Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I said my good-byes to Rosa.

Of course our business was unfinished, but I had caught her attention with my ghost. Rosa was a much darker character than Shelley, much more cynical and remote, and so much older, of course. But when she focused on a problem that interested her she was bright, sharp, curious, intense, just as Shelley was. They had a lot in common, I saw — even though Shelley the rationalist engineer would have been suspicious of the arcane strangeness of Rosa’s life.

I endured the hours of the flight into JFK, where Shelley met me. We only had a couple of hours on the ground before we set off again on another immense seven-league-boots jaunt to LAX, and Shelley gently coaxed me through the airport processes. Already jet-lagged, I managed to sleep on this flight, but by the time we were vomited out at LAX I felt even worse.

And after that yet another flight, this time a local hop aboard a small dozen-seater passenger jet, owned and operated by EI themselves. The plane was adorned with the corporation’s somewhat tasteless logo, of an Earth cupped in the palm of a human hand — “like a wrestler illegally squeezing a testicle,” as Shelley aptly said. Shelley and I were the only passengers, and our drinks were served by a little rubber-wheeled bot.

From LAX I had expected us to cut inland toward the Mojave, but to my surprise we headed west, out to the coast and over the ocean.

The plane was a very modern design, a shell of glass and ceramic full of light and air, and I could barely hear the discrete thrumming of its hydrogen-burning engines. It felt as if we were in a bubble, suspended over the sea. The afternoon sun was low, and the water looked like it was on fire. When I looked back toward the coast, L.A. was a carpet of streets and buildings, a rectangular grid like circuitry coating the contours of the land. Over the city the air was discolored, but the vast orange smog dome I remembered from trips out this way when I was a kid had pretty much dissipated.

Shelley noticed something in the ocean. “Look at that.” A city-size area of the water was stained a deep green. “What do you think that is? An algal bloom, maybe a sewage outlet?” But the area was a neat straight-edged square, artificial.

“Actually we’d call it a plankton bloom.” A VR popped into existence on a seat facing us. It was a man, aged maybe fifty, blond, blue-eyed, trim, his skin pale and healthy-looking. He was dressed in a neat, nondescript business suit of a style that can’t have changed significantly for a century and a half. He smiled in a sensible sort of way. “EI welcomes you to California.”

Shelley scowled; she was notoriously intolerant of such VR stunts. “Who the hell are you?”

“Forgive me. My name is Ruud Makaay…” He was a senior executive at Earth Inc., he said, responsible for what he called “outreach.” “Of course this is a VR projection. I, the flesh-and-blood Ruud, will be your host today at EI — in person, once we land.” His English was smooth; later I learned he was actually Dutch.

Shelley asked, “And that algal bloom in the ocean?”

“It is a demonstration of one of our simpler techniques. The productivity of the ocean can be stimulated with the judicious injection of certain iron compounds; the ‘bloom’ you see is the result. The purpose is to draw down carbon dioxide in the air into the microscopic bodies of the little creatures that make up the plankton. If it’s down there, ” he said, grinning, “it can’t be up here in the air contributing to the greenhouse effect. To increase the effectiveness of the take-up we are experimenting with various gen-enged developments of plankton species — of which there are many, it’s a whole ecology down there, you’d be surprised. Now, look over there.” He pointed to his right.

Peering down I made out a row of structures, vast but skeletal, floating on pontoons on the surface of the ocean. Each was an upright hoop within which long windmill blades turned in the wind off the sea: each a hundred meters tall, they looked like vast egg whisks. As the plane dipped over the turbines, I saw that a pale mist, like a bank of fog, lingered around the machines. Close up, the sheer scale of these lacy engines was stunning, and their shadows, cast by the setting sun, were long and graceful.

“Spray turbines,” Makaay said. “Another of our simpler ideas. You just spray seawater into the air, to make clouds.”

“Why?” Shelley asked. “To trigger rain?”

“Actually the opposite,” he said. “The purpose is to stimulate the production of the clouds themselves, and so to make them more reflective…” Water droplets formed in a cloud when vapor gathered around seed particles, “dust condensation nuclei” in Makaay’s terms. The idea was to load so many nuclei into a cloud that the droplets multiplied, but none got big enough to fall as rain. So the cloud got whiter, and kept out the sunlight.

Leaving the spindly spray turbines behind we returned to the coast and flew inland, heading for EI’s headquarters in the Mojave Desert.

The geoengineering solutions promoted by Earth Inc. could be vast in scale, Makaay said, but were based on two simple principles. Earth intercepted heat from the sun; and an excess of carbon dioxide in the air trapped too much of that heat. So EI solutions were based either on reducing the amount of solar energy the planet soaked up in the first place, by making the Earth, or its atmosphere, more reflective — “albedo manipulation,” Makaay called it — or reducing the amount of heat trapped by drawing down carbon dioxide from the air, “carbon sequestration.”

“And here, in one glance, you can see two of our solutions at work, on a demonstration scale anyhow. This is why we do our best to bring people out here in person. There is nothing like seeing things with one’s own eyes to make an impression.”

Shelley eyed me. “Primate politics,” she said. “I told you.” She turned on Makaay. “Even you. You’re a great big tall man in a suit. Even now, all the guys at the top are just like you. When I started my working life I got a crick in my neck from looking up at my bosses all the time. It was like being in a forest.” She seemed a little out of tune to me, a touch over-aggressive, even rude. But she had never been very tolerant of managers, bureaucrats, and marketeers.

Anyhow I knew what she meant. Makaay was a tall, bulky man, his sheer physical presence impressive, and his broad, heavily boned face seemed to ooze control. He was like my brother, John, or my father — one of the competent-looking big men who make serious waves in the world. Not me, though. I somehow always knew I wouldn’t turn out that way.

Makaay didn’t seem insulted; he even seemed amused. “Ms. Magwood, I know very well I’m a walking clichй. But you have to understand I spent half my working life inside the Beltway, or in the UN and Stewardship complexes in New York or Geneva. And there, believe me, you have to wear a uniform like this” — he indicated his body — “to be taken halfway seriously. By looking like I work for IBM, I’ve won half the argument already.

“It also helps that I’m Dutch, by the way. We Dutch have been geoengineers since the Middle Ages, ever since we reclaimed half our own country from the sea, and we’ve been exporting our expertise for as long. These days we’re somewhat in demand, to help bail out drowning countries from the Pacific Islands to Bangladesh.”

We were silent for a moment. It helped his moral authority, of course, that in our lifetimes Holland itself had given up its own centuries-long battle against the sea, and the Dutch had become a nation of exiles.

“You’re quite a package, Mr. Makaay,” Shelley said dryly.