The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  There was also a Lima Syndrome, she read, in which the kidnappers developed for their hostages a sympathy so strong that they let them go.

  What if both syndromes occurred at once? Surely that was how it would sometimes happen, in a kind of symmetry: two people, both suffering from different kinds and degrees of trauma, recognizing in a moment of high stress a fellow sufferer. Wasn’t that right?

  So hard to say about these things. Trying to put a name on a confusion of feelings. A wrong feeling that nevertheless got felt. Many psychologists doubted the reality of Stockholm Syndrome. It had never made it into the DSM handbooks. It was pop psychology, a journalistic term, a fiction.

  Well, but. Every possible thing happened, eventually. In moments of high stress strange things happened. Probably it was stupid to try to put any kind of label on these events, any kind of explanation. Syndromes, psychology in general: bollocks. It was just that one time, every time. In this case, just Mary and that young man, in a kitchen for a very intense couple of hours. Not that different from a bad date you felt obliged to ride out. Well, no. That pistol, that moment of fear— a jolting spike of fear for her life— she had not forgotten that, or forgiven it. She never would. Nothing was quite like that. But nothing was quite like anything.

  In Zurich she left the Hauptbahnhof and crossed the river to the tram stop and got on the next 6 tram and rode it up the hill to Kirche Fluntern. Wearily she walked along Hochstrasse to her building and let herself in. Bodyguards still stood outside, pleased to see her. Up the stairs, feeling wasted. Poured herself a glass of white wine on ice and slurped it down fast. She didn’t like living alone, but she didn’t like living with bodyguards either. Probably she should have invited them inside; it was cold out. But at times like this she didn’t want to talk to anyone. It would have been impossible, she was too confused. She would have been snappish, even if she had tried to be polite. As it was she took a quick shower and fell into bed, still stewing. Luckily sleep swept her off.

  In the morning she went first to her office and got through the necessary things. Then she looked at the report that Badim had worked up on the young man. Frank May. He had indeed survived the great India heat wave; he had been right in the area worst hit, while there as an aid worker. At the time he had been twenty-two years old. And his DNA had been found at the murder site on Lake Maggiore, on a chunk of wood used as the weapon. Probably that would be charged as manslaughter. But they had him dead to rights, it looked like. She sighed. The other stuff was trivial in comparison, but the problem was that it made a pattern, added up to a repeat offender. Meaning more time in prison.

  She looked up where he was— Gefängnis Zurich, the Zurich Jail. After a call to make sure of visiting hours and his availability, she walked to the tram stop. While waiting for the next tram she inspected the stuff in the kiosk shop. What did you bring a prisoner? Then she remembered she was visiting her kidnapper. She didn’t buy anything.

  The jail was located on Rotwandstrasse, Red Wall Street. The nearest tram stop was Paradeplatz. She got off and walked to the street; no red walls in sight. It could have been repainted, or knocked down eight hundred years before. The jail was obvious; a three-story concrete building, extending for most of a block. Institutional; tall windows in deep embrasures, obviously not meant to be opened.

  She went in and identified herself. They called in; the prisoner was willing to meet with her. There was a big meeting room. First she had to leave her phone and other stuff in a locker, then go through an X-ray machine, as in airport security. After that she was escorted by a guard down a hall and through two doors that unlocked and opened automatically. Like an airlock in space stations, she thought. Inside this building, a different atmosphere.

  And it was true. It looked different, it smelled different. The Swiss almost always displayed a little stylishness in even their most institutional institutions, and that was true here too— a blue wainscotting line, a big room with lots of widely separated tables with chairs, potted plants in the corners and some Giacometti imitations gesturing toward the ceiling in their usual elongations. But it smelled of ozone and power. Panopticon. A pair of guards sat behind a desk on a small dais by the door for visitors. Another guard came in the door to the prisoners’ side, escorting a slight man who moved as if hurt.

  It was him. He glanced up at her, smiled briefly, uncertainly, confused to see her; a fear grin; and looked back at the floor. He gestured at one of the tables, walked to it. She followed him, sat down in the chair across the table from him. The table was clearly called for. When they were seated, the guard who had escorted her in left them and walked over to chat with the other guards.

  She looked at him in silence for a while. After a single startled glance, as if to reaffirm that it was her, he looked at the table. He looked withdrawn. He had lost weight since that night in her apartment, and he had been skinny then.

  “Why are you here?” he asked at last.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I wanted to see you in jail.”

  “Ah.”

  Long silence. Now I’ve got some of my own back, she didn’t say— barely even thought. Now I’m safer than I was before. I won’t get shot in the street. Now the tables are turned, you’re the one being held against your will, I’m free to go. And so on. It wasn’t feeling like good reasons had brought her here.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I’m here.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got arrested.”

  “You were at a refugee dinner, I heard?”

  He nodded. “What else did you hear?”

  “I heard that they got attacked by some hooligans, and you went to their defense, and you were still there when the police came, and they were looking for you for something that happened at Lake Maggiore.”

  “So they said.”

  “What happened at Lake Maggiore?”

  “I got mad at a guy and hit him.”

  “You hit him and he died?”

  He nodded. “So they say.”

  “Are you some kind of a … ?”

  He shrugged. “Must have got lucky.”

  “Lucky?” she repeated sharply.

  He squirmed. “It was an accident.”

  “Okay, but don’t joke about it. From now on, what you say may have an impact on your legal status.”

  “I was just talking to you.”

  “Practice it with everybody.”

  “No jokes? Really?”

  “Will that be a hardship for you? I don’t recall you making many jokes when you visited my flat.”

  “I was trying to be serious then.”

  “Do that now too. It could make a difference.”

  “In what?”

  “In how long a sentence they give you.”

  The corners of his mouth tightened, he swallowed hard. No joke there.

  “This person who died, did you hit him with something?”

  “Yes. I was holding a piece of driftwood I found on the lakeshore.”

  “And that was enough to kill him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe his head hit something when he went down.”

  “Why did you hit him?”

  “I didn’t like him.”

  “Why didn’t you like him?”

  “He was being an asshole.”

  “To you or to others?”

  “Both.”

  “Were these others Swiss or Ausländer?”

  “Both, really.”

  She regarded him for a long time. Apparently theirs were the kind of conversations that included many long silences.

  Finally she said, “Well, it’s too bad. It means they’ve got you for multiple things now. So … Well, I’ll put in a word for you, if you want.”

  “That I was a good kidnapper?”

  “Yes. That’s already been put on the record. I mean, I reported it as a kidnapping, so now I can’t exactly say I was having you over for a nightcap. They don’
t have any three strikes type laws in Switzerland, as I understand it, but you do have this latest fight you were in, to add to the death and what you did to me. That will have an effect on the judgment. If I weren’t already on the record saying otherwise, I would consider telling them we were just having a night.”

  He was startled. “Why?”

  “To help shorten your sentence, maybe.”

  He continued to look surprised. She too was surprised. Who was this man, why should she care? Well, because of that night. He was obviously damaged. Something wrong in him.

  He shrugged again. “Okay.” Then suddenly his look turned dark. “Do you know how long it might be? My sentence?”

  “I don’t.” She paused to think about it. “In Ireland I think what you did would get you a sentence of a few to several years, depending on circumstances. Then there’s time off for good behavior and so on. But Switzerland is different. I can look into it.”

  He stared through the table, down this unknown abyss of years. “I don’t know how long I can do it,” he said quietly. “I already can’t stand it.”

  Mary pondered what she could say. There wasn’t much. “They’ll give you work,” she ventured. “You’ll be let go out to work. They’ll put you in therapy. It might end up being not that much different from how you were living before.”

  This earned her a quick fierce black look. Then he was staring at the table again, as if unhappy she was there.

  She sighed. In truth there was little encouragement to be had in a situation like his. Well, he had made his choices and here he was. If they had been choices. Again the question of sanity came to her. All the horrid violent crimes in the world, worse by far than anything this man had done— weren’t they all prima facie evidence of insanity? Such that any subsequent punishment became in effect punishing someone for being ill?

  Or in order to keep the community safe.

  She didn’t want to be thinking about these things. She had bigger fish to fry, she had a busy day. But there he was. Stuck, jailed, miserable. Possibly insane. Not just post-traumatic, but damaged by the trauma itself in some way even more crippling than PTSD. Some kind of brain damage, from overheating or dehydration or both, damage which had never healed. It seemed quite possible; everyone else on the scene had died.

  Well, who knew. He wasn’t going anywhere. She had things to do, and it would be easy enough to come back.

  “I’m going to go,” she told him. “I’ll come back. I’ll see what I can learn, and talk to your lawyer. Have you got one?”

  He shook his head. “They assigned one to me.”

  He looked completely hopeless.

  She sighed and stood. One of the guards came over.

  “Leaving?” the guard asked.

  “Yes.”

  She was the one in power now. Briefly she touched him on the shoulder, almost as he had first touched her on Hochstrasse. She was partly there for revenge, she felt that now. He was warm through his shirt, hot; feverish, it felt like. He shrugged her off like a horse shivering away a fly.

  51

  The thirties were zombie years. Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth, staggering toward some fate even worse than death.

  Everyone felt it. The culture of the time was rife with fear and anger, denial and guilt, shame and regret, repression and the return of the repressed. They went through the motions, always in a state of suspended dread, always aware of their wounded status, wondering what massive stroke would fall next, and how they would manage to ignore that one too, when it was already such a huge effort to ignore the ones that had happened so far, a string of them going all the way back to 2020. Certainly the Indian heat wave stayed a big part of it. They could neither face it nor forget it, they couldn’t think about it but they couldn’t not think about it, not without a huge subconscious effort. The images. The sheer numbers. These recalled the Holocaust, which had left a huge hole in civilization’s sense of itself; that was six million people, but an old story, and of Jewish people killed by Germans, it was a German thing. The Palestinians’ Nakba, the partition of India; on and on these bad stories went, the numbers always unimaginable; but always before it had been certain groups of people who were responsible, people from an earlier more barbaric time, or so they told themselves. And always these thoughts obtruded in an attempt to stave off the heat wave, which was now said to have killed twenty million. As many people, in other words, as soldiers had died in World War One, a death toll which had taken four years of intensely purposeful killing; and the heat wave had taken only two weeks. It somewhat resembled the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1920, they said; but not. Not a pathogen, not genocide, not a war; simply human action and inaction, their own action and inaction, killing the most vulnerable. And more would surely follow, because they all were vulnerable in the end.

  And yet still they burned carbon. They drove cars, ate meat, flew in jets, did all the things that had caused the heat wave and would cause the next one. Profits still were added up in a way that led to shareholder dividends. And so on.

  Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done, and everyone kept doing too little. Repression of course followed, it was all too Freudian, but Freud’s model for the mind was the steam engine, meaning containment, pressure, and release. Repression thus built up internal pressure, then the return of the repressed was a release of that pressure. It could be vented or it could simply blow up the engine. How then people in the thirties? A hiss or a bang? The whistle of vented pressure doing useful work, as in some functioning engine? Or boom? No one could say, and so they staggered on day to day, and the pressure kept building.

  So it was not really a surprise when a day came that sixty passenger jets crashed in a matter of hours. All over the world, flights of all kinds, although when the analyses were done it became clear that a disproportionate number of these flights had been private or business jets, and the commercial flights that had gone down had been mostly occupied by business travelers. But people, innocent people, flying for all kinds of reasons: all dead. About seven thousand people died that day, ordinary civilians going about their lives.

  Later it was shown that clouds of small drones had been directed into the flight paths of the planes involved, fouling their engines. The drones had mostly been destroyed, and their manufacturers and fliers have never been conclusively tracked. Quite a few terrorist groups took credit for the action in the immediate aftermath, and demanded various things, but it has never been clear that any of them really had anything to do with it. That multiple groups would claim responsibility for such a crime just added to the horror felt at the time. What kind of world were they in?

  One message was fairly obvious: stop flying. And indeed many people stopped. Before that day, there had been half a million people in the air at any given moment. Afterward that number plummeted. Especially after a second round of crashes occurred a month later, this time bringing down twenty planes. After that commercial flights often flew empty, then were cancelled. Private jets had stopped flying. Military planes and helicopters had also been attacked, so they too curtailed their activities, and flew only if needed, as if in a war. As indeed they were.

  It was noticed that none of the experimental battery-powered planes had been brought down, and no biofuel-powered planes, also no blimps, dirigibles, or hot-air balloons; no airships of any kind. But in that period there were so few of these, it was hard to tell at the time if they had been given a pass or not. It looked like they had, it seemed to make sense, and the surge in airship manufacture, which had already gotten a small start, has never ceased to this day.

  The War for the Earth is often said to have begun on Crash Day. And it was later that same year when container ships began to sink, almost always close to land. Torpedoes from nowhere: a different kind of drone. It was noticed early on in this campaign that ships often went down where they could form the foundations for new coral reefs. In any case, they were going down. They ran on diesel fuel, of cour
se. Loss of life in these sinkings was minimal, but world trade was severely impacted. Stock markets fell even lower than they had after Crash Day. A worldwide recession, a feeling of loss of control, price spikes in consumer goods, the clear prospect of the full-blown depression that indeed followed a few years later … it was a time of dread.

  Two months after Crash Day a group called Kali, or the Children of Kali, issued a manifesto over the internet. No more fossil-fuel-burning transport. That was about twenty to twenty-five percent of civilization’s total carbon burn at this point, and all of it vulnerable to disruption, as the manifesto put it.

  Next up, the Children of Kali (or someone using that name) told the world: cows. Later that same year the group announced that mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, had been cultured and introduced by drone dart into millions of cattle all over the world. Everywhere but in India, but especially in the United States and Brazil and England and Canada. Nothing could stop these cattle from sickening and dying in a few years, and if eaten their disease could migrate into human brains, where it manifested as Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and was invariably fatal. So to stay safe, people needed to stop eating beef now.

  And indeed in the forties and ever after, less beef got eaten. Less milk was drunk. And fewer jet flights were made. Of course many people were quick to point out that these Children of Kali were hypocrites and monsters, that Indians didn’t eat cows and so didn’t feel that loss, that coal-fired power plants in India had burned a significant portion of the last decade’s carbon burn, and so on. Then again those same Indian power plants were being attacked on a regular basis, so it wasn’t clear who was doing what to whom. Scores of power plants were being destroyed all over the world, often by drone attacks. Power outages in those years were most common in India, but they happened everywhere else too. The War for the Earth was real, but the aggressors were nowhere to be found. It was often asserted they were not in India at all, and were not even an Indian organization, but rather an international movement. Kali was nowhere; Kali was everywhere.