“It was close enough, as it turned out. Besides, I think you offered it once, but I said no. I hate that kind of thing.”
“Even so. It might be just for a while. They’ll probably pick this guy up soon.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“It’s hard to stay off the grid for long.”
“But not impossible.”
“No,” he admitted. “Not impossible.”
She shifted back into the bench, shuddered. Really things were fucked. She needed to sleep. But here they were.
“Look,” she said, thinking it over. “You grew up in Nepal, right? And I grew up in Ireland. In both places there was a lot of political violence. Which really means murder, right? Murder and all that follows murder. Fear, grief, anger, revenge, all that. The damage never goes away, I can tell you that, and you probably already know it. And then the better murderers in these murder contests tend to take over in the end. It’s not at all clear it has ever done any good in the world at all.”
Badim wagged his head side to side, not agreeing with her.
“What?” she cried. “You know it’s true! The damage has been tremendous!”
He sighed. “And yet,” he said. “What was the damage before? And did doing some of these things lessen the damage overall? This is what is never clear.”
“So what has this black wing of yours done!” she exclaimed, suddenly frightened.
“I really can’t say.” He saw her face, temporized. “Possibly some coal plants have experienced problems. They’ve had to go offline, and the investment crowd has seen that and understood that they won’t ever be good investments again. In a sense you could say that worked.”
“How do you mean worked?”
“The plants stayed shut, and solar’s gotten another investment boost. And new coal plant construction worldwide is down eighty percent since these things started happening.”
“That could be because of the Indians shifting to solar.”
“Yes.”
“Has anyone been hurt or killed?”
“Not on purpose.”
“Has anyone been terrorized?”
“You mean scared away from burning carbon?”
“Yes.”
“I think it might be good if that had happened, don’t you?”
“But how?”
“Well, you know. What really scares people is financial.”
“What really scares people is being fucking kidnapped!”
“Granted. Threat of violence. Although access to their money, if people get cut off from that, they are definitely scared.”
“Fuck. So you’re playing the god game.”
“Excuse me?”
“Playing god. Putting people through experiences they think are real, then seeing what they do.”
“Maybe. But it wouldn’t be just to see what they do. It would be to make them change.”
“So you terrorize them!”
“Well, but terrorism means killing innocent people to scare other innocent people into doing what you want. That’s what it means today, right? It isn’t just boo in the dark.”
“No, I suppose not. But you scare people. You use intimidation.”
“If we had, it might be a good thing. It might be doing the needful. As you were pointing out yourself, I think.”
She nodded. She remembered the young man from the night before. He had scared her, no doubt about it. On purpose. To get her attention. In fact he had had to calm her down a little, maybe, just to get started, so that she would better take in what he had wanted so desperately to convey to her. He had wanted her to pay close attention to what he was saying, so that she wouldn’t forget it. A mammal never forgets a bad scare; and they were mammals. And indeed she would not be forgetting.
“I just had that done to me,” she said. “That man wanted to scare me.”
“It sounds like it.”
“It worked,” she said, looking at him.
He looked back, letting her think that over.
She considered it. She felt like her stomach was going to implode.
“All right,” she said. “Look. I want to know what’s going on. I’ll lie if it comes to that, or take the hit if need be. But I want to know.”
“Do you really?”
“I do. You have to promise me you’ll tell me. Do you promise?”
For a long time he didn’t speak. He looked out at the city, then at the ground. Finally: “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
“Everything!”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“No.” He looked her in the eye. “I can’t tell you everything. Because look: there might be some people who deserve to be killed.”
She stared at him. The sandwich inside her was getting trash-compacted, it felt like; it would be better if she could just throw it up.
Finally she said, “Maybe I can help you to focus this program better than it is now. I know some things now that I didn’t yesterday.”
“I’m truly sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. They’re things I should have known all along.”
“Maybe.”
She thought it over. “Fuck!”
“I know.”
“But … Well, we have to do something. Something more than we’ve been doing.”
“I think maybe so.”
“Because right now we’re losing.”
“It’s a fight. That’s for sure.”
28
The Hebrew tradition speaks of those hidden good people who keep the world from falling apart, the Tzadikim Nistarim, the hidden righteous ones. In some versions they are thirty-six in number, and thus are called the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six righteous ones. Sometimes this belief is connected with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and God’s promise that if he could be shown even fifty good men in these cities (and then ten, and then one) he would spare them from destruction. Other accounts refer the idea to the Talmud and its frequent references to hidden anonymous good actors. The hidden quality of the nistarim is important; they are ordinary people, who emerge and act when needed to save their people, then sink back into anonymity as soon as their task is accomplished. When the stories emphasize that they are thirty-six in number, it is always included in the story that they have been scattered across the Earth by the Jewish diaspora, and have no idea who the others are. Indeed they usually don’t know that they themselves are one of the thirty-six, as they are always exemplars of humility, anavah. So if anyone were to proclaim himself to be one of the Lamed-Vav , this would be proof that actually he was not. The Lamed-Vav are generally too modest to believe they could be one of these special actors. And yet this doesn’t keep them from being effective when the moment comes. They live their lives like everyone else, and then, when the crucial moment comes, they act.
If there are other secret actors influencing human history, as maybe there are, we don’t know about them. We very seldom get glimpses of them. If they exist. They may be just stories we tell ourselves, hoping that things might make sense, have an explanation, and so on. But no. Things don’t make sense like that. The stories of secret actors are the secret action.
29
We set up camp on the Thwaites Glacier, about a hundred kilometers inland from the coast of Antarctica. Thwaites was chosen because it was one of the fastest-moving big glaciers, combined with a fairly narrow gateway to the sea relative to other glaciers in its class. There were about fifty glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland that were going to dump ninety percent of the ice that was going to end up in the sea in the next few decades, and in that group, this one looked like one of the best test subjects. So there we were.
The camp was a typical Antarctic field camp, of the larger variety. A runway long enough for C-130s was secured; this meant landing first in Twin Otters, then checking a two-mile stretch of ice to make sure there weren’t any unseen crevasses. Blow up and bulldoze any crevasses you find. Eventually yo
u get a full landing strip. After the C-130s could land, a few Jamesways were flown in and assembled to serve as galley and commons. These Jamesways are basically insulated Quonset huts of World War Two vintage: they are floored half cylinders, very simple, easy to assemble, and pretty energy efficient. These that we set up were powered and heated mostly by solar panels, as this was a summer camp and the sun would be up all the time. A few tents for people who liked to sleep away from the huts— I’m like that myself— and a couple of yurts like the Russians use. When we were done we had a little nomad village, colorful against the white background: yellow, orange, khaki, red.
The drilling equipment was one of the ice coring systems that have been operated for a long time in Antarctica to get core samples, or drill down to subglacial lakes, or get through an ice shelf to the ocean below. They shoot hot water at the ice through a thing like a giant shower head, and melt it. As the ice melts the drill head goes lower, and down it all goes. The meltwater gets pumped out, and the hole can be sleeved with a heated sleeve if you want to keep it open, which we did. Some of the meltwater gets recycled into the drill head’s feeder tank to be reheated. The rest gets piped away and dumped where it can spill out and freeze without messing anything up. Progress down the hole is slow by some standards, fast by others. A typical speed for a two-meter-diameter hole is about ten meters per hour. Fast, right? It’s a lot easier than drilling in earth or anything else hard, although you do need a lot of power to heat the water. That used to mean burning a lot of diesel fuel, but solar will work too if you’ve got enough of it.
This time, when we got to the bottom of Thwaites, about nine hundred meters down from the surface, water came up the hole, but not all the way to the surface. It was under stupendous pressure from the weight of the ice on it, but no matter how thick the ice, the water under it gets shoved up the hole only about ninety percent of the way. The physics of hydrology dictates this, although we ran a pool anyway to see who could guess the actual height of the rise the closest, because there are always variants in play that mean the actual level in the hole will range a few meters one way or the other. In any case about ninety percent of the way to the top, so the energy needed to pump water the rest of the way to the surface was not that great. So we did that, but no matter how much we pumped out, it was replenished from below. This was the crucial question; could we empty out the water down there? Would we be able to pump up so much that there was nothing left to pump?
There turned out to be a lot of water under the Thwaites, as predicted. Bigger and bigger summer pools of meltwater on the surface had run down moulins, which are like vertical rivers that run down cracks in the ice. That water bottoms out on the bedrock and then lubricates the slide of the ice over it, until the ice is like riding down a water slide. The glaciers are therefore becoming more like rivers than ice fields, flowing almost as fast as some flat-country rivers, but with a hundred times more water in them than the Amazon, or even more. And the water in the Amazon was rain the week before, but the ice in Antarctica has been perched up there for the last five million years at least. So we’re going to see sea level rise, big time.
So if we could pump that subglacial water out from under the glacier, the ice would thump back down onto bedrock and slow down to the grind-it-out speed that used to be normal. After that we would keep pumping subglacial water out, and the ice would stay grounded on the bedrock, and it would stay at its old speed, deform viscously, shatter in crevasse fields, all the usual behaviors, and at the old speeds. Thus the plan.
We were here to test the method. Some said the water at the bottom would get mixed with glacial silt until it was the consistency of toothpaste, and hard or impossible to pump up. Others said the silt was long since gone, the bottom clean as a whistle after millions of years of scraping, and the new water down there would be pure, and therefore gush into the sky the moment we punctured the ice, wrecking everything and maybe drowning or freezing us, or both. People good at hydrology scoffed at that last prediction, but you had to try it to be sure. We could only be sure by testing it.
So we got that first well melted, and the water came up about eighty-seven percent of the hole, so that I won the pool. Come on, Pete, they said, you can’t win a pool you set up yourself! Sure I can! I replied. And we pumped water from the top of the column and it kept refilling to the same level. This went on for four days. All good!
But then the water from below cut off abruptly. Some shift in the ice down there had presumably cut off our hole. Like capping an oil well, some said, but not really. A shift in the ice, I reckoned. There was a crevasse field about thirty kilometers upstream that made me wonder how far downstream the ice was broken up.
Anyway, not good. Clearly, if the method was going to work, the wells were going to have to be kept open. So it was a question of whether our cut-off was a typical thing or an unusual accident. We also had to find out if we could fix it. Re-open it, in other words, and then prevent whatever had happened to it from happening again. Failing that, we would have to abandon it and presumably start a new one. But if we couldn’t figure out the problem, and if this was what was going to happen all the time on these quickening glaciers, maybe the whole idea wasn’t going to work.
A team was dispatched out to us to run some seismic tests, also to bring in more cameras and other monitors to drop down the hole to see what we could see. We had to wait out a windstorm for them to be able to fly in, so for a couple of days there was nothing to do. I thought we were going to be able to figure it out, but the mood in the dining hall got more and more what you might call apprehensive.
Pete, this might turn out to be another fantasy solution, one of my postdocs said to me. One of those geoengineering dreams of redemption. Silver bullet fix that just shoots us in the head kind of thing.
I sure hope not, I said. I like the beach.
Hey, someone else said, geoengineering isn’t always just a fantasy. The Indians did that sulfur dioxide thing and that worked. Temperatures dropped for years after that.
Big deal, someone else replied.
It was a big deal!
But it didn’t do anything to solve the bigger problem.
Of course not, but it wasn’t meant to do that! It was a fix!
That’s why we’re here, I pointed out. This is a different fix.
Right. But look, Dr. G, even if we could get this to work, the glacier would still move downstream, so eventually this whole pumping system would get swept out to sea. It would have to be rebuilt up here again.
Of course! I said. It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. All kinds of things have to be done like that. Maintenance stuff.
Besides, what’s the alternative? someone pointed out.
It’ll cost a ton!
What’s cost? I said. Postdocs can be so stovepiped, it would be funny if it weren’t so alarming. I clarified reality for them: Look, if you have to do something, you have to do it. Don’t keep talking about cost as if that’s a real thing. Money isn’t real. Work is real.
Money is real, Dr. G. You’ll see.
This method is the only way that will work.
But it didn’t work! It cut out on us!
Yes, but this was just the start. If at first you don’t succeed—
You’ll never get funded again.
30
When thinking about the suspended years before the Great Turn, what some have called the Trembling Twenties, historians have speculated whether it was part of the Great Turn itself, or the last exhausted moments of the modern period, or some sort of poorly theorized interregnum between the two. Comparisons have been made to the period 1900–1914, when clearly the twentieth century had not yet properly begun and people were unaware of the stupendous catastrophe approaching. The calm before the storm. But there is nothing like consensus here.
Of course attempts are always made to divide the past into periods. This is always an act of imagination, which fixes on matters geological (ice ages and extinction even
ts, etc.), technological (the stone age, the bronze age, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution), dynastic (the imperial sequences in China and India, the various rulers in Europe and elsewhere), hegemonic (the Roman empire, the Arab expansion, European colonialism, the post-colonial, the neo-colonial), economic (feudalism, capitalism), ideational (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Modernism), and so on. These are only a few of the periodizing schemes applied to the flux of recorded events. They are dubiously illuminative, perhaps, but as someone once wrote, “we cannot not periodize,” and as this appears to be true, the hunt is on to find out how we can best put this urge to use. Perhaps periodization makes it easier to remember that no matter how massively entrenched the order of things seems in your time, there is no chance at all that they are going to be the same as they are now after a century has passed, or even ten years. And if on the other hand things feel chaotic to the point of dissolution, it is also impossible that some kind of new order will not emerge eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.
“If things feel” like this or that: these feelings too are linked to periodization, because our feelings are not just biological, but also social and cultural and therefore historical. Raymond Williams called this cultural shaping a “structure of feeling,” and this is a very useful concept for trying to comprehend differences in cultures through time. Of course as mammals we feel emotions that are basic and constant: fear, anger, hope, love. But we comprehend these biological emotions by way of language, thereby organizing them into systems of emotions that are different in different cultures and over time. Thus for instance, famously, romantic love means different things in different cultures at different times; consider ancient Greece, China, medieval Europe, anywhere.
So how you feel about your time is partly or even largely a result of that time’s structure of feeling. When time passes and that structure changes, how you feel will also change— both in your body and in how you understand it as a meaning. Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.
The Ministry for the Future Page 12
