Engineering Infinity (43 page)

“When such a bloom persists long
enough to fill the waters with life, the gasoline tree releases, or maybe
synthesizes, the millions of species that make up the mat. The mat traps
everything it can in that huge area of ocean, and drags it all to the centre,
where some of the biomass is shredded and put in the bone cavities, and nearly
all of it is oxidized for energy to fuel the construction of the bone towers,
which are, just as Captain Pao said, rockets.

“Those rockets have just
launched. A sampling of a few billion tons of Earthly life is on its way out
beyond the solar system, to wherever it may come down; at a guess, the bone
will crumble slowly into small pieces, each still pocketed with Earth life, and
most of it will just continue through space forever, but some small fraction
will rain down on many worlds as grains and bits, across perhaps as long as a
billion years. On already-living worlds, Earth’s genetic material will
introduce new possibilities; on worlds not yet alive, it will provide many
possible bases for a start. In any case, what we have just witnessed is as
natural as the swarming of bees, the blowing of cottonwood fluff, or the sudden
hatching of shrimp in dry salt lakes after a rainstorm fills them - just on
such a long cycle that spring, or the rain, doesn’t come very often. We may
have similar events from time to time, here or elsewhere. Now -”

Lars asked, “And what must we do
to prevent these eruptions?”

“What must we do to stop spring?”
Nicole said. “Or continental drift? Or beaver pond succession? Lars, a natural
process is a natural process; eventually we understand it and fit the way we
live around it. Unless you want to go down in history with the people who
controlled every forest fire, put levees on every river, and drained every
estuary to create beachfronts. You remember how
that
worked out.”

Letting the autorec pick up the
rest of the meeting, Stephanie edited her main story. Her file of possible
follow-on ideas grew and burgeoned like...
like the mat,
she thought.
Grab everything and throw it to the centre,
wrap it up for others or use it for propellant.

She didn’t always understand
Nicole’s conversations with the scientists, but she realized Nicole had at
least established her explanation of the gasoline trees as the one to beat.

Meanwhile, Lars, who had looked
sick and old at the start of the meeting, seemed to awaken and youthen by the
minute. He reminded Stephanie of the way she’d first seen him, down on the
floor playing with her and the other children, on the television explaining the
plan to cool the planet, defying mobs of protesters during his marriage to
Nicole - like the return of the hero she had committed her life to.

Except maybe
committing my life to a hero isn’t what I want to do. Except it might be.
Except...

The meeting wound down; on the
way out, Nicole touched her shoulder, gently, and murmured, “As the more
experienced wife-of-Lars, I want to suggest that you go straight to your cabin.
He’ll be in there fretting.”

“Didn’t take much experience to
know that. And thanks for everything.”

Back in the cabin, he was crying,
big hard wracking sobs, and she was holding him before she had time to think
what to do.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he
said. “I thought I’d lost you. Then afterward there wasn’t a spare private
second to tell you how glad I was you were alive.”

She held him close. “You must be
upset, too, that every plan you’ve made and everything you’ve done to tame the
planet is undone now. You have to start all over.”

He sank his pale fingers into her
dark curls and guided her face close to his, as if afraid he’d lose sight of
her. “Ten thousand interrelated things to put right, right away? Utter chaos where
there needs to be order? What’s not to like? I’ve been bored out of my mind
ever since the Rapid Sequestration Initiative turned out to work. But I was so
afraid I’d lost you. I didn’t know what I could do with my life if you weren’t
there.” He kissed her. “I’m declaring that there’s nothing to be done until the
science team reports, giving them six months, and ordering them to use it all.
You and I are going somewhere, somehow, to celebrate the start of another
lifetime of chaos and challenge, the best work there is.” He kissed her again,
slowly and tenderly, as if making sure he remembered. “So this might be our
longest vacation for a decade to come. Where do you want to go? What do you
want to do?”

“Surprise me,” she said.

Jonathan Strahan is editor of
more than forty books, including
The New Space Opera
and
The New Space Opera 2
(with Gardner Dozois),
Eclipse Three
,
Life on Mars
,
and
The Starry Rift
.

A three-time nominee for the
prestigious Hugo Award and two-time nominee for the World Fantasy Award, he is
also the editor of the
Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of
the Year
and
Eclipse
anthology series,
Swords and Dark Magic
(with Lou Anders);
The Locus Awards
(with Charles Brown);
Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle
;
Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling
;
The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson
;
Fritz
Leiber: Essential Stories
; four volumes of work by Jack Vance; and many
more.

Strahan has won the Locus Award
twice, the Aurealis Award twice (he is the only person to win for Best
Anthology), and the Ditmar Award six times. He is also a recipient of the Peter
McNamara Award for contributions to Australian science fiction.

In the 1990s he cofounded the
groundbreaking Australian semiprozine,
Eidolon
, and
edited
The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and
Fantasy
anthology series. He has been reviews editor for
Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field
since 2002. He lives on the west coast of Australia with his wife and two
daughters, and visits the United States regularly. His website is
www.jonathanstrahan.com.au
.