Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Thus far,” Gerda said, as if she were merely following the meandering course of an improvised reverie, “the rise in sea levels has been an unmitigated nuisance—but it might yet provide opportunities as well as threats. With the bulk of the Antarctic ice-cap still to melt, it might be advisable to look harder at the potential opportunities. The ideal sea-bed plant, you know, isn't one that simply sends up kelp-like fronds to float on the surface....”

  “It's one that extends foliage above the surface,” Kay continued, allowing his imagination to be gripped. “Trunk below, crown above. Algae can't do that—not without massive genetic modification, at least—but plants might be more readily adaptable ... if only we can identify the right kinds of plant. Plants grow best on land where there's a lot of leaf litter and other organic debris in the soil ... if marine plants were able to mop up methane from the sea-bed and dissolved carbon dioxide as well as extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they could be really useful. How easy will it be?”

  “Fiendishly difficult,” Gerda admitted. “Lots of problems, including the salt in the water, the destructive potential of tides and waves—but even some of those problems might be turned into opportunities, if the genomic strategists are ingenious enough.”

  “The reports I get,” Kay mused, “keep telling me that it will take a long time to get the sea-level back down to where it was in the twentieth century, even if we can stabilize the atmospheric temperature. The next best thing, in the short term, is to find a means of making the inundated land economically viable. If it were possible to develop off-shore orchards ... it wouldn't be much, but it would be better than nothing. What are the chances of putting living accommodation in the crowns of your sea-dwelling trees, and connecting up the individual crowns with rope-bridges or something similar? We could really do with some new rope technologies, to help maintain the price of hemp.”

  “It would certainly be possible for people to live in the kind of swampland I envisage,” Gerda said, guardedly, “provided that they were prepared to adapt their lifestyles to the necessities of the situation. With population pressure the way it is, there'd be every incentive.”

  “How far away are we from initial viable product?” Kay wanted to know. “Are we talking years, decades, or centuries?”

  “Decades, probably,” Gerda said. “Faster, of course, if a few extra trillions of research money were diverted in that direction. It might pay off extravagantly to investors prepared to be a little bit patient.”

  “Is that advice, or just idle rhetoric?” he wanted to know.

  “It's an off-the-record opinion from someone who isn't as unworried about her funding as you might like to believe. It isn't just money the neo-cycads need, though—they could really benefit from the services of a top class propagandist: a man with the balls to get involved on every level.”

  “For the sake of Mother Gaia,” Kay told her, “it's worth taking the trouble.”

  To which Gerda said nothing at all, lest she give the game away.

  Kay took the opportunity to change the subject and bring in something else that was on his agenda. “Forty's still a critical age,” he observed. “More so for you than me. Responsibility urges women not to bring children into a world teetering on the brink of total ecological meltdown, but the species can't leave reproduction entirely to the irresponsible. Have you made arrangements to put some eggs in cold storage?” He was allowed to ask her questions of that personal nature, because they'd been close friends for such a long time.

  “No,” she said, increasing the steeliness of her gaze slightly. “Have you made some provision for your own genetic future?”

  This time, there was enough pink to defeat the bronze mask. “There's not so much urgency in my case,” he said. “As it happens, though, I am planning to get married this year—June, to be exact.”

  “Congratulations,” Gerda said, including herself in the congratulations for showing no emotion at all. “Who's the lucky lady?”

  * * * *

  Kay's lucky lady was a nice Magyar girl named Magda, who was a full ten centimeters shorter than Gerda. She did have blonde hair and blue eyes, but they were the consequence of somatic engineering rather than her natural genetic heritage. Gerda honestly couldn't see what Kay saw in her, given that, whatever it was, he had obviously never bothered to look for it in Gerda. She went to the wedding, though, and didn't cry or forget to smile.

  Gerda also waited until Kay had plunged a substantial fraction of his own fortune into cycad futures, as well as persuading a substantial fraction of the Gaian Economic Priesthood to follow his lead, before she put herself forward as a candidate for the European Parliament in northern Sweden. Because Selma Rosenhane was still going strong as Kiruna's leading lady, Gerda had to run as a second string on the regional ticket, and only just squeaked home under the labyrinthine rules of the PR system. Once she was in the chamber, however, she soon began to outshine her mother as an orator, if not as a deal-maker behind the scenes.

  If Selma was jealous of her daughter's sudden emergence from academic obscurity on to her own stage, she kept the feeling well-hidden. She soon began telling her daughter what a great team they made, and advising her as to what offices they might both aspire to attain, with the benefit of their combined skills and Siberian backing. The Siberian backing did not materialize, though; as soon as the Russians discovered the full extent of Gerda's radicalism, they decided that she was too far off message to be accommodated within their tactical schemes. Selma then began lecturing Gerda on the necessity to be pragmatic, and the terrible danger of taking up a position too far away from the parliamentary consensus.

  “The Parliamentary consensus is rotten at the core, Mommy,” Gerda told her patient advisor. “It's due for collapse, and when it does come down it'll shrivel like a burst balloon. The future lies in providing a nucleus for the new consensus that will take its place.”

  “You may think forty's old,” Selma informed her, sternly, “But it's not. Starry-eyed ideals are all very well, but politics is the art of the possible.”

  “Biotechnology,” Gerda told her, “is the art of the possible too—but strategic genomics is the art of the imaginable ... and the genius of the unimaginable.”

  “That kind of glibness might play well to the media,” Selma said, with a hostile edge to her voice, “but it doesn't wash in the back rooms where the deals are made. If you're wise, you'll let me be your guide now that you're in my world.”

  Gerda smiled at the time—and then ignored her mother completely. From her point of view, the decision of the Siberian Oligarchs to oppose her and isolate her within the opposition ranks was a relief and a blessing, because she didn't want to be stuck with any of their baggage. She had no alternative but to begin her work as a propagandist within the ranks of the existing opposition, but she knew that she needed to build her own constituency in order to steer it in an entirely new direction.

  There were two sets of vested interests that sprawled across the political boundary separating the confirmed anti-Gaians from the increasingly disgruntled bad Gaians, and those were the groups that would have to be captured in their entirety if the old Gaian majority were to be conclusively punctured. One set, familiarly known as the “littorals,” consisted of the already dispossessed inhabitants of the inundated coastal regions and the about to be dispossessed inhabitants of the present coastal regions. The other comprised the persistent complex of old industrial interests that Kay called “the Heavy Metal brigade.” Gerda set out to capture them both, beginning with the factions that were already loosely associated with the so-called opposition.

  The particular neo-cycads in whose preliminary genomic design she had been involved, she told the two groups, over and over again in every possible venue and context, offered enormous potential, not merely for enhancing the economic potential of the new shallows, but also for developing the economic potential of the old shallows. They would do it not merely by producing new and useful biom
ass, but also by doing something that had never been done before, which would involve a new collaboration between organic and inorganic technologies, and forge a vital economic link between Big Tech and biotech, living fibers and heavy metal.

  On the one hand, Gerda argued, neo-cycads could provide vast tracts of new lebensraum of an admittedly challenging but extremely promising sort; on the other hand, they would generate bioelectricity on a massive scale to feed and replenish the Heavy Metal brigade's ailing distribution networks. They would achieve the latter trick by taking an entirely new approach to bioelectricity generation: the conversion of tidal energy. The stout boles by which the cycads would attach their ambitious crowns to the sea-bed would not be mere supportive trunks, but would extend net-like and sail-like structures to capture a substantial fraction of the enormous energy imparted by the moon's gravity to the ocean on a twice-daily basis. The realm of human habitation would become larger than before, and its energy supply would be secured.

  All of this, she assured her potential followers, was both possible and practicable. Previous attempts to develop bioelectrical facilities by generic transplantation had gone awry because natural bioelectricity was an animal monopoly, whereas commercial bioelectricity required plant-like supportive structures. That kind of ambitious hybridization had never succeeded using angiosperm stocks—but she and her former collaborators had devised a potential means of achieving the desired end in neo-cycads. Organic and inorganic technology had been estranged for far too long, and had grown accustomed to regarding one another as mere casual acquaintances, if not as enemies—but the time had come for them not merely to become friends, but to indulge in passionate intercourse. A new era was dawning.

  At first, everyone thought that she was crazy. Indeed, they never actually stopped thinking that she was crazy—but they did not take long to remember how desperate they were to find some way out of the imprisoning Cubic Centimeter, or at least of making it a more comfortable confinement in which to dwell. Crazy or not, she was offering them a new hope: an alternative to yet more lectures on the Gaian vices and the need for everyone to become more virtuous.

  Gaian vices and virtues did not figure in Gerda's argument at all, even in the beginning. Even then, she did not seek to conceal—although she refrained from laboring the point—that neo-cycads could not and would not flourish in a cool world. If they offered hope now, it was only because the world had already warmed sufficiently to let them offer it. If they were to fulfill that hope generously, they would need to be gifted with the climatic environment that suited them best. Much more active than the trees that had driven their primitive ancestors into tiny corners of the land tens of millions of years in the past—living fast and dying young, by tree standards—the neo-cycads needed a higher ambient temperature in order to do their work, and bioelectric neo-cycads were especially thermophilic. Unlike Gaia's favorite species, and Gaia herself, neo-cycads liked it hot.

  The Gaian reaction was entirely predictable. Humankind, the Gaians argued, was the species that Gaia had favored more than any other, the one that had benefited most from a relatively cool Earth whose carbon was mostly locked away in inert deposits. The new ecosphere that Gerda's radical biotech would eventually produce would be intrinsically inimical to human beings and human life; that was far too high a price to pay for effective bioelectricity. The core members of the great Gaian coalition regarded this argument as conclusive—but it failed to deliver the expected killer blow, and the coalition found itself leaking support on a serious scale for the first time in a century.

  Gerda's initial support base came from the first of her two potential constituencies—not merely from the Netherlands and Belgium, whose densely packed populations had suffered greater setbacks than any other European nation from the erosions of the sea, but most extravagantly of all from Britain, the Crazy Man of Europe, whose crazy jingoists saw the potential to become an even bigger sceptered isle than before, expanding gradually but majestically into the wilderness of the North Sea until it finally reached the continental shore again.

  The Heavy Metal brigade was a little slower to come aboard, even though she took great care to emphasize that it was they who could provide the definitive answer to the Gaian challenge. Heavy Metal, Gerda reminded its power brokers, often and insistently, had always taken the blame for the CC, but it was also Heavy Metal that had made it possible for at least some people—the rich—to live quite comfortably in tropical heat, by means of air conditioning. The spread of air conditioning had long been inhibited by problems of energy generation, but now that those problems were potentially soluble, there was no reason why the Heavy Metal brigade had to continue thinking in terms of air-conditioned buildings or air-conditioned domed estates. The time had come—or soon would come, if the political will could be mustered—to think in terms of air-conditioned cities. If the neo-cycads could be gifted with the hothouse climate they needed and deserved, then Big Tech could start fulfilling its age-old dream of building glittering crystal cities, hermetically sealed by external membranes, whose internal atmospheres could be differentiated at will from the one that the neo-cycads breathed and sustained.

  Privately, Gerda did not imagine that enclosed environments would be anything more than a stop-gap solution; her belief was that the lebensraum offered by the neo-cycads would inevitably give rise to a new human species that would love the heat as much as they did, whether by means of genetic engineering, natural selection, or cyborgization. As a practicing politician, however, she stuck to more pragmatic issues and carefully limited imaginative horizons. She was, after all, her mother's daughter.

  * * * *

  Gerda knew, and had always known—or at least felt—that she was bound to win in the end. The only real point at issue was how long it would take for the rotten ancien regime of the Gaian majority to crumble away, and for the new consensus to consolidate a step-by-step program.

  Many a politician, from Moses onward, had sown the seeds of Promised Lands without living to see more than the faintest glimpse of their reality, but Gerda had always hoped that things might move faster for her, even in a world that was still essentially cool. As things eventually turned out, she was luckier than most, even though she shared the fate of many of those same visionaries in being forced to hand the reins of power over to others some time before the seeds she had sown began to germinate.

  By the time Gerda's sixty-fifth birthday came around, an unholy alliance of Heavy Metal entrepreneurs, Siberian Oligarchs, and resurgent Asian Not-so-Slow Developers had hijacked her prospectus and her party—but it was her slogans that they continued pushing and polishing. She lost the battle for personal control, but she won the war.

  When Gerda and Kay met up in London to celebrate their sixty-fifth birthday, seven years had passed since they had last shared such a celebration. The previous one had ended badly, after Kay had accused Gerda of betraying him, by tricking him into investing not merely his own funds but those of hundreds of his allies and acquaintances in research in neo-cycad biotechnology. He really had felt betrayed, and really had believed that she had cruelly taken him for a ride in order to pursue an agenda directly opposite to his, with no other motive but malice aforethought.

  When Kay agreed, in response to her urging, that they could get together for their sixty-fifth “to talk over old times,” he still had not forgiven her, but he had accepted the inevitability of circumstance. He had not deserted the ailing rump of the old Gaian coalition, but he had accepted that he was now doomed to be a has-been, to the extent that he had ever been at all, within the political arena. Gerda guessed that he only felt able to face her again because he now considered that she too was a has-been, having been deposed from her various positions of nominal political authority.

  “You might have won the war,” he conceded, ungraciously, “and you'll doubtless say that all's fair in war, and that there's no such thing as betrayal in politics, but that's not what rankles. We were friends—practically broth
er and sister. It's the personal betrayal that I can't stomach. You didn't have to play me for a sucker. You could have won without doing that.”

  “I didn't play you for a sucker, my love,” she told him. “Everything I told you was true.”

  “But it wasn't the whole truth,” he pointed out. “You never said anything to me about neo-cycads needing a higher atmospheric temperature. You let me believe that they'd be living carbon sinks, just like all the other trees we'd been planting for the last hundred years to soak up carbon emissions. You took advantage of my ignorance. You didn't have to do that. You didn't have to involve me at all. You could have left me out of it. That would have been the sisterly thing to do. When we were kids, you told me that we were two halves of the same whole—you should never have betrayed that just to score a point when we happened to end up on opposite sides of the chamber. You didn't have to oppose me, you know, back in that stupid high school debate. You could have seconded me instead. We could have worked together.”

  “You could have seconded me,” she pointed out.

  “But you were on the wrong side!” he complained. “You still are, even though you've hooked the majority with your counsel of despair. The people who've usurped your throne aren't saving the world—they're changing it out of all recognition. We could have saved it, Gerda, you and I, if we'd only joined forces in the same cause. I don't believe for a moment that neo-cycads were the only game in town, or even that your kind of booby-trapped neo-cycads were the only possible means of reclaiming the inundated shallows. We could have taken a different route entirely, biotechnologically speaking—and you should have. You didn't just betray me; you betrayed the species and the ecosphere.”

  “You're a tactician, Kay,” Gerda told him. “I'm the strategist, remember. I'm the long-term thinker. I didn't betray you; I saved you—you just haven't realized it yet. And you did make billions out of cycad speculation—far more money than I ever did.”