Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  We gathered on the living room sofas with mugs of coffee, heaps of cookies, flipcharts, scratch pads and softscreens, and got down to business.

  “So,” said Tom. “The world is going to flip its icy lid. What are we supposed to do about it?” He meant to be ironic; he just sounded out of his depth.

  To my surprise Sonia leaned forward. “Can I make a methodological suggestion? . . .” She began to outline an approach to problem-solving she said she’d used many times before. “We’ll break the day into two halves. It’s eleven A.M. now. We’ll work until lunch—one, say, or one-thirty. And we’ll use that time to open up the problem. We’ll just throw in everything we know, and anything else we come up with—any suggestion or idea, however tentative.”

  Tom said dryly, “And are we allowed to laugh at other people’s dumb suggestions?”

  “The whole point is to develop ideas. But there are two rules. One is that everything gets recorded. And the second is, before lunch anyhow, that if you do comment you do it in a positive way. You have to start by saying what you like about the idea. We’re trying to find ideas and build on them, not destroy them. After lunch we’ll pull it all together more coherently and critically.” Tom laughed, but Sonia said firmly, “Those are the rules.”

  Shelley grinned. “Fine by me.”

  I was impressed. For sure, if I had suggested this, Tom would have shot it down in flames at the get-go. I imagined Sonia working like this out in the field, pulling together her own motivated, trained-up, overbright staff with a few unhappy or angry locals, to fix whatever was broken. Now she was using those same management skills to handle our awkward father-son dynamic.

  Shelley leaned to me and whispered, “I think we’re going to be glad she’s here.”

  So we began pool what we knew about gas hydrates.

  Tom had his personal experience, and what he’d picked up on the ground in Siberia. I had what I’d learned from Gea, and in follow-up studies since. Sonia for now acted mostly as a recording angel.

  The most interesting new facts came from Shelley, who, typically, had been doing some burrowing. She’d found that the end-Permian extinction, through which Gea had walked me so painfully, wasn’t the only instance in which gas hydrate releases had made a mess of Earth’s climate. She displayed graphs of temperature and atmospheric composition. “This spike is known as the ‘initial Eocene thermal maximum.’ It happened about fifty-five million years ago, ten million years after the dinosaurs died off.”

  There had been a sharp increase of global temperatures, a hike of five or ten degrees in a “geological instant”—a time so short it couldn’t be distinguished in the rock record, perhaps as fast as decades, maybe even just a few years. And at the same time there had been a big pulse of carbon dioxide injected into the air. It had been a major gas-hydrate release, just like the end-Permian event.

  Just as the end-Permian had been kicked off by the immense Siberian traps volcanism, so in the Eocene, volcanism had again, it seemed, been the trigger. Off the coast of Norway, in deep sediments under the ocean, lava had funneled up from deep magma chambers and seeped into the hydrate layers along the continental slopes. The lava hadn’t even broken the surface; this was minor as volcanic events go. But as the lava had dumped its heat, the icelike crystals that contained the gases had melted, and the lid had come off the hydrate deposits. We stared at images of layers of sediments that had collapsed over emptied-out hydrate layers, and at great vertical ruptures, the remains of conduits where the released gases had forced their way to the surface.

  The methane had reached the ocean floor, bubbling up in immense spouts like the one that Tom had lived through, and causing, no doubt, plenty of local damage. But that was just the start.

  Once the methane reached the ocean and the air there had been a complicated series of chemical reactions. The methane cheerfully reacted with oxygen, a process that itself released heat. The products of the reactions were more hydrocarbons, water—and carbon dioxide, gigatons of it, more greenhouse gas.

  “And the rest,” Shelley said, “is history. The event wasn’t nearly so severe as the end-Permian catastrophe, because only a fraction of the global hydrate load was released. But it was a huge sloshing, a perturbation of the entire carbon pool of Earth’s surface. You can still see traces of it in isotopic imbalances and the like. Eventually the excess carbon dioxide was drawn back down out of the atmosphere by Earth’s systems—photosynthesis, weathering. But that took millennia, maybe megayears. And in the meantime there was a spike of warming.”

  Sonia said, “So in the Eocene the trigger was this undersea volcanism. But in the present day—”

  “In the present day,” Shelley said, “the trigger is anthropogenic global warming. Gea is right, as far as I can tell, Michael. The carbon dioxide and other crud we’ve dumped into the air has done the damage, more than enough to replicate the volcanic perturbations of the past. The anthropogenic warming of the climate we have already induced will cause the hydrate deposits to become unstable. At least we know what’s coming,” she said sepulchrally. “Different causes but same effects: the fossil record can teach us that much.”

  Tom said, “And the timescale—”

  “As Gea said,” Shelley told us. “A decade or less. In fact the destabilization is already happening—as you know.”

  We let this sink in.

  As she went about her self-appointed task of recording all this Sonia’s small face was pursed into a frown. The practical soldier was having some trouble with thinking about these huge scales in space and time, I thought. “OK,” she said. “So we can’t afford to let these hydrates go up. That’s the consensus, right? So what do we do about it?”

  We all looked at each other warily. This was the crucial question—and the tricky part.

  We were a guilt-ridden generation. President Amin and the Stewardship had taught us we had to change our ways; now we all lived a lot cleaner, and had stopped fouling the pond. But a legacy of the new thinking was that one of the worst insults was to be called an instrumentalist, in jargon that dated from Amin’s time: a meddler. To imagine that we could actively fix planet-sized problems seemed as hubristic and arrogant as the mind-sets that had got us into this mess in the first place. So to ask Sonia’s question—what do we do?—was to confront a modern taboo square in the face.

  Shelley said reasonably, “Look at it this way. We don’t trust ourselves not to make a mess even worse. But those gas hydrates have no conscience, no soul, no sympathy; they will blow however we feel about it.”

  Tom surprised me. “All right, so let’s play the instrumentalist game. If the crud we’re injecting into the atmosphere is going to cause the hydrates to tip over into instability, let’s just stop doing it.”

  I caught Sonia’s eye and remembered her rules. I said, “What I like about that is that in the long term it has to be the right solution. To remove the root cause of a problem has to be a better strategy than to tinker with the symptoms.”

  Tom said cautiously. “Let’s hear the but—”

  “But it’s too late.”

  Shelley backed me up.

  We’d already done a great deal by eliminating most of the automobiles. But even if we shut down all the factories and power plants tomorrow, carbon dioxide would still be injected into the air from, for instance, rotting deposits on the dying seabeds. We were dealing with planet-sized systems; the vast inertia of Earth’s processes would ensure that the rise in carbon dioxide content continued to rise for decades, and the warming with it.

  Sonia recorded all this. “So it won’t help if we stop putting the stuff into the air. Why don’t we try taking it out again?”

  Shelley said, “That’s such a good idea that people are already doing it.”

  It was true; there were “geoengineering” projects going on in various corners of the globe—tentative, deeply unfashionable. Most of them focused on modest efforts at what was called “carbon sequestration,” drawing down ca
rbon dioxide from the air faster than natural processes could manage.

  “So we just accelerate those programs,” Sonia said. “Maybe we should make the carbon dioxide snow out, like it does on Mars.”

  That was one from left field, the kind of wacky idea that I imagined Sonia’s own process was supposed to generate. We played around with it a bit. The difficulty was that Mars is much colder than the Earth. You’d have to reduce the global temperatures to make carbon dioxide freeze, which was precisely the problem we were dealing with anyhow. Or maybe you could somehow tinker with the atmosphere, add some kind of freeze factor to the air . . . None of us knew enough chemistry to come up with a plausible way of making this happen.

  Tom clasped his hands behind his head and sat back in his chair. “I hesitate to say this in front of an arch-instrumentalist like you, Dad, but maybe we’re thinking too big here. After all we aren’t interested in cooling down the whole damn planet. Just stabilizing the hydrate sediments would be enough—wouldn’t it? So why don’t we just think of a way to refrigerate the poles?”

  Shelley said, “Actually there have been a lot of schemes proposed in the past for cooling down selected portions of the Earth’s surface.” She ran through this quickly, what she could remember or retrieve through her softscreen, and we chewed it over.

  Most of these ideas involved shadowing a chunk of Earth’s surface, thus cutting it off from the sunlight. You could inject crud into the air, aerosols of various kinds to screen out the light. Or, even more simply, you could send fleets of planes over the poles dropping shards of some silvered material onto the ice or the water. If you made the material smart, we thought, you could make it self-assembling, a self-knitting, self-repairing mirrored cap. You could even program it to break up on command. It was quite a thought, to wrap a significant chunk of the world in silver foil.

  Or, we thought, you could put some kind of solar-shield system into orbit. The Russians had played with this idea in the past. You would get a lot more control over the light you let through than with systems in the atmosphere or on the ground. For a few minutes Shelley and I disappeared into happy elaborations of this idea. You would be looking at a massive, unprecedented program of space launches, but we knew that if we turned our minds to it our Higgs-energy engines could fuel the booster fleet required. But the dynamics of positioning a shield so as to provide an effective screen to the poles would be tricky. The equator would be comparatively easy to protect; there you could throw your shield up to geosynchronous orbit where, orbiting once every twenty-four hours, it would seem to hover over a single point on the surface of the turning Earth. Geosynchronous wasn’t the only solution, though; Shelley dug up some esoteric material on complex orbital patterns the Russians had once used to provide twenty-four-hour comsat coverage to their scattered, far-from-the-equator domains.

  Eventually Sonia timed us out. We were getting too deep into specifics, she said.

  “OK,” Shelley conceded. “But we must get in touch with some of those geoengineering groups, whatever we decide to do. They have got to have experience of these megaprojects we can tap into.”

  Tom was shaking his head, in a world-weary way I’d seen too often as he was growing up. “Geoengineering. Terraforming. Wet dreams.”

  I snapped, “What use is it to sneer, Tom? And besides it was you who suggested we cool the poles.”

  “I didn’t say cool,” he said. “I said refrigerate.”

  Shelley jumped in between us, damping down the fire before it started. “You’re quite right, Tom.” She thought it over. “A refrigerator is a machine for extracting heat from a volume. So how does it work? You pass your working fluid, your refrigerant—ammonia, say—around the volume you want to chill. The refrigerant is vaporized with heat from your target volume, so extracting the energy. As a gas the refrigerant is passed to a condenser, where it is returned to liquid form and so gives up that heat. And then the liquid is pumped around the loop again to suck more heat out.”

  Sonia made notes, but she looked dubious. “How could you refrigerate the hydrate deposits? They are buried deep, and they cover millions of square kilometers.”

  “It needn’t be so difficult,” I said, thinking fast. “You’d pass a network of pipes into the substance of the hydrate deposits themselves. It wouldn’t take long to build up a functioning network.” I sketched rapidly, producing a sketch that looked a little like a road network, with big arterial routes and smaller side roads branching off. “Your working fluid needn’t be ammonia, of course. In these volumes it probably couldn’t be. Liquid nitrogen, perhaps—you could just draw down the nitrogen from the air . . .”

  Tom was shaking his head again, and I was on the point of snapping back at him, and I knew that despite all Sonia’s hard work we were falling into the elephant traps of our relationship.

  But Sonia and Shelley seemed to come to the same conclusion simultaneously. We needed a break. They both stood up. “Lunchtime,” Shelley said. “Michael, you’re the cook.”

  “Fine,” I said with bad grace. Tom clambered out of his chair looking as grumpy as I felt.

  Sonia made one last note. “Refrigerate. Hold that thought.”

  Lunch was a buffet, plastic-wrapped plates of stuff I’d prepared earlier in the day: smoked snake meat, a green salad with big, bright leaves of out-of-season gen-enged lettuce. We filled our plates and our glasses. I had some of those little clip-on drink holders that you fix to the side of your plate, and I let my guests wander around the house.

  Shelley said to me around a mouthful of snake meat, “It’s going well, don’t you think?”

  “The session? We’re coming up with some ideas, I guess. I think you’re right, we ought to contact those geoengineers if we’re going to start treading on their turf—”

  She shook her head. “Not that. The important stuff. You and Tom. You seem to be getting on OK. The real reason, the only reason you’re interested in saving the world is because it gives you something to talk to your son about. Isn’t that true?”

  Just as George had said, I remembered. “I guess so. But why else would anybody do it? Anyhow we’re both on our best behavior with you two around.”

  “Sonia is quite a find, isn’t she?”

  “You like her?”

  “I think she’s terrific,” Shelley said. “Smart, obviously competent, healthy—what more could you want? She’ll be good for Tom. How close do you think they are?”

  “I can’t tell. I never could. . . .” I’ve always had a complicated view of relationships—either subtle or confused, depending on your point of view. It seems to me that there is a whole spectrum of possibilities between the poles of platonic and lover, whole levels of intimacy, sharing, degrees of distance. When I was younger I always enjoyed the early days of a new romance as you both reach out to explore, trying to understand what you had, where on that spectrum of possibilities you sat.

  I tried to explain this to Shelley.

  “ ‘A spectrum of relationship types,’ ” she said. “Even when you talk about love you sound like an engineer.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Looking from the outside Tom seems to be just the same,” I said. “Maybe he’s at the early stages still with this Sonia, you think?”

  “Oh, I think they’ve gone further than that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The way they look at each other—or rather the way they don’t. The way they sit together. They’re aware of each other, but in an accustomed way, they don’t need to check. They’re used to each other, Michael.”

  Now that I thought it over, I saw she was right. “I hope they’ll be happy.”

  “Oh, I think they will be. So where do you think we are on your spectrum?”

  I was taken aback; I’d never thought of Shelley that way.

  She squeezed my arm. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. Don’t worry, Michael. I do understand, you know.”


  “You do?”

  “Sure. Because for you, the spectrum isn’t there anymore, is it? For you there is only Morag, and that’s all there can ever be. Morag, wrapped in a rainbow cloak. But I’m here anyhow.”

  “I—”

  “You don’t know what to say? So don’t say anything.”

  Tom, followed by Sonia, came walking through from the lounge. His face was ominously hard. “Dad, you had a message. I took it for you. Sorry, I obviously wasn’t meant to hear it.” His tone dripped with insolence, or contempt.

  “What message?”

  “From Rosa in Seville. My aunt,” he explained to Shelley and Sonia. “Another bat in the family belfry. She said your immigration checks have been completed, and she’s been passed as a suitable personal mentor for you while you’re in Spain. Oh, and she said she looks forward to ‘swapping ghost stories’ with you.” His anger was obvious, cold.

  Shelley took a step back from me and sighed. “Oh, Michael.” And Sonia avoided my eyes. She was a sane person giving a nut some space. My embarrassment deepened.

  “I thought you were done with this stuff, Dad,” Tom said bitterly. “Didn’t we have a deal?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But you’re going over there even so.”

  “I have to.”

  Shelley sighed again. “I thought we had you back, too, Michael. But you were fooling us, weren’t you?” Somehow her disappointment in me hurt more than Tom’s reaction. She dumped her plate on the table. “OK, that’s enough bullshit—and enough of this rabbit food, thanks all the same, Michael. Let’s get back to work.” She put an arm around Tom’s shoulders. “I want to follow up this idea of yours. Refrigeration . . .”