“That reassures me completely,” said Diko.
“We do nothing political. Do you understand? We don’t interfere with government. We care a great deal about what governments do, but when we want to achieve some goal, we act openly. I would write to a government official as myself, as Manjam. Or appear on a broadcast. Stating my opinions. Do you see? We are not a secret shadow government. We have no authority over human lives.”
“And yet you spy on us.”
“We monitor all that is interesting and important in the world. And because we have the TruSite II, we can do it without sending spies or openly talking to anybody. We just watch, and then, when something is important or valuable, we encourage.”
“Yes yes,” said Hassan. “I’m sure you’re noble and very kind in your godlike role. Who are the others?”
“I’m the one who came to you,” said Manjam.
“And why are you showing us this? Why are you telling us?” asked Tagiri.
“Because you have to understand that I know what I’m talking about. And I have to show you some things before you will understand why your project has been so encouraged, why you’ve had no interference, why you’ve been allowed to bring together so many people from the moment you discovered, Tagiri and Hassan, that we can reach back and affect the past. And most especially since you, Diko, discovered that someone had already done so, canceling their own time in order to create a new future.”
“So show us,” said Hunahpu.
Manjam typed in new coordinates. The display changed. It was a long-distance aerial view of a vast stony plain with only a few desert plants every square meter, except for thick trees and grass along the banks of a wide river.
“What is this, the Sahara project?” asked Hassan.
“This is the Amazon,” said Manjam.
“No,” murmured Tagiri. “That’s how bad it was before the restoration began?”
“You don’t understand,” said Manjam. “This is the Amazon right now. Or, technically speaking, about fifteen minutes ago.” The display moved quickly, mile after mile down the river, and nothing changed until at last, after what must have been a thousand miles, they came to scenes familiar from the broadcasts: the thick growth of the rainforest restoration project. But in just a few moments they had passed through the entire rain forest and were back to stony ground growing almost nothing. And so it remained, all the way to the marshy mouth of the river where it flowed into the sea.
“That was all? That was the Amazon rain forest?” asked Hunahpu.
“But that project has been going for forty years,” said Hassan.
“It wasn’t that bad when they started,” said Diko.
“Have they been lying to us?” asked Tagiri.
“Come now,” said Manjam. “You’ve all heard about the terrible loss of topsoil. You all know that with the forests gone, erosion was uncontrolled.”
“But they were planting grass.”
“And it died,” said Manjam. “They’re working on new species that can live in the scarcity of important nutrients. Don’t look so glum. Nature is on our side. In ten thousand years the Amazon should be right back to normal.”
“That’s longer than—that’s older than civilization.”
“A mere hiccup in the ecological history of Earth. It simply takes time for new soil to be brought down from the Andes and built up on the banks of the river, where grasses and trees will thrive and gradually push their way outward from the river. At the rate of about six to ten meters a year for the grass, in the good spots. Also, it would help if there were some really massive flooding now and then, to spread new soil. A new volcano in the Andes would be nice—the ash would be quite helpful. And the odds of one erupting in the next ten thousand years are pretty good. Plus there’s always the topsoil blown across the Atlantic from Africa. You see? Our prospects are good.”
Manjam’s words were cheerful, but Diko was sure he was being ironic. “Good? That land is dead.”
“Oh, well, yes, for now.”
“What about Sahara restoration?” asked Tagiri.
“Going very well. Good progress. I give us five hundred years on that.”
“Five hundred!” cried Tagiri.
“That’s presupposing great increases in rainfall, of course. But our weather prediction is getting very good at the climatic level. You worked on part of that project for a while in school, Kemal.”
“We were talking about restoring the Sahara in a hundred years.”
“Well, yes, and that would happen, if we could continue to keep so many teams working on it. But that won’t be possible for even ten more years.”
“Why not?”
Again the display changed. The ocean in a storm, beating against a levee. It broke through. A wall of seawater broke across—fields of grain?
“Where is that?” demanded Diko.
“Surely you heard about the breaching of the Carolina dike. In America.”
“That was five years ago,” said Hunahpu.
“Right. Very unfortunate. We lost the coastal barrier islands fifty years ago, with the rising of the ocean. This section of the North American east coast had been converted from tobacco and lumber production to grain, in order to replace the farmland killed by the drying of the North American prairie. Now vast acreages are under water.”
“But we’re making progress on finding ways to reduce the greenhouse gases,” said Hassan.
“So we are. We think that, with safety, we can reduce the greenhouse effect significantly within perhaps thirty years. But by then, you see, we won’t want to reduce it.”
“Why not?” asked Diko. “The oceans are rising as the ice cap melts. We have to stop global warming.”
“Our climate studies show that this is a self-correcting problem. The greater heat and the increased surface area of the ocean lead to significantly greater evaporation and temperature differentials worldwide. The cloud cover is increasing, which raises the Earth’s albedo. We will soon be reflecting more sunlight than ever before since the last ice age.”
“But the weather satellites,” said Kemal.
“They keep the extremes from getting unbearable in any one location. How long do you think those satellites can last?”
“They can be replaced when they wear out,” said Kemal.
“Can they?” asked Manjam. “Already we’re taking people out of the factories and putting them into the fields. But this won’t really help, because we’re already farming very close to one hundred percent of the land where there’s any topsoil left at all. And since we’ve been farming at maximum yields for some time, we’re already noticing the effects of the increasing cloud cover—fewer crops per hectare.”
“What are you saying?” said Diko. “That we’re already too late to restore the Earth?”
Manjam didn’t answer. Instead, he brought onto the display a large region filled with grain silos. He zoomed in and they viewed the inside of silo after silo.
“Empty,” murmured Tagiri.
“We’re eating up our reserves,” said Manjam.
“But why aren’t we rationing?”
“Because politicians can’t do that until the people as a whole see that there’s an emergency. Right now they don’t see it.”
“Then warn them!” said Hunahpu.
“Oh, the warnings are there. And in a while people will start talking about it. But they’ll do nothing, for the simple reason that there’s nothing to be done. Crop yields will continue to go down.”
“What about the ocean?” asked Hassan.
“The ocean has its own problems. What do you want us to do, scrape away all the plankton so that the ocean dies, too? We harvest as much fish as we dare. We are at maximum right now. Any more, and in ten years our yields will be a tiny fraction of what they are now. Don’t you see? The damage our ancestors did was too great. It is not within our power to stop the forces that have already been in motion for centuries. If we started rationing right now, it wo
uld mean that the devastating famines would begin in twenty years instead of six. But of course we won’t start rationing until the first famine. And even then, the areas that are producing enough food will become quite surly about having to go hungry in order to feed people in faraway lands. Right now we feel that all human beings are one tribe, so that no one anywhere is hungry. But how long do you think that will last, when the food-producing people hear their children pleading for bread and the ships are carrying so much grain away to other lands? How well do you think the politicians will do at containing the forces that will move through the world then?”
“So what is your little non-cabal doing about it?” asked Hassan.
“Nothing,” said Manjam. “As I said, the processes have gone too far. Our most favorable projections show collapse of the present system within thirty years. That’s if there are no wars. There simply won’t be food enough to maintain the present population or even a major fraction of it. You can’t keep up the industrial economy without an agricultural base that produces far more food than is needed just to sustain the food producers. So industry starts collapsing. Now there are fewer tractors. Now the fertilizer factories produce less, and less of what they do produce can get distributed because transportation can’t be maintained. Food production falls even further. Weather satellites wear out and can’t be replaced. Drought. Flood. Less land in production. More deaths. Therefore less industry. Therefore lower food production. We have run a million different scenarios and there’s not one of them that doesn’t lead us to the same place. A worldwide population of about five million before we stabilize. Just in time for the ice age to begin in earnest. At that point the population could start a slower decline until it’s down to about two million. That’s if there’s no warfare, of course. All these projections are based on an assumption of a completely docile response. We all know how likely that is. All it will take is one full-fledged war in one of the major food-producing countries and the drop will be much steeper, with the population stabilizing at a much lower level.”
No one could say anything to that. They knew what it meant.
“It’s not all glum news,” said Manjam. “The human race will survive. As the ice age ends, our distant children will again start to build civilizations. By then the rain forests will have been restored. Herd animals will once more graze the rich grassland of the Sahara and the Rub’ al Khali and the Gobi. Unfortunately, all the easy iron was taken out of the ground years ago. Also the easy tin and copper. In fact, one can’t help but wonder what they’ll do for metals in order to rise out of the stone age. One can’t help but wonder what their transitional energy source is going to be, with all the oil gone. There’s still a little peat in Ireland. And of course the forests will have come back, so there’ll be charcoal until they burn all the forests back down to nothing and the cycle starts over.”
“You’re saying that the human race can’t rise again?”
“I’m saying that we’ve used up all the easy-to-find resources,” said Manjam. “Human beings are very resourceful. Maybe they’ll find other paths into a better future. Maybe they’ll figure out how to make solar collectors out of the rusted debris of our skyscrapers.”
“I ask again,” said Hassan. “What are you doing to prevent this?”
“And I say again, nothing,” said Manjam. “It can’t be prevented. Warnings are useless because there’s nothing that people can do to change their behavior to make this problem go away. The civilization we have right now cannot be maintained even for another generation. And people do sense it, you know. The birthrates are falling all over the world. They all have their own individual reasons, but the cumulative effect is the same. People are choosing not to have children who will compete with them for scarce resources.”
“Why did you show us this, then, if there’s nothing we can do?” said Tagiri.
“Why did you search the past, when you believed there was nothing you could do?” asked Manjam, smiling grimly. “Besides, I never said that there was nothing you could do. Only that we could do nothing.”
“That’s why we’ve been allowed to pursue time travel,” said Hunahpu. “So we can go back and prevent all this.”
“We had no hope, until you discovered the mutability of the past,” said Manjam. “Until then, our work was turned toward preservation. Collecting all of human knowledge and experience and storing it in some permanent form that might last in hiding for at least ten thousand years. We’ve come up with some very good, compact storage devices. And some simple nonmechanical readers that we think might last two or three thousand years. We could never do better than that. And of course we never managed to come up with the sum of all knowledge. Ideally what we do have we would have rewritten as a series of easy-to-learn lessons. Step by step through the acquired wisdom of the human race. That project lasted up through algebra and the basic principles of genetics and then we had to give it up. For the last decade we’ve just been dumping information into the banks and duplicating it. We’ll just have to let our grandchildren figure out how to codify and make sense of it all, when and if they find the caches where we hide the stuff. That’s what our little cabal exists for. Preserving the memory of the human race. Until we spotted you.”
Tagiri was weeping.
“Mother,” said Diko. “What is it?”
Hassan put his arm around his wife and drew her close. Tagiri raised her tear-streaked face and looked at her daughter. “Oh, Diko,” she said. “For all these years I thought we lived in paradise.”
“Tagiri is a woman of astonishing compassion,” said Manjam. “When we found her, we watched her out of love and admiration. How could she endure the pain of so many other people? We never dreamed that it would be her compassion, and not the cleverness of our clever ones, that would finally lead us to the one road away from the disaster lying ahead of us.” He rose and walked to Tagiri, and knelt before her. “Tagiri, I had to show you this, because we feared that you would decide to stop the Columbus project.”
“I already did. Decide it, I mean,” she said.
“I asked the others. They said we had to show you. Though we knew that you would not see this as parched earth or statistics or anything safe and distant and containable. You would see it as each life that was lost, each hope that was destroyed. You would hear the voices of the children born today, as they grew up cursing their parents for their cruelty in not having killed them in the womb. I’m sorry for the pain of it. But you had to understand that if in fact Columbus is a fulcrum of history, and stopping him opens a way to creating a new future for the human race, then we must do it.”
Tagiri slowly nodded. But then she wiped the tears off her cheeks and faced Manjam, speaking fiercely. “Not in secret,” she said.
Manjam smiled wanly. “Yes, some of us warned that you would feel that way.”
“The people must consent to our sending someone back to undo our world. They must agree.”
“Then we will have to wait to tell them,” said Manjam. “Because if we asked today, they would say no.”
“When?” asked Diko.
“You’ll know when,” said Manjam. “When the famines start.”
“What if I’m too old to go?” said Kemal.
“Then we’ll send someone else,” said Hassan.
“What if I’m too old to go?” asked Diko.
“You won’t be,” said Manjam. “So get ready. And when the emergency is upon us, and the people can see that their children are hungry, that people are dying, then they will consent to what you’re going to do. Because then they’ll finally have the perspective.”
“What perspective?” asked Kemal.
“First we try to preserve ourselves,” said Manjam, “until we see that we can’t. Then we try to preserve our children, until we see that we can’t. Then we act to preserve our kin, and then our village or tribe, and when we see that we can’t preserve even them, then we act in order to preserve our memory. And if we can’t do that, wha
t is left? We finally have the perspective of trying to act for the good of humanity as a whole.”
“Or despairing,” said Tagiri.
“Yes, well, that’s the other choice,” said Manjam. “But I don’t see that as an option for anyone in this room. And when we offer this chance to people who see their world collapsing around them, I think they’ll choose to let you make the attempt.”
“If they don’t agree, then we won’t do it,” said Tagiri fiercely.
Diko said nothing, but she also knew that the decision was no longer Mother’s to make. Why should the people of one generation have the right to veto the only chance to save the future of the human race? But it didn’t matter. As Manjam said, the people would agree once they saw death and horror staring them in the face. After all, what had the old man and the woman in that village on Haiti Island prayed for, when they prayed? Not for deliverance, no. In their despair they asked for swift and merciful death. If nothing else, the Columbus project could certainly provide that.
Cristoforo sat back and let Father Perez and Father Antonio continue their analysis of the message from court. All he had really cared about was when Father Perez said to him, “Of course this is from the Queen. Do you think, after all these years, she would let you be sent a message without making sure she approved of the wording? The message speaks of the possibility of a reexamination at a ‘more convenient time.’ That sort of thing is not lightly said. Monarchs do not have time to be pestered by people about matters that are already closed. She invites you to pester her. Therefore the matter is not closed.”
The matter is not closed. Almost he wished it were. Almost he wished that God had chosen someone else.
Then he shrugged off the thought and let his mind wander as the Franciscans discussed the possibilities. It didn’t matter anymore what the arguments were. The only argument that really mattered to Cristoforo was that God and Christ and the dove of the Holy Ghost appeared to him on the beach and called him to sail west. All the rest—it must be true, of course, or God wouldn’t have told him to sail west. But it had nothing to do with Cristoforo. He was bent on sailing west for . . . for God, yes. And why for God? Why had Christ become so important in his life? Other men—even churchmen—didn’t deform their whole lives as he had. They pursued their private ambitions. They had careers, they planned their futures. And, oddly enough, it seemed that God was much kinder to those who cared little for him, or at least cared less than Cristoforo did.
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