Earth

Again, he thought he knew what Stan Goldman might say.

“Hey, all right. We make mistakes. But who told us, back when we started digging and mining and irrigating, that it would come to this? No one. We had to find out for ourselves, the hard way.

“So where were those damned UFOs and charioted gods and prophets when we really needed them? No one gave us a guidebook for managing a planet. We’re writing it ourselves now, from hard experience.”

Concealing a sad smile, George also knew how he’d reply.

I mourn the moa, whom my own ancestors drove into extinction. I mourn the herons and whales, slaughtered by the pakeha. I mourn you too, little fishes.

When all of this was done, he would fill glasses for his friends, and drink to each lost species. And then, if there was enough beer left in the world, he’d also toast those yet to die.

“Come on, Sepak,” George said, folding away his handkerchief. “You can help me adjust the crane assembly. It has to be perfect when we lift the cylinder out of its bath.”

“Precision, precision.” Sepak sighed. Notwithstanding his engineering degree from the University of Port Moresby — and skin no darker than George’s — he muttered, “You honkies put too much faith in your precious machines. They’ll steal your souls, trust me. We Gimi know about this. Why just the other day my grandfather was telling me…”

Content to receive a healthy dose of his own medicine, George listened politely while they worked together — suffering in ironic role reversal the very same sort of guilt trip he’d inflicted on countless others since he first learned how.

Stan would just love this, George thought, and listened humbly while Sepak turned the tables on him, milking the everflowing teat of Western shame for all it was worth.

… And so She stopped first at the planet Venus to see if that might be the place. But when She sipped the atmosphere, She exclaimed, “Oh no! This is much too hot!”

Then She went to Mars, and once more cried out. “Here it’s much too thin and cold!”

At last, however, She came to Earth, and when She tasted the sweet air She sang in delight. “Ah, now this one is just right!”

• CORE

It wasn’t much, as sculptures go. Especially on an island renowned for its monuments. A small pyramid of stone, that was all — jutting from a sandy slope, where sparse grasses swayed to restless ocean breezes. A black-winged Chilean kestrel took off with a screeching cry as Alex climbed the low hill to get a better look at a three-sided nub of polished granite. At first sight, it was something of a disappointment.

Come on, Lustig. Get with the spirit. It’s only the tip of something much, much bigger. Imagine it doesn’t end

just below ground, but keeps slanting down, down, ever downward…

He knew how those edges were aimed, probably far better than the original artist who had put the sculpture here, seven decades ago.

Imagine the Earth surrounds a solid pyramid, with four faces and four vertices, whose tips just pierce the surface…

He pictured a vast, stony tetrahedron — like one of the magic geometric forms Joha

Similar carvings had been placed in Greenland, New Guinea, and South Africa, in one of the only arrangements that let each vertex emerge on dry land. For reasons similar to the artist’s, Alex had chosen the same four sites to place his secret resonators. It was more than mere happenstance, therefore, that had brought him here to Rapa Nui.

Standing over the stone pi

How strange to think on such scales, when all my training is to contemplate the infinitely small.

Standing here, he knew with utter precision where the other Tangoparu teams were dispersed around the globe. Probably none of them would encounter their local portions of the Whole Earth Sculpture. Sites two and four were offset from the actual monuments by several hundred kilometers.

But this was the hub. Few islands were so small compared with the vast ocean surrounding them. Alex could not have missed this apex had he tried.

Some say pyramids are symbols of luck, he pondered. But I’d still prefer a dodecahedron.

Rapa Nui had been chosen as headquarters for other reasons, not least of which was security. Here the Pacific Society of Hine-marama had more influence than the “national” authorities in faraway Chile. Under the society’s umbrella they could bring in a large crew, sparing Alex the need to supervise construction, leaving him time to wrestle the cloud of numbers and images in his head.

Those images followed him everywhere, even walking along the cinder cone of an ancient volcano or contemplating strange monuments on an isle of monuments.

Just north of Rano Kao, for instance, near Rapa Nui’s solitary town and landing strip, squatted a white shape that had once been a proud bird of space. Now guano streaked and forlorn, the shuttle Atlantis perched permanently on a rusted platform for visitors to gawk at and birds to use in other ways. Keeping his promise to Captain Tikhana, Alex had paid his respects to the stripped hulk, once a multi-billion-dollar vessel of aspiration, but now just another Easter Island obelisk. The sensations engendered had been forlorn.

Like the first time he had seen the native statues this place was famous for. There had been that same woebegone feeling.

… as if this were a place hopes came to die.

Alex turned southward. There, by the tiny, crashing bay of Vaihu, stood a row of seven towering carvings, called moai, pouting under heavy basalt brows. Several bore cylindrical topknots made of reddish scoria. They faced inland, seamed with cement where latter-day restorers had pieced them together from broken fragments. The glowering sentinels did not seem grateful. Rather, they radiated grim; obdurate resentment.

Before departing for the Arctic, Stan Goldman had given Alex a slim book about Easter Island, with old-style paper pages. “You’re going to one of the saddest, most fascinating places on Earth,” the elderly physicist had told him. “In fact, it has a lot in common with Greenland, where I’m headed.”

Alex couldn’t imagine two places less alike — one a continent in its own right, covered with ice, the other a fly-speck, broiling and nearly waterless amidst the open ocean. But Stan explained. “Both were experiments in what it might be like to plant a colony on another world — tiny settlements, isolated, without trade or any outside support, forced to live by their wits and meager local resources for generation after generation.”

Stan concluded grimly. “In neither case, I’m afraid, did humanity do very well.”

Indeed, from what Alex later read, Stan had understated the case. Hollywood images of Polynesian paradises ignored the boom-and-bust cycles of overpopulation that hit every archipelago with desperate regularity — cycles resolved by one means chiefly — the bloody culling of the adult male population. Nor did movies refer to that other holocaust — the slaughter of native species — not just by people, but by the pigs and rats and dogs the colonists brought with them.