Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I've heard good things about contemporary work on hemp and ... er ... those primitive trees that were among the first colonists of the land,” Kay said, blushing when he was momentarily unable to conjure up the second term.

  “Cycads,” said Gerda, helpfully. “Gymnosperms that look like crosses between tree-ferns and palms. Very interesting to engineers because of their lack of attention to strict speciation.”

  “Right,” said Kay. “Will you be doing anything with hemp or cycads?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Gerda said, “I will.”

  “Which?” was all that Kay was able to say by way of follow-up.

  “A bit of both,” she said. “I'm not a frontline engineer, modifying small sets of genes to produce new strains of existing species. I'm more of a genomic designer—a strategist rather than a tactician. Making incremental improvements in the old staples is all very well, and there's certainly a spur of urgency driving such work right now, but the process is too much like the early development of systemic computer code—or natural selection, for that matter. It's just one quick fix after another, improvised patches gradually building up into nightmarishly confused strata. Somebody has to think on a bigger scale, and in a longer term.”

  Kay obviously had little or no idea what she meant, but he wasn't about to ask for enlightenment in any craven fashion. “At least you'll be working for the cause,” he said. “The Heavy Metal brigade still favors engineering solutions to the problem of getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turning the methane-bomb problem into an energy-producing opportunity, and they have industry's inherited quadrillions behind them, but I'm all in favor of the natural approach. Gaia made trees to secure her own carbon balance, so that's probably the wisest way to get back to twentieth century carbon dioxide levels, if we can only make the crucial breakthrough. That's what the current work on hemp is all about, isn't it?”

  Gerda flashed him a broad smile, as she always did—without always being conscious of it—before she set out to lead him up the garden path. “Hemp's old news,” she told him. “It's a perfect carbon-sink crop, I suppose—it grows like wildfire, and every part of the crop is useful.”

  Kay knew enough to amplify that. “The fibers have always been used to make rope,” he said, “but modern engineers have expanded their textile versatility marvelously. The woody shiv produces building materials—properly processed, the material is as strong as concrete. We've got several initiatives in hand to increase its use, although your mother's friends keep making smart remarks about rebuilding the Kremlin, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, and the White House out of matchsticks. Is that the sort of thing you're working on?”

  “No. Insofar as hemp figures in my genomic schemes, it's the leaves that are the interesting part. We all know what sort of potential the leaves of Cannabis sativa have as brain-food.”

  Kay furrowed his black eyebrows at that. “I thought the engineers were trying to take the psychotropics out of the leaves,” he said. “Even the industrial varieties that have been tweaked to make the leaves usable animal fodder only preserve a mild tranquilizing effect.”

  “That's the present situation,” Gerda agreed. “All of the research to date has focused on adapting the foliage as a foodstuff or a biofuel source—but that's a bit wasteful, in my view. If we've got abundant potential already there for the production of cannabinols, why not exploit it? That's where the wise money is going now. Give the world a better building material, and people will shake you by the hand; give them a better way to get high and they'll love you forever.”

  “I don't know about that,” Kay said, dubiously—and accurately.

  “If Gaia made trees to strike the right compositional balance in the atmosphere,” Gerda told him, carefully keeping a straight face, “she must have made psychotropics to strike the right compositional balance in the noesphere. She's an all-round chill-out fan, after all.”

  * * * *

  After that exchange, Kay didn't bother to ask about the cycads, any more than he probed any deeper to find out whether Gerda really had been converted to the Gaian cause—but the cycads were, in Gerda's opinion, far more important than hemp to the cause of remaking the world. Hemp was a Gaian agent through and through: an old-school carbon sink that loved a relatively cool environment. If the newly fertile lands of northern Europe were to be planted with vast forests of genetically engineered hemp, the rains that fell on them would continue to be dutifully temperate, and the northward progress of the Creeping Tropic would be inhibited, even if it were not eventually reversed.

  If Gaia were to be permanently toppled from her icy throne and replaced by a Mother with fire in her loins, in Gerda's opinion, hemp could only be awarded a peripheral role in the deicidal army, perhaps as a sly double agent. A host of new cycads, on the other hand, might well provide shock troops capable of turning the battle into a rout.

  For the moment, research on cycads, like research on many other species, was being driven by anxieties about the global decline of insect populations. People who thought botany had “something to do with flowers” considered flowering plants to be one of Gaia's artistic masterstrokes, and were horrified by the thought that much of that beauty might be lost because many of the nasty insects that had long undertaken the duty of pollinating them were in danger of extinction. Flowering plants had, of course, been so outstandingly successful in the eternal war of natural selection precisely because insect pollination allowed them to range further and faster than plants relying on less agile and versatile pollination mechanisms. Where the insect-pollinated angiosperms had led, the sturdier varieties had been able to follow, including the fruit-producers that used evolutionary johnny-come-latelies like birds and mammals as seed-transmitters.

  Now that the insects, birds, and mammals were all on the decline as rapid climate change took its punishing toll, the pressure on agriculturalists and genetic engineers to save the angiosperms had become intense, but the difficulty of the task was such that biotechnologists had been forced to examine the possibility of a bolder substitution, responding to a potential angiosperm die-back by introducing new and carefully enhanced models of the various kinds of plants that the angiosperms had replaced, especially the most ancient: tree-ferns and cycads. The primitive nature of their genomes gave them a certain precious flexibility, which more recent species had forsaken. Cycads, in particular, seemed remarkably amenable to exotic genetic augmentation, unusually hospitable to gene-complexes transplanted from very different species, including fungi and animals. They had never made much appeal to tactical engineers because they had few economically useful properties to be enhanced, but from the viewpoint of genomic strategists they were raw clay, which might be molded into anything at all by flesh-sculptors of genius.

  Gerda knew that it was the versatility of specialized angiosperms, more than any other single factor, which had facilitated Gaia's manifestation as the Snow Queen, cooling the Earth down from the much higher temperatures that had been normal when gymnosperms ruled the climate. Gerda was interested in cycads not because they might have the potential to take up slack as Gaia's favorite carbon sinks ran into difficulties, but because they might have the potential to initiate a much more profound metamorphosis in the ecosphere. For the neo-cycads, Gerda thought, the imaginable might be only the beginning. The ultimate objective of human intelligence, as she saw it, was to roll back the horizons of the presently imaginable into the realms of the previously undreamed-of—and, for that, flesh-sculptors of genius would require the proper clay.

  Gerda was perfectly well aware, of course, that humankind had been a casual byproduct of Gaia's fondness for a cool throne. It was not so much that Homo sapiens was a mammal, designed to live in a cool environment—its ancestor-species had, after all, evolved in the tropics—but that its great leap forward, in evolutionary terms, had resulted from the sequence of Ice Ages in which Gaia had displayed her most recent wardrobe. It had been the domestication of fire—the foundation of all t
echnology—that had allowed human beings to colonize almost the entire land surface of the globe, including such inhospitably cold regions as northern Sweden. Gerda was not prepared, however, to draw the conclusion from this intrinsic indebtedness that humankind was bound to remain Gaia's slave forever, trying loyally with all its collective might to restore the world to the climate she liked best.

  In Gerda's view, such ecological conservatism could only lead to evolutionary petrifaction and an end to progress. If humankind were to continue to advance, it needed to evolve; to evolve, it needed new challenges, new pressures, and new opportunities.

  Gaia had cooled the world down by putting carbon that had once been incorporated into living organisms into a whole series of inert deposits: coal and oil sealed up in geological strata, methane held in crystalline clathrates in permafrosts and on the sea bed. The cost of the ecosphere's cooling had, in consequence, been a massive loss of biomass: biomass that had once been embodied in species that thrived in the heat, based in jungles and swamps that must have made angiosperm-dominated rainforests look like mere kitchen gardens by comparison. There had been no deserts in those days, when it really had never rained but it poured.

  Unlike Kelemen Kiss and his pusillanimous majority, Gerda Rosenhane did not want to design new carbon sinks in order to calm the atmosphere down and make the Earth cool again. She wanted to design new carbon carriers, in order to liberate all the dead carbon from Gaia's miserly hoards, to give it life again, and to restore the ecosphere to all its prodigal glory. She believed that humankind, armed with a sophisticated biotechnology, could not merely come through that transition but thrive on it, emerging stronger than before—and she also believed that if the species’ statesmen would only condescend to become constructive strategists instead of mere reactive tacticians, they ought to be able to take control of the metamorphosis and guide it.

  Cycads were to be her secret weapon; they had lost their first battle against the angiosperms, but the war was not yet over. With the right scientific allies, there was every chance that they might be re-equipped to take full advantage of the trouble that the angiosperms had run into as their traditional pollinators died in droves. If they were to do so, however—if the world were to be fitted out with a new and enduring heat-loving ecosphere—they would need human foot-soldiers to clear their way. Gerda knew full well that the war would first have to be won in the political arena, and that was where she intended to fight when the time was ripe.

  In Gaia's cool world, however—in spite of the fact that it had now been in dire danger of becoming seriously uncool for the better part of a century—time, like fruits, did not ripen overnight.

  * * * *

  While Gerda labored patiently and unobtrusively in Bern, Kay's career went from strength to strength. He inherited his father's seat in the Strasbourg Parliament at thirty, became EC ambassador to Beijing at thirty-three, and at thirty-six was one of the key architects of the fifty-first Global Carbon Treaty—the first one, in the estimate of many cynical observers, that actually stood a slim chance of remaining unbroken for more than a decade. By the time he turned forty he was widely known as the Hemp King, not so much because he had made billions of euros investing in hemp biotechnology, planting, and processing, as by virtue of the fact that he had become such an enthusiastic propagandist for the existential benefits of neo-cannabinols.

  When he met up with Gerda in Brussels for their private fortieth birthday celebration—he had such an elevated public profile that he had now to have an “official” one as well, although she did not—Kay was careful to give Gerda due thanks for this particular aspect of his success.

  “You were absolutely right,” he told her. “Carbon sinks, polite handshakes; better highs, unconditional love.”

  “Not unconditional,” she corrected him, blandly. “There's no such thing as unconditional love in politics.”

  “That's true,” he admitted, “but the principle holds good. The utilitarian aspects of Gaia-worship will save the world, but the spiritual aspects help it to want to be saved. Good Gaians need to get their heads straight.”

  “That's a trifle glib too,” she pointed out. “Neo-cannabinols reduce appetites, in more ways than one. They enable people to be happy in consuming less and doing less, but that's not really the spiritual aspect of Gaia-worship, is it?”

  “You really have turned into a scientist, haven't you?” he retorted. “Full marks for pedantry. Mind you, you were never the easiest person in the world to compliment. Perhaps I should content myself with simply saying thanks.”

  “You're welcome,” she said.

  “Mind you,” he said, “we're still running faster just to stay in the same place. The pace at which things are getting worse probably isn't accelerating any more, but we're going to need something new to help us turn the corner. The methane bomb hasn't stopped ticking, and it has to be defused. If something were to trigger a massive clathrate-release, we'd really be sunk. You biotech wizards haven't got any ingenious new algae in the pipeline, by any chance? Ideally, something that we can sow on the surface of the New Blue Ocean to help stabilize its temperature and soak up an extra measure of carbon dioxide. The Heavy Metal brigade are still pouring their inherited quadrillions into the search for a mechanical solution, of course, trying to find a mining technology that will allow them to strip the methane out and process it for use as household gas, but you know my take on the problem. Mother Gaia gave us seaweed to help keep the world in balance, so that's probably the best way to get the balance back again. Edible fish stocks have recovered somewhat since the CC wiped out the dolphins and all those other greedy predators, but all the reports say that the plankton are almost at the end of their tether, and that we need to rebuild the marine ecosphere from the bottom up, if we can. I've heard some good things about kelp, but I'd appreciate an off-the-record opinion from someone who isn't primarily concerned with protecting their EC funding.”

  “Algae aren't the answer,” Gerda told him, bluntly. “I suppose Kelemen Kiss, the Kelp King, has a certain ring to it, but I wouldn't put your own hard-earned billions into it if I were you. Not that I'm an expert on algae, mind. Modern classification has excluded them from the plant kingdom, so they're not in Practical Botany's bag any more.”

  “You could have made billions, too, if you'd been prepared to take risks,” Kay pointed out, his features briefly exhibiting what might have been a twinge of guilt. “You can't blame me for getting rich on your advice. You should have had the balls to act on it yourself.”

  “The comment about giving people a better high wasn't advice, Kay,” Gerda told him. “It was a flippant remark—just idle rhetoric. Only politicians can't tell the difference.”

  He might have blushed at that had his complexion been paler, but any hint of emergent pink was lost in the bronze. “So what is the answer, sister mine?” he asked. “Biotechnically speaking, that is.”

  “There was a time,” she said, “when algae pioneered the conquest of the land—but they didn't hold the lead in that particular race for long. They adapted well enough to fresh water, but the vast expanse of the primal continent required something cleverer. That's where the plants came in, and never looked back, even though they might have taken a wrong turn or two on evolution's highway. Maybe it's time to start looking back, investigating unexplored avenues of potential—or unexplored plunges of potential.”

  Kay took a moment or two to catch her meaning. “Oh,” he said, when he had. “You mean reversion to the sea—like the poor old dolphins.”

  Gerda nodded. “Not a bad analogy, my love,” she conceded, graciously. “Reptiles and mammals both evolved on land, participants in a selective process driven by the imperatives of land life—but both orders produced species that successfully re-adapted to life in the sea, where many of them preyed very successfully on the fish that had stayed there all along, and others became world-champion plankton-filterers. You're right—given that plants are so much cleverer than algae,
why shouldn't they produce species better adapted to sea life than the algae are?”

  Kay caught a glimpse of a patch of intellectual high ground and raced to occupy it. “Difficult for plants to work on the sea bed, though,” he said. “Chlorophyll only works close to the surface, so that's where the green algae are, and the food-chains that depend on them; the sea-bed food-chain thrives on the dead bits that sink down.”

  “Trees thrive on land,” Gerda said, nodding in agreement, “because there's considerable selective advantage in lifting foliage up, above the competition—but in the sea, living organisms can float. Even kelp, which often anchors itself to the bottom even in deep water, is basically a floater rather than a sturdy-boled thruster. Only corals build marine dendrites on a truly heroic scale.”

  “They used to,” said Kay, glumly. “Almost extinct now. You reckon that could change, though, with a little help from biotech? You think plants might be able to take over the niches that corals have left vacant? You think they might take the shallows back, at least? The forests drowned by rising sea-levels don't seem to be coping very well on their own, though, and the vast increase in swampland has been disastrous for serious economic activity.”

  “That,” said Gerda, “is because it's the wrong type of swampland. Angiosperm swamplands have always been precarious things, never capable of much in the way of versatility and aggressive expansion. Gymnosperms had a lot more practice at swamp life, especially in the days before the primal continent broke up and continental drift began to open up the deep trenches and push up the high mountains, so that much larger tracts of land dried out completely. Mother Gaia's drainage system didn't do the gymnosperms any favors, alas.”

  “Cycads!” Kay exclaimed, getting there at last. “I've heard good things about cycads, too. Primitive, but lots of untapped potential, according to the reports I've scanned. You think they might be able to take back the new shallows—and maybe, in time, the continental shelves—in a manner that will permit agricultural exploitation?”