She and Art talked the situation over as they served the people in the apartment tea. Spy or not, Art knew Terra, and had an incisive political judgment, which she found helpful. He was like a mellow Frank. Was that right? Somehow she was reminded of Frank, and though she couldn’t pin down why, she was obscurely pleased. No one else could have seen any resemblance in this lumbering sly man, it was her perception and hers alone.
Then more people began to crowd into the apartment, cell leaders and visitors from out of town. Maya sat at the back and listened as Jackie spoke to them. Everyone in the resistance, Maya thought as she listened to her, was in it for themselves. The way Jackie used her grandfather as a symbol, waving him like a flag to rally her troops, was sickening. It wasn’t John who had gotten her her followers, but her white scoop blouse, the slut. No wonder Nirgal was estranged from her.
Now she exhorted them with her usual incendiary message, enthusiastically advocating immediate rebellion, no matter what the agreed-upon strategy was. And to these so-called Booneans, Maya was nothing more than an old paramour of the great man, or perhaps the reason he had been killed: a fossil odalisque, a historical embarrassment, an object of men’s desire, like Helen of Troy called back by Faustus, insubstantial and weird. Ach, it was maddening! But she kept a calm face, and got up and walked in and out of the kitchen with her head averted, doing what paramours did, keeping people comfortable and fed. Nothing more to be done, at this point.
She stood in the kitchen, staring out the window at the rooftops below. She had lost whatever influence she had ever had on the resistance. The whole thing was going to come unraveled before Sax or any of the rest of them who counted were ready. Jackie was ranting on cheerily in the living room, organizing a demonstration that might get ten thousand people into the park, maybe fifty, who could say? And if security responded with tear gas and rubber bullets and truncheons, people would get hurt, some killed; killed for no strategic purpose, people who might have lived a thousand years. And still Jackie went on, bright and enthusiastic, burning like a flame. Overhead the sun gleamed through a break in the clouds, bright silver, ominously large. Art came into the kitchen and sat at the table, switching on his AI and sticking his face into it. “Got a note from home Praxis on the wrist.” He read the screen, nose practically touching it.
“Are you nearsighted?” Maya said irritably.
“I don’t think so . . . oh man. Ka boom. Is Spencer out there? Get Spencer in here.”
Maya went to the doorway and signaled Spencer, who came in. Jackie ignored the disturbance and went on talking. Spencer sat down at the kitchen table beside Art, who was now sitting back, round-eyed and round-mouthed. Spencer read for five seconds and sat back in his chair, looked over at Maya with a strange expression. “This is it!” he said.
“What?”
“The trigger.”
Maya went to him and stood reading over his shoulder.
She held on to him, feeling a bizarre sensation of weightlessness. No more staving off the avalanche. She had done her job, she had just barely done it. At the very moment of failure, fate had turned.
Nirgal came into the kitchen to ask what was going on, attracted by something in their low voices. Art told him and his eyes lit, he couldn’t conceal his excitement. He turned to Maya and said, “It’s true?”
She could have kissed him for that. Instead she nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and went to the doorway to the living room. Jackie was still in the midst of her exhortation, and it gave Maya the greatest of pleasure to interrupt her. “The demonstration’s off.”
“What do you mean?” Jackie said, startled and annoyed. “Why?”
“Because we’re having a revolution instead.”
PART 10
—— Phase Change
They were pelican surfing when apprentices jumping up and down on the beach alerted them that something was wrong. They flew back in to the beach and stuck their landings on the wet sand, and got the news. An hour later they were up to the airport, and soon after that taking off in a little Skunkworks space plane called the Gollum. They headed south, and when they reached 50,000 feet they were somewhere over Panama, and the pilot tilted it up and kicked in the rockets, and they were pressed back in their big g chairs for a few minutes. The three passengers were in cockpit seats behind the pilot and copilot, and out their windows they could see the exterior skin of the plane, which looked like pewter, began to glow, and then quickly turn a vivid glowing yellow with a touch of bronze to it, brighter and brighter until it looked as if they were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, sitting together in the fiery furnace and coming to no harm.
When the skin lost some of its glow, and the plot leveled them off, they were about eighty miles above the Earth, and looking down on the Amazon, and the beautiful spinal curve of the Andes. As they flew south one of the passengers, a geologist, told the other two more about the situation.
“The West Antarctic ice sheet was resting on bedrock that is below sea level It’s continental land, though, not ocean bottom, and under West Antarctica it’s a kind of basin and range zone, very geothermally active.”
“West Antarctica?” Fort asked, squinting.
“That’s the smaller half, with the peninsula sticking up toward South America, and the Ross ice shelf. The west ice sheet is between the mountains of the peninsula and the Transantarctic Mountains, in the middle of the continent. Here, look, I brought a globe.” He pulled from his pocket an inflatable globe, a child’s toy, and blew it up and passed it around the cockpit.
“So, the western ice sheet, there, was resting on bedrock below sea level But the land down there is warm, and there are some under-ice volcanoes down there, and so the ice on the bottom gets melted a bit. This water mixes with sediments from the volcanoes, and forms a substance called till. It has a consistency kind of like toothpaste. Where the ice is riding over this till it moves faster than usual, so within the west ice sheet there were ice streams, like fast glaciers with their banks made of slower ice. Ice Stream B ran two meters a day, for instance, while the ice around it moved two meters a year. And B was fifty kilometers across, and a kilometer deep. So that was one hell of a river, running off with about half a dozen other ice streams into the Ross ice shelf.” He indicated these invisible streams with a fingertip.
“Now, where the ice streams and the ice sheet in general came off the bedrock, and started floating in the Ross Sea—that was called the grounding line.”
“Ah,” said one of Fort’s friends. “Global warming?”
The geologist shook his head. “Our global warming has had very little effect on all this. It’s raised temperatures and sea levels a little bit, but if that was ail that was happening it wouldn’t make much difference here. The problem is we’re still in the interglacial warming that began at the end of the last Ice Age, and that warming sends what we call a thermal pulse down through the polar ice sheets. That pulse has been moving down for eight thousand years. And the grounding line of the west ice sheet has been moving inland for eight thousand years. And now one of the under-ice volcanoes down there is erupting. A major eruption. About three months old now. The grounding line had already started to retreat at an accelerated rate some years ago, and it was very close to the volcano that’s erupted. It looks like the eruption has brought the grounding line right to the volcano, and now ocean water is running between the ice sheet and the bedrock, right into an active eruption. And so the ice sheet is breaking up lifting up, sliding out into the Ross Sea, and being carried away by currents.”
His listeners stared at the little inflatable globe. By this time they were over Patagonia. The geologist answered their questions, pointing out features on the globe as he did. This kind of thing had happened before, he told them, and more than once. West Antarctica had been ocean, dry land, or ice sheet, many times in the millions of years since tectonic movement had deposited that continent in that position. And there appeared to be several unstable points in the long-term
temperature changes—“instability triggers,” he called them, causing massive changes in a matter of years. “This climatological stuff is practically instantaneous as far as geologists are concerned. Like, there’s good evidence in the Greenland ice sheet that one time we went from glacial to interglacial in three years.” The geologist shook his head.
“And these ice sheet breakups?” Fort asked.
“Well, we think they might go typically in a couple hundred years, which is still very fast, mind you. A trigger event. But this time the volcano eruption makes it much worse. Hey look, there’s the Banana Belt.”
He pointed down, and across Drake Strait they saw a narrow icy mountainous peninsula, pointing in the same direction as the coccyx of Tierra del Fuego.
The pilot banked to the right, then more gently to the left, beginning a wide lazy turn. Below them as they stared down was the familiar image of Antarctica as seen in satellite photos, but everything was now brilliantly colored and articulated: the cobalt blue of the ocean, the daisy chain of cyclonic cloud systems spinning away to the north, the textured sheen of the sun on the water, the great gleaming mass of the ice, and the flotillas of tiny icebergs, so white in the blue.
But the familiar Q shape of the continent was now strangely mottled in the area behind the comma of the Antarctic peninsula, with gaping blue-black cracks in the white. And the Ross Sea was even more fractured, by long ocean-blue fjords, and a radial pattern of turquoise-blue cracks; and offshore from the Ross Sea, floating up toward the South Pacific, were some tabular icebergs that were like pieces of the continent itself, sailing away. The biggest one looked to be about the same size as New Zealand’s South Island, or even bigger.
After they had pointed out the biggest tabular bergs to each other, and the various features of the broken and reduced western ice sheet (the geologist indicated where he thought the volcano under the ice was, but it looked no different from the rest of the sheet), they simply sat in their seats and watched.
“That’s the Ronne ice shelf there,” the geologist said after a while, “and the Weddell Sea. Yeah, there’s some slippage down into it too. . . . Up there’s where McMurdo used to be, on the far side of the Ross ice shelf. Ice was pushed across the bay and ran up over the settlement.”
The pilot started a second lap around the continent.
Fort said, “Now say again what effect this will have?”
“Well, theoretical models have world sea levels using about six meters.”
“Six meters!”
“Well, it will take a few years for the full rise, but it’s definitely started. This catastrophic break will raise sea levels about two or three meters, in a matter of weeks. What’s left of the sheet will be afloat in a matter of months, or a few years at most, and that will add another three meters.”
“How could it raise the whole ocean that much?”
“It’s a lot of ice.”
“It can’t be that much ice!”
“Yes it can. That’s most of the fresh water in the world, right down there under us. Just be thankful the East Antarctic ice sheet is nice and stable. If it were to slide off, sea levels would rise sixty meters.”
“Six meters is plenty,” Fort said.
They finished another lap. The pilot said, “We should be getting back.”
“That’s it for every beach in the world,” Fort said, pulling his face back from the window. Then: “I guess we’d better go get our stuff.”
When file second Martian revolution began, Nadia was in the upper canyon of Shalbatana Vallis, north of Marineris. In a sense one could say that she started it.
She had left South Fossa temporarily to oversee the Shalbatana closure, which was similar to those over Nirgal Vallis and the east Hellas valleys: a long tent roof over a temperate ecology, with a stream running down the canyon floor, in this case supplied by pumping from the Lewis aquifer, 170 kilometers to the south. Shalbatana was a long series of lazy S’s, so that the valley floor looked very picturesque, but the construction of the roof had been complicated.
Nevertheless Nadia had directed the project with only one small part of her attention, the rest being focused on the cascading developments on Earth. She was in daily communication with her group in South Fossa, and with Art and Nirgal in Burroughs, and they kept her informed of all the latest news. She was particularly interested in the activities of the World Court, which was trying to establish itself as an arbitrator in the growing conflict of the Subarashii metanats and the Group of Eleven against Praxis, Switzerland, and the developing China-India alliance—trying to function, as Art had put it, “as a sort of world court.” That effort had looked doomed when the fundamentalist riots began and the metanats prepared to defend themselves; and Nadia had concluded unhappily that things on Earth were about to spiral down into chaos again.
But all these crises were immediately cast into insignificance when Sax called to tell her of the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. She had taken his call at her desk in one of the construction trailers, and now she stared at his little face on the screen. “What do you mean, collapsed?”
“It’s lifted off the bedrock. There’s a volcano erupting. It’s being broken up by ocean currents.”
The video image he was sending cut to Punta Arena, a Chilean harbor town with its docks gone and its streets awash; then it cut again to Port Elizabeth in Azania, where the situation was much the same.
“How fast is it?” Nadia said. “Is it a tidal wave?”
“No. More like a very high tide. That will never go away.”
“So enough time to evacuate,” Nadia said, “but not enough time to build anything. And you say six meters!”
“But only over the next few . . . no one is sure how long. I’ve seen estimates that as much as a quarter of the Terran population will be—affected.”
“I believe it. Oh, Sax . . .”
A worldwide stampede to higher ground. Nadia stared at the screen, feeling stunned as the scale of the catastrophe became clearer to her. Coastal cities would be awash. Six meters! She found it very hard to imagine that any possible ice mass could be so large as to raise the sea level of all Earth’s oceans by even as much as one meter—but six! It was shocking proof, if one needed it, that the Earth was not so big after all. Or else that the West Antarctic ice sheet was huge. Well, it had covered about a third of a continent, and was, the reports said, some three kilometers thick. That was a lot of ice. Sax was saying something about the East Antarctic ice sheet, which apparently was not threatened. She shook her head to clear it of this nattering, concentrated on the news. Bangladesh would have to be entirely evacuated; that was three hundred million people, not to mention the other coastal cities of India, like Calcutta, Madras, Bombay. Then London, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, Rio, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Djakarta, Tokyo . . . and those were only the big ones. A lot of people lived on the coast, in a world already severely stressed by overpopulation and declining resources. And now all kinds of basic necessities were being drowned by salt water.
“Sax,” she said, “we should be helping them. Not just. . .”
“There is not that much we can do. And we can do that best if we’re free. First one, then the other.”
“You promise?”
“Yes,” he said, looking surprised. “I mean—I’ll do what I can.”
“That’s what I’m asking.” She thought it over. “You’ve got everything ready at your end?”
“Yes. We want to start with missile strikes against all surveillance and weapons satellites.”
“What about Kasei Vallis?”
“I’m dealing with it.”
“When do you want to start?”
“How about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow!”
“I have to deal with Kasei very soon. Conditions are good right now.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Let’s try to
launch tomorrow. No sense wasting time.”
“My God,” Nadia said, thinking hard. “We’re about to go behind the sun?”
“Yes.”
This position vis-à-vis Earth was mostly a symbolic matter these days, as communications were assured by a great number of asteroid relays; but it did mean that it would take months for even the fastest shuttles to get from Earth to Mars.
Nadia took a deep breath, let it out. She said, “Let’s go, then.”
“I was hoping you would say that. I’ll call them in Burroughs and give them the word.”
“We’ll meet in Underhill?” This was their current rendezvous point in case of emergency, Sax was in a refuge in Da Vinci Crater where a lot of his missile silos were located, so both of them could get to Underhill in a day.
“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow.” And he was gone.
And so she had started a revolution.
She found a news program running the satellite photo of Antarctic, and watched it in a kind of daze. Little voices on the screen chattered at speed, one claiming that the disaster was an act of ecotage perpetrated by ecoteurs from Praxis, who supposedly had drilled holes in the ice sheet and set hydrogen bombs down on the Antarctic bedrock. “Still at it!” she cried, disgusted. No other news shows made this assertion, or refuted it—it was just part of the chaos, no doubt, swept away by all the other accounts of the flood. But the metanatricide was still on. And they were part of it.
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