Veil

by Eliot Peper

  “So…” Zia said in a low voice. “What bit did you leave out?”

  “There!” he pressed a finger to the glass and the endlessly curious little boy shone through her father’s aging face.

  Zia looked where he was pointing. The churning prairie of cloud ended in a surprisingly even edge that stretched for hundreds of kilometers in either direction. Beyond the creamy fringe to the northwest, ocean stretched to the arcing horizon in a heterogenous gray and blue patchwork. To the northeast sat a peninsula, afternoon sunlight casting shadows that highlighted its topography, the coastline pocked by inlets.

  “Okay,” said Santiago. “This is Luzon. See that city way over there on the east side of that huge bay? That’s Manila.” His voice turned husky. “And there, straight ahead, that mountain? That’s Mount Pinatubo.”

  Ringed by jagged peaks, an aquamarine lake filled the gaping crater of a massive stratovolcano. Pinatubo dominated the landscape around it, its lush slopes overlooking the surrounding farmland like a fickle geological deity. From this high up, it appeared simultaneously epic and domesticated, as if Zia could summon a mountain from the crust of the Earth with the ease of a game designer assembling a virgin world from scraps of code.

  “In 1991, Pinatubo erupted,” said her dad in an awestruck tone. “Lava shot thirty-five kilometers into the sky, forming a cloud four hundred kilometers across. Debris flows decimated the surrounding countryside. The high-pressure gas building up in the magma chamber shot billions of tons of molten rock straight up the center of the expanding tower of ash and ejecta. Some of that gas was sulfur dioxide, which oxidized to produce sulfate ions that combined with water vapor to create teeny tiny droplets of sulfuric acid that spread out across the planet’s stratosphere in a thin mist with a combined surface area approximating that of every grain of sand in the Sahara Desert.” He looked up from Pinatubo to the glowing turmeric coal of the setting sun. “When sunlight reached Earth, some of it reflected off that fine aerosol mist, backscattering off into space instead of reaching the surface of the planet. As a result, global temperature dropped by half a degree Celsius for the subsequent two years, despite the fact that humanity was burning fossil fuel and releasing greenhouse gas like a hormone-addled teenager.” He sketched a circle with his hands. “Until those droplets finally fell back to Earth, Pinatubo’s particulate haze was a veil that cooled the planet, protecting us from ourselves.”

  Humanity was burning fossil fuel and releasing greenhouse gas like a hormone-addled teenager. Hairs raised on the back of Zia’s neck. That was a line from her mother’s unfinished manuscript, the rough-cut masterpiece that Galang had helped Zia compile and publish after her death—against Santiago’s wishes. It was part of the introduction, concluding a section detailing the ecosystem collapse, environmental degradation, and mass extinction brought on by anthropogenic climate change. The sentence had stuck with Zia because, as an only child, she couldn’t help but wonder if it alluded to her own teenage transgressions.

  Zia jumped from reverie to speculation. There’s something I need to show you. Her father was not one for idle chitchat. He hadn’t brought her up here on a lark. Leaning forward, she caught a last glimpse of Pinatubo as it passed beneath the long wing of this strange aircraft. Her blood ran cold. She could feel rough bark under her hands, hear insects chattering, see the fog-shrouded volcano rising up behind the villas through a gap in the foliage. What had he just said? Protecting us from ourselves.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re planning to blow up the volcano on your island base in order to slow down global warming,” she said.

  “What?” Santiago’s genuine confusion was the sweetest salve. He shook his head. “Oh, no, no, no. Nothing like that. I mean, sulfur dioxide isn’t even that good of an aerosol. Plus, it accelerates ozone depletion and causes acid rain. And that’s not even mentioning all the other toxic gases and lava and ejecta and all the rest that wreak havoc when volcanoes erupt. No. That would be like treating a broken wrist by amputating the arm.”

  “Okay, gross,” she said. Her relief quickly curdled into frustration. She had been torn from her life to joyride twenty-five kilometers above the ground. She should be back in Chhattisgarh with Himmat, doing things that actually mattered. “So, why are we here?”

  “The dangers of climate change require serious immediate action but eliminating the industrial economy’s greenhouse gas emissions is extremely hard,” he said, sobering. “The UN failed to accomplish much of anything. National governments failed to accomplish much of anything. The private sector failed to accomplish much of anything. The scientific community failed to accomplish much of anything. Environmental activists failed to accomplish much of anything. Those failures mean business-as-usual continues and business-as-usual means condemning future generations to climate hell.”

  Zia frowned, remembering Selai’s graphs. “But global temperature has stabilized. As a matter of fact, it’s even dropped slightly over the past few years. Selai tells me it’s the big mystery in climatology right now. Reality is defying all the models.”

  Santiago’s shit-eating grin was terrifying. He patted the armrest affectionately.

  “Mystery solved,” he said. “I call it: Project Svalinn.”

  +

  15

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  Turbulence thrummed as they descended into the capricious troposphere with its dramatic and changeable weather. Clouds whipped past, turning the windows into blank panes displaying nothing but the fact that they were in a machine flown by a machine, two humans huddled in the center of a matryoshka of generations of technology lacquered onto itself. Zia tried to ignore the butterflies in her stomach, tried not to wonder whether her vertigo stemmed from the bumps and jolts of the drone or her father’s words.

  “This fleet doesn’t just boost Interstice bandwidth and hoover data,” he said with the nervous enthusiasm of a child giving a tour of a newly constructed bedroom fort. “They spray a mist of purpose-engineered inert aerosols into the stratosphere, cloaking the planet in an envelope that reflects just enough sunlight to offset global warming. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t do anything to solve ocean acidification from the buildup of carbon dioxide, for example. But the most disastrous effects of climate change stem from the direct impacts of rising temperature. This program buys us time by adjusting the thermostat.” Santiago’s monologue accelerated into a breathless manifesto. “It gives us room to adapt, to transition the energy system away from carbon. It heads off the positive feedback loop of melting permafrost that would otherwise accelerate warming. It saves countless species from the brink of extinction. It’s a hedge against our inborn shortsightedness. It’s shelter from a storm of our own creation. And it works.”

  Her father’s eyes shone in the reflected light of the instrument panel. This was just the kind of silver bullet he would latch onto: a straightforward technical fix to an otherwise intractable problem. But Zia had lived with him long enough to see how such technical fixes were rarely straightforward and often produced new generations of intractable problems. Scientific progress was an escalating game of cat and mouse.

  “Hold on,” said Zia. “Global temperatures started stabilizing years ago.”

  Santiago rubbed his hands together. “Yep,” he said. “I started working on the problem a decade ago and the first drones started flying three years later. Since they went up, we haven’t set a temperature record, Arctic sea ice has advanced, some glaciers have started growing again, sea levels are holding, aggregate wildfire coverage is decreasing, and that’s not even counting reductions in human suffering.”

  If that was true… “How do I not know about this?”

  “Nobody knows about this,” said Santiago. “Actually, to be precise, one other person besides the two of us knows about this: Ben Munroe, the chief scientist on the project. He lives over at the Atlantic base and manages all the modeling. But nobody else knows. I keep the entire engineering side of the project carefully sequestered in need-to-kno
w teams distributed throughout Interstice and outside contractors. Ben does the same thing on the climatology side. The entire program is run remotely through a backdoor system I hacked personally and that only I can access, which annoys Ben sometimes.” He chuckled. “Honestly, it’s not that different from high-profile product development.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Zia. “You’re saying nobody suspects what you’re up to?”

  He shrugged. “We’re Interstice,” he said. “We have a good reason to be in the stratosphere.”

  “But—” Zia’s train of thought caught up with her. Selai’s research. The annotated papers. The broken models. The fleet is loaded with every exotic sensor we can get our hands on, and we give the data to scientific and educational groups pro bono. “You’re— You’re fleecing the data.” Zia could hardly believe it, could hardly bring herself to say it. That was how she knew it must be true. “You’re scrubbing any evidence of the—what do you call them? Aerosols?—from the feed you sell to governments and research groups.” No scientist I’ve interviewed has been able to fully explain it, Galang had said. Lots of handwaving. “That’s why the climatologists can’t figure out what’s going on, why their models don’t work, why SaudExxon PR is having an extended field day. They’re all operating on a false premise. You’re lying to them.”

  Santiago’s face hardened. “You’ve read your mother’s books. The world knew about the risks of unmitigated global warming for decades, and did jack shit about it.”

  Her fingers dug into the armrests. “So you hijacked the climate.”

  He stared at the cloud-blank window. “I’m saving them from themselves.”

  Something unspooled inside Zia. Years of strict tennis training. Being shipped off to boarding school against her will. The unrelenting questions. The quiet and not-so-quiet judgements. The living-under-my-roof rules. Rationing of allowances. Condescension toward friends and lovers who didn’t meet an unwritten standard. This wasn’t an aberration. This was her father mercilessly pursuing his definition of what was best for the world. With such a starkly precise vision for what constituted the right thing, nothing would do except absolute control.

  Scraps of cloud whipped past the window and then the drone dropped out of the bank and the view opened up like a time-lapse flower. There was the island poking up above the waves like the tip of a spear, its shaft obscured by the briny depths. Another long-winged drone was taxiing for takeoff, preparing to replace their own shuddering craft in a carefully choreographed high-altitude dance that stretched the sheerest of veils around this tumbling rock that life called home in an effort to make that home a little more hospitable for certain residents who couldn’t be bothered to clean up after themselves. The last crimson slice of sun dipped below the horizon, smearing bloody fingers across the arching dome of sky.

  “What are the side effects?” Zia asked softly.

  “It makes sunsets redder, for one,” said Santiago. “More light gets diffused coming through the atmosphere.”

  “And for two? And three? And four?” If there was one thing Zia had learned from her mother, it was that the Earth system was hellishly complicated. No model came close to capturing its entirety. One small change could cascade into ten thousand unforeseen consequences.

  Santiago shifted in his chair. “Uptick in biomass accumulation,” he said. “Many plants seem to prefer diffuse light so they tend to grow a little faster.”

  She let silence expand to fill every nook and cranny of the cabin, then asked, “What is it you’re trying so hard not to tell me?”

  Santiago stilled, retracting into himself like a pill bug.

  The drone banked, lining up for landing.

  Zia held her breath.

  “When Tambora erupted in 1815, it created a stratospheric veil twice as thick as Pinatubo’s, cooling the entire planet for years,” he said. “As a result, the Indian subcontinent didn’t warm up enough to suck in moist air from the surrounding ocean, and the monsoon failed.”

  Ice flowed down Zia’s spine and seeped out to her extremities. The bitter taste of soil on every breath. The petty viciousness of the BSF officer. The brittle don’t-fuck-with-me eyes of the fourteen-year-old girl who was selling herself for ration chits. The measured indifference of the mid-level government official who was diverting water intended for agricultural irrigation to an industrial facility rich enough to pay him off. The skyrocketing rates of alcohol and drug addiction.

  A nation, crippled.

  “Are you telling me that your pet project caused the drought in Chhattisgarh?” she asked.

  Her father forced himself to meet her eye.

  “I’m telling you it’s not impossible,” he said.

  Touchdown.

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  16

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  “Stop,” said Zia, splaying her hands out on the polished cement countertop in the open-plan kitchen of her father’s villa as if the smooth, cool surface might help douse the rage blazing in her chest.

  “Oh, grow up,” said Santiago, running his finger around the rim of his tumbler of sparkling water. She’d never seen him drink a drop of alcohol lest the liquor dull the keen edge of his sober intellect even for a moment.

  Implications reproduced like hungry bacteria in the rich substrate of Zia’s mind.

  “We’re talking about the lives and livelihoods of more than one and a half billion people,” she said. “It’s not just India, it’s the whole subcontinent—plus Sri Lanka. It’s been three years since the last real monsoon. That’s three years of crop failures, malnutrition, and economic stagnation. The poorest people are the worst hit, as always. And they’re just some footnote in your scheme, not even worth mentioning. It’s environmental colonialism.”

  “Look,” he said, taking a sip in a failed effort to hide a wince. “I know you’re close to—”

  “What about the hurricanes hitting the Caribbean and US?” interrupted Zia. “Or the Ukrainian cold snap? How do you know your precious little drones aren’t causing those?”

  “The models—”

  “You’re the one who always told me that even the best models break when they hit the real world,” she snapped. “That the problems with academics is that they need to get out of the lab and into the field. This is spray and pray—in dust we trust.”

  Santiago stood abruptly and his stool crashed to the floor. “What would the world look like without Project Svalinn? You really think unabated global warming would have been better? Yes, people in India are suffering. No, I can’t prove beyond a doubt that I haven’t contributed in some indirect way to hurricanes or cold snaps, although I can make some very educated guesses. But how many more would have died, how many more would be suffering, if I hadn’t intervened? You want to see everyone totally fucked? You want to go post-apocalyptic? Storm surges. Resource wars. Nationwide wildfires. Look at Central America and sub-Saharan Africa, five years of consistent regional growth and increased life expectancy. What would those places look like if they hadn’t had a respite from global warming? Imagine a world without my program and tell me, tell me, that you’d do a single thing differently.” He paused, cheeks flushed, breath coming in sharp pants. “Humans started engineering the climate the minute we began burning fossil fuels in earnest, we just didn’t realize it yet. But ignorance is no excuse. The only difference now is that I’m doing it intentionally. I thought you’d be thrilled. I’m trying to dodge the blows that you try to soften.”

  “Oh, so you want to argue net benefit, do you?” Zia stood to face him across the counter. The conversation was falling into the practiced, belligerent rhythm of a war drum. She knew he knew she could feel it too. Worn ruts diverging. No Miranda to coax them back onto the same page. “India suffers so that Africa thrives, but overall more people are better off? What gives you the right to make those calls?” She stabbed a finger into his chest. “Who are you, Captain Planet cum Stalin? Nobody else gets a say? Nobody even gets to know it’s happening? What a staggering load of go
dforsaken bullshit.”

  “And who exactly would you trust with this? The UN?”

  “Pull the plug,” she said, shaking her head. “Call a halt. Shut it down.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Stop, or I’ll blow the whistle,” she said. “And boy, will I blow it loud.”

  And then she’d take the opportunity to sever every remaining tie she possibly could. Order the lawyers to disband the trust. Change her name. Get a restraining order. Whatever it took.

  “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t stop it now. At least, not right away.”

  “I thought you were the fucking circus master.”

  In one smooth motion Santiago swept up his glass and hurled it across the room like a pitcher throwing a fastball. The glass smashed against the French doors to the front deck, shards of tumbler scattering, cracks spiderwebbing out across the pane, drops of flying water fragmenting light into rainbows that lived and died in the space of a blink.