The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “And so we’re here,” one of them said, “with our own Captain Nemo!”

  “Yes,” Art replied easily. “But without his brooding, or so I hope.” This said with a lightning glance Mary’s way. “I hope I’m more like Passepartout. Passing by all, you know, with the least amount of difficulty.”

  The green and gray masses of Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro loomed over them to the south, one very flat-topped, the other a little flat-topped. Neither had glaciers, nor any sign of snow. No such thing as the snows of Kilimanjaro. Something they could only hope for in distant times to come.

  But the great plains of east Africa were still populated by animals. Yes, they were now doing a safari from the air. Elephants, giraffes, antelopes, great herds of all these, migrating from river to river. Some of the streams’ water was now piped in, Art said quietly. Desalinated at the seashore and then piped up to the headwaters and released to keep the streams flowing, the herds alive. They were in their twelfth straight year of drought.

  Then Madagascar. The reforestation of that big island had been happening for well over a generation, and such was the fecundity of life that its rugged hillsides already looked densely forested, dark and wild. It had changed during Art’s time aloft, he said, and now the people of Madagascar were joining with Cubans and other island nations to help similar restoration efforts all over the world. Indonesia, Brazil, and west Africa were teammates in this effort. Rewilding, Art called it. They were rewilding down there.

  That night when Mary joined Art in his understudy, Madagascar was already behind them, but the air still seemed to carry its spicy scent. Art sat looking back at the island, bulking like a sea creature with thick napped fur. He seemed content. They sipped their whiskies for a while, enjoying a companionable silence. Then they talked about other voyages they had made. He asked about her escape on foot over the Alps, apparently a famous story of her professional life, and she made it brief, talked about the Oeschinensee, and Thomas and Sibilla, and the Fründenjoch. Have you flown your Clipper over the Alps? she asked.

  Once or twice, he said. It’s a bit much. They’re too high. And the weather is just so variable.

  I love the Alps, she said. They’ve caught my affection.

  He regarded her with a little smile. A shy Irishman. She knew that type and liked it. She had always liked those men who kept to themselves, who had only a sidelong look for her. Probably there was something back there in his past, some event or situation that had made him so aloof; but the island world he had made for himself was one that she was coming to like. Or she could see why he liked it. He was younger than she was, but old enough that they were in that temporal space that felt roughly contemporaneous.

  These were fleeting thoughts. Mostly she just watched the ocean and the great black island behind them, slowly receding. But they were thoughts that led in a certain direction. She tried to track them as if they were shy animals. Desire stirring in her, maybe that was like a tracker’s curiosity. On the hunt. A hope for contact. Then in the midst of her musing he stood, saying he was feeling tired. Time for bed. He led the way up to the main gallery, said good night and turned toward his cabin.

  Not a mind reader, she thought. Recalling that in her youth she had seemed to be able to reach out telepathically. Or maybe it had been a matter of looks, of pheromones. Animals in heat. Not at their age. But there was no rush.

  Nothing more than that happened between them for the rest of that voyage. They still met on some nights in the viewing chamber to chat, but no more Madagascars; they were too far south.

  Over the endless ocean, angling west to fight the great shove of the westerlies. Their pushback caused the Clipper to tremble and rock more than earlier in their voyage. Then one morning she woke and went to the viewing chamber, and there to the south lay Antarctica. Everyone was standing at the forward window to see it. The ocean was distinctly darker than before, almost black, which itself was strange, and faintly ominous; then to the south a white land like a low wall, white flecked with a black blacker than the strangely black sea. This great escarpment of ice and rock extended from east to west for as far as they could see.

  Antarctica. It was early autumn, the sea ice minimal, although as they flew south they saw that there were icebergs everywhere. These made no pattern, just white chunks on black water. An occasional misshapen iceberg of jade or turquoise hue. Flocks, or it seemed rather shoals, of tiny penguins dotted some of these icebergs. Once they flew over a pod of orcas, sleek-backed and ominous. On tabular bergs they sometimes saw Weddell seals, looking like slugs splayed on the ice, often with smaller slugs attached to their sides like leeches. Mother and child. Their cousins, down here thriving on ice. If they were thriving.

  Then Antarctica itself, white and foreboding. Ice Planet.

  It was surreal in that icy desolation to come on six giant aircraft carriers, arranged in a rough hexagon like a coven of city-states, surrounded by smaller craft— icebreakers, tugboats, shore craft— it was hard to tell what the smaller craft might be, they were so small.

  Apparently aircraft carriers made excellent polar stations, being nuclear powered, and outweighing ordinary icebreakers by a thousand times or more. Sea ice stood no chance against such behemoths, they were icebreakers from God and could leave anytime they wanted to; but they didn’t. They made a little floating city, anchored by the shore of Antarctica, supporting various inland encampments, all of which had been airlifted upcountry from here.

  They passed over the carrier city and landed on the snowy surface of the continent itself. Out of the Clipper onto flat snow. Very bright and very cold, although no colder than Zurich on a windy winter’s day.

  Around them cloth-walled huts, blue-glassed boxes. The camp managers were happy to meet Mary, seemed to consider her their patroness, which made her laugh. And they were well-acquainted with Captain Art, a frequent visitor.

  The glacier slowdown operation had been a success. Ice fields had therefore also slowed. All this would have been impossible without the navies helping. Aircraft carriers were mobile towns. Deploying them like this was a chance to make use of the huge amounts of money that had been spent building them. Swords into plowshares kind of thing.

  “Like the Swiss,” Mary observed. “Can we see a pumping site?”

  Of course. Already scheduled. For sure a feature of interest.

  All of Art’s passengers occupied only a corner of one of their giant helicopters. Helmets on, sit sideways looking out through a small window, then up, straight up, not like the Clipper’s rise. Then over endless white snow, listening to the pilot and her crew discuss things in a language she didn’t recognize. Black sea behind them receding from view.

  “Why is the ocean black down here?” she asked into her helmet’s microphone.

  “No one knows.”

  “I heard one guy say it’s because the water is so clean down here, and the bottom so deep starting from right offshore, that you’re seeing down to the dark part of the ocean where the sunlight doesn’t penetrate. So you’re seeing through super-clear water to the black of the deeps.”

  “Can that be right?”

  “I heard the plankton down here are black, and they color the water.”

  “Lots of days it looks as blue as anywhere, I think.”

  “No way!”

  Then they were descending. Snow or ice as far as they could see. Then a cluster of black dots. Around the dots black threads, like a broken spider web. These dots and lines held civilization suspended over the abyss.

  “How many stations are there like this one?” she asked.

  “Five or six hundred.”

  “And how many people does that add up to?”

  “The stations are mostly automated. Maintenance and repair crews fly in as needed. There are caretakers in some of them. But mainly it’s construction crews, moving around at need. I don’t know, twenty thousand people? It fluctuates. There were more a few years ago.”

  The helo landed with
a foursquare thump. They unbelted, stood awkwardly, filed down the narrow gap between seats and wall and down metal steps to the ice.

  Cold. Bright. Windy. Cold.

  Light blasted around the edges of her sunglasses and blinded her. Tears were blown off her eyes onto her sunglasses, where they froze in smears. She tried to see through all that. Blinking hard, she followed the others toward this settlement’s main hut, like a blue-walled motor home on stilts.

  “Wait, I don’t want to go inside yet,” she protested. “I want to see.”

  A couple of their hosts stayed out with her and walked her to a pump, which stood inside a little heated hut of its own. Not very heated, as the floor inside was ice, with the black housing of the pump plunging right into it. The saving of civilization, right there before her. A piece of plumbing.

  They went back outside and followed one of the pipelines up a gentle gradient. It stretched across the land from black box to black box, lying right on the ice. Mary stopped to look around. The snow seemed to her like a lake surface that had flash-frozen, all its little waves caught mid-break. Glowing in the light. Her guides explained things to her. She liked their enthusiasm. They were happy to be here not because they were saving the world, but because they were in Antarctica. If you like it, one told her when she asked, you like it a lot. It gets into you, until nowhere else seems as good.

  A white plane under a blue dome. Some cirrus clouds over them looked close enough to touch.

  “It’s like another planet,” Mary said.

  Yes, they said. But actually just Earth.

  “Thank you,” she said to them. “Now I’m ready to go back. I’m glad to have seen this, it’s just amazing. Thank you for showing it to me. But now let’s go back.”

  Because I too have a place I love.

  They flew north up the Atlantic, to see St. Helena and Ascension. Before Art dropped Mary off in Lisbon, where she would train home, she joined him in his understudy one last time. When they were sitting in their usual spots, sipping their drams, she said, “Will we meet again?”

  He looked uncertain. “I hope so!”

  She regarded him. A shy man. Some animals are reclusive.

  “Why do you do this?” she said.

  “I like it.”

  “What do you do when you’re on the ground?”

  “I resupply.”

  “Aren’t there any places you like to walk around?”

  He considered this. “I like Venice. And London. New York. Hong Kong, if it isn’t too hot.”

  She stared at him for a while. He shifted his gaze down, clearly uncomfortable. Finally he said, “Mostly I just like being here. I like the sky people. The sky villages are a lot of fun to visit. I like the way they look. And the people in them. Everyone’s on a voyage. Did you ever read The Twenty-one Balloons? It’s an old children’s book about a sky village.”

  “Like your Jules Verne.”

  “Yes, but for kids.”

  Verne is for kids, Mary didn’t say.

  “Anyway I read it when I was about five. Actually my mom read it to me.”

  “Is your mom still alive?”

  “No. She died five years ago.”

  “Sorry to hear.”

  “Is your mom still alive?”

  “No. My parents both died young.”

  They sat there for a while. Mary saw that he was unsettled. Rejecting all the fashionable diagnostics of their time, knowing him to be fond of her, maybe, she pondered it. So, he was quiet. Perhaps he was shy. Perhaps he played a part for people: Captain Art, doing his best to get by.

  She was not quiet, nor was she shy. A bossy forward girl, one teacher had said of her at school; and that was true. So she could only guess at him. But this was always the case, with everyone. And it seemed to her they got along. His silence was restful. As if he were content. She wasn’t content, and she wasn’t sure she had ever met anyone who was, so it was a hard thing for her to recognize. Maybe she was wrong. No one was content. She was projecting onto his silence. But from what, and onto what? Oh it was all such a muddle, such a swamp of guesswork and feeling.

  “I like you,” she said. “And you like me.”

  “I do,” he said firmly, and then waved a hand, as if to push that aside. “I don’t mean to be intrusive.”

  “Please,” Mary said. “I’m about to disembark here.”

  “True.”

  “And so?”

  “And so what?”

  Mary sighed. She was going to have to do the work here. “So— maybe we can meet again.”

  “I’d like that.”

  After a pause during which Mary watched him, making him go on, if he would, he said, “You could come with me again. Be my celebrity guide. We could make a tour of all the greatest landscape restoration sites, or geoengineering projects.”

  “God spare me.”

  He laughed. “Or whatever you like. Your favorite cities. You could be a guest curator or whatnot.”

  “I’d rather just be your girlfriend.”

  His eyebrows rose at that. As if it were an entirely new idea.

  She sighed. “I’ll think about it. One nature cruise may be enough for me. But some ideas might come to me.”

  He took a deep breath, held it, let it out in a long sigh. Now he looked really content. He glanced at her, met her eye, did not look away. Smiled.

  “I always come back to Zurich. I have my room there.”

  She nodded, thinking it over. Say it took years to get to know this man; what else did she have to do? “I’ll want you to talk a bit more than you have,” she warned him. “I’ll want to know things about you.”

  “I’ll try,” he said. “I might have some things to say.”

  She laughed at that, knocked back the whisky in her shot glass. It was late.

  “Good,” she said. She stood and kissed him on the top of the head, ignoring his flinch away. “Maybe you can tell me when you’re in town, and we can get together. Fasnacht is at the end of the winter, that’s a party I like. We could do the town on Fasnacht.”

  He frowned. “I’ll be out on another trip that month. I’m not sure I’ll be back by then.”

  Mary stopped herself from sighing, from saying anything sharp. This was not going to be anything quick, or even normal. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “Now I’m off to bed.”

  103

  I don’t think anyone ever figured out who organized it. Whoever they were, they wanted to stay out of the way and have it look self-organized. Have it emerge out of the Zeitgeist. And maybe it did, I mean ultimately we all did do it together. It was already a feeling everyone had. I think something like three billion people tapped their phones to say they had taken part.

  It was sort of like New Year’s Eve, except it was agreed it should be a simultaneous moment all over the Earth. Near the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, like Narooz or Easter. Having it be the same very moment for all seemed right, it was important to feel the connection with everyone and everything else, as a kind of vibe. Kulike, in Hawaiian, means harmony. Or la ‘olu‘olu, harmony day. Evoke the noösphere, call it into existence by everyone thinking of it at the same time— that’s not a time-delayed thing, it has to be simultaneous. So we in Hawaii kind of got the short end of the stick, time-wise. The timing was presented as a given, which I think means that someone somewhere had to be doing it in terms of organization, but anyway east Asia got the late night, then going west they went down through the time zone hours until western Europe got noon, then across the Atlantic it got earlier and earlier across the Americas, to a dawn patrol kind of thing on the west coast, so we in Hawaii were looking at 3 AM I think it was. Fine, whatever, an excuse to stay up all night and party, and it has to be admitted that it was still nice and warm for us even in the middle of the night, so we could go to Diamond Head and look out over the ocean as we partied. And the moon was full that night, no coincidence I’m sure. So it was nice. Down in the concert bowl bands played through
the night, and we sat on the ridge talking and drinking and watching the ocean by moonlight, good south swell too, so that a lot of us were talking about going to Point Panic at sun-up to catch some waves, great way to finish this event, back in Mother Ocean where we all began. Slight offshore wind too.

  So the time came and we listened to the voices on our phones. We are the children of this planet, we are going to sing its praises all together, all at once, now is the time to express our love, to take the responsibilities that come with being stewards of this earth, devotees of this sacred space, one planet, one planet, on and on it went, it seemed clear to me that the original had been written in some other language, that we were listening to a translation into English, and in fact you could tap around and hear what was being said in other languages; Gupta insisted on listening to it in Sanskrit, which he admits he doesn’t understand when spoken, though he reads it, but he claimed that what we were hearing had to have been written or thought originally in Sanskrit, maybe even thousands of years ago, and in fact the Sanskrit version did sound very primal, which made me curious and I clicked around and found a version in Proto-IndoEuropean, why not? It sounded like Spanish. I switched to Basque, supposedly a living fossil of a language, and it too sounded like Spanish. Actually both sounded quite a bit stranger than Spanish, older than Spanish, odd harsh primal sounds, but no more so than Dutch or many another language that isn’t Hawaiian, you always hear all the same sounds, and no matter which language I tapped on, I kept hearing mamma Gaia. Yes of course mamma would be one of the oldest words, maybe the first word, invented over and over by babies trying their best to talk but having limited control of their mouths, and yet always trying to say the same thing, to beseech or celebrate that great goddess filling their sight, the fountain and source of all food, warmth, touch, love, and eye contact— mamma! I cried out that night on the ridge, seeing the why of it for the first time, the why of everything, of course it’s a category error on my part to genderize the planet in that crass way, but we were high that night on the worldwide lovefest, and since everyone else was singing and cheering and hooting as after having caught a great ride on a great wave, I just kept shouting Mamma Mia! Mamma Mia! Because of course, being human, the other first word we speak is always me, mine, me me me, and God bless the Italians and whoever else in the Romance languages for holding fast to that very first Ur phrase, the same in all the languages, I checked Proto-IndoEuropean and sure enough it was the same there too, Mamma Mia! Mamma Mia! Genius of a language!