by Adam Roberts
G S SEIDENSTICKER Well, the results are well known! The mouths of the sheaths lodged in the ice pack at magnetic north, and the tails broke free from one another, unbraided we would say, and thrashed through the atmosphere nine thousand kilometers south, buoyed up by the lines of terrestrial magnetism. About sixty of the sheaths retained their integrity, and the tails of these began spitting out ice water drawn from the polar cap. The sheaths were – are – in constant motion with the variations in the magnetic field and the pressure from above and along the lines of force of solar radiation, so the tails thrash about a bit, varying their height from few hundred meters to thirty thousand meters depending.
SFF This produced the Snow?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Almost certainly. This would explain how the snowstorm has maintained itself. There is only one way for a snowstorm to maintain itself, and that is by being fed constantly with new water as the old water freezes out and falls as snow. In the old days the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Norwegian Seas were the main suppliers of moisture for all those snowfalls from our childhoods, those snowfalls that used to be characteristic of northern European and North American winters. But the way the older weather systems worked meant that eventually the falling snow would chill the air, and without warm air to rise from the ocean surface carrying moisture with it the snowstorm eventually peters out.
SFF But the sheaths changed that.
G S SEIDENSTICKER Exactly. They deposited a constant supply of moisture into the atmosphere. It was drawn directly from the Arctic ice, warmed only very marginally by the passage through the sheath, so these very cold layers of moisture were being constantly laid out into warmer air – that’s how you get the precipitation needed for snowfall. The rubbing together of warm air and cold chafes water out as snow.
SFF One question I’ve heard very often is how can so much snow have been drawn from any one place?
G S SEIDENSTICKER The polar ice cap used to represent about 2% of the world’s water; maybe 20,000 cubic kilometers of water. Now, that would be enough to cover an area of 20,000 square kilometers in a kilometer of snow – Europe is about a thousand times as big as that, and North America is twenty-five million square kilometers, so you’re right, the ice cap alone doesn’t explain it. Clearly what happened is that the sheaths started draining the polar seas, and then shrinking the world’s ocean layers. There seems to have been some kind of malign chain reaction. By the time the ice pack was (shall we say) redistributed via the sheaths, so much snow had fallen that the whole northern hemisphere had altered. Ice had formed all across the northern seas, and snow had settled on top of it, the ice packs freezing out the water from saline. And it was this that the sheaths were sucking into the air, so the snow kept falling from the sky and the ocean got saltier and the levels got lower and lower.
SFF Isn’t it the case that snow occupies a greater volume than the same quantity of water?
G S SEIDENSTICKER That’s right; the snow packs down under its own weight of course, but even at ground level, miles beneath us now, it’s slightly less dense than water. At the higher levels it’s mostly air. So if the water from the oceans was redistributed around the globe as snow it would occupy a great deal more space – it could fill up the oceanic basins and then cover the land to a height of many kilometers. I guess that’s the most likely explanation for what has happened.
SFF The million-dollar question: how long will the sheaths hold out? How long will the snow keep falling?
G S SEIDENSTICKER We’re all amazed at the longevity of the sheaths – it’s quite exciting, actually, from a scientific point of view. But no reputable scientist believes that they’ll last forever. There’s already been one major change in the weather pattern – in the early days of the Snow, the sheaths were depositing cold water and ice directly into warm air, and so we saw those great billowing cloud fronts, cloud-ceilings, those spectacular nimbostratus formations. We don’t see those any more, of course: the snow still comes down, but from high cirrostratus, or sometimes from what seems to be open blue sky.
SFF Your prediction?
G S SEIDENSTICKER Another five years of snow at the most. That’s as much, I think, as the sheaths will bear. Perhaps much less than that – two years, one maybe.
SFF And after?
G S SEIDENSTICKER No more snow from the sky. After that, all bets are off: weather, climate and landscape are the classic instances of chaotic systems; it’s nigh on impossible to predict them. Big thaw? A thousand years of chill? Something else? Who can say?
SFF Professor Seidensticker, thank you very much.
G S SEIDENSTICKER You’re very much welcome.
Know Your Snow!
DENDRITES The pretty six-sided flakes – no two are alike! Each flake has six sides because of the way the molecules of water fit together to make ice crystals. Each water molecule is a bit like the letter V, with two oxygen atoms, one at each of the topmost prongs, and a hydrogen atom at the bottom. It just so happens that this shape makes up into ice crystals with six sides. Dendrites form when it’s not too cold!
NEEDLES When the air is a little bit colder, the water can grow into tiny needles – between about four and seven degrees below zero you’ll find these forms, but they’re so small it’s hard to see them with the naked eye!
HOLLOW PRISMS Colder still, down to minus nine, and the needles form as fatter tubes, layered one inside the other.
SECTOR PLATES Plates are what their name says! – six-sided flat plate-like crystals. Sectors are tiny budded versions of the same. Plates and sectors form when the air is colder than minus nine. If the air carries enough water in it (what is called water supersaturation relative to ice percentage) then the two forms combine to form fat flakes called sector plates.
Doc 08–999 [Clouds]
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One
Question: where did all this snow come from? I’ll try to answer that question. My name is Tira Bojani Sahai. I published an account of my time with the Snow years ago – it was issued in an unexpurgated version first of all, and then in an expurgated version when the government brought in its restrictions on printed text. It was never banned altogether, although I suppose that this current letter, this document you are now reading, will be banned. Times have changed. I cleared the writing of this text in advance, as the law required me to, but I don’t believe it will do me any good. I can see the censor now, sitting in his hut, wearing woollen gloves from which two fingers have been cut off so he – or she – can hold the red pen properly; see him reading this opening paragraph and giving his head a melancholy shake. And his pen cuts through the tissue of the writing like a knife leaving a red mark. Slicing through sentences that lie there like arteries. Separating word-cell from word-cell. These eight sentences I have just written, for instance; I’m sure they aren’t a promising start to a narrative, as far as the official line of the government of New America is concerned. I’m not even supposed to use that term, ‘New America’, although (and the phrases people would use here are: come on, get real, let’s be honest) most people call it that. I should say ‘the Free World Coalition’, of which NUSA is only one delegate. But in reality the Free World is NUSA, we all know. How could it be otherwise? NUSA companies are the ones that control the mining, and so control the food supply; and it is NUSA companies that promise us new developments in food supply to take over when the food-mines are all mined out. Crow cal
led it ‘New US’, sometimes pronouncing the acronym as ‘noose’, which I thought had a certain mordant applicability. Of course, jokes like that were rather lost on Crow. But fish are swimming, so I suppose we needn’t worry.
When I arrived I was billeted in the immigration compound. I was the first person to arrive at Liberty for several months, and the first to be pulled out of the snow for over a year, ‘something,’ the officer told me, ‘of a celebrity. People are more or less giving up on the under-snow now as far as survivors are concerned. Miners keep going down and keep finding corpses and corpses and nothing else.’
‘So where do the immigrants come from?’
‘Oh,’ the officer replied, his mouth a moue. ‘From the other cities, sometimes, the over-America cities, though to be honest people tend to move the other way – who’d want to come to over-London from the over-States? People want to go back, you know. They want to go back. Where else?’ He mused for a moment before adding, as if wanting to be scrupulously accurate, ‘Sometimes we might get a foreigner.’
The officer, whose name was [Blank], had been a miner until he had trapped his foot in a factory machine, under the snow, one time. ‘Buried for over a year and the thing was still primed to go off. Can you believe that? God knows where the power came from,’ he told me. We talked many times during my ten days in the compound. ‘Must have been some sort of battery, some sort of cell. Amazing it didn’t just run down during that year, but, you know. Especially in that cold. Whatever.’
‘What happened?’ I asked him.
‘I was standing on something to reach some boxes, wondering what was in them. This was in Liverpool-under-snow. So I jigged something, and the machine coughed into life and the next thing my foot was being eaten.’ That phrase seemed to me childlike in its horrible vigour and simplicity: my foot was being eaten. That past-continuous sense. I winced, and he grinned, wanting to force the point home. ‘Chewed it up,’ he added, ‘the bone all munched,’ and laughed.
After his accident, the authorities gave him a managerial post running the immigrant compound.
‘What were you looking for?’ I asked him. ‘What were you mining?’
‘Eh?’
‘When you had your accident. What was it you were looking for?’
‘Food,’ he said, laconically. ‘Where else you think the food comes from? There’re no animals and there’re no plants left alive up here, that’s for sure.’
The scientists were asking: where will the oxygen come from? The biomass had been entirely smothered, and not a green thing was left alive. ‘Where’s the oxygen going to come from?’ [Blank] asked, rhetorically, waving his right hand generally in the air over his shoulder to indicate oxygen. ‘That’s what they keep asking. Me, I’m not worried. The way I see it is, God’ll keep us alive. He’s kept us alive this far.’ In this manner I learned that [Blank] believed in the ‘divine wrath’ theory of the Snow’s origin. But then he went on, ‘Besides which, there’s some green stuff left south.’
‘In the south?’ I pressed. ‘You mean, the snow hasn’t covered the whole world?’
He shrugged. ‘So they say. They say some bits of the southern hemisphere are clear. How should I know? We’re not supposed to talk about it.’
‘Not supposed to talk about it? What you mean?’
‘They said,’ said [Blank], winking mysteriously. ‘The guys, you know. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. You know.’
‘I don’t,’ I said, genuinely baffled.
‘It don’t matter – do – not – matter overmuch. Some say that there are places in the south clear of snow. Or likely only snowed under to a few feet. Some say not so, that the whole world is sunk as deep in snow everywhere as it is here.’ He shrugged again. ‘Difficult to know who’s right.’
‘But it is really important to know,’ I said, slowly, the whole notion of clean land, open under the sky, blossoming gloriously in my head. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘The government says that the whole world is snowed. So it’s not a good idea to gainsay them. When is it ever a good idea to go against the government?’
But that night I fantasised about leaving the compound, leaving the Free World that I hadn’t even seen yet, and travelling across the globe to – I didn’t know where – Australia, maybe, to sit on an orange beach thrummed by the surf, looking out over a purple sea, drinking beer in the heat. To think, only, of heat!
It was the heat I missed most. I would go for weeks without ever feeling warm. Really, it’s almost incredible to recall, but it’s true. I’d be cold when I woke in the morning, and colder when I washed and dressed, and then chilly in my clothes during the day, and in the evening I would slip beneath cold cotton and leaden blankets and shiver myself to sleep. Matters weren’t too bad in the compound apart from this, as it happened, apart from the ubiquitous cold. I had space and privacy. The original stream of immigrants had died away to a trickle, and then to nothing. I was [Blank]’s only charge, the solitary occupant of the dorm, his only companion at mealtimes. ‘When they set the place up,’ he told me, ‘there was a hundred or more coming every month. Nobody for ages since.’
‘A hundred a month?’ I said. ‘What – pulled out of the snow?’
‘Rarely that,’ he said. ‘Rarely pulled from the snow. Usually they trekked here. One group came on the snow from Denmark, wearing these great snowshoes like winnowing-nets – walked the whole way, believe that? Another couple groups came by air, gliders, planes, whatever. Some by hovercraft. But that supply of population, it’s mostly dried up now. Mostly. On the other hand, there’s always you!’
‘There’s always me,’ I said.
‘I think there won’t be many, after you,’ he opined. ‘I consider that we’re to be thrown on our own resources now. The seven cities’ll have to look after themselves now.’
‘Unless there are people in the south?’ I said. ‘They may find their way up here. It’s still snowing,’ I observed. ‘Maybe they’ll be driven up here.’
He shrugged. ‘We’re not supposed to talk about the south,’ he said.
It still snowed sometimes, though without the intensity I remembered from my last time above ground. Instead of packing the sky with cold down, the flakes were sparse and often fell from a clear blue sky. Instead of the horizon-to-horizon cloud cover that I remembered from before, the clouds were now high and streaky, barely staining the blue. Or else there would be a parade of little cottony clouds, each one curled into a ball, six of them, seven, eight, nine. I could watch these clouds forever. [Blank] told me not to loiter outside. ‘The air may be cold,’ he said, ‘but the sun’ll burn you sharp.’ So I sat at the window in the dorm and simply stared as the pattern shifted, slowly, in the sky above me. It was a sort of procession. Victory parade, maybe.
A government official came and interviewed me. ‘A formality, really,’ he said. ‘I think I can say, pretty much without fear of contradiction, that a young woman such as yourself will find a sponsor in the Free World easily enough.’
I didn’t know what to say to this.
This new official, [Blank], asked me a series of questions. I wasn’t sure where the line of questioning was going, but I answered faithfully. ‘Do you suffer from any contagious diseases that you are aware of?’
‘No.’
‘Are you or have you ever been a member of a terrorist or governmentally-proscribed organisation?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have any criminal convictions?’
‘No.’
‘Would religious or other dietary considerations prevent you from eating food deemed fit for consumption by the government? Before you answer,’ he added, with an unconvincing smile, ‘I could prompt you. Food is not a thing to get high and mighty about, as I’m sure you realise. Until Novadic gets some home-grown veg into market, we have to eat pretty much what we get given, so it’s not worth your while to make a fuss about – I don’t know – being exclusively vegetarian, eating pork or whatever. You’re not Jew
ish are you?’
‘No,’ I said, surprised at the question. ‘Would that matter?’
He widened his eyes. ‘That’s not one of the questions. I mean, are you Jewish isn’t one of the immigration questions.’ He was speaking hurriedly. ‘There’s nothing to stop a Jew from immigrating to the Free World, of course not. The law is clear. I was only saying … don’t misunderstand me. I’m asking about diet. Any Jew could apply to immigrate, just as anybody else. I’m asking about diet.’
‘I’ll eat anything.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Should you have a list?’ I asked. ‘Or something? Should you be ticking these things off a list?’
‘Paper’s too precious for that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘I’ll remember it, don’t worry.’ He poked his forehead with his thumb, in dumbshow emphasis of the point. ‘There’s a couple of other things,’ he said, ‘but we can pretty much skip them. I think we should be able to move you out of the compound soon – tonight if you like.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Now, I’m assuming you don’t have any money.’
‘I don’t.’
‘That’s OK. We’d have to confiscate it if you did anyway. The government’s got to keep control of the money supply, or inflation would get going. So the supply’s got to be limited and official.’
‘What’s the currency here?’ I asked.
He looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘Dollars,’ he said.
‘Real dollars?’
‘What other kind?’ he said, with a geeky sort of snorting laugh. ‘We try to keep things normal in the Free World. The government has dug up a proper balance of currency, and if you – say – had a million dollars in your underwear, like, stuffed in your bra or something,’ and he snickered snortingly again, ‘then I’m afraid I’d have to confiscate it. But you don’t?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘That’s OK. I have no doubt you’ll find a sponsor. In fact, given that you’re the first immigrant in a while and a woman to boot, an, if you’ll excuse it, attractive woman, you know, you know what I mean, there’s been a certain amount of interest. Can I make a suggestion?’
