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Like a glittering scarecrow, the cruciform laser system watched over her squat hives. When she had first turned it on, the surrounding fields had come startlingly alight with hundreds of tiny; flaming embers. The next morning, ash smudges were all that remained of the vicious invaders within line of sight. But her own honeybees were untouched. Now she looked forward to a sweet profit and her first stingless summer.
Perfect timing, she thought ironically. Just as I’m about to move away.
Before going inside, there was one last chore to do.
Claire clambered down to the little creek behind the house, to check on Sybil and Clyde.
The piebald gloats bleated at her. They had finished eating all the water hyacinths within reach along that stretch of bank, so she readjusted their tethers to bring them near another weed-clogged area. Without such creatures, every waterway in the South would be choked with rank tropical opportunists by now, flourishing unstoppably for lack of natural controls.
Some neighbors made pets of their cha
The Mississippi’s coming anyway, she thought, looking out toward the land she both loved and longed to leave behind. You better get used to the idea, Atchafalaya. You’re go
After adjusting Clyde’s protective goggles, Claire brushed at his speckled coat. “What’s this? Some sort of mange?” The gloat bleated irritably as puffs of dry fur floated from its patchy side. “All right. All right. I’ll look into it.” Sighing, Claire took a sample and patted the creatures, who were soon munching exotic weeds again, contentedly.
Echoes of gunfire and rocking explosions rattled the walls as she passed her mother’s suite of rooms. Music blared — the strains of some oldtime movie Daisy was condensing for a Net entertainment group. Though she perpetually proclaimed contempt for the industry, Daisy’s expertise at compressing oldtime flicks was legendary. Skillfully, she could pack ninety tedious minutes into a crisp forty or less, speeding the languid pace of classics like The Terminator or Deliverance to suit the time-devouring appetites of modern viewers.
Or, for others wanting more out of a particular film, Daisy McCle
Most of the time.
Besides, a career working on the Net had one more advantage — the occupation lacked any obvious impact on the real environment of the Earth.
“Tread lightly on our world’s toes” went the motto of one of Daisy’s eco-freak organizations, the sort whose members didn’t take off their shoes inside their houses, but instead removed them before going outside. That particular group had as their totem emblem a fierce Chinese dragon, curled and snarling, representing an angry, violated eco-sphere fed up with swarming, pestilential humanity. The same reptilian icon stretched above the hearth of the main sitting room, Daisy’s favorite part of the villa, but one seldom visited anymore by Claire.
Hell, she was too damn busy maintaining the rest of it! Claire cursed roundly when she saw that Daisy had neglected even to empty the trash, supposedly on her own list of chores. Not content with the normal five recycling bins, her mother insisted this house have twelve. And three mulch piles. Then there were the soap maker, the yoghurt maker, the midget brewery…
Claire thought of a recent stylish trend among her peers. Oh, I’d make a swell Settler. I can grow herbal medicines, make my own paper, grind ink from bark and lamp black… and fix the water pump’s gaskets myself, since mother hates buying parts from Earth-raping manufacturers.
City folk, tending high-yield gardens and a few clip-wing ducks on the roof, loved pretending that made them rough and independent, blithely ignoring all the ways they still counted on society’s nurturing web, the tubes and ducts that piped in clean water, power, gas… and carried off a steady stream of waste. Ironically, few kids ever grew up better qualified to homestead a new frontier than Claire. And few had so little desire to do so.
After all, who in their right mind would want to live that way?
Oh, reducing your impact was moral and sensible, up to a point. Beyond which there was a lot to be said for labor-saving devices! Claire swore her own place would have a microwave-infrasound cooker. And an electric garbage disposal, oh please. And maybe, just for that first year of celebration — a licentious, never-ending gallon of store-bought ice cream.
Changing out of her sweaty work clothes in the privacy of her own room, Claire paused by a shelf of mementos brought by her father from trips all over the planet. A ten-million-year-old spider, encased in Dominican amber, lay next to fossils from the Afar desert and a beautiful hardwood dolphin, carved by a Brazilian engineer Logan had met in Belem.
Her mineral collection wasn’t exactly world class. But there was a lovely polished slab of bright green smithsonite, alongside its cousins jadeite and entrancing malachite. More yellowish than green, the hypnotic, translucent autainite had come from France, and the purple erythrite from deep in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
None of these minerals were particularly rare, not even the disk of glittering “star” quality quartz hanging over her mirror — where she let down her reddish-brown hair and checked for stray droplets from Tony’s pond. Picking up the crystal lens, she peered through it at her own image, wishing the highlights it gave her hair might somehow translate into the real world, where she so often envied other girls their shining locks.
As a child, she had thought the bit of quartz magical. But Logan had emphasized that it was a routine miracle. The Earth contained veins and seams and whole flows of beautiful mineral forms that took only a practiced eye to discover and a little skill to prepare. In contrast, Claire had been shocked when an uncle thought to please her one birthday with a “unique” gift — a slice of fossilized tree trunk. It had subsequently taken her weeks to investigate and discover its origins, then anonymously donate it back to the petrified forest it had been stolen from in the first place.
There was a difference, of course. Many common things could be beautiful, even magical. But in a world of ten billion people, true rarities shouldn’t be owned. At least on that point she, Logan, and Daisy all agreed.
Claire put the crystal back. Beside the mirror lay her favorite treasures, several beautiful chert arrowheads. Not archaeological relics, but even better. Logan had taught her to chip them herself, during one of their too infrequent camping trips. To be fair, Claire admitted both her parents had taught her useful things. Only Logan’s lessons always seemed much more fun.
Under the window, nesting in her neglected model of the Bo
The wall screens of her Net unit flickered on idle, showing new assignments from the remote-school in Oregon. But Claire first checked for personal messages. And sure enough, there was a blip from her father winking on her priority screen! At a spoken command, it lit up with a bright picture of Logan Eng standing atop a bluff overlooking a bay of brilliant blue water. To save power, she took the message in written form. Rows of letters shone.