The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Now he was back. He wanted to look back. He walked across town to his school and spoke to the assembled students, and all the young faces were enough to slay him on the spot. Talk about burning desire. They wanted what he had, and he didn’t know what to say to them. He said, To get anywhere in this world you must hitch your tiger to your chariot.

  He went out with them to the fields outside the city where they were working in the India Regenerative Agriculture job guarantee program. There was full employment in India now, and the work was hard but it was scientifically based too, and drawing carbon into the soil year by year in ways making them all safer. He worked with them planting corn and then repairing a terrace wall, and ended the day feeling cooked. I’m still a hill boy, he told them, I can’t hack the terai, it’s too hot. But look you, this is good work you are doing, so you must persist. Gandhi made up this word, satyagraha, that’s Sanskrit for peace force, you all know this word, right? But the Mahatma made it up himself, and I think he would be happy to imagine another word that puts the two parts in reverse order. Grahasatya. Force peace. It changes it from a noun to a verb, maybe. And you are exerting that force for peace. The work that you do here helps save the world, it forces peace on the world. Keep at it.

  Then as he was preparing to leave, he got a note handed to him in the street requesting a meeting. And this was interesting enough to pursue. Indeed he had wanted to speak to some of these people and had not been able to figure out a safe way to reach them. So he went to the address on the note.

  When he got there he was startled and amused to find it was just one street away from the very intersection where he had spent much of his truant youth, the same X of alleyways meeting at a big plus sign of crossing avenues. A very messy intersection, as messy as his young mind and life had been, the same tram wires overhead, same narrow wrought iron balconies on the buildings. It gave him a little smile to think the people he was meeting, no doubt some of this generation’s young toughs, had accidentally called him back to his old neighborhood.

  These were not the same kind of people he had been, however. They had a purpose; their burning desire was already directed, hitched to a chariot outfitted for war. They stepped out of a doorway and gestured to him to follow them into an empty tea stall. They were older than he had been, and a woman led them. His childhood gang had been happy and boisterous; these people were angry and cautious. Of course: lives were at stake, theirs included. And they had probably been in the heat wave. That would change you. Forged in the fire: yes, these were Children of Kali, staring at him as if calculating where to insert the knives.

  We want you to stand up, the woman told him bluntly.

  And I want you to stand down, he replied, as mildly as he could.

  She frowned heavily, as did the four men with her. They looked like the demon faces on Kali’s necklace.

  You don’t tell us what to do, she said. You’re like firangi now.

  I am not, he said. You don’t know what I am. You know enough to ask to meet with me, I’ll give you that, but that’s all you know.

  We see what’s happening. We brought you here to tell you to do more.

  And I came when you asked, to tell you the time has come to change tactics. That’s a good thing, and it’s partly because of what you did. You were doing the needful, I know that.

  We are still doing the needful, she said.

  It’s a question of what’s needful now, he said.

  We will decide that, she said.

  He looked at each of them in turn. He felt how it could be more intimidating than anything one might say. It was almost like touching them; like an electric spark jumping the gap from mind to mind. A hard look; but he let them see him, too.

  Listen, he told them. I understand you. I’ve helped you, I’ve helped work like yours all over the world. That’s why you asked me to meet with you. And it’s why I agreed to meet with you. I am putting myself in your hands here, to make you understand I am your ally. And to tell you that conditions have changed. Together we helped to change them. So now, if you keep killing the wicked ones, the criminals, now that all the worst of them are dead, then you become one of them.

  The worst criminals are not dead, there are many more of them, she said fiercely.

  They always find replacements, he said.

  We do too.

  I know that. I know your sacrifice.

  Do you?

  He stared at her. Again he shifted his stare one by one to the men with her. Faces to fear, faces to love. That burning desire.

  He said slowly, This is Lakshmi’s city. I grew up here. I hope you know that. I grew up right here in this neighborhood, when it was far tougher than it is now.

  You weren’t here in the heat wave, the woman said.

  He stared at her, feeling a strain inside him that might break him apart. His whole life was cracking inside him. Trying to control that, he unsteadily said, I’ve done more to stop the next heat wave than anyone you have ever met. You’ve done your part, I’ve done mine. I was working for this neighborhood long before the heat wave struck, and I’ll keep doing that work for the rest of my life.

  May you live ever so long, one of the men said.

  That’s not the point, he said. My point is, I see things you can’t see from here, and I’m your ally, and I’m telling you, it’s time to change. The big criminals are dead or in jail, or in hiding and rendered powerless. So now if you keep killing, it’s just to kill. Even Kali didn’t kill just to kill, and certainly no human should. Children of Kali should listen to their mother.

  We listen to her, but not you.

  He said, I am Kali.

  Suddenly he felt the enormous weight of that, the truth of it. They stared at him and saw it crushing him. The War for the Earth had lasted years, his hands were bloody to the elbows. For a moment he couldn’t speak; and there was nothing more to say.

  79

  The time approached when Frank was to be released from prison. Term served. It was hard to grasp, he didn’t know what to think of it. Years had passed but he wasn’t sure how. Part of him was still stuck outside himself, beyond life and its feelings. That was a relief in many ways— to be spared all the pain, the fear, the memories. Just cold sunlight on the corner terrace of a Zuri day. That he could spend four or five hours without a thought in his head— this was what the life here had given him. He didn’t know if he wanted to give that up. Dissociation? Serenity? He didn’t care what he called it. He wanted it.

  Because something else had gone away too: he wasn’t afraid. As far as he could tell. And surely he would be able to tell, if it weren’t the case. He was a creature of habit now. Eat, walk, work, read, sleep. He was neither happy nor unhappy. He didn’t want anything. Well, that wasn’t quite true. He wanted to be free of fear. And he was interested to see more animals. And he wanted the people in the refugee camps to be released like he was going to be. These were all different kinds of wants, and some of them he could try to pursue, others were out of his power.

  Every morning, he either took the prison van or the city trams and buses to refugee centers and helped clean the kitchens; or he walked the downtown, criss-crossing the Limmat on its many bridges and often ending up at one of the lakefront parks.

  On this day he went into Grossmünster to have a look around. Say hello to the spirit of Zurich, so gray and austere. Like a big old concrete warehouse, immensely tall and almost completely empty. That this was their place of worship always struck him funny. Zwingli as some kind of zen monk, an advocate of nothingness. Purity of spirit. A devotional space reacting against the baroque church, the very idea of church. Did it reveal as much about the Swiss as it seemed to? Wasn’t the graceful Enlightenment church across the river a better image of what they were in modern times? Possibly so. He walked out, recrossed the river, passed the “Goethe slept here” sign, went into Peterskirche. No, this wasn’t it either. Smooth, tasteful, kitschy, alabaster; the Swiss weren’t like that now. Bauhaus had struck
them harder than anyone, they were all about design now, leapfrogging back toward Zwingli, or forward to some space-age clean line. Function as form, yes that was Swiss style. Do it right, make it last. Clean, sober, elegant, stylish. The old-fashioned Heidi gestures banished to the touristic parts of the Alps where they belonged. Here in Zurich it was all about function.

  He passed by the women’s club set right out over the Limmat, where bathers lay in the sun. Across the river stood the Odeon, looking at the sunbathing women like prurient Joyce himself. Then to the bridge at the river outlet, Quaibrücke, the beginning of the Limmat. West along the lake to the first lakeshore park. Sit at a bench above the tiny marina and watch the statue of Ganymede hold his arms out to the big bird before him. A simple gesture, enigmatic to the point of blankness. His kind of statue. Ganymede’s ta-da— that was Frank, maybe, going forward. Offering something to a great eagle. The sight gave him a shiver. In the sun, wan though it was, he shouldn’t have been cold, but he was. Then he felt a slight wave of nausea, and a cold sweat burst out all over him at once. He sat there, willing the sensation to leave him. To his relief it did. But now his clothes were damp, and he sat there feeling weak and cold.

  This had happened a few times recently. He hadn’t told anyone, had brushed it off. Somehow out here in the pale sunlight it felt worse. He stood up, caught at the bench arm unsteadily. Walked down the broad steps to where the lake lapped against the concrete abutment. The sight reminded him of something he couldn’t recall— couldn’t afford to recall— he knew what it was, but he ignored it in order to plunge his hands into the water. Cold alpine water, clean and fresh. You could drink right out of the lake, Mary Murphy had told him. She swam in it and knew. He scooped a handful and lifted it to his mouth, sucked it down. Cool and bland, a little organic. He could taste that it had been snow a week before. He sucked down several handfuls, ignoring a couple of passersby who thought it was strange of him to be drinking from the lake. It was James Joyce who had said you could eat your breakfast off the Zurich streets. Now you could certainly drink their lake water. He had swum in it once or twice, he recalled now. It had been years. Jake in the lake. Strange it was so long ago.

  He took a deep breath. Something wrong there, some light-headed chilled weakness he couldn’t identify, couldn’t put a word to. People said it was a shock to be released, that the days stretched out forever in the weeks before it happened, that you went crazy, that you got afraid of the freedom, wanted back inside. None of that was right when it came to him; it was not any of his old familiar reactions, which he had been told were mental states manifesting in his body. Post-traumatic stress disorder, yes, but this phrase always hid more than it revealed. What was the trauma, what was the stress, what was the disorder? No one knew. In the jungle of each mind a wandering went on ceaselessly, finding a clearing here, a pool there, all in the murky light of one’s sputtering thoughts, half awake, half asleep. Why the helpers tried to put words to it he didn’t know. Well, they were trying to help. People were wordy creatures, they felt their feelings as words. Sometimes. But sometimes it didn’t work. No words fit.

  A shaft of fear cut through him like a blade. Something was wrong.

  He took the steps up from the lake carefully, looking down to make sure his feet were set right. Not a place to stumble, there were too many Zurchers out for a walk, and if he fell and they helped him and saw his ankle monitor they would think he was on drugs. No, he had to maintain.

  He got up to street level, breathed deeply. He took stock, shook his limbs, felt them move as he expected them to, took heart. Across the busy street and into the little sidestreets between Bahnhofstrasse and the river. Up here was a candy shop that sold wedges of candied orange half-dipped in various types of chocolate. He liked the darkest chocolate. Best possible wedges of orange, bittersweet, not quite dried, half-coated with the best possible chocolates. He had made a habit of dropping by and buying just one, to nibble on while he walked. He went in now, and the saleswoman recognized him, plucked out a wedge with tongs and put it on a sheet of waxed paper without him having to ask, a nod from him was enough. Then back out into the narrow pedestrian streets, smooth flattened pavers almost like cobblestones but not, back toward Paradeplatz, across the tram tracks running down Bahnhofstrasse and up into the neighborhood around the prison, so well known to him.

  Orange and chocolate, chocolate and orange. Bitter and sweet, dark and light. The complementary tastes forming a composite taste of its own, full and chewy. An infusion of sugars flowing into him, some fat, probably a little jolt of caffeine too. He turned the corner and saw the Gefängnis and felt better. He would shake off this malaise, await his release as stoically as he had endured it, get out and take an apartment in the neighborhood. There was a co-op apartment nearby, overlooking the bus garage, that he had been on the waiting list for since the beginning of his sentence. Now a little bedroom in it was available. He would take that and keep living just as he was now. Keep his head down and get through the days just as he had been.

  Mary Murphy didn’t come by for a while, until he began to wonder. Then when she did, he joined her at the table across the street and told her about seeing the chamois under Pilatus. He couldn’t tell it right; he could see she wasn’t getting it. You should go up there and see for yourself, he said finally, irritated.

  I’m glad you went, was all she said. It sounds good.

  Then he asked her about her refugee division and what they were doing. He said to her, There’s something like 140 million of them now, and growing all the time. That’s like the entire population of France and Germany combined. It’s as bad as it’s ever been.

  I know.

  You have to work up a plan all the governments will agree to, he told her. Have you looked at what happened at end of the world wars? There were millions of refugees wandering around starving. They put Fridtjof Nansen in charge of the problem after World War One, and he came up with a system they called Nansen passports, which gave refugees the right to go wherever they wanted to, free passage anywhere.

  Is that true? she asked.

  I think so. I’ve been reading around, not very systematically, but you’ve got a team to throw at this. There should be Nansen passports again.

  She sighed. There’s a lot of countries won’t accept such a thing, I’m afraid.

  Do like you did with the central banks. It’s a plan or chaos. The camps, I know you’ve visited them, but what I see there is that it’s like this jail here, but worse, because they don’t have any sense of how long they’ll be held, and they never did anything in the first place. Europe is just punishing the victims. Sudan takes care of more refugees than all of Europe, and Sudan is a wreck. People come to Europe and they get called economic migrants, as if that wasn’t just what their own citizens are supposed to do, try to make a better life, show some initiative. But if you come to Europe to do it you’re criminalized. You’ve got to change that.

  She shook her head. It isn’t just Europe.

  But you’re in Europe, Frank said. He stared at her. She was looking at her kafi fertig. They were falling back again into the pattern of their first night, probably not a good idea: he hectoring her to do more, her resenting that.

  On the other hand, here she was, so many years later. It was strange. He didn’t know what to make of it. But suddenly he realized it was important to him. He wanted her to visit. That represented something he couldn’t name. But he needed it, whatever it was. This Irish woman was kind of crazy, kind of ominously interested in him, really, and quite often a bit vengeful and harsh, pushing him around in ways that bothered him, very irritating; but he had gotten used to her visiting. He needed her.

  You should go to the Alps, he said. Remember you told me that, and you were right. Now I’m telling you the same thing.

  She nodded. Maybe so.

  80

  I’ve had to push him every step of the way. He’s just like one of his oxen, that’s why he likes them so much, also why
he doesn’t like me. I’m like one of the birds standing on the oxen poking them in the back. He’d be so much happier if I were an ox. Instead I’m his wife and it’s a stupid fate but I have no one to blame but myself, and truthfully, I love him; but I don’t want to starve for that.

  So he inherited the butt end of his father’s property, two hectares as far from the river as his family’s land got, which meant it had been used as a dump for many years, and first we had to dig through a thick layer of various kinds of crap, even pay to get some of the worst of it carted off, at which point we had a triangle of dirt hard as a marble floor. First job was breaking up the hardpan surface, second was getting an irrigation channel cut over to us from the cousin’s property upstream. I drove him to drive his brothers and nephews to help us, and eventually that all got done and it was time to amend the soil. Here his stupid oxen were of some help, as we could rent nearby pasturage for them and collect their manure and turf it into our land. Of course the water from the ditch just ran over our property at first, carrying everything loose to the river, so we had to deal with that, berm, terrace, channelize, polder, whatever. I did most of that, being the only one who could work an hour straight, also read a level. Progress was slow.

  Then we heard the rumors that the district council would be giving out money for carbon retention. Given the state of our property, this would be getting paid for what we had to do anyway to keep from starving, so I told the ox to get registered right away. He dithered and mooed as always, why waste my time, he complained, those things never work. Quit it! I said. Get down there now or I’ll divorce you and tell everyone why. He went and got us registered.