Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  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 of 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 G
aia'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 explain 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.”

  “You?” he said, with an unintentional hint of a sneer that was a stab in the heart, not so much because it was a sneer as because it was so utterly casual.

  “Maybe not,” she admitted. “But somebody with ideas similar to mine. The slogans that will win the future are ours. FREE THE CARBON. WAKE UP TO WARMTH. BIOMASS IS OPPORTUNITY. HEAT IS GOOD. GO WITH THE FLOW, NOT AGAINST IT. EVOLUTION, NOT DEVOLUTION. PROGRESS, NOT REGRESS. Shall I go on?”

  “Do you really think the voters will go for that sort of crap?” he asked her bluntly, effortlessly coming all the way down from the intellectual high ground he had initially tried to occupy. “Here in Strasbourg I mean, not in the ex-frozen wastes of northern Sweden.”

  “Maybe not,” she replied, “but a true statesman's job is to change public opinion, not to reflect it. You might win this battle, by courtesy of historical inertia, but you can't win the war. You can't stop progress, and the CC really is progress, no matter how frightening it seems.”

  “Frightening? It's more than frightening, sister. It's costing lives—billions of lives.”

  “Everybody has one life, my love, and nobody loses it more than once. It's Gaia's world that can't sustain the present population, and Gaia's people who've produced it regardless. Maybe a better, warmer world can sustain a larger human population, and maybe it can't—but there's every chance that it will sustain a wiser population, because it will need a wiser population to create and sustain it.”

  “You can't dismiss the misery of billions of people with that kind of smart rhetoric.”

  “And you shouldn't try to sustain that misery with stupid rhetoric.”

  It was at that point that the argument came close to spoiling the meal, and the birthday—which was something that neither of them wanted.

  “Anyway, this student presidency thing is kids’ stuff,” Kay told Gerda, relenting his tone a little. “It's a game. We won't be going into battle until we actually graduate from uni—which is why you still have time to switch sides and join the White Knights. In real life, if not in proverbial wisdom, it's the side that wins the battles that wins the war, and the Gaian majority is solid. It won't disappear in our lifetimes unless the methane bomb goes off and the CC turns into the Venus Effect. School politics is only play-acting, but we'll be embroiled in the real thing soon enough. Do you really want to be stuck in the struggling opposition? You don't have to step into Selma's shoes, flying the flag of prevarication for avaricious Eskimos and the Siberian Oligarchs—there are plenty of other things you might do. Your father was a bureaucrat, working on the day-to-day amelioration of the crisis, and there'll always be more than enough to do in that direction. If you don't want that, you could always work for me. We've always had a useful camaraderie, and every great front-man needs great back-up.”

  “There's a world of difference,” Gerda replied, sadly, “between being friends and being a team.” Because she was exactly the same height as he was, she was able to look him straight in the eye without any implicit disadvantage, and she knew full well that blue eyes were better equipped for staring, but she took the fact that he eventually looked away as solid evidence of the virtue of her cause.

  Kay won the NIS presidential election hands down, just as he had predicted, but Gerda wasn't unduly downhearted. The game had a long way to go before the final whistle. Kay might have put the first point on the board, but Gerda felt, passionately, that history and evolution really were on her side. As with all the other gods and goddesses that humankind had ever worshipped, the ideals that Gaia stood for were more honored in the breach than the observance. In Christendom, the meek had conspicuously failed to inherit the Earth, and even the loudest of Gaia's preachers continued to breathe out more than their fair share of carbon dioxide, without ever managing to dampen civilization's industrial flamboyance.

  * * * *

  Gerda and Kay never discussed the possibility of going on to the same university after leaving the NIS. Kay took it for granted that the tacit parting of their ways introduced into their lives by their increasing commitment to opposing political ideologies would extend to an actual parting of the ways, and Gerda accepted the assumption—but she was able to leave it to Kay to insist that they meet up at least once a year to celebrate their birthday.

  “I'll never give up hope of bringing you into the fold,” he told her. “I'll keep on trying to win you over.”

  “So will I,” she promised.

  Even Kay, of course, could not step directly into his father's shoes after university, mainly because his father was still wearing them and fully intended to go on doing so for another ten or twenty years. That was a normal situation for ex-IS students to be in, and the conventional career path of the school's elite had to accommodate that period of delay. Most went to Brussels, which had clung on to the greater part of its bureaucratic functions when the legislative chamber had decamped, in order to serve as cogs in the administrative machine while they waited for power-charged slots to open up, and that was what Kay did. Gerda, on the other hand, decided to stay on at her own university—Bern—as a postgraduate researcher.

  When she communicated this decision to Kay on thei
r twenty-second birthday, during a meeting in Budapest, where he had taken his own degree, he was not at all surprised. He even seemed to take a certain satisfaction in her decision, as if he imagined that he could take some credit for it. Mistakenly—mistaking her motives had become second nature to him by now—he jumped to the conclusion that she was planning to abandon politics permanently, having realized the folly of setting up a campaign-tent outside the Gaian encampment.

  “It's a wise move,” he told her, smiling to demonstrate his good will. “Academic life is a safe haven, especially for ... what was the title of your course, again?”

  Gerda knew that Kay had studied International Relations, as a good MEP kid should; he, on the other hand, only contrived to remember that she had not. “Practical Botany,” she reminded him.

  “Right,” he said, putting on a show of vagueness. “I knew it sounded as if it had something to do with flowers, even though it was really about crop engineering. Good decision—plant engineering is hotter than ever. It's not just a matter of tweaking staple crops to help them adapt to changing climatic conditions, is it? The necessity of compensation for insect decline has forced the engineers to be more adventurous. And it's still the cutting edge of carbon sink technology, even if it hasn't delivered yet.”

  “Plant engineering is crucial to the world's future,” Gerda agreed, as she had at least twice before, when Kay had condescended to make similar remarks on their previous birthday meetings. His affected vagueness was intended to assist him in maintaining the appearance of knowing where the intellectual high ground was, even though his ignorance of the intimate details of genetic engineering prevented him from operating there. It never worked, and Gerda always took a certain delight in watching him flounder as he tried to pretend that he knew and understood more than he did.