The Golden Fleece

by Brian Stableford

  Under other circumstances, the cultural differences between Gerda, who was Swedish, and Kay, who was Hungarian, might have been immense, but they not only lived on the same street, they attended the same school: the so-called New International School, whose pupils came from the assorted nations of the EC, but where all the classes were taught in English. Everything in their world tended to be prefaced with the label “New,” even though the practice was getting rather old. As beneficiaries or victims of New Internationalism, however, they were certainly united in their cultural affiliations in a way that even their immediate families did not entirely understand.

  Another circumstance that helped Gerda and Kay find common cause in their early days was that they only had one parent each, and that the parents in question, busy about the ever-problematic business of running Europe, were almost entirely absent from their quotidian lives. Gerda’s father, an EC bureaucrat, had died on a fact-finding trip to the vanishing Arctic ice cap before her second birthday, a victim of the treacherously melting ice; Kay’s mother—a much-married woman—had resumed her briefly interrupted career as a celebrity model as soon as she had recovered her figure after the relevant divorce, which was finalized not long after her pregnancy came to term.

  At six, Gerda believed, with an innocently boundless conviction of which only six-year-olds are normally capable, that Kay was her other half—or, because she had a precocious love of language, her “inevitable counterpart.” They did, in fact, look uncannily alike, apart from the fact that Gerda was very pale of complexion, blonde and blue-eyed, while Kay was dark, black-haired and brown-eyed. “Like opposing pawns on a chessboard,” Gerda’s mother once observed, rather unkindly—quickly adding, for the sake of kindness, even though it wrecked the analogy: “But one day, when you’re grown up, you’ll be a queen.”

  Even at the age of six, Gerda had been able to reply, “I can’t, Mommy. We live in a democracy.”

  When Gerda and Kay started at the NIS, the fact that all its classes were taught in English was only mildly controversial, but by the time they reached their final year it had become a running sore of angry contention. This was not because anything had happened in the meantime to the ever-dubious reputation of the United Kingdom, which was still the Crazy Man of Europe, but because it was universally recognized that the NIS practice of offering classes in English had nothing to do with far-from-merry England and everything to do with an “American cultural hegemony” that was supposed to have died in the first half of the twenty-first century, and whose inertial persistence within the World Wide Web generated a good deal of World Wide Resentment. Pragmatism insisted, however, that if any language were ever to get the children of Europe’s elite talking like a true community, English was the only possible candidate, so English survived while “American cultural hegemony” became effectively synonymous, on European lips, with “the poisonous ideas that got us into this unholy mess.”

  The unholy mess in question was, of course, the CC. Hardly anyone called it the Carbon Crisis any more, as if merely spelling out its name might somehow make the catastrophe worse. Indeed, such were the mysterious ways in which euphemism operated, that it was often re-expanded, with calculated absurdity, as “the Cubic Centimeter”—except in England, where the cultural significance of the letters CC was as farcically out of step with the rest of Europe as everything else. There, the unholy mess was routinely referred to, in a similar spirit of perverse flippancy, as the Cricket Club, even though—as the smart kids at the NIS were fond of pointing out, in order to demonstrate that the Second Great Depression hadn’t entirely robbed the world of its sense of humor—the only things England had that remotely resembled crickets were itsy-bitsy grasshoppers, which no one ever hunted with clubs, or even packs of hounds.

  Long before she came to the end of her schooldays, Gerda had grown used to thinking of her relationship with Kay as an unholy mess, but it wasn’t the same kind of unholy mess as the CC, even though the CC had already become tangled up in it. The CC was all about unwelcome overheating, but Gerda’s love for Kay had never had a chance to overheat, because Kay had never given it a chance to do so. When Gerda first confessed to Kay that he was her other half, her inevitable counterpart, he agreed, but his casual manner made it obvious that he didn’t really understand. It soon became painfully clear to Gerda that he understood the analogy in a very different way. He thought that they were like non-identical twins: that his idea of “inevitability” was that they were and would always remain pseudo-siblings, as close as close could be but in an inviolably non-erotic sense. As time passed, although his sexual indifference never became a hostile jet of ice-cold water chilling the force of her emotion, it definitely functioned as a frustrating gust of carbon dioxide, warm enough in its fashion but fatal to wholehearted flamboyance.

  Because she continued stubbornly to yearn for him, in a pathetically desperate fashion, Gerda grudgingly accepted and adapted to Kay’s insistence on thinking of her as a sister. By slow degrees, as she passed through puberty and matured into an adult, she even managed to half-convince herself that perhaps it was for the best; romance was, after all, an obsolete twentieth century delusion born of a world careless of the deadly Cubic Centimeter, blithely unconscious of the holocaust to come. She, as an apostle of New Internationalism, owed her first and greatest dedication to whatever part she might be able to play in the Great Crusade for the Salvation of Civilization.

  There were, of course, many parts available in that great drama, which was an end that lent itself to many means, but Gerda and Kay were MEP kids in an era when European politics was proudly recovering the old dynastic dimensions that it had briefly forsaken in the twentieth century. There was a tacit expectation in the NIS that the best of its students would become the MEPs and EC bureaucrats of the future, and that all other vocations were second-rate. Kay was never in any doubt that he would follow in his father’s footsteps, but Gerda was not at all sure that she wanted to follow in her mother’s. This was not because of any difference in the quality of the role models that Miklos Kiss and Selma Rosenhane provided, but did have something to do with the fact that they were routinely opposed in key debates, Miklos being an orthodox Gaian utterly dedicated to the war against global warming, while Selma represented a constituency that had seen significant local benefits from the shift in climate and was not at all averse to keeping them, in spite of the nasty problems that were being caused elsewhere.

  While Gerda and Kay were children, their parents flew home on a regular basis to visit their constituencies—Selma Rosenhane to Kiruna, Miklos Kiss to Szeged—but the need to maintain the continuity of their NIS schooling and conserve their NIS-based social lives meant that the only times Gerda ever saw Sweden and Kay saw Hungary were during the long summer vacations. There was a sense in which they both felt even closer to the beating heart of EC politics than their parents did, but that sense of closeness affected them differently. The fact that it was his father who currently had a seat in the chamber never seemed to Kay to be anything more than a mere technicality, and Kay lived in the expectation not only of one day stepping into his father’s shoes but also of finding them a perfect fit. Gerda, on the other hand, was not so sure that her mother’s shoes were the correct size, or the most apt design; in particular, she was not sure that her mother was sufficiently passionate in the cause she represented.

  Kay and Gerda remained united, however, in the conviction that they had been born with a mission to change the world, and that their schooling constituted an intense training-program that would allow them to carry their mission through. The Strasbourg chamber was still afflicted by the Curse of the Thousand-and-One Interpreters, but in the corridors of the NIS there was no need for such barriers to understanding. Even the six-year-olds there knew that they were the future in embryo, whose responsibility it would be to steer the New Old World through the climatic ravages of the CC. Such subsidiary tasks as defending the EC against the economic ravages of the New New World o
f Asian Slow Developers—whose brief days as Asian Rapid Developers had recently run into the bumpers at the end of the Great Historical Track—were also on the agenda, but the focal point of all their hopes, fears, and endeavors was the Cubic Centimeter.

  ~ * ~

  Kay was a trifle envious of Gerda’s summer holidays in the Far North, not because they took her away from him for weeks on end—which always left her own heart more than a trifle desolate—but because they gave Gerda an opportunity to see snow. The snow in question was not, admittedly, in her immediate vicinity, but on the as-yet-undefrosted mountaintops that formed Kiruna’s western horizon. Snow was snow, though, and everyone knew that it was soon to become extinct, except in Antarctica, where the colossal mass of the great ice-sheet was not yet in a tearing hurry to be gone. Snow was symbolic of Gaia’s ongoing decline; it was her favorite dress, and all true Gaians loved it. Gerda had never known the ravages that snow and ice could inflict on populations for whom winter was Hell, but she nevertheless contrived, during her summers in Kiruna, to absorb something of the traditional local terror. She never liked snow herself, and became impatient with Kay’s reverence.

  “Green is supposed to be Gaia’s color,” she told Kay ostentatiously when they came together again after the summer that divided the Elementary and Secondary sectors of their NIS education. “There’s plenty of green in Kiruna nowadays. The New Agricultural Revolution is just as spectacular in Sweden as it is in Greenland and Siberia. Nobody there wants the old winters back.”

  “Szeged may not be the hell on Earth that Southern Italy and Spain have become,” Kay retorted, dutifully reciting the Gaian party line, “but it’s still bearing the cost of your New Agricultural Revolution. I know that your population’s expanding as people from the drowned coasts are relocated, but it’s tiny by comparison with the numbers whose livelihoods have been wrecked. We live in a democracy, remember. Anyway, I hate spending summers in Szeged. My great-great-great-grandfather should never have moved from the mountains to the city. It’s still tolerable up there, even in July—so they say.”

  Everyone in the International School was an expert in European geography by the age of eleven, and most of the pupils were fairly well up in European history, in spite of its appalling intricacies, so Gerda was able to reply: “But the mountains that your ancestors came from are in Rumania now. If your ancestors had stayed where they were, your father wouldn’t be a Hungarian MEP. He’d be a tourist guide showing crazy English people around one of Count Dracula’s alleged castles.”

  “The real Dragulya was a Magyar, and therefore quintessentially Hungarian,” Kay pointed out, attempting to claim the intellectual high ground, as he always did before going on to state the obvious. “Anyway, he’d be a Rumanian MEP instead. He was a born politician. Everybody says so.”

  Even at eleven, Gerda knew that Kay’s arguments carried real weight. The Greenlanders, Laplanders, Siberians, and Kamchatkans were tiny in number by comparison with the southern Europeans who had been displaced by rising sea levels or seen their agricultural bases shrivel beneath the effects of devastating heat waves and violent storms. Even the Siberian Oligarchs paid lip service to Gaian ideals, like ancient would-be saints crying “Lord, give me chastity—but please, not yet!” Even so, it never occurred to her to modify her gathering political convictions simply because Kay, whom she loved so desperately, did not share them.

  Much later in life, Gerda came to suspect that the peculiar dynamics of their personal relationship might have intensified their political opposition. She suspected, too, that the true—subconscious—reason for Kay’s failure to understand that her beliefs were correct, while his were seriously misled, was his refusal to admit that he really was her other half, her inevitable counterpart. Even while they were still at school, she could not help believing that there was a sense in which Kay could not really believe what he claimed to believe, but must be a victim of delusion, of some strange arcane spell cast upon him by an inability to connect with or comprehend the wisdom of his heart.

  Although Kay claimed, as all committed Gaians did, that his ambition to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was purely based in reason and utilitarian calculation, Gerda came to suspect, even before she completed her education, that it was really based in unthinking idolatry, and that in worshiping Gaia, he and the rest of the vast democratic majority that he aspired to represent were merely cherishing the chains of an ancient bondage.

  Gerda, on the other hand, became firmly convinced that the world needed a new Mother, if it needed a Mother at all—and her conviction of that was as firm as her love for Kay. Her love for her own mother was just as firm, but it was increasingly infected with a conviction that Selma Rosenhane was a member of the opposition for all the wrong reasons. Had Selma been born in Szeged, like Miklos Kiss, she would have been a committed Gaian, because that would have been the obvious way to gather votes and the most useful source of profitable alliances. Hungary was hardly in the front line of the CC, having no coastline and still being ten degrees north of the Creeping Tropic, but the only pro-change nation with which it had a border was Ukraine, which was only pro-change because it was in Russia’s pocket, and Moscow was now the hapless puppet of the Siberian Oligarchs.

  Selma Rosenhane was no Laplander, ethnically speaking, but Lapland was her vote-cropping turf; her political allegiances and alliances were forged in the hinterlands of the Arctic Circle, on the shores of the New Blue Ocean, whose present shore-dwellers—especially the immigrant “converts” to whom it seemed a land of limitless opportunity—did not take kindly to the fact that the rest of the world had taken to calling it “the Methane A-Bomb” since the ice cap had disappeared and the waters had started soaking up the sunlight. Selma was, however, too canny a politician not to play the Gaian game; she not only paid lip service to the idea that the CC was a global disaster, but accepted it. Even in her own opinion, she was merely one of the worst of the vast multitude of bad Gaians who deplored the way the world was going but did not want to make the personal sacrifices required to return it to its old stability.

  Gerda, by contrast, became an honest and devout anti-Gaian, who wanted to find a new stability rather than returning to the old one: a warmer, more passionate Earth Mother, who did not care to dress in snow and ice, who did not love a world that was cold and bleak. She admitted that the ecosphere might not be able to find a new stability unaided, but that was because the ecosphere was under Gaia’s dominion. If the ecosphere could not achieve a new stability unaided, Gerda thought, then it was up to humankind—a humankind intellectually and materially liberated from Gaia’s dominion—to discover and impose one. That would certainly require a more profound change in human behavior than a patchy migration from the Creeping Tropics to the New Temperate Zones—but who, in their right minds, could possibly believe that Gaia’s humankind was so perfect as not to require real and profound change?

  ~ * ~

  Kay did not seem to understand, at first, that Gerda was not simply following in her mother’s footsteps in taking up an anti-Gaian stance. When they both stood for election as Student President in their final year at the IS, thus coming into open conflict for the first time, Kay tried to take advantage of their mutual birthday party to persuade her not to do it—and, indeed, that the platform on which she intended to stand made her a traitor to her own people as well as the entire human race. It was, by coincidence, the first birthday party they had entirely to themselves, in one of Strasbourg’s most carefully air-conditioned restaurants—an indulgence for which Selma Rosenhane and Miklos Kiss had grudgingly agreed to pay the bill.

  “Just because you’ve seen snow in the distance, my dear sister,” he said, sternly, “doesn’t mean that you’re a real northerner. You’re Strasbourg through and through. Your mother might have been sent here to give the barbarians a voice, but your mission in life ought to be to carry the good word in the other direction. It’s up to the children of the Arctic MEPs to expla
in to the up-and-coming generation why the fact that atmospheric warming might make Novaya Zemlya into the new Caribbean and turn Siberia into the world’s grain basket is not adequate compensation for the devastation of the Mediterranean, even if one only takes economic costs into account. We all have to be better Gaians now than we’ve contrived to be before—better practicing Gaians I mean—else the world is doomed. All opposition, wherever it’s based, lends dangerous support to the reckless and the gluttonous, encouraging them to continue their bad habits. Anyway, I’m bound to win—you’ll be humiliated.”

  “The point, beloved,” Gerda riposted, affectionately, “is not to worship Gaia more devoutly, but to cast her idol down. She has held the world in icy thrall too long. Now that spring is here, the task at hand for humankind is not to preserve what vestiges of winter we can for as long as possible but to make proper preparations for glorious summer. And whether you win or not, and however large your majority might be, you’re backing the wrong horse. We’re the third or fourth generation that has battled with its conscience over carbon restraint, and people will soon be exhausted by the toils of the losing battle. Gaian politics is on the point of collapse; it’s only a matter of time before the balance tips and the opposition catches fire. All the true cause will need to bring about a revolution in ideas is a clever torch-bearer.”