Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  “Wade, it’s Frank Vanderwal, and I’m looking at that e-mail you sent with the video of the prototype pumping system.”

  “Oh, yeah, isn’t that neat? I helo’ed out there day before yesterday.”

  “Yeah, it’s neat,” Frank said. “But tell me, does anyone down there have any idea how frozen sea water is going to behave on the polar cap?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s kind of a mess. You know, when water freezes, the ice is fresh and the salt gets extruded, so there are layers of salt above and below and inside the new ice, so it’s kind of slushy or semi-frozen. So, the spill from the pumps really spreads flat over the surface of the polar cap, which is good, because then it doesn’t pile up in big domes. Then the salt kind of clumps and rises together, and gets pushed onto the surface, so what you end up with is a mostly solid freshwater ice layer with a crust of salt on top of it, like a little devil’s golf course–type feature. Then the wind will blow that salt down the polar cap and disperse it as a dust. So, back into the ocean again! Pretty neat, eh?”

  “Interesting,” Frank said.

  “Yeah. If we build enough of these pumping systems, it really will be kind of a feat. I mean, the west Antarctic ice sheet is definitely going to fall into the ocean. No one can stop that now. But we might be able to pump the water back onto the east Antarctic ice sheet.”

  “So, what about the desert basins in the north thirties?” Frank said. “A lot of those are being turned into salt lakes. It’ll be like a bunch of giant Salton Seas.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “I don’t know; what do you think about that?”

  “They’ll hydrate the areas downwind, don’t you think?”

  “Would that be good?”

  “More water? Probably good for people, right? I mean, it wouldn’t be good for arid desert biomes. But maybe we have enough of those. I mean, desertification is a big problem in some regions. If you were to create some major lakes in the western Sahara, it might slow down the desertification of the Sahel. I think that’s what the ecologists are talking about now anyway. They’re loving all this stuff. I sometimes think they love it that the world is falling apart. It makes the earth sciences all the rage. They’re like atomic scientists in World War Two.”

  “I suppose they are. But on the other hand . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. Better if we didn’t have to do all this stuff. Since we do, though, it’s good we’ve got some options.”

  “I hope this doesn’t give people the feeling that we can just silver-bullet all the problems and go on like we were before.”

  “No. Well, we can think about crossing that bridge if we get to it.”

  “True.”

  “Have to hope the bridge is still there at that point.”

  “True.”

  Short and unhumorous laughs from both of them, and they signed off.

  * * * *

  In San Diego, Frank rented a van and drove up to UCSD, checking in at the department, then walking up North Torrey Pines Road to RRCCES.

  The new labs were fully up and running, crowded, not messy but busy. A functioning lab was a beautiful thing to behold. A bit of a Fabergé egg: fragile, rococo, needing nurturance and protection. A bubble in a waterfall. Science in action. In these, they changed the world. And now—

  Yann came in. “You have to go to Russia.”

  “I am.”

  “Oh! Good. The Siberian forest is amazing. It’s so big even the Soviets couldn’t cut it down. We flew from Chelyabinsk to Omsk and it went on and on.”

  “And your lichen?”

  “It’s way east of where we spread it. The uptake has been amazing. It’s almost scary.”

  “Almost?”

  Yann laughed defensively. “Yeah, well, given the problems I see you guys are having shifting away from carbon, a little carbon drawdown overshoot might not be such a bad thing, right?”

  Frank shook his head. “Who knows? It’s a pretty big experiment.”

  “Yeah, it is. Well, you know, it’ll be like any other experimental series in that sense. We’ll see what we get from this one and then try another one.”

  “The stakes are awfully high.”

  “Yeah, true. Good planets are hard to find.” Yann shrugged. “But maybe the stakes have always been high, you know? Maybe we just didn’t know it before. Now we know it, and so maybe we’ll do things a little more . . .”

  “Carefully? Like by putting in suicide genes or other negative feedback constraints? Or environmental safeguards?”

  Yann shrugged, embarrassed. “Yeah, sure.”

  He changed the subject, with a look heavenward as if to indicate that what the Russians had done was beyond his control.

  * * * *

  After that, Asia. First a flight to Seattle, then a long shot to Beijing. Frank slept as much as he could, then got some views of the Aleutians, followed by a pass over the snowy volcano-studded ranges of Kamchatka.

  The Beijing meeting, called Carbon Expo Asia, was interesting. It was both a trade show and a conference on carbon emissions markets, sponsored by the International Emissions Trading Association. Carbon was a commodity with a futures market (like Frank himself). With Phil Chase in office, the value of carbon emissions had soared. Now, however, futures traders were beginning to wonder if carbon might become so sharply capped, or the burning of it become so old-tech that emissions would so radically decrease that their futures would lose all value in a market collapse. So, there were countervailing pressures coming to bear on the daily price and its prognosis, as in any futures market.

  All these pressures were on display for Frank to witness. Naturally, Chinese traders were prominent, and the Chinese government appeared to be calling the shots. They were trying to bump the present value up by holding China’s potential coal-burning over everyone else’s head as a kind of giant environmental terrorist threat. By threatening to burn their coal, they hoped to create all kinds of concessions and essentially get their next generation of power plants paid for by the rest of the global community. Or so went the threat. The Chinese bureaucrats wandered the halls looking fat and dangerous, as if explosives were strapped to their waists, implying that if their requirements were not met, they would explode their carbon and cook the world.

  The United States, meanwhile, still had the second biggest carbon burn ongoing and from time to time could threaten to claim that it was proving harder to cut back than they had thought. So, all the big players had their cards, and in a way it was a case of mutually assured destruction all over again. Everyone had to agree on the need to act, or it wouldn’t work for any of them. So, everyone was dealing, the Americans as much as anyone. It was like a giant game of chicken. And in a game of chicken, everyone thought the Chinese would win. They were bloody-minded hardball players, and only a hundred guys there had to hold their nerve, rather than three hundred million; that was a magnitude-seven difference and should have guaranteed China could hold firm the longest. If you believed the theory that the fewer were stronger in will than the many.

  It was an interesting test of America’s true strength. Did the bulk of the world’s capital still reside in the US? Yes. Did the US’s military strength matter in this world of energy technology? Maybe. Was it a case of dominance without hegemony, as some were describing it, so that in the absence of a war, America was nothing but yet another decrepit empire, falling by history’s wayside? Hard to say. If America stopped burning 25 percent of the total carbon burned every year, would that make the country geopolitically stronger or weaker? Probably stronger. One would have to measure many disparate factors that were not usually calculated together. It was a geopolitical mess to rival the end of World War Two, and the negotiations establishing the UN.

  Then the meeting was over, with lots of trading done but little accomplished toward a global treaty. That was becoming the usual way with these meetings, the American rep told Frank wearily at the end. Once you were making what could be called progress (meaning inventing ano
ther way to make money, it seemed to Frank), no one was inclined to push for anything more.

  * * * *

  Frank then caught a Chinese flight down to the Takla Makan desert, in far western China, and landed at Khotan, an oasis town on the southern edge of the Tarim Basin. There he was loaded with some Hungarian civil engineers into a mini-bus and driven north, to the shores of the new salt sea. Throughout the drive they saw plumes of dust, as if from a volcanic explosion, rising in the sky ahead of them. As they approached, the yellow wall of rising dust became more transparent and finally was revealed as the work of a line of gigantic bulldozers heaving a dike into place on an otherwise empty desert floor. It looked like the Great Wall was being reproduced at an order-of-magnitude-larger scale.

  Frank got out at a settlement of tents, yurts, mobile homes, and cinder block structures, all next to an ancient dusty tumbledown of brown brick walls. He was greeted there by a Chinese-American archeologist named Eric Chung, with whom he had exchanged e-mails.

  Chung took him by jeep around the old site. The actual dig occupied only a little corner of it. The ruins covered about a thousand acres, Chung told him, and so far, they had excavated ten.

  Everything in sight, from horizon to horizon, was a shade of brown: the Kunlun Mountains rising to the south, the plains, the bricks of the ruin, and in a slightly lighter shade, the newly exposed bricks of the dig.

  “So, this was Shambala?” Frank said.

  “That’s right.”

  “In what sense, exactly?”

  “That was what the Tibetans called it while it existed. That arroyo and wash you see down the slope was a tributary of the Tarim River, and it ran all year round because the climate was wetter and the snowpack on the Kunluns was thicker, and there were glaciers. They’re saying that flooding the Tarim Basin may mean this river would run again, which is one of the reasons we have to get the dig at the lower points done fast. Anyway, it was a very advanced city, the center of the kingdom of Khocho. Powerful and prominent in that time. It was located on a precursor of the Silk Road, and was a very rich culture. The Bön people in Tibet considered it to be the land of milk and honey, and when the Buddhist monasteries took over up there on the plateau, they developed a legend that this was a magical city. Guru Rinpoche then said it was a magic city that could move from place to place, and that started their Shambala motif.”

  “And now you have to move it again.”

  “Well, it’s already moved on, from what I understand. But if we’re going to protect these ruins from the flooding of the Takla Makan, we’ll have to act fast.”

  Frank shook his head. Another salt sea, created on purpose to keep sea level itself from rising too much; it was hard to believe it would work. But this dry basin in central Asia was so large that filling it with sea water would take something like five to ten percent of all the water that would otherwise devastate the coastal cities of the world. It was geo-engineering again, and God knew what would happen there and downwind from there, but the Chinese were willing to do it, and so it was getting done. Hubris, desperation; could anyone tell which was which anymore? Had they ever been different?

  * * * *

  An Aeroflot flight then, during which he caught sight of the Aral Sea, which apparently was already twice as big as before its flooding project had begun, thus almost back to the size it had been before people began diverting its inflow a century before. All kinds of landscape restoration experiments were being conducted by the Kazakhs and Uzbeks around the new shoreline, which they had set legally in advance and which now was almost achieved. From the air, the shoreline appeared as a ring of green, then brown, around a lake that was light brown near the shoreline, shading to olive, then a murky dark green, then blue. It looked like a big vernal pool.

  Later, the plane landed and woke Frank. He got off and was greeted by an American and Russian from Marta and Yann’s old company. It was cold, and there was a dusting of dirty snow on the ground. Winter in Siberia! Although in fact, it was not that cold and seemed rather dry and brown.

  They drove off in a caravan of four long gray vans, something like Soviet Land Rovers, it seemed, creaky like the plane but warm and stuffy. They progressed over a road that was not paved but did have fresh pea gravel spread over it, and a coating of frost. The vehicles had to keep a certain distance from each other to avoid having their windshields quickly pitted.

  Not far from the airport, the road led them into a forest of scrubby pines. It looked like Interstate 95 in Maine, except that the road was narrower and unpaved, and the trees therefore grayed by the dust thrown up by passing traffic. They were somewhere near Cheylabinsk-56, someone said. You don’t want to go there, a Russian added. One’s of Stalin’s biggest messes. Somewhere southeast of the Urals, Frank saw on a phone map.

  Their little caravan stopped in a gravel parking lot next to a row of cabins. They got out, and locals led them to a broad path into the woods. Quickly, Frank saw that the roadside dust and frost had obscured the fact that all the trees in this forest had another coating: not dust but lichen.

  It was Small Delivery System’s lichen. Frank saw now why Marta had been not exactly boasting, nor abashed, nor exuberant, nor defensive, but some strange mixture of all these. The lichen was obviously doing well, to the point where a balance had clearly been lost; lichen plated everything, trunk, branches, twigs—everything but the pine needles themselves. Such a thorough cloaking looked harmful. A shaft of sunlight cut through the clouds and hit some trees nearby, and their cladding of lichen made them gleam like bronze.

  The Small Delivery people were sanguine about this. They did not think there would be a problem. They said the trees were not in danger. They said that even if some trees died, it would only be a bit of negative feedback to counter the carbon drawdown. If a certain percentage took on lignin so fast they split their trunks or had roots rupture underground, then that would slow any further runaway growth of lichen. Things would then eventually reach a balance.

  Frank wasn’t so sure. He did not think this was ecologically sound. Possibly, the lichen could go on living on dead trees; certainly, it could spread at the borders of the infestation to new trees. But these were not the people to talk to about this possibility.

  The new lichen started out khaki, it appeared, and then caked itself with a layer that was the dull bronze that eventually dominated. As with the crustose lichen of the high Sierra that you saw everywhere on granite, it was quite beautiful. The little bubbles of its surface texture had an insectile sheen. That was the fungus. Frank recalled a passage in Thoreau: “The simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves; matter not dormant, but inspired, a life akin to my own. It is a successful poem in its kind.”

  Which was true; but to see it take over the life it was usually symbiotic with was not good. It looked like the parts of Georgia where kudzu had overgrown everything.

  “Creepy,” Frank remarked, scraping at an individual bubble.

  “It is, kind of, isn’t it?”

  “How do the roots look?”

  “Come see for yourself.” They took him to an area where the soil had been removed from beneath some sample trees. Here they saw both before and after roots, as some trees had been girdled and killed and their roots exposed later, to give them baseline data. Near them, some living trees, or trees in the process of being killed by the exposure of their roots, were standing in holes balanced on their lowest net of fine roots, leaving most of the root balls exposed. The root balls were still shallow, in the way of evergreens, but the lichen-infested trees had roots that were markedly thicker than the uninfested trees.

  “We started by treating an area of about a thousand square kilometers, and now it’s about five thousand.”

  “About the size of Delaware, in other words.”

  Meaning some tens of million trees had been affected, and thus tens of millions of tons of carbon had been drawn down. Say a hundr
ed million tons for the sake of thinking—that was about one percent of what they had put into the atmosphere in the year since the lichen was released.

  Of course, if it killed the forest, a lot of that carbon would then be eaten by microbes and respired to the atmosphere, some of it quickly, some over years, some over decades. This, Frank’s hosts assured him, given the situation they were in, was a risk worth taking. It was not a perfect nor a completely safe solution, but then again, none of them were.

  Interesting to hear this reckless stuff coming from the Russians and the Small Delivery Systems people about equally, Frank thought. Who had persuaded whom was probably irrelevant; now it was a true folie à deux.

  He had once stood a thousand feet tall, it had seemed, on the floor of the Atlantic, while in a simulator in La Jolla; now it looked like he had been miniaturized and was threading his way through the mold in a Petri dish. “Really creepy,” he declared.

  Certainly time to declare limited discussion. It was impossible to tease out the ramifications of all this; they depended so heavily on what happened to the various symbioses feeding each other, eating each other. There would need to be some kind of Kenzo modeling session, in which the whole range of possibilities got mapped, then the probabilities of each assessed. Feedback on feedback. It was probably incalculable, something they could only find out by watching what happened in real time. Like history itself. History in the making, right out there in the middle of Siberia.

  * * * *

  Then it was on to London by way of Moscow, which he did not see at all. In his London hotel after the flights, he was jetlagged into some insomniac limbo and couldn’t sleep. He checked his e-mail and then the internet, clicking to Emersonfortheday.com, where searching using the word traveling brought up this:

  “Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”