One thing they were trying was to slow the outflow glaciers off the Greenland ice cap. Antarctica and Greenland were the two meaningful reservoirs of ice left on the planet, and modelers were very hopeful that eastern Antarctica at least would hold fast through the heat peak into the hoped-for return to a colder atmosphere and ocean. If they could get the CO2 down to 320 parts per million, and capture some of the methane, and temperatures therefore fell, and the ice cake on eastern Antarctica held, then the ocean would nevertheless stay high and warm for hundreds more years—but it would be a big success nonetheless. In fact if they failed to keep the East Antarctic ice, it wasn’t worth thinking about. So they needed to succeed. At some point, many were saying now, they were going to have to treat Earth like they were treating Mars and Venus, and whatever they lost by that would be too bad. Some said another little ice age was just what they needed; the billion or three likely deaths were not spoken of, but latent in the argument was the notion that fewer people wouldn’t hurt the situation either. Shock therapy—triage—people who liked to talk tough to make themselves look practical were full of this line.
So, Greenland was a much smaller ice cake than East Antarctica, but it was not insignificant. If it melted off (and it was a remnant of the previous ice age’s giant ice cap, located very far south for current conditions), it would mean another seven meters’ rise. That would ruin the adjusted new coastline civilization, so painfully fought for.
As with all ice sheets, it did not just melt; it slid in glaciers down into the sea, speeded by the lubrication of meltwater running under the ice, lifting the glaciers off their rock beds. It was the same in Antarctica, but while Antarctica’s ice slid down into the sea all the way round its circumference, so that there was nothing they could do about stopping it, Greenland was different. Its ice was mostly trapped within a high tub of encircling mountain ranges, and it could only slide down into the Atlantic through a few narrow gaps in the rock, like breaks in the edge of a bathtub. Through these gaps the lubricated glaciers poured at a speed of many meters a day, down U-valleys already smoothed for millennia, and when they hit the rising ocean, their snouts floated out over the terminal lips that often lay at the mouth of fjords, thus launching icebergs to sea more smoothly and swiftly than ever.
Early in the history of glaciology, researchers had noticed that one fast glacier in West Antarctica had suddenly slowed to a crawl. Investigations had found that the lubricating water underneath the ice had broken into some new channel and gone away, so that the immense weight of the glacier had thumped back onto the rock, causing it to stall. That now gave people ideas, and they were attempting to do something similar in Greenland by artificial means. They were testing several methods at one of the narrowest and fastest of the Greenland glaciers, the Helheim.
The western coast of Greenland was rather reassuringly icy, Swan thought, given all that one heard about the big melt. Under their helicopter lay a skim of winter sea ice, breaking up into giant polygonal sheets of white on a black sea. There was a polar bear park on the north shores of Greenland and Ellesmere Island, she was told, where tabular bergs floated on the natural eddy or got herded there by long flexible booms pushed by solar-powered propellers. So the Arctic ice was not entirely gone, and it was really quite beautiful to see it below her, and also to see how black the ocean was, as unlike the blues of tropic seas as could be imagined. Black ocean, white ice. All the blues were in the sky and in melt ponds strewn everywhere on the exposed ice of the Greenland ice cap, held three kilometers above the ocean by jagged black ridgelines—the coastal range, the chewed edge of the bathtub, holding in place the inland plateau of ice. The whole situation was as clear as could be, viewed from a helicopter flying five kilometers up.
“Is that our glacier?” Swan asked.
“Yes.”
The pilot headed down toward a little red X marking a flat spot of rock on a ridge overlooking the glacier, several kilometers upstream from where it calved into the ocean. The flat spot as they descended turned out to be about twenty hectares, with room for the whole camp; the red X was giant. As they made their last descent the whole scene lay below them, a fantastic prospect of black spiny spires, white ice, blue sky, black sunbeaten water in the fjord.
Outside the helo it was stunningly cold. It made Swan gasp, and a bolt of fear shocked her: if one felt this kind of cold in space, it would mean a breakdown and imminent death. But here people were greeting her and laughing at her expression.
Around their plateau, black lichenous spikes shattered in their thrust at the sky. Below them in the great U-valley the rock of the side walls had been ice-carved to curves like muscled flesh, scored by horizontal lines where boulders had been scraped across the granite hard enough to dig right into it—when one thought about it, quite an astonishing pressure.
The glacier itself was mostly a broken white surface, nobbled blue in certain patches. Though crevasse fields disrupted it frequently, the ice plain was fairly level across to the black ridge on its far side. Swan took off her sunglasses to look, then blinked and sniffed as a stunning white flash hit her like a blow to the head. She had to laugh—snorted—through her squint spotted Zasha approaching, and reached out an arm for a hug. “I’m glad I came! I feel better already!”
“I knew you would like it.”
The camp’s plateau made a perfect location for what was really a little hodgepodge of a town. After showing her the galley and getting her stuff stowed in the dorm, Zasha took her out to the edge that overlooked the glacier. Directly below the camp the ice was shattered all the way across to the other wall of the glacier. This apparently was the result of injecting liquid nitrogen between the ice and the bedrock. A certain amount of ice had been tacked down, but the ice over that had sheared off and continued on its way, shattered and slower, but still moving.
Downstream from that jumble there curved a deep gap in the ice. “That’s their latest experiment,” Zasha said, pointing. “They’re going to melt a gap all the way across, and keep melting the ice as it comes down. The ice downstream will slide away, and having cleared a space, they’re going to build a dam in the empty air, and when it’s done let the upstream ice come down to it.”
“Won’t the ice just flow over the dam?” Swan asked.
“It would, but they plan to build it so high that it will match the height of the interior ice cap. So ice will flow here until it rises up as high as the rest of Greenland, and then there won’t be any downward flow.”
“Wow,” Swan said, startled. “So, like a new ridge of the mountain range, filling this gap? Created while the ice is flowing down at it?”
“That’s right.”
“But won’t the ice up on the plateau just flow down other glaciers?”
“Sure, but if it works here, they plan to do it all the way around Greenland, except at the very north end of the island, where they’re trying to keep the sea ice park supplied anyway. They’ll corral what slides in up there, and slow the outfall, and that will keep the Greenland cap substantially in place, or at least really slow the melting down. Because it’s the sliding into the sea that makes it all happen so fast. So—we’ll stop up every break on the island! Can you believe it?”
“No.” Swan laughed. “Talk about terraforming! This must be a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers idea.”
“It sounds like it, but these are Scandinavians here. Plus the local Inuit. Apparently they like the idea. They regard it as a temporary measure, they said.” Zasha laughed. “The Inuit are great. Very cheerful tough people. You would like them.” A quick glance. “You could learn from them.”
“Shut up with that. I want to go down there and see what the bedrock looks like.”
“I figured you would.”
They went back to the galley, and over big mugs of hot chocolate some of the engineers in the camp sat with them and described their work to Swan. The dam was going to be made of a carbon nanofilament weave, somewhat similar to space elevator material, and
it was even now being spun over foundation pilings drilled deep into the bedrock. The dam would rise from the ground, spun in place by spiderbots rolling back and forth and passing each other like shuttles on a loom. The dam, when completed, would be thirty kilometers wide, two kilometers tall, and yet only a meter thick at its thickest point. The structuring of the dam’s material was another biomimetic, the carbon fibers shaped like spiderweb strands but woven like seashells.
Downstream from the dam a short new glacial valley would be exposed. This would revegetate just as the other little green parts of Greenland had at the end of the ice age, ten thousand years before. Swan knew just how the U-valley would turn from bare gray rock into a fellfield biome, having induced it to happen in many an alpine or polar terrarium. Without assistance it would take about a thousand years, but with some gardening the process could be shortened a hundredfold: just add bacteria, then moss and lichen, grasses and sedges, and after that the fellfield flowers and ground-hugging shrubs. She had done it; she had loved it. From now on things here would every summer be exfoliating, flowering, casting seed; every winter it all would tuck into its subnivean world happily, and then struggle through the thaw and melt of a new spring, the really dangerous time. The ones that didn’t make it through the tough spring would provide food and soil for the ones that came after them, and on it would go. The Inuit could garden that if they wanted to, or let it go its own way. Maybe try different things in different fjords. How Swan would love to do that. “All right, maybe I need to become an Inuit,” she muttered at Z, staring at the map spread before them. She saw that Greenland itself was a whole world, and her kind of world—empty—therefore no one mad at her.
After dinner Swan went back outside and stood with Zasha above the great gap of air, under the huge dome of the sky. Out in the wind, oh the wind, the wind… The broad glacier below her—upstream a white shatter—downstream a blue gap—then a lower and smoother white sheet, rushing off to the sea. On the low wall of the dam she could now make out machines, running back and forth on both its top and its sides, looking a little bit like spiders, in fact, weaving a web so dense it was solid. The mountain ridges anchoring the two ends of the dam would wear away before the dam did, one of the engineers had said. If another ice age ever came, and the Greenland ice cap piled farther into the sky and overflowed this dam, the dam would still be there and would reemerge in the next warm period.
“Amazing,” Swan said. “So terraforming can be done on Earth!”
“Well, but Greenland is more like Europa than Europe, if you see what I mean. You can do it here because there are only a few locals, and they like the plan. If you were to try this kind of thing anywhere else…” Zasha laughed at the thought. “Like they could use this technology and polder New York Harbor, drain the bay down so that Manhattan was above water the way it used to be. You could make the whole area like a Dutch polder. Not even that difficult, compared to some things. But the New Yorkers won’t hear of it. They like it the way it is!”
“Good for them.”
“I know, I know. The fortunate flood. And I love New York the way it is now. But you see what I mean. A lot of good terraforming projects just won’t ever get approved.”
Swan nodded and made a face. “I know.”
Zasha gave her a brief hug. “I’m sorry about what happened to you in China. That must have been awful.”
“It was horrible. I really don’t like what I’m seeing this trip. In different ways we seem to have offended almost everyone on Earth.”
Zasha laughed. “Did you ever think it was otherwise?”
“Fine,” Swan said, “maybe so. But the thing is, now we have to find who attacked Terminator.”
“Interplan is the organization that has the closest to a total human database, so hopefully they will manage to find them.”
“What if that doesn’t work, what then?”
“I don’t know. I think it will work, eventually.”
Swan sighed. She wasn’t sure Genette’s team could do it, and she knew she couldn’t do it. Zasha gave her a look. “I’m not having fun anymore,” she explained.
“Poor Swan.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I think so. But look, just go help gather the new inoculants for Terminator. Do your job, and let Genette and Interplan do their jobs.”
Swan was not happy with this either. “I can’t just leave it. Something’s going on. I mean, I was kidnapped, damn it, and asked a lot of questions about Alex. You said she didn’t trust me at the end, but what if I knew something I didn’t know was important?”
“Did they ask you about things on Venus?”
Swan thought it over; something had been triggered. “I think maybe so.”
Zasha looked worried. “There’s some strange stuff happening on Venus. When they get to the next stage of their terraforming, a lot of the planet will open to new settlements, and that’s causing fights to break out. Real estate wars, in effect. And these strange qubes Alex started us looking for, we’re finding more and more of them. They seem to be coming from Venus, and they often show up around New York. We’re not sure what it means yet. So, but just go help get the inoculants together. That’s not as easy as it used to be.”
“They just need to replace what we had before.”
“Not possible. They won’t let you take topsoil off Earth in anything like the quantities they used to. So our new soil is going to have to be some kind of Ascension, and you’re the expert at those.”
“But I don’t like Ascensions anymore!”
“They’re necessary now. It’s not a style choice.”
Swan heaved a great sigh. Z stayed silent, then gestured out at the scene. It was true: this glacier was a sight for sore eyes. The world was bigger than their petty melodramas, and as they stood here it couldn’t be denied. And that was a comfort.
“All right. I’ll go help with the soil. But I’m going to keep talking to Genette.”
So—back to Manhattan, freakish and superb, but without Zasha there to make it fun. And besides, things weren’t fun anymore.
The weariness that came at the end of the day on Earth. The sheer heaviness of life on Earth. “She’s so… heavy!” Swan sang to herself, dragging out the last word and repeating it in the way of the old song. “Heavy—heavy—heavy—heavy!”
Usually when she hurt in the effort to hold herself upright at the end of a day, she would get into her body bra and relax, let it walk her around. It was like getting a massage, just to be carried, lifted up as you walked. Let it dance you, melt into it. Oh lovely waldo. It stiffened under you no matter how you moved, and when fitted and programmed right, it could be dreamy; bad for bone building, bad for a full adjustment to life on Earth, but a lifesaver when flagging. People in space talked longingly about moving back to Earth, people went back for their sabbatical happily, crowing at the prospect—but after the thrill of the open air wore off, the g remained, and slowly but surely it dragged one down, until when the sabbatical year was over and one had had one’s Gaian replenishment, whatever it was, one rose back out of the atmosphere into the brilliant clarity of space and resumed life out there with relief and a feeling of ebullient lightness. Because Earth was just too damned heavy, and in every possible sense. It was as if a black filter had been dropped between her and the world. Inspector Genette had said things were going well, but obviously had no expectation of anything happening soon. The case seemed to be regarded as Swan would regard the growing of a marsh; you set certain actions in motion, created certain conditions of possibility, and then went away and did something else. When you came back, you would see that things had changed. But it would be years.
So she worked on soil acquisition for Terminator, advising the Mercurial traders on the commodities market, and one day she was able to go to the Mercury House in Manhattan and say, “We’ve got all the inoculants. We can go home.”
She went to Quito and took the space elevator up to its anchor rock, feelin
g balked and defeated, invaded and tossed aside. She brooded through repeat performances of Satyagraha—ascending with its final notes, simply the eight rising notes of an octave repeated over and over. She sang along with the rest of the audience, wondering what Gandhi would do about this, what he would say. “The very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of Satyagraha.” Thus Gandhi in the program notes. Satya, truth, love; agraha, firmness, force. He had made the word up. Tolstoy, Gandhi, the opera’s Future Man: they all sang of hope and peace, of the way to peace, satyagraha itself. The Satyagrahi were the people who enacted satyagraha. “Forgiveness is the ornament of the brave.”
As the Earth slowly receded below her, becoming the familiar blue-and-white ball, chunking space with its marbled glory, she listened to the Sanskrit lyrics bouncing in her ear. She asked Pauline to translate one haunting turn in the melody; Pauline said, “Until there is peace, we will never be safe.”
Lists (10)
It’s too hard, there isn’t time, someone might laugh;
To protect one’s family, to protect one’s honor, one’s children;
Kin selection; bad seed;
Original sin, intrinsic evil, fortune, luck, destiny, fate;
Sloth, avarice, envy, malice, jealousy, anger, rage, revenge;
For the hell of it
Because someone else might be taking advantage
Because
No one knows for sure
It doesn’t make any difference
It’s written in the stars
No one told us not to
We can get away with it
There’s no such thing as utopia
It probably wouldn’t work anyway
It might make some money
There isn’t enough for everyone