Better Angels (21 page)

Kal had long since run out of fingers, but that didn’t stop him from shaking his head.

“That’s an awful lot to load onto a bunch of sunspots and solar flares.”

“Oh?” Lydia said, looking at him skeptically, yet fearful that too much of what he was implying might just be true. She remembered too clearly the closing down of research at the tar pits. “And you have another explanation for all the blackouts and computer crashes?”

“Not totally,” he said with a shrug as he closed the door to the storage shed behind them, “but before our systems went down, I got an interesting masscast e-note from my old buddy Al Davis. He was a roommate of mine from way back, when we were in grad school together. He worked skeleton crew at NOAA, usually on what’s known as the K-index. The index measures disturbances in several vectors of the Earth’s magnetic field, averaged over three hour periods. Sort of a measure of how the Earth’s magnetic lines of force are being tweaked and torqued. The K-index is generally calculated for the mid-latitudes—in Colorado in the northern hemisphere and Australia in the southern. Disturbances tend to be much more severe poleward.”

Lydia began to walk slowly ahead of him, back toward the main office trailer.

“And this all has something to do with the solar storm that caused the infosphere crisis?” she asked, trying not to sound impatient.

“Everything to do with it!” Kal assured her. “What it takes to precipitate a technocrash depends on whether the tweaking of the field lines is the result of a pulse or a sustained period of severe storming. The K-index is not an instantaneous quantity, so a quick pulse of high amplitude would not normally be significantly reflected in the K-index. For a quick pulse the K-index would generally be irrelevant—and, as a result of the crash caused by a killer pulse, the index would probably never be calculated for such a pulse.”

Dr. Elliot slowed and stared down at his feet as one of the undergraduates on the Project walked past them, toward the storage area from which they had just come. When he spoke again, his voice was lower.

“But Al was working on atmospheric phenomena called sprites and jets,” he continued, “which are related to much briefer electromagnetic events in the Earth’s atmosphere—as brief as lightning bolts during thunderstorms, in fact. So his equipment had a lot narrower resolution than almost anything else out there. His detectors had much finer discernment than those used to calculate the usual K-index. His e-note said he was seeing some interesting things.”

“Such as?” Lydia asked, curious almost against her will.

“A sustained period of severe solar storming takes out electrical systems on the basis of how well protected they are,” Kal said. “The less protected a system is, the more readily it can be knocked out. The main danger is not from the storm itself, but from the disturbances the storm causes in the power grid, which tends to amplify whatever perturbs it.”

“And your friend Al’s instruments showed him something to do with that?”

“Right,” Kal said. “As the solar activity’s effects began to peak in the index’s low 20s, a series of precisely timed pulses began to appear, mainly over North America as it came out of night shadow, but with a few spikes scattered over the rest of the planet too. Totally artificial—and virtually invisible, as far as standard K measures were concerned. Glaringly visible to Al’s research equipment, however.”

Lydia craned her chin inward in disbelief.

“Someone manipulated a solar storm in order to shut down the infosphere?” she asked incredulously. “Who? Little green men?”

“No—men of ordinary stature from Earth,” Kal said. “In the usual range of skin colors. Perhaps dressed in army green, but otherwise not at all alien. And not ‘manipulated’ a solar storm—exploited it. For cover. I haven’t heard anything from Al since, but it’s not so hard to figure out the rest. With a series of precisely timed electromagnetic pulses, those non-little non-green men set up oscillations in the power grids. Those oscillations, at least at the surface of the Earth, unleashed far more power than the storm itself did. With the right timing and placement in the upper levels of the atmosphere, they wouldn’t even have needed to use nuclear explosions to generate the pulses. The ultimate bang for their buck.”

Lydia stared at her boss as they stepped back into Dr. Elliot’s office.

“But think of all the suffering, all the deaths, the infosphere crashes caused,” Lydia said, sitting down in a chair opposite the seat her boss had taken behind the desk. “Why would anyone want to do such a thing?”

“Power,” Kal said simply, shrugging out of the torso half of his coveralls, into his shirtsleeves beneath. “The control that comes from being out of control. Once the pulses were going, the out-of-control controllers could selectively take out sections of the infosphere all over the planet—least protected first. The transnational corporations, governments, and particularly the military have the most EMP-protected machine systems. The highest ranks of the powers-that-be collapsed the infosphere back down to what was under their immediate control. Now they’re in the driver’s seat like never before.”

Lydia glanced around Kal’s office, at his cluttered desk, computing equipment, bound folders of data standing in rank upon rank on the shelves behind them.

“Why are you telling me this?” Lydia asked cautiously. “And why now?”

“Because it looks like this newest ‘new government’ is going to stick around, at least for a while,” Kal said. “I know about your role in the Rancho La Brea shutdown, so I thought you should learn about this sooner rather than later. If what I’m say is true, then you need to know how this is going to affect us here.”

“How is this going to affect us?” Lydia asked, growing more annoyed as she grew more worried.

Kal let out a sigh.

“Very little, I hope,” he said, obviously having thought about the potential impacts before. “Non-military scientific research will probably take a massive hit under the new regime, but we’re fairly insulated. The Garbage Project has been doing analyses for over forty-five years, which means lots of inertia. The Project has established ties with four universities in four different regions of the country, so we’re covered there.”

Lydia, her political antennae up and twitching, was not so sanguine.

“But the Trashlands site has been digging for a while,” she worried. “Any chance somebody might push for a move to someplace else? Maybe into one of those other regions?”

Kal thought about it and shook his head.

“Unlikely,” he said. “Since the summary study of Fresh Kills back east was completed last year, we’ve been garbology’s biggest show on earth. We’re arguably the largest archaeological site on the planet. All the post-quake debris makes us unique—as do the Trashlander communities, the TechNots and Neo-Luddites over near Yucaipa. And they’re not likely to move.”

Lydia nodded. She knew some of that history too. The Trashlanders’ holiest of holies was an old court decision, Greenwood vs. California, according to which trash was public domain once it was in a container on a curb. The recycleroids had built that into the Trash Access Law. Not even the new CSA government would mess with that, unless they wanted appropriatek-types rioting all over the country. Despite Kal’s assurances, however, Lydia was nonetheless starting to have full-blown flashbacks to the last days of the tar pits research.

“What about funding?” she asked. “State? Federal? Local?”

“We may be primarily an archaeological site,” Kal said, tapping a pen against the edge of his desk, “but everyone from structural engineers to social theorists does field research here. We are the Oxford of offal. We have comparatively little dependence on government funding of any sort—pretty impressive, considering the size of this operation. Some government agency funds from here, from Mexico, and from Australia. Some of our research foundation and university funding might be vulnerable, but our biggest single funder is private industry. The transnational corporation we have strongest ties to is Retcorp and Lambeg. They’re headquartered in Ohio, so no one back in the heartland can claim we’ve been too bi-coastal and overlooked them.”

Lydia thought again of Kal taking down the Biblical paraphrase sign in the sunset light tonight.

“How about ideological or religious reasons for shutting us down?” Lydia asked, all too aware of how powerful those could be.

Kal Elliot gave her a quizzical smile.

“I see you can think like an administrator when you have to,” he said, “despite all your ‘I’m just an apolitical working scientist’ shtik. I’d say, though, that we’re a generally non-controversial project. No anti-Biblical evolutionary biology here, Lydia. Our research also happens to give Retcorp and Lambeg insights into how people use, abuse, save, and discard packaging—including their packaging—so sponsoring us makes R & L look like a responsible corporate citizen.”

Lydia stared at the floor.

“I didn’t mean so much religious or ideological tests for the whole project...,” she said.

“You mean for individuals?” her boss asked. “Workers whose history might ‘raise a stink’ for the Project? Hah! That’s a thought—someone in the Garbage Project raising a stink! You yourself seemed to have come away from the tar baby of the tar pits remarkably clean, actually. You’re right to be concerned, though. We seem to be in the midst of another of America’s periodic relapses into paranoia and persecution hysteria. Who can say how things will play out? All we can do is look to history and try to learn from that.”

“Persecution hysteria?” Lydia asked, leaning forward. “Witchhunts, you mean?”

“If you like,” Kal said with a shrug. “The Salem Witch Trials are the classic example, but the overall pattern is broader. That’s why I prefer ‘persecution hysteria.’ The term’s broad enough to include the Ku Klux Klan in the 1880s and 1890s, and their success at overturning any progress the freed slaves might have made since the Civil War. Broad enough to include the anti-alcohol persecution hysteria called Prohibition. That only succeeded in ballooning organized crime in the 1920s and early ’30s, pumping it full of new money, the bad synergy of attempted forced ‘temperance’ and bootleggers out to make a buck.”

“That’s going back an awfully long way,” Lydia said, wondering about the relevance of such a history.

“The anti-Communist persecution hysteria of the 1950s, then,” Kal continued. “That drove a lot of the country’s best brains overseas, where they ended up developing things like the Silkworm missile. Then the anti-drug persecution hysteria of the 1980s, which ended up ballooning the gang problem the same Prohibition way by making the gangbangers middlemen in the era of ‘zero tolerance’. About every thirty years the hysteria used to sweep through. Maybe it’s happening more often now. Think of the waves of anti-sex and anti-privacy persecution hysteria, all the pornographic Puritanism of our popular culture. All that’s really just been a continuation of last century’s news.”

“I don’t see the continuity,” Lydia said.

Her boss brought up a home-made graphic on one of his computer screens—a teardrop shape. At the top point of the drop was the word Individual, while at the swollen bottom end of the drop was the word State. At the top, off to one side, was the phrase Dispersed Control, while at the swollen end, again off to one side, was the phrase Centralized Control. Along the right side of the teardrop, under the rubric of Racial/Intuitive, were the phrases Modern Conservatism, Fascism, Nazism—each one further from the Individual point and closer to the State end than its predecessor. Under the rubric of Global/Rational, the same pattern of movement away from the Individual and toward the State also held on the left side of the teardrop, for Modern Liberalism, Socialism, and Communism, respectively.

“Every government and corporation,” Kal said, pointing to the graphic, “is just a larger or smaller, weaker or stronger, subtler or more blatant aggregation of thugs wielding the mighty right of power. Human politics, parties, wings—all just one or another house of pain. A plague on all their houses.”

Somehow, Lydia did not find this historical analysis reassuring. That unease must have shown in her face, for Kal once again strove to reassure her.

“Don’t worry, kiddo,” he said, smiling. “I’d never join a club that would accept me as a member anyway. If we’re lucky, maybe real serve-the-poor, gospel-according-to-Mark sojourning Christians—among whom I’d like to be counted myself—will take control away from these fascist morality-mongers who are in charge now. The way I see it, the best analog for what we’re going through now is the English Revolution, mid-seventeenth century.”

“How’s that?” Lydia asked, again not quite seeing the connection.

“Nobody really thought that would come to what it came to, either,” Kal said. “Our twenty-first century Puritans have made a united front, until now, against their Great Satan, the Evil Empire of ‘internationalism and liberalism and environmentalism responsible for sixty years of cultural decay’. Now that they’ve got power, though, how long do you think it’ll be before they fall to factional squabbling and their coalition collapses? I don’t think their Christian States of America will last as long as England’s seventeenth century republic. This is traditional hierarchy’s last hurrah. After this it’ll all be networks rather than hierarchies.”

Lydia found this part of the broad historical perspective strangely comforting, although not totally. She wondered whether networks, even if they might be more subtle, would be any less brutal than hierarchies in the long run.

“Is that your plan, then?” she asked. “Just wait it out?”

“Wait, yes,” Dr. Elliot said, leaning forward on his elbows, “but also watch. Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of our continued freedom, but we can afford it. We’ll make it through this, Lydia. Don’t worry.”

They heard a computer phone ringing in a nearby office cubicle. It was a reassuring sound, since the infosphere crisis had knocked out communication for days and lower priority systems were only now coming back on line.

“I think that’s mine,” Lydia said. “I’d better answer it. But hey, thanks for the words. I appreciate them.”