especially the one that covered the Arctic Ocean. Cold, fresh water poured out through the Davis Strait into the North Atlantic, short-circuiting the Atlantic Conveyor—that part of the globe-circulating currents that brought warm water north from the tropics, keeping New England and Northern Europe livable.
The last time that happened was twelve thousand years ago. The planet was warming, the ice sheets of the Pleistocene were retreating, and suddenly the ice collapsed—quite possibly as the result of a small asteroid impact—and fresh water poured into the Atlantic. The Earth plunged back into a short-lived ice age known today as the Younger Dryas. The megafauna of North America—mammoth and mastodon and short-faced bear and countless other species—abruptly went extinct. Human communities known as the Clovis people, who’d crossed in skin boats along the edge of the ice from Europe hunting seals, were wiped out as well, or forced to migrate to the American Southwest. The renewed cold and drought may well have stimulated the growth of agriculture in the near East when climactic change led to starvation among hunter-gatherer cultures.
The same thing was happening today. This time, however, instead of Clovis spear points and skin boats, we had the space elevator and orbital solar arrays. The North Hemisphere Reclamation Project had been reflecting sunlight and beaming high-energy microwaves onto the ice for well over a century now, but carefully. The Commonwealth didn’t want to eliminate the ice entirely; that would toss us back into the bad old days of the pre-ice twenty-first century, when cities like Miami, D.C., New York, and London all were in danger of being swallowed up entirely or in part by the rising sea levels. The idea was to gradually increase the temperatures of both the ice sheets and the cold North Atlantic until a comfortable balance was struck, a balance that could be indefinitely maintained by the Commonwealth’s NHRP and applied global climate engineering. It was the biggest-scale piece of applied engineering ever attempted, and the one that promises to affect a larger percentage of Earth’s population than any other by far.
And there’s just a chance that it killed Paula.
Oh, the theory is largely discredited now after some four centuries of study—the idea that high-frequency microwaves can cause everything from cancer and Alzheimer’s to high blood pressure and stroke. There’s never been a provable link, but the neo-Ludds and other anti-space groups often trot out various statistics that show increases in those conditions when they started beaming microwaves down from Geosynch along with reflected visible light. Paula and I were out on the fringes of the beam, which should have been diffuse enough not to cause a problem.
Still, sometimes I wonder how much I have in common with some of the neo-Luddite crazies. It would be so easy to blame the NHRP and its synchorbital microwave arrays for my pain.
“You know, Doc,” Joy said gently, emphasizing the title, “there’s stuff you can do for that. Nanomeds and neuroengineering and all of that.”
I nodded, but said nothing. Of course there’s stuff that can be done, just as we can block the doloric receptors in the brain and switch off physical pain. Grief is just chemicals in the system, same as love and anger and any other emotion you care to name. You lose a loved one, and the pituitary gland at the base of the brain secretes adrenocorticotrophin hormone—ACTH—which is part of the fight-or-flight response. Among other things, ACTH acts on the adrenal glands, perched on top of the kidneys, to release a cascade of reactions that lead to the production of a steroid hormone called cortisone.
Normally, cortisone switches off the production of ACTH, but if the stress, the grief, continues, cortisone levels rise … and rise … and rise, eventually reaching ten or twenty times their normal levels.
And that does all sorts of nasty things, among them shutting down our thalamus and switching off the production of leukocytes. No white blood cells, no way to fight bacteria, viruses, and even precancerous cells.
There’s also CRF—corticotrophin releasing factor. That is a stress-related neurotransmitter and peptide hormone that shoots sky high with the loss of a loved one. It stimulates the production of ACTH, and can lead to a number of truly nasty conditions, including major depression. You find elevated levels of CRFs in the spinal fluid of most suicides.
I’d gone through therapy after Paula’s death—been required to do it, I should say. They’d given me the option of nanomeds—including CRF nanoblockers—to kill the emotional pain associated with my memories of Paula. Problem was, I didn’t want to lose Paula. I know it sounds crazy, but the memories, and the emotional pain connected with them, were all I had left, and I didn’t want to give them up.
So I went on a nanomed routine aimed at boosting my immune response, circulatory support, and anticarcinogen ’bots. Treating the symptoms rather than the cause, yeah, but at least I wouldn’t die of grief, as a lot of other people still do. As for the grief itself, well, lots of other people were able to get through it, had been getting through it since long before nanomeds and thalamic receptor blocking. I would get over it. Eventually.
In the meantime, I had my career in the Hospital Corps, and I had Joy, and if I occasionally felt overwhelmed by grief or by those nightmare memories of helplessness when Paula had her stroke, well, that was all part of the territory, as my father likes to say. He’s senior VP of research and development for General Nanodynamics, and he’s the one who suggested I go into the Hospital Corps in the first place. Out on the frontier, interacting with newfound cultures and civilizations, that’s where Humankind will learn new technologies, develop new nanopharmaceuticals, and make new fortunes.
That was the original idea, anyway. I’d long since given up on making fortunes—you don’t enter military service with that as your goal—but I think Spencer Carlyle still had hopes for his Navy med-tech son.
Too bad. I hadn’t been home since shortly after Paula’s death.
“C’mon,” Joy said, grabbing my arm and tugging me closer to her. “We’re here to have fun.”
Yeah … fun. Specifically, losing ourselves for a few hours in the Hilton’s Free Fall … a combination restaurant and microgravity swimming sphere that’s a bit on the pricey side, but well worth it. We managed to go there once every few months, for celebrations, as often as the budget allowed. And this was a celebration. We’d survived the assault on Capricorn Zeta … and while I was under an official cloud, I hadn’t been court-martialed.
At least, not yet.
We’d been to the Free Fall before. Hell, the first time Joy and I had had sex with each other had been up there, in that shimmering blue sphere of water suspended in microgravity.
We weren’t here for swimming this time. We entered the rotating sphere at one pole, in zero-gravity, the interior rotating around us. A human hostess met us, and led us down along the curving deck through exotic tropical foliage to a table between sky and water, with every step taking us into a higher G level until we reached our table near the equator.
Directly overhead, the big, ten-meter hydrosphere flashed and rippled blue-green in the constantly shifting beams of sunlight, hovering at the center of the fifty-meter hollow globe rotating around it. Where we sat, the turning of the main hab sphere generated four-tenths of a gravity, about the same as on Mars, and a transplas viewall section in the deck showed the stars and Earth sliding past beneath, making a complete circuit once every twenty-some seconds.
A human waitress arrived to take our drink orders. That’s one reason the place is so expensive, of course—human waitstaff instead of robots. In keeping with the jungle theme of the place, they wore either skin nano or animated tattoos—I couldn’t tell which—that gave their skin constantly shifting dapplings
