The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Then one morning she came in and there were two hospice nurses in there, women attending to him— but no; cleaning up the scene.

  One looked up and saw her and said, “I’m sorry, he’s gone.”

  “No!” Mary said.

  That one nodded at her, the other shook her head.

  The one who had spoken said, “They often slip away when no one’s around. Seems like some of them want it to be that way. A kind of privacy, you know.”

  She was not upset, as far as Mary could see. Not even alarmed. This was her job. She helped people at this point of life, helped them get to the end with a minimum of pain and distress. Now this one was gone.

  Mary nodded absently, regarding Frank’s still face. He looked to her like he had when he was sleeping. She had been coming by for two months. Now he was very still. She took in a big breath, felt herself breathing. Felt her heart beating. She was confused; she had thought there would be a struggle, a final clutch at life. She had thought it always went that way. As if she knew anything about it. It had been a long time since she had attended a death; and there hadn’t been that many.

  “We can take care of him now.”

  Mary nodded. “Give me a moment with him,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  They left. Mary arranged his stiff curled hands on his chest. They were cold; his chest was still warm. She leaned over and kissed him very lightly on the forehead. Then she picked up her pad, put it in her bag with the rest of her things, and left him. She walked out of there and wandered over to Bahnhofstrasse, and turned toward the lake.

  She walked the handsome prosperous streets of Zurich both sightlessly and seeing things she hadn’t noticed in years. Mind skittering, feelings blank. The chipped heavy stone blocks that formed the buildings flanking Bahnhofstrasse. They were amazingly regular geometrical objects, not perfect, lightly pocked and nobbled to give the faces of the buildings texture, but regular in that too, and set so perfectly that it was hard to imagine the process that would manage to accomplish it. In the end it had been the human eye, the human mind. Swiss precision. Buildings from a time when stone masons still did most of this kind of construction by hand. Artists of a very meticulous aesthetic, maybe even fanatics. Monomaniacs of cubical form. Stolid. Permanent. Many of these buildings had been here since 1400. Their stonework repaired probably in the nineteenth or twentieth century, but maybe not. Maybe set in stone for good.

  Unlike a human life. A mayfly thing, a wisp of smoke. Here then gone. Frank May was gone. Well, now she would never wake up one night to find herself being murdered by him. She shook off that thought, shocked by it. The one who lives longest wins. No. No. Never again his spiky rebukes. The pleasure in an Alpine day, the rare moment of peace, the dark brooding anger, the ceaseless, useless remorse. He was released from that at last. Thirty years carrying that burden, manifesting whenever he let down his guard.

  A PTSD sufferer. If that was really the way to think of it. Weren’t they all post-traumatic in the end? So that it was just a way of pathologizing being human? Martin had died on her just like Frank— hospice bed, painkillers, suffering through the final breakdown of his body’s functions, the end of his life, at age twenty-eight, when they had only been married five years; wasn’t that trauma? It most definitely was! She could see all that as if it were yesterday, and of course sitting with Frank had brought it all back in ways she hadn’t felt for years. So wasn’t she post-traumatic too?

  Yes. But PTSD meant someone whose trauma had been— brutal? But death was so often brutal. Violent? That too. Shocking, bloody, premature, evil? Something cruel and unusual, so that the person who survived it couldn’t get it out of their minds, kept having flashbacks to the point of reliving the experience, as in some nightmare of eternal recurrence? Yes.

  Maybe it was a matter of degree. Everyone was post-traumatic, it was universal, it was being human, you couldn’t escape it. Some people had it worse, that was all it came down to. They were haunted by it, stricken, disabled. Sometimes it was bad enough they killed themselves to get free of it. Not uncommon at all.

  What a thing. Death and memory. Martin had been young, he had struggled against death with a kind of furious resistance, with a sense of injustice. Right to the end he was never reconciled to it. Long after he had lost consciousness for the last time his body had fought on, the lizard brain in the cerebellum rallying every last cellular spasm to the cause. Those last hours of labored gasping breaths, what used to be called the death rattle, would never leave her. It had gone on too long. She seldom thought of that, she had learned to forget most of the time. This was the key, maybe, that ability to forget; but she dreamed of it sometimes, woke gasping and then remembered, as of course she always would. One didn’t forget but rather repressed. Some kind of boxing up or compartmentalization; what that meant inside the brain and the mind she had no idea. Somehow they managed not to think of certain things. Maybe that was what PTSD was— the inability to do the work of forgetting, or of not recalling.

  Not working at all for her now, she had to admit. The trigger in her brain had been pulled, and she was shot. Poor Martin. She wandered in an abreaction, through this handsome stone city that she quite loved. Remembering Martin. It wasn’t so hard when she let herself. In fact it was easy. How she had loved him. Ah Zuri Zuri my town, my town. Some old poem from her German class. This was her town. Martin and she had lived in London, in Dublin, in Paris, in Berlin. Never in Zurich or anywhere in Switzerland. She loved it for that. Really she was very fond of this town. She even loved it. The way they could make her laugh with their Swissness. Their stoicism, their insistence on order suffused by intense feelings of enthusiasm and melancholy. That peculiar unnameable combination that was a national affect, a national style. It suited her. She was a little Swiss herself, maybe. Now aching with old pain, heartsick at the loss of someone gone now forty-four years.

  She wandered the narrow medieval streets around Peterskirche and the Zeughauskeller. There was the candy shop where Frank had bought them candied oranges, proud of them, how good they were, how much an example of Swiss art at its finest.

  Down to the lake. She headed toward the park with the tiny marina below it, intent on visiting the statue of Ganymede and the eagle. Ganymede perhaps asking Zeus for a ride to Olympus. It wouldn’t be good when he got there, but he didn’t know that. The gods were godlike, humans never prospered among them. But Ganymede wanted to find out. That moment when you asked life to come through for you.

  It was so hard to imagine that a mind could be gone. All those thoughts that you never tell anyone, all those dreams, all that entire pocket universe: gone. A character unlike any other character, a consciousness. It didn’t seem possible. She saw why people might believe in souls. Souls popping in and out of beings, in and out, in and out. Well, why not. Anything might be true. All things remain in God. Some saint’s line, then Yeats, then Van Morrison, the way she knew it best. All things remain in God. Even if there was no God. All things remain in something or other. Some kind of eternity outside time.

  As she stood there above the little marina she heard a roar, saw smoke across the lake to the left. Ah yes: it was Sechseläuten, the third Monday of April. She had completely forgotten. Sachsilüüte, to put it in Schwyzerdüütsch. The guilds had marched in their parade earlier, and now a tall tower erected in the Sechseläutenplatz had been set on fire at its bottom. Stuck on top of the tower would be a cloth figure of the Böögg, the Swiss German bogeyman, his head stuffed with fireworks that would explode when the fire reached them. The time it took for this to happen would predict whether they would have a sunny summer or a rainy one; the shorter it took, the nicer the weather would be.

  Mary hurried across the Quaibrücke to Bürkliplatz, past the squeak and squeal of the trams over their tracks. If the Böögg went fast she wouldn’t get there in time. Had to hope for a bad summer if she wanted to see the fireworks burst out of its head.

  She got there sooner than she
thought it would take. The platz was jammed with people, as always. The cleared circle they kept around the burning pyre was smaller than any other people would have kept it; the Swiss were strangely casual about fireworks. Their independence day in August was like a war zone. Some kind of wanton pleasure in fireworks. In this case they were at least going to go off well overhead, as opposed to August 1 when they were shot off by the crowd into the crowd.

  The tower in the center of Sechseläutenplatz was about twenty meters high, a flammable stacking of wood and paper. On top, the humanoid big-headed figure of the Böögg, ready to ignite. The crowd was thick to the point of impenetrability, Mary was as close as she was going to get.

  Then the Böögg went off. A fairly modest explosion of colored sparks bursting from out of the head of winter’s monster. Some booms, then fireworks pale in the late afternoon light, then a lot of white smoke. Giant cheer from the crowd.

  The smoke drifted off to the east. She walked over to the lakeshore, just a few blocks from her schwimmbad. It was near sunset. She could see three ridges to the south; first the low green rim of the lake, then the higher, darker green ridge between them and Zug; then in the distance, far to the south, higher than the world, the big triangular snow-splashed peaks of the Alps proper, now yellow in the late light. Alpenglow. This moment. Zurich.

  97

  There are about sixty billion birds alive on Earth. They’ve been quicker than anyone to inhabit the rewilded land and thrive. Recall they are all descended from theropods. They are dinosaurs, still alive among us. Sixty billion is a good number, a healthy number.

  The great north tundra did not melt enough to stop the return of the caribou herds to their annual migrations. Animals moved out from the refuge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and repopulated the top of the world. In Siberia they’re establishing a Pleistocene Park, and re-introducing a resuscitated version of the woolly mammoth; this has been a problematic project, but meanwhile the reindeer have been coming back there, along with all the rest of the Siberian creatures, musk oxen, elk, bears, wolves, even Siberian tigers.

  In the boreal forests to the south of the tundra and taiga, wolves and grizzlies have prowled outward from the Canadian Rockies. This is the biggest forest on Earth, wrapping the world around the sixtieth latitude north, and all of it is now being returned to health.

  It’s the same right down to the equator, and then past the equator, south to the southern ends of the world. Certain inhospitable areas everywhere had been almost empty of humans all along; now these have been connected up by habitat corridors, and the animals living on these emptier lands are protected and nourished as needed. Often this means just leaving them alone. Many are now tagged, and more all the time. There is coming into being a kind of Internet of Animals, whatever that means. Better perhaps to say they are citizens now, and have citizens’ rights, and therefore a census is being taken. Watersheds upstream from cities are adopted by urban dwellers who observe their fellow citizens from afar, along with making occasional visits in person. Wild animals’ lives and deaths are being noted by people. They mean something, they are part of a meaning. Not since the Paleolithic have animals meant so much to humans, been regarded so closely and fondly by we their cousins. The land that supports these animals also supports our farms and cities as well, in a big network of networks.

  What’s good is what’s good for the land.

  There are fewer humans than before. The demographic peak is in the past, we are a little fewer than we were before, and on a trajectory for that to continue. People speak now of an optimum number of humans; some say two billion, others four; no one really knows. It will be an experiment. All of us in balance, we the people, meaning we the living beings, in a single ecosystem which is the planet. Fewer people, more wild animals. Right now that feels like coming back from a time of illness. Like healing, like getting healthy. The structure of feeling in our time. Population dynamics in play, as always. Maybe that makes us all living together in this biosphere some kind of supra-organism, who can say.

  In a high meadow, wild bighorn sheep. Their lambs gambol. When you see that gamboling with your own eyes, you’ll know something you didn’t know before. What will you know? Hard to say, but something like this: whether life means anything or not, joy is real. Life lives, life is living.

  98

  Notes for Mary’s last meeting, taken for Badim again. All in attendance except Estevan, who is in Chile. Also Tatiana of course. Someone took away her chair.

  All stand as Mary comes in late. Mary shakes head. People, please. Sit. Let’s get down to business, there’s things to do.

  We laugh at her. First pleasure, then business. Retirement cake on coffee table, etc. A little party, quick and subdued, as Mary obviously doesn’t like it. She adjusts to the idea as people toast her with coffee. Changing of the guard, she says. The winter general, handing things over for the spring charge. Etc. Toasts. Awkward.

  Then everyone to their usual places around the table. Mary convenes meeting, looking relieved.

  M: All right, thanks for that. Yes, I’m retiring. Going emerita. Very happy Badim has agreed to take over. The secretary general and all other relevant parties have agreed to this and have named him acting minister. I’ll be trying to see to it that they make it a permanent appointment. That would be good for all.

  Badim thanks her. Looks at her as he always does: mongoose regarding cobra. She likes that he regards her as a problem to solve. Still.

  M: Want to stay involved but without messing things up. Ambassador for the ministry, agent at large, that kind of thing. Available for whatever.

  Janus Athena: Staying on as minister?

  People laugh. J-A smiles briefly at Badim to indicate joking, but several are nodding. Badim among them. He says, At least go to the San Francisco meeting for us. I think you need to do that one.

  M: I’m done. It’s your turn now. Everyone has to do what they can in their time. Then it’s time to pass it along. All of you will get to this point sooner or later. Hanging on too long never good. I may have done that already. But you’re all young. Me, I’m done. I’m around if you need me. I’ll stay in Zurich. Professor at the ETH and so on.

  Badim: You’ll always be welcome. In fact, we need you.

  Mary smiles. I doubt that. But it’s all right. It’s time.

  99

  We’re here today to discuss whether any of the so-called totalizing solutions to our current problems will serve to do the job.

  No.

  I suppose I have to ask, do you mean no to the question or no to the topic.

  No to the question. There is no single solution adequate to the task.

  And so what can we expect to see?

  Failure.

  But assuming success, just for discussion’s sake, what shape might that take?

  The shape of failure.

  Expand on that please? A success made of failures?

  Yes. A cobbling-together from less-than-satisfactory parts. A slurry, a bricolage. An unholy mess.

  Will this in itself create problems?

  Of course.

  Such as?

  Such as the way like-minded people working to solve the same problem will engage in continuous civil war with each other over methods, thus destroying their chances of success.

  Why does that happen, do you think?

  The narcissism of small differences.

  That’s an odd name.

  It’s Freud’s name. Means more regard for yourself than for your allies or the problems you both face.

  Well, but sometimes the differences aren’t so small, right?

  The front is broad.

  But don’t you think there’s a real difference in for instance how people regard the market?

  There’s no such thing as the market.

  Really! I’m surprised to hear you say this, what can you mean?

  There’s no more of a real market behind what we now call the market than there
is gold behind what we call money. Old words obscure new situations.

  You think this happens often?

  Yes.

  Give us another example.

  Revolutions don’t involve guillotines anymore. Alas.

  You think revolutions are less visible now?

  Exactly. Invisible revolutions, technical revolutions, legal revolutions. Quite possibly one could claim the benefits of a revolution without having to go through one.

  But doesn’t already-existing power resist revolutionary changes?

  Of course, but they fail! Because who holds power? No one knows anymore. Political power is itself one of those fossil words, behind which lies an unknown.

  I would have thought oligarchies were pretty known.

  Oligarchic power is the usual answer given, but if it exists at all, it’s so concentrated that it’s weak.

  How so? I must say you amaze me.

  Brittle. Fragile. Susceptible to decapitation. By which I mean not the guillotine type of decapitation, but the systemic kind, the removal from power of a small elite. Their situation is very unstable and tenuous. It’s highly possible to shift capital away from them, either legally or extra-judicially.

  Just capital?

  Everything relies on capital! Please don’t be stupid. Who has capital, how it gets distributed, that’s always our question.

  And how does it get distributed?

  People decide how it gets distributed by way of laws. So change could happen by changing the laws, as I’ve been saying all along. Or you could just shift some account numbers, as happened in Switzerland.

  Ah yes. The banks. That reminds me of a fine story. Do you remember what the bank robber Willie Sutton said when a reporter asked him why he did what he did?

  I do! Good of you to ask. And good of that reporter too.

  The reporter said, Why do you rob banks?

  And Sutton replied, Because that’s where the money is.