“Good morning, Ibrahim,” the datacloth said. “It’s zero three forty-five, second December 2100, thirtieth Ramadan 1524. It’s eight degrees outside, clear with occasional clouds. You have twenty hours and fourteen minutes left to vote in the carbon balance referendum…”
“Khara, shut up,” said Ibrahim, rolling off his futon and fumbling for his clothes. He must have been too tired after iftar last night to take the datacloth off voice. But maybe it was for the best; Antarctic seasons blew his sleep cycle to hell at the best of times, and without the voice alarm, he’d have slept through breakfast for sure.
He’d almost done that anyway. The sun never set here in December, and no one could agree whether to use Mecca, Cape Town or Christchurch time, so the compromise – the consensus, although it had taken plenty of shouting to get there – was that the fast began at four. He had fifteen minutes to shower, pray and eat, and he suddenly wished the damn cloth had woken him at three thirty instead.
The shower was easy. The datacloth – damn it to the tenth generation – had learned Ibrahim’s habits well enough to know that he’d want to do that first, and by the time he got to his feet, the sound of rushing water had already started and steam was coming from the stall. The hot water shocked him awake and it took only a moment to wash clean, and then he threw on the clothes he’d dragged from the dresser and stirred some lingonberry and sea-buckthorn into last night’s fufu for sahur. That done, he knelt vaguely to the north and said a quick fajr – a perfunctory fajr, his mother would have told him, but she wasn’t here – and walked out the front door. It was three fifty-nine.
Outside, the sun was low in the eastern sky and the breeze carried the smell of the sea. After the heat of the shower and the closeness of the apartment, the air felt fresh and bracing. Ibrahim would never have imagined, growing up in Ilorin, that he would go outside in eight-degree weather in only his street clothes, but unlike the summer’s endless days and the winter’s unrelieved nights, he’d long since become used to that. Eight degrees with the sun in his face felt life-giving, and the bright colors of the apartment blocks and the berries and ornamental mosses in the community garden made it more so. The earliness of the hour was forgotten; he was alive to the world.
He turned left at the main street, past the assembly-field at the Plaza of Pines with its moss border in the blue, green and white of the Consistory Environmental Section; past the low public buildings and university campus in airy arctic-modern style; through the tangle of warehouses and garages that ringed the port; and finally to the docks. The
Sea-Gardener was waiting at the end of one of the Consistory piers. His graduate assistant, Wojciech, was also there, running diagnostics.
Wojciech looked up at the sound of Ibrahim’s footsteps. “Everything green,” he said. “The kids will be here in a few minutes.” And then, after a moment’s pause, “did you vote yet?” He didn’t even wait for Ibrahim to shake his head before saying, “Me neither. Can’t seem to decide.”
“No one can,” Ibrahim answered. He knew that wasn’t true – more than three billion votes had been recorded already – but then he realized it
was true of the people in his section and most of those he knew in similar sections elsewhere. The people like him – the ones who actually worked maintaining the carbon balance day to day – were having the hardest time deciding whether to change it.
“We know how much this will cost,” Wojciech said – Wojciech always could read his thoughts. “Keeping the climate where it is costs a tenth of the world’s GDP. How much more to change it back – but how much not to?”
That was it in a nutshell, wasn’t it? The referendum question was simple enough:
should it be the goal of the Consistory Environmental Section to restore as far as possible, no later than 2200, the climate that existed prior to the onset of anthropogenic climate change? But both alternatives carried the potential for enormous costs, not all of them in money.
He started to say something – Wojciech seemed to be looking for a serious answer – but was cut short by the sound of children’s voices. A dozen of them were coming down the dock with the day’s duty teacher, Maryam, in tow. The younger ones were running and chattering with excitement even though they must have been up since three. Ibrahim knew the students competed to be assigned to the
Sea Gardener on their public-work days, although he wasn’t vain enough to think it was because of him.
He greeted Maryam as the children swarmed up the gangway and found their favorite vantage points for departure. The two of them had been at the university together for a couple of years; they’d gone different places during their Wanderjahre, but they’d both fetched up here at around the same time, and for most of the past month, they’d seen each other at iftar. She returned the greeting and finished herding her charges aboard; he double-checked the diagnostics and made his way to the controls. He made sure that Wojciech had finished untying, checked the time on the bridge readout – four forty-two – and cast off.
Outside the harbor, the boat swung north up the coast. Ibrahim let his eyes rest on the carpet of hairgrass and yellow pearlwort flowers that started a kilometer away, rising past stands of feral berries to rugged, mossy cliffs. There were snow-capped mountains in the distance, but the cliffs and strand had none; this part of the peninsula had been ice-free in summer since before Ibrahim was born, and the lines of glacial erosion were starting to be replaced by runoff channels. For forty years, since the climate had stabilized, it had been the Consistory’s policy to keep it that way. Now that might change…
“I voted yes!” said one of the students – Catherine, he remembered, one of the second-years. He wondered for a moment if the school had held a mock vote, but then he recalled that the age threshold had been waived for this referendum. And why not? This wasn’t an election for town council or world chamber or the governing board of the Antarctic Legatum Humanitatis – it might set the direction of the planet for as long as the students were likely to live. For Catherine to have a vote almost made more sense than for
Ibrahim to vote on a project whose end he would never see.
“How come?” asked Maryam.
She was never one to miss a chance to teach, Ibrahim remembered.
“My mother says it’s for the animals,” Catherine answered, “and the sea.” Ibrahim, still looking out at the coast, nodded silently. Those were the reasons for a yes vote that he, too, found most persuasive. Temperatures and carbon dioxide levels might have stabilized, but that didn’t mean the planet was done changing; sea levels were projected to keep rising for another fifty years, and just because the elephants and big cats and apes had barely made it didn’t mean that the world had stopped losing species. And in a world where biodiversity was wealth…
“But what about the animals and plants that have adapted to the new climate?” Maryam pressed, and
there was the most persuasive case for a no. The natural environment – the human environment too – had just survived a major disruption; what would a second one in the space of two centuries do? Would a hundred-year timetable be enough to cushion the impact, or would returning to the baseline kill as many species as leaving it had done?
“And what about the life where there was none before?” said another of the students. Yes, that too was something to consider in a place that had been green for only half a century, and even more so as the
Sea Gardener drew closer to its destination. Below Ibrahim now, visible through shockingly clear water, were the vast beds of seagrass that had been introduced here – that had been
engineered here – to sequester carbon. And on the coastal verge, now only three hundred meters distant, the inlets that threaded through the penguin rookeries were a tangle of low, woody plants whose genetic stock included both Arctic willow and temperate mangrove.
He anchored the boat at the first of the day’s inspection sites. “Suit up!” he called, and the students ran to the diving-suit lockers as he went to get his own.
This was why the children fought for this assignment, and it took only a moment before everyone was assembled at the rail.
“All right,” Ibrahim said when the excitement had died down. “Who can tell me what we’re looking for?”
One of the sixth-years, Mei, raised her hand first. “Dieback?”
“Yes. You’ve got the historic figures for all the marine animal populations in the suit display – if any of them are declining, we need to know. We also need to make sure the penguins and seals have a path to their hunting grounds. That can change every year, so if they’re not here, we need to know where they’re going. Anyone else?”
“Changes in the water?” asked Catherine.
“Yes, all that carbon the seagrass is trapping has to go somewhere. Your suits can test that too – look for any changes in the pH, oxygen levels, nutrients… And make sure you’re all back here in thirty minutes. The water temperature is minus two, and even with the suits on, you can get hypothermia if you stay much longer than that. We’ve got all your locations, but we don’t want to have to pull you out. You understand?”
The students chorused their assent, but they didn’t really care about the water temperature; they wanted to explore. And Ibrahim couldn’t really blame them. There was an initial shock of cold as he followed them into the water, but it went away quickly – nothing could
really be cold to someone who’d worked a season on the winter maintenance crew at the highland solar farms – and once it passed, he was conscious only of the swaying forest of seagrass and the fish swimming through rippling green-tinted light. These waters had always been rich with life, and it had adapted well to the grass, which was now food source and dwelling-place.
He swam to the bottom, twenty meters down; here, decaying seagrass supported mats of bacteria and the sea-worms and krill that fed on them. Some of the bacteria, too, had been introduced from the Arctic to minimize the release of sequestered carbon when the seagrass decomposed, and Ibrahim ran his tests to make sure it was doing so. A couple of readings were slightly high, but within the range of random variation and well within acceptable levels; he routed them to the Environmental Section database but without any alarms.
So much effort, balancing the native species with the invasive ones and the engineered ones. This was no longer really a natural ecosystem or even a garden; it was a
factory, and it would have to become even more of one if the referendum passed – at least until the climate restoration was far enough along for these waters to become icebound again. But maybe, if the vote passed and the project succeeded, it would be possible to let go…
Or would it, even then? A line that the other Ibrahim had written – the ancestor that Ibrahim was named after – came suddenly to mind. It was near the end of The Silent Ones, just after their speech had been restored –
I have learned so many things for which our words were not made. The past was a lost country; to restore it was to go from one arbitrary point to another, and the force of all that had happened between then and now would push it inexorably onward.
Ibrahim wondered what his ancestor would have thought of the referendum. Was the arbitrary point of a century ago worth returning to, and which way would the weight of change move it from there? But there was no way to ask. The other Ibrahim was two hundred years dead, cut down at twenty-two by an Afghan sword at Saragarhi, and the idea that the climate was in humans’ power to change would have seemed to him like purest fantasy.
But he might have known how to approach it, at least. The dead Ibrahim was more of a Belloist than the living one, and far more of a mystic; he had instinctively understood the world as community, and his fascination with movement would have told him which way that community could run and which way it would stumble. Without that instinct, though, how could anyone know?
By letting everyone in the community speak and counting their votes, Ibrahim guessed, and that just brought his question back to where it began.
I have learned so many things for which these words were not made.
With a start, Ibrahim realized he had been underwater for twenty-eight minutes. He surfaced carefully and swam to the boat as quickly as he could, but not in time to avoid the children’s laughter.
“Yes, I’m the late one,” he said. “I need to listen to myself better. Go warm up – it’s an hour to the next site.”
There was more laughter at his expense, but the students hurried below, leaving only Wojciech and Maryam on deck. It was ten after six and Wojciech reached for the coffee-maker, then remembered who he was with and faltered.
“Don’t let us stop you,” Ibrahim said. “And the way you make coffee, just the smell of it should last me until iftar.”
Wojciech looked to Maryam to see if he had her permission too and, satisfied, started the brewing. “Did you find an answer down there?”
“I think I at least found the question.”
“Maybe you’ll decide after dhuhr,” Maryam said.
Ibrahim nodded. They’d probably be back in port for dhuhr, and he wouldn’t have to hurry it as he had hurried through fajr. He might be in the right frame of mind after, and he wanted to cast his vote before the Eid began.
Or maybe he was there already. Maybe he
had found an answer, or at least
his answer. He would wait until dhuhr, but he didn’t think he’d change his mind.
The only way the world could go was onward, and he hoped humanity had learned enough.