Evolution

TWO Humans

Interlude

Alyce and Joan shuffled with the crowd of passengers toward the airport terminal. They had been out in the dense, smoky air for only a few minutes, and Joan was supported by the arm of Alyce Sigurdardottir. Still, she felt as if she were melting.

And when she had stepped off the plane the first thing Joan had felt was an earthquake. It was an extraordinary sensation, a dreamlike shifting, over almost before it had begun.

The quake had been caused by Rabaul, of course.

Beneath the island of Papua New Guinea, magma was stirring; molten rock, a thousand cubic kilometers of it. This great bleeding had been moving up through faults in the Earth’s thin outer crust, up toward the huge, ancient caldera called Rabaul, at a rate of ten meters every month. It was an astounding pace for a geological event, a testament to the mighty energies. The rising mass had pushed up the overlying rock, putting the land under immense stress.

Rabaul had erupted cataclysmically many times before. Two such eruptions had been identified by human scientists, one some fifteen hundred years ago, the other around two thousand years before that. It would surely happen again sometime.

The other passengers, trooping through the smoky air to the airport’s small terminal, seemed oblivious to the quake. Bex Scott had rejoined her mother, Alison, and her sister, who had golden eyes and green hair. Beneath a sky stained by remote fires, as the land shuddered beneath them unnoticed, the beautiful genriched children chattered brightly with their elegant mother. They had their silver earplugs still nestling in their small ears, Joan noticed. It was as if they walked around in a neon fog.

Joan remembered guiltily her bland assurance that Bex would have to be desperately unlucky for Rabaul to go pop just when she was in the vicinity. Out here, on this shuddering ground, such certainty seemed foolish. But she might still be right. The mountain might go back to sleep. One way or another, most people didn’t think about it. It was a crowded world, with plenty of problems to worry about even more immediate than a grumbling volcano.

The walk to the terminal seemed endless. The airport apron was a dismal place despite the corporate logos plastered on every surface. The intermittent shuddering of the ground was a primeval disturbance, and the huge whining of the jet engines sounded like the groan of disappointed animals.

And now Joan heard a distant popping, like damp logs thrown on a fire. 'Shit. Was that gunfire?'

'There are protesters at the airport fence,' said Alyce Sigurdardottir. 'I glimpsed them as we came in. A great ragged band of them, like a shantytown.'

'Just for us?'

Alyce smiled. 'You can’t mount a respectable conference on globalization without the protesters jetting in. Come on, it’s a tradition; they’ve been trashing these conferences so long the veterans have reunions. You should be flattered they’re taking you seriously.'

Joan said grimly, 'Then we’ll just have to work harder to persuade them that we have something new to offer. I sense you don’t like Alison Scott.'

'Scott’s whole life, her work, is show business. Even her children have been co-opted — no, created — to be part of the performance. Look at them.'

Joan shrugged. 'But you can’t blame her for genriching her children.' She stroked her belly. 'I don’t think I would want it for Junior here. But people have always wanted to give their children the best chance: the best school, the best stone-tipped spear, the best branch in the fig tree.'

That forced a smile from Alyce. But she went on, 'Some genriching would be desirable, if all could afford it. There is nothing physiologically inevitable about our bodies’ limited repair capabilities, for instance. Why can’t we regrow amputated limbs like a starfish? Why can’t we have several sets of teeth, instead of just two? Why don’t we replace worn out and arthritic joints?

'But do you really think that’s where Alison Scott has made her money? Look at her kids, their hair, teeth, skin. Innards are invisible. What’s the point of spending money if you can’t show off what you’ve got? Ninety percent of money currently spent on genriching goes on externals, on the visible. Those wretched kids of Scott’s are nothing but walking billboards for her wealth and power. They didn’t put the rich in genrich for nothing. I’ve never seen anything so decadent.'

Joan put her arm around Alyce’s waist. 'Maybe so. But we have to be a broad church. We need Scott’s contribution just as much as we need yours. You know, I feel like I have a boulder in my belly,' she said breathlessly.

Alyce grimaced. 'Tell me about it. I had three of them. But I went back to Iceland for them all. Ah, poor timing?'

Joan smiled. 'An accident. The conference has been in the planning for two years. As for the baby—'

'Nature will take its course, as it always has, regardless of our petty concerns. The father?'

Another paleontologist, he had been caught in the middle of a meaningless brushflre war raging in the collapsed state of Kenya. He had been trying to protect hominid fossil beds from thieves; a bandit warlord had thought he was guarding silver, or diamonds, or AIDS vaccine. The experience, and the pregnancy that was its legacy, had hardened Joan’s determination to make her conference a success.

But she didn’t want to talk about it now. 'A long story,' she said.

Alyce seemed to understand. She squeezed Joan’s arm.

At last they got inside the airport terminal. The coolness of the air-conditioning fell on Joan like a cold shower, though she felt a pang of guilt at the thought of the kilowatts of heat that must thereby be pumped out into the murky air somewhere else. A Qantas representative, an Aborigine woman, smoothly guided them to a reception lounge. 'There’s been some trouble,' she said to the arriving passengers, over and over. 'We’re in no danger. There will be an announcement shortly…'

Alyce and Joan made their way wearily to an empty metal couch. Alyce went to fetch them both some soda.

The walls of the lounge were smart, filled up with airline information, news bulletins, entertainment, phone facilities. Passengers were milling about. Many of them were conference attendees; Joan recognized their faces from the program booklet and their net sites. All obviously jet-lagged and disoriented, they looked either exhausted or hyper, or a mix of both.

A short, potbellied man in what might once have been called a Hawaiian shirt approached Joan shyly. Bald, perspiring heavily, with an apparently habitual grin on his face, he wore a button- badge that cycled images of Mars, the new NASA robot lander, an orange sky. Joan, as a small child, might have called him a nerd. But he was no older than thirty-five. A second-generation nerd, then. He held out his hand. 'Ms. Useb? My name is Ian Maughan. I’m from JPL. Uh—'

'The Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA. I remember your name, of course.' Joan struggled to her feet and shook his hand. 'I’m delighted you agreed to come. Especially at such a time in your mission.'

'It is going well, thank the great Ju-Ju,' he said. He tipped up his button-badge. 'These are live images, live net of the time delay from Mars, of course. Johnnie has already set up his fuel plant and is working on metal extraction.'

'Iron, from that rusty Mars rock.'

'You got it.'

'Johnnie,' the Mars lander, was officially named for John von Neumann, the twentieth-century American thinker credited with coming up with the notion of universal replicators, machines that, given the right raw materials, could manufacture anything — including copies of themselves. 'Johnnie' was a technological trial, a prototype replicator. Its ultimate goal was, in fact, to make a copy of itself from the raw materials of the planet itself.

'He’s proving an incredible hit with the public,' Maughan said with a shy smile. 'People just like to watch. I think it’s the sense of purpose, of achievement as he completes one component after another.'

'Reality TV from Mars.'

'Like that, yeah. I can’t say we planned for the ratings we’re getting. Even after seventy years, NASA still doesn’t think PR very well. But the attention’s sure welcome.'

'When do you think Johnnie will have, umm, given birth? Before my own attempt at replication?'

Maughan forced a laugh, unsurprisingly embarrassed at Joan’s mention of her human biology. 'Well, it’s possible. But he’s proceeding at his own pace. That’s the beauty of this project, of course. Johnnie is autonomous. Now that he’s up there, he doesn’t need anything from the ground. Since he and his sons won’t cost us another dime, this is actually a low-budget project.'

Joan thought, Sons!

'But Johnnie is more an engineering stunt than science,' said Alyce Sigurdardottir. She had returned with plastic cups of cola for herself and Joan. 'Isn’t that true?'

Maughan smiled, easily enough. Joan realized belatedly that despite his appearance he must actually be one of JPL’s more PR-literate employees; otherwise he wouldn’t be here. 'I can’t deny that,' he said. 'But that’s our way. At NASA, the engineering and the science have always had to proceed hand in hand.' He turned back to Joan. 'I’m honored you asked me here, though I’m still not sure why. My grasp of biology is kind of flaky. I’m basically a computer scientist. And Johnnie is just another space probe, a hunk of silicon and aluminum.'

Joan said, 'This conference isn’t just about biology. I wanted the best and brightest minds in many fields to come here and get in touch with each other. We’ve got to learn to think in a new way.'

Alyce shook her head. 'And for all my skepticism about this specific project, I think you underestimate yourself, Dr. Maughan. Think about it. You come into the world naked. You take what the Earth gives you — metal, oil — and you mold it, make it smart, and hurl it across space to another world. NASA’s image has always been dismally poor. But what you actually do is so — romantic.'

Maughan hid behind a weak joke. 'Gee, ma’am, I’ll have to invite you along to my next career review.'

The lounge was continuing to fill up with passengers. Joan said, 'Does anybody know what’s happening?'

'It’s the protesters,' Ian Maughan said. 'They are lobbing rocks into the airport compound. The police are pushing them back, but it’s a mess. They let us land, but it’s not safe for our baggage to be retrieved right now, or for us to leave the airport.'

'Terrific,' Joan said. 'So we’re going to be under siege all through the conference.'

Alyce asked, 'Who’s involved?'

'Mostly the Fourth World.' An umbrella group, based on a splinter Christian sect, that claimed to represent the interests of the global underclass: the so-called Fourth World, people with less visibility even than the nations and groupings that made up the Third World — the poorest and most excluded, beneath the radar of the rich northern and western nations. 'They think Pickersgill himself is in Australia.'