Earth

• HYDROSPHERE

On a different continent, but only milliseconds away by light-cable, another woman also sailed the data sea. Only while Jen Wolling carefully navigated a dinghy, Daisy McCle

On her work wall, a science fiction space epic stepped frame by frame through a flashy battle sequence — her video processor inserting new special effects, making already grand starships even more magnificent. Matted stars and planets grew three dimensional, and explosions more titanic than ever. With such magic Daisy breathed new life into old classics, though for a diminishing, specialized audience.

Again, however, Daisy’s attention swerved from her cash crop of embellished movies to other scenes and truer obsessions. The news services told of recent raids by Bedouin rebels, attacking the International Petroleum Reservation. She checked the reports’ accuracy by other means and discovered that U.N. peacekeepers were understating the amount of oil spilled from pipelines severed by the nationalists, but not by enough to cause a scandal, unfortunately. Daisy had learned from hard experience never to cry “coverup!” unless the payoff was worthwhile.

Now here was a likely target. Blue symbols off Luzon showed one of the floating barge-towns of the Sea State, heading northward toward Japan. UNEPA was supposed to make sure the nation of refugees obeyed its rules. But sure enough, only two inspector boats showed in the vicinity. Nowhere near enough.

I wonder what Sea State is up to, she asked herself.

Keying an oceanographic database, Daisy noted that a large migration of spi

“Gotcha!” Daisy said, and sent a coded alert to an activist group in Nagasaki. When that Sea State flotilla reached its destination, there’d be a party waiting to pounce on the slightest infraction.

What next?

For a while she thought she had managed to trace a twisty money trail, proving that an official in Queensland had gor-sucked to local hotel interests. But the carni-man was smarter than usual. Computer taps on his accounts failed to report any unusual purchases in real estate or minerals futures.

For this case, her background as a McCle

A timer beeped. She was supposed to get up and do some chores around the compound, or else Claire would raise a fit. This work in the Net was important for world survival, but her daughter didn’t seem to care about that… probably wished she lived more like her spoiled cousins.

Well, there’s no getting out of it, I suppose, Daisy sighed. It probably was past time she took a turn of her own at the cess pit. Or was it greenhouse maintenance Claire had been after her about?

But as she rose, Daisy caught a sudden change in one of her alert boxes, highlighting a name from her special watch list. For years she had maintained a tiny lamprey program attached to the home unit of the infamous Je

“Hmm,” Daisy pondered, sitting down again. “The witch hardly ever tries to hide anything. What’s she up to now?”

With trivial ease, Daisy traced the memorandum to its source. Of course. The Pacific Gaians were just the sort to conspire with Wolling. Compromisers, they worshipped an anemic goddess who seemed willing to settle for a world only half destroyed by man, with most of its species preserved in glass bottles, relying on technological “solutions” thrown together by bright idiots like Logan Eng…

The cipher code was a good one. It took an hour to crack it. And when Daisy finally read the decrypted letter, she found a second layer filled with personal references and context-laden hints — the hardest kind of puzzle for an outsider to untangle.

That only made it more tempting, of course. Daisy knew about some new language programs, almost intelligent in their own right, that might apply here. And there were human consultants who owed her favors, too. Some of them might pick up co

If all else failed, she also had certain contacts among enemy groups, as well… big corporations and government agencies with fantastic resources at their command. Among those, too, were also men and women indebted to her for past services. Daisy had dealt with devils before, when it suited her purposes. Sometimes honest rapists were preferable to mealy-mouthed compromisers.

She transferred the partially deciphered letter into her “possible clues” file, along with other anomalies like her ex-husband’s paper on the mysterious Spanish quakes.

Ignored to her left, small screens monitored all twenty hectares of Six Oaks, the realm she and Logan had built here on the bayou, where she practiced self-reliance and “zero impact” far more faithfully than the pallid versions preached by the NorAChuGas. Not just “good faith efforts,” but independence from the mines and factories and polluting power plants of industrial society… and from her own damned, smug, aristocratic family.

One of those displays showed her daughter standing on a stepladder next to the greenhouse, her hair tied back in a kerchief and arms covered with putty as she scraped the labels off newly bought sheets of glass and fitted them one by one to replace those cracked in a recent storm.

But Daisy did not see, nor did she recall her promise. Drawn once more to the holo screens, her blue eyes roved the electronic sea, the data ocean, seeking the blood foes of her world. Practicing the art of vendetta. Pursuing prey.

□ No animal is as likeable as an individual, and yet so loathsome in large groups. Voracious, implacable, using up everything in sight, this creature has been a bane to the Earth. Within a few mille

The animal isn’t Man, though humankind helped it multiply in vast numbers. It is the goat. A boon to smalltime nomads, the goat is an immeasurable calamity to the planet’s biosphere. Even today, it shares as much blame for the advancing sands as global warming or ill-pla

That is why we, the Preservation Alliance of North Africa, have reluctantly taken action to sacrifice one species for the good of all. It is why we come onto the Net today, via this un-traceable routing, to a

Some say the preferred target of a wi

Besides, the Helvetian War proved Homo sapiens to be biologically adept, highly resistant to engineered diseases. The major powers’ biocrisis teams would make matters moot within a few weeks anyway. Only a few million would die before cures were found, resulting in no long-term ecological change, just our own pursuit as criminals.

None of these drawbacks apply to our other target species, however. We are certain the world will retrain the remaining pastoral shepherds once their destructive herds are eliminated. And we emphasize that our virus has been carefully tested. The disease is quite specific to goats. It should have no other effect than to correct a horrible mistake of man and nature.

One purpose of this a

Another purpose is, of course, to seek public discussion. Criticism and data on the effects of our peremptory measure may be sent to the general and open display board [□ OpDBaqi .779.-66-8258-BaB 689.] We will read your comments regularly, and we welcome your suggestions.

Sincerely,