Earth

Especially, the word didn’t apply to that complicated living thing known as topsoil! Wi

Jen glanced over her left shoulder to see Kuwenezi’s lambent towers. The main ark was dim, but its great glass-crystal face reflected a rippling sister to the moon. Within those artificial habitats dozed plants and animals rescued from a hundred spoiled ecosystems. To the radicals, such arks were glorified prisons — mere sops to humanity’s troubled conscience, so that nature’s slaughter could go on.

To Jen, though, the great arcologies weren’t jails, but nurseries.

Change can’t be prevented, only guided.

The radicals were right about one thing, of course. What finally emerged from those glass towers, someday, wouldn’t be the same as what had gone in. Jen’s public statements — that she did not find that in itself tragic — ensured continued hate mail, even death threats, from followers of a sect she herself had helped found.

So be it.

Death is just another change. And when the Mother needs my phosphorus, I’ll give it up gladly.

The local denomination, of course, held that Gaia’s true complexion must be that of pure, fecund earth, and yet they seemed not to care about the paleness of her skin. As Jen lifted her arms, they carried their offerings to outsized recycling bins, waiting under the stars. When the last contribution tumbled inside, a shout of celebration rose, commemorating the salvation of several thousand square meters.

This ceremony had delightful idiosyncrasies, but it was essentially similar to others she’d officiated at, from Australia to Smolensk. In all those places, people had taken it for granted that she was an appropriate surrogate — a stand-in for Gaia herself.

Only a surrogate… Jen smiled, offering her benediction and forgiving their error. The drums resumed, and dancers rejoined their exertions. But for a moment Jen watched the torchlight play across the faces and the glass towers beyond.

Modern folk, you pay homage to the Mother as a “parable.” And I am but a stand-in, tonight, for an abstract idea.

Well, we shall see about that, my children. We shall see.

She had planted seeds during her visit. Some would germinate, perhaps even flower into action.

The young man in the bandages appeared again. She saw him seated across the arena, his baboon companions resting against his knees. He nodded back as she smiled at him, and Jen had a sudden, clear recollection of his final question, yesterday afternoon in the lecture hall.

“You talk about a lot of possibilities Doctor Wolling…” he had said. “Maybe we could do some of those things… or even all o’ them, eh?

“But won’t we also have to give up somethin’ in return? They say there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. So what’ll it cost us, Doctor?”

Jen remembered thinking, What a bright boy. He understood that nothing was ever easy, which her own grandson never seemed to grasp, no matter how often the world smacked poor Alex in the head.

No, Jen thought. Humanity may have to give up more than a little, if the Earth is to be saved. We may, in the end, find the old gods were right after all. That nothing worthwhile comes without a sacrifice.

Jen smiled at the boy, at all of them. She opened her arms, blessing the dancers, the audience, the animals in the arks, and the ravaged countryside.

That sacrifice, my children, may turn out to be ourselves.

PART III

PLANET

The newborn world liquefied under pummeling asteroid impacts. Heavy elements sank, generating still more heat, and a dowry of radioactive atoms kept the planet’s interior warm even after the surface cooled and hardened.

Eventually, the inmost core crystallized under intense pressure, but the next layer remained a swirling metal fluid, a vast electric dynamo. Higher still congealed a mantle of semisolid minerals — superdense pyroxenes and olivines and lighter melts that squeezed up crustal cracks to spill forth from blazing volcanoes.

Heat drove the circulating convection cells, jostled the plates, drove the fields. Heat built continents and made the Earth throb.

Heat also kept some water molten at the surface. Preorganic vapors sloshed in solution, under lightning and fierce sunbeams…

The process started taking on a life of its own.

□

A range of minor mountains divides the city of Los Angeles. During the city’s carefree youth, great battalions of trucks streamed toward the little valleys between those hills, brimming with kilotons of urban garbage.

Coffee grounds and melon rinds, cereal boxes and disposable trays…

In those profligate times every purchased commodity seemed to come inside its own weight of packing material. The average family generated enough waste each year to fill home and garage combined.

Newspapers, magazines, and throwaway advertisements…

Even earlier, during the fight against Germany and Japan, Los Angeles mandated limited recycling to help the war effort. Citizens separated metals for curbside pickup. Bound paper was returned to pulp mills; even cooking grease was saved for munitions. Those few who weren’t glad to help still complied, to avoid stiff fines.

Milk cartons and paper towels… and never-used, slightly dented goods, discarded at the factory…

After the war, people found themselves released from decades of privation into a sudden age of plenty. With the crisis over, recycling seemed irksome. A mayoral candidate ran on a one-issue promise, to revoke the inconvenient law. He won by a landslide.

Peanut hulls, fast-food bags, and takeaway pizza boxes…

The hills dividing L.A. had been formed as the Earth’s Pacific Plate ground alongside the North American Plate. As the two huge, rocky masses pressed and scraped, a coastal range squeezed out at the interface, like toothpaste from a tube. The Santa Monica Mountains and Hollywood Hills were mere offshoots from that steady accumulation, but they helped shape the great city that eventually surrounded them.

Boxes from frozen di