I would be able to start within a few months, once I have settled my affairs in my home country.
I would like to start immediately. I am eager to begin my doctoral work.
I would like time to consider the offer.
16: We feel that the thesis cannot be considered complete without a thorough treatment of the residual terms. A proper characterisation of these terms will lead to a clearer picture of the “anomaly” that seems to be implied by the current analysis. This will entail several more months of work. Are you prepared to accept this commitment?
A moment grows longer, becomes awkward in its attenuation. She feels their eyes on her, willing her to break the silence. But it has already gone on long enough. There can be no way to speak now that will not cast a strange, eccentric light on her behaviour. That light coming through the window feels unbearably full of meaning, demanding total commitment to the act of observation.
Her throat moves. She swallows, feeling herself pinned to this moving instant in space and time, paralysed by it. Her migraine feels less like a migraine and more like a window opening inside her head, letting in futures. Vast possibilities unfold from this moment. Terrifying futures, branching away faster and more numerous than thoughts can track. There is a weight on her that she never asked for, never invited. A pressure, sharpening down to a point like the tip of a diamond anvil.
There’s a version of her that did something magnificent and terrible. She traces the contingent branches back in time, until they converge on this office, this moment, this choice.
Agree to their request. Or fail.
She gathers her notes and rises to leave. She smoothes her skirt. They watch her without question, faces blank—her actions so far outside the usual parameters that her interrogators have no frame of reference.
“I have to go to the park again,” she says, as if that ought to be answer enough, all that was required of her. “It’s still hanami. There’s still time.”
They watch as Kamala Chatterjee closes the door behind her. She goes to Ueno Park, wanders the cherry blossom paths, remaining there until the lantern lighters come out and an evening cool touches the air.
Cold Comfort
PAT MURPHY AND PAUL DOHERETY
Pat Murphy writes fiction that inhabits the borderland between genres, where life is interesting and the rules are slippery. She is very grateful that science fiction exists, since it has provided a happy home for seven of her eight novels and many of her short stories. Her work has won numerous awards, including two Nebula Awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Her novels include The Falling Woman, The City Not Long After, Nadya: The Wolf Chronicles, Wild Angel, and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell. Her short stories are collected in Points of Departure and Women Up to No Good. With Karen Joy Fowler, she cofounded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender roles. In her day job, she is the resident Evil Genius at MysteryScience.com, where she creates science activities to inspire and amaze elementary school students.
Paul Doherty is a physicist, author, teacher, and mountaineer. As part of his job as a senior scientist at the Exploratorium, he worked as a scientist/writer at McMurdo station Antarctica. There he joined a group of scientists doing research on the rim of Mt. Erebus, an active volcano, and learned firsthand about surviving in the extreme cold. In collaboration with Pat Murphy, Paul writes a science column for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He has written many nonfiction science books, including the Explorabook, which came with the tools for doing the experiments it described. He is the winner of the Faraday Award for Excellence in Science Teaching from the National Science Teachers Association. A longtime science fiction reader, Paul worked out the equations for the navigation of a relativistic spacecraft back in 1979, which landed him a mention in Fredrick Pohl’s novel “Starburst.”
Here they join forces to show us how a race between a Fart Catcher and a catastrophic release of methane from thawing permafrost may make the difference between disaster and preserving our civilization—and catastrophe is winning the race.
I stood in the center of the frozen Arctic lake, chipping at the ice with an ice chisel, a sharp-edged piece of steel attached to a five-foot-long handle. It was the middle of May, and the ice was still about a meter thick. I made an indentation large enough to hold a bundle of six explosive cartridges.
One cartridge in the bundle was primed with a number 6 electric blasting cap. I attached the lead wires to the cap, placed the cartridges in the crater I had made, then scraped the ice chips back into the hole to cover them. The afternoon sun would warm the surface and melt the snow a little. In the chill of the evening, it would refreeze, sealing the charge in place.
I walked north on the ice, unrolling the lead wires. The spruce trees that surrounded the lake tilted this way and that, leaning on each other like drunks at closing time. A drunken forest. The trees had grown in the permafrost, the permanently frozen soil of the Arctic Circle, and their roots were shallow. As the frozen soil had melted, the trees had abandoned their upright posture, beginning a slow motion fall toward the ground. As the permafrost melted, it released methane, the main component of natural gas.
I stopped to brush snow off the ice and chip another crater. Beneath the black ice I could see thousands of white blobs, as numerous as stars in the sky. Some were as big as my hand; some as big as my head. Each one was a bubble of methane released by the melting permafrost and trapped beneath the ice.
I looked up when I heard the crunch of footsteps in the snow. My friend Anaaya grinned at me. “You’re slow, Doctor Maggie. I’ve already finished the other side of the lake.”
Anaaya was the only person who insisted on the honorific. She was an old friend. We had been roommates in our freshman year at University of Alaska. She had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering; I had gone on to get a doctorate.
“Of course you’re faster,” I told her. “You actually know what you’re doing.”
“I’ll help you out, Doctor Slowpoke.”
It was a small lake, but it took us three hours working together to plant all the charges. When we were done, we surveyed our work from the lakeshore. The afternoon breeze was already blowing snow across the lake, erasing our footprints. The charges and the connecting wire were invisible beneath the snow and ice.
“No sign that we were ever here,” I said.
“We were never here,” she said. “Who would ever stop at this lake? No one. No fishing here, no hunting—no reason to stop. You’re on your way to check on a methane monitoring station; I’m looking into some reports of illegal trapping for my aunt.” Anaaya’s aunt was involved in tribal management. “All official business.”
Looking out over the lake at the drunken forest, tilted trees as far as the eye could see, I didn’t hesitate. “Of course.”
We returned to our snowmobiles and headed north to accomplish our official business.
* * *
Two weeks later, the lake exploded. Our charges had cracked the ice and ignited the rising methane.
I wasn’t there to see it happen. No one was. But three satellites were perfectly positioned to capture the show. Two aerospace engineers—friends of friends who could not be traced to me—had independently calculated the orbits and set the ideal time for the explosion. They had done a good job. The satellite images were spectacular. A very impressive mushroom cloud. Trees for miles around the lake were blasted with ice shards.
An ecoterrorist, JollyGreen, took credit for the explosion, releasing a lengthy manifesto about the melting of the permafrost and the release of methane. JollyGreen was a sock puppet, of course. Not my sock puppet. The sock puppet of a friend of a friend of a friend with no connections back to me.
JollyGreen’s basic message was this: Earth’s average global surface temperature was i
ncreasing and the Arctic was heating up faster than the rest of the planet. The permafrost was melting and releasing methane, which was twenty times better at trapping the sun’s heat than carbon dioxide. More methane meant more warming. That meant more permafrost melting, which meant more methane and more warming … and so on in a positive feedback loop with negative consequences.
“The human race is already screwed because of climate change,” he wrote. “There’ll be flooding, famine, drought, and more. Too late to turn all that around, but it can get worse. If all the permafrost melts, we are royally screwed. Mass extinctions, mass die-off of phytoplankton and disruption of the ocean’s ecosystems, wildfires on land. Nowhere to run; nowhere to hide.”
For the next few days, news programs featured Arctic researchers explaining the consequences of climate change north of the Arctic Circle. Some of my former colleagues at the University of Alaska were quizzed on camera about the permafrost and methane in Arctic lakes. Several cited my work. Yes, they said, the permafrost was melting, methane constantly bubbled up under Arctic lakes. None of this was secret information.
I was not among the scientists interviewed. I heard that a couple of reporters trying to find a way to contact me put pressure on the PR department at the university, but no one gave me up. They just said I was no longer affiliated with the university.
A month later, after the explosion had faded from the news cycle, the National Science Foundation called me. I was about 100 miles away from the exploding lake, making coffee over a driftwood fire in Ivvavik National Park, Canada’s least visited national park. I had spent the month living in a qarmaq, a sod-roofed hut built decades before by an Inuit family to serve as a winter camp. It was just large enough for me, Claire, and Marina—grad students who had elected to spend the summer getting a little field experience working with me. The qarmaq was conveniently situated right beside the one-acre plot where I was testing a unique method of capturing methane released by melting permafrost.
Here there were no spruce trees to betray the softening of the soil beneath the surface. Low grasses and shrubs grew in a boggy landscape. Nestled among the plants were carbon fiber tubes, woven together to make a very loose mat. In some areas, the fibers had been trampled into the soil by a passing herd of reindeer.
A year before, I had submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation about this pilot project. I had called this tangle of carbon fiber tubes a “methane sequestering mat.” When NSF turned down my grant proposal, I had posted the project on a crowd-funding site, where I referred to it as a “fart catcher.” Crowd-funding had financed my one-acre pilot project.
It was a warm day by Arctic standards—slightly above freezing. I wore hiking boots with two pairs of wool socks, rather than the large white bunny boots—rubber inside and out with thick insulation between the waterproof layers—that were necessary in the winter. I could breathe without a filter to warm the air before it reached my lungs. Practically balmy.
I was talking with Clan and Marina about plans for the day when the satellite phone rang. The call was from an NSF program officer, the same guy who had turned down my grant proposal. But that had been before the lake exploded, before permafrost became—ever so briefly—the star of the 24/7 news cycle, before some members of Congress began calling for zero methane emissions in the Arctic.
NSF was adding a new initiative that focused on methane emission from the melting permafrost. The program officer had called my house in Fairbanks and persuaded the house sitter to give him the number of my satellite phone. He wanted to discuss my proposal for a methane-sequestering mat.
Sitting on a camp stool by the driftwood fire, looking out over the tundra and the tangle of carbon fibers, I told the program officer about results to date from my crowd-funded prototype. Knowing that this program officer had an engineering background, I focused on how the project made use of recent innovations in nanotechnology—the carbon fiber tubes, the low-pressure methane-hydrate storage tank made possible by advances in carbon nanotube technology. I recited numbers—emission rates, kilograms of methane recovered. It was a cordial and productive conversation.
* * *
Nine months later, I landed at Franklin Research Station. Built of recycled shipping containers and located on the coastal tundra just outside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the station was a low rust-colored box surrounded by ice. To the north, the Beaufort Sea—a plain of ice stretching away to meet the blue sky. To the south, the Brooks Range—mountains that looked as if they had been sculpted from snow, not just covered by it. I had been lucky to fly in during a calm spell. March was the start of the Arctic research season, but the weather was always dicey.
“Welcome to your home away from home,” the pilot called out as he turned the plane’s nose into the wind and brought it down smoothly on the ice-covered runway.
“Happy to be here,” I said sincerely.
A few hours later, after unpacking my gear, I repeated that sentiment as I met with Jackson Hanks, the head of operations at the station. I had done my research on the man. He was twenty years my senior. A biologist by training, but he had been head of operations at the station for more than a decade, while station managers had come and gone.
A former colleague from my university days who had spent a summer at Franklin Station provided me with more detailed information than Google ever could: “That guy? He’ll never go rogue. He knows how to work the system. He’s never the leader but always in charge. He keeps his head down and knows where all the bodies are buried.”
Oki, the head cook at Franklin Station, was a distant cousin of my friend Anaaya. He had provided even more important information: what Jackson Hanks liked to drink.
I arrived in Jackson’s office with a bottle of bourbon. “A gift from the south,” I said, as I set it on his desk. “My sources say it’s your favorite brand.”
Jackson smiled, opened the bottle, and brought two glasses out of a drawer. “A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Lindsey.”
“Maggie,” I said. “Nobody calls me doctor.” I accepted a glass of bourbon and sat across the desk from him. We engaged in the usual small talk of the Arctic, discussing the weather, the state of the sea ice, my good luck in getting in before the wind picked up. At that moment the wind was blasting the triple-paned office window with ice crystals and making the station vibrate with a steady hum.
Jackson sipped his bourbon, then told me they’d been having problems with polar bears of late. That led to a story about a grad student who had come to the station to study the population decline of polar bears. “He thought they were cute until he got trapped in a remote observation blind for three days when a couple of young bears decided he’d make a good snack. After that, he switched to studying the decline of the parrotfish population in coral reefs off the coast of the Yucatán.”
“He could have switched to Arctic foxes,” I suggested. “They’re plenty cute and not at all menacing unless you’re a lemming.”
Jackson shook his head. “He’s better off in the tropics. He didn’t belong up here.”
“So you condemned him to sweltering on the beach and watching the sea level rise.”
“Drinking warm beer because there’s no ice. Battening down for hurricanes. Battling giant tropical spiders.”
We lifted our glasses and toasted the guy who couldn’t cut it in our environment of choice.
“When I found out you were coming to the station, I asked a few sources of my own about you,” he told me.
“Find out anything interesting?”
“The station manager at McMurdo says you passed his test, and that’s good.”
When I was in grad school, I’d spent a summer at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, helping with a study of the microbiome of Antarctic soils.
“What test was that?” I asked. I didn’t remember a test.
“He watches what people do in the cafeteria. He looks for people who are just as comfortable in a group discussion as they are sitti
ng by themselves. You passed.”
I nodded. “I get along with people,” I said. “And I can get along alone.”
He leaned back in his chair, studying me. “Tell me—why did you leave the university? You were teaching, doing research, on a tenure track.”
“One too many committee meetings,” I said lightly. He laughed, and I added, “I like to get things done.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “So tell me about this methane sequestering mat of yours. Or do you prefer ‘fart catcher’?”
I shrugged. “Either one.” Since Jackson was a biologist, I launched into an explanation of the biology of the system. “The mat’s made of carbon fiber tubes, but what makes it work is the colony of bacteria in those tubes.”
It turned out that Jackson knew quite a bit about Methylomirabilis oxyfera, the bacteria that made the mat work. Amazing critters those—they thrive in stinking black mud without light or oxygen, digesting methane and nitrogen oxides for their energy. In the tubes of the mat, they consumed enough methane to create a concentration gradient that kept the methane flowing into the tubes and rising into a storage tank.
“A biological methane pump?” he said. “That’s clever. And you want to cover a square mile with this fart catcher? That’s ambitious.”
“A square mile is just a start. We have to move fast, you know. With the current rate of methane emission…”
He held up a hand to stop me. “Hold on. I don’t need to hear JollyGreen’s manifesto on Arctic warming. I live here, remember?”
“Sorry.”
“Having that lake blow up gave your permafrost research quite a boost, didn’t it?”
“I suppose it did.”
“I can understand the motives of whoever did it. No one pays any attention to what happens up here unless it involves something cataclysmic or cute. Polar bears get press; permafrost usually doesn’t.”
I didn’t say anything. I just waited.
He studied me, then smiled, ever so slightly. “I assume that safety protocols will ensure that there will be no explosions associated with your project.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 52