We were silent for a moment. It helped his moral authority, of course, that in our lifetimes Holland itself had given up its own centuries-long battle against the sea, and the Dutch had become a nation of exiles.
“You’re quite a package, Mr. Makaay,” Shelley said dryly.
“But, you know, it’s not me who’s the throwback,” he said mischievously. “It’s the pols and bureaucrats I have to deal with who have some serious evolving to do.”
Even Shelley smiled at that.
Once we were over the Mojave we flew a circuitous route that took us over more of EI’s pet projects, set up on a demonstration scale across the face of the desert. There were windmill-like factories lined up in a row; Makaay said these were designed to strip the wind of carbon dioxide by passing it over absorbing chemicals, such as calcium hydroxide. Then, following the line of a canal, an arrow-straight lane of blue cut into the desert, we flew over patches of green fields and forests, all neatly squared off and contained. I learned later that this was a land-based analog of the plankton bloom we’d seen in the ocean; these virulently green grasses, shrubs, and trees were gen-enged to soak up a lot more carbon dioxide than their wild, unmodified ancestors. The key, it seemed, was to enhance the lignin content.
The most impressive constructions were domes, each coated in a filmy coat of geodesic silver, sitting in patient rows like vast golf balls. More carbon sequestration, Makaay said. The principle here was simple: just to freeze carbon dioxide out of the air, thousands of tons at a time, and then coat it in an insulating cladding—and, well, just leave it sitting there in the desert. “Hardly attractive, but it works,” he said.
Shelley argued with VR Makaay about the practicalities. Running a vast refrigeration plant to freeze down all that carbon dioxide was itself going to inject more heat into the atmosphere, wasn’t it? Yes, but if you took a longer view, over a decade or more, the net effect was a reduction of the atmosphere’s heat load through removal of the greenhouse gas. And then, no matter how efficient your insulation there would always be some leakage, wouldn’t there? So in the end you weren’t actually removing the carbon from the air but just adding a time lag. Yes, admitted Makaay, but this was a simple method to apply large-scale, and at least you were buying some time while you figured out a better solution. . . .
I switched out of the conversation. As we dipped over one of those domes I could see the plane’s reflection, a moth that slid across a curving face of sky blue.
We had all fallen into a skeptical habit of mind, I thought, even Shelley, perhaps even myself. Geoengineering solutions always tended to brush over the complexity of the real world, notably the tangled intricacy of the biosphere—and so it was easier to do nothing than to do something big and risk making things worse. But Shelley and I were here to ask for help with some macro-engineering of our own, on a scale that would make these silver-clad golf balls look like toys.
Before it began its landing approach the plane banked, to head into the wind from the coast. Briefly we left the EI facility behind, and looped over an arid landscape populated by nothing but scrub and Joshua trees.
And suddenly the ground blazed with reflected light. I made out cars, neatly parked, a carpet of glass and brightly painted metal. They looked perfect, intact and unmarked, row upon row of them.
After the Amin policy announcements that had effectively robbed the gasoline automobile industry of its future, there had been years of adjustment and bailout. In Detroit and other motor cities the assembly lines had continued to roll like a tap nobody could turn off, pumping out vehicles for which there was no longer a market. The federal government had simply bought up the excess stock and shipped them to such places as this. And here these exquisitely engineered vehicles sat, rust-free in the dry air, as if in expectation that the great smog-choked days of the twentieth century might somehow return once more. Some of the later models were very smart, I knew, smart enough to be self-aware. I wondered if they knew where they were, if they were waiting like abandoned pets for owners that never came.
We emerged from the plane into a flat blistering heat; it was worse than Seville. I was even more impressed that EI had managed to turn bits of this desert green.
Ruud Makaay met us in person at the foot of the airplane steps. He seemed oddly bigger than his VR representation, and his handshake was firm.
EI’s buildings, at the edge of the smart tarmac of the small airfield’s runway, were just boxy white blocks, unimpressive. They were air-conditioned, though, and we stepped indoors with relief. Makaay led us through what looked like a regular office environment, an open-plan clutter of partitions and desks and people working at softscreens and terminals of various kinds. Most of them seemed to be here in the flesh, though one or two had the fake sheen of VRs.
“Your place is smaller than I expected,” I ventured.
“Well, this is only the head office,” Makaay said. “Corporate HQ. We have design facilities, labs, manufacturing plants all over the country—all over the world, in fact. And we kept this place low-key by design. We didn’t want to make the mistake of having our visitors distracted by the place itself, by fountains and pot-plants and statues of the founder. Have you even been to St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London? The tomb of Wren, the architect, has a Latin epitaph: ‘Visitor, if you seek my monument, look around you.’ Something like that. It’s the same with us. We want to make sure that what’s out the window is more interesting than what’s in here.”
He brought us to a small office. We sat; Makaay poured us both coffee.
“So,” I said, “do you think you’ll be able to help us?”
“Too early to say. Your proposal’s a little thin right now,” he said dryly. “But we’ll get to that. However, now you’ve seen something of us, what do you think—do we look as if we can make your project fly?”
I thought that over. “You’re certainly bigger than I expected. Wealthier.”
“Actually I wouldn’t say so.” He frowned. “We’re not rich yet, not given the size of the operation we run. It’s just that we play big. Everybody is surprised we have achieved any success at all, however. I think we have all got locked into a mind-set that says there is no way to make money in this contracting world of ours.
“Look at it from the point of view of an industrialist in, say, 2020. The shift to hydrogen, the need for new power generation systems, the dislocation of getting rid of the automobile—even if you could get your head around such vast changes, you didn’t have the infrastructure in place, the raw materials, the patents to exploit them; you didn’t have things sewn up the way your daddy used to. So it was better to resist change, to keep your head down, hoping it would all go away, or at least hope the storm wouldn’t break until you had finished your own career.
“It was Amin’s administration that changed all that.” He smiled fondly. “I was in business school at the time, at Harvard. Amin’s policies laid the foundation of new growth industries, in bio-infrastructure, compensation, environmental mitigation. There was money to be made in saving the world! When people realized that you saw a flurry of patents to protect technologies that were going to be key in the new political, legislative, and economic environment. At Harvard our instructors told us we were privileged to be living through a shifting in the economic paradigm, perhaps the most profound since the Industrial Revolution. And people started to get rich.”
“Like EI,” Shelley said.
“Look, this company has greened an area of the Sahara the size of Texas. You only need to siphon off a little of the proceeds from such an enterprise to bring in some major sums. But it’s nothing to what we could be achieving, I believe.”
There was a still skepticism about EI’s work, he said. The carbon-sequestration projects had generally proven more readily acceptable because it was relatively easy to make money out of them, by earning carbon credits, or reducing your liability to carbon taxes. But, he said, the schemes appealed because they were essentially passive. “Y
ou are fixing, not changing. Of course it’s true that the risks of changing things are more unknowable, and therefore greater.”
Shelley said, “Such as Cephalonia.”
Makaay leaned forward, passion showing in his pale eyes. “I was on the clean-up team. I haven’t forgotten. We are engineers, the three of us; you understand. Things go wrong. We learn from mistakes. We fix them. Nothing like Cephalonia has happened again, or will. And it mustn’t stop us from trying again.
“But we do need to reassure people, I accept that. Our lawyers are trying to agree to a code of conduct for geoengineers at UNESCO. A kind of Hippocratic oath, if you will, a pledge that we will use our powers responsibly. If that is accepted perhaps we can start to build trust once and for all. And then we can really get on with the job.”
Shelley said, “OK. But do you think we’ve a chance of getting the support we need for the hydrate-stabilization project?”
He sat back. “It’s not impossible. It’s a question of how you sell it. Your project is vast in scale, and that will instinctively repel a lot of people. But it’s essentially passive, like our carbon-sequestration programs. You aren’t meddling; you’re simply trying to maintain an equilibrium, to prevent a loss. So perhaps we can avoid a few philosophical obstacles on the way. We have a lobbying firm we use in Washington; they’ll be able to advise.”
At his use of the word lobbying I quailed; the world of high politics was not one where I would feel comfortable.
Shelley noticed this and smiled. “We have to do this, kiddo. We’re talking about a major international effort here—billions of dollars of investment. We have to deal with the big boys.”
Makaay’s expression was friendly, engaged, but reserved, consummately professional. “I can’t say yet if we’ll support you. Our board has to make the decision. It’s a big task for us. But I do believe that your project is exactly what EI was founded to do in the first place.” He stood and paced around the little office. “I see an opportunity, for all of us. We need a success. And once we have shrugged off our anxiety about ‘meddling,’ the opportunities are vast.
“Look—call me a progressive. I want to build a world with room for as many happy, well-fed, and healthy people as we can cram in. What’s wrong with that? But obviously I also want to do it without wrecking the environment in the process.” The two levers of geoengineering, he said, carbon sequestration and albedo control, were actually independent of each other. “Now, an increase in carbon dioxide has some beneficial effects: plant growth is stimulated, for example. So suppose we let the carbon levels rise, but kept the temperature under control with albedo modification? That might be the way to advance our civilization to a new optimum, while protecting the planet.
“And we can go further,” he said. “This Bottleneck will teach us to cooperate on a planetary scale. Then we will be able to reach beyond the Earth altogether. We can reserve the Earth simply for doing what it is best at, to support the most complex biosphere we know, and use the resources of space to escape the constraints of closed planetary economics. . . .”
Shelley stood up to stop his flow. “Terrific. But in the meantime, do you have an office where we can set up?”
He grinned, self-deprecatingly. “Quite right. Let’s get to work.”
As we followed him out of the room Shelley whispered to me, “Call him Prospero.”
“Who?”
“Don’t you remember your Shakespeare? The Tempest. Prospero called down a storm; he was an early geoengineer.”
“Didn’t he cause a shipwreck?”
Shelley raised her eyebrows, and we walked on.
Chapter 31
Eusocial living was nearly as old as mankind. The first human eusociety, the first hive, had in fact been born on old Earth, in the days before spaceflight.
It was a solution to the dilemmas of cramped living, which tended to emerge when a community was isolated, when resources were short, when it was difficult to strike out away from home. Reath said, “Anywhere you can’t get away from Mom, this is the way you end up living. It’s a feature of our neural processing, I believe—some would say a deep flaw. But it’s undoubtedly a part of the human story.”
It always began with social pressures. If adult children stayed home, they would compete with their parents for resources. So a mother bullied her daughter into having fewer children, or none at all, and made her devote her energies to her sisters. Families extended into great conflations of sisters and cousins and aunts, all childless, all tending the needs of the children of a single mother.
Ultimately all this served the needs of the genes, or it would never have worked at all. A human was more closely related genetically to her daughter than to her niece. But if by living eusocially you could preserve more nieces than you would have had daughters, you could give your genes, though indirectly, a greater chance of survival.
And then, when the social pressures were locked in, natural selection took over.
As the generations ticked by, as a drone you adapted to the environment you found yourself trapped in: the environment of the Coalescence. Individual creatures, the building bricks of a higher organism, were modified in different ways to serve the needs of the colony as a whole for nutrition, physical support, locomotion, excretion, even reproduction. And why waste energy on the vast bodily reengineering of puberty if you were never going to have a child? Daughters were born in whom the ability to reproduce was postponed—or never cut in at all.
And then there was intelligence. Eusociality required a tight central organization. With the mother and her precious babies at the heart, concentric circles of childless workers served the mother and infants, constructed and maintained the colony, gathered food, fended off predators. There was no command structure. Workers picked up cues from those around them and acted accordingly, and out of this network of endless local interactions the global structure of the colony as a whole emerged. This was emergence: from simple rules, applied at a local level and with some feedback, large-scale structures could emerge.
Minds were not necessary for this. Indeed, it was better not to know what was going on globally; the colony, emergent from everybody’s small-scale actions, simply worked more effectively that way.
Better not to know that you were in a hive.
Alia gazed at the swimming mothers. “All this in half a million years. What will they become in five million years—or fifty, or five hundred?”
Reath said, “Up to now no human hive has become more closely integrated than a colonial organism. But the evolutionary process has barely begun. Alia, in a sense you are a hive! You are a composite of perhaps a hundred trillion cells, each of them one of several hundred different specialist types—muscle, blood, nervous. You are the ultimate outcome of an evolutionary decision of the ancestors of your cells, which were once individual entities, to cooperate some six hundred million years ago. . . . I suppose there is no limit to the integration which is possible with time.” He shook his head. “The end result is unimaginable.”
“I don’t understand why we’re here.”
“Alia, hives are repulsive things. But they are useful.”
Eusocieties were stable, and very long-lived, typically enduring many multiples of the life spans of their members. And that made Coalescents good archivists, recordkeepers of all kinds. A Coalescence was a mound of natural clerks and librarians. “Coalescences have been used as information processors and stores for most of human history. That’s why they are so useful for the Redemption project.”
Bale and the other Campocs were more skeptical. Bale faced Alia. “Hives are useful, yes. And if you want to know what it feels like to be a drone, go back to the Transcendence.”
Alia was shocked by Bale’s comparison of the mindless fecund swarming of the Coalescents with the lofty ambition of the Transcendence. There was no similarity—was there?
Berra took them to the mound’s deepest levels, to the chamber of the Listeners.
This
chamber was low and flat. Its floor was empty save for a few low constructions, and it was lit by lanterns studded at random in the roof. But as Alia peered around she saw that these dim constellations went on and on, blurring in the distance into a single band of light. This one chamber had to be kilometers wide, perhaps more.
Bale stared at the ceiling. “I wonder what’s holding up the weight of the mound?”
Drea snorted. “You’re very literal, aren’t you, Rustie?”
Alia walked forward to the nearest of the low structures on the floor. It was a box no more than waist-high. She found a disc of some translucent substance set in its wall. When she passed her hand before the disc a spot of light, a very faint blue, showed up on her palm. She asked, “Lasers?” Glancing around, she imagined a network of the beams criss-crossing the huge chamber.
And now she heard a scuttling, glimpsed a hunched form. It ran through the shadows, hurrying from the cover of one of the laser boxes to another. It had huge eyes, eyes like saucers.
Drea said dryly, “I take it that was a Listener. Another specialist drone type?”
Alia said, “I suppose so. But what do they listen to?”
Berra said, “To the echoes of time.”
The Transcendence did not see itself as an end for which the desolation of past lives had merely been a necessary means. It believed it must somehow redeem the past, if it were to be cleansed—if it were to be perfect.
But once the goal of Redemption had been formulated, the nascent Transcendence had had to face profound questions. How was the past to be redeemed? Throughout the Commonwealth, Colleges of Redemption were established to address this question. At the very least, it was soon realized, the Transcendence—and indeed the mankind from which it arose—must be aware of the past, so that the past could be taken into the awareness of the Transcendence, a part of its eternal whole.
In the first attempts, vast museums were established. Many of them were virtual, shared between worlds, with no single physical presence. And in these museums immense dioramas were shown, great events of the past brought before the eyes of the present, based on the best reconstructions of the historians and archaeologists.
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