Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

A stewardess came running, fingering the weapon in her holster.

Jack apologized, waving his other hand in the air, sloshing his drink. “Sorry, sorry. A nervous twitch! It always happens to me. What can I say?”

He had to submit to a scan from a handheld sensor. But eventually the stewardess spoke into a lapel mike, and with some reluctance, I thought, caused the restraint to release him and slide back into the body of his seat.

Jack turned to me. “You see that? By the time you get on the plane you’ve been through all the checks and the psycho profiling and all the rest, and you’re in your damn seat, and you think they’ll trust you at last. But no, no. One false move and wham, you’re pinned like a lab rat. I mean, what could you do? Scratch somebody’s eyes out? Lethe, even this shot glass is unbreakable. If I throw it against the wall—” He raised his arm.

“Don’t bother,” I said quickly, “I believe you.”

He laughed and sipped his drink. “It’s the way of the world, Mike — can I call you Mike?”

“Michael.”

“The way of the world, Mike. Lethe, it’s the way of the world.” He settled back on his couch with a grunting sigh, and kicked his shoes off, which did nothing to improve my immediate environment.

Lethe. I’d heard that word used as an oath before, somewhere. John, I thought; John used it sometimes.

That stewardess came by again, checking we were ready for lift-off. She caught my eye sympathetically. You want more privacy? I shrugged, subtly.

The plane surged forward and I was pressed back in my couch; I felt it adjust to accommodate me. I hadn’t even heard the engines start up. With a word I turned my smart wall into a window, and watched the drowned Florida landscape recede beneath me, covered in pools and lakes that shone in the sun like splashes of molten glass.

Once we had settled into the flight I buried myself in a softscreen study of climate change at the poles. It was a dull classroom subject, but after Tom, suddenly it was personal.

It all started with the Warming, of course; all the searches I set off looped back to that. For decades carbon dioxide had been accumulating in the air twice as fast as natural processes could remove it. By 2047 its concentration was higher than at any time in the last twenty million years, an astounding thought. The consequences were depressingly familiar. The ice was melting, the seas rising, ecosystems unraveling. All that heat energy pumped into the air and oceans had to go somewhere, so there were many more hurricanes and storms, floods and droughts than there used to be.

And so on. I skimmed all this, trying to find out about the Arctic.

At the poles the Warming is amplified, it seems. Apparently there is a positive feedback effect; as the ice melts the albedo of the ground is lowered — it reflects back less sunlight — and so the ground and the ocean just soak up more heat. As a result temperatures there have been, at times, rising ten times as fast as in the rest of the world. In the north, the ice was all gone, and strange storm systems came spinning down from that rotating plate of ocean to ravage the land. Once the sea ice actually protected the land from ocean storms and the worst ravages of the waves. Now, all around the Arctic Ocean, coastal erosion was “rapid,” “dramatic,” “traumatic,” so I read. At the same time the permafrost, the deep-buried ice cap, was melting. I’d seen some of this in Siberia; on a ground that undulated like the surface of the sea, roads collapsed, buildings just sank into the ground, and trees all over the immense, world-embracing taiga forests tipped over.

Of course all this hit the people. As Tom had said, even fifty years ago many of the locals in Siberia still lived as hunter-gatherers, following the reindeer around. Ironically the programs to relocate them out of there were paid for by the environment taxes paid by the big oil, gas, aluminium, and logging companies that had done so much damage to the area in the first place.

And then you had the methane.

Right around the poles huge quantities of methane, carbon dioxide, and other volatiles were locked up in hydrate deposits, kept stable by the low ocean temperatures and the pressure of the land and water above. The physics of it seemed simple enough. The peculiar geometry of water molecules makes them difficult to pack into a solid structure when they freeze. So “solid” ice contains a lot of empty space — room enough to trap other molecules, such as methane. And there is a lot of methane to be found on the seabed; there isn’t much oxygen down there, and anerobic decay processes release a lot of the gas.

When the temperature rose, that natural cage was broken open. The consequence was “methane burps” of the kind Tom was unlucky enough to have encountered.

But that was a localized event, I realized, lethal as it was if you happened to be in the way. The Warming, however, was nothing if not global. There was more methane down there in the hydrate layers than in all the world’s fossil fuel reserves, and methane, though it doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere, is in the short term twenty times as potent a greenhouse gas as our old buddy carbon dioxide.

So what would happen, I wondered vaguely, if this went on, if all that methane was released? I tabbed through pages on my softscreen, seeking answers. But my question chains petered out; my softscreen couldn’t answer. I sat back, tugging at a thread of speculation.

I admit I didn’t know much about the Warming, about climate change in the Arctic or anywhere else. Why should I? The planet was warming up, my body was growing older, it was all just part of the world I’d grown up in; you either obsessed about it, or accepted it and got on with your life. And besides, we had dumped the automobile, we had accepted the need to run the Stewardship. We were managing the pain, weren’t we?

But if those hydrate deposits all gave way, instead of the world just becoming slowly shabbier… I thought there was some bad news buried in here. Maybe very bad news. And on some level I just didn’t want to know.

Was there anything to be done about it? I cleared the softscreen, took a stylus, and began to doodle.

I kept being distracted by the environment of the flight.

If I miss driving, I miss flying more. When I was a kid my parents flew all the time. At the peak of their careers they had pretty much sewn up the Miami Beach market for corporate eventing, and scarcely a weekend went by without them managing a sales conference or marketing-strategy session at one resort hotel or another. All that was local, but to set up the deals they had to travel to where the customers were. When they got the chance, they would take us kids, John and me. Our teachers would kick up a stink, as in those days you were still expected to attend school for the regulation five days a week. But for better or worse my parents took the blows, and we flew.

We kids loved seeing the great centers of business across the country, from New York to San Francisco, Chicago down to Houston. A few times we traveled overseas, to Europe and Africa and even Japan once, though my mother worried about the effect of such long-haul trips. The whole thing was a great eye-opener that gave me a real sense of the planet I lived on.

But most of all I just loved to fly. I relished being in a vast machine that had the energy to hurl itself into the sky. I was always fascinated to come into a major airport, and to glimpse all those other sparks of light in the sky, and the mothlike shapes of more planes on the ground; you got a real sense of the millions of tons of metal suspended in the air over the continental United States, a great dome of dynamic engineering speckled with fragile humanity, every minute of every day. All gone now, of course. Now nobody flies — nobody but the very rich. It’s the same logic that took away the automobile: we’ve had to sacrifice some freedom to survive. I accept all that, and most of the time, like everybody else, I don’t think about it. But I still miss flying.