The Golden Fleece

by Brian Stableford

  In Gaia’s cool world, however—in spite of the fact that it had now been in dire danger of becoming seriously uncool for the better part of a century—time, like fruits, did not ripen overnight.

  ~ * ~

  While Gerda labored patiently and unobtrusively in Bern, Kay’s career went from strength to strength. He inherited his father’s seat in the Strasbourg Parliament at thirty, became EC ambassador to Beijing at thirty-three, and at thirty-six was one of the key architects of the fifty-first Global Carbon Treaty—the first one, in the estimate of many cynical observers, that actually stood a slim chance of remaining unbroken for more than a decade. By the time he turned forty he was widely known as the Hemp King, not so much because he had made billions of euros investing in hemp biotechnology, planting, and processing, as by virtue of the fact that he had become such an enthusiastic propagandist for the existential benefits of neo-cannabinols.

  When he met up with Gerda in Brussels for their private fortieth birthday celebration—he had such an elevated public profile that he had now to have an “official” one as well, although she did not—Kay was careful to give Gerda due thanks for this particular aspect of his success.

  “You were absolutely right,” he told her. “Carbon sinks, polite handshakes; better highs, unconditional love.”

  “Not unconditional,” she corrected him, blandly. “There’s no such thing as unconditional love in politics.”

  “That’s true,” he admitted, “but the principle holds good. The utilitarian aspects of Gaia-worship will save the world, but the spiritual aspects help it to want to be saved. Good Gaians need to get their heads straight.”

  “That’s a trifle glib too,” she pointed out. “Neo-cannabinols reduce appetites, in more ways than one. They enable people to be happy in consuming less and doing less, but that’s not really the spiritual aspect of Gaia-worship, is it?”

  “You really have turned into a scientist, haven’t you?” he retorted. “Full marks for pedantry. Mind you, you were never the easiest person in the world to compliment. Perhaps I should content myself with simply saying thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  “Mind you,” he said, “we’re still running faster just to stay in the same place. The pace at which things are getting worse probably isn’t accelerating any more, but we’re going to need something new to help us turn the corner. The methane bomb hasn’t stopped ticking, and it has to be defused. If something were to trigger a massive clathrate-release, we’d really be sunk. You biotech wizards haven’t got any ingenious new algae in the pipeline, by any chance? Ideally, something that we can sow on the surface of the New Blue Ocean to help stabilize its temperature and soak up an extra measure of carbon dioxide. The Heavy Metal brigade are still pouring their inherited quadrillions into the search for a mechanical solution, of course, trying to find a mining technology that will allow them to strip the methane out and process it for use as household gas, but you know my take on the problem. Mother Gaia gave us seaweed to help keep the world in balance, so that’s probably the best way to get the balance back again. Edible fish stocks have recovered somewhat since the CC wiped out the dolphins and all those other greedy predators, but all the reports say that the plankton are almost at the end of their tether, and that we need to rebuild the marine ecosphere from the bottom up, if we can. I’ve heard some good things about kelp, but I’d appreciate an off-the-record opinion from someone who isn’t primarily concerned with protecting their EC funding.”

  “Algae aren’t the answer,” Gerda told him, bluntly. “I suppose Kelemen Kiss, the Kelp King, has a certain ring to it, but I wouldn’t put your own hard-earned billions into it if I were you. Not that I’m an expert on algae, mind. Modern classification has excluded them from the plant kingdom, so they’re not in Practical Botany’s bag any more.”

  “You could have made billions, too, if you’d been prepared to take risks,” Kay pointed out, his features briefly exhibiting what might have been a twinge of guilt. “You can’t blame me for getting rich on your advice. You should have had the balls to act on it yourself.”

  “The comment about giving people a better high wasn’t advice, Kay,” Gerda told him. “It was a flippant remark—just idle rhetoric. Only politicians can’t tell the difference.”

  He might have blushed at that had his complexion been paler, but any hint of emergent pink was lost in the bronze. “So what is the answer, sister mine?” he asked. “Biotechnically speaking, that is.”

  “There was a time,” she said, “when algae pioneered the conquest of the land—but they didn’t hold the lead in that particular race for long. They adapted well enough to fresh water, but the vast expanse of the primal continent required something cleverer. That’s where the plants came in, and never looked back, even though they might have taken a wrong turn or two on evolution’s highway. Maybe it’s time to start looking back, investigating unexplored avenues of potential—or unexplored plunges of potential.”

  Kay took a moment or two to catch her meaning. “Oh,” he said, when he had. “You mean reversion to the sea—like the poor old dolphins.”

  Gerda nodded. “Not a bad analogy, my love,” she conceded, graciously. “Reptiles and mammals both evolved on land, participants in a selective process driven by the imperatives of land life—but both orders produced species that successfully re-adapted to life in the sea, where many of them preyed very successfully on the fish that had stayed there all along, and others became world-champion plankton-filterers. You’re right—given that plants are so much cleverer than algae, why shouldn’t they produce species better adapted to sea life than the algae are?”

  Kay caught a glimpse of a patch of intellectual high ground and raced to occupy it. “Difficult for plants to work on the sea bed, though,” he said. “Chlorophyll only works close to the surface, so that’s where the green algae are, and the food-chains that depend on them; the sea-bed food-chain thrives on the dead bits that sink down.”

  “Trees thrive on land,” Gerda said, nodding in agreement, “because there’s considerable selective advantage in lifting foliage up, above the competition—but in the sea, living organisms can float. Even kelp, which often anchors itself to the bottom even in deep water, is basically a floater rather than a sturdy-boled thruster. Only corals build marine dendrites on a truly heroic scale.”

  “They used to,” said Kay, glumly. “Almost extinct now. You reckon that could change, though, with a little help from biotech? You think plants might be able to take over the niches that corals have left vacant? You think they might take the shallows back, at least? The forests drowned by rising sea-levels don’t seem to be coping very well on their own, though, and the vast increase in swampland has been disastrous for serious economic activity.”

  “That,” said Gerda, “is because it’s the wrong type of swampland. Angiosperm swamplands have always been precarious things, never capable of much in the way of versatility and aggressive expansion. Gymnosperms had a lot more practice at swamp life, especially in the days before the primal continent broke up and continental drift began to open up the deep trenches and push up the high mountains, so that much larger tracts of land dried out completely. Mother Gaia’s drainage system didn’t do the gymnosperms any favors, alas.”

  “Cycads!” Kay exclaimed, getting there at last. “I’ve heard good things about cycads, too. Primitive, but lots of untapped potential, according to the reports I’ve scanned. You think they might be able to take back the new shallows—and maybe, in time, the continental shelves—in a manner that will permit agricultural exploitation?”

  “Thus far,” Gerda said, as if she were merely following the meandering course of an improvised reverie, “the rise in sea levels has been an unmitigated nuisance—but it might yet provide opportunities as well as threats. With the bulk of the Antarctic ice-cap still to melt, it might be advisable to look harder at the potential opportunities. The ideal sea-bed plant, you know, isn’t one that simply sen
ds up kelp-like fronds to float on the surface....”

  “It’s one that extends foliage above the surface,” Kay continued, allowing his imagination to be gripped. “Trunk below, crown above. Algae can’t do that—not without massive genetic modification, at least—but plants might be more readily adaptable ... if only we can identify the right kinds of plant. Plants grow best on land where there’s a lot of leaf litter and other organic debris in the soil ... if marine plants were able to mop up methane from the sea-bed and dissolved carbon dioxide as well as extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they could be really useful. How easy will it be?”

  “Fiendishly difficult,” Gerda admitted. “Lots of problems, including the salt in the water, the destructive potential of tides and waves—but even some of those problems might be turned into opportunities, if the genomic strategists are ingenious enough.”

  “The reports I get,” Kay mused, “keep telling me that it will take a long time to get the sea-level back down to where it was in the twentieth century, even if we can stabilize the atmospheric temperature. The next best thing, in the short term, is to find a means of making the inundated land economically viable. If it were possible to develop off-shore orchards ... it wouldn’t be much, but it would be better than nothing. What are the chances of putting living accommodation in the crowns of your sea-dwelling trees, and connecting up the individual crowns with rope-bridges or something similar? We could really do with some new rope technologies, to help maintain the price of hemp.”

  “It would certainly be possible for people to live in the kind of swampland I envisage,” Gerda said, guardedly, “provided that they were prepared to adapt their lifestyles to the necessities of the situation. With population pressure the way it is, there’d be every incentive.”

  “How far away are we from initial viable product?” Kay wanted to know. “Are we talking years, decades, or centuries?”

  “Decades, probably,” Gerda said. “Faster, of course, if a few extra trillions of research money were diverted in that direction. It might pay off extravagantly to investors prepared to be a little bit patient.”

  “Is that advice, or just idle rhetoric?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s an off-the-record opinion from someone who isn’t as unworried about her funding as you might like to believe. It isn’t just money the neo-cycads need, though—they could really benefit from the services of a top class propagandist: a man with the balls to get involved on every level.”

  “For the sake of Mother Gaia,” Kay told her, “it’s worth taking the trouble.”

  To which Gerda said nothing at all, lest she give the game away.

  Kay took the opportunity to change the subject and bring in something else that was on his agenda. “Forty’s still a critical age,” he observed. “More so for you than me. Responsibility urges women not to bring children into a world teetering on the brink of total ecological meltdown, but the species can’t leave reproduction entirely to the irresponsible. Have you made arrangements to put some eggs in cold storage?” He was allowed to ask her questions of that personal nature, because they’d been close friends for such a long time.

  “No,” she said, increasing the steeliness of her gaze slightly. “Have you made some provision for your own genetic future?”

  This time, there was enough pink to defeat the bronze mask. “There’s not so much urgency in my case,” he said. “As it happens, though, I am planning to get married this year—June, to be exact.”

  “Congratulations,” Gerda said, including herself in the congratulations for showing no emotion at all. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

  ~ * ~

  Kay’s lucky lady was a nice Magyar girl named Magda, who was a full ten centimeters shorter than Gerda. She did have blonde hair and blue eyes, but they were the consequence of somatic engineering rather than her natural genetic heritage. Gerda honestly couldn’t see what Kay saw in her, given that, whatever it was, he had obviously never bothered to look for it in Gerda. She went to the wedding, though, and didn’t cry or forget to smile.

  Gerda also waited until Kay had plunged a substantial fraction of his own fortune into cycad futures, as well as persuading a substantial fraction of the Gaian Economic Priesthood to follow his lead, before she put herself forward as a candidate for the European Parliament in northern Sweden. Because Selma Rosenhane was still going strong as Kiruna’s leading lady, Gerda had to run as a second string on the regional ticket, and only just squeaked home under the labyrinthine rules of the PR system. Once she was in the chamber, however, she soon began to outshine her mother as an orator, if not as a deal-maker behind the scenes.

  If Selma was jealous of her daughter’s sudden emergence from academic obscurity on to her own stage, she kept the feeling well-hidden. She soon began telling her daughter what a great team they made, and advising her as to what offices they might both aspire to attain, with the benefit of their combined skills and Siberian backing. The Siberian backing did not materialize, though; as soon as the Russians discovered the full extent of Gerda’s radicalism, they decided that she was too far off message to be accommodated within their tactical schemes. Selma then began lecturing Gerda on the necessity to be pragmatic, and the terrible danger of taking up a position too far away from the parliamentary consensus.

  “The Parliamentary consensus is rotten at the core, Mommy,” Gerda told her patient advisor. “It’s due for collapse, and when it does come down it’ll shrivel like a burst balloon. The future lies in providing a nucleus for the new consensus that will take its place.”

  “You may think forty’s old,” Selma informed her, sternly, “But it’s not. Starry-eyed ideals are all very well, but politics is the art of the possible.”

  “Biotechnology,” Gerda told her, “is the art of the possible too—but strategic genomics is the art of the imaginable ... and the genius of the unimaginable.”

  “That kind of glibness might play well to the media,” Selma said, with a hostile edge to her voice, “but it doesn’t wash in the back rooms where the deals are made. If you’re wise, you’ll let me be your guide now that you’re in my world.”

  Gerda smiled at the time—and then ignored her mother completely. From her point of view, the decision of the Siberian Oligarchs to oppose her and isolate her within the opposition ranks was a relief and a blessing, because she didn’t want to be stuck with any of their baggage. She had no alternative but to begin her work as a propagandist within the ranks of the existing opposition, but she knew that she needed to build her own constituency in order to steer it in an entirely new direction.

  There were two sets of vested interests that sprawled across the political boundary separating the confirmed anti-Gaians from the increasingly disgruntled bad Gaians, and those were the groups that would have to be captured in their entirety if the old Gaian majority were to be conclusively punctured. One set, familiarly known as the “littorals,” consisted of the already dispossessed inhabitants of the inundated coastal regions and the about to be dispossessed inhabitants of the present coastal regions. The other comprised the persistent complex of old industrial interests that Kay called “the Heavy Metal brigade.” Gerda set out to capture them both, beginning with the factions that were already loosely associated with the so-called opposition.

  The particular neo-cycads in whose preliminary genomic design she had been involved, she told the two groups, over and over again in every possible venue and context, offered enormous potential, not merely for enhancing the economic potential of the new shallows, but also for developing the economic potential of the old shallows. They would do it not merely by producing new and useful biomass, but also by doing something that had never been done before, which would involve a new collaboration between organic and inorganic technologies, and forge a vital economic link between Big Tech and biotech, living fibers and heavy metal.

  On the one hand, Gerda argued, neo-cycads could provide vast tracts of new lebensraum of an admittedly challengin
g but extremely promising sort; on the other hand, they would generate bioelectricity on a massive scale to feed and replenish the Heavy Metal brigade’s ailing distribution networks. They would achieve the latter trick by taking an entirely new approach to bioelectricity generation: the conversion of tidal energy. The stout boles by which the cycads would attach their ambitious crowns to the sea-bed would not be mere supportive trunks, but would extend net-like and sail-like structures to capture a substantial fraction of the enormous energy imparted by the moon’s gravity to the ocean on a twice-daily basis. The realm of human habitation would become larger than before, and its energy supply would be secured.

  All of this, she assured her potential followers, was both possible and practicable. Previous attempts to develop bioelectrical facilities by generic transplantation had gone awry because natural bioelectricity was an animal monopoly, whereas commercial bioelectricity required plant-like supportive structures. That kind of ambitious hybridization had never succeeded using angiosperm stocks—but she and her former collaborators had devised a potential means of achieving the desired end in neo-cycads. Organic and inorganic technology had been estranged for far too long, and had grown accustomed to regarding one another as mere casual acquaintances, if not as enemies—but the time had come for them not merely to become friends, but to indulge in passionate intercourse. A new era was dawning.