Evolution

"Of what, the eruption, the terrorists?… Excited-scared right now. That could change."

"Yeah. Alyce, listen." Joan leaned closer. "The Rabaul curfew the police imposed on us" — officially the line was that the ash from Rabaul, mixed with forest fire debris from further away, was mildly toxic — "it’s not the full story."

Alyce nodded, her lined face hard. "Let me guess. The Fourth Worlders."

"They have planted smallpox bombs around the hotel. So they claim."

Alyce’s face showed exquisite disgust. "Oh, Jesus. It’s 2001 all over again." She sensed Joan’s hesitant mood. "Listen to me. We can’t give up because of those assholes. We have to go on with the meeting."

Joan glanced around the room. "We’re already under pressure. It took an act of courage for most of the participants to come here at all. We were under attack even at the airport. If the attendees get wind of this smallpox scare… Maybe the mood is too flaky for, you know, the Bull Session to start tonight."

Alyce covered Joan’s hand with her own; her palm was dry and callused. "It’s never going to get any easier. And your Bull Session is the whole point, remember." She reached out and took Joan’s soda away from her. "Get up. Do it now."

Joan laughed. "Oh, Alyce—"

"On your feet."

Joan imagined Alyce jollying some timid student of chimps or baboons into the dark dangers of the bush, but she complied. She kicked off her shoes. And, with Alyce’s help, she clambered on to a coffee table.

She was overwhelmed by a self-conscious absurdity. With her conference literally under attack, how could she think she could get up on her hind legs and lecture an audience of her peers about how to save the planet? But here she was, and people were already staring. She clapped her hands until a quorum was turned her way.

"Guys, I apologize," Joan began, hesitantly, "but I need your attention. We’ve worked hard all day, but I’m afraid I’m not going to let up on you now.

"We’re here to discuss mankind’s impact on the world against the background of our evolutionary emergence. We’ve assembled here a unique group, cross-disciplinary, international, influential. Probably nobody alive knows more about how and why we got into this mess than we do, here tonight. And so we have an opportunity — maybe unique, probably unrepeatable — to do something more than just talk about it.

"I’ve had an additional purpose, a covert purpose, in calling you together. I want to use this evening as an extra session — an unusual session — if it goes the way I hope, a session that may spark off an entirely new thread. A new hope." She felt embarrassed at this unscientific language, and there were plenty of pursed lips and raised eyebrows. "So charge your glasses and vials and tubes, find somewhere to sit, and we’ll begin."

And so, in this nondescript hotel bar, as the conference attendees settled on dragged-over chairs, stools, and tabletops, she began to talk about mass extinction.

Joan smiled. "Even paleontologists, like me, understand cooperation and complexity. Papa Darwin himself, toward the end of Origin of Species, came up with a metaphor that sums up the whole thing." Feeling awkward, she read from a scrap of paper. "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by the laws acting around us…"

She put down the paper. "But right now that entangled bank is in trouble. You don’t need me to spell it out for you.

"We are undoubtedly in the middle of a mass extinction. The specifics are heartbreaking. In my lifetime the last wild elephants have disappeared from the savannahs and forests. No more elephants! How will we ever be able to justify that to our grandchildren? In my lifetime, we have already lost a quarter of all the species extant in the year 2000. If we keep going at the current rate, we will destroy some two-thirds of the species extant in 1900 by the end of this century. The event’s severity already puts it up there with the previous big five of Earth’s battered history.