Existence is Elsewhen

by John Gribbin

  “Rick said the prospect of seeing Child obscure Madonna made the whole mission worthwhile; never mind the task of building a colony and terraforming the planet.”

  “He was a bit of a romantic, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.” And he’d have been desperately upset that he didn’t get to see it himself, she thought.

  “Have you got enough oxygen and power to stay out here for the whole show?” Yang asked.

  “Totality should be in another couple of hours,” Abigail said, “I can last to well past then. I’ll nip in to renew my battery and tank and then come back to watch the end of the show.”

  She felt a gentle breeze push against her back. The morning wind sweeping southwards to replace the less cold rising air at the tropics. This was nothing compared to the storms that had raged when they landed at the end of Long-autumn. Then the ground had been bare rock. As the temperature plunged, the water in the atmosphere fell first as rain and then as snow, never melting and building up layer upon layer to be covered by the layer of carbon dioxide frost. The habitats had been jacked up on stilts every Short-year or so while the sides of the polytunnels became cocooned in insulating ice. The grave markers had had to be dug out and re-fixed now and again so that they always stood proud, facing the light.

  The stars overhead faded from view as the sky took on a violet hue. The red and blue suns cast a purple light over the icy panorama. Abigail thought it looked beautiful and wondered what she would feel when trees filled the valley, and how the photosynthesising bacteria they intended to release would change the climate and the view. They were waiting for the Long-spring, when there would be liquid water, before that event took place. A couple of her companions were questioning whether they should carry out the release. The colony had arrived on what they had expected to be a barren world. Scientists back on Earth had suggested that life was unlikely because of the strange configuration of stars and the wild oscillation in temperature. The experts had been confounded. Anaerobic extremophile bacteria-like microbes lurked in cracks and fissures in the rock deep underground, warmed by the heat from the inner planet and insulated from the surface temperature changes by the rock above them.

  The colonists had discovered their neighbours when the bacteria released spores at the end of the Long-autumn. It was their means of dispersal. The biologists had been fascinated by the discovery but they had not bargained on the bacteria’s hunger for carbon. They had taken a liking to the graphene panels used in everything from the habitat modules to the shuttle. A bacteria-corroded turbine blade and the worst storm of the early Long-winter were the joint causes of the accident that had killed three of the eight colonists. There were no spores now and the bacteria were safely under rock and ice but come the Long-spring the colonists would have a fight on their hands to stop their home dissolving around them.

  Child had taken a big chunk out of Madonna now although both were still low in the south-eastern sky. Abigail loved the opportunity to just stand and watch in the calm and the silence, despite the cold. The habitat was cramped and crowded even though there were five instead of eight of them. There was always noise from a pump or some other piece of machinery. As the only one without a declared partner she often felt herself alone although all of them were friends as well as colleagues.

  Yang stepped closer to her and placed a companionable arm around her waist.

  “Beautiful isn’t it,” he said, “I wonder how many people will see this sight next time.”

  If the colony survives, Abigail thought. In one Long-year there should be tens of first generation Disciples and hundreds of the second generation. The Paul Dirac should have returned with more equipment and migrants and maybe there would be other starships. Perhaps, if the terraforming took hold, Mid-Long-winter in this valley would never look the same again. The expanse of ice and the black rocks poking through at the ridges to the east and west would be obscured by the GM conifers. But still there would be the fierce blue Child eating into the crimson heart of Madonna.

  Something to beef about

  by

  John Gribbin

  John Gribbin was born in 1946 in Maidstone, Kent. He studied physics at the University of Sussex and went on to complete an MSc in astronomy at the same University before moving to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, to work for his PhD.

  After working for the journal Nature and New Scientist, and three years with the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University, he has concentrated chiefly on writing books. These include In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, In Search of the Big Bang, and In Search of the Multiverse.

  He has also written and presented several series of critically acclaimed radio programmes on scientific topics for the BBC (including QUANTUM, for Radio Four), and has acted as consultant on several TV documentaries, as well as contributing to TV programmes for the Open University and the Discovery channel.

  But he really wanted to be a successful science fiction writer, and has achieved at least the second part of that ambition with books such as Timeswitch and The Alice Encounter, and stories in publications such as Interzone and Analog. But as John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi so nearly said “Sf is all very well, John, but it won’t pay the rent”. Another thing that doesn’t pay the rent is his songwriting, mostly for various spinoffs of the Bonzo Dog Band.

  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, as well as being a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical and Royal Meteorological Societies.

  It was eighteen o’clock, all but five minutes, when David Jenkins eased the two-seater into his parking bay at the Institute. The car park was almost deserted, this early; but he almost had the problem cracked, and he was eager to get back to the Box. The notebook on the passenger seat already held the fruits of several hours work at home, but he could take the latest line of attack no further without the Box’s power to help – after all, he was no more than a journeyman programmer, and the notebook was pretty limited; it didn’t even have a quantum chip.

  Through the tinted glass, the sky seemed reasonably overcast, and it was only a few steps to the shelter of the awning over the main entrance. David quickly slipped the dark glasses into place, and pulled the loose hood of his shirt over his head. Sliding out of the car, he reached for the notebook with his left hand, straightened, and shut the door. It took less than thirty seconds to plug the vehicle in for a booster charge while he was at work; he was out in the open for no more than a minute, and only his hands had been exposed, anyway.

  Inside the cool of the airconditioned lobby he paused, pulling down the hood and removing the dark glasses. The weather forecast was showing on the wall screen to the left of the porter’s cubbyhole, but Josh was nowhere to be seen – probably brewing tea out the back. David watched the changing pictures, half listening to the commentary. High pressure over southern England, severe storms tracking across Scotland; pretty average for April. There was a category B flood alert for the east coast for the next 24 hours. Somebody was playing safe, in case the storms turned south into the North Sea, but there didn’t really seem much likelihood of that. The local summary gave the UV peak at 70 per cent.

  He hung on for the news headlines. The bush fires in Australia were running out of steam. Canada forecasting a record grain harvest. Italy still bitching to Berlin about the lack of regional aid. Japan had postponed the launch of their latest Luna shuttle. Six killed in a clash between UN forces and bootleg loggers in Brazil. Javed injured in practise and doubtful for the first Test, due to start under the lights at Trent Bridge in two hours.

  Cursing at the bad news – the one thing that could get David away from his work was the cricket – he set off down the corridor to his lab. With Julia away for the rest of the week on holiday, he ought to get an uninterrupted night in, especially if he was shut away with a DO NOT DISTURB sign up before the commuter rush piled in to work.

  Fourteen hours later, having had just one short meal break and three visits to the to
ilet, David rubbed the back of a hand across tired eyes, turning away from the screen into which he had been staring for far too long. He had the solution, right there in front of him. And yet, it didn’t make sense. The structure of the virus clearly showed that it was indeed a mutated form of the original bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the “mad cow” disease that had swept through Britain in the early nineteen-nineties. He was right, the team at the Medical Research Council’s lab up in Cambridge were wrong, and he’d be collecting on his bet, a rather nice bottle of Armagnac, just as soon as the editor at Nature accepted the paper.

  That shouldn’t take her long, considering the importance of the work for the whole European farming industry, and especially considering the tentative diagnoses now coming out of India and South America. BSEII (and now everybody would ‘have’ to accept that it was BSEII, not a new disease at all) looked like breaking out worldwide, and unless it was checked soon it would be back to eating loaves and fishes for just about everybody.

  It was the lack of any prospect of checking it at all, let alone soon, that had David sitting late at his console, wrecking his vision and trying to get a tired brain to see patterns that just weren’t there. It was small wonder, really, that nobody had realised, at first, that they were dealing with a variation on BSE. The mutations were so neatly meshed to the organism’s needs that they made it resistant to every treatment that had proved effective against BSEI, as well as making it spread more effectively from animal to animal, and develop more rapidly in afflicted cattle. And not just cattle. With over two thousand people dead in Britain alone as a result, no wonder the eating habits of a nation were changed.

  Eyes open again, but staring at the old movie posters (Bogart, Dick Tracy, Back to the Future V) on the wall at the right, not at the screen, he spoke.

  “Box. Get me a rundown on some food prices.”

  The multi-tasking machine left the viral gene map on the display, and responded in kind.

  “The standard price-index set, or something more specific?”

  “Just a couple – beef, some fish. Superstore prices, not wholesale.”

  “I can get you best Scotch beef at one mark ten for a kilo. Cod is up to twelve marks. Dover sole, locally, is twenty-three. But I’ve got a contact in Newhaven . . . “

  “Forget it.”

  The Box, used to David’s speech patterns, did no such thing, but simply stored the data for future use.

  The people who were doing well out of this panic were the fishermen, no doubt about that. For a moment, David had had a wild idea. The genetic changes that had transformed BSEI into BSEII were simply so neat, so precise. It looked almost like a tailoring job, a tailoring job by one hell of a genetic engineer. But who would benefit from setting such a beast loose on the cattle population? A few fishermen. Devoted though he was to detective stories, even David had to admit that trying to explain the sudden emergence of BSEII as the work of an evil cabal of fishermen, out to get rich in the process, simply didn’t make sense.

  It might make more sense as a scenario in an economic war. Except that, first, Europe wasn’t involved in a trade war with anybody, and, secondly, the way the disease was spreading the whole world would be affected in another year, or less. Of course, that was one of the proverbial dangers of biological warfare. That the weapon might blow back in your face. The only people who might feel bad enough about the continuing affluence of Europe to lash out at them in this way would be the Southern Bloc, where the famine figures were still barely making a dent in the population growth.

  Could it really be something like that? If we can’t have your lifestyle, then we’re gonna make sure you don’t have it either? If so, and if the Indian reports were correct, they’d surely shot themselves in the feet, as well.

  None of it made sense. He swung the chair round, took another look at the gene map. A couple of clicks with the mouse, and the overlay from BSEI was in place, with the minimal mutation tree needed to make the conversion to BSEII highlighted. The more he looked at it, the more convinced he was that it was a tailoring job. But who? And why? Somebody who had a down on cows? A militant vegetarian?

  Smiling at the thought, he decided he’d had enough for one night. It was too late to be out in the streets, especially with a – what was it? – 75 per cent UV figure. But he could crash down in the bunk next door, a room kept ready for anyone who worked so late at the lab that it simply wasn’t worthwhile, or safe, to go home. But there was no reason why the Box should get off lightly.

  “Box.”

  “Still here, boss.”

  “I want you to run a search for me. Go back to, oh, I dunno. Say 1990, when BSEI broke out. Look for anybody saying that cow disease was a good thing, or predicting that there would be more outbreaks, after the first one was sorted out.”

  “Scientific literature, or general?”

  “General. Full media. You’ve got plenty of time, I’m going to get a couple of hours’ sleep. Good night.”

  “To hear is to obey, O wise one. Good night.”

  David frowned. Someone had been tweaking the Box’s personality. Jill, at a guess. Just her idea of a fun thing to do before she went away on leave. Still, no matter. As long as it did the job. Hitting the light switch as he left the room, he departed for his well earned rest. Then he had an afterthought, poked his head back into the darkened room.

  “What was the close of play score, Box?”

  “Australia 287 for five. Javed got three wickets.”

  Pretty even. Well, David thought, as he headed for the bunk, if we can get them out for under 350 tonight, we’re in with a chance …

  Six hours sleep, a bacon sandwich from the machine in the canteen, and about a litre of coffee had him not quite raring to go, but fit for business. Thoughtfully, the Box had provided a neat printout of its most interesting discovery.

  July 1990.

  BBCTV interview with Professor Jim Lovelock.

  “Our fall from the Garden of Eden was when we took up farming. We should consider persuading our genetic engineers to develop a cattle plague, like the disease myxomatosis, that virtually eliminated the rabbit from Europe in a couple of years . . . vast areas of land could revert to forest.”

  Lovelock! Old man Gaia himself. He’d been dead for decades, but his was still a name David remembered fondly – and not just David; nobody could have missed the remembrance celebrations – though it was hardly a name that David expected to see in this context. Didn’t the Gaians revere all life on Earth? What could they possibly have against cows?

  “What is this crap, Box? Where did you dig it up?”

  “I got a lead from New Scientist. There’s a complete set in the library. They had an enormous amount on BSEI in the early nineties; quite fascinating. I think this is supposed to be some sort of a joke – a reference to it appeared in a humorous column by one of their regular writers, Lyn Murray. But you know how much trouble I have with jokes.”

  “But it says here ‘BBCTV interview’. You haven’t got the entire output of BBCTV in the library, have you?”

  “Ah yes.” He could swear that the Box sounded smug. “I hoped you’d notice that. You see, I’ve got this contact at TV Oxford, and they’ve got access to the national archive.”

  “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know about your illicit contacts. But you’re sure its genuine?”

  “Of course.” The damn machine definitely sounded hurt. “I can get you full video, if you like. Nice white-haired old man, rather like God. But it will only be flat screen.”

  “Don’t bother. Summarise.”

  “Okay.” Much more bright and cheerful. “Like I said, I think it was a joke. Part of a long interview about Lovelock’s ideas, and Gaia. He’d planted a lot of trees on his farm in the west country, and he was explaining how good trees are at absorbing carbon dioxide, and how wasteful it is to use land to grow food for cattle. Did you know that it takes only one fifth as much land to feed a vegetarian as to feed a carnivore? If a
ll you people gave up meat, 80 per cent of farmland could be turned over to forests, stopping global warming for a hundred years.”

  “Eighty per cent of all farmland!” The picture was mind-boggling. It made a crazy kind of sense. Definitely Lovelockian logic, he now saw. But who?

  “Has anybody else accessed this information recently? In the past two years?”

  “How do you expect me to know that?”

  “C’mon, Box; you’ve got contacts. Don’t tell me how you know, just tell me what you know.”

  “There has been some activity on the network. Somebody has been accessing a lot of old stuff about Gaia. And about BSEI. And this BBC interview was in the package.”

  “Okay. Who?”

  “You won’t like it, boss.”

  He waited. The damn machine couldn’t refuse a direct instruction, whatever quirks Julia might have poked in to it.

  The delay was no more than half a minute.

  “Pauline Jefferies, in Cambridge.”

  Jefferies! At MRC! The very person he had laid his bet with. The head of the team that had staked its reputation on the claim that BSEII wasn’t a variant of BSEII, but was completely new cow disease. He’d tear them apart. To hell with the Armagnac, this was something big.

  Halfway to the door, eagerly planning to call in somebody – anybody – and share the news, he suddenly stopped. Pauline Jefferies wasn’t crazy. Why would she be involved in a stunt like this?

  He turned back to the console, sat down in the swivel chair.

  “So Lovelock said we should get rid of cattle and plant trees to save us from the greenhouse effect, right?”

  “Sure thing, boss.”