Earth

George Hutton spoke gruffly. “I’ve decided I’ll handle Irian Jaya myself.”

Stan turned and blinked at him. “But we need you to coordinate everything. Our equipment…”

The billionaire waved one hand. “All can be accomplished by hyper, using company codes and colloquial Taupo speech. But some things have to be done in person. I must be there to arrange matters with certain friends among the Papuans.”

“Do you have a specific site in mind?”

George smiled. “The perfect site. I discovered it during a resource survey ten years ago… a series of deep caves even greater than the Mulu caverns, in Borneo.”

“But I never heard. How did you keep them secret? And why?”

“How is easy, my friend.” George put one finger to his lips. “Besides me, only chief engineer Raini knows about it, and she swore me an oath. It didn’t qualify as a “mineral resource,” per se, so we simply neglected mentioning it to the Papuan government.”

“But it is a resource! Caves like the Mulu generate income from tourism…”

Stan stopped, suddenly aware of the irony. No more than a kilometer away were the grottoes of Waitomo, wonders of nature now reduced to yet another brief stop in the travel itineraries of millions, its ancient floors trampled, its limestone seeps forever altered by rivulets of vapor condensed from myriad human exhalations, its glow-worm constellations demoted from silent, awesome mysteries to a few more frames in the next tourist’s automatic camera.

“That’s why enough for me,” George answered. “Another reason I want to take this task is to see the Irian caves once again. If there’s time near the end, you too must join me there, my old friend. You’ve never seen their like. We’ll drink a toast to Earth, down where no stone has ever felt the brush of human voices.”

The look in George’s eye told more than his words. But Stan shook his head. “If it gets that close and we know we’ve lost, I’ll take Ellen to Dunedin to be with the grandkids.” He shook his head. This was getting much too morbid. “Anyway, I’ll be doing a job of my own up north, at site three. That’ll be plenty vivid enough for me, staring at all that ice.”

Auntie Kapur was still studying her screen and the map overlay Alex Lustig had prepared. “According to our Pommie genius, your requirements are less severe. You can set up your small Greenland resonator anywhere within several hundred kilometers of the tip of our mythical pyramid. Do you have any place in mind?”

“I have some friends working on the Hammer Dig, east of Godhavn. Everyone knows I’m interested in the project, so it won’t be much of a surprise if I show up with a team to do some local gravity scans. It’ll be a perfect cover.”

“Hmm.” Auntie Kapur was clearly worried. Sites one and two were within the Pacific Rim, in reach of her network of sympathizers and coreligionists. There were Gaians in Greenland too, of course, but of a completely different sect. Stan and Teresa would be pretty much on their own up there.

“You know all this is going to make us subject to the secrecy laws,” Stan said dryly. “We could get in trouble.”

The others looked at him, then burst out laughing. It was a welcome if momentary break in the tension. Normally a serious thing, breaking the provisions of the Rio Treaties was at this point the least of their worries.

“That leaves Africa,” George summarized when they got back to business. And indeed, the final site would be the toughest. Tangoparu Ltd. had never done business in the area where they had to set up the last resonator. Their geological maps were obsolete, and to make matters worse, the region was on the U.N.’s Stability and Human Rights Watch List. Nobody on their team knew anyone there well enough to rely on. Not well enough to help them set up a thumper in absolute privacy.

“I’ve already started putting out feelers,” Auntie Kapur said. “With a nested hyper search I ought to find someone trustworthy who can get us in.”

“Just make sure to run your search routine by Pedro Manella. He’s in charge of net security,” Stan cautioned. “We don’t want some bored hacker’s ferret program arousing attention—”

He stopped when Auntie gave him an indulgent look, as if he were trying to teach his own mother to tie her shoes.

She’s not much older than me, he thought. I’m a grandfather and a full professor. So how does she always

manage to make me feel like a little boy, caught with a frog in his pocket?

Maybe it’s something she learned in priestess school, while I was studying inconsequential stuff like the workings of stars and the shape of space.

“I’ll be careful,” she promised, remaining vague. But in her eyes Stan read something that seemed to say she knew exactly what she was doing.

Back in the year 1990, the people of the United States of America paid three billion dollars for eighteen thousand million disposable diapers. Into these snug, absorbent, well-engineered products went one hundred million kilograms of plastic, eight hundred million kilograms of wood pulp, and approximately five million babies. The babies weren’t disposable, but all the rest went straight into the trash stream.

Early designs for “disposable” diapers had included degradable i

As the price of landfill dumping rose above $100 a ton, by 1990 it was costing Americans $350 million a year just to get rid of single-use diapers, so for every dollar spent by parents on disposables, other taxpayers contributed more than ten cents in hidden subsidy.

That didn’t include, of course, the untold cost of the 1996 New Jersey Rota epidemic. Or the nationwide hepatitis outbreaks of ’99.

But what could be done? To busy young families, needing two wage earners just to make ends meet, convenience was a treasure beyond almost any price. It could make the difference between choosing to have a child or giving up the idea altogether.

Packaging and disposal fees might have let old-fashioned diaper services compete on even terms. But that, and other bullet-biting measures, voters succeeded in putting off for another generation… for another, harder century.

These, after all, were the waning years of high-flying TwenCen. And nothing was too good for baby.

Anyway, if the bill wouldn’t come due for another twenty years or so, all the better. Baby would be a superkid, raised on tofu and computers and quality time. So baby could pay for it all.