She was coming around. She was still painfully cold, her skin mottled red on white in a kind of pinto or Appaloosa fashion, it probably wasn’t her best look, although it could possibly be taken as orgasmic or something; the water was hotter now, and she was feeling better and better. She had only been submerged in the canal for a couple of minutes, they said, so now the water on her skin began to feel kind of painfully hot, actually. Like burning hot. “Hey!” she said. “Ow! Hot! Hot!”
So they cooled it a bit, and slowly they brought her back to a safe temperature internally, and dried her off, and got her into some clothes borrowed or bought on layaway, or put-’em-on, as someone said it should be called. Layaway, put-’em-on, lots of laughs at this. A very friendly crowd. “You are all so nice!” Amelia said. “Thank you for saving my life!” And she burst into tears.
“Let’s get you home,” Nicole said.
When Amelia had recovered from her dunking in the canal, she got in the Assisted Migration and flew from New York to the northeastern coast of Greenland. On the triangular island of hills between the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Fjord (which had been a glacier before the First Pulse) and the Zachariae Isstrom Fjord (likewise) stood a rather spectacular city called New Copenhagen. Given the state of old Copenhagen many people said this city should just be called Copenhagen, acknowledging that the city had in effect been relocated. Back in Denmark people sniffed at this presumptuousness and insisted their city was just fine, that it had always been a watery place. On the other hand the idea that there was another Copenhagen on the northeast corner of their old colony was not actually very objectionable, and the truth was that as the two places had little to do with each other, the names were not important. There was a Copenhagen in Ontario too.
In any case, Amelia had visited New Copenhagen before and was pleased when Frans guided the Assisted Migration down to the long line of masts at the southern end of the city, where a short fjord cut north to the island’s center, giving the island and city the shape of a horseshoe. The docks of the city protruded into the iced-over fjord, and behind them stood the downtown. Its buildings were mostly in the Greenland style, steep-pitched roofs on cubical shapes painted in bright primary colors, lit by hundreds of brilliant streetlights, which turned the darkness of the northern midwinter into a space far brighter than the interior of any room. The concert hall at the apex of the U was an enormous cube set on one point, homage to the similar concert hall in Reykjavík, and a famous locus for the New Arctic movement in long-duration opera and instrumental music. Some pieces played in this hall lasted all winter.
When her airship was secured, Amelia took a bus to the head of the fjord, where the biggest pedestrian district was located. The brilliantly lit cobblestone streets, blown clear of snow, were nearly empty, but then again it was very cold, and the few people out were mostly hurrying from one building to another. Despite the warming of the Arctic, midwinter here was still frigid, and sea-raw, as in any other coastal town. It reminded Amelia of Boston.
Inside a pub called Baltika it was steamy warm and loud with people enjoying a Friday evening. Amelia’s local friends from the Wildlife Migrators Association had gathered there to commiserate with her over her disastrous voyage south, to drink the memory away, and to discuss new plans. Some of them had helped her in Churchill, and they were as angry as she was at the wicked reception her bears had gotten in Antarctica.
One of them, Thorvald, was not as sympathetic as the others. “Antarctic Defense League includes almost every person down there, and they’re way worse than Defenders of Wildlife. People are only down there because they really want to be there. It’s like here, but more so. They really believe in it.”
“I know that,” Amelia said sulkily. “So what? Antarctica is huge, and if a few polar bears were living in a bay or two down there, so what? They could have shipped them back north in a few generations or a few hundred years. Round them up when things get cold enough again up here, send them home. It was a refuge!”
“But we didn’t consult them,” Thorvald said. “And they’re very caught up in their idea of Antarctica. The last wilderness, they call it. The last pure place.”
“I hate that shit,” Amelia said. “This is a mongrel planet. There’s no such thing as purity. The only thing that matters is avoiding extinctions.”
“I agree with you. But they don’t. So, you needed more than just people like me.”
He stared intently at her, and despite his rebukes, Amelia began to get the idea that he was coming on to her. Nothing new there, but in the mood she was in, it was somewhere between a comfort and an irritation. She might take him up on it. She still felt chilled right down to the bone, days after her dunking. It wasn’t just that anyway. Something had to change. Although the style he was using, as if by being rude he could boss her into bed, didn’t appeal to her.
“So what should we do?” she demanded. “My friends in New York were saying that if I kept it secret I could move some bears down there on the sly.”
They all shook their heads at this. Thorvald said, “You can see every polar bear on Earth from satellites. The Antarcticans would see them too. And we don’t want to get any more of them killed.”
“Maybe if we made a deal with them,” Amelia said.
But they shook their heads at this too.
“They won’t compromise,” Thorvald said. “If they were the kind of people who would compromise, they wouldn’t be there.”
Amelia sighed gloomily.
Thorvald said, “Maybe the thing to do is find new places around Greenland. There should be some newly opened bays where polar bears and their prey animals will do well.”
“It’s too warm up here now,” Amelia said. “That’s the point.”
Thorvald shrugged. “If you’re saying global temperatures have to drop for polar bears to survive, you would need to pull about a thousand gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere.”
“So what? Couldn’t we do that?”
“If that were our main project, yes. You would only have to change everything.”
“Oh come on. Everything?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like that. It’s too much. So we have to do what we can. I mean, isn’t that what assisted migration is about?”
“Sure, fine. You need refugia in the hard times. But they are only stopgaps. You are the queen of stopgaps.”
“Stopgaps?”
“That’s what they are. Because in the long run, only a system fix will work. Until then, we try our stopgaps. We do what we can with the handouts of the rich. We try to save the world with their table scraps.”
Amelia found this depressing. She drank more aquavit, knowing that would only make her more depressed, but so what; that was how depressed she was. She didn’t care if she was being stupid. She wanted to be stupid right now. Because she had lost any thought of going to bed with this guy Thorvald. And in fact it might not have occurred to him anyway. He was in a heavy mood himself, or else he was that way all the time. Too much reality in him, and some kind of anger, maybe like her own anger, but they weren’t complementary. She needed a little fantasy to get off, and she thought everyone else did too. Maybe. She didn’t really know, but she could see that guys were fantasizing when they were with her, it was as clear as the gleam in their glassy eyes. They interacted with some fantasy Amelia in their heads, a mix of her show’s persona and her actual presence, and she played to that, and it made things easier in some ways. But it wasn’t really her. The real her was getting really, really mad.
“Meanwhile we don’t have to be rude,” she said primly.
At which he just rolled his eyes and polished off his drink.
She was too mad to go into the cloud and talk to her people, too mad to go home. Things were not right, and it was beyond her power to fix them. Ever since she had rescued baby birds who had fallen from their nests and started working at the local bird sanctuary to get away from her mom—a sanctuary that had been filled with
birds who could be saved and put in some situation or other—she had been working on the unexamined assumption that she would continue to do that work all her life, at bigger levels, until all was right. And for a long time it had seemed to be working. Now, not. Now she was the queen of stopgaps.
She told Frans to take the blimp home the long way round.
“Did you say, the long way around?”
“That’s right.”
“New York is about five thousand kilometers southwest of us. The long way around would have us go over the North Pole, down the Pacific, across Antarctica, and back up the Americas. Estimated distance, thirty-eight thousand kilometers. Estimated time of flight, twenty-two days.”
“That’s fine.”
“Estimated food on board will last for eight days.”
“That’s fine. I need to lose some weight.”
“Your weight is currently two kilos below your last five years’ average.”
“Shut up,” she explained.
“I calculate the food shortage to be worse than a diet.”
Amelia sighed. She went to the corner of the bridge and looked at the globe floating there between two magnets, saw what Frans was talking about. She didn’t want to go back to Antarctica anyway. “Okay, make it a great spiral route instead of a great circle route. Head from here to Kamchatka, then across Canada and home.”
“Estimated time of trip, ten days.”
“That’s fine. That’s what I want.”
“You will get hungry.”
“Shut up and drive!”
“Ascending to bottom of jet stream to try to speed our journey home.”
“Fine.”
As the first dark days of this midwinter trip passed, she looked down on the North Atlantic. It took a long time to pass the glow of the brilliantly lit city on Svalbard, the Singapore of the Arctic, illuminating the night like an enormous Christmas tree. Then the Norwegian Alps, a line of fierce black and white spikes, with long flat white glaciers flowing between the peaks. Then Siberia, which went on for day after day. Even though the Russians had built some massive cities along their Arctic coastline, most of the tundra she floated over remained empty. Tundra, taiga, and boreal forest, with the so-called drunken forests bordering the taiga. White ice hills called pingos disfigured the tundra like boils. These masses of pure ice got shoved up through the soil by the freeze-thaw cycle, in effect floating up to the surface. When the pingos melted they left round ponds on top of low hills, an odd sight. The methane released to the atmosphere in this process was prodigious.
Often visible on the tundra, as gatherings of black dots, were herds of de-extincted mammoths. Even if you thought they were pseudo-mammoths, they were still very impressive. They looked like black ants swarming over the land; there had to be thousands of them, maybe millions. Good in some ways, bad in others. Population dynamics again. If those dynamics were the only factors involved, over time they would sort themselves. Meaning these mammoths might be headed for a crash, but it was hard to tell. Meanwhile they at least took the stupid ivory pressure off elephants.
Really, she thought as she looked down, despite everything, the world looked good. Maybe flying in the dark helped. Maybe the shores of the Arctic Ocean were benefiting from the warmer climate. If they succeeded in chilling the climate back down by some way or other, this region would be screwed, maybe. So hard to say.
So Amelia passed these days looking down at the world, and as she did she tried to think things through. What that seemed to mean was that she got more and more confused. This was what always happened when she tried to think, which was why she was not fond of it. She trusted there were other people who were better at it, although sometimes she wondered about that, and in any case, whether or not they existed, their existence did not help her. Everything people could do in the world at this point had a rebound of secondary and tertiary effects. Everything cut against everything else. It was not so much a weave as a mangle. Why had her teachers told her ecology was a weave, when actually it was a train wreck?
She searched her wristpad and brought up a recording of her undergraduate advisor at the University of Wisconsin, an evolution and ecology theorist named Lucky Jeff, whose voice even now had the power to soothe her. In fact that power in person had been so immense that she had slept through most of his classes. Still, he was what she needed now, his calmness. She had liked him, and he had liked her. And he had usually kept things simple.
“We like to keep things simple,” he said to begin the lecture she chose first, which made her smile. “In reality things are complex, but we can’t always handle that. We usually want there to be one master rule. Pöpper called that monocausotaxophilia, the love of single causes that explain everything. It would be so nice to have that single rule, sometimes. So people make them up, and give them authority, like they used to give authority to kings or gods. Maybe now it’s the idea that more is better. That’s the rule that underlies economic theory, and in practice it means profit. That’s the one rule. It’s supposed to allow everyone to maximize their own value. In practice it’s put us into a mass extinction event. Persist in it, and it could wreck everything.
“So what’s a better master rule, if we have to have one? There are some candidates. Greatest good of the greatest number is one possibility. If you remember the greatest number is one hundred percent, and includes everything, that one works pretty well. It suggests creating something like a climax forest. And it has a long history in philosophy and political economy. There are some bad interpretations of it, but that will be true of any rule. It’s serviceable as a first approximation.
“One I like better comes from right here in Wisconsin. It’s one of the sayings of Aldo Leopold, so it’s sometimes called the Leopoldian land ethic. ‘What’s good is what’s good for the land.’
“This one takes some pondering. You have to derive the consequences that would follow from it, but that’s true of any master rule. What would it mean to take good care of the land? It would encompass agriculture, and animal husbandry, and urban design. Really, all our land use practices. So it would be a way of organizing our efforts all around. Instead of working for profit, we do whatever is good for the land. That way we could hope to pass along a good place to the generations after us.”
As Amelia listened to this, wondering if any of it was true, or if it could help her if it were, she was looking down at Kamchatka. The dark land below her was studded with white-sloped volcanoes, but some were black, because their sides were so hot they melted the snow that fell on them. Bizarre to see land so hot that snow melted on it. The lower land around the volcanoes was thickly forested, and white with snow. There were a few towns, scattered like giant navigational beacons, but it was easy to imagine that the habitat corridors they were working so hard to establish in North America were the natural order of things here. Was Kamchatka lightly populated? Had the Russians done things better? She had thought the Russians were crazy despoilers of their country. But maybe that was the Chinese. The Chinese had definitely wrecked their land. Maybe their rule had reversed the Leopold rule, and been What’s good is what’s good for people. That was maybe what people meant when they talked about the greatest good for the greatest number—number of people, they meant. What Leopold had been saying was that taking care of the land took better care of people, over the long haul. Kamchatka, magnificent, bizarre—alien—like another world: was it doing well? She had no idea.
Then over the Aleutians, and then over Canada, where she saw more and more other aircraft in the skies around her. There had been some giant robot freighter airships over Siberia, but the midwinter dark kept a lot of small craft out of the sky, or headed south. Now she was seeing all kinds of airships lighting the sky like lanterns, including a bevy of skyvillages, floating along at the seven-thousand-foot level, the altitude that was generally kept clear for them. Amelia loved skyvillages. They were round or polygonal collections of balloons, often actually a single ring of a balloon mad
e to look like a circle of old-style balloons, holding aloft under them (or it) platforms on which complete little villages were built, in some cases even towns of a few or several thousand people. Thirty to fifty balloons, or units of a single balloon, held each skyvillage aloft, with the smaller resort versions displaying twenty-one balloons, as in the children’s book The Twenty-one Balloons. People spoke very highly of life in these villages, and Amelia always enjoyed her visits to them. They included farms, and some had so much surface area and so few people that they were almost entirely self-sufficient, like the townships on the ocean, so that they hardly ever came down.
Amelia was now flying at around ten thousand feet, so the skyvillages she saw below her looked like flower arrangements, or cloisonné jewelry. Canadians in particular liked to fly or live in them. Her cloud show was popular in many of them, she had been told, although a little research had revealed that liking her show appeared to be a kind of campy thing, indulged in by young people who liked to laugh. Oh well. An audience was an audience.