Earth

Studiously, Logan pretended not to see the flashing light atop his tiny camp-transceiver. Until he touched the play button, he could still plead ignorance — claim he’d been out of reach somewhere on the mountain. Dammit. The others in his consulting firm had been told, forcefully. He wasn’t to be disturbed except in an emergency!

Washing his face with a cloth dipped in a crevice streamlet, Logan tried to be cynical. They probably want me back “urgently” to clear somebody’s drain spout. Returning to the tent, he tossed the wash cloth over the little red beacon.

But he couldn’t dismiss it that easily. His imagination betrayed him. While Claire rattled the cooking pot Logan kept envisioning scenes of moving water. As they ate quietly in the gathering dusk, he found himself — like some character out of a Joseph Conrad tale — picturing inundations, deluges, liquid calamities breaking through man’s flimsy barriers, setting all works, great and small, in peril.

It was incongruous, here in a parched land where one’s very pores gasped, where moisture was assessed in precious droplets. But he had little control over the train of images thrown up by his forboding unconscious. He pictured levees bursting, rivers shifting… the Mississippi finally spilling over the worn out dikes confining it, tearing through unprotected bayous to the sea.

Surrendering at last, he flung aside the tent flap and entered to read the damned message. He remained inside for some time.

Emerging at last, Logan saw that Claire had already packed away the utensils and was dismantling her own small shelter under the early stars. He blinked, wondering how she knew.

“Where’s the trouble?” she asked, as she rolled the soft fabric tent into a tight ball.

“Uh… Spain. There were some strange earthquakes. A couple of dams may be in danger.”

She looked up, excitement in her eyes. “Can I come? It won’t interrupt my schoolwork. I can study by hyper.”

Once again, Logan wondered what fine thing he must have done to deserve a kid like this. “Maybe next time. This’ll be just a quick dash. Probably they just want reassurance, so I’ll hold their hands a while and then hurry back.”

“But Daddy…”

“Meanwhile, you’ve got to spend a lot of time on the Net, catching up, or that college in Oregon could revoke your remote status. Do you want to have to go back to high school? At home in Louisiana? In person?”

Claire shivered. “High school. Ugh. All right. Next time, then. So get your gear; I’ll take care of your tent. If we hurry we can make it to Drop Point by eight and catch the last zep into Butte.”

She gri

A dust wafts through the hills and valleys of Iceland.

The people of the island nation sweep it from their porches.

They wipe it from their windows. And they try not to scowl when tourists exclaim, pointing in delight at the red and orange twilight glow cast by suspended topsoil, scattering the setting sun.

Stalwart Northmen originally settled the land, whose rough democracy lasted longer than any other. For most of twelve centuries their descendants disproved the lie that says liberty must always be lost to aristocrats or demagogues.

It was a noble and distinguished heritage. And yet, the founders’ principal legacy to their descendants was not that freedom, but the dust.

Whose fault was it? Would it be fair to blame ninth century settlers, who knew nothing of science or ecological management? In the press of daily life, with a family to feed, what man of such times could have foreseen that his beloved sheep were gradually destroying the very land he pla

Was there ever a time when grandparents didn’t speak so?

It took a breakthrough… a new way of thinking… for a much later generation to step back at last and see what had happened year after year, century after century, to the denuded land… a slow but steady rape by degrees.

But by then it appeared already too late.

A dust drifts through the hills and valleys of Iceland. The people of the island nation do more than simply sweep it from their porches. They show it to their children and tell them it is life floating in ghostlike hazes down the mountain slopes. It is their land.

Families adopt an acre here, a hectare there. Some have been tending the same patch since early in the twentieth century, devoting weekends to watering and shoring up some stretch of heath or gorse or scrub pine.

Pilots on commuter flights routinely open their windows and toss grass seeds over the rocky landscape, in hopes a few will find purchase.

Towns and cities reclaim the produce of their toilets, collecting sewage as if it were a precious resource. As it is. For after treatment, the soil of the night goes straight to the barren slopes, to succor surviving trees against the bitter wind.

A dust colors the clouds above the seas of Iceland.

At the island’s southern fringe, a cluster of new volcanoes spills fresh lava into the sea, sending steam spirals curling upward. Tourists gawp at the spectacle and speak in envy of the Icelanders’ “growing” land. But when natives look to the sky, they see a haze of diminishment that could not be replaced by anything as simple or vulgar as mere magma.

A dusty wind blows away the hills of Iceland. At sea, a few plankton benefit, temporarily, from the unexpected nurturance. Then, as they are wont to do, they die and their carcasses rain as sediment upon the patient ocean bottom. In time the layers will creep underground, to melt and glow and eventually burst forth again, to bring another island to life.

Short-term calamities are nothing to the master recycling system. In the end, it reuses even dust.

• BIOSPHERE

Nelson Grayson had arrived in the Ndebele canton of Kuwenezi with two changes of clothes, a satchel of stolen Whatifs, and an inflated sense of his own importance. All were gone by the time, nine months later, he gathered his tools by the Level Fourteen Ape-iary and stepped through the hissing airlock into a bitter-bright, air-conditioned sava

By then, Nelson felt irrevocably committed to shoveling baboon shit for a living.

It was not a highly regarded occupation. In fact, the keepers would have assigned robots the job, if not for the monkeys’ a

At least, each of those ancestors had survived long enough to beget another in the chain leading to him. In his former life Nelson had never given much thought to that. But of late he’d grown to appreciate the accomplishment, especially as his employers reassigned him from habitat to habitat — catering to one wild and unpredictable species after another.

Most of his first months had been spent in the sprawling main ark — Kuwenezi Canton’s chief contribution to the World Salvation Project, where scientists and volunteers recreated entire ecosystems under multi-tiered, vaulting domes, where gazelles and wildebeest ran across miniature ranges that looked and felt almost real. Nelson’s first task had been to carry fodder to the ungulates and report when any looked sick. To his surprise, it wasn’t all that hard. In fact, boredom made him ask for a more demanding job. And so they named him dung inspector.