Existence

something.

After refusing three times, striving hard to keep up with their increasing pace, he abruptly felt a narrow beam of unpleasantness rattle his jaw on one side. Turning, he felt struck, full-face, by a wave of sharp rebuke-there was no other way to interpret the harsh sonic waves-cast from the brow of an irascible dolphin he had nicknamed Bicker-a-lot.

Heck, make that Bicker-a-ton! The creature glared the way cetaceans do, by crafting a jagged shape around Hacker’s head, composed of craggy, uneven sound waves. None of it showed visibly. There was no change in the beguiling, misleading dolphin smile.

All right. All right. If you feel that strongly about it.

The top female Sweet Thing, offered Hacker a dorsal fin, and this time he accepted. Soon, they were streaking along, building speed, alternately dipping below the thermocline and then racing upward to jet out of the water. Each time, he got an exhaled blast across the facemask as she arched and soared, blowing and filling her lungs while gravity was checked for a brief, glorious moment. Hacker couldn’t help flinching and squinting-and giving a hoarse yell. It was no rocket, but one hell of a ride.

He also tried to take advantage, every leap, of the chance to look around. After a while, Hacker glimpsed something-a blurry line of white and tan and blotchy green up ahead. It was hard to make out amid the jostling of spray and exhilaration. He didn’t dare to linger on the hopeful word-land.

Too soon the rollicking journey ended. The pod of cetaceans slowed and submerged, heading downward at a shallow slant. Now I’ll find out what “home” means to a pack of wild…

A bulky object emerged out of blue dimness, down at the sloping bottom. No more than ten meters below the surface, between sheltering, sedimentary rilles, it had the edgy lines of something man-made. At-first it seemed a derelict, perhaps a sunken ship. Then Hacker sucked in his breath, as the object resolved into another kind of thing altogether. A construct that had come to the muddy sea floor with deliberate purpose.

They were approaching an undersea habitat dome, hidden in a narrow canyon-one of thousands that had been mass produced in the twenties, during a brief suboceanic boom, when some thought it to be the next great property-rush frontier. Dad invested in a few underwater hotels and mining facilities, Hacker recalled. With sea levels rising, he said that humanity would adapt, as always, and we needed to be part of it. Even make money off it.

Too bad none of the ventures ever made a profit.

While his heartbeat settled down, Hacker noticed a few other things. Like the shape of the gully, clearly formed by drifting sand and silt, piled up over many years. It was the kind of terrain that only formed where ocean bottom approached the continental verge. In fact, he could now pick up growling, repetitive rhythms with his implant-a complex pattern that any surfer would recognize-of breaker slapping against the shore.

Shore… The word tasted strange after all these days-weeks?-spent languidly swimming, living on raw fish and listening to timeless ocean sounds. Suddenly, it felt odd to contemplate leaving this watery realm, returning to the surface world of air, earth, cities, machines, and nine billion human beings inhaling each other’s humid breath everywhere they went.

That’s why we dive into our own worlds, I suppose. Countless thousands of hobbies. A million ways to be special, each person endeavoring to be expert at some arcane art… like rocketing into space.

Psychologists approved, saying that frenetic amateurism was a much healthier response than the most likely alternative-war. They called this the “Century of Aficionados,” a time when governments and professional societies could barely keep up with private expertise, which spread at lightning speed across the World Mesh. A renaissance-without-a-cause, lacking only a clear sense of purpose.

A renaissance that seemed to be dancing atop a layer of fragile ice, moving its feet quickly, as if afraid that standing still could be lethal. The prospect of soon rejoining that culture left him suddenly pensive, even a bit sad, pondering something he never would have considered, before that ill-fated desert launch.

What’s the point of so much obsessive, frenetic activity unless it propels you toward something worthwhile?

Once, a few days ago, he had heard one of the dolphins voice a similar thought in their simple but expressive click-language, as far as he could dimly interpret.

# If you’re good at diving-chase fish!

# If you have a fine voice-sing!

# If you’re great at leaping-bite the sun!

Hacker knew he should clamber up the nearby beach now, to borrow a phone and call people-his partners and brokers, mother and brother, friends and lovers.

Tell them he was alive.

Get back to business.

Instead, he swiveled in the water and kicked hard at a downward slant, following his new friends to the habitat dome.

Maybe I’ll learn what’s been done to them, he thought.

And why.

DISPUTATION

Why haven’t we overpopulated the planet?

That may seem an odd question, while refugee riots wrack overcrowded cities that incubate new diseases weekly. Forests topple for desperate farmland, even as drought bakes former farms into desert. Starvation lurks beyond each year’s harvest and human waste is now the world economy’s biggest product by sheer mass. One can understand why some view nine billion humans as a curse, shredding and consuming Earth to the bone.

Yet, it could have been worse. A generation ago, scholars forecast we’d be past fourteen or fifteen billion by now and still climbing toward the limit prophesied by Malthus-a great die-off. It happens to every species that out breeds its habitat capacity.

Trouble is, any die-off won’t just dip our population to sustainable levels. Humans don’t go quietly. We tend to claw and drag others down with us. Out of blame, or for company. Given today’s varied tools of ready wrought destruction, any such event would affect everyone. So, aren’t we lucky that population growth rates are way down? With the total even tapering a bit? Maybe enough to squeak by? Sure, that means old folks will outnumber kids for a while. Well, no one promised survival would be free of consequences.

But how did it happen? Why did we escape (even barely) the Malthusian Trap? Some credit the fact that humans can separate the recreational and procreative aspects of sex.

Animals feel a compulsive drive to mate and exchange genes. Some scatter their offspring in great numbers. Others care intensively for just a few. But animals who finish this cycle and are healthy enough, routinely return to the driver of it all-sex-starting the process over again. Its power is rooted in one simple fact. Those who felt its urgency had more descendants.

This applied to us, too, of course, till technology gave us birth control.

Then suddenly, the sex compulsion could be satisfied without procreation, with amazing effects. Everywhere that women were empowered with both prosperity and rights, most of them chose to limit childbearing, to concentrate on raising a few privileged offspring instead of brooding at max capacity. We became a non-Malthusian species, able to limit our population by choice, in the nick of time.

Too bad it can’t last. Today, some humans do overbreed. These tend not to be the rich, or those with enough food or who have sex a lot. They are having lots of kids because they choose to. And so, whatever inner drives provoked that choice get passed down to more offspring, then more. Over time, this extra-strong desire will appear in rising portions of the population.

It’s evolution in action. As time passes, the locus of compulsion will shift from sex to a genetically-driven, iron willed determination to have more kids…

… and then we’ll be a Malthusian species again-like the “motie” beings in that novel The Mote in God’s Eye, unable to stop. Unable to say “enough.” A fate that may commonly entrap a great many other species, across the cosmos.

Before that happens to us, we had better finish the job of growing up.