Bowring said grimly, ‘Well, the damage is being done. Dr Abrahams, I’m sure you can imagine the kind of effects the spin-up is having on this world as a whole. Every Earth is essentially a ball of liquid: the iron core and the mantle. The solid crust is only a fine rind laid over that liquid interior. Under the continents the crust is maybe sixty miles thick, compared with the Earth’s radius of four thousand miles. It’s as if the Earth is a big round crème br?lée.
‘Because of its spin – I mean its regular, standard-issue twenty-four-hour spin – every Earth is deformed, flattened slightly, not quite a sphere, bulging at the equator. Normally this isn’t a problem. And the natural state of things is actually for the spin to be changing anyhow, slowing very gradually over geological time. The solid crust has the chance to adjust to the changes of deformation.
‘That’s not the case here. In the few years since the spin-up has begun, the crust’s deformation, at the equator at least, has increased by around eight miles. That might not sound much, but the ocean-floor crust is only about three miles thick. And so—’
Abrahams traced the jagged lines that spanned and circled the oceans on the basketball globe. ‘Fractures in the sea bed.’
‘I’m afraid so. There are natural faults where the sea floor is spreading, such as down the spine of the Atlantic, and where the oceanic tectonic plates butt up against the continents, such as around the coasts of the Pacific. Now these faults are cracking, opening up, and you get quakes and volcanism. If they’re underwater, you can get tremendous tsunamis that batter the coastal areas—’
‘The smell of sulphur in the air.’ Abrahams smiled sadly. ‘The aroma of Yellowstone. Wonderful sunsets. Symptoms of a world coming apart at the seams. And bad news for anybody like me, who only came here looking for a spot of quiet farming.’
Bowring looked impatient, uncomfortable. ‘I must keep stressing that this is still largely guesswork. Extrapolation. We have so little data … This is not the Datum, which is, or anyhow was before Yellowstone, saturated by survey gear of all kinds. Networks of seismometers, for instance. I myself worked at the Large Aperture Seismic Array in Montana, an exquisite instrument. And of course the climate was monitored by ships, planes, satellites, as well as weather stations with a global coverage. Here we have only our one observation platform in the Cowley, a few pinprick settlements like yours, Dr Abrahams – forgive me – and a handful of observations from the instruments we can emplace. We need gravimeters to measure the planetary morphological distortion, line-of-sight lasers to measure the distortion directly.’
Jha said, ‘I know you’re doing your best, Ken. As we all are.’
Bowring grunted, visibly unhappy. ‘At least we can do something. I myself was trained up properly, before Yellowstone. But the Datum science institutions have never recovered from the volcano. The next generation of scientists will be amateurs, if that. Then we’d have no hope of understanding something like this at all.’
‘So,’ said Abrahams, ‘we’ve talked about the what. Have you got any closer to understanding why this is happening?’
‘Well, we’re asking the question, at least. Come see …’
The silver beetle was, self-evidently, dead.
It lay on its back on a table, the gas pods removed from its green underbelly, its sections of silvery armour carefully detached and laid aside, its carapace of what looked like black ceramic sliced through and peeled back to expose a greenish, pulpy mass within.
‘I have to emphasize we didn’t kill this thing,’ Bowring said. ‘We found this corpse—’
‘Or this inert unit,’ Jha corrected him. ‘There’s no consensus yet over whether these creatures are alive or not.’
‘Very well. We found him in the big exhausted mine working you call the Gallery. Evidently inactive. We’ve no idea what happened to him, or even how long he’s been there; we’ve no idea how processes of decay work with these creatures.’
‘Or even if he’s a he,’ Jha said dryly.
‘True enough. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize. Especially when you see one standing upright, with that eerie mask-like face turned to you.’
‘You settlers call them “beetles”,’ Jha said to Abrahams. ‘I’ve heard the scientists call them “assemblers”. The marines under our Colonel Wang are calling them “bugs”.’
‘But we don’t know what they call themselves because they won’t talk to us,’ Bowring said, sounding exasperated. ‘We believe they are capable of communication, Dr Abrahams. Well, that must be true for them to be able to accomplish such complex feats of engineering as the viaducts. We believe they are individuals; they exhibit individualistic behaviour – such as the first ones discovered by the children here, who began trading rock samples for bits of beetle jewellery. You could regard that as a kind of preliminary communication, if you like. Pre-symbolic. You could even see it as a kind of play.’
‘Play?’ Abrahams mused. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’