Tomorrow’s Heritage (2 page)

TODD realized he had read the same row of figures three times. His thoughts kept drifting away from his supervisors’ year-end predictions. Giving up on the reports, he looked at the other screens lining the bulkheads around him. Their displays tapped his own ComLink Corporation and rival telecom networks, plus the offerings of the entertainment companies leasing those outlets. Fiction and fact, frivolous to grimly serious, the monitors showed humañity laughing at itself, weeping over its agonies, struggling to survive. Dramas, comedies, news from Earth and space . . . a documentary on the Trans-Pacific war, on medicine’s fight against the neo-anthrax mutation and the rat invasions in the cities, on the damage wrought by the African volcanoes, on the “sports” tally of dead and injured in the controlled-violence arenas in South America and the Middle East.

And, of course, there was always politics. Campaigns like his brother’s were heating up in the races for seats on Protectors of Earth’s global council.

Todd cued the monitors, asking for a readout from the science satellites. ERS orbiters coordinated with ground and sea stations, painting Earth in a startling variety of colors and viewpoints. Some lenses showed red vegetation and yellow soil. Others traced foliage blight in angry blues or mapped pollution with brilliant greens and black. Civilian access to declassified military scanners converted the globe into bright orange danger areas and safe purple and white ones, where plague and radiation had abated enough to let life exist there once more. Other systems corrected to human vision norms. On those monitors, a beautiful, cloud-chased sphere floated in infinite blackness. Todd stared at those views a long time.

Ident numbers in the corners of the screens noted the sources for each scene. The science network borrowed from ComLink and other commercial chains, continually updating, checking, cross-filing. Twenty years ago, that hadn’t been the case. When the wars were at their worst, the monetary bases collapsing, national boundaries vanishing, new ones forming, the Death Years and the Chaos reached out into space, destroying man’s orbiting eyes. A saner policy had risen out of the ruins. Now treaties guaranteed neutrality, at least in orbit. The satellite networks maintained a friendly, peaceful rivalry. Still, Todd noted with approval that Saunder Enterprises’ ComLink net was reading ninety percent optimal. His competitors’ equipment and governmental tie-ins needed tune-ups or replacement as often as not. ComLink’s output was unquestionably the best. After the space wars, when he and his father had built ComLink, they had improved greatly on the systems the missiles had wrecked. The readouts showed the results.

Todd leaned back in his chair, smug, assessing. Vignetting and sidelap on the ERS terminals—quite acceptable. High and low orbiters and planetary stations working fine in tandem. Tireless and patient, his corporation kept watch over the world and over man, helping Earth communicate, educate itself, entertain itself, and take its own pulse. Navstar GPS and ground-based tracking systems regulated Earth’s business and pleasure transportation. Only military craft were masked against that guidance, their jammers confusing the scans. ERS inventoried oceans and fresh waters; crops; forests; animal and fish migration and harvest; the fossil, nuclear, tidal, wind, and geothermal fuel supplies and output. With methodical disinterest, satellites counted the catch in the Antarctic hill fisheries, syntha-food production, mining operations, blight, toxic dump seepage. Man-made changes on the maps entered the records beside avalanches and tsunamis and other events over which humanity had no control.

Thermal scans traced the extent of the Canadian, Siberian, and Scandian glacial breakouts. Drought regions, lands parched and needing the moisture bound up in that new ice, were marked. Floods, winds, missile strikes. On Earth’s night side, lenses penetrated the darkness, cataloging the glowing dots that were population centers. The Tangshan quake, like the Upper Baltic conflicts and some plague areas, left vast sections of. Earth lightless. On the day side, the enlarged Guinea Basin, a war aftermath, and the mid-continent engorgement of the Mississippi-Missouri Rivers caused by the New Madrid quake graphically demonstrated that man and nature could be equally cruel.

Looking at the immense, shallow lake on the face of old America, Todd felt a memory resurfacing. The family, together on a summer evening. One of the pleasant times, when Ward and Jael weren’t quarreling, for once, and when her parents weren’t picking at them all, increasing the friction. 2019—that was when they were living in the industrial towns rising out of the craters west of Chicago. Jael was holding seven-year-old Mariette on her lap, Todd remembered, and he remembered leaning on the chair, squeezing close to his mother, jealous of his sister’s privileges as the youngest. Pat, fourteen years old and almost grown up, was looking over Jael’s shoulder. Dad was sitting nearby, fussing over a design for one of his inventions. Jael’s velvety soft voice read to them from a recently published book, describing how the world she’d known as a girl had just been torn apart and reshaped.

“You know what an earthquake is, don’t you, Mari?” Mariette, drowsy and resisting sleep, nodded, trying not to suck her thumb.

Jael turned a page, and photos leaped at Todd. They were crude tri-di pictures, needing the still-to-be-created refinement of Ward Saunder’s holo-mode patent to make them fully realistic. Yet they had tremendous impact on an eleven-year-old’s imagination. Todd had gazed in morbid fascination at the camera’s portrait of the catastrophe. The Earth’s crust had shifted massively. Whole cities had been flattened into rubble, populations wiped out, fissures opened, highways ripped to pieces. The very land sank, forming an incredible depression across the continent’s heart. St. Louis and many other cities simply ceased to exist. Water lines rose thirty meters at Louisville and Cincinnati and other river cities as the mighty Mississippi-Missouri system reversed and rushed to fill the newly formed lake bed. The dammed waters continued to spread, creating a shallow lake hundreds of kilometers long, altering the map beyond recognition. The book Jael held had been issued to bring the intelligent reader up to date on this change.

“Geologists said it was lots worse than the 1811 quake,” Ward commented absently. “Tangshan’s probably going to cut loose sooner or later, too, over in China. Plenty of shaky areas around the world due for surprises. Wonder who gets it next?” he speculated, aware of the grief natural phenomena caused, but insatiably curious. Todd remembered looking at his father, absorbing the words, sharing his father’s inquisitive nature.

“Don’t frighten the children,” Jael said primly, cuddling Mariette closer.

Twenty-one years ago, yet the moment was vivid. Todd saw Pat’s face as they both grimaced over Jael’s protective remark. They weren’t children, and they weren’t scared. As if it were happening now, Todd felt the paper pages between his fingers, relived the amazement of years still earlier, when he had discovered that truth and fiction could be expressed in this form as well as on a vid screen. His mother’s silky shirt brushed his arm as she reached to turn those pages. Her perfume tickled his nose. Pat’s dark hair was close to Todd’s as they looked at the pictures. Pat pointed out the text under one photo. The voice that was destined to become one of the world’s most recognizable said, “They weren’t ready for it, were they? If they’d been prepared, more might have survived.”

“That’s right, Patrick.” Jael took the opportunity to point out a moral lesson. “You should always be ready for surprises, then you can handle them better.”

Todd had wondered then how one got ready for an earthquake. But his mother sincerely believed the theory, and she taught Pat to believe it, too. How were they going to handle the surprise Todd was about to hand them? Nothing in their experience—in human experience—would prepare them for the event.

His attention returned to the present. The ERS scans were showing Earth’s polar regions. The Arctic glaciers seemed smaller than last winter’s, so maybe that problem was finally easing. The Antarctic was nearing mid-summer, its weather as mild as it ever got. Alone of Earth’s continents, Antarctica had escaped the heavy missile strikes and toxic dumps and radiation during the Death Years and the Chaos. The renewed treaties of ‘91 and ‘21 had kept the bottom of the world neutral, just barely, a common ground preserved from destruction. Navstar tracked a supply plane crossing the glaciers, heading for the plateau’s Pole of Inaccessibility. Incoming for Saunder Enterprises Antarctic Enclave, maintaining that cryogenics facility’s contact with the world. The Enclave was a sub-glacial construction; there was little to see at its location, little to mark the place where thousands of lives were locked away in frozen sleep.

If only we’d had if operational before Dad . . .

Todd pushed the wish away. “Give me a view space-ward,” he cued the scans. “Pick up Goddard Colony and Lunar Base Copernicus.” Screens blinked. The huge lens carried by the sat platform ComLink supplied to the Global Science Council reached out and framed the Moon. Small detail was visible. Comp arrows locked in on the military base and the research center nearby. Goddard, though, was too distant to define well. Todd regarded the screens a moment, then canceled the comps’ effort to nail down the view precisely. He knew where Goddard was and didn’t need the arrows and grids to bracket it. Goddard Colony—that faint, glowing speck, proof of human courage and faith, even if most of its inhabitants scorned the wave of new mysticism preoccupymg much of Earth’s population. “Beautiful,” Todd whispered. “I wish Pat could see things this way and know how it is. Really see it.” He didn’t bother hoping the same for Jael. She had made her attitude clear. She wasn’t going to change. Pat, though, could be persuaded. He had to be persuaded.

“Give me Earthward view, eastern CNAU and oceanic environs.” The screen blinked again and drew from the scans of Geosynch Orbiter HQ. Lower satellites in Com-Link supplemented to provide a complete picture.

The Atlantic was dark and peaceful, a blue-black canyon dividing the continents. ERS deep-sea probes showed the mid-line trench and seabed geothermal and mining activities. A could-be hurricane was brewing off the Azores but didn’t look troublesome yet. Mapper scans drew lines, and idents marked the waters and landmasses, adding appropriate tags to everything. At a distance, the globe looked serene. Closer views showed irreparable scars. Atlantic Inlet was twice the size of old Chesapeake Bay. Monitors, relentlessly searching for data, showed the ruins under the waters. In the Caribbean, a scar left from the two-day conflict fifty years ago had separated Yucatan from the mainland. Todd was grateful that had happened before he was born. If it happened now, it would probably destroy the planetside haven he loved.

“Let’s see Saunderhome.” Zoom lenses took him in low over the Caribbean states of Central North American Union. The viewpoint narrowed to a cluster of natural and artificial islands, then tightened still more. The smoky haze which had obscured the area a week ago was dissipating. Apparently the minor volcanic eruption in the Windwards was over. Saunderhome was washed clean by tropical rain, a jewel-like tropical paradise of green vegetation and reefs and white sands connected by dainty bridges and underwater tunnels. Extreme close-up carried Todd in to twenty meters’ elevation. He could see striations on the reefs, tell deep from shallow waters, follow groundskeepers and security guards riding or walking along the paths or bridges. Security guards. They hadn’t needed them when they first lived at Saunderhome. They hadn’t needed that many servants, either. They had been content to rough it.

“Shift north. Eastern continent view.” Another collective blink from the monitors. Snow was falling through the Great Lakes, good for next spring’s crops. Humanity was long overdue for a favorable climate shift back to “normal,” whatever that was. None of the changes in this century had benefited mankind at all. Fog lay over CNAU from the Maritimes to the United Ghetto States enclaves in Michigan and Ohio and south below Atlantic Inlet. No problem. Like the infrared ERS sateffites, ComLink could penetrate these weather conditions. In theory, Todd knew fog had caused telecom problems years ago. But thanks to Ward Saunder’s genius, all that was history.

“You wouldn’t believe all we’ve done with your inventions, Dad,” Todd said. The monitors waited patiently for an order they could translate. “No, you probably would believe. In fact, you’d be enthralled. You were never afraid of the future. You’d think it was funny that they dreamed up a special name for family corporations like us. They call us quasi-nations. How’s that? Monitor bank two, show Saunder holdings planetside.”

There were enough displays to push the screens’ capacity. The system gauged the in-flow and split signals, faceting the screens to accept a series of shrunken views. Saunder Enterprises rarely bought or leased dwellings or offices or vacation estates; it traded Ward Saunder’s patents for financial power. As a result, Saunder enclaves dotted the globe. Offices, factories, syntha-food plants, fisheries, seabed mines, transit lines, telecom, energy . . . expanding every year. There were science-oriented SE enclaves, most of them churning out pure profit. SB Enclave was largely altruistic, operating at a loss. But it had gained favors from the contributing world governments for supplying that cryogenic storehouse: Saunderhome in the Caribbean; an Alpine mini-country of their own; a former billionaire’s office building and bombproof underground apartment complex in New York—Philadelphia; branch offices in New Washington, Yokohama, and twenty other locations around the planet.

“Monarch?” Todd hadn’t heard Dian come into the office. But he nodded and smiled, welcoming her now as she slid her tether line along the rail beside his chair. Her slender brown arm went around his shoulders.

“You mean, monarch of all I survey?” Todd returned her embrace. “Cancel and return to general ComLink net overview,” he said in a toneless programmer’s voice. The screens obeyed, once more displaying the standard fare. Todd looked up at Dian. “I’m just big brother’s eyes and ears in the sky, so he can pull Earth’s strings. No monarchs here.”