Aurora - страница 84

But for now it’s good-bye to the beaches, and indeed many a celebrated island of yore now lies deep under the waves. An entire world and way of life has disappeared with these fabled places, a lifeway that went right back to the beginning of the species in south and east Africa, where the earliest humans were often intimately involved with the sea. That wet, sandy, tidal, salty, sun-flecked, beautiful beach life: all gone, along with so much else, of course; animals, plants, fish. It’s part of the mass extinction event they are still struggling to end, to escape. So much has been lost that will never come back again, that the loss of the joy of the relatively few humans who were lucky enough to live on the strand, who combed the beaches, and fished, and rode the waves, and lay in the sun—that’s nothing much to grieve for, given everything else that has been lost, all the suffering, all the hunger, all the death, all the extinctions. Most of the mammal species are gone.

Still, it was a way of life much beloved, and still remembered in art and song, image and story—still legendary, still a lost golden age, vibrating at some level below thought, there in their salty blood and tears, in the long, curled waves of DNA that still break inside them all.

So there are people bringing that back. They are bringing the beaches back.

These people are one wing or element of the Earthfirsters. Tree huggers, space haters, they’re a mixed bag. Many of them renounce not just space, but also the many virtual, simulated, and indoor spaces that so many Terrans seem happy to inhabit. To the Earthfirsters these people are in effect occupying spaceships on the land, or have moved inside their screens or their heads. So many people stay indoors all the time, it seems crazy to Freya, even though she herself still cowers in the shelter of built spaces every waking moment. But she has an excuse, she thinks, having been locked in all her life, while the Terrans have no excuse: this place is their home. Their disregard for their natural inheritance, their waste of the gift given them, is part of what causes her to gnash her teeth, and drive herself to windows, even into open doorways, there to stand trembling on the threshold, terrified, willing her body to stop clenching, to step out. Willing herself to change. Finding in that moment of liminal panic that sometimes you can’t make yourself do even the things you most want to do, when fear seizes you by the throat.

So, but these beach lovers are apparently like her in this opinion or belief about how to regard Earth. They are kindred souls, perhaps. And they are expressing their love of that lost world of the seashore, by rebuilding it.

Freya listens amazed as Badim and Aram bring into their compound a short old woman, brown-skinned, silver-haired, who describes her people and their project.

“We do a form of landscape restoration called beach return. It’s a kind of landscape art, a game, a religion—” She grins and shrugs. “It’s whatever. To do it, we’ve adapted or developed several technologies and practices, starting with mines, rock grinders, barges, pumps, tubing, scoops, bulldozers, earthmovers, all that kind of thing. It’s heavy industry at first. A lot of landscape restoration is. We’ve used this technology all over the world. It involves making arrangements with governments or other landholders, to get the rights to do it. It works best in certain stretches of the new coastlines. They’re mostly wastelands now, intertidal zones without being suited for that. Being amphibious”—she grins—“is weird.”

They nod. Freya says, “So what do you do, exactly?”

In these new tidal zones, the woman explains, they proceed to make beaches that are as similar to those that went away as can be arranged. “We bring them back, that’s all. And we love it. We devote our lives to it. It takes a couple of decades to get a new beach started, so any given beach person usually works on only three or four in a lifetime, depending on how things go. But it’s work you can believe in.”

“Ah,” Freya says.

It’s labor intensive, the woman continues. There is more work to do than there are workers. And now, even though the starfarers are controversial and in trouble—or rather, precisely because they are controversial and in trouble—the beach makers are offering to take them on. Meaning the entire complement of them.

“We can all go?” Freya says. “We can stay together?”

“Of course,” the woman says. “There are about a hundred thousand of us, and we send out working teams to various stretches of coastline. Each project needs about three or four thousand people during the most intensive phases. Some people move on when their part of a project is done, so the life can be a bit nomadic. Although some of them stick to the beaches they’ve made.”

“So you would take us in,” Badim says.

“Yes. I’m here to make that offer. We keep our whole thing a bit under the radar, you have to understand. It’s best to avoid political complications as much as possible. So we don’t go out of our way to publicize our projects. Our deals are discreet. We try to stay out of the news. I bet you can see why!”

She laughs as Aram and Badim and Freya all nod.

“Look,” she says, “there’s a political element to all this, which you need to understand. We don’t like the space cadets. In fact a lot of us hate them. This idea of theirs that Earth is humanity’s cradle is part of what trashed the Earth in the first place. Now there are many people on Earth who feel like it’s our job to make that right. It’ll be our job for generations to come. And now we’ve seen that you’re part of the damage they’ve done. It took us a while to get that, but when you punched that guy it became very obvious.” She laughs at the look on Freya’s face. “But look, it’s all right! We’ve taken in quite a few people who got in trouble by resisting that kind of shit one way or another. So, adding five hundred lost souls to one of our teams won’t be any big deal. You’ll blend in, and you can keep your heads down, do your work, and make your contribution. We can use the help, and you’ll have a way to go forward.”

Freya tries to take all this in and comprehend it. Beach building? Landscape restoration? Can it be? Would they like it?

Freya says, “Badim, will I like this?”

Badim smiles his little smile. “Yes, I think you will.”

The others are not so sure. After the woman leaves, there is a long discussion, and at a certain point Freya is asked to go out with an exploratory group and take a look at one of these projects and see what she thinks.

This will of course mean going outdoors.

Freya gulps.

“Yes,” she says. “Of course.”

Again they fly. This time it seems their Chinese hosts might be happy to see them go. More rooms and tunnels, planes and trams, trains and cars. Travel on Earth is not dissimilar to moving around in the spokes, although the g stays constant. They keep a low profile. Herded from one room to the next. Somewhere on Earth you go indoors, and move around in differently shaped rooms, which either move or don’t, and the next time you go outdoors (if you do!) you are on the other side of the planet. This is so strange. Looking out of a plane window at the ocean planet below, under its layer of clouds, Freya resolves to master her fear, to make her body obey her will. She is tired of being afraid. Sometimes, you get sick of yourself, you change.

A west-facing coast somewhere. They tell her where and she promptly forgets. She hasn’t heard of it before. Temperate latitude, Mediterranean climate. Yellow sandstone bluffs jump right out of the white-edged sea. Used to be beaches at the foot of these bluffs, they are told, beaches so wide they held car races on the flat wet sand, back when cars were first invented. It was a morning’s walk from bluff to water, their guide says, and all flat sand. Laying it on a bit thick. Point of stories however being that there is a lot of sand still out there in the shallows. Some of it has been swept south by currents into a giant underwater canyon that runs from just offshore to the edge of the continental shelf, but even that canyon bottom is a now a kind of underwater river of sand flowing down toward the abyssal plain, a river of sand that can be vacuumed up in tubes onto barges, barged over to the land, brought into the estuaries of the little rivers that break the long curving line of bluffs, and put there. Old sand for new beaches, located right at the new tideline, up in the estuaries. They’re also trucking in giant granite boulders from inland, some to drop offshore and make reefs, others to drop at the foot of the bluffs to establish a new strand on, others to grind down into new sand, gravel, shingle, cobble—whatever type of rock that used to be there on the shore. It takes certain mixes of minerals to make a beach that will last, to make it nice. Also certain kinds of reefs offshore. Millions of tons of sand and rock have to be moved and installed. There is so much their guides want to tell them, these guides all sun-browned, hair crisped by sun and salt, eyes aglow.

The starfarers are tired by their journey—jet-lagged, they have been taught to call it—out of synch with the planet’s rotation, diurnal rhythm, circadian rhythm—an odd malady that they are learning to recognize. After a first tour of this coastline, driven around in a car on roads along the top of the bluff, then around the shores of the estuary, with many stops to get out and look (but Freya does not get out), they are taken to an inn on the bluff’s edge. The inn seems to be a modest little conference center, with bungalows around a main building. Freya gets out when the car is parked inside a garage, and makes her way up to the lobby, then, in a controlled dash under a walkway, hustles to her assigned bungalow, next to the one occupied by Badim and Aram. Once she is settled, she looks out her open doorway to see the two old men stretched out on reclining chairs, in the shade of an overhang extending from their bungalow, looking out at the ocean. The overhang is called a ramada, they have been told.