Earth

After he was caught, being sent to that hospital-jail in Bombay hardly mattered to Sri Ramanujan, whose own body had been a prison since infancy. But cutting off his net privileges had been an added punishment far worse than any death sentence.

“As you wish, Jen Wolling.”

The simulated visage seemed pleased. He bowed and disappeared, making way for unreeling sheaves of data. Colors demarked significant passages, enhanced by her semantic-content filter.

Her eyes focused on text which glowed with reddish highlights. Ah, the little devil, she thought, for the program had slipped in a cluster of hate mail.

“… Wolling has become a loose ca

“But what irks most is her recent cavalier reassessment of the essential Caian paradigm — a scientific model she herself helped develop so many years ago! She is becoming a senile embarrassment to biological science…”

Jen found the style familiar, and sure enough, the signature was that of an old colleague, now a bitter opponent. She sighed. It was strange to find herself regularly assaulted as unscientific whenever she deviated an iota from “accepted” principles… principles based upon her own earlier theories.

Well, she admitted to herself. Maybe sometimes I deviate more than an iota. And I do enjoy causing a stir.

She flicked her tongue. Electromagnetic sensors read her intent and swept the diatribe away without comment. Another glowed redly in its place.

“… Wolling is an embarrassment to our cause to save Our Mother. Isn’t it enough she pays homage to the reductionist values of patriarchal western science, giving that discredited realm the devotion she properly owes Gaia?

“In giving ammunition to Earth-rapists — to Zeus-Jehovah-Shiva worshippers — she betrays Our Mother…”

Strange how one word could mean so many things to so many different people. To biologists, “Gaia” described a theory of planetary ecological balance and regulated feedback loops. But to devoted mystics it named a living goddess.

Another tongue flick, and a third tirade slid into place.

“… Evolution has always been driven by the death of species. Take the so-called catastrophes of the Permian and Triassic and Cretaceous, when countless living types were a

Smiling made the display shimmer. Here were representatives of three different, unasinous points of view, each deeply opposed to the others, and yet all attacking her! She leafed through other crimson diatribes. Some Madrid Catholics poured calumny on her for assisting the gene-resurrection of mastodons. A white antisegregation society fired fusillades at her for visiting Kuwenezi. One of the “ladybug combines” accused her of undermining the trillion-dollar organic pest-control industry, and so on. In most cases the writer clearly didn’t even understand her real position.

Should a rare piece of vituperation actually show cleverness, it would go into a clipping file. But none of today’s hate-grams offered anything illuminating, alas.

The technical citations were hardly any more interesting. Most were doctoral theses referring to her old papers… the “classics” that had led to that damned Nobel prize. She selected five promising ones for later study, and dumped the rest.

Among the personal messages was one bona fide letter from Pauline Cockerel, asking Jen to come visit London Ark.

“Baby misses you.”

The young geneticist added an animated montage of the young demi-mastodon in action. Jen laughed as Baby lifted her trunk in a gri

There were a few other friendly notes, from loyal colleagues and former students. And a data packet from Jacques, her third husband — containing a folio of his latest paintings and an invitation to his next showing.

All of these merited replies. Jen tagged and dictated first-draft answers, letting the syntax-checker convert her clipped short-speech into clear paragraphs. In fact, sometimes thoughts streamed faster than judgment. So Jen never “mailed” letters till Tuesdays or Fridays, when she scrupulously went over everything carefully a second time.

She glanced at the clock. Good, the chore would be done well before morning tea. Only two letters to go.

“… I’m real sorry to bother you. You probably don’t remember me. I sat in the front row during your talk…”

This writer wasn’t adroit at short-speech. Or he lacked a conciseness program to help him get to the point. Jen was about to call up one of her standard fan mail replies when one highlighted line broke through.

“… at Kuwenezi. I was the guy with the little baboons…”

Indeed, Jen remembered! The boy’s name had been… Nelson something-or-other. Uneducated, but bright and earnest, he had asked the right questions when his more sophisticated elders were still trapped in a morass of details.

“… I’ve been studying hard, but I still don’t understand some things about the Gayan Paradime…”

Jen nodded sympathetically. The word “Gaian” had become nearly as meaningless as “socialist” or “liberal” or “conservative” were half a century ago… a basket full of contradictions. She sometimes wondered what James Lovelock and Ly

Perhaps these times were ripe for a new church militant, as in the waning days of the Roman Empire. Maybe great movements liked having living prophets to both idealize and later crucify. Veneration followed by varicide seemed the traditional pattern.

With Lovelock and Margulis and Vernadsky long gone, the new faithful had to settle for Jen Wolling — founding saint and heretic. At times it got so she even wished she’d never had that epiphany, so long ago on the frosty shoulders of Mount Snowdon, when the turning leaves had suddenly revealed to her the jewellike mathematical clarity of the Gaia metaphor.

No regrets. Jen shook her head. I ca