Earth

“What happens when you or I lose a piece of ourselves? A finger? A lung? Do we expect to function the same afterward? Will the whole ever work as well again? How, then, can we be so blithe at the dismembering of our world? Our mother?

“Gaia’s cells, her organs, are the species that share her surface! “Here, today, hypocrites will tell you they’re saving species. But how? By amputating what’s left and storing it in a jar? You might as well cut out a drunkard’s liver and preserve it in a machine. For what purpose? Who is saved? Certainly not the patient!”

Alex watched the speaker while his grandmother bought tickets. Most of the fellow’s words left him perplexed on that day. Still, he recalled being fascinated. The orator’s passion was unusual. Those who held forth on Sundays at Speakers’ Corner seemed pallid and overwry in comparison.

One passage in particular he recollected with utter clarity. The fellow stretched his hands out at passersby, as if pleading for their souls.

“… humans brought intelligence, sentience, self-awareness to the world, it ca

“But what have we done? ”

The demonstrator wiped at the ash stains above each eye, ru

For a moment, the speaker caught Alex’s eye and seemed to be addressing him especially. Staring back, Alex felt his grandmother take his hand and pull him away, past metal detectors and sniffer machines into the relative tranquility of the grounds inside.

On that day nobody seemed much interested in the bears or seals. The African section held few tourists, since that continent had been declared stabilized a few years before. Most people thought the great die-back there was over. For a time, at least.

Passing the Amazona section, Alex wanted to stop and see the golden lion tamarins, their large enclosure outlined in bright blue. There were quite a few other blue-rimmed areas there. Guards, both human and robot, focused on anyone who approached those specially marked exhibits too closely.

The yellow-maned tamarins looked at Alex dispiritedly, meeting his eyes as he passed. To him it seemed they too were aware of what today’s activity was about.

Crowds were already dispersing in the newly expanded section of the zoo devoted to creatures from the Indian subcontinent. He and Jen were too late for the official ceremony, naturally. Gran had never been on time for anything as long as he’d known her.

Still, it didn’t really matter. The mass of visitors wasn’t here to listen to speeches but to bear witness and know that history had marked yet another milestone. Jen told him they were “doing penance,” which he figured must mean she was a Gaian, too.

It wasn’t until many years later that he came to realize millions thought of her as the Gaian.

While they queued, the sun came out. Vapor rose from the pavement. Jen gave him a te

Half the exhibits in this section were already lined in blue. Guards now patrolled what had only a month ago been standard zoo enclosures, but which were now reclassified as something else entirely. This was before the hermetically sealed arks of later days, back when the demarcation was still mostly symbolic.

Of course the extra animals, the refugees, hadn’t arrived yet. They were still in quarantine while zoos all over the world debated who would take which of the creatures recently yanked out of the collapsing Indian park system. Over the months ahead, the exiles would arrive singly and in pairs, never again to see their wild homes.

Painters had just finished outlining the blackbuck compound. The deerlike animals flicked their ears, oblivious to their changed status. But in the next arena a tigress seemed to understand. She paced her enlarged quarters, tail swishing, repeatedly sca

Alex pointed a finger at the great cat. Although he knew he was supposed to feel sorry for it, the tiger seemed so huge and alarming, it gave him a ritual feeling of security to cock his thumb and aim.

“Bang, bang,” he mouthed silently.

A new plaque glittered in the sunshine.

“I’ve looked into the gene pool figures,” Jen had said, though not to him. She stared at the beautiful, scary, wild thing beyond the moat and spoke to herself. “I’m afraid we’re probably going to lose this line.”

She shook her head. “Oh, they’ll store germ plasm. And maybe someday, long after the last one has died…”

Her voice just faded then, and she looked away.

At the time Alex had only a vague notion what it was all about, what the ark program was for, or why the agencies involved had at last given up the fight to save the Indian forests. All he knew was that Jen was sad. He took his grandmother’s hand and held it quietly until at last she sighed and turned to go.

Those feelings lingered with him even long after he went away to university and entered physics. Everyone is either part of the problem or part of the solution, he had learned from her. Alex grew up determined to make a difference, a big difference.

And so he sought ways to produce cheap energy. Ways that would require no more digging or tearing or poisoning of land. Ways to give billions the electricity and hydrogen they insisted on having, but without cutting any more forests. Without adding poisons to the air.

Well, Alex reminded himself for the latest time. I may have failed at that. I may have been useless. But at least I’m not the one who killed the Earth. Someone else did that.

It was a strange, ineffective solace.

No, another part of him agreed. But the ones who did it — whatever team or government or individual manufactured Beta — they, too, might have begun with the purest of motives.

Their mistake might just as easily have been my own.

Alex remembered the tigress, her savage, reproachful eyes. The slow, remorseless pacing.

The hunger…

Now he pursued a far deadlier monster. But for some reason the image of the great cat would not leave him.

He remembered the blackbucks, gathered in their pen all facing the same way, seeking security and serenity in numbers, in doing everything alike. Tigers weren’t like that. They had to be housed separately. Except under rare circumstances, they could not occupy the same space. That made them harder to maintain.

There were analogies in physics… the blackbucks were like those particles called bosons, which all sorted together. But fermions were loners like tigers…

Alex shook his head. What a bizarre line of contemplation! Why was he thinking about this right now?

Well, there was that postcard from Jen…

Not really a postcard — more a snapshot, sent to one of his secret mail drops in the Net. It showed his grandmother, apparently as spry as ever, posing with several black men and women and what looked like a tame rhinoceros — if such a thing were possible. Transmission marks showed it had been sent from the pariah Confederacy of Southern Africa. So Jen was making waves, still.