Earth

• LITHOSPHERE

The Bay of Biscay glowed with the same radiant, sapphire hues Logan remembered in Daisy McCle

Sauvel sat next to him, behind the zep’s pilot, gesturing to encompass the brilliant seascape. “Our silt stirrers are already scattered across eight hundred square kilometers, where bottom sediments are richest,” he told Logan, raising his voice slightly above the softly hissing motors.

“You’ll provide power directly from the Santa Paula barrage?”

“Correct. The tidal generators at Santa Paula will feed the stirrers via superconducting cables. Of course any excess will go to the European grid.”

Sauvel was a tall, handsome man in his early thirties, a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique and chief designer of this daring double venture. He hadn’t welcomed Logan’s first visit a few weeks ago, but changed his mind when the American suggested improvements for the main generator footings. He kept pressing to have Logan back for a follow-up. It would be a lucrative consultancy, and the partners back in New Orleans had insisted Logan accept.

At least this trip was more comfortable than that hair-raising truck ride from Bilbao had been. That first time, Logan had only seen the tidal barrage itself — a chain of unfinished barriers stretching across a notch in the Basque seaboard. Since then he’d learned a lot more about this bold type of hydraulic engineering.

All along this coastline the Atlantic tides reached great intensity, driven by wind and gravity and fu

But try telling that to those demonstrators, back in Bordeaux.

This morning he had toured the facility already in place across the former mudflats of the Bassin d’Arcachon, near where the rivers Garo

Demonstrators paced the facility’s entrance as they had for fourteen years, waving ba

Then there was the other half of Eric Sauvel’s project, about which still more controversy churned. “How much sediment will you raise with your offshore impellers?” Logan asked the project manager.

“Only a few tons per day. Actually, it’s amazing how little sea bottom muck has to be lifted, if it’s well dissolved. One thousand impellers should turn over enough nutrients to imitate the fertilizing effect of the Humboldt Current, off Chile. And it will be much more reliable of course. We won’t be subject to climatic disruptions, such as El Nino.

“Preliminary tests indicate we’ll create a phytoplankton bloom covering half the bay. Photosynthesis will… is the correct expression skyrocket*.”

Logan nodded. Sauvel went on. “Zooplankton will eat the phytoplankton. Fish and squid will consume zooplankton. Then, nearer to the shore, we plan to establish a large kelp forest, along with an otter colony to protect it from hungry sea urchins…”

It all sounded too good to be true. Soon, yields from the Bay of Biscay might rival the anchovy fisheries of the eastern Pacific. Right now, in comparison, the bright waters below were as barren as the gleaming sands of Oklahoma.

That, certainly, was how Sauvel must see the bay today, as a vast, wet desert, a waste, but one pregnant with potential. Simply by lifting sea floor sediments to nourish the bottom of the food chain — drifting, microscopic algae and diatoms — the rest of life’s pyramid would be made to flourish.

Dry deserts can bloom if you provide water. Wet ones need little more than suspended dirt, I suppose.

Only we learned, didn’t we, how awful the effects can be on land, if irrigation is mishandled. I wonder what the price will be here, if we’ve forgotten something this time?

A lover of deserts, and yet their implacable foe, Logan knew stark beauty was often found in emptiness, while life, burgeoning life, could sometimes bring with it a kind of ugly mundanity.

So the tradeoffs — a bird marsh exchanged for a dead but valuable energy source… a lifeless but beautiful bay bartered for a fecund sea jungle that could feed millions…

He wished there were a better way.

Well, we could institute worldwide compulsory eugenics, as some radicals propose — one child per couple, and any male convicted of any act of violence to be vasectomized. That’d work all right… though few effects on population or behavior would be seen for decades.

Or we could ration water even more strictly. Cut energy use to 200 watts per person… though that would also stop the worldwide information renaissance in its tracks.

We might ground all the dirigible liners, end the tourism boom, and settle down to regional isolationism again. That would save energy, all right… and almost certainly finish the growing internationalism that’s staved off war.

Or we could force draconian recycling, down to the last snippet of paper or tin foil. We could reduce caloric intake by 25 percent, protein by 40 percent…

Logan thought of his daughter and threw out all brief temptation to side with the radicals. He and Daisy had responsibly stopped at one child, but of late Logan was less sure about even that restriction. A person like Claire would cure many more of the world’s ills than she created by living in it.

In the end, it came down to utter basics.

Nobody’s cutting my child’s protein intake. Not while I’m alive to prevent it. Whatever Daisy says about the futility of “solving” problems, I’m going to keep on trying.

That meant helping Sauvel, even if this pristine ocean-desert had to be overwhelmed by clouds of silt and algae and noisome, teeming fish.

The glare of sunlight off the water must have been stronger than he realized. Logan’s eyes felt fu

Shivers coursed his back. Logan wondered if a microbe might feel this way, looking with sudden awe into a truly giant soul.

All at once he knew that the sensations weren’t subjective after all! The minizep shook. Tearing his gaze from the hypnotic sea, Logan saw the pilot rub her eyes and slap her earphones. Eric Sauvel shouted to her in French. When she answered, Sauvel’s face grew ashen.

“Someone has sabotaged the site,” he told Logan loudly to be heard over the noise. “There’s been an explosion.”

“What? Was anybody hurt?”

“No major casualties, apparently. But they wrecked one of the anchor pylons.”