Studying all this, Aram points out that the true artificial intelligence is the actuarial long-term study; no human could ever see these things. This particular AI has made a compelling case. Suggestive, plausible, persuasive, probable, compelling: scientists’ linguistic scale for evaluating evidence is still the same, Aram says, and it tops out with quite a strong word, really: to compel. People do it because they are compelled to. Reality makes them do it. The urge to live makes them do it.
But there is another effect, almost the opposite of the sabbatical, and just as strong, if not stronger: earthshock. People come back to Earth, perfectly healthy on arrival, and die of something without warning. Sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what exactly did it, which adds to the fear of the syndrome, of course. Quick decline, earthshock, terrallergenic; these names contain within themselves the terrible news that the phenomenon they refer to is not well understood, an effect with unknown causes. Names like this reveal the ignorance in the name itself: the Big Bang. Cancer. Quick decline. Any disease ending with the suffix -itis or -penia. Et cetera. So many ignorant names.
So, the returned starfarers, having missed their own sabbaticals by some two hundred and fifty years, are now dying of earthshock, it seems. Even when causes can be found for any individual case, it’s suspicious that the causes have cropped up so soon after their return. Hard to believe they would have happened in the ship, in hibernation or not. No, something is going on. Something they will either survive or they won’t.
Meanwhile, living on this big crazy planet that still scares Freya out of her wits, what to do? What to do? At this point she could not be more miserable.
A week or more of this misery drags on before Badim comes to her and answers her question So what are we going to do? as if only a second has passed since it burst out of her.
“We go to the beach!” he announces cheerily.
“What do you mean?” Freya demands.
For of course there are no beaches. Sea level rose twenty-four meters in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries of the common era, because of processes they began in the twenty-first century that they couldn’t later reverse; and in that rise, all of Earth’s beaches drowned. Nothing they have done since to chill Earth’s climate has done much to bring sea level back down; that will take a few thousand more years. Yes, they are terraforming Earth now. There’s no avoiding it, given the damage that’s been done. In this the common era year 2910, they are calling it a five-thousand-year project. Some say longer. It’ll be a bit of a race with the Martians, they joke.
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!”