Earth

If I were this planet, I guess I’d be feeling pretty damn sick of us by now.

Teresa inhaled the bracing air flowing off the ice. In evaporating, it gave off odors trapped inside crystal lattices ages ago — back when there were no living beings around with minds or speech… nor any concept that it can be worth half a lifetime just to reach such a place… to stand where no one ever has before.

She closed her eyes. And while her intellect wouldn’t let her realize her deepest fear, that all this might soon be gone forever, nevertheless she stood there for a time and worshipped the only way a person like her could worship — in silence and solitude, under the temple of the sky.

□ Net Commercial Data Comparison request Uit 1523835A8.2763: Price contrasts in standard 1980 international dollars.

Commentary: The effects of rising education continue devastating prices of once prestigious services, while resource exhaustion keeps pushing up the cost of material goods, except photonics and electronics, which have escaped upward spirals because of competitive i

• MANTLE

The pakeha had a saying… “It’s only a little white lie.”

George Hutton enjoyed collecting inanities like that. To whites, there seemed to be as many shades of untruth as Eskimos had words for snow. Some lies were evil, of course. But then there were “half-truths” and “metaphors” and the sort your parents told you, “for your own good.”

As he crawled through a narrow, twisty stone passageway, George remembered one fine, lazy evening at the Quark and Swan, bearding poor Stan Goldman about such western hypocrisies. Because it would gall his friend, who loved novels, George particularly disparaged that mendacity called “fiction,” in which one person, a “reader,” actually pays an “author” to lie about events that never happened to people who never even existed.

“So all your Maori fairy tales are true?” Stan had asked in hot response.

“In their own way, yes. We non-western peoples never made this artificial distinction between real and imagined… between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective.’ We don’t have to suspend disbelief in order to hear and accept our legends…”

“Or to adopt six impossible worldviews before breakfast! That’s how you Maori get away with claiming your ancestors never lied. How can anyone lie when they’re able to believe two contradictory things at the same time?”

“Are you accusing me of inconsistency, white fellow?”

“You? A man with fifty technical patents in geophysics, who still makes sacrifices to Pele? Never!”

Inevitably, the argument ended with them shouting, noses half a meter apart… then breaking up in waves of laughter until someone recovered enough to order the next round.

All right, George admitted to himself as he felt for a narrow ledge along the polished stone of an underground streamway. It’s easy to be sanctimonious about the lies of others. But it’s quite another thing when you find yourself trapped, having to deceive or face losing all you love.

Pulling back from the rock face, he sent his helmet beam ahead and saw that the worst was over. A few more teetering steps and he’d be able to jump to something vaguely like a walking path, with enough headroom to stand instead of hunching like a gnome in a maze.

He took the traverse quickly and landed agilely, hands spread wide for balance. Adjusting the lamp, George peered up a narrow, scending tube of water-smoothed limestone to where a sharp wedge divided the twisting cha

The accepted thing to do would be to publish the map, of course. There would be money, prestige. But the Net wasn’t ever getting this datum, he had vowed.

How do you justify a lie? George asked himself as he carefully retraced his steps, heading back the way he’d come.

A decade ago, on first discovering these immense caverns beneath the mountains of New Guinea, he had chosen to refrain from telling his clients about them. Was that theft, to keep this marvel for himself? Perhaps. Worse than theft though, was the lie itself.

To believe six impossible or contradictory things before breakfast… Yes, Stan. And one impossible thing I believed was that I could save this place.

He had to squeeze headfirst through the next opening, sliding down a chute into a sparkling, miniature chapel. Knobby calcite growths covered not only the walls but the floor as well, catching the lamplight in dazzling crystalline reflections. “Cave coral,” it was called… a common enough phenomenon till humans invented spelunking, penetrating the depths to seek Earth’s hidden treasures. Now the coral was gone from nearly every known cave on Earth, scavenged bit by bit by souvenir hunters — each rationalizing that just one more fragment wouldn’t be missed.

Passing again through the minute cathedral, George sought the exact footprints he had made on the trip out — tiny breaks and smudges among the glassy shards. These he tried to step in, but there was no way to avoid adding some slight, incremental harm this time, as well.

“The world is made of compromises,” he seemed to hear Stan Goldman say, though his friend was far away at the moment, doing his own part amid the icy wastes of Greenland. “You must make trade-offs, George, and live with the consequences.”

“A pakeha way of looking at things…” George muttered half aloud as he exited the coral suite, wriggling sideways through a narrow crack into another streamway. Whispering echoes skittered around him like tiny creatures. Among the soft reverberations he imagined Stan’s reply.

“Hypocrisy, Hutton! Who do you think you’re talking to, some California tourist? Using ‘pakeha’ science made you a bloody billionaire! It gave you power to do good in the world. So use it!”

One of life’s joys was to have friends who gave you reality checks… who would call you on your crap before it rose so high you drowned in it. Stan Goldman was such a friend. Together, in Wellington, their wives still had each other for company. But now George, alas, would have to make do imagining what Stan might say.

As he panted, squeezing his massive bulk through a cramped stricture between sodastraw draperies, the echoes of his breathing came back to him as a voice that wasn’t there.

“Dump the sanctimony about wishing you were really a noble savage, Hutton… Admit you’re as Western as I am.”

“Never!” George grunted as he popped free, into the final stretch of open passageway. Gasping, with hands on his knees, he seemed to hear his friend’s voice converging like a conscience from every wall.

“What, never… ?”

George stood up straight at last, and gri

“Well… hardly ever.” The ringing in his ears sounded musically like laughter until it faded away. Setting out again, he thought, There are no non-Western peoples anymore.

Indeed, there wasn’t a Maori alive whose blood didn’t flow with multicolored blends of English, Scots, Samoan, and scores of other flavors. Nor had any living Maori grown up without color video or the omnipresent, all-pervading influence of the Net.