Baker, Kage - Lemuria Will Rise

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Lemuria Will Rise!

by Kage Baker

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First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May 1998

Fictionwise Contemporary

Science Fiction

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Somewhere God has a celestial Polaroid of me, standing there in the Dunes with a painted

clamshell in one hand and a sprig of _Oenothera hookeri _ssp. _sclatera_ in the other, staring

heavenward with a look of stupefied amazement. When He needs a mood lightener, He takes a look at

that picture and laughs like hell.

It was 1860 and the Company had sent me to Pismo Beach. The place was not yet the vacation

destination of Warner Brothers toons; the little town of cottages and motels wouldn't exist for

another generation or two; but it did feature all the clams one could eat, and all the sand too.

I wasn't there for the clams, though.

If you stand on the beach at Pismo and look south, you can see twenty-odd miles of shore

stretching away to Point Sal, endless lines of breakers foreshortened into little white scallops

on blue water. The waves roll in on a wide pale beach toward a green line of cypress forest,

rising on low sandhills to your left. Beyond them, and further south, rise the Dunes.

You never saw anything so pure of line and color in your life, though the lines shift

constantly and the color is an indefinable shade between ivory and pink, or possibly gold. Even on

a grey day they glow with their own light, pulsing as cloud shadows flow across them.

Beautiful, though I couldn't see how anything could be growing out there; and yet this was

where I was supposed to find a rare variant of Evening Primrose.

Everywhere else in California, _Oenothera hookerii_ is a lemon-yellow flower. In 1859,

however, a salmon-pink subspecies was reported, growing only in a certain place in these very

Dunes, and a single sample collected and preserved. Now, Evening Primrose Oil from the yellow

flower has a number of recognized medical uses, such as being the only substance known to help

sufferers of Laurent's Syndrome, that terrible crippler of the 21st century. Thanks to a unique

and complex protein, it helps retard the decay of those oh-so-important genito-urinary nerve

sheaths afflicted by Laurent's. Analysis of the only surviving sample of the pink variety showed

it to have had an even _more _unique and complex protein, which would probably _stop _the decay of

the nerve sheaths entirely, bringing bliss and continence to those suffering from the Syndrome.

Unfortunately for them, it will be extinct by their time, long since destroyed by the

ravages of the offroad vehicles of the 20th century. Interestingly enough, Laurent's Syndrome and

its attendant neurovascular damage occurs most frequently in people who spend a lot of time with

their reproductive organs suspended over internal combustion engines -- such as the ones that

power dune bikes. Mother Nature giving a rousing one-fingered salute to offroad enthusiasts, I

suppose.

Not my job to judge -- I was only there to gather samples, test them for the suspected

properties, and (if they tested positive) secure live plants for the greenhouses of my Company,

Dr. Zeus Inc. Dr. Zeus operates out of the 24th century and makes a pretty penny, let me tell you,

out of miracle medical cures obtained by time travel.

So I shouldered my pack, settled my hat more firmly on my head and set off down the beach,

keeping to the hard-packed sand and splashing through the surf occasionally. There were clams just

below the surface of the sand, massed thick as cobblestones. They were big, too, and beautifully

danger-free: no sewers yet dumping _E. Coli_, no cracked pipes leaking petroleum surfactant, no

nuclear power plants cooking the seawater. In fact there weren't even any railroads through here,

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