Dust by Nonya Business

Author:Nonya Business
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-03-17T23:08:40.789000+00:00

DAY 67

The news from Darwin II's chemosensors went back through space station Alpha, shot through a nerve system of satellite relays into news centers and notepads around the entire circumference of the planet, and brought almost no response at al .

On an ordinary day, hints of life on (or, rather, in) Enceladus would have been profoundly inspiring to some, simply profane to others; but today it was merely an irrelevant oddity, matched as it was against the dawning realization that the crisis criers might have been right after all and that all accomplishment, all discovery-the labor of centuries-would, in the end, count for nothing if the discoverers and the laborers were themselves doomed.

A kind of shock state, or numbness, was settling upon humanity's nerve endings, on Enceladus, and humanity itself, on Earth. The sensory pleasures of discovery were suddenly no more relevant to the world than fine dining was to the violently il . Enceladus became a footnote on the internet. Nothing more. It was dwarfed by video footage of oil tankers, heavy with cargo, lying low in the water off Manhattan and Long Island. The captains claimed that fear of mite contamination prevented them from docking; but as dwindling gas supplies reduced traffic on the Long Island Expressway to, mercifully, one third its normal volume, and as cars formed lines more than two blocks long at every gas station, the net and the airwaves came alive with speculation that if the captains were truly afraid, they would simply have turned their ships around. They were, in the opinions of most observers, waiting for diminishing supply and increasing demand to drive the wholesale price of their cargo up high enough, wherever that magic figure-"high enough"-might be.

Though no one had officially closed the borders of Long Island, ship and truck traffic, and hence delivery of fuel and food, was becoming increasingly sporadic. The traffic on the Robert Moses Bridge, spanning Long Island Sound, was light and unusually orderly, limited almost exclusively to cars and minivans. Most of the vehicles were heading away from the island, and a few were loaded down with camping equipment. As the 81st Airborne soap-bombed Queens County and the price of milk, when it could be found, soared to pornographic heights, Long Islanders-a growing number of them-were beginning to suspect the real scope of the breakdown, and by the hundreds, by the thousands, they were now hauling up stakes and seeking the imagined sanctuary of the New England woods, where they could go fishing and camping until the crisis blew over and life returned to normal.

Their car radios and notepads told of riots and communications blackouts in India, Thailand, and parts of Africa. In Japan, where every hour of every day, bil ions of dollars flowed through businesses and banks, a major food shortage had wiped clean, as if it never existed, 26 percent of the nation's gross national product. For the recovery effort, a huge glut of cash was drawn back into Tokyo, halting Japanese investment elsewhere in the global marketplace.

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