Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  Chantal was one of the team that accompanied Peshwar on his trip to the North African People’s Republic in 2091. In the worst affected parts of northern Africa, there had been no significant rainfall for almost two years. Peshwar had been granted permission to demonstrate his procedure. The media interest was huge, as you can imagine. You may even have seen the news footage from that time: children dancing in the rainstorm that turned the dust of their refugee camp to a shallow lake within the space of half an hour, the carpets of desert flowers that bloomed in the aftermath. Vinson Peshwar was a hero, for that day at least.

  It’s what he always wanted, my aunt notes wryly. Not the rain, but the adulation. People telling him he was a genius, that he’d been right all along. His name on the front page of every news site in the world. The rain was just a means towards that end.

  And yet a month after her return from Djibouti, my aunt was writing a long, impassioned letter to my uncle, explaining why she’d decided to stay on with the Rainmaker Program. Much of what she wrote concerned the refugee crisis in the NAPR, the increased trafficking of women and children to the Indian subcontinent, the warlords who were using drinking water as a bargaining chip. Chantal had made a friend in the camp near Djibouti, a doctor from Madagascar named Hanny who had worked with victims of the traffickers and the forced labour gangs. I owe it to women like Hanny, my aunt writes. We cannot let this catastrophe continue. Not when we have the power to do something about it.

  Another letter followed three days later, in which she informs Ballantine that if he has heard rumours about her and Vinson Peshwar he should dismiss them immediately.

  If anything, I admire him even less now than I ever did, Chantal writes. Having a brilliant mind is no excuse for the way he behaves, and the man is a bully. I’ve seen what he can do to people, believe me.

  There is a gap of several months, and then the letters seem to pick up where they left off. Something has changed, though. Chantal informs Ballantine that she is thinking of resigning her position at the university. There are two jobs she is interested in applying for. One is the post in Florida, the other is at the University of Kerala, as part of a new climate change unit. She seems most excited about the job in Kerala, but then suddenly changes her mind and accepts the Florida post instead. The reason she gives is that the job is more closely connected with the research she’s been doing with Peshwar. It seems a shame to let all that go to waste, she writes. It is still a young science.

  The first thing that occurs to me is that if my aunt had gone to India, she might still be alive. Of course, Vinson Peshwar went to Florida. How much that had to do with my aunt’s decision, I will never know.

  “UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE CHANGE: TIMELINE AND ANALYSIS”, BY RIMINI PARKS, AGED 16, HELSTON MIDDLE SCHOOL ESSAY COMPETITION “FIRST PRIZE”, JUNE 2132

  1962 – Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring published

  1984 – Bhopal disaster leads to large scale contamination of water and soil

  1990 – Radioactive mutations reported near Chernobyl

  1995 – Greenhouse gas emissions talks in Tokyo end in deadlock

  2001 – Significant coral die-off reported at Great Barrier Reef

  2017 – Galilee Basin coalmining expansion greenlighted in Queensland

  2032 – Cuadrilla prosecutions in UK over groundwater contamination in Lancashire

  2045 – Siberian tiger officially declared extinct

  2060 – ‘Three typhoons’ devastate the Philippines

  2074 – Five-year drought triggers Kaduna massacre in northern Nigeria

  2094 – La Palma tsunami

  2116 – Collapse of the Golden Gate Bridge, partial inundation of San Francisco

  Approximately twenty million people were killed in the La Palma tsunami, either in the wave itself or in the earthquakes, building and freeway collapses, wildfires, gas explosions, spontaneous munitions detonations, air crashes, flooding, inundation, land slippage and avalanche associated with the immediate aftermath. This estimate constitutes a minor proportion of the eventual casualties, those who died in what has come to be known as the aftershock and throughout the longer term of the remapping. Over a period of twenty years, a repeating pattern of severe weather events, famines and disease pandemics arising from those weather events, economic collapse and hyper-inflation, breakdowns in power supply and food distribution, prolonged worldwide telecommunications and internet outages, social upheaval and civil unrest, aerial bombardment and the widespread use of previously banned chemical and biological weapons has led to a decrease in world population roughly equal to if not in excess of that documented during the plague pandemics of the 1300s. As the largest number of casualties occurred in areas of the world where communications and medical facilities have been poor to non-existent, it has been impossible to collate anything approaching an exact number. Although a measure of stability has been restored in some areas, continuing climate inconsistencies and consequent shortages of food and clean drinking water have resulted in uncontrolled levels of civic violence in others. Mass migrations of homeless people in search of better living conditions and adequate food supplies have further exacerbated the ongoing refugee crisis.

  Whilst the alterations and fluctuations in climate and pre-existing weather patterns have not been as severe overall as some predicted, there is no doubt that the Earth’s human population has been dramatically affected by the climate crisis, mainly because even in the decades before the La Palma disaster, human demands on the planet’s ecology were already unsustainable. Factors such as the outsourcing of manufacturing industries far from their main centres of consumption, the forced industrialisation of developing nations using technologies and systems already discredited in more advanced economies, the stripping of assets—both mineral and agricultural—from developing nations at the expense of their home populations, the decimation of natural ecosystems for short-term economic gain have all contributed to our current situation. As we move towards the rebuilding of some kind of workable humanitarian infrastructure, it is generally agreed that our main focus should be upon securing environmentally viable local support systems, as opposed to the re-establishment of the global model. The Earth we now inhabit is an alien world, with new rules and new environments, new pressures upon our ability to adapt. We ignore the needs of our new world at our peril.

  One remaining area of controversy is the role played by the controversial Rainmaker Program in triggering the global climate catastrophe that led to the remapping. The Rainmaker Program was a targeted system of cloud seeding, developed in the first instance as a quick-fix response to the widespread droughts and famines that devastated the North African People’s Republic during the 2070s and the 2080s. Hailed by its supporters as a universal solution to increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and water shortages, the Rainmaker Program soon drew criticism from environmentalists, who claimed that interference with the weather on such a global scale could have unforeseen and possibly disastrous consequences for the ecological stability of our planet.

  Several of the Rainmaker Program’s leading scientists suffered a sustained campaign of online harassment and even death threats during the years leading up to La Palma. The project’s co-ordinators, Professor Lyonel Raimond and Professor Vinson Peshwar in particular were targeted. There were rumours that Vinson Peshwar survived at least one serious attempt on his life, although the precise details of the attack remain unknown. Raimond went on to found the New Centre for Climate Studies at the New University of Pittsburgh in 2103. Peshwar died in the La Palma tsunami. Claims about the safety and long term effects of the Rainmaker Program have never been decisively proven either way.

  MY UNCLE WASN’T a climate scientist at all, but an entomologist, an expert on ground beetles. He met my Aunt Chantal by chance, in the university canteen. As members of the same faculty, he and Vinson Peshwar started out on friendly terms. They even went hiking together a couple of times, in Snowdonia and in the Peak District. As their attitudes t
owards the Rainmaker technology began to polarise, the friendship turned to antagonism. In an interview for Nature in 2085, Vinson Peshwar referred to Lindsay Ballantine as an amateur busybody. A year later, my uncle resigned his post at the university and moved to the bungalow.

  I have never been entirely clear on what he was doing here. I know that at least some of the answers are likely to be found amongst the farrago of papers and letters and press clippings in the filing cabinet, but every time I think about sorting through them a sense of futility descends upon me. My uncle is dead. Everyone he knew is dead. The world he fought to save is dead. What can it possibly matter, what he did, or wrote, or thought?

  Every now and then I remove something from the filing cabinet so I can examine it more closely. I make my selections at random, tugging papers or envelopes or photographs from the general chaos without bothering to mark their position or to distinguish them from the rest. One of these documents was part of a letter, a draft that was never sent perhaps, or that was later amended. The top page, the page that presumably would have included the name and address of the intended recipient, seems to be missing. I don’t recognise the handwriting—all I know is that it’s not my uncle’s. Midway down this second page, part of a paragraph has been underlined in red:

  Vinson Peshwar is a terrorist. He’s like one of those mad doctors in the horror movies—so intent on proving his theories he doesn’t care if he kills his patient in the process. He must be stopped.

  The last four words have been underlined twice. I am struggling to connect the strident tone of the letter with my uncle, with the dishevelled, otherworldly man who brought me lemonade and opened the world to me through the lens of his microscope.

  I want to know what happened here, and at the same time I don’t. I’m afraid of what I might discover.

  I only knew him for a day, I remind myself. I barely knew him at all.

  RADIO RECEPTION IS better at night. I inch the dial slowly around, searching for voices, searching for evidence of a world beyond my own. I find London stations: a channel I’ve come across before that plays rap-raga, a soap opera centred on the endlessly warring tribes of the refuse collection mafia and the ongoing failure of the city’s sewerage system.

  When things are bad in London they are very bad, though since the worst of the floodwaters have receded, conditions have stabilised. I hear voices from Germany, a snatch of applause that sounds like static, a woman speaking French. “Je m’appelle Soraya Lellouche, coming to you from the city of Algiers,” she says. She has someone with her in the studio, or whatever back room or prefab or semi-bankrupt hotel they are broadcasting from. They are speaking too quickly for me to understand much of what they are saying, but there is something about the woman’s voice that makes it pleasant to hear.

  I try to imagine her life and find I cannot. They say the whole of the NAPR is uninhabitable, desertified, and yet here is this woman, with her bubbling laughter, her argumentative studio companion. One of them puts on a record and the notes shiver up and down the scale, faint but still audible, rippling beneath the barrier of tonality like quicksilver.

  Slowly I let out my breath. Large moths thrust themselves against the window glass then veer off again into the darkness. I wonder what species they are. My uncle would know, probably. I feel as if we’re becoming closer, my uncle and I. It is often difficult to remember we’re not really related.

  I DON’T KNOW what happened to Lindsay Ballantine. I don’t know if he’s dead, or not, though I suppose he must be. I have no idea where he went when they released him from prison.

  THE WORLD IS in a state of forgetting. The only way to go on is to forget the way things were before. If you’ve lost someone it’s best not to think of them. It’s even better if you can pretend they never existed.

  WHEN I MENTION to Noemi about wanting to go online, she asks me why I don’t hack in, like everyone else.

  “I don’t know how,” I tell her.

  “You should have said.” She asks me what I’m looking for. “What kind of information, I mean? Is it restricted?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Probably.” I tell her about my uncle being arrested. “He was sent to prison, not long before La Palma. I want to know what for.”

  “How come you don’t know already?”

  “We lost touch. I mean our families did.”

  She nods, as if that explains everything, but really she’s stopped listening to me. Her whole attention is focussed on the computer. I want to tell her to hurry up, that Magda will be back at any moment, that if my boss finds us in her office we’re done for. At the same time I feel exhilarated because for the first time in a long time I’m doing something unauthorised. What’s Magda going to do anyway, push me over the bridge?

  Noemi’s fingers flicker over the keys, like a pianist’s, like a drone pilot’s, and I can see she’s in her element. The revelation is sudden and unexpected.

  “How come you know about computers?” I ask.

  “I did computer science. At Ankara. That was my major.”

  “You never said.”

  “You never asked.”

  I realise it’s true, what she says, that I have never properly imagined Noemi in a world where she was anything, where she did anything other than lope along the shoreline looking for whelks. I have never imagined her sitting at a desk, or sending an email.

  Did I imagine her reading, even? The question seems preposterous, but there it is.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not sure what I’m apologising for. Everything, I suppose. All the above. Noemi shakes her head: forget it. Pages open and close. She busts through Magda’s password and firewall, the barbed wire fence of code that separates the institute from what remains of the outside world, the outer limits of the new internet, the bleak and endlessly unfolding horizons of the spaces beyond.

  “Here’s something,” Noemi mutters, and finally there are images: photos of my uncle, of someone else I don’t immediately recognise but who I think may be Vinson Peshwar. The Lindsay Ballantine in the photographs doesn’t look much like the man I remember meeting. This man is older, with heavy black glasses and a receding hairline. Yet in spite of his grim expression I know it is him.

  ... was remanded in custody on a charge of possession of banned substances with intent to cause explosions. The accused, who was previously the subject of a police investigation on grounds of defamation, online harassment and malicious slander, was apprehended close to the home of Professor Peshwar following an anonymous tip-off earlier this morning. Dr Ballantine was previously employed as a senior lecturer in the biology department of the University of East London.

  “This was actually on all the news sites, can you believe it?” Noemi says. I know what she means. It is difficult to remember, sometimes, that news was once traded like any other commodity, that news sites used to run conflicting versions of the same story just to get traffic. Not in opposition to the way things were, but out of boredom.

  Boredom also has become a luxury. When I think of boredom, I think of something impossible: an endless stream of days exactly the same. Of myself, writing this diary in a world where the future is still a valid possibility. Of buying bread from the market. Of buzzards, dipping and circling like micro-drones above the moor.

  I’VE DECIDED NOT to sort through my uncle’s papers. They belong to the past. I shall place my journals with them, when the time comes, in the filing cabinet with the rest of the muddle. Good day to you, the person reading this. Whoever you are, I am glad you are reading. It means the future was a possibility, after all.

  “HE WAS QUITE some guy, your uncle,” Noemi says. “At least he tried.”

  “He wasn’t really my uncle,” I reply. “Just a friend of the family.”

  We are sitting together on the old motorway bridge. I have warned Noemi about diving into the sea from here because of all the cars but she just laughs.

  “I’ve learned where it’s safe,” she says. “I�
�ve learned where it’s deep. You should know that by now.”

  SOMEONE HAS CREATED a sculpture on the patch of scrubby moorland close to Stithians. It is made from scrap metal—the rusty carcases of cars and broken tumble driers, machines that no longer work and cannot be adapted. These chunks of refuse have been piled up and rammed together to form a strange kind of tree. Corroded padlocks hang from its branches, like petrified fruit. A snapped-off chainsaw points skywards, like a jagged flower. The sculpture is huge, as high as a house. It is infested with weeds: hogweed and brambles and nettles. Spikes of buddleia thrust their way outwards from a smashed car window. The buddleia sways when the wind blows, throbbing with bees.

  Someone has spelled out the sculpture’s name in pebbles on the ground. Fireweed and dock leaves poke up between the stones without obscuring them. The sculpture’s name means Earth, or mother. I have seen people sitting here sometimes, on the ground beside the sculpture, just sitting. The sculpture is not beautiful exactly, but it is striking. The most remarkable thing about it is that it exists.