Earth

Now, though, the fens and farms of Norfolk were drowned. The dikes had surrendered to the sea at last and those problems that once had vexed Alex now seemed trivial in retrospect. What wouldn’t he give to have them back, in exchange for today’s?

From the darkness behind him there came a rustle. “Alex? Can’t you sleep?”

Momentary moonlight filled a trapezoid-shaped portion of the small room as he turned around. June Morgan lay half within that canted illumination, propped on one elbow, watching him from bed. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Her smile was warm, if tired. June’s blonde hair was tousled and flattened on one side. “I reached out,” she said. “You weren’t there.”

Alex inhaled deeply. “I’m going to the lab for a little while. I’ll be back soon.”

“Oh, Alex,” she sighed and got out of bed, wrapping the sheet around herself. She crossed the narrow floor and reached up to brush at his wild hair. “If you keep this up you’ll kill yourself. You’ve got to get more rest.”

She had a pleasant smell — a feature more important to Alex than it was to most men. Still, there are some women whose aroma hits me like… ah, never mind.

It was no reflection on June, whom he liked a lot. Probably, it was just a matter of mysterious complementarity — of the right interlocking pheromones. Lucy and Ingrid had smelled like goddesses to him, he recalled similarities between two otherwise completely different lovers, known more than a decade apart. If only one complementarity carried with it all the others, he thought wistfully. Then all we’d have to do is go around sniffing each other behind the ear, to find the perfect mate.

“I’m all right, really. Much more relaxed.” He threw his shoulders back, stretching. “You’d do professionally, as a masseuse.”

Her eyes seemed to twinkle. “I have. Someday I’ll show you my license.”

“I quite believe you. And… thanks for being so patient.”

She looked up at him. Since it seemed expected of him, and because he knew he really ought to want to, Alex took her into his arms and kissed her. All the while though, he chided himself.

She deserves better. Much better than you can give her now.

Of course she had her own memories and pain. As he held her, Alex wondered if maybe she felt the same way toward him as he did toward her. More grateful than in love.

Sometimes it was enough just to have someone to hold.

Alex said hello to the techs on duty when he arrived. They, in turn, waved and greeted their tohunga, their pakeha-pommie expert on weird monsters and cthonic exorcism. Several of them crawled over scaffolding surrounding the gleaming gravity wave resonator, giving it required servicing. Their unit’s next run wouldn’t be for several hours yet, so nearly everyone else was taking advantage of the lull to catch up on sleep.

Those of us who can.

He sat down at his own station, touching panels and bringing displays to light. The subvocal he left on its stand. Lately he’d been having trouble controlling the hypersensitive device. It picked up too many random, useless surface thoughts which insistently manifested in his clenching jaw muscles and a recurring tightness in his throat.

All right, he thought, grimly. What’s the latest death toll?

Alex dialed the special database he’d set up to track their guilt. Instantly, the far left display unrolled a list of “accidents” reported in the media, whose time and location coincided with one of their emergent beams… a ripped zeppelin… a minor tidal wave… a missing aircraft… a mile-long freshwater tanker with its rear end shorn off.

Surely some of these would have happened without our intervention.

Yes, surely. Mishaps occurred all the time, especially at sea. This epoch’s ocean sediment consisted of a rain of manmade junk, sunken vessels, and myriad other debris.

But looking at the list, Alex knew some would never join the growing layer on the sea bottom. Some, in all probability, were no longer on Earth at all.

He thought of Teresa Tikhana, the first person he knew who had lost someone to this strange war. She had forgiven him, even now helped carry the burden. After all, what were a few lives against ten billion?

But what if we fail? Those men and women will have been robbed of precious months. Months to spend with their families, with lovers, with summer skies or rain. Robbed of their good-byes.

It was about to get worse, too, because the project had been going exceptionally well. Until yesterday, each of the four resonators had acted independently. Almost every gazer beam had emerged along a line nearly straight through the Earth’s core. And opposite each of their four sites lay only open ocean.

But now they had the right parameters. Beta, their taniwha, had pulsed and throbbed with every scan. Each time it mirrored amplified gravitons, it also experienced a kick. Those kicks were starting to add up. Soon, if luck held, the trough of its orbit would rise out of Earth’s crystalline i

And so the tricky part began — coordinated scans from two or more stations at once. That would be arduous to arrange in secrecy, but Alex wasn’t daunted by that, only by the inevitability of doing even more harm. From now on, the beam would emerge in a different location every time, and he’d face hard choices.

Should he scrub one run because a beam might graze a suburb? There were so many vast suburbs. What if it happened at a crucial stage, when a beam deferred might mean losing control of their monster for an orbit, or ten… or perhaps forever?

Anyway, only a fraction of the beams interacted with the surface world at all. Most passed through silently, invisibly. Alex was only starting to piece together clues as to why some did so while others coupled so dramatically with seismic faults, seawater, or even man-made objects. Unfortunately, they couldn’t delay to figure it all out before continuing. They had to go on.

The holo showed Earth’s inmost regions. The pink core still enclosed two pinpoints, but his Iquitos singularity had nearly evaporated. Another day and it would be invisible.

The other object, though, was heavier than ever. Ponderously, Beta rose, hovered, and fell again. To Alex it appeared to throb angrily.

Each day, seemingly, he got coded queries from George Hutton asking about the monster singularity’s origin. Pedro Manella, ru

Who had created the thing? When and where did the idiots let it fall? Was there evidence that could be shown to the World Court?

Next week Alex would have to answer in person. It was frustrating to have learned so much and still be unable to give a conclusion. But something was queer about Beta’s life history, that was certain.

It’s got to be fundamental. The thing can’t be less than ten years old. And yet it has to be, or no one could have made it!

Above the liquid outer core, the lower mantle glowed many shades of green, tracing ten thousand details of hot, slowly convecting, plasti-crystalline minerals. Some currents looked patient and smooth, like trade winds, while others were spiked cyclones, spearing toward the distant surface.

Dotted lines tracked intense magnetic and electric fields — June Morgan’s contribution to the model. Most currents flowed slow and uniform, like heat eddies. But there were also faint traceries of lambent blue — slender, snaking threads that flickered even as he watched in real time — the superconducting domains they had only just discovered. Fragile and ephemeral, they were the energy source used to drive the gazer.