Engineering Infinity (42 page)

“They’ll be at the surface in
twenty minutes?” Nicole said. “Come on, people, grab your parkas and come up
and see this!”

Most of the scientists stood, but
Lars gestured for them to sit. “We have work to do, don’t we? Alerting the rest
of the planet, making sure they know what’s going on so that if we don’t make
it they have our information? And perhaps deciding what we should do? Shouldn’t
we -”

Nicole said, “I am useless for
most of that, and if you want me, phone me. Specifications of what I found are
on the big screen here.”

“And this is my chance to
interview Nicole and record whatever comes up,” Stephanie said, and followed
her out. Lars said nothing and didn’t look at either of them, intent on putting
together his “response teams” and “brainstormers” and “issue teams,” but
Stephanie saw by the set of his shoulders that he was as angry as he permitted
himself to be in public.

Out on the deck, the sky was
clear, and after Nicole spoke on her wristcom with the bridge, they turned off
running lights; the sky was instantly powdered with stars, with hundreds of
minute shooting stars crossing from northeast to southwest.

“The iron,” Stephanie said,
staring up at it. “Lars is so terrified that that is what has caused this...
um, this whatever this is.”

“Well, he might be right, but
that’s not a reason for him to be upset, if I’m guessing right. The iron
enrichment did what it was supposed to do and took an immense amount of carbon
out of the atmosphere, and it fed a lot of people along the way. Nothing to be
ashamed of for that.”

“What are you guessing?”

Nicole extended her hand. “Come
on over here; it’s more exposed but we can see better. Let me lay out this
thought. Before we towed asteroids into orbit around the earth, fastened robots
onto them, and started shooting chunks of iron into the atmosphere above the
Southern Ocean, what was the main reason why this area wasn’t producing much
biomass?”

“Well, lack of iron, obviously.”

“And where did the little bit of
iron there was come from?”

“Meteors. That was the argument
for why it was safe to do this. Because the process was completely natural, and
they were just ramping it up.”

“There you go. Now just watch and
think about all these meteors for a while; see if I can lead you onto my guess.
I’ve got a better grip than you, so let me hold you so you don’t have to worry
about slipping off.”

Her strong arms gripped around
Stephanie’s waist, holding her tight, and Nicole’s body shielded her from the
wind, now coming from astern; she gazed up at the unending procession of
shooting stars, streaking down into the atmosphere as the bombardment from the
asteroid chunks continued.
Some people wanted this shut
down as soon as the strange growth started, but there was no proof that the
iron was driving it, and the artificial meteor shower has been going on for
decades,
Stephanie thought.
But that’s politics and
policy, and Nicole doesn’t care about those things, so that isn’t what she’s
trying to make me see.

What
does
she care about? I barely know her.

The horizon to horizon smear of
stars was streaked everywhere with swift shooting stars. Nicole’s arms and body
held her warm and safe on the freezing deck. The shooting stars plus the
security turned her mind to thoughts of being a small girl, back when father
had told her the forest might die from the heat and the dryness, back when she
had watched the little screen and seen her father’s old friend, Lars,
explaining what they would have to do, because there was no longer time for
anything gradual...

That awakened other memories on
the screen, of Lars standing with Nicole, the police arresting him, the trial
scenes, the moment when he and Nicole came down the steps with arms raised in
triumph...

She thought of the short videos,
when she was in grade school, of the solar sail rigs dragging chunks of the
iron asteroids, as big as airplane hangars, into Earth orbit, of the
toy-truck-like pebblers, tunnelers, melters, and shooters crawling over surface
of each chunk of iron like so many swarming termites, of the dozen barrels on
each shooter spraying bits of iron, anything in size from a sesame seed to a
tennis ball, out at a rate of dozens per minute... Lars’s voiceover explaining
how a million little meteors a day could cool the Earth, bring back the rains,
feed the fish to feed the people...

Of her graduating class trip, the
first time she had been south of the equator, standing on the deck of the big
tour ship and watching the iron come in to make the oceans bloom... just a
couple of years, then, before she met Lars...

And Nicole had been here all that
time, fresh back to Earth when the plan was announced, walking the seabed and
swimming between the icebergs before the first artificial meteors fell...

Nicole had lived a whole lifetime
before hers, and how was she to judge it or understand it? She knew only that
she trusted the person holding her, and knew that humaniform and human,
daughter of the far planets and daughter of Africa, at least shared wanting to
know more than wanting to govern, and placed truth before rules.

She thought until she said, “You
think this is a natural process. Those... um, gasoline trees grow whenever the
ocean blooms for long enough.”

“That’s what I think,” Nicole
agreed.

“What are they for?”

“Stephanie, evolution doesn’t
have a purpose; they’re not
for
anything. The
question is what they
do
.”

Stephanie let her back press
backward slightly, turning and raising her shoulders for a more secure place in
Nicole’s hold. She thought for an instant that the warmth on the back of her
neck, between cap and collar, was Nicole’s breath, then realized she didn’t
breathe; it was the radiated warmth from her face. “Do you know what they do?”

“I have one idea that’s pretty
crazy,” Nicole said. “That’s why while we’ve been standing here I’ve been
sending the captain my text about it, and that’s why I’m going to hold onto you
till we go below.”

“You’re predicting something big?”

“These things rushing up toward
the surface are about twenty times as big as the biggest redwood, back before
the warming killed them. The safest thing, the
almost-Lars-in-its-tepid-chicken-shitness thing, that I can possibly say is, ‘I’m
predicting something big.’“

Stephanie said, “I probably
shouldn’t laugh at him. He’s my husband.”

“Didn’t mean to put you in an
awkward spot. I still love him, myself, and how many ex-wives can say that
after a few decades? But he’s about safety and security, making the world more
certain than it would be otherwise. It’s a necessary part of the ecology of
life. But so is surprise and amazement and wonder. And considering he married
me... and now he’s married to you... I think he knows that he needs some of
that in his life, too.” Her grip tightened, pulling Stephanie closer. “Whatever
is about to happen should happen in the next minute.”

The ship barely rocked; overhead,
the flurry of meteors continued,
dug from the asteroids,
fired into the Earth, politically guaranteed forever by the International
Fishing Association,
as Stephanie had said once in an article. The stars
twinkled, and the ocean’s surface all around them began to rise into dark
pools. The ship’s jets fired and
Clarke
scooted two
hundred meters at top speed, almost throwing them to the deck, her stern
swinging round to stop her just as quickly with another blast of the jets. As
they scrambled to their feet, the dark pools welled up, into swellings,
springs, hills of water punching through the thick mat, geysers, immense towers
of seawater reaching toward the stars above them.

Nicole’s hands found the hip-belt
of Stephanie’s parka, and for one absurd second she thought her husband’s ex
intended to pants her out here. She started to laugh, but the sound was lost in
the boom of seawater rushing into the sky; she closed her mouth as water poured
down over the deck, and opened her eyes on the sight of immense black columns,
far bigger than any skyscraper ever built, rising slowly out of the sea, all
around, a forest or a downtown of these mighty pillars.

Nicole pulled Stephanie down to
the icy deck and lay across her, pinning her on her back, yanking the hood of
the parka around her ears and screaming “
...your hands over
your ears!
”

Stephanie’s mittens stretched the
parka hood tight around her head as she forced them in, covering her ears. The
icy sea water poured down around her but with Nicole’s chest sheltering her
face, she could breathe. Nicole’s more than human arms cradled her tight. She
had only a moment to think, Now, what?

The light was blinding, even
through closed lids; the shock was worse, and then they were flying, floating,
until the sea slammed into Stephanie’s back, and she felt the burning
sensation. It was only then that she knew her clothes had been on fire and that
she was singed, salt water stinging at burns where the terrible heat and light
had blasted away her thick winter clothing and left a pathway to her skin.

Far under the deadly cold water,
she wanted to scream, but Nicole fastened her mouth over Stephanie’s, worked
some strange trick that opened both jaws, and released Stephanie’s breath
before giving her a burst of air, unneeded in a fusion-driven humaniform, from
Nicole’s lungs. Three more times as they rose to the surface, Nicole fed her
mouth-to-mouth air; she shuddered with cold, her skull contracted and squeezed
her brain terribly, the salt in her bare flesh stung fiercely, but she lived.

As the water broke around her and
she drew a free breath, she felt Nicole grab, slide, push, and a moment later,
Nicole’s body was pressed against hers inside the oversized parka. Nicole swam
on her back, forcing Stephanie’s head up into the air, kicking with great
force, steering and adjusting with Stephanie’s arms along for the ride; she
could no more have stopped Nicole from moving the arms than she could have
pushed back against a bulldozer.

Within the parka, the seawater
became blood-warm; Nicole had cranked up her fusor and was heating the space
inside the coat to keep Stephanie from hypothermia.

Stephanie shook her head to clear
the hair from her face, and gasped, “Thank you.”

“Look up,” Nicole said, still
stroking. “Look up, don’t miss this.”

Stephanie became aware that the
black and green sea surface was lighted as if by a spotlight, brighter than
day. She arched her back, pressing her belly hard against Nicole’s, and looked
overhead, into the brilliant welding-arc white lights that filled the sky. She
watched, numb with wonder, as the warm, delicate surface of Nicole’s skin
brushed against her, warming her, rippling with the effort of moving them
across the sea, supporting her. Stephanie gazed into the sky, and the brilliant
lights grew dimmer and smaller as the distance increased. In a flurry of no
more than five seconds, the bright lights all flared for an instant, then
dimmed into a faint red glow that faded into the dark of the sky, where the
stars were coming out again.

Nicole shouted “
Clarke
ahoy!” a few times before one crewman, still
fighting a fire in the superstructure, heard her. A few minutes and some hard
work with a winch, and they were hustled across the wreckage on the deck, and
down into the intact, if scrambled, guts of the ship.

At the door to Stephanie’s and
Lars’s cabin, Nicole said, “You’ll want to be there when I present in a few
minutes.”

“Yeah.” Stephanie was shaking
with the terror of the last few minutes. “Just... hey, thank you.”

“I’m glad there was one human
witness, by naked eye, and it was you.” Nicole moved to kiss her cheek;
Stephanie turned to take it on the mouth. Gently, Nicole turned Stephanie’s
face away. “You’re still married. And this is a stress reaction. Now, take a
shower, and I’ll have everyone together in the main conference room in a few
minutes.”

The meeting was delayed while
they stabilized broken bones on two scientists and treated Stephanie’s burns,
but that gave Captain Pao time to establish that
Clarke
was
“floating, functional, and able to take us home,” as she put it, in the opening
remarks to the meeting. Besides the scientific and technical people, as many of
the crew as did not have other duties were packed in to hear Nicole talk. The
captain added, “When I took this job I wondered why a science ship was armoured
and equipped like a nukeproof International Patrol disarmer, but I promise I’ll
never wonder again. We’ll limp, but we’ll limp clear to Cape Town. For the rest
- Nicole?”

Nicole stood. “I think the first
thing you’re entitled to know is the answer to what everyone shouted during the
burst:
what the hell was that?
So here goes. I think
we’ve just confirmed one of the main hypotheses about why Martian and Europan
life are so similar to Earthly life. The answer is what I called the ‘upside-down
trees,’ what Stephanie calls the ‘gasoline trees,’ and what I just heard
Captain Pao call the ‘big rocket bush.’ I think it’s one path of panspermia -
life spreading through space.

“The seed or spore of the
gasoline tree arrived, perhaps, in a chunk of bone, tumbling through our air in
a slow enough approach not to burn up or destroy the life it carried, sometime
in the last half-billion years. It grew on the sea floor as slowly and coldly
as stalactites on a cave ceiling. But now and then, a big meteor shower; or a
cloud of interstellar dust; or the temporary capture of an asteroid inside
Earth’s Roche limit; or the right volcanic eruption, or perhaps the right
impact on the moon, caused iron to rain down for a few decades, creating an
immense bloom in the Southern Ocean, or one of its ancestor oceans. Or, in this
case, the human race, in an increasingly warm soup of its own brewing, decided
to clear out centuries of excess carbon dioxide in the air with rapid growth of
phytoplankton.