The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Over the central valley. Habitat corridors looked like wide hedgerows, separating giant rectangles of crops and orchards. A green and yellow checkerboard. Farther east hills erupted out of orchards; the first rise to the Sierra, now a dark wall ahead. The airship rose with the land, floating over wild oak forests and then evergreen forests, with steep-sided canyons etched deeply through the hills. Snow ahead on the highest peaks.

  Art brought the airship down onto Tuolumne Meadows, a high expanse of snow and trees, punctuated by clean granite domes. The roads to it were still closed, they seemed to have it entirely to themselves. Along with a family of wolverines.

  The airship attached itself to a mast sticking out of the snow near Lambert Dome. The two members of the crew maneuvered the craft down and secured it to anchor bollards. A ramp extended from a door in the side of the gondola, and they walked down into chill still air, onto hard white snow.

  What do they eat in winter? the passengers asked Art, looking around at the white folds of snow, the steep granite faces; no obvious signs of food, unless you could eat pine trees. Did they hibernate?

  They did not. They were fine in winter, Art told them. Dense fur, feet like snowshoes. In winter they ate little mammals dug up from under the snow, but mainly bigger creatures found dead. Carrion eaters. Not uncommon in winter to find creatures that had died.

  They followed him over the hard snow. He was looking at his phone as he walked, his other hand balancing a spotting scope on a monopole over his shoulder. Then he stopped, phone extended to point. They all froze. From a knot of trees emerged three black creatures, galumping over the snow. They looked somewhat like dogs with very short legs. A mama and two kits, it appeared. Broad backs, reddish black fur. Bands of lighter fur around the sides of their bodies. The mother had a buff band across her forehead.

  She stopped and suddenly began digging hard in the snow. Not far beyond them, a steaming hot springs had melted an open patch of ground, muddy and crusted at the edge with brown ice. Possibly a water hole in wintertime. Then the mama wolverine stuck her head in the hole she had dug and began to tug upward. Ah: a dead deer, buried under the snow near the spring. Patiently, with some more pawing and many hard tugs, the mother pulled it up out of the snow. Serious strength in that small body. She began to tear at the corpse, and her kits flopped around her trying to do the same.

  One old name for the wolverine, Art said quietly as they watched, was the glutton. They always ate with great enthusiasm, it seemed, and usually tore their prey to bits and ate every part of it, including bones. They had a tooth at the back of their mouths that made it easier for them to tear flesh, and their jaws were so strong they could break any bone they came on. Gulo gulo was their Latin name, referencing this supposed gluttony.

  “We’re lucky to see this,” Art said quietly. “Wolverines are still rare here. There weren’t any at all in the Sierra from about 1940 to the early 2000s. Then a few began to show up on night cameras near Lake Tahoe, but they were wanderers, and it didn’t look like there were any breeding pairs. Now they’re being seen all up and down the range. There were some re-introductions to help that along. Now it seems like they’re back.”

  “Lots of deer up here?” Mary guessed.

  “Sure. Like everywhere. Although at least here the deer have some predators. Mountain lions, coyotes.”

  They settled in and shared time at the spotting scope. They watched the wolverine family eat. It was a somewhat grisly business. The kits were playful in the usual style of youngsters. This was their first year, Art said. Next year the mom would shoo them off. They weren’t graceful, being so low and foursquare. They reminded Mary of otters she had seen in zoos, the way otters moved on land; but otters were very graceful underwater. For wolverines, this was it. Not graceful. But of course this was a human perspective; they were also obviously capable, confident, happy on the snow. Unafraid. Wild creatures at home, back at home, after a century gone. Knitting up the world.

  Mary moved away, stood watching. For a time she was distracted, thinking of Frank and the chamois and marmots. Then these animals brought her back. The kits harassed their mom, played in the usual style of the young. Such a deep part of what mammals were, playing when young. Did baby salamanders play? She couldn’t remember ever playing, her childhood was so far behind her— but no, there it was, she remembered. Kicking a ball in the yard and so on. Sure.

  Then also the careless tolerance of the mom, ignoring her youngsters as they clambered on her, wrestled with each other, fell over themselves. They snuffed and worried at her underside, she knocked them away with a flick of her foreleg. They did have big feet, clawed pads like snowshoes, broad and long. Lords of winter. Nothing up here could harm them, nothing scared them. Art said people had seen them chasing away bears, mountain lions, wolves. Masters of all they surveyed.

  Captain Art regarded them with a fixation Mary found pleasing. He was lost in it. They were in no hurry; this was the place to be. Again she thought of Frank in the meadow above Flims, but now it was all right, she could be grateful he had taken her up there, that he had introduced her to this man. It was getting cold, she felt the first pinch of hunger, she had to pee. But there before her, wolverines. It was a blessing.

  Only when the sun dropped into the treetops did Art stir and lead them back to the airship. By then they were really cold, and warming up in the gondola was a kind of party. They flew east on the wind, looking down at the pink alpenglow suffusing the range of light.

  North and east above desert, the Rockies, flat prairie, and then tundra. The border between the great boreal forest and the tundra looked ramshackle and weird; a lot of permafrost here had melted, Art said, creating what was called a drunken forest, trees tilted this way and that. Then lakes everywhere under them, more lakes than land. Flying over this huge wet expanse it looked like the Half Earth goal would be easy to reach, or was even already accomplished. Which was not the case, but one always judged by what stood before one’s eyes. In fact they infested the planet like locusts. No, that too was wrong. In the cities it looked like that, but not here. There were many realities on a planet this big.

  The new port city on the Arctic Ocean, called Mackenzie Prime, looked like an old industrial site. A single dock six kilometers long, studded with cranes for handling container ships. The opening up of the Arctic Ocean to ships had made for one of the odd zones of the Anthropocene. Traffic was mostly container ships refurbished as autopiloted solar-powered freighters, slow but steady. Carbon-neutral transport on a great circle route, and as such not much to complain about. Also there were few to complain, at least in terms of locals; the total population on the coasts of the Arctic Ocean still numbered less than a million people: Inuit, Sami, Athapaskan, Inupiat, Yakut; Russian, American, Canadian, Scandinavian.

  The great shock of their arrival was to see that the ocean, clear of ice to the northern horizon, was yellow. Naturally this looked awful, like some vast toxic spill; in fact it was geoengineering, no doubt the most visible act of geoengineering ever, and as such widely reviled. But the solar heating of the Arctic Ocean when there was no ice covering it might be enough all by itself to tip the world irrevocably into jungle planet. All the models were in agreement on this, so the decision to try to forestall that result had been made according to Paris Agreement protocols, and the color dye released. Yellow water didn’t allow sunlight to penetrate it, and even bounced some sunlight back into space. Relatively small quantities of dye could color a large area of ocean. Both the artificial and natural dyes they were using broke down over a summer season, and could be renewed or not the following year. Petroleum-based dyes were cheap to manufacture, and only mildly carcinogenic; natural dyes, made of oak and mulberry bark, were non-petroleum-based, and only a little bit poisonous. The two could be alternated as they learned more about them. The energy and heat savings in terms of albedo were huge— the albedo went from 0.06 for open water (where 1 was total reflection and 0 total absorption) to 0.47 for yell
ow water. The amount of energy thus bounced back out into space was simply stupendous, the benefit-to-cost ratio off the charts.

  Geoengineering? Yes. Ugly? Very much so. Dangerous? Possibly.

  Necessary? Yes. Or put it this way; the international community had decided through their international treaty system to do it. Yet another intervention, yet another experiment in managing the Earth system, in finessing Gaia. Geobegging.

  Mary looked down at the ungodly sight from the airship’s gondola and sighed. It was a funny world. “Why did you bring us up here?” she asked Art. “Was it to see this?”

  He shook his head, looking mildly shocked at the suggestion. “For the animals,” he said. “As always.”

  And a few hours later they were flying over a herd of caribou that covered the tundra from horizon to horizon. Art admitted he had brought the airship down to the right altitude to create this effect; they were about five hundred feet above the ground. From this height there seemed to be millions of animals, covering the whole world. These were migrating west, in loose lines like banners or ribbons, which bunched whenever they were crossing a stream. It was stunning to see.

  South over Greenland.

  As they flew they saw a lot of other airships. Giant robot freighters, circular sky villages under rings of balloons, actual clippers of the clouds sporting sails or pulled by kites, hot-air balloons in their usual rainbow array. There had not yet been any regularization of shapes and sizes; Art said they were still in the Cambrian explosion moment of airship design. Many people were moving up into the sky, and traffic lanes and altitudes had been established, as with jets in the old days. Airspace was humanized and therefore also bureaucratized. And carbon neutral.

  As they flew, Mary spent more and more time listening to Art talk to his passengers, his clients or guests or customers. He had lived most of his life on this airship, he told them. He was about sixty, Mary reckoned, so the “most of his life” seemed a bit premature, a statement of intent as much as a history. She liked him. A slight man, angular face, hooked nose, balding. Startling pale eyes, a distinguished look, a sweet shy smile. He looked like the photo of Joyce Cary that her father had kept on his bookshelf, next to a row of Cary’s novels. Despite his job as ship captain and chief naturalist, he seemed to her a shy man. He spoke mostly of animals and geography. Which given their position made sense, but days passed and she never learned a thing about him except what she might deduce. Irish; eventually, she even had to ask, she learned he was from Belfast, his dad Protestant, mother Catholic.

  Something had sent him aloft, she thought as she watched him. It had been an escape, perhaps. A refuge. An ascension into solitude. Then, after years had passed, perhaps, he had gotten lonely, and begun running these tour cruises. This was her theory. Now he liked to share the pleasures of his life aloft, and he gained some company by it, some conversation. And he had an expertise he could teach to people, the various joys and fascinations of a bird’s life. An Arctic tern he was, back and forth, pole to pole. A few years before he had hired an events coordinator in London, who booked his tours and helped him arrange their various ports of call.

  So: nature cruise. Mary was still very dubious. It was not her kind of thing. She doubted she would do it again. Still, for now, the other passengers were pleasant; some Norwegians, a few Chinese, a family from Sri Lanka. They were all interested to see the world from the air, in particular the world’s animals.

  Earth was big. At this height, at this speed, that immensity was becoming clearer and clearer. Of course scale was so variable. Pale blue dot, mote of dust in the sunlight, true enough; but from this vantage it was beyond enormous. You could walk your whole life and never cover more than a small fraction of it. Now they lofted like an eagle over it.

  “We’re so stupid,” she said to Art one night.

  He looked at her, startled. It was late, they were alone in the viewing room, the others had gone to bed. This had already happened once or twice before; it was beginning to look like a habit, a little conspiracy to chat.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Sure you do,” she replied. “Why else are you up here?”

  Again he was startled. His other guests didn’t speak to him like this, she saw.

  “Didn’t something drive you up here?” she pressed.

  “Oh,” he said, “let’s not talk about that.”

  She relented, feeling she had gone too fast, hit a wall. “You like the beauty,” she said. “I know. And it is beautiful.”

  “It is,” he agreed quickly. “I never get over it.”

  She smiled. “You’re lucky.”

  “It’s true.” And he added: “Especially tonight.”

  She laughed at that.

  He was still young enough to blush. She knew that kind of fair skin very well; her grandmother had blushed furiously right into her nineties.

  After that conversation, the habit was set. They stayed for a nightcap in the viewing chamber after the others had retired. There they had the view of everything below. When he dimmed the room lights, the world below them became visible. This was especially true when the moon was up; then the land and ocean became eldritch things, glittery and dark, distinct in their forms.

  The airship also had a tiny viewing chamber on top of its big body, there among the solar panels, so that Art and his guests could see the stars when the moon was down. In its earliest phase, after the thin glowing crescent of the moon set, he took guests up through the body of the ship to this chamber to observe the starbowl. One night at new moon he led Mary up there after the others had retired. Milky Way low in the west, Orion climbing up over the eastern horizon, all of this very far from cities, and at five thousand feet, it was simply amazing how many stars they could see. It was a whole different sky, primal and alive. Art knew the constellations, and some of the stories behind them. He had a telescope in that bubble set with a tracking motor that kept it fixed wherever he aimed it, but on that night he left it alone. He taught Mary to see a galaxy visible to the naked eye, in the north near Cassiopeia.

  But mostly they stayed in what he called the understudy, looking down at the Earth. As they flew down the Atlantic, over Iceland, then the Hebrides, then Ireland— this last part for her, and for him too, perhaps— then over the Bay of Biscay— they would say good night to everyone, then she would go to her cabin, go to the bathroom, change clothes perhaps, and slip down the private stairs he had taught her to find, using the key code he had taught her to use, back to the viewing room at the bow, now locked and empty, except for them.

  One night they watched the Pillars of Hercules float by below them, framing the Strait of Gibraltar. The little lumps of Gibraltar Rock and Jebel Musa stood like sentinels over the black water. Art told Mary the story of the flooding of the Mediterranean; it had been a dry low plain between Europe and Africa, then as an ice age had ended and sea level rose, the Atlantic had spilled through this strait into what had been flat playas. Two years of flow, he said, at a thousand times the rate of the Amazon, moving at forty meters a second, and carving a channel a thousand feet deep, until the Med was filled and the two bodies of water equalized in elevation.

  “When did that happen?”

  “About five million years ago, they say. There isn’t total agreement.”

  “There never is.”

  She watched him closely. A flood, a sudden breakthrough. Now he was talking about the end of the last ice age, fifteen thousand years ago, when enormous lakes of meltwater on top of the great ice sheet had broken through ice dams and poured down into the ocean in stupendous floods, changing the climate of the whole world. Then the Mediterranean had risen high enough to flood through the hills of the Bosporus, filling the Black Sea’s area in just a few years’ time, flooding land that had been occupied by humans, giving rise to the legend of Noah’s flood.

  He was nattering on. He was perhaps a little nervous. Was he a dry plain himself, she wondered, a space waiting to be flooded? Was
she the Atlantic, he the Mediterranean? And she? Was she rising? Would she pour over into him and fill him up?

  There was no way to know, no rush to decide. They were headed for Antarctica, and they hadn’t even reached the equator yet. There was time. She could enjoy the idea of it, mull it over in mind and body. When she got up to go to her cabin, at the end of that night, she leaned over and gave him a quick kiss on the top of the head.

  Across the Atlas Mountains, east over the Sahel. Here there were new salt lakes and marshes being created by water pumped up from the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. Salt seas in dry basins, an interesting experiment. They definitely changed things. Here in the Sahel, the dust storms that used to fly off these desert basins over the Atlantic were much diminished, and certain kinds of plankton out to sea were going hungry. Unexpected consequences— no, unforeseen consequences. Because now they were expected, even when they couldn’t be predicted.

  For now, the desert below them was dotted by long lakes. Green, brown, sky blue, cobalt. Cat’s paws. Little towns hugged their shores, or stood on outcrops nearby. Irrigated fields formed circles on the land, circles of green and yellow like quilting art. Local culture was said to be thriving, Art said. Polls indicated most residents loved their new lakes, especially younger people. Without them we would have left, they said. The land was dying, the world had killed it. Now it would live.

  A red dawn, punctuated by two black masses rising up higher than they were: Ethiopian highlands to their left, Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro to their right. As they flew through this immense gap, Art told them about Jules Verne’s first hit novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon. Also about his later works The Mysterious Island and The Clipper of the Clouds, both describing balloon and airship travels, as did of course a big part of Around the World in Eighty Days. Art also told them about Verne’s Invasion of the Sea, which told the story of pumping seawater onto Saharan deserts to create lakes, just as they had seen during the previous few days. Verne’s books had bewitched him as a youth, he said. An idea of how to live. He had taught himself French in order to read them in the original, said that Verne’s prose was far better than people usually supposed when judging by the wretched early translations.