PART III

EARTH

1

Monica Beus was exhausted by the time Scott Coplon, her USGS guide, had led her to Kanab Point, here on the north side of the Grand Canyon. And that after a (reasonably) gentle one-mile hike from the off-road vehicle that had brought them almost all the way from the North Rim entrance station.

It was close to sunset — probably one of the best times of day to view the Canyon — and the light, coming in flat and low from a cloudless sky, filled the Canyon with dusty blue shadow. The layers in the rock shone yellow, orange, pink and red, the colours of fire.

Scott was a kid of thirty or so, his face hidden by a bushy black beard and thick Buddy Holly glasses. He was dressed, as she was, in a bright red survival suit and woolly hat. He asked now, “Are you okay?”

Now that, she thought, was a spectacularly dumb question, and she sat on a ledge of ancient, eroded sandstone and considered it. Not only was she being eaten up from the inside, not only had she become, without noticing it, a decaying old lady, but, according to the best of her information, some kind of dreadful global catastrophe was coming down. So: no, she was not okay, and never would be again.

Even if the quacks did say the bone disease she had contracted was a really “good” form of secondary cancer; even if the quacks still, absurdly, gave her a fifty-fifty chance of survival, despite the startling acceleration of her anatomy’s failure.

But it didn’t make a piece of difference as to what she had to do, to be the eyes and ears and scientific brain of the President of the United States, just a little longer.

Anyhow she let the kid off the hook. “I’m fine. Just let me catch my breath.”

He took a couple of steps closer to the rim. “You can smell it, even up here.”

“What?”

“The sulphur. And the ash. If you’re asthmatic—”

“I’m not asthmatic. Help me up.” She lifted her arm. “Give me a minute.”

“For what?”

She smiled. “To sight-see. I’ve never been out here before, to my shame.” And I sure as hell never will again.

He grinned and backed off. “Sure. I understand. This is why I got into this game, you know.”

“The scenery.”

“Uh huh. I get paid to be up here. Take all the time you want.”

She stepped forward, alone, her feet crunching on basalt fragments.

Jesus Christ, this was the Grand Canyon.

From here, on the northern rim, she could see the sweep of the land. She was in the middle of the Colorado Plateau, thousands of feet of rock laid down by the shallow seas and deltas that had once covered much of North America. On the horizon, to the south, she could see the smoothly swelling surface of the Plateau, flat and undulating, reminiscent of the sea which had given it birth. It was speckled with green, what looked like blades of grass spilling over the plateau walls. But each of those blades was a tree, a juniper or a canyon pine, each of them twenty or thirty feet tall.

That was the Plateau, magnificent in itself. But the Colorado River had just cut through the whole thing, as clean as a knife gouge, dynamic and unstable. And the complex channels and incisions had exposed, in the outcrops and walls, the layers of sedimentary rocks laid down in that vanished ocean. Looking around the fragmented landscape, her gaze could complete the lines of distinct layers, invisibly spanning the Canyon’s channels. And she could see where the eroding river waters had met stiffer resistance, from the older, deeper rocks; scree piles flared against the base of surviving plugs.

It was inhumanly vast. And yet she could see that this was a canyon, a channel cut into the softly swelling Earth. If this had been the Valles Marineris on Mars — compared to which the Canyon would have been just a tributary — it would have been so huge as to make its nature incomprehensible, and it wouldn’t have been nearly so striking. It was as if it had been placed here, this great wound in the land, with exactly the right dimensions to force a response from the human soul.

As the sun set, the colours in the Canyon walls turned to gold. The sky up to the zenith was already stained pink. The sun was scattering light from haze layers fifteen or twenty miles above sea level. LIDAR measurements, pulsed laser beams scattered from the haze layers, had confirmed that the Edinburgh event had spread dust and aerosol particles throughout the stratosphere, all across the middle latitudes of Earth.

The ozone layer was taking a beating from the chlorine injected up there. The meteorologists and climatologists and oceanographers were having fun predicting the impact on the atmosphere’s heat balance. A global cooling of maybe a half a degree. Acid rain, from all the sulphuric acid being created up there. Disruption to El Niño, in the equatorial Pacific, over the coming summer and fall.

Droughts in Australia. Heavy rain and waves on the coast of California. And so on.

And this, she thought, is evidently just the start.

The first star was already out, low in the east. Maybe it was Jupiter.

She knew if she dragged herself out of bed in the morning, she would see Venus, still bright enough to dazzle and cast shadows, surrounded by a halo from all the shit in the upper atmosphere.

Beautiful. Deadly.

Scott was pointing out some of the Canyon features to her. “…The peak over there is Mount Sinyala.” A crude cylindrical plug, with a flared skirt of smashed rock. “The channel that lies between Sinyala and these pinnacles in the foreground is the Colorado itself. The plateau you can see at the foot of Sinyala is called the Esplanade.” A cracked and shattered sheet. “It’s an erosional feature resting on one of the more resistant members of what we call the Supai Group of rocks. You can clearly see the contact between the Coconino Sandstone — that’s the lighter coloured stuff on top — and the Hermit Shale, the deeper red below.”

“Yes.”

“This is the western end of the Canyon. We’re a goodly way away from where the tourists come to roost, at the resort areas on the South Rim some way to the east of here. The landscape here is different. Older.” He pointed. “You can see cinder cones over here. Lava cascades.” He looked at her. “You know, you can tell the nature of the rocks, just by looking, just from the way they have eroded. The shales form slopes. The thick beds of limestone and sandstone form steep, almost vertical cliffs. And the Inner Gorge, at the very base of the Canyon, is a V-shaped groove that reaches down maybe a thousand feet to the river itself. Those are ancient rocks, igneous and metamorphic…”

She could see, now he described it, how the Canyon was a complex structure, channel cut within channel, Canyon within Canyon, each inner valley chiselled into harder, older rocks, all of it centred on the Inner Gorge, the narrowest valley cut into the oldest rock of all.

“Enough of the tourist stuff.” Now it was Monica’s turn to point. “Tell me about that.”

It was a plume of black smoke, rising from one of the incised channels.

Scott grinned. “You can see for yourself. One of those old cinder cones has just cracked open and started belching ash. We think a more significant event is on the way. We’ve recorded more seismic activity in the Canyon area in the last few weeks than in the previous couple of years. It’s actually very exciting; there are a couple of dozen guys from the Survey working the area right now…”

She let him run on. Right now the Administration was keen to keep enthusing scientists off the screens, but if this kid’s excitement was what motivated him to be up here and keep working and studying and gathering data, that was fine by her. The fact that what he was studying was liable to kill him, ultimately, was neither here nor there.