The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “No.”

  She regarded him. There was something about him more pinched than usual. “That was no ordinary fall,” she told him.

  “I know. I felt faint.”

  “So you need to see a doctor. Get checked out.”

  He pursed his lips unhappily. She could see he wasn’t going to do it. It was like looking at a child.

  She sighed. “If you don’t, I’ll tell the people here. As it is, you’re a danger to them. You’ll fall and hurt yourself, and maybe someone else, and their insurance costs will go up.”

  He gave her a bitter look.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll go with you to the clinic. After that we can go get a drink.”

  He grimaced. After a long pause, looking down at the floor, he shrugged and stood.

  The clinic took the usual stupid amount of time, and in the end it was just the start. They measured him and took blood and asked questions and made an appointment for him to return. And after all that, he didn’t want to go get a drink. So Mary walked him back to his co-op and then went to the tram station and took a 6 tram up the hill to Kirche Fluntern, past her old apartment and up the Zuriberg to her safe house. Bodyguards following her all the way, yes; she always gave them a nod when she saw them and then forgot about them, or tried to.

  She sat there in the strange house feeling low. Something to celebrate, and no one to celebrate with. Even the beasts of the field had company of an evening. Ireland too; in the old days the men would go to the pub, the women gather in kitchens or hang out with the kids. A social species. Of course there were animals such as cats who were isolatoes most of the time. Some people were like that. But not her. She was like the marmots or the chamois. A group to chat with, or just to sit in a room with while reading or watching a screen; this was her preference. She wondered if she should move into something like Frank’s co-op. The bedrooms there were private, small and cozy, and then all the rest of it was communal— the big kitchen, the dining room, the common room with its books and piano. People moved into places like that to have that experience.

  Well, but she would probably just sit in her room anyway. And here she was. They probably wouldn’t let her move. And she didn’t like to move. All the moves, all the years; she was tired of it.

  That night she slept uneasily, and the next morning it was a relief to walk down to work. This group of people who worked for her were serving as her family, she realized. That was fine, a lot of people functioned that way, maybe, although it felt a little odd when you considered it. Work colleagues did not usually function as family. Family, what was the saying? When you had to go there, they had to take you in. Probably that meant not the people you happened to work with.

  Or maybe not. Because when she went into the office she found everyone crying, or palely grim-faced, sitting on desks with their heads in their hands. News had come just seconds before: Tatiana had been found dead outside her apartment, which turned out to have been in Zug. Shot. Her security team said a drone strike of some sort. “Ah no!” she exclaimed, and went to the nearest chair and collapsed in it, getting down before she fell. “No.”

  The police had put Tatiana in a safe house under full protection, including a big crew of bodyguards, but she had not been regular at following their instructions, they said. They had thought her gone to bed for the night, but she had stepped outside her door, no one knew why; they heard her fall to the ground, rushed out, there she was. Shot three times, no sound of gunfire. Bullets not yet recovered, they had gone right through her and had not yet been found.

  Mary stopped asking questions when she heard that, feeling sick. The officers telling her regarded her warily. She would have to move again, they said. Go into better hiding, more complete.

  “No!” she said instantly, wildly. “I’m not leaving! I won’t leave Zurich. I want to keep working here. We can’t cave to this kind of thing. You just do your jobs!”

  They nodded, looking worried. Telecommuting, one suggested. For a while. From a secure location. Until they figured out more about how this had happened, and who might have done it.

  They had some evidence already, of course. A little body camera that Tatiana had been wearing; Mary didn’t want to look at that. What an ugly job these people had. Someone had to do it. The cameras on the building apparently didn’t show anything. Shot from a distance. Little to go on. News came in while they were sitting there pondering her, remembering her. They had found two bullets nearby. American bullets. Not a definitive sign of anything. The investigation would continue. And so on.

  Tatiana. Their tough one, their warrior. Her brother in arms. They kill the good ones, Mary thought bitterly, the leaders, the tough ones, and then dare the weaker ones to pick up the torch and carry on. Few would do it. The killers would prevail. This was how it always happened. This explained the world they lived in; the murderers were willing to kill to get their way. In a fight between sociopathic sick wounded angry fucked-up wicked people, and all the rest of them, not just the good and the brave but the ordinary and weak, the sheep who just wanted to get by, the fuckers always won. The few took power and wielded it like torturers, happy to tear the happiness away from the many. Oh sure everyone had their reasons. The killers always thought they were defending their race or their nation or their kids or their values. They looked through the mirror and threw their own ugliness onto the other, so they didn’t see it in themselves. Always the other!

  And of course she was doing it now. So it was another way the bad could infect the good, by making it furious, making it join the general badness. Fuck them, kill them back, jail them, lock them in some room of mirrors where they had to see themselves for what they were. That would be the punishment she would concoct for them, if she could: they would have to live in a mirror box, look at themselves all day every day for the rest of their lives. See what they saw. Narcissists could not look in the mirror, the myth had it backwards.

  She tried to focus on her helpers, weeping as she looked at them. Swiss police. Switzerland. Think about how this little city-state of a country had gotten by in the world. In part it had been by accepting each other despite their differences. Some clever rules and a few mountain passes, both now irrelevant to power in the world; really it was just a system, a method. An old hoard and a way of getting along. The faces watching her now, their strange fairness, their insistence on some kind of justice for all. Some kind of enlightened self-interest, the notion that Switzerland was safest when the whole world was safe. Really very odd, this culture; and right now she wished with all her heart that it could conquer the world. No Zurcher would ever do anything like this. This thought made her weep harder than ever for a while.

  Then she listened to these individual Swiss people advise her. Work from hiding for a while, please. It could be done. Until they knew what had happened, and knew it wouldn’t happen to her too.

  Can I live near Utoquai? Can I still go out swimming?

  Probably not a good idea. It was well known she was a member of that swim club. Perhaps if she wanted very much to swim in the lake, they could go down the lakeshore and visit a private house, dive in from there.

  Mary sighed. She saw immediately that her swimming was a social activity, that going out into the cold water was unpleasant enough to be a ritual that had to be shared by other sufferers to turn it pleasant. That and the shower and meal afterward, the kafi fertig. As with Tatiana, so many times. Their little ritual. She had been such a beauty, such a power.

  Now Mary’s eyes were burning, now she was furious. Her Swiss helpers were standing around looking uncomfortable. Other people’s grief so awkward. One of the women officers sat down next to her, put a hand on her arm. She began to weep like a faucet.

  When she stopped, she said, Get me Badim, please.

  He was out of the office.

  Get him on the phone! Now. And I’ll need to be able to confer with him, even when I’m hiding.

  So she would agree to hide?

 
Yes. But in Zurich only. Same safe house she was in now would be best.

  They nodded uneasily. If you were to stay in it all the time, for a while, maybe.

  She agreed to that. Then she thought of Frank. Oh hell, she said. Fuck.

  She asked for a phone, they gave her one. She called him.

  He picked up. “I’m sorry your friend was killed,” he said immediately. “I heard about it on the news. I hope you’re being careful.”

  “I am. Thank you. Did you find out anything from the doctors yet?”

  “Well … They’re still working on it.”

  “Come on, tell me.”

  “They’re still working on it!”

  As in, they found something wrong but I don’t want to tell you now, when you’re upset. Meaning it was bad.

  “Tell me now,” she said furiously, “or I’ll think it’s worse than it is.”

  He laughed.

  “What!” she said, alarmed. He was laughing at the idea of there being something worse than what it was. “What is it!”

  There was a silence. “Something in my head,” he said at last. “As always. But this time it’s visible on a scan. Some kind of tumor. They don’t know what kind yet. Could be benign.”

  “Damn,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. Briefly he blew air between his lips. “Oh well. It was always going to be something.”

  After another silence, she said, “I have to go into hiding for a while.”

  “Good. Hide.”

  “But I want to see you.”

  An even longer silence. She thought maybe he didn’t approve. That he was letting her contemplate how strange she had become.

  “We can talk like this,” he said.

  “When will you know more?” she asked.

  “I go back tomorrow.”

  “All right. Good luck. I’ll stay in touch. I’ll come see you when I can.”

  “Stay safe,” he told her. “If you aren’t safe, I don’t want to see you.”

  “Did you get Badim for me?” she asked her minders.

  They nodded. She handed them the phone and they tapped at it.

  Badim came on the line. Mary stood and left her minders, went into her office, shut the door.

  “Can you talk?” she asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “And is this phone private, do you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “So— who killed her?”

  “We don’t know.”

  She said angrily, “What good is your fucking black wing if it can’t figure out stuff like this?”

  He let a silence stretch out, to make her hear how pointless and stupid her question was.

  “I loved her too,” he said. “We all loved her.”

  “I know.”

  After a grim pause, both of them lost in their own worlds, he said, “I’ll tell you what I think, although most of it is obvious, stuff you probably already know. I think she was killed by Russians. Russia is really opaque at the top, but they’ve been making some bold moves lately, and I mean by that some good moves. Really important moves, both in the open and in the black. I think it’s very likely Tatiana was part of those. She kept a lot of contacts there. So, whenever a government changes direction like that, it leaves some people behind. They’re on the wrong side of the change, they’re scared, they get angry. If some of those people who got caught on the wrong side thought that Tatiana was part of the change, maybe even directing it, then killing her could stop the turn, or at least exact a cost for it.”

  “Revenge.”

  “Yes, but also maybe an attempt to reverse the change. Serve as a warning to the people Tatiana was working with, and so on.”

  “All right. So that must mean just a few suspects.”

  “A few thousand.”

  “A few groups, I mean.”

  “A few dozen groups. Russia has been a kleptocracy for a long time. The people who got rich after the fall of the Soviet Union, their kids have always felt like they ruled the world. So now it’s as fractured and complex as anywhere else.”

  “Even at the top?”

  “Especially at the top. This is a fight for how Russia operates.”

  Mary sighed. “None of this will ever end.”

  “That’s true.”

  She thought about it for a while. “Listen, I’m not going to hide. I won’t be forced into hiding by this sort of thing.”

  “It’s dangerous right now.”

  “Are you in hiding?”

  “Yes. I’ve got our whole team secured right now.”

  “But if it was a Russian matter, like you say, then they won’t care about us.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I want to face up to them. To all of them, to everyone like them. Listen, this year’s COP meeting was going to be in Zurich anyway. It’s the sixth global stocktaking, so it’s supposed to be big. We can use that. Make it as big as can be. A memorial to Tatiana. Everyone there, all of us. And we’ll make a public accounting of where we are now. We have to rally the cause. We have to show people where we are, how far we’ve come, and how we can get the job done.”

  “It would be a security challenge.”

  “That’s always true! So it’s best to put the thing right out in the open and make it as big as possible. No more hiding from these fuckers.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “You know I’m right. Otherwise we’re just caving in to terrorism. Do that and there’ll just be more of it. There’ll always be more anyway. Even if you identify and kill these particular murderers, there’ll always be more. Meanwhile we have to live.”

  “All right.”

  “What?”

  “I said, all right. You’re the boss. The COP is three months from now. We’ll put out the call and prepare for it, and the Swiss security services will go all in. After Tatiana, they’ll be worried enough to lock the whole country down.”

  “Yes. They’ll call up their army, I’ve no doubt. Bigger is better in this case, all round. The whole world watching.”

  “All right.”

  “And listen, your black wing— sic them on those bastards!”

  “I already have. When we find them, we’ll kill them.”

  “Good. I hope you can find them.”

  So she let the security people move her to a new safe house, near the Opera. She stayed in it all the time for a couple of weeks, communicating by phone and screen with her team and with everyone else she needed to talk to. They helped her to organize the coming COP as the regularly scheduled global stocktake, plus more: a full progress report from every country, every continent, every industry, every watershed. To that account of the good done, they would add a description of every outstanding problem, every obstacle to getting where they needed to be. The global situation was to be judged actor by actor. Rated, scored, judged; and if judged malingering, then penalized. Time was passing, patience was running out. The sheriff would have to be formed by a concoction of every sanction and penalty they had at hand. The general intellect. The world in their time. In all the blooming buzzing confusion of their moment, they would take stock and get some clarity on the situation, and act. And if Badim’s black wing had anything to it, they would act there too. The hidden sheriff; she was ready for that now, that and the hidden prison. The guillotine for that matter. The gun in the night, the drone from nowhere. Whatever it took. Lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, fuck it— win.

  Meanwhile, however, as they approached the time of this conference, a lot of the news coming in was actually quite good. Real progress was being made on many fronts. The main point, or maybe what the financial sector would have called the index that stood for all the other factors involved— which was to say, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere— it really had dropped in the previous four years, and pretty sharply too. This was confirmed from multiple sources. And it had been leveling in the previous ten years before that, shifting up and down with the seasons as always, but staying more level t
han at any time since measurements had begun in the 1960s. That in itself had been celebrated, but it was now cycling downward between 450 and 445, they said, cycling seasonally as it did, with the current trend moving downward by about 5 parts per million per year, but that rate too was increasing, it looked like. This meant not only that they had stopped burning carbon to a large extent— not entirely, because that would not be possible in their lifetimes— but they were also drawing carbon down from the air in significant and measurable quantities, by way of all the carbon drawdown efforts in combination. There were discussions as to how much the oceans were still serving as a sink for carbon burned into the air, but now, in the Great Internet of Things, the Quantified World, the World as Data, all these aspects of the problem were being measured, and the ocean’s uptake or drawdown was measured to within a fairly small margin of error; and the conclusion from the scientists involved was that since the ocean had already been quite saturated by the carbon it had absorbed in the previous three centuries, the drop they were seeing was only slightly explained by continuing ocean uptake. The majority was being drawn down by reforestation, biochar, agroforestry, kelp bed and other seaweed growth, regenerative agriculture, reduced and improved ranching, direct CO2 capture from the air, and so on. All these efforts were paid for, or rather rewarded beyond the expense of doing them, in carbon coins, and these coins were trading strongly with all the other currencies in currency exchanges. In fact, it looked like there was a possibility that carbon coin might soon supersede the US dollar as the world’s hegemonic currency, the ultimate guarantor of value. The US was a big backer of this complementary currency, of course, which was no doubt a factor in its success; in some senses the carbon coins were like dollars created by the sequestering of carbon. This made for a kind of double standard, or rather something finally to replace the lost gold standard; they had now a carbon standard, and also the dollar to use for exchanges. But the carboni, as more and more people called it, was also complementing the euro, the renminbi, and all the rest of the fiat currencies that had underwritten the new one.

  As significantly, money itself was now almost completely blockchained, thus recorded unit by unit in the consolidated central banks and through the digital world, such that any real fiat money now traveled within a panopticon that was in itself a global state of sorts, unspoken as yet, emerging from the fact of money itself. Another brick in the controlocracy, some said of this recorded money; but if the public kept ultimate control of this new global state, by way of people power exerted by the ever more frequent strikes and non-compliances, then the people too would be seeing where all the money was and where it was going, move by move, so that it couldn’t be shuffled into tax havens or otherwise hidden, without becoming inactivated by law. Digital distribution of the total blockchain record through YourLock and other sources meant there was a kind of emerging people’s bank, a direct democracy of money. So now the various old private cryptocurrencies were only being used for criminal activities, and traded at fractions of a penny. Lots of investors who still held these worthless coins were looking for a moment to get out with a minimal haircut. Others had simply cut their losses and sold for mills on the million. Holders of the various cryptocoins owned trillions of them, but trillions multiplied by zero still came to zero, so they were mainly done for; their owners might as well have been holding piles of copper pennies, except copper was more valuable.