Earth

• LITHOSPHERE

It was truly “mad dogs and Englishmen” weather. Claire wore her goggles, of course, and was slathered with skin cream. Nevertheless, Logan Eng wondered if he really oughtn’t get his daughter out of this blistering sun-shine.

Not that, to all appearances, anything could possibly harm that creature up ahead, with the form of a girl but moving along the striated rock face like a mountain goat. It never occurred to Logan that Claire might fall, for instance, here on a mere class-four slope. His red-headed offspring strode ahead as if she were crossing a lawn, rather than a forty-degree grade, and disappeared around the next bend in the canyon wall with a final flash of bronzed legs.

Logan puffed, reluctantly admitting to himself why he’d been about to call her back. I can’t keep up with her anymore. It was inevitable, I guess.

Realizing this, he smiled. Envy is an unworthy emotion to feel toward your own child.

Anyway, right now he was occupied with greater spans of time than a mere generation. Logan teetered on the edge of the period called “Carboniferous.” Like some ambitious phylum, aspiring to evolve, he sought a path to rise just a few more meters, into the Permian.

That landmark, which had seemed so stark from far away — a distinct border between two horizontal stripes of pale stone — became deceptive and indistinct up this close. Reality was like that. Never textbook crisp, but gritty, rough-edged. It took physical contact, breathing chalky sediments or tracing with your fingertips the outline of some paleozoic brachiopod, to truly feel the eons imbedded in a place like this.

Logan knew by touch the nature of this rock. He could estimate its strength and permeability to seeping water — a skill learned over years perfecting his craft. Also, as an amateur, he had studied its origins in prehistoric days.

The Carboniferous period actually came rather late in the planet’s history. Part of the “age of amphibians,” it spa

Of course Logan knew volcanic mountains, too. Only last week he’d been scrambling over vast igneous flows in eastern Washington state, charting some of the new underground streams awakened by the shifting rains. Still, mere pumice and tuff were never as fascinating as where the land had once quite literally been alive. In his work he’d walked across ages — from the Precambrian, when Earth’s highest denizens were mats of algae, to the nearly recent Pliocene, where Logan always watched out for traces of more immediate forebears, who might by then already have been walking on two legs and starting to wonder what the hell was going on. He regularly returned from such expeditions with boxes of fossils rescued from the bulldozers, to give away to local schools. Though of course Claire always got first choice for her collection.

“Daddy!”

He was negotiating a particularly tricky bend when his daughter’s call tore him from his drifting thoughts. A misstep cost him his footing, and Logan felt a sudden, teetering vertigo. He gasped, throwing himself against the sloping wall, spreading his weight over the largest possible area. The sudden pounding of his heart matched the sound of pebbles raining into the ravine below.

It was an instinctive reaction. An overreaction, as there were plenty of footholds and ledges. But he’d let his mind wander, and that was stupid. Now he’d pay with bruises, and dust from head to toe.

“What—” He spat grit and raised his voice. “What is it, Claire?”

From above and somewhere ahead he heard her voice. “I think I found it!”

Logan reset his footing and pushed away. Standing upright required that his ankles bend sharply as his climbing shoes pressed for traction. But begi

Just so long as you do pay attention, he reminded himself.

“Found what?” he called in her general direction.

“Daddy!” came exasperated tones, echoing faintly down narrow sidecha

Logan smiled. As a child, Claire never used to call him “Daddy.” It had been an affront to her dignity. But now that the state of Oregon had issued her a self-reliance card, she seemed to like using the word — as if a small degree of residual, calculated childishness was her privilege as an emerging adult.

“I’m coming, Geode!” He patted his clothes, waving away drifts of dust. “I’ll be right there!”

The badlands stretched all around Logan. Sculpted by wind and rain and flash floods, they no doubt looked much as they had when first seen by whites, or by any people at all. Humans had lived in North America for only ten or twenty thousand years, tops. And though the weather had changed during that time — mostly growing dryer and hotter — it had been even longer since any appreciable greenery found a purchase on these sere slopes.

Still, there was beauty here: beige and cream and ci

His job often took him to places like this… to map out schemes for managing precious water. It was a role much like the “wildcatters” of twentieth-century lore, who used to scramble far and wide in search of petroleum, until each of the six hundred major sedimentary basins had been probed, palpated, steamed, and sucked dry.

Logan liked to think his goals were more mature, his task more benign and well thought out than that. Still he sometimes wondered. Might future generations look back on him and his world-spa

His ex-wife, Claire’s mother, had decided about that long ago. After his involvement in the project to cover over the lower Colorado River — saving millions of acre-feet of water from evaporation and creating the world’s longest greenhouse — she had rewarded him by throwing him out of the house.

Logan understood Daisy’s feelings… her obsessions, actually. But what was I to do? We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

All over the planet there were problems crying out for solutions, not tomorrow, but right now. Nations and cities wanted water shifted, pumped and diked. As the seas rose and rains migrated unpredictably, so did his labors, as governments strove desperately to adapt. Great changes were at work, in the air and land and oceans. They were the sort of global transformations one read of in the very rocks themselves… such as when one long epoch of geological stability would come suddenly and violently to an end, leaving everything forever recast.

And yet… Logan inhaled the scent of sage and juniper.

Nothing had altered this country within man’s memory. Not even the greenhouse effect. He rejoiced in places like this, where no one would ever ask for his services. Places invulnerable to any works he could imagine.

A red-tailed hawk patrolled the next mesa, cruising a thermal air current that made the intervening gullied slope swim before his eyes. He touched a control near the left strap of his goggles and the bird steadied in view, smart optics enabling him to share its hunt, vicariously. There was a gleam in the raptor’s yellow iris as it sca