I stepped on the buzzer. “That you, Hap?” she asked over the intercom.
“Last time I looked. Mind if I come in? Brought some hot dish for dinner.”
There was a click and Gladys said, “Come on, the door’s open.” I lifted the hatch and went down the stairs.
Gladys’s place was a duplicate of mine, so I wandered through the den/office to the kitchen, set the bag down and walked over to give her a friendly peck on the cheek. “Do you want to eat right away?” she asked. “Or should we look over the odd stuff first? I just finished brewing a pot of herbed tea.”
Gladys is about my age, tall and lean with short hair the color of freshly cracked iron. “Tea sounds nice,” I said, so she poured two big mugs, handed me one and walked out to the consoles in the office, me trailing. We usually take turns, one day her place, one day mine.
The folks at Langley have created some really nice software to help us sort things out, but a big part of the job is just sitting back and letting the information river flow over you while you keep your eyes open. Gladys is better at looking down from above, seeing bigger trends. I’m better at spotting the individual outliers. It works out well.
“Hm. Hap, have you been noticing the stock markets?”
“I’ve been watching commodities.” Pork bellies had been acting strangely lately, varying with pirate activity in the Malaccan Straits and groundwater levels in Arizona, p < 0.0005. “And did you catch the U.N. coverage this morning?”
“Getting crazy.” She sipped her tea. “The way the Footsie and Hang Seng are going I think maybe we should do something about those dust storms in central Asia.” She flicked the data over; I took a long look and agreed. Then we talked about where to grab or put and the probable consequences.
I guess people finally began to take the whole climate thing seriously when the north Asian tundra began rapidly thawing en masse, releasing enough methane to make it dangerous to strike a match anywhere between Vladivostok and the Ural Mountains. After the Great Siberian Fart, the Clathrate Catastrophe, melting Greenland and other interesting occurrences the world’s leaders finally decided to stop talking about studying the situation some more and start talking about doing something. At least the ones who still had countries above water.
When my father was a kid everything had to be studied some more. But after a while you’d better stop studying that mole on your nose and do something about it. Unless you have a vested interest in metastatic cancer-metastatic cancer is highly successful from the cancer’s point of view, after all. So we went from climate change to climate crisis to climate catastrophe, with the blame levels rising in a sort of log-normal fashion.
But in fairness to everyone, the real problem was the maddening lack of strong correlations between causes and effects. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere went up, temperatures went up. Sometimes. And then they’d stop going up. Scientists could point to irrefutable mechanistic proof that CO2 trapped heat. Skeptics would point out, like some anti-Galileos, that nevertheless, the temperature, she don’t a-move. So there were clouds, and water vapor, and El Camino, and North Atlantic Decadal Oscillations, and a million other things, until everyone tripped on their own models.
It seemed to take forever for some genius to finally figure out that the real problem wasn’t an incomplete understanding of cause and effect, but a weakening of cause and effect itself. The climate change couldn’t be properly modeled because a lot of it wasn’t our own doing. A big chunk of it was coming from somewhere else.
Someone was sending batches of bad climate back to us from the future.
That took a while to sink in. There was no basis in scientific thought for such a silly hypothesis, but that didn’t stop the government. DARPA set up a black study, convinced itself, then began looking for anyone with an ability to affect the weather. Remember, they also looked at remote viewing a while back. “When I was a little girl I would always say ‘Rain, rain, go away’ when I wanted to go out and play,” Gladys had told me. “And apparently it would go away. Wonder where I sent it.” Me, I had never really made the connection between undone homework and snow days. So while the scientists and engineers were working on adding sulfate particulates to the atmosphere or designing improbable mirrors for the Lagrange point, a few of us were learning how to export climate to the past or import it to the present.
People like Gladys and I move climate around. Somewhere uptime people like us are shoving their unwanted climate back and we’re trying to get some kind of balance while shoving it even farther back. So all that stuff about orbital eccentricity and Milankovich cycles aside, you might get a tweak about why the last Ice Age ended so quickly; glaciers are a good heat sink.
The biggest problem with moving anything through time is, as I said, that it messes up causality. This wasn’t obvious at first. Well, there were a few canaries who had done their Monte Casino simulations, but the point was that temporal swapping let people do something right away about a rapidly deteriorating situation (“Swap, Baby, Swap!” was the slogan early in the program). People who pointed to what appeared to be increasingly weird side effects were told the matter needed “more study.”
(It’s possible to spot periods where lots of climate swiping and swapping were going on by the increase in strange or inexplicable occurrences. You can only move so much climate to or from any given time before the probability side effects get bad, and then you end up with unbelievable stuff like frogs raining out of the sky or the First
World War.)
It turned out that the work was much more intuitive than analytical. Modifying the climate is more conducting an orchestra than solving differential equations. No offense to the mathematicians, but most of them don’t have a sense of rhythm. You have to look around and shuffle a lot of relatively minor changes instead of going for the brass ring in one big grab.
So they found us and teamed me and Gladys up and put us in the middle of nowhere in central Wyoming to work on it. We convinced them we had to be isolated from other humans for our amazing powers to work without interference. That was bull, of course. We both just liked the place and were a couple of loners who didn’t appreciate the thought of officious types hovering over our shoulders.
“I still feel bad about screwing up the deep ocean currents,” Gladys had remarked near the beginning.
“How could we know? To be fair, all we’re trying to do is unscrew a bigger mess someone else is laying on us.”
“Trouble is, it’s like trying to unscrew a virgin. The improbabilities are really starting to pile up.”
“And the ones uptime are unscrewing what we screw back in. We’re really getting into a positive feedback loop here.”
We were importing cool climate from the Maunder Minimum that month. It’s best to keep a balance between exporting heat and importing cold. (Too much net heat causes a spike in gasoline prices, among other things. Too much cold brings a rise in dissatisfied employees shooting their bosses. Don’t ask, I just work here.) It’s also less perturbing to move smaller amounts of climate over shorter intervals. We don’t use the Ice Ages anymore. Gulf Stream, cessation of, vide supra. Not to mention the mammoths.
What’s that hand up over there? Thermodynamics? Fine, smarty pants; try integrating over discontinuous time when t=0 changes partway through. Show your work. Dirac delta functions not allowed.
But in truth things were starting to get out of hand. The Indian monsoon had unexpectedly shifted three hundred miles west last year, and while we managed to more or less move it back, such a big swap meant three Category Five hurricanes hitting the southeast United States, Argentina declaring war on South Africa and the simultaneous introduction by six different fast food chains of deep-fried butter sticks (“Try ‘em with BACON!”). You had to wonder just what was going so wrong uptime.
A few hours later I leaned back and switched the console off. “I think we missed dinner,” I said.
Gladys was still looking at her box. “Would you mind puttin
g it in the oven to warm up? I’d like to finish something here.”
“Sure.” I walked back to the kitchen, slid the casserole in the oven, and set it for fifteen minutes at three hundred. Then I picked up a cookbook and sat down, looking for some interesting new recipes.
Gladys eventually followed the scent of food into the kitchen.
“You like tofu?” I asked.
“Only if it’s free-range.”
“Ah, well, too bad. How about banana-nut bread?”
“With candied cherries I can eat a whole loaf.”
“Excellent. Tomorrow.” I spooned casserole onto two plates and slid one over to her.
She took a bite and nodded. “Good.” We ate in silence for a while, which was unusual. Something was bothering her. “Hap…”
I looked at her and raised an eyebrow.
“We’re running out of wiggle room.”
I nodded. Causality was beginning to have kittens and we were rapidly being painted into a corner.
“There was a bulletin just before I came in. The tsar announced he’s converting to Judaism.”
“What? Reform?”
“No, Orthodox.”
“Oy.” Some things are improbable, but now we were rapidly sliding over to the impossible. I looked around. “You know, we can probably hold out here for quite a while if we have to.”
She nodded. “Unless the Yellowstone caldera blows.”
“And what are the odds of that?” I asked without thinking. Then we both laughed.
I ladled out seconds and we ate some more. “I have an idea,” Gladys finally said.
“Excellent. That makes one of us.” I was thinking about defense. One of the things I had insisted on was having guns, and I had kept up my marksmanship by plinking cans and the occasional varmint.
“Seriously. It’s a little out there—okay, it’s way out there.”
“Given what we do for a living, I find it hard to think of anything truly way out there.”
“Good point. The problem is that we keep shuffling improbability around along with climate through time. The whole thing is just getting harder and harder to balance.”
“Agreed.” I let Gladys talk; she’s the smart one.
“So what if we could uncouple the improbability from time?”
I sat there. Nothing happened. “Explain, please.”
So she did, and suddenly this great big clue-by-four came down and whapped me in the head. “Beautiful!” I laughed. “Just beautiful!” I leaned over and gave her a kiss. A real one. Ooooh, it suddenly hit me that we had some spooning to do when everything was done. “Okay, let’s get Goddard and Langley on a three-way.”
“It could backfire, you know.”
“Sure. But we’re going to try it anyway, aren’t we?”
“Yes. So I guess it’s only polite to tell them first.”
Goddard was intrigued. Langley was cautious. Needed “more study.”
Gladys was adamant and I backed her up. “Look,” she finally said, “We’ll try a small test and see if there is any measurable result.” Goddard agreed that their instruments would probably be able to detect any transfer. Langley finally conceded there was no additional harm in trying, given how things were going. “Okay,” Gladys finished, “Leave us alone for a while. Then we’ll give it a go at twenty-hundred hours.” She flicked off the box. “Dessert?” she asked me.
“There’s cherry ice cream in the freezer. I’ll scoop some out if you’ll make a pot of herbed tea.”
It went off without a hitch.
Goddard reported the probe registered a change in response three standard deviations above background. We looked at each other, raised our mugs, and clicked rims. “To the future,” I said.
“Screw the future,” she replied, giggling. Quite girlish for Gladys.
Like all elegant solutions, this one was a headslapper in retrospect. Instead of moving climate through time, we found it was just as easy to move it through space. Easier, really, once you got the feel for it. And the obvious place to put extra warm climate was Mars.
If we work it right, Mars will be well on the way to being terra-formed in a century or so. Maybe sooner, if the people uptime figure out what’s going on and stop dumping on us and use Mars instead. The causality of that could get interesting.
“Of course, in addition to the warmer climate, we’re also adding all that improbability to Mars,” I noted as I paused at the foot of the stairs. “It’s a smaller place. I wonder if that will have any effect.”
Gladys shrugged. “If in a couple of decades something wanders up to one of our probes and waves we might have to rethink things. But for now we’re just riding the tiger. As usual.” She looked at me. “Would you like to stay a bit longer, Hap?”
“Let’s get everyone else’s cause and effect worked out first.” I winked and headed up the stairs, going home.
THE MASTER OF THE AVIARY
Bruce Sterling
Every Sunday, Mellow Julian went to the city market to search for birds. Commonly a crowd of his adoring students made his modest outing into a public spectacle.
The timeless questions of youth tortured the cultured young men of the town. “What is a gentleman’s proper relationship to his civic duty, and how can he weasel out of it?” Or: “Who is more miserable, the young man whose girl has died, or the young man whose girl will never love him?”
Although Julian had been rude to men in power, he was never rude to his students. He saw each of these young men as something like a book: a hazardous, long-term, difficult project that might never find a proper ending. Julian understood their bumbling need to intrude on his private life. A philosopher didn’t have one.
On this particular market Sunday, Julian was being much pestered by Bili, a pale, delicate, round-headed eccentric whose wealthy father owned a glass smelter. The bolder academy students were repelled by Bili’s mannerisms, so they hadn’t come along. Mellow Julian tolerated Bili’s youthful awkwardness. Julian had once been youthful and awkward himself.
Under their maze of parasols, cranes, aqueducts, and archery towers, the finer merchants of Selder sold their fabrics, scissors, fine glass baubles, medications, oils, and herbal liquors. The stony city square held a further maze of humble little shacks, the temporary stalls of the barkers. The barkers were howling about vegetables.
“Asparagus! Red lettuce! Celery! Baby bok choy!” Each shouted name had the tang of romance. Selder’s greenhouses close-packed the slope of the mountain like so many shining warts. It was for these rare and precious vegetables that foreigners braved the windy mountain passes and the burning plains.
Mellow Julian bought watercress and spinach, because their bright-green spiritual vibrations clarified his liver.
“Maestro, why do you always buy the cheapest, ugliest food in this city?” Bili piped up. “Spinach is awful.”
“It’s all that I know how to cook,” Julian quipped.
“Maestro, why don’t you marry? Then your wife could cook.”
“That’s a rather intrusive question,” Julian pointed out. “Nevertheless, I will enlighten you. I don’t care to indulge in any marriage ritual. I will never indulge in any bureaucratic ritual in this city, ever again.”
“Why don’t you just hire a cook?” persisted Bili.
“I’d have to give him all his orders! I might as well simply cook for myself.”
“I know that I’m not very bright,” said Bili humbly. “But a profound thinker like you, a man of such exemplary virtue… Everybody knows you’re the finest scribe in our city. Which is to say, the whole world! Yet you live alone in that little house, fussing with your diet and putting on plays in your backyard.”
“I know people talk about me,” shrugged Julian. “People chatter and cackle like chickens.”
Bili said nothing for a while. He knew he had revealed a sore spot.
Mellow Julian examined the sprawling straw mat of a foreign vendor. All the women of Selder adored seash
ells, because seashells were delicate, pretty, and exotic. Mellow Julian shared that interest, so he had a close look at the wares.
The shell vendor was a scarred, bristle-bearded sea pirate. His so-called rare seashells were painted plaster fakes.
Julian put away his magnifying lens. He nodded shortly and retreated. “Since you were born almost yesterday, Bili,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, “I would urge you to have a good look at that wild, hard-bitten character. This marketplace has never lacked for crooks, but this brute may be a spy.”
Bili pointed. “There’s even worse to be seen there, maestro.”
Huddled under a torn cotton tarp were five dirty refugees: black-haired, yellow-skinned people in travel-torn rags. One of the refugees was not starving. He was the owner or boss of the other four, who visibly were.
“They shouldn’t let wretches like those through the gates,” said Bili. “My father says they carry disease.”
“Every mortal being carries some disease,” Julian allowed. He edged nearer to the unwholesome scene. The exhausted refugees couldn’t even glance up from the cobblestones. “Well,” said Julian, “no need to flee these wild invaders. My guess would be that somebody invaded them.”
“They’re some ‘curious specimens,’ as you always put it, maestro.”
“Indeed, they most certainly are.”
“They must have come from very far away.”
“You are staring at them, Bili, but you are not observing them,” said Julian. “This man is in the ruins of a uniform, and he has a military bearing. This younger brute must be his son. This boy and girl are a brother and sister. And this older woman, whom he has dragged along from the wreck of their fortunes… Look at her hands. Those hands still have the marks of rings.”
The ruined soldier rose in his tattered boots and stuck out his callused mitt. “Money, water, food, house! Shelter! Fish! Vegetable!”
“I understand you,” Julian told him, in a fluent Old Proper English.
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