? Am I a traitor then, if I say that part of the job has succeeded? Why, in some places we’ve even made additions to the gene pool, like Baby here.” She nodded toward the furry pachyderm inside the big cage. “You should have faith in your own work, Pauline. Habitat restoration will come off the drawing boards someday. Most of these species should be back outside in only a few centuries—”

“Centuries!”

“Yes, surely. What’s a few hundred years, compared to the age of this planet?”

Pauline sniffed dubiously. But Jen cut in, putting on a touch of Cockney accent for good measure. “Cor, why d’ye take it all so bloody personally, dearie-o? Step back a minute. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“We could lose every unprotected terrestrial species massing over ten kilos!” the young woman replied fiercely.

“Yes? For good measure, let’s throw in the contents of these arks—the protected species—and every human being. All ten billion of us. That’d be some holocaust, to be sure.

“But how much difference would it make to the Earth, Pauline? Say, ten million years from now? Not much, I’ll wager. The old girl will wait us out. She’s done it before.”

Pauline’s mouth was slack, her expression stunned. For a moment Jen wondered if she’d really gone over the top, this time.

Her young friend blinked. Then a suspicious smile spread. “You are awful! For a minute there I actually started taking you seriously.”

Jen grinned. “Now … you know me better than that.”

“I know you’re an unrepentant curmudgeon! You live to get a rise out of people, and someday your contrary habits will be your undoing.”

“Hmph. Just how do you think I’ve remained interested in life this long? Finding ways to keep amused … that’s my secret of longevity.”

Pauline tossed the reading plaque back onto the cluttered desk. “Is that why you’re going to South Africa next month? Because it’ll outrage everybody on both sides?”

“The Ndebele want me to look over their arks from a macrobiological perspective. Whatever their politics and race problems, they are still vital members of the Salvation Project.”

“But—”

Jen clapped her hands. “Enough of that. It has nothing to do with our little project in stirpiculture, right here. Mammut americanum. Let’s have a look at Baby’s file, shall we? I may be retired, but I’ll bet I can still recommend a better neural factor gradient than the one you’re using.”

“You’re on! It’s in the next room. I’ll be right back.”

With a youthful grace that Jen watched lovingly, Pauline hurried out of the lab, leaving Jen to ponder alone the mysterious ways of ambiguity in language.

It was, indeed, a bad habit, this toying with people. But as the years flickered by it grew easier. They all forgave so, almost as if they expected it … demanded it of her. And because she tested everybody, taking contrary positions without prejudice, fewer and fewer people seemed to believe she meant anything she said at all!

Perhaps, Jen admitted honestly, that would be the world’s long-term revenge on her. To attribute everything she said to jest. That would be some fate for the so-called “mother of the modern Gaian paradigm.”

Jen stroked Baby’s trunk, scratching the bulging forehead where induced neoteny had given the elephant-mammoth hybrid an enlarged cortex. Baby’s brow-fur was long and oily, and gave off a pungent, tangy, yet somehow pleasant odor. The worldwide network of genetic arks had a surfeit of pachyderms, even this new breed—“Mammontelephas”—with half its genes salvaged from a 20,000-year-old cadaver exposed by the retreating Canadian tundra. So many of them bred true, in fact, that there were some to spare for experiments in extended childhood in mammals. Under strict supervision by the science tribunals and animal rights committees, of course.

Certainly the creature seemed happy enough. “How about it, Baby?” Jen murmured. “Are you glad to be smarter than the average elephant? Or would you rather be out on the plains, rolling in mud, uprooting trees, complaining about ticks, and getting pregnant before you’re ten?”

The pink-tipped trunk curled around her hand. She stroked it, tenderly. “You’re awfully important to yourself, aren’t you? And you are part of the whole.

“But do you really matter, Baby? Do I?”

Actually, she had meant every word she said to Pauline—about how even mass extinctions would be essentially meaningless in the long run. A lifetime spent building the theoretical foundations of biology had convinced her of that. The homeostasis of the planet—of Gaia—was powerful enough to survive even great cataclysms.

Many times, sudden waves of death had wiped out species, genuses, even entire orders. Dinosaurs were only the most glamorous victims of one episode. And yet, across each murderous chasm, plants kept removing carbon dioxide from the air. Animals and volcanoes continued putting it back again, give or take a few percentage points.

Even the so-called greenhouse effect that had everyone worried—melting icecaps, spreading deserts, and driving millions before the rising seas—even that catastrophic outcome of human excess would never rival the great inundations following the Permian age.

Jen very much approved of the way everyone marched and spoke out and wrote letters these days, passing laws and designing technologies to “save the Earth” from twentieth-century errors. After all, only silly creatures fouled their own nests, and humanity couldn’t afford much more silliness. Still, she took her own, admittedly eccentric view, based on a personal, quirky, never-spoken identification with the living world.

Out in the atrium, a low rumble echoed off the walls of the glass cavern. She recognized the deep, purring growl of a tiger, her totem animal according to a shaman she’d spent one summer with, before the last century ended. He had said hers was “the spirit of a great mother cat …”

What nonsense. But oh, what a handsome fellow he had been! She recalled his aroma of herbs and wood smoke and male musk, even though it was hard right now to pin down his name.

No matter. He was gone. Someday, despite all the efforts of people like Pauline, tigers might be gone, too.

But some things endured. Jen smiled as she stroked Baby’s trunk.

If we humans annihilate ourselves, mammalian genes are rich enough to replace us with another, maybe wiser race within a few million years. Perhaps descendants of coyotes or raccoons, creatures too adaptable ever to need refuge in arks. Too tough to be wiped out by any calamity the likes of us create.

Oh, Baby’s delicate species might not outlast us, but Norway rats surely will. I wonder what kind of planetary custodians their descendants would make.

Baby whimpered softly. The elephant-mammoth hybrid watched her with soft eyes that seemed troubled, as if the creature somehow sensed Jen’s disturbing train of thought. Jen laughed and patted the rough gray flesh. “Oh, Baby. Grandma doesn’t mean half the things she says … or thinks! I just do it to amuse myself.

“Don’t worry. I won’t let bad things happen. I’ll always be watching over you.

“I’ll be here. Always.”

World Net News: Channel 265/General Interest/Level 9+ (transcript)

“Three million citizens of the Republic of Bangladesh watched their farms and villages wash away as early monsoons burst their hand-built levees, turning remnants of the crippled state into a realm of swampy shoals covered by the rising Bay of Bengal.… ”

[Image of tear-streaked brown faces staring in numb dismay at the bloated bodies of animals and canted, drowned ruins of farmhouses.]

[Viewer option: For details on cited storm, voice-link STORM 23 now.]

“These are the die-hards, who have refused all prior offers of resettlement. Now, though, they face a bitter choice. If they accept full refugee status, joining their brethren in Siberian or Australian New Lands, it will also mean taking all the conditions attached, particularly that they must swear population restriction oaths.… ”

[Image of a pregnant woman with four crying children, pushing her frightened husband toward fair-skinned medics. Zoom on one doctor’s hammer and sickle shoulder patch … a nurse’s Canadian maple leaf. Members of the screening team wear kindly smiles. Too nervous to show resentment, the young Bengali signs a clipboard and passes under the tent flap.]

[To read out specific oaths, voice-link REFUGE 43.]

[For specific medical procedures, voice-link VASECT 7.]

“Having reached the limits of their endurance, many have agreed to the host nations’ terms. Still, it’s expected some will refuse even this last chance and elect instead the harsh but unregulated life as citizens of Sea State, whose crude rafts already sail the fens and shallows where formerly stretched great, jute estates.… ”

[View of barges, rafts, salvaged ships of all shapes and sizes, clustered under pelting rain. Crude dredges probe skeletons of a former village, hauling up lumber, furniture, odds and ends to use or sell for scrap. Other, quicker boats are seen pursuing schools of silvery anchovies through newly inundated shoals.]

[Real-time image 2376539.365x-2370.398, DISPAR XVII satellite. $1.45/minute.]

[For general background, link SEASTATE 1.]

[For data on specific flotilla, link SEA BANG LA 5.]

“Already, spokesmen for Sea State are asserting sovereignty over the new fishing grounds, by right of reclamation.… ”

[Ref. UN document 43589.5768/UNORRS 87623ba.]

[Diplomats in marble halls, filing papers.]

[Surveyors mapping ocean expanses.]

[Time-delayed images APW72150/09, Associated Press 2038.6683]

“As expected, the Republic of Bangladesh has issued a protest through its U.N. delegation. Though, with their capital now underwater, the remonstrations begin to sound like those of a tragic ghost.… ”

[View of a brown-skinned youth in a greasy bandanna, grasping a rusty railing, staring toward an uncertain future.]