Earth

He rolled over and reached into the cargo hamper, tossing bags and jars onto the tracks ahead. They split and shattered. Narwhal tusks and rhino horns coated the tracks in powdered form, obstructing further travel in that direction. Then Roland fought fresh waves of nausea to writhe around on the narrow trolley, facing the direction he had come.

He’d worried he might have to manipulate the lever with his feet. But there was a duplicate at the other end. A red tag prevented the switch from being pushed past a certain point. This Roland tore out, ripping one of his fingers in the process.

“Yes, I am willing to have my house arrest fully monitored by cameras at all times…”

“I’m sure you are, carni-man,” Roland muttered. “But you don’t fool me.”

He slammed the lever home and the trolley glided forward. What began as a gentle breeze soon was a hurricane as power flowed from the humming rails.

You forget, Chang, that your estate is still on Mother Earth. And my guess is that Mom’s had just about enough of you by now.

The light ahead ballooned in a rapidly expanding circle of brilliance. Roland felt solenoids try to throw the lever back, but he strained, holding it in place. In an instant of telescoped time, he saw a figure turn in the light, stare down the shaft, raise his weapon…

“Gaia!” Roland screamed, a battle cry chosen at the last second from some unknown recess of faith as he hurtled like a missile into space.

It was a mess the UNEPA team came down to inspect, after peacekeeping perso

“Well, here’s your missing cache, Elena,” one of them said, picking carefully through the white and gray powders scattered across the floor. Three walls of shelves were intact, but a fourth had collapsed over two quiet forms, sprawled atop each other in the corner. There, the snowdrifts had been stained crimson.

“Damn,” the UNEPA man continued, shaking his head. “A lot of poor beasts died for one geek’s fetish.”

Elena looked down at her enemy of all these years. Chang’s mouth gaped open — crammed full of powder that trailed off to the limp hand of the young recruit she had spoken to early in the evening. Even dying, riddled with bullets, this soldier apparently had a sense of symmetry, of poetry.

A peacekeeping forces noncom sat near the boy, smoothing a lock of ruffled hair. The corporal looked up at Elena. “Senterius was a lousy shot. Never showed any promise at all with weapons. I guess he improvised though. He graduated.”

Elena turned away, disgusted by the maudlin, adolescent sentiment. Warriors, she thought. The world is finally growing up though. Someday soon we’ll be rid of them at last.

Still, why was it she all of a sudden felt as if she had walked into a temple? Or that the spirits of all the martyred creatures were holding silent, reverent watch right now, along with the mourning corporal?

It was another woman’s low voice Elena seemed to hear then, so briefly it was all too easy to dismiss as an echo or a momentary figment of exhaustion. Still, she briefly closed her eyes and swayed.

“There will be an end to war,” the voice seemed to say, with gentle patience.

“But there will always be a need for heroes. ”

After the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea, millions of years passed while the Indian landmass wandered northward away from Africa, creeping across the primordial ocean in solitary splendor. Then, once upon an eon, India collided head on, into the belly of Asia.

Great crustal blocks buckled from the slow-motion force of that impact, gradually, inexorably piling mountains higher and higher until a huge plateau towered through the atmosphere, creating a vast wall that diverted air to the north and trapped the southern winds in a pocket.

During each winter the land beneath this pocket cooled, lowering air pressure, drawing moisture-laden clouds onto the foothills to pour down monsoon rains. Each summer the countryside warmed again, raising pressures, driving the clouds back to sea.

This regular cycle of wet and dry seasons made routine the bounty of the great alluvial plains below the mountains, fertilized by the plateau’s silty runoff. When human beings arrived to clear the forests and plant crops, they found a land of untold fecundity, where they could build, and create culture, and have babies, and make war, and have more babies, and make love, and have more babies still…

Came then a time — only an eyeblink as the ages mark it — when the pattern changed. Gone were the great forests that had cooled the valleys with the transpired breath of ten billion trees. Instead, the soot of cook fires and industry rose into the sky like a hundred million daily sacrifices to individual, shortsighted gods.

Not only in India, but all around the world, temperatures steadily climbed.

As always with such changes, the sea resisted, and so the first grand effects were seen onshore. The chill of winter vanished like a memory, and summer’s ridge of high pressure remained in place year-round over a hardpan that had once welcomed fertile farms.

In fact, it rained now more than ever. Only now the monsoons stayed where they were born… at sea.

• BIOSPHERE

The trick to reading, Nelson Grayson decided, was slipping into the rhythm of the words, but not letting that get in the way of listening. Nelson concentrated on the sentences zigzagging across the page.

Although many struggled to keep their faith in a static, unchanging universe, it was already apparent to the best minds preceding Darwin that Earth’s creatures had changed over time…

The worst thing about studying, Nelson had decided, was books. Especially this old-fashioned kind, with motionless letters the color of squashed ants splayed across musty paper. Still, this dusty volume contained Kuwenezi’s sole copy of this essay. So he had to stick with it.

Evolutionists themselves argued over how species changed. Darwin’s and Wallace’s “natural selection” — in which diversity within a species provides grist for the grinding mill of nature — had to pass ten thousand tests before it triumphed conclusively over Lamarck’s competing theory of “inheritance of acquired traits.”

But even then arguments raged over essential details. For instance, what was the basic unit of evolution?

For years many thought it was species that adapted. But evidence later supported the “selfish gene” model — that individuals act in ways that promote success for their descendants, caring little for the species as a whole. Examples of individual success prevailing over species viability include peacocks’ tails and moose antlers…

Nelson thought he understood the basic issue here. A good example was how people often did what was good for themselves, even if it hurt their family, friends, or society.

But what do peacocks’ tails have to do with it?

Nelson sat beneath overhanging bougainvilleas. Nearby, the gentle flow of water was punctuated by the sound of splashing fish. The air carried thick aromas, but Nelson tried to ignore all those deceptively natural sensoria for the archaic paper reading device in his hands.

If only it were a modern document, with a smart index and hyper links stretching all through the world data net. It was terribly frustrating having to flip back and forth between the pages and crude, flat illustrations that never even moved! Nor were there animated arrows or zoom-ins. It completely lacked a tap for sound.