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The females scattered, dispersing on all sides. Dark eyes peered at him through the tall grass.
Panting, blinking in surprise, Nelson wondered. Was that it? Hey, maybe all it takes is the right bluff!
Then he saw why the females had given up so easily. They were moving aside to make room for a new force.
Rumbling with a low rage, the patriarch and his entourage arrived. Nine big males, their manes fully inflated, ambled with patient assuredness toward him and his frightened, weary charge. Their pace might be confident, but flecks of saliva dripped from their curled lips. Nelson read their eyes, and knew them for killers.
And yet, in that same suspended moment, Nelson had time to feel something he had never before imagined… a strange, crystal calm. As if this was all somehow familiar. As if he had been in this place, in this very predicament, many times before.
We were all like this, once, he realized, feeling the weight of his makeshift cudgel. White, black, yellow… men, women… our ancestors all shared this, long ago…
Back when Africa was new…
Human beings had changed the world, for well and ill. Would their efforts now save what was left? Nelson couldn’t begin to guess.
All he knew for sure was that for the first time he cared.
Nelson and the little mother shared communion in a moment’s eye contact. Leaving her baby clinging to his shoulder, she slipped down to stand beside his left knee, guarding his flank.
The pack slowed and circled. The bull shook his head, as if reading something different in Nelson’s stance, in his eyes. But Nelson suddenly knew the creature saw only part of it.
We humans almost wrecked the whole world. Humans may yet save it…
You don’t mess with guys who can do shit like that.
“Okay, it’s nine against two,” he said, hefting his rude club, smacking its reassuring weight in the palm of his left hand.
“That sounds about right.”
When at last they charged, Nelson was ready for them.
□ Ru
U.S. Population Over Age 65
Year | Percent
1900 | 4.0%
1980 | 11.3%
2038 | 20.4%
Voting Clout of U.S. Citizen Age Groups
Citizen Age Group | Percent Who Vote | Political “Clout Factor”
18-25 | 19% | 5
26-35 | 43% | 23
36-52 | 62% | 39
53-65 | 78% | 44
66-99 | 93% | 71
National Comparisons
Nation | Citizenry Over 65 | Seniors’ Voting Clout
Japan | 26.1% | 87
U.S.A. | 20.4% | 71
Han China | 20.2% | 79
Russian S.F.S.R. | 19.1% | 81
Yakutsk S.S.R. | 12.1%* | 37
Yukon Province, Canada | 11.7%* | 31
Sea State | 10.0% | 19
Republic of Patagonia | 6.2%* | 12**
* Biased by effects of immigration.
** Interactive and remote voting outlawed; polling allowed in person only, at voting stations.
• LITHOSPHERE
The rattling truck stank to high heaven.
It wasn’t just the fumes from its gasoline engine—
Logan Eng was used to riding high-priority construction equipment. Fragrant, high-octane aromatics were as familiar as the grit of countless deserts or the metal tang of grease and drilling mud. Even the sweat fetor pervading the cracked upholstery spoke pungently of honor-able work.
But in addition to all that, Logan’s driver was a tobacco addict. Worse, he didn’t take his nicotine in pills or spray. No, Enrique Vasquez actually smoked paper-trapped bundles of shredded weed, inhaling the sooty vapors with deep sighs of satisfaction.
Logan eyed in unwilling fascination the glowing ember that seemed ever about to fall off the tip of Enrique’s cigarette. So far in this lurching ride across rugged Basque countryside, that mesmerizing bit of ash hadn’t yet set off flaming catastrophe. But he could not help picturing it landing amid the floorboards, there igniting a great ball of exploding petrol fumes.
Of course Logan knew better. (With his forebrain!) Only a generation ago, over a billion cigarettes had been consumed each year. And back in TwenCen, the rate had reached staggering trillions. If the things were as unsafe as they looked, not a forest or city would be left standing.
“You will want to stay for our National Day celebrations!” Enrique bellowed to be heard over the engine and rattling springs. The hand holding the cigarette draped the open window casing, leaving the other to handle both steering and shifting. The complaining gearbox set Logan’s teeth on edge in sympathy.
“I wish I could!” he shouted back. “But my job in Iberia’s finished tomorrow. I’m due back in Louisiana—”
“Too bad! It would you make happy. Glorious fireworks we’ll see! Everyone drunk gets. Then the young men, fun with the bulls have!”
The Basque were the oldest people in Europe, and proud of their heritage. Some said their language came from the Neolithic hunters who first claimed this land from the retreating ice. In a Bilbao museum, Logan had seen replicas of tiny boats Basque sailors used long ago, to hunt whales out on the rude Atlantic. They must be very brave or suicidal, he thought, then and now.
Logan gasped as his guide swerved, sending plumes of dust and gravel billowing toward an onrushing lumber hauler. The drivers exchanged obscene gestures with a vehemence that seemed quite sociable, in its macho way. Enrique shouted parting insults as the pickup roared along the rocky verge of a hundred-meter drop. Logan swallowed hard.
They sped past tumbled stones that must once have been some ancient wall or boundary. Conifer forests blurred where hardscrabble farms and pastures once covered these slopes. Here and there, commercial quick-pine gave way to newer stands of cedar and oak, planted in grudging compliance with the Balanced Reforestation Treaty, though their slower growth would profit only future generations.
Enrique gri
Logan managed to parse the strange version of Simglish they taught here. He nodded.
“I spent a week in Badajoz, going over every datum within two hundred klicks of the quake epicenter. Those dams will last a long while yet.”
Enrique grunted. “In Castile they are good engineers. Not like down in Granada, where the land they are letting go to hell.” He spat out the window.
Logan refrained comment. Never get involved in interregional prejudices was a principal rule. Anyway, nobody could stop the climate from changing, since the Sahara had vaulted the Straits to begin southern Europe’s desertification.
Blame it on the greenhouse effect, Logan thought. Or the shifting Gulf Stream. Hell, blame it on gnomes. Let the scientists figure out causes. What matters to me is how much we can save.
Logan closed his eyes and tried to sleep. After all, if Enrique sent the truck over a cliff, watching it happen wouldn’t change it. Anyway, if he’d had ambitions to live forever he’d never have become field engineer. He hardly noticed the rhythmic jouncing of his skull against the metal door frame — a relatively trivial irritant. Dozing, he found himself recalling how Daisy — his former wife and Claire’s mother — used to approve of his professional plans.
You’ll fight the system from within, she had told him when they were students and in love. Meanwhile, I’ll battle it from the outside.
The plan had sounded bold and perfect then. Neither of them had figured on the way people change… he by learning compromise, she by growing more adamant with each passing year.