Earth

“Now I want to make clear I’m talking about genetic improvement here, and there are limits to how far one can go in that direction. We’re already by far the most plastic of animals, the most adaptable to environmental influences. The real core of any self-improvement campaign must remain in the areas of education and child-rearing and the new psychology, to bring up a generation of saner, more decent people.

“But there really are constraints on that process, laid down by the capabilities and limitations of our bodies and brains. And where did those capabilities and limitations come from? Our past, of course. A haphazard sequence of genetic experiments by trial and error, slowly accumulating favorable mutations generation by generation. Death was the means of our advancement… the deaths of millions of our ancestors. Or, to be more precise, those who failed to become our ancestors.

“Those who did survive to breed passed on new traits, which gradually accumulated into the suite of attributes now at our disposal — our upright stance, our better-than-average vision, our wonderfully dexterous hands. Our bloated brains.

“As for what the latter has done to our skull size, ask any woman who’s given birth…”

At that point the audience had laughed. Jen noticed some of the tension seeping away.

“Other species have meanwhile collected their own, similar catalogues of adaptations. Many of them at least as wonderful as those we’re so arrogantly proud of. But here’s the sad part. With one exception — the inefficient interspecies gene transfer performed by viruses — no animal species can ever profit from another’s hard-won lessons. Until now, each has been in it alone, fending for itself, hoarding what it’s acquired, learning from no one else.

“What I am proposing is to change all that, once and for all. Hell, we’re already doing it! Look at the century-old effort to blend characteristics among plants, to transfer, say, pest resistance from one hardy wild species into another that is a food crop. Take just one such product — legu-corn, which fixes its own nitrogen. How many productive farmlands and aquifers has it saved by eliminating the need for artificial fertilizer? How many people has it saved from starvation?

“Or take another program — to save those species of birds who ca

“Or take our experiments at London Ark, where we’re remaking a vanished species by slowly building a woolly mammoth genome within an elephant matrix. Someday, a species which has been extinct for thousands of years will walk again.”

A woman in the third row raised her hand. “But isn’t that exactly what the radical Gaians object to? They call it bastardization of species…”

Jen remembered laughing at that point. “I am not a favorite of the radicals.”

Quite a few in the audience had smiled then. The Ndebele shared her contempt for the taunts, even threats, of those who proclaimed themselves guardians of modern morality.

No doubt the original idea behind her invitation to come here had been prestige. Southern Africa suffered partial isolation from the world’s ever-tightening web of commerce and communication, largely because the commonwealth still practiced racial and economic policies long abandoned elsewhere. No doubt they were surprised when a Nobel laureate actually accepted. This visit would cause Jen problems when she returned home.

It was worth it though. She’d seen promise here. Cut off as they were, these archaic racialist-socialists were looking at familiar problems in unique ways. Often cockeyed wrong ways, but intriguing nonetheless. They had a great advantage in not caring what the rest of the world thought. In that way, they were much like Jen herself.

“What matters to me is the whole,” she had replied. “And the whole depends upon diversity. The radicals are right about that. Diversity is the key.

“But it need not be the same diversity as existed before mankind. Indeed, it ca

“We must become smart enough to minimize the damage, and then foster a new diversity, one able to endure in a strange new world.”

Of all those in the audience, some had looked confused or resentful. Others nodded in agreement. But one, the boy in the front row, had stared at her as if struck dumb. At the time she had wondered what she’d said that had affected him so.

Jen was jerked back to the present as Director Mugabe spoke her name over the rhythm of the beating drums. She blinked, momentarily disoriented, while hands gently took both her elbows, helping her to stand. Smiling women in bright costumes urged her forward. Their white, perfect teeth shone in the flickering torchlight.

Jen sighed, realizing. As the oldest woman present, and guest of honor, she couldn’t refuse officiating at the sacrifice… not without insulting her hosts. So she went through the motions — bowing to the Orb of the Mother, accepting the bound wheat, pouring the pure water.

So many people had taken to this sect, movement, Zeitgeist… call it what you will. It was an amorphous thing, without center or official dogma. Only a few of those paying homage to the Mother did so thinking it a religion per se.

Indeed many older faiths had taken the simple, effective measure of co-opting Gaian rituals into their own. Catholics altered celebrations of the Virgin, so that Mary now took a much more vigorous personal interest in planetary welfare than she had in the days of Chartres or Nantes.

And yet, Jen knew many for whom this was more than a mere statement or movement. More than just a way of expressing reverence for a danger-stricken world. There were radicals for whom Gaia worship was a church militant. They saw a return of the old goddess of prehistory, at last ready to end her banishment by brutal male deities — by Zeus and Shiva and Jehovah and the warlike spirits once idolized by the Ndebele. To Gaian radicals there were no “moderate” approaches to saving Earth. Technology and the “evil male principle” were foes to be cast down.

Evil male principle, my shriveled ass. Males have their uses.

For some reason Jen thought of her grandson, whose obsessions in the twin worlds of abstraction and engineering were stereotypical of what radicals called “penis science.” It was some time since she had last heard from the boy. She wondered what Alex was up to.

Probably something terribly silly, and utterly earth-shaking if I know him.

Soon came the final act of the evening. The Cleansing. Jen smiled and touched one by one the offerings brought before her by adults and children, each presenting a wicker basket containing broken bits of mundane archaeology.

Scraps of tin… broken spark plugs… shreds of adamant, insoluble plastic… One basket was nearly filled with ancient aluminum beer cans, still shiny thirty years after they had been outlawed everywhere on Earth. Each collection was the work of one member of this community, performed in his or her spare time over many months. Each basket contained the yield given up by one square meter of soil, painstakingly and lovingly sifted till no trace of human manufacture was detectible, as deep as the individual’s time, strength, and piety allowed. In this way, each person incrementally returned a small bit of the planet to its natural state.

Only what was natural? Certainly not the land’s contours, which had been eroded and moved wholesale by human enterprise.

Not the aquifers, whose percolating waters would never be quite the same, even where antidumping was enforced and where inspectors granted the precious label “pure and untainted.” That only meant the content of heavy metals and complex petro-organics was too sparse to affect one human’s health over a normal lifespan. It certainly didn’t mean “natural.”