Helliconia Summer - Brian W. Aldiss [550]
A drop of only a few degrees had been enough to throw the intricate mechanisms of climatic control out of gear. The nuclear blast had induced in the living biosphere – in Gaia, the Earth mother – a state of shock. For the first time in epochs, Gaia met a brute force she could not accommodate. She had been raped and all but murdered by her sons.
For hundreds of millions of years, Earth’s surface had been steadily maintained within the narrow extremes of temperature most congenial to life – maintained by an unwitting conspiracy between all living things in conjunction with their parent world. This despite increases in the sun’s energy, causing dramatic changes in the constitution of the atmosphere. The regulation of the amount of salt in the sea had been maintained at a constant percentage of 3.4. If that had ever risen to a mere 6 percent, all marine life would have ceased. At that percentage of salinity, cell walls disintegrate.
The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere had similarly been maintained at a steady 21 percent. The percentage of ammonia in the atmosphere had also been maintained. The ozone layer in the atmosphere had been maintained.
All these homeostatic equilibria had been maintained by Gaia, the Earth mother in whom all living things, from sequoias to algae, whales to viruses, had their being. Only mankind had grown up and forgotten Gaia. Mankind had invented its own gods, had possessed those gods, had been possessed by them, had used them as weapons against enemies, and against their own inner selves. Mankind had enslaved itself, in hate as much as love. In that madness of isolation, mankind invented formidable weapons of destruction. In committing genocide, it almost slew Gaia.
She was slow to recover. One striking symptom of her illness was the death of trees. Those abundant organisms, which had spread from the tropical rain forests to the northern tundras, were killed by the radioactivity and an inability to photosynthesise. With the disappearance of trees, a vital link in the homeostatic chain was broken; the homes they provided for a myriad of life forms were lost.
Conditions of cold prevailed for almost a thousand years. Earth lay in a chill catalepsy. But the seas lived.
The seas had absorbed much of the large clouds of carbon dioxide released by the nuclear holocaust. The carbon dioxide remained trapped in the water, retained in deep ocean circulation and not to be released for centuries. The ultimate release initiated a period of greenhouse warming.
As had happened before, life came forth from the seas. Many components of the biosphere – insects, microorganisms, plants, man himself – had survived, thanks to isolation, freak winds, or other providential conditions. They again became active, as white gave place to green. The ozone layer, shielding living cells from lethal ultraviolet, reestablished itself. Once more, as the firn melted, the pipe of separate instruments reached towards orchestral pitch.
By 5900, better conditions were evident. Antelope sprang among low thorn trees. Men and women muffled themselves in skins and trudged north after the glaciers.
At night, those humbled revenants huddled together for comfort and gazed upwards at the stars. The stars had scarcely changed since the time of paleolithic man. It was the human race which had changed.
Whole nations had gone forever. Those enterprising people who had developed mighty technologies and had struck out first for the planets and then for the stars, who had forged clever weapons and legends – those peoples had wiped themselves out. Their sole heirs were the sterile androids working on the outer planets.
Races came forth who, under an earlier dispensation, could be regarded as losers. They lived on islands or in wildernesses, at the tops of mountains or on untamed rivers,